 I see Lori back there. First of time, we'll get started with the opening ceremonies while the last couple people get checked in. I wanted to welcome everybody tonight. I'm Steve Eustice, your moderator. We're going to do the pledge, and then the Essex High School Chamber Choir will do a couple of songs, the Star Spangled Banner and such, after the pledge. So why don't we all stand up now and follow me in the Pledge of the Allegiance? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And please stay standing. Oh, say can you see what's up from whose broad stripes and bright stars. Please be seated. All right. I'm going to start by introducing Village President George Tyler, who will introduce the head tables and others. Thank you, Steve, and welcome, everybody. Bit windy out there tonight, huh? I'd like to start to my left at the far end, recording Secretary Kathy Ainsworth, Village Clerk Susan McNamara Hill, Deputy Manager Greg Duggan, Sarah Macy, our finance director, and Mr. Evan Teach, our unified manager. And on my right, far down, Lori Houghton, who is also one of our state representatives, Trustee Dan Caron, and Trustee and Village Vice President Andrew Brown. I also have a few recognitions out in the audience tonight, if that's OK. Bear with me. I would like to recognize, I'm not sure if Chief Gary is here, but Chris Gaborio, Library Director Wendy Husko, Chair of the Brown L Board, Christine Packard. Is, I'm not sure if Brad Luck is here tonight. Maybe I should. OK, he's not here. He is. Brad, good to see you, Brad. And I also are amazing guru of all things related to water in the environment, Mr. Jim Jutris. I also want to give a special thanks to our highway superintendent, Mr. Rick Jones. Rick, I think on behalf of everyone in the village, we appreciate the work you and your crew did this winter. It was a very hard winter. I also want to recognize Mr. Representative, State Representative Dylan Jambotista. Dylan, you out there? Yep, Dylan, welcome. We also have two candidates for the Board of Trustees with us tonight, Amber Tebow, Amber, and Raj Chawla. Raj, I also want to give some recognition to town selectman, Andy Watts. Andy, up in the chief seas. Good to see you. OK, I'm not sure if our newly elected selectman, Annie Cooper and Patrick Murray, are in the audience. Good. OK, they're busy already doing their select board work. That's good to see. I also want to welcome and recognize the newly elected board of the Essex Town Selectman and former trustee Elaine Haney. Elaine, did you want to say? I'm going to go against decorum and speak to the audience for just a moment if that's OK. Sounds good. All right, thank you. So I just have something I want to read to everyone. So last year, when voters elected me to the town select board, as well as the village board of trustees, I had hoped that I would be able to serve as a bridge between the two communities and the two boards, and that is what happened. I brought village insights and information to the select board and I brought a townwide perspective to the trustees. As a result, both boards knew more about our communities and made more informed decisions. I am very grateful to everyone from our communities who honored me by electing me to those boards. Well, I would have been very happy to continue serving on two boards for the remaining two years of my terms, but a different call to service has arisen. And this past Monday, the select board unanimously elected me chair of the town select board. So I'm deeply honored to have been chosen to lead the board and I want to do my very best to make sure I serve the community well. So being a general member of two boards was challenging but manageable. So it can be done. But the select board chair requires a significantly higher level of commitment. So because I want to ensure that I can serve our entire community with the kind of focus being chair requires and give all of Essex the leadership it deserves, I've decided to step down from my seat on the village board of trustees. Knowing myself, my work, my family commitments and the demands of an elected position, I believe that serving only on one board is the best option for me at this time. So the board of trustees will appoint someone to replace me for the remaining two years of my term. I want to thank everyone in the village who has supported me as a trustee for the last seven years. I want you all to know that I will continue to represent you to the best of my ability on the select board as I have for the last year and will continue to bring all the experience from my time on the village board to the table at 81 Main Street. And I also wanted to thank the trustees and make you all aware. I'm not sure if you know the high quality and level of dedication of your leaders that are here on the board of trustees. I joke around a lot that we are in a bubble because the board of trustees is a very friendly, collegial, respectful group and we all get along and you don't see that on every single board. So it's a wonderful example. Over the years, we've had our share of heated discussions and split boats and there was some shouting from time to time, but it never diminished our respect for each other and we never once forgot that we work for you. And working with this board has been an absolute pleasure and I will remember it forever as one of the best public service experiences I've ever had. So thank you, thank you and don't forget, you are town residents too. So come see me on the select board because we have a lot of work to do together. So thank you very much. And I've got one last person to recognize and I said I wasn't gonna do this at a board meeting but I didn't say anything about not doing it at an annual meeting. I'd like to give special recognition to someone who's been a statesman and a hero for this entire community. Someone who has been in the forefront of fostering a new spirit of trust and cooperation between the village and the town and without whose intelligence, integrity, and heart of gold most of the progress we made would not have been possible. This is someone who hung in me through many long hours worrying about what's gonna happen if IBM closes. How are we gonna keep global foundries here? What are we gonna do about their water permit? What do we do about recruiting a new unified manager? How do we handle all the stuff that seems to keep coming at us? How do we foster a spirit of cooperation between the two boards and keep small arguments and other issues from knocking us off track? This is someone who understands that he instinctively understands that there are lots of ways to get things done in life but always the best way is with truth, honesty and