 meeting to order for Monday, August 3rd. Everybody's been well. Obviously, first thing to do is to approve the agenda. All the Board members see the agenda and anybody else that's joined us, if there's any wishes or considerations to add or change the agenda. Chris, I make a motion to add on the agenda, the item that Bill suggested about extending the recreation program by a few weeks. Thank you, Mike. Put that under a manager's items. Any other changes or additions? Okay, see a none. I'd like to have somebody approve the agenda with the addition of the extending the recreation program. I'll make a motion to approve the agenda with the change. I hear a second. Second. Any further discussion? All those who wish to approve, say aye please. Aye. Aye. Aye. Consent agenda items simply consist of minutes of July 20th meeting and a liquor license for the old stagecoach in. There are a motion to approve that. Consent agenda, please. Motion to approve that, please. Make a motion to approve that. Okay, second. Second. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Public, is there anybody that joined us tonight that wishes to speak at this point? Have any comments or anything? Guess not. So we will proceed. Little bit early, 7.08. The item that's up now, regional concern meeting, a bridge 44 over the Little River. And I think we have a few people here that will speak to that, but we'll let Bill kick it off as always. Yeah, well, thank you. Laura Stone is here, I know from VTrans. I'm not sure who else I imagine, maybe Martha Evans-Modgen is here for this particular item as well. But I think we'll just turn it over to Laura. And let her talk about this. This is the Route 2 Bridge that spans the Little River. And it's in need of some upgrading. And it's been something that we've been hearing about for a couple of years now. And this meeting has been pushed off a couple of different times, but here we are. So Laura, why don't you take it from here and then you can introduce others who may be on to assist you. Hi, thank you, Bill. So we have Martha from Duboy and King and we also have Todd Subner from VTrans who is the Consultant Project Manager. I'll go ahead and share my PowerPoint here. Hopefully everybody can see this. So this is the regional concerns meeting, as you said, for bridge 44 over the Little River. Again, we have Todd Subner here, myself and Martha Evans-Mungin as well. So really the purpose of this meeting, we wanna provide an understanding of our approach to the project. We wanna provide an overview of project constraints, discuss our selected alternative, both for the bridge and for traffic control, and provide an opportunity to ask questions and voice concerns. Here's a location map. The bridge is located just east of Little River Road. There's an aerial view. As you can see, route two parallels I-89, right at that location. So I'm gonna go briefly over the VTrans project development process, give the project overview, so the existing conditions of the bridge, environmental resources, we'll talk about the alternatives considered and our selected alternative. We'll talk about maintenance of traffic, the schedule, so when you can expect to see this in construction. Summary and questions, I'm happy taking questions either all at the end or if people have questions as they come up through the presentation, you can interrupt me as well. So here's our project development process. This slide is really just to show that the project's been funded. This isn't a really, project definition has been initiated. It's a really early stage of project development where we identify the resources, the environmental and cultural resources, evaluate alternatives, public participation, that's where we are right now. We've finished a scoping report and now we want to build consensus or project that we've chosen. From here, the project will be defined. That's when we're going to quantify areas of impact. That's when we're gonna develop plans, estimates right-of-way process if needed. It's not for this bridge. Then we'll go on to contract award and that's when the bridge will go into construction. So before I go on to the existing conditions, here's just a picture of some of the descriptions of the terms I'll talk about. The bridge deck is the part that you drive over. The beams are what hold the deck up. At each end of the beams, we call it a substructure or an abutment. That's really the supports for the bridge and there's also intermediate supports we refer to as peers. Here's a picture looking west over bridge 44. The road is classified as a major collector. It's a 243 foot long, three span roll beam bridge. Constructed in 1961. It was repainted in 1984 and it's owned by the state of Vermont. So there's no local share for this project. The deck, the bridge deck is in poor condition. There's large delaminations and spalling throughout with scattered areas of saturation. That really just means that concrete's falling off of the bottom of that deck. There's exposed reinforcing steel. The superstructure, the rolled beams have paint peeling mostly along the flanges and the beam ends. So where there's water leaking in through the joints, there's heavy rust scale and minor to moderate section loss. The substructure, the abutments are in good condition. However, the peers, so those intermediate supports, those are in poor condition. So here's the condition ratings. You can see some of that spalling on the underside of the deck with exposed rebar. The deck is rated a four, poor. Superstructure or the beams are rated a six, satisfactory. And the substructure is rated a four, poor. Here's a picture of the eastern abutment. As you can see, satisfactory condition. The western abutment, again, there's not a lot of concrete coming off there. And there's the eastern pier. So you can see there's a lot of spalling along the pier cap or that top section of the pier. Again, the pier columns, you can see a lot of exposed rebar. Resources, here's a picture looking downstream. This is an important wildlife corridor. There's wildlife cameras up all underneath the bridge. And there is a Northern long-eared bat habitat which really just restricts the time of year that we're allowed to do any tree clearing. Here's a picture of the existing condition. So the gray portion is bridge 44. I would like to point out it's all state of Vermont right of way in all four quadrants of the bridge. So no right of way will be needed. Also point out there's a utility line. I don't know if you can see my mouse, but there is a buried conduit that's attached to the bridge and then it's buried to the north side of the bridge. So design criteria and considerations, there's an average daily traffic of 3,000 vehicles per day, a design hourly volume of 460 vehicles per hour. So that's the peak hour. Percent trucks of 5.8, design speed of 50 miles per hour. Again, we do have underground utilities. It's a consolidated communications cable with a six inch conduit attached to the bottom of the bridge. And this is a high priority bike corridor. So the alternatives we considered, we looked at no action, obviously with the condition of those piers and the deck, something has to happen in the next 10 years. We looked at a deck replacement. Extensive repairs would have to be made to the pier columns and the caps. Deck replacement would have an 11-4 typical section which is currently what the existing typical section is. So those are two 11-foot travel lanes with four-foot shoulders on either side. The four-foot shoulder does meet the bike requirements. We expect about 30 years from a deck replacement. Next, we went on to a superstructure replacement. Again, extensive repairs to the pier columns and caps would be needed. New bearings and bridge seats. 11-4 typical for all of the alternatives that we looked at. And we'd expect, well, we say 40 here, but we'd really expect more 40 to 60 years with a superstructure replacement. Talking about the repairs to the piers that we're gonna talk about. Full bridge replacement on alignment. We'd maintain the horizontal alignment. Again, 11-4 typical section and we would expect about 75 years out of a full bridge replacement. So what we selected here was a superstructure replacement. 11-4 typical meets the minimum standard. It matches what's out there right now. Again, this says 40 here, which is typically for a superstructure replacement, but out of this structure, we're gonna talk about fully encasing the piers, possibly replacing the entire pier caps. So you could expect about 60 years before another project has to go through here. Again, no right of way will be needed. So here's a picture of the proposed typical section. This shows the two 11-foot travel lanes and the four-foot shoulders required for shared use. The typical section of the roadway, very similar. And the proposed layout. And as you'll notice, this looks very similar to the existing conditions layout. The substructures and piers are going to remain and a new superstructure, so new beams and a new deck will be placed on the existing supports. So Laura, real quick. One of the questions I was gonna ask was by accepting the superstructure model you wouldn't be salvaging and reusing the current I-beams that are there then? No, we'd be replacing the beams. So once you get into a deck replacement with just painting the beams, costs are pretty high just because of the late leadabatement. Painting beams is pretty high. So it's actually more cost-effective sometimes to just take the beams off entirely and replace them. Also, by removing the beams, that allows us to do all the work that we wanna do to the piers below. And what do you typically do with the discarded beams? Are those the contractors' property or? Todd, could you speak up to that? Is that, I believe it would be the contractors. I could be wrong there. Yep, it took me a while to find the unmute button, but I found it. Yeah, no, it's gonna be the property of the contractor and they're liable for disposing of it because it is expected for it to have lead paint on it. So they need to dispose of it properly. And there is some salvage value associated with that. So we'd expect that we would see kind of indirectly a credit back to the project through the bidding process. Thank you. So here's a proposed profile. So this is, if you're looking at the side of the bridge or the fascia of the bridge, the proposed profile is gonna match existing. We're not talking about changing the grades at all. So the maintenance of traffic options considered. We looked at an offsite detour with accelerated bridge construction techniques. We looked at phased construction, which would keep one lane of alternating traffic open during construction for an entire construction season. And then we considered a temporary bridge. So what we're proposing here is a two lane temporary bridge upstream. So that would be right about that location right there between bridge 44 and the interstate. We really felt with the state park there with farce fields, with all the bicycle routes in the area. This is a backup route. If I, if I 89 needs to be closed, they would be detoured onto route two. So we really felt that it was important to maintain traffic and maintain two way traffic through the project area. Again, no right of way will be needed as it's a state owned land. Here's an upstream temporary bridge layout. This is very conceptual in nature. It may be closer to the interstate bridge. These are really just conceptual plans. So currently this is in the project budget for construction in 2023. There's a total cost estimate of 4.6 million. That's with engineering costs, permitting costs and construction costs. So a project summary, we're proposing a superstructure replacement with traffic maintained on a two way temporary bridge, 11, four minimum typical section. No right of ways needed. There will be a buried communications cable relocation. And we expect this to be constructed in 2023. So that's the presentation. There is a link up at the top of the screen here. All future plan sets will be posted to this link. Tonight's presentation will be posted to this link as well. Yeah, I had a question about the road that's there. Was that far road? It's far road, correct. Will there be any disruption of their access to the property? There won't be disruption. There may, I mean, when they're putting this approach in, it may be down to one lane, but we'll make sure that everybody, I know this is, I believe it's a dead end road here. So we'll make sure that access is maintained at all times. Laura, how does the three alternatives was a deck superstructure and full replacement? How does the third project differ from the other two? A full bridge replacement. Right. So with a full bridge replacement, the difference is that we would remove the existing abutments. We'd remove the existing peers entirely. And we'd put new supports. We construct new supports under the new superstructure and deck. Okay. So in terms of what, what it looks like to the public, I mean, that would probably be very, very similar. Same alignment, same with. It would just be the placement of, of the peers and the abutments that might change. Second. Second question was, I know. I don't believe there will be a lot of, I don't believe there will be a lot of. I'm an angle to communicate with the angling community. Little river is a fairly. There in the dam. Will there be any disruptions to a fisheries population. From this project. I don't believe there will be a lot of the work is going to be out of the stream. I don't believe there will be a lot of the work is going to be out of the stream. So we do have to abide by permitting. There's certain industry restrictions, time of year. So. I wouldn't expect any. Any impact to the fisheries. Thank you. Yeah. Laura, I did have one more question. And I'm not sure if you can speak to this, but. I forget how many years ago now it was, but we did the off-ramp. Was it the current model of the, of the dam? The current model of the dam? Is this similar to the exit 10? Is this similar in. The level of. The level of rebuilding of the bridge project. As, as that was. I'm not sure that I'm 100%. Aware of what, what the exit 10 project entailed. I don't know if Todd is more familiar with that project. I'm just wondering more of like from a disruption standpoint and you know the length of the project and the amount of noise involved because I do remember you know we got quite used to being lulled to sleep by the sound of jack cameras for a couple of years there so. Yeah I don't expect that because this is there's a temporary bridge in place I wouldn't expect that the contractor would be working overnight. Again we're maintaining two lanes of traffic there aren't any ramps being closed or anything like that so there might be some disruption like when they're when they're switching traffic over from us to onto the temporary structure onto the temporary bridge but that should really be the most traffic impacts that we would see obviously there'd be construction vehicles entering and exiting and exiting the construction zone but. I don't believe that the impacts would be the same. At all. No I wouldn't I wouldn't expect the the work to continue into the evening or anything there's no reason we're going to have a temporary bridge you got one full you'll have one full construction season to get the deck and the new the new steel in there so that's something that should be very doable verse during normal working days I don't know the contractor might do five eights or six eights working on Saturdays or they might do 10 hour days that it all depends but it wouldn't it wouldn't be any night work is not anticipated to be needed. Okay thank you so I just have a question can you guys hear me yeah the length of time so we say 2023 is this a year two year three year project. This should be a one year project it's possible that the that the contractor will want to construct the temporary bridge in the fall ahead of time at this point I I'm not sure but the actual construction of the bridge should be a one year project. Well there'll be enough time for the people that live on that road to modify their travel plans if they needed because there are people that are from on either side of that far road that take that road to go to their houses so they'll be convenient a little bit. Yeah they should still be able to access um go right or left off a far road um from uh onto the temporary approach so I don't I don't expect there to be I don't think they're going to be cut off from their properties or