 Okay, then now I'm going to call the April 25th, 2018 Select Board meeting to order. And I will call the Essex Junction trustee meeting to order. I invite you all to rise and join us in the Pledge of Allegiance, please. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I'd like to welcome everyone to tonight's joint Select Board trustee meeting. And just remind everybody to please make sure you sign in so that we have that for the record. And if you could turn your cell phone to silent or off, that would be greatly appreciated. I think I did that. So we're going to move on to agenda additions and changes. And then we have a couple of things I see at our place. I have a few things for you. The first is a memo from the police chief about liquor license applications for backstage and veterans of foreign wars, Essex Junction post 6689. This was emailed to, this is just for the Select Board, on the first couple of things. This was emailed to you, but put a hard copy in front of you now to see you have it. Secondly, I'd hate to do this, but looking to add something on to the agenda. This is for 5B. It's a first class liquor license and commercial kitchen for playing family LLC. It's kind of just a housekeeping thing. They had checked, the box they had checked originally for the first class. Provol has been changed slightly. So it's not a huge thing, which is why I hope it's okay to add to the agenda tonight. So they can continue with some of their business plans that start in May. That would be for item 5B. And then for both boards, there's a memo from Max Levy and George Tyler dated April 2nd, about documents for our next joint meeting. You had all received this by email, but just wanted to put it into the record by putting it onto the packet tonight, as I had not done so earlier. Okay, so the Jonathan Lange and Lange family LLC change to the liquor license can be considered a renewal and done. He's already been approved for the first class liquor license. It's still a first class liquor license. It's going to be for a commercial kitchen as opposed to a restaurant. And I can walk you through what the Department of Liquor Control has said that's okay. They just want to basically make the select board aware of it since you had approved one thing. This is just a slight modification to what you had already approved. Okay, but it's again approval of a first class liquor license renewal? Or do we say a modification to it? Modification, you've already approved it. Okay, then I need that, yes? I'd like to either add something to the agenda or speak in public to be heard and I'm not sure which it should be. I'd like to present a petition from 280 outside the village residents to ask the select board to acknowledge and remedy the lack of representation they have. I mean, I would propose we do that public to be heard because we won't be able to have a discussion on it today, but we can put it on a future one. I just know that since representation is mentioned later on, I didn't want to get caught. Okay, so if that's okay with you, I think. So we have these items. Do I have a motion to amend the agenda to add these to the select board agenda? So moved. Second. Thank you, Irene. Any further discussion about amending the agenda to include these items? All those in favor, signify by saying, oh, yes. We're going to keep them where they are. Yeah, it's just how we go around, how we approve them. We're going to need to separate them. Okay, any other discussion? All those in favor of amending the agenda as described, signify by saying, I. I. I opposed. Okay, motion passes 5-0, thank you all. So just for the audience, this is a joint meeting with the trustees, but the select board has just a little bit of business to do before we get started collectively. So, and it's about first class liquor license renewals. I'm going to open it up to the board. We have three liquor license renewals. One is for backstates LLC, and we have Vince here. And the other is for Kevin Cody Incorporated, which is Cody's. And we have Chris here. And veterans of foreign wars as instruction post 6-6-8-9. Okay, I'm sorry. Yes, I missed something. I missed the, I jumped on the agenda. So, thank you. We need to, before we get into the business items, I'm going to open it up to public to be heard. My bad. Public to be heard is a time for the public to speak to the select board on items that are not on the agenda. So, I'll open it up to anyone wishing to speak during public to be heard. And if you could just state your name for the record, please. Sure. Just speak from there, but loudly if you could. Great. Well, thank you so much for hearing me tonight. My name is Mary Beth Redmond. And I am a representative of the Vermont Commission on Women. And I come to you, I'm a representative from Essex to the Commission statewide. And I come to you tonight really to read into the record and have in the record the fact that the commission is doing a statewide survey on the state of women and girls. And I have a copy of the survey here as well as the URL that I can provide to you. But I just wanted you all to be aware of it, both in the junction and the town, because it is an effort for us to really collect in the coming months and find out what the priorities are for issues related to women and girls. There have been some recent studies released through Change the Story Vermont that really have shown the impact on women and girls economically, that there's a lot of economic insecurity happening. And so we're really focused on inquiring more deeply into that and taking those results and having that formulate our priorities and policymaking in the year to come. There are going to be several listening sessions around the state. There won't be one in the Essex area only because we're really trying to focus on some of our more underserved areas, the Northeast Kingdom down in the Bennington area and one in Central Vermont at this point. But I just wanted you to be aware of it. Some of you have generously shared the information on social media, which I totally appreciate. And I'll provide the URL. But if you can, on your own social media feeds or wherever, please spread the word because we're looking for as much input as possible. We just put it up a week ago and already we have over 500 responses. And interestingly, the research or what's coming back in the response are the immense challenges elderly women in the state are facing. So that's been an interesting discovery in the last few days. So thank you for your time and appreciate the space to make the announcement. Yeah, if you could leave that information with the other now be sure. Here's the survey and the URL is right down there. Thank you. Okay, anyone else wishing to speak? Okay, so your hand up again. If you could state your name for the record, please. Sure. Margaret Smith, I just have a request. Am I creeping old age? I'm having trouble hearing. Can you hear that people would mind, if people would mind using microphones or the microphones on because it doesn't sound like- Yes, these are on. I guess we have to lean in maybe a little bit further. Because it's hard to hear. Thank you. Okay, thank you. And yes, again, state your name, please. Marie Frochel. I'm just here because I want to urge the select board to do what they need to do to affect the charter change. Because while I realize it is legal for one person to now serve on both boards, I find it very unethical. And I would really like to see the people who live in the town outside the village have equal representation in this forum. Thank you. Okay, thank you for your comments. Yes, Jerry. Jerry Fox. And I don't have a problem with Ellen serving on both boards. Well, I'm going to have to qualify that. There's a lot of precedent for that. Some of you know me, I'm a history guide. You go through history, there's often sometimes multiple people from both the town and the village on boards. However, she's in a special position in that she's voting for two different opposing and sometimes opposing parties. And she needs to be very carefully. And we all need to help her do that. The other thing I have to say is that you guys have handicapped yourself in the way that you have dealt with the school board by not doing something to make sure that there's some kind of equivalence between the number of people representing, and I hate this term, the town outside the village. I want to see that term go away and that nobody even recognizes it like it was 100 years ago. But nevertheless, there's a lot of resentment now, a lot of fear now that you guys are going to be forced to deal with very, very carefully, or you're going to blow this whole process because you've undermined it, allowed it to be undermined by the fact that there is not equal representation for the next year on the school board for those folks outside the village. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, Jerry. Yes, Diana? I'm on that Essex-Westford school board. And as far as I could tell, there was equal representation from the appropriate entities or former entities. And quite frankly, you still have 10 members with two members from Westford having sharing a vote. And you have four votes from West, from the Essex Junction School District, and you have four votes from the Essex Town School District areas. So the intent still remains. And I don't think I'm speaking for the board. I'm speaking for myself as an individual. When I say that I think everybody's got fair representation, and I encourage you all to come visit us twice a month on Tuesdays. Thank you for clarifying that, Diana. Anybody else wishing to speak during public appearance? OK, Irene. So as I mentioned earlier this evening, I'm here to urge the select ward on behalf of the 11,000 residents who live outside the village of Essex Junction and lack representation comparable to their village neighbors. That is, there is no one speaking for all of those outside the village residents as these consolidations of town village departments move ahead. This unequal representation should be as much of a concern to everyone here as has been the issue of unequal taxation. If you've been paying close attention, you know our consolidations have begun to address the disparity in taxes by shifting expenses over the past five years. On the other hand, the disparity in representation has not at all been addressed. The boards continue to put forth plans for merger and plans for consolidation without acknowledging or attempting to remedy this representation deficit. Every time a one-sided proposal is defeated here, the finger pointing begins. How about we deal with this fundamental problem once and for all so that every voter can feel confident that they have representation in meetings like this? Fair outcomes will only result from balanced negotiations. Why won't the board members want to see equal teams when discussing matters that affect all voters equally? And what could be more pressing for all of us than making sure that the voters see that we have their backs? And this is the petition on which I have 280 signatures. I'll be glad to get more. Thank you. So I'd like to ask Evan to consider putting this on a future agenda at some point so we can have full discussion on that. OK, anyone else wishing to speak to public to be heard? I see a hand in the back here and then I'll come to Andy. OK, if you could state your name, please. Teri Anstine. Yes. I'm hearing two completely different sides. So maybe since I'm not really apprised of how this all works, do we have four people from the town representing us on the school board? Or don't? I'm kind of confused here. OK. So maybe you guys could? Yes. The answer is yes. As Diane Clemens, who was on the school board, said yes. There is four members of the board representing the former Essex school district, which is outside the village. There's four on the board, on the consolidated board representing the village. And there are two from Westford sharing one vote representing Westford. So yes, there's equal representation today. OK, so where is the breakdown of? It's almost like apples and oranges of what I've been hearing and reading. I'd like to know where you think the breakdown is in the perception that we do not have a vote for things regarding the school. Yeah, because this has not been worn for discussion today, we're taking it as public to be heard. What we're going to do is add it to an agenda for a future meeting that will be worn. And then we can have that discussion and clarify whatever the unknowns are that we have out there. But as of now. But do you know what this half the town thinks we have no representation and the other half thinks we do? I'd have no idea why there's a misperception. Can I? OK. Since this is a trustee, also a trustee meeting, maybe I could help. I think there's two different things going on here that are being conflated, being overlapped. There's a concern about the new school district and representatives to the new school board. And what we have heard is that there were four from the former village school district on that board, four from the former town district on that board, and two from Westford on that board. But there's a concern going forward that the way elections are held that might not happen. But I don't think that's ever going to change. And we can discuss that in further details. Then there's a separate issue about discussions between the Essex Junction trustees, which is municipal fire departments, police, and the Essex Town Select Board, that we are trying to work on consolidation and alignment of the two governing bodies. These are the municipal bodies. We don't really have anything to do with the schools. And so there's some discussion and differences of opinions about how we should be approaching this. And I think we'll be talking more about this later on, but we don't really want to get into it right now. So if you're going to add this to a later agenda, I'd like to ask somehow that I have made my opinion that when you make this change, that it's mandated that there is, like, if these people are on the school board and everybody from the town quits, that it can be filled up with people from the village or Westford. Is it going to still be based on a population number for the amount of people that are being represented? It sounds like the electoral college setup. Now, if people quit or voted in, there should only be four places for the town, four vote, four places for the village, and two for Westford, of course, unless the population shifts dramatically, which we know is not going to happen. That is my concern. There's nothing in place today that I'm aware of in the legislature anywhere that wants to change that. It's the four representatives outside the village, four in the village, and two from Westford. If all four from the outside of the village become vacant, then you need to have four people from the town outside the village fill that eventually. Diane, am I speaking correctly? OK, great, thank you. OK, anybody? Andy, you had your hand up. Yeah, I just, I know Irene read a statement, but I'm not sure what actually the petition asked us to do. Does the petition actually, what is it, what's it requesting? Can we at least hear that? Is it? Yeah, I think so. OK, has it written there, or Irene, do you want to address it? Evan, what does the petition say? State of Vermont, Chintin County, we, the undersigned legal voters of the town of Essex hereby call on the select board to one, study current representation imbalances that are inherent in some school and municipal frames. Two, acknowledge instances of inequitable representation. Three, work to reform archaic, incomplete, and or inadequate government structures in order to provide, for example, town outside the village voters an independent voice in school and municipal matters on par with their town inside the village counterparts. And number four and final, make this a priority. OK, so that's the petition. That's something that we can have on a future agenda and have a complete discussion. But since it wasn't warned, we've just taken it public to be heard. Irene? If I might add a little clarification, the select board warned the school vote this year, which is something, to my knowledge, that we have never done before. And because the scope of our control is larger than the town outside the village, the ballot that we warned was for the entire town. Therefore, people from inside the village got to vote on the seat that had formerly been set aside for outside the village residents only. And had anyone been interested in running for that seat from the village, they could have run for it. So that is the hiccup that we face this year and that we will face again unless something changes locally or something changes at the state level, which I'm told is in the works, but it has not passed the legislature yet. So that is what is behind this concern that more people voted on one seat than were expected to when we first agreed to merge. And from what I understand, we have Betsy done here. In the legislature, from what I understand, is working to correct that error that required the select board to warn the school director meeting. Is that correct? It must be in government ops. It's in education. It's in education, so it's in another committee. But my question I had was around with this woman. Sorry, I don't know your name. But Terry was saying, are we saying that Westford has two guaranteed seats on board? Yes. And the town and the village has four guaranteed seats on the board, and there's four guaranteed seats for the town outside of the village. Correct. Four guaranteed. OK, that's good. That's what I wanted to know. Thank you. Right. OK, Elaine. Just to further elaborate a little bit on what Betsy was, well, the legislation that Irene is referring to, board member Martha Heath came to the select board at our last meeting and explained that the reason that voting glitch occurred was because of an error that was not noticed until it was too late at the legislative level at the statehouse. And they are working on it, and the intent is to correct it so that next year we will all vote the way we're used to voting, village for village, town outside the village, for town outside the village, and Westford for Westford. So this was a one-time thing that the legislature does not plan to let happen again. So it's something that this board can't really fix because the board at the time warned it because the result of the error, that was the best that could happen, it had to be warned, and that this was the body that could do it. If all goes according to plan at the legislature, that will not