 select board meeting for recording in progress Monday January 3rd first order business to prove the agenda unless there's any changes do you have paper copy it's okay you can keep that when I have it in my email I just need I was gonna say I'll just I'll take one I'll take one that's the ship falls apart when you're not here Carla it's a pretty short agenda so you have the consent agenda items from the last meeting liquor license managers items is fire contract 221 budget and generally discuss 22 I make a motion to approve the agenda as presented all right is there a second second all right it's been moved and seconded any further discussion all those in favor please say hi first is consent agenda items minutes from December 14th meeting and then liquor licenses for craft your seller crossroads discount beverage smuggler's notch distillery and Billings mobile prove the consent agenda as listed right there's second second and moved and seconded any further discussion all those in favor please say hi thank you Bill here we lose our video thanks it seems like audio hit that button so it looks like it's just off if you hit this we've been having some trouble with the Wi-Fi you hear us we say we got a restart the meeting so anyone is a nice needs to log back in yeah the zoom is frozen I'm sorry I thought it was fine why 2k I guess I'm just rejoining hopefully they're still there they can hear us Karla can you hear I think the only public I saw this well yeah just stops recording in progress I'm sorry for the technical difficulties but looks like we have everyone we got prior to us so now is the public remarks section this is an opportunity for the public to speak on anything that's not on the current agenda looks like the only person I see is Tom and Meg I don't know if you had anything from public remark before we move into select work business we will move forward with select work business consider applying for a Steve Terry for canopy urban forestry grant sorry also thank you so each year we've got a fine state urban forestry funding last year we funded for a combination of and roadside after removal and we'd like to apply again the state has $50,000 available and so we definitely want to do a planting and the two spots are one is in Pilgrim Industrial Park there's a section of lower railroad street that has no trees across from where the greenhouse was station lumber and so we have permission from Wayne Leverton is a partner in long properties that owns really the whole industrial park now and fine with us planting trees there the right-of-way for railroad street is quite narrow it's only I think something like 17 feet wide but the state will allow us to plant trees with grant funding with a written agreement with the private property owner and they would be street trees we would plant them they'd be warranty planted by evergreen gardens and you know we would establish them and so that would qualify for the grant funds the other project is in Hope Davy Park so if you flip your paper over this is the area by the picnic shelter that we worked on this past year highway department expanded the parking lot to create another bay of parking and they're going to add a timber barrier down the middle of the parking lot similar to the other parking lot off Loomis Hill we planted two trees this past summer with funding I was an Arbor Day planting we planted a celebration maple and renovated it's in the middle of the hexagonal commemorative bench there and we planted a heritage river birch these are trees that tolerate wet conditions underlying soils I get very wet in that particular area like a lot of water break center and so what we'd like to do is plant four more heritage river birch that would be between the expanded park out the picnic shelter and they're shown on this planting plant and then we want to plant a swamp white over they do well in wet conditions we plan to add desk and row field down by Windows Street last year so there'd be a total of 12 trees I've got Dr. Mike McLeod with over green gardens today tree cost has gone up actually be about $7,000 for the trees so what we'd like to do is have you authorize a project budget that would not exceed $10,000 those grant funds will cover basically 50% of the project cost so it's an equal match we would do a cash match and probably I talked to Bill about this we probably go through our department budget and so it would be up to a $5,000 grant and then up to a $5,000 cash match I say up to that we're having some conversation to the state since there's only $50,000 available we may scale it back to do just the planting this year and maybe do another ash removal but we'd like you to authorize the the full project that would be a $10,000 budget a $5,000 grant request the applications are due this Friday so it's a project of the treaty committee so Dean Brown with the treaty committee is offered to assist in putting together the grant application so that that's really the project and not shell it will complete the planting renovation if you will at Hope Baby Park and then it will actually complete the street tree planting for railroad streets so it will be a nice addition to our urban forestry program and complete the planting for those two areas. Steve, any idea on how many grants that they plan to or I don't know I've got a call into the program director and I'd like to get her advice so I should hear back from her in a day or two and just see as I say as I mentioned we may scale the project back a little bit to do just the planting but we'd like to have that option of we would we did the full project we would put $3,000 towards removal of some additional roadside ash and then probably did the same project the treaty committee is willing to do the bucking and splitting we sold the firewood we sold seven quarts this past fall with the last project and raised almost $2,000 was split between the Good Neighbor Fund and the Waterbury Rotary Charitable Fund so we sold the firewood as I mentioned and for tax deductible donations that went directly to those charities so if we go that route we would do a similar project but to scale back from what we did this past year. Just out of curiosity what were the what was the price on the trees prior to so the trees were about let's see 12 there about $500 a piece planted and Mike estimates that the cost has gone up about 10% and it's it's not just the nursery cost it's trucking because in a lot of industries right now trucking costs have gone up a lot and so I talked to Mike today he's gonna get me a quote by the end you know before the end of the week to include that he thought that the other probably insignificant question is you know anytime you plant trees in the fall those trees shed leaves and how much of a pain is it for from a maintenance perspective because I know that big maples that I got at home when they drop their leaves it's like ridiculous trying to deal with them yeah do we have we don't have bags on the mowers right or do they just mulch mulch into the ground yeah do we have it does the work police crew do some week you know all the parks yeah just curies no exception long railroad street we really haven't had issues I think in these open areas the leaves tend to disperse these trees would be about 40 feet apart so it's not like a dense road but even in hope Davey we find that it's not a huge issue street trees we end up yeah Steve totally understand the supply chain you know issues that's happening everything but should like you know these trees are probably not going to go in until spring should things change around is is there some flexibility if costs go down then we can probably would be I don't think costs would go down it may more be an availability issue where a two to two and a half inch caliper tree may not be available we may have to go to an inch and three quarters to two inch and I think the states can experience this from lots of municipalities that there has to be more flexibility right totally understand yeah just so I think yeah we would stick with these feces we might have to adjust the sizes around okay the overall project anyone else have questions and then the motion would be you're always going to try to match so for some reason the grant comes in at three is that mean that the cash matches three then correct yeah so the motion would be to authorize bill to sign the grant application for the total $10,000 with a $5,000 grant matching match not exceed 10 right including the $5,000 right so moved second and moved and seconded any further discussion all those in favor please say aye aye we keep us posted yes definitely keep you okay thank you thank you all right managers items that's very fire contract okay I did send out to today I think but we're getting benefit a couple things as we start the budgeting process there are certain elements of the budget that are in the budget for quite some time and the fire contract with the town of Duxbury is one of those items the contract basically we provide first response fire protection to almost all of Duxbury is about 13% of Duxbury's grand list down near Howard Union High School that more town covers on first response a number of years ago we developed this particular contract structure where the two towns basically pay for the fire department as if the total grand list of the two towns together were being used to pay that so they're paying the same fair share as water break is of our fire department budget so what we do is we look back to the past year so the 2021 budget ended when I did this last week 772 895 and we take that number and then we use the equalized grand education grand list which we get from the state's website and do the math and it comes out to contract for 2022 2023 April 1st and March 31st of $120,570 it was 115 and change in 2021 to 2022 so I sent this to the Duxbury select board last week told them that I would try to get you to use the select board to approve this now every year what I tell them and you is that the $772,000 spending that we had I try to project bills that are going to come in in 2020 and early 2022 but they need information early enough so they can do the budget so typically our fire year-end fire expenses typically are a little bit higher than we base the contract on it only usually would amount to a couple thousand dollars and rather than risk $120,000 revenue by nickeling and dining them for an extra $500 or $1,000 we just say kind of that's it if you read the email that I forwarded to you I think I sent you the whole thing I sent the email to Marie Pratt the chairperson of the board over there about three years ago they questioned the discount of 13 or 17% we built on 83% of their grand list total which means about 17% of the value of their town is not included in this and a few years ago