 We'll bring our select board meeting to order for January 14th, 2019. First thing to do would be to approve the agenda. Are there any changes or additions? One change. The library budget, we're not going to discuss that tonight. The library commissioners, we're going to come in tonight for a variety of reasons, mostly to do with me. They're not, they're going to come next Monday. But Nick was very flexible as a recreation director out of B. And we'll replace the library discussion with a recreation discussion tonight. So we'll still make progress on budgets. But library next week, okay? Perfect. With that change, would somebody like to approve the agenda, please? Make a motion. I'll move that we approve the agenda with the change in the budget item. I'll second that. Okay. Any further discussion? All those approved, say aye. Aye. Consent agenda items, the minutes of the January 7th meeting. Liquor license from Maplewood Convenience Store, Quinlan Farms. And the wine vault. And also sign in the Duxbury fire contracts as approved in the last meeting. Any motion to approve that consent agenda, please? I make a motion to approve the consent agenda items. I'll second that. Okay. Any further discussion on it? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Public. The public must have gone outside for a cigarette because nobody's here. Alrighty. Running a little early. It looks. I'm still a lot. That's me. Thank you. Bill, do we sign both copies? Yes, please. So next thing on the agenda is to a little discussion with John Malter. Over Ad River Management Resource Alliance. But he's not here just yet. I don't think he saw it. We're a little early, I think. We're out to find him. Right here and now. Right here for us. Okay. You're not even going to have a chance to sit down, John. Geez. I was just going by the schedule here. So you can go right over there. Where do you want me? We're hurrying through tonight. Okay. Let's do this here. Close it. Thank you. Good job. Thank you. Yep, thank you. You know, when I left high school, I thought I was getting away from those paper crabs. You can read it online. Well, not just yours. I'm dying to know all of it. Then you decided to get involved in government. That was my downfall. Welcome, John. Okay. Good evening. I appreciate the opportunity to once again give you the state of the world in the line of trash and recycling and all the good stuff that everybody wants to try and avoid, but has to deal with that on a regular basis. I've given you two sheets of paper, both sides. The first sheet is the annual report, which has all of our information on what we did this past year. The backside has some additional information about our household hazardous waste collections. And then the second page goes into a little bit on our proposed budget. I wanted to just give you a couple of the highlights of some of the activities we've had and focus a little bit about Waterbury and then take any questions that you might have. First of all, as always, I think the household hazardous waste collections are the most important part of our function that we provide to the residents within the Med River Resource Management Alliance. And this past year at our two events over at Harwood, we had 508 households that participated. And of those 508, 200 of them were from Waterbury. So 39.4% of the participants, which just proves that Waterbury has a lot of hazardous waste. Now, it just shows that people are really interested in doing the right thing. And that is a good number. And the highest number, percentage-wise, of all of our communities. And driving out to Harwood, it's a good thing to see. Chris? Real quick, John. Is there a different way of monitoring like the surplus that doesn't go to the hazardous waste? How does that, when it comes into the trash dumps or the transfer stations, how is it dealt with there? Well, it's not supposed to be going to the, in your regular garbage. Granted, some of it does. But periodically, they do trash sorts where they'll literally will open bags to find out what is going in. And that's when we find out how recalcitrant our residents might be over the year. But to give you an actual number, it's pretty much impossible to say. But what we find is that we're getting things that go into the recycling bins like batteries. I mean, people do wish recycling. And unfortunately, we can take it in the hazardous waste collection. But when they put it into the recycling, it winds up being disposed of as a waste or as a hazardous waste. And so that sometimes becomes a problem and can be even more problematic in terms of some of the lithium batteries as potential fire hazards and issues at the material recovery facility for something like that. But this past year, we collected over 27 tons of stuff at our collection. And that's the second highest amount we've had in the past six or seven years. We're definitely getting the word out. And I don't want to jump around, but I think it's appropriate to say that our budget for the first time since 2016 has to be increased because the hazardous waste contractor that we've been using for the last six years has been bought out by a venture capital kind of organization. And they have chosen to change their model and they're only doing collection activities in states where their facilities are located and they don't have any facilities in Vermont. So we're not the only ones that are losing our contractor, but it's created an interesting dilemma for us that back in early November, I put out a request for proposals to four other contractors and December 7th I was supposed to have responses in by. And the sound of crickets in my mailbox was very prevalent. We got no responses that day. And I put it out again to two contractors. One of which found their initial response in their spam file. One of the dilemmas of trying to go electronic is that the mailbox, the mail delivers. The electrons sometimes don't. But fortunately, we were able to get a successful bid from the one contractor. And it's going to be about 20% more than we've had in the past. And so I've raised and my board has approved the draft budget for a 25 cent increase. And that reflects in Waterbury as a $1266 increase over the per capita. It's a $6 and 25 cent versus $6 per capita. So it's 4% over the past three years. So it's not that much of a tremendous amount, but it's more. And it wouldn't be if I could have kept our old contractor. So there was that food scraps. We had 279 plus tons of food scraps collected commercially within the Alliance communities. Plus with the household composting bin program, we collected individually about 16 tons of food scraps. Now, that's not every individual. That's the combined amount based on the estimate of the number of bins we have out there and the amount of stuff that was generated. We also collected over 11 and almost 11 and a half tons of tires this past year, which is over 900 tires, including green up tires, which we take at no charge to the communities as part of our ongoing program. And we do the tires for our residents at a much reduced rate. This past year, we were doing it at $3 a tire. And those tires wind up going for a combination of either tire derived fuel or as civil engineering application of chopped up and used for erosion control activities, things like that. It continues to be a good program. We also do metal collection in conjunction with the green up activities in the spring. And in the fall, we support the wheels for warmth program with some advertising, but we don't have a full collection in the Alliance per se. Other than down at the village grocery in Wadesfield, they do collect tires there and they go for, you know, some people can buy them and the good ones where they're also taken away for tire derived fuel or engineering applications. And I should say that at our, down at Earthwise in Wadesfield where we do the majority of the collection, I get people that come in taking away tires, which is really the best thing that we can have people do. It's the best disposal is no disposal and reuse is the direction we certainly encourage people to go with. So that's been an ongoing activity. E-Waste is collected at both the Castella Transfer Station in Wadesfield and over at the state surplus property facility right here in Waterbury. And this past year we collected over 25, notice how I say we, like I'm busy moving all these tons, but it was over 25 tons of computers. That's a lot of cell phones, but now it's a lot of TVs, monitors, computers and printers. So when did they do that? E-Waste? E-Waste? At the state surplus property and over at Earthwise down in the valley. When? Over the last year. Did they take a computer every day of the year? I'm trying to find out. Every day when they're open, they're open from I think eight to four. So you don't have to wait to the hazardous waste day or anything else? Whatever they're open, and I think they're open actually Saturday's part of the day. They hold like two TVs, can you take those there? And no charge. And other electronic material you can bring there, but there is a charge, I think it's 50 cents a pound. So if you've got a bunch of cell phones, that's pretty cheap. So is it financially advantageous for them to do that? Is there enough precious metals inside those computers? Well, basically it's a program, it's part of our product stewardship program. It's a joint, mainly the manufacturers take back the material and they're covering those costs in either remanufacturing or de-manufacturing and taking some of the materials and then processing for new computers. The company that makes the milk runs there, it's bid competitively and the company that's won the bid is out of Middlebury that picks up and takes the things, then they sort them by what they are and they go to whether it's Hewlett Packard or Deller, go on the open market for reuse, you know, some of them are beyond use. Some of my computers are like that, just get rid of them. So it's saving on resources. It's preventing stuff from having to come out of the earth and saving to, you know, so that we don't have to make quite as many out of raw materials. And that's part of what our message is and has been. We want to continue to recognize that this is the Mad River Resource Management Alliance, not the Mad River Salad Waste Alliance and these are resources that just need to be properly managed. So where is this place on route to the state office, surplus property office? You know where some common is? It's right before that and on the right-hand side and you take them around the back. It's not, you go in the front and there's all sorts of surplus. Right, interesting field trip to go for. If you're looking for office supplies or wondering where all the knives that are confiscated at the airport by the TSA people, that's where you'll find them and you can go from there. Recycling markets have changed and they're probably never going to be the same again. China, which has been our biggest driver, has entered the 21st century with guns blazing, where the United States, as one of the principal exporters of recycled materials, was routinely able to bring recyclables at a contamination rate up to 10 percent and it was accepted. China has now developed their own infrastructure, their own material recovery facilities, their own middle class generating their own stuff and over the last year they have gone to, we don't accept 10 percent, we don't accept 3 percent, it's now one half of 1 percent which is virtually impossible to meet even at the best of facilities, simply because things get broken and things get mixed in. And so what's happened is that where costs were based on both material going to China and then the Chinese products such as Apple computers and the like would come back in the same sea containers, they're now having to go to other markets in Southeast Asia, in India, Malaysia and the like and in some cases there isn't the return of products that includes something of value so the transportation costs effectively have doubled and that's created a major cost. The United States and Canada have both recognized the industry, the recycling industry, things like the paper mills that had taken all the used paper, recognized when the Chinese market was thriving that they couldn't compete effectively. Now that the markets have changed, they're rethinking their processes and they have already dove into being more efficient at processing waste material and I think the numbers that I've