 Hello, and welcome to ongoing coverage of Town Meeting Day on Town Meeting Television. My name's Bobby Lucia, and I'll be the host for tonight's program, which will cover an overview of the proposed budget and ballot items for the town of Williston. This program is one in a series of forums that Town Meeting TV is hosting to cover Town Meeting Day, which falls on Tuesday, March 7th this year. In our forum series, Town Meeting TV invites candidates and municipal officials to unpack the items and races that you'll see up and down your ballot. So we'll dive in in just a second, but before we get started, just a reminder that if you're tuning in live, we welcome your questions any time. You can call in at 802-862-3966, that's 802-862-3966. Give us a call at any time throughout the program, and we'll put you live right on there and hear your question. So with that, now I'd like to introduce our representatives from Williston, who have joined us on Zoom and are going to walk us through some of the items on the Williston ballot tonight. So we have Terry McCague, who is the select board chair. We have Eric Wells, who's the town manager, and Shirley Godell Lackey, who's the director of finance and HR for the town. So without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to Terry, and you're welcome to pull up your slides whenever you're ready, and we'll hear a bit about what Williston residents will expect to see on their ballots, and what they can expect for town meeting day this year. Good, thank you, Bobby. Thank you very much. And we appreciate the telemedicine TV's presentation tonight, and continuing, I'm sure you're going to be broadcasting this at some point in time. So thank you very much for hosting the show. So the dates for town meeting this year are that will certainly will be back in person after a two-year hiatus with just informational meetings. So we will be meeting on Monday, March 6th at 7 p.m. in the Williston Central School auditorium, and we'll be taking up articles one through four that night. It will be voting by Australian ballot on Tuesday, March 7th, from 7 in the voting till 7 at night in the armoring. Absentee and early voting will be available in mid-February, about two weeks from now, and the town budget is the main article for consideration this year. So Eric and Shirley will tell us about the general fund budget for the year, which is article five. So I'll toss it over to Eric and Shirley. Thanks very much, Terry. So I'll kick things off here and talk about just in general to start out. I always like to have this slide of what is a budget? So a budget is our municipal spending plan. This includes the services to be provided, the cost to provide those services, and the revenue to pay for the services in order to balance the budget. And when we put our budget together, it's the best revenue and spending model with information we have available at the time. Our municipal budget process actually starts in about late August every year. So we work there, starting to forecast ahead what the expense needs may be, what the major items will be for coming on the budget. I direct department heads to put together a draft budget over September and October, both for operating and capital items. And then starting in November, we work to finalize a transmittal job. Shirley and I work closely on producing it. And we'll put that out the month of December. The select board will review the budget proposal for the public hearing in early January. Then the board will work through deliberations on the budget and then finally arrive at a proposed number to place on the morning, which the board did a couple of weeks ago. That brings us to where we are today as we start to share information about this town meeting day, 23. So looking at the budget proposal for this year, it has a $13.97 million budget. This is about an $830,000 increase from the current fiscal year 2023 budget for a 6.3% increase. So what's the story behind the budget this year? And probably comes in no surprise to folks out there. The primary theme evident throughout the budget is the effect of inflation on the US economy and its impact on the cost to provide municipal services to our community. We looked at the most recent consumer price index, which is a good measure of inflation for the period that ended through last December of 2022 for our northeast region in the country, indicated a inflation rate over the last year of 6.1%. We looked nationally over the same period, the inflation rate was 6.5%. The budget proposal we prepared at Williston at 6.3% is between these two rates that we've looked at. Most of our increase in the town's proposed spending plan is connected to wage and benefit costs. The youth make up generally over 60% of our operating budget. The town's tries to provide a competitive wage for staff. And like most employers today, it's looking to retain our staff and attract new employees when openings do occur, but remain competitive in a challenging job market. About 71% of the proposed budget increase, about $590,000, is tied to wage and benefit costs. We're fortunate to have such a dedicated, hardworking staff, and we cannot deliver high-quality services without such