anything like that. You know the only thing I can think of is possibly uh they're going to have flaggers out there as they're taking truck deliveries from materials to do the fill or to put the temporary bridge in there launching it and stuff like that so that there may be some short term durations you know where they're just going to you just got to wait for the flagger turn the paddle around this says okay you can go slow now. Right yeah there there should not be a lot of disruption to local traffic there. When you when you answered the question and said one year construction you really mean one construction season correct? One construction season like I said they it hasn't been determined if the um if the temporary bridge will be constructed the fall before. Right but the construction of the temporary bridge except for a little bit of disruption on far road really doesn't impact traffic at all. Not on route two. Right. So I've got a few questions there if nobody else has got anything to ask at this point or comment. Okay so my first question is and I guess it's an assumption I'm assuming that the state looked at possibilities of possibly on and off ramp off the interstate bridge to or was that looked at I guess is my question to prevent having to put in a temporary bridge I don't know if there's enough width on the interstate bridge you'd have to take up probably in the shoulder and the shoulders in both lanes in order to access on one side and come out the other as opposed to putting in a temporary my next question kind of follows that uh what was what would be the cost of the temporary bridge and then um then I was looking for a cost difference between full reconstruction and the superstructure option. Yeah so information. I actually I do have this here so here's the costs for for the different options. I don't know if you guys can see this little that out of the way. Um so the cost of a temporary bridge here is maybe 500,000 700,000 I mean it's it's cheaper to close or it's cheaper to phase can you know phase construction but we felt that a temporary bridge is really important here in terms of the ramps I'm not quite sure that I understand what you were asking you were talking about ramps off of the interstate. Yeah I didn't know if there was a way of coming off from route two onto a section of the interstate you'd have to put up jersey barriers and split a section of the bridge probably narrow it down to one lane traffic from the interstate and would you still have room for two lane from a route to access on and back off kind of circumventing the project. So I don't believe we'd have enough room for both interstate traffic and two lanes of route two. I'm not sure that that would be cheaper I would actually expect that to be more expensive than a temporary bridge option I mean a temporary bridge a lot of contractors have them they reuse them from place to place um but it's it's a good idea well just yeah just just a question outside the box yeah um and then the cost difference between full reconstruction and superstructure option yeah so the cost difference so 4.6 million is what we estimated for a superstructure replacement 7.3 million for a full bridge replacement almost double almost double and again like I said I have 40 years there but um when when we discussed this internally it's what we're talking about doing to the piers is actually like encasing them it's not just the typical you know take take the bad concrete off and put some patches on it's going to be a more robust repair that we'd expect quite a bit more than 40 years out of and you can in you can eliminate that internal rot when you encase something like that if you don't basically get all the infection out from the inside um what are the chances that it's going to eat itself out from the inside yeah so that's a good question um so we currently um we've put in the request to do some concrete cores here so they're going to core the concrete at both the worst areas of the concrete and the best areas of the concrete just to see what we're dealing with if we're dealing with like alkali silica reaction which we don't expect here they'll test um the strength of the remaining concrete they'll test um the chloride content in the concrete and so if those tests came back and it said you know this concrete is awful it's chloride laced it has asr um we'd likely end up replacing the entire pier so it's possible um but based on based on just a visual inspection of them and the inspector's notes we don't expect that to be the case um also sometimes we'll put in um they look like little hockey pucks um but they uh Todd could you help me out on what they're called well like wafers type yeah there there are sacrificial thing what happens is you put them you can put them into the concrete you tie them to the exist existing uh rebar and it kind of draws uh and i i know i can never get them right if it's cat on or anion but it draws it together it kind of draws it out and they actually i mean i i'm i'm been looking for an excuse to use it on one of my projects but um it it may be just be surface concrete because what really is making those that concrete look bad is all the leaking expansion joints so it could be just surface if it's more in depth than that we'll consider using something like hockey pucks if it's even worse than that where we don't think that they're not that they're not going to work like Laura said we'll be going just we'll be just replacing it but one of the things is um with the new deck um and replacing the steel they're going to be continuous continuous uh girders so there won't be any more expansion joints over those piers so if we can just get that fixed up it's going to be protected a lot more moving forward than it is right now so now that i got you on the hook Todd you bring a question to mind um okay in the past i've noticed i have a uh tri-axle bobble tri-axle that i drive on the interstate and uh some of the bridges that you encounter um the the first joint and the last joint are horrible bumps um and i know that uh there's been some work to improve that um can you talk about that a little bit and the method that you guys are using these days well a lot a lot of the times a lot of those bumps is that the expansion joint is failing you have a lot of um you got a lot of the the concrete is rotting out around it you're getting a lot of leakage it's just it's in rough shape um in this particular case you know we haven't got into the the great you know the details of it because this is just still the alternatives but once we get into the design we're going to look and just you know v-trans has uh has um hired uh Du Bois and King off our retainer contract to do the design so i'll be we'll be working together on that and we are going to move those expansion joints off the bridge so they're not going to be on the bridge maybe they'll be at the end of uh an approach slab or something like that so um it doesn't necessarily and so it'll be a little bit easier to repair there's gonna be a different type of joint possibly well it looks like they've been using some form of a rubber compound to uh yeah that's that's faulty band aid get over those outside that's they called that enough as faulty plug joint and those um they're relatively cheap a lot more than trying to replace a finger joint bridge or Vermont joint bridge and you can keep replacing those every every five years or whatever i'm not sure what the lifespan on those things are you can still replace those again and again uh like when you do the paving when they go through and pave the project they can replace those as faulty plug joints a lot cheaper thank you but that doesn't necessarily i mean depending on the situation that you know it maybe like you said it could be just a band aid yeah until um the real problem is addressed i'm not sure if i answered your question or not yeah for the most part yeah thanks any other questions go ahead mike i have another question uh root two is a fairly heavily used road i know that's going to be a temporary bridge both ways what's going to be the um is there going to be any kind of weight restriction on that temporary bridge why that's being used i assume it would no that temporary bridge will be designed to carry all legal loads okay good that's good because the bolton pit you see about the only game in town for a lot of contractors yeah well another reason is is what happens when there's an when there's an accident on the interstate where does traffic get detoured root two so it's so we felt it was very important to have a two lane temporary bridge to mitigate those those those things or that possibility as well good question mike thanks i have one more question so on the offsite detour between alternative one and alternative two it's not quite a million dollars but you have the temporary bridge in there so what is the difference in the cost between the offsite detours between our alternative one and two if you could elaborate please can you repeat the question so you're asking what the difference is between because you both you both have offsite detours for for the expansion alternative one and alternative two there's a quite a cost difference but you still have the temporary bridge in there so i wanted to know what those costs were for the offsite detour yeah so the offsite detour cost for alternative one just a deck replacement is 2.4 million and in terms of costs of the actual detour piece that's um you know signed packages um that sort of thing and then for the supers that's a lot of money Laura i think i think you need to explain that the costs there are the other costs right oh yes this is this is alternative one it's just a deck if you're doing offsite detour the project is 2.4 million dollars if you're doing placement and you use phase construction the cost is 3.2 it's not you know you don't add them all up it's the cost of the project doing it with either a b or c in alternatives one two or three right thank you bill that's that's exactly right so this is these are total project costs of the bridge traffic control permitting construction engineering um engineering um it's the total costs um of the project so that the cheapest so the cheapest project is to do a deck replacement with an offsite detour but they've determined that a deck replacement doesn't do enough for the bridge it doesn't give uh you know the quality product that they want it doesn't give them a long enough lifespan than they want so they move to alternative two and then they look at the cost between the offsite detour phase construction but they've decided that a temporary bridge is necessary in order to keep traffic flowing into to make the the project um you know take care of existing traffic as well as put a bridge in so they have to look at all the different alternatives but they've chosen alternative two c as the optimum one this is the one that gives us the best ability to maintain traffic as we have to maintain it gives us the the wife expectancy for the bridge that we need and the safety so you know you it's kind of a cost benefit analysis and they're showing you here all the different costs with all the different benefits and they've chosen alternative two c as the one to go with carla do you still need the ipad identified yes please so the woman who just asked a question about the temporary bridge cost can you identify yourself for a record please hi this is Cheryl gloar thank you you're welcome yeah i understand the concept i just wasn't sure why the costs were different for but anyway but thank you i appreciate it well bill if there's no more questions from anybody we can probably thank our guests for the presentation and uh let them go for the night if they wish all right thanks Laura thanks Laura thanks Todd thanks Martha thank you very much okay so we can jump to our next item which is the select board items and uh i actually changed that on my agenda to to say speeding in waterbury because we've had so many complaints and so many different roads in the town of waterbury it seems like this is just another one to add to the list and this is specifically tonight we'll be talking about stow street and there's probably a few people here that may have some comments pertaining to that so go ahead bill and see where we go um well it's really not anything for me i mean you said it quite clearly chris that you know speeding is an issue that we have um not just in waterbury it's kind of a universal problem on on streets and in communities all over the country i'm sure there's some people here that asked for this to be on the agenda i think you should you should hear them um i will remind the the board and uh you know maybe we need to get this fellow um mario depignee jiru into a meeting uh one of these times this is the high risk rural road projects that we have uh pegged for both guptell road and stow street we talked about this a year ago when when we had people on guptell road talking about speeding and uh you know bill woodruff and i told the board that we had this uh this project from the state they were going to do signage and some uh you know other kind of traffic coming issues not not speed bumps not not narrowing the roads at all but we signed up for this it's going to be four years ago now and steve is here on the on the uh on the zoom and maybe he remembers but i did ask bill woodruff to reach out to the v-trans and find out you know where these projects are i sent that email out to the select board last week where he's indicated that they have received some proposals from contractors they're being evaluated in their hope that the project will be under construction later this year um maybe we ought to have them back to remind us exactly what they're going to do maybe steve remembers but uh it's it is very frustrating from my perspective that this is taking so long bill i could just speak briefly to this before we open it up if that would be good christ you call yeah absolutely steve you know fill us in if you've got any new information absolutely so uh the high-risk rural roads program is a program of v-trans um bill mentioned the engineer mario who consulted with us and uh they came up with a scheme uh the one project that was uh a result of that was the radar speed sign the signs that um have been installed at the foot of the hill if you will uh coming down from waterbury stow road before you get to the uh interstate bridges and east street and um there there were a number of other recommendations uh one of them had to do with updating the school signage package and um the the warning signs and so on for the 25 mile an hour speed zone even though the whole street is 25 miles an hour that's a special zone so there are standards that um the federal and state government have for these school zones so mario recommended a new package that would add safety and warning signs and so on for that zone and presumably make it a little bit more enforceable the other improvements that mario recommended were more traffic calming improvements and they were somewhat dependent on on repaving stow street involved uh line work to put a special center line on the street to help define the lanes help reduce traffic um i don't have the details right in front of me but that repaving project uh obviously hasn't occurred yet so um we put those improvements on hold uh the signage package that bill mentioned uh is dependent on uh funding through uh through v-trans it's uh i believe a hundred percent v-trans funded so there's a pool of projects that um statewide and they um i think they issue a contract each year that packages a bunch of these projects to make it cost effective bill mentioned briefly guptal road i won't go into details on guptal road but um there were signage improvements there that um would be a separate discussion i believe but that's that's in a nutshell what i recall from the iris rural roads package okay thank you steve uh i'm sure there's a few people here perhaps that uh live on stow street who'd be the first to like to weigh in on this issue feel free to speak up i am matt green i live on east street um everybody hear me okay yep um so i commute through town every day uh to bicycle express over across from snow fire uh by bicycle uh so i've seen a lot of aggressive driving erratic speeds um and just a lot of pedestrian traffic that uses the street anyway um and through that you know with the construction and stuff like that that's been going on over the past couple of years there's certainly been an uptick in our regular use traffic on stow street um which