seen in the last two years are like in the next two years we're going to be more independent of the foreign markets and material will be taken here in the North America for processing. So that's been a, you know, where recycling costs were not recognized as a cost to the consumer even though there were fees associated with it. Now the consumer has been sharing that cost and that'll probably continue for quite some time but at least our industries are ramping up to deal with that stuff. Those are the major points that I have are like I say our budgets gone up a quarter from six dollars to six and a quarter. One of my messages every year is that the select boards always need to approve the budget and authorize your representative and Alec unfortunately and I just had a meeting of my board and I just hadn't given Alec notice in time. He had another commitment tonight or he would have been here as well but he's been a fine representative for Waterbury and I try to have representatives for life so they understand my sense of humor and can go from there. But are there any questions? I guess that would be my first question. Any idea of the potential increase in the quantities of food scraps once the law becomes official there? Well you know the about 30% of your waste stream is food and food related material and you don't have to include meat in the recycling or the ban. You can still throw meat products in the trash which has been I think one of the major concerns on the part of residents that they were going to have to put their leftover hand bones in the recycling bin and would that really work and you know we have green cones that'll deal with digesting that kind of thing but compost bins are really good at bringing out the bears if you're not careful and something like a nice smelly piece of meat is a real good attractant. So we aren't encouraging that from happening but you're going to see an increase in the amount of compost bins at the local level and you're going to see more commercial collection at transfer stations and material going to commercial composting facilities and alternate anaerobic digestion facilities. So are the seagulls and the crows going to go on strike here? Well you know they've been able to share that for quite some time and some people that's their means of composting. They just spread it out and see who's going to come. It's nice if you want to do Wildlife 101 but somehow Smoky the Bear and composting are just not compatible. You sell the composting units? I do. We do. The Alliance does. I just contributed that. And we also have, I do a couple of workshops on composting. I've got one scheduled for the end of April here at the library which folks are welcome to come to at no charge. If they come to the workshop there's a reduced price for the compost bins but even at full price the bins are, they've been $52 a piece and if you go to Costco that's probably, or gardener supply that's probably half of what they're normally charging. And you can compost up to 650 pounds of food scraps and garden material annually and makes great, great material for your, as a soil amendment. It's good stuff. And I would encourage the town to be using it with the plant pots or any kind of landscaping work that's being done. And it's just, it's good stuff. The other question that I'm sure is on the tip of everybody's tongue is what's going on with RTR in terms of they're not being able to take stuff. And they've had truck problems for the last couple of weeks. They're still working on it. I'm trying to keep people informed through front porch forum and they're still taking redeemable bottles and cans but in the interim if during the week people need to have a disposal option for trash or recyclables they can go up to stow or down to earth wise and on Saturday over to Rodney's over behind Crush Rows. But that's where that's at right now. Got a question for John there? Yeah, what's happening with rags and cloth? Textiles? Textiles. Right now nothing. You can take it up to stow. There will be a charge. When we lost the landfill we lost a lot of leverage in terms of having a spot to stockpile stuff. But Goodwill Industries takes trailer loads, tractor trailer loads of material. If the town of Waterbury was interested in spotting a tractor trailer it would still cost something to get rid of this stuff. But that's the challenge is that the markets are up and they're down and we're as a couple of years back when the landfill was operating they were paying 15 cents a pound for some of the textiles. And now it's about a penny a pound when you factor in the cost of trucking and all the infrastructure associated with that just isn't economically viable. So that's where that's all at. Thank you. I'm on the garden club. Maybe the garden club should buy one of these compost bins so that when they do the weeding of all those beds in the village they set up weeding plastic bags. They could. Yeah, I'm actually doing a workshop with the river runs through it. Okay. Thank you. Appreciate your time, John, like always. My pleasure. So you need a motion for them to appoint Alec? Is that what you said? I need two motions, one for your budget, our budget and one for your representative. So a motion to approve paying six and a quarter per capita. Or if you want to move to six fifty or seven dollars and a trip for me to Hawaii or I could go. So I could check out some new compost bins. Okay. So if somebody would like to make a motion to increase our budget amount to Mad River Solace waste or Mad River Resource Management Alliance. Thank you. From the current amount to six dollars and twenty five cents. That correct? That's correct. Okay. I'll make a motion to approve the amount of six dollars and twenty five cents for the budget as just described by Chris. Okay. Is there a second? I'll second that. Any other questions from anybody? All those who wish to approve say aye. Aye. And the second motion was, remind me again, appoint somebody to be the representative. I'll appoint Alec Tuscany for the ensuing year for representative of Waterbury. Representative Waterbury. Mad River Resource Management Alliance. I'll make a motion to appoint Alec Tuscany as a Waterbury representative to the Mad River Resource Management Alliance. And Bill Woodruff as the alternate. Second that. I don't know what you'll do as a job. Hoping there's no further discussion. The only point of this is that normally you have to be absent to get appointed to something like this. Glad to see that you're here. Well, I'm happy they want Alec for life. And you become the alternate for life then. Okay. Motion to be made and seconded. All those who approve say aye. Aye. Aye. Very good, John. And if you keep saying Mad River Resource Management Alliance, it's hard to get it out of your head. Thank you. Okay, Bill. We'll start with Nick, do we? Yeah, so I'm going to pass two packets to you. First of all, I just want to tell the select board I apologize that's the budget and then you see some background for the parks portion of the budget, which is really serious. So I apologize that I was not able to send any budgets or memos to you over the weekend. I'm sure that you were crying that you didn't have to read anything over the weekend from me. Unfortunately, I just with having to be away last weekend for personal reasons. And other meetings that I've had library meetings and EFUD meetings, I just was not able to get quite as much done as I would like. Also, you know, I like to transmit good news. And so far, the news is that, you know, costs, not costs so much, but paying for the costs are going up some. Anyway, by next Monday's meeting, I will have plenty of emails to you. So don't fret that you're going to miss out on all that good stuff. Anyway, Nick is here. And we have a two page or back to back page pool recreation programs, rec administration and parks. The parks budget is a collaborative effort really between Nick a little bit and Mose Celia. We'll talk about parks budget right now while Nick is here at the head table. And then after we're done with the rec and the parks, then Celia and Bill Woodruff will help with the highway budget, which I'll pass out in a minute. So the first thing that I'd like you to notice, I pointed this out a little bit last week, but if you go to the second page, so that's the page with rec administration and parks budget on it, at the bottom you can see an unlabeled line that has 247,695 in it. That's the net expense for these four budgets from 2018. So all the expenses and all the revenues add the revenues together, add the expenses together. And in 2018, we thought the net expense for these four programs was going to be 247,695. I explained to you last week when we met that we took in more revenue than we anticipated. Some costs were a little lower than anticipated as well. So the net expense really was 228,848. So we had a little bit lower, less expense than we planned on last year. And right now, if you just passed all of this and it got approved by the town meeting, the net expense for 2019 is 252,775. So that's up, you know, about 25,000 from the actual, but it's only up about 5,100, not even 5,100 from last year's budget. So that's about a 2% increase on the net and that's kind of right in line with inflation. So with that, round up of kind of the net numbers, I'll turn it over to Nick and he can talk about programs and pools and administration a little bit and then he can answer some questions. All right. I just wanted to do a quick overview first of like a recap of this past year, my time here in this past year. So the summer was successful with the summer camp, the mini camps that did run in the pool. The pool had over 200 memberships sold and offered four sessions of some lessons that were at 50% capacity or more. Moving to the fall and winter, I renewed our partnership with First and Fitness in Berlin. They have a pool and some workout equipment. Deb had put that in place before to give them 15% of whatever income we took in offering swim lessons there. I thought that was great so we redid it. And subsequently we had 15 kids sign up this fall for swim lessons compared to four last fall. This winter we ran another eight week session and we had 41 sign up compared to 20 last year. I think the increases in part due to some marketing through the new Facebook page, front porch forum, probably seeing them all over there. I like posters, some radio advertisements, et cetera. For events, we did a Halloween in the park the first time. We had candy, we had over 200 trick-or-treaters even though it was a rainy night. We also helped out with River of Lights, which we had a lot of positive feedback on. It was my first time with any sort of event that involved lanterns in a road, so it was pretty cool. And then I was planning with Winterfest helping with a couple events that Wreck will be included in. But we also ran a kids night out, the 21st, just kind of an idea. Parents maybe want to get their kids watched after school into the evening while they did last-minute Christmas shopping. It was kind of a dud. We had low enrollment. It was pouring that night and half of our planning was outdoor activities using the ice rink and whatnot. But we're hopeful to try running it again, see maybe if we get better enrollment and plan it a little differently. Pair it up with maybe an adult event happening in town where they would like their kids watched or not. So Nick, was it a dud in the respects that nobody showed up or a dud in the respects that the rain would kind of wash it out? Both. We had people show up but not nearly what we wanted. And then the rain kind of put a damper on things. I mean, it's what the idea is, is to provide a low-cost childcare service so that parents can go out to dinner, go out shopping, what have you. I mean, what was the price that you had for it? It's very reasonable. Yeah, it was $30 for seven hours and I had Shaw's. They donated the meal, like, by the food. So it was $30 for up to seven hours including a meal. And we did tons of crafts we sent home with, so. That's a long time. That's pretty good. It was a long time. They only have to stay seven hours if they don't want to. One did, so. So maybe you want to make it five hours. Yeah, and less cookies, because that was... Yeah, so we'll restructure it. I'll make it shorter. I'll do like four hours, which, you know, the price I thought was on point, but with fewer hours means we'll have fewer costs involved. Get some feedback from some