happen again. And the representation on the school board will maintain the same levels for each community that it currently has. And the school board will warn their own. And the school board will warn their own meeting next year. So there's really nothing that this board can do about that. Should we follow up on that? Do you have an anticipated date that the legislature is going to make that decision? Lori, do you happen to? You know what, I don't. But I can find out and bring it back to the select board. But I know it's being worked on. We understand it's an issue. And it truly was just an oversight error in one sentence in the legislation. And it will not happen again. If you want more particulars, you can contact Representative Dylan Giambattista, who is one of the villages state reps. He's on the education committee. And he knows everything about how this happened. So it was last year, right? I honestly don't remember. It was Act 46. It's language in Act 46. Yeah, it's language in Act 46. Right. That was, yeah, it was several years ago. OK, is there anyone else wishing to speak during public hearing? OK, thank you all for your, oh, in the back. Hello, Barbara. Just state your name for the record, Barbara. Sorry, Barbara Higgins. I have a point of clarification. Maybe you addressed it before I came here, so I apologize if I'm repeating something. I've been away, and I believe this is the first joint meeting. But how, and this is a question for probably the town manager, because he may or may not have already discussed it with the lawyer. But how will any votes or any discussion when Elaine is involved, because she has two positions, how will that be dealt with administratively? I am unaware of any circumstance where there's a joint meeting where the person has a position on each of the boards. When you're in the legislature and you're a representative, it is an entirely different situation because it's not a joint meeting. So I'm looking for clarification on how the conduct of a meeting and the conduct of votes in a joint meeting will occur. Because I, as a citizen of the broader town of Essex, understand that Elaine represents me. But she also is a trustee, and therefore represents another group, which in some circumstances, it may not be to the benefit of the broader community, whatever is being discussed. And I just want to understand how that will transpire administratively within a joint meeting. If I may give two kinds of answers. One will be a technical and one will be a philosophical. Technically, when the boards meet together, there is never a group of five. And then there will be two votes on every action item, one for the trustees and one for the select board. So that's how that will work. There are no action items, as far as I know, on this agenda tonight to see that in action, but other than possibly an executive session. But that's technically how it will work. Philosophically, what I can tell you, and this is up to you to accept it or not, as an elected official on both committees, I have pledged to have as much integrity as humanly possible to do the right thing for the entire community. It might surprise some folks in the audience and people watching that when the trustees have conversations and vote on things, we don't just think about the village when we vote on them. We think about the impact our decisions have on the town because we are part of the town. And when I sit as a select man, I think about the impact of everything we do on the town. And that includes the village because the village is part of the town. So that may feel like slippery logic to some folks. To me, it's crystal clear that my responsibility is to the entire community. And that's pretty much the way I see it. Yes, Chair. Would you just recuse yourself in that vote? I would recuse myself from a vote that has to do with me personally benefiting from the results of the decision, which is the rules of conduct. So if there was some reason I might benefit financially or personally by a decision that's made, those are the grounds under which I would recuse myself. And you live in the village, correct? I do live in the village. Okay. All right, thanks. Okay, anybody else would like to move on if we could, but Betsy? I have a question about the minutes that we see. And when have we switched to it's member A or member B or member C or member D? And we're not identifying who is the speaker of this sentence. Because I've got this one that says member A when your board members your thoughts on the continuing governance conversation. Yeah, those are not minutes. What are they? That was just a survey of the trustees and select board and submit your input. And then it was just out there listed as A, B and C. It's not the minutes. In the minutes when people speak they're identified. So I'm still questioning though why we don't have the name of the person who is making those comments because if I disagree with those I may not vote for that person the next time, but I have no idea who's making the comments. Yeah, because this is public to be heard for topics not on the agenda, what you're talking about is on the agenda. So when we get there, if you'd like to comment on that and ask questions at that time, Betsy, that would be the appropriate time for that. Thank you very much. And anybody else? Irene. I have an email from Dylan in which he references language in S.257 that they're working to make effective next year. So I don't think you're gonna see a vote on this language for what's worth before the end of the session this month, next month. Because I think you pass it and then it's effective the following year, but I may be wrong on that. We can vote on it as early as January next year and have it effective immediately, so. Okay, okay, state your name, please. I'll be very quick. Mary Lou Hurley. Hello, Mary Lou. I appreciate your saying how you want to proceed and how you feel, but personally I am not going to be able to feel comfortable as long as this situation exists. Okay, thank you for your comments. Anybody else for public to be heard? It was a lively one today. Okay, then we're gonna move on to the select board business items, which as I mentioned out of step there are liquor licenses. So what we'll do is I'll open it up to questions and comments from the board on the applications and then we'll need to act on them, I think, separately. So, and again, we know that Vince is here for backstage and Chris is here for Kevin Cody, for Cody Cyrus Pub and Vince you're here for the VFW. Yes, sir. Okay, so comments from the board on the actual licenses. All right. I'm concerned about the violations I'm reading about and I just wondered if someone wanted to speak to what type of violations they were and whether there was a recommendation to suspend the license or to deny the license or to restrict the license accordingly. In our packet, that actually is defined from REC. There was a late note that suggests how we should handle that one and that's probably with the hearings. Okay, great. I'm all for that. Yes, sir. Sure. Now, what we're probably going to do tonight, Vince, is my hope anyway, is because we have this information from the chief, we don't have any details. So, we're likely to, well, let me back up. As we state in the usual admonition, we take these very seriously, right? And we don't like to see any violations. Now, we understand there are violations with respect to yours and we need to do due process. So, that would allow us the opportunity tonight to say we can approve your license conditionally that we have a hearing at some time in the very near future where then you can come back and explain whatever it is that you'd like to do. So, I don't really think you need to do that tonight. Okay? At least that's how I'm hoping things will go, okay? Okay, any other comments? Okay, what I would propose then is that we do the liquor licenses separately, that we do back state or Kevin Cody's first, if we could, and then we can deal with the other two. Andy. I move that the select board approve first class liquor license renewal for Kevin Cody, Incorporated, doing business as Cody's Irish pub and grill with outside consumption permit. Okay, thank you, Andy. Do I have a second? Okay. Thank you, Irene. Any further discussion of approving Cody's Irish pub's first class liquor license? Okay, hearing none, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes 5-0 and what I want to do, I'm going to read you the, Chris, the usual admonition, which is that the select board takes the issuance of liquor licenses very seriously. As should the area establishments who serve liquor. We expect you not to serve liquor to underaged miners nor to anyone who's obviously inebriated and we really don't expect to see any, we expect a continued clean record on yours. We think that's very important. We want to say thank you so much for doing business in Essex and we wish you the best of luck this year. Well, and you know, thank you from us. This is the end of this year. We are 20th year, completed in our 20th year. Fantastic. We're very lucky, we're very happy and we as well obviously take it very seriously, take our responsibility very seriously. So thank you for letting us be a part of the business community here. Appreciate you being here. Thank you. Have a good night. So, four, yes. Yeah, let's do, yeah, let's do that one. So, we approved the Jonathan Lange and Lange Family LLC first class liquor license, whenever, a week or two ago. On April 2nd, it was approved. And now they just updated their license for a commercial kitchen as opposed to a first class restaurant and that's kind of bookkeeping, right? So, they don't need to be here tonight but we do need to have an approval that for the first class liquor license as a whole, right? Have you already approved the first class liquor license? Based on some housekeeping on their end, it actually should have been a first class commercial kitchen. So, it's still a first class license, that's been approved. The clerk's office has worked with the Department of Liquor Control to get the details and Department of Liquor Control has all set. They just wanted to basically make sure the select board signed off on it, was aware of the change. So, if you approve tonight, let's just give them an initial, the original application redated that you saw the change, we'll send it into the liquor control board and it'll get processed. Okay. So, do I have a motion to approve the Jonathan Lang and Lang Family LLC first class liquor license to go from a commercial, to be a commercial kitchen as opposed to a first class restaurant? So moved. Thank you, Mike. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you, Andy. Any further discussion on the modification of the liquor license for the Lang Family? Okay, hearing none, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes 5-0. Excellent. So, on the, as I mentioned before, we have these violations that are before us, at least we don't have the details, but we do. Can we remove from the VFW application at this point? I will no longer be commanded. Okay. But the licensing falls differently than our elections. So I've been there for three years and I've been on the license for three years, right? I won't be there. The quarter master is also on the license who is also, he is still there. Okay, but as of today, the year on it though. Is that correct? I was on the old one, yes. Yeah, which isn't valid today. Yes. Excuse me. Will a new application be submitted? Not if we can't get it approved before May 1st, so no. We can't. Subsequently. Yes. Mr. Chair, I don't think you can do that because their liquor license is before us. It is going to the state. The question I guess I would have is, is two people necessary on the application? I believe there's a second. There's a first and you're the second. Correct. I'm the only one on my liquor license. So it only requires one. If it is only, if that's the petitioner's request, we can honor the request. For VFW to strike. For VF students from. What we would ask for him to do is you can take it on his word. We'd ask for a letter from the petitioner stating that is his request. You can act upon it tonight, subject to that letter being done. What about the April 30th deadline? What does that do to a change in leadership for lack of a better phrase? You have one of the, you have a person who's on the application telling you he no longer wants to be on the application. So what I'm suggesting is you're taking it on face value that he will no longer be an officer. He's going to give you a letter for that. If the select board is of the opinion to approve the license subject to those conditions, you may do so. And then staff will verify and update the record that it is a singular person from the VFW. Subsequently, if the VFW wants to add somebody to their license, they should come back before the liquor commission and get that approval at a later date. Mr. Chairman, I would like to ensure that the party that's going to be taking over is the one that's at the hearing. If the gentleman here today is not going to make that hearing, obviously if that other individual is part of the leadership then I'd prefer to see both, to be honest with you, but. And I think that's appropriate that somebody from the VFW appear at any hearing at which their liquor license is at issue. I don't believe that any of that has to do with VFW. That will be determined. So again, regarding VFW then, if we get that letter, can we give it the full approval with the condition of getting that letter? Correct. And the letter would need to be in very soon because at the end of this month, the license expires. Correct. Yes, as long as we get that letter tomorrow, preferably tonight, you can wait. You're right. You're just saying that I will no longer be Commander after June 6th, is that correct? Your letter to the liquor commission is that you are requesting to be removed from the liquor license of the VFW that is in their possession going to the state tomorrow. Are you asking to be removed subsequently after this goes to the state you want to take yourself off the license? Well, why don't we just amend after? Drop it. Yes, I apologize, guys. I will make the amendment after and no longer if the commander will petition that, okay? Okay, Mike, did you have a comment you want to make? One more. I'm really not happy that that second individual is in here tonight. That would have been the best way to handle this. He's not the commander at this point, sir. It doesn't matter. He's going to be. In my view, he should have been here. Okay, so what I'd like to throw out to the board to consider is to give a fair hearing to backstage and have a hearing put on a future agenda. One of the, our next one, if we take these seriously, we want to do this quickly and approve it conditionally that tonight pending results of that hearing and then we can take whatever action is appropriate, whether it's none or whatever the board acting as the liquor commission thinks is appropriate. So if that's okay, could I entertain a motion to that effect? I move that we grant the first class liquor license to the backstage and to the VFW. Take them separately, please. Sorry. Let me start again. I move that the select board approve, conditionally approve a first class liquor license for the backstage pub, such condition being that a hearing will be held at the first available select board meeting. Actually, I'm going to back up. I'm going to say the next select board meeting, not first available. Next, please. So it's conditional pending having the hearing at the next meeting and then we can see what actions we take at that point. Okay. Thank you, Irene. Any further discussion? Andy. Maybe this is an input. Do we have to mention outside consumption permit? Yes. Yes. I'll accept that friendly amendment. Good catch. Thank you, Andy. Yep. Okay, any further discussion on basically a conditionally approving the first class liquor license for backstage? Okay. Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. Motion passes five, zero. And then for the veterans, how did you, do you have some different way to handle that one? I just want a separate motion. You may want to motion that steps differently than you did backstage. I don't know, but I figured I'd give you the opportunity if you wanted to craft it differently. Okay. Anyone want to take a shot at that? What that might look like? So it's a conditional one that a different person has put on the license or Mike? I'll give it a go, but I'm gonna ask my fellow select board members to weigh in with friendly amendments if they feel that they're necessary. I move that we approve a first class liquor license for the veterans of foreign wars conditionally approve a first class liquor license based on a letter from the current commander stating that he will be stepping down and that there will be a new leader of the VFW and that that new leader be present at the hearing. And on the license. I'll second that. Thank you, Mike. Thank you, Irene. Any further discussion on that? Andy, outdoor consumption. He's good. He is, he's very good. He's consistent. Okay, Mike, with that? I'm fine. And Irene, okay. All right, so all those in favor of the conditional approval of the veterans of foreign wars as exjunction post 6689 first class liquor license renewal, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes five, zero. So it'll be, you'll get word of a hearing. Yes. And it'll be probably at our next meeting. Which I believe is May 7th. Probably, yeah, May 7th. And I'm gonna, I already did the regular, usual omniscient, but it's a special case. I'm gonna do one more time that the select four takes the issuance of liquor licenses very seriously. As should the, your establishment as well. And not serve minors, alcohol to minors, nor anyone who's obviously inebriated and could pose a danger. We really don't like to see any violations of any kind. But we'll have the opportunity to hear from you on May 7th. And I hope things can work out. Okay? Thank you. Okay, that a little longer than usual. So we're gonna move on now. We're gonna bring in the trustees now to the joint meeting together. It's now, I guess, by definition, 7.05. Yeah, by definition. So 6A, we have managers, personnel, updates. Evan, and I think to have a complete discussion, we probably should go have personnel matters discussed in the executive session. Can I, while Evan's looking for the answer, let me note that the trustee agenda's a little different because we didn't have the same, so our numbering is a little out of sequence, so you guys all get that. Okay, so we can just say the next item then. This is just for informational, pretty much what's going on in the organizations. Some of it relate to alignment. Some of it is just a notice of some people that are leaving our organization due to retirement. So I just wanted to give you a little bit of a heads up. So there's really not a much need for, if you do wanna discuss it, it's not anybody specific. You could talk about generalities of position. The name's listed though. That's one person who's retiring. But, okay, and we also mentioned some people who got the awards. So. I just wanted to add, it was me who put in the option for executive session. It's kind of just a standing, if you're talking about personality, to put the option out there. I don't think you need it in this case, but the option is there for some reason, the board decides. We don't talk about all, there's certain personnel items that we don't talk about in public, but if the board's comfortable, and the trustee's comfortable with, and transparency is always preferred. Yep, sure. So, okay. This village board talked a little bit about the human resources director, adding two items to the essential functions. Team building and succession planning was asked to be added. Happy to add that to the job description. Go through my notes. In the assistant to the manager, communications position, I'll put my glasses on. Under essential functions, under the second bullet point, we would add minutes taking. Sometimes we need somebody to be the backup, or the backup backup, or the third backup. So, we're gonna add minutes to the duties. Well, they also review those before they go out to the board. When you do manage, you're supposed to review them, et cetera. Excellent. And we will have that position. Okay. And that was pretty much it. I did wanna call attention to the assistant to the manager position that we are discussing as an organizational change. At several of the meetings that have occurred, there has been a call to have someone be more in tune with maybe a communications director. I don't feel that that's a full-time position, but it is someone who has to have the ability to create the strategy and work with another position or other positions that we have in the organizations to be able to affect that strategy. So, this position is a lot. Patty did a lot. She is retiring. And we're looking at how to best serve to Lincoln and other functions. So, we're gonna give it a shot. So, this has the option because Patty's leaving to be cost-neutral? Yep. Very much. Okay. And I know we've talked about applying this communications position for quite some time. So, this is maybe a great way to bring it in. It has the opportunity to be cost-neutral to start. What we actually did is there was a, to be confusing, not on purpose, because I didn't mean to do this, but the select board and the village board in their budgets had said, we will have a full-time human resources manager. That person is also currently a part-time administrative assistant. So, we're losing that part for right now. We're trying to pick it up in the new position as well as some other duties. We wanna give that a shot. And see how that plays. And if that position can, in fact, also provide some of the administrative assistants that that position, as Patty did for me so far, but also maybe pick up a little bit for Greg and others and see how that plays out. And we'll see. We still have that extra half position in reserve that we're not looking to fill right now. Thank you. I just wanted to say I've been asking for the communications position for three years. Thank you so much for making room for it in the budget and the staff. It's outstanding. Thank you. You're welcome. We'll be filling it in September. So, yeah. And we really do. As I mentioned in my interviews and things, I've mentioned it to several people that I've met. I think the village and the town have a voice. You have things to tell your citizens and listen to them. They may not, except for tonight, they may not all come out to village or town meetings. This is a big crowd for certain meetings. And, but there's 20,000 residents and businesses and only a few come out. So, but they do have a voice and we wanna figure out how to get that voice heard from us and then how do we get our messages out to them in a timely manner, in an efficient manner. And I think someone dedicated to it, working on it is the best way to at least start to address that. Okay, great. Thank you. Any other comments on the discussion? Arie? The assessor's retirement that's upcoming, have you thought at all about how wide a net you're gonna cast for that? Will it be an in-house only search? Do you have any sense? I haven't stopped crying. Okay, thanks. That's fair. If the personnel rules would let me hold on to his leg and it's, no, I have not. Any other questions? Andy? The HR director job description mentions town quite a few times and I think that it was intended to be a town and village support. So just. Yeah, I mentioned that that actually in a lot of our job descriptions, they need to go back, we need to go back through it. Those where their shared positions need to go back and put in town and village. He's well aware of his work to be done since some of the first things he's doing is filling village positions. Okay, anybody else? Clarification for the discussion. Thank you for putting those items in there. It's good to keep abreast of all the good things that I don't know. I still only sort of have to do it once. So thanks, thanks, Evan. Well, Evan, you're not off the hook yet. Yeah. Okay. So now we get to the big, to the other piece here and we're gonna be hearing about the staff work plan and consolidation of alignment. Consolidation being a controversial issue. We'll just call it alignment for now. Okay. But based on the meeting we had, the joint meeting we had on the 24th with a lot of public dialogue and some board dialogue and other discussions and also for ongoing historic reasons. We charged the staff to come up with some kind of, first of all, to digest what happened on the 24th, to look at the facilitator's notes in her summary and to sketch out for us, for both boards, a kind of a plan for how they might proceed with alignment in the coming year or years. And so now I'll hand it back over to you. Thank you. Okay. In your packet is a memo. It has got my name on it, but by no means is it just mine. Staff, Greg and Lauren as well. Many people helped me craft this because I'm here two months. You guys have been at this a little bit longer and have had many meetings. And so one of the first things that you'll note in page one is. Yes? Is the select board meeting over? No, this is a joint meeting of the trustees. Tonight's purpose is the trustees and select board joint meeting. The select board had a couple of liquor licenses to deal with prior to that, but now we're into the joint meeting. Yes? So the select board met on the liquor licenses. The select board is continuing to meet. We have an adjourned. So it's a blended meeting. It's now a joint meeting. Yes, it's a blended meeting. The trustees. The select board is making decisions, select board decisions that are apart from village interest, correct? The select board will make decisions that the select board that affects the select board that come to the select board. Trustees will do ones that come to them. We don't do a blended vote. They're always separate. In the past, when I was on the board, we would adjourn a select board meeting and then we would go into a formal joint meeting and they were actually two different meetings. So have you changed? We called to order the select board meeting. I'm sorry, I was late. And we called to order the trustees meeting. We're doing those simultaneously. So both meetings, both the trustees and select board meeting are going on together. They've both been called. They both have to adjourn separately at the end. Okay, Evan? Okay. So you'll see on page one, one of the things that I felt was necessary was to put together an alignment group of employees by no means as an exhaustive, but what you see here is, but I wanted, if our goal, which you see down in, so we put some people together because I want this exercise and this workload not to be dust done by the unified manager. This is an organization-wide activity as Lauren can attest from the finance department and Greg and others can say, when we look to put departments to work together, there's lots of details about how that works, whether it's in their contracts, their association contracts, or pay and compensation, or work rules, or IT, you can go on and on. So I wanted more than just myself thinking about it and working as a team and as a culture to do these things. So you see that. And then through that, we started talking about what would our goals be? What are we trying to achieve as staff for the boards and what would be the right outcome? So you'll see those points as we move down that list. And it really starts to help us as a staff focus on what the task at hand is and what we should be focusing on. It also gave me some great insight into what the boards could be doing as your work plan to help along side by side. We're doing things inside and underneath the workings and you're up at policy and given us direction, which comes somewhat next. The second one you see is the public works. Here's a little bit of an update. Three years ago, you did a memorandum of understanding of the town highway and the village public works department to start aligning, start to work together. Back in the fall of 2017, you received a report from the group saying that they were working, they were making great strides, and that they would look to continue that alignment and that process. And in the coming weeks, you would see a draft of a MOU to extend that relationship. Dennis Lutz is working on that. And with our alignment group, we wanna focus some more on the types of places we can share equipment, share personnel, share expertise. In fact, what happened last night was a perfect example of the town and the village working together. The town put out the paving bid for both the village and the town. It was done by town staff. They put together with the village what streets the village wanted to do, what were their lengths, what was the width, how much asphalt was gonna be needed, what was the work product. The town went out to bid, which included the village work, and the bids came back at $60 a ton, which actually produced to the village a $70,000 savings over what was budgeted. And with coordination between the town and the village public works director, Rick Jones, Rick Jones is like a static. Now he's gonna get to do more of the streets that are on our list because of the price. So the village paid no more money than it had paid. In fact, it paid less because the town didn't charge the village for the work to do the bid, to put the documents together. So pretty much win-win all the way around. And I believe that was the intent of the MOU and people working together. And the beneficiaries are both of our, the municipality's residents and business. So that's moving along forward. And then as you'll see, and probably the one you'll probably comment the most on is the proposed staff work plan, which presents some days and dates of the work that needs to progress and what we think we could get accomplished in those years. And then in the back, there is certainly what the village board and town select board could consider to be working on, which is page three. First of all, of course you have, I could read it for the people who may not have it here, tax equalization. That is gonna be a big issue. And it does need to be addressed. And I don't think it should sit and wait, but it should be an ongoing discussion with the boards and give direction on what you may wanna do with that. Obviously you've hired a unified manager and you are required to jointly provide goals for that manager, which is also on the agenda tonight. That would be wonderful if I actually knew what your priorities were. So that would be nice. I generally do, but it's better if they're specific, especially if you're going to evaluate me on it at some point. I'd like to know what that is going to be. Yeah, and structure of legislative bodies. Again, you could call that governance. You can call it whatever you wish, but I think it's about representation and what those structures look like. Are you going to look to combine committees? Maybe not now, but in the future, but you may wanna consider whether you wanna do certain committees or not others, but and what their missions are for the greater good of the communities. Representation of residents. I think that the vein is public outreach and public input on these processes. Plan commission, I believe there was a previous iteration that said maybe doing one plan commission and two DRBs, design review boards. And I don't remember if it was one ZBA or two ZBAs. I don't know if we have to go over it right now, but that's just my recollection that there was a document that said that. Voting. The ZBAs go away. I think it goes away. The ERPs come out. Okay. Yeah, things just get stronger up. Some of it's pretty confusing. It is. It is. Voting, how would voting occur in not only, as you move forward, how do you wanna do voting to give direction and to provide consensus? Budgets. Yeah, and budgets. And then penalty, this one got thrown in, penalties for late tax payments. Sometimes your policies are just vastly different. And so that's a big one. So do you wanna, you could have discussions on things of that nature. And then one of the things that staff was talking about, although we really enjoy going to night meetings, but we run on night meetings. And we have a lot of committees and they're important and they do great work for the communities, but several of them are not staffed by staff members. And I think that at some point, we should talk about a staffing component for those committees and commissions to give them a help in what they're trying to achieve. Sometimes they have policy questions. Sometimes they have procedural questions. Sometimes they have budget questions, but staff is not there to help them with that. So that leads to some confusion and maybe not so much to be productive as they could be. And some feedback that I received from the chairs of some of the select board commissions and committees is they realize there's some synergy between the various boards and they'd like to have some method where they could actually communicate that and work somehow in coordination. And I'm not sure we don't do that yet, but that's something that they said they'd like to see. They could be more effective that way. So, and then while it's on the list, a space needs study, there is money budgeted to do some planning of space needs. But as we align, if we are still aligning and we start finding out what's best, sometimes space becomes an issue. For instance, this part-time administrative assistant is supposed to help the administration department. I don't actually have a place to put this person. That is near me. I could put it downstairs, but it's not near us. I can, so it's kind of like, where do we start putting people where they fit better? Maybe where space is things. People like departments that don't deal with the public nearly as much, don't need to be in a public place where they service the organization more than the public. We want to look at some of those things. We also want to make ourselves more accessible to the public. And so make sure that our work environments are inviting and open to the public when they need to be for that thing. So that's my work plan. It does take us out a few years. And we do have a lot of work as Lauren and Greg can attest, still working on the alignment of the departments that have been aligned, public works. We are just starting fire, the two fire departments, which is going to take a little bit more communication and discussion with our fire chiefs and our consultant that we were using as to what we're doing, how we're doing it, and for what benefit we're doing it. It has already been budgeted, that's the good part. And so those types of things, Lauren, you can chime in if you wish about just finance and how we're going to try to do budget. I start trying to align the budget so that the processes are the same and what goes into each line item is reflected in the same way because it's so different not in the way that insurances are budgeted. There's just a lot of things that are done differently, town and village, and they need to get those aligned. And you find best practice. Right. Of the two. And that's really, back to the alignment group and to what we're trying to achieve, one of the things we heard from some of the employees or a lot of the employees was, can we please get away from the village way and the town way and go to the best way? What is the best way for us to do our services to the residents and the businesses of the communities? Some of the ways we've been doing it may be have been in practice for a long time and may they may not even be even taking into account the changes of what has occurred. And so it's a great opportunity for staff to sit down department to department and say, what works, maybe your policy on this works and we should keep it. It's better than this one. And this one's better than yours. And why don't we agree that we're gonna do this one this way, that one that way, or change them both that serves us better, makes it easier and makes it easier for administration not to have to administer multiple policies on everything that the village and town does. And we do a lot and we do everything by policy and procedure. And there's a reason for that. We do not treat people individually if we, so we cannot give someone a benefit that we are not willing to give to everyone. So we have a policy of how we're going to address whatever it issue it is. We can't treat somebody's taxes different, whether they're in the village or the town or a man or a woman or a senior or a middle-aged person. It is what it is in the policy. And that's how we have to keep addressing things or we will get in trouble. And so that's how we look at these, we plow streets. We have a process and a procedure. That's how we do it. And there's a reason why we do it that way. And we can go on and on. But I've taken up a lot of time and I'll answer questions. Okay, it's a great, great work plan. So yeah, anyone have questions? Trustees? I think just to take up on the last point, Evan, you're right, there are sort of the area in village and town procedures that are non-policy