explains in part some of the uh you know erratic driving and stuff like that um but moving forward i think you know with the fact that there is very little shoulder and stuff like that um on stow street uh slowing traffic down would increase safety for those that use it for commuting uh by bike or walking and stuff like that uh going forward so uh just like to put my voice out there and kind of make that issue um as known as it needs to be because nobody wants to get run into the guardrail no that's true um me and you're right stow street is narrow to begin with um and with the additional traffic from the construction project um that does add an increase uh percentage of risk but i will you know i'm sure you're probably a pretty conscientious bicycle rider but i'll i'll tell you today um had a guy working with me that drives truck almost every day and um we were headed into stow there on 100 and uh talking about the bicycle lane that is now on 100 and uh he pointed out there was a couple of guys riding the bike up just how close to that white line they were uh the bicycle riders um and at back when the root 100 project began um v-trans had mentioned that they were going to narrow up the travel lane for vehicles by a foot to allow for this bike lane and by law you're supposed to stay three feet away from a bicycler well now they have their bicycle lane but they're hugging the white line which is right up against the travel lane and it's making it difficult for you know the travel lanes already been narrowed um and when you're driving big truck it's uh pretty difficult to shrink that thing up a little bit when you're caught in a tough spot um um where um there's no option um so i just i plead with bicycle operators to try to utilize those lanes you know as as center as possible uh or even to the perhaps to the right for their own safety um and then tonight when i was turning on to gupto road uh the same guy was with me coming back to my house and a guy on a bicycle was coming down the golf course road and he never he never looked he never looked and i i had to hit my brakes because i thought he's coming right out in front of me um he barely slowed down and he rounded the corner never looked to see if any oncoming traffic uh was nearby and uh that's risky for for you know people to do things like that so um i understand your concerns but there's also you know there's there is issues with bicyclers um not really doing the right thing all the time uh and putting themselves at risk as far as um the speeding is concerned um that's everywhere and i quite honestly don't know how to address it we talked a couple of meetings ago about little river road um and some different options there of which i was for none of them my vote has been right along to double our fines for speeders and take the burden off from the good taxpayers but that that failed to go anywhere so i'll leave it up to some of the rest of the board to maybe come up with some better ideas as to how to handle uh these issues because i don't think they're going away no matter what we do amy i think oh the person underneath amy's name i think you're about to say something oh is that me dana allen uh okay yeah just um dana allen 48 stow street i was going to put together a letter of support i believe carlo forwarded you all that pdf this morning um just sort of showing that there is a lot of support for traffic calming measures along stow street uh and a lot of the residents who responded also brought up um railroad and union there's definitely a lot of traffic cutting through using those two streets to avoid construction uh or just as a quote unquote shortcut um so we're seeing a lot of this usage of these streets as sort of like almost secondary arterials when in fact they're residential side streets and so it's it's super hard to you know get people to do 25 miles an hour um since i live on stow street i'm kind of a grumpy old man about it and i drive 25 and i get i get pushed down the street right on my bumper fairly frequently i've been tasked on stow street which was exciting um and again you know as a as a cyclist uh as well as a motorist you know i like to use my bike in town to reduce the number of cars circulating as much as possible um and i'm super conscientious most cyclists i'd say all cyclists in verman or um you know they're motorists as well so they're very conscious of the rules um and so what prompted this particular uh you know letter email to you guys to to get this on the agenda was was almost getting run over by a driver who um ignored a hand signal and passed um actually right in front of my house which is a it's a blind hill um there's a couple of blind intersections depending on the way you come so i think that i think that we can all agree that something needs to be done and steve and bill i appreciate your efforts on this and thank you for letting me know uh about that v-trans program it sounds like there is some positive movement uh i'm curious is there a definite timeline for that uh or is it contingent on funding is there a way to get more information on that um and frankly what can we as citizens do to help this along there are traffic calming demonstration packages that are available from organizations like local motion that use temporary measures to sort of set things up as to how could this potentially work so yeah i'm just curious if there is a timeline associated with that v-trans project and if you don't know right now that's that's totally fine yeah but it'd be great to know at some point yeah well um i don't have a specific date yet dana uh as i said uh ario jiru depicting jiru said that contractors have submitted proposals and i believe and i'm just reading from his email i believe these are being evaluated now it is our hope that the project will be constructed this year so it's july now this year would mean you know uh i would imagine before october i think a couple things what steve indicated we need to pay attention to that as far as stow street is concerned uh most of what we're talking about is going to happen this year is probably signage the paving project you know there were new sidewalks put on stow street i don't know it's probably six years ago now uh it was supposed to be a sidewalk paving project at that at that time and if the paving had been done at that time i think some of the center line and i don't know if they were going to put in rumble lines or whatever but um that the paving portion of that project got pulled so the sidewalks were done the paving did not happen and we will still you know it's one of the streets that that will need to do uh to your other points dana i just want everyone to understand that both stow street and union street are class two arterial town highways they're not considered residential streets for the purposes of the transportation infrastructure and again steve is on the regional planning commission um does a lot with traffic he can probably explain a class two road better than i can but it it basically measure it's a measure of volume and the fact that these roads are collecting uh traffic from the residential streets and bringing them to class one town highways which would be main street route 100 route two and then the interstates so union street and stow street both are are more than a standard class three highway gupto road is the same it's also a class two road so it's it's a little bit of a challenge and to and i i don't want to i'm not contradicting you dana i believe that you probably are a conscientious bicycle rider but saying that all robot bicyclists are motorists as well and they're all conscientious the number of bicyclists that i see blow through the red light at the top of stow street you know they're coming up main street they look to their left there's nobody there's nobody on stow street with the green light they just keep going i have seen one stop for a stop sign you know whether it's on meaning flats coming down the gupto road they just they look left and they say well there's nobody coming so i'm going to go and it takes it takes cooperation from everyone if we're going to make it safe so i would encourage you bicyclists out there to really pay attention to what the rules of the road say if it's a stop sign you're supposed to stop if it's a red light you're supposed to stop but with regard to the these two projects none of them have anything to do with actual physical traffic coming right now it's it's manage packages i believe we're talking about in the state correct you're muted i believe i know i believe you're right bill that the this phase will be some additional an updated signage and then the the traffic calming and i can share examples of what was given to us four years ago but thank you state so two things i would like to recommend christ and i spoke a couple weeks ago i was hoping maybe we could wait until october when we are in person again rather than to try to do it on zoom but i think it's you know we've been in this coronavirus world for several months now and uh i had reached out to lieutenant white of the police back in february to try to arrange for him to select board meeting where we could talk about terms that we have and clearly speeding is a big issue and we get emails from the public i got you know his email i got emails from people about wanooski street i forward those to lieutenant white and say these are complaints that we're receiving about speeding about unsafe traffic these inform the troops about now we don't have it for tonight's agenda but the uh police report just was sent to uh myself and mark mater today are we going to put it into graphic form like he's done for us in the past and maybe at then on the 10th we can talk about that report i looked at it only briefly this afternoon i think the state police wrote 10 tickets in june and frankly you know that's not a lot of tickets 10 for speeding they wrote a lot of you know they wrote other tickets for equipment for you know going through stop signs i'm not saying they only wrote 10 but i i believe it was only 10 for speeding and uh i think the issue is really more enforcement than anything whether we double the fines or not you know and i walk on stow street almost every day i park at the park and ride and i walk to work walk down the sidewalks on stow street i hollered at a kid the other day in front of the school who was going 35 or 40 when i hollered at him and then after i hollered at him you went 60 so you know that's that's kind of what what happens and uh people don't like it when you call them out on their bad behavior but i see the police cruiser the state police cruiser pretty once a week i see them at the pullout on stow street so i know they're out there but i think we we should try to have lieutenant white in and whether we i'll lead to the select board i would prefer to do it in person as opposed to getting like this but it's the board's call and we're hoping to start meeting again in person in october and then you know steve maybe we can try to get mario in again we have almost a completely new select board now from the one that signed for this and bring him in and talk about what they can do both with these sign packages and a little bit more information if we were to get stow street repaved what might we be able to do there you know speed bumps i think are not the ideal location for most locations like stow street and union street that just they have too high graphic volume i understand that people see them in certain places they have mixed adults um you know there are people that complain about the noise that they make um they cause drainage issues sometime and we have people on on randall street who've asked to have them taken out so they're they're not always a panacea but anyway steve maybe we can reach out to mario and try to get him into a future select board meeting in the not too distant future yeah we can definitely do that he can show examples of traffic calming and um bill's correct uh mario recommended not putting speed table or speed bumps on stow street due to the traffic but there are other methods that he would be glad to share with um with the slack board and with others and chris chris chris yes i'm having problems here or something i don't know if it's me or is it can you hear me you're kind of breaking up all right sarah you want to go well we have two we actually have uh two hands up one the first one was roger the second one was emily hayman can you add sarah morgan to that afterwards is roger still want to speak sure can you hear me yes i'm sorry i'm sorry can you hear me yes okay i i think the um item that was raised about bicycles and bicyclists not being safe is a uh what do they call it a false canard uh it they're children that walk along stow street especially if school is in session there are plenty of pets that go along stow street i think the calming needs to happen on stow street whether it's a construction boulevard for people to get around the intersection i don't think we should be pinning blame on bicyclists only the the pedestrian traffic on stow street is is great so that that's all i wanted to say at this point thank you uh tubby t u bb y thank you i'll change i'll change it up here emily is next hello i'm emily hayman um i'm a resident of south main street and i bike and drive in town um i would like to point out that when you're driving at 30 miles per hour your likelihood of killing a pedestrian is nine percent if you go 10 miles faster at 40 miles per hour that likelihood increases to 50 percent most traffic accidents and traffic fatalities are related to poor infrastructure designed when a road is designed for people to go fast they go faster myself included i remember a front porch forum post from years back where a family was um grieving the loss of their cat that died on stow street because someone was driving too fast and ever since then i try to avoid stow street unless i absolutely must go up it um more so with construction and when i do drive on it i always think of that situation and remember to drive slow so i think there's a lot we can do to encourage people and remind them of these important statistics because people are driven by emotion when they see the blinking speed sign they like to see how fast they can make the number go when they see a speed bump they blow down to it and then they speed up when they pass by i think a select board meeting is not the time to be playing traffic engineer or playing bridge engineer it's a time to think about what our options could be perhaps even consider establishing a bike ped committee we know our town staff is pushed on their time pushed on their capacity a staff committee could help um look at these options play advocate when needed for state funding um and also test out examples dana mentioned the local motion demonstration kit this would be a temporary option where we could play with a couple ideas in terms of pay pavement markings um or bump outs along some of these streets like union stow etc and play with them on a temporary basis where it's not the permanent paving it's not the perfect permanent build out try out these options and not feel defeatist about how some bikers drive how some drivers drive and remember the core fact that the way our infrastructure designed has an impact on how people drive what their speed is and reminding people of those core facts around uh fatalities and how a slight difference in speed can save a life um i would personally be happy to be on a bike ped committee if waterbury wants to establish one and take these options and look at them from a constructive positive side as opposed to a negative point of view thank you so sarah's next hi everybody um this is charol thank you for your time so i grew up in this village i've biked in it since i was a kid and i've driven it for a while um i for one really do not want to drive over bumps to get to my house every day i don't think that you can make people drive well it's just how they drive i think there's there are ways to limit traffic speeds but i you can't make people drive the way they're going to drive on randall street i see them drive behind in between the speed bumps they race slow down speed bump race slow down speed bump i just i think we've become a town where there's a lot of biking going around and we're not used to the amount of volume of the bikes it might just be maybe there is a better signage issue that we need to have so that everybody remembers that bikes and cars share the road um i'm also concerned that you know a lot of these people aren't here they