 and welcome to ongoing election coverage by town meeting television. This is one of many forums we are bringing you in advance of local elections and town meeting on the first Tuesday in March, March 1st, 2022. Town meeting is traditionally where voters weigh in on local government representation, municipal budgets, school budgets, and local ballot items. All candidates on the ballot are invited to participate in town meeting TV election forums. Town meeting TV election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with the issues that shape your local community. If you're watching this live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. Again, if you're watching this live, we do welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. You can watch town meeting TV on Comcast channel 1087, Burlington telecom channels 17 and 217, as well as online at town meeting TV's YouTube page. If you go to Google and type in town meeting TV, you'll find the YouTube page that way. Today we have the very well-versed and organized team to present the Williston budget and ballot items for the town of Williston. We have Eric Wells, the town manager. We have Shirley Goodall-Laki, the finance and HR director. We have Erin Collette, the fire chief. And we have Terry McKeg, the Williston select board chair. Thank you all so much for being here. And we welcome you to present your Williston budget and ballot items. Thank you, Annie. I am Terry McKeg, the chair of the select board. And I have the great opportunity to welcome our residents of Williston to our annual municipal budget presentation. Annie has made the introductions, so I won't do that again. But the, instead of doing a real town meeting like we have done in the past, except for last year, we'll be doing simply a public information hearing on Monday night, the 28th of February at 7 p.m., doing a virtual meeting using Zoom. So there'll be no in-person meeting due to COVID again this year. And that's disappointing, certainly to me and to the select board. So all of the voting will be done by Australian ballot. And the ballots can be sent in either requested for an absentee or early voting and either sent back by mail or hand delivered to the safe ballot box or safe boxes in the parking lot or to the town clerk's office. So the absentee ballots we expect to be available towards the end of next week or early the following week by February 10th. So this presentation is going to be about the main topic, which is the town budget, the general fund budget that we have unanimously approved, the select board is unanimously approved for this year. So I'll turn this over now to Eric and Shirley to run through the first parts of the presentation. So Eric. Thanks, Terry. And hi, everyone watching out there. Appreciate you tuning in and listening to the show this year. So I'll get started here on the general fund budget proposal for FY23 and always before again is the fine details. I was going to take a step back and take a look at what a budget is. So what is our municipal budget? You'll find it as article three on the town meeting warning. The budget's a plan to deliver services to the community, including what level of services to be provided, the cost of those services and the revenue sources to pay for those services. The budget's the best revenue and spending model made with the information available as it's developed each year. And development of the budget starts in August and it culminates in March a town meeting. There's a lot of work that goes into putting this budget together at both the staff level and a sweatboard review level to get it where it is now on the ballot for consideration. So we'll take a look at the numbers here. The operating budget is just over $13.1 million. This is an increase of just over $1.5 million from the current FY22 budget, or 13.63% increase in operating expenses. The estimated property tax rate has a .0383 cent increase. What does this mean? For a median homeowner in town, this would be an increase of about $115 for the year, or $9.58 per month. As a reminder, the final tax rate is set in July after the grand list is finalized by the Listers. And this estimated tax increase was reduced during the budget development process using town reserves and American Rescue Plan Act. So now it's the story behind this year's budget. So we'll examine this increase in two parts. Half of the $1.5 million increase is for the addition of career firefighters to provide fire and emergency medical services. The town engaged the independent consultant named AP Triton last year to evaluate how our fire department delivers services and the community's risk. This budget adds three firefighters per shift, or nine total. This was a recommendation from the AP Triton report. Driving this proposed change is a sharp decline in fire call staff members and they their availability to respond over the past five years. It brings a foundational shift in the department's personnel resource structure to address the reality of resources available and to build the necessary depth for a more consistent response capacity. And the call staff division remains an important part of the department, but realistically it cannot be called on to complement the department's operations to the extent it once did. The town greatly appreciates any time our members of our call staff can give as they balance commitments at work and at home. And our fire chief collects joining us today and you'll have more extensive information overview on this a little bit later in the show. Other piece I want to speak to, the other half of the increase to the budget is a number of factors for service delivery. These include increases in the capital budget for capital items, additional new staff positions, one being an energy and community develop services planner, a police dispatcher position that was added during the current fiscal year. We have new collected bargaining agreements in place for our