 A meeting of the Waterbury Select Board on Monday, January 8th, 2024. First item on the agenda is to approve the agenda. Do I have a motion? So moved. I think. Moved and seconded. Any discussion? Hearing none. All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? All right. Next is the consent agenda. Do I have a motion? I have a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented for the minutes of the January 4th, 2024 meeting. Second. Okay. Seconded. We don't need any discussion on this. So all in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? All right. Now we have the public session. Anyone would like to address any items not on the warned agenda. Please come forward. And I ask that you. Keep your comments to three minutes if possible. If you need more time, we'll be glad to add it to the agenda. Yes. I'm kind of requests just today to testify in front of Senate operations Wednesday. About the municipal flood response and in essence. I want the interactions with the state and town government. Okay. Do you mind putting that at the end of the agenda? Right before the next meeting. Discussion. Anything else? Then I understand Brian Voight is joining us via zoom. Brian, are you there? Yeah. Hello. Great. Great. Brian, thank you for joining us. You've agreed to present us with some options on floodwater mitigation. If you wouldn't mind just introducing yourself with your title and your brief. And then we'll go ahead and do that. And then we'll go ahead and do that. And then we'll go ahead and get your position. Within the state. And then go forward. Happy to do so. Hi, everyone. Brian Boyd. I'm a senior planner and program manager at the central Vermont regional planning commission. My apologies that I. Couldn't make it there tonight in person, but I'm glad to be here. I'm a senior planner and program manager at the central Vermont regional planning commission. I'm a senior planner and program manager at the central Vermont regional planning commission. I've been at the regional planning commission for. About 18 months. I'm the lead natural resources planner and also. Head up the, the GIS geographic information systems work here with the organization. I'm the lead natural resources. I'm the lead natural resources. I'm the lead natural resources with a real. How the amount of that workload. Allocated to working on issues of water quality and water quantity. To that end, I'm the. The team lead on the clean water service provider program for the Wanooski river basin. And I'll touch on that in a few minutes here as I go through my, my presentation. Am I able to share my screen? Okay. I'm. Otherwise happy I could email Tom. Presentation right now, or we could do without. And I can just talk about my slides. However you see fit. Karen's given you a little authority to show your screen. Sounds dangerous. Thanks, Karen. Thank you, Bill. Okay. So hopefully you can see. A slide that. Says opportunities for flood hazard mitigation. We. On the same page. Okay. Great. Okay. Well, I've already introduced myself. So I won't, won't bother doing that. That's a bit again. I'm going to talk tonight about a few different things related to flood hazard mitigation. I'm going to start out with a brief overview of storm water master planning. And then I'm going to talk about a few different funding opportunities and really want to leave plenty of time for a discussion. And then I'm going to talk about the next steps. And then I'm going to talk about the numbers of the public that are attending the meeting tonight to talk about, you know, in your ideal world, what would the next steps look like and talk about what role CVR PC could play in facilitating those next steps. So I'll kick it off with. Again, a brief discussion of, of storm water master planning. So, you know, why, why plan? What, what's up with these storm water master plans. So, you know, I'm going to talk about a couple of things. And then I'm going to talk about, you know, some of the services predate the statutory, statutory requirements for storm water management. So we're already sort of starting from behind the eight ball, if you will. And really the, the goal with storm water master plans is to. Focus on water quality improvements. And minimizing downstream impacts from, from flood waters. We operate on the, the old adage preventive, when we do start to reduce or increase the, increase the current generation. So if we can target these areas where we're seeing increased pollution or excess, um, stormwater runoff, uh, we can capture and hopefully remove or mitigate. That situation more efficiently at its point of origin, as opposed to dealing with, um, recovering and repairing downstream damages following an event. What is a storm water master plan produce a list of prioritize management practices, things like green stormwater infrastructure and low impact development policies that can both help repair past damages but also look towards the future to hopefully avoid repeating some of the mistakes of the past. And then the other nice and very essential component of a stormwater master plan is this public participation piece. So increasing public awareness about stormwater problems, identifying opportunities for community action and also daylighting the cost of engineered and other solutions, helping the community make sense of the potential financial ramifications of project implementation and also helping them contextualize an outlay of money that they may not consider as something worthwhile by addressing or explaining what has happened via past events and the costs associated with post storm recovery in the past. So a little bit of background on stormwater master plans. The Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation has worked on this topic since the late 1990s with a staff position supporting urban watershed management in the year 2000. The legislature passed a Vermont stormwater management statute that among other things promotes implementation of pollution prevention, encourages municipal governments to utilize existing regulatory and planning authority to implement improved stormwater management and promote this public education and participation among citizens with a goal of achieving a cost effective and innovative measures to reduce stormwater discharges. So the overarching goal really is to target locations where this pollution is generated so that we can capture and mitigate this in a cost effective manner. So the stormwater master plan is essentially a comprehensive plan for addressing stormwater runoff and a typical process for stormwater master planning includes things like defining the water quality problem through existing data. So things like biological chemical monitoring, river geomorphic assessments. So things that already exist within the state library so to speak, we would gather existing data so make use of our extensive spatial data resources from the Vermont Center for Geographic Information. We might look at existing reports or existing data analysis if either both of those exist. And then in addition, some new data collections. So field surveys to compile a list of potential sites that are contributing to stormwater problems or water quality pollution problems conducting a limited amount of field data analysis, compiling that list of sources associated with these defined water problems. And really the end goal here is a list of prioritized projects that can lead to the selection of projects deemed feasible by the community that we can then advance for funding and implementation. So currently the town does not have a stormwater master plan but some work was done in the 2009 timeframe by the state DEC to map some stormwater infrastructure in both Waterbury Center and the town of Waterbury. And how this differs from a stormwater master plan is that essentially it's DEC staff that gather available information. So they might look at anything from municipal plans for stormwater infrastructure to site design or permit issue permits related to site design to gather any available information they can about the way that stormwater is being managed throughout a municipality. So this effort resulted in a table, don't worry about the numbers or even really a bit of a field heading, suffice it to say that there's this catalog of stormwater infrastructure throughout the town. This information is a bit dated, it's 14 or so years old at this point but it does include a potential place for us to start beyond the projects that Tom and I have discussed briefly in a past few phone calls. So the nice thing about this is that the outcome of this stormwater mapping effort by DEC produces this list of potential projects and we get an idea about the amount of throughput going through these different project locations both in terms of the quantity of water but also importantly any pollutants associated with that flow of water and in particular we're talking here about phosphorus and I'll come back to why that is important later when I talk a bit more about some of our funding options. Last thing I'll say about this table is that maybe you can see some color coded cells here on the left hand side of the table. There's also a loose prioritization, again not based on any actual sophisticated modeling they actually use a fairly simple approach to modeling the sediment and phosphorus loads in these locations but the document itself is at least internally consistent and we could use this as a jumping off point for identifying potential areas for greater scrutiny if the town chose to go through a full-blown stormwater master planning process. So what does that process actually look like? This is something that I mean it certainly could be handled in-house if you had the required staff to do this but typically when we engage stormwater master planning we procure an engineering consultant. We've worked with several different engineering firms to work on stormwater master plans throughout the central Vermont region. So we procure an engineering consultant and the planning and conservation commissions really play a significant role in this effort and that's not to sideline the select board the select board is encouraged and certainly could be as involved as they have time to engage this activity but we use the public input from planning and conservation commissions and active citizens to generate a list of potential problem sites. The engineering team would then perform an initial analysis generate a list of 20 to 30 potential projects interface with again the planning and conservation commissions and the select board as well to really set up a more prioritized list of projects. So from that initial a tranche of 30 or more projects it gets narrowed down to about 20 projects and then typically anywhere from three to five of those 20 projects go through a preliminary engineering design. The state refers to this as a 30% design. So they distinguish between this preliminary or 30% design with a 100% or final design which is the last thing that happens prior to project implementation. So the document that comes out of this process and there are several different templates depending on the area of focus anywhere from individual site all the way up to entire municipalities or potentially even sub basins within the Lake Champlain drainage area. But the output of this is a document that includes details of the entire process and more importantly really sets us up for the three to five projects puts us in a good position to pursue additional funding be it from federal or state resources to complete the implementation of these projects. As I mentioned before there's a significant education and outreach component involved here looking to involve the public really at every phase of the master planning process with the end goal of building awareness about the current concerns and what it's going to take to implement these changes moving into the future. And I should mention also a really interesting example and the central Vermont Regional Planning Commission doesn't have a parallel to this but it's something that we internally have discussed as a possibility moving forward but the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission has a stormwater education program called Rethink Runoff again really geared towards reaching the public and helping build consensus around the work that needs to be done related to stormwater management. So that's the stormwater master planning process in a nutshell. Certainly happy to answer questions either now or can wait until I run through just a handful of additional slides but I'll take a quick break here. Any questions? Yeah. How long does the process of implementing a master plan typically take place? I'm not sure I told her the question how long is the master planning process or how long is it from the past? Okay, yeah, so on the order of months, six months to maybe eight this is something that could be completed certainly within a calendar year. So as soon as we would be budgeting for such a function would be 2025? Well, let's not get out ahead of the budget discussion just yet because I do have some potential funding options where we wouldn't necessarily look to the town to fund that or if we did, it would be a small slice of matching funds and not necessarily well, depending on how you do your budgeting it might be something that you could work into existing budget buckets, so to speak. I think for a stormwater master plan if we were to target the entire municipality then we're talking on the order of $35,000 to $50,000. That would be the town's portion? No, no, that would be the whole cost of a stormwater master plan. Yeah, sorry, didn't mean to suggest that 35 to 50 K is pocket change for anybody's budget. Yeah, okay. And well, you'll get into what it might cost to the town depending on your succeeding discussion, right? Yeah, and we can certainly talk more about that beyond this evening as well. Yeah, Chris. So is he specifically talking about a master plan that encompasses all of the tributaries and potential stormwater runoff throughout the entire town of the water area or are you talking about just the needs of that municipality itself in the property that they encompass? In other words, are you talking all private projects as well? Yeah, so the plan can address both public and private lands and so the question about does it address all the tributaries? This is not a stormwater modeling exercise. Typically the way the process works is after the engineering consultant's been procured, then we would meet with whatever group, planning commission, conservation commission, select board, all of the above and generate this list of potential problem sites. You're the ones that know your community the best and so you can think about where do I see standing water after even a moderate rainfall? Where do I know that we've got issues with blown out culverts or undersized bridges? Identifying projects like that, that we can then task the engineering consultant with digging in further. So some of those locations may very well fall on private property and that's another reason to engage the public about this and quite frankly not every private landowner would be all that excited to host stormwater infrastructure on their property and that's their prerogative as the private landowners. So that would influence that final list of projects and in particular that list of the three to five that go through the preliminary design, that 30% engineering design. We certainly wouldn't wanna advocate for a 30% design on a project where a landowner has said that's not something I'm interested in pursuing. Any other questions? All right, go ahead and why don't you go ahead. Okay, great, thanks. Okay, so I'm gonna talk about three different funding opportunities and talk about or discuss how I think they do or don't fit with stormwater master planning and also the opportunities that they present even if they don't fully address the complete stormwater master planning process. So I'll talk about the hazard mitigation grant program, the building resilient infrastructure and communities grant program and then lastly the formula grant clean water service provider program. So the first of these, the hazard mitigation grant program and I should mention I will send this slide deck to Tom so that he can distribute further and or just put this up on the town website and I have hyperlinks to the different grant programs in the slide deck that you'd be able to access easily if anyone wants to do additional background work here. So the hazard mitigation grant program, this is money that was made available following the July 2023 flooding event and it's money that comes through the federal emergency management agency and it's administered by the Vermont Emergency Management, DEL. It's important to note that damage from the flood is not required as part of your proposal. So the money itself is released in response to the July in response to a flooding event in this particular case we're talking about the July 2023 flood and you don't need to have realized specific damage to infrastructure or a property that might fall under this proposal during that event. It's just that the money becomes available