they rent they come in for a few years and then they leave i don't want to have a permanent situation that occurs that we're all having to deal with 10 years down the road and as um it was talked about earlier these don't seem to work very often the speed bumps they're more of an impediment than they are a help so for me who lives off of stow street i'd actually ask you not to have those on there thank you hey um sarah sorry i thought you said sure well not sarah my apologies sarah are you here okay thank you oh wait here we go can you hear us now oh are they talking here okay hi this is matt maran with my my wife sarah and uh we've lived in waterberry uh for about oh yeah and uh we've lived on uh swazy court which is right off from stow street and um yeah interesting discussion on on bikes and and cars and uh you know certainly i've seen my my share of uh really bad car drivers and and bad bikers and uh obviously one is a lot more vulnerable too if things go wrong but um to me and to us i think one of the most significant things about stow street is that uh we have an elementary school right there both of our kids have gone through the elementary one's at middle school one's at the high school now and over the years uh you know they were able to to walk to school and we'd walk with them particularly until they were older because um we had too many close calls and uh in in one case um came so close to being hit both my younger son and I uh by a car speeding right through the crosswalk and uh I fortunately was probably the only case where I've accosted a driver and uh definitely gave them uh uh at the time some thoughts on on their speeding through a school zone but I think that's one of the most significant things in my mind is that it just seems like it's an accident waiting to happen one of the major crossings at that elementary school is right at the top of the hill there on stow street and it's really unsafe um oftentimes there's there's cars that are parked to on stow street that further obscure view of both the pedestrian and of the drivers coming up the hill and I I just think that uh you know it's been lucky that there hasn't been someone hurt badly yet and um it just seems like something could be done I liked a lot of what I think it was Emily was saying about design about maybe there's some things that could be done to help to better ensure that people aren't uh flying up that hill um and I think we even heard like one of the crossing guards even got rushed or flipped by a vehicle um and they're you know in a reflective vest with a big stop sign um so uh and then outside of school hours obviously there's a lot of you know beyond whether crossing guards there there's a lot of kids that go in and out of there and and again to me and us I think that's probably the biggest concern we have and I think it's different from most other streets in waterbury it's very unique yeah people speed on a cocktail and all over the town I see it all the time it's definitely a problem and not unique to stow street but what is unique to stow street is that we do have a school there and it would be great if a little bit more consideration were maybe given if we have an opportunity with some planning during uh upcoming uh schedule work thank you yeah and I just want to I just want to say that um Swayze court is a tiny little street but um you have a lot of people who park for um events let's pull events for town events um uh porous you use google maps and they come down stow and they just don't know you know you come down that hill go into the underpass there's not a lot of houses around you sort of feel like well I can go a little bit faster I can go 40 or something and and the cop isn't is great but he can't be there all on so maybe like um for me I hate speed bumps but if we had something when I go into weights field for example there's a school right there which I know and I've seen enough the cop there enough times and I see this the light telling me what my speed is and I'm like god I didn't know I was going fast um and uh so that's enough with the deterrence some people need that like myself and uh and the sign to just slow it down a little bit and I was curious um if you could let us know if there's not funding for such a sign if that's something that the public could fundraise for and perhaps get because personally I think speed bumps are that's that's a tough sell on that road but um but it is heavily used and I feel like when I I've had little kids and dogs right across at that intersection the crosswalk is poorly painted and I'm I you always have to look both ways when you cross the street but I feel like I have to rush across that street because people sometimes they come right up over very fast and I you know thank goodness my kids are older I don't have to worry about that thank you and chris chris all right um mark you want to go yeah sure um I was gonna follow that up too I I mean maybe some people might not be aware but I actually live next to Dana for 12 years um I saw a lot of I think a lot of the concern that residents are showing on that street um similar to other roads like the little river road problem um I guess my question to either Steve or Bill is in front of prohibition pig there's always been that little crosswalk sign I'm always when I was living there I was always fearful of children getting hit because of what happens after school and all the cars start to park and pinch the road why don't we have um you know that seems like that prohibition pig yield walk crosswalk sign sits permanently in front of prohibition pig is there a reason why Stow Street can't have a similar thing right there it's probably something that we could do mark yeah and I mean I think the other comments about and of course I think every time we have concerns around speeding is the uh the active speed um but maybe if we we do do that idea of having one that we can move around town is we try to address things but I also I'll I'll follow up Bill's comment of I do believe we have an enforcement issue too my concern is that either we're not getting enough out of the contract but we just don't have enough officers to help curtail the direction we seem to be going with speeding there are some options with regard to the flashing speed limit signs um we have we have three permanent installations in Waterbury two of them are on Stow Street right above East Street as Steve indicated and then the one on just before you get to um road coming from Ben and Jerry's that's also uh the town owns that one but um the village used to have at least one if not two portable signs that could be moved around and actually mounted on um on signposts so if you had a speed limit sign you could mount it on a speed limit sign I know they were mounted on no parking signs over on Union Street I did ask Bill Woodruff to look into those they are relative they're very affordable frankly and we probably should invest in a couple of those um and if you move them around enough I think part of the problem with the permanent ones is just like anything else when it becomes permanent it just becomes part of the background and people don't pay attention to them and if it's there for a couple of days well oh that's brand new and you slow down a little bit so I'm not saying we're going to take the ones down that are on Stow Street but I think they were much more effective when they were first put up than they are now but we can buy those signs that can be moved around I think they're in the three to five thousand dollar range which would include you know a battery pack and the like so if the select board is willing to go ahead and allow something like that you don't really have to make a motion but uh that's something that we can probably buy right away I don't know how quickly it will get here you know there's a lot of things that we order right now and just because of COVID shipping takes a long time but if that's something that the select board would be interested in two of those signs we can order those pretty quickly I would be in support of that part um Brian Shay I live at 86 Stow Street um one thing I was thinking about talking about these signs is they have the signs that have the flashing blue light on them and I know that when I'm driving and I'm going a little too fast and the sign tells me I'm going too fast that blue light flashes and that really gets people to slow down um I think that's another thing that's worth considering because blue obviously means police to most people in Vermont so yeah we can we can look into that I know the um on the state highways the state does not allow any strobe lights at all there was a strobe light on that one on 100 just before crossroad and the sign was disabled for about three months while they tried to figure out how to get the strobe light off of it but Stow Street's the town road I think we could probably do that there but uh we can look into that there's there's a myriad of options as I said um and we'll just try to you know uh they're they're portable and we can we can move them around and it will help a little bit I hope so I apologize I apologize here my computer failing now I got a vaccine here on my way from here and there's anybody else that wants to say anything on this subject we read Amy hi friends and neighbors Amy Sharf I'm at 39 Stow Street homeowner cyclist pet owner and mom of two kids who are out crossing the street using the sidewalks etc um a couple things that I just share and take notes on is uh as I'm walking through the house to a better place to sit um I live down uh in the Victorian that's down towards Union Street and there's also the fact that people kind of like to jump that bridge that's like right about there um so it is like a game of chicken sometimes about trying to cross the road here uh right at the intersection of railroad and union and Stow Street um the other things that I heard uh like there's the paving project coming in I actually was talking to my son as we were bicycling and I was thankful that it's not paved I've been thankful that Stow Street is bumpy and cracky and that makes some people slow down and I do feel when it when it does get paved that it's just going to create more of a racetrack um as the Moran said we have the school right here but the school I'm feeling right now in summer and the unknown with COVID it seems like this summer I'm seeing a lot more people just peeling through past my house and um I don't know if it's just okay schools out so they're not worried about hitting kids but with school being partial or whatever I'm fearing that that may continue let alone there's not a lot for people to do right now um the conversation about bicyclists I think I kind of rolled my eyes honestly when you guys were all talking about it because that's a totally separate issue I think about uh cars speeding on roads and erratic driving and the bicyclists community uh just makes this economy thrive in Waterbury so um the other thing I want to say is I did hear uh Belle you just talked about um could invest in some signs and I heard Mark Friar backing that so I'd like to hear more from the other board members of that I also heard um Mark Friar talk about the crosswalk in front of pro pig and Bill responded with a a could maybe happen and so if it is something that improves safety here then I think the could maybe can turn into should and will um and speed bumps nobody likes a speed bump but nobody likes a kid run over on the sidewalk either and part of the things that I worry about is speed and people jumping curbs jumping the sidewalk like we said I've had a hard time just getting out of my driveway because of the speed that comes past my house it is kind of a quick get out there and try to take off before somebody comes on either side to rear end and another thing besides I mean we have so many children around here and the good thing is they are getting outside during COVID they are scootering they're skateboarding they're biking they're social distancing literally in yards across the street from each other to have a conversation we also do have a hearing impaired child on our road and she can look both ways and look both ways again and then go but with some of the speeds that are happening somebody could be right on top of a kid in an instant so um my history too as I was on a select board for four years and I understand the the work and struggles and I appreciate the time and the time away from your families that you're taking um and I appreciate this town I love where I live and I don't I'd rather see and hear rumble strips at night when I sleep with my windows open then have somebody get hurt and I'm just afraid that it's just a matter of time that that somebody gets hurt so how we can prevent it then I'd say all all people forward please that's it hey Chris yes I'm not trying to take over your job but I can see when people have their hands up that want to speak so if you're okay with it I'll just keep it out for some reason I'm getting feedback you hear what I said yeah can you hear me yep so next up are you getting feedback on your end a tiny bit but I can hear you well now go ahead and take take the meeting next up was Mike yep I just want to make a comment I thank all the public for their input on this issue it is a serious matter and I know the select board at least I know I take this very very personally but the problem is we have so many roads that we can't have every road having speed calming devices having police officers patrol yes I do think that by rotating police in different things to have some enforcement I would say a couple of speeding tickets go a long way to slowing down in in individuals and I think maybe because of COVID I think we're not we're not seeing the amount of tickets that we normally see written you know people who are responsible you know aren't going to get tickets people who are driving fast and I don't think they're going to be giving someone a ticket for 30 miles an hour in a 25 they're looking at the which one we're all concerned is the people going 50 miles an hour up Stow Street I do think I agree with Mark I'm all for you know purchasing a couple of different devices that can be rotated around I think that's the key is rotating devices to different places so that so it doesn't become part of the background we need to kind of have people hey this is something I see this you know that you know they slow down and it becomes habit and you know a few weeks later they're probably going to start going faster and hopefully it's going to rotate back around in a little bit but I think whoever had the idea of maybe forming a committee bouncing around some ideas you know I don't think we could have traffic calming on on every street in Waterbury it's very difficult especially on the highways I think highway a road like Stow Street has special concern because of you know the kids going up up and down and we all just got to take whether you're a motorist whether you're a bicyclist we all got to just take better care and think about your your neighbors as to how you drive you know both a bicycle you know walk you know I see people who are walking who don't even think about walking they just start across the street and you know I have almost hit a couple of people that way and you know we all just need to be respectful to our neighbors thanks the last person I've seen that had the hand up is Kerry hey everybody um I just wanted to well I guess I should say where I live so my name is Kerry Lore this is my husband Alex King we're residents of 17 Hill Street extension in the village we used to be renters on South Main Street and we were lucky to purchase the house in the village a couple years ago thank you for adding this topic to the agenda and giving everybody here the time and space to share their perspectives and their experiences I just wanted to add my voice to the conversation as I guess a multi-use user of Stowe Street our road is a little side street at the end of High Street so you know for us when we're commuting to work go down High Street hit Stowe Street and that's how we're starting our commute for the day I guess what I just wanted to add as a cyclist as a walking pedestrian we walk our dog on this road almost every single day and as a driver is you know just the speed just feels out of control sometimes and it's not I just I think everybody in town deserves to feel safe and you know just to echo a couple comments about the kids using the sidewalk whether it be on their strider bikes whether it be they're walking to school from