 Okay, we'll call the meeting to order at seven o'clock. This is a joint meeting of select boards with the fire department, the annual meeting in August to talk about the last year's business and what's going on now. The chief wants to do his chief support first because he's got to leave. So he will take over and do his chief support. So I appreciate everybody coming tonight. I haven't taken a vacation more than two days in the past, 27 years. So I took a vacation. I booked it. I'm up near the Canadian border. But I felt this meeting importance come back to and share what I have for the chief's report. And then Toby and Paul, as the vice president president, will go through the financials. And any questions that you have for me, we can answer those as I give the report. You'll find that my style is different than the previous chief. I'm not long-winded. I'm to the point. But if you don't understand something, please ask me and I'll explain it very clearly. Whether it takes once, twice, three or four times that you have everything going. So what you have in front of you is the financials. It's Toby, Sandy's a board of directors, member of Paul's board of directors, Judy's treasurer. We've got two or three other board of directors, people which I thought would be here tonight. But evidently it's August and it's night where they couldn't be in. So what I'd like to start with is the COVID issue, why we asked you to ask up. Toby is the president of the organization. He simply asked that he not stay in a room for more than 10 minutes because of the VA-5 variant that's out there. We're transporting people that have no symptoms but we get a call from the hospital on a regular basis, almost on a daily basis saying that they're COVID positive. So when we do go out on ambulance calls, everybody's wearing a N95, a high end N95, wearing goggles, wearing gloves, and the ambulance is sanitized beyond your imagination when we at the hospital disinfect the clean so that we don't transmit that onto a future patient. So we're taking every precaution that we can possibly take. We use a spray. We use a spray, we use the hospital supplies us with the disinfectant that they've approved for COVID contamination. And I think most of you are aware of the COVID issues. Even the president of the United States, he was double boosted, double vaccinated, still had COVID twice, had a rebound. I think you probably, everybody sitting here knows someone that's had it once or twice or whatever. Hopefully the vaccines prevent all of us from getting a serious illness. So that's what the goal was there but I'm going to honor Toby's request of what we're doing tonight here. I appreciate what you're doing here. So what I'm going to quickly do is just go over a few items. In the past two or three weeks here, we've had three structure fires. Callis has a couple fires and we've gone up to Woodbury for coverage. And so there's, for some reason all of a sudden we've gone up with something that we don't see very often is a structure fire. That's a surprise, it's time of year. It's time of year too when nobody burned in wood and everything else and those, they were, when they investigated them, they found various sources that caused the fires to happen. On the last one up in 14 Callis, the gentleman was injured with burns to the face, the hands and so forth. Our ambulance transported the patient out. Paul will discuss those in a little bit but the reason I bring up fire calls during the day or at any time is a staffing issue. So the staffing for East Montpelier fire, for Woodbury fire, and for all the departments around us is critical. I think if you've watched the news in the past, two weeks, channel threes running, all kinds of things about recruitment, retention, short-handed firefighters, you just can't find people for EMS and for fire. So we face the same problems here. We've been relying on, like tonight, we have one person, one paramedic on duty here and Sandy is the driver. And so normally if I was back in the area, I would be the second person when we can't find the two people crew requirement. So that's an ongoing daily type thing. So we rely on mutual aid and we're going to really emphasize retention and recruitment. And this is something that I want to bring up to the select boards because you're going to hear a lot about this and we're going to be asking the select boards to be proactive in developing something as other departments are developing, other towns all around us. Sandy will address that in a little bit about some of the programs, some of the plans, some of the things that the state of Vermont is recommending, some of the things the state of Vermont is doing. So recruitment, retention. I think everyone here is aware that even to hire people into a restaurant, you can't find people. I was up in the Canadian border there and we wanted to go to a restaurant and they were only open from 11 to one and four to seven. And it's a big, big restaurant and they were only open six hours and they said they just don't have a store. Yeah, it's a problem everywhere. Everywhere, every industry, everything else. So it's even much more prevalent in the fire and EMS service than ambulance services. Even the full-time services such as Barry town, Barry city and Montpelier have trouble with callbacks. So if you listen to a scanner, you'll hear mutual aid responding on a regular basis. Today we had a call up on the Groton line and we had our ambulance went out with only one paramedic on board as we had nobody to cover the day shift and mutual aid came in from Barry town. So mutual aid, they do come, but it's a delayed response. So my goal as chief is to really build and aggressively go after recruitment, retention and to bring people on. Over the past couple of years, we've lost a number of people here due to various aspects of the way the organization was run. That has changed. In the last two days, I get calls from two paramedics that are coming back. So we'll have two more paramedics that'll sign up for shifts, which really will help us. A third paramedic locally who left is also returned. And he was a great help. He is the district six training coordinator. He's the highest trained paramedic in this district. He now works for us and he's working eight or nine shifts a month, which before he totally left. So it's really good news for the community, for each one of us, for me especially, for anybody that you don't know when you're gonna need the ambulance. This ambulance saved my life two years ago. I died in the ambulance. I