parents. Yeah. What they would like. So I'm hoping to run that in the future again. The parents that did show up loved it, so. And the kids. Moving forward into 2019, I kept, for the winter and spring, I'm keeping slash playing, I'm keeping the same programming that was ran last year. So that includes the vacation camps in February and April for kids on school break to have a mini camp for the week. Again, it's affordable childcare, theoretically. We're going to keep winter and spring swim lessons and the lifeguard recertification classes that you were scheduled last spring. We're going to keep those. In addition, I've partnered with some other instructors to offer more programming. So this actually this past Tuesday, we started the women's self defense course, which is four weeks. We're offering three, four week karate courses for adults, children, and then one for parents and children at Green Mountain Dojo, which is up the road at the intersection of snow fire. Still learning my buildings here, but. And then we're offering to four week ukulele classes. So there's just some interesting new programming that I'm trying to add. So anybody signed up for that? Yeah, too. I was, I was kind of interested in that. The instructor is still room. Awesome. Yes, there's still room. I might take it. So and then finally for this summer, I have expanded day camp from kindergarten. It was kindergarten through fourth grade. I've expanded it kindergarten through seventh grade. The main reason being when I first got here and ever since people are asking, why can you have more space and why can you offer it to older children? The reason that it was brought down to fourth grade is because there's only 80 spaces available to safely house at the rec building. And fifth and sixth graders could probably watch themselves better than a fourth or third grader can. So they shorten it to expand the seats to those folks. For this camp, I have worked with skip Flanders and have booked the, I'm calling it the community room at the bottom of the Methodist Church. It's a large basement. It's actually bigger than the rec building. It's kind of way nicer kitchen and bathrooms, but we're going to do kindergarten through third grade at the rec building with 80 spots. So that should alleviate some of the stress that parents are already emailing me about space and whatnot. And then fourth to seventh grade will go to the Methodist Church. And there's 40 spots available there. Skip flexible on that. If we get influx of people, I can, I can up it a little bit. That means we're going to have to hire a few more staff to make sure that we're staffed at both locations. But ultimately it's the same camp just at a different location in the afternoons. They will all swim at Anderson. They'll utilize the same lunch program at the senior center and the field trips. They will go together so everyone gets the same opportunity for the price. So just stop there for a second. So if you look at your program's budget, you'll notice that first line summer program pay. We budgeted $47,250 last year. We actually spent about $51,300. And the budget this year is $69,120. And that's because of that additional camp that Nick just explained. And you can see the revenue for the camp last year. We budgeted $53,000. We took in $53,000. And the budget this year is for $80,000. And I just want you to understand where some of these additional expenses are going to show up. And the one thing that I'll say is that, you know, a number of years ago probably, when was, how long ago was Jessica the leader of the number? Long time, right? Anyways, probably 15 years ago we tried to open a camp for middle school aged kids. We did it at CrossFit Group. And it takes a little time for something new to catch on. And the select board when we did that said, yeah, we'll do it, but it needs to pay for itself. And it didn't the first year and then they canceled it. And this is really the first opportunity that we're trying again. And I'll just say up front that while we hope that just like last year we'll have enrollment to cover the expenses of it, there's a minimum number of staff people that he's going to need to run that program. And if we're thinking that, you know, we can break even at 30. And I'm not trying to put numbers in his mouth because I don't know the number. But if we end up with 20, we still have to run the program. And there's a possibility it could lose a little money. And we can reevaluate it after the end of the year. But I'm just letting you know up front that we've tried to show costs that we think we're going to have. And we've tried to be a little bit conservative on the revenues. If we get what we're thinking, we'll be okay. But I just want to explain that there could be a little bit of a lag. And I'd like to add to that some of these costs, like for instance under programs and new equipment and increased $2,000, that's just a one-year increase because this camp has no equipment, no sports equipment, whatnot. A lot of these other lines, they're reflected. So if there's fewer enrolled, that means there's fewer shirts we have to buy, which means safety wear and clothing won't be as much. So that's an example. Not all of these are going to be set. Some of the lines, if there's not enrollment, we won't have the expense and we won't have the revenue. But when you're planning on a five-day-a-week program, you've got to have enough people to cover the program. How many staff do you think you're going to need down there? Six. Okay. So we're going to hire six people and six people, you know, if we get 30 or 40, that's a good ratio. If we get 15, we still have six people that I'd really rather not have to tell them that we're not going to pay you this summer. So just beware that it's a gross, slow process. You've experienced interest, though, in expanding this program. Definitely, yeah. And the thing about it is kids from year to year, they get older each year. Right. And I think with the group that is already your customer base as they grow along and we get the option available, I think it will populate itself once it moves along. That's the whole thing, yeah. I think it's also helpful that it's going to be right in the village as opposed to across the truck, you know, in terms of getting them to the swimming pool and things like that. A lot easier lunches in the lake. Yeah, I think my daughter actually was in that CrossFit Brook Middle School program. She did some amazing things. They went to a cave and went cave exploring, which is a little scary for me. And yeah, they were also exploring bat and the whole learning about bats and they built bat houses. Oh, okay, that's kind of cool. So did I understand that you were going to have the same activities as the younger kids? Yeah, so the structure is the mornings will be focused more towards the age groups because, let's face it, the sixth or seventh graders want to do the same thing as a kindergartner. So cave through three will do their own activity in the morning, activities. Five or four through seven will do their activities. They'll probably use this field because it's the biggest field. Unless it's raining and they can do things in the church. But in the afternoons is when we usually swim. And so that's just going to be all camp sometime. Also, sometimes we do activities like some sort of basketball game or something in the field to capture the flag. So that's all camp activities. And the reason marketing it as cave through seven is because we want the kids that are in fourth grade moving up to be, okay, this is going to be this similar wreck that we're used to. So they'll go on field trips together. All our field trips are geared towards those ages something. Okay. Well, you also have social media that you didn't have 15 years ago. Right. It'll help. It'll help, yeah. And then so I guess just tied to the, okay, we'll actually real quick the mini camps. We're slated to run 13 mini camps throughout the summer. They include athletic camps, high-conficient camps, camping camps, and science camps. There's potential to add a few more, but I'm still ironing out the details. For instance, if these karate classes that are working or that are scheduled for this winter work out, then they're willing to partner with us for the summer. So tied to summer camp, I also would like to propose a new fee. As of now, I mean, even with the proposed fees, we're still want to be like the lowest option for childcare in the area. This past summer, it was 650 for eight weeks and 700. So 650 for residents, 700 for non-residents for all eight weeks. Proposing we raise it by $50 to 700 and 750 for residents, non-residents. That's still less than $100 a week for childcare for eight and a half hours a day for eight weeks in the summer. So I think that's still low, but it's a reasonable increase without making families upset. Is that adjustment built into your projected numbers? Yes. And that adjustment is to make the program more funding itself better? Yeah, minimum wage increase a little bit, other expenses increase. So it's to help even that out. If you flip the page over the rec administration budget, which is basically the budget that we pay Nick from, you'll see that's down about 5,400 from last year. About half of the 5,400 is in the regular pay line. It's gone down from 46 to 43,4 not so much because Nick is making less money than Deb did. It's very comparable actually, but in 18, we budgeted for some overlap. There was a time that Deb was going to be here and then Nick was going to be here as well. So it's just Nick for 12 months. So there's a little savings there. Some of the other lines are just directly related to the payroll line, you know, Social Security retirement and etc. The telephone internet line is down a little bit, about $1,300. I told you last week you could put a new phone system in. So I think that's a good number. The computer services line is down a little bit from what we budgeted. Again, that was somewhat related there. So I think on that budget, we're pretty good. There's really not anything real big to review there. The parks budget, Celia's here and Nick is here. Celia, why don't you come up and sit next to Nick because we're going to go to your budget, the highway budget soon anyway. So I'll just start off on the regular pay for parks and the part-time pay for parks. There's a little bit of savings there last year. Last year, the regular pay line, we spent almost $24,000 and I carried $24,000 there. We hired Dylan Haskins in the highway department last year. He gets his pay posted to the highway department from January 1st through about April 15th. And then it's posted to the regular pay in the parks line from April through the end of October, maybe into November a little bit, then he switches back to highway. So the $24,000 there for regular pay parks is comparable to last year. Should be fine. The part-time pay line is down a little bit. The $25,000 last year, I didn't talk to Bill yet about this, so maybe he's going to cringe. But last year, we actually had budgeted for two people to serve in that position. We ended up only being able to hire one. They got the job done, I think. So I just carried the amount of money for the one person now. So we didn't talk about that earlier today. I didn't think about it until right now. If you want somebody else, we'll have to figure it out. Do you need more than one part-time person if the person's working? We were fortunate we had a good one. Brad's getting that. If we don't get Brad back again and we hire another one, it's not necessarily going to pan out the same way. I mean, there were times where they were the weather cooperated with them. So if we had had a very fast-growing season, they wouldn't have been able to keep up as well. So there's a lot of factors to it. While they did a good job with the season we had with just the two of them, will that continue on to this year? Was it dry? We had dry weather, so it didn't grow as much. That's true. The $25,000, the two people, and I don't remember the numbers, but we had one person that was like from April to the end of October and then the other part of the budget was more for summertime. And we had the six-month person in Brad who didn't hire the other person. So I think we can live with this budget if we have to hire somebody else and we overspend, we'll overspend, but I don't want to necessarily add anything to this, but just be aware it's a little bit shaped back for that reason and I had forgotten about the dry weather, so sorry about that. What type of basic teamwork schedule type or work type of chores? Mowing and... Yeah, so Dylan, when he switches over to the parks and you know Randy had done this for years and years and years and now how you're dealing with dealing with the parks and Randy's able to do some more things on the highway department and have concrete work and stuff, Randy's pretty good at that. But some of the pay is in this parks line and they obviously take care of mowing. They take care of trash removal in the parks. Do they do any of the line striping? Yes. So they put out the line striping. It's paid out of a different budget. They mow the cemeteries. And that's not included in this, you know, 18,000, 565,000 and 24,000. There's more money in the 730 budget. But they mow the cemeteries. Am I missing anything? What else do they do sometimes? Trash. I got stuff like that. Yeah. All odd jobs. Maintenance of the buildings. They clean the bathrooms. They'll paint. And do some painting. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. Repairs. Yeah. Okay. So the only line that's really important for you to talk about with Celia is the grounds maintenance line in the parks budget. And we budgeted 19,250 last year. We spent not quite 16. And if I remember correctly, Celia, you budgeted. How much did you budget for that line? I don't know. We cut it off before. For the grounds maintenance? Yeah. What I want for it? Yeah. What did you budget? For this year? For 2019. I'm looking for 29. That's on the sheet. Yeah. So I gave you that. You're the only one that got it? No. Everybody's got it? Yeah. Okay. Gave yours away. So anyway. Thank you. Thank you. You're the only one that got it? No. Everybody's got it? Yeah. Okay. Gave yours away. So anyway. One of the reasons I cut it down was because we budgeted 19,250 last year and we didn't spend 16. So I'm looking for money to save in the budget. So I lowered it. So if you look at that page on the second page, you see the above are a must for normal operations. And there's a number of 16,540 there. And that's $16,540 takes care of heart again, Myers, bags, paint, toilet paper, paper towels, cleaning supplies, dog station, replacement bags and the like. All that adds up to 16,540. Can you talk to him about how to get a little bit and the changes that are happening and the requests that you have? Well, we're encountering a large increase from our Portalette. Portalettes. For the last five years, when they were heart against, they kept the price per month the same for the last five years. Unfortunately, this year under new management, the prices have almost doubled. And we have talked about with the use of the parks are becoming heavier. So they're being used a lot more. So instead of once a week is what we've been doing it. We wanted to start cleaning them twice a week, which unfortunately increases the price of the Portalettes. Two years ago or last year we started using a handicap Portalette at Hope Davey because they don't have anything to that. And that road is not either. So we would like to introduce another handicap Portalette for the Dachro facility. We don't need one at Anderson because of the Scout Hall. But with the additional and the handicap ones are very, very expensive. Especially if we do them twice a week. So there's a huge increase. We were paying I think this year for 10 a month for once a week cleaning for the five Portalettes. Now we're looking at almost $1,100 a month for twice a week and the additional Portalette. But with the regulations for bathrooms at our facilities, since we don't meet them at the Dachro one, we really need to introduce the handicap Portalette at this point until we decide to do something on a more stationary project. How many months do they have the Portalettes in? The Portalettes we put out the first of May and we have them taken up the last day of October. So I guess my question would be the fees that we're charging. I'm wondering if our costs are outpacing? Yeah, I inherited the fee structure that you guys approved 2016 and it goes until this next year. There's a slight increase but we will probably definitely need to revisit those fees until at the end of 2019 to implement a new increased fee structure for years moving forward, especially with increases like this. Because everything's increasing and our trash recycling is increasing because they can't get rid of it cheap enough. Even our trash bags, I've already been told from my supplier that they're going up 20 plus percent because of the tariffs. Same way with the dog bags. I mean we spend quite a few dollars on providing dog bags which I think is a good idea because other than that. Well they don't hang them in the trees like I've told them they do. I mean most people are able to put them where they need to go but occasionally not. So it is just the general operation fees for the parks has gone up quite a bit this year and as we know it's going to go up every year but the portlets are big and we looked at other changing suppliers and unfortunately Hardigan was still the cheapest. They're the closest and anybody else would have almost doubled that again. I mean you had reasonably good service from that right? Up until last year yes. They got bought out. Yeah once they got bought out and changed their service has not been quite so well so we did look at going somewhere else but with the pricing of what we're hoping to do with the twice a week the cost would be a lot more if we went with somebody else. Okay so the ask from Celia was $29,340. $16,540 of it is really kind of fixed costs and that's where we've been through that. So that's Hardigan that's recycling cleaning supplies and the like. So from the $16,540 down to where it says equipment, maintenance and bold. Those are more they're not, I don't want to say very well, they're discretionary. We don't have to do any of that but there's some things that we need to do there. I don't know if your copies have the line through the $1,000 for the Hope Daily Park expansion. Okay so I've taken that out. We've got a number of dead trees in the Maple Street parking lot at Hope Daily, right? And we've got to take those trees out they're dead and dying and since we're going to do that Nick asked if we could expand the parking lot as you know especially Jane you live right there that parking lot it's overflowed. I took the $1,000 out for expanding the parking lot this year because we haven't designed it yet and we're going to need a permit probably need an amendment to our 250 permit so we're going to, I just found out about that really today so we may take the trees down which there won't be a cost to that. If you take the trees down you could remove the fence and people could park on the grass temporarily. So we'll deal with the parking lot later. And then the $2,000 is there a question mark next to the $2,000 for the Rusty Parker Park? Yeah. Okay so the Rusty Parker Park playground there the Rotary Club is actually doing a project right now to try to come up with some of this money. I'm going to take that out of this and you know there may be some we're going to have to be involved but I think that $2,000 was to do what? We've got to put a path in there or a path in there to the for handicap accessibility we have to do that. Mulch, like the yeah it's the path and then the mulch to redo the whole there's just dirt there now so and then whatever the if we were going to concrete it. If the project may be done there if the project goes forward we'll have a little involvement with it it may or may not cost $2,000 but I just added you know about $5,000 to the $16,000 as opposed to adding you know $13,000 and that's how I got to the $22,000. So that's the soft number on the page I told Celia and Bill this afternoon that like every year we have to do we'll have to do. I'd rather sometimes is as counterintuitive as it sounds I would almost rather have a line item be overspent by $3,000 than consistently underspent by $3,000 to $4,000 because every year we we budget so last year we budgeted we budgeted $19,250 we always spent $15,700 and if you look back when we do that on a consistent basis you're raising money and you're not spending it I'd rather sometimes have a little bit less and if we go over it's not that big a deal because you're going to raise the tax this year if you put it in. Any additional questions? It's really only that one line item but you have a real discussion. Okay so $10,000 more for parks and the ground maintenance very clearly demonstrated the need for that and then you've cut some of these other items so what would you say the final was $22,000? The number that I've given on this page is $22,000 so it's it's more than $7,000 less than Celia asked for and it's not that I don't trust her numbers but as I said if you look back there are line items that we understand so we can adjust this next week or the week after if we have to I mean ultimately we'll come back together when we have reviewed all the budgets and do a major reshuffling and a consolidation if we have to but right now I like this number because I know what's happening in other departments and other areas and I'm trying to find places to save and we're not going to talk about the Recreation CIP tonight we may touch on that my way CIP is a little bit I want to come back to that as well I haven't had a chance to put that all together yet so I'm ready to move on Chris unless you folks have specific like you have to do something different for now you're all set okay so Nick you're welcome to stay as long as you like but you're like off the hot seat now sorry I'm going to close your phone are you going in for your last manager's item yeah thanks thanks okay you can pass that one we'll get to that eventually I don't know I just need one I think there's enough you can pass take one and pass one of those yep okay so if you start with this page the one that the highway budget is on I'll just do a little bit of an overview hit some of the high points for road points and then we can turn to Celia and do a little bit so the first thing that I want to tell you is that if you look at the first two columns the budget of 2018 and the actual of 2018 there's a few changes that I've made if you looked at the accounting software the expenditures would be a little bit higher than they're showing here so for example if you look at the retirement pay line it's in kind of bold blue font and it says 20,068 I'm probably going to move some of that retirement that 20,068 out of this budget not because I want to do something underhanded but I told you before that Dylan worked in the parks department in the summer months so I'm going to move the retirement for Dylan which is all showing up in this 20,068 right now I'm going to move some of that off to the parks budget the new equipment gas line down at the bottom of that same column the fuel gas line I'm sorry right in the middle of the page if you look at that fuel gas line that and I'm not sure right now whether I put that in blue to move some of it or if I already have I think I already have moved some of it I think the year end number in the highway department was around $7,000 I moved some of that gas to the cemetery fund and I moved a little bit more of it to the parks department the parks department had a gas expense but I don't think it was quite right so that number is different than it would look like if you look at the accounting software right now and then the new equipment line and I'll ask Bill this if he remembers the new equipment line there Bill if you look at the NEMRIC software right now says like $5,600 it was a piece of equipment last year that you bought Celia that was going to be split between the three departments and this 1921 is really a third of that so I think I got to I got to move or have the other two departments pay the highway department back so that I believe is the real number if you go up to the revenues at the top of the page about four lines down you'll see the WASI fuel line there's a $3,000 budget to date WASI has paid us $6,268 there's another like $480 that we just billed them that will be added to that number so that is going to go up a little bit if you look over to the right and that same line to where it says budget 2019 I'm thinking that I want to make that line zero not because I don't want WASI to pay us back anymore but I think rather than having a revenue line show up there and then have to look at the expense line and then