either the direction of Hen of the Wood or from the direction of the reservoir one thing that really comes to mind that's really concerning is in the winter when the kids are crossing the street from Thatcher Brook to go cross country skiing in the fields you know like they have to cross not even really as it at a designated crosswalk and so that's you know that's something that I worry about outside of you know my own safety as a driver and as a cyclist just to kind of again just echo a couple conversations about just sort of that blind hill right there I was talking to somebody else who's on this call right now earlier about you know once I if I'm riding my bike or even you know walking my dog once I get to the crosswalk that's at that corner of Swayze Court and Stow Street I will either pull my bike over and stop and get off because there's a chance that while I've checked behind me to see if there's a car coming or not by the time I've already looked ahead again to make the turn to make sure that nobody else is coming from the other direction towards me that somebody could be right behind me and hit me which is scary and I don't like it and you know kind of the same thing with our dog it's like I'd like to not run across the street at that crosswalk to make sure that I don't get hit by somebody who is late for work or maybe they're late to drop their kids off at school or they're late for an appointment whatever like they've already kind of gotten speed whether it be the curb underneath the bridge you know the viaduct bridge by hand of the wood or they're coming down the hill from the direction of the reservoir so anyway lots of great conversations here and perspectives and I really appreciate you know everybody taking the time this evening to talk about this and all the considerations of lots of different solutions that seem to be available to consider so thanks. Do you have anything to say? Yeah I think everybody has kind of covered the bases here I mean I'm also sort of a multi-user I also cross the road where the kids do to cross country ski in the field I guess I'll just add that there are a lot of places on Stow Street that people cross the road there's that one that's kind of in the dip to cross into the the field down by the river on both sides of the Stow Street bridge over the railroad tracks under the highway there's you know the parking area that's down there that doesn't really have a crosswalk to and from it so there are a lot of places where people cross the road because the sidewalk ends or or what have you and or they're trying to access some of the other parts of town so I think you know I guess as others mentioned I think Emily mentioned that you know a group to kind of discuss some of the ideas for traffic calming and and or just kind of you know how we design the street better would be good because you know personally I wouldn't be in favor of repaving the street at all because the the potholes and speed bumps are the only form of speed control that we have right now and I'd rather keep those than you know make another drag strip through town so anyway thank you thank you all for your your time tonight and uh Louise has her hand up hi everyone Louise Linnolack 48 Stow Street married to Dana Allen I'm just gonna say this really quickly um you know to reiterate one of Kerry's points actually Dana you might have to mute your computer it's echoing um sorry about that hold on one second guys so I wanted to reiterate uh one of Kerry's points um I um I agree with a lot of what she said and you know while while I don't personally have kids Dana and I don't have kids um you know I do tend to fear for myself when I'm pulling out of my driveway sometimes uh because of the lag time that she mentioned so uh one of the things that's really tricky about living right at the top of the hill and this is something that people um pulling in and out of high street experience as well and Swayze Court is that there's a pretty significant blind spot so what I have to do when I pull out of my driveway is I have to look if I don't see a car uh when I'm pulling out there's actually no like down the down the street probably about you know a couple hundred feet I there's no way for me to know if there's somebody already zooming up the hill there it's a complete blind spot if I see somebody but in that dip then I know that in like 20 seconds they're gonna come up on me and I can I can anticipate that and I just wait but that blind spot uh is significant more than more more so not just because it's hard to anticipate that but because it comes right after a straight away so the um the speed sign on Stowe Street is beforehand of the wood and what happens is that even with the cop there every once in a while although I really like that I do think that there's there's something to be said for having that cop there more often because it's just not enforced enough people will hit speeds up to 45 50 miles an hour on that straight away coming over the top of that hill and there's literally no way for me to anticipate that if they're already going that speed and I can't see them some my car is just going to get crushed someday um and and then you add into the mix children crossing the street dogs crossing the street the fact that people can't see the um the street crossing anymore because it's been the the sidewalk but the the crossing is basically worn away so you can only see the sides of it at this point um it does definitely need to get repainted whether or not it the the road is repaved somebody needs to repaint that um and I think that it's like it's the visual cues that are really important for people and you know I think I can't remember who mentioned it but it's nice to have that signal for those of us who need it that you know like oh hey you're going 10 miles too fast you need to slow down but the fact is that it's very easy for anyone to pick up another 10 15 miles an hour on that straight away because there is no um traffic calming that occurs coming into town past that sign and people pick up speed past 10 of the wood very rapidly there and I don't I think most people aren't trying to I really do truly believe that most people don't even realize that they're going that fast so for me it's like yes it's enforcement but it's also very clearly not on people's minds on that straight away and I think that we need to come up with other options um you know like the local motion um program that we can test out to see if there are traffic calming uh solutions for that particular area and for the area that Amy Scharf was talking about because I for one across at the top of the bridge because it's so scary to cross below the bridge I'm worried about somebody clipping me at the bottom of that bridge so yeah so so just a final word I appreciate all of your input and your concern and you know sometimes folks don't understand that we can only do what the state law allows us to do and there are there are traffic standards that we have to live with so for those of you who don't see the chat there's been a number of folks wondering if speed limits could be 15 or 20 miles an hour especially near the school municipalities by state law have the ability to set speed limits between 25 and 50 we can't go below 25 that's the lowest speed limit we're allowed to set um everything in the former village is already 25 every street in the village is 25 miles an hour so we've got them posted as as low as we can post them the conversations about crosswalks when the dry bridge was reconstructed probably 15 years ago now um you know we asked for crosswalks across from the corner of railroad street to the corner of union street so there would be a crosswalk there and the state says you can't have a crosswalk there because it doesn't meet the sight distances for a crosswalk you can't see that crosswalk when you're coming over the dry bridge until you get to the top so the state to me it's like well if there's a crosswalk there at least people coming from the school will see the crosswalk and when you get to the top of the bridge you'll see the crosswalk people are going to cross there whether there's a crosswalk or not wouldn't a crosswalk be better you can't put a crosswalk there i asked to can we put a crosswalk at the top of the bridge charlie adams who used to live on swazy court was a trustee when when i was first hired here in 1988 and he grew up there on swazy court and he told me that his mother told him the best place to cross those three was at the top of the dry bridge because you can see in both directions and everybody can see you but no you can't put a crosswalk at the top of the dry bridge because it doesn't meet this the set this the sight distances where the children go down into the field for cross country skiing there's only a crosswalk on the east side of the road there's no crosswalk on the west side of the road unless there's a crosswalk i mean unless there's a sidewalk on the on the on both sides of the road to accept a crosswalk you can't put a crosswalk there so maybe we can think about building across a sidewalk from from a swazy court down to that driveway or whatever you want to call it into that field but there's no cross there's no sidewalk there now so you can't have a crosswalk there we fight this fight on rule 100 trying to get a crosswalk from stow street across to blush hill because people use it well you know and by the time you're done it's a half a million dollar project to build all kinds of sidewalks in order to put a crosswalk across the street so it's very frustrating and i don't i'm not saying this to tell you that we can't do anything i think the idea of the of the sign like we have had on several of the crosswalks on main street we can get that i'm sure we can get that put up at the crosswalk of the school we will certainly get the crosswalks painted there's no question that they've worn off now there's been no school for some time we've you know had highway crew on furlough so we're behind on some things but we can get those kind of things done but there are some things that seem commonsensical that it would be great to put a crosswalk in a particular location but the highway standards that we have to live by as the town won't let a crosswalk be put into those locations so just understand we'll do what we can do but we can't do what we're not allowed to do and crosswalks where there are no sidewalks is one thing that we're not allowed to do i'm just wondering if things have changed here but i'm still getting an echo on my head i can hear you fine you can yeah um perhaps we could suggest to the um state police are patrolling that area to move to various locations up and down so street if maybe that could just change up where people speed up on that straight away whether it's you know parking at where those parking spots are directly under the bridge or on that hill coming down where they used to park where there's a cement blocks in the winter so maybe just switching up their location until we find like a more permanent you know solution or a sign they do move around katie they they are in several places on the street but as i said before you know we i i try to communicate with lieutenant white um and i think it would be a good idea to have him to a select board meeting and have you folks be able to talk to him directly so we'll try to set that up you know in that regard do you want to i mean do you want me to try to get him to come and just do it on a zoom meeting or do you want to wait for him to come in person i mean i'm fine with him coming in on a zoom meeting and then when things come back down and go back to normal coming in regularly on a basis for updates would be seller okay well i i'll make a statement in here um it sounds like we're gonna walk the same path that we've walked several times before trying to mitigate these speeding problems and uh i'm just gonna stand back and wait for these new ideas to be implemented and see where they go and maybe at some point if things don't change we'll circle back around to possibly doing something with a speed fine even posting them on the roads like i said i mean you people are speculating on the fact that you're saying that doubling those fines won't have an impact if you don't know you're just speculating never tried it um and until you do we won't know the results so we'll continue pouring effort into things that we've already done um because if you want a little results i i told you a couple meetings ago if the select board wants to amend the ordinance and deal with fines go ahead and do it and if you're talking about doubling the fines that's very different than what you were saying a few weeks ago where you were talking about 500 dollar fines i'm talking about just raising the fines so that it makes people slow down okay no until the board the rest of the board has any interest in doing this you know there's no sense in entertaining it oh well exhaust these other efforts if they work great if they don't maybe then the board will reconsider to do something that impact people's pocketbooks enough so they pay attention i mean i'll i'll step in and say that i i think i'll i was reacting similar to bill that i think the proposal was a very large fine but um bill what is the how does that work in terms of the breakdown of the fine structure i mean i am interested in potentially raising the speed limit fines but i'm not interested in creating something that is absorbent that impacts lowing people to the point where they can't afford to pull out of fine yeah we we can certainly look at what fines are reasonable and maybe the fines that we have now are are too low um and i don't have a problem looking at the fines but chris i mean in the in the past you were talking about 100 dollar parking ticket fines you know to uh and and i said at that time if you make a fine so that it's so high that a judge will just throw it out it's not worth doing so if you want to get the fines we can look at the fines my question is why are fines supposed to be reasonable it defeats the purpose okay we can talk about we can talk about how reason and time i mean if you don't raise it to a reasonable amount then i don't have any impact laws need to be reasonable chris speed limits need to be reasonable that's why to change speed limits requires an engineering and a traffic study and somebody earlier said that people drive uh that the conditions of the road allow and that's and that's true and that's why speed limits you know i i've brought the manual out many times before you don't set the speed limit for the worst condition on the road you you set it for the reasonable conditions because most people drive the reasonable speed some people drive more than that and that's where you need the fines so if you want to look at fines we can look at fines i can do some research about what other communities have for fines what what levels seem to be reasonable but as i said earlier two meetings ago whether you have a 25 dollar fine or a 50 dollar fine the only time anybody gets a fine is if somebody stops them and writes a ticket and i think enforcement is the biggest issue that we have here we don't have enough enforcement of the rules that we already have yeah i just want to i i just like to say bill that i agree with that i think that um it's important to have a balance between um enforcing the law enforcing the speed limit because what i will say is if people are driving 25 miles an hour the posted speed limit i've been seeing a lot of the notes on the side and as somebody who sees i work from home i see pretty much everybody go by um and when people are driving the speed limit i can i can tell because it looks like a reasonable speed to go down stow street um and i can also anticipate them coming over that hill so i feel a lot more safe when they are just going the posted speed limit i do think that when we start to talk about exorbitant fines for people speeding um like bill said i think a lot of these people really just don't realize how fast they're going um and i do worry about it uh negatively impacting the process because and i'm just one of those positive reinforcement kind of people that's who i am but but i do think that um to balance out uh having more police uh surveillance on that part of stow street it's important not to find them too much because my concern would be that that would build resentment and wouldn't necessarily incentivize driving the speed limit at a certain point so um and it would also make people less likely to buy into future traffic calming options so i