 We're going to get started at 701. So we're going to call the November 7th, Monday meeting to order of the water rights blackboard and Danny vice chair, unfortunately, Mike, our chair could be here with us tonight. So I'll be doing my best to run our meeting. And we'll get started with approving the agenda. We'll take a motion to approve. So most. Motion and seconds further discussion. Yes, I would propose to adjustments. Can we take the acknowledgement of the Verizon virus off of the consent agenda. And we'll have that as the first select board item, and then add a review of our input process at the end of select work items. So I add one other thing. Brief description about. Yes, should put that the end of the select board items. Short like less than five minutes. Okay. Let's put it before so that'll be G and our full VH. So we move the cell tower from consent to the top of select board items we've added a bulletin gravel. To G and then added our input survey conversation to H and other amendments. To approve agenda as amended. I didn't know if we needed a new version of the idea. All in favor. Hi, any opposed. Excellent agenda has been approved as amended. Next is a motion to approve the consent agenda items A and B. Work to approve the consent agenda. Also moved and seconded further discussion. All those in favor. Aye. Any opposed. Consent agenda passes. So move on and give an opportunity for the public to speak whether on zoom or in the room. And this is an opportunity to talk about something that is not on the agenda. You will have an opportunity to speak to agenda items later. So does anybody in zoom or in the room. Like to speak at this time. I think it's very important to have a public thank you and acknowledgement to everyone who came out to the open house for Bill and Carla and their retirement. And also give a special public shout out to Ingrid Shepple look for her incredible behind the scenes organizing and coordination. I think anyone who was attended was really blown away and just want to acknowledge all the work that went into that. I think we're just here but have not voted for those who are not aware tomorrow's election day. The polls in Waterbury are open 7am to 7pm. Our polling location is Brookside primary school on Stowe street. If you have not return your ballot and have your own ballot bring it with you. If you don't, don't worry about it. I'm going to go to the back and avoid 7.30am and 2.30pm if you can because school is the session. But most importantly, I hope everyone knows if they have enough. Thank you. Anyone else for public. And then we'll move forward to item A on the select board items which is the acknowledging the receipt of an offer receipt of a Verizon wireless proposed application for a temporary 80 foot tower to provide the service. And we moved this item to have a little discussion about the history and what's happening currently. Okay. The extent to the select board believe the application packet that the attorney firm of MSK sent. This is their application for a certificate of public good to build a temporary power at the state complex. I did hear from Tom this afternoon that someone asked the question. The town opposed the power a few years ago how come this is just on consent agenda. The select board in the town did not oppose cell towers and water right. They oppose the installation of the cell power on North Hill, which was a critical wildlife habitat. And she'd still build corridor and the corridor that wildlife uses to move from basically West to use into the into New York State to New Hampshire, and there was significant bear habitat there, and the select board along with a number of private citizens and to a lesser degree the town is still all ejected to the site of the towers there. And we actually won at the public service commission, public utility commission. We spent a lot of money on that. It wasn't my project to to oppose it. But it wasn't because we oppose cell towers in fact, we made it plain then that there's a need for cell towers and we understood that opposing that particular one might have caused some problems with service for a time. There's a couple of other projects in the works that I'm aware of one, I believe is on great hill. I don't think it has come up before the public utility commission yet. This particular power at the state complex, and there's a map on what I sent out. It's a map of state drive near the Department of Public Safety and power plant. And I'll just mean to you just the short portion of the description, due to issues affecting the state police's use of the Verizon network and waterway. Verizon is deploying their short term sell on wheels portable site at this location for a longer term until a permanent solution can be found Verizon must wreck the temporary Dallas tower to ensure that service in this area is not interrupted. And they expect this tower to be in place for two years. And it's, you know, it's in an area that has some buildings that are fairly tall and trees around. I'm sure you'll be able to see it. But to be able to see it means that signals can get out of it. And on the consent agenda simply to, you know, they're required by law to inform the legislative body of the balance going in the planning commission and other other impacted parties. It appeared to me that this was not something. We're concerned to the board. I think we should simply acknowledge that we've received it, unless you have very different concerns than I do. Since it's moved from consent agenda, do we need to make any motion or official action. Yeah, you do because you've taken it all consent agenda. I would say just to let everyone know to mind everybody, maybe some of the select board members as well. Communications facilities like this do not need local permits, they're not subject to local zoning regulations. I suppose the one on North Hill because our town plan specifically cited that wildlife corridor and suggested that that was not a good place for this kind of facility. But this is all dealt with at the public utility commission. So there's no zoning application that will be filed here. The BRB will have no role in the siting of this all those issues with regard to aesthetics and impact would be handled at the public utility commission if people choose to go. I move that we acknowledge with that rejection of the proposed horizon wireless wireless application. Motion do we have a second. Any further discussion. Those in favor. Any of those motion topics. Thanks for that. Next to the old Jimmy down there. Inside. Yeah, I thought the same thing Chris I thought they could just put the transmitter on top of the town same sounds. The construction of the tower but probably that historic structure that that Jimmy is, we would be allowed to have something. Yeah, one of their comment please we're getting something that's right. Before we move forward, I am a miss that I've missed something very important there's another face of the table with me and it's Tom who is our newly hired municipal manager. I'm a deputy manager while Bill is still here and transitioning. But this is your first official meeting here with the select board so I'm so sorry I left that pass by but we're very, very glad you're here and that's. I think we're going to move forward to housing task force appointment so we put out to the public, an invitation for citizens to join our newly forming housing task force to Waterbury and we got, I think, a dozen or so interested folks. The board has had a little bit of time to review those because we don't have yet, but we will near future time we knock on your door and actual application or specific criteria for for appointing. The application will be a little bit loose but I think what we're looking at is approximately six out of the 11 or 12 to round out the committee, knowing that anyone who is not technically appointed is still welcome and encouraged to attend those meetings of their public meeting, including input from citizen to Waterbury. So that said, Melissa, do you mind if I toss you in the stardust or how would you. Yeah. Yeah. So you said, you said something about looking for six out of 11. So where's the other five. We had 11, I think it was 11 or 12 applicant. And you're pointing six. Yes. Okay. That's the goal. But I thought it was pointing 12. Oh no, opposite. Yeah, other way. Um, so honestly I'm not sure how to structure the conversation I had asked folks to maybe think of their top handful three to six. And we can either start with that list or I'm just refreshing my memory. Too many days ago. You've got 10 here. I did add one. So there's a follow up email to that email. So there's one additional. I think it is 11. I guess I would say just to ground us. So this was the idea of how the passports has floated around. We had a lot of nebulous discussions. Ironically, I will say, we said, oh, it might be too big. Let's keep it a manageable time. So he said with the four kind of sets he's being a select for each of our planning commission. That would be six members of the public as the ballot. So again, I would just say like, one, I just want to acknowledge that getting 11 folks is really awesome. We have a later appointment and commission for a board or commission with vacancies, which is more common. So I would say we haven't often had to whittle down the room quite as much and just reemphasize what you said around. In my view, this would be a group to coordinate with initially but would welcome kind of broader input. And some of the other criteria we talked about was just diversity of perspectives, professional expertise. So in considering folks that was some of my ones. I genuinely don't know where to go next. I mean, I can just list. Yeah. A couple of applicants are in the low income housing or affordable housing industry. Red flag came up to say, you know, possible conflict of interest. I don't know how you guys feel about that or something that we need to, you know, consider. I was looking for somebody that's a couple of somebody that's, you know, it's not very often we get even this many people are buying for something like this. It would be nice to see some new faces. Well, in the town, perhaps. And if you don't think conflict of interest is an issue of various values. And I respect their expertise in those areas. That's just the first thing that came up. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Sorry, I was just going to see the jobs. Yeah, so I'm just referencing the document we looked at. So just to say we said the purpose of the Waterbury area housing task force is to advance the goals in the Waterbury municipal plan pertaining to housing. And to engage in other areas of work related to housing as agreed upon by the group. So the purpose of the municipal plan are to ensure the availability of safe decent and affordable housing for all current and future Waterbury residents. And to create housing in locations that maintain the integrity of neighborhoods, while increasing density respecting the natural environment, and minimizing the need for infrastructure improvements. That's just background to be clear about responding to your question yet. I guess. Just a little bit at the red flags, I guess my personal view is we want a diversity of experiences so I certainly wouldn't want to commission only focused on affordable housing and I wouldn't want to commission only focused on market rate or high end luxury housing. I think our goal is safe decent and affordable housing for all current and future Waterbury residents which is going to look like a lot of different types of housing for a lot of different types of people. In terms of qualifications, you know we have folks speak to a lot of backgrounds we have, you know, in architects we do have a couple of attorneys and I know some of them did mention low income tax credits as well as someone who's on the board of Down Street housing and community development. I think they are membership and professional perspective could be valuable in terms of living, eating, sleeping, breathing and the same way when we talk about roads you say well yeah I drive a truck and this is what it's actually like and I haven't seen the cost of it in a way I don't. That's just speaking to my personal view I think in terms of conflict of interest that will be something the commission would navigate in the group if there was to be a scenario as of now this is really an advisory group, working to further the goals of the plan. They don't have a budget they don't have legislative authority, ultimately that type of thing we come back to the select board or municipal step you know I don't think this group can't on its own go or do things. I will say I serve on a separate board with someone. So I as a select board member have to make a note to disclose and say hi we're talking about property and Waterbury. We have a select board and we have a process to go through. So if there was to be some sort of public statement I think that's something we can navigate. I acknowledge we're balancing that on another committee right now and candidly it's a draft. But, you know, in my view I think there are benefits to folks who are working in this field potentially being part not being an entire commission. My view, bringing that background and expertise could be died. That's my view in this context based on what we explained. And please, can someone if there's waiting room. Yeah, or yell at me because I'm trying to do a couple. I think if it was, I think because it's a, it's a larger group, it's a group of six. We obviously like we said want a diversity in perspective and profession so we want to make sure that group has a diverse representation I think we can do that because so. Do you have input or question. Yeah, I mean I think on a board like this it does help to have a diversity of different professional perspectives. So you have somebody who has a law background law someone background finance construction. He has a renter is approaching it from a user perspective. So we have, you know, those four or five different viewpoints represented I think we've got a good shot diversity and getting some good professional opinions was within the task force. We're at 11 so you're looking for six that's. I hear you. I'm not. We couldn't, but I know stable. Sorry, go on. A proposal, we could move by person. Okay. I guess so we can do it that way. Yeah, one gal there is for more jam. Right. She asked a question because she's more down because I don't have that answer. I don't either. I think because we have a large. We have large interest and folks that do rent and own in Waterbury I'm inclined to not appoint her in that group but encourage her to be a part of the conversation and come to me I mean they're open meetings and she can still come to them. Does anyone agree or disagree. Well she didn't put any of her. You know, yeah there wasn't. Yeah. So let's see you can have your own library burden and bring choice voting and just. One to one to 11 if you want and then see which ones. Can you use an Excel sheet though. Here we go. I think we can do this. I honestly think it's the most effective in this folks want to do it later and I'm open to do I know we have scheduled items on the agenda. We didn't have an appropriate mechanism for that. So do you want to do it now does everyone want to rank and all first credit. One for I are revolting low score low score is what you want. First is the winner. Yes, one for high 11 for bottom. All right, so it's like we're members will all read that. Like and I have it here. And then we can. And that's not my pitch for we really need a process and criteria for these activities. But this is going. Yeah, this could be it. And acknowledge we don't. Right. We're four out of five of them. This will probably be the fastest time reminder that you can go into the session. Melissa had looked and thought we couldn't. Evaluation of a supplement or evaluation of a way you have to make your choice. You'd have to. Let's try this first. We're voting for our top six. We're going to rank. It should be at the end of the same. Did you got it? Sorry. And then everyone else. We're going to go to the next one. She doesn't put me on this. Yeah, come on. Do we need to do. Yeah. This is my order. This is. And then what are we doing with the rest? Sorry, Roger. Just, just, I would say don't just put them in and I'm going to go from there. You know what I'm saying? Am I not. We love. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. All right. I'm just doing our bath. Anybody else can step in. If you look at all the card dealers. Chris, did you write yours down? I don't know. I don't know. Was this part of them. I don't know. I have 10 questions about how well do you know them. No, that was harder. I got to. I didn't know that. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's worse. It's worse than picking the one in the parable. It's just as rewarding to. Yeah. Great. So I'm so sick of this machine already. But I mean, I said to him, I said. This is ridiculous. 1.9 billion. I mean, come on. Yeah. That's right. It doesn't go nearly as far as it used to run out of money. You should have a cut off point. He just said 150 million or something like that. The higher it gets, the more customers they get. No. No, I'm not. No, I'm not. No. I'm not. No. I'm not. No. No. No. I'm not. My sister. My sister. You mentioned here. Retire. I will make sure. Okay. Yeah, I'm just at the top, right? Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah. Practice was more. Yeah. Almost there. Sorry. What a fun. Game show, Ron. We do need that music now. Yeah, we have openings on the back. Do we still have fans? Do we have fans viewers? We don't have. Oh, Yeah. Everybody used to think that fenced viewers were going to come on and resolve their boundary. Yeah. It's like, no, their job is to do what it says, look at the fences and then determine who is responsible or fixing the fixing this fence or how to a portion of fixing the fence. It's not to figure out whether your line should be here or there. It's about fences. So we haven't had a fence to use. Sometimes it goes on offices though. What's that? Sometimes it says in Franklin County, there's a sheriff's cabinet. It was the only one on the ballot. Right. And somebody's been charged with assault. Right. Yeah. We might want to be there. There's nobody else on the ballot. So if he has to be arrested, it's under sending the high school. So that's an office that no one really thinks about when they come to play pretty soon. Sorry. What do you need anything? No. One was like, that's a good thing. You know, so it's nice. You're still going to see it again. It's cool. So just because the bottom side. Nope. Okay. I think we did it. I think we did it. I think we did it. obviously. I think we're going to be. Okay. Chris, we need your bottom half. Sorry, the formulas don't work without a full one to 11. So can you rank the bottom five. You did one through six, but we need to do one through 11. So can you put the order for the rest of the list. Thank you. include the late commerce. You can use that you can use the original list. You can use the original list. You can use the original list. No, we need the whole list. So we have those numbers one through six. But like your one could be my 10. And so we need the whole total. I was going to. I thought I said that. You did. We did it for hiring. I know what it's like that. All right. Thanks. I don't know. I don't know. It's like doing a school presentation. If you don't have your presentation. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Did you go to the informational meeting for down street. Women's. Your best friend also your worst. Your best friend also your best friend also your best friend. Overall presentation. She did a great job. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got there early. And sitting in the room and skip off that one. What do you hear? Yeah. What are you doing here? Yeah. I was kind of reluctant to. Say much because I didn't know. I didn't know. I didn't know. You know, just start talking to a boy member and tell him. So I just told him I'm a candidate, but I. There's the process. I want to respect the process. So. Before you were officially hired. Yeah. Yeah. It was, I think before the first in our view. Yeah. It's all the blur. Skip to me that. So you recognize you. Yeah. Somebody, somebody walked in and thought you're a reporter. I can't. That was good. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I should have used that as my cover. Yes. So. I don't agree. I don't agree. Yeah. What's the next step? Okay. So yeah. So, yeah. This is the word. We had to figure that. Grown thin. And bring the kids to the river of White Baron. Yeah. Oh, it's so magical. That's like, I mean it might be 70 degrees. The last year was. Last year, 30 and just snow globe. And we did the, we did the disc golf. I hope they be not. Yeah, I mean it was perfect. Yeah. Do you play with this? I'm going to start doing it because it's kind of popular. Yeah. But for me, it's just, you know, sometimes I say, hey, let's go for a hike. And sometimes you're super enthusiastic. Say, yeah, let's like, man, feel it. And they want to do it. I'm not liking from the mountain. And some days I go, I say, let's go for a hike. And they don't want, they just don't want to do it. Which means if you try to get them to do it, they're going to complain them. No, let's go play a game. Which is essentially just walking around and being outside. Yeah. It was funny. I was there and some guy who had this, you know, said of like 15 frisbees, he squawks up and says, oh, it's that frisbee you're throwing. I forget what he said. It's like, it's like, you know, a shoe marker model 12. No, it's the frisbee they gave me for free when I opened the bank account. For the Northfield savings. I found it. I'm not filming. Yeah, let's talk to this guy and he's sort of, you know, trying to get back to what he's doing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's quite an array of assortments of different drivers that we've seen, others we've seen so far. Skilled it up, you know, a lot of the smaller ones are for the shorter distance. I don't know if this is what you're looking for. 7 to 11 or 7 to 10 or whatever you want left. Thanks everyone for your vision. One through six. Yeah. And then the rest. He's the rest of our brain. Yeah, because you did one through six. And there's five or four or five people out. Take all the men here that's like, you feel them more like this. Yeah, just fun. Well, you've been doing. So I think they just get hard. Sure. I think. Oh, yeah. Skip the service. Sewer presentation, which would be as kind of this. It'll be more to the attention to. Oh, no, that's an hour long step presentation. They said, they said the sewer presentation is much shorter. Really? I can't make the joke. That was about 1970 instead of 18. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I knew we were in for it. But he said, yeah, well, go back to the 1800s. You could just squeeze me in. I thought squeezing you in. That's the whole me day. I should have brought popcorn. Next one. Well, it was fascinating. I learned a lot. Yeah. Who knew probably somewhere out there. I'm not saying they're active in the system, but somewhere out there, there's probably still wooden pipes. Were you proud? Yeah. You know, awesome. Yeah. Yeah. Were they being used? Did we do that? All right. I'm going to rain us in so that keep us on schedule. She's doing her battle. I'm going to. These were the six lowest. I would say there was six and then a gap between folks. So the winners, the top per our rankings, the folks who ranks the highest were apologies in advance for everyone's name. Chris. Well, if it falls on them. Yes. Paul. Lara. Maddie. Young. Elizabeth. Daniel. Joe. Cam. That's going to my next thing. Camerada. Thank you. And Elizabeth. Nova. Smith. Those were. Oh, Eliza. Eliza. Sorry. Um. Great. Those were the six lowest. I would say do we all want to take a moment and reflect? Is there any concerns about. There's no, I want to propose that slate or any further discussion. That would be the slate based on all of us ranking our preferred choices. No, I use my own criteria for choice. I'm happy with it. I think it reflects. I'll just say it does include, I know, at least one renter. In architect folks who've lived in the community. Attorney historic preservation. So it's a nice blend of folks. So I will move to a point those six folks as the public representatives on the housing task force. And also again, just acknowledge and thank everyone who applied as you saw, although we were sitting here quietly. That was in part because it took a while for us all to go through everyone and appreciate everyone volunteering. And again, as has been noted, I think we would welcome more interest and involvement in this group, not less. But this will be the official commission for the time being assuming this motion passes. And we can go. Could you list them again? Yes. Chris Ball. Actually, we have a motion. So let's do this. Oh, yeah. We should have. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Thank you. Further discussion. Do you want to read the names? I'm sorry. I did. The association is really. Yeah. But I like it. Chris Balzano, Laura Lunan, I believe. Maddie Young, Elizabeth Danu, Joe Camarada, and Eliza Novick-Smith. Oh, but this is yours. Oh, you have your original. Okay. Yeah. Any further discussion? Okay. Here in none. We have a motion and a second. All in favor. Aye. Any opposed? Excellent. So our next steps will be to send emails out and schedule a first meeting. And I will personally, because everyone emailed me, I'll personally email everybody with the results. And then, Eliza, should I give them the guess, the appointees your email as the point of contact on the task force for now? Yeah. You can CC me, but we still are waiting on a couple like EPUD hasn't, but yeah, things like that. Okay. Okay. So yes, we'll be in touch. But if you're willing to do that. Yes. Absolutely. And Roger, we need a second on the motion. Sorry. I won't. So thank you. Thank you everyone for your patience. We, you know, it's, you mentioned government in action. Okay. Slow action. It's a marathon of a sprint. Fantastic. Max, we have a nomination from Billy Diggard, who is the chair of the conservation committee, nominating Meg Baldor for one of the open positions to serve on the conservation commission. Sorry, commission not committing. And this would be a four year appointment. Correct. And it's one of two open. Um, places on the commission. So they're still an open place. If you are passionate about conservation. I'm moving on Meg Baldor for the conservation commission. I'll second it. Move to executive for their discussion. She's up on zoom. She wants them. Meg, do you want to say anything? Give us a overview of why she's interested in such a thing. Sure. I'd be happy to do that if you guys would like me to. Yeah. Well, thank you. It's nice to see everybody. About three years ago, I saw an article that was called small forests are a big deal. And it was out of UVM extension. And it just completely caught me. I've had a lifelong of, you know, trees and rocks and outdoor, you know, kinds of things. So it's always been in, you know, part of my life. But I saw this article and I just loved it so much because it said that small woods matter. And even if you have just a little bit of land, okay, like myself in Waterbury with some woods on it, that I could actually make decisions and take steps to make my little bit of woods healthier and make the whole forest healthier and make the planet healthier. So of course I loved that. So that brought me to taking the course called my backyard woods, which is through UVM extension. And if any of you guys have taken it, you know, it's fabulous. And if you haven't taken it and you have interest in it, it's fabulous. So truly, I just kind of took a deep dive into, you know, things like invasives and, I don't know, thinking about forest accession and soils and water and wetlands and canopies and understories and just like on and on and on for my own woods. So that was really great. And from there, I got, well, I got supercharged about the whole thing. And from there, I took the environmental leadership courses that's offered through the agency and natural resources. And I had Andy Woods and Yarns Healthy, who I know have been working at Waterbury as my trainers. So I completed level one and level two of the environmental leadership training. And it starts with a science. And then from there, it just goes into like all the concepts, like just boom across the board. And then on top of that, we got to learn how to really use the mapping. So really got into all the data that's at the state level and how all these different folks who are real experts in the field really use all that information. And it's just, it's so fascinating. I mean, I just love it, love it, love it, love it. So that's really what happened. I mean, it started and then I just sort of took this giant dive into it. One thing about the leadership training that I loved was the mapping. So we actually learned how to do the mapping like in a much more, how to say it, like a deeper way. Like there's many, many, many layers. And as you guys know, in our municipal plan, we have maps that go along with our plan, which are really important. And we get the help from the central office there that really helps with mapping. But in understanding all these different data sets and like where the data sets come from, how the state updates them, how you can like layer all these things, you can really look at like big issues. I mean, starting with the climate, watersheds, the river basins, water quality, habitat, forest blocks and connectivity. And then of course that gets into community development. Where are you going to plan for your growth and planning for best growth while protecting your natural resources, really thinking about community and making sure that it's working for the people in the community, like all that stuff. So I've been hooked. I have a background in public health. So working in public health, I actually worked in communities and that's a big part of public health or can be. And that's community planning. So a lot of it is the stuff that Waterbury is actively working on and has done some fabulous work to make communities walkable and to make open spaces accessible. And the park study that's undergoing now to think about how those parks can serve the needs for people now and into the future, protecting natural resources, all that stuff. So all of that's in my background. And I'm really passionate about it. And then things like this, I saw that the Waterbury wastewater treatment plant is like the first one in the state of Vermont that actually takes the phosphorus or whatever by binding with heavy iron. So it's taking 95% of the phosphorus out of the water that's flowing into the Winooski and then onto Lake Champlain. And of course, we're part of the broader watershed. You know, we're a district or basin eight and all our certain streams, you know, the graves and the Thatcher and where the water flows down and how it all happens. I mean, it's just so cool. So that's why I'd like to be on the conservation commission. I love the mission. I really love how in Waterbury, the commission is really charged to be looking obviously at natural resource protection but also at community development. And I think it's just, it really speaks to the strength of our town and the way our town handles things is to have our conservation commission, you know, so integrated with planning and development. So I'd love to be a part of it. And, you know, I know that they're getting ready to do a community inventory which a lot of communities around Vermont have done, of course. Oh, that's another thing from participating in these leadership classes. I also have had the chance to work with folks from around the state. So I've met a lot of people on other commissions. I've met people who said in different, you know, board select board people, recreation, you know, people like myself, I'm on the rec committee. And it's just really great to be able to see what other towns are doing. And there's like so much, you know, modeling and I don't know, kind of best practice or even just like seed ideas about how we might, you know, want to consider things. Thanks, Meg. I'm going to give the select board an opportunity to see if they have any further questions. And then, can I speak? Yes, thank you. Yeah, Joan Beard. And I am on the conservation commission and you can see why we are very excited to have Meg join us. So I'm here to support her nomination. Thank you, Meg. Thanks. Sounds like Meg's done a good job to get her feet wet already. We didn't want to make that pun, Chris, but yeah, it's a deep dive. Thank you. Other questions before we vote? Yeah, really brief because I want to be cognizant of how do you envision collaborating with the select board in your work on the conservation commission? Oh, absolutely collaborating with the select board. I mean, by the statute and the bylaws of the commission, in Waterbury, the commission is really tied closely with the select board working together. But I think there's also opportunity for the conservation commission to generate ideas and data and do other sorts of community gathering and such and actually bring things forward. So I see it very much as a collaborative effort and I also see it as certainly if the select board had certain projects or wanted to say, hey, guys, could you? I don't know, take this and run with it and come back to us. I mean, however we could serve best is how I see we could do it. Thank you. All right. We have a motion on this second. All in favor? All right. All right. Any opposed? An extension. All right, motion passes. Thank you, Meg. Congratulations, Meg. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you. And just as a point of information, I believe we're appointing her to like until four-year terms. So I think the remainder of whatever it means in four years just I think they're within the same amount. I think it's three. I think it's 12. Yeah. Oh, and then what? Oh, okay. Oh. Three for the reverend. All right. And then we'll follow up if we need to. Thank you. See you at the end. I'm going to get another one. I'm going to get the two. I thought the term was one four is what? It's in here. I don't know. We'll have to. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Follow up with that. But they should have it on them. All right. Our next item is a discussion on short-term missiles and water buries. So what we're going to start with a conversation among the board and I've asked for some input from Steve and then we'll also have input from the public. I want to just preface by saying this is the beginning of a conversation and just make sure the expectations of tonight are to have a discussion, to raise some questions, to talk about what might be feasible and what we might want to do to move forward with the conversation tonight is not going to be where we solve the town's problems. So short-term rentals or not. It's a conversation to include with zoning and planning, the planning commission and then of course the public as well. So I wanted to start there. And I think the question that has come up is obviously housing and water buries is in high demand and in short supply. And there's been concern that a lot of that about the amounts of short-term rentals and what the town might do to limit or not the short-term rentals. Bill, do you have some input from Steve? Yeah. So at the last meeting or when this issue came up, I took it upon myself after that to talk with Steve and then I looped Neil in on the system. And I was talking to Steve and then he said, well, Neil, you're supposed to do this in Woodstock. So Woodstock, and I think at the last meeting I said, I'm not sure what the authority municipalities have to regulate this because we can only do what the law allows us to do. And it does seem like there's enough in the enabled legislation or in the general law of the state that towns can regulate this through zoning among other things. And in Woodstock, they did so. They had a registry that was supposed to sign up. I can't remember if they paid a fee in Woodstock or not to be on that registry. And then the fire chief in Woodstock actually went out and did the inspections of the property. Now, their issue with Woodstock was more to level the playing field with all of the other hospitality industries that if you have a bed and breakfast or if you have a hotel, you have certain life safety codes that you have to meet through the Department of Public Safety and if you just have an Airbnb that didn't apply to you. As I understand it, I think they did change the law. There's some regulation now in the state that says that there's supposed to be certain criteria. Neil indicated there was very controversial in Woodstock. Lots of the folks objected to the town sticking their gloves into their desire to make some money. And it was challenging. And I think in Woodstock they had a volunteer fire department but the fire chief was probably a full-time employee. So he was working so they had him doing that. We do have in the new Unified Development Bylaws, evidently, there is language in the new bylaw that we are hoping to adopt someday. That short-term rental is listed as a use-table and it's available, it will be available, this by-law, in almost every district except the institutional district and that's the state office complex and the commercial industrial district, mostly the current industrial zone districts that will be funded by the fire chief to other places that are listed as commercial industrial. So Steve indicates there's been considerable discussion on the planning commission and the barriers here. Steve suggests that the planning commission has had some discussion about requiring short-term rental properties be either owner-occupied or occupied by someone with a minimum 12-month lease that it will conclude renting out an entire house on a short-term basis, continuing. So what was the minimum, just a minimum? Yeah, so either owner-occupied or someone has a lease to live in the house for at least a year. So that would mean that there would be an occupant of the house in addition as opposed to just having a house that you just put out on a short-term rental market and continually roll it over. But how do you enforce that is a challenge. If you require somebody to live in the house, either the owner or a tenant with a lease, then they're envisioning that's more like a bed and breakfast. Well, I'm not sure a bed and breakfast is a good argument. You could have a, I guess that's for a single family fault. I was going to say you could have a three-minute apartment building and two of the units are short-term rentals and there's no bed and breakfast there. But if you're requiring that of single family homes, it would be a little bit of mathematics I've done, not sure that the tenant would make breakfast. So, and then Steve kind of states the obvious. I'm sure this approach would be opposed by people who currently rent their house out continually. And I think that's the challenge is that I said this at one of those down street meetings, the informational meeting before the meeting where the vote was that government is good at being reactive. We act to address the problem. So short-term rentals have been growing and existing for a number of years now and now it's starting to percolate up to the top. And whatever you do to try to change the paradigm is going to cause some consternation on some people. So anyway, that's what little I have found out. Do you have any experience in St. Alden's with hearing with us? We really didn't have this