 Tuesday, February 21st, 2023, Berlin Select Board meeting to order with us tonight is Joe Stop, to my far left. And Dave Sawyer, to my far right, I'm Brad Town. Flo Smith will be joining us shortly. Willis also is Vince Condi, Town Administrator and Diane Rizbel, our Town Treasurer. The additions or changes to the agenda? No additions, I just want to mention that there will be executive sessions tonight for contract purposes. Okay. Public comment, hearing none, special events applications, approvals. There's two applications in your folders for the CV Runners Club in Montpelier for two different events down there. They have submitted their applications and their certificate of insurance as well. Again, these are yearly events that happen down there. They do have volunteers that are going to be positioned throughout the course. I didn't see the signage, but I'll be happy to get back to them, Joe, from your email to make sure there's signage. Again, typically the past couple of years they've had their signage as well. They didn't put it in the application, yeah, correct. The Chief had no problems about this? No, I got no feedback from the Chief and from Joe on the fire department regarding signage with the only other feedback that I had. Okay. Make a motion to approve the Central Moner Runners applications for the road racers that have it. Here a second? I'll second. Okay. We're going to do one at a time. It's two different groups, right? Right. Yeah. Okay. So again, all those in favor of the Central Moner Road Runners? Aye. Aye. Motion carries. I'll make a motion on the Capital City Stampede 10K road race that would be on... That's also CV Runners. It is a CV. Okay. It's CV Runners. Central Moner Runners. I'll second. Any discussion? All those in favor? All right. All right. Motion carries. Brian Lafayette. I reached out to him to remind him that he asked to be on here to speak regarding the little top. I did not hear back from him, so I'm going to assume that he's not going to come in tonight. He's not online either, so... Okay. Fisher Road Diet. Presentation. We have Mr. Sargent here to... Are you sure? Are you sure? I will. Are you sure? I will. Are you sure? I will. I mean, say I will attempt to do that. Well, thanks everybody for having me out. So I've got a presentation that the, you know, you folks have a paper version. I'll have this online in a second. I know everyone's busy, so I'm going to go through the presentation itself relatively quickly and try to leave time to talk and ask questions. You should be able to now, Chris. I hope this host is able to just have a screen share. Really? Yeah. Share screen. Let me try this. How about a dummy? Yes, I can, sir. Okay. Thank you, Miss. All right. So again, I'm Chris Sargent. I'm the project manager for this, the Berlin Fisher Road Scoping Study. And, you know, I run the planning team at B and K. So we've done a number of planners and a few engineers working on this project. I'm a planner myself. So if we get into deep technical questions, I may have to hold my answer until I can get some technical expertise. But I'm just going to roll through this really quick. So the first thing I want to do is just going to remind everybody what a scoping study is and sort of where it falls, because people often see this type of stuff and think, oh, my God, it's going to get built tomorrow. But that's not where this is at. This is a scoping study. The purpose of the scoping study is really to, you know, take an idea and go, okay, is this idea even feasible? And how might we do it? One of the different ways in which we might do it. And that's where we're talking about tonight is this sort of there's four approaches. One of them is doing nothing. But there's three approaches that are we sort of been batting around and have sketched out conceptual designs for us to talk about in this case. But, you know, when you have a project like this, you then move into if the time chose to do anything with the material that comes out of the scoping study, you would then move forward with, you know, design and engineering and then eventually to the building. But there's a whole lot of process to get from where we are right now to there. And a lot of opportunities for you folks to think about it and make decisions and for the community to have input. So where this fits sort of in the context of Berlin is you guys did this Newtown Center application and a lot of stuff came out of that. And we started this scoping study. Again, we're going to then think about possible future redevelopment. And why? Because the vision of the Newtown Center involves a lot of new development that's going to add a lot of extra traffic and extra pressure to the road itself. Plus, there's a real desire for having, you know, pedestrian facilities that are adequate for even the people who are here now, but also that larger population folks and same for bicycle. So what we're looking at really is again, it's Fisher Road. We're from paint turnpike to the intersection of Route 62. The focus of our project really is at the mall road intersection. We do not get into any redesigned suggestions for Route 62. Largely because it's a limited access highway and that's a really complicated thing. We certainly consider it and it was part of our modeling process and we were doing our traffic modeling. But we didn't get too deep into that. Looking at Fisher Road today, some concerns you guys have some significant users already. CBMC, the mall crossing at Route 62 isn't very safe. There's limited crossings on Fisher Road and there's not particularly good pedestrian infrastructure in this area. And the truth is in particularly once you get next to CBMC and you're, you know, from the mall intersection to Route 62, the pavement is pretty wide there and probably wider than it needs to be in order to accommodate the traffic. We looked at this sort of holistically by