think that i guess i would encourage some kind of more even-handed approach is is my final thought um looks like um so my name's obviously not any but i've talked before um i think even if we had somebody sitting on stow street giving out warnings that would have just as big an impact as giving out actual speeding tickets because it's it's the process of getting pulled over that makes people think twice about what they're doing um so it's it i don't think it's about the fines i think it's about policing and and it's about holding people accountable for what they're doing don't have enough police police all the problems that we're seeing now we have that i don't know i guess you're you're kind of echoing there already do you have any we've shut off everything do you have your computer and a computer for lianne on near each other because i can see lianne on the meeting computers are echoing because they're too close to each other what other ones downstairs that's the only thing i can think of mark is just checking corn yeah i didn't think the meeting would be mark mark maybe you should yeah i can uh i can help take over um i i mastered stress asking the same thing so i i think we appreciate everyone's time coming tonight to talk about um issues on snow street as you may have heard we we're here in the similar concerns on the little river in guppel and i think snow street does have a unique situation so i think we'll continue to look at the options and um hopefully the state can help us understand some of the work that's being done on guppel and snow street signage that we've been waiting on um and i do agree that i think forming some kind of group that can help the select board understand some of the options would be helpful so if there's someone on this meeting that wants to help champion that and i can discuss bill um how those groups would be formed and then we can follow up but uh unless anyone says anything else i think uh in terms of time we need to move on to the next to the next item but i really do appreciate our own coming in and we hear you and your concerns and hopefully we can come up with some solutions thank you all so next thing on the select board is the extension of the zumbarn uh entertainment permit um i'm assuming chris will want to uh let me take over for this second um so i guess i'll turn it over to bill to talk about the request and i'm assuming this is similar to the previous permit i'm not sure if there's any changes but i haven't heard anything uh in terms of the last six weeks if there's been any issues which i know there weren't quite a few concerns going into uh the last time yeah um i already know a fisherman both reached out to me and asked if you know they could go ahead and extend this permit um i think that they may have thought that the permit was um um for longer than it was and i went back and forth with them and sent them a copy of the of the minutes where it was clear that the select board approved the entertainment outside for six weeks um i think we still have a couple of weeks to go on the uh six-week time frame but arian know what both said that you know they really needed to be able to communicate with the people that they were working with as far as entertainment was concerned and would like to you know get this cleared up and asked if the select board would allow the entertainment to go through april 30th next year now uh they need an entertainment permit for both indoor and outdoor entertainment uh you can do it all in one permit i think it's pretty clear they're not going to have outdoor entertainment there at you know christmas eve or anything like that but i asked carla and uh caron both uh who you know answer the phones and take comments from the public whether anyone has called to make any complaints or concerns no one has i haven't heard anything from anyone so i just simply told uh arie that um you know go ahead and and ask the select board tonight and if they had any comments or concerns they could be addressed carla has the uh i don't have the permit that was issued in front of me but clearly talked about uh decibel level at the property line and i believe it was two nights a week for six weeks thursday night and one other night i think it was i think arie's on the call so if he wants to chime in maybe that's the best place to start and then the select board can ask questions and members of the public if they're here for this issue can express support or concern so arie why don't you go ahead we can now um is i think my brother's on there i believe he's probably the one right there yeah probably better off to have him articulate our needs he's the okay well grant no sure um yeah and i wrote you guys a email as well on this but i mean like i've said before our business is very much linked with entertainment and food and we're relying on this um to provide this service to our customers to keep this business going especially during covid um without covid you know doing music inside is totally fine and we're set up for that that's our preference um we found over the last um several weeks of trying this out that we had to tinker a little bit with the sound um we've been doing basically we have a bluegrass night on on thursday's and then other than that we've been doing solo singer songwriters on other nights um i've been in close contact um with leanne and chris and you know our other neighbors and checking in with them when we've done these shows to see if they have any issues with what we're doing i've also been down to the property line and monitoring the decibel levels each time um i've gotten to a point where i can tell now that if we based on my system i can shoot out a certain number of decibels and now i've kind of got to the point where i can see if i put out a certain number of decibels it's about 85 at the source i know it's going to be 60 decibel at the property line um again which is a very low level like i i've been down there at the property line where a car drives by and shoots up to 70 75 just to give you a sense of the relative nature of it um and so you know and then we've been i feel like you know we've been able to meet kind of the discussion we had before and establish some better dialogue with our neighbors and i'm hoping that we would be able to keep doing this um through covid um and we're hoping that we could do um you know up to four nights a week in that capacity you know basically doing that kind of full singer songwriters mellow music outside under our tent you know um i've got a lot of different artists that want to play there and you know we just want to create that kind of a experience for our customers and hoping that we might be able to do that um and then in terms of the indoor music i wasn't sure if this was you know it talked to bill and clarified that indeed that was tied in with this so you know i i guess i feel like if we're talking indoor music that you know i don't know what's going to happen with covid but in general i feel like we should be able to do indoor music generally inside i don't i don't believe we ever had a music uh an issue with the indoor music have you have you talked with any of your other neighbors about um upping the number of shows you do per week and did you get a feel for what their thoughts on were that yeah i mean in terms of my other neighbors i've you know the the guptles across the street are very supportive they usually come over and enjoy the music they've you know and they help us they're they're they're very they love music and they come over all the time um that's really the main other and you know the we haven't had any other i don't think in the history of this i've had any other neighbors complain about the sound i mean then my parents and me are the next couple neighbors so there's not a lot of other um you know direct folks that have had any issue that i can that i've had any that i've ever had an interaction with that i've ever had any problem with that um i i will say i went to your first bluegrass night after we had okayed at the last time and i thought it was really well done and if it was okay i liked it cool glad that i didn't notice you there but i probably was somewhere in the background but glad to hear that i mean it did it take a little tweaking there was one or two nights like you know leon mentioned were like a little too loud and i noticed the decibels were a little higher so i you know i i turn it down and we dialed the sound in and it did take a little tinkering but i feel like we really got it figured out now um leon and chris yep um did you hear me yeah that's a lot better i shut off your other device you're good now good okay um yeah you're right it was one night there we had a problem but i have to be honest i was happy with the only a few nights because i have to be honest we can hear it every night that one night it was a little louder so i kind of went and at the point of i thought we had an agreement we're all good so you're all good with two nights yeah i'm all good with two nights but not forever i just want to say i just want to keep that in mind we're not doing forever i hope i want i want to support them for sure i i i got that i i don't want to have for the next 27 summers that it's like that you know it i'll just i'm trying to stay neutral on this because i want my neighbors to be successful me too it's it's one thing if you come down a night or two a month to listen to music that's fine everybody can appreciate that um but if you have to listen to it every night after a while it just it wears on you um it had been great we were we do say they have been great but yeah they just don't want it every night um my wife had said something earlier about if if you were to increase this by one or two nights if it could be revisited again uh in a month and maybe we'll you know it's one of those things you don't know until you try it maybe maybe it'll be fine um but my other what i said to him was i don't think that you should have to pay for a permit every time no if we're going to i already i already told them that from my perspective the permit if it had been approved through april 30th next year it would have been 25 dollars so i i told them they needed to get approval but i wasn't going to charge him a permit for it because they've they've paid for the permit i think okay great because i didn't expect them to you know right so now they're here you know the issue that i thought we were talking about was extending it from the six weeks that was approved that still has probably two weeks to go to the rest of the you know summer and into the fall under the same conditions that it was before that you know i'm sorry i didn't understand that i thought it was going to be more nights if it's only the two nights i'm good with that no i yeah it's really i'm telling you what my understanding was was that it was going to be asked to be extended from the six weeks through the rest of the summer and fall i just heard about the four nights just now okay i have a problem with that right so that's that's where we are at the moment okay and to the point of the guptos and you know i can appreciate the guptos enjoying music they're on the front of the front of the building um they don't get the direct impact that that you do from the back side it rides up this hill she's but i mean aria aria and noa both they've been great been great again i want to support my neighbors sorry you want to talk i just want to give um noa and aria some props i know sometime i've been a little critical of um you know some some of the uh music issues but i know i travel gupto road quite frequently you know i go back and forth home and back and i've been by there as a matter of fact i kind of if there's no one around i i slow my truck down if if my windows rolled up i roll it down and just here and i have barely been able to hear things so i think the sound maybe sometimes it's people aren't playing but i think for the most part what at least i'm hearing and that's kind of offsite which is usually what we're talking about i know we're not going to talk about what the decibel levels are right on site but if it's not traveling and i know chris is probably the one that's it's most affected with sound coming up his hill but i think for most of the neighbors i think it's been good i think you guys have done a good job i'm i'm for at least extending the permit based upon what we had before i know we're hearing now two more days but i think your neighbor kind of has a little bit of a concern with that i think we did a give and take on that so i i just like to hang with that for a little while make me feel happy for a little bit sorry so a couple of things here just unpack you know this is these are extraordinary times right now in our industry and i realize a lot of people in here have government jobs have construction jobs their job may have changed but they're not on life support a lot of construction guys business is doing better than ever we are seriously hurting right now and the difference from us to do a music night we didn't experiment last wednesday because we said we were going to just push it and do three nights because we had we didn't realize the way the permit was exactly and we said you know what let's cancel wednesday night our business went down 70 and it's already down so then it dropped an additional two we're at a business level so it's not like we want to do this we need to and when we originally went in we asked for just to be able to do music and we said well and our understanding was oh no we'll give you guys two nights as a trial see how that goes i understand it's a bit of a disturbance i also have a feeling you know haven't grown up here you know Gupta road used to be a lot quieter road back when it was golden horn east and we were kids and we'd play on the road it's gotten louder and louder it's a pretty steady stream of traffic the car tire noise at least at my house is a lot louder than any music we play and i get it's a bit of a nuisance but it's also a matter of you guys saying all right well then put us out of business and let's see who ends up in there next and you know what can they do i mean i moved back here eight years ago and had this opportunity to open a place next to the house i grew up in and have had a room in my entire life i own land there that i want to build on and plan on being here my entire life and it's just this you know kind of dream come true scenario that's a ton of work i haven't taken a dime out of the place and we're just trying to you know make it happen and you know last week or last select board meeting i was pretty disheartened by the lack of support not from my neighbors but just in general from the select board and i appreciate that you know we had to prove ourselves a little bit i think we've done that we're again we're also not trying to do shows right now we'd love to it would be great for us if we could throw a big party once a while outside late night lights sound everything that would be awesome but realize that isn't going to happen right now we're literally just doing dinner shows where a person comes in they play the people come in they have dinner they sit and enjoy the show and everyone's gone at nine and when we don't do that people are sort of like you know what i'm not going to go out to dinner it's just with all this stuff in the news and everything that's going on it's just it ain't really worth it to us i'll just stay home i'll grab takeout you know then they don't get any you know they don't get any beverages they don't get dessert and it's it's just not really a viable business for us i thought we'd be back to normal by june and then i thought we'd be there by august you know now who knows and this winter is not going to be easy for us we've got a few months here where we can actually try to get a little money in the bank so we're not just begging the government for more money and i don't know it just be nice you know i feel like with chris and leanne you know you've got our number now and we will you know do anything we can the second you tell us something's bugging you turn it down adjust it i mean i don't know know what can we go a little quieter even i mean you know what can we do on you know maybe these other nights we can get it even more tight and quieter just something that gives us you know something to bring people out and come in and uh you know that's kind of where we're at with things but it's not it's a lot of work for us to move everything outside and do the things outside we got to move the equipment in and out