following these large scale events. This has a 75% federal, 25% local cost share and if the town has any ARPA funds still remaining ARPA money can in many cases be used as the local match for this. How about any state money involved with this one? No. Okay. That's that, well, let me just say maybe and then come back to that because it's actually a slightly more complicated question than just a yes or no thing. So when I talk about the Clean Water Service Provider program, I can talk about how that money can maybe be used as a match and technically that money comes from the state but we'll cross that bridge here in a few minutes. In terms of eligibility, oh, sorry. Sorry to interrupt, Brian. Tom's gonna give us a little insight. We've had conversations about hazard mitigation grants for Niske Street being one project, the COVID-19 law, and we lost them right over being another. Let me speak on this a little bit. Stephanie Spanthus in charge of the program at the state has said don't apply five times, apply it once. Otherwise you're administering five grants instead of one. The challenge with the 25% match is it has to be non-federal and so many state grants have a federal component to them too. So that's the long and short here. Yeah, thanks Tom for mentioning that you've talked with Stephanie. I was meant to bring that up as well. I'll just, let me just address this, the local cost share piece. The Clean Water Service Provider program, you are allowed to use some of that money to serve as match for federal projects. I would need to get the approval from DEC for that, but it is possible whether or not that, well, it's possible, but it does also present some other complications and we can talk about what those might be when I touch on that program in a little more detail. But there are options for cost sharing, anywhere from ARPA to the municipal tax base to potentially some fairly restricted funds that may work for this. So we've got a few different eligibility requirements. There needs to be a FEMA approved and adopted local hazard mitigation plan. My colleague Keith Coven is currently working with town staff on this with an anticipated completion date, I believe he told me in summer of 2024. Good standing with the National Flood Insurance Program. We can check that box for you. And then also an adopted local emergency management plan, another box that we can check. So really the outstanding issue here is the local hazard mitigation plan, but given that there is a work in progress, we can also apply for a waiver from that requirement. And that essentially means that the town's gonna commit to wrapping up that local hazard mitigation plan within, I believe it's 12 months of receiving the hazard mitigation grants of funding itself. So it's not necessarily a workaround, we still have to commit to getting that local hazard mitigation plan done, but it's not a complete obstacle for seeking these funds just because that work has not been completed. So typical project types for funding under this kind of opportunity, dam removal, upsizing a bridge or culvert, floodplain restoration, and even engineering design for elevating residential properties or commercial municipal property flood-proofing. So this goes back to the point that Tom made, we should really have a conversation about the diversity or the range of projects that the town is interested in, scope some costs for what that might look like and then make some decisions about the projects that do or don't make the cut for the proposed funding. I will note that there is an application deadline at the end of the month for this current round of funding and that the other important piece to note here is that four projects that are funded through the hazard mitigation grant program, the scoping projects that are funded under this are also expected to then pursue funding within the same funding cycle for project implementation. So that's another piece that maybe might constrain the list of projects that would be included on a grant proposal to this program. A typical scoping process here involves procuring engineering services and it's going to be this engineering consultant that would work with the RPC if you want us involved as well as the town to assess the issue or issues that are present and develop a list of alternatives. They would work with the project team, the project partners to select a preferred alternative and then develop some designs, a budget and a real scope of that preferred alternative in addition to a benefit cost analysis in order to set the stage for pursuing implementation funding. So much like this idea of this 30% design for projects in the stormwater master planning, you're going to scope a project or a set of projects, develop your preferred alternative and really advance those to the design stage so that you're well positioned to a solicit additional funding for implementation. So this particular funding opportunity, it is probably not the best fit for pursuing money to do a full blown stormwater master plan but I do think this would be good for some of these isolated projects and Tom and I have talked about at least a couple of them. I'm sure there are some other ideas floating around that I'd certainly like to hear about as well but my conversation with Stephanie and my understanding of this grant program is that it might not be the best fit for pursuing stormwater master plan funding. So we'll just put that in our back pocket for now and move on to the other funding opportunities and then we'll circle back in the discussion piece here. The next opportunity I want to mention is this building resilient infrastructure and communities grant program also known as the BRIC grant program. So unlike the hazard mitigation grant program that we just discussed, this funding opportunity is an annual program. So FEMA administers funding annually to essentially fund hazard mitigation activities with the end goal of reducing risk from natural hazards. It's really a pre-disaster mitigation program. Now FEMA sets aside $2 million for the state of Vermont. My understanding is if there's a project of national significance and I'm not exactly sure how that's defined but if we come up with a really big, big project idea I'm certainly happy to coordinate with our regional FEMA administrators to talk in more detail about what that looks like but if we did come up with a very large project it is possible to ask for funding in excess of $2 million. Once again, we've got a federal local cost share same basic idea where the clean water service provider may be able to provide some or all of that local match again, depending on the project or projects that are being pursued. Several different eligible project types including and probably of primary interest to the town is really scoping for specific structures or areas with flood vulnerability. So you could use this brick monies to study a single bridge or look at stormwater needs writ large across the entire community. So lots of options for the scale of analysis that could be conducted through this program. Now in my conversations with Stephanie she suggested that if the town wanted to pursue stormwater master planning monies through one of the DEC programs currently that this was probably the better fit and that as long as we package that proposal or couch that proposal in the language of flood resilience that it's likely that we could access some of the funding here. The downside of this, if we look at the last line on the slide here application deadline January 12th. So that application deadline is at the end of the week. So that's maybe a bit more compressed of a timeline than we're necessarily thinking about on the downside but on the plus side note that this is an annual allocation of funds. And if for some reason other funding opportunities didn't pan out favorably for the work that lies ahead we could certainly make sure that we're well positioned to apply for brick monies in the beginning weeks of 2025. So the last of these funding opportunities as I mentioned is the clean water service provider program the State Department of Environmental Conservation that ministers the clean water fund. And as part of that the legislature passed a clean water act in recent years. And one of the things that that did was to establish these clean water service providers for each of the basins that drained into Lake Champlain. There's a lot longer history about this that I won't totally go through but essentially we're tasked with cleaning up our phosphorus loads going into the lake. So I mentioned before that this funding resource might not necessarily be the best place to shop for funds because the projects that we're talking about here must be non-regulatory. So not required by a permit that doesn't mean that they don't require permits for implementation but I'm talking about required by a permit like a three acre permit for example with a primary goal of phosphorus reduction. So I know that the conversation tonight is really centered around enhancing or improving flood resilience. So that puts some pretty heavy guardrails on the types of projects that might align with the formula grant funds. So really what we're talking about here for ideal project types are going to be things like a floodplain or stream restoration, developing river corridor easements, implementing riparian buffer plantings and potentially performing operations and maintenance on existing stormwater projects. And so this last one is still sort of a work in progress at DEC but as the clean water service provider I can quote unquote adopt an orphan project. So think about a stormwater project that was implemented but the catch basin's never been cleaned out. The stone line drainage ditch is now overgrown and filled in with sediment. So we can expend some formula grant monies to maintain the operation of these different stormwater pieces of stormwater infrastructure as long as there is a phosphorus credit that can be claimed in relation to that work. On the plus side, I'm soliciting projects at least four times and sometimes up to six times per year and I have a budget of about $875,000 to do project implementation. Now that all sounds great but I just wanna bring us back to this primary goal of phosphorus reduction. So in my conversations with Tom, I certainly know that floodplain reconnection is excuse me, a type of project that Tom emphasized through our conversation. And so maybe there are some projects that are one-off projects that are really a good fit. And the other nice thing about this is that the municipality can apply for this directly with or without the assistance of the Regional Planning Commission. So the last thing I will say about this, I mentioned earlier that we can use some of our budget as matching funds. So I could potentially, if we advanced a project and it was to a place where we were gonna award funds for said project, we could use some of those project monies to serve as a match for federal money. So there's this potential, thinking back to the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program, the first funding opportunity that I talked about, if there was, for example, a floodplain reconnection project that really rises to the top of the list of priorities for the town, typically those types of projects also convey a fairly significant phosphorus reduction benefit. And, you know, thereby implying that it's a good fit for the program itself. So, you know, again, I'm not ruling anything out and I don't want you to either. I just wanted to make sure that folks are aware when they see a big dollar amount, oh, a million dollars per year, you know, yes, it is a lot of money, but there are some fairly stringent guardrails that have been placed on that money that I'm happy to work with the town to continue to explore looking for projects that do fit well under this current funding regime. And then lastly, I just want to talk about some next steps. As I mentioned, I've had a few conversations with Tom. I have at least a limited understanding of the priorities that have already been identified but would certainly like to hear about other project types and other work that the town hopes to engage over the coming months and years. I'd be happy to talk about how CVRPC could help with broader municipal engagement and outreach up to and including engagement with landowners, be they the state or private property owners. And then lastly, really want to emphasize that the Regional Planning Commission is here to help you both identify funding resources but also to pursue those funding opportunities. So please don't hesitate to reach out if some technical assistance, grant writing assistance is something that you think that the town could benefit from. So with that, I'll stop talking. I'm happy to answer questions, but would also love to hear your thoughts on what you've heard tonight, the kinds of projects that you really want to prioritize and really where we go from here. All right, Brian, thank you so much. Great overview of some options open to us. Any immediate questions? Brian, all of those funding levels are statewide and how competitive are they between the states or is there any priority given into different municipalities? Yeah, so a couple of things here. The formula grant money, that budget that I showed on the formula grant slide, this is for work only in the Winooski River Basin. So I mean, there are 50 or so municipalities. There are plenty of non-governmental organizations, natural resource conservation districts, watershed organizations, et cetera, that are competing for those funds. Now, that said, I've got a fairly significant amount of money left over from FY23 and haven't spent any of my FY24 money yet. So we are particularly flush at this point with money through the Clean Water Service Provider. So if we can identify a good project that meets this non-regulatory phosphorus reduction target that we're talking about, I think that there's a really high likelihood that the town could access some of these funds. The hazard mitigation grant program funds, those are the ones that only come out following a disaster, declared disaster. My recommendation would be at a minimum, we find one or two projects and pursue funding through that program. That money is only available following a disaster. There is a lot of money available. And sometimes that money gets sort of lost in the shuffle with all of the other things going on, post-disaster recovery-wise. It's my understanding that there are times when that money doesn't get all the way drawn down. So I think going after some of that hazard mitigation grant program money does make sense, even given the relatively short timeline with a scoping proposals due by the end of this month. The BRIC money, that Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities money, that's probably gonna be the most competitive. That said, if we were looking to the BRIC program to fund a stormwater master plan, we're not asking for a ton of money. And that could make it an appealing project for the funding decision makers from that perspective. Because we're not asking for, or we wouldn't be asking for anything close to the $2 million allocation. Again, thinking on the order of $50,000, where if the municipal match, the local match is 25%, that means your federal request would be in the order of $35,000 or so, $1,000. So out of a $2 million tranche of funds, I think there is potential there to access that. If you were trying to pursue a bigger project with the BRIC funds, I think that we'd have to make a really compelling case for why the town of Waterbury feels like they deserve the lion's share of the funds for a particular year. Yeah, Danny. I was curious if Tom, the fume, Brian had talked about potential projects for, particularly for the hazard mitigation program. Yeah, we talked about Woodusky Street. We talked about Culver Project, which is actually some work at the sort of land. And you feel like that's pretty reasonable to get the proposal in this month? I'm sorry, without a question for me, I didn't totally hear that. No, thanks, Brian. Sorry, I'll speak up by the time I answer that one. Yeah, I mean, in terms of the deadline, I can help work on the proposal and then also our emergency manager, Keith Coven, who's working on the local hazard mitigation plan for the town, he would also be available to put some staff time towards that so that we could develop the most compelling proposal possible. Brian, I would expect that the master planning has been done for several different towns and that the template for developing a proposal for that funding would be fairly well-established. Yeah, I would have to look back at, we haven't done any stormwater master plans since I've been here. I have, and Gay, I was on the planning commission in the town of Waitesfield for a long time and actually was involved in the planning commission when the CDRPC did the stormwater master plan for the matter of our valley. So I've actually been involved in the process. The proposal piece for that, not overly difficult. They're basically looking for an identification of who the project partners, the project team would be and then some details about the