kinds of procedures, but there are procedures that are spelled out in specific policies. And just for everyone's assurance, when it comes to changing something that's in a town policy or a village policy, you're gonna have to come to the board. The board's gonna have to vote to change the policy. So I think- Absolutely. You know, I'm just reiterating what you're saying so that we have some understanding of some giving everyone comfort level that there's where representation is concerned, policies aren't gonna be suddenly switched, anything like that. There's always gonna be, this is all gonna be done in the public. Policy alignments, policy changes will be brought to both boards, debated, each board votes on its policies independently of the other board. Just wanna make that clear. And when there's money involved- Yeah, absolutely. As well, that has to be addressed. Let's check some balances. I just wanna clarify that when you're talking about these changes in adopting similar policies between the town and the village operations, but when you're talking about employees, there's a union, union agreements and contractual agreements are not gonna be changed at this time when we're talking. I just wanna clarify for the members of the- No, not at this time. Right, right, right. But we are going to be talking with the associations about aligning the terms of the contracts along with our employee manuals so that we're not operating under five separate documents. I'd like to get it down to under three. Yes. So would Lauren. I heard you talk about the fire department for just one example. My concern would be that when we're talking about these consolidations that if you're talking only to management, rank and file may not be having their voices heard and especially with departments like the fire department. It's great if the chiefs agree with you on doing something but if all the volunteers don't agree, they're gone and we don't have a fire department or two left. So I would just- That's a good point. Want you to talk among very different levels with people about what issues they have not just within their departments, not just with the other department but even with other organizations within town and village government because I think there's a lot of opportunities for improvements that may be teased out by talking to different people. As a matter of fact, when you look at the alignment group there are a few people that are not currently department heads and the conversation at our first meeting, one, our next one's tomorrow, timing being everything, it'll be fresh tomorrow from this discussion. A lot of what they wanted to talk about was best practices, culture and how they would, that they wanted to meet other people in the organization. So people from 81 Main rarely get out to public works either building, they may see them but they don't know their names. We've had changes of personnel. They actually want to do events, lunches and other things, meet and greets where they become more of a team and a family than just a collection of people they don't know, trying to work on something to gather from different perspectives and so some of that is important and sometimes you can take their advice but you still have to take a direction but I do want their input. I want to say I've had the same conversation with Evan about the fire departments and they're kind of a special case because the name of the game is retaining volunteers and we don't want to make any policy changes in either department that drives away volunteers because that's their key and so I kind of feel that we may want to think that when there is an alignment or a discussion about possible consolidation that would have where some change might impact service delivery, where it touches the public that we have staff, that we have boards involved, that we have elected officials involved. Now I know that might slow you down but I think on some of these things it might be a thoughtful way to do it because then we can give that extra level of assurance we feel assured ourselves and we can also bring assurance and maybe some public perspective and public oversight to the process. I don't disagree. You're still in the formative stage at this point so I'm not saying we're gonna get in there but I do make the argument that if we're talking about policy practice procedures that impact service delivery, impact the public might be a good idea for one of us or one from each board or something like that to be involved in the discussion. Just some thought. The idea is although we're going too far down the road. Right, and could save you time because you don't wanna go through the whole process of spending hours working on aligning policies and then what you would like us to do and then you bring it forward to the boards and we say, ah, no, we don't like that at all so it might be better to have us involved at the ground level on some of these things. All right. My sense is that other city councils in the area and select boards are very busy doing other things besides consolidation and so although that seems to be a focus, consignment, alignment and consolidation for us in Essex I wonder if you have anybody in your staff who's got the periscope out and looking at what everybody else around us is doing so that we don't miss out because we're so focused for another year or five or 10 on making consolidation work. There's all kinds of great stuff going on and I wouldn't want us to miss out on it because we didn't give you enough freedom in this document to do other really good stuff that has nothing to do with consolidation and alignment. Yeah, that's a good point. We've already been talking about, you know, succession planning, both in this and outside of this recruitment and retention. We're talking about, you know, we have we have an interesting dichotomy of a workforce. We have some people with long years of dedicated service and we have some new people in the organization and that balance of, you know, what's the plan for some of those older employees and how are we going to get the newer employees on board and even the ones we're talking about development of an onboarding process but also not only of our employees but of elected officials and commissioners for boards and commissions, which we're learning from other communities because some of them have wonderful programs already in place. And one of my models is steel from the best. It's a form of flattery and then don't do things that don't work from other communities. And then when they say they wish they had never done it, it's usually an indication, don't do it. And so you do those things but that we wanna, you know, this is why, you know, I think the boards would be better served taking their time, dotting eyes, crossing T's, working on policies, working on culture and working together to see if this process should continue to keep going on which I believe I've heard from many of you that you believe it should. But how it should is as important is that it does continue and have goals in mind. And I'm a guy that likes to work on goals. If you tell me a goal is to be done by this time, I will move heaven and earth with our staff to make it happen. But if it's just sort of nebulous, it can get lost in translation and the wash. So, okay. I'd just like to add in terms of the keeping track of what's going on in other communities. We have staff that is very active regionally statewide. We've got public works as are some of the leaders in stormwater. There's the regional planning commission organizes a lot of events around planning, transportation, stormwater that our community development departments are active in. Public works is active, highway is active. Evan and I had lunch last week with other managers in the area. Sarah, our assistant finance director is the president. She's on the G. President-elect or president? President of the. You do have to. Government finance officers. You have to battle her. Government finance officers are recreation directors on the state recreation board. So we're certainly keeping a price of other stuff in addition to doing the consolidation. Walk, chew gum, pat your head. We got a. Put yourself on the back. No, no. No. Yeah, that's fine. It's fine, good. Justice, any other comments about this at this point? A couple of things I've been really excited about hearing from you today. I've heard you mentioned building a team and not necessarily doing things the village way or the town way, but doing things the best way, which it's great to hear that. I mean, earlier talking about trying something with one of the new positions. The flexibility and that willingness is great to hear. And then on a slightly different note in looking at the work plan, knowing that we've talked about a lot about consolidation, some about charter changes, we've heard about representation in looking at the timeline. One of the things we've also talked a lot about is how we don't have a great turnout when it comes to actual voting, when it comes down to participating. So in seeing FYE 2020, it makes me think of the election coming up in 2020. I'm assuming that there's gonna be quite a few people who might want to participate that November for elections. If we could also align any kind of charter changes with that date, it could really be a great way to entice many, many more people to participate and have a lot of people participate in an election for municipal purposes that they typically wouldn't. It's funny that you're, I'm laughing because I was like, what election in 2020? Nevermind, nevermind. I was like, what municipal election do we have in 2020? There are some others. Nevermind, something else is kind of, yes. That's an interesting, that's an interesting. Because typically we tend to ask people to take time out of their day and come to us. Let's go to when they're already going to be out voting and try to have them vote on things that concern them very, very directly. Okay. Good suggestion. I'm sure voter turnout will be much higher in November of 2020 than in local election. I think one of the statistics. Certainly brings that up. You're right. Yes. Any other comments from select board members? All right. I look at your new alignment group. I noticed that a number of the members are brand new or very recently new to local government. And I would just hope that under the other staff heading, you would include people who know the history here. Ringer many times and can help the newer folks understand why we may or may not want to do certain things because we've tried that before. But in their enthusiasm and I love them for it, they may not foresee the pitfalls or the quicksand ahead. And I would just put that out there. And part of it is, I mean, I literally could have doubled the group. And part of the problem is trying to get four people in the same room on the same day at the same time is hard, try doing it with nine vacations, this, that and continuity. So I kind of paired it back and a couple of the members actually asked for other members to be added to the list already. So, and that's why I put in there that people will be added as needed for expertise and some things. I will, I know this is gonna sound, I don't even know how it'll sound. We have jeans day on Fridays. We allow jeans to be worn at work on Fridays. It's just our culture, what we allow. Everybody was worried that when I came here, I was getting rid of jeans day. It also was bad because on the first Friday, I didn't wear jeans. I apparently didn't get the memo. And one of our employees came up with an idea to try to build camaraderie. This Friday is where your Alma Mater shirt day. We added it, some people may have not have gone to college or whatever. We said, well, wherever you went to college or wherever your money's going. So if your money is going to Dartmouth or Champlain College, you can wear the sweatshirt or where your kids are going. And we're hoping to spark conversation amongst the staff. Oh, I didn't know you went there. Oh, my son goes there. Oh, my daughter goes there. And they are excited to do this. And okay, great. We'll try anything. Nobody gets hurt. I hope, you know, unless they're Duke, North Carolina. Or, you know, whoever beat Vermont in the NCAA tournament. So that's just some things that are going on. Better relationships. So that's good. Okay, any other comments from the suckboard on the staff work plan? Okay. Want me to do this one? Sure. All right. Now we are moving on to trustee and select board comments about our part and our vision of what we, how we'd like to continue the governance, the discussion on governance. And I, we had asked when we had the meeting on the 24th, Max and I had ended the conversation by saying to everybody, would you all like to, everyone going to continue this? Yes, everyone said yes. And then would you all like to send us your ideas about what we should do next? And everyone said yes. And then we sent out a reminder and we got four responses. I'm one of them. I will admit now, I'm member D. That's me. I'm very wordy. The biggest, longest, most verbose one is always me. And the least verbose is me and member B. And so, and so what I would like to, okay, head to Evan, you want to explain how why you did this? It explains that defeats the purpose. It was meant to be not select board or board. It's just a thought. But okay. I get it. Transparency. Well, what I was thinking of doing was just once again to try, but to have everybody and since there are four of us who submitted and the rest of us decided not to for various reasons, what we won't go into. But I thought that maybe, maybe you'd like to, maybe you'd like to talk about it now. Maybe we'd go around the room and just everybody give their thoughts, but maybe that's not a good idea. I think it's a great idea. So I end, Greg. Just want to quickly point out that in my copying and pasting of the comments that came in, I screwed up and mysterious member D who's been described as George Tyler, there's a line at the bottom of yours that got attributed to member C. So you can cross off that last line under members C. That's fine. But would everyone like to do that? Would everyone, would that be a good way to sort of break the ice on this? And who would like to start? And A, so I will start. Go for it. I'll read what I wrote so maybe if you don't have it and then I'll just. I know there's a lot we need to accomplish should we continue to consolidate, but I feel our most important step is to address the elephant in the room, taxes. We need a full understanding of costs associated with the remainder of programs and departments to consolidate, how they would affect each entity and thoughtful solutions on how to resolve to ensure residents from both communities will continue to support consolidation. If we don't tackle the money slash tax issue, we may be spending time working towards the status quo. If that is the case, I would like to learn that sooner rather than later that a full consolidation is not going to happen and move our attention to other important matters. We could still continue to work on joint communications and improving what is already consolidated. If we can find a solution to the tax equity issue that I would like to address board governance prior to consolidating any more departments. And so just to give you a just a couple quick more sentences on it. I am fully supportive of what we have done so far and if that is all we do, I would recommend that we that that's the status quo. We don't go backwards, but that's not what this is intended to be. But I do think there are two major issues that we need to address and one is tax equity and one is representation. And we only do that one through a discussion of how we would govern these communities together. And if we don't do those now, I feel we are just spinning our wheels and a year from now we'll be back having the same conversation. And I know at least speaking for the, as a village trustee, we have a lot we could be doing besides this. And we've talked about creating a board, a downtown redevelopment board, a business association. You know, there's a lot that I'm sure the town wants to do. So we need to be clear in our direction, really work on the hard stuff now, decide how we're gonna move forward. And if we're not, then we're not. That's all I've got. So before we move on to the next person, should we just open that for comments or what do you think Jordan? Well, if someone has a comment, I think anyone have a question or comment or do you wanna, should we just keep going and just go around, keep going around the horn? And I don't wanna put anyone on the spot. If someone doesn't feel like talking about this, I don't wanna put anyone on the spot. So any volunteer to go next? I'll look at that. I'll put it in my two cents. Yep. I would like, I agree with a lot of what Lori says. I'm a little more interested in moving more slowly and deliberately on a department by department basis. I realize that tax equity and representation are the two biggest issues that we have to deal with, but they break down into smaller things. And what I would, I'm happy to see what Evan had on his work plan, which was that the staff is gonna continue working on aligning organizations, departments within the organization that have already begun their alignment. So I would like to stick with that and start working on public works because there's a lot of financial stuff that has to happen in order to complete the alignment and the way we pay for our services and the way we bill for our services and the different ways we do our capital budgets and all of those different financial operations. That's some heavy lifting and some of it will touch tax equity, but most of it will touch just the finances. And so I'd rather tackle that one big project first and then move on to the next one as opposed to trying to impose a blanket solution to both issues at one time because that's too easy to fall apart. And if we do it a little bit at a time as we go on, we will get closer and closer to the goal. And the more we work with smaller chunks, the better we'll get at the subsequent chunks. So that's my two cents. Oh, I'm sorry, one more thing. Evan mentioned at the end of his memo to the existing resources that we have, which I'm really glad that you said that because I would like us to consider tapping into heart and soul again. It's sort of dormant now and it was such a successful process in the past that when we get to portions of our conversations and alignment procedures that require a public input portion, I think it might be a really good idea to revisit how we communicated with