was defibrillated four times. I wound up having one stint placed in Burlington. And since the two years ago, I'm 100% clean bill of health. No damage to my heart or anything else. My function is 85 to 90%, which he said was better than it was before. So I owe my life to the crew. I was training and working on East Montpellier Fire Department. So the overview of what's going on here in the department for the past year, we still continue to train. And you see the schedule on the board here. So every Tuesday night, there's a bigger group coming back than there was in the previous year. And what I'd say that that means for trainings, we had a training here for MCI, Mass Casualty Training. And normally on a year ago, we'd have six, seven people. We have 25 people here on this training. So people wanna come back, they wanna train. There's a different look to what we're presenting here. And that's what I wanna emphasize. What we're looking for is in the past year, you have the report in front of you. I have it electronically. We've responded to about 733 calls. So the call volume is up in the last year. You have it, it might be on the last couple of pages. Is that just the EMS or is that fire? EMS and fire combined. And for like a six month period, you have 389 calls or so then you have 356 total calls per month. But we're averaging about 60 calls a month, which is a couple calls a day. So for a little department, we're covering the four towns. In 99% of the time, we have crews covering those ambulance response. Fire were the same as Plainfield, Marshfield, and Cabot. If you hear a call for a structure fire in one of those three towns or you hear a call for even a car accident, all three departments are at home at the same time because they can only expect two or three people from each department to respond. I wondered how that worked. I asked Chance, because somebody asked me, how does that work? How do you know that you need to go to an event in Cabot? How do you know that, you know, how does Woodbury know to come and assist in East Montclair? How does that work? Dispatch or Capital West dispatch, dispatch is all the towns in this district. They dispatch Cabot, Plainfield, Marshfield, East Montclair, Woodbury, all the surrounding towns is 25 or 30 towns that are dispatched out of one dispatch center, Capital West. So when we have a structure fire, like we had up in Calis, immediately Woodbury and East Montclair are dispatched. And if Paul was the senior officer on the scene or when the call went out, he immediately strikes with Capital West, what's called the second alarm. Second alarm immediately alerts Capital West to pull out a run card. And it says we want Berry City, an engine, Berry Town, engine and a tanker. We want Montclair with an engine. We want Worcester with an engine. So on that initial tone, we're getting seven or eight or nine departments. How do you know which ones to ask? I mean, how do you know that you need them? Well, we get a call right now and it was in Calis for a house on fire. Soon as we understand that there's flame showing or smoke showing, we pull the alarm. We pull a second alarm and we pull a tanker task force. So the second alarm brings in probably six or seven departments. It brings in 10 or 12 pieces of equipment. All of them, we're looking for the manpower. The NFPA guidelines say you must have 18 men on scene within the first 10 minutes. Only way we could do that is to aggressively push people in here. A tanker task force is called immediately in five tanker units carrying anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 to 3,000 gallons of water. It's dispatched at the same time. So at the structure fire on Route 14 in Calis, as soon as that call was initiated, there was probably 10 or 11 departments toned and there was probably 15 pieces of equipment running in that direction. They know the location, they know what's happening and then when it came in as a person that was burned, the ambulance was dispatched automatically on the first tone. So our response is the first tone we need to get 15, 16 people coming with apparatus because number one, it's such a hot day. Heat exhaustion, they transported the firefighter out of that for heat exhaustion. Number two, we just need the water source, the manpower because up there the water source was just up the road on Moscow Woods, it was a tri-hydrant. We had all the water we wanted but you gotta get it from there to the fire. So when we have these calls to overcome the situation of shortage of manpower in the station, we have to pull up a big mutual aid attack. So the communities of East Montpelier Calis that we cover, we aggressively protect with the mutual aid system. In turn, when they get a call, we respond to them and it's a mutual aid agreement all the way through. So unless we had a full-time department and what we're seeing with the full-time department's fire, sorry, even Barry and Montpelier don't have enough manpower. They have three to five people on duty on a shift and when that truck goes out and they get a second ambulance call or call behind it, they call mutual aid. So no matter what you do, if you wanna pay a million dollars to have people sitting here, you're still gonna call mutual aid on the call. So we're fortunate to be able to do that. Any questions on that aspect of it? No, thanks for explaining. So for many years on this department, the age to drive a fire truck or an ambulance was 21 years of age and that was just a preference that the department, the board of directors set up. Our insurance allows us to have people covered at age 18, 18, 19, 20. So we looked at the departments I did around us. I talked to Barry Town, I talked to Woodbury, I talked to all of the volunteer departments around us and I said, how old can an individual be to join your department and serve in the fire or EMS site? And they all said 18. Now, do we let an 18 year old drive a 45,000 pound fire truck that's 35 feet long and loaded with expensive equipment costs recorded a million dollars to replace it? No. We go through it at real rigorous training programs and the training program is set up through the state and it's also set up for in-house work. So on this department, we're reviewing that right now but you would not see an 18 year old driving a fire truck. You would see them maybe driving an ambulance but not a fire truck. As they achieved capabilities and maturity and are okayed by the department through the training offices and through the SOGs, the standard operating guidelines that we put