area of interest which I'm inferring, but certainly correct me if I'm wrong would be the entire town as opposed to just the downtown. Either way is fine. We just need to be real specific about what we're looking to analyze as part of that planning process. And then are you familiar with the McBroom study that identified larger mitigation initiatives that was developed in 2013? I am, yes. And... I can't say that I've read it cover to cover and certainly don't have it committed to memory but I do know of that work and it would certainly be worth digging into more. Based on what you did see, would any of those be a good fit for the hazard mitigation grant program? I think so, yeah. I mean, again, I can't tell you a specific project off the top of my head but I could certainly look back at that resource and flag those that I think would be the best fit as one of my next steps coming out of the meeting. Yeah, if I recollect, there were three preferred alternatives that came out of that. One was the Harvey Farm over in Duxbury which if the landowners decide that they are not interested in working with us may not be feasible, at least initially. Another was the excavating of a portion of the state-owned cornfield. And then a third was the reconnection of floodplain just opposite the town of the state complex in Ronewski. I mean, that's great. Yeah, I think given the questions about the landowner for the first project, I don't think that's right for proposal at this time but I do think that the second two would be priority projects that we could and probably should pursue funding through this program for. And this is a case, you know, again, where we're talking about these floodplain reconnections that those are the kinds of projects that convey a fairly significant phosphorus reduction benefit. And that really helps to support and justify the expenditure of the formula grant funds through the Clean Water Service Provider to help facilitate that project. And so we can do this, you know, we can think strategically about how we might mix and match the funds to make them go the furthest. I can tell you that I'm working on a project in Marshfield currently, a berm removal project along the main stem of the Wonewski River. And my target for the year is a 70 kilogram, 140 or so pounds, 150 pounds of phosphorus reduction per year. That one project, that one berm removal project, if we get it all the way through implementation, represents almost two years of the phosphorus target for me. So when I hear about places that are interested in these floodplain reconnection projects, those are the ones that seem really attractive that I think we could shepherd through the funding request process, even if it means trying to tap funds from multiple different sources. Bill. Yeah, my only question, Roger, I know Brian is with the Regional Planning Commission. The cornfield certainly is in Waterbury. The one across the river is Duxbury. So would Duxbury have to apply for that? Are you, is Waterbury eligible to apply for the ones across the river? Did you hear that, Brian? Not really. I heard that it's had something to do with two different towns, but I'm not exactly sure what the issue was. Yeah, Bill was just asking. The cornfield does lie within the town of Waterbury, although it stayed on the floodplain reconnection. Opposite the state complex is in the town of Duxbury. And he's wondering if Duxbury would have to apply for those funds or whether the town of Waterbury could apply for that project, even though the project would take place within the town of Duxbury. That is state on land, though, correct? Yes, it is. Yeah, so really as long as we engage the state and the state as a willing partner, ideally we would involve Duxbury in the conversation, but it's not really incumbent on Duxbury to apply for the funding. It would be a little bit of a unique case, I suppose, but certainly engaging Duxbury through the process should help alleviate any concerns. And at the end of the day, if we're talking about state property, assuming that the state is on board with the effort, in some ways, it doesn't necessarily matter what the town thinks. And let me just, I know this is being recorded and put on TV, so let me just say I'm not advocating that Waterbury start making decisions for the town of Duxbury, but I am falling back on this. It is a state owned land and if the landowner is willing to engage the process, I don't necessarily know why it would matter if it was Waterbury or Duxbury that applied. It might strengthen the application if we get a letter of support from Duxbury or if Duxbury were to actually sign on to that part of the project. Yeah, and I think that's what Bill was just suggesting is that we could strengthen our proposal by having a consortium of two towns on this initiative. Do you know of who represents the state in terms of whom we would approach within the state about the project, the two projects, Cornfield and the project across the river? Jennifer Finch, she's the head of building general services. Jennifer Finch, okay. Cool. Well, it appears like we're making some progress. I've been doing a lot of talking. Who else has a question? Here's a question. Oh, okay. Yes. Let me try to read this. For the clean water service provider funding, is flood hazard mitigation identified as a co-benefit for the project? In other words, do projects that both reduce phosphorus and improve flood resiliency be scored well? The short answer is yes, but it's really incumbent on the phosphorus reduction piece. The phosphorus reduction piece. So I mentioned before my target of 70 kilograms per year phosphorus reduction. If you look at the overall budget, that means I've got about $15,000 per kilogram of phosphorus removed. So as long as the project being proposed yields a phosphorus reduction benefit that is on the order of $15 or so $1,000 per kilogram, then the project itself looks attractive from a funding perspective. The flood mitigation co-benefit does earn a project proposal additional points, but the way that our scoring works for the proposals that we review under this program, if the phosphorus reduction isn't significant and also meeting that cost constraint, it's really unlikely that the project would get funded regardless of the number of co-benefits that exist. And I know that's disappointing to some or many of our partners. It's different than the way DEC has operated funding for this type of work in the past, but the clean water service provider is specifically tasked with phosphorus reduction. And if other good things happen, that's great, but certainly not the focus of the money for that program. I read this morning that the cities of Berry and Mopilier are looking at flood proofing. I would assume that means or could involve the construction of berms. Are they looking at these same funds or are you familiar with those initiatives? You know, I have been involved in some conversations, particularly with some of the House and Senate members. They, from Berry, Berry Town, Berry City and Mopilier that are responsible for the recent omnibus package that was put before the state legislature. Part of that work, if it were to be funded, and I know there's a couple of different groups that are doing some work on this. And I'm not sure if Chris Kaleeva is involved on the UVM side in a parallel effort here, but, you know, part of that omnibus package, if it were to pass, would fund a flood study that would really help us identify the most vulnerable locations within the drainage basin, within the Winooski River basin, and help set priorities on a more regional basis. I'm not aware of either Mopilier or Berry City looking at the hazard mitigation grants program funds or the BRIC funds for that matter to do any work just yet. And they definitely have not applied for money through the clean water service provider for this work. I would be surprised if berms were the way, we can't universally say no more berms, but I would be surprised if berms rise to the top of priority projects, given that we're actually trying to take berms out in many other locations. Right, yeah, it becomes up there. Other questions, Chris? Jordan, I need you to come up, or can he hear me? Step forward, because it helps so you can look forward there. Thanks. Brian, for a long time I've been advocating for a problem that I see as being a huge impact into our stormwater and environmental issues, which is trying to reduce the amount of sand and salt use throughout the state. Most towns put up 3,000 to 5,000 cubic yards a year. They go through a large portion of that. Most of it ends up in our Brooks and Streams. I don't know how this, how your department, if it's even on the radar, number one, number two, how would it address it? If there, are there any avenues to address it? You know, just while I live on Neyland Flats, it's probably a two-mile stretcher road, pretty flat most of the way. There's a short incline up by the town shed, but we cross five bridges. If the road's so close to the Brook, we cross five bridges there, and it's exclusively used, the salt is used to clear the road. So it doesn't have a long ways to travel to get right into the water stream. Second question is, and kind of encompasses the salt and sand use, you mentioned dam removal. I know on Codyville they removed one or two dams there in the last couple of years. What I've witnessed is huge amounts of sediment have been eroded from the last few streams that has caused huge embankments where the Brook has, during high water problems, it has cut huge amounts of silt down through that section of Brook, and all the way up through by my house, and I'm curious to know what the impacts of that are on the lower tributaries, through Nuske and even the Lake Champlain. And then the last thing pertains to the mitigation study done on the Duxbury side of the river, back after Irene. There was a project, two duplexes that were built just down here on the Bolton Road, just outside of town below the dam, the exit of the dam river that flows into the Nuske. I'm assuming, and quite sure, because I spoke to an engineer just two days ago about it, that those projects, the two brand new duplexes, had to meet new floodplain criteria, as far as elevations of first floor. Both those units have been flooded twice during the last two storms to the extent of two to two and a half feet of water in the lower units. And I guess my question to you, Tom, was when that last storm hit, or the last two storms, was the dam still operating under some capacity releasing water and had it been able to shut the water completely off, would that have prevented those apartment complexes from being flooded? The Reservoir, the Waterbury Reservoir? Yeah. Everything you did is documented. What I can tell you is they followed their protocol and they closed the floodgates, not just on the Reservoir, but all the dams, all the flood safety dams upstream of us. And at no point did water flow over the floodgates, or did they have to open the floodgate because of capacity issues. Several days after the flood proceeded, they opened their gates in a major way to get themselves additional storage to be prepared for the next event. But my understanding is, in short, the dams did their job, 100%. But they don't shut off the flow. A little river doesn't stop. Yeah. They don't pull away from the back. We'll see, back when we were looking at the new flood elevations, the consensus was to go at, I believe, a 101 foot elevation for new structures, for first floor structures. I proposed 140, and there were some other people on the planning commission that were on board with that too, but we settled on 101. And consequently, those two new apartments got flooded because of it. Not to say that, you know, and I was wondering what could have taken place that might have prevented that. And if I recall, that mitigation study, 300,000 cubic yards, I believe, that it cost a $7 million, only lowered the water level of foot from the Irene flood. So I think it's going to take more than that. It's a good start, but I think, you know, moving forward, I think we're seeing worse consequences from the storms, and wondering how effective something like that would be. Thanks. Okay, thanks, Chris. Brian, do you want to address any of the three questions that Chris had? Yeah, sure. So the first question about salt use on the roads, the Lake Champlain Sea Grant recently had a workshop and Chris Stepanek is, I think, leading this effort here at the Lake Champlain Sea Grant, but basically looking at salt application and alternatives to salt. And so you might have seen in the last few weeks or so a story or two about using brine on roads as opposed to salt, you know, that is really a decision to be made by the select board and the road department. The RPC does not dictate or govern what the way that the individual roads are managed within the municipality. That said, you know, there is this effort through the Lake Champlain Sea Grant. There's a better back roads grant funding as well as this research effort out of UVM and the Sea Grant. And really, you know, it's not that the technology super advanced, but it does cost money. And it's a different piece of equipment that would be used to spread brine even to create the brine than what exists for all of the trucks that are outfitted currently that are spreading sand. You know, 25 years ago I moved here from the Pacific Northwest. They stopped using sand, I'm sorry, salt on many of the roads, at least on the west side of the Cascade Range because they were concerned about the impacts to salmon. Obviously winter looks a little bit different over there, but, you know, they've dialed it in pretty well. So it's certainly something that can be done, but it is a pretty big change of mindset from the way that roads are currently managed. I can certainly have our transportation planner reach out and talk more to the select board and or the town road crew if that's something that folks are interested in advancing. Second question was about the dam removal and what sounds like some scouring following the removal of some small dams. I need to get a little more detail on the dam specifically so that I could do some research on when were those dams removed, who was the project sponsor and make a connection with the project sponsor as well as maybe connect with some DEC staff, the river scientists, for example, to go out into the field and take a look. And it's potential for a project like that where what's known as a strategic woody addition. So basically dropping logs or other large chunks of wood into a stream anchoring them, slowing down that water and thereby reducing the potential for scouring during the high flow events. So there are some options but I think I need to get a little more detail before I wanna to dig in too much on that. And I'm happy to follow up with you on that, Chris. And then the last piece was a question about floodplains and new development. I'm not sure how the new development, the duplexes are that you're talking about but we're currently engaged in a process with FEMA where they're updating all of our flood insurance rate maps. And as part of that, they're going to delineate new flood hazard areas. And my understanding is that for Washington County, we are looking at a preliminary data release, hopefully sometime in 2024, the date has been shifting backwards a little bit but I've been led to believe that it should be summer 2024 but also don't have any control over when those maps themselves are released. My expectation based on your description of the property would be that the recently constructed duplexes are likely to fall inside the new designation for that flood hazard area. And we're working right now on some evaluations of town plans and zoning bylaws to assess whether or not they conform with the model language that's already been approved by FEMA and we'll be conducting outreach over the course of this next year to engage the planning and conservation commissions, particularly about updating flood hazard regs in the towns. Doesn't do much for the structures that are already there but hopefully we'll get us to a place where we can avoid these kinds of repeat losses for future development. Yeah, Bill. Yeah, just a couple of points. First, the second point, Brian, the dam in Kobeville was not a dam removal, it was a dam failure. No one, somebody owns that dam but it hasn't been maintained or actively looked at at all. Two winters ago or two springs ago now, a small hole came into the dam and now the hole is bigger. DEC was notified of it when it happened. So there's nobody to find who removed that dam. It's simply a failure and I looked at the hole the other day and it's bigger than it was a year ago so I expect there'll continue to be some degradation there. Your point about woody debris, putting wood into the stream, we did that in the lower portion of Thatcher Brook down below. The Grist Mill probably 15 or 20 years ago to try to stabilize the bank where the kids cross country ski down below the school. The village or EFUD has a sewer line that goes across that field and it's important that that be stabilized. There was riprap in there too. Yeah, there was