the community using heart and soul, because that was a very successful effort that brought out comments and participation from people that we normally never see. So it would be really good if we could remember that that tool is at our disposal if we want to re-engage it. Okay, thank you. Do you want feedback? Anyone? Comments? Take a grant to re-establish that? If you don't mind. Laurie. Tax equity is a, first I think we need to, every time we talk, you all talk, we should be working on the same definition of what they mean. I think what you mean is tax, the tax rate difference of what the village pays into the town over and above what the town pays. What I mean is I would like every citizen in Essex to pay the same tax. And one of, I've been kicking around, one of the things I've asked Lauren and her department to do is to give some indications of what that difference is. And maybe even so far, we have a lot of money going back and forth between the communities. And there's still a gap. And then ultimately a conversation of the boards of whether you want staff to take a stab at something or hire someone much smarter than me, hopefully, to put something together with some recommendations of what to do versus whatever comes out of the mind of me or anyone else. And I think that's great. I know it's not an easy, but it is obviously not an easy one. I think it's gonna take time and I think you should, I do think it should be on the list of what you're working on. I don't think you do it at the end. I think you do it as part of a work plan for the board. And it may not seem like it at the time, but I believe what we've done so far has been the easy work. And what is left is really difficult. And so we need to be very clear about that. And the fact that piece is a big part of that because I'm talking about the rep departments and the libraries. And so, and I just, I feel as personally, I just feel like we talk around it a lot and don't talk about it. In regards to heart and soul, I think you were gonna ask a question. So heart and soul is technically dormant, but we're still a board. We still meet and we are actually trying to figure out a way to resurrect it. And we have a plan that we eventually will bring before the two boards. But I know in regards to engagement, yes, it's still there. Yeah, because that would be a wonderful entity to reinvigorate for this. Okay. Others? Andy. Yeah, I have to confess that I completely forgot that I had a homework assignment. So I'm neither A, B, C, or D. My apologies for that. Full disclosure. Oh boy, where to start? So a couple of quick comments to make on the document that we were given. There was a list at the bottom of page one. This is identify areas where that might require outside consultation and assets, how we deal with assets isn't listed there. I don't know if that's implied under, because there are assets that are owned by the village that he'd understand how to. The other thing that we may need help with is libraries, because library governance, before I say this, I have to disclose that my wife is a library trustee, I six free library trustee, and I won't gain any personal advantage by saying these things, but. You could only help or hurt yourself. So I can hear. But I think we need to have a discussion with the State Department of Libraries or something because they're a separate entity, they have their own trustees. Questions, I have questions about what our jurisdiction really is over them. Can we tell the two libraries to consolidate or is it up to the two trustee boards to do that? I also, I did have a short conversation with someone from the State Library entity, whatever it is, at the last town fair that I was at, and the discussion implied that the village library has different governance laws associated with it because it's the way it was formed and so forth, so I think there's a lot of, from the standpoint of what do we need to know, I think we need to understand more about the libraries than has ever been discussed between these boards. Can I just add real quick, so there's a woman who works for the Department of Libraries who's an Essex resident and she's a specialist in library governance, so she's a consultant. Oh, okay. Can you share the State Florida libraries? There you go. Great, great. So I think we need to understand what we can and can't do with regard to the libraries. It may be up to them to decide. I just want to add one thing though that I do kind of know. If, I'm not going to speak for the Essex Free Library, but if the Village General Fund had no money to give to the Brown Hill Library, the Brown Hill Library would cease operation. I mean, they've got a foundation that's worth, got a couple thousand bucks in it, I think, that's it. So, I don't know if that amounts to governance, but if we decide not to give them money anymore, then they'll have to figure out how to fund their million dollar operation and that's going to, I don't think. We're not suggesting that we're not going to do that. We're not doing that, but I'm just saying. Don't start rumors. And I think the town with the Essex Free, I think if the town said we're going to remove you from the Town General Fund Essex Free Library, I think that- See the flames already. Yeah, really, George? Just stop. I know. I think the governance is through the money, I think, that's the point. Okay. Right, okay. So, I didn't mean to. That's fine. I still got probably plenty more. With regard to the tax equity thing, the one thing that, and I've kind of, I've asked Greg and Evan earlier to try to lay out where we're sharing costs, because every time the town pays 50% and the village pays 50%, because 42% of the grand list is in the village, they actually pay 71% of anything. And so, that's, I think, part of the crux of, but of the inequity, but I think we do that on purpose so that each entity has a say in what goes on. But I think we need to have that discussion about whether it's really appropriate to be 50-50, or whether we could start transitioning it, or somehow make that more equitable, because it's really 71-29, it's not 50-50. One thing I would add to that is, in similar vein, what is the village taxpayer getting for some of that money that they are providing to the town, like I mentioned earlier, the town providing a service back to the village, engineering to do the bids. We should be quantifying, not so much dollar-for-dollar, but service lines, how we share and do things. Because- There are definitely some things that they're paying for twice. Where it's duplicated needs to be part of that. The exact same resource twice. One of the things I would look for Lauren and Sarah and the finance department to do is have that as part of the budget document as well. I'd like to know that myself. There's a lot of stuff moves back and forth. We're actually working on employees, a list, which is getting rather long. So it is, I mean. Good point. Can I continue? Sure. So I perhaps naively looked at the, I've got the village report over on the shelf behind me over here and it says you're raising 3.4 million in taxes. And I'm assume that, I mean with discussions that we had on the 24th, one of the prime points that people were making was that we should not reduce any services. And so you could naively assume that you need to take that 3.4 million and add it to the town budget, which is a 13 and a quarter cent tax increase. And so I think we need. Sorry, I can't hear you about that. Could you just speak up a little bit? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, I recently got a hearing aid. So I'm really loud to myself. So maybe I need to take it out so I don't hear myself talk so much. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just remind everybody at the table here to lean into your mics. Yeah, seriously, I was thinking I was really loud. I'm gonna take it out so I can speak louder. There we go. Now I'm not augmenting myself. I'm sorry. So anyway, the, where was I? So right, so this question of whether we want to maintain all services and whether we can really stomach a 13 and a quarter cent tax increase, I think we need to have that discussion. I mean, we're fooling ourselves if we're going down this road and we in the end don't really want to do that. And potentially we could do it incrementally so that it's not so hard, this whole question of starting to shift some of the costs one way or the other. Maybe there's a way to do it, but I think that's from a tax equity standpoint, that's a big thing to swallow. So that was my shared cross. I talked about library. I wanna touch on TGIA. I know that a lot of people put a lot of discussion into that there was a proposal put on the table. And it's my understanding that the trustees have chosen to stop discussion about that. And I believe the concern is related to state statute says that the town has all the responsibility with regard to appointing all of the commissioners to a planning commission. And so again, this is another thing where we have, I mean, there's been no discussion about this. I only know what I've read in the paper about it. And so we haven't in a group like this talked about since the trustees decided to put the brakes on this, we haven't had a discussion about it. We did have discussion about potential memory, memory, MOUs or whatever to try to, even out the representation, but I think this is something that could move things forward if we had a discussion and came to a resolution. Just putting that out there as a potential next step. I mean, I understand that there are concerns with regard to future select boards may not be as accommodating with regard to representation. But I think that's a good, that's a discussion we're gonna need to have at some point as long as there's two boards. The last thing I wanted to touch on is, and it was mentioned earlier, is the rec department is a big part of the budget. We did have a significant amount of activity on that recently. During that time period we were told by the rec department heads that they were working on a consolidation plan, a way to consolidate each other. I don't recall ever seeing that plan. And I think now that both directors work for Evan, I'm wondering if it was worthwhile to pull that back out and see if there are things in that could start happening again. It's my feel that the vote against the consolidation of the rec was relative to the governance structure that was proposed to it, not the fact that folks thought that, and I could be wrong, it's just my opinion there. But I think it may be, again, because it's a large chunk of the difference in the tax rates, I think that's another place that needs to be looked at soon. So those are all my comments. Any comments on the comments? I'm hearing aid back in. I would like to just make, if I can, Andy, if I maybe get a comment. I'm sorry, let me lean into it. Sorry. Let's just do a thought experiment real quick. Imagine if the Vermont legislature said no more village charters were done and the trustees no longer have any authority. And so all assets, village assets, departments, processes have to be handed over to the town. I know all of you pretty well, and I know all of you are good-hearted people, and I know that none of you, as a select board, as a group would say, okay, we're gonna shut down the Brown Hill Library to save people in the town money because now that we have to take this on, we're not gonna, you're not gonna tell 10,000 families in the village. Now you have to use the pool up in the town center. Okay, you're not gonna do that. I know you're not gonna shut down the village fire department because half the calls it makes are in the town. So it's clearly providing a service that the town relies on. And state law would require the town to provide planning, zoning, and community development within the village. So my point is, is that all of the services that the village is presently providing are services more or less that the town would need to provide if the village didn't exist? Yes, you could, if we said if there was a complete consolidation, could you have some, could you save some money? Of course you could. You could save maybe tens of thousands of dollars. Are you gonna save millions? No, you're not gonna save millions of dollars. We're probably not even gonna save hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I just wanna clarify that that really is the issue. The village, we sometimes talk of it as an overlay district, or it's kind of like icing on the cake. No, the village, I think, we have to kind of get our head around the fact, and I'm trying not to make this a political statement, and you'll tell me if it is a political statement. But I think we get our head around the fact that the village is sharing responsibility with the town government for providing services for this entire community. And yet, as you point out, people in the village, the money doesn't, we're not being compensated basically, and you put it that way. People in the village are the only ones being taxed to provide our portion of those services, but people in the village are sharing the responsibility for what the town government provides. And I don't want to keep hammering on this because I'm sure the select board is probably sick entirely listening to us say this, but I think it's probably important for us to start with kind of a grounded understanding of what it is we're about and what the funding issue really is. So that's my thought. And I again, hope someone can tell me am I making a political statement Irene or you see any problem with what I said? I would just counter with the same things happening on the outside of the village side with no representation because if we combined things, it would be very different. But right now, Evan talked about the town highway department paving town streets and village streets. I would beg to differ. They're paving outside the village streets and inside the village streets. The town highway department, like the town planning department only deals with outside the village things, but they don't have a board to appropriately manage those policies, like the muddy roads, posted roads thing that comes up every year. There are things that happen outside the village that the select board does outside the village residents and departments the favor of legislating on, but it is not appropriate if you look at where those lines are drawn for that to happen and we need to revisit that because it's a chicken and egg thing. And if folks want to see this go forward, I think the most appropriate way would be to get buy-in from the 11,000 or so people that live out there by affording them representation equivalent to the village. And then we can move forward by having conversations around a table where there's equivalent strength on each side. Other comments? Other comments? Who wants to do the next? I raise? I'll just mention that we're talking about sort of the silos of consolidation, but there was a suggestion a couple of years ago that we in the village, I believe it was called a cultural district, that the recreation department in the village align with the library in the village and become its own district. So because they have a lot of things in common, a lot of kids recreate through the library and through the rec program, maybe consolidating the Brown Hill Library and EGRP is something that we shouldn't overlook as a possibility because they may have a lot more in common than say the two different philosophies, locations and backgrounds of the two different libraries. So I would just want us to be really broad and are thinking about what consolidation means and how it can happen here. Well, can I explore that idea a minute? So let's say we did that. Would you look to do a similar thing with the town services and so you would have adjusted tax rates in the village in the town or would you say people in the village have this entity but they're also continuing to support the mirror entities in the town? How would you go about doing that? It wouldn't be my decision to make because I would want a room full of outside the village representatives and inside the village representatives to hammer that out because right now having a select board that has the big picture view only doesn't help anyone hammer out those compromises. It just doesn't. It's inappropriate. Well, I'll continue to have the conversation but I don't want us to dominate. So let's open it up for some other folks. Just a question. Sure. I'm trying to understand the chicken and egg thing. Sorry, sorry. I'm trying to understand the chicken and egg thing. Sure. I'm hearing from you that there are solutions to our problems but that they cannot happen until the select board solves the town outside the village problem. Is that accurate? That's one way of looking at it. I don't know that the select board is the only one. Maybe it's a legislature issue to solve. That's why I'm putting it in the select board's hands and hopefully our town attorney and our brilliant staff who know this stuff and are paid full time to look at things like this can actually come back to the select board who's volunteers and provide us some paths forward. Isn't that what we've been doing? We sat together on March 24th and heard tons of public input about how we're doing it so badly and that they want us to change it and that we need to move forward and we're having this entire conversation about doing exactly that. We are working on that problem right this second and what we're dealing with now is not just some capricious setup that this select board decided this is how we're gonna do it. It's state statute. I mean, we're working with a charter that is in VSA annotated. I mean, it's not something we can just fix. We're working on it right now. So I'm not understanding and maybe I'm just being dense. I'm not understanding how the fixes you're proposing are any different from the fixes that everybody else in this table is proposing. I think as I said earlier, as we've consolidated the other departments so far, we have shared some expenses and I believe the village tax bill has gone down to some degree or at least that was the goal of sharing some of those departments. But I have never heard someone say, oh, and by the way, this is gonna fix the representation thing or this is going to work on the representation thing. That's just not even been part and parcel of the discussion. And yet if you go back 60 years, I think some of the merger hiccups we've had and the frustration is that we have not had adequate representation. And when you don't have equivalent representation, you set yourself up for these things that