they said well we're not sure that's the right number it might be better for us and I said well we'll have to look and we'll have to recalculate and they didn't they didn't take me up on that a couple years ago so this year I told them I said this is the contract arrangement that we've had I think it would be to our both of our benefits if we revisit to make sure that 83% is the right number and what I suggested as a carrot to get them to do it is to say let's sit down together Dan Sweet who's our appraiser is their appraiser as well sit down with Dan and myself and a couple select board members from Duxbury along with Gary Dillon make sure we draw the circle around the right part of Duxbury that is supposed to be excluded and then let Dan figure out what the value of that excluded area is and what I told them is I would recommend to the select board to approve this contract as is with 125 70 as the number and then told them that if we would do that math that I think should be done because it hasn't been adjusted probably in 15 years now if we if we do that math and it's to Duxbury's benefit I would recommend that we give them the benefit and lower the contract price as if we do this before the first installment is due and if it's benefit to Waterbury we'll leave it as is now and then next year we'll we'll true it up so my recommendation is to have you offer formally offered this contract of 125 70 to Duxbury for the period April 1st 22 to March 31st 23 the only question I do have I know Gary's gonna meet with Duxbury select board members would he want to have a Waterbury select board member there well if a select board wants to go that's fine I mean what I proposed is Gary and myself and Duxbury doesn't have a manager so right maybe I didn't hear with you no no me myself Dan sweet and the Duxbury select board number two nothing for a second okay it looks like any time we have that associated with the fire department that gets included in this budget which I see the last three line items are the capital improvement yeah principal and interest so when we take on large expenses they share in that yeah yeah and I specifically put that back in a couple years ago and went over and told them that hey you know we've got a million dollars worth of fire trucks that you're using as well so yes that's that's included because most of the other debt that we have gets paid out I moved this back to make sure that was included yeah I don't know if you agree with this but I mean over the years we've cut them a little slack from time to time but you know in cases like you just said when CIP you know when the fire department requires a higher budget that goes into the calculus I think I think our goal here is to not to make money on the town of Duxbury it's just simply to provide them with a fire service that's adequate as long as you know both parties are fairness yeah I don't think I don't think yeah and I think you know almost every time a new select board gets elected over there they think that this is this waterways getting rich off and then you go over and you explain it and then you tell them that you got 55 firefighters that all the training they go through and all the equipment that we purchase and it's all available to them and then you know they look at their alternative which is trying to figure out how to drum up 10 people to be their own volunteer fire department and they think it's not a bad deal so I think it works both ways and like I said I don't want to nickel and dime you know I make my best estimate at this time of year so if it passes now and then it does end up needing to change you would bring it to a board meeting and we would vote on making that change or it would just be yeah so what what I envisioned Danny is I would hope that sometime in February or March you know after we get through the budget period that we could have this meeting Gary would help us identify the areas make sure everybody's in agreement with it then Dan Sweet would do the calculations and if we did it and it turned out that they should get a 20% discount instead of a 70% discount would calculate that and then revisit the contract and I'd bring it back here to tell the board you know my recommendation is to allow the contract to be adjusted down by $3,000 or whatever so yeah I would come back to you the motion would be to approve the proposed fire contract with Duxbury for the period April 1, 2022 to March 31, 2023 as presented okay thanks okay okay again to refresh all of your memories and to bring Danny up to speed January is a really busy month for us we're really lucky there's five Mondays in January I think we should plan that there'll be a meeting on everyone maybe if we get lucky we won't need it on the last Monday of the month but chances are we will what typically happens and you're the only one who hasn't been through this pleasurable process yet is that you know this first meeting it's first of all it's very early it's oftentimes not until the 6th or 7th so it's earlier this year than normal and it's right right off the holiday so I did take a little time during the holidays and didn't work constantly over Christmas or New Year's so this first meeting will pretty much just review where we stand at the end of 2021 I always explain to the board that the numbers that you see as the year-to-date numbers now will likely go up in terms of the expenditures because bills that come in that were for goods or services that we bought in 2021 will have to be posted back so electric bills phone bills heating fuel diesel fuel potentially soft for the highway department the training that we had a couple weeks ago from there again and she hasn't built us there for that yet so anything that we did in 2021 will get posted back so the numbers that I'm showing in this budget today in the second column to the right you know budget and then the year to date column that year-to-date column is likely to go up I believe the projected column if you look at the projected columns that I have for 2021 are higher than the year-to-date columns and that's my best guess right now as to what will happen over the next few weeks and then what will happen is that I will present budgets to the board we'll talk about the general government budget in the general fund tonight we'll talk about the health and social services budget a little bit tonight and I take care of presenting a number of the budgets that don't have department heads if you will and then probably on the 17th of January two weeks from tonight Steve will come in to talk about the planning budget maybe Gary Dillon will come in to talk about the fire budget next week probably have Nick in the recreation budget we'll probably have some people from the senior citizen center some of the bigger groups that request appropriations they come in to tell us what their what their plans are for the year so as we move through I'll make changes not so much based on what you folks say tonight but as we move forward there'll be presentations made from department heads I'll ask you as we go through the process to preliminary approve departmental budgets just to make sure that we have a general consensus on where we are and then I'll make changes between meetings as I said in my email yesterday I'll do my best to try to get information out to you by late in the day Saturday certainly I'd like to be have it no later than noon on Sunday to give you a little time to look at it if I meet my goal of getting it out on Saturday you'll have a whole day and a half or so to look at it anyway and then as we move forward things will solidify and individual budgets that looked good when they were presented might look in the aggregate that it's not what you folks want and will make adjustments and fine too I'm hopeful that on the 24th I will present to you a budget that is really pretty close to what I think it I think will be in in compliance with your with your review as we go forward and then if we have to meet that last Monday of the month it will be really for fine-tuning and just cleaning up so that's where we'll what the process is like pretty much work every day during January from now until we're finished so if you need something you know the best way is to just email me if you have a question let me know and we'll go from there hopefully it won't be too painful so to review 2021 as I said in my memo in one respect this will might not have to be a very painful process at all because we have significant fund balances going into 2022 mainly due to the fact that we were very conservative a year ago when we budgeted for revenue that was coming from the state because of the COVID pandemic and all of what we dealt with in 2020 layoffs and and pulling back spending because we just didn't know what things were going to happen in 2020 and going into 2022 we're still pretty uncertain I talked to the board a year ago at this time and said you know we should really maybe plan for a significant decrease in state payments especially those that are dependent on sales tax revenues which that's the pilot payments so we budgeted far less you can see on the if you look at the revenue page in the general fund we budgeted $160,000 for a pilot and we ended up taking in 330,000 so because we had significant revenues from the state and that same case that same situation is the case for the forest and parks revenue and the current use revenue all of which you know about three times what we budgeted so can I stop here on pilot is there like a year delay like are we potentially going to see a strong was there a drop that we know of and within I can't imagine there was a drop in the meals tax at some point and are we just maybe never going to see yeah you know mark I don't I don't know for certain I'll try to find out from the folks at the league of cities and towns a little bit more but you know 2021 I mean 2020 there's a lag so the state uses sales tax revenue that ends on July 1st of 2021 to fund what we would get in calendar year 2022 and they use the values of the buildings as of April 1st the prior year so everything is a year behind and I would have thought that given that we had virtual lockdowns in places were closed in 2020 that 2021 would have been the year where we saw steep declines my my guess would be just based on how much I went out to restaurants and the restaurants that I see open it seems like there were more of them open in 2021 than they were in 2020 during the midst of the high points of the pandemic but I'll try to make sure but nothing on this page I haven't proposed anything yet for 2022 revenues but we budgeted 160 to come in in November of 2021 and 330,000 came in right I'm just what I was just asking for a clarification maybe there because I'm interested to see what you put in as a yeah and I and I