in place and we feel they're good, we would utilize them. I'll give you an example, Thomas Parker. You may know Thomas, his father was Todd, he's a firefighter here, Todd was a firefighter. His grandfather was killed in the line or died in the line of duty in East Montpelier. He died at a fire down at the carpet burn and died of a heart attack back in the building. And ever since that, his family had donated a special pass device that all firefighters wear. If you stop moving for 25 or 30 seconds, the alarm alerts. When Deputy Chief Parker died, he went to search the back of the building, looked, he had a heart attack, felt nobody knew he was there. So that was something we learned from that but his grandson joined this department when he was probably 15 years old, came with his dad every, all the time. When he was 18 and 19, he actually achieved a CDL license to drive trailer trucks but he couldn't drive a fire truck here because the rule was 21. He was higher trained than anybody on this department as far as credentialed, but he couldn't drive a truck. And I thought that was, and he's one of the most mature young men you'll ever see. He's 22 now and he is the truck officer that maintains all of the fire apparatus and ambulance for this department. He has a degree in diesel mechanics. He's a certified diesel mechanic and he's 22, 23 years of age. So that's the kind of guy we're looking for. So we're looking at the schools around us and Paul will speak to what his grandson is taking is only 18? 17 right now. 17 and what kind of a course has he rolled in? He's gonna be starting in September a paramedic course at the vocational center in Barry. So at age 17, he's gonna be starting a paramedic course. Don't you think we wanna go after him? I do. I want guys that are, I need someone to take my place. I want 17, 18, 19 year old guys that I can relay my experience of training to and get them to take up. So you're gonna hear in the future of promotional material on radio, TV, newspapers, interviews, same thing Williston does. Williston does it all the time. Wadooski does it also I think too. We're gonna be aggressively going after 18 to 20 year olds that are graduating from Vermont Tech as EMTs, paramedics and fire science degrees. Now where are these people going? They're going to full-time departments and those full-time departments are happy to see them come in. So we're aggressively gonna look at how many of those people we can find that would come and help East Montpellier fire out. So we're developing a training program that they would go through to make that happen. We're also looking at recruitment and retention. I talked about recruiting the younger generation out there. And this idea was brought up to a spite a new member on the board, Alex Bogozowski, was a new member, voted in. And his idea was to reach some of these younger generational people, his age bracket under. And this is the place to reach them. They're in school, they want a job. And in the past couple of weeks, I've been approached by two people that are 19 years of age that are EMTs taking the AEMT course, taking the advanced course. So we're seeing people that wanna do this and I wanna have this department open with the proper training, the proper mentoring and education to utilize people of that age bracket and build this department up with the younger people. We need to. At the last company meeting we had or the last annual meeting, we had 23 people here. And I think they figured the average age was in the late fifties, something like that. And even older of the men that are. Got the wrong with that. Yeah, I know that. But we're an older department and we need to look for people in that younger group. Let's see average age of basically municipal workers in the state of Vermont and in Maine. So they're pretty much 55. They're gonna retire in 10 years or less. And fire service is the more difficult thing. Actively in the department, we have maybe 10 or 15 members that are really active in another group that's semi active. So we're trying to build and strengthen this department. So when you have people that you're working with doing training and they're not from around here, where do you have them stay? So we don't, I mean, the majority of our people on ambulance stuff don't live in this area. They don't live in East Montpelier. I think the only ones that live here is Ty, myself, Paul on the fire side, Sandy. There's not a lot of people live out that are full time people. So if we're gonna bring these young guys in that live in the community, we're going to say to them, we can offer you a job in the future for DM at this point in time, but we can offer you a number of hours to get your foot wet. We can train you, get you working and hopefully retain you down the road. My brain's just going, you know how when they have the baseball players come and they say, would you sponsor one of them to stay in your home for two months or six weeks or whatever it is? Maybe there's people in the communities. Well, a lot of these young men and women that will be coming in here live within the traveling distance of their station. So they would like right now we have people that live in Washington. We have people that live down in Corinth. We have people that live in Montpelier, you know, all around the area that come here, Plainfield, Marshfield. So we're looking at people that live in the area. We don't want them to leave the area. We don't want to lose these young people to something in Burlington or something else. And Burlington Fire hires on a daily basis. They're looking for people all the time as is the other departments. I have a question. My daughter, she just got her EMT certificate last month. She's a good PM, pre-med, but she's, you know that tonight. Is that the kind of thing during the year she's going to be doing with working with their EMT volunteer squad, but then during the summers, is that the kind of her, if she's here? We'd love to have her come down as a pre-med member. She'd pick up. She would come in and we would start to do a training program. Yeah. We would do a training program with her as far as familiarization of what we do and how we do it. And that's the kind of people we're looking for. They can help us up for three months, four months, five months, two months as they're doing that. UBM, there's a program up there with St. Mike's and a lot of those pre-med students that are involved in that work at St. Mike's. And they work, if they can work three hours a day or six hours, they use it. That'd be