high-quality people working for the town. This budget aims to stay competitive in our wages and our benefits. Benefit costs continue to increase, especially the cost of health insurance. We are able to change our health insurance carrier earlier this year. We were able to reduce the cost increase for health insurance from $180,000 to $120,000 in this budget proposal. We're also seeing the effect of inflation throughout the operating budget for all the expenses that go with providing services. These include professional services, fuel for our vehicles, our utilities for our town buildings, materials that we use in missile operations, our capital equipment, and many other items that we use on a daily basis to provide services to. So here's a look of expense and buy object in the budget proposal. And as going back to when we started working on the budget, my direction to the Parliament heads last fall putting their proposals together was to create a budget that maintained the current level of services that we offer the community in the current week. During this budget review and formation process, we added a limited number of additional hours to existing staff positions to address service-demand pressures that we're facing. There are no new services or positions in the FY24 budget proposal. Of these hours added, we're increasing the assistant library director from 28 hours to 40 hours, increasing part-time hours for finance and treasurer's office support staff, and elevating a seasonal buildings and grounds position full-time starting in November. Among the duties for these buildings and grounds positions will be providing winter maintenance services on the town's sidewalks and path network. This will provide the town with staff capacity to clear all existing sections of sidewalk and path throughout the winter months. It's the practice we're unable to provide today with just one plow and one employee who's able to operate that. The town recently purchased a second sidewalk plow using the American Rescue Plan Act that our funds just arrived last week, and we're able to start using it a little bit. And here's a view of expenses by department. I'll point out, expenses for public safety, including police, fire, and public work, the counts are just over 60% of the budget. On the expense side, our capital expenses are just over 10% off. So that's a look at the expenses. So in order to balance the budget, we have to create a revenue plan as well. And I'll pass it over to our finance director shortly to walk through the revenue proposal. Thanks, Eric. So as Eric pointed out, he covered the expenses, and now how do we pay for those expenses where we find the funding? So there are a variety of sources and user fees. So to give you some examples of the user fees that the town hall charges, as in the clerk's office, there's a fee for passports or a recording of any documents. Planning and zoning, we charge permit fees. Parks, the recreation department has camp fees, and they have all kinds of day camps and summer camp programs, but the recreation programs as well. And the largest resource of fees are from our EMS delivery service. So if there's a transport, there is a related fee along with that service that's being provided. So those are a variety of the different types of user fees that the town has. State and federal grants, we have one state grant through the Agency of Transportation that is included in the operating budget. And that comes from the Agency of Transportation, and it's to help maintain our class two and three roads. And in the FY24 budget, that's approximately $160,000. And then you say, what are host town fees? That's an unusual revenue item. Well, the town of Williston, as most of you know, does host Cassella's transportation down on Avenue B. So the town receives a fee for the tonnage process there, as well as on Redmond Road, Chittenden, sorry, Solid Waste District, also has their composting facility. And they also have their mirror for the materials recovery facility. And we also receive a fee for the tonnage processed at those two facilities. Local options tax, as you probably all know, is 1% on sales, rooms, and meals. That in the FY24 budget, we are projecting $3,615,000 from that revenue source. And that's approximately 26% of our overall revenue to help pay for expenses. Property taxes. Property taxes are $7.4 million in this FY24 budget, about 53% of our revenue. And that's based for this current time. The grand list, we used the FY22 grand list. We increased it by a quarter of a percent, or which added about $5 million to the grand list. And right now, our estimated grand list is $2.1 billion. And the last item is reserve and ARPA funds. So reserve is excess funds that came from prior years. Our local options tax was more than we budgeted, or permit fees were more than budgeted. Wages came in less than budgeted because we had some unfilled positions. So that creates what we call a reserve or fund balance. And then ARPA, as Eric mentioned before, those funds, the combination of those in the current budget is $821,000, and that's about 6% of our revenue. But we used the combination of those two things to help minimize the tax rate increase and also to help