every night it's it's a ton and then the last thing i want to just mention too that we keep we don't seem to mention is these artists that that's what they do for a living and they don't have a whole lot of options right now either um they're not getting ppp loans and you know these big these big government bailouts they're just trying to you know hey i got 150 bucks tonight sweet you know if i can do that a few nights a week i might be able to pay rent eat and it's uh it's a serious thing for them too so you know just a big picture thing and i do you know chris and leanne have been great and all our neighbors have been great and uh you know i guess we're just we're just asking to i mean i don't know what do you think i think some sort of continuous sort of a trial period through the season we're kind of open to that if we could separate from the indoor music and um but we'd like to be able to like get some more people in the door yeah i mean one thing is timing is i mean we're come mid october we couldn't pay people to come to an outdoor show so we're not talking about and i don't think you know given what i see what's happening with covet i don't think we're going to be doing big you know shows inside maybe some real mellow stuff really spaced apart i don't even know what's going to happen the fall for restaurants i think is a really scary time november slow anyway get with covet i mean it's going to be really tough so we're trying to bank whatever we can right now because the next month month and a half it's like you know this is our time to make some money i mean we're asking for a time bound chance to do you know four nights a week i mean i'd restrict that as much as i need to be able to offer entertainment while people eat if it's just you know acoustic music which is what we've been doing anyway we could probably keep that you know i know i can get the decibel level even lower than we've been doing i wanted to kind of see what an ideal level would be i know i can get it even lower you know we want to something is better than nothing for us and it means it can be the different it like i was saying it's like we see a dramatic difference because people don't really want to go out they'll go out they need an excuse you know for our clientele they need an excuse to come out and it's you know the next few months are really critical for us so if you guys would consider like a time bound like you know through the you know into the early fall you know giving us that four nights a week keeping that decibel level down let us you know be in touch with the vans and all our neighbors and make sure it works you know we'll we'll keep it even lower um i mean i'm we're all ears we're trying to we're trying to work with everybody um and we can we can make it work right and we want you guys to succeed too i mean we're all in business we all know that can we do a month to month and i agree can we just keep in contact so what you suggest is like i said earlier i wouldn't be opposed to a four night thing uh give it a month trial it goes um and if we have issues you know we'll we'll work it out with you contact and we've done that and i think i think in all honesty you've got you people are going to do everything you can to keep us shut up you couldn't buy us out you know i was going to be my next suggestion take it all and we'll get the hell out and you can raise hell everything for all right here um so yeah let's compromise here we'll we'll can we do a month a month can we check it we check um no no no what do you what do you feel about um us approving i guess i assume this would be the month of august if we did it um for i mean i know you have to book out so i don't know if that's difficult for you to to agree to because we'd have to look at when the next select board meeting or i think that's going to be i i a i want to say uh christin leon thank you for offering that because i think that helps for the conversation um far mark mark hold on we understand nose right and you're not you're not going to book people outside in october um i would just soon leave it like this go ahead bill you're going to say something i was just going to say that i went out in the other room the next select board meeting is after next week is september eighth unless you have a special meeting so if you come through you know through the first week of september then you could reevaluate on the eighth part of the issue they have is that you know if you make through august 31st labor days late this year there's two weeks between that and the next select board meeting so instead of the month would you be willing to go to like september seventh yeah absolutely and just just revisit it and everybody you know i'm sure everybody's going to work towards um this thing you know working out for everybody so i don't think i don't see what we'll have a problem come september eight whatever it was you said yep can i have to say guys i appreciate you guys contacting us about that special event can i make a suggestion that maybe this permit would be allowed to go through september but we check in on the eighth select board meeting and they would know that you know the permits are potentially at risk if there are problems but it doesn't require them to have to um and request an extension on the eighth just because i'm sure no i i mean i have a music venue though and i know that you have to book months out sometimes maybe it's a little easier right now with covid but um do you have concerns if we said that we could only get you to september seventh would that make it difficult for you to plan september i mean what i would probably do here is i would plan out through september and then i would do my everything possible to keep you know he's everyone happy and i think i can do that and my expectation is that if you guys you know if there's any issues that i would hear about it and and i really think that we can address it and you know i'm hoping that i would before the select board meaning that i would know if there's an issue but i really i feel like because yeah you got to i mean there's some shows i want to book you know september is like the last month i would have to book some music so there's a few artists i'd love to get in there and and book some shows you know if i screw it up or if we can't come to terms i know that i have to keep you know everyone happy so if we can't do that i know that i'm not going to be able to keep doing it and so we're going to be on the line to make sure that we keep it contained and keep you guys i don't have any problems i mean here's the way i look at it unless there's unresolvable issues you know there's no reason to to waste everybody's time i mean if that if something could be drafted up that says unless both parties just can't come to terms this thing is good till the end of the year here or you know till the end of the weather whether that's what i'm thinking um you know what i mean you understand what i'm saying yeah i think we did the last permit contingent on select board continued approval if there were any issues i can't remember exactly what the wording was bill i don't know if you could speak to that but um i you know i i am completely i'm unfortunately in the same business as you guys so i'm so i'm just understanding how bad that business is um so i really appreciate um your neighbors uh looking to help you guys out so i don't think there's a select board member i don't even need to have bill tell us how to work if any select board member would want to make a motion um i think we could probably get there now yeah if you want to make a motion to allow it through september 8th i think i can write it such that the select board has the ability to revisit it if if necessary so i think we're all understanding the general consensus and leon and chris are trying to be generous as much as they can but they want a little bit of a safety valve if something should go wrong so if you make it through september i think it can be written in such a way that makes everybody happy as i said i haven't heard any complaints so i think you'll probably be able to get through it no i'm sorry it sounded like we were saying that maybe this could go the approval would be past september but we would just be checking in at select board meeting that's what i'm going to say well i can't we just have it through the end of october and at the next the september select board meeting we'll just see an update on how it goes and if it's going well i'm sure if you go to the end of october that's going to cover i don't think there's going to be too many outdoor concerts in november that's what i need to remember like to make a motion i agree with that yep i'll i'll make i'll make a motion to allow the zen barn to hold outdoor musical events to four nights a week through through octo october 31st and to be reviewed upon at the september uh select board meeting is there a second um is there any further discussion the only just a second mark um is it all right with the select board because you know no one and only both talked about indoor music and they've offered that in the past the only thing that spoke to indoor music in the past was their zoning permit but as i stated at the last meeting the there is an entertainment permit and you're required you know mark your your entertainment at the reservoir has always been indoor and you've needed to get an entertainment permit for it so for the purposes of consistency i would like to have the permit allow indoor music it will have a content that the you know the doors have to be shut just like the planning commission already said on the zoning permit or the drb i should say and that the same decibel levels uh that see 60 decibels at the at the property line and then that way they're able to transition from outdoor to indoor without having any problems and you know the indoor stuff uh i don't think there's been really any real problems with that in the past so i'd like to just include it all in one permit if we can i think we need to amend my motion to include uh indoor music through what was it through April 30th April 30th yeah i can figure it out mark in terms of writing um any further discussion all those in favor please say aye hi hi great thank you very much thank you already know for working with your neighbors and uh luck with everything and hope you guys get it i appreciate it guys and i didn't know about the entertainment permit that $25 so i'm going to take the uh three years we didn't pay and i'm going to chip it in toward those fancy $10,000 crosswalk signs you're buying get out of here thanks a lot everybody really appreciate thanks um chris i think your mic's working again so if you want to take the meeting back over yeah yeah that's fine i appreciate that thanks for filling in for me there and i apologize for whatever happened and uh before we move on here i'd like to ask carla uh karen seemed to resolve the problem what the heck was it she felt you had two devices going they were too close to each other so she shut one of them down so basically leanne i think maybe was also logged into zoom and even though her mic was muted the audio is picking up on your mic and creating this crazy echo and so you usually kind of do zoom meetings going with audio playing uh or makes that that problem i mean we shut off everything there like our phones are tv so we've got a result and that's great and i apologize for mishap um so the rotary club entertainment permit anybody know what that's about you brought to the table carla or yeah i haven't here okay they're asking for live music similar to what they did the last time they asked for your permission um they have three concerts august 6 august 13th and august 20th that they usually do in the park but they are in touch with either pilgrim park or farce fields do it there um these concerts would be driving with masks highly recommended and social distancing in place for parking and sitting yeah i thought that i thought that uh somebody from the rotary club would be on the on the call um you know august 6th is just three days from now and they asked as carla said to do this um they had asked to have concerts at rusty park or park in july and uh that just wasn't no go there was you know they were they were suggesting that they were going to limit the number of people but you know there was no way you could keep people away from there so um we said no to that the the ifad commissioners uh and then they wrote uh week or so ago and said well you know we're not going to do anything at the park we want to have it but you know i'm not sure what we're permitting now we can i don't think it hurts to do it but uh i would think that they would know by now what they're going to do it at farce field or at the park if they're really going to do it so i haven't heard anything from them for a while so i don't know what to tell you um who polls is there any buddy from the rotary that would if they're having it down in farce field no they've had events there before we ever had history of any any complaints or anything about late night music or anything like that no and this wouldn't be late i think it's you know six to eight thirty or something like that okay yeah it's it's really a to mirror what they used to usually would do at the uh gazebo in rusty park or park with the farmers market on thursday nights but um you know we permitted it when they did they had the uh pull the trailer through the town and then they had a concert over at pilgrim park um i didn't hear anything about it whether it went well or not but i'm not sure where they're having this so if you want to just permit it i don't i don't think it hurts to permit it to say the select board gives them permission to do it we'll contact them and say and have it at either place as far as we're concerned but uh yeah sure as long as they've got a couple of designated places we just don't want to give them a permit for wherever right so yeah so if somebody'd like to make a motion then um farce field and what was the other place carla somebody just said in the chat that it's at farce field pilgrim park ariel who works in our office and is in rotary and she said farce okay did we get the did we get the times for this event i'm sorry seven to eight thirty p.m well somebody needs to make a motion then for uh entertainment permit at farce field the sixth thirteenth and twentieth between seven and eight thirty correct carla yes don't move all right again all right uh any further discussion being none none all those wish to approve say hi hi hi right uh next on the item list is a prohibition pig on street seating request is that another you carla no i saw eric warnstead on the call earlier but he seems to have dropped off yeah i think he was having phone issues he texted me and said he was having some phone issues i think bill has some info on that so um we could go to a week ago today i got an email from a couple of residents complaining that the prohibition pig had set up tables on the sidewalk on main street uh not this past weekend but a week ago and the people complained that they were forced to you know walk around parked cars into main street to get where they were going so i contacted eric and i and i told him i said you know you don't have a permit we've allowed um you know tends to be put up outdoor seating to be expanded on your own property um i said the select board did talk about potentially allowing you to use uh elm street and some other considerations for stow street uh given the construction and just traffic in general uh having um on you know having seating on main street seems impractical there but i told him i said in in any regard no matter where we're talking about you can't set up tables on the sidewalk we can't have pedestrians being forced to walk into the street to get where they're going so uh he got back to me and said that he would you know be interested in potentially some on street um use the parking spaces on on on street i asked him i said it would be helpful if you would send a little sketch tell us how many places that you were thinking of uh using how many parking spaces how many seats were you talking about and then i reminded him that you know this is to uh replace indoor seating not supplemented so in other words i said if if you've got a permit for a 60 seat restaurant and you're going to put 20 seats out in the in the street you can only have 40 inside you you can only have 60 seats all together i didn't hear anything from him and he was on tonight as uh carla indicated but he's not here anymore