haven't I haven't put that in yet because I don't have information my guess is that somehow the state you know they may have used some of their federal money you know there's been before before ARPA you know there was COVID relief money that came a year ago so the state may have used that to backfill and try to get this is a local option tax so really money that maybe left restaurants and went to groceries well just certain but some of that might have actually just found yeah and you know so the local option tax it's rooms and meals sales and and rooms and meals alcohol and sales now sales probably went up you know in terms of people buying online you get that tax now all right so if you're buying from you know Amazon or Walmart online they've got to pay that local option tax to Williston or where so I think if I think if you have a brick-and-mortar building in a particular town yeah that's how if you know and I don't know all the ins and outs of how it works but clearly we were expecting we weren't expecting but we were prepared for a huge drop and fortunately you know it didn't happen so we end up we're pretty flush going into 2022 and can can you just remind everyone with the forest and parks income is Perry Hill right goes across and it goes up the Worcester Range so you know it's if you think about the acreage that's involved they're paying us you know percentages of pennies on the dollar but it's still you know it's it's it's 90 92 thousand dollars that we get to put on budget if it was privately owned you know would have hundreds of thousands of taxes that's use fees that's where this money generated or is this just a percentage of estimated value yeah they've they've changed their formula the last couple of years and they've they value the forest and then there's a percentage we used to get we used to get in the up until about four years ago we were getting in the low $60,000 so they changed the formula it bumped up about 30 grand from what we used to get and and then the the other thing that's in that forest and parks it's not only the forest land but in that no no I'm sorry in the in the regular pilot for that we got the 330,000 structures at state parks are included there so the value of lean twos and the ranger stations and whatever outbuildings are at the Little River State Park and the Center State Park we get that's that's included there and then the current use is for people who have who have open land and they you know they've signed up for the use value taxation so they get a they get a lower tax bill and the state makes up part of that lost revenue to the towns so that's what that is. Who knows in the near future we might have a lot of item here that's for theft and use apparently I think it's a state passed a bill that if you steal something you're supposed to claim it. Oh yeah. Yeah yeah wow. Wow. I wonder how many papers they have. So continuing to look at the revenue page of the 2021 budget we did receive a big donation from Albertsons in the recreation program that was a $60,000 grant and we used that money to buy to put towards two vans as it turns out and if you look at the I don't I haven't told it I'm sure Nick will do it when he comes in to talk with you next week but if you look at the revenue that we've generated from the the recreation programs and the pool and the like it's significantly above what we anticipated the mini camp income you know 470 percent of what we have what we proposed and that's basically all of the after-school camps and camps that we've had to try to provide a place to go for kids during the pandemic when other things are closed so you know Nick did a really good job of again second year in a row being pretty nimble and fortunately have been able to get enough staff to run these programs and take in that revenue. I didn't do the tally but I know that the net cost for recreation programs is significantly lower than still costing the tax payers money but the tax more of the programming have been covered by revenue this year than has been ever. Do you and Nick have any kind of inkling if we might see any Albertson money next year? Have not have not been no indication of that yet. Also on here and I put in my memo if you look down to the bottom of that first page we have a $50,000 transfer from the tax stabilization fund to the general fund that we budgeted and we've got this tax stabilization fund Danny I think I've talked about this in the past but started when Duxbury and Waterbury put our K-8 school system, pre-K-8 school system together. Duxbury bought into the equity where at the time was the Waterbury Elementary School and it paid us I think it was $644,000 and we took that money and we've invested it and then we when we have years when there's a reasonable game we we had a very complicated formula before that was basically able to take up to 5% of the year-end value that's the current policy and last year the fund ended at about a million dollars in value so we could transfer $50,000 from the tax stabilization fund to the general fund. I didn't make the transfer yet because although the tax stabilization fund did very well I haven't got the last statement yet for December but I don't think we really need the money this year so I'll just leave it where it is. Yeah we shouldn't move it out. The only reason you move it out is if we really needed it to fulfill the budget right? Yeah that's what that's what I would do and you know we can we can talk about 2022 you know when we move forward we might want to include it in the budget but this year I don't I don't think we need it right now and if it turns out at the end we decide we want to do it we can still move it and I can still post that transfer back to 2021 if that's really what the board wants to do. If we don't move it it just goes into the coffers of the additional cash position that we already have right? Yeah I mean it's one of those things where it's not at risk I mean well it's only $50,000 what'd you say? A million? A million on a seven? Over a million. Yeah I mean but I look at it this way if you're doing so well doesn't hurt to skim a little off the top to benefit the purpose it was put there which is to have the people that found and if we can put it into our overall budget and either help prevent taxes from rising up a little bit or use it to you know save money on something else I think it's you know the purpose for in which the tax civilization fund has met its goal and done for us and I think it's important that we utilize that to you know to help the purpose that it was made for but I think that might be short-sighted we have incomes that came in significantly higher for example pilot that 50,000 dollars we budgeted last year was because we didn't know we were going to get those high revenues to I think if you look at on a on a long-term macro level leaving money either vested or not spending it now if we can avoid it I think we'll pay in droves later to be a better tax stabilization fund I think if we take money out we don't necessarily need to because basically there's a good chance that we're still going to calculate out that we should put it into the budget for 2022 the question is do we do 2021 we we put it in there to get to a tax rate that we presented to the voters but I don't necessarily think we can avoid the movement of that money and that money can't potentially I think the market through and over time it returns 7% I know there's a certain position amount of cash or less risk with the portfolio there's a calculation there that also we make sure that as the portfolio grows that we take some risk out over time correct me if I'm there so I don't think there's a lot of risk to leave it in there and I think long-term it's better to not if you don't have to take money out I really think it should say yeah and and to be clear in the first paragraph of the memo that I sent out in in that well I don't have the balance sheet here but I said the December 31st balance in the town's cash operating fund so in the people's United Bank just our cash account there's 2.8 million dollars in the bank right now of that 2.8 million dollars a hundred and 77 of that cash already belongs to the tax stabilization fund so there's no there's no risk moving it from the tax stabilization but it's already got it's already got at least 17% of its portfolio is in cash right now and there's probably more cash in the money market at Edward Jones where it's invested so moving it into this fund to take risk off the table isn't what you need to do because we can we can manage that portfolio and manage the risk within the tax stabilization fund so it's it's not a matter of risk I think it's just a matter of philosophy in terms of the movement there have been many years where there's let's say then a million dollars at Edward Jones and there's a fifty thousand dollar transfer that's going to happen and all you do accounting credit one fund and you debit the other fund and that just means that the transfer has been made on paper but there's still a million dollars in Edward Jones we've got enough cash so it's just you know you just do it for accounting purposes you know I think this conversation I I think it's better for what are we going to make a transfer in the budget in 2022 as opposed to 2021 right now because I agree with what Mark said the 2021 budget was built we we had a tax rate of 53 cents or whatever it was that 53 set tax rate paid for everything we've got a lot of money that we're going to be able to bring forward this year and you know if you decide well let's put more money in the capital funds for future paving or bridge work or something you can you can do that but I think moving the money in 2021 at this point it's just it's just a it's just a balance sheet exchange because you either get it in a fund balance at the end of the year or you bring the current fund balance forward in your budget fifty thousand dollars for next year and you're in the same place no what I meant was think about putting it into this next year's budget 2022 right you know not only help serve the purpose of which it was created for which is to try to keep me even if from an inflationary standpoint if inflation because I'm seeing I mean I just bought four pallets of sewer drain pipe today because it's so scarce and the cost is just you know I did that to have it to not be impacted and if the fifty thousand can go even just towards neutralizing the inflation and impacts that we're having I think it's money I think for the 2022 budget it's certainly on the table to put money in there I'm just thinking right now it doesn't make sense to move that from 2021 because we're in a very good position in the other comment I wanted to make and maybe this wasn't the right time to do it but you know the fact that you