remember to net out the revenue when WASI pays us starting in 2018 I'm going to just credit the expense line so if we paid $10,000 for diesel fuel and WASI paid us $1,000 what we use is actually showing on the expense line it's just a little cleaner the reason the diesel fuel for us is up as high as it is and it may go higher if we get another bill at the end of the month you know winter lasted a lot longer it was winter well into April last year you remember Chris because you were going to do a job at my house and you had to wait and then winter started in November even though it warmed up just before Christmas we had January weather in November and December WASI the reason they used more fuel than we budgeted is the prices were probably higher than they were the fuel prices moved up a little higher than they had in previous years but WASI's fuel use is not related at all to the winter really except there might be a few more accidents that they have to go to their fuel is dependent upon how many times 9-1-1 rains and they have to go out so I think I'm going to take the revenue out of there and just net it out in the expense line and it will be a truer cost of what we're spending and it will be easier going forward How do you tell what WASI made us then? I'll be able to I'll be able to look at the detail in that expense line and there will be lots of payments to Boren's for the fuel there will be 12 payments from WASI to us and you won't see it here so you won't be as able as quickly to say 65,000 minus 6200 equals 59,000 but the information will still be available it's just that I kind of like to have an idea of what's happening in our department that we control as opposed to what somebody else is doing so anyway the 2019 budget will start in the expenses so the regular pay line you see is up $14,500 from what we budgeted last year and it's up about $10,000 from what we spent remember we hired Dylan in 2018 the new employee so he was being paid in the part time pay line for the first three and a half months of the year we didn't hire him full time until after 30 days past time meeting and then almost right away he started being paid out of the parks department so this budget reflects a full year of 8 highway employees as opposed to 7 moving down the part time pay is lower and it's lower because Dylan now is a full time employee we still do have part time people working right now unfortunately between the water department the sewer department and the highway department lots of people who have been out on extended leaves and we've got a part time person Brad Roy that we were talking about as the summer employee is still working right now and he's working and being paid out of the highway department but the water department's paying their share of his time Celia was out twice last year with two serious physical situations in the water department which is part of BFUD Matt Hunt is on paternity leave he's just starting to come back now but we need it to cover that time and now I just found out today that one of our highway employees got hurt on the job a couple weeks ago or a month and a half ago maybe but he went to physical therapy and once he got to have surgery he wants to take that and he's going to be out for six weeks so you know we'll save a little pay because that will be a workers compensation claim and he'll get his compensation through workers comp might take a little sick time but what that translates to is that we've got to have part-time people work a little bit more and then the full-time people have to pick up the slack so we ended up paying more overtime last year than we would have even if the winter hadn't been extra long the fact that one person is out means that other people have to step up so the 364-500 is my best projection right now it'll be close it won't be exact same with the part-time pay the health insurance is again it's up because Dylan took health insurance we didn't have him last year at all so part of his health insurance gets paid out of the parks department as well then the rest of the lines disability security retirement those are all payroll related to kind of direct correlation to payroll so they're going to go up a little bit unemployment insurance we're up a little bit that's just kind of unfortunately the way unemployment works is that if you had somebody working for you three years ago and then they leave and then they go to a different employer and they get laid off you get a share of their costs so even though we haven't laid anybody off for a long time that's credited to our experience and we've had a little worse experience and it's also tied to payroll so you pay our unemployment rate I think is it's based on $300 worth of base pay and it's about 1.001% so it's not much but it is somewhat tied to payroll workers' compensation is going up a lot and workers' compensation is going up a lot for three reasons one it's tied to payroll so as your payroll increases you know the highway department has the second highest rate I think it's about if I remember right about $9.75 per $100 worth of payroll so you take your payroll which is about $370,000 you divide it by $100 and then you multiply that by 9.75 I think or maybe it's $9.75 but it's the second highest rate only water and sewer have a higher rate than highway folks and then the second reason why it's going up is that we've had lousy experience the last several years we've had a fair number of pretty high workers' claims but we got looked at as a town-wide and then we get an insurance bill we've had people in the highway department out on workers' comp and then we have a number of little injuries every single year but the last couple of years we've had I know of at least four people who have not only had medical expenses which can be high but who have actually missed time and the missed time is where things really get driven up so you know you've got to pay your premium and that's what happens so that's up significantly and then moving down the line you know there's not anything else that jumps out at me until you get down to building maintenance why don't you two explain the building maintenance on this sheet that you have that I cast out all of the line items that Celia has we don't have to go over it now you certainly can if you want but just like I did with the maintenance line in the parks budget some of these line items Celia has asked for a higher amount of money than I put in the budget and she and I and Bill went over those this afternoon they understand they might not agree with what I've put on the paper here but they understand why I've done it some of the time it's because they asked for an amount last year we didn't come close to spending it the amount that we're asking for this year's higher and I don't blame them for that they're trying to look at unit prices and costs and what they think they might have to buy but a budget is a budget and some line items are not going to be over spent and some are going to be under spent so anyway if you have questions about any of the line items in the 2019 column at your leisure you can look at this page and just understand that there might be numbers on this page that are different than the numbers on my page and I just explained why but on building maintenance that's a fairly decent job 6400 over what we budgeted last year so I don't need to explain what's going on with well we talked about starting to try and do more maintenance on our buildings we haven't really put a lot of like painting the buildings looking at redoing some siding so we looked at a few smaller projects like the highway garage is probably close to 20 years old now it is we need to we need to start doing some bigger upkeats I mean we do the minimal that we have to but like the floor the inside floor is starting to crack so we're looking at trying to resurface that to hold off the cracking just the the greater burn hasn't been painted since I've been here and it's close to 14-15 years so trying to do more of cosmetic stuff to keep it from starting to rot so there's the increase there whether we have to do it start doing it this year I mean it's up to you guys but I don't have absolute numbers just because I haven't been back to work for very long before this needed to be done so I gave a rough idea and basically if we get money to do something we'll do what we can with the money we have and then we'll proceed and go from there yeah so the highway garage itself the metal building is 20 years old now and there's some things when I first got this budget I toyed with well should some of this go into the IEP but it's really it's not really anything that's a capital project it's mostly maintenance of what we have so I think we can keep it in this budget are we talking about just basic cosmetic stuff or is there any reconstructing of any parts I don't think there's any reconstruction at this point I mean I think if we can get ahead as I say like paint the paneling on the greater barn the lower stuff with the water hits it needs to be replaced and then just put a new coat of paint on it and the roofing's all good the structure is fine it's just I mean if it keeps getting wet then eventually we will have to do more I think it's all mostly maintenance Christ I mean at some point the windows in the highway garage we should take a look at replacing but at this point I mean 20 years like I said when we discussed the barn for this place 20 year barn versus the 30 year I said in 30 years people would be 25 years 20-25 years that's about the maximum length of time there that a building any type of wood structure can go before it starts to start replacing it work and other things so it's right on schedule right and the highway garage is still building right yes yeah so no no I understand you know there's a few panels where on the highway garage itself that it's rusted you know see a little air through there so you know it needs to needs to be replaced but it is a little bit of a jump up from last year and you know we clearly we need to do it let's see building maintenance going down that column speed lights that's just a factor of remote power rates equipment maintenance vehicle maintenance so a little bit both of them are a little bit higher than last year on the vehicle maintenance we may as well mention this now if you remember in 2018 we had planned to buy two new dump trucks regular six-wheel trucks and they were both you know about 120,000 each we didn't plan to replace the sidewalk for $150,000 last year but we did we had to we didn't have a choice so we spent more in our highway vehicle fund than we thought one of the trucks they were both ordered at the same time I believe weren't they so we ordered both of the dump trucks at the same time we got one of them when October second one we haven't received yet they're still building it and so that's that will become a 2019 expense in this packet of information that Celia gave to me this is the year the tandem dump truck is supposed to be changed and the straight price without any trade is $190 I think I asked Celia can we all fit it up yeah that's everything and we'll be able to sell the existing vehicle and get a fair you know either trade or sell on that I asked Celia though if we could push the tandem to 2020 I'm not absolutely certain that's what I'm going to recommend we'll review the structure and the CIP budgets in more detail in the next week or the week after but I put her on notice that because the sidewalks cloud got bumped up a year and it wasn't really kind of bit us by surprise because we put it off a few years ago it was ready to be replaced and we didn't do it so this vehicle maintenance line is probably lower than Celia had yeah she asked for $30,000 for vehicle maintenance and I carried $30,000 for vehicle maintenance but I asked her if we could keep the tandem for another year she said well yeah I think we can it's in pretty good shape but there's things that you know tires maybe we would need to buy that we wouldn't have otherwise if we were going to trade it I guess Eric indicated that there's a little something going on with the transmission and if that went so we're not going to make this decision tonight but I'm just letting you know that if we put it off it could end up making that line go higher Is that standard? Yes Are you planning on next time second with the standard? No the driver wants an automatic for the driver yes So is that something a year from now you might be planning the next budget