thinking about traffic volumes, people walking and biking, making sure it's successful at all times, and the idea of sense of place. And one of the things that came out of the Newtown Center is really this desire to sort of look at Fisher Road as the gateway. So we took all those things in mind as we were beginning to think about the concepts. Things that we considered, like as I bikeped improvements, possible green space expansion just to kind of enhance the aesthetics, intersection design, obviously, and traffic modeling work, big components of the work that we've done to date. And the traffic modeling is key because we really need to consider the change in traffic volumes. We set sort of the 2025 as the sort of present year for our model and then looked at 2045 as the max as the build out. And based on that, what we know about the Newtown Center, at maximum build out, we're talking more than 300 residential units, 5,200 square feet of new commercial services. The desire to have improved walkability and some additional internal designs for walkability within the Newtown Center. And what this really amounts to is about 17% growth in vehicle trips in the area. So that's pretty significant. One thing I will notice is that our modeling does consider CBMC's growth one of the lucky things about us getting hired as we had done a fair bit of work with CBMC on there designed so we had done some traffic modeling for them with sort of understanding what they were seeing for growth. And when we met with them last fall, I think it was last fall, they asked us about that and we talked to them about what we had today and they're like, yeah, that's still pretty accurate. So that was good. I'm not going to get into the super details of this slide. I can actually give you a second. For those of you online, I should be able to really quickly if it's able to drop this into the chat. So I just dropped this PowerPoint into the chat so anyone can download it if they want to and Tom will have it up online tomorrow. So, you know, but the primary thing I want to hit on with regards to the methodology is, you know, that we used one of the things we did is use data that was pre-COVID because, you know, all of the traffic data dropped during the COVID era, obviously. So we used pre-COVID data and we, you know, when these models are being done by our engineering staff, they apply factors that sort of assume that just naturally the amount of traffic is going to grow just based on the things that go on and those were also sort of modified to consider the impacts of COVID as well. So the design concept, like I said, there were four of them. One of them is the no-build design. It's pretty simple. You just opt to choose to do nothing. And that's considering that is actually required as part of any of these projects that have federal pass-through to the state. Then we considered this idea of paint-only. So if we sort of reconfigure things, kind of like they did on the Barry Mock-Tillier Road, where the lanes get changed, paint goes on, and that is a tool that's used to help change the traffic patterns. We looked at just reducing the number of lanes physically, so that means the physical improvements between the curbing and things of that nature. And then finally, a roundabout and a pathway. And one thing I'll note is that while we tied, like, the lane reduction and sidewalks to one specific thing, you could have the roundabout and sidewalks. Or you could have paint-only and a pathway. So there are pieces that can be mixed and matched in this, if you chose. Obviously, it would change the dollar amounts for some of these things. If you added a pathway, that would be an investment to the paint-only. So... Get in here and we will... So obviously, no build. There's nothing to talk about there. That's things stay as they are. Over time, traffic would get significantly worse if you left it as it is, for sure, by 2035 anyway. So there's this idea of a paint-only road diet. And what's proposed here is bike lanes, no green space additions, no new sidewalk, maybe something like a painted median next to the hospital, although that would still be something as flexible. And that would sort of be a tool that would reduce... It would reduce the number of lanes slightly, and provide better bicycle road destruction just because there would be dedicated bike lanes. The cost for that is somewhere between $525,000 and $765,000. And it's important to note that a lot of these types of projects would be funded in significant part by seeking grant funds from the state. There would be a 20% match, I think is typical. So that's what the town would bear, but... That's that. And this change in traffic in lane configuration applies to both this paint-only, but also the lane reduction. And really, the only thing that's changing is that if you look at that slide that's just currently proposed, the yellow line is we're combining a right turn and a through lane, which is currently now separate the way it's designed. And that gives us some additional asphalt basically to kind of net things down a little bit. In this instance, in this information, I should have updated this, but I didn't. So this focuses specifically on the intersection at the mall, so the mall intersection. This really isn't going to change significantly. The road diet will make minor improvements at 2045. What you want to see for the level of service, which is basically sort of a level of service is sort of an all-around... If it's an A, it's really fantastic. If it's an E, it's awful. And right now, if we left things as they were at night, it would be pretty brutal, I think. You'd have a lot of traffic. It would be tough. But it would improve slightly. Intersection delays would be better at certain times, but worse at other times. And we thought a bit... One of the things we thought about, too, was kind of queuing lengths. How long are the cars