unwavering sense of humor. Someone with whom, with I first met him, I didn't understand why his lovely wife Allison, which he saw in the guy, but now I do. It was someone I wasn't expecting to meet on the odd journey through local government but now who has become a dear friend and finally someone who appreciates the deep existential humor of the three students. I'm talking about with my good close friend and colleague, former chair and current very contented member of the Essex Town Select Board, Mr. Max Levy. Thank you, George. So now we'll start the main part of the meeting. I'm gonna start by reading the instructions on how we're gonna run here. So Robert's Rules is the basic rules of order for this meeting except for where Vermont law takes precedence. This body cannot change state law but can change Robert's Rules with a two thirds vote if desired. All motions, remarks and discussion should be addressed to me. Please stand up, wait for the microphone, then give your name and speak in a loud voice so that your comments may be heard by everyone. An article must be moved, seconded and restated by me before it is under consideration and debate on an article may begin. Articles may be amended and amendments amended once. Amendments must be germane. A division of the house can be requested by the moderator or one voter before or after a voice vote. State law allows seven people to request a paper valid unless this body has made other arrangements at the beginning of the annual meeting. Debate may be cut off by a motion and a two thirds vote by calling the question. The person making this motion must have the floor at the microphone. Reconsideration of an article is allowed by state law until we reach a point in the meaning where another article is under consideration. This means if you have voted down an article, a motion can be made to reopen consideration of this article by a person on the prevailing side. However, once I have placed another article before you, no more action can take place regarding the article at this meeting. State law prohibits consideration of articles that have not been warned. This means that you cannot take binding action at the end of the meeting during article four. My role as moderator is to help you accomplish the business you intend to do. Please raise your hand and ask questions if you don't understand what is happening, if you think what is happening is wrong or if you want to do something but don't know technically how to proceed. Please tell me if you think I'm ruling improperly. Above all, let's be civil and respectful of all of our opinions. And I'd like to, I think everybody knows the drill, but the people who are not registered voters are supposed to sit in the back where the couple select board members are sitting. All right, time to get started. Article one, shall the voters act upon the report of the auditor? Do I have a motion for article one? Name? Mike Plagueman. Now that I can focus. Second? Bob? Bob O'Neill. All right. Article one has been moved and seconded. Would anyone like to speak to article one? Looks like no one is wanting to speak to article one so we can move to the vote. Do you want to speak? Nope, okay. It was fake. All right, so all right. All those in favor of article one signify by saying aye. Opposed nay. Article one passes unanimously. So we'll move on to article two. Shall the voters approve an annual general fund budget in the amount of 5,164,913 dollars for fiscal year July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020, 3,556,422 dollars of which is to be approved by the levied in taxes against the village grand list. Do we have a motion for article two? Bob O'Neill moved article two. Do we have a second? Allison Wormer second. All right, we're going to start with article two discussion by the village president making a short presentation. Very short. Do you have the slides? Do you want me to do them? Okay. I can, I think. Hang on a second. Good, and I need to go down. Let's tap on it and it goes. All right. Is that better? They can't see that part. We won't show them that. Okay. And that should be. Gotcha. So very quickly I will get on to the challenges that we faced on the budget that's in front of you tonight. The major challenge was how do we spend more on infrastructure and like other Chittenden County communities, we have a ton of traffic. We have bad roads. We have bad winters, lots of salt, lots of damage done to our roads. How do we invest more in our infrastructure? We wanted to try to move a little bit more from our general fund budget into our capital budget in order to catch up with things. And so that's why we're asking kind of for a general fund increase. The other issue, one of the other drivers was that we had some personnel changes this year. Sometimes when we have personnel changes, it triggers a few, an increase or a change in healthcare costs. So those were the two big financial drivers. One of the other challenges was how do we continue to move forward with our initiative for shared services and shared costs with the town, but without going too fast that we hit a political bump but fast enough to keep the momentum going. And you know, guys, if I miss something, jump right in. Okay, just jump right over here. So the general fund budget this year total is $5,164,913. And you can see that that's a fairly $210,000 change from last year. The dollar amount that we're actually increasing is from $867 per average village home to $892, and that's an average of $24.36 for the average village home. That's not a great, it was a bigger increase than what we usually like to see. We usually like to see a closer to 3.5%, but overall, if we look at the tax rate, the tax rate stayed was really just a change from 0.3% to 0.31%. So we kind of thought that was tolerable. As I said, these are the major drivers of the budget increases this year. The biggest one, as I said, is capital costs. The second largest one is health insurance. Some of the others, we put them up there because we wanted to get, give you a sense of some of the interesting things that are going on. The emerald ash borer is something that's coming our way. We needed to put a little bit more money into that. We had scheduled some increases in the fire department salaries, so we wanted to honor that. And if anyone has a question about something, I guess I could just take it really quickly if it doesn't get us too far. Okay, good. So this is the pie chart, showing sort of a total distribution of local property taxes by far. The piece on your right is the school tax, and then we see town taxes, and we see village of Essex Junction taxes. Total taxes on an average village home of $280,000 