fund capital budget projects. Our ARPA funding, as Eric and I both talked about, the requirements of ARPA mean we need to have a plan to spend that, those funds, by December 31st of 24. And they have to be completely expended by December 31st of 2026. And Eric, if you want to move along to the next slide, that's just the presentation in the chart format of what I've talked about. You'll see property taxes funds a little over 50% of our total expenses with the local options tax at 26%, and everything else at 21%. If you want to move along to the next slide. So Eric talked about expenses in the budget. I spoke about revenue in the budget and the end result is, well, how does this impact my property taxes? What am I going to pay from year over year? So first, I'm just going to mention that this is, you'll see on this slide, it says estimated FY24 tax rate. That is because the grand list won't be finalized until late spring. So once the grand list is finalized, then we will recalculate what the tax rate is in order to fund the budget that we have come up with. But overall, the median home assessed value is $300,000. So year over year, we are looking at a $98 increase annually for property taxes or $8.16 a month and increase in your property taxes. And I'm set for the next slide, Eric. So this, of course, is the current year that we're in, the 2022-2023 fiscal year. And it's just all the Chittenden County towns and where Williston is in relation to those towns. So we're the second to the lowest municipal tax rate. And we've done that by using our local options tax as we saw on the previous screen is about 26% of our revenue. So we use that local options tax to help minimize our tax rate. And that is it for me. And I'm going to toss it back over to Eric and he's going to talk about solar panels. Thanks, Shirley. That's something a little bit different here, but just as interesting, I hope for folks, is we're looking at a couple other ballot items this year. First, Article 6 on the warning is for the town to, the voters to consider whether the town should purchase a solar array on the roof of the public works facility using $125,000 of unspent bond proceeds from a 2013 sale of bonds to construct the facility. So currently the solar array was built and it's owned by a third party owner. The town receives some of the net metering credits from this array, but the owner receives the vast majority. So should the voters support making this capital purchase of public services today, then the town would be able to produce all the net metering credits. This in turn, either to reduce our overall spend amount in town, as we can apply those net metering credits towards our electric bills. We also own a solar array, the tracker panels behind town hall, which we apply those net metering credits to our electric bills as well. We have these unspent bond proceeds from just over 10 years ago to find a good way to spend these funds. And this is a proposal that the select board asked to be placed on the morning after we did some external analysis on this project. And the town views it as an investment to consider for the future. So that is the solar piece of it, actually the roof of the public works facility and what the solar panels look like. So I will pause it back to you, Sherry, to chat about our last article, article seven. So this article may look familiar from the 2022 town meeting, but this is for the purchase of an ambulance. Like everything else, we probably would have normally already had this delivered and in operation, but with everything else that's behind and you can't get parts and the manufacturing's behind, we're looking to have an ambulance delivered in the summer of 2023. But the reason we're putting this back on the ballot again is the first time around, we really were looking at financing through bank or credit union. And the Vermont bond bank has come up with some new financing, which is very favorable. They put out the first application in December of 2022 and it was too early for us to be able to apply. And they are hoping to come back out with another round sometime in 2023, but it is called their flexible bond program. And it's a small loan program, allowing us to borrow between 10,000 and 400,000 terms between two and eight years. We have a prepayment ability with this type of financing where we don't with a bond. And the rate was zero to 1%. That doesn't mean that will be the rate on their next round of financing, but it does have very favorable terms. It would cost less than bank financing. So this gives us the flexibility to look at what financing will provide the cheapest financing cost overall, so that interest rate cost to the town and purchasing the new ambulance. And I am gonna shoot it back. I'm sorry to Terry at this point. Thank you both Eric and Shirley for your presentations. So to sort of wrap up my part of it anyway, we'll be talking about early and absentee voting. You can request an earlier absentee ballot by contacting the town clerk. And that's shown on the screen here with her phone number and her email address. The ballots will be available, as I said before, probably in mid-February, no later than that. But a few options that you can use