too? Yeah I mean it's still possible that I come back to you in a week and say we got to do it but yeah we would put it off a year but putting that off a year I mean it just kind of it dominates you know we've got kind of a schedule and it was not got a whack by the sidewalk following now we're just going to deal with it How does the purchase of the two smaller trucks fit into this $30,000 there's nothing there that doesn't represent payments for those trucks There's nothing here the only if you remember the bottom line on this page on the highway budget if you go down to the bottom for that dark line you see the two capital fund $533,000 gets sent to the capital funds and then the trucks are bought out of the capital funds so whether we buy a truck and not buy a truck it really doesn't impact this budget except if we keep a vehicle longer than we thought we might end up having some additional maintenance expenses on it that we didn't plan for Yeah I was just trying to have a connection with the conversation because the second truck we're waiting for if we had gotten rid of it when we thought we were going to we've had a lot of additional cost that we were if we had gotten rid of it prior to it wouldn't have been our cost but yeah so Chris could you use your microphone? Yes dear I'm not sure is it on Chris? Yeah I was too but it goes off after a little while I think so moving down from vehicle maintenance the diesel fuel line where it says $60,000 in blue that will be the net expense for next year That includes the roll out of the Wasi Yeah so no income in Wasi up in the revenue but the crediting of the Wasi expenses I mean of the income here so it's still $7,700 from last year as far as the budget is concerned and it's a crapshoot some of these line items I go back we'll get to solve I'll explain that but I kind of do a rolling average and drop one year off at another year and there's just a lot of variables it's not just the price of fuel it's a long winter lasts Public Works Director that's just up a little bit I expect probably in the next couple of years that will go higher Bill is a water department employee as far as his pay is concerned Alec is a water department employee as far as his pay is concerned they both keep spreadsheet and they tell me at the end of the year that okay they both Bill works 2080 hours a year that's what gets paid for I have that spreadsheet as well I'm sure you do I try to be fair anyway so so I mean both Bill and Alec will keep track of where they spend their time so they spend their time highway department water department sewer department recreation departments for this building there's probably one that I'm cemetery fire department and then you know I take their compensation for the year and then I portion their compensation for the same percentage that they spent their time and for highways this year Bill and Alec together and what I do is look at what we paid them in 2018 so this is retrospective it looks back to what they what they worked last year and what they were paid last year and then we pay based on that and then in 2020 we'll pay based on what they do in 2019 so in 2019 the main street project is going to ramp up and I'm sure Bill is going to probably spend more time so next year this line will probably go higher than it is now that's how it's calculated so speaking of that real quick is that money do you know if that money has already been created for that project to begin by the state yeah by the cycle so the federal shutdown not going to yank the rug out on us well we haven't been told that yet I'm not in a position I don't have the information that's what I was wondering everything that we hear the contractor was in last week he's coming again next week with our staff it seems like the state and the contractor are moving towards starting in April if the shutdown is still going on in April we might find out something we don't know now but I told you so moving down from here this is where things kind of get a little bit more out of whack from what you're putting here um going down to contractor Syria did I come close to what we had in there for contractors we have 22.5 I put 18 um I put 19.5 same as last year um I think we can live with the 19.5 we'll work it out um but if you drop down to um salt before we do that can you just touch base a little bit on what contractors represent just that's nothing to do with um so no that's not different that's just a little different contractors I use for corrections doing our additional roadside mowing they see it thanks sorry how many weeks did we have the mowing machine last year and you buffed it up a week this year I would like to yes if okay Chris this isn't the time for it now but we'll talk about vehicle purchases and stuff but but and they're made I'm not trying to open a Pandora's box but you asked me a couple years ago would we be better off buying a mowing machine as opposed to spending $9,000 a year I don't know how much one costs but after a certain number of years pay for it but it's another vehicle you have to put on your vehicle replacement schedule and it's another one that you have to maintain the last mowing machine we had was the sidewalk that we used over the years yeah that was before me we haven't had anything since I've been here because you know Howard Ripley used to do his own tractor first with a sickle bar that's how they used to do it and then we moved to the blue behemoth there that we had for another few years they used to love to put up like this the trees that looked great and then we moved to that it wasn't the Belos it was the trackless and is that attachments we bought a trackless last summer we didn't buy that attachment do they still have those they do yes it just puts a lot of extra it really torques the machine I mean if we were just to use it for a little bit here and there that'd be one thing but it's a very expensive attachment to do that but it's I mean it's our main sidewalk machine so I'd just assume not overtax it right I'm not suggesting that we should I was just asking do they still yes they did yes but anyway you had asked me a couple of years ago whether we should think about buying it I don't think this is the year that we should but anyway it's the question that we should probably address yeah I mean just simple math if you're spending nine grand a year what's the what would the payment be and this is yeah the nine grand this would be the first time we spend that because up until this year we've only been doing it two weeks and yeah it's three thousand dollars a week right but it's over the last three years it goes up four hundred dollars every year so it's taking a huge jump as far as that goes but yeah so next year we could if we do it three years three weeks we could probably look at ten grand with the way they've been increasing their rental fees so yes I mean if we mortgage one out we had it ourselves what's the cost of that per year versus what we're spending a firm attractor and a more for what we need we're probably looking at nine grand ninety grand to get a brand new one if we look for a use one but then you always have issues with use one so it depends on what so anyway that's a discussion another day but it's just you know as the price for this rental goes up it comes to a question that you want to ask more okay so that takes care of that bridge culverts and stuff like that that's normal I'm sure I budgeted less than she did but again we didn't spend anywhere near as much as we thought we were going to solve so Celia why don't you talk about salt you can see on Celia's page she budgeted sixty two thousand five hundred and fifty dollars for salt five hundred and fifty one thousand five hundred dollars which is a big drop from what she budgeted it's a huge drop from what we spent in 2018 we spent more than twenty thousand dollars more than we budgeted in 18 and so far over in 18 we could get away with so much less well it's just guessing what we're going to do so this is one that I did those rolling averages on Jane so that average even including the seventy thousand dollars that we spent this year it's still the average for the last five years is less than fifty and the year that dropped off was actually one of the higher years so we replaced the high year with the high year but there's a couple of years in the past five that we spent like forty three and as I said winter lasted longer in the spring and it came a lot earlier but it also has to do with how the winter is like if it's zero degrees for four weeks of your winter you're probably going to use less salt don't use salt yes twenty five degrees right so it's to hit or miss if we got a real winter where it's cold all the time then salt usage is down you get a warm winter or warm or winter get frozen rain like we had right before Christmas yes well last week here I had mentioned to the board that I had wanted to have a serious discussion about our salt and sand use I know it's a touchy subject to people I just want you to be assured that I'm not after anybody here I have a genuine concern about the amount of salt and sand that we use in this entire state it's not just the town because everybody does pretty much the same thing there's a lot of factors involved I mean I'm smart enough to know that our weather is changing our our weather reporters these days exaggerate these storms to make it like it's the last day on earth help me god the public I know part of the problem with the highway department is they don't like to hear the calls from people the other issue and again I'm not after anybody here it's not a battle I'm interested in taking up tonight but with any with any business or some businesses but this is the time of year that employees of municipalities and state government have the ability to make extra money by accumulating overtime the concern there with me is not so much that they're working the hours it's more the concern that in the winter there isn't a lot to do you've got a full-time mechanic I know there's other things that can be done cleaning up the shop and organizing stuff but let's face it there's a limited amount of that that has to be done too I know that you have to cater to the buses I know all this so I'm not this conversation I'm not just picking it out of the mic backside here I witness a lot of what goes on I just so what happens is I think sometimes when the guys are sent out to check roads and it's a mentality that's just been developed over a long period of time because this is the way we do things when they go out to check roads sometimes a lot of the time it's my speculation that they don't always come back with as much as they probably could come back with for a couple of reasons part of it is they probably feel like we're rid of this load of dirt or salt we're not doing our job again they don't want to hear people bitch so I'm just I guess my question is is there anything that we can do different not only from an environmental side but from a budget standpoint as well to do whatever we can to curb the amount of salt and sand used to try to make a difference on both fronts I know that's a tough question myself I guess having grown up here in the state I don't need all that but apparently a lot of the public does and that's the biggest problem do I think we can use less certainly it's just a hard situation to I mean can you just imagine this and I don't you know have one of the highway guys overhear me one day when I was talking to some of the boys at the coffee shop about this particular issue and it may have been pertaining to the state he looked at me and said I thought you were a vermoner I was really pretty shocked that that came out of his mouth because I looked at it like this I said because I care about the environment in the state that I live in but no longer a vermoner really and I never forgot it you know it's like you got to be kidding me my son sent me a video just yesterday day before yesterday he was headed to Morseville and he's got one of those cameras there in his truck he sent it to me it was a state truck that was in front of him and God there was a patch of snow this wide right there just as you're going up by Fairfields he was dumping salt pouring it on absolutely the rest of the road was completely clear and my son couldn't believe it and then I was talking to one of the upper administrative officials I guess and the agency of transportation he's no longer there he just got done some words out here and we were