is $6,638. This gives you a sense of how we distribute, how the taxes are distributed, what the costs are. If you look at the top, you will see that the street department has zero, even though the street department is one of our biggest budget items. That's because we take the street department budget after the trustees approve it, and we just, we move it into the town general fund where it is paid out of the town general fund. So it's a cost that's distributed throughout the community. And so even though we need your permission to spend that much money and budget for that much money, we don't need to raise the money that's necessary for the street department. That's raised by the town. This slide, some of you were at town annual meetings, saw the same slide. This is the savings that we've achieved through consolidation over the last five years. And it's been very significant. You see the most significant costs that have been in our shared administration, which is what we intended all along. And I think it's been working out really well. The others are we've had some, we have continuing costs with stormwater that in public works that we're gonna be seeing for the next few years. And this is the savings just this year alone, 0.69 million in consolidation with the town, consolidation mainly of administrative services. I wanted to put this in here. Normally we throw enterprise in funds and at the beginning of the discussion, I wanted to take it out and put it at the end of the discussion. Enterprise funds, we struggled to come up with the definition of what it means in their self-supporting activities funded through user fees. In other words, something like the operation of our water treatment. Money was still left in the budget, but assigned to, I believe, the building maintenance or general housekeeping. Did that, was that tabled? Was there any discussion of that? Is there still talk of offering resident feed and non-resident town members for abuse of the parks and recreation department? I'm just kind of curious as to where we're at with this budget. Thanks for that. So within this budget, the way that things have operated in the past, we'll continue to operate in the past. And the current plan is that as we have joint meetings, we're gonna continue to talk about recreation and talk about that again, in terms of whether that should change or whether we keep going with the status quo. And this budget, though, does maintain that non-resident's pay and non-resident fee. All right, anybody else on article two? All right, last chance. All right, let's vote on article two. I'm going to reread it. Shall the voters approve an annual general fund budget in the amount of $5,164,913 for fiscal year July 1, 2019 to June 30, 2020, $3,556,422 of which is to be levied in taxes against the village grand list. All those in favor of article two signify by saying aye. All right. Oppose nay. Article two passes unanimously. Article three. Shall the voters approve holding the 2020 annual meeting on Wednesday, April 1, 2020 to act upon any articles not involving voting by Australian ballot and to reconvene on Tuesday, April 14, 2020 to vote for the village officers and transact any business involving voting by Australian ballot. Do I have a motion on article three? Bob O'Neill. All right, do we have a second? Alison Wormer. Second. All right, any discussion on article three? Fairly straightforward. No pranks will be allowed. All right, doesn't look like any discussion so let's vote on article three which I'll reread. Shall the voters approve holding the 2020 annual meeting on Wednesday, April 1, 2020 to act upon any articles not involving voting by Australian ballot and to reconvene on Tuesday, April 14, 2020 to vote for the village officers and transact any business involving voting by Australian ballot. All those in favor of article three signify by saying aye. Opposed nay. Article three passes unanimously. Stand on track. This takes us to article four to transact any other business that may lawfully come before this meeting. So at this point, I know there's a couple of topics that we want to bring up for certain but people can bring up any topic involving the village but it's non-binding since it hasn't been warned and so just a couple announcements. So the voting is April 9th and as George alluded there's two people running for trustees, Board of Trustees and there's also four other positions that day, the moderator and there's three library trustees, a two, four and five year term as well as various school items to pay attention. So that's April 9th for that portion and then I also had an announcement from the library that I wanted to quickly read here. The Brown L library is updating its five year strategic plan and would like your input. Help plan the future of the library by filling out the brief survey available at the library table in the hall or from one of the Brown L trustees who will have them as you exit the meeting or you can go to the Brown L website if you would prefer to do it later. All right, so we got that one and then I'm going to open things up for article four. Okay, you're gonna introduce it perfect, all right. George will introduce. And I have one other announcement on behalf of, for Jim Jutris, if you haven't picked up, if you have a dog, even if you don't have a dog but you need some doggie bags, get some at the table. The reason is, is that the state counts how many doggie bags we give up as a kind of a credit towards our stormwater education efforts. Think about that. Sorry, sorry, but your state tax dollars at work, I had to say it. Okay. But we have two folks. First of all, I'd like to introduce Lori, a representative of Lori Houghton and former trust, soon to be former trustee, Lori Houghton who was gonna say a few words and then Andrew Brown is gonna discuss capital improvements in the village and some options and ideas, thanks. Lori? So my son asked me last night, I was gonna cry because I cry at everything and I said, absolutely not. So I'm keeping this very short. As George said, I have decided not to seek re-election to the board of trustees, but I've been really honored to serve this community for the past eight years as a trustee and I thank all of you for all your support over those years. I'm proud of the collaborative work we've accomplished in guiding our community forward. I know I and the trustees didn't always make everyone happy, but I can ensure you our decisions were made with the best intentions for each of you, all our residents and all of our businesses. I also want to thank the trustees and village staff. Working with all of you has been a really wonderful experience and I will actually miss our