riprap and there was some kind of experimental programs in terms of driving tree trunks and the like into the bank. So that might be something that can be none there. I came up here, I don't think Chris really meant to imply that a foot of flood reduction isn't important. $7 million to reduce the flooding by a foot. Even in Irene, somebody was flooded that wouldn't have been flooded if it had been a foot lower. And in July and in December, I think if we had that extra foot of capacity, there'd be a lot happier people around. And $7 million sounds like a lot of money, but it's three times that we've had that flood since 2011 and it's probably gonna be, I hope not, but more frequent. So anything that we can do to lower the flood elevation is important. In those buildings that Chris talked about, I remember the whole discussion about 101 or 104. Probably it would have been good in those days if we had said, if there's nothing in the flood plain, you just can't build in it as opposed to deciding to raise the elevation of the first floor and it displaces water and everything else. But that's a different issue. But I did want you to know that the dam was not a removal, it was a failure and reducing the elevation by eight inches for a foot. Whatever we can do to make the flood elevation go down, I think it's the cost benefit over the course of time will be worthwhile. Yeah, thanks Bill. And maybe Tom knows the answer to this, but has anyone from Dam Safety been out to look at this following any of these dusts? If so, no one's notified us. They haven't seen it. Okay, I can reach out to some folks over there, see if it's on their radar and if not try to get it on their radar to go out and look at that and see if anything could be done there. Bill just mentioned that Dam Safety was notified when it happened in 2021, I think it was. We notified them and looked at it. There's no report here that I'm aware of. So we have to hear it now? No, Catherine, who only is identified as Catherine's iPad, says October 17th, 2021, dam release in mourning in Cobyville. Yes, dam safety has been out. Catherine, do you wish to speak to your comments? It's only Catherine's iPad maybe. Oh, that was sweet. Woody said, home on Kate's iPad. Hi, Woody. Woody? He doesn't know. He's on an iPad. Oh, so he's on an iPad. Okay. All right, thanks Woody. Well, we do have an update. Thank you, I appreciate it. Great, Tom, you've been having conversations with Brian about the priorities and I wanna get to the next steps because we're running out of time for what we allocated. In terms of near-term priorities, what have you been discussing? Potentially some flood heartening at the sewer plant. The water infrastructure seems fine. We've been discussing Windowskey Street and discussing. There's also a sewer line down here that's exposed and potentially protecting that. We've been discussing the Great Hill Cove and potentially a couple of other ones. And then some conversations about the cornfield and the state complex and across the river. Those are really big projects. Not on Brian's list, but we actually, it's in our to-do list to go to visit a couple of facilities that use Brian. The state has facilities and I think Morse, either Morse Town or Morse Hill has one. So I think we go there at some point this winter and then there we are. But it's a likely six-figuring fest been to convert entirely to Brian. Right, we have to convert all our trunks, right? And we are reducing salt use on a number of streets on an experimental basis. Yeah, okay. I do think for my list of projects that might be eligible, the culverts aren't optimal. As Chris pointed out, we go over five bridges, climbing that road. And we saw in December areas that flooded, that weren't flooded in Irene and weren't flooded in July. So I think having water in places where there shouldn't be water, especially up there, was a great concern to a lot of people. And I know some of those culverts are probably smaller than they need to be at that point. Yeah, we can look at those. But the challenge is none of them failed in the end. And when it comes to, our focus is gonna be on the art of the possible here for the first round. And you know, bridge work we can do where all the bridges were inspected by engineers and they came through the floods fine. The flooding in private land is a private land issue at this age, we haven't engaged with them yet. So yeah, I think there's probably some projects here, but it may not be a 2024 maybe the next round of funding later in this year or next year. Yeah, Melissa. Brian, have towns used municipal planning grants or other resources, particularly for the master planning for stormwater? Not that I'm aware of now. My recollection is that I've never seen that kind of work prioritized by ACCD for the municipal planning grants. It's more like update your flood bylaws or update your village master plan, but I've not seen anything specifically targeted towards stormwater master planning with those funds. I mean, we could certainly ask the worst they could say is no, and then we're in the same place we are. And I'm happy to reach out to the crew at ACCD to ask that question. But my suspicion is the answer is no, that there's other funds that they would prefer that we pursue for that purpose. Yes, Brian, as kind of it's been said a little bit here, flooding events, phosphorus, siltation, sediment, they all don't respect political boundaries. It's a basin wide program. And a lot of the proposals for hazard mitigation plans hazard mitigation plans, et cetera, are on a town by town basis. Is there any move to convert to more of a basin type planning to attack all of these issues? Because if we don't, some of the towns may be passing some of their problems onto other towns. I think some towns are already passing their problems onto other towns as it relates to water for sure. Have I seen any move towards that? Yes and no, yes from the perspective of river corridor management. So one of, I think it was Bill that mentioned this earlier or maybe at least think about this, that this thought that you had if there's not already development in the floodplain then let's not let it, let's not permit new development there. With the river corridor management pursuit by DEC, they're looking really at no adverse impact. So basically not permitting structures closer to the floodplain than already exists. So not allowing that type of encroachment to occur. I feel like the state is beginning to acknowledge the need for a larger role, at least in the river corridors as they present themselves. What that means for local planning and decision-making, I'm not quite sure yet because I don't think that idea has been fully fleshed out. I mean, I think you're spot on. The issue is it really kind of conflicts with the history of local land use decision-making in the state. And so when you start talking about giving up some of that authority at the local level, there is almost certainly going to be some pushback. Even though I would agree from a hydrology or ecology standpoint, managing some of these critical resources at something other than a political boundary definitely makes more sense. I think the legislature is going to have a heavy session of discussion related to flood hazard mitigation. And so I'm excited to see what comes out of that. And really hoping that the release of the new flood maps from FEMA will help us guide that conversation in a way that's constructive and yields the results that we all really want to see. Mm-hmm. Brian, given the tight deadline for the BRIC funding, would it make any sense for us to try to scramble and get in a proposal for a master plan before Friday or by Friday? Or should we, would it make more sense to just wait until FEMA's done its work and wait for next year? Let me look at the application in more detail. And I can let Tom know tomorrow morning if I think that's something we should pursue. My inclination is to say that we should probably wait for next year. But if the application does not seem too onerous, we might be able to pull something together in time. The question there would be whether or not the town has matching funds available at this time or if we'd have to seek other funds for matching or if you would, and I'm not sure where you're at in your budgeting process, whether there's still time to include matching funds as part of the next year's budget. We can figure out the matching funds fees. Yeah, we're still in the budgeting process and will be until the end of the month. So, we can figure that one out. That shouldn't be an obstacle, especially for $15,000 or something like that. Chris. Yeah, one last question, Brian. When I agreed with Bill that any help to lower the flood level is a benefit. The $7 million price tag was a decade ago. Do your programs have the capability of putting that type of funding forward for projects such as that? It wasn't $7 million, Chris, through Bill. You sure? I think it was 2.8 or 3 rings, obviously, but it's probably seven today. Yeah, so, you know, the short answer is no, but the hazard mitigation grant program, as I mentioned, you know, that's a pretty big pool of funds and so that might be an area to try to tap for a project of that magnitude. The other piece to mention is that we could continue this dialogue with the emergency management and try to assess whether a proposal like this might actually represent a project of national significance where we could go for money in excess of that $2 million, basically competing at the national level to see if a project of this nature might be interesting enough as a proof of concept, for example, to tap into a larger bank account and, you know, implement the project and use that as sort of a benchmark for other communities facing similar types of issues. You know, it's not, certainly not guaranteed. The provision is there for these projects of national significance, but again, without knowing the set criteria for what that actually looks like, I'd be hard-pressed to say that that would be a good avenue for sure. Okay. What if, for example, the whole basin went in on together of very Montpelier, Waterbury, Richmond, or if we all went in on a project together to apply for that federal grant, do you think that would be an avenue we could pursue? I think if we made the connection between upstream and downstream communities and had support from downstream communities, that that takes us certainly down the path of generating more compelling project idea than simply the town itself proposing a project for $7 million with the potential to benefit downstream neighbors without collaboration. So I think if you could bring more partners to the table and or get supporting documentation from other municipalities in this case, that it does make the proposal stronger, whether that meets that yet to be determined threshold of a project of national significance, I don't know. But you're thinking along the right lines in my estimation. And when I was speaking with the legislators from Berry City, Berry Town and Montpelier, my message to them was really, it's great that the three of you are working together, but what I'd really like to see is that you reach out to the reps for even the municipalities in Chittenden County. Because if we can get Chittenden County on board and supporting projects like this, little old Washington County might seem a lot more important at that point. And mitigating the issues in our county before they get to Chittenden County certainly seems like the right way to go. And that might include even more wild ideas like having the other downstream communities help facilitate potentially matching funds for a project of that magnitude. They're still gonna derive some benefit even if the project isn't a constructor to implement it within their county boundaries. Challenge you have right now, Kane, is most communities that work it hard don't know what their plan B is as yet. They're still figuring that out and they haven't had a lot of time to do that because they're still figuring out the FEMA claim from the first flood. The other piece is after the flood, my sense from talking with folks at the state was they were really interested in projects that would reduce the impact of future flood and more floods like lowering the flood plain areas for connecting flood plains, more so than flood hardening and since then it sounds like they're thinking has shift and even the state of the state last week I really got that sense that there's less interest in those sort of projects and more interest in just acknowledging floods are gonna be here, it's hard but it's cheaper to do that than to reconnect flood plain and do some of those other projects. It's just a sense I have, it could be entirely wrong. All right, Brian, thank you so much for taking all the time with us. I realize we've gotten a bit over time but we really do appreciate your expertise and you sharing it with us. As we mentioned, you'll be back in touch with Tom maybe as early as tomorrow about potential for the master planning and then also these hazard mitigation priorities that we're taking under consideration. Yeah, great, and I will as I mentioned share my presentation with Tom so he can share it out with you and for those of you that don't have my contact information, it's included on the last slide of the slide deck. So look forward to continuing to work with you and yeah, please just don't hesitate to let me know how we can help moving forward. Okay, thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Bye. Oh yeah, sorry. I just want to acknowledge Doug who's our rep to CVRPC who obviously provides this type of stuff on an ongoing service but has been going to the monthly meetings I took the minutes while we were sitting here so just to thank him, one of those folks we have pointed a long time ago. And Doug, do you have anything to add to the conversation before we move on? Only that the regional planning commission's been asked to assemble sort of these ideas to share with a couple of legislators when there's the flood issues that we're facing and then we can work on that internally and that will go out but I don't believe there's anything in it that hasn't been seen elsewhere. I think we've mentioned a couple of priorities here. I think Tom, I don't know if you have a sense of how to move forward in the short term with Brian and any ideas that we can share with Doug. I think in the short term I've been focused on the hazard mitigation grants. The BRIC is relatively new to me and that's just sort of an example of the morass of funding out there where you've got to figure it out. I think hazard mitigation grants are a best approach from what I've been hearing. For that we would need to identify a number of priorities and then narrow them down to 30% engineering. In essence, if you apply to the state, the state does the engineering, pays for the engineering through the grant and based on that they do their own cost benefit analysis and if it fundamentally makes sense to pay for the implementation, they'll help you with that. Correct. Then we would share that information with Doug so that he can coordinate with the central program that you don't plan on. Correct. There are no more questions on this. We'll move on to the next dynamic agenda which is the budget starting with the cemetery. Thank you, Karen. So Tom, do you mind just leading us through the... Sure. It's been prepared for the cemetery. Yeah, if you start with the expenses and I'll get to the revenues because there's a couple updates. So on the expense side, there's regular pay and part-time pay. The regular pay is for some staff that do some work related to all the administrative work for cemeteries. Part-time pay is actually generally public works where they come in and do the grave openings. We thought in 2023 we had some extra funds in there. We were looking to hire a very interesting job out of a cemetery sextant. So it still exists but it's someone who, in essence, manages the administrative side of the work. I've gotten quite an education in grave openings and related things. Put that hit the pause button on that done because it's a tighter budget this year. Challenge we have for cemeteries, there's sort of two big numbers on the expenses. There's grounds maintenance and there's contractors. We spent extra in 2023 in part because there was a donation received in a prior year to do some capital work which was done. So the money came in a prior year, went out in 2023. We also, for years, had a great deal with a local guy who mowed Hope Sanitary for almost nothing. He retired, didn't want to do it anymore. We went out to market what he got everybody could and the cheapest bid was two grand a week. He mowed every week and trim every other. We have just recently, we hired a member of the fire team who's gonna mow and trim for us all summer. He's a retired individual. And that should help control costs and then there's a proposal to hire an individual that's been working for the water department and to make him in essence the third paid for by the town those costs are in public works. And that would help too. So I think in the men analysis, the $50,000 for contractors is probably gonna be controlled but we'll shift it to pay. So I think on a net we're gonna save a little bit but I'm not super confident on that yet. But the short way to think of it is that it's 90 grand or so to maintain your cemeteries and there's no big major capital projects planned for next year. The good news is we've done a lot the last couple of years so we should be able to maintain around that $90,000 level. On the revenue side what I showed on this street was sort of base revenues that we anticipate every year from things like lot sales and then grave openings which are fairly minor. The Seminary Commission is looking at some of the prices we charge but there's not a lot of volume there. People are cremated these days and that's just the trend, if you will. What I didn't show here, it is appropriated to the budget and sort of the summary pages is the funds for the Cemetery Trust. It's timely because I met with the library earlier today to talk about funds from their trust. For the last several years the Cemetery Trust has given sort of skimmed off the top 25 grand. The Cemetery Commissioners have agreed to increase that to 42 offset the budget so that's in there. So the way to think of a cemetery is there's net revenues of about 57 and there's net expenditures of hope in the 90s so you've got low $30,000 costs of the taxpayer at the end around the cemeteries which is not incredibly high but it's higher than it's been in future years. Future, sorry, it's higher than it's been in the past years. In the past few years the taxes we sent to the cemetery were fixed at 15,000 but in the end, that wasn't enough. So we were sort of catching up for the last couple years and the Cemetery Commissioners, just like the library commissioners, don't control your budget but they have an element of control of the trust. So they've agreed to that increase. Absolutely. 