going to be waiting and so how are they going to stack up? We thought about that at Route 62 intersection as well. For the lane introduction and sidewalks, this is more physical than just paint. You know, this would be maintaining existing crosswalks, but add free pedestrian crossings. It would be added at the four-way stop for Berlin Mall and Oslo Loop Road. You know, this... An additional sidewalks would be added on the... It would be the south-ish side of the road. And then other connections would be made on the north side of the road as well, just to kind of complete the network. So it was full. And the sidewalk would theoretically go to the point where we'd meet up with a shared used path that's being proposed at this point that's connected with Mall. And, you know, in addition, we'd be looking at, you know, possibly planted median and some buffered bike lanes still. The potential cost for this is 1.3 million to 1.5 million. If you said, you know, we talked about this in our last meeting, is the idea of, well, what if we wanted to do the shared-use path versus doing a sidewalk in this one? And I would add about $450,000 to this total price for either of us. Because it's a... The shared-use path is 12 feet versus 5 feet, so it's that additional material would effectively cost about that much extra. And let's see what else we're looking at. So in this, again, it improves things a little, but not significantly in terms of sort of the traffic analysis end of the process. Things get a little better, but not infinitely better. And then the final one is the big one here. This is the roundabout. And with this particular example, we included the shared-use path. Again, the shared-use path could really be a piece of any output. It would just change the price. Again, sidewalks could be... We did get a lot of feedback from the public, but they were really interested in the idea of shared-use path. So I think that that's got a lot of public support for that. This also proposes potentially doing some street trees and traffic calming. The roundabout itself is going to allow traffic to pass through a good clip, but also provide really good opportunities for pedestrians to cross. And from a pedestrian standpoint, it would be a lot safer, I think, or deal a lot safer. Again, this one proposes a 12-foot-wide shared-use path that basically runs... It's a new town center to Fissure Road. And we are proposing that it go all the way down to Cane Turnpike. And we'd still be suggesting some sidewalk extensions to sort of allow CBMC to their property that are connected to this whole network. And this is about $2.5 million or $3.5 million somewhere between there. It depends on getting into the details. And with this one, the traffic piece of it, this is where the roundabout makes traffic, but that's just in this case it will. The modeling shows that you go from sort of average... I mean, C and D isn't horrible. We're not in Boston since nothing... I mean, I suppose for many of us, probably D would be annoying because we're not from Boston, but I agree, we're from a metropolitan area. We'd be probably happy with D. But everything goes up to A. Intersection delays are significantly reduced, obviously. And queuing is also reduced because of just the ability to move through the roundabout so smoothly. So the final thing I want to talk about is this alternative comparison. I'm going to switch my deck over here so that you guys can see what it says. So we always run through these processes and we do a matrix to sort of compare difference. Okay, we've got all these different ideas. Let's score it and see how things come out when you break things down. And we looked at bicycle and pedestrian safety, traffic coming, and combine those numbers to create a safety score. We looked at impacts to properties. So how much land is going to need to be used in order to facilitate these? And obviously, not doing anything, it has no impact. So we've got a three roundabout, definitely eats some land on the edges of the corners of that intersection. And so that went. We considered conceptual cost and utility impacts as well for the implementation score. And then there's also the traffic, the traffic modeling was considered and public support. And we did have a survey that was out for, we had it open for about a month and got really good feedback. It was over 200, I think, which is really, really good. And one for another time, we had 17 people respond. So he's nice to get credit to his credit. We weren't getting a lot of feedback, as much feedback as he wanted, and he pushed it out with the radio. Radio was great. Yeah, and that made a big difference. It really caught it. So ultimately the sort of clear, quote unquote, winner in this case is the roundabout pathway because it hits all the notes in comparison. Obviously that's the most expensive one, so that's a big thing to think about and how that would ultimately be implemented and whether there's any opportunities to partner with some of the significant property owners to bear some of the cost. I don't know, and I don't know if that's a conversation worth having, but I know that some communities can work things like that out as well. So that's, I wanted to roll through that quickly so that there's opportunity for questions. What do you folks have for questions? Anything? Of the room 62 in the room, and Payton Turnpike, what's the stacking in there now? In terms of the amount of things I can't, personally I can't mention that all the time. Busy. Yeah, but one of the things that we really focused on with the modeling was we were concerned about, particularly the roundabout, because okay, everybody's going through really fast. That's great, but if they start lining up at the end of there and line up all the way back into the roundabout, and ultimately it was when we modeled that, it was okay. You know, I think the vehicle queuing was not bad, and