Tuesday nights together. I will continue to stay engaged with the village as my work in the state as a state representative, but mostly because I just really love the village. So thank you. All right, now Andrew's gonna talk on the capital budgets. What a conversation to follow. Hi. So in 2014 I came to you all and had said there's a funding problem with our capital infrastructure and you approved the bonds. Here we are 2019, not much has changed. I'm gonna talk to you about why I think we need more money. I don't think it's gonna take much to convince you of that. Maybe I'm wrong, but we'll see. The intention of this conversation is to help get some direction from all of you as to where we wanna go in terms of whether or not we want to raise more funding for our infrastructure. So things like water lines, things like roads, sidewalks, so on and so forth. Or not, that is always an option. So what have we done? 2014 we had a bond, 3.3 million. That had the impact that you can see here. Since 2016 we have been increasing the capital transfer from the general fund to the capital fund that we pay for capital infrastructure. We've been increasing that at 7.5%. The budget you just passed, thank you by the way, that has increased the transfer from 7.5% every year to 15% every year. So we did double it. That's why George had talked about how the funding had a significant impact on the overall budget. With that, if you all turn to, or look at your booklet, you will have a, a addendum we'll call it, but a loose piece of paper that has the five year capital plan. In it, at the top section, all the way on the right hand side is a column marked future. These items you will notice have no year. These items are past the fiscal year of 2026. Think about that. That means June 30th, 2026 is when, beyond that is when these projects as the current funding is defined as would start to happen at some point in time when funding allows. Which means those projects right there would be completed by June 30th, 2032 with the current funding. That's 2032. I don't think that's far to say that that's not good. If you look at some of the projects that are on that list, Pleasant Street, Rosewood, North Street, probably should be done before then. I don't think that's a stretch to say. I think we have agreement there. Although I could be wrong, it's not the first time. So, how can we get there faster? I'm gonna be blunt. This will involve taxes. There is no magic pot of gold. There's no other funding other than raising taxes. So there are basically three options. One being a bond, borrowing money. Another being take that capital transfer, raising it to a million and then adding 15% on every year. Or we re-explore the local option tax. When we look at bonding and a capital transfer, if we bonded for $5 million or took out a loan, you can see the impacts that it would have. If we gave a one-time boost to a million dollars to the base of our general or to our capital transfer and then added 15% on to that, you would see what that would mean to you as a resident and what that would mean to your wallets in terms of the average $280,000 home. There is an impact. You will also note that each of those also solely come from property taxes. We all love paying them. That's where it comes from. That's what it helps to fund. By the way, there will be more audience participation. Let me know if you wanna get back to this in a moment. The other one being the local option tax. The local option tax, at a very surface level, we have not done a lot of research into this. So this is very, very early. Basically is a 1% tax on anything, meals and rooms and sales and use. You go and buy something at Lowe's. You go and buy something at Marton's. You stay at the Essex. There's gonna be an extra 1% tax on that. The state will then take that pot of money and then give the town and village. What I'm saying in this is that the village alone should not go forward with a local option tax if that is decided to go forward. It is something that the town and the village should do together, especially when we think about the potential in terms of funding for that. What the state will do is the state will take 31%, say thank you, that's how we administer it. We will then get 69% and we can then use that money towards capital funding. Should we have done that back in, I think, 2010 was when this was last talked about. In 2018, we would have had $1.3 million as a community to go towards capital funding throughout our community, town and village. For those of you who weren't at the town meeting, someone very kindly came up and said we should have an extra $100,000 for the budget. That might not need to have happened. And with a local option tax, again, if we go to Lowe's, if we go to stay at the Essex, we go to Martones, and we buy something which isn't something that only Essex Junction or Essex Town residents do, that money helps to pay for our infrastructure. So as people drive down, Susie Wilson wrote, as people drive down North Street, as people go around School Street, Lincoln Street, to avoid five corners, they could then help to pay for the infrastructure they're driving on. Now we come down to the audience participation. What I would love to do from here is if you have questions, let me know. Otherwise, when questions have ceased, what I'd like to do is a little straw poll, raise your hands in terms of whether we should go with each of those three options. I'll start off with doing nothing, just to put it out there. And from that, that'll help to inform us as to where to go. I wanna make sure to clarify, this is not a formal vote, this is not a formal motion, this is not binding, this is only exploratory. My hope is on April Fool's Day of 2020, I will find a prank to play on you, which will not be related to this, but we will then have some kind of a plan of here's what we did. So are there any questions? So it would be, the state would give us 69% of the money. And of that, we would need to define how that should be split. That's one of the conversations we haven't had. But yes, a portion would go to town roads and other infrastructure, a portion would go to village roads infrastructure. Excuse me, could you? Correct. That's just one year. That's one year, my apologies. When I said that, if this would have passed in 2010, I probably shouldn't have used that as a benchmark. In 2018 alone, that was $1.3 million. Yeah, can you please go to the mic if you're gonna? Oh, I'm sorry, do you wanna moderate this? Yes. This is the job. Did you wanna say anything else? So the question was, if I can rephrase things quickly, is the figure there 2018, is that 69% comes from the state because they keep a fee, the 69% will get split in some way or another between the village infrastructure and the town infrastructure, yet to be figured how we figure that out. But it would be the entire Essex community. And that number represents a single year, 2018, not since 2010. So I think that summed up the whole discussion. And so thank you for coming to the mic. Kelly Adams, King's Court. Can you go to the slide that shows all three parts, please? Go back to you. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify for the purposes of the straw poll, like, can we want all of these things to happen? And therefore, can we raise our hand each time? Like, or are you distinctly hoping to like, be on, like, is the goal to try to find a path and pursue it or can these things be pursued together? Andrew tells me that you can vote for more than one. The idea is to get a sense of which ones are palatable. Okay, thanks. John Wurmer. I was curious if there'd been exploration of looking at Champlain Valley Fair and other big events like that and having a specific tax on purchase, et cetera, there. It feels like when I'm there, I watch the workers taking a lot of cash. And I'm not sure if the village has a good specific idea of how much they're taking. Is it kind of taking a face value they've raised so much over the course of time? How are things like that taxed? I know if I've ever asked for a receipt, they look at me like I have two heads and then maybe give me one. How do you guys look at large events like that in terms of this local option tax and making sure it's honored? So with the CVE, my understanding is since if you go and you buy a burger, that that's part of the rooms and meals side of the tax and that they would then need to charge the extra 1%. In terms of other things related to concerts, admission tickets, I don't know how that relates to sales and use. I can only assume, but we know what that means from childhood tales. I don't wanna swear on camera. But it doesn't go well. And then my other question is, have you considered specific item taxes? I know it's a heresy, but maybe five cents per cup of coffee or things like that, yes. Frankly, no, we didn't consider taking a look at coffee separately or liquor separately. Or what? Or sugary drinks. We did not look at any of that. Just the broad sales and use and meals and rooms. So we're down to just the nothing and these three options, I believe, is what we'll probe on tonight. Go ahead. Hi, I'm Cecilia Polanski. I live over by five corners. And it just, it seems like, I mean, when I look at the general fund and the revenues, it's gone, the property tax item two there has gone up for general fund revenues from 2.5 million to 3.5 million since fiscal year 16. That's a million bucks right there. So you want another one now for other stuff. It seems like we could scour this budget and find some cuts. You know, I feel like we should start a citizen's auditing committee or something because you guys all get regular raises. Do you guys have great health insurance? Do you have retirement? We don't. I mean, we don't. And it just seems like maybe some more thoughtful planning in the budget could yield a million bucks. I don't know. Just a suggestion. All right, thank you. All right, go ahead. Scott Friedman. I would advocate for the options tax. Can you get closer? I would advocate for the options tax. I think if we don't do it in the surrounding communities already have, I don't think people are making a comparison in saying I'm gonna go to Lowe's because I save 1%. Maybe if they bought a refrigerator or something big. But I think we're kind of, in a sense, a little bit chumps not to do it because all the surrounding communities have done it and Burlington even has more on their meals. So I think if we don't move in step with some of the surrounding communities in Chittenden County, we're just leaving money on the table that nobody's gonna notice is gone. All right, thank you. Go ahead. Andy Clovis, Pleasant Street. Can you go back to the slide that had the 2018 estimates for what the? Past this one? I'm just curious what that estimate is based on. Where, how that number was arrived at. Thank you. It came from the State's Department of Taxes. Yes, it's based on sales of the, from the town and the village. Any business that identifies as either operating in Essex or Essex Junction. Hi, Greg Morgan, Grove Street. I'm sure this number, it's not included in the 1.3 but I know the legislature is considering retail sales of cannabis and in that bill there's a local option, option if we opt in to have retail sales. Any sense at all of what that might add to this? No. No. That is an easy answer. Would you like to start a retail business and then we don't have any understanding of who wants to come and where and maybe you get a big warehouse of retail sales or you get a little shop but the village and the town have not even discussed whether they would want those types of sales and where but we've sort of just focused in on retail sales and what goes on and the state has plenty of exemptions and my learned colleague to my left, your right has done a lot of that talk with them and so when and if it gets to the next stage we can bring a lot more specificity than say 10 years ago. Right. And just for our representatives my position on that has been I don't care if we ever sell it here I believe we're gonna grow it here in warehouses and if we do I'd love an excise tax where we could tax, put a tax on what we grow and ship out of town. So that's and I think there's a lot of money in that I'm not sure that's not something the legislature is considering but other states have and it would help us a lot. All right, thank you Greg. Giln Road, thank you Andrew. Can you get a little closer please? Sure. So I had a question about on the previous two options you gave a dollar amount of how much that would cost as a resident. Do you have a sense, I know it depends on how much you spend but do you have a sense of how much the third option would be as a resident of S-Extension? Any sense, that would be a relative comparative. From the Department of Taxes they don't tell us how much of the tax revenue that could have been there would have come from which community the businesses don't report that. The only thing I can offer to anybody who wonders how would this affect them is if you keep your receipts and then add 1% onto that. Beyond that, no, I have no other guidance in terms of what it means. Okay, a follow up question if I may. Do you have a sense of any disadvantages of the third option? Any disadvantages of the local option tax? Correct. Nothing's perfect. I'm sure there are, somebody would have to charge it. Some