40,000 dollars cut into the principal? Yeah. No. There's about 400 grand in there. So unless you're in 10% it'll cut into the principal. No, so. Yeah, I apologize. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding and I've had this conversation a couple of times with Tom. Unlike the library, the cemetery fund, fund 53, has as an asset the money that's in the trust, the money that's held in the town's checking account, the other revenues come into that fund and all the expenses for the cemetery are in that fund. So if you go back to the 2023 budget, the only interface between the cemetery fund and the general fund was the $15,000 that top line, property taxes from the general fund. In the general fund budget, there was a $15,000 appropriation made and you can find that in the town report and that $15,000 gets sent to the cemetery fund in 2023 and it happened. If you look down in the 2023 budget, Tom has a line that says from cemetery trust which is not in the budget for that was presented last year. There's a line that, this line that Tom has for interest, 53,6008,00100, that line was budgeted for $250 this year and you can see there's $15,072 of interest that's been posted to that line. That interest is the interest that is generated for the cemetery trust by money that's just in the town's checking account. And my presumption is that there's 15,72 there and that's in the town's checking account. That there's 15,72 there because I think earlier in the year you took $25,000 out of the investments and you put it in the general fund. But when you took the $25,000 out of the investments, it went from money that was invested in fund 53 and now it shows up on the due to line in fund 53 so it's still all in fund 53. The $25,000 that Tom has on the line that says from cemetery trust, I have the budget here. That's interest on investments. Last year we generated 17,462 and we had losses last year of almost $60,000 on another line that's not on Tom's budget for securities gains and losses. So that line that says from cemetery trust, you don't need to take money out of the cemetery trust to put into the general fund to pay for the cemeteries. The money is already in this fund. I don't know what the gain is going to be but my guess is that on the interest line that Tom doesn't show, interest on investments, is probably going to be above $10,000 and I'm pretty sure that there's going to be securities gains this year. So I think in your 2024 proposal, you should have something from the cemetery trust generating interest there. You don't have to take money out of the cemetery trust fund in order to pay for cemetery expenses. As long as there's enough money in the general fund, you can just pay for it and the due to line changes. So this is accounting. We just have a difference in accounting but this is budgeting. Well, there should be something in the proposed 2024 budget. It's on a different page of the budget. For our interest. All right, sit next to me. Just the way you keep telling me here is from last week's packet overall, sorry. I'm just doing the same thing. Summary of all revenues. And then in this time we have cemetery fund which is serving 25, 25, 25, 25 budget and the proposed 40 for next year. But the 25,000 you're claiming that's often an interest. But that was just reflected in a different mind here. All I'm saying is you don't have to take money out of the cemetery fund. The cemetery commissioners don't have to say, sure, let's take $40,000 rather than 25. It's all in the fund. It's already an asset in the fund. So if you want to take money out of the investment portfolio to earn less interest and to not be able to get gains on it, that's fine. You just don't need to do it in this fund. The library fund is different. The library fund has fund 16 which is the trust fund. Money gets generated there and it gets sent to the operating fund of the library. This is the operating fund for the cemetery. So you don't have to take money out of the trust unless there's not enough money in the general fund to pay for cemetery stuff. So in terms of budgeting, all I'm trying to say, and I apologize, is that I think there should be the line items that we proposed to the public last year should be shown to the public this year in terms of how they perform. And they probably, at least one of those lines should have some revenue that's generated for the trust. The $25,000, I think that you have here, Tom, that you're showing from Cemetery Trust is the money that you took out of the investment portfolio. Yes, and I've changed the accounting for how we do cemeteries. Okay. That's fine. So the accounting has changed. Yeah. And that's something to describe it, so. Okay. Questions about the prison time? I don't know if you're done. Yeah, I'm done. Okay. Questions about the cemetery budget? Okay. Yeah. I'm not to go too deep into the cemetery fund. Just 60. I thought that's where you were going, but you didn't decide. Yeah. But at some point with the rate of people not being buried, right, eventually the fund runs out. Yeah. Right? It's not this year, it's not next year, but in some years the fund will run out. It could be this year. The way to think of it is, forget if there was a trust. 90 grand in expenses, 20 grand in revenues. You've got a gap of 70 that falls to the taxpayers. We skim money out of the trust to cover some of that gap. There's no guarantee if the trust goes up or down, right? I think it's important to take money from the trust because if the cemetery commissioners who have gone to control over the trust, they see the monthly statements of the trust balances. So if we say to them, hey, there's 400 grand in the trust, but there's an accounting entry, so you really don't have that 400. It's infested on behalf of the town. That sort of gets lost in the wind and they think, well, we've got 400 grand. Think if they make decisions to pull from the trust, we should pull from the trust, which is what they decided, similar to the library. But yeah, the library is different. The library is ongoing. The library is going to have ongoing capital needs. At some point, there's going to be a big capital project to redo the building. I know it's new, but give it 20 years, right? They'll pay their fair share of the heating system which we're going through all sorts of machinations with. Cementaries are really pure maintenance. The maintenance is going to increase very slowly. So yeah, the future of the cemetery trust, it's probably going to take many, many years, but there may not be a trust fund invested there. It depends on the reasonable rate of return you expect there and also the reasonable tax increase rate you want to have and how you want to balance those two. But in the end, it's all a taxpayer cost in the end. Which is the direction I was going. Since we are losing money and people are seemingly not choosing to be buried or receiving headstones as we go through the years, it's worth thinking about moving this out of this sort of budgetary discussion and maybe putting it to referendum at some point in the next 10 years on whether the town continues to maintain the cementaries using fund or using taxpayer dollars. I mean, in the end, they're one and the same. They're all sort of owned by the taxes. So isn't the town owned by the trust fund? The town owns the trust fund. The commissioners, it's just like the library. The town owns the trust fund. It is indeed town dollars, but the commissioners vote on the use of the fund. Right. And there's... Cain, if you look at it, if I'm hearing what you're saying, if you use the trust fund to maintain the cementaries, in the next five years, there's not going to be any money left. Right. And then it's just taxpayer dollars to that point. There is no... Right. And I think what you're trying to manage is the balance between those two over the long term. Right. So you don't want to... I'll use the fiscal cliff analogy. You don't want to sort of have a shock to the budget all in one year. So if you want to sort of increase, I think the cost of taxpayer relatively slowly which we're doing to the tune of about 15 grand. And then I hope, you know, we're going to work real hard again to hire for the summer, but I think the way to do it, I think we can maintain the cementaries cheaper with our own part-time staff. It's been a struggle to find that level eight. And it's funny because for the first 20 years of my career, the mantra in state local government was outsourcing. Now I think that coin is flipped a bit. We're trying to insure some of the work again. I think that's a better option. We just got to find that people will do it. But we've got one guy who's happy to run him over in a trimmer of 40 hours a week all summer, and that's going to be a big help. And then if the... If the flight board and E-File board agree to hire the employee, we talked about he'd be available in the summer for a lot of that work too. That's not necessarily a savings because to some extent it frees up more experience for a crew to do real work. The other piece to think about is that the budget... I tried to get there. I just didn't have time and I didn't want to make too many changes in prior years. But for at least several years, Public Works crew have done a fair amount of cemetery work already. So we're not reflecting there across in the budget. But really, you know, last year they did all the mowing and trimming in Maple Street. What is that in terms of time? It's a pretty fair amount. Well, that's reflected in REC, in Parks and Rec, but they did all that work too. Yeah, in past years, that money was accounted. The Cemetery Fund paid the Highway Fund for what the Highway Fund did. And it was on the across Maple Street. You can easily do that. And it was done with... There's cross charges, or there used to be cross charges, at least, in every department. So in past years, what the Highway crew did for the cemeteries was paid to the highways. And I think if you look at the 2023 budget, you'll see line items for revenue in the Highway Department and expenses in other departments that paid those cross charges. And whether or not that was done this year, I don't know. The Cemetery Fund, I guess all I would ask is that the 2023 budget for the purposes of reporting to the residents and taxpayers should be shown as it was budgeted last year. So line items that are not on this sheet that were presented to the taxpayers should be on there. So you can see all of the revenue that went into the Cemetery Fund and all of the expenses that came out of the Cemetery Fund. If Tom wants to change how he accounts going forward, I have no problem with that. And it's not an issue between Tom and me about 2024. But 2023 should be accounted for as it was presented to the voters. And right now, here it's not. It's just a different part of the budget. Just presenting it differently. I guess as I'm trying to consider this as a select board member, I'm asking if we're comfortable with the recommendation from the Cemetery Commissioners. I don't have a lot of experience in this. I know we have a tax stabilization fund that has a set policy. I know the library can't find the set policy. I don't know what policy the Cemetery does or doesn't have. I don't really disagree with Tom about if it should spend it down or not. But I guess I feel like the question within our purview tonight, I just want to be careful about what we can and can't adjudicate. I think that's a fair point. I have the time recorded up for next year. I think we can report in a parallel way for comparison as it's useful. The proposal I see is a $40,000 from this year if the Cemetery Commissioners are comfortable with it, I'm not inclined to object. I think it's a broader board policy about do they have a set policy? Do we have concerns about their set policy? Are we touching no more than 5% of the principal of the year? I don't know, but I'm just trying to figure out how we just are respectful of everyone here tonight and adjudicate this and then also move forward with the other departments we have to review. There's that. That's sort of the question. I think it builds just addressing an accounting issue and it's just asking if we show the budget the way it was presented to the taxpayers last year. The budget was presented to the taxpayers and I'd like to see what you've got. Can that be done in a narrative way? Yeah. Because I feel like addressing it, obviously, there is a change in the structure to the budget. People might not know how to look for that or where to look. I don't know if you can report this as an elected presentation. Sure. We just need to footnote this and we could even add a line showing where the transfer was made. I guess I would say, offhand, I have a moment of pause around the idea of spending trust down forever. I do recognize it's a vastly different operating model from the library, but I guess in my limited understanding a portion of the earnings every year. I'm just saying, I have no problem with this year's presentation, but I guess that team is the other footnote is if there's a the broader conversation, I think Kane's point may be a little aggressive because I think we're obligated to take the going on business cemeteries, but it is like the longer term operational model about how we do it at what cost is, you know, maybe worth revisiting outside of this year's budget. My understanding is that the reason we're in the cemetery business is that they don't make money and so therefore it becomes the responsibility of the town. Yeah. One final point, and the reason why the $15,000 was in the general fund and showing the transfer into the cemetery fund was simply what we're talking about is that it was to show the voters that the cemetery is owned by the town that it's the town's obligation to maintain those cemeteries and by raising $15,000 of taxes and putting it into fund 53, the cemetery fund that's $15,000 that's going in which doesn't have to come out of the trust and you can leave that money invested and it grows more. So you know, and I'm not telling you that you should budget $15,000 to send to the cemetery fund. I mean Tom's got a tax rate that he's trying to meet. There's all kinds of different ways to do it and I'm not suggesting that you've got to put money there but the $15,000 going from the general fund was to show the public that there's an expense a tax expense for the cemeteries and in time that line probably is going to have to go higher. So if you just take it out you're going to have to add it in and it's going to be a bigger expense than going from zero to whatever is going to be more than going from $15,000 to whatever. So I just want to explain that the the trust fund was always viewed as something to protect if we could and not not take money out of that. Thanks. Appreciate it. Alyssa. I'm going to not try and ask budget and accounting questions of Bill and Tom in a public meeting because it's probably a poor use of all of our time but that's your question. I can ask Bill a specific question about the 2022 budget. I think fundamentally it's about different ways of reflecting the things in accounting and being not an accountant I would like to hear their detail perspective but I don't think this is the end. The short version is I showed it on the tax levy page and the second page in your whole budget packet but the short version is if