issue in a major way. And I've had some conversation again with folks and it's I guess it's a push-pull kind of thing. Is this a bigger issue in the places where it's single-family homes? My neighbor, the house that's next door to me, just sold a year ago. Now there's an occupancy. They're living here full-time. But for the six years prior, people had been barred and they came up to two months in the summer. And well, that fully received it at Christmas for a week. And the rest of the time it was near D&B. And was not problematic at all in the summertime when it's a pretty big house when four couples, each with three kids came and you had 14, 15 people in the house. It was a little bit of a notice that and then they would just sit out until two or three in the morning because they're on vacation. They weren't bad or rude. They were just talking in a normal voice, but overnight it carries. But that's taking one house on the equation. Or is the bigger problem that I said before, three or four unit apartment building in a downtown where there's an owner there. And rather than rent to Alyssa or Dan for a one-year lease, sort of three-year lease, whatever it is, to just say, well, I can make more money if I have somebody here two weekends a month than I would rent an entire month. So anyway, that's what I've learned so far. Anyone else on the board have initial input or question? I spoke to the house minority with the state house. This is a few days ago, nothing serious. He said the legislative body had no desire to touch it and there was some kind of worry. Because I was talking to him about whether or not because I had a real estate agent call me and he was very concerned about the situation that she was dealing with. And so I just got back to her on that. And I didn't know what there was some guidelines that the town, of course, most of what we do, we have to structure what we do around state and regularity regulations. And at this time, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot. I did see it, however, that I didn't get to read the quote. I spotted it yesterday. I'm like, well, it's coming out with some type of guidelines. I'd be curious to see what those are about. One thing that sitting here listening to the conversation and I said to myself, it's too bad we couldn't somehow introduce and impact the source on these Airbnb's and somehow convert that into affordable housing funding mechanism if that were possible. If we had a registry that had to pay a registration fee. Or excessive sense tax. You know, whether or not that would help. Right. I mean, there's supposed to pay rooms and meals tax if you're ruining everything you're supposed to collect the rooms and meals tax incentive for the state and the powers that have a local option meals tax, I think they're 1% while 70% of 1% of that. So, you know, there is a potential for some revenue there as well. I think you have to try to identify what problem you're trying to solve. You know, are you trying to are you trying to make it more difficult to have Airbnb's because you think that they're detrimental to having higher vacancy rate than we have? Are you wanting to register these to regulate to make sure like in Woodstock that they're on a level playing field with other folks who make their living this way? Are you concerned about that, you know, maybe they're not the safest of places? I know, you know, I had a neighbor of mine when I was chatting about our neighbor who had this. You know, the house in question has a leech field that's on my property, you know, they have an easement and the leech field is on my property. It's like, I'm not sure how great it is to have, you know, like 12 to 15 people in there for short spurts of time. And, you know, is that what does that do to them? It's not my leech field, fortunately. They got a second one, but it's still, so is it an environmental issue? So I think you've got to think about that a little bit. The question is, what is the problem now we're trying to solve? What's your goal? My impression is that the principal issue here is that the Airbnb market takes longer term affordable housing off the market. And it makes it much more difficult for young families and individuals that don't are homeowners to find a reasonable place to stay at an affordable price. And in there, and in there for my doing that, the ones that are left, like I spoke to somebody the other night, that you're gathering that had no desire. He's getting into the apartment rental business. There's no desire to Airbnb for several reasons. But one of them being that because the Airbnb is taking up so much of the inventory that it's allowing its ability to price rentals, full-time rentals higher, because people, because they're, you know, Do you have anything you want to add before we open it up? No, I just want to be clear. We don't charge any impact fees for development in Waterbury right now. It often might just are just to like, well, Aston has like a whole suite of know what for schools and different things to just say it's totally new. I mean, I think I agree broadly with Roderick's assessment. I mean, I'll just state I'm really glad we just appointed six members to a housing task force looking at creating safe, decent, affordable housing, prop books in Waterbury. I want to just acknowledge we have that as a group. I think we've heard from some other communities this question of like, what is the issue? What's the state of the issue in getting that data? Can you really help for next steps? I think candidly it's a really challenging issue to regulate. So trying to think about like the capacity we have as a town in particular in crafting legislation. I don't know how finally we wound up in Burlington, but I know like some of the interesting carbots they had, if it's a multi-unit building, essentially some folks were short-term renting one unit to allow for more affordable rent. And the other, you know, essentially subsidizing say about four units. I do this one short-term because I bring in more money and that helps keep my rent affordable. So they have like a carve out for that. They had a carve out of if you're living on the property, they have more advanced mechanisms around like a housing trust fund, which we don't have right now. So to me, I think the idea of what, you know, we're seeing a housing challenge. We have some first steps with a housing passport to look at, what are ways to support that. And then in terms of regulation, it might be like what's the most effective way to do it. I mean, I think some town just is now like subsidizing home share where people already have a home and just like, what is the suite of options? And I think this might be one. And I will also say I don't doubt it would be controversial. And I don't think that's a reason to not do that. But I think our region and aging with the folks who are participating in this and why, regardless of what we ultimately choose to do is important. You know, I will say when I worked at RWD, we have folks who say operate like quasi hotel, short-term rental types of, I mean, they exist. And again, there might be a reason we want to change that, but just acknowledge them. They're going to be stakeholders. And briefly before I open to public, I want to emphasize what Alyssa said is that this housing task force is going to be a really great resource so that they can take on the research and learning and work together, hopefully with the planning commission and with the slack word and it's not just all on this table because we need some folks with capacity and expertise. So that's what I love to open it up to folks in the public. I'm going to try to keep folks to about three minutes with questions and statements if you have them and then we'll go from there with discussion. So happy to hear from anybody who would like to speak. Sure. Yeah. And then I'll have you come up to the table and just state your name and we can pick it up since we're recording with the owl. Sure. Thank you. I said is that cool? Oh, of course. You don't need to stand and orate. Great. Yeah, that's awesome. Perfect. Thank you. All right. Add your name to start, Carmen. Absolutely. I'm Brett Stewart. And I live here in the village. I was the one that requested that this be on the agenda for this select board meeting. And I appreciate the discussion that's already happened so far. I think it's covered a lot of the points that I wanted to raise. Specifically for folks that are interested in the issue if you haven't read the proposed changes to the zoning law, i.e. what the literature sorry the verbiage is going to look like in that. I think that's an important place to start. I think it's 180 days and someone has to occupy the place the house in order for them to be considered the full-time odor or resident as well as beyond a 12 month lease. And then at that point you're allowed to have additional rooms for a term rental. I think that that goes in the right direction with what we're trying to do. I'd like to be someone asked what is the problem we're trying to solve? I absolutely think the problem we're trying to solve is the housing issue. I'm not trying to come to this from an Indian needs perspective of someone down the street has an Airbnb and they make noise and have too many cars parked in front. I don't like it. That may be true but I don't think that that's the need of the matter here. I think the issue is kind of what Chris alluded to is that at a certain point things like short-term rentals are going to drive up the price of actual affordable housing in town for where people can't afford to continue rent here. If we want Airbnb's to continue to be allowed i.e. in an additional room in somebody's house in a mother-in-law suite type situation in a residential district, things like that, those are probably things we can look at. I will say the Burlington legislation that discusses this outright says that it's conditional use only in residential zone districts, i.e. you would have to apply for a specific permit to have a short-term rental anywhere that's on residential from the gate jail, which I personally think is the right direction as someone that lives in a residential zone area. However, getting back to what I was saying before, I think that the price of housing is only continuing to go up and as the short-term rentals continue to take away that housing, the people who are left to pay for housing in town are going to be paying more and more premium to stay in whatever is left. I realize that people are trying to make money and they're being out of different room in your house as a way to do that and I'm not trying to discourage people from making money off of the papers, but there is a stark difference between that and running, like Alissa said, what is effectively a hotel in a residential district that is full of people and that is taking up housing that can be for people who live here in town. We want tourism money, we want tourism dollars, all that makes sense, having people come to visit the library is an important part of how we have money in town, that all makes sense to me, but there's going to be nothing to visit if people can't afford to live here and work at the res and work at Cropay and, you know, being a part of the vibrant community that makes the library special and what makes people want to come here, look around in town, every business that employs people here in a service industry job has a hiring site outside and that's not because people don't want to work, it's because people don't want to commute from somewhere where housing is affordable to work somewhere where housing is not and then there's, you know, there's all kinds of data in the main street study talking about, I think at the time of this commission there were 52 short-term rentals of those 33 could be converted into actual full-time residences, I think 18 being single-family homes, that were already in existence, I'm sure those numbers have evolved, there's one on my street that opened like three weeks ago, so I'm sure that's in the mix now as well, but those numbers are going to continue to increase because the reality of the housing market now is that with interest rates where they are and home prices where they are, it's challenging for people to buy a house, people who need somewhere to rent and the people who can afford to buy and flip houses are doing so at the detriment of the people who want to live here in town and be a part of the community. I think I well exceeded that. Not barely. Thank you. That's the opinion I wanted to present. I look forward to appearing with the housing passports as well as the rest of you guys think about that, but I echo the comments made before that this will probably be controversial and will probably be difficult, but I think that is not a reason that we shouldn't pursue trying to make it work anyway because making housing available for people who want to live in Waterbury is an important priority to deserve an attention. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. I want to just clarify a comment. I think, Brett, and you correct me if I'm wrong, the verbiage you referred to, I just want to say that's the current draft of the proposed unified development bylaw. Yes. Yes. Yes. So just if anyone has a follow-up along at home, yes, it is now on the planning and zoning page, unified development bylaw, phase one, there's a draft and if you control that, short term rental. That's the absolute. The direct bylaw. Control that. Yeah. I'm going to have one more in the room and then tell them we'll have you after that. Come on. My name is James Sweeney, I live in the village, where I live in the center. I've spoken here before, but I think about roads. He essentially said most of what I was going to say, I'm glad that he brought the labor aspect completely because it's not that we're running out of housing for renters. There's no housing for renters. You go on Craigslist, you go on Facebook Marketplace, there's zero housing and there's maybe one apartment and that apartment is a one-bedroom apartment that costs $2,600 a month. It's at this point, it's not a problem anymore. We've reached a fever pitch of now Airbnb has completely dried up our renting market. And then on top of that, the price of buying property has skyrocketed to the point where people who were going to leave the housing market to buy property had no longer do that. And if you look at Burlington's Airbnb proposal or their short-term rental proposal, it's comprehensive. To me, looking at that, it essentially shuts down anyone who can't afford to play the game. So anyone who's just renting a building that they own completely out, if they can't afford to do the fire checks, they can't afford to pay the hotel fees, they're out of the game, they have to rent those apartments to long-term rentals. It essentially just kneecaps anyone who's going to... What essentially is greed. You're drying up the renting in the town, there's no one who can live there and you're just using it specifically for tourism. So this problem has reached a critical mass where something has to be done. I'm so glad that but you've got this commission that you're starting and picked out your candidates and I'm very happy here that at least one of them is a renter because hearing from architects is great. Hearing from people who have been building because it's great, but buildings go up in two, three, four years. People need houses right now and that's exactly what that renter is going to tell you. So the proposal, everything that you come up with at this table needs to be done, I think, at a more quick and pace than typically proposals are done in any town because it's a huge problem in this town. It's not just a angle-biter anymore. That's all I have. Thanks, Dan. You know it's not just this town. No, it's every... It's especially snow there on the force. Everyone can work since then. That's what I absolutely... Tom? Yeah, Tom Scribner I just wanted to say, I think we're in a nomadic society now where people don't have to be somewhere to go to work. I think any point in time, I think Waterbury probably has 20% more people in it than what we have for the population. And I know right around the center, there already are houses that are bought as investments and run strictly as Airbnb's. I know that in a very close proximity to where we are, there are multiple unit Airbnb's, as many as three, as many as five that are ongoing. My bigger thought on it is about the financial aspect. I watched crushed stone go up the hill, truckload by truckload last spring because we had the worst mud season that we've had in years. And of course, the more traffic, the worse the roads get, the more stone you need. So these people are paying the house owner, but the town is not being paid for the use of town services, whether it's the septic plant or the roads. And I think that has to be considered in the money that's coming in with them staying in individual houses. So that's the basic point that I would like to make is that, yes, money's changing hands. I don't see how the town is being paid for the extra stress on the services that the taxpayers of the town have to pay for. Thanks, Tom. Yes, come on. And then I'm going to do one in the room and then Eliza will have you next. I'm healthy, I live in a village. I just, I want to bring up that I think the economic perspective is really important that people living in affordable housing can bring labor to our town. But I also want to bring up that Waterbury is a beautiful place to live and it's climate resilient and it's a special place. And it shouldn't just be for people that can afford to divide these houses and rent them out for a quarter of a turn. Housing is for labor, but it's also for people. And I think Waterbury deserves to have a more diverse populace. And we can bring in a lot of people, a lot of different perspectives here, different racial perspectives, different socioeconomic statuses. I just want to bring up that point, but it's also for the people. Thank you. I don't see. Eliza. Yeah, hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Thank you. Sorry. I'm Eliza Novik Smith. I'm up in Waterbury Center. And I recognize that this is an ongoing conversation, but I came sort of recently ish from another small mountain town that was probably five years ahead on these issues. And just want to flag at the outset, A, echo everything everyone else has said, but that the constituencies who will be against any changes will show up. I'm sure this is not news to anyone, but and the constituencies that are going to benefit probably like the homeowners, the potential homeowners who don't are not able to buy homes in Waterbury are not going to come to the select board meetings. And likewise, the potential renters who don't get, who are not able to rent in Waterbury are going to be less vocal, but no less in need of like the urgent attention to this issue. So just thinking ahead, making sure that like the new group and the select board also anticipates and all of the like the rejoiners are out there growing and have dealt with this, other towns have dealt with this, Woodstock and towns and other parts of the country that have dealt with this, like Waterbury potentially out of the advantage in so far as it can learn from and have ready responses to some of the challenges, because they're common now, but that feels like a really important piece because it's going to be the folks who don't want any restrictions who are going to come and show up and force them to realize this is happening or anything is happening. Not that it needs to be bad, but like any change is hard. So just there are good responses, but they can't all be thinking about the money piece feels really important too. And in the place where I had to leave because of these issues, that was like the most persuasive argument was always came down to how much it's going to cost. Well, thanks for your input, Liza. And