are not ever going to work out in ways that are fair to everybody. And yeah, the tax equity is another piece that has to happen. But until you have people who can say yes or no to that tax equity, I don't believe it's appropriate for the select board to step in and say that necessarily because we cannot represent the outside the village voters. That's not a charge. But all we're talking about right now is representation and every meeting we've had for the last several months has been about that. So why don't we just focus on the future and get it done? That'd be great. And do you have to hand up? I just wanna reiterate again that I represent the residents outside the village and I resent being told that I don't. And I really, it really upsets me when I hear that. All select men represent the entire community, whether regardless of where you live within the town, yeah. Mike? So I'm gonna put myself right beside Elaine and I guess I'm gonna have to convince that I'm dense because I just don't get it. I don't understand the argument and I have to agree wholeheartedly with Andy. I live in the village. I'm on the town select board. It's my privilege to serve there. And I haven't heard anybody in six years tell me that my opinions are slanted one way or the other. It's always been about what's best for Essex. So let's get this skunk on the table and let's get it done because I'm tired of listening to it, to be honest with you. Let's, if there's a fix that needs to happen, let's get it done. And let's get it done soon so we can move on. Mike, did you wanna add anything else about, did you have an opportunity to say something? I did. No, I'm El, I'm El for loser. I'm this, no you're not. I'm just my assignment. That's okay, you can just wing it right now. Go ahead. You're wearing out a lot of people here who have that same Al. Yeah, Bob was doing that. Is there anything else you'd like to add? There is. This is a big time. There is. El for me. I have to confess that I'm not sure which comes first, the tax issue or settling this governance issue or representation on the town, but I'm willing to listen. But whichever one comes first, then that's the one we need to deal with first, followed closely by the second. I think Lori and Andy both eloquently stated that there are tax inequities that have to be dealt with. And I think those have to be dealt with before we can take too many steps forward on consolidating because I also agree with Lori. I think we've picked the low hanging fruit and now we're gonna start to get into some really thorny stuff. And I welcome that challenge just speaking for myself, but it's not gonna be quite as simple as what we've done in the past. So I say, if you're looking for my top five, the governance issue and or the tax issue, a thoughtful discussion with all nine of us about where consolidation goes from here. Do we solve these two and we table consolidation for a little bit or do we continue to try and do it altogether? Those to me are the three things that we've got to deal with. Okay, thank you, Mike. Any comments on what Mike had to say? Can I just make one? Sure. I would say we have to tackle them at the same time. That's my personal opinion. It has to be a parallel conversation. But with all of the votes that we've had in the past that have gone down, I don't want to get to the point when we're just talking about one and not the other. So that would just be my parallel conversation. Okay. Andrew or Dan? Well, I'll just wait and I mean, I agree with what's been said by many people here, Andy and Lori especially, but a lot of this comes down to understanding, we have an understanding better than most of the population that we represent, probably almost all of it. And I mean, there are people out there that are aware of what's going on and the process we're going through. But I think there's, as we've said before, the number of people who come out and vote, you'd hope that they're all well educated on this. I'm hoping that this message is being sent through whatever source we have, the paper, the channel 17, so that they're being thorough with this information so it's out there so those people aren't lacking for knowledge. And that, I mean, I don't expect 20,000 people to show up at our meeting, but we just need to be better about getting that message out. And I think once there's a better understanding, I have this discussion with friends in the town outside the village trying to explain the whole process. And there's just obviously a lack of understanding by a lot of people in the community. Comments on what Dan had to say? I'll do one follow up comment and sort of in line with what Dan and others have said, but I will say, I will just stake my own piece right here. I think any consolidation that we should do should not hit people outside the village with some gigantic tax increase. I think right now, the scenario I presented, if suddenly the village just disappeared and all the villages, three and a half million, four million dollars worth of services had to get into, moved into the town general fund, it'd be a huge impact on outside the village residents. It wouldn't be so much an impact on village residents because we're used to it, but it would be a big hit. And for lots of reasons, I think for ethical reasons, it's not right, and I think for political reasons, for practical reasons, it's not right because if we attempted to do that through some kind of a charter vote, I know that it passed the first time around in 2007, but it was contentious and it was defeated subsequently. And I would rather see us try to aim towards something where we get overwhelming support from both sides, but that means we have to do it, so that's a lot of work. It's a lot of work, but I think it's doable. I think we can be creative about how we go about doing it, but I think, I would like to say, to maybe move the conversation along a little bit, I would like to see us maybe discuss what is the process that we see doing? Do we wanna work on this and how do we work on it? How do we put our ideas forward and how do we begin to chip away and modify and critique each other's ideas going forward? I think, and you guys who didn't write something Andy, Mike, you're not gonna get away with this anymore. I think we all need to be putting stuff, putting some ideas out there and really try to see. I'm wondering if we all just had a few days to think about it and came up with some kind of a structure and some kind of a way of handling all this. If we compare them all, I wonder how much overlap that would be. I'm willing to bet that it'd be quite a bit. And we might be able to look at those areas of overlap and then begin to work on the areas of non-overlap and see where we could get some ideas of how we could put it together. So I'll just throw that out there. Thoughts? I'll go, just haven't said anything yet. So the way that I've seen this going is we have, as Evan had said earlier, we don't wanna have the village way, we don't wanna have the town way, we wanna have the best way. In the six years that I've been on the village board and prior to then just as a resident, nobody I've spoken with has said the status quo is the best way. Nobody I've spoken with has said this works in the way that they want it to be and that something needs to change. So whether we do taxation, whether we do representation, those are the cruxes of the municipality. You don't have one without the other. I can't see how those get finalized or those get resolved in any kind of a separate process. It has to be a parallel process in my mind. Along those lines, until we go around and identify what the end goal is that we want to see, which someone had mentioned in here and it wasn't me, cause I'm one of the five who didn't do it, I'm happy to, I'll jump in that, but with you Mike and Andy. Until we do that, we don't know where we're starting from. It's kind of hard to come together until we're all showing our cards. Otherwise we all have the poker face on and we're all hiding our cards from each other instead of trying to be as transparent as we are. As I said at the meeting on the 24th, every day that we talk about, what are we, every day that we go forward without an actual plan, and this is not a judgment called anybody on the board. So please don't take it that way. Until we go forward with here's what we're doing, here's how we're going to get there, and here's what the end goal is that we're gonna work towards. Until we get to that point, those are days that we can't spend on other things. Like what Lori had mentioned before, at least in the village, some of the things that we've talked about doing, we had more Collins come to us not that long ago about trying to get an affordable housing committee. There are other things that we could do that we can't do because we don't have, I'll speak for myself, I don't have the time to do it in addition to these things. From looking at the work plan, I don't think our municipal staff have the time to do these things. So I would love to get this done sooner rather than later, but don't think we can get there until we identify where it is we'd like to see this go. Comments on, yeah, Mike? Just one. This isn't gonna go over well, but I'm wondering how much we can accomplish in a meeting in just four a year, or five a year. I just, I think we are setting ourselves up for this to drag by virtue of the fact that we haven't accelerated that a little bit. Yep, agreed. Like I said, I don't expect a lot of hozzahs with that idea. No, no, I think you're right. I wanna go to more meetings. We're doing it, I wanna read from a select group. I think you're right, I think we're probably gonna complete agreement with it, so we're not defending anybody. I just don't think we're gonna be able to accomplish what we want to accomplish. We need a process for doing this. That said, in the document that Evan gave us about what our work plan should be, the recommendation is that the select board and trustees discuss next steps among the boards and assign working groups as appropriate. We've identified a bunch of topics, perhaps we should divide and conquer. Right, in order to basically have subcommittees that warn their meetings, even though they're not gonna be forums, I think we need to be as transparent as we can on those, right? I mean, we would be fooling ourselves to think that what we're trying to accomplish here isn't going to involve extra meetings. I know we can't do it in four meetings a year. It's gonna have to be more, so maybe we can, if we divide and conquer, everyone doesn't have to go to every single meeting. And they're not, as much as I'd love to spend time with you all, they're not going to happen in this setup of a meeting. No. Although I think this is the best one we've had because I feel as if we are finally all putting our thoughts on the table, it's time to now start working. Right. I agree, I think we should start working. I don't wanna, again, I think we'd come back to this and think of a structure and a process going forward, but maybe it would be helpful if we went around the table real quick, each one of us, and say, what do you see the end goal is? Do we all see that a consolidated village town government is the goal? Or do we see, are we thinking, well, we'll somehow modify the existing charters? What is everyone, would everyone like to do that? Is everyone prepared to do that? To have a, just sort of lay it out there and say what you think. It doesn't mean you can't change your mind and it doesn't mean you can't be influenced by other people's thoughts. But you wanna try it, should we try to do that? Yeah. Yeah? And that's what I wrote in my comments for member B is actually that we do propose we come to an agreement of the boards soon to talk about really what is the end game? Yeah. And identify what the major issues are to getting there, but at least define what the end game is so that you know when you actually arrived. You know, we've talked about tax inequity, representation, the board structure, what do you do with assets? Those are things you would have to work on in order to get to where you wanna go. But if we could define what it is, we see as the goal of where we wanna be. At the meet on the 24th I talked about, I think it's important to make it a sustainable community. And that's, there's a definition out there and it talks about how you work together, you don't work in silos. What an opportunity we have is the village and the town as a whole to become sustainable by working together. And we've been on that path, we've done the low hanging fruit, now come some tougher stuff, but it's not insurmountable. Especially when you put your high beams on and go I'm not talking about worrying about tomorrow or next week or next year or the next couple of years, but we're talking about looking out 20 or 30 years. Are we gonna be in a better place if we come together and work together? And I think there's only one right answer personally, but I would like to hear everybody's view and see what they think the ultimate goal is. And if you don't, we don't reach it because there's some hang up, something that we can't overcome. Okay, let's define that. But working with, you know, bailing wire and duct tape now with these MOUs is just untenable. We need to get to the closest we can to our goal and then let's get rid of those MOUs and create the charter changes. And we have to be cognizant of bringing the public along with us because this is their town. We need to make sure we're validating what we're doing with the entire community, whether that's through surveys or some other method so that we do a check and adjust based on what we're going. So ideally, and I said this on the 24th, when you do charter changes as your ultimate one, and we said we only really wanna do this once, a lot of moving pieces, wanna do this right, get them all in the right line and do it, that requires a vote of the public. And I think we can say we were successful, not if it's a positive vote, but if the vote comes out positive because we already knew it was gonna be that way because the public told us they were with us. So if we can work in a way to define that with the check and adjust and validating with the public, but identify where it is we wanna go, I think we'd have a lot easier time getting there. Can we, we see that there's some public comments, can we hold off, because we really- To what you said you were going to do next, you are very clear what you mean by either merger, consolidation or alignment because you all use those words and I use them and they mean so very different to each of us. Try to be clear what you mean. Do you mean a merger of public works with a single public works department under the town or do you mean a department that works together but still is governed by two bodies? That's really the crux of it. Yeah, Barbara, I think we're trying to figure that out right now. No, but if you just ask people to give their opinions and it would be helpful to me as a citizen, each of you when you say that, you're as clear as you can be about what you mean by those words. Okay, thank you. If I could just comment too on this in the packet, I don't know if you have it, Barbara, but the board work plan for consolidation and alignment, the first bullet under discussion actually says, yeah, we need to do exactly that. We need to put definitions to these words that we do throw around so that it's clear when we use them that everybody knows what it means. Would that go to just clarification again? The same with tax equity. I've heard it so you use so many times it's like a slogan but I would like to be able to see it put up on that whiteboard there and everybody agrees with it because it may mean different things to different people. I would like to know what it is. Laurie's got a point of view. Somebody else may have a different one. What does it mean? How's it operationalized? We can add that to the list. Thank you. George, you go ahead. Yeah, I think that we, so let's, so Elaine had a, or did you wanna start? I was gonna say, we're gonna start, I'll go first. Go first. So hoping this is super clear, Barbara, because I really understand what you're getting at. My vision for the end of this conversation, which may be 10 years from now or five years from now or three years from now, a single community with one board, one budget, one staff, a common set of services and a common set of voting opportunities. That's what I see. The same, don't you? Yeah. Andrew, do you wanna just go around? Sure, but if that's okay or? Mark, when you say one voting opportunity, do you mean that we would vote on the schools at the same time too? Well, yeah. Because that would be wonderful if we could work on that. Yeah, what I said was a common set of voting opportunities. So yes, I would love to see one day of school meeting, budget meeting, and town budget meeting, and then we vote on it once. I mean, village residents have five opportunities to vote and town residents have three opportunities to vote. It's too confusing. Okay, thank you. Andrew. I don't have much difference to, I feel like I'm screaming into this microphone. Is it too loud out there? No. Okay. That's wonderful. I don't know about one. You're changing your audience. No, you're distracting me. So where I, I don't have much different to say from what Elaine had. I'd love to see one community, meaning one municipality. I'd love to see one board. Whether that board is governed by an equal number of representatives from inside the village, outside the village with some out large, I'm not a hundred percent sold on how that should go. I would love to see our voting aligned with the school votes so that that way we don't have to come out to multiple times for our, what our community needs. That's it. I agree wholeheartedly, almost a hundred percent with what Elaine and Andrew just said. The only thing that I would add is I want to see one community. I want to see one voting opportunity, but I can, I'll go on the record now and tell you that I think that the hybrid model for how we vote for town meeting, I do not want to get rid of town meeting. I will vote against it every single time somebody brings it up. But I think town meeting is sank or sanked. I think that stays. But if we do the hybrid, we can still have town meeting. We can still have input into the budget and then we vote on it. And everybody gets a chance to vote on it later on. So I agree with the one community. I like the, I love the idea of one voting opportunity. And I have to agree with Andrew. I'm not sure how the one board, I think that's gonna take a lot longer discussion