you take what's in front of you and you add $45,000 to revenue you've got about 62 grand in revenue and 89 expenses so your tax payer dollars are about 27. That's what would go into the cemeteries in 2024. You can take less from the trust but you're then raising your tax rate. Mike, I don't know if that would be a footnote in this thing but that's not what I want to ask. I know we discussed last meeting about robotic mowers. Are we going to really seriously look at that because robotic mowers don't pay, don't get paid health insurance, retirement, etc. etc. I think it's something to at least not be economical but at least something that we should look at as a municipality if it's a cheaper source I think we should do it. Wasn't the main concern we can't prevent it from getting kidnapped? It's part of the challenge. But if you hire a service to do that they're responsible for they may have some sort of a lock or something like that. That's not something I've found yet is someone who does that as a service. All of our services that do that. They're basically leasing it out to you as a you and I remember on Shark Tank they had a company that's doing it nationally. Look at some of the past editions of Shark Tank and identify them. Any other questions on cemetery at this point? We can of course come back and we'll visit this but I think we have the issues in front of us right now. Let's move on to general government. Starting with the revenues tax interest and penalty 2024 numbers are pretty comfortable with 2023 penalty is applied once a year so that wouldn't change as we finalize 2023 if the accounting done. The 0.2 0.225 of 1% of school taxes that may go up a bit depending on school taxes but it's a pretty rational figure I think. The village admin service fee is formulaic at this point. That may change a little bit but that's town to e-fund money. The pilot money so in 2023 we had a $40,000 surplus of pilot. The increase in 2024 is based on an estimate for a pretty conservative estimate for some of the new towns that are pilots that went in place over the past year. So I think that's despite an increase from the actual on the big increase on the prior year budget I think it's pretty reasonable. The forest and parks money and the current use money those are based on the actuals and those are pretty set amounts every year the state has to appropriate them but they haven't done that for a long, long time and I think that would be a sea change if they had those sources for towns despite their difficult budget because there's a lot of towns where it's a much bigger number than us although we are a sizable number. Going down a little further town forks fees those are reduced to be consistent with the actual for this year a lot of that's driven by property sales and refinancings and there's no inventory in the market no one's refinancing so I think it makes sense to reflect the actuals. Historical society is tied directly to their expenses it's been a smaller number in prior years in 2023 they hired someone on a part time basis that they are paying for so that person is in our payroll actually just today sent on the final 2023 bill. I'm not entirely sure that's going to continue and that they have the money to continue that at least at the current rate but if that revenue is reduced the expense is reduced so it's a net zero in the end the debt services is generally based on actuals the $50,000 shown there is essentially the skimming of the 5% from tax stabilization but overall the real change of the revenue boils down to the big increase in the pilot some reduction in work fees and better interest earnings. We go to general government expenses no substantial changes going forward I want to change some of the accounting we used to show the quirk and only the quirk and we have a quirk and an assistant quirk and so I want to show them together because I think that makes sense to really show the department more or less as one did include some ongoing expenses for Tom Drake's position so I mean his work is going to continue into 2024 about 400 hours of his work so less than 10 hours a week on average but I think that's about what we can expect unless there's another flood in which case something else would happen health insurance is of course a very big number it's going down that's the luck of the draw on who you hire and the plans they take but it's still an awful big number no other huge changes going down I do want to know towards the bottom senior citizens are not asking for anything extra and I do want to know further down the money to the cemetery fund showed here is just showing in a different place in the budget in 2024 as we go into the second page sorry two million operating funds is that being shown elsewhere or are we just choosing a second minus 17.5 that's just down so we have we have a reserve fund built up there so we're in some prior years we funded the we funded the cost of this building so we're just coming across to operate the building that is the line that is to MBOF this 56,088 in 2024 which is just down from what was budgeted in in 2020 but I'm just acknowledging that's proposing just covering costs not saving going to the next page the RW expenses at 91,000 we had some of that planning development so it's out of the budget and moved to here just in solidarity in one place there's big changes and that's the operating funds that were used last year that came out of this year's budget on the public safety side I was actually going to meet with them this morning, sorry, go ahead oh, I didn't want to interrupt you we have a line item that has no name it's just $20,000 but there's no sorry, that's Stowe Street Alleyway and Senior Kitchen should be moved up a line oh, okay thank you very much public safety I was actually going to meet with the state police today to try to get some final numbers there but Charles Gwynne has the fool so that was delayed but their presence the new officer presence has been felt yeah, I think so I think the current team they have is really good I've got both positive and negative reviews so I think they're working so they got a warning or a ticket or what bar they were frequenting so the police contract expires June 30th so the increase would only be felt for the final two quarters of the year but nonetheless it was a pretty healthy buffer I think do you have any indication that they will be asking for an increase I know that you assume that they will but state police offers service to virtually every community in the state where the only one that has a contract with them other towns have contracts but they're generally hourly based with a set amount of hours for things like patrol so there's a lot of contract models out there ours is unique in that it's two full time people right now they think they generally request reasonable increases of other towns but we've had a contract for three years that effectively had almost three years of zero in it trying to hedge here and be a little careful the emulence service side is another pretty big decision so I've met with them several times the proposal here increases there per capita we had a $35 per capita that's still that's up from 26 so it's a big increase that's still pretty consistent with the range of cost you see statewide you see some some areas of the state there's a lot of ambulance service consolidation and that's driven down rates a little bit but not much without it's parallel in its own right the emulence is I think in rural America not just Vermont but in rural America been in flux and change and struggling for a few decades now I think it's going to continue to be the case if the federal and state governments decide to increase Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates consistent with the rate of inflation then we'll be able to increase our budget consistent with the rate of inflation there's a lot of numbers which has not happened in a long, long time the only other option Wazie has is to charge a town more and seek other business and they are trying to seek some other business and they are pretty aggressive about that but to give an idea you know this year they've had some they've had some help they've got some extra funding unplanned for things like fascination clinics but if you would have stripped that out of the budget because that can never be counted on to break even Wazie would need to charge us about 50 bucks per capita so I think that's a number we're going to have to work towards over the next couple of years and it's really none of that is about their new building the new building I think is going to help retain staff and actually get some revenue it's operational costs so another 15 bucks per capita would be 75 grand roughly I guess my fear with trying to reach that $50 threshold is that it sort of works like inflation and minimum wage right state house was like well we're going to be at 15 at this year but now our inflation rate has exploded and now 15 is no longer right so if we're at 50 right now we're trying to reach that just to say in a few years it's not going to be 75 I mean I think part of the challenge was they charged so little for so long I mean if you go back even just to 2020 I mean they charged us less than 8 bucks per capita when I think statewide the average is probably closer to 30 because they were doing outside fundraising or maybe 2020 is not the best year because I'm sure they got a lot of COVID money but in general their per capita fee has been very very well they got a great deal for years now we're catching them to market I think the other piece we have to prepare for is and actually the DRB just approved their permit last week but when they open their new building we get about a $20,000 credit on the wazi bill because we pay the full dispatch bill for the town and that's prorated so their share of that is in essence reflected in this number so when they move to a new building we have a $20,000 cost increase for that amount and that gets paid out sorry I got confused it's the dispatch doesn't change we get a credit because we own the building there and now so we get sort of a lease credit a few so that's where the $20,000 arises from the dispatch will stay the same alright that's my question paying thanks no problem and then municipal building so the auditors requested that all debt be consolidated in the general fund and that's what's in the operating funds not in capital funds that's what's been done here so municipal building the debt that was in there last year is in different lines in the general fund and split between the general fund and the library based on I believe based on square foot it's roughly 50-50 but not quite so that expenses out but the short way to think that the municipal building fund is it's about $122,000 to maintain the building it's funny because at this time last year we were dealing with heating issues or we were going to blow the budget sort of having that same thought now because we're still dealing with heating issues in the beginning of this month we had essentially no heat over there and now the heat won't shut off we're hoping this week they'll find that balance and get it right but it's been a bit of a stream of challenge Bill Woodruff has said to me that the thing that keeps them up at night is not necessarily another flood or a big snow storm that's at this building Gizem is his share of headaches and a heartburn so hopefully we can iron out some of these issues I tend to think we're past the warranty period for the heating system by about a year I tend to think if we get another truth be told over the summer it was fine but I tend to think if we get a third winter under our belts and we still struggle mightily with the system we're going to have to rethink things a little bit and maybe have a capital project that's beyond maintenance I don't know what that means at this point heat pumps not quite sure it's what we have there's a little effect they're super cheap and efficient when they work but the problem is we've had a couple leaks in the vacuum and those are expensive part of the problem is heat doesn't work or it doesn't work for part of the building and it goes double time in the other part it goes upstairs and the machine has a code and the code says Z197 and it has to call the technician in Texas who has to figure out what code Z197 is and then find the local tech to fix it it's I don't know that it's over design or not I'm not an expert in these things but it's quite complex let's put it that way so it's not something the library today did a little cooking thing and they tripped a circuit because they had six waffle irons plugged in we can fix that the building's pretty tough so that's that's a chat a lot going on in the library and then on the final page here is the development service kept some money in there for the community service officer which is where we pay an animal control officer if we can find one or if we want to find one which is a different conversation and then the which is minimal but we struggled to find that position for a lot of years so I'm assuming that my success will be no better than anyone else's the big expense on the bottom the public health expense that is funding for Washington County mental health but in the end it's a pretty minor cost center after the dog control hearing we'll redouble our efforts to try to find an animal control officer and do what we can to make some strides there and I listened and Karen and I sat last week and tried to figure out some potential updates to the ordinance that might help us on the fees we'll see what brings something back to you hopefully around the end of the month and not in February and then we are on to any questions on this the public health the Washington County that's above and beyond what their special article request is they don't think they have they don't have a special article I thought they had a special article they have a page in the book I know they're in the report yeah but they're not a special article okay thanks on the recreation side broke this out into different cost centers Poole had a difficult year this past year generally due to the weather so we're assuming our Poole revenue recovers to about this historical average and we've spent a lot of time and struggled mightily trying to figure out the pay issue and we've even discussed what we're going to do but we've even discussed having Poole hours without staff which some of these Poole pools actually do aren't sure, hates the idea but some Poole have essentially a sign that says we'll make our own risk and they have certain hours for instance just for adults but we're putting pressure there on trying to be reasonable about the staffing levels you know the Poole manager to her credit is very much program and wants to make sure people are a thousand percent safe you know I've made the argument that you know if the Poole was open just for the swim team for example presumably they're pretty capable swimmers and presumably the coaches are pretty actively involved and so maybe one lifeguard is plenty so we've had those conversations to try to control cost but the Poole in essence in your average year is probably going to cost about 50 which is what we budgeted you won't find a municipal pool that some are only in Vermont that operates a profit or break even they all have some cost basis to them and that's just the reality of running an evening pool we talked about last year and we're talking about now trying to trying to work hard to expand hours and increase public use but in general that's been tried a lot in the past and hasn't really worked all that well we'll keep trying doesn't mean we won't try I don't think we're going to dramatically exceed our revenue number by figuring out some magic formula staying open at certain times really the pool is fundamentally about the day camp program when it's loaded with kids going down a little further showing the revenues for the non pool programs numbers are a little above 2023 actuals but we think very achievable and we've also had a lot of conversations about rate increases in part because now we we found the executor and have two full-time FTEs but I also think that with the staff we have we're going to deliver a higher quality program so I think this idea of you know essentially $100 per week for what amounts to 50 hours a week for your child to be in the rec campus it's going to have to change it's not going to have to change dramatically but it's certainly going to change and above the rate of inflation and I think similar things for the after school program they're also working pretty hard to do little things and identify new revenue sources the simple one they're already working on is school and service days where we can be open and take kids at our rent facility no days are a tough enough to crack because they're unplanned and we sometimes need the high school kids and since they can't plan any better than schools can we can't necessarily be open but planned in service days we can we can work around that school schedule and snag some revenue that way but the salaries so the salaries are reflective of the two full-time year-round people we have now summer program pay is above 2023 