we look forward to having you help us craft some of those responses on our housing test boards. Were there any other hands, folks? Yes, sir. Yeah, so I know I'll be stopping off the stage here soon. I just want to remind the board you just appointed someone to the conservation commission a few minutes ago. And I just want to remind all of us that there's no single issue. The same people are talking about affordable housing are talking about the need to conserve open space and the safe land. And because of the way that you thought it had, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing or a good thing, but there's a considerable amount of acreage on Wash Hill that is next to water and sewer. Water and sewer is now available to it. The village over the past four or five years has spent money, worked with the folks who built where clean salvages, 60 apartment units are there on Wash Hill. We've got grants, we did work on the water system to be able to get gravity feed, high pressure water up further on Wash Hill. And now there's a deal that's going to happen before the end of the year that's going to take 60, 80 out of how many acres it is. But it's a lot of acreage that's coming off of every conserve, preserve forever. It's open space. We have 60% of our town is conserved. It's in the mountain edge field and a part of state forest. And I'm not saying that little pockets here and there, viewsheds, no, I know Chris and I probably had similar feelings when the field there near Henry Myers's fire was started to be developed. It was a beautiful space on Wash Hill, went up about, you know, went around that corner from Thatcher Brook. There was nothing there. Now there's houses going in there. And it's sad to see that field with houses in it because it was such a pastoral scene, like that picture over there. But now there's some houses going in. So I just want to remind all of you that there are competing interests, that we all seem to want our cake and be able to eat it. And we've got to figure out how we're going to impress this and keep all of those things in perspective. It's not a bad thing to conserve land and to keep it open. But where we do that, I think is something that I wish there was a little bit more thought about because if you're going to have dense development and be able to make an impact and make it affordable, you need water and sewer. So maybe you shouldn't be trying to conserve households that are easily served by the water and sewer system that is in existence today. The water and sewer system needs customers to try to keep the rates reasonable for the people that are already on it. And we need housing. And if you're going to have housing, it's going to make a dent in the marketplace. You're not going to make a dent in the marketplace by trying to build 50 houses up. Fire away from places where water and sewer can exist because the land prices are too high. The cost of building is too high. And every house is one more house that's in your inventory. And every house helps. But where those houses are, what kind of housing you can build is really critical and strategic. As you think about these public policy issues, just remember there's competing interests. And we're all on both sides of that. It's a good reminder. I think a lot of times we look at the committees and commissions and boards in silos. And it's a really good reminder that we, it works best and we're all talking to each other to make decisions about the jam. Anything, Mary, are you raising your hand or are you just sitting that way? Yes, because I can't figure out how to do the little hand raising thing. I've done it before and some other, but I don't see it. I'm here as someone who is just a town resident, village resident. I think this is a critical issue. I think it's a very complex issue. I'm also a member of the planning commission, but I'm not here to speak on behalf of the planning commission. You're a spectacular landlady. Right, who doesn't want to do Airbnb ever because you've got to clean up after people all the time. But I think it is a very complex issue and listening to all the input, but it touches on the conversations that we've had in the planning commission when we gave input for the draft, but we have not with the current planning commission had a full discussion about the draft regulations. They were part of the unified development bylaw draft that Brandy, whose last name is escaping me, put together and pulled some of these recommended possible regulations for short-term rentals from some of her other work. The point to this thread is that we, I think we need a public hearing that includes us like for the planning commission and perhaps the housing task force to really get a sense. I think Eliza brings up a really good point, but I think hearing from people and bringing stories, I mean, I'm aware of the dangers in larger cities whether it's Burlington or where I grew up in New Orleans, a whole different urban area, but after Hurricane Katrina, a lot of opportunists and developers and people with cash came in, bought houses, did a lot of Airbnb's, and at night, many nights, it's just instead of a neighborhood, there's black, you know, if you're not renting and you don't have people who stay there, you don't have a neighborhood anymore. So that's like one extreme that we, I think still have time to get ahead of. We're never going to be a Burlington or New Orleans, but I think we do have neighborhoods that we cherish and we want them to be largely inhabited by people who are invested in part of the community. And then we also have community members who choose to, you know, use an apartment or over their garage or in their house, Airbnb, because they also have family who live their part time and I don't think we want to cut those people out either. I would like to hear from, you know, give everybody an opportunity to come and share their thoughts and their perspective and their anecdotes. And before we go off in a direction, whether it's just like word of the planning commission or the housing task force without a little more input. So that's just my personal opinion. Thank you, Mary. Anyone else on this topic before we move on? Excellent. Thank you, everybody, for your input. Wow, we ambitious timeline on this agenda. We're doing great. Thanks. The next topic, E, is a social media policy discussion. So at a couple of select board meetings, citizens have brought up questions about the use of personal social media by folks on boards, commissions or committees acting as something within the violation or if it was appropriate, but we don't have a policy. So what we have as a town is a policy for staff members. Using town social media and then certain departments like the recreation department has their own social media policy for their employees, but we don't have one that's overarching that can be used by all boards, committees and commission. So that if an issue comes up, we have nothing to point to to say this is or isn't in violation. So what I sent to the board was some examples of things that can be included that are used by other towns. And I think some of the big questions like Bill asked with the housing is what's the problem we're trying to solve? That's the question before we take action is, sorry, I'm trying to find that email. Is what are we trying to do? What's the point? What's the purpose? Are we the people to create this? I don't even know if that's something that we do or that staff has to do. And then is it just a framework that we provide to all boards and committees saying use this as a basis, but add to it if you like, or this is not a template. This is a mandate. So those are kind of the big questions. And then Bill, I don't know if you have any answers any of those questions. Not really. And I would encourage Tom to chime in. So first things first, if it's going to be a town policy, then it has to be adopted by the board. Staff can put in place, for lack of penetrating practices, standard operating procedures, that kind of stuff. So if I wanted to kind of direct staff, and this is more or less how the recreation one came up, there were issues way back when we first started the issue. The first issue that came up with recreation was just, well, are you going to allow, are we going to post photographs on the Facebook pages or on a website or something like that? And we have to give parents the chance to say, don't think that there's a microphone or whatever. And then we probably walked beyond that. And that is getting a little bit into what types of things are okay to talk about. And so, but a policy would be a board adopted policy. And you can direct that policy. Are you one? You can say this is the policy for the organization. And you might be able to have some sub standard operating procedures for that policy, particularly with parents. It's not real intuitive to me because I'm not a social media user, if you haven't figured that out yet. And it's always walking a fine line if you're going to try to tell somebody just by virtue of the fact they sit on a board for a community or if they're employed by a particular community that they cannot say something on their own social media platform. You've got free speech issues and you have to be really careful about that. And some folks try to say, well, it's very simple. If you work through the town, you can't say the taxes are too high on your social media website. You know, you really can't say that and you might really feel that. So it is a little bit of a challenge. So having said that, no, I don't have any answers. That's fine. I didn't mean to say experience. So the other thing too is what's the problem you kind of saw? Then one of the things Tom and I found that we agree on a little bit. We're going through a process right now with that fellow like Gilberto and I told Gilberto and I hired to do some financial work and get addressed things that you are with phrases. Having a policy can encompass you as well. And how many policies do you want and does everything have to really be addressed by a policy? So he was going to say something. I wrote a few and the VLCT has a model, but it also pertains to staff. The only common thread I found is that many of them did the select board pretty clear guidelines that they can essentially exclude from a committee. If you're posting information about your work in the committee, that's not factual. So you can, in essence, denigrate the work of the committee and so on. The housing task force can say something contrary to what most others believe and that's fine. But if you stick to the facts, otherwise it's free speech. So that's the only clear thread that's out there. And many towns, their attorneys have specifically said to simply avoid this that it's too broad with the paraphrase of the stage. A couple of the things that were included, because I'm also very hesitant to have a huge list of don'ts. When legally, I don't actually understand their implication, but a couple of things are violation of open meeting law, right? So Chris posted something on Facebook and Roger, me and Alyssa are all commenting and discussing that technically is in violation of open meeting law. So that's something that's pretty clear, cut and dry that could apply as policy. And then a couple of other pieces are, you know, like this is a personal, like not representing yourself professionally via your personal Facebook, but I still don't know legally if we can do that. Like, can I use my personal Facebook on, you know, the WADA Facebook to say there's a meeting tonight about, you know, recreation, everybody should come. I don't, I wouldn't do that. I don't think that's appropriate, but I don't think I can be dictated not to do that. So I'm pretty hesitant. I think if we want to create something, my opinion is that it should be pretty bare bones. And although it feels maybe an extreme, and I don't know about the investment, but like we should consult the lawyer because I don't want to put us into a position where we're creating something that is in violation of somebody's rights. Yeah, you definitely, if you're going to develop a social media policy you will absolutely want a lawyer to look at it. And the legal firm that we use takes a pretty, maybe you don't want to go down that road if you're not kind of a perspective right now. It's, it's, it's challenging. I just had a question. Is the GRB and the other commissions we have, this new housing task force, all subject to the other meeting laws? Well, those are reasonably strict about the use of social media in terms of not conducting business outside of the meeting. You can't conduct business in there. Thank you. You know, that, the example that Dan used is a good one, you know, you put something on your own Facebook page and then if it's related to town business, you know, not your son's birthday or something like that, but it's related to town business and then Danny comments on it and then Alyssa comments on it. Now you're conducting the meeting and you're, you are in violation and it's one of those things that I'm not sure anybody who's ever been in violation of the open meeting was ever been in possibility. You know, it's, it's not, it's not a good look. You don't want to encourage that. The issues that really my mind seems to come up more is when, and it has to do, once I'm experienced with our employees who are told they have to do this, this and this in their job and then they go out and they integrate that or they criticize that and it's not helpful. It's, it's, it's, you know, it's not in the interest of the organization as a whole. Can they be disciplined for that, fired for that? Sometimes it depends on what the position is and I think that the standard is that the higher up you are in the chain, the more to the party line you're supposed to be. So, you know, if you're the police chief you ought not to be really critical about something, but if you're the secretary in the police department and you want to say something is stupid, there's a little bit more leeway to that. When it sounds, you know, it doesn't sound fair but it's, I think it's commonsensical that you just have to be cognizant of the position that you hold and try to be a little bit circumspect to know what you're saying and how you write that into a policy. Right. Chris, do you have anything? Yeah, I've been hearing a lot of conversation about something that kind of, don't trust me to be an expert in Joe Zeig and not even number find me on social media. But it sounds like the, the information or the things that are coming out of some of these people who have been appointed to these positions in these committees. So it's called the arrest. So is it, it's simple as saying anything that pertains to anything that your committee is charged with investigating or looking into can only come out of the committee by agreement amongst everybody. You can't just go off on your own and start, you know, keep your mouth off about something that if you're, if you're taking the responsibility to be on a committee, then anything that comes out of that committee should come out of the committee itself and not you personally. But what if it's factual and public information? Yeah. So if it's true and it's not false, so if you're going and saying, well, we decided that X, Y and D and it's not true, obviously, of the problem. But if it is true and it's not private, it's not done in an executive session, why or how can we limit your free speech to post that? So what you're saying is, is absolutely what the goal should be, the standard should be. But it's in practice, you can't make somebody told the party line that and it's, you know, I've always, I've always encouraged, you know, the boards that I've worked for. Okay. You know, when you're coming up to the town, you know, we discuss an issue. It's a three to two vote in here. Now that means it's the town's policy. We're going in this direction. I've encouraged boards. Once the decision is made by the board, it would be very helpful if we all could get in line and support the decision. The decision has been made here. But you get to town meeting sometime and one select board might say, well, you know, the board voted to do it this way and that's why they want to go that way. But I voted against that. And this is why any, you can't tell somebody that they can't give their reasons. Is it, is it good public policy? Does it help get you where you want to go? No, but it's hard. You can't muzzle people. So it's a, it's a tough challenge. No, I wasn't suggesting that you take and limit that. May I sum, I think what you were saying is that it does an announcement or information to be given and should be given by the committee in a public way via the whole committee, not one person going out to assembly. If somebody disagrees with what the committee has said and they for some reason want that public, then it should come out of the committee as a statement by the committee that we voted this way, but this person voted that way. For whatever reason, if he wants it stated, or if they want it stated. You can, I mean, that happens once in a while. You know, I'm going to vote no when I want to explain my vote. It's in the minutes. Right, it'll be in the minutes. I bet you know, I know. But, but while that might be the preferable way, but what we're trying to say is you can't dictate that. Best practice versus community galaxy. You can't dictate what people do about that. I mean, in your comment about, you know, somebody at a lower level being less, yes, we'll count upon. Less accountable. Accountable. Yeah. I mean, that's leadership comes with certain responsibilities. Responsibility. I mean, that's why you're supposed to be a leader, to be held to a higher standard. Right. And that's what I mean. But again, it doesn't, you'd like that person to be circumspect and anything else. And sometimes, I mean, there's plenty of times where I, my career have stood up and said, you know, this is what we need to do. And it's, I've argued in here that this isn't where we should go. But the board makes the decision and it's incumbent on me at that point. And I would argue that it would be unethical for me. And the profession that I can, to publicly say, well, the board voted to do this and this is where the talent is going. But I really think we ought to do this. That would be unethical. But it's not illegal. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, I'll say that later. I mean, in terms of what issues, the issue I would be really concerned about is like misrepresentation or false. I guess that's the thing I see that's challenging is I think it's very challenging, as we said, for us to manage any of this. I think candidly, some of, I'm aware of very few complaints. So one case I'm aware of complaints has to do with attribution of saying, are you speaking on behalf of a board committee or as an individual? And I don't know to what extent we would want to regulate that for a policy or otherwise. I mean, the things that I claim is open meeting law, I think it's valid. And I think our general education to boards and committees about open meeting law can probably be improved with appropriate caveats to that. I think if I'm thinking of things as a board member that would concern me is I really need to have, I think acknowledging that in general, we're all using good judgment in terms of like, I'll just say, I have social media accounts. I post on them in an incredibly limited way. They're kind of just there. I am friends with folks in Waterbury, but not a ton of them. Again, they have, but I do want to know at certain points I've said like, oh, we have, you know, we're doing XYZ. Here's the link to the town website. And I've shared only publicly available information that's posted elsewhere, but I like there's the piece of like, I'm a select board member and I'm not speaking on behalf of the select board, but I don't necessarily say on every single post. This is not an official post on behalf of the select board. I am sharing this for general information in the community. Can you imagine reading prep for a form like that? But I would say that would be the, if there was issues around clarity. I think to me that's again a piece of like, I think the best practice is that the committee should have spokesperson, that all the information should live on the town website, that you should reference those available sources. But I don't know that the creation of a policy. I, one, don't know that we have a major issue. Again, I'm very limited in weights, but two, that creating a policy would be a way to solve it. But that would be the thing that would really concern me is the like on behalf of affiliating individual misogynization. Yeah, thanks, Tom. So it sounds like the themes I'm hearing are clarity, misrepresentation, sorry, misrepresentation, there's the public meeting while issue. Is it better, is a simple approach in the short term just to to have staff work with the select board to draft a memo that could go out to everyone serving in your committee saying, this is what's contrary to open meeting law. This is what we think is appropriate. Yes, I, I think so. And I would take it, my opinion is that we do just that. We outlined some best practices, as you just mentioned. And then we talk about a chain of commands, so to speak. What's the protocol? So is it, you don't necessarily come to a select board meeting first, if you see something you're concerned about, you go to the chair of that board or committee or permission, and you start there, and they can help and work it out. If it becomes a big complex that needs to come to the select board, perhaps at the next step, but giving autonomy to the chairs of the boards and committees to help, you know, regulate, that's why they're there. No, you know, no, you know. So follow up questions. So this discussion has been about the select board and other boards. If there's a desire for staff to have increased use of social media, give us some runway to work on a policy first, is the request. Excellent. I understand there's a policy, but it's pretty strict to record at this point, is that what you're talking about? Yes. Yeah, we don't, at least to the best of my knowledge, accept the record if we don't have it on Facebook, site or Twitter account like that. And, you know, there's something in these that feel that that is a very effective way to be able to engage with the community because I'm at the tail end of my career, never got into that. It's not a directive that went. But if you want to do that, that's where I think this whole best practices is important. And, you know, it's getting back to adopting policies in general. You adopt policies where there's this agreement about this, right? Everybody was on the same page, you don't need a policy. And, you know, we have a conflict of interest policy and conflict of interest policies. You know, the title is very clear. You shouldn't have a conflict. But how do you regulate that? Conflict of interest policies first are supposed to be self-policed. You as individuals have to say, I have a conflict. But you may know there's an issue, but you don't think it's a conflict, so you don't retain yourself. Somebody else might think it. And it takes a big step for a board to say, well, Roger has a conflict, but he's not willing to admit it. And now we're going to basically take a vote to tell him he can't participate in this particular issue. And it gets more near and cloudier all the time. So policies, by virtue of what you're trying to do, always fit nebulous and hard to implement because you're trying to fix an issue that is out there. And, you know, in Vermont, conflicts of interest. Everybody, you know, I mean, it took me about 10 years in Vermont to finally learn that I shouldn't talk about somebody until I was actually sure they weren't your seven cousins, you know, because they usually are. Thank you. Anything. Yeah, I just think a great step forward is to put together a memo on deaf practices and circulate it. I'll make sure that's been brought up. Next, we have who knows what number? Oh, no, at first. Spores work plan for management team two months. That was Tom's suggestion. So. Okay. And I think yeah. So it was a general thought process was that obviously these issues to tackle on day one that can get into it in a few minutes. And then obviously, lunch with transition involves a lot of history lessons that I'm getting. And I wanted to make sure if there was anything specific about the beyond some of the major items, some of the history of the budgets, all those obvious things that the board wanted us to focus on. Oh, we're both still here. There may not be anything about we're done, what we're working on, and what we plan to work on. But I just want to make sure that question out there. And doesn't necessarily mean to have this answer right now. There's still going to be a meeting in two weeks. And you can email us individually, and we'll let the rest of the board know for you what the best is for you. I think I'm upset. I said many times over the weekend, 54, I don't think I'm going out the door on the 31st of December and just saying, oh, that's down. You've got nothing else to do. But if there is something in particular that you've been willing over, let us know. Thank you. And I think one of the things that you've obviously heard is that we have a town that's managed by two different municipalities. And right now I think we're working reasonably well together, but that hasn't always been the case. So, and Bill's lived through this for 34 years. And I think he's got a plan in mind as to how ultimately that can get resolved. And so I think just hearing that out and continuing to move forward is a piece of good idea. Yeah, I would say for both I defer to Bill's last year professional expertise and certainly not saying to two month timeframe, but in the same vein, we've had the lovely personnel policy. And I know Bill has already said he's worked on it and how do we go real. And not if not two months, I'm not saying two months, but I'm just saying it as it was asked. No, that's fine. When you see on the 15, 45 minutes ago, and my next one was hiring. That's how much we did. And that's when we got the meeting would actually end. So I'm curious. No, we just I told Karen when she put it together, I said, well, you could be saying if we go over. No, I'm excited. And as I said, we're meeting agenda time. I would that a lot of minutes over the other day. I was reminded how many meetings that I lived through that ended at 1130 or after that night. I will not stand. No good government for 10 years. We have a lot of Chris. Do you have anything right now for that? Or do you want to follow up on this particular question? Yes, sir. I'm just sitting here listening to all this and watching what's happened over time. I've always had this, I guess, philosophy and that's the right word or witness. That's when things get especially like companies, corporations, government. When they get bigger, they become more inefficient and more effective. I just wonder if there's ways that we as a town, without being irresponsible, can limit just how much we put in our basket and try to take on and handle because it becomes so overwhelming at times because you only have so much time on your hands to deal with it. And as the basket gets poorer, each item gets less and less time. I paid attention to it and therefore things just become inefficient. And I've tried to express this idea or thought process that bigger isn't better. That's why I don't live in Burlington. And I've always wished even though growth is expectation or is a reality, what can we do to try to keep it in a smaller basket so that we don't lose control of it. I guess keep that in mind when we're adding and adding. Chris, you want to keep going? Bolton gravel? Too sorry. My other just, and I said we have employment later about hiring, just I know we know of some vacancies now and some in the future. And I don't know what the plan is, but just knowing that. That's good. Yes, that's how it is. The first thing I said, I know we're just specific leaders. I just reiterated. And then as a new board member, I don't know if there's an annual calendar and this might be something you have in turn anyway as you're reviewing things with Phil. I know January is budgeting. But just thinking of resources, I would have appreciated around like cycles of annual things just and that might more be, I would say, don't create something special for us. But if there's a resource that feels like it couldn't be applicable to an annual calendar schedule, if it's something our person would be interested in. Please try to do a board member orientation, you know, one agenda item that we can read. Totally understand. I haven't had a lot of time to do that. It'll help a little bit of it, but, you know, investments and trying to, you know, bring it up to speed on different things. I wonder if putting those together as like a packet with a video or a special meeting or like an actual orientation. I know that was something when I came on the board. I was totally blindsided. Like I felt like the VLCT training is a state level. You don't have nothing like it didn't really impact the day to day. And my first year, we had more of those on the agenda. But I feel like it's just, they've been so full. It's hard to... Well, it's hard. I mean, staff or boards, you know, board-elected boards and you just be fine. Sometimes, you know, you put an agenda together and say, well, it's already going to be 9.30 and I haven't even put any of that stuff on. We're wish-listing. They gave up the opening, so we're taking it. That's all. All right, full-time gravel time. Update, short and speed. So I sent Steve Wilder down to get a load of gravel the other day and he told me and said, you can't have it. He said, I'm sitting here, back up to a pile of 4,000 yards and she won't give me one load. So I had to come back with a load of roads and put my yard. So then I hear that Chip Averga sat down, but soon I suspect we'd get a couple loads of gravel. And he was sent home without it. And then I was told that there'd be nothing more coming out of that pit from here on out other than the winter sand. Same. Yeah. Yeah, I heard the same thing. What do you, what do you told me about that? And it might have been because of the Chip thing, but I think he said, actually, and I asked Woody to try not that I wasn't believing Woody for the second hand, but I asked him to try to confirm, you know, call somebody and get the scoop. And I'm not sure if he's made the call. I mean, this is just like Wednesday or Thursday this week. So I didn't think to ask him to perform tonight's meeting, but yeah, it's a concern that I put in. So it sounds like what I had feared right along was starting to come to fruition. So just to let you know that, you know, because my sense of urgency, you know, I wish that towns like Woody had taken the opportunity when they had it the last time at the court. But I don't think it's something that we want to draw off on our radar because it could become a very expensive issue. Well, and maybe it was a meeting that, were you in the meeting? I think in Mabel's with Celia when we were talking about some issues. And, you know, she was going to look into how far do they have to go to feel if they can't get it prepared. And I know I had the conversation with her and she was like, well, you know, we'll probably have to do more of our own home because it's going to cost too much. And I said, well, whether it's Bolton or if it's, you know, Hyde Park or Morrisville or wherever, you take it. I mean, if it's going to be an hour and 45 minute travel trip, just hire a contractor to do it. Otherwise, you're going to have nobody here to do any work. It should be driving on. And that, you know, it's wearing tear on the truck. It's not going to be any cheaper in the long run given you're wearing tear in the truck for the fuel and you get full loads a day. And that's all of the production that you have. Well, number one, the size of the truck here. I want to carry in half or whatever. Right. Well, even if you're just used to sand. Right. But so, but in the past, she's had just recently, she's had the boys haul sand. Unfortunately, those small trucks run just as much fuel per trim as the big ones do. And you're hauling half or whatever it costs, you know. And then again, as there is a wear and tear. And then they won't do anything except drive. So it doesn't make sense to haul our own. And if you put these types of things out to bid, you know, you tend to do a little bit better on pricing. But sometimes the better solution is to have our own for your own and help if we could get it. That's it. Great segue into our conversation about the input for the ARPA use of funds because this is part of that. So this is not a short conversation, but it is something we want to get to. Because I thought it was a review of steps. Or I'm just listening. And what did I miss? That was nice. Yeah. I don't think it's going to be short because we have to approve the survey and your letter, right? Well, that's the question. I guess I'm just not. No, I didn't want to like being real about time in different things. I know I was circulating mine very early this morning. A draft of letter. You circulated a draft of the survey. I know I, for one, have not given you any feedback on said survey. But Roger has A plus on his homework. Has the mailing center raring to go for distributing it. So figuring out what are next steps for getting approval. I know Tom is kind enough to offer to be the point of contact. So people wanted to call him on the phone. So to review, our ideal was to have input at a Monday, December 5th meeting and to have the surveys out to folks in the mail in enough time before that, which would be this week. Otherwise it's not. I don't know. It's going to be a little late. So with that in mind, we have a draft of a letter that would go out and the draft of a survey. So the next steps are approving both. Decided that they work as our first step. Just let's sit in. But deciding we don't like them. We want to go a different route. And then deciding a deadline of getting things in the mail and getting things printed or that's it printed in the mail. So, yeah, I did not have time to read your letter today. So I have no, I don't have input. So we can either hash it out out loud today. We can see if folks have capacity by the end of the day tomorrow to email any feedback or we can just do it now. And I'll just name one consideration for the letter is we want the survey to ultimately live on the municipal website. So I did call Karen today. Obviously she'll be at the polls tomorrow. So just to name realistically, I don't think we're going to have to meet with someone else to do it as well. But my thought would be we want to make sure we have the appropriate URL to the right survey before we put something in the mail. So that someone when they go to the site, it goes to the right place. So just to name my thought would be Wednesday would be a potential deadline for a thing. Right. I don't know what the backend turnaround that comes on that. I still think I think we could accept surveys after the public. To me, I mean, folks can see the letter. I did a table with three columns. We're seeking your input on funding. You can fill out the survey mail back to us. You can do an online form or you can come in person. So they work in tandem versus like, yeah, to me, it's choose your adventure. They just need advance. And so I think I agree and totally own and acknowledge I did not get this done as soon as I want it. But I think we can. I'm sending it in the next week or two. Okay. Or as soon as we can. But on the back end side, they were really hoping to have everything today. So then get printed to be in the mail by Thursday. Those Friday is a federal holiday. Most of us will be open at this point. I don't think it's likely that it's going to get in the mail this week. Because Wednesday it's beginning the next week. It's as much. So if we got it to them by end of day, Wednesday, we could think about a Monday, Tuesday. Yeah. I mean, you know, they don't work as fast as they can. Yeah. And get in the mail. We're next week. The one issue consideration I had when the survey is, it talks about the quarry. Most people are in the mail. So how can we reword or get about my draft email? I wrote sustainable, long-term, source of aggregate for the community. But Chris, let me check my wording. Because to me, that's the outcome, right? Like that's one potential tactic. I don't know that there's anything else on the table. But the problem we're trying to solve is figuring out a sustainable. So what would you call that? Instead of quarry as a bucket? Sustainable or long-term plan for oil? And while we all know maybe what aggregate is in here, I would say, you know, grab the products as opposed to. For the road. Aggregate is the right term, but a lot of people aren't going to know what that means. So a sustainable source? Just say gravel. I would say town-operated aggregate resource or low-maintenance. Something along that line. Are we going to use more of that? I mean, people don't know what that is. It's not such things. We're going to say town-operative gravel. This will be his collection. Oh, yeah, something. Town-operated gravel. So I think that that would go in the bucket. So if the bucket, so to speak, is a sustainable source of gravel to road, then in that bucket are subcategories, such as collaborative purchasing between towns or a town-operated gravel pit. And I guess so this was my more meta question, Dan, and I'm just acknowledging I'm saying this too out loud right now. I saw like it was a prioritization of buckets and then the items within each bucket. And I guess I just wasn't sure, like, do we want community input on it, but should be town-underground? I mean, maybe folks. Yeah, not so it would be. So they would vote in those subcategories. I recognize that. I'm asking what I'm trying to think of what I as a select board member would do with that information. So speaking only for myself, my thought is I would like to know just can you really want to go gun-ho on rec? You really want to go gun-ho on conservation? And I recognize for some of the buckets there are real prioritizations. Right, being a good example, which how are you really into the pool? Are you really into trails? To me, Dan, with a public pulse on that, I just wanted to say for some of them, I wasn't quite sure what the, for more operational ones, like maybe roads. Just personally, I don't know that I particularly think that public opinion on who the operator should be is valuable. I think if we think the public says yes, invest in roads or yes, find a sustainable source, that's really interesting to me. In that case, I'm less interested in the specific details. So I totally understood and appreciated why you did those breakouts for some of them. And I guess for other ones, I was like. So maybe theirs can just be, they can write in like there, because there was one right, even half subcategories. It was like housing, which is way too big. So it's just, I want to know, but we could let it be a short answer with four lines and they can write there. So you're saying get rid of the gravel, but reference entirely just put invest in funds and roads? No, the budget would be there. Roads, but town operating versus not, versus a contract to me, like that's the execution versus the priority. I'm like, I'm so interested. That's how I believe about how I might use the survey, but. Is there other, so we have, yeah, so the first or second choice of buckets. So like for housing and the gravel sourcing, those can just have a header that says, housing bucket input, please write any input you have. Regarding having priority to these, but any input you have. Like if we don't have specific input to solicit in those buckets, then I agree. And then we're framing now, and maybe a better thing as you have, please rank the buckets subcategories. I would just say, please rank maybe the following initiatives, from not at all important to very important. Like to me, the relative ranking of like, I can remember everything that's one, two, and three, versus I think the pool is really important. And I think baseball fields are not at all important to be your example, but here we are. Do you know what I'm saying? No, I don't. Okay. So you don't think it's important for them to rank them, or you think you just want them to check the most important? I'm more interested in relative ranking than absolute, after having just done that annoying itself. For 11 and it was really annoying. Instead of setting up revolving investments, first choice, second choice, very interested, somewhat entrusted, not at all entrusted. Oh, just the word. Yeah. So you don't have to rank them. They're just identified. Oh, okay. Sorry, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Here's an improvement. And that's first choice, second choice, third choice, first choice. Yeah. And that is the default. Thinking of like, garbage. No interest, some interest, a lot of interest. Well then, so what I would say, because they're all like, some have five and some have two, it would be one to five, one being most interested by being least interested, because. Because you want to force them to. No, because some will have two. Well, I mean, I guess we could just word it differently on everyone, because if one has two, it's very interested, not very interested. And that might not be the case. They might be really interested in both, but one is more important to them. Oh, you want that for every single. Sorry. Yeah, I was just, I was just like, to me, how many? You want that for every single. Over pair slash improvements, fifth as opposed to third. I'm just thinking of my data brain and what I would do with that data versus 70% of people rated pool improvements as a very high priority use of our thought. Okay. I have to figure out how to do that, but I think we can do that. And like I said, I have been acknowledging I've even noticed feedback and I'm happy to work with you tomorrow after we volunteer with the polls. Okay. Yeah. That'll take a little time, but I think we can get there. Okay. And do we get to the school question? Oh. We got the response. Did you see my response? I didn't. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. So, so I'm a little concerned. I don't know what the implicit question is, but all of our children in all the schools that we have are union schools. So are we going to be spending water very enough of money? I mean, I mean, this should be a school law to go there. Right. Because it's not just the town of Waterbury. That's what we pay school taxes for. Yeah. I would agree. I think it's just too harsh that I'm single. Regardless of, I had to reread the email because I first thought it was like, are we asking about a school blog and that I was really confused about why we're completing it on a survey, but I have to say, I think either way, Bill makes this point ad nauseam frequently that like what people complain about taxes, the portion of that, that's municipal taxes and that we steward that really responsibly into the schools, but I think it introduces a weird complication. Where can for was just, I talked to a couple of people saying that we're talking about priorities for ARPA funding and a couple of two different people were asking me why wouldn't you consider the school, because it's sort of the top of mind is the bond that I just went down to defeat and I guess so. We're going to get money for that. Awesome. Right. And other. Well, we can. We did, right? Biden's paying off everybody's tuition, so we're going to request for ARPA funding. Great. Or talk to the state of Vermont who may or may not have all sorts of, well, I'm just acknowledging we got local ARPA funding this day. You got a ton of funding and VLCT just came up with a guide to all of the new state programs funded by ARPA funding. The state whose take their amount of one time on the funding to buy down the tax rates spashed here by about 15 cents spent on the three-bridge town. So as I understand it, and folks I've talked to, there's no money to do that. It's coming near. So there's a likely 15 percent, sorry, 15 cents in tax increase before you do your budget. Before budget. You're saying it's a one-time deal? Yeah. Okay. 15 cents was that the amount? No, it doesn't. I don't think people elected the rightest one. We don't believe that. All right. So my proposition then is that we, that Alyssa and I work together to revise the drafts that we have and redistribute what will hopefully be the draft of what we'll actually send out. So that'll be much easier to give feedback. And then we'll go from there. Our goal will be to have this complete by the end of day one day, but I, you know, I don't know. May I, I'm just throwing this out there. Is there a way of simplifying it? I think that's what you're looking at probably doing. I'm trying to do. Yeah. Maybe more so. Encouraging people to fill out a simple, simple survey and then get their butts to the public mood. They've got other concerns. We might want to throw it out there, but we only have one thing to know about. Do you read the first slide? That's from Chris and revisions are welcome. Okay, that is the plan. Hang for a ton of mail. Appreciate what you're doing. And I just hate to see you taking up all your time. Yeah, I'm trying to avoid getting in the weeds, but also make it meaningful because if it's not giving us information, I mean, I know it's twofold. One, we want some data, but also we want that public facing saying like, you know, we're trying, we're trying to have this conversation or start the conversation. But I also want it to be helpful data. So we want it simplified, but also useful. Right. You don't want to turn people off and looking at a complicated list of questions. I don't know if there's a fine long narrative to me. Yeah, it's a list of short and sweet. Right. Front and back, maybe. Here's the fun side. Here's the scary side. We're going to work. Yeah, we do. We're going to do it every Sunday. We are moving on to mean that there's I am status report town that obligation. All right. So this was one of the things that I needed to bring comic speed on. And since a couple of you have been through a budget process, this is updated. We didn't issue any debt in 2022. So it's fairly straightforward. If you started pop left, you see there 8.97 percent. That's the percentage of debt that we owe to us, as opposed to banks. A few years ago, that percentage was much higher to us, like 17 or 18 percent. But in 2020, we issued 1.36 million dollars of debt in a bank. It was that money. Well, it meant us that money. So the the ratio changed significantly. That was for the fire. Fire across the roadside ball or all that stuff. And basic question now being barred from the tax stabilization. That money that we owe ourselves. Yeah, you can see it. Yeah, just kind of. And the left is called the tax stabilization costs. So it's pretty simple. We issue you can see the the amount that was issued there on the third column over from the left. You can see the balance today of those things. So the paving bond, which we issued in 2015, we paid half of it. And that was we paid half of it through the end of last year. And we'll pay down another $50,000 this year. In fact, we don't have. But the balance there in Green was going into this year. You can see the number of years each obligation was. Some of them look odd, like when you see 11 years or 21 years or 22 years. When we voted the bonds for the municipal building, we voted the bonds in 2014. We owe the first interest payment late that year. So we get the money early in the year we had to pay our first interest paying six months worth of interest in the fall that year. And then we actually asked for deferment of one year. So we paid in 2014 and 2015. We only paid interest. And then 2016 was the first year that we actually paid principal. So it was a 20 year bond, but we deferred the payment schedule for a couple of years. The next call is the interest rate. If you look down at the ones that we borrowed from the tax stabilization phones, the bottom five. And you can see there, the interest rate says variable. 2.75. So when we issued to ourselves a loan from the tax stabilization funds to the infrastructure CIP back in 2014, we decided to pay ourselves 4%. And at that time, we did that because it was a way that we could put a fixed income component into our own tax stabilization funds going back there. The tax stabilization fund was first created. We probably have 40% of the tax stabilization fund investments when fixed income. Corporate bonds, things like that. One which backsecurities and the like. And they were paying 4, 5. I mean, we've still got a couple of bonds that are paying more than 7%. They're about to mature next year. But when we couldn't get that anymore, we shifted a lot of our investments away from bonds and we bought balanced mutual funds that paid good dividends. But then when we started to have these needs of our own, we had money, wasn't in our checking account over here in the Jones account and said, well, instead of borrowing $250,000 from the People's United Bank, let's borrow it from ourselves. And we paid ourselves 4%. And that was kind of buoying the fixed income portfolio of the tax stabilization fund. The last couple of years, you know, we've got to raise that money even to pay ourselves through taxes. And the interest rates kept going down, down, down. So we said, well, 2.75 is still more than we would be able to borrow. I mean, a better rate than we would be able to borrow from the bank. So we lowered the rate. So on those, in 2022, if you just look at that top one, the infrastructure things that we did from the tax stabilization fund, we owe, we still owe $37,500. In 2022, we're paying principal and interest to ourselves at $13,500. That's at 2.75%. The rest of the columns to the right, I bumped it back up to 4%. I don't know if that's what we'll charge ourselves next year, but I bumped it up. And that's why the 2020-2023 problem for those five loans to ourselves are either the same, you know, their level of principal and interest. And some of them go up, but we'd have to pay ourselves more. So we'll figure that out during the budget process. But at the bottom, under that big solid line, those are the total interest in principal payments that we're making to the banks and to ourselves for all of these loans. And then there's the annual change. And you see from 2022 to 2023, next year, there'll be an $8,000 savings over what we're paying now. The year after that, it will drop another $14,500. The year after that in 2025, it will drop off by $73,351, assuming we don't add anything down. So the tax rate necessary to pay this interest in principal, you can see right there in 2022 is 9.6 cents of our tax rate when to pay that service. I didn't segregate it. You can quickly do it if you wanted to. We don't have to charge ourselves any more interest than what we get on the flow of the bank. So if the cash in the bank is getting 0.25 percent, we could pay the tax stabilization from back to 0.25 percent and comply with the law, you know, it's undercounting that one of the loans in that fund. You shouldn't lend it for nothing, but again, we're trying to set money aside, so we can charge ourselves higher interest. And you see that tax rate will continue to go down, especially when we get out in the years 26, 27, 28. It's dropping by, you know, 3 or 4 cents then. That's assuming an increased grand list of half a percent. So if we get more than half, percent of a grand list increase, the tax rate will go down. And you can see those red Xs, those are the years in which that particular loan goes away. So I don't want to belabor the point. You know, it's, we're paying about 20-ish percent. My tax rate is 15 something cents, 53, 55, whatever it is, but, you know, 9 cents of 15, so 10 cents depending that the percentage in desert of our tax rate is in that service. And again, considerable amount of that has been paid to ourselves. It's like, you know, we're going to send you money. So anyway, if that's, if you have questions, you can ask them now. It's an exercise, a bit mainly for tall, but since I was doing it, we've been in a lot for development. I know, yeah, it's helpful. Questions? Is it likely that we will take on and work that to purchase more vehicles? It's hard to say, Roger. I mean, we're going to talk about the CIP in the second and it's just going to be a structure kind of thing. We do have needs coming down the pipe. The investment portfolios have taken a bit of a beating this year. So there's not as much in the investment portfolios as there once were, but I was very pleased the other day when I gave Tom all the Edward Jones portfolios and said, review them and here's the balance sheets for the funds. And, you know, Tom said, boy, it's nice to be part of an organization that has some resources. And I think we're much better off than many communities, our size in particular, and even more so than some that are bigger than us. So are we going to have to borrow? My philosophy, and I know it, is that odds with philosophy of some people who are here tonight and they can speak for themselves. But, you know, you're not going to be able to borrow at 1.55% like we did on that $266,000 line. And you're not going to be able to borrow $1.1 million at the 2% that we did two years ago. But whatever we can borrow at is going to be much less than you can borrow at, even if you had the same amount of capital in the bank and the same credit rating and everything else, because the interest that banks own from municipalities is not taxable to them, you know, if they pay income tax on it. So we get lower rates. And when we buy a fire truck that costs $750,000 or $950,000 or $450,000, whatever it was, and it has a 20-year life, you're a lot better off to borrow the money at below market interest rates and pay it off over time. And we've chosen to borrow syllabus from ourselves. And I think that's a good idea if you've got those resources that are available and especially if they're outside of your, you know, the cash that you're operating, we've got it in a separate institution. It's not part of our day-to-day operation. So if we borrow from the tax stabilization fund and pay ourselves back, we kind of get the best of both worlds. We're not using our operating capital or our taxes to pay for everything we like to put and getting decent interest rates so, yeah, over time, you know, if you pay 20 years of interest on something, you know, you're going to pay more in the end than if you just paid $500,000 out of the fund today. But the dollars 15 and 20 years from now are worth much less than they're going to be than they're worth today, especially if inflation stays at 8%. So I think that, you know, public finance is different. At home, if I have extra money, go against my mortgage to try to pay my mortgage off quicker and get rid of my debt because I have a finite life span and my kids have a finite life span. But here, the municipality is going to be here forever and people are going to need fire trucks and bridges and everything else and they should be paid for over the life of their years. Yeah, no lifetime of their use by everybody who uses it. So I think that we have kept our debt reasonably manageable. Do we like to have less? Absolutely. Every year in the budget time, we like to say, oh, gee whiz, in 2026, it's only going to be 7.5%. I mean, 7.5 cents as opposed to 9.5 cents. That's good in that budget year but it doesn't mean you shouldn't borrow. And again, one last thing is, you can look at the money that we're sending from the tax stabilization fund to the general fund. We've got $50,000 budgeted this year. We made a decision a few years ago at our meeting that we could use up to 5% of the year in value of the tax stabilization fund to send to the general fund. It's valued at about a million dollars. 5% is $50,000 so that can go. But the market is down right now. But we've got $1.5 million worth of aqua money still sitting in the bank or I haven't moved the money out of here we've no pay the ice center. So on the budget report, I'm going to show that there's a $50,000 transfer from the tax stabilization fund to the general fund. But I'm not going to sell security that might be down 25% this year and what it was at the beginning of the year to raise that $50,000. It's just going to show up on the balance sheet as it do fund the tax stabilization fund to the general fund. So managing your money taking advantage and being able to use your assets without actually spending it is what we're trying to do all the time here. And we'll talk more about that in the budget. I fear our ability to keep pace with the escalating increases of vehicles by way of vehicles. I think I told you about the cost of the drives. And now, yeah, it's huge. Well, modern $80,000 to 250,000 dollars. You know, let's say probably if you can get it if you can get it. That's the other thing. So, you know, we're vulnerable to pretty quick impact and in order to decline in our ability to keep on top of our rolling vehicle maintenance program. Most of those things, you know, if things don't take a turn here. Yeah, this is the most challenging. I've seen you there right now. Well, I told you there's a community that I'm, you know, they're the trucks that we ordered a year ago and they're still not here. They're still not on the road for us. I mean, what are we going to do? Of course, you know, I've been trying to put pressure through Kingsway. Things happen at the highway department when it comes to excessive standing and excessive solving. Now we're facing the fuel issue on top of all that. It seemed more imperative than ever to consider looking at that at least during the short term until you get there and until a few places can start to go the other way. Have you heard anything about our weed? As much as I need to say it, are we locked in for our salt season? From what I'm understanding, there's only one supplier and there's no locker to add to it. And we don't have sport, which, you know, for me, it's like great. I'm glad to see some pressure start to be put there so that it maybe forces us to start to curb the usage. So I'm wondering if the highway department's been informed about that, are there any of those things that are being done to start to try to get them curbed? Okay. All right. So any other questions on the desktop right now? No, thank you. So Mike Gilbar, the guy that I hired from the LCT to help with some of the audit stuff that I was getting frustrated with. So one of the things that we have, we have to keep a list of all of our capital assets. And this isn't that list. But we have the people list of all our capital assets, including the value of Main Street out there. And we have the straight line depreciated every year. And it's crazy because we can't sell the road. We can't use hot road. We can't borrow against the value of the road. But we have to say that it's worth $21 million and this year, I think we're deciding it has like a 40 year life. And when auditors just changed the life expectancy of buildings on our audit this last year, they lumped it from 40 years to 75. So don't ask me why, but... Big difference. ...is going in. All right. So anyway... Great. From a depreciation perspective? Yeah. So it's less depreciation than it is. Yeah, but is it really going to last 75 years? I wasn't going to put that $150 down from my arpeggio. So anyway, this is... I photocopied the 1999 annual annual county board. So you didn't bring your county board. This is what the CIP used to look like. So one fund. It was fund 30. It was one fund and all of the highway equipment that we felt was capital was listed. We have the replacement values there. The administrative was some debt. And then the car that I used to drive was considered an administrative department asset. The fire department trucks recreation department. This is what it's going to look like. And you can see there that in 1997, the replacement value of all the things that we cared for list was $1.4 million. And then in the next column, we showed that we were going to buy a dump truck for $87,000, a one ton truck for $39,800. And some office equipment for $8,500. And then we were going to do $19,620 worth of field improvements on one of the right fields. And that was going to be $152,700 spent. Then you see the grand list at the time, $2.493 million. And then the beginning balance of the capital fund in 1999 was $255,000. And we had made a decision back in those days that we were going to put four cents of our tax rate in the capital fund. So four cents times that grand list generated just short of $100,000 of revenue. And then we had some of this money. Some of that $255,000 was being invested and you see that there was an expectation of interest earnings. And then there was the purchases. And in 1999 worked exactly like we thought it would. We would have $213,000 at the end of the year. And if you look at the next column, the dump truck cost a little more. We didn't buy the one ton truck. Spent $8,200 for office equipment. And we spent $4,600 on building movements. So we spent $147,000. We earned $13,000 of interest. But we had a $27,000 loss in the investments. So at the end of the year, the fund value was $236,692. This is how it was structured. This is how it was looked. At risk that she might watch this. Rebecca Ellis did like this. She didn't like the fact that we had it all on one fund. And in one year, I was telling Thomas afternoon when I forget what year it was, but we were doing something on Stow Street or Union Street upgrading the road. And Pilgrim Park was starting to really build out. And if you remember the entrance to Pilgrim Park from railroad street, you get by the Elbridge Mill and you pitch down the road. And it was a gravel road down there. Down it was, there was no drainage. And the road was all washboards. So I went to the select board. I said, I've got the screw here. You've got these materials here. Let's do the road. It wasn't in the budget. And let's just do the road. And the select board, it was a little controversial, but the board decided to do it. And I can't remember if Rebecca was on that board or if she came on a year or so after that, but she didn't like that. And advocating for splitting our capital fund into what we now know is fund 70 is paving, fund 71 is infrastructure, fund 72 is highway vehicles. 