police and fire unions, a market-based wage adjustment to recruit and retain public work staff was made last October. And as I'm sure everyone's aware, we're looking at inflation right now in the country and this has led to a cost living increase of about three and a half percent per staff. This affects materials and services throughout the budget. And then for a quick visual, if you look at all our town departments here, this is how the expense side of the budget is spread out in the FY23 budget proposal. So that's the expense side. And for a budget, you need to balance it with the revenue side. And I'll turn it over to our finance director, Shirley Godell Lackey, to walk us through revenues this year. Shirley. Thanks, Eric. So how are our services paid for? So we have many revenue streams, user fees, probably many of you are familiar with. We have permit fees, fees to use the ambulance services, also learn fees, fees for recreation programs and recording documents. So there's a variety of fees. And we look at those generally to help offset the cost of running the department. State and federal grants, we only have one state grant that we receive annually that is included in the operating budget. And that is from State of Vermont for our class two and three roads. Although the town has many grants, we have a separate grant fund, and that is outside of the scope of the operating budget. Post town fees. We have agreements with the Chittenden Solid Waste District and Casella Waste Management for the operation of their facilities within the Williston borders. And we collect a fee for 10 inch from those contracts that again just helps to offset the cost of maintaining the roads with the extra truck traffic on the roads. Just an additional source of revenue for the town. Local option tax, which I'm sure you all have paid, is the 1% on rooms and meals and sales and use. About 90% of the local options tax is from the sales and use. And we get that from all purchases in Williston or for all purchases that are delivered to Williston, including all those online sales that people have been doing in the last two years. So the state collects the 1% for us, but they keep 30% and we get 70% of that back. Is a huge help to offset our property taxes. Property taxes you're all aware of that help pay for the budget. And as Eric already mentioned, the property tax we have is proposed based on our best estimate of the grand list right now. And that'll be finalized in July. So the reserve and ARPA funds. The reserve, many of you would probably refer to in your own budget to Serenity Day fund. So that is the excess of revenues over expenses over several years. And that is how the town looks at it's an accounting terms. It's a undesignated fund balance. So we are able to have that money there. So when VSP couldn't dispatch for us, and we had to add that third dispatcher this year, that's where we got the funds to be able to do that. So ARPA, what is that? It's the American Rescue Plan Act. Those are funds coming to the town, every town and city in the state of Vermont was receiving those funds. We'll receive approximately three million over two years. In this budget, we have $542,000 used, $300,000 is just to generally offset expenses. And another $242,000 is being used to fund the capital budget. Instead of the fund balance or operating expenses, we've used that to help reduce the taxes. As for the reserve, we have used almost three quarters of a million dollars in our reserve to again help offset the tax rate increase. We'll move forward, Eric. So here's looking at a pie chart of our revenue. So 49% is from property taxes, probably not a surprise, but the local options tax at 26% of our total revenue collected. That's a significant amount that in the budget for FY23, that's $3,430,000. And I guess to put that in perspective for you, our proposed tax rate is 0.3104. If we did not have the local options tax, that would be 0.474 or 1.64% for sense increase in your tax rate without the local options tax. So if you move forward, Eric. So Eric mentioned this already, what does that mean to you as a taxpayer? So from our assessor, we got the medium home assessment value of $302,000. So if you look at our current day taxes, that's $817. If you put that into a monthly figure and say, I'm doing my budget, that's about $68 a month. So with the proposed rate at 0.3104, that's about $78 a month or just less than $10 a month. And the actual tax rate increased for you. Go ahead, Eric. So what's happened for the Wilson tax rate over the last seven years, including over the last six years, including this year. So in 2017 was the year of our last full reappraisal. So from 2017 to 2022, our tax rate has remained the same. Actual math is it has decreased 0.007. But part of the reason for that is if you look at the grand value list, it has been increasing, which is because of the commercial and residential growth in the town of Williston. So that increase in the grand list helps to minimize the increase in the tax rate. And chief will talk shortly about the increase as Eric already mentioned it, but the public safety issue that we are addressing in the FY23 proposed budget. And one more slide, Eric, and we're almost there. So these are the FY22 current tax rates. You see, Williston is second to the bottom lowest tax rate in the county. Williston has been in that position for many years. And those towns with asterisks, those mean that those towns have a local auctions tax, which again, I think points out that that tax does help reduce our tax rate. But even with our proposed tax rate of 0.3104, we are for FY23, we would still be lower than St. George's tax rate for FY22 at 0.32. So our estimation is that we probably aren't going to change from that next to the bottom slot for the lowest tax rate in Chittenden County or the next to the lowest tax rate in Chittenden County. And I'm all set. And I'm going to pass it on over to Chief to talk about the fire