budget but below actual because our second full-time person is going to be full-time managing the summer program he'll be there so that's a big part of it then the minicamp pay is pretty consistent with last year's budget some of the summer program pay I think we're going to make an accounting entry in 2023 and move it into minicamp but overall the payroll for rent non-pool programs is about 315 grand 320 grand so pretty big number but pretty substantially all set by the revenue the way I tend to think of these programs is you know at our at our peak I think we enrolled 168 kids last year that doesn't mean they were all involved for the fully weeks but that was that was the peak in theory of who could show up one day that's probably a bit high but then the last 150 160 kids and you're talking I think good quality safe fun and child care for what amounted to 100 bucks a week last year that's a pretty darn good deal right the last one so it's not going to be 100 a week this summer but it's not going to be 200 like 115 a week the other piece we're trying to figure out is I guess it's two years now where our system crashed the day parents registered their kids and so we have and this past year was actually done on town meeting day when registration opened so one we're not going to open registration we're also going to work with the vendor to see if we can stagger registration and perhaps have Waterbury residents get first bite at the apple we didn't turn away anyone last year but I think there was a production from a lot of parents that the system crash couldn't register a kid and they thought they would be locked out and wouldn't have a place for their kid to go for the summer so I don't think that'll be the issue but I'd like to find a way to give perhaps Waterbury residents a couple days to register and then open it up to non-residents Is she not having registration on town meeting day? No all I did was get phone calls on town meeting day and then I couldn't answer I was at the school getting phone calls Yeah, so it's not a great idea to do that That deviates from years and years and years of that so I just don't think it's a good practice I just don't think it's a good practice maybe Katarina will convince me Could we do it before town meeting day? I think we could I think a week is going to be fine That would avoid getting lots of complaints at town meeting day Yeah Just to add to that I'm not so sure it matters what day it is it's the popularity of the program it's the affordability of the program so no matter what day it is there's going to be issues around that software crashing Right For years in the office we've had all kinds of conversations about how to stagger it by age group or last name but then you get families who have kids that may have two last names may have two age groups so I think a change is warranted for sure because it's crash two if not three years but I don't think it's going to matter if it's town meeting day or the Friday before or what it is just a popular program Yeah, just a popular program Affordability is one of the key elements of its popularity Sure Going down further to the next page no big changes in the rest of the record temperatures the amount in line I think we have 84 that we're sending to the capital fund it's just sufficient to cover the fund expenses but we're not building that fund there's no because I like the idea of building a capital fund if you're going to pay cash or make a meaningful down payment towards something but in rec the big thing facing us is going to be the pool and building an extra 20 grand a year for a couple of years and that decision funding is almost going to be a rounding error in the context of the pool costs Well I guess it's in practice we've got a lot of other things in the past like lights on the ball fields The capital fund has a balance so we've got some money there if needed not too worried about that in the short term and Caterina is pretty aggressive about applying for grants on to the parks maintenance side we essentially budget here half time half time of the public works employee grants maintenance all summer and some part time pay we've got some money in there it's less than last year in part because we've struggled to find people so we feel like it's a reasonable amount to put in there just based on the labor market what we can do and find and then the grants maintenance of 20,000 is pretty consistent with our historical costs in general just materials and stuff they need for haul the ball fields related to that it's not in here is the soccer field up at the ice center we own the field we are going to put some work out to bid for that field in a few months but the current plan is that that's a FEMA project the town owns the field and the soccer club would cover the town's match so it shouldn't be a town expense related to that and I think that's essentially part of what we have for them going down a little further we've got some new lines in the parks budget which are just maintenance items so they're removed out of the recreation capital fund because I view them more as maintenance and not capital so much but nothing huge that the short version of parks is is about 100,000 dollars to maintain your parks and I think that's going to stay relatively consistent over the years but perhaps some increases if we add parks which we've actually had conversations about going down you're still holding on to that park maintenance fund they are indeed are they're holding on to the parks maintenance do they have any plans for that spending yes yes they indeed do I realize it's a different municipality but I'm just curious eFUD had sharp rate increases in 2023 my preview of the 2024 budget is there will again be need for some rate increases but eFUD has some financial needs so I think it's probably a pretty hard ask for eFUD to give up that amount and then for let's just leave it at that we'll have to so the way I think of WREC is you go to line 117 on the final page and then an impact of all programs is 311,000 dollars in the budget very consistent with 2023 budget I think we can achieve that through pretty careful management of the summer expenses and trying to balance out some reasonable rate increases for the summer and then also the WREC staff pursuing every little opportunity they can to get extra money like the can we expand and do snow day coverage and other programs like that and they're working hard at that but the short version is that's what your WREC department calls you I think of it in a large part as a child care subsidy going down a little further the capital fund and 26,000 dollars in the revenue that goes in is just money from the WREC budget and then we have in here the big item for the year is where we've got 20,000 dollars for accessibility improvements and that would be matching funds for hopefully a successful grant application and if not we could perhaps just start that project down around or wait for a future year and try to go by again for other grants but that's the hope and the rest is smaller smaller items which are relatively consistent with prior years sometimes the capital items are things that are wise but I hope Davey is the first phase hopefully the first phase given there was a study done I think we're in a pretty good position to get grants based on the study so that's the hope and do we know when we're going to hear about that grant application I don't know I think it's a couple of months I think it's a couple of months not before April okay all right other questions Lisa I just want to pick up a little concurrence about the WREC creation we can't sign up on that because it's part of the coverage and for the changes that's why people are so accustomed to that I want to change it maybe my WREC staff might disagree with me but I have 15 messages after town meeting day oh I totally get it the other part of the multitask however to move it before town meeting day would probably not be a great move because school break is that week the first day back to school is town meeting day this is the day after town meeting day so like if you put it in that week of school vacation that would I think I'm not putting it during the school vacation it would probably be a good idea I appreciate that yeah off topic March 1 March 1 March 1 my only thought in terms of me opening it before town meeting day would be to lessen the burden and if people were paying attention they could get the early birds special people pay attention to that once you're in the system we can send an email to everyone on the system I appreciate the fact that people will be on vacation some people will be here but it would perhaps dissipate the big flood of sign ups and if they're taking everybody that applies at least we have this past year that isn't a huge concern that people are going to get frozen out yeah Mike I just want to give a big shout out to the Wreck Department I think they're doing a great job and our town's folks should be really because I think they're getting the service for a relatively reasonable amount of money I know some people think it's expensive but I look at it compared to daycare it's probably cheap but my thought is that any programs who should have town residents paying for a lot of these costs town residents should always get preferences and I would also just note especially with their new director there is a lot of programming that addresses all ages just to say as a 28 year old there's yoga and ear-making and painting and I also just want to caution us to not conflate this entire budget while recognizing it is largely that I just think especially now there is more emphasis on serving all ages and also including parks that serve a huge number of residents I'm going to also go to the British Barbers Center which is a village in Chicago and it's a a a a a a a a a a a a And Tom, you're still available to meet with the WREP committee on Thursday. Yep. We'll talk about Anderson Fields planning. There are some topics. All right. Any other questions on anything that Tom has presented on the budget? Here we go. Let's move forward. I guess this is the part where we were looking to have discuss Tom's testimony on behalf of the town to about flood recovery. So Senate government operations. They essentially want to know, was the government flood response effective or incorrect? Levels of government smooth. What could be done better in the future and how we can make government itself more resilient, etc. I have 10 minutes max. Who's the chair of that committee? I don't know because I think it changed. I'll certainly know by Wednesday. Yeah. We don't want to make this constructive, right? So 10 minutes of complaining probably isn't going to go anywhere. I think the biggest point I want to make is, and Brian brought it home. There's a complexity to all the state programs and all the funding sources. And we might miss out on some funding in the short term. There's a lot next year, but it's nice to get things off the ground now. Because of that complexity, we don't have a full-time grant writer or anyone who can step into the void. So the focus after the flood, after the cleanup was the FEMA click, which is its own challenge. I think what I might want to say is in our ideal world, it would be nice if someone from the state came to Waterbury and said, tell us your story and brought the team of, you know, a half dozen state employees and said, okay, well, these are the funding programs you want to apply for. Here's your deadlines. Make it a little bit easier for you, given we don't necessarily have any staff to do these things above the beyond staff that are fully unemployed. So that's, I think, a big part of my message. The other part of my message is we're six months out from the flood. And there's been no regional conversation directed by the state about the flood. I feel like that's a little bit overdue at this point. So, you know, several people during Brian's presentation talked about a regional approach. But I think the state's got a lead with that. And that, thus far, just hasn't occurred. I know they've created a, I'll call it a flood czar position. The gentleman I've talked to is in that position. It's great that those are, I think, the big challenges that I see. Having worked in a different state where there's county government, I kept thinking that over and over during this flood is it's easier to deal with these natural disasters when there's one MC that has a real geographic look to the region and coordinate all the resources. On the glass half full side, I thought Brian's presentation was excellent. I really appreciate him coming prepared, presenting us very clear opportunities and even giving us sort of a road map for moving forward. To be clear, he's not state government. Just say it out loud, I just want to say. But, you know, this is some funding. That is sort of a vision to what's possible. And I think that would be worthy of mention. Jenny. Tom, I noticed your last on the list of the agendas. I don't know if you're actually asking. You can leave a big, a big impression. I think, you know, I'm just bringing up like with Bill and Liz and Tom, we're sort of talking about it's like that half work of available funding. And that even our most knowledgeable and dedicated folks who are volunteering are still feeling like they're running around in circles. And so I'm not sure, you know, the direct succinct question, but just the mention of like how difficult it is without that coordination. And that's just the funding piece in particular that have come up. And I suppose if I could look back, in a perfect world, I probably would have gone, would have come to the slide board in July or August and said maybe we need to hire a position to grant right to go through all those things. I feel like now we've got a better hand in line so we can get it done, especially with Brian's help. I wish in retrospect that that's what it's something I would have brought to you. I feel like that was a mistake in my part. Doug, do you have your hand up? Yeah, I first want to offer an observation. I've been on the Regional Planning Commission now for several months. And of course we're reading staff reports every month in preparation for our commissioners meeting. At the very granular level you'll see the town names of what the Planning Commission staff are doing for the town. Not all of the towns appear there. The Regional Planning Commission is a resource that not all of its members take advantage of and has the ability to do the sort of thing that Brian did for us this evening. So I would encourage this tent to be, I don't say aggressive, but to be cognizant of that resource and use it in ways that we can for the start. Alyssa. I don't know if this is within the scope of the testimony and I want to keep the positive framing, but I guess to like borrow a bit of a Ted Brady conversation from the Vermont League of Cities and Towns. He always talks about towns are being asked to do more. And I guess kind of my, like one of my big takeaways both in July and December was kind of the dichotomy between community sentiment and community needs and capital M municipal government needs and sentiment. I mean maybe most pronounced in this most recent December meeting where kind of you gave the like 24 hour municipal update, which was you know, yep, roads are in good shape, culverts are in good shape, kind of we're fine. And then we have volunteer coordinator saying there's imminent needs with 60 households and you know, I want to make sure we frame it in the framing of state government response. But I guess it's figuring out, you know, I think towns or at least our town at least in July took on the purview of providing more support and did a lot of that through incredible volunteer resource. And I want to honor that and then say that like my reflection on how state engaged with that is that maybe they didn't always recognize that. You know, there was systems of the RPC calling you to ask about roads and ask about damage. And I don't know that that just as municipality, I was struck by you have these kind of two separate systems with two different needs. And I don't know that there was a whole lot of coordination in general, but to the extent that there was that it recognized those different roles. And in my view, kind of both sides could be strengthened. There's the piece you're speaking to about rating. And I would also just frame, I think like water break, like we have more capacity than most towns I work with professionally. Like the fact that we have a, you know, town manager. So the fact that you're still saying there's a huge need just really strikes me, you know, knowing that like we're not a volunteer. So we're doing it all on our own. But yeah, in terms of things on the ground, I think like there was volunteer resources or things and we've kind of had conversations about whether everything going through an emergency management director makes sense. But I guess my closing thought would be around transparency, around how the state wants us to coordinate information or use resources. I will say in this last event, I heard more clearly in the press conferences and maybe I just didn't hear it before, but