70 is fire vehicles, 74 is fire. Fire and shunna. Whatever and then recreation will be 75, right? So it's all split. But we don't do anything really differently than we did here because she was trying to advocate that we should put enough money into each of those funds to keep all their fund balances above water. And if you look at your report when you have it and through next, if you look at the fund balances in all of those 70 to 75 funds, the fire one might have $700,000 in it, and the recreation one might be under water and the town infrastructure one might be negative $190,000. And at the end of the page and the last page after fund 75, I say the consolidated balance is this. And if you're trying to keep all of those funds above water, you'd have to raise way more taxes than four cents or whatever it is that we're raising today. So I would advocate, let's go back to this. Now it will make next year's town report look a little funky because I'm going to have to show that fund 70 had whatever $500,000 budgetary and we spent $407,000. But the proposed fund 70 spending in 2023 will be zero because we're not going to have it. We're going to go back to this. So you can think about it. I'm going to start working to update this. But Gilbar, the guy who I hired to try to satisfy the auditors when I showed him won't have for capital fund right now on 70 to 75, he said, that's not a capital budget. That's, I don't know what that is. And I showed him this and I said, well, and he said, yeah, that's the capital budget. So I asked him about it. It says capital budget written by the auditors and minutiae. And this shows us everything I think we need to see. And go ahead. No, go ahead. I agree with Bill. I don't think there's a logic of value added and showing it in, you know, five separate buckets and managing those buckets to the bottom line of all of that makes perfect sense. And you don't need, as long as you're, you know, if you've got that plan fire truck that's three quarter million dollars purchased in three years, as long as you've got the cash in three years, you can be negative in one year and that's fine. It doesn't matter. So I think that's what we'll find next year. This list of items on this capital agreement plan shouldn't change unless we, for some reason, decide we need something that isn't. That's out of the ordinary, right? I mean, the first thing that they ask us is what do you define as a capital asset? And Tom and I have been talking about that a little bit, talking about it right now. It says that any single item that we buy that's five thousand dollars more is considered capital. Tom thinks that's a low, probably, especially the day for simplification. I might agree with him. So when we buy a dump truck for the highway department, whether it's a panda or just a regular, the smaller one, what are they? Well, six wheel trucks, no, we're not. There's fandoms on the six wheel, right? Truck is okay. Okay, look at that. Ten wheels. Yeah. So six wheels, small. So when we buy a truck. And then I just have to say one second. I'm going to say one second. I'm going to say one second. I know way too deep down that we are near a dead block. I'll be just, I'm going to move on. Anyway, when we buy a truck. And let's say the truck costs $102,000 to buy a cabin chassis. And then it's another $40,000 to buy a plow, the body, and the sander. We put it all together and the truck is $250,000, whatever the price is. But once in a while, something happens and you keep the truck while the sander fights the dust and you have to buy a new sander. So now we're buying a sander for, you know, $15,000. And that's a couple of things. Are we just fixing them up? So those are details that we have to figure out on this side. And will Mike help you with that? Mike has already helped by saying what I have done before is really what you've done. And to your point, yes. The list won't change very often. You know, it might say, you know, 1996 load or replace in 15 years. So, you know, when 15 years gets here, for this will change and it will say, you know, 2008 load or whatever 15 years from 1996. No, I meant the list of accumulated items like the tractor. Right, yeah. The idea is they're going to be replaced. So the number of items that we have is going to be minimal. And the thing, the place where the most chance for expansion of the list is, is the recreation plan. You know, the tennis boards, the fields, the buildings. That's kind of a lesson you have in question, I think. Well, this is, so one, my brain is still exploding over depreciating mainstream. But I'm going to get over it because it's just, it's just our playing hysterical. So with that premise that I have no financial background or expertise that deferred to the two of you and the person you need to do this, as a layperson, when I think about my budget in an Excel spreadsheet, there is something I'm remembering when Gary came to talk about the CC Fisher Fund. And you said, even if you're paying for this training out of donations, I think you should run it through the town because we want to know what the costs of running a good fire fund. So my assumption is that you can still, am I correct that this is some minutia about how you put things in funds that doesn't make you too happy. And I don't mean that to be like demeaningly, but to me, knowing some of those things departmentally might have that, at least to a layperson, a useful effect, or is that just a divide between me as a, like, again, not a list? I think if you, you know, we can, there's a page in the town report that's called CIP Snapshot. We can still put in that snapshot that infrastructure we're going to do this bridge, this culvert, and how vehicles we're going to buy this truck. So we can have that in the CIP Snapshot. And still, but you can, you can see it all right here. You can look at this and say, okay, in 1999, we're going to buy that dump truck. And then we're going to buy that dump truck, that same dump truck, we're going to buy it in 2002 because it has a six-year life or whatever like this. It's all right. I understand that, I'm just saying it in the same way like you gave up this table and said, this isn't broken out by default. So I don't know how much of our debt service is paying for. It's because we did a new building and it took a ridiculous bond. And so, you know, five cents of the nine cents we're paying is actually for this. Again, I'm not going to argue against it. I know it's always, my question is, is there, I guess I missed you. My question is, as a lay person, seeing some of those more frequently in categorized is useful. You clearly are telling the others they're telling us not to do that. So I will defer to your expertise. I'm just saying, as a person who's looking at this for the first time, the reason the Rebecca Ellis fund Seventy Fire and WREC is different is because maybe there's, it's just interesting they're like, hi, we have a million dollars in WREC assets and nothing in trust in the CIP fund. I frankly think breaking it out is more confusing because if you look at it, if you take the time to look at it, I would think people would raise their hand and say, why is the infrastructure CIP unbalanced, you know, maybe the $250,000? Now you have to explain to them, well, because, you know, we don't put enough money in it to keep it above water every year because we've got all kinds of other issues. We have it all right on one day. And the transfers are always collective, that work centers. So right now we have, well, from our general fund, from the fire department budget and from the WREC department budget, there's transfers going to the CIP funds. And some of it, you know, WREC all goes to fund 75, but some of the fire money goes to fund 73 to pay for the vehicle, some of it goes to fund 74, and highway money goes from the highway department to 70, 71, 72. Now it's just, you can put on there, the amount of taxes going to fund capital expenses is, you know, $99.04. I don't know what to use now, but you have to do a lot of math and jumping through books to figure it out now because we've got it in six different funds, as opposed to 25. But it's how much WREC contributes proportional to how much WREC can then get out or then that's what I need, like, and this might just be because I haven't been for a budget cycle. So we don't need to believe or this anymore, I'll come neatly to the point. I'm not just speeding up on the slide, I'm just saying as- I'm not upsetting your question. So there again, how much does WREC contribute? Maybe you change that part of the budget because we're funding Fund 75 and that's recreation only, you have to show it's coming from recreation. So there's an exit stand, right? But you can take it out of an individual department, you can just put a line item in your general fund budget that says to capital fund and that's the amount of money that you need. Whether it comes from WREC or fire department or whatever, it doesn't even matter. It's immiscible versus personal budget. So when I save money, I say I'm the opponent for years, here's 50 bucks a month, here's 600 dollars. That's not for something else. Again, I think I'm not just meaning I defer to your financial expertise. We're still going to see the revenue by departments. You'll still see departmental revenues. But you'll see expenditures from departments. But we won't see revenue. And I think it's a snapshot. I don't think there's action tonight. I'm just talking here. I'm like, it's bizarrely counterintuitive to me as the person who doesn't do it, but I defer to let all the professionals think we should do it. That's all. We can, I mean, we've done it for, since like 2000. No way. If you trauma my career, you are, I think we should do it. It makes sense to me. I'm not going to stand here and say no. I'm saying from the, like I said, really lay perspective. I can see why some folks thought it was internal. To further confound you, the auditors just told me now that we've had these audits, Sullivan and Powers have been auditing us since 2007. That was the first time it's been. So every year they give us, okay, Tom's been through it. Auditors just want to make you jump through because they can. And you spend a lot of time and energy arguing with them. This is why we do this. Well, we better get it. So anyway, right now, we send money from the fire department finally, or that's a bad example. Highway, we send money from the highway. There's whatever $500,000 in the highway budget that says to capital funds. So 500,000 dollars goes over there. Some of it goes in the paving fund. Some of it goes in the infrastructure and some of it goes in the vehicles. Right. But it all adds up to 500,000 dollars. Each of those funds, like the paving fund, there's a debt service line that says $50,000 to pay that paving loan back. We've been doing that forever since Rebecca made us split this up. The auditors have been auditing those funds 70 to 75 since 2017. This year, they told me, you really shouldn't be paying debt out of your capital funds. That should be paid out of your general. So it's like, okay, well, we've been doing, we've been sending it over here, paying it. So people can see that we're paving a road, we borrowed money, we put the revenue in there for the borrowed money which goes up in the CIPS revenue. Now we have to pay that back to the bank, but you're telling us you don't want that line item in the CIP budget. You want it over here in the general. So there's things we're going to be changing anyways. And it's as frustrating to me, Melissa, as it is to you. But that's why we're talking about it now. Just don't want to just spring it on here and say we're making a big change. But I think this is much more than lying with how we have to report our assets, how we have to report appreciation and how we frankly plan. Because seeing it all on one page is a whole lot easier. It gives you a universal, a global snapshot, so to speak, right away. And you know that it didn't work. Well, instead of $500,000 coming out of the Highway Department and those are paving projects that are just a matter of the general fund. Is that what you're paving? Well, I mean, because this clearly is, you know, you're calling a capital improvement, but basically it's vehicles and there's no paving on this page. Well, that's because we didn't fund paving as a capital. That's infrastructure. To me, infrastructure is different then. But we didn't fund paving that way back in 1999. We didn't put all the paving projects in the capital fund and fund it this way. Is that your plan? What are you thinking? My plan is to move back to something like this. And we should have everything that we consider a community capital expense in the whole page, right? Which paving is now. Yeah, so most paving is a capital plan. Now, you know, you get an argument in terms of, well, you know, it's an overlay a capital expense. Yeah, some of its maintenance, right? But some of its maintenance, but if you Well, if you do a little short stretch, like the $20,000 for the down there, maybe that's not really capital. You could just put that in the highway budget. But if you do a mile a road, and it's, you know, only $100,000, well, that's a capital expense. Even though it's really just overlaying something. That I would consider that a capital expense. I think it's good. Great. Is this the one you had to find when you don't have it on you? That's that you have it on. Yeah, I did appreciate it. Oh, I remember that. Okay. Finish it up with a staffing update. Okay. So this is I spent the better part of the week before last, kind of starting on holiday this last Monday. Okay. Yeah. So the week before last, I was worrying quite a bit whether Tom would actually show up here. Oh, no. Not because I was hearing Tom, you know, pull the past one on us, but I was hearing Tom might say, screw that. Such turnover there. So in the past month. He's here. In the past month, FIFA has had two of its two water treatment companies reside. Fortunately, Bill Woodruff still has a license, and we're not violating our requirements today. But two water treatment plant operators reside. One of them reside and took a job over in probably Union to the facilities manager over there. And when he resigned, then we had also already heard that Brad Roy, who had was the second in command, if you will, he just has a baby. So he's been on paternity leave family. We, I guess, we followed him. And we already knew that he was looking for another job. So to put it in perspective, he was making just short of $25 an hour for that job, which is, I don't know, what's that, 40, 15 a year, 45, 48, almost $50,000 a year. And then he had some over time, a couple of hundred hours of over time. He was offered a job that was going to be $59,000 a year without any overtime. Without any overtime, without having to be on call, without having to work on weekends, all of which are required in our time. Offered him a $10 an hour raise to stay. $10 an hour, you know, every dollar is $2,000. And so it's a 20 grand raise before any overtime. Thought about it, but didn't like the fact that I didn't work the on-call one three times. And, oh, by the way, the new job that he had, he didn't work at home. So he doesn't have to worry about dial-care, even if his wife goes back to work. So it's harder and harder to compete in this marketplace. And then, so that was two weeks before it was coming. And then on the Thursday before it was going to come, Eric Austin, the mechanic in the highway department said, he was leaving on November 11th, Friday, this Friday, his latest last day. And he's going to go to work with Duxbury. And he said, you know, it's more money, and I get my own route, and I get my own drive. Said, how much more? Four dollars an hour. And, you know, he's making about $25 an hour for us. So four dollars an hour. That's eight grand a year before overtime. And this is not just water-related. This is happening. You know, it's going on water treatment operators just in between Randolph and probably Essex, which may go further north up to Morrisville over St. John'sburg. There's like eight positions over there. Really? We advertise for that position. We've got three applicants. One of whom has a license. When carrying the King Town clerk, we advertise for the tax facility billing clerk. Before COVID, we would have 15, 20 applicants. Easy, we had four. We have to re-advertise them. So I don't have any real hard and fast things that I'm going to tell you, but we're trying to be creative to try to figure out how we're going to repaint people. And it's kind of critical to try to repaint people. And the only thing that we have is money. And I think you're going to see that wages are going to have to go up. And I know that it's the tax rate more than anything because it's our biggest expense is personnel. But if we don't have them, we can't do what we need to do. And, you know, we've cashed around between Tom and Woody and myself, you know, if it was just, and I say just, I don't mean to denigrate anybody, but it was just one of the highway truck drivers and not the