staffing. Right. Thank you, Shirley. I'll introduce myself again. Aaron Collette, I was appointed as your fire chief in September of 2020. And when I came into the department, I came in here with my eyes open, my ears open and watched and learned to see how we delivered services. And in that short amount of time, relatively short amount of time, I started to see a trend that was quite alarming to me that I found that we appeared to have some difficulty with assembling enough persons to answer the call volume and the type of calls that we had that we were occurring across the community. So concurrent calls, meaning calls that occurred at one time or at the same time as others in addition to demand per service and then participation. So one of the challenges, the list of the challenges here that you've seen in front of you included the limited career staffing. And I'll take you through that in a minute. But currently we operate three shifts of four personnel, career personnel per shift. And those shifts can operate down to a minimum staffing of career personnel at three people per shift. And I'll show you what that looks like here in a minute. A decline in call staff personnel, increase in EMS call volume, an increase in the community risk, and the potential for us to not be able to meet the demand for service, which then resulted in an increased risk to the public and to our firefighters. Eric, if I could have the next slide. So here's a snapshot of what the current career staffing looks like. So when members of the public drive by our beautiful fire station, you'll see a number of apparatus in the inside of the bays of the station. One engine of that group, that fleet is staffed daily. And one ambulance is staffed daily. So we prioritize the ambulance where two people will always staff that ambulance. And the engine either runs with one person from the 24 hour shift, or for a full staffing, they run with two people from the 24 hour shift. Monday through Friday, we have an administrative staff, which includes the deputy chief and myself, as well as a career captain who has the roles and responsibilities of not only answering emergency calls, but also as the training officer for the department to help set the goals for knowledge, skills and abilities of our members. I could have the next slide, Eric. So some of the current call staff challenges is that unfortunately we've seen a real decline in call staff participation across the department. In the graphs that will follow this slide, I will show you what that looks like. Where at one point, in 2016 and 2017, we had almost 30 members on the roster. Today, in June of 2021, we were down to eight persons on our roster. We also saw an overall decline in participation across the call staff. And that's not unique to the town of Williston. We're seeing this as a national trend across the fire service. You're going to see Senator Sanders and his team address this tomorrow on Saturday, the 29th, in a town hall meeting forum where we're going to hear the pleas across the Vermont fire service and what that may look like. We also saw limited shift coverage participation. So our call staff members don't always need to respond in from home. So if they live a distance away, that would be prohibitive from them to respond emergently into the station. They will come in and work shift coverage, meaning that they could sign up and work 12-hour shifts. They're paid a minimal stipend for that. But we really didn't see a whole lot of participation in my early arrival here at the department. We've also seen unpredictable availability for emergency responses from call staff. That meant that maybe members of the call staff were working their primary jobs. Maybe they were tied up with family obligations, children's games, maybe their coaches. Any number of things that could take them away and not make them available to respond to emergencies to help the department. For those members that do live here in the community, delayed response times from home means that it could take some folks as long as eight to 10 minutes to respond into the station, which is obviously a delay in the delivery of emergency services. We have no assurances or response on recall of call staff personnel, meaning we don't know at any one time how many people would be available to help augment the department. And unfortunately we have limited numbers of persons that have EMS certifications within our call staff. So here are some of the challenges that we faced. Eric, may I have the next slide, please? Here's an example of the number of call staff on payroll. Like I said before, in July of 2016, you saw as many as almost 30 persons on the on the call staff payroll. And in June, we were down to eight. I wanted to dive a little bit deeper into that. So I ask Eric to advance the slide. And what we have done here is taken an analysis of the call staff payroll. And call staff payroll is a little bit better of a barometer to show the actual number of hours that a call staff member may be participating in. And as you can see in 2016, especially the summer months, we had almost 1200 hours of call staff participation. And we see that decline in sub 200, even 100 hours in our entire call staff in the June of 21 timeframe. So that shows that we just simply didn't have folks available. And they weren't in the firehouse or responding to calls. May I have the next slide, please? With that, we saw an increased demand for EMS, which is emergency medical services. This graphic represents the actual number of calls excluding vehicle crashes that our members responded to for emergency medical services. And you can see that that increase as many as almost 1200 in 2021. And in calendar year 2021, this is the fiscal year and calendar year 2021, including car crashes were over 1300. So the demand for services continues to grow as it relates to emergency medical services, which works against us in some ways. When we transition to the next