I have to look, the queuing that's there includes, yeah, the data for there includes the room 62, and it looks like it's slightly less, you know, sort of if it got built, assuming the roundabout was built at 2025, you'd actually get some good gains, a few less queuing. So right now, it looks like existing conditions, maximum queue lengths of cars at route 62 were about 14 cars. It kind of stands to the reason why the hospital gets out of work, anyway, it's leaving. And so you might have 13 with the roundabout, so it actually would go down a little bit less, but by 2045, it looks like it would be, it looks like it would remain about 13. So, it doesn't look like it's going to get any worse. And I think one thing that will need to be addressed, obviously, is the timing. And we did find that just by adjusting the timing of the mall intersection right now, if that got done, that would improve today, at least a little bit, wouldn't be like, it's not going to be the same effect as the roundabout, but it would definitely improve things a little bit. So there's opportunities, I think in both intersections, to maybe have the agency at least rethink their timing on that end and then do something about the timing on your end, then it's going to improve the snack. That answers your question? Yep. Then what about truck stacking in there, too? You know, I don't know how much we specifically looked at truck stacking, so that's a good question. I don't think that was, I'm not sure that was specifically looked at in the model. Do you find that you're getting an excess of truck traffic there, or is it, I mean, because that sounds like something to consider. If you look at this going forward, if the model does develop out, is there going to be more truck traffic on Fisher, or is it just going to stay on 62 in the entrance? Most of the development is residential in the Newtown Center, so you wouldn't expect a lot of truck traffic outside of UPS, small truck traffic. The FedEx. Can you tell us more about the survey responses and the breakdown and what that looked like, though, in general? I'm not sure I have that view. I might actually have it. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Is it in there? Yeah, actually. Thank you. I think you're going to see slightly more truck traffic on the 62 and the, that end, than you do now, if, you know, Hobby Lobby and all that goes through, and then reconfiguration of Subaru and Toyota over there. I'm not sure how much those guys don't come in from the upper end and down there. You know, off Fisher Road. I mean, for the... The car delivery and stuff. I think I've seen them coming in the upper part more than I have the lower part. Well, I think that's a lot of that because of your GPS. That's the way it's sending them. Yeah. The quickest. Just download it and not share it. Thank you. Absolutely. I'm glad you asked. It's an excellent presentation of the materials. Very detailed. Good one. Thank you. Give my little internet connection here a second and we can talk about a bit of that. And I'm going to... That is definitely a really good response. Yeah. It's, I was, I was frankly stunned. I mean, I've been in, this is my 21st year as a planner, and I mean 25% return rate is pretty good and that's, what is that? This was, I don't know what that felt like but it's more than 25, I'm pretty sure. Well, of course, yeah. We, through a wider net, but just kind of... Yeah, but it was, that was, that was a really, it was a great call and I felt like we got a good... Fisher Road users. Yeah. Right. Okay. So hopefully people can see my screen. I'm going to go over here a little bit. So I said, okay, so it was 144 people. Sorry. I didn't think I spoke, but that's still really good. The majority of, a 65% supported the roundabout and shared use path alternative. 15% favored no action action. Largely because of cost. Fair. You know, of the concerns noted, most of the cost, most of the comments were about either related to cost or safety. Yep. So those who selected the no action alternative just weren't really into spending money, didn't think it needed to be upgraded. There were a few people who favored, preferred the paint only alternative because it was simple. It was easy, you know. I will say that. So as a planner, I'm not often, I don't get into the detailed cost estimates that was an engineering staff. I was actually kind of surprised at how expensive the paint only alternative was. So I was like, I kind of thought, just slap some paint on, but of course, you know, there's always more to it than that. The sidewalk and forwardway intersection, some people really felt like it was simpler to use. You know, there are a lot of people who are pretty uncomfortable with roundabouts. I understand there's some roundabouts that I don't like either stuff. And they liked the idea of the dedicated bike lanes and sidewalks. But the roundabout was definitely the one that was most recognized as popular. So it's a little fuzzy here, but yeah, this shows the green on this kind of fuzzy pie chart is the, that's the support for the 65% support for the shared use path. Anything else? Not much else there, but you know, sort of the best comments that we saw there. You know, someone said they live on 302 and doesn't feel like there's much to do. In Berlin with my son, we have to go to Barrier Montpelier. I really enjoy the possibilities the Newtown Center brings to have local community events. The Fisher Road alternatives allow these new places and events to be more accessible to us on foot or bike. Someone else has said, one, prioritize bicycle and pedestrian circulation, two, traffic calming, three, a road diet, more vegetation, four, safety concerns addressed. So they were really, that was sort of why they liked the roundabout. And some folks, one folks, the person said, open space and less confusion about lane choice and road versus pedestrian