mechanic. Well, maybe we're just saying, well, we'll live with one less. And, you know, when I first came here, we had six and now we have eight. And we don't really have any more rows. We've got eight because we're doing a lot more taking care of ball fields and cemeteries. Dylan Haskins is in the highway department, but for more than half the year, he's more and more lost. We've just been told by the cemetery commissioners that the long term, long time contractor that's Mold Hope Cemetery has told us, well, he's retired, he's going to die. So we kind of have to build that building. So there's a lot of shifting sand out there, so to speak. And it's challenging. And some of these positions are absolutely critical. I mean, you can't knock out a lot of freedom. But on the highway side, you know, if it was Dylan instead of Eric that was short gone, hate to lose him, but not that, you know, not an emergency. But now we don't have a mechanic. So we've kicked around. Should we just try to hire a mechanic and say, this guy's going to be the full time mechanic, not have him follow, he doesn't necessarily need a truck so you can save a truck once in a while. You've got a mechanic. If you can find one, you're going to have to pay somebody for that. Maybe we don't have to send out as much of our work as we do. Even with Eric, you know, Eric's a pretty good mechanic, but when it comes to the bigger trucks, the Vsoles and everything else, and as we kicked it around, it's like, well, you can hire a mechanic, but it's not 1985 anymore. You need all kinds of computer equipment and everything else to do the diagnostic work. So maybe we don't even bother trying to hire a mechanic anymore. Do you have a contract with people who are more specialized? We don't have a contract. I mean, we bring things back to where we buy them. You know, we don't have a contract or whatever that means that it's not a contract anymore, right? But, you know, we'll bring vehicles back so that our dump trucks, the better diesel, that's where they take them and go, going to see if we have a challenge. But we've got a diesel one time right now. It's a Ford, I think. And none of the Ford dealers around do any diesel. So we finally found a diesel mechanic that would at least work at it. You know, just a guy goes and tells us, well, and if he says, well, it'll be $5,000 to fix it, we'll fix it. He tells us it'll be $20,000 to fix it. You know, if the truck was going to be retiring next year anyway, he probably wouldn't do that. So just like you know, I feel badly, I told Tom when he came and said, you know, when I announced my retirement in December, I thought we had a financially sound organization. I'm happy that he thinks that we do. But a stable, good workforce. You know, that had relatively low turnover and we've had more turnover this year, I think probably that we've had in 15 years combined. And it's, it's top right now. So I don't, you want to say anything, but. I think I think it's going to be important that we hire the water operators at because I think it might take a look, you know, there, if I know they're easy, but they're, I think they all consider themselves part of the same crew. And so we might create some equity issues at the highway department based on how highly, how much they have to pay these people. So that might dictate what has to happen down the chain. And then the obvious piece, I think, is we've got, you know, Woody essentially teaching the wastewater operators to run the water plant. And so maybe there is some sort of compensation that comes with cross license. I think if you can do both, you're pretty valuable to us. Unfortunately, you're also very valuable after the rest of the world. And we've done that. I mean, Paul check, who was, what he's called a treatment plant crew operator, he had a water overseas. And Brad Roy, who just left the walk, he has a wastewater. So we've been cross training, but as he said, cross train, what do you call it? They've got more options. So it's this kind of, you know, circular and chasing the tail. And some of it, I think just depends on, you know, what the individual wants. Now in St. Albans, we had a really young green drill we needed to keep. And the complaint we had for years was responding to emergency. So we said to all these young folks, all right, fine, we can buy a brand new cell phone from Verizon for a buck. And we can pay for them when they're planned for 30 bucks a month. We can buy you all cell phones. And the caveat and pay for them. And you can use them for whatever you want, personal use. Copy that is when it goes up to a yen, you have to answer. And that's your response, but you have to acknowledge the call. And that resonated because they were all buying new cell phones every other year. It's your 500 bucks and paying 100 bucks a month for a plant. So that paid more than paid for itself. So sometimes you've just got a rainstorm with them to see what works best. But the theme I've heard in, I've heard other places where I've worked that I've heard here that's hard to address, but you know, I don't, before working in misspoke government, I didn't think of a water operator as a stressful job. I thought of water plants as pretty highly automated. I didn't think at all about the downstream work in water or the downstream work in wastewater. But a theme I've heard a lot is, you know, on a day-to-day basis, it might not be stressful, but if you make a mistake, it's a big deal for a lot of people. And all these jobs require, well, the water jobs require someone there seven days a week. And I get it that we've got to pay you, you know, one wants to work seven days a week. No one wants to be on call all the time. So it's just part of the challenge. And it's a changing landscape because it's no different. When I came here in 1988, we had to, somebody had to go to the water plant every day. Somebody had to go to the wastewater plant every day. But if it's snow, you had to show up and go to the cloud. It was a different time. People just said, well, that's the job. And, you know, Mike Gray said, oh, well, really? And stayed full of farmers. And, you know, they were just, they were here. They worked it out. And I'm going to Boston to a Red Sox game. Okay, I'll be around. I'll take care of it. But now you're getting people. And it's not a bad thing. It's just a different thing. Where, well, you know, if you want me to be available to respond seven days a week, you know, before you resign and where I thought it was going, you know, Grad Roy and Scott wrote a three-page memo that says, this is what we ought to pay for our talk. What we do and have done forever is you go in on the weekend. You have to show up. You've got to make sure that everything's working. Take a few readings. They're typically there for two hours. And we pay them 15. And if there's something wrong when they get there and they work seven, we pay them for seven. But that was always enough to say, you know, so every week you, they're built in. They're going to have 44 hours a week. They get 40 hours of straight time, four hours of hours of later. One of them works this weekend, you know, Saturday and Sunday and two different day weeks and then next weekend the other day. And, you know, and that was forever. It's been fine. Now it's like, well, if we're going to do that, we want, we want this amount of time for the weekend. That's okay. But, you know, Monday through Friday, we're also on call if something happens. So we want an hour a day just to be on call, which well, it's 20, 25 bucks, but then it's every day. So it's $125 a week that you're going to pay for the on-call stuff. And it's just, it's different. And, and they can get it. There's other places paying a lot more. The reason I offered grad $35 was not just to try to keep them. It was looking into the BLCT salary survey and what's exploded since the, since the pandemic. You know, we never were at the top of the heap in terms of pay, but it's solidly in the top. And, you know, we gave a 5% increase this year to just about everyone. But we're looking at these people applying for the water-operated job with not a days of experience and not one hour towards getting a license. And having paid them $31 just to get them to come through the door. So grad's got a license. He's got four years of experience. So it was, we'll pay you $35 a second. And it still wasn't. So we're going to have to, we're probably going to have to make some decisions now just to with pay to try and start the budget. You know, the line item is looking already because we gave a 5% increase in April as opposed to the 3% of whatever I had budgeted. We're already going to be over on those line items probably by five grand. We're going to have to do more. And then I don't think we have a choice. Well, I don't personally think we're going to be able to buy ourselves out of this problem. The whole healthcare thing at the last meeting was part of my frustrated frustration because obviously in this particular case of Eric Austin, it didn't work. I don't have this left anyway. You know, my son claims that $30 an hour is a new minimum wage. Then close. They're going to McDonald's and put them for the $17 an hour. If you want to pay rent, you have to. For else you don't have anywhere to live. I just, I quite honestly can't figure it out. You know, I'll say this and may not feel to any of you, but it seems like we're, instead of a country of opportunity, we're becoming a country of opportunists, work less and get a hell of a lot more. I've never been under that philosophy or the reality. I want all life. I want all I want in life on 40 hours a week. I remember when I worked 40 hours a week. And it's also really important to remember that there are a lot of types of people in the world with lots of priorities. And it's important to have folks like you who are fully passionate and dedicated to their work and are able to do that. And it's also important to remember that work and just surviving to pay bills is not some people's priorities. And it doesn't make anyone right or wrong, but because I don't want to work more than 40 hours a week just to survive doesn't make me less of a hard worker, more dedicated. I'm saying me just because I'm representing myself, but the types of people who don't feel like 50 to 60 hours of their waking week should be dedicated to earning income doesn't make them not hardworking, not passionate, not dedicated or good citizens. It means that they have other things they want to do like volunteer serve on boards, raise children, travel the world. And those are all really valid. And so, Bill, I think I want to be clear that you weren't not saying this, but just because people don't want to work on weekends doesn't make them lazy. I clearly said you were not saying that. I just want to say it out loud. Absolutely. It's been just the shifting of it's not the word work ethic, isn't the right word, it's the one that comes to mind. It's a shifting. It's a life work balance and integration. And Brad Roy, he said in my office and he told me, he said, look, he said, I've been working for Waterbury between the sewer and the water for almost five years now. He said, and he worked for, you know, UBM, he worked in the lab work, but he was assigned to a boat that did a lot of testing on bike shame. Okay. And he said, when I was in college, he went to UBM. He said, my professors told us as people, he said, what you've done, Bill, you know, 35 years in one place, they tell us you should plan to be three to five years of the job, move on, do different things. So people, a lot of people aren't looking to have one career you might want. They're looking to have a varied experience. So they're going to say, well, I'll go do that for a while and then I want to do something different. And that puts pressure on those of us who rely on them, and especially when it used to be that you could preach to people at employee meetings and say, you know, we're never going to get rich being municipal employees, but it's secure. You're going to get your pay. You're going to get your benefits. You're going to have retirement. So one of the cards we try to play a little bit is, you know, even with Brad after he left, it was like the place you're going to have a retirement plan, and he said, oh yeah, I think they do. I would never give that up. So it's just a different world. I mean, we've gone from five days a week, eight hours a day down to four days a week, 10 hours a day. Now, to guarantee you, we're getting no more production. Yeah, my family was born. And our cost for that same value is a hell of a lot higher or it's higher, but it's that way. And those are the types of things that frustrate me. And then to turn around and say, I can't afford this. I can't afford that. You know, don't go. Well, the challenge Chris is that, that, you know, we're not, we don't operate in the back. So I resisted the highway department going to them four days a week for a long time. So I just don't like the optics that, you know, something that happens on a Friday and we only have a clue wrong. I just didn't like how it looked. But when so many other places are doing it and the with Brad, the whole work from home that happened during COVID. Now there's experts in the field with your read articles. Now they'll tell you, well, it's the pendulum's going to swing back. You know, there's employers who are saying, oh, you know, we're not going to be doing the work at home like we used to, but VLCT, you know, I mean, they're pretty much becoming a virtual organization. You know, there's probably anybody in the office there now. And there's pros and cons. It's great. Well, how are you, you know, it's harder to measure productivity. I don't think you get the networking and the collegiality and all the rest of it. So I don't want to stay here until I'm just letting you know we're facing some challenges and you're going to have to trust us to do what we have to do to try to make sure that we have people to do the jobs that we've done. And Chris, I know that we disagree in some of the viewpoints that said what I didn't want to do is interrupt you when you were saying that you don't think that necessarily buying our way out of it or how we said it is the solution. If you do have ideas, they're obviously welcome and whether it's in the meeting or going to see Tom and Bill, you know, it's one thing to maybe fundamentally disagree, but if you have constructive or creative ideas to put forth, they're obviously, I know they're welcome here and I know that they're going to be welcome in the office of the municipal managers. We're also talking about the recognition issues. We hired Wyatt to be the program manager and it was still here. Nick is still working. He's still working for us. About 10, 15 hours a week helping Wyatt, it will end at the end of the year. But he's still doing stuff and, you know, unfortunately he and I had our following out, like he's professional, he still wants this to succeed, but we're in a position now, okay. Here we are. We're changing the guard at the managers level. We've got Wyatt right now. Is it should we just kind of put it in neutral? And I've already told Wyatt when you work with Nick, no new initiatives right now. Just do the best that you can do to keep staff in place, because that's the other thing. Planning lifeguards and camp counselors, there's a lot of pressure on that wage too. And you know, we're probably going to recommend a little bit of an increase in the fees to cover some of those expenses, but there's just a lot of challenges here right now. Because of the labor market, it's an employees market right now. And maybe with the actions that the fed are taking to try to force us into a recession, we'll start turning the tide on that a little bit. By the municipalities, I'm not sure how quickly that will happen. So you have to understand Danny that, you know, I'm 63, I'll be 63 shortly. I've been self-employed for over 40 years and I've been on a dead run for over 40 years. I have the logbooks to prove it. What frustrates me coming from my perspective is having done all I've done and I didn't, I don't live to work. And I understand that people out there that work to live. My goal was to, and it was something that had in my head from a long time ago that I bust my ass while I was young and get to a point in my life where I thought I could retire at a reasonably young age, maybe 63, 64. Still young enough to be able and physically able to do the things that I wanted to do, knowing that there isn't a lot of time left after that. And what frustrates me now, and I see it not only here in the municipality, but also in my business and everywhere, people don't wanna go to the extreme that I did to do, to make myself in a position where I could hope to be comfortable in my retirement years. Instead, they're wanting more to do less. And that's coming from somebody like me who has busted their ass all their life. And now at a point where that ability is waning as you get older and physically less able to do it. So you've got a certain amount of reserve that you're counting on and that's starting to get away quicker because you're having to dole more of it out for people who wanna do a similar job that will help a lot more money. It's, I hope you understand. Yeah, I do understand your perspective. And while I think it's probably better for us to have this conversation, not in the meeting, I'm gonna say this just because people do watch this and it's there, your perspective is valid and it's your perspective. And I don't wanna wait until I'm 70 to do the things I wanna do. I wanna do them while I'm 37. And that doesn't make me right and it doesn't make you right. I don't want to do less and get more. I want to live my life fully because as you know, there is no tomorrow that is guaranteed us. And so I want to work very hard and I want to be able to provide an okay life for myself. And I work for nonprofit. I used to be a teacher. I don't plan to be a millionaire. But I and people with similar views as me want to work and live simultaneously in a way that's not necessarily the same as you and other people who want to work very hard for a certain period of time. And neither one of us is right. And I just, when I disagree verbally with you in these meetings, it's because we are representing and speaking to a large plethora of people of varying world views and experiences and priorities. And I wanna make sure that we're considering them and their goals when we're having these conversations and making decisions about wages and hiring and housing. It's not because I think you're wrong. It's because I want us all to remember that everyone is different. And that's what's really important about our community and to other people because they have a separate lived experience and different wants for their lives is detrimental to the togetherness of the community. That doesn't mean that some people have bad qualities and are greedy and want to be lazy. People are, but some people are. It's human, it's human. Some people, that's how it is. But I just want to be careful when we publicly categorize people, we are othering our constituents and I just wanna be really mindful of that and remember that we have different priorities. But we share a common goal. So how do we get there best? And that's why I say like your ideas while we might have different foundational ideas, you might have really, really good ways of solving a problem that are not the ways that we thought about. So I understand you and I don't think you are wrong. I also just think more perspectives are right than just one. And that notes, shall we? Motion to adjourn. Thank you so much. All艾 All of a sudden. All in favor say goodnight. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, very important. Sorry. No, no, sorry. You should have gone. No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don't know what I'm thinking about.