budgeted you structured the budget last year the way you did and you were projecting those shortfalls that never came to fruition in your eyes I don't believe and maybe you can confirm this that we didn't the town didn't suffer one iota from your your budget prediction and the fact that we kind of lived under that budget and then what actually came to fruition was the surpluses you know that's been my philosophy and conversation to people right along when they talk about tax revenues versus tax rates and I keep telling them the secret is at least in my eyes is to create a town budget that and you've done a terrific job over the years that is is as fiscally responsible as possible and as your grand list grows or as your revenue source grows and I think if you ask a lot of people how many people ever seen it you know in other towns how many people have ever seen their tax rate go down well it's because the dog's always chasing his tail and the more revenue that comes in the more that seems to get spent the only way we're reversing that is to do exactly what you did last year in a sense and structure the budget that's just fiscally responsible and conservative and as the revenue stream grows over time the tax rate should go the other way instead of going up it should go down I mean we can't the school control education cost but from the town's perspective yeah I don't think we were hurt one iota we didn't lack for anything last year and now you know because of what was done you look at the surplus moving forward right I think we have tickled we're going to be in it we're going to be in a pretty good place and and I haven't done a lot of budgeting for the expense side for 2022 yet I've started but you know I think last year we put together a spending budget that was I thought rather tight but I encouraged the department heads you know if we don't need to spend something you know you've got the money to do this and obviously we tried to do things in particular in the highway department and with sidewalks and in the parks to keep up with the things that we had to do but you'll see when we go through this that not only do we have significant above in revenues but most of our spending we were able to spend less even then we budgeted so and you know the challenges that you know and I've never been the type to tell people that well you know if you don't spend your budget you're not going to get that money next year right so I don't want to punish people and if they've got a $25,000 budget and they only spent 20 last year if they come back and they asked for 28 I might say well why do we have to go up from 25 but you know I would not punish them and say well I'm not gonna budget 23 because you you know you only spent that out of a $25,000 budget unless there was some structural issue that happened that you could say that's a long-term savings but anyway I think for for right now on the tax stabilization fund where we're fine where we are now just a little bit on the spending side for 2021 I put most of this stuff I had yellow and green highlights in the budget information that I sent out most of the time yellow there's an explanation as to why it's higher than it was budgeted and the green is most of the time the green is in the proposed columns and talking about why it's higher than it looked before so in the general government budget which is the one budget that we can actually talk about my proposed 2022 spending because it's here on the budget side from 2021 we overspent some of the health department I mean the health insurance line because an employee had a change in their families that is for employment spouse lost one job took a different job and therefore the our employee who is declining coverage or taking a lower coverage had to have to bump up so we were up about $4,000 up on that budget $3,500 the Memorial Day 4th of July again that's kind of an accounting issue we didn't really spend any money for the fireworks display that we had last year in 2021 we actually paid it in 2020 they didn't do the display in 2020 we let them keep the money we didn't ask for it back and just said put it on account but the way accountants work you have to show the expense in the year that happened so it was a prepaid asset that we had in a on our balance sheet from 2020 which inflated the fund balance a little bit and then it shows that we overspent the budget in 2021 on that line Danny in particular so if we pay the town has paid for the fireworks display for the not quite independence day since around the time of the flood the Rotary Club used to do all of it on their own the fortune for the July committee before them did it and you know the town didn't pay anything the town now is has been paying for the fireworks display since around 2010 I think and we get more bang for the buck so to speak if we pay if we pay by the end of January so unless the select board doesn't want to see $14,300 and it's about of the 14 300 I think I put it in the memo some of that is for you know paying for the security at the quite independence day some of it is for the trash removal and then the balance of it is for the QID and then there's there is $500 there for the Legion that they use at Memorial Day if they remember to ask for it anyway so you might if you sign the order as you might see a bill going out north on Star fireworks this month so unless the board doesn't want to get a little bit of a they give about a 10% premium if you will if you pay early so and the money we earn in the bank is about you know point two five percent so it's no big loss to us so before we talk about 2022 in the general fund let's just run through we already talked about the fire department budget we'll come back and talk about the health and human services budget the recreation budgets you'll see in the pool you know we spent about $20,000 less than we budgeted but we we took in for pool fees about $6100 more than we anticipated so that was about a you know $26,000 to the good can you explain how we are so under for cool yeah we were under for regular pay because two reasons one we didn't do a lot of the winter we rent space at either what was first and fitness up in Berlin or in Stowe at the Golden Eagle thank you to do winter lessons and we because of COVID we weren't able to do quite a bit of those and then we lacked staff at the pool we paid overtime but we had fewer lifeguards than we had hoped and I think the pool was actually not open I think on at least one weekend day we were closed because staffing issues so we were we were down on that level in the programs there you can see about you know a 46 47,000 dollar over overage in the budget and that's because we ran all of those after-school programs and the one day a week last spring that that the kids didn't go to school there was a program on those Wednesdays so Nick as I said scrambled and was able to put that programming together you can see that big jump is really down two-thirds of the way in that where it says many programs just below field trips that's almost all of those after-school programs and week long vacation camps as well as that one day a week and in the programming revenues we were right on schedule for programs but many camps we were fifty five thousand dollars above what we anticipated so again we took in more money there than we spent in terms of the overage is concerned was the Thanksgiving break camp that he put on was that successful did that have a lot of interest in it I know it ran I don't you know some of those programs especially when we get into the winter months are constrained just because of space you know the the rec building is pretty small and you can't you know you can't in the summertime you can have a program and run a hundred kids out of there but they're outside they're at the pool but during the winter you gotta have enough space so you can ask that question next week when Nick is here but I think it was fairly successful and he didn't put one on for Christmas break. There was something. They had to cancel a day or two because like school closed early. Yeah they had one they shut down the day the school was closed because of COVID they closed but they had a mini camp between Christmas and New Years. Let's see. Rec administration that was pretty much spot on it was only over because we spent a little bit more money for Nick and he worked a lot of overtime so parks right now it's showing for part-time pay twenty nine thousand five hundred fifty dollars some of that is going to get moved into a different department the work was done but some of that was done in work in the cemetery so I'll transfer some of that over spending into the cemetery fund it will all balance out in terms of you know it was it's all for town work but it's just a different department and it looks like right now that that was terribly overspent and it's not quite that bad. Steve will be here in two weeks to talk about the planning department's budget but you can see here that there's a little bit of overspending for the regular pay line. I've given Steve a couple of bumps in his pay since he's been doing the work of the zoning administrator since Dina left in July and I don't know if this board knows but the last person that you appointed didn't take the job so we're still it seems like Steve knows better than I but it seems like he played us off against his current employer. His current employer gave him a pretty big raise from what I understand. Well they had another job. When his references was a current supervisor he basically told me that they were looking at them for our positions. That's what he ended up doing? Yeah. So anyway we'll we'll be back at some point. It's partly this stupid process that the state law requires that doesn't allow us to act proactively really you know it's just you got to get the planning commission to make a nominee and then your board has to end up deciding to. There's nothing we can do about that. Yeah but you're not going to get a charter meeting in the next few months. Well we're going to talk about that in this budget process. Not telling, but in this budget process. So the planning department was underspent and the underspending the planning department is almost wholly due to the fact that we didn't have a zoning administrator since Dean-Elept. That management is pretty simple, special articles is pretty simple. So right now the the projected ending fund balance in the general fund for December 31st 2021 is $201,000 which would be carried forward into into next year's budget. As I said at the beginning that number will probably go down some from where it is now because we will not get any more revenue from 2021 but we will have a few more expenses. So that number will probably ratchet down a little bit but you can see that the total expenditures