about how that board is comprised, but that's what I would like to see. I will agree with the three of you. I'd like, I believe we should be aiming towards a consolidated community. I have lately had some thoughts about perhaps is there some way we could keep two charters? Why? Because keeping two charters might, if they could be modified dramatically, might provide a mechanism for resolving the tax equity issue. You could potentially look at a former village and former town districts or departments and if one is costing a little bit more, at least for the first few years of a merged community, it'd give you a way of adjusting tax rates. You could justify it by working within the two different charters. I'm not sure it would work. It sounds really complicated. I also think that probably for the first few years of a consolidated community, you'd wanna do something where you have voting districts where you have a former town outside the village district, a former village district and maybe one at-large person just to give people confidence that there's not gonna be domination or overrepresentation from one former part of the community or other. I don't know how you'd do that, but I think it could eventually go away, but basically I'm in agreement with the three of you. Okay. Again, with the headlights on, your high beams looking down many years or I don't know, a number of years to have a single sustainable community working together with one tax rate for all, one governing board, perhaps with districts, if that makes sense based on size. And I disagree with Mike a little bit. I think it's time that we do put the budget on a ballot as sad as that is. I like town meeting, I like the opportunity to take people through town through the budget so it's clear what they're voting on, but I get a lot of input that says people think otherwise. But this idea of sustainable community is really working together. Working in silos isn't gonna get you into the future. And if you think about what do you do next after we're consolidated, you're probably gonna need the next set of boards, you're probably gonna need to look beyond our boundaries into other communities to see what additional things could be consolidated further with them, just looking even way down the road. So, yeah, put me on record for a single sustainable community in the future. Pretty much all of it, one community, one budget, one board, representation structure we have to figure out. One vote, prefer the town meeting hybrid method I would like economic development for the entire community. I would like one tax rate for all and I would like to do it via a brand new charter. I'd like to set both aside and start fresh. And what I want most of all is that when we are out in the community and I say I'm from Essex, I don't have someone roll their eyes and say, oh, Essex, you guys can't figure it out. I want us to be respected in this state for all that we offer, all that we do, and for all the reasons people choose to live here. Well said. I agree with my, with everything that's been said so far, I would beg to differ. However, on the at-large representation, I believe that has proven problematic on the select board because of the way we are charged with representing everyone. And I've heard my peers insist that they can or can't represent people from certain districts depending on the issue or not. And I just think that if we could have, ideally, in my fantasy, it would be a large select board that could somehow meet as hybrid individual boards while we're still working out the kinks, such as while there's still an EJRP that the village needs to manage or budget for, those four or five members of that larger select board would be able somehow legally to meet and determine their direction, what needs to happen with those village-only issues. Same thing with the outside the village members who would be equal in size to their counterparts. And yet that whole group could get together as we do on a joint meeting and meet as 10 people to discuss the town-wide issues. And we would, ideally, in my mind, have new terminology so that when we say the word town, it doesn't mean 50 different things to 50 different people depending on what sentence we're using it in. And I would also ask, please, that we, while the new Merge School Board is still new and fresh, could we please consider low-hanging fruit to be finding a different voting date that is not right after the winter school break and is conducive to all of us holding all of our meetings in a compact voting day or days? Because right now, having them stretched out to me has just gone on for way too long, and I'm not sure what's holding up our having those conversations with our good friends on the school board. Thanks. So if I could just clarify, Irene, you also agree to a single municipality that you were talking about how you eventually get there with these two different, okay. Or it's one board that can meet as working groups. Because that could be the term, right? Is that the term? Well, this would be the committee of the whole, and it would have subcommittees. That's a very common thing. In this formative period. Right, absolutely. So that we can get to the place we all want to be with people feeling they're adequately represented and getting to that endpoint. That's a good idea. Thank you, Irene. Dan. I agree with comments made so far. A little bit of what Irene had to say, but to start with, I disagree with continuing to be separate in a part in certain ways. Doing this, phasing it in and having the EGRP separate. If we do this, it needs to be all, it's everything. And do away with the identity of the village in the town and just whatever, I know last time it was brought up, the name of the community became a big issue. Are we Essex or are we Essex Junction? I really don't care. I'm a Vermonter, I'm an American, whatever. Let's look at what brings us together as opposed to what makes us different. I think we got enough divisive activity going on in this country already. So we need to look that way. So I think it's possible. I want to see it all done together and not. I heard from Irene, I see that more of the status quo and continuing at a slow pace instead of moving forward quicker. I'd rather see this go faster than slower. But end up at the same place. At the same place. And whether it's a board, it's phased in as far as the board representation, we can do that, but one board and as far as the village is concerned, for me, I'm passionate about the village center, the downtown. I want the community as a whole to identify that as their downtown, their historic district, whatever. And as far as outside the village center, I'm not so concerned about what would change whether it was members of the community outside of what we call the village right now. The village as a whole, voting on those matters. I just want to see that we preserve what we have here, the historic village center of Essex Junction more than everything else. Andy, last but not least. Oh boy, how do I add to that? Okay, so I guess my thoughts of what we should be working toward would be a single community, a single board, all members voted at large, whether there's a transitional board structure at getting there, but I think you need to have a single board. Again, everybody elected at large. The elected officials are certainly beholden to those that elect them and need to be responsive to all members of the community in that regard. Another thing that I would like to see and I'd like to see, I'd like to have considered sooner rather than later is the question of whenever we have a town-wide vote, whether we should co-mingle the ballast before we count them so that we're not getting the faction implications of who voted how because we can see how the village voted, how the town outside the village voted and you can see that I'd rather get that input from voters directly. I'd like to have them tell me what's on their mind and I think we should co-mingle votes. Just as a point and that's a good point. The Union 46, Diane can attest to this, the Union 46 school district, which was comprised of the village in the town, they had to co-mingle before they counted. They, I must say everyone was cumbersome because they then had to come by hand. They can do that. Well, so I, how do we want to wrap this up? That's a good, Max asked me. I don't really know. I think probably a little bit more discussion. Irene. Take comments from the public. Yeah, why don't we do that? And I'm going to have to excuse myself real quick. Okay. Yeah, I think that, Evan. Do you want to take a recess? No. No. Then go without George. Okay. So I saw Jerry's hand first and I'll come to you, Bruce. So, Jerry. Jerry Fox. I've lived here coming on 50 years. And after the high school opened, if anybody would have told me that in 2017, we'd have a single school district, I'd have told them to go soak their head because that was the most divisive time that happened when I lived in this town. And I can go into the history of what I know about that, but I don't think you really care. We can do this. On the other hand, I'm an old bureaucrat. I worked at GE for almost 30 years. His staff has tons of dog work to do and dog work takes time. I suggest that somebody made the idea of committees, some committees, and I don't mean you and you on a committee. I mean you and you and me and three of them on a committee that reports to this board on a subject and you have one committee for every damn subject you can think of. The libraries, the rec department, public works. I like your idea of public works. Make one thing work. That's show success. When you show success, people think you're doing something. It may take you a couple of years, but it's worthwhile. She's got a huge problem. She needs a lot of help. Figuring out if the town calls it one thing and the village calls another, it makes her budget crazy. You have to resolve those things. She needs about a hundred people. Did she pay you? Yeah, yeah. So what I'm saying is if you want to move this faster, you need more men power. Thank you, Jerry. Thanks for your comments. Bruce? Well, thanks for your discussion and some good questions that you're posing. And of course, those definitions are all important too. But when the merger vote went down and was a 2006, is that when the vote was, and I took the town and the village to court over it because of some things contained in the new charter, but it didn't need to finish because the revote. One of the things that was said is, well, maybe if we could learn to do things together over the ensuing years, then it would be easier to merge later on. So I have no idea really exactly what has been going on, what has been going on, what the cost implications are have been unknown. Have there been any savings? Usually, a merger results in some efficiencies and consolidation of things and maybe even reduction in the number of employees. But that's tough stuff. I would prefer you use the word municipality rather than community because under the Vermont statutes, the community is not defined. Municipality is a very specific thing where you now have two municipalities. If you're gonna talk about one municipality, then one of them is gonna go away and people have to understand that. But I don't think this needs to take all that long. You did have a citizens committee before on the merger that held a series of hearings and had participation. Four years ago, you had a lot of recommendations from what is called the Essex Governance Group. And I really, I don't even know if the new town manager or the staff even know what that comprised of. But there were a lot of good ideas. A lot of people have worked hard. So we don't have to invent a lot of new things out of whole cloth. We have some experience. We have had some citizen surveys recently through the governance group. We can start putting this together if you figure out a process for doing so. But you do have to, I agree, I'm gonna leave the question of tax equity aside because if you have a merged community, then that goes away. A question might be though, do you phase it in over time? So you don't have shock to your system. But how much of my taxes have gone up because of all these consolidation agreements? I don't know. But this is the kind of stuff I would like to know. I'm a data geek, but I can think big too, but you need to know this stuff. But we don't have to trash around. You make a decision. The thing that I've heard in the past was that we would have a new charter, but then there would be a special carve out for the village. And that's more Hatfields and McCoy stuff. If you wanna have a historic district and have your own way of doing it, it's fine. But I think if you're gonna have one municipality, you have one municipality. You don't have any carve outs for special sections. You might have districts. I would favor that because I believe I've had people come to me when I was on the board who live near me. They've had an identification with me and I with them. If they had gone across to Dave Rodgerson, they might not have gotten the same result because he was all the way on the other town. But that's an issue within the major issue. So I thank you for engaging it tonight and make your minds up. Thank you for your input Bruce. Appreciate that. Anyone else in the audience? And by the way Max, I do contend that this is a public document and people should be identified. Okay, I think they were now, you'll see that in a minute. Likely. Who's member C? Yeah, okay, Mary? Yeah, Mary Post. I just wanna say that except for you Max, you did mention it, that finally someone said something about involving the public. And I haven't been going to meetings lately, but I'm not gonna blame that on anybody except myself. But I know it is hard sometimes to find out exactly what you folks are talking about because it's so vague. And I just think that, all of a sudden I started thinking, are we talking merger here or what? Are we using euphemisms like alignment? I mean, what is it? And I think that the townspeople, I mean, I think the whole, both municipalities need to know what we're talking about. And you talk about what we're hoping that people are, someone here said I hope that people are educated and that we are getting the word out. We're not educated because we're not getting the word. And then I believe that I'm hopeful that we can change the way things have been done in the past. A lot of us that used to put a lot of time into meetings would find that it was like for nothing. We'd come to meeting after meeting after meeting. And it was just, it was worse than nothing. It was being treated as if it didn't matter. And so people would say, well, we get stuff from the staff here and say, we want you to come to our meetings. We want to hear what you want. You're part of this town. Well, I've gone to all those meetings and whatever we said that we wanted and they wrote down half the time was never even looked at and the opposite would be done. And I could, you know, I can give you examples. I can't do it off the top of my head now. But I'm just hoping that maybe things will change and that if we all get involved again, it'll be in a really good positive way. And not feeling like we're going and wasting our time and that nobody's listening because then there's a lot of anger that comes up. But if we could have some real honest, good meetings and committees and where you actually would hear what people would say, it doesn't mean you have to do what I want. But at least if I felt like I was heard and respected. Thank you. Thank you, Mary. Betsy? Betsy Dunn. So, you know, there are so many town charters out there. You don't have to create your own out of nothing and thinking what you have, you can look at what other people have done and how does that work for you? And town charters are looked at regularly at the State House. And it doesn't take that long to get them through. It takes long to get the people to agree to it because there are certain things you have to do as some of you that have gone through that process before know. But you have to crush your teeth and dot those eyes and make sure everything was warned in the right amount of time. But if we want anything, I would think it would be one charter. Two charters, it doesn't, you know, why are you prolonging the misery? Just get it over with and jump in and let's do it because it is a community and the community could have a town center and the town center could be where you have your historic area. It doesn't, how you name it, everyone's gonna call it like Butler's Corner. You know, it's still Butler's Corner or where it is. You just have to agree that this is what we're gonna become. And I think that people want that. And as I knocked on doors, people were, you know, why don't we do an Australian ballot for our budgets and everything? And that would be the hybrid model. You can talk about it at the town meeting and warn it the next day. And then when we have the school vote, that's 30 days later, that's perfect for doing the recommendations from the budget. It all works. I think you just have to, as it has been said, get small ad hoc committees together and ask people that are in the community who would like to work on this. You've got so much expertise out in our community that it might not be as hard as you think it is. Thank you, Betsy. Appreciate your input. Yeah. Yes, good evening, Jim Berniger. I think this is the first time in a long time that I felt thinner than anybody else in this room because I only carry about now 16 months worth of engagement involvement with Essex. I'm in a new arrival here. But I came with the opportunity to at least contribute in some way to the economic development, which forces one to take an external look. That's my audience out there. It's not, I'm not mirrored in the history and in the issues that all of you have lived with all of these past decades. I've just assumed that what I'm representing out there is a single entity. I've pursued all of the efforts that we've made thus far in development on a range of issues of being at the table as Essex as a single entity and just ignoring, frankly, a lot of the issues. And so I'm just encouraged that I've just have witnessed a very single point of view which I have always felt was our charge and how we want to represent this community because we're competing with a lot of people out there for resources and we can't do it with this division. So I encourage it and whatever help from my standpoint, we can bring to the various committees you decide to set up. I'm delighted to participate. Anyone else who hasn't had a