slide, you'll see that when the ambulance transports to the hospital, you remember what our staffing look like. If we are minimum staffing is at three persons. We only have 1.3 full time firefighters that are staffing a single engine company at any given time when the ambulance is out of the community and transporting to the hospital. That means that you could have a single firefighter show up with a fire after hours unless someone is here at the station performing shifts on a very serious incident, which is a recipe really for unsafe and prohibitive challenges. The consulting group AP Triton when they came in, this is one of the safety issues that they called out and recommendations, which led us to this recommendation of increased staffing. When we look at what some of the tasks specific to the organization that need to get done, we talk about critical tasking and critical tasks are simply those tasks that need to be conducted in a timely and efficient manner by fire firefighters on an incident scene. And that my role as the chief of department is to make sure that our staff is trained and equipped and ready to do that. And unfortunately, we fall short of a number of the benchmark goals of critical tasking. Let's take, for example, a cardiac arrest. When we show up and we have a patient in cardiac arrest, we have five critical tasks that we must be able to meet. And unfortunately, we cannot currently do that. So we have to juggle between who does what role, we need a lead EMS provider, that's going to be the lead patient care provider. We're going to need someone on airway and then someone on performing chest compressions during CPR. That leaves the question who is driving the ambulance, who's the incident commander providing for psychological first aid training and informing the patient's family members about what actions or interventions are occurring. And then also looking out for scene safety and responder safety on that incident scene. Those firefighters silhouettes that you see in red are unmet critical tasking needs that we currently cannot do with our meet with our current staffing. Let's look at another call type and that being motor vehicle crashes. With a minimum staffing of three persons, that means we are limited to an incident commander who will perform scene safety, as you see here, who's overseeing a patient extrication specialist. These two firefighters in the photo are working to extricate the patient in the rear of this car. But it begs the question, who's the lead EMS provider providing patient care, who is the ambulance driver, who's the engine chauffeur who's providing fire suppression, putting a protective hose line down, or who's also checking for secondary care attendants, looking over additional patients that may be on that scene or providing BLS care to others. These firefighters silhouettes with the blue Xs through them are all critical tasking needs that currently aren't being met. As it relates to structural firefighting, we look at additional goals that have to happen. And what we've done is escalated the incident types from these complex to more complex. And certainly this is one of our greatest risks. This deployment of initial firefighting personnel helps show you lay citizenry about some of the tasks that need to happen on the fire ground. We all understand that someone is going to be the fire truck operator who's going to be the pump operator. That person is critical to that mission, as well as the two firefighters that are inside to put the fire out, put water on the fire. That leaves other functions here on the fire ground unmet. I'll take you to the next slide, please. Those other functions include the search and rescue team, a rapid intervention team, which is required under the OSHA law, which says that for any firefighters that are working inside and immediately dangerous to life and health environment that you have to have two firefighters at least who are trained and equipped on the outside of that to rescue the firefighters if they were to get in distress. That means that you will need to have additional personnel that cannot staff a backup line. There was no provision for emergency medical services. So if we came upon a patient or had a patient that was injured, you would have no one to treat that patient and no one to ventilate the heat, smoke and toxic fire gases out of the building, nor incident safety officer. So these are again all critical tasks that our department has challenges that are being unmet. The addition of hiring nine personnel on the next slide would at least allow us to staff a rapid intervention crew, which is the requirement of the OSHA standard. And potentially if we're at full staffing, allow us to get a search and rescue mission underway to ensure that we can make sure the room, the building of origin doesn't have persons that are trapped inside of the building and help to get them out to safety. Next slide, please. So you'd say that, hey, we're surrounded by other fire departments, but when AP Triton came in, they looked at response times and other challenges associated with mutual aid. We saw that there is prolonged response times because of the delay through dispatching because we operate under multiple dispatching platforms where actual telephone conversations occur and add more and more time to the notification of other additional responders. There's limited responder availability as seen in the call staff numbers, the number, the call volume of mutual aid agencies is increasing as hours are increasing. So are our partners and our neighbors around us that share borders with us. And so their availability is just as limited. And they're often taxed in some cases, such as the city of South Brent and even greater than we are. And it's also our own ownership. We have a local responsibility for public safety. So these are the challenges that we have. And this is the hope that the addition of nine career personnel will start to meet