right now are 2,842,000 and I'm projecting it's going to be 3,046. The big discrepancy there is the I got to beg the state to bill us for the police contract. They're supposed to send us the bill every quarter. I had to get after them in August and say you haven't billed us for the last two quarters of the first contract that we had. So they finally got a bill out for that $182,000 in September I think it was and then I was looking the other day they didn't bill us at the end of September like they should have and they didn't bill us yet at the end of December. So that will come eventually and we'll pay it but if they're not in a hurry for it. You know it's one of those things I start wondering why am I bugging you know. Anyway Highway Fund kind of the same thing there. Property taxes for the Highway Fund they get all of their taxes. The delinquencies show up in the general fund. I already can tell you that if you go back to the front page of the budget report where it shows that our property taxes are it shows that there about 108,000 below budget and then I discounted that again. So we billed 2.172. It says that we've collected 2.64. That's really what the general fund bill and it's all because of the people who file their homestead declarations late in that that top line there fluctuates between the time we bill it and the time we get it. But we only have about $123,000 of 2021 taxes delinquent that includes penalty and interest which is you know that means we've collected more than 98% of our taxes and you'll be able to count as collected in 2021 anything that we collect through the end of February. So I that that alone might actually keep this fund balance kind of close to where it is because we've done quite well with tax collection. Yeah, so we'll probably get that down to close to 100 before we have to stop counting. In the highway budget, we did the same thing with the Vermont State Aid in the highway fund. That's general Vermont State Aid. We got actually got an increase. The legislature provided more money than they have ever in the general state aid. So we budgeted 85 but we collected 120,500 almost. So that builds fund balance there in the highway fund. The two lines over in the right that are in yellow highlighting the highway labor materials and the pool cross charges, those haven't happened yet. So that money will come over but it shows up in my projected column already. So it is factoring into that fund balance. But spending is down. I'm projecting it's going to be down by about what $35,000 or so from what was budgeted. And it's looking like we'll carry a pretty hefty fund balance forward. We had a good fund balance to begin 2021 in the highway fund. We had 143,250. We were anticipating using all of that and ending the year with zero. But it looks like we're going to have a current year fund balance or surplus in the current year of about 150, this says 158,000. So we end up with a fund balance of over $100,000. Again, if this all comes to fruition, things look pretty good there. And then in the library fund, the same thing except to a lesser degree, they were spot on really with revenues, they did get some additional donations that they weren't anticipating and a few more nonresident fees that they weren't anticipating. The donations, as they should have been, have been spent. You'll notice that down toward the bottom of the expense line. They spent just about what they took in, or I guess exactly what they took in, which is how it should be. But it, you know, the library's fund balance looks like it's going to be about $17,800, which is about $17,800 more than the anticipated. So all those things together lead us to a fund balance coming forward that is quite strong compared to what it's been in the past couple years. So, solid good news. So any questions on the spending? And again, you don't have to ask them all tonight. But if you have questions, you can ask anytime during the budget process. If you don't have any questions about 2021 revenues and expenses, we can talk about two of the budgets tonight. The general fund or the general government budget and the general fund, that's the budget that pays for all of the front office staff as well as myself. And Michelle, who worked out in the old building, Barb Farm, her pay for 2021 and all the years prior to that is in that top line. We budgeted $349,200 last year. Looks like we're going to be a little bit overspent at $352,282. Part of that is just due to the nominal pay increase that I asked you about a couple of weeks ago. That factor's in there. And then there's a little bit more, Barb had a little bit more time than anticipated. But the $308,000 that's proposed there in 2022 does not include any money for Barb's position. But it's not a complete savings because as I said in the memo, we had $25,000 budgeted to receive reimbursement from the state for that position. I can't remember the percentage that the state paid for Barb's time, but it was it turned out that they paid about $31,000 and I think her total expenses probably were close to 75 or 80. So they were they paid about probably a third of her expenses. So the fact that the budget line for regular pay is going down is not a complete savings because we're shedding Barb's pay but we're also losing out on that reimbursement. The $308,000 does include two and a half months worth of overlap between myself and whoever is sitting here next year at this time. And as I said in my memo, that's kind of weird to say even doesn't doesn't quite feel right yet, but that's what it is. Health insurance, it's a little up next year for two reasons. One, as I said, we had one employee who bought up mid-year this year to a family plan I think as opposed to the two-person plan that they were on. And then there's also money in that $92,695 to pay for a couple months worth of health insurance for the new person as well. There's nothing else really here that's anything of a big deal. Right in the little bit lower than the middle of the page, the two MBOF, that's the Municipal Building Operating Fund. What happens is we have a different fund, Fund 76, is where all the expenses for this building are shown. And we pay for the insurance and for the heat and the lights and the building maintenance and everything out of that Fund 76. The revenue source for that Fund 76 is 53% of it comes from the library, 47% of it comes from the municipal, from the general government budget and it's simply based on square footage. The library's about 53% of this building. But that number is a number that has to be backed into and I haven't got the information from Bill Woodruff about what Fund 76 is going to cost yet. So it's going to be whatever Fund 76 needs and then we pay or this budget pays 47% of it. So that 55,910 is a rough estimate right now. It's going to change. I don't know how much. The county taxes. Before you go down, Bill, I wonder I'm looking at the training line. And I wonder about including a higher item to consider ongoing training either from Mary or another facilitator knowing that the board is going to change each year and even if not it's something that maybe we want to include department heads in as well since they didn't have the opportunity to do that. That's fine by me and training you know that that's pretty low anyway. I mean, we do we do encourage employees to get training. Some of the training comes in other line items such as you know managers professional development that would be training and there's some training that gets paid for in the professional services line item up above because some of those things are trainings that we get through the company that provides our accounting services, but sure, but especially with dollars is not a lot. So if you think that should go up. Yeah, and especially with knowing someone, although it would be, yeah, like someone new coming in in manager position, there might be more need than usual in that line. I don't know about in 22. You took the words right. I figured with a new manager coming on board. Don't take this the wrong way. You're an old hack though. You know everything that's kind of going on, but it depends upon who we have, what their experience is. I think there's going to be a fairly significant need for the training for that new person. Yeah, and I would think that, you know, my expectation is you're not going to you're not going to be hiring the 28 year right now. You're going to have to get somebody who had more experience, right, has more experience than I had when I took this because this job is very different now than it was back in 1988. But I think the training for that person is mostly going to be in 2003. But if you're thinking of board training, in particular, yes, you know, $1,000, kind of cut it. So, you know, tell me what number you want there. You spent almost all of that 2931. Because there's also some of the VLCT stuff that I don't know that most of us didn't take advantage of this year, I think due to it not being in person. And I know for myself, like, I've got a lot of learning to do it, I'd like to take advantage of more of that as well. So I don't know the number right now, but I would say you should put five. Yeah, I mean, you spent 42, 43. And you know, whether you folks decide that you want additional DEI training or not, that's immaterial. You know, you'll have some money and you can figure out what you want the training for. Bill, I just was on my head and I might not be on a topic exactly, but where's the match for the 2%? Where's that in the budget for the big dig? Because that's falling off, right? Yeah, that's in that's in one of the CIP. So now we'll be going away. Yeah. No, they'll they'll everything there, just about everything there will be charged back to 2021. We're waiting for one last final invoice of our boys in today to try to figure out whether we have that invoice or not yet. But the payment for the Main Street project is pretty much going to be a 2021 there. It might be a little bit of spillover into 2022. But that will be adjusted in the Flint 71, the infrastructure CIP. So that could mean all things being equal that you could have a lower transfer from the highway department into the CIPs. But again, we'll talk about that going forward, you might want to just roll whatever you were spending there and put it in for bridges 2021 transfer to CIP when that payment's made to the state that doesn't offer the payment doesn't hit the budget. It hits it hits from 71, which you don't have in front of you. So these these are just the operating budget. So if you look at the highway budget, fun 12, if you look at fun 12, down at the bottom, you see that we sent $584,000 to the CIP fund. Some of that went into fun 71. And that's where we paid for the Main Street project. So if there's