so i don't know if he gave you any information lack i i really don't know what to say beyond that yeah well we did talk about it a little bit um i know that he said that those seats out front his manager they had talked about the idea of it and his manager just said it so he wasn't correct he didn't apologize for doing it and had him removed right away um i think as everyone knows uh or probably does know that the restaurant industry is having problems um and part of it is what's happening with the rule book on social distancing which i think is the right thing to do but what it's creating is we you can't seat any of your bar seating and he has the problem that he has very limited outdoor space i'm making almost all of my sales which i'm still off 40 to 50 percent with mostly outdoor seating he has that ability in the back but his front restaurant which was more of his business had no outdoor seating previously um i thought he mentioned to me that it was two parking spaces he was hoping for um i don't know if he was looking for anything more and i did see him earlier and i was hoping he would be here to tell us what he was looking for but um i know that he did mention that erlington has allowed him to do i believe parking spaces in front of under the wood burlington because that also has the same problem he has outdoor seating on a regular basis and and that was one of the things they've been doing to try to help the industry um they actually built little parking there like a little platform which i know the construction might not allow for that but um i know i honestly don't know exactly what he was hoping to ask for without sketch well um i guess a possibility and and i understand that there may be some reluctance to approve something that you don't really understand but if the select board is generally agreeable to allowing use of some parking spaces on elm street you could authorize um you could you could authorize that permission to do that provided that staff work out the details with him and as i said before you know we've got to be careful there's there's water and wastewater allocations and in the number of seats that he's able to have is supposed to be inclusive whether it's inside or outside um steve's still on the call here um and we'll have to work out with him you know as he's trying to provide seating for the main restaurant um how can he serve the main if he if it is the main restaurant is he able to provide service on to elm street evidently he's using some of the space between the two buildings now for an outdoor seating steve right right so we were out there uh measuring for garland um a little over a week ago and um so there's the seating at the annex in the back on elm street um that i think everybody is seen in their patio area between the sidewalk and the porch and then they've added three or four tables uh rod iron tables in the area between the annex and the building in the front uh mostly under the roof so it has some cover from the weather um i'm i'm concerned about uh anything that might involve the parking spaces on elm street up next to the main building because of the proximity to the intersection and the activity with construction i know uh i've come out of there a couple times and uh i think there there'd be a potential conflict if if those spaces would be used so i think the spaces would have to be further back uh closer to the annex so you know i haven't been any part of any conversations with eric so i can't speak to what he's looking for but um i think we'd have to be pretty careful about how it would be laid out let me ask a couple of stupid questions um i'm assuming two parking spaces also means the sidewalk well between the parking spaces and the restaurant no oh just the sidewalk the sidewalk would have to be just the parking just in this tree sidewalk stays open so the server would have to come you know from the restaurant cross the sidewalk and then sort of in this in the street um you really got to keep the the sidewalk open there's no way no that was why i asked the question concerned that the sidewalk wouldn't stay open um so does it is does it make any sense to with the with the village parking lot right next door there uh is that too far away from the restaurant or does it make sense to rather than take it to parking spots on elm street to give them to in that parking lot does that benefit them well the parking lot has uh i can't remember whether there's different time restrictions in the parking lot than there is on the street we don't really enforce parking anyway um and then that you know that parking lot is it's the funds parking lot so there's a different board involved i think it's a little far away too but especially if he's trying to service it from the front restaurant i mean how are people protected on on the street like that i mean it from possible action vehicle driving buyers yeah well we'd have to talk about that we'd have to you know probably put up some cones at the very least and and uh you know the tables should be close to the curb uh there's a lot of issues it's just you know i'm i'm trying to i'm kind of responding a little bit to the conversation that the select board had a couple of meetings ago and just trying to figure out a way if there's if there's a way possible to help somebody to do some business if we help i'd like to help i'm not saying that we absolutely can do it but uh he's not on the phone now or not not on the on the computer now so we can't ask him direct questions so it's either we pass over and say no and you know deal with it next monday because we have a meeting on the 10th or you can authorize staff to try to work it out and if we think it's something that makes sense allow us to do it so it's really in your court at this point so i don't want to sound too hypothetical here but um if we pass the permit let's say pass the permit give them two on-street sites and some drunkard fool runs over somebody while they're sitting there eating their meal would the town be liable for that because we gave the permit i can't say no i mean whether we're liable or not i don't know but could we be sued yeah absolutely it's that you don't there's no protection from lawsuits you know people can sue whoever they want okay and and you know there's a risk there's clearly a risk so what's the ward's pleasure sorry i i got disconnected um i i like the idea that we try to just have the town work with eric and try to help him figure that out i don't think we're gonna run into any kind of problem with um with seat count because you can't even seat bar seating i don't think that's gonna change maybe if it does the social distance seems he's lost at least half of the tables in the restaurant so i don't think we're gonna have a number a number of seats problem um he's also going to be combating weather because i'm doubt he's going to try to put a 10 over this in the next couple months so i would make a motion that the town work with prohibition pig to allow up to three parking spaces that looked on google mass looks like there might be three there next to the building i think two isn't enough um because you have to have six foot between parties and i think a typical parking space is like 19 feet or 18 feet um so i would say three spaces work with the town and try to help them out see if we can do something for them i second that motion okay any further discussion you can whoever works with them can they just update us on you know effects how it goes and what was like the final outcome and what not uh yeah i'm wondering if it makes sense to uh try to work it out first figure out what the what the layout is uh and if bill and steve you feel that you know it's as safe as it can be um then draft up something that says we're gonna allow you to do this uh bring it for the bring it to the board at the next meeting for our signature or is that easy looking for something sooner does that even make sense i just know that we're running out of summer um like they alluded to in the other present bar you probably he's probably only got a month and a half of seating that that maybe that's maybe he's given up on the idea of even doing this there because he's still late in the game on it but i i would suggest that we just approve it contingent on working it out with bill and steve and trust him that you know whatever they would have presented us down the road at another meeting that you know will be agreed to but maybe we could put it contingent on if there's any reason somebody has a problem with it we can bring it up in the next select board meeting but allow them to at least get started and do something i agree with mark i think we need to play shape we can and we just gotta you know if they're gonna if if prohibition pigs gonna do something they're gonna want to act quickly and let's get it done if if the town officials you know have a problem with it we could speak about that next week that's fair alissa you had something to say i was just echoing i've hesitated on if to weigh in because i haven't spoke with ark recently but i had back at the end of june um called bill and sent him the information i had spoken with the manager who had been interested on the elm street setting so i just really applaud the approving it so that they have the options and i do know it then in a follow-up had gotten to barb and woody talking and potentially there being some barricades that could also help support this um so like i said i just appreciate what you all are doing and totally respect the safety needs but also think um unfortunately didn't all get packaged up well tonight which is why again i was also going to defer to eric but this has been something they've been thinking about for over a month and like it was said there had been i think some other conversations too okay thank you all right the motion has been managed in seconded um no more no more discussion um all those who wish to approve say hi hi hi motion taxes all righty last but not least a couple items there of managers items on it engagement letter first go ahead bill you're muted oh you're muted okay i sent this out to you this afternoon as i said the the audit is newly complete just in the transition from regular meetings to zoom meetings because of co-vid i just failed to get this before you it's a standard engagement letter spells out the scope of services and everything that the auditor is going to do the free changement uh is uh $22,700 that's what we put in the budget this year because we had this information going into the year so i would just ask the select board to approve the engagement letter and authorize me to sign it on behalf of the town bill moved a second you're muted chris find the right button so anyway somebody already second mark already seconded it so uh we're off and running all those who wish to approve say hi hi hi thank you okay thanks bill um so the last thing on the item is uh nick extending the rec program yeah so nick is here um as i think you probably all know school has been delayed till uh september 8th and um i talked to nick a week or so ago right after i heard about it and nick had already sprung into action and had already been working on a plan so why don't you just go ahead nick and tell him what we're talking about and what you'd like to do okay thank you guys um so i'm trying to bill this afternoon and i think he sent in to you but it's just the one pager um going over the purpose of it it's basically summer camp um you know as it has been for the past eight weeks uh just just a smaller size due to staff availability um a lot of even though uh covid's very present in active day a lot of colleges are still accepting students back so we're losing a lot of our staff uh back to college um and then the ones that are staying home uh and working remotely uh and some of the our high school staff that are a little bit um more mature uh we'll be running this camp it'll it'll host 44 kids um instead of the original uh 101 125 that we were able to hold um they'll be at two locations uh anderson and uh wesley we got confirmation that we could use that church again for the additional two weeks um outside of that um there isn't anything that's changed too much we're gonna charge $100 a week per resident um and $150 for non-residents and that projected to it no additional costs to the taxpayers this this two weeks will pay for itself any additional ability for new new kids you full up um i mean what if what if some of the parents or whatever reason pull their kids at the end of the regular season um how would you fill that void yeah so i should have specified in the registration so since it can only hold 44 kids uh registration will open up like it does on town meeting day next monday at 7 p.m and it'll be like town meeting day first come first serve based on who's interested and who gets the spot i sent a survey out a week ago uh got a huge response back looks like it's gonna be popular it's probably gonna be wait listed um i anticipate those 44 slots selling out very quickly but if they don't sell out or if somebody leaves the program you'll you'll probably have a waiting list and be able to fill that slot right absolutely yeah yeah the only downside from my perspective is that it's you know 44 kids i think that that the survey that nick sent out indicates there's probably more demand than that but in such a short time frame we we just don't have the ability to turn around and and hire additional staff to be able to take care of more than the 44 kids and because you know locations are an issue uh you can only have what 25 students at a location anyway or something like yeah 25 staff and kids right so i think this is the the best that we can do on such short notice um i did feel it necessary to come before the select board just to make sure that you know you're on board with us uh going forward with it our typical summer rec program is eight weeks and uh there will still be one gap week right that we're not going right up to the day school opens it's still going to be like normal where there'll be one week of nothing right yeah so staff's recommendation is to approve this to allow us to to implement what nick has put together um and um you know because there there's a demand for it i think that you know we could sell more slots if we had more staff in more places but we just don't have that luxury so emotion needs to be made then to extend the rec program to the dates or as we need to date yeah for traditional weeks uh starting and ending uh august 17th to the 28th to extend it those two weeks and make that motion extend it the two weeks second any further discussion are your are your staff trained in why sit down there i didn't know if you could get any any kind of volunteers or whatever background checks and all that need to be done yeah all right all right so motion has been made and seconded um any further if there's no further discussion then we'll put it to bed all those who wish to approve would say aye hi hi pass it and with the heads up um we're not prepared to go into the details tonight but nick will probably be back at next week's meeting for another those things that we might be trying to do into the fall um but we're not ready to talk about that yet but you know with with school only being in session with one day a week for each child uh you know there's there's demand for um for programming and and care we don't know yet how we can meet it or what we're going to do but nick will probably be back next week with at least a conversation about what we might be able to do going forward so uh just a heads up yep okay i appreciate that and anything else from anybody i'll close it out all right well i appreciate you all being patient with me there through my computer dilemma uh i'll try to have my act together a little better next time mr technology oh yeah you know me right i'm good with a shovel in the ditch but when it comes to this stuff it's out of my league so i'll take a motion to adjourn and by the way just a real quick comment did anyone get another one of those email things that have been coming around the do you did net net you know i forget from whom yeah i got one that's pretending to be chris or about an urgent matter it's kind of getting out of control yeah must be i'm a pretty popular guy well i've gotten exactly the same email from almi too yeah just say no to all of it yeah yeah okay thanks for the warning mic okay take a uh the second on the motion earlier adjourn i'll second all right buddy else all those in favor hi hi thanks everyone thank you all bye night