space. So that's our, that's the summary of that show. Thank you very much for taking the time to share it. Absolutely, I'm really glad. Thank you Google Box for making it. Any other questions? I did have one. My question was just with all the ambulance is coming in and out all the time. How does that affect, like, on the roundabout? So, I mean, the ambulances have their, they have that side entrance to you they can go in, but actually I think it would be faster with the roundabouts going to be easier for them to navigate because there's no stopping at that. I mean, there's some slow-missions going down, but if they come in, they'll enable them to go through people. So I have a question on the ambulance portion. So CLC had a plan at one time of moving their emergency entrance to there. Yeah, to there. So, and I think that the roundabout would jive with that idea. I don't know whether they will. I can tell you that roundabouts are really difficult sometimes to maneuver, at least going the proper direction. Right, yeah. I've been going the wrong way. Gosh, but we can make it. Yeah. I'm just wondering with that, if they were to move forward with that design, if that would, if it's a, if you have a lot of ground cover, you know, your vegetation or whatnot, if you're really choking it down one lane, you know, what are those people are going to do when the sirens go off? Yeah. You stop. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, some of it's just getting beginning to, you know, learning how E.D. operated there and the sirens are going to come up behind them and hopefully they'll move forward. And, Joe, we sat down specifically with them prior to any of this coming out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They were pretty keen on the roundabout, just because to get their employees in and out, they see that as really beneficial to their campus. If you notice the roundabout, assuming the mall is west, you can see the roundabout actually pushes further towards the mall property and off of the CVMC campus property. So that allows them to keep some of their internal lanes that they may have now for emergency use, especially if they move the emergency room to, you know, to that, the new area. Mm-hmm. And so they really like that idea of shifting the roundabout further off of their campus, giving them the ability to do some internal stuff. Any other questions? Well, thank you very much, Chris. Oh, thank you. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. The Lister's certificate of Heels Proof of Technology. Yeah. This is the yearly, right? Each year the tax department requires them to file this, saying that they have no appeals or suit spending for the current tax year. That's what this is. The document's in your package, and just you'll need that signed this evening, accepting that by the board, please. Tax proposal? Local options tax proposal, yes. So we have Raylene here with us tonight. She was involved with doing some marketing for Berry this year when theirs passed first time through. I've asked her to come in and kind of talk a little bit, answer your questions about what was done, what they did. As I briefed you in the last meeting, it's about 700 bucks a quarter to have them do a similar program for us to promote over the course of the next year, our local options tax proposal. So Raylene, if you'd like to talk to the board and probably answer one or 200 questions. Yeah. Thank you. Hi. So I guess I can start by telling you kind of what was, what was done in the city and then we can go with questions that you might have. It was, it was broken up into four different pieces so that there was a quarter for each piece and the main piece, the beginning piece number one was the, the initial sell the, what we're looking for. So in our, what are you looking for? We gave a solely for that. This is what solely for the tax will be used for. So capital equipment, streets and sidewalks, and then capital infrastructure and improvements. That was the main focus at first. And then we talked about what it was actually going to be used for. And then the pitch at the final end of that quarter was. So many communities around. Barry were already doing it. And to get back what you're already giving away when you go to Williston, Essex, Burlington, South Burlington. And it would be the same case for Berlin. And the difference is I'm assuming in Berlin, you probably get a lot more non resident shoppers than we do down in Barry. I know that I go to Berlin for most of my stuff. So that could be one of the pitches, the initial pitch of we want to do this because. This is what you'll gain from it. And then the second quarter, you would spend your time. Going over the revenue options and. Talk about how. What that's going to do to the property tax and how. We could actually mitigate increases in property tax. And what is that? What is that going to do? By most of that money coming in from non shoppers. And then we want to talk about the impacts that it would have on. Fixed income property owners, which is zero in the end. There is a zero impact. And then we get into. The other thing is that it's good for both and proving. Proving that it's good for business is a lot tougher than it is. Proving that it is good for. Or just a residential property, of course. And so finding the pitches. Finding other business owners that have been through this was. It's good for business owners and get them to be involved in our pitch in very city to say, this is what we did. And yes, we may have been against it at first, but now this is why we're happy that we did it. And many people were gladly willing to jump on. And the third quarter. And then we took those questions and answers. And that's what we. Did for our final quarter. We took all of those questions and answers directly from the people on the council. And then we took those questions and answers. And that's