savings there, what I'm saying, you could lower that line, or you could maintain it, you could maintain that and just, you know, target more bridges or what happened, but we'll we'll talk about that at a later date. So back to that general government budget. Right now it's coming in slightly less than last year. If we add the $5,000 or $4,000 to that training line, they'll bring it up. It'll be pretty close to last year's budget level. The county tax line. Did everybody understand that? Yeah, it's a reduction. We spent 84,000 in 2021. And I'm projecting 66 570 right now. This county offered us in 2020 to not make our full payment because it called it and we took advantage of it. So we instead of paying that November of 2020, we paid it in 2021, along with our first 2021 payment. So we paid more money this year, just allowed us to keep a little bit of money in the bank. When we still were a little bit uncertain about what we were going to have last year. So that's that. Any questions there? If there's anything, you know, like Chris made the point of not seeing like, you know, detrimental consequences from having that more conservative budgeting. And so I'm curious if there's anything that didn't get funded or anything that that might have felt some sort of pressure or consequences that would need to get funded in 2022? Yeah, not in the general government budget. That budget is pretty much to run the administrative portion of the operation. So I don't think there it would show up. It may show up Danny when we talked about the fire budget or the planning budget or the rec budget or highway budget, those those kind of places, but the general government budget. No. Right. So with that, I'd like to talk about this social services budget. And I did make a rather bold proposal here, not asking you to approve it tonight. But I'd like to at least talk about it a little bit. The health officer position and animal control officer position in particular concerns. As I said in my memo, the state requires towns to appoint a health officer. And what happens is the select would nominate someone to be the health officer for the community. And then the State Department of Health appoints that person. And the health officer is really an agent of the state, if you will, gets its authority through state statutes. And the health Department Commissioner is really kind of in charge of all the health officers, except the state doesn't do anything or fund any of that. They just, they just give you a rule book and say, this is what your authority is. And this is what your responsibility at. If no health officers appointed by the select board, the chairperson of the select board by default is the health officer. We do not have a health officer now. I don't know if they've caught up with Mark. But I don't know if they ever thought I have gotten calls. Yeah. So technically right now, Mark is the health officer. I am the deputy health officer. And I have been for pretty much the whole time that I've been here in town. The health officer position in towns like Waterbury, in towns like Waterbury, are typically not proactive at all. It's a reactive position. You wait until the phone rings and somebody says, I've got a problem. Most times the health officer gets called for two things. Dog bites and rental housing inspections. The dog bites are if somebody gets bitten by a dog, they go to their doctor or the emergency room. The medical provider is obligated by law to contact the town health officer. They usually do that through Carla. They send her an email or a fax comes to Carla and she gets it to me. Or the health officer but since we don't have one, it comes to me. And then I have to contact the person who has bitten, try to get some information from them. If we had an animal control officer, a lot of the information about the bite would have been investigated by the ACO and shared with the health officer but we don't have an ACO right now either. We haven't had since Peter Trumell left a few years ago. But then the health officer has to call the owner of the dog if it can be identified and the dog is supposed to be quarantined for a certain period of time first. You've got to find out whether the dog has had its shots. If it's had its shots, it should tell the person okay, you're going to keep the dog quarantined which is basically should keep it inside or on a leash in a fenced area and don't let it have contact with any other animals or people for 10 days and if the dog, if the animal shows any signs of unusual behavior or illness, then you've got to go to your vet and then you've got to follow up. The other thing that the health officer gets called for is people call up and say I live in such and such a building in apartment C on such and such a street number. Joe Smith is my landlord and I've got black mold in my house or the heating system won't work and you know on a day that's I think I think when the ambient air temperature is 55 or below the heating system has to be able to get the the living space to 62 degrees or something like that. Anyway, you get called for to do a rental housing inspection and it used to be you could go and do the inspection for what they call for. Legislature changed a lot two years ago. Now when you get called to go for a rental housing inspection, you're supposed to inspect all of the all of the unit for every one of the items. So you're looking at electrical, you're looking at plumbing, you're looking at all kinds of different things. Not to not that I'm a plumbing inspector, but just to see does if you turn hot water on, does hot water come out of it? Does water go down the drain? You know, do they have a working toilet? That kind of stuff. And you've got to write a report and you've got to put it on file and if you find there's a rental housing code violation, you got to contact the landlord and you got to tell them they've got to take such and such an action in such and such a period of time and then we're going to go back and look at it again. Takes a lot of time and you hope nobody ever calls because you don't want to do it, right? And it's it's I do it because there's nobody else to do it. The state last year came close. I think the governor actually vetoed legislation requiring there to be a rental housing registry in every town where if that law passed and I'm sure the legislature is going to bring it up again. They're going to want an inventory of all rental housing units and the LCT is trying to get the state to say you shouldn't have local health officers doing these inspections anymore. You should put it on the Department of Fire Safety Public Safety, the Department of Public Safety, but the fire division or whatever. But they don't have enough inspectors to do that. So I don't know if that will ever happen. I didn't propose it here, but there are towns, St. Albans, City, Montpelier, I think Walewski, not sure about Stowe, but there are towns that have said, well, we're going to have our own. They don't write their own housing standards. They just adopt the state's codes for standards. But they require a registry and they require all of the property owners to pay a fee. And then they use that fee to hire a person and they go out and they might inspect 20% of all the units in any given year and over a five-year period you get into every building and, of course, if somebody calls with a complaint you go and deal with that. I'm not suggesting that here, but that's a situation that takes some time and it's something that needs to be done. I think you were on the were you on the board when we dealt with the rat issue on Stowe Street? That took me and Steve Simons, who was the health officer at the time and I was the deputy. I must have spent a month, almost full time, you know, not a month straight, but 40 hours a week times four just dealing with that rat infestation issue had to get Joe McClain involved from, you know, Stitzel Page and Fletcher. We probably spent 10 grand on that particular issue. So I'm not going to be here after this year and the other issue is that you've brought it up several times, Mike. Gary Dillon has brought up parking around the school. We've got business owners not so much the last few years because of the Main Street Project, but now that's done. And if we ever get back to normal, there's going to be an expectation that our parking ordinances need to be enforced a little bit at least. And if they're not going to be enforced, we shouldn't even have it. Why should we put signs up that say it's two hour parking or 15 minute parking if we don't care how long people stay there. So I don't know if you can get a person to do these jobs for $50,000 a year, but I think you ought to try that. I think in this, the 2021 budget, I've got six months worth of that in there. And then the column to the right of the proposed column, which isn't headed. So for 2021, I mean, 2022, the cost to for the Social Services Department would be almost $75,000 compared to $21,000 that we budgeted last year. $13,500 of that is to the public health that's a standard payment we make every year, but all that that's highlighted in green is additional is additional. So this year that would be what 75 minus 15 would be about 60. And then I I showed you what the 2020 2023 budget would look like. And the reason why it's not double this because there's a vehicle there, I've got, you know, $15,000 to buy a used vehicle that the person could use to do their patrolling. You know, we've got a winter parking band right now. And the way that we enforced that right now is we have a deal with a towing company and we basically say, you know what, they're not supposed to park on the street from one o'clock to six in the morning. And we don't have a police department anymore. So we're not out there writing tickets. We're not out there trying to find people. If they're on the street, you got a tome out of there. We haven't had any any complaints this year. Last year I had several complaints that usually complaints usually start coming in February because it doesn't seem like winter weather gets here much before that. But that winter parking band should be enforced. This person, you'd have to allow the person to work some flexible time. Have to work sometimes at night to do that. Aco, you know, if you saw the orders last week or two weeks ago, we paid the town of Bolton $200 because the state police called Bolton's Animal Control Officer because somebody down on Route 2 in Waterbury or Little River Road had lost the dog. They needed assistance. We don't have an ACO. They called the town of Bolton. The guy was willing to do it. I don't know. He drove around. He drove for 200 miles looking for a dog. And I know the town of Clark down there. I said, you know, it's not that important that the dog be found. I