a good promotional thing. It is. I know she's working on getting other young people going in it too. Exactly. That's the kind of people we need. I mean, that would be good by all means. You know, we would utilize her. She said I could work two days a month or two shifts a month. Get the experience. She's got to get the experience somewhere in that and she goes on to her full-time big career. She wants the experience as an EMT. We do that now. We have people that work two shifts a month, three shifts a month. And we train and utilize them. They fill a shift for us. So we're gonna be working on that in the future. We're also, Paul will discuss this a little bit. The average EMT, EMT, EMT paramedic wage scale needs to be adjusted. We've looked at that over the last 10 years and it hasn't really been adjusted to meet the competition in the area. So we're gonna look at that and the board will discuss that as something for the next fiscal year to try to make it competitive with the market outfit. And some of the towns were more than competitive and some of the other ones were not quite competitive. So in order for us to bring somebody in here, we've gotta be at a competitive rate. So we're looking, that'll be presented by the board back to the slack board in the next budget. As it comes up, there'll be something in there for an increase in wages because everybody here is no benefit package. And we're gonna be looking at that, how we can enhance that a little bit. And we see it happening all around us in New York State. It's happening on a regular basis. You can see it on channel three, channel five of the things they're doing. Big recruitment pushed towards young women. Big recruitment pushed towards young women. We have four or five or six women on our department and three of them right now are enrolled in the advanced EMT course. So we have a couple, I think one that's in a paramedic course. So we're looking for that generation but what New York has pushed was on channel three or channel five, a real push to hire women in fire and EMS. So I would like to see in the future women in the officer corps here. That's the goal, is to train good women. Waterbury has women in the officer corps. Other departments around us, Berlin I think or there's other departments that do that. Women are more than welcome and highly trained and very good at what they do. Barrie town ambulance says the majority probably of the paramedics are young women. So we're you pushing that goal to that's a source we need to take a look at here. We haven't done that in years past. So we want to encourage that to happen. Any other questions overall on what we're doing? We're trying to build a stronger morale here. We're trying to build a cohesive group of men and women doing, and your goal to move forward and have a community service that provides what select boards and town expects. We've got a lot of really good people here. Toby does an excellent job on presenting financial reports. Former chief Ty Rollin has done an excellent job building the department in the past years but we made a change and we want to move forward. I'm just looking for cooperation amongst the men and women here to move that change forward. And I'm open to suggestions to try things, not try things and see how it works. I don't run any kind of a forced hand, hot hand, hand on your head type environment. It's open, it's a real open environment. You got a suggestion, let's try it. Let's put it in place. And I've indicated to all the officers here this time, I won't be here. So you need to be trained up to handle the department. And that's happened in the past couple of weeks. I've been on vacation and I've been 78 miles away at times up right on Derby line right at the Canadian border and beyond. And so when they had structure fires, by the time I got back here it'd be hour and a half, two hours into it. But I know that the department is in good hands. The men and women that are working here will do their absolute best each time the call goes out. And they'll do their absolute best to work with the towns, calluses, Montpelier, Plainfield, Marshfield to provide the best possible treatment and service that we possibly can supply. So any other questions or thoughts for me on this? It sounds like we really need to be helpful for us in reaching out and in the community, in our communities right here in this system. Just getting word out there that, hey, we really need this folks. Who can stand up and who's interested. It's something that we've got a little sign up front and there's a little bit of Facebook-type activity, but that's going to be promoted very strongly in the near future. I want to be ahead of the other departments in our area. I want to be ahead of the group that is nicking up these people, because they're out there. And like your daughter's a prime example and her career path is taking her to be a physician or to be something else. Everybody at UVM, they seem like they're all EMTs, they go to St. Mike's or they go to another place, they get them home for a couple of months and they want to do something. We're so happy to have that type of individual come down and train them. They get the experience, it's going to help them in their field and it helps us in what we're doing here. What by all means, I mean, more than happy to ever come down and make an application out and put that process and see if she can come in and train and help us grow. So that's what we're looking for. I mean, she comes in before about during the year too, so, I mean, even some weekends. Well, that's exactly what we're looking for a weekend. They're a big deal for us to get somebody here for Sunday, Sunday, keep them here on a regular basis to come in and work two shifts, three shifts, eight hour shifts, you know, things like that. So we appreciate that very much. So that's kind of a general overview. There's many other things, but I don't want to take a lot of time with that. I wanted to take about 30 minutes, which I did. And does anybody have any questions? Any comments or anything that I can help you with further? You know, by all means, if you can think of ways for us to help promote, you know. We're going to get a list of things very soon. Our last meeting was cut short because we had a critical ambulance call at the time. We lost one of our former members. And Stereolino, I think a lot of you know, Stereo McCallis, so we were in a board meeting. Junior, right? Junior, yeah, sorry, Junior. I forgot, Stereo Senior was there in Junior. So former members, you know, we do everything we can. But we were, at that meeting, we were discussing some things to present to the select boards, even at this meeting or put it in writing and submit it. That will be forthcoming as to some of the plans that we're looking for for recruitment attention. And Sandy will briefly touch on that. But if there's no other questions for me, I've got a two hour drive. You are dismissed. Appreciate it. Have a good time. And I really appreciate each one of you coming out tonight. And thank you for wearing a mask. We want to make this comfortable for everybody that's in there. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you Larry. You have a nice trip up there. How are the rest of your vacation? It's Sunday, so I'll be back. I work five days next week. Gotta make up for lost time. I think so. But Toby will take over and start the rest of it. Thanks so much. All right, thank you Larry. Okay, you've all studied the financials. You all have your questions ready for me? I did study them. Good. Far away. So page one is a balance sheet. Essentially shows you where we started last before last year and where we finished up this year. Things of note, we replenish the contingency account to 31,000. We added 31,000 to it. So that was monies that we earned to replace that contingency fund. We've made, we've increased the capital account by $52,000. And the checking account is $12,000 more. That's just a timing thing. It's not necessarily has any relationship to assets. It's just the point in time that's got $12,000 more. That's the balance sheet. Sort of gives you an idea what's there. So page two is the budget versus actual on the ambulance. So we came in $7,000 under budget on the ambulance side. 7,067 under budget. And on the second page of page two, you can see that the insurance revenue was $158,000. That's actually down from last year when we made 164,000. Okay, the other thing to note is the COVID vaccination down below at the bottom of that page. So we brought in $213,000, paid out 124,000, 12,000 for tax, 7,000 for workers comp. So essentially we're ahead by 70, roughly 70,000 in this particular fiscal year. It means that we collected more money than we expend it. Did you, yeah, were the insurance collections down where the calls were up though, correct? Yeah, but again, the percentage of Medicare Medicaid calls depends on what that function is. It's all that. Yeah, so if you have more Medicare Medicaid calls, you're gonna get less revenue. And some of it's timing too. And some of it's timing when it's reported. So we're up 60, well, we're up 70,000 on the vaccine COVID this year. Last year we were $20,000 under. So essentially we really only got roughly $50,000 in pocket. And I just did an accounting of the payments that we got from the state and they double paid, I think three invoices. So that number is not correct. So we'll have to fix that. So I think the total vaccination contract over the two year period is a gain of about $20,000 that we had over above expenses. And most of that is because we paid, essentially the state offered us $70 an hour to pay people and we only paid them 50. And we took some of that money to run the building and do other stuff. So that's some of that. That's why there's this bonus in here. Yeah. Okay, any other questions on ambulance? If you go to the first page three, that's the budget versus actual on the fireside. If you look on the second part of page three, you can see that we were $22,000 over budget. Okay, so there are a couple of factors. So one of them is building two, which we're in. And we had a couple of issues here in this building. The pump, the well pump diet, it cost us $5,500 to replace. We recoded the driveway out here for $2,500. We had a new company come in to do all of our life safety stuff, which is fire extinguishers and alarms and all that kind of stuff. So that was something that we hadn't done before. And that was another roughly $2,000. So most of that is stuff that's just individual items. And also diesel is laid out for everybody. Right. We also replaced a lot of the lights. So when we first moved in here, we're mon efficiency, but in compact lifters. So we've replaced all the bulbs and the light fixtures with LEDs now. So the electricity should go down a little bit. And that was an expense on this particular building. Was it, I thought the painting was covered under the excess leftover from? Yeah, but we didn't receive it in this year. We didn't get the payment from the town. So it will show up as a payment. Just as a light bulb. Yeah, okay. So that pretty much covers the building, firefighter supplies. That line item is a little bit up because we had to replace a lot of equipment. There is one line item in there. We bought new pagers that should have been in a different line item. That doesn't change the 22,000, but it changes the firefighting supply number to the offset a little bit. So it's not as much over as it appears. The pagers were like $4,500 and that should go up to a capital expense. So that ended up in there and it will change that. So essentially we're probably $15,000 over in fire actual. What is 5,360 stipend matching fund? It's got a zero. It's a stipend we pay everybody. It's, we do that every year. Okay, yeah, because it says zero. Well, so we had to change that line item because it's paid out of payroll. So it's in. So the line is still there with zero, but if you look a little bit lower, you'll see salary stipend. Well, that was going to be my next question. Is this something new? That essentially just moved to a different line item. Okay, so you just created a new one. Because we have to take taxes out, which wasn't being accounted for on the line. Okay. Any other questions on the fire budget? That's on the well. Huh? That's on the well. Yeah. Well, we have put in. Oh, I did. Yeah, it is on the well. Page four is our collection rate. The usual discounts versus what we collect. So you can see we actually collected more than we bill, which is a great collection rate. Medicare was 44%. Medicaid finished 14.8%. So that's just to give you an idea of how successful we are collecting. Does the other companies like Blue Cross and all that, do they pay? 100%. 