what we. Did for our final quarter. We took all of that information and pushed it out with all of the other plugs that we had been doing throughout the year. So any testimonials, any. Feedback that we've got. Both negative and positive. And how this can be done in a marketing. Way would be all through. Digital. Adds video ads testimonials. The. The forums that are. Live. They would be live on Facebook and on YouTube. Giving people to. An opportunity to participate in person. Or. Like I am right now. And it, what it does. Being. What helps I believe the most as far as Facebook goes. Is that people often. Don't weigh in when you're live. They weigh in later. They don't want to be the. The one that is speaking out right in front of everybody else. So they'll weigh in later. And then the people in the town can monitor that. And answer. Those questions. Of the people that didn't necessarily. Want to speak out during an open forum. And so it allows that option as well. And then, of course, we would invite. Any of you to come down. I know Dave has sat in the studio with us before. So he knows how it goes. But. We would invite any of you down to. And do little, little clips or even an entire show where we could come to you and. And really promote it to. To the town's people. And I did mention to Vince the other day. I have reached out to the sound. I have reached out to. To the town's people. And I did mention to Vince the other day. I have reached out to the central Vermont chamber of commerce as well. I did that. Before I did stuff with the city. And I just did that again yesterday with Kevin national box. Just to see where they stood because. As they've often spoke out against it. And they said they've given up on speaking out against it because. They found when they did. That so many people were in favor of it. That really what the information they was, they were passing along was literally just information that it was taken with a grain of salt at this point. So that's kind of that's good news. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Questions for railing at this point. Again, at the end, I'm going to be looking for the board's approval to, to move forward with this marketing campaign. And how often. How many quarters were we going to do this? We got four quarters. How many, how many segments in a quarter. Great. So we would do. Each quarter would have. Each quarter would be designed with different segments. And it would kind of. It would go. In the, in the order in which. You all felt comfortable and proceeding, I guess. So. The first quarter in the city, it was. We, we first pitched the idea that, you know, this is what we're thinking of. And then. The next pitch was take back what you're giving away in other communities around you by. Getting it from the non-residents. And then the end of the first quarter was the huge pitch of. What is this solely for? What, what is this money used for? Because that the bottom line is that's what everybody wants to know. And mostly they want to know that. Keep being reminded that they're going to be the ones that are gaining that they. They're going to be the ones that are going to be the ones that are likely to have an increase in the property tax or as big of an increase. Of course. You know, won't always be a zero percent. But. And then the second quarter was the projected revenues. What. What are the projected revenues? And what will those. Projected revenues. Help with. And what could it. Help with. The money. We know that the expenses are always going to be there. They're not going to go away. So. This is the perfect way to have a revenue. Other than property tax. And. When you say that. That's where I think you get more people involved because. The word not increasing property tax always is a. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is. It is broken up into quarters and how it's done. We depend on. On all of you and how you. Thought it should be done. Do you want to do little. Video type commercials. Do you want to start by doing them with just. Ads that I make up and. With graphics and. In wording that. You approve first. You guys have voted on this before. Find people who were in favor. And are they still in favor and why were they in favor. Nothing like having your neighbor think it's a great idea. And especially if you're somebody that's new to town. I'm not so sure that that's the case. You could. You probably have people that have been there a lot longer than. Probably doesn't change over as much as here. But those are the those are the ideas and. And. You just do little bits each time, but with one focus for each quarter. In the third quarter being the. Where you really focus on having a couple of those town hall type meetings. Where you can generate the information and you can generate. Kind of the feel. Of. Of the community before you go into. The next quarter. And you're pitching it on your fourth and final quarter. Before you vote. Yes. Joe percentage that you thought this thing was voted down last time. We. Was like 30. 32 people that voted differently. Then it would have. The past. I think. You need a big swing. You just got to get the information out there. It was 70 something votes, right. And this was going to cost. What was the cost per quarter? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. Approximately. It. Well. And I see 700 a quarter. And I was. Told Vince's too. If I put this much work into. Who helping or to do this for. A big, a local business. It would cost, it would cost them more. But I have to. I have to take into account that. That is a public service announcement, which. Most of you know, some of you may know, we do, we do those for free. So I have to. Take an account. For that factor and kind of taken. Take that away from. From the package and say that, that part of it's kind of like our duty to help out a little bit. Yeah. So do you see this as being. Maybe one or two sit downs. And segments and then. Couple of that with the public service announcements to really keep it in. The residents. I guess. I mean, I, if you, if you do this. It would be my plan that literally. Five days a week every week for the next year. So the, the people in your community see at least one, if not two ads a day. On top of anything that we do videos or shows or. That the, you know. And we. Right now our viewership is like 50,000 a month. Right around there. And we have a really good percentage in Berlin. The majority of our listeners, of course, are very. But then we have a. I think the last time I looked in, I can look again, 38% of our. Listeners were in Berlin. So that year, our next. Town besides Barry that, that tunes in. And so that is, you know, that's a good plus two. But we would make sure that literally. At least five days a week. Every week for the next year that. It's on there. A couple of times a day. Yeah. I make the motion to move forward with the local options. Marketing a proposal through aired out. And as presented to us this evening by. I'll be in touch Ray Lee. Second that motion. Any further discussion. All those in favor. All right. Motion carries. I'll be in touch Ray Lee. Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy your evening. Thank you. I'm going to. Have a good night. You too. I'll be in touch. You too. So. Any further discussion. There is a copy in your folder. Very simply. We want to up the limit. Just driving Diane crazy in simple terms. What's the limit current. I think. Right now. The 2500 we want to go to 5,000 what's happening is the police. Every training's all the trains I have to pay for. they want to get paid immediately, and a lot of the things are not even in this area. And some of them are through video, but I think that's the biggest part of it. But the other thing is too, we can't find all the things that we need here, like maybe a part for a piece of equipment that's broken down, or even a printer. Some of the time that we can't get that at Staples, we just can't get these things in, and we can get them from Amazon. So it's not like we use it every day, but there are times when that's the only source that we get it at some place where we have to have a credit card. So I have a question. This would only be used authorized by the town administrator or the select board. Right? Do you foresee having maybe even a smaller limit for your use or the town clerk if you are not in the office? I'm not saying it's the rubber band that you need to go get. I don't see that happening because people are coming to mean regardless right now. Especially the police. That's the biggest piece of it. Those are the things that could cost five or six hundred dollars or even more. Especially the chief of police, because some of the stuff that he's had to take, which is mandatory, has cost thousands. I don't think we're there yet, Joe. We come in down the road, but I don't think we're there yet. It's that much of an issue where we need other people authorized to your point in what we have right now. It's just more to keep track of too. I know we've had to increase ours at the park of five thousand. We were, so I'd make a motion to increase the limit to five thousand under the policies that are in effect. Is that the only change from the current? That's the only change. I just cleaned it up a little bit and changed the amount. I second that. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Motion carries. I will need a board to sign off on that as well tonight, please. CV Fiber, proposed obstacle line terminal. Yes. So there is a package in there with an email from Karen Koteki as well that talks a little bit about this with what it's going to look like. The proposed location by the Riverton fire station as well. They're looking, they've looked at a number of locations. Basically is what she's saying in the email to bring high speed internet and the CV fiber territory. The optical wind terminal site consists of a concrete pad, a metal cabinet to house the electronics, a power meter, backup power, which may be an above ground propane tank, and hand holes which are underground boxes located within the easement area and is where the fiber comes into the, comes into and leaves the site. The typical dimensions for the easements are approximately 25 by 25 feet but can be scaled back to being in type of equipment to be installed. And again, you'll see the plans, what they're talking about and the description of the cabinet, the noise in DVs. There's a report on that in here as well. Part of the technical specs with regard to that. This is the large parking lot near the mailboxes. The large parking lot on that side. I think it's on that side of the building. I thought it was just off the fire department footprint but I could be wrong in that. I'll have to look and check again. What is the price proposed? Is there a price associated? No. No price associated with this. The idea of this is to benefit who? To hope. It's to bring high speed internet to the town, right? Through CV fiber and the surrounding communities. It's kind of a hub that go out from here to Northfield. They have been working on it for quite a time. And this is just in conjunction with what's going on. So again, just to be clear, this is for information for the board tonight to look at and review. And then I will bring her in to, she actually wants to do a site visit if the board's interested to walk and talk there and answer any questions as well. So it's really information. This is what they want to do. They want the board to be aware. And then they're willing to come and talk, either come here or do a site visit. Excellent. I'm in favor of a site visit. More details. That's wonderful. It seems like Comcast and Consolidated. They've been working on getting the high speed fiber optics through at least to our area. They've