mean, you don't have that much time. But we sent $200. He had sent to build the Bolton. And Bolton was saying, well, this is your stuff. For the Animal Control Officer. Yeah, he said he doesn't want to do anything about it. I told him. I said, he can tell the state police. No, he doesn't have to come. But anyway, we don't have one. And that kind of thing, you know, happens. But we have one dog bite this year. I don't know. Did you hear about it? Or one of you, somebody heard about it. There was a dog bite, I think in the parking lot between the sporting goods store and Kathy Cummings building. There was somebody there. And there was a couple from Massachusetts. They got out of their car and their dog just attacked this woman and bit her terrible injuries. She ended up being hospitalized for several days and even surgery. And, you know, the people, fortunately, who owned the dog stepped up. And from what everything I understand, they've made the person whole. And, you know, so but the Animal Control Officer should have investigated that. There should have been, you know, we've got a dog ordinance, a vicious dog ordinance. There should have been a fine. I don't care about the fines, but it's just the service that we're not offering right now. So I don't know if you're going to get anybody to bite if we advertise for this job. But I think you ought to try. I agree, Bill. It's all these unfunded mandates that we have. We have all these things that need to be done. And we're just kind of they're out there. And why, as you said, why have them if they're not going to be enforced at least in some way shape or form? You know, I don't expect full compliance, you know, but I think, you know, you know, it's going to get to the point with parking and, you know, people are just going to say, you know, I'm just going to park there all day. We've got and it's it's not just the parking in the downtown. We've spent a lot of time here dealing with the Blush Hill Access. Yeah, we've spent a lot of time sometimes here dealing with Sweet Road and the Hunger Mountain Access. Steve has has had to help me. He stepped in, you know, and we're trying to figure out a way to to to get something solved there. Maybe the state should have bought the property that I told them they should have bought 25 years ago. But, you know, Steve's working with me on it. But, you know, I had a gentleman in the library this morning. He said, well, that all these, you know, you've got one of the property owners update was putting ropes up along the highway telling people like he doesn't want to parking in front of his his property, even though it's the town highway right away and he can't regulate it. So we've got that issue. We've got the Hunger Mountain. I mean, the Blush Hill boating access. We've had problems in the past in the going into the state park at the at the center where people have been parking all over the place there. We have issues at the trailhead down at the ice center for the for the bicycle trails there. So, you know, I think and then we have issues in in the Hope Dady Park. I mean, Tom Mayer still here. We've got you've all heard about the conflicts with the disc golfers and the walkers and you've got people that are engaging in bad behavior and you know, I mean, what can we do now if we get that kind of complaint? It's either you got to find Nick and try to send him up there and he's busy doing his programming or working with kids or I've got to go or Bill Woodruff has to go. I'm not sure it's it's not the be all and end all but it's I just am throwing it out there as something to consider and you don't have to decide tonight but I just think that you could look at it a little bit like look at what the village had before merger. Their police budget was over $400,000 wasn't it? Oh, yeah. And this was back five, ten years ago. You know, we've gotten this state contract. Who knows the longevity of our option to be able to continue to utilize that product. But right now that is saving the town money. But what it doesn't allow us is the certain elements, some of which you're describing in this position. So it almost makes that missing component of the police department whole by bringing in that element. Plus, I do believe we have some responsibility to make sure that housing is safe and the landlords are following the whole book set forth. And if we're not, I don't I feel like that's a big problem. Yeah, and I I thought about that part of it a little bit yesterday. I described how some communities have put in this this registration fee system to generate income to have these inspectors in place. I think I don't from the way I think about it and from what I've seen, I almost think it's better if the town just funds that through taxation makes everybody pay a little bit of it. I've been in a lot of really, really substandard places that none of you would even want to go in. Never mind, live it. And if you if you try to make the property owners pay for it, then you have all the property owners who are good landlords paying the long dollar, which is only going to make their housing price go higher, right? So I think you could, if you had this position, you could work with the state code, talk about you know, get information from other communities about what they do for inspection, but just do that through the budget as opposed to having a fee structure. You can look at it both ways and there's pros and cons to both, but I think something more than what we're doing now is this. The one potential advantage to some kind of registration in small fee would just start to get some of the data surrounding long term rental unit numbers that we almost don't have right now. And we in the fee doesn't have to be, I think it's something like it was like $500 a year recommended or something like that. Yeah, I don't know. There was something. I don't know what the state was recommending. Oh, well, that makes plenty. You know, that fifth, it's 50 bucks a year. I don't see that as a huge claim of like my rent is going to go. You know, I need to raise. That's right. Is like a 50 right? Okay. I don't know. I was reading something else. So that, yeah. So then I would agree, Mark, especially because we, you know, housing is one of the big issues we're tackling now and going forward. So, yeah, and I think that you know, it's war. I mean, obviously we need to talk through it right to my mind that that's the second issue. So if you buy into this concept and you can hire somebody and you can hire the right person, then you can charge that person with doing some research and getting information and potentially helping develop the fee structure. I'm not sure that we're going to be able to do that between now and July if we even if we put this in the budget. But I think having the commitment, even if we are not able to hire somebody right now, at least having the money available for that resource and if you have to bump up the pay or whatever. But those are three areas right now where I think we're wanting in many respects. The housing one is going to be, I know because years ago I used to do that, but we had a big big stick to because we've done a fairly subsidized housing. So if you had some sort of deficient findings, you basically could threaten them with the loss of their their housing subsidies, which was a big part of their income for their property. The ones that don't have any subsidies. That's a real challenge. You know, you'll a small mom and pop ones that you know, a lot of them are really good landlords, but you know, there are some you know, some bad actors out there and that's going to be the ones that's going to be hard to change. You know, what you know, they may just be breaking breaking even what they're doing, right? But it goes both ways too. There's plenty of people that call up and you go there and you find out, you know, all the heat isn't working, but then you look around you wonder how these people, how can they live in the conditions that they live in and you know, the trash that's building up. That's not the landlord's fault. You know, there's it goes both ways. Some of it's definitely can and driven. Yeah, but that has nothing to do with the heat working. So, no, that's what I said. If they call it the heat, that's fine. But there's other issues that you find that are not they're self-inflicted if you want. Anyway, I don't have anything more for tonight. You don't have to make any decisions on any of this tonight. You're conspicuously silent. So, I've spent the list that you just gave of responsibilities for said person probably to some of them volatile and seemingly unchangeable. Not saying that I'm against this proposal, but I guess it would be a wait-and-see circumstances to just tell a second of this person to be with the responsibilities given him and I just would hope that in the end it wouldn't be throwing good money after that to try to solve problems that may well, ultimately not be solvable. Well, you know, the most instance is not to say that it wouldn't change some of it, but I'm the housing staff is that's the most challenging. You know, animal control officer stuff, you can if you have somebody that's willing to do it and we had we had some issues with Peter in terms of his bedside manner, but he was somebody that was willing to do the job and go out and actually do something. And he did a lot of good. We had a few problems because of just his personality sometimes. But a $50,000 salary and then you add benefits that is not that's not significantly lower and it might still be higher than most entry-level police officers are making this thing. You know, when we had police officers here they haven't worked for us for since 2018. But you know, they were in the twenty two twenty three dollar an hour range and that's that's about fifty grand. I think twenty four dollars an hour is fifty thousand dollars. So so how much of that just for clarification on my part? How much of what your consolidation kind of versus what we've already been spending on are we talking about a wash or are we talking about three percent additional cost? Well, we budgeted for we budgeted for an animal control officer of fifty five hundred dollars this year. We didn't spend anything because we didn't get anybody to do the job and we had advertised trying to get somebody a few several months ago a year ago and we were advertising like 18 bucks an hour or something. We didn't get any any takers on it. This is more money than was than we've ever spent before but I think part of the issue that I'm trying to get you to understand is not that the next town manager wouldn't be willing to be the health officer if you decided that was something that you wanted to make him do or her do but I'm not sure it's really the best use of that person's time. You