things may cost, it'll cost 1% more. There's the opportunity. I mean, right now, Colchester has it, Williston has it, South Burlington has it. So if you are a local shopper, you could decide, well, I'm going to drive to somewhere that does not have that and then you have to do the price. It depends on how much gas you wanna spend to save the 1% on what you're buying. That's a disadvantage. You are in competition with your neighbors. You are in competition with the internet whether you want to be or not. Amazon's a wonderful company except they do undercut a lot of prices and they use a lot of fuel to deliver your discount to you. But this is a way to look at having the people who may not live in your community but come through your community help which they are not necessarily directly doing it. They are supporting their local businesses but they're not doing it directly to the roads, et cetera. So are there, I'm sure over time there would be some testimony for that and it'll just have to be weighed if it is positive or negative overall to what our goals are. Thank you, you're welcome, good question. Thank you, you're next. Hi, my name is Eden Stern, I'm off of East Street. I have recently moved here and I'm just gonna say that I grew up or I spend most of my life in a place where they did have extra tax and extra in towns near us and it never stopped me from going to that place. If I needed a cup of coffee I went to that Starbucks because I knew to travel back to my hometown would cost me more in gasoline to get it. So when I was out it just made sense to pay that extra eight cents. So I'm definitely for the third one because I think that is distributed amongst the whole state and all the visitors that come here not just the residents of the town. Thank you. Go ahead. Nick Meyer from Pleasant Street. I think it was 12 or so years ago where we looked at the options tax and one of the things that kept coming up was the fairgrounds because they are considered a nonprofit. They still exist I believe under the auspices of a county fair and there are some who wanted to challenge that for other events because that would be a good revenue source with the amount of events that are now going on far beyond the original intent of the county fair being nonprofit. So I think we need to look at that again. We had probably 600 signatures when we did this drive to have them change it. So maybe we can look at it but I would support that. I'd also be interested to know as we move forward with shared services or merger how would a bond reflect if we are one community in 2022-23? I can answer that Nick because we've looked at that a lot. If we merged right now, the legislature just merged us, the bond, any bonds that the village took out exclusively would stay with the village. They would not get redistributed unless the town agreed to redistribute them. But for example, the recreation department, this is our last year paying off for recreation department bond and that was with the village school district and even though the school districts merged that the cost of that bond stays with the village. Thanks. One more, go ahead. Hi, Laura Bjerman, Jackson Street. That's B-U-E-R-M-A-N-N. So we're talking a lot about the local option tax and it sounds appealing but I would be really curious to hear what our neighbors have to say. There are communities that have had that additional tax for quite a while now and hearing their positives and negatives I think would help us make that decision whether or not that would really be beneficial to our community. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. All right, I think we've got plenty of discussion on it. You want me to just go through the four things and raise hands and you can get a sense of it? Sure. All right. I'll just do my piece of paper. It looks like it goes, thank you. So, I'm fine. So just give a raise your hand if you're interested in a particular top. One of the four things we'll just go through them in order and as said before, you can vote for more than one and it's just to kind of get a sense of what may be more popular than others. It might be allowed them to eliminate considering one or two of the options. So the first thing is, is there anyone that doesn't want to raise any taxes for capital planning type of things? Show of hands on the none option. All right. So it's clear everybody wants to do something. So now we'll move on. The option two was to do the bond. Anyone in favor of a bond? Okay. Got a sense of that? Okay. Thank you. And then the next one, after local options, which one? Go to the one million to the capital. Oh, just bumping up the regular budget to move it up to a million each year. Move back one slide. The boost, boost the capital transfer from what it is to one million and then do the normal annual increment after that point in time. So who's interested in option three? No, no, no. What's, I guess, what's the total right now that we give? What you just approved was 365,000, give or take. Okay. Close enough. This would take that 365. Next year's budget would be a million and then go up 15% from there. A one-time big increase and then the normal inflationary kind of thing. All right, so who's in favor of that option? All right. Thank you. Got a sense of that? All right. And then lastly, just to keep the slides straight, the local option tax. Who's in favor of that? I think that was the most popular. Okay. All right. Thank you for that input and that can again help guide the discussions over the next period of time. Just wait one moment. Okay. All right, so that's all we wanted to talk about. Probably perhaps longer than we wanted, but go ahead. Thank you. All right. Anyways, are there any other topics anyone would like to bring up before we close the meeting? Go ahead, Mike. Mike Sullivan, Orchard Terrace. I live in the section of Indian Acres. Seeing a fair amount of conversion of single family homes to being occupied multi-family homes. I'm just very concerned about the trend and want to know if there's anything the trustees have concerns about in that respect. You know, it speaks to the quality of life and values of property. Mike, I'm not clear. Some of the, I'm sorry. Some of the properties I can, are clearly not being maintained. Oh, I see. So I, yeah. Did you want me to rephrase this? So instead of one, just to rephrase what Mike said. So a house was built for one family and there's more than one family living in the house. That's the issue? Yes, that's, you know, the Indian Acres are all very small houses. They're not very... You're seeing them occupied by more than one family moving in. Yes. I can't say that Dan... I just wanted to comment. They're in the