100%. So page five essentially is just a summary of what came in and what went out based on all the reports that we have here. So you can see we almost collected a million dollars. And we almost, we spent over 900,000. It's all itemized there by category. So it was a busy year. A lot of money in, a lot of money out. So any questions on any line item there? Thank you. Yep. Page six is again, July to December for each town and category for total calls. The second page six is January to June. So total is over 700, over 700 calls all together. We broken down by town. So you can see what the percentage is in your town. That's just how many times we went out for all kinds, everything. So then you go to the last page, page seven. Again, that's July to December. And the second part of it is January to June. And again, broken down by towns. So 169 were the transports in July to December. And 169 was the transports in January to June. Yep. We get called out a lot of times and don't take a patient to the hospital. Any other questions about financials? Great. That's all I have. I just had one thing. I just wanted to make just a statement. I think that the chief was saying that if, if just the problem went full time, you probably have a million dollar budget. I think it probably closer to a million and a half dollar budget because the budget's almost a million dollars now. Well, so the 200, so you're looking at 200,000 that came in this year that won't be coming in. Won't be coming in. And again, so right now it's, you know, it's a $430,000 ambulance budget. Yeah. Okay. And we brought in 158,000 worth of revenue. So that's 600,000 that we can bring to the table, including what we get from the two towns, the four towns. And what we collect, but we're also asking the towns to participate in paying for trucks. So the truck, the 158 is the truck side of things. And if you take that and put it into the, the operating budget, which we could do, now you got to raise that other 150,000 or 100,000 a year for the capital side. So it's, you have to be careful about how you look at what that number is. And if you look at the fire department, you look at the ambulance together, I mean, that's a substantial amount of money. It's a large chunk of money. I was saying that where I was telling manager before, coming here on the select board, you know, our police department was a million dollars a year. Right. Of course, the fire department was a lot less because it was volunteer. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if you look at the fire budget for the two towns combined is 180,000. And we've actually stayed pretty level on that over the years. Because essentially we've managed everything that we need to do. And our fire calls don't, don't, you know, we don't see a large increase in fire calls over here. Right. And most of that is all volunteer based. So there's no, there's no salary based in that. Yep. Thank you, Joey. You kind of, you know, with the climate change issues we're having, and I've seen the night National Water Service projections on temperature and then more extended drought periods. Are there any, do you see any issues in that coming from the near world of, you know, talk to Scott Whittier if he pointed that over National Water Service? No, I mean, drought would mean more brush fire. You know, we have maybe one or two brush fires a year right now. So Vermont is a very green state. It's not a big drought state. So our forests, you know, are healthy. And so I don't see that being an issue as far as climate change goes. You know, longer winters or shorter winters, driving issues. I mean, we might go to more, more vehicle accidents, but not a significant change because of climate that I can see. I've heard that, I mean, I'm talking working with them, you know, National Water Service throughout emergency operations, you know, they are getting possible, you know, probably increased rainfall, but also in larger, high-volume, short-duration events and then increased number and longer droughts. So we, for the most part, don't get called out to those kinds of events flooding unless people are trapped and or floods, you know, essentially the beaver dam went once and we were called out to that to manage that. We haven't been called out to any others because essentially it's a culvert washed away or a couple of roads washed away, but it's not life safety or property safety that we can handle. I mean, you know, in a flood event, we would bring pumps and pump people's basements out or take boats to take people, rescue them from their houses, but we don't, we have not, we've only had that one flood event in my 20 years in the fire department and we've had lots of other road washouts where the fire department was not involved. Sure, I got you. That's good, that's actually good. So I don't think that's a big effect for us. The hurricane, we were on duty. Katrina or- Irene. Irene, right. Yeah, we did a lot of running around for those two days as we were on the road a lot. And that was mostly blocking roads and making sure people weren't traveling in dangerous places. I mean, it wasn't rescue work, it was road management. Couple of rescues. There was one car that was stuck and the mud was moving it. And Larry and someone else, I don't know, did you go, it was up north about, north Montoya. And by the time they found it, the car was moving in the mud and they got it out. Did you see a lot of mutual aid calls in that? I think it was certainly, obviously some areas got hit very, very bad, like East of the Greens, you know, the Grand Falls. When we were called in to Montpelier, there were people needed to be rescued in a trailer parking, just in the middle of the city. I remember that. We did get calls for that. Yeah. Again, life safety and for property damage. Again, in my 22 years, two or three events. So I'm not, I'm not losing any sleep over it. That's great. I guess Scott, that means that he didn't, because of the quality, the characteristics of our forest, they weren't super concerned at this point. I mean, looking at the temperature and those rainfall changes, they're, yeah, he was less concerned than other threats, we say. Other than that, any other questions, any other business to bring before the fire department? Great. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. We'll be going over the year. I was going to discuss something that Larry asked me to touch on. Well, I talked to Larry about it first, and it is the, we give out stipends for our firefighters, they have to be a member, not per diem people members. They have to meet criterions, but we're wondering if the town could push for something on the state level or maybe on the town levels to help us for retention and to get members as maybe a kickback on their taxes somehow, or something to say you're a resident of Calis or East Montpellier, you're a volunteer, you've got to meet these criterions, you might get a $100 discount off your property tax, something like that, or approach the state to put in a program, ask your representatives, something because there's been a lot of talk on recruitment retention and something to maybe boost it from a town level to give a little kickback, whether it's a tax break gone, buying tires for your vehicle or something or tax breaks, something, I don't know what, just for helping us with recruitment and retention. Oh, they would have to meet a criterion, they'd have to meet special guidelines put out by the state or the town, whoever's giving that benefit back to us, that they would have to be at so many, it's the same thing with getting a stipend, they have to meet 50% of our business meetings and 50% of our trainings in order to get a stipend to qualify and then that depends on how many people qualify and how much percentage they qualify goes from that pool of money and that's how we divide up the money for stipends, not everybody gets stipends in our department, some may only show up once or twice a year, they wouldn't be entitled to a stipend, same basis would happen. I don't have to mention names, but how many volunteers are there from Calis that might qualify? For a stipend? No, for some kind of a, do you have any idea how many people are in Calis? Two? Maybe two or three, but if it's only two or three, just it might be its incentive to hold that pool. Yeah, no, I hear you, it's worth discussing. Can you keep a running list of these ideas like this for us and just work on this together? Yeah, some sort of incentive for recruitment and retention to have someone say, look, I'm volunteering, but what do I get? Nowadays it's all about the money, what am I gonna get out of it? It's not the old days, everybody pitch it, volunteerism is way down, I mean, you see it all over. All these clubs, there's very few people doing all the work. There's only a small percentage. How about if there's something to give them the incentive to wanna participate more? I mean, I like this idea. It's worth checking out. Yeah, somewhere, something, whether you push that idea onto a state level. That would be even better because they might be able to do more. It would be, but I don't know where we can go with it right now, but I wanna put it out there for discussion and that's what I talked with Larry a little bit about. And he said, hey, bring it up at the meeting and see if the towns can do anything at the town levels. Oh, that's quite possible. It's worth talking about. It's even for us, we can work on the legislators too, but that's something we can pass on. We already have a veterans discount. In town. And you get the voters to approve that. Right. So it'd be similar to that. You could do the same thing. You could just have a special discount on taxes for volunteers. Well, and the state has a certain amount for veterans. Calis does more than what adds more on to. We do more for the veterans in Calis. Right, so you only can do it at a local level. You're already doing it at the local level. Yeah. You can just need to. I mean basically you do it for landowners that keep their land open and stuff like that. We're looking at the same thing, keeping the volunteers active, something like that. Basically acknowledging that. Maybe they could do that for select board members. Maybe. This is our third meeting. Maybe we get paid to get my channel on. Let's start with part of it. I don't know. I don't know. But it would be similar to veterans it's worth talking about. Thank you. Thank you. So I have one quick question. You guys took the loan out for the 66,000. What are you doing with the proceeds? Are you putting it in a reserve account? Well, that is an issue. We don't have a treasurer currently. We're going back out to recruitment. We worked hard to recruit. We had somebody that had sucked to the job. Anyways, long story short, we don't have a treasurer. So we don't have anybody to sign the loan paperwork. So I've been working with the town's attorney to see how we can get around that issue. So. Well, there's no rush. I'm just, I saw that you had voted to approve. I just want to make sure that when you get the proceeds that you put it in the fire department reserve fund. So it stays in one place where you're. Right. This is our portion of the new truck. When is the, when? It could be a year from now. It all depends on construction. Okay. Cause our, the town attorney asked me to ask you for a debt schedule. Do you have that? I don't think we're at that stage. You're not at that stage. Okay. Right. Yeah. He asked me to ask that question. And another one. And that's why I asked you for your phone number. I was going to call you because he had two questions you wanted me to ask. And I can't remember the other one. So we've talked, we'll talk to the credit union and they're all set, but they haven't determined anything. Cause if the truck's not delivered for a year and a half that schedule won't be built until then. Right. So we have time. Yeah. But all I'm saying is that you've signed the document and it's going to be happening and you're going to have the monies before the truck arrives. I hope so. Make sure, yeah, it's not going to be a year away, we hope, but anyway, just make sure that you put it in the reserve fund so it sits there untouched. That's right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cause Isma Peter has their capital fund in. It's already there ready to go at a moment's notice. Right. So that's where we're at. I'm working on it. Hopefully you can get a charger or a hired. Yeah. If you know anybody, send them our way. That's it. So thank you all for coming. Oh, do you have anything? Well, Larry, Larry asked me just to briefly, briefly talk about the two fires that we had, which he already mentioned, could have been that already. But Larry, since he's become cheap, he's missed all of that. He wasn't here for either one of them. He was away on vacation. But he mentioned about the, and you had brought up about the multiple fire departments coming in and how that gets started. Berry City has a good system where their dispatch, not capital West, Berry City dispatch, where they get a call into their dispatch about a fire in a building or spoke in a building. They have the option as a dispatch to automatically tone several departments all at once. The fire department doesn't have to call for that second alarm. The dispatch can do it themselves. So they can tone, I don't know, what is it, six departments