chatting I talked to him a little bit about why he got done from what I understand from one another top official that the agency of transportation has fallen apart at the seams at the state level but he mentioned several different times the policies that are in place in this state one official one top official said if it's snowing I want to see water running so I guess my question to everybody here is how would you like it for every glass of water you drank somebody dumped rock salt in it something to think about the impacts that I see to the Brooks and Streams and all the invasive species that are growing along the reds to the road sides I could contribute it to all this excessive use and I don't know what the answer is somebody I believe that at some point in time that the state is actually going to say we need to set a policy that's going to curtail it curtail it because our environment can't deal with it anymore but unfortunately with all the administrators we have the people that move into Vermont who expect to get services like they do from wherever they came from it's not as easy as it was 20 years ago and as I said the winters are changing so the temperatures are affecting how we have to maintain the roads whereas if it was this cold all winter long we wouldn't have to use hardly anything but because we're averaging above freezing as soon as traffic rolls on it it ice is right over so that's unfortunately one of the issues why we're using more and because we can't regulate who drives on the road or regulate that they are required to put real snow tires on or have a four wheel drive or whatever we can't not put stuff out when it's icy because people are going to get hurt so I mean of the two evils sand or salt I mean I'd rather see sand down in more cases than salt even to the point where if it's possible if the temperature is going to warm up during the latter part of the day in the morning as opposed to trying to dump salt on there making nothing but slime I'm working on that that's all I'll say I appreciate it I know it and I know you're stuck with the task of beating it into the guy's heads you gotta make some changes here now I know the state because I had spoke to them here a year or so ago this isn't something that I just came to last week it's been on my mind for a long time I know the state offers a course in how to use properly use salt and sand probably a waste of breath going to that class I guess the jobs in your hands but just if there's something that can be done for two purposes the environment and obviously for our budget because quite honestly when Bill's all done here the board's going to have a hard choice here what to do with our tax rate this year and it may sound like I'm a pessimistic at times but quite honestly I believe I'm optimistic otherwise I wouldn't be here otherwise I wouldn't be here trying to help out to make things better for everybody and budget I mean we just can't keep going back to the well you know it's if you look at what's going on in the nation as a whole this whole shutdown I was pretty surprised to see people who have been employed by the federal government for years they can't even afford paying additional months mortgage payment and vehicle payments because they just either they're mismanaging their tax or they're really their backs are up against the wall everybody's stretched that thin in this country I mean that's frightening to see that everybody's living paycheck to paycheck like that and so the budget's important but I appreciate your time anyway yeah and then the last thing the salt also is just the you know the impact on our infrastructure that's another huge part culverts no I those things get our trucks I don't know if bill mentioned to you there that I was trying to put together something here in fact I made a few phone calls today a few of the other select board chairs in some different towns I made a quite a list there of contacting some of these chairman to any interest in helping me out up at this you know I'm sorry chair people up at the state house to I guess ideally I'd like to have one elected official from every town show up at the state house and talk about possible two cent gas tax with the gas rate as low as it is right now to raise revenues to go strictly to the towns for pay repaving roads and infrastructure one of the chairman chair person from one town suggested that every town bring one of their town trucks into Montpelier if it's specific day to try to get a point across but it's a pretty big uphill task for me to contact every town in the state of Vermont but I think it's worth the effort so we'll see where it goes said enough yeah thank you um and not the believer the point but again um I jumped with Celia and Bill today um if I had a nickel for every time one of the highway foreman who's worked for me has told me that we're in before the winter's out I have about you know three dollars by now but there is concern you know we used a lot of material in the first part of the winter here and you know I cut the sand budget down to about what it was long ago I'm not playing chicken and I don't want to take it back or anything but I'm hopeful that we are not a sand and we'll be able to you know I think she's done it in her budget to how many yards more 500 more so anyway um so having said all this if you go to the bottom of the page you'll see that the budget for 2019 that I proposed and I admittedly have cut line items from what Celia asked for $1,640,000 which is $15,600 more than we budgeted last year and only about $6,000 more than we spent last year um that is a one percent increase in the budget all together if you go up to the very top of the page you'll see property taxes are up 10% even though the budget is up 1% and the reason for that is simple you have to go back to the bottom of the page to see the simplicity of it we thought we came into the year with $94,000 fund balance um the auditor whom I have not met with yet had adjusted that somewhat it was not quite as high as I thought but we ended 2018 with almost $12,000 in the hole and that $12,000 in the hole is probably going to go higher because we're going to get some expenses that get posted back so really you know even though we have almost a flat budget we've got to raise $12,000 right now just to get back to where we were last year you know with the fund balance you know we thought we had 95 you take that 95 away and then you add the 12 to it so you know our fund balance or the cash on hand is slower so right now the highway budget if we pass this budget tonight as is and everything stays the same we're looking at a 10% increase in taxes in the highway department I'm not ready to say it's going to stay there yet as I said a minute ago could go higher than that we're not going to be able to make any decisions about the capital fund line item I left it at $533,000 to transfer to the capital funds this year I haven't had a real chance to get in and look at how the capital funds ended the year I'm pretty certain that the paving CIP ended better than we thought it would and I'm not suggesting we shouldn't put as much into the paving CIP as we have because we're trying to catch up but we'll have to revisit that next week probably but right now you know from a budget to budget if you just look at what we're going to spend we're pretty much flat and we're flat by pulling some things out that they asked for if I put everything back in that she asked for I imagine that would be probably 3.5% I didn't do the calculations I'm just taking a guess I'll cut my head right now inflation is running about 2.5% right now so you know keeping the budget in that range is okay and we may come back in a week or so and we visit this and you may feel more comfortable adding something to some of these line items but anyway that's that's all of the information I can impart at this point I wanted a nice shell if budget to budget it only changes by 1% but because we're not forwarding the surplus that we had last year not able to then that jumps it to 10% any questions from the board okay so if you you don't know if I what else I gave you in that packet I know I gave you this right okay so just briefly I'm not going to talk about them right now the schedule as I said for the tandem to be replaced this year one pickup truck with a file in the sand to be replaced in one of the models that we're using the parks in the cemeteries I'm not sure you mean that I didn't I said I didn't get to so anyway we'll talk about that next meeting or the week after but I'll bring that now this page that you do have that is a memo from Alec to Bill Woodruff this is dealing with infrastructure and paving now remember not so much from a cost standpoint although it will be in our infrastructure budget we're going to have an expense for Main Street this year we don't yet know what it's going to be what they told us going into the bidding process the way that the state expected the work to be done our guess would be that we would have a higher expense in water and sewer in the first year and then a bigger expense for the highway in the second year because we thought they were going to do the whole street there's some discussion going on with the contractor about doing it differently we don't know yet we're in a fortunate position that our responsibility the whole thing is 2% and you know it's between water sewer and highway it's slightly more than $400,000 over the course of two and a half to three construction seasons Bill and Barb and I have been working on separating water sewer and highway I don't have that number with me tonight Bill might but I don't think we need to get there there's something in our infrastructure budget to cover main street expenses this year we don't think we're going to have to go out for a bond to do it I don't think we need to have a special appropriation by the town to do it because it's going to be over the course of three years and I think we'll be able to fit it in but the thing that will be a cost to us a little bit is staff time and I don't mean that it's going to cost us dollars our staff is going to work the same amount of time that they usually work I just mean they're going to have to spend more time watching and observing and being involved in main street so we might not be able to do as many other projects as we might if we just had to worry about money so this first page bridge is here and I think we can actually take it to two bridges right away bridge number 47 which is listed at the bottom of page one is this bridge here on Main Street we discussed that last year we really can't do that now bridge four on Guttel Road that's what we call the Dr. Murray Bridge right near his entrance to his house and tree farm there and then the bridge 33 Armory Drive that's the bridge as you leave Union Street right here in the village to go up to the existing Armory and they are shown here in the order that we would do if we can only do one so bridge four on Guttel Road would be the first priority and then Armory Drive the second one it's we will apply for a structures grant we definitely will not get two structures grants so if we decided to do both we would only get a grant for one and we're kind of speculating that given the fact that we've got Main Street reconstruction going that it might not be Waterbury's turn to get a structures grant anyway so we may not get any grants for bridge work whether we get a grant or not I think we deserve the right to change this recommendation but I think we can do the one on Guttel Road bridge number four that's a priority and it's also out of the village Union Street is going to be used as people are going to be bypassing Main Street so working over on Union Street might not be any easier than working on the Newsy Street bill so to me if we're going to do any of these I would do bridge number four I did instruct Bill if we go ahead with this if the select board does put it in the budget grant for it and see what happens to turn over to page three it says 2019 possible paving and again I haven't had the chance yet to do all the inputs and outputs of the paving CIP last year and what the fund balance is but Loomis Hill we did from Maple Street to the bridge at Thatcher Brook last year and we we changed all the culverts up to Hubbard Farm Road correct and we have three culverts above Hubbard Farm Road that we would do this year before the paving project two of them are fairly large one just above Hubbard Farm at Kelvin Potter's