to return your ballots either by mail. And we would request you put those in the mail relatively early and because we are having some difficulties in Williston with mail service. We do have the secure Dropbox behind the town hall in the parking lot, which is very well marked. You can drive up and put your ballot in there. Those will be checked several times a day. You can return your ballot to the armory between seven and seven on March the 7th. And you can also obviously appear in person to vote your ballot at the armory again on March 7th. And before I turn it over to Eric, I'd like to take just a moment to thank both Eric and Shirley for their hard work on putting this budget together and all of the department directors that have been working on this since October along with Eric and Shirley to do that. The select award has been working since mid-November until about a week ago to put the budget together. So a large thank you to all of those folks. And I'll turn it back to Eric. Thanks, Dary. So I'm gonna kind of wrap things up here. We gave an overview of the work and what's being considered on the ballot. There's certainly places to go to learn more and to dig into the numbers in more detail if you'd like. We've got a lot of great resources on our town website. Go to town.wilson.bt.us slash town meeting. That's your home base to find everything that you'd like to consult for town meeting as you prepare to vote. We've got the complete operating and capital budgets for review line by line. We'll have a copy and report up by early next week and we'll have a sample ballot and we've got the town meeting official warning up there as of today. So if you wanna go there and look for resources, if you'd also like to have a hard copy, just stop by town hall and I have my desk I can certainly let anyone look at. We're gonna have a public information hearing at our official town meeting on March 6th after we wrap up official town meeting business. We'll have a public information hearing where we'll provide a similar overview presentation as you're watching this evening. Then we'll open it up for questions or comments from those in attendance about the budget or any other articles on the warning. And then you can always reach out to me. Questions are always welcome and encouraged. Give me a call, drop me an email, stop by town hall. Be happy to chat with you about any questions you have as you review what's on the ballot for town meeting coming up and anytime during the year as well. So I'll end the slideshow there and I'll pop it back to our host Bob. Great, thank you so much, Eric. And thanks for all of the third information that you all provided tonight. We have a couple of minutes left here. I just wanna make some space. If there's anything happening in the town of Williston that's not on the ballot or that you haven't mentioned tonight that you'd like to highlight or anything else you want voters to know before we wrap up. Oh, one thing that's our record issue in the department for years is it's not had its own facility. So we've found some great space to lease and that they record the week that they record some since we're a harvest lane. It's we're gonna be leasing that space to start with 2000 square feet. And we're rolling that out more probably in early March that the province getting things set up over the next month. But that's a community to stay tuned. There'll be more information about that. We'll have a lot of opportunities for programming and more space, which is certainly a request. We get a lot of time for people have space to meet in or different programming needs. So that's a new initiative we're excited to launch here. So, do you have anything else you'd like to share as well? A lot of things are going on in the town, of course, not necessarily directly related to this year's budget, but we do have a couple of studies that will be conducted during the next several months and probably not get a report back until summertime. That's the study by a consultant on library expansion in a community center that a lot of people have some interest in. Also, the Wilson Police Department will be doing a study on the status and their needs over the course of the next number of years. So those are things that are coming down the pike. We'll be also looking for public information regarding the expenditure of our ARPA funds and other things that are necessary to take a look at over the course of the next several months to a year. And I'm sure there's other things on the list that I haven't listed right now, and Eric probably has those. Yeah, so we'll be looking at the future for the other thing I just said. How planned is it up? When you will come up at 8.25, sort of reaching out to the community that much. But we'll start it as well. Great, thank you so much, Eric and Terry. I think that just, oh, I'm sorry, Shirley, did you wanna chime in? Nope. Okay, I'm gonna move forward. I think that about wraps it up here. Thank you, Eric, Terry, and Shirley for joining us. And thank you for tuning in to Town Meeting TV's coverage of local candidates, local budgets, and ballot items in advance of Town Meeting Day this year. You can find this forum and others at our website, ch17