village, people, as long as it's owner occupied your residents, you can rent out space in your home. It's called a, it's the F.S.R. apartment and that's perfectly legal to do so. But like I said, the caveat, you have to, the owner of the property has to reside there. Then you can rent out, say, the basement and have somebody staying in the basement. It helps a lot of people afford to stay in their homes. And so that may be some of what you're observing. As far as maintaining property, there are ordinances in the village that pertain to dilapidated structures. You know, the way people are maintaining their property as far as tires and trash and such, those are enforced by the village. Okay, but the first part you said was... Accessory apartment. Accessory apartment. Yes. And if it's not accessory apartment, i.e. non, is that an enforceable regulation? That's something you go to the village, as far as how many people reside in that structure, that it's something that the village, Plain Area Department... I'm sorry, I misunderstood. But maybe the manager could probably speak to it. You know, we certainly could take a look. I don't know that ordinance right off the top of my head, but we'll certainly take a look at what constitutes single family and what the density is. Right. And we could look into that. I'm certainly addressing the issue where it's non-owner occupied. Okay. We'll take a look at that. Go ahead, Nick. On that same note, I've approached the trustees a couple of times about maybe trying to enact a rental registry program, which exists in Burlington and Winooski, that pretty much it's a fee based on the units and you would maybe have the fire marshal or somebody else who does an inspection to make sure that it is leased up to safety standards for the residents living there. And it gives the landlord to be, he's got to pay a lot more attention to what's going on. And it has worked really well in Winooski and Burlington and cleaning up some terrible housing stock. So I would encourage the trustees to keep looking at that. And that would be one approach. Thank you. Thank you. I don't know who is next for you. Are you next? Thank you. Go ahead. Well, hi again. One of the things I really love about being in Asic Junction is having the train right there and go to New York City or DC very easily, but the train station kind of needs paint. Is there anyone to get a grant for a couple thousand bucks to fix that thing up? I would volunteer time. I would volunteer time. We're there with you totally. We've been trying to fix that. We have a plan for fixing it up, but we don't have the money. But we hear you and it's absolutely a priority for us if we can find funding for it. And I would just add, we don't own the building and there's several different organizations that do own the building. So as much as I would love to join you with painting, we just can't. Looks like you're up, Mike. Mike Plegman from Beach Street. I just want to bring up the Berriwana issue. I, it's my issue. Well, the issue in terms of the funding. I think it would be a big mistake at this time to consider attaching Berriwana sales to ways to raise money for this community. I think the legislature has miles to go before we should even start thinking about using that as a revenue source in this community. I'm not naive. It's here. I know it's here, but I'm counting on the legislature and Montpelier to put thoughtful breaks on how this gets enacted. And like I said, as a short-term funding source for this community, I think it would be a huge mistake. Thank you, Mike. Go ahead, Sue. Hi, Sumacarmic East Street. So I have lived here, I guess almost 29 years. And the last couple of winters, the sidewalks have been really challenging. And I always have had a fantastic feeling about the public works department. They're always working hard in our neighborhood. And so I'm just trying to understand what's happening. And if the problem has to do with equipment, is are there any plans to maybe have a more appropriate sidewalk plow? It would just be good to know why in the past few years the sidewalks have been kind of really difficult to navigate, which was not the case before. I can try. I'll take a shot at it. Rick, if I say something inappropriate, raise your hand, jump right up. You know, Sue, I agree. And you're talking about the plows tearing up people's lawns. Is that what you're saying, or doing damage? Sue, can you go to that window? Thank you. So I walk all around the village all the time. And in past years, the sidewalks are just generally clear. And in recent years, they're just icy. And the plows seem to do a great job of digging up the dirt, but not a great job of plowing off the snow in the middle of the sidewalk. So it's just become treacherous to walk around, which was not my experience in the past. I don't think this is a totally made-up answer on my part. But I do believe, and Rick, tell me if I'm wrong, a lot of it has to do with when it snows, how much it snows, what the melt cycle is, if it melts a little bit and then freezes again. And so sometimes when there's a thick layer of ice that gets down on the sidewalk, there's not a whole heck of a lot they can do about it, except dump a whole bunch of salt on it. Is that, Rick, am I missing something? So it really depends on the snowfall pattern. And I don't know, we talk about climate change, I don't know if that's the kind of thing that we're looking at, it's probably hard to say. But I know what you're thinking, and probably all of us have experienced that. There seems to be a lot more ice on the sidewalks these days. I can also add, you know, this year over, say, last year, our overtime hours are way up. Our salt bill is way up. So it is not the number of hours, it is not the amount of salt. By the way, sooner or later, the state and the EPA is gonna get back to everybody about the amount of salt that we put down on our streets and our sidewalks because it ends up in our streams and it impairs our streams. So that'll be something for the future. You'll be lovely to hear that. But the general just is, and George is right, and Ricky probably could talk to you over a beverage about how the freezing thought cycle is. Our guys and our women who work in public works, they have a call out procedure. And if they're not on a call out and it gets icy, the police call them out. It is really a function of what the temperature's gonna be. If it's gonna rain, if it's gonna rain, no amount of salt is gonna do any good, it's gonna wash out. And then if it freezes, we're behind the cycle. It's not that we don't want to maintain them, it is just what's happening in that period. If we get sun, it melts, if we don't get