like if you have needs, they need to go to your emergency management director and they need to go to the SEOC. But I think about instances like not knowing they were using cleanup crew or putting 211 in data. I think if there was more knowledge of how the state operated and what systems it's used shared by all both municipal and volunteer in our case or all those other things, there would just be more thought about how you could plug in effectively to the system. That's me off the cuff. So I also just want to like say that personally I'm comfortable with you also having a conversation with like Liz Schlegel and getting her thoughts, not to say take them all, but I guess that dichotomy is what I strike from a municipal perspective. And Tom, you and I met with Liz last Friday. One of her points was that she feels that there's a general lack of awareness about 211, how it works, why it's important, and one of the impacts of that was that Washington County was left off the most recent request for FEMA emergency funding in the December incident. And that's going to have an impact on us as a community. Bill, you had your hand up. At that point, Roger, Tom Drake just posted on much forward in the last couple of days asking people, please report to 211. It's not too late to do that. So folks should. I think Tom, you're being a little too hard on yourself in terms of going back to last summer and deciding that we need a grant rate or whatever. I mean, in the heat of the moment so to speak, what needs to be done and there was a lot of things going on. And thinking back to Irene, what I feel is different and I'm not intimately involved except through crew is that there's not been a lot of disaster recovery initiatives put forward by the state yet. I talked the other day about the disaster recovery fund and their kind of still haven't got any money out the door yet. But we weren't able to get viral fire. I think it was 2013 before she started. The flood was in 2011 and we applied for CBG, the air grants and things like that and we didn't get that funding until late in 2012 and 2013. What we did have and I've asked this question before is AmeriCorps and VISTA volunteers, that program, they haven't really stepped up to my mind as to what they did the last night. We had three excellent young people that provided big assistance to the municipality and I wish they would get something out that could be used to help because they were tremendous staff resources that we paid I think it was like $6,000 or $8,000 a year for 40 hours a week for those positions and we had them for three years. So that's those are the things that I think are lacking right now. Tom, I just want to clarify, you're testifying in front of who? Senate Operations. Okay, I was going to keep this under the lid but for what it's worth, and I don't know if you can use this to our advantage, I received a phone call today from the Secretary of the Head of Agency of Transportation in reference to my concerns about the aggregate issue that were faced with. I was told that they would pursue it and do what they can to try to see it through but if you can, from your avenue, put yet more pressure on and it brought to mind the conversation I had with her was lengthy but you brought to mind more issues that the urgency of having a quarry would help out with is during the flood the response time to repair roads and get aggregate to those damaged areas because we don't know where aggregate resources might be and whether or not they're even available and I know that McCullough is absolutely out of everything right now and even if we've got a stockpile of river road floods and we're getting access to those other quarries in this distance the way they are, you know, be advantageous from that perspective to have power in place where we could get it so if you can use that as any kind of leverage to kind of pile on from another avenue, the importance of that resource might open some doors for us. I think he's probably got enough input because we gave him 15 minutes and he's only got 10 minutes to speak. I'm going to watch it online as a note. You choose. Be excited. That's going to be tomorrow, right? Tomorrow? Wednesday. Sorry, I was looking at the whole agenda. Yeah, we're not quite at midnight yet, so. 1.30 p.m. on Wednesday. 1.30? Okay. Senate Operations. Okay, let's talk about next meeting. They're looking pretty full up. Maybe not certificate a five-way mileage, but... It'll be Monday, 22nd. Again, point of order. Danny, you are available to chair if I just zoom in as a innocent member. Innocent? Yes. Okay. Are you coming in under an alias? Yeah, so you can use that as I thought it would be fake mustache. Walk in time. Thank you. And we've got Joe, he's ready as far as we know to make his presentation. Because I already sent a draft out to the committee. Yeah, the library will need some time. Mm-hmm. I met with them today. How'd it go? They had a, the meeting continued after I left, but they're struggling with their own library trust. Okay. Whether they agree with a bunch of proposal or not, it's a good conversation to have between both boards, I think. And they're going to be there, right? Yeah, they're, they're 22nd should be plenty of time for that. Okay. And then revitalizing Waterbury and Senior Center. They're looking for flat budgets. I highlighted them because I'm not sure that we need to... Yeah, if they don't want, I mean, it doesn't seem like it's a contested issue. Do you think, Dump? It's certainly not contested. So I don't think we need to have them here. If you, if you wanted them, they're certainly not going to come. Um, I, anyone feel like we need to talk with them if they're just asking essentially for flat budgets or... I've said this to Tom before, but I guess it's like we use the budget de facto to do kind of our annual updates. So I do like having been an employee for revitalizing Waterbury. Like they should come and present to us and we should hear about what they're doing. I don't feel it needs to be on January 22nd to defend the budget proposal. Um, or I would say Karen should come and she'd be mad at me, but I digress. Um, but, and Ditto with like the Senior Center, you know, had ARPA funding for the kitchen. So to be clear, I don't have qualms with that outline in the budget. Or it feels they need to be there the 22nd. Maybe I would propose for an agenda item on the 29th. We have a conversation about regular check-ins with groups like them. I mean, again, they tend to send a six-month update, but I'm okay with foregoing it in the budget context, but not in an overall annual check-in context. I would agree. Knowing how much we've got going on this month, it might be better suited another time. So it would help me with a more specific direction. We're going to move them to the first agenda in February. Well, making sure Roger agrees before we. Uh, yeah, I'm okay. In fact, I would prefer, honestly, to talk with them about their annual plans if it's not specifically budget-related. And we could spend a little bit more time perhaps talking about the economic development proposal, because essentially, you know, Vitalizing Waterbury is our economic development committee. And then the senior center, unless people feel that there are particular things that we want to know from them, I would say we should schedule a little bit of time. Mike, we should probably just keep them on the agenda, but really not have, I don't think they need to be here. I think it's better to be there, but just have the numbers and just go over the numbers very, very quickly in cursory and just say we all kind of agree on what's there. Yes, I'll just say as someone who used to work for an organization, if I'm on an agenda, I sure as heck am going to be at that meeting. Just personal, that's my personal view. So that's fine. But if the intent is for them to not come personally, I would. I mean, we can specify, but... Well, we have to discuss the budget. Okay. Right. We have to discuss the budget. So they have to be on the agenda. I don't think you can just say, you know, flat budget don't include it. Even though it is, we all know that we're looking at both having flat budgets, but I think we at least have to acknowledge that and agree to that going forward with the whole budget. Okay. So in response to Karen's request, I would say we're going to keep it on the agenda. They're welcome to be here and speak to any issues that may come up, but we will reserve an opportunity to speak with them at greater length at another time. Yeah. Deal. Okay. I did write this, but I thought they think it took it off of the template that you provided, Tom. What are we talking about with special order? Because I want to be prepared. Do you want to see the letters of request? Are there any changes? No. I have to ask three times for an invoice. But anyway, no, there's the tall flat funding. So I can bring the letters of request. I think, yeah, we just reviewed the last thing this last year, but if it's all flat, I mean, last year, the conversation focused around the senior center and the increase, but also how much of it was in the budget versus has a special article on it. Well, and maybe the decision, maybe that's the conversation this year again, is now the increase is not an increase to just move it into the budget. Okay. That's your call entirely. On the 27th. And then just to give where we're at in terms of the tax levy, the public works budget had that $30,000 for sidewalks. And the more I talked to Bill Woodruff and thought about it, we have no qualms about deleting that in part because it's a lot of work for his crew because to stretch your 30,000, they pull the old sidewalks and they've had other priorities that are in the roads. And in part because the more linear feet you can bid out, the better price you get. So it's nice to chip away at it and show some progress each year, but maybe it's something we save up for a few years and have a bigger market. But if that were to, so we have no, you could certainly leave that in and repurpose it. But if that were to come out and the library were to agree on the trust fund usage, your tax rate would go up depending on half, which is less than 3%. Without the $100,000 bidon? Correct. Without what I'm sorry? Without Tom presented a rate that would be based on paying down $100,000 of debt from the general fund. Without that, you could be less than 3%. Keep that $100,000 dry and save it for a few turns. I guess my only instruct that was not on the agenda tonight and we're approving a $10, and I don't forget the increase, which is just to say I have no problem with it, but I find this RW Senior Center. They can certainly be on the agenda. No, I don't think they can be on the agenda, nor do I think it's RW Senior Center. I'm not, it's not a hell I'm going to die on. And then on the sidewalks, I guess I would just say, I felt like, Roger, you said that as a passing comment at the end of the last meeting, or maybe I interpreted the conversation wrong, but just saying we're facing, you know, pressure with school budgets, which is real and what not, and what choices we should make, I guess I would just say like, if there's a desire to change the budget by $30,000, and to be clear, I defer to you on Woody more than anything, so if Woody thinks it's a good idea, great, you know, he knows the crew and knows the people, I guess I wouldn't, I didn't feel like I was going into that conversation with we need to cut something in sidewalks is what we should cut. It was kind of an afterthought comment, so if staff thinks it's the right thing to do, I'm not going to advocate to put it against staff recommendation, but it wasn't like leaping off the page as like, wow, that super extravagant maintenance of sidewalks in the village. It was something we had in the budget in 2023 and didn't get to do it. We wanted it in 2024, and then after some some conversation, Bill Woodruff and Celia, you know, one of their, one of their complaints about the Main Street project of which sidewalks has been part of it is that, you know, they lose two members of their crew for quite a bit of time pulling sidewalks, and they'd like to just have some more time for roads and especially get some gravel road projects done. And don't they already have to do part well? They have to do some of that already. So, there will be sidewalks done, but it's already made for them. So yeah, I'd be happy to have the $30,000 disappear and keep our price, our tax increase as many as possible because again, our tax payers are going to be facing all sticker shock, regardless of anything we do here, but the more that we can reduce that, the better for my standpoint. Okay. Will we have a copy of the on the agenda draft warning we will copy prior to? Yeah, so we'll probably get that for the 22nd. That's all right. And then 29 is a valid date, correct? Sorry, Roger. Here you go. I don't know if this is narrative and you mentioned you drafted this like before before, it just strikes me that we spoke to ARPA really specifically and for the reference of Brian earlier tonight, you know, there is $500,000, of course, we've accounted for it for our green money. Yeah, there is no arm of money. I personally and the way Alyssa does accounting and budgeting feel that we have $500,000 that was originally ARPA and so I'm just thinking about either addressing that, how we address that I guess my sense is it's going to be narratively in the select board report, but again, just particularly in the context of our earlier discussion tonight, like there was so much focus on it last year and we provided a plan that accounted for so at a minimum, I think it's important that we highlight how we accounted for it for general government expenses, but I think if we have intentions of using it for special projects in the future, which I guess is my personal company, whether it's flood mitigation or something else, again, it's not part of like the warning, but I think we just need to make sure we address that or have a response to that for town meeting. Okay, and as I texted all members of the board I am drafting a letter to go into the annual report and we glad to mention that if I think that we would say A, that the ARPA monies have been incorporated into the town so it's all part of town revenue now. It doesn't have any special requirements in terms of being appropriated but that we're personally, I'd be interested in directing at least a portion of that towards flood mitigation since it's one of the things that qualifies as a local match. So is this conversation going on the next agenda? I was going to just put it into the letter that I was going to submit to you since you told me I had a deadline of Friday. And then also invite others to feed me and I can send you out the sort of like the outline of what I've got right now and then you can tell me if I'm missing something. Makes sense. Could be a status update too because there has been positive like this bridge work was done and this gravel will be happening this later and this is how the rest of it was accounted for in future plans. The certificate of highway mileage I put that on today it doesn't need 15 minutes I think it just requires your signatures. It's an annual Yeah. It's a formulaic part we have to complete. Woody fills it out and I think I just have to bring it here and decide it is my recollection. I'll change the times but I'll be in by the end of next week and we'll be here for the meeting if you need my signature through next week. I'll see if I can get I gave Bill Woodruff the deadline of Monday the 22nd so I'll see if I can get it on Keeper. She's giving me a deadline but the budget's not done so I can't write the report. I'm going in I know the real deadline. Just one last thing Danny has invited Skip to present EFUD on 29th. One other final thing of the big importance I responded affirmatively and I've already got a couple people from Town Hall but I was invited to be part of game show night for Winterfest. They're like a town team. I think the library might do its own. So give me a second here to give you the date. It's February 2nd Friday night starting at 6th. Do we have to enter by the 12th? Is this what Natalie just told me to do? Yes, you should to get yourself registered. There's going to be... You just said Friday at 6. So No, it was the part you wrote at the top. Did I? I don't know. Just maybe clarify because when I read it I'd believe it because I would be available. Friday the 2nd starting at 6.30 I think getting there by 6 would be helpful. And it's at the Legion. They have what their bars like. The bar is very open and reasonably priced. So I should have said that during public. I should also say speaking of venues at the Legion that you all should come to. February 10th there's a what are we calling it? What? Is it a volunteer appreciation? I think the select board is all duly invited and should try to attend. What time is it now? I don't think I have time yet. 6 I think there's going to be some broader reasons. They're making like a town Facebook event and what not. Meet again to the 22nd. I think there was a motion to adjourn in a second. Yeah, Alyssa made it in a second. Alyssa. All the papers are out.