house and then one just a little bit further up the hill than that and those two are fairly large squash culverts yeah 44 by 72 inch or so and then there's a third culvert up the hill at Kellett's place that isn't they're not well two of them are listed here we've already bought the large culverts the two large ones maybe we have the other one too yes so Bill and Celia are suggesting that to do those two culverts would be about $50,000 would we do the one up the hill ourselves the smaller one yes at Kellett's place so to do the one almost 1.6 miles of Loomis Hill from the bridge to the top that's what we'll go over to the end that project would be very similar to the project that we did up Perry Hill a number of years ago now I don't want to promise this yet but I think we can do that and maybe not have to borrow any money to get it done I'll tell you if I'm wrong next week when I look at the other budget and we did Perry Hill we borrowed a half a million dollars to do it and I think there's a lot of reasonable reasons that you might want to borrow the money just because it will take a pretty big chunk out of the fund and but interest rates are going up a little bit now and if we can avoid borrowing and then if we have to borrow in the future year we would have to do it well just one last thing the other roads here that we're talking about if we can fit it in we talked today Alec and Phil and Zillion I Loomis Hill the East Street Mill and Overlay and the Jenny Datas Overlay we would do those the Union Street for the same reason that I don't want to do that bridge I don't want to work on Union Street while Main Street is being done so because it's going to be a lot of traffic on that road so now you can ask a question Chris okay one question before the one I was just going to ask we didn't reclaim Perry Hill right we just that was all reclaimed yeah I never went went through there one we we milled out did we actually take stuff away no we had some hill up there and added chloride and rolled it in and then built the base up again they burned up their teeth on the reclaimer because as fault was 16 inches deep in spots and yeah well increased the grade a little bit yeah yeah yeah because the machine counts on it going into dirt to cool off and it was just not getting below there when the asphalt and spots of that hill had been paved over and over and over more on the money didn't you tell me at one point here back remember a few years ago when I was talking about our pavement issues there and said something the effect that you could just borrow 25 million and get it over with did you tell me one time that wouldn't be possible because town's not allowed to borrow more than they could spend it or more than they could do in one year or is there what's the story of that? 25 million would be a big stretch for us I remember the question I don't remember the full answer that I gave to you first of all you can borrow money and not spend it all in the first year so when we first established the CIP fund fund 30 and every one of our capital projects was in it we actually borrowed like I think it was $600,000 to see the capital improvement fund and in the first year we probably only spent 250 and we left the 400 in there to earn interest and then we spent it down the road so you don't have to use it all in the first year that you borrow it but after the most recent financial crisis 10 years ago now, 2008 2009 they have changed the rules and it's much harder they used to give you your money all up front and you could take your money and you'd start paying interest on it as soon as you got it but you could invest it and then build your project and have it over time. Now through the bond bank when we built this building I think when we did well not the Perry Hill job but when you borrow money now through the bond bank what they do is they only let you it's reimbursable you do the work and then when you're going to pay the contract you call up the custodial bank and you say well you don't call them up you send them an email and you got to fill out this paperwork and then you say okay we're going to be paying our contract at $200,000 next week send us the money and you're paying interest on it and I did work to invest it but it's not anywhere near as easy as it used to be to get money in the one summit and have it. So I guess my question to you is in the board projecting out the next few years the infrastructure issues if something does it come to fruition with the state or any other fallen built bucket of crap come out with some new revenue source to help us out here with the fear of interest rates continuing to climb does it you know how much have we lost by not doing something back when I said and do we still have the potential to save ourselves a lot of money if we were to borrow a lump now lock in our interest rate now and just you know pretty good possibilities that the rates are going to climb here in the foreseeable future how much could we save ourselves and you know what benefits might come from thinking along that line I guess well I don't know and part of the difficulty is you know how much can we actually do in a given year you know when we do a project like Perry Hill was or like Loomis Hill is going to be and a bridge project and we've got Main Street going on I mean there's a limit to how much we can kind of supervise the plan and get ready for and you know borrowing money is I'm not against it I feel a little bit like because usually you tell me you don't want to borrow it I think about a lot of different things and you know faced with faced with a row of repairs and bridge repairs that we're going to have coming as the interest rate climbs the ability for us to raise the taxes enough to pay those extra interest rates you know I guess I'm just throwing the question out there what are the differences and do we stand a better chance but I think as the interest rates climb and they've gone out considerably than they were three years ago borrowing money and not spending it and holding on to it is not worth it because you're going to pay 4% to hang on to that money and you haven't done anything so I think you can still borrow it's just borrowing it incrementally and historically rates are still really long I mean they've gone up from what they were a couple years ago but you know when I came here in 1988 the prime rate was you know up there was pushing you know 8-9% and when I bought my first house on Loomis Hill I had to get a variable adjustable rate mortgage like at 7% because a fixed rate was you know 10-12% something like that you know when Ben & Jerry's borrowed the money from the village to build their plant the village lent them $650,000 from the UDAG fund that the village was granted Ben & Jerry's that was a rock bottom low interest rate 9% is what they paid back so interest rates are historically still long right now they're going up but nowhere near what they have been in times past well let me ask a question in a little bit different way given what we've got that we're looking at with you know available man hours hours available bandwidth of the administration with the reconstruction project and what you've got laid out for paving what percentage of max capacity do you think we're at with what we've laid out for 2019 well he's probably in a better position than I am to figure this out you know we've talked about it nobody nobody said that we couldn't do these three things plus Main Street and there's water and sewer stuff but Bill probably is in a better position I think Main Street is just going to be an everyday grind that we're going to have to put up with in terms of your time as well as for my time I don't mean to interrupt you while you're on that subject is this a federally funded project right Main Street well not all of it 90 percent state and 2 percent local I mean how much oversight from the state is there'll be tremendous oversight from the state so I guess my question is the state has a resident engineer assigned to the project he'll be overseeing probably three or four or five six other guys as well so I guess my question is why is it going to be ours and I think we want our eyes on it as well I kind of figured that yeah I mean they'll be there they'll be there all the time but like I say in the end they're going to hand the keys right over to us and it's going to be ours so we want it done our way yeah so why do the toilets flush out now yeah but with some of the paving projects I think I don't think it's too ambitious to what the three bill kind of prioritized um Loomis Hill will be a big project and a lot of it falls on Celias but we've tried to um push a lot of the other highway projects towards the center and knowing that Main Street's going to have a lot of action and what have you into her crew would probably prefer to stay up in that direction anyway but I don't think it's too ambitious but but I don't think we can do much more either from a financial standpoint or a planning standpoint in other words I don't think we can do Loomis Hill and Maple Street yeah we're not nowhere near ready to do Maple Street whether it needs it or not we're not prepared to do Maple Street we kind of set the groundwork to do Loomis by doing all the culverts last year and the first part of the road and what have you so the $50,000 that's been sold in at the bottom here Loomis Hill that was that's for the culverts the two big squash culverts I'm not trying to second guess your planning and strategy I'm just trying to come at it from a different way of you know if Chris says well what about if we just you know borrow a bunch of money and get a lot more done if we're at capacity we're going to have to hire all that out and are we better better served to keep it in the house the concept wasn't so much to get more work done this year the concept was more to borrow cheap money while we had the availability to try to save us some tax dollars that was and you know I'm not again I'm not prepared to recommend this yet but you know we've spent a little fund balance this year so far we've just talked about that you know we had a good surplus in the highway department and now we've got a deficit but you know we also have the ability fortunately to borrow from ourselves to a degree and that's and we pay ourselves interest and we've been paying ourselves a premium of interest just so you know when we borrow money from the tax stabilization fund that we're actually we're paying ourselves so if we can afford to do it pay ourselves and build that up so it generates more revenue down the road you know we're doing okay last year we didn't have to do any tax anticipation borrowing for the things in the highway infrastructure and the fire department vehicles we borrowed from ourselves just advanced to and from other funds so we're still in a sense borrowing but we're not borrowing and paying somebody else we're borrowing from ourselves and if we you know we can do that that's I think the best situation that we can be in so I'll be in a lot better position a week from now to talk about those kind of things but I appreciate your you know that the bandwidth is a concern as as much as the financing I just want to thank both of you and your crews for what you do day in and day out and I appreciate the thoughtful proposal that was put in so you know we've got to do hedge trimming on a bunch of different funds but proposals were well thought out and well prepared and I appreciate that thank you so I'm done with budgets for tonight I have a question are we meeting like next week is Monday is Martin Luther King day so once I'm at King it's my first we don't have that as a holiday so when we meet again we're going to meet Monday next week and we're going to meet the Monday after but you see this Monday January so we are meeting on a holiday well it's a holiday for you but it's we're working that day so it's not a holiday for us yeah so so and I also wanted to say just about the main street project waterway main street that I appreciate you know the consideration that it was is going to it's going to be an effort because there's going to be a lot of unexpected things sure so just have to go with it thanks thank you appreciate it so what do you think yeah yeah I forgot to bring the two part motion but since this I will make a motion that we move to executive session to deal with a legal issue I will second that all those approved say hi so we can let and tear down if we go into the other rooms thanks