any sun, it won't melt. And if you get Sub-Zero, no amount of salt is going to melt it. You all have your driveways, you know that for a fact. So it has been a long, tough, winter, I believe it started in mid-November and we even had a dusting of snow the other day. So we do our best. Our men and women really try hard. We do have some areas that we know need some addressing. And in our annual budget, we do address some segments of sidewalk that pond and that do get some, but it's expensive to do small sections of sidewalk versus long stretches. But we are on it and we have some areas that we have on our hit list. Yep, just to add in a general weather comment, gotten over a hundred inches of snow this winter. And despite that, I think it was above freezing almost every single week this winter as well. So tons of precipitation and constantly up and down compared to normal. Hi, go ahead. Dorothy Burgendoll, I have one thing I wanna emphasize again and another thing I wanna mention. First, I wanna emphasize that in my opinion, after 50 years, almost 50 years of living here, that fairground has got a sweetheart deal. And it's time for it to change. They have functions all year long. I live on the far side of this high school and I can hear them. I used to live next to the fairground. I'd hate to be over there now. So I think that deal needs to be revisiting. And then the senior center hasn't had a director for three months. That also needs to change. Thank you. Go ahead, Mike. Mike Sullivan again. As to the sidewalk plow, one of the reasons I think there's a problem is, isn't the sidewalk plow four feet wide? And at least in Indian Acres, many of the sidewalks are just three. You're guaranteed to have a, I live at a dead end. And the sidewalk plow leaves the sidewalk, it's a loop actually. The sidewalk does completely loop. They only do half the street, half the side. I'm just thankful I'm not on the side that gets done. The other side every year spends a bunch of time fixing the four foot wide plow path. Thank you. Go ahead. Tim Miller, and I just wanted to speak for a minute on the sidewalk and the public works. I grew up in an area of New York where residents were responsible for cleaning their own sidewalks in front of their house. I walk my snowblower a quarter mile to clean two fire hydrants on Nama Avenue. So there's always that option folks. Rick does a great job with the resources he has. And I will tell you that I see their public work trucks out every spring repairing the grass that is torn up. So to sit here and say, what can the government do for me? I think is the wrong approach. Get out of the shovel, find a neighbor with a snowblower, clean your own sidewalks, pretty simple. All right, thank you. Go ahead. Stephen Gray again. I'm asking you about the five corners design. I just wondering a few things about it. I think it's a symbol of our community has been and I know we've had engineers look at it and I know the comments been made. We trust other engineers. Why not traffic engineers? But have we given like sentimental value to our community identity as well as look at other more important things like emergency vehicle access and how that affects that response route in the village and access to certain parts of the village in the town? Is that a question? That is a question. That is a question. I think we looked at that. Have those things been thought about? Specifically in terms of emergency vehicle access for example? Yeah, so there was two questions there. The kind of community identity that comes along with five corners and it's kind of iconic nature around the state as well as emergency vehicle access. So kind of two separate questions. I had a slide presentation I was gonna show and I decided not to because we had some other things we wanted to discuss and we wanted to give everyone else a chance to talk. So I won't go back to it but we had another civil engineering company doing independent study. The regional planning commission did it for us, the city of Weiss and King and they showed that wait times at five corners if we put in the Crescent connector as it's planned and converted to a four way intersection. The average wait time would decrease by more than 50% and the capacity of the intersection would increase by something like 40%. The idea is that if you have less traffic stacked up at five corners I would assume that emergency vehicles would simply just be able to get there, be less traffic there. In terms of community identity I have to say that if our identity is a big traffic jam in the middle of the community I'm not clear that's the kind of identity we want. Maybe you're on board with that but I kind of when I think, I know when I first moved here I looked at that and I said, wow, why did they do that? But I get it, I totally understand but it is something, certainly we're not gonna do this overnight but it is kind of a long range goal that we really are serious about because we see that the overall positives really outweigh the negatives. One of the big things that just to consider right now, just this morning I was at five corners walking across it's a daunting intersection for someone who's in reasonably good shape. For a pedestrian, for some of our older citizens getting across that, that's a big expansive asphalt to get across converting that to a four-way intersection would really, really shrink it down and make it a lot more manageable, a lot more humanistic and if you could do that without improving the traffic flow that seems to me like a good idea. The associated question for follow up so we reduce wait times at, what is it now, five corners but what happens to wait times at Maple and Railroad? They are talking about the wait time through the entire village center. So they were looking at the five traffic legs that meet at five corners so they're considering that entire flow of traffic that's in there. Several intersections there and surrounding. Right, but I think they were looking at just saying the five corners intersection but they were looking at the, they included the intersection for where the Crescent connector would cross Maple Street on the other side of the tracks. Thank you. All right, anybody else? Lots of good, most talkative article of the night by far. Okay. I'd like to, if no one has anything else to say we can entertain a motion to adjourn. You got an e-nay or a Bob O'Neill again? And what, who else back there? We got too many hands. Who wants to be the seconder? What's your name? You get, did you get it? Okay. All right, motion has been made in second to adjourn the meeting. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Those opposed nay. The meeting is adjourned.