been busy going there. Yeah. And this is different than the Comcast and Consolidated. I believe so. Yeah. So it's just a third option. Yeah. All right. So if the board wants to look that over, I can set something up in probably March or April. With her to come and meet and do a site visit. OK. I'll look at license approval. There's a summary sheet that I had put on the table. I think there's three or four on there. It was just the one page here. There it is. Looks like it's out right there. I make the motion to approve the letter in the back home licenses. I'll do them one at a time. For KPH, drugs incorporated second class, it's a renewal. The location is Canadian Drugs Group 302. I'll set that. Any further discussion? Any problems with the chief? No. No problems. Is that just the class two liquor? Is it cigarettes? Cigarettes too. It's both of them. Liquor and tobacco. The NIC. Any further discussion on that? All those in favor? Aye. Carries. I make the approval for liquor and tobacco license for select board approval tonight for Brockton Corporation. Tobacco substitute endorsement is new. The location is Shaw's Cain Turnpike. And it's already been approved for the tobacco and liquor. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Carries. I make the motion for the liquor and tobacco license for select board approval for Lamont CVS Pharmacy LLC. It's a second class. It's a renewal. And the location is CVS Pharmacy Room 302. Second answer. Any other discussion? Hearing none, those in favor? Aye. Carries. Approval of licenses, permits, vouchers, and applications. I make the motion to approve payroll warrant 23-17 for payroll from January 29, 2023 to February 11, 2023. Paid on February 15 of this year in the amount of $62,022.71. Also payable warrant 23-G-15 with checks 22-704 to 22-732 for payables in the amount of $67,996.49. Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Motion carries. Approval of February 6, 2023. Is there any other board members that are able to meet that have been very tired in this area? Aye. Can we postpone this fence to the next meeting? Sure. Until we all have a chance to recall fully. Okay. Hearing motion to table the minutes to the next meeting. I make a motion that we table the minutes of Monday, February 6, 2023 to the next meeting, please. Second. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. And round table drill. Okay. Hello? Two things. I wanted to compliment the staff on Crosstown Road. Very nice in terms of degrading that was done recently. And also I wanted to check if you've heard anything that's on the status of Lover's Lane and Riverton. Nothing. No. So no commitment in terms of time frame? Not yet. Okay. Thank you. I will be reaching out again here real soon. Appreciate it. Really appreciate it. Dave? No. Vince? Just a couple of things real quick. I was going to ask you about the campus if you grange the open house there that's coming up. Good point. I did see that they were having an open house. I won't be able to attend. That was for the elevator, right? Yeah. That's for their elevator. I was going to try this off. So you're prepared to say a few words? Perfect. Okay. Thanks, Dave. Okay, thanks. Now we go to the chairs. Just a couple of things. Chief wanted me to brief you on just an upcoming expense. It's going to be a yearly deal. That's the benchmark software for the personnel files and tracking. It's about $5,000, roughly. So again, I'm just letting you know that. I have not done anything yet with regards to the MOU on the Beaver baffles. I think the general feeling was, and correct me if I'm wrong, at the time was kind of to let's wait and see. There's nothing to say that we can't go back to this group. But I think the general feeling was let's wait and see what happens with the Beavers. If it gets any worse, gets better, goes away, stays about the same from Tim's perspective as well. Unless the board wants me to, again, ask him to come in. If we don't commit from what I heard, though, we'll be paying for him to give us an estimate. I mean, in the past, it's not like they've taken a lot of Beaver out of there. We took two out last year. We trapped two. And that was on this end. That's a lot of money. See how it goes in the spring. OK. That was all I had. And then we will have an executive session tonight to review a draft contract. I had one other thing. And that is, if the board would think about whether anyone's available to accompany Mary with the ballots on the evening election when she takes them forward, she needs one other person, Republican, she said. And I'm not sure that I can do it. She has asked me if I could. But I'm not sure yet. So I'm just putting it out there. If there's anyone else on the board that can. OK. She would greatly appreciate it. Or if you know anyone else, Vince, that could. Yeah. I'm sure. And it's possible that things will change for me, and I can. But at this point, it doesn't look like I will be able to. I don't want to leave her in the lurch for too long. OK. I want to have a good commitment. Yep. Let's see here. So executive session on a contract? Yes. I'd make a motion to enter executive session. I second that motion. All those in favor? All those in favor? All those in favor? All those in favor? All those in favor? All those in favor? All those in favor? All those in favor? Contracts actually require the premature finding of exposure before you go into executive session. So what he's saying is we have to make the statement that due to premature pre-mature exposure of that information could be detrimental for the town at this point in time. Go again? One more time. I don't know if I can say it twice in a row. I don't think I can either. Make a motion to go on the executive session for contract due to premature information could affect the outcome of the contract adversely We're here second All those in favor. Thanks to her. Thank you to her