that, to deliver a better product to ensure safer community. And with that, I will transition back to Terry. Thank you, Chief. And to wrap up my part of this, the articles that are usually voted from the floor, of course, will now appear on an Australian ballot. And article one is the article that would set the dates of the tax payments, as we usually do. Article two is to accept the annual reports of town officials. And article four is to authorize the town to finance the purchase of an ambulance out of the mount, not to exceed $280,000 over a term, not to exceed seven years. And this is a replacement of the 2014 ambulance that was purchased that has now reached the end of its useful life for the town. Articles five and six are for the election of select board members. Article seven is for election of the Lister. Article eight and nine are for two library trustees. And article 10 is for the Champlain Valley District School District for the one director to be elected. For early and absentee voting to receive a ballot for earlier absentee voting, please contact the town clerk. And her phone number and email are on the slide. You can visit the mvp.vermont.gov. Ballots will be mailed out when they're available, probably around February 10th, as I mentioned before. And you can return your ballot on the postal mail or use the drop box behind town hall, which is a drive-up box. Or at the armory, you can vote in person on March 2nd between 7 and 7 p.m. So I'll turn this back over to Eric to wrap it up. Thanks, Terry. And I just noticed a typo on that slide. It's March 1st for voting at the armory. Apologies for folks looking at home. I didn't catch that earlier. So just to clarify, it's March 1st for in-person voting this year, and you can certainly vote over it if you'd like to. So where you can learn more, we've done an overview with this show today, but if you visit our town website, town.wilston.vt.us, you can find a complete detailed line-by-line and extensive summaries of our operating and capital budgets for review. We'll have a copy and report on the website and available at town hall probably mid-February, if you'll arrive. We'll also have a sample ballot, and up there soon, we have the town meeting warning on the website today as well, along with a number of videos, recordings from meetings starting in last October through November, December, and January. We discussed the fire staffing reports and fire staffing, and along with a budget review by the select board. And we'll have the public information hearing coming up, as Terry mentioned at the top of the show on February 28th at seven o'clock, and they'll just be over broadcast over Zoom. And we really encourage and welcome your questions on anything related to town meeting. Can reach out to myself as town manager or really anyone on this panel, we'd be happy to make sure your question is answered. We want you to be an informed voter coming up for town meeting day. So I will stop sharing my screen now. Let's see. That was wonderful and wonderfully informative. Sorry, Eric, I think I interrupted your final statements. Oh, no. That was a presentation, Annie, but we're certainly built. Is there any questions on the call line right now? Sure. Let's find out if there's any calls. Any questions or comments from the public? No calls. No calls currently in. I have to say that I kept up with the whole thing, and I don't, I feel so informed right now that I feel like I could vote. I'm not going to go vote in Williston on Living Essex, but I feel that your presentation was thorough. You got somewhere for people to ask questions. The budget is very clearly laid out. Certainly your pitch, Chief Collette for the fire department has my heart, and I'm hopeful for your budget. And I can't personally think of anything that you haven't answered. If you all have a random question that you think somebody might ask you, you can present it, but I think you're pretty solid. You feel good? See my panel nodding, so yes, I think we're in good shape for this presentation. Great. Perfect. I hope I haven't over talked. I got a little nervous there. So thank you. Thank you all so much for being here. Thank you for your commitment to your community, to Williston, and thank you for the roles you play and the jobs you do that are so integral to the functioning of a town and the way that towns are here in Vermont. Certainly each of your roles are so valuable, so thank you all for the work that you do. I'm sure that you, like me, would like to thank Town Reading TV for what they've offered us already, especially during this pandemic, this ability to interrelate. And do you have any parting words before I close out? Anyone here? We certainly do appreciate the Town Reading TV to produce this type of a show. And also for attending our meetings and broadcasting them for the Select Board meetings and DRB meetings as well during the course of the year. So thank you. Great. Anyone else? You all feel good? Yeah, thanks very much for watching. Thank you so much. I'm going to close us out by saying to the public, thank you for tuning in to Town Reading TV, ongoing coverage of local community candidates, candidates, budget, and ballot items, as we had here today for Williston. You can find this and more forums at www.ch17.tv. Don't forget to vote on or before the first Tuesday in March, Town Meeting Day, March 1, 2022. Early voting by mail is available by contacting your Town Clerk's office. Polls will also be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Today you've heard the Williston budget and ballot items from Town Manager Eric Wells, Finance and HR Director Shirley Goodell-Lackey, Fire Chief Aaron Collette, and Williston Select Board Chair Terry McKay. Thank you all so much and thank you from a personal note to Town Meeting TV again because I think we're just also fortunate here in Vermont to have this ability to communicate. So thank you all so much and stay well and have a great day.