know it's it's it's something that I do just because I you know it's always kind of been an expectation. You try to deal with it. I don't I mean I don't slough it off but I do what I need to do to kind of meet the minimum requirements in case somebody complains that I didn't do something but to really provide the service that people are expecting when they call for rental housing inspection. I mean Beth Ann Mayer she thought when she applied to be or she volunteered to be health officer and the select board appointed her a few years ago. You know she thought she was going to be able to make a difference and then you end up with just being you have no resources. You have no real authority and you're just in the middle of a landlord tenant dispute. So if you had somebody that really had the job and you provided some training and some information and you know allow them to be a little bit proactive. I think you can do better than being done now and it's just you know I'll continue to do what I've been doing as long as I'm here but I'm not going to be here and I just don't think just being reactive I don't think we're doing right now what really needs to be done given the public's expectations. I mean some of this stuff is you know from my perspective this is based on the reaction that I've seen from the population throughout the world and especially this country in the last two years with short tempers and unreasonable reactions towards each other makes this position even more or less desirable? Yeah it makes it more difficult to fill I think if we were having this conversation in 2015 and you offered a $50,000 salary to do these things probably somebody would have stepped up and you might be right but not being able to hire somebody even though you have the resources to do it is different than not being able to not even thinking that it's something that we need to do you understand it's like you need to you can't do anything unless you put some resources behind it and if you're going to just continue with the status quo that's your choice but I'm not sure that is in the best interest of most of the population. Did we have a health safety officer? The health officer yeah that we budgeted $600 this year in the past I think we've I think we paid like $100 a month stipend for it and it was an afterthought last year so so basically to Chris's comment earlier we had about maybe about $6,000 in the budget to represent some of what we're talking about for this incrementally at $50,000 is the budget item we're looking at a $44,000 yeah you gotta add you gotta add more and benefits yes so $50,000 probably $80,000 probably you know $75,000 to $80,000 but once you purchase the vehicle then that you purchase the vehicle but that drops a little bit the person you know sounds good I don't even remember I have to look I have to look back to see how many hours a week I think I budgeted in 40 hours for the job because I've got health insurance here but can't we consider you know we were paying the Bob Forrest position so that kind of you know we're losing that salary yeah no that's what I was getting at you know I want you to go different so you know that's what I look at yeah well I haven't got I haven't got there yet so on top of that I'll throw another curveball I don't know if it's a curveball but we had a fund that we were starting to put money aside to keep up with the maintenance of our buildings yeah and that's getting up eating faster than we're creating it and you can tell me if I'm wrong but it goes back to our conversation earlier about the tax stabilization fund I mean I'd like to start that orignite amount with $50,000 and build on that because these buildings are starting to age a little bit yeah start to need and we put some money in there so next meeting I can I can give you the numbers this last year I we put I think we only put like $5,000 or $6,000 you guys followed us like two weeks later yeah well eating problems yeah but I don't think I paid for those eating problems out of that particular budget but anyway you're you're not wrong anyway so that's just food for thought the other thing too so you talk about Bob Farr's some of the expenses going away and being picked up here that's true I will tell you already I think if you remember back to what Nick was here he's there's going to be a request for an additional full-time person in the rec department because he cannot do what he's built now by himself and and a bunch of part-time staff so that'll come out of the revenue from the department there's there's there's revenue it's clearly you know there's there'll be some revenue to support that but these causes it's not much you know it might be a little revenue but fines or something like that but not a lot so I'd see that budget surplus moving forward well not if he's able to grow capacity with a new staff and see I mean I haven't looked at the budget yeah some of the some of the revenue of course some of the revenue is for the rec programs is restricted by the building space that we're available to put kids in you know so that's the definition all right because it came up during this we had talked when we're talking about parking at hunger about looking at that land in terms of possibly providing more parking has that gone anywhere with yeah exactly we've contacted the state about that and the particular parcel I think that you're talking about is right now subject to a court situation that you've probably seen if you look at any of the bills that we get from Stitzel page and Fletcher there's this Grayson appeal it's called so Grayson's got a permit it was from the DRB this is a couple of years ago then what they failed to file a plan or something like that well that's correct with the latest permit then that's right they had to reapply because they had not filed your file so the first time they got the the local permit that was appealed and then I don't know what happened with that but then too much time went by they didn't file their their plan so they didn't get the permit they reapplied they got another permit from the DRB which is being appealed by a neighbor and so we're so yes we're pursuing that right but we don't have anything to propose holding yeah so a little bit tied up in that court case we had suggested to the to our attorney a potential settlement that would involve the state getting that particular piece of land for parking but until the there's some motions before the court that we can't take any action until the judge makes some decisions and then lastly I cannot recall the meeting where we voted about Act 250 and when that time deadline is up for appeal do you know the date or maybe Carla 45 days from the date that you find the agenda 45 days was December 29th I think so it's so we're well no it's 60 days total well it's it's but I think for appeal they have 45 days to get a petition right that date is so that date is past then it doesn't look like no petition has been turned in as far as I know yeah so that means that your decision will will go into effect 60 days from that date so okay in couple weeks yeah thank you for that I'm going to mention one thing too forgot to bring it up at the beginning with Steve and he's in past away yes oh yeah so yeah I just want to say on behalf of the board thank you for everything he's done for the town but also don't know he was part of pilgrim partnership a lot of the reasoning that coffee groceries grew in town I'm sure others know a lot more about his history in town but don't ever think yeah actually was going to mention that I also wanted to mention that is much heartache and I guess head butting and controversy the banner created I quite honestly and very pleased with what's hanging there and think that it sends a subtle but strong message that start treating each other each other fair on the same plan field and I'm glad we ended up with what we ended up with because I think it sets the town separate from this turmoil that the rest of the country has gone through like like coming up with what we did I'm very pleased with it we've had some positive feedback from the public too going back to what Mark said about Steve maybe we should dedicate the next select board meeting in his honor yeah I'm sure I did history called development yeah many years I was attending recently I was not a very caring you could consider dedicating the annual report to him if you want to yeah something like that would be nice that would be a long more visible yes would have been good if we thought about it last year yeah good point but anyway okay the last thing that I want to just mention is that when I announced a couple weeks ago that I was going to be retiring I did suggest that you contact the LCT to see if they would help in a search I don't know if you're interested in that or you want to do it all yourself but I really should I mean I can call them up and say you know the board wants your help but my fingerprints should not be on who the next person is so it really needs to be the board that does this if you're going to and I can get you mark Ted Brady's information and and you know see what they might be able to do for okay yeah I think that's a good idea I think we should put that use every resource we can yeah are you going to we can all connect yeah I'll yeah I'll send something to you Mark and then you can delegate it this sounds good motion one last just point to vote for her just to make sure the meeting on Martin Luther King is that they not because it's a holiday I'm just making sure that we're on the right 17 right yeah so right now times like on holidays we switch it to yeah so this may be something that the board might want to consider changing but permanently and for all time Martin Luther King day is not a holiday that has been ever recognized by the town we've always worked on that day yeah so it's not one of the 10 holidays that we get off I understand I just want to make sure it's again a lot of so the board meeting my expectation is that every Monday in January including that one will be here I have no problem next week I have another meeting I'm not a board meeting I have to give reports that so I will be late to this one I don't think it will be more than an hour and a half or so but I will be here an hour and a half late or an hour and a half late hour and a half late probably there's still the O. Center proposal that you put forward yeah we've got to talk about that too will that be in February? probably conversation or do you think we can some of it may have to be in the budget so we'll talk about it so I won't do it next week though I need the full board here for that and I know you have an interest in the O. Center anyway so we'll maybe talk about that on the 17th or 24th okay motion motion to adjourn second David ah