all at once, even before Berry City even leaves the station. So, but in our case, like it would tie the other day when we were headed to the County Road, he actually made the call to go to a second alarm and to call Montpelier, Worcester, Berry Town. We actually manually tell Capital West to call these other departments in. It's interesting, Cal's has had two fires in, like two weeks, right? A week. A week. Yeah, same week, yeah. Yeah, so that's a little different. Berry City's obviously they have the dispatch center, but they can not, theirs is automatic. And ours is that we tell Capital West to go to a second alarm and we can not. Okay, so like when the fire happened on Route 14, somebody called 911. Yeah. And then we started to respond. But before that, how did you get a call from Capital West? Capital West will tell East Montpelier and Woodbury. At the same time. Those are the two departments that are told first. Right. Whoever is going to be in command, either Ty or Paul Saruti, whoever's going to be in command, they would go to the next step and ask for other departments. Because they know they don't have enough people in the house. Exactly. Because what, where does he have to have 18? Yeah, that's what the goal, the goal is to get as many people as we can. Because each department isn't going to send 12 men. Right. Like the one on 14, then I guess, Walden, Hardwick, Cabot? No, I don't think Cabot, it was Hardwick, Woodbury, East Montpelier, Montpelier, Berry City, Berry Town, and Burger Land, or the ones that were. They were, most of the, some of these departments are called because we actually mainly called for a tanker task force. We've brought in three other more departments in the house. So that's, so with Berry City, that's automatic there. Dispatcher can, has the authority to do it. In our case, Ty or Toby, as the lead officer would, or whoever the lead officer is going to be, be the one to call for those extra resources. Okay, depending on. And that's what happened in Calis. Right. They call for the extra resources. Yeah, but no. Even before you know how serious it is, because it's. We can do that when we leave the station, right? We don't need to know how serious it is. But it's good to get everybody on the road. Right. Because it takes so long to get there. Right, right. So we want to get them started. And what else happens when you might have thought Walden, Walden might have been called in to cover Woodbury Station, or Waterbury might have got called in to cover Montpelier. That's, that's, right. So those are other scenarios that take place. Everybody backs up everybody. Right. You know, so no one's left empty-handed in case something happens in their towns. Right. So that's why you might have heard something about Walden. They might have came down and covered Woodbury in case something happened because Hardwick came up to the fire too. So it's a mutual aid system that everybody backs up everybody. It's great. So it's a ripple system. So you guys, you guys have a Facebook page, right? I do. It's not very active. Well, it should be. Let me tell you why. Woodbury's Facebook page is very active. They post stuff all the time. They get a lot of people making comments and it really keeps them in the public eye. And I think that is really helpful when you're looking for recruits, you're looking for donations, you're just looking for people to know that you're there and all the wonderful things that you do. So I would really encourage you to have somebody, maybe there's some. On the other side of that is you have to be careful for privacy of the person. Right, they don't. It's a medical call. Right, they don't do medical, they don't do the medical calls. It's only the fact of the fire. They don't say who's it is. Yeah, something that has to be watched because. But there's Facebook pages really, really good. And they get a lot of people looking at it. Yeah. So I would really encourage you to beef that up. I don't even have Facebook. What do you call it, Facebook? Facebook page. I don't even know that. Yeah, the only reason I did Facebook years ago was because I was getting a puppy. That's the way I could keep in contact with the breeder. So the other fire department, the other fire too that was the same week Woodbury had, they went to a Greensboro bet. Oh wow. So Paul Saruti's crew really should be commended for what they did in a week's time. They were just, their trucks were stripped on all those calls. Right. And they kept going until the job was done. So then it's passed off to Woodbury. They did a great job. And that was in this, the last one was during the night. So they were up all night long. And they were, they were tired. They have to go to the next party. Yeah. I do have another request. When you take minutes, is there any way that the boards can get a copy of the minutes that, that you take for the fire department meeting? The board wants you to have them. Yeah. Now I will tell you, it's not going to be in the next couple of days. No, I'm just, just a while. Just to, I think it would be helpful if we could get copies of the minutes that you take. We don't have a quorum tonight. You don't have a quorum. So there isn't any minutes. I'll probably write up some notes. But other than that, it would be really helpful if we could get, and I used to ask about this quite often years ago, if we could get copies of the minutes and it never happened. Okay. Let me make sure you get the time. Did you get the agenda for our board meeting? Not this time. Nope. But in the past. Nope. Okay. We can talk about that. Okay. Yeah. Okay. This is not me instructions. I have my little black. I've asked for it, but we never got it. You haven't asked me for it. No, it was before you. I know it's not you. Oh, are you? Yeah. Okay. It would be helpful. We'll get it. I get my book out every time I check. Everything that I have. So does it go to you or does it go to the chairperson? It should go to all of us. Okay. I don't think we have all of the email address. I think you probably do, but I can send it to you. I'll send you everybody's email address. Yeah. Okay. Does the useful player want the same thing? Yeah. But I think it would just come to me. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. We would like it to come to all of us. Okay. So it will be the approved minutes of our board. Right. Yeah. And then. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Okay. So I guess we're done. Yep. Yep. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Sandy. You're welcome. Thank you.