chance to speak yet that would like to? Okay. Again, thank you all for your effort. So how do we want to proceed? Do we want to discuss committees for a moment or do we want to talk, we've got to be a couple of things. We're going to talk about committees, but we also, or maybe it was just me, I said maybe we could all just sketch out and put in writing our ideas. We could do both. There's no reason we can't do both of those things. So how do you want to proceed? I wonder if it would be, I'd like to hear from staff. They work in a municipality. So I think between the nine of us submitting our ideas and then the staff putting them together and submitting their own ideas, I think that would be, I'm feeling a little overwhelmed in terms of the quantity of ideas that have come forth. And it's late and we have two more agenda items and I think we need to take a breather and think hard about this and then come back. So you're proposing that people do submit in writing then to the manager's office about what committees are needed and perhaps how they should be, who should be on them? A number of people from the trustees select board, perhaps from the public, which there is a wealth of talent out there that probably need to tap. Yeah, that's what I'm recommending. And so, but do you want to put forward your idea for what we, not just the process for how to proceed but what you would like to see, a theoretical model of what you would like to move towards? More detail than what we just discussed. Yes. I see. Sure. I mean, I would think that each one of us could just send our thoughts on the topic in general to Evan to compile for all of us to share. I, let me just interrupt. I'm sorry, everyone, I want you to look, let me just interrupt for a second. The reason I keep pushing, the reason I keep pushing the model thing. Homework. The reason I keep pushing the model thing is that, I mean, I express the opinion having gone through this many, many times that if we can put a draft model in front of the public, it focuses the discussion because too frequently, it is not to keep the public out, but too frequently, we're starting at ground zero. And we've made, I think, a lot of progress over the last year. And I think sometimes if you put a model in front of the public, you can say, then you say, well, why are we doing it? Why did you have that model? Because this addresses this problem and this, we're doing it this way because it addresses this problem. It addresses this problem. It focuses discussion. That's why I'm keep pushing this concept. But so we could create a model and then validate it with the public. Something like that, just a very general idea. But let me go around. Andrew, did you have thoughts about how we should proceed, what we should do next? I seem to recall at a previous joint meeting before the 24th, one of the things that we talked about was having a consultant come in and talk to us about the different types of models. Because sure, I can brainstorm some. I can look at some of the other charters that are on the website. But that's just what I can get. That's just what I can come up with. I wonder if models were proposed to us, if that could then be a more of a dry erase board, move some things around, a group activity that we could do. Okay. So that way it's not just, I don't wanna say that the ideas that I put forward are the only ideas I'm willing to go work towards because of my own knowledge gaps that I may have in terms of musical structures. So you would define what your thoughts are for the model and then some perhaps tools or methods of how to get there with getting this input from experts, is that? I can, I just wonder if it's worth the time of, I don't know if the experts are the staff telling us about what some of the models are and what some of the options are because me putting on a piece of paper is only gonna allow for what's up in this brain. I'm confused. Maybe it's just me but I'm hearing two very different things going on here. The first thing I would say is it's way too early to start talking in my view. It's way too early to start talking about committees made up of members of this board until we decide how we wanna proceed. I just, I'm hearing, I'd like to get the public's input but with all due respect to the people sitting here, we talk about this all the time. We ask the manager's office to put ads in the paper asking for volunteers, not a, or very, very few. And you just, you do not get the kind of participation that you would love to have. So I'm willing to give it another go but I'm just, I'm here to tell you that aside from the people sitting here, there's not a lot of additional involvement. So I'm not ready to talk about committees yet. I just, I still would like to see the nine of us sit down and figure out what are we gonna tackle, first, second, and third. I'll reserve my comments, I'll just pass it on. Yeah, I was hoping to do the same, okay? So, Lori, you're on. Check in our what? Listening. Cheers for Raghiv. So I'm gonna admit that I am usually in bed by now so I hope this makes sense because I'm winding down here. I think we should each submit our one, two, three, of what we feel needs to be tackled whether it's in an order or alignment, a parallel conversation. And I think we should submit a list of committees that we feel need to be created to tackle those top three things. I think the staff should do as well, at least the department heads should do as well. And then I think we should bring all that data together and what rises to the top, what are the top one, two, three things and start working. Harry? I'd like to see us set up some more joint meetings so if staff could set up a doodle or two for the intervening months and we don't have them set up, maybe that's a good next step so that we can actually make more progress. You suggested we do every month, perhaps instead of every other. Is that kind of a consensus? I've seen a lot of head nods and it puts a lot more burden on staff, I know. It does. It does, but as long as they're productive, thank you, they're productive. And as long as we are not, a staff not consistently putting together so much information time after time after time while we're still trying to do the business of the town and the village, that's okay. Which also means that like separate questions, separate, you know, stuff that we do on a daily basis, we just have to prioritize what's being asked on a daily basis from the membership of staff. Okay. So I guess a doodle would be helpful. Happy to send that out, okay. All right, it's a good idea. Second suggestion has to do with making representation of priority right now as we set up committees. I don't care what boards you sit on, but I'd like to see one outside the village person and one inside the village person on each committee and then fill in with equal numbers of people from each district to make sure that we are right now from the bottom up looking at having fair teams negotiating whatever it is that each of these committees is working on. And I think that that will go a long way to building confidence in whatever that committee comes up with. Thanks. Yeah. I agree with Irene saying that she wants the committees to be broken up by whatever representation, you know, equal on both sides. But I agree with pretty much everyone's comments here. The, what we want to accomplish, we have to come through an agreement of what we want to accomplish. And I think one of the things that Evan brought up earlier, we're gonna have somebody hired as an assistant to be public relations and doing that, but that's not gonna be till September. I'm concerned about the message that's being brought out, the woman brought up there just as I said before. The meeting we had on March 24th, there was nothing, nothing in the Essex reporter on that meeting, nothing. Everything was said, we had a facilitator there, there was not an article at all about it. And that was astonished. And the people, I mean, I appreciate channel 17 being around, but for the most part, people, that paper gets around the community much better or is more viewed, I'm sorry. That's a fact. I know you, as the board did it before, they checked to see where people are getting most of the information. And I think the study done back, George, you can correct me, maybe 10 years ago. And the majority of people get the information through the Essex reporter. So that, I was stunned. So I'm concerned about that, I want that to be taken care of, okay? So we're getting. I know, I know. Well, I just think that people, I just think, I think we need to do a press release. We need to make sure we're getting stuff out to the people so that the people are aware, as we heard before from the woman out there, that they're not, and the other thing I want to clarify for everybody here and everywhere that we know, just because you don't get what you want doesn't mean you weren't heard. So that's something that I heard from a lot of people that say, we were against this, we were against that. So we weren't heard. No, you were heard. It's just you didn't get what you wanted. So that doesn't mean you weren't heard. Everything is considered, but there's rules and there's ways things operate. And I just want to clarify that as well. I think they just wanted to make sure that it was given due consideration. Oh, it is, but. Yeah, I guess I want to pull this out so I speak loud enough. I just want to say that democracy is kind of designed to run slowly. And I think that adding more meetings may not speed things up. I'm also partly concerned or very concerned, Evan gave us a work plan for the staff. It seems pretty busy already. And then we're trying to layer some additional committees on top of that. I think we need to, you know, maybe this is getting off topic here, but I guess what I would propose for this homework assignment is that we make comments on the work plan. And also, as Andrew said, comment on the things that we don't think we know. Where do we need more help? I mean, there is a list of those on the bottom page one. Identify areas that require outside consultation. I think that's the list that we need to make sure we have fleshed out so that we know what we need to talk about or what we don't know enough about to talk in a reasonable method. I, for one, I just started another, changed my positions at my employer and it's gonna involve more traveling. So more meetings is not gonna work well for me. Which is fine, I don't need to be at every meeting, but just maybe absent frequently. Evan? You may never hear me say this again about extra meetings, but I don't mind the idea of extra meetings because I think this meeting was very good. And it brought out a lot of good comment and a lot of good suggestions. And I would hate for that to dissipate for the period of time that is in between your select board meetings. So I might suggest something. We insert the next meeting and maybe have a potential second date to fill in between the meetings. And then let's see where we go with those and then if we can find dates to insert, great, because the momentum is what's important. It's this camaraderie and what you're talking about with each other that is so important, including some of the public's comments that are helping to focus that conversation and Andy, I think you're dead on. I did give you things to do. You have homework assignment. I'm not sending you out a reminder. I do think part of your homework for this thing is please look at these definitions and write what you think they mean. They could be sent to a committee to hone, but you need to be talking the same language. When you say alignment, what do you mean? When you say quality of life, what do you mean? Because that's the communication you're gonna give back to the community. You're gonna go and tell the community, we're in, this is what we mean by service level. This is what we mean by it. It's just something so that they understand what you're talking about. And we wanna add tax equity to that. And tax equity, what is the vision of these boards of what that will mean? And if you don't know, you don't know when we hire a consultant that's not town, that's not village, that's not staff, that's not biased. It's just someone who wrote the book as a professor of something, prefer not philosophy. An actual somebody who knows this field. So anyone, you wanna try to? No, I thought maybe I could try to just wrap it up. Yeah, so just to wrap it up. Yeah, what's the homework assignment? Let me just try to get, if I can, just to give you a big summary of everything I heard, really quick synthesis, see if everyone would agree on this. So unfortunately, it sounds like for Andy's sake, we do wanna have another meeting, we're probably gonna have another meeting like this. We wanna maybe dedicate it specifically to this discussion and not do other things. Okay, and what we would like to do to listen to Andrew and Andy, we wanna make, first of all, we make comments on the work plan that's been presented by staff. Okay, and we'll write all this down. We'll make comments on the staff work plan. Do we like it, we don't like it? What's good or bad about it? What, how would we modify it? And that's number one. Our thoughts about committees, what, I mean, I don't think we have enough substance at this point to say what kind of committees we're gonna form. I think we need to discuss more. But our thoughts about what committees should be, should we have committees, what would they work on, how would that work? So where do we need help? Do we need a consultant? Do we need to consult a lawyer? As Evan said, a professor of philosophy. No, I'm sorry, you said not a professor of philosophy. I don't know what they do. That would really make a late meeting. Ideas about solutions for governance and representation, and we don't have to do this, but any ideas you have, sketch those out, include those. Priorities, what we are doing. Gloria, am I getting this right? So write down our priorities, one, two, three. What do we hope to accomplish? If we, in the coming, if we move governance forward. And then lastly, write down what we think each one of the, write down the definitions of these terms that staff gave us. Right? Is that the, okay, did I know? Those are all the items that I need. Those are the same ones you got, Nick? Yes. Does that sound good that I sort of touch, that I equally offend everybody? Or is that good, does that sound reasonable? That's great. Okay, Dan? So just going back to the whole thing of defining these terms and the language going forward. So I assume we all do that. We come up with our plan and our definition for these alignment, tax equity, whatever, and how to accomplish. But then my opinion is that we move forward just as we did when we were selecting a manager and we put all our ideas together and we came to one agreement on who we picked, what we were gonna do. We move forward with that. And we keep moving forward, taking from a whole and narrowing it down to a single or just one or two. Rather, because, like you said, with all these different committees and Mike, you asked for public input. I think public input is great, but it can also slow it down. I mean, sometimes it can slow the process down, but we need to move forward and narrow it down to a single focus or very little rather than keeping it broad in nature. So George, you and I can do a memo that identifies this so everybody is reading from the same page. There are stars on it saying homework. And it's due date. And it's due date, yeah. And what's gonna happen if you don't get anything done? Okay. All right, awesome. Are we good? Can we move on? It's getting late? We're getting late so we should report. Everyone good? Can we put them off to another meeting or is it critical that we do have this thing right now? Because I'm getting tired tonight. Okay. Yeah, I think we kind of, the Consentogen of Radar List is... No, it's the goals and process for the... I think that's probably a good idea. I make a motion to put that off to the next term. Yes, go ahead. Remember this... At least with this like board, I'll make that motion. Remember, we have the June 24th meeting is the last meeting before July 1st where we have to have this all done. Right, that's... Well, we might meet in May. It sounds like if we add a different date. Yeah, since we're gonna be adding potentially this one. Okay. It is late. I'd rather give that. If you okay? Yeah. Everybody okay with... I was much more concerned with the first part of this meeting and so as part of your list for homework and other things, let's make sure that the goals get taken care of maybe first on the list. Okay. And if you... I'll add that, Evan. And I maybe take Dan's suggestion, take the hole and condense it down. Please don't give me like... And that doesn't mean like number five has 17 parts. Because I know you. Cice. Yeah. And this is my first year. So, you know, I'm... Well, it's your third month now you're in there. Yeah, I know I'm an old hand. You're looking at me. Well. Okay. So do we need to amend the agenda to not do something? I think you just thought of... I think you do a vote to table. What would you say? I think we need to use the table that 6D item for the select board. Okay, which is goals and process for annual joint evaluation of the unified manager. Thank you. Second. Okay, thank you. And any for the discussion? All those in favor? Seeing the five is saying aye. Aye. Okay, I will make the same... Do I hear a motion for the trustees to... For us, it is item 5D. I'll second. Who made the motion? I made the motion. You made the motion. I'll second. Okay, any for the discussion? All in favor? Aye. Okay, so we don't need an executive session, so we could entertain the most due to adjournment. Do we just do consent agenda? Oh, consent agenda, okay. I would move approval of the consent agenda with select board member comments. Do I have a second? Second. Okay, any further discussion on consent agenda? Okay, hearing no comments, all those in favor of the consent agenda signify by saying aye. Aye. And I'll make a motion that the trustees accept the consent agenda. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Okay, passes. Have a motion to adjourn? I would move to adjourn. Thank you. Any to have a second? Second. Come on, guys. Elaine got it. Okay, all those in favor of adjourning signify by saying aye. Aye. I'll move to adjournment. No, come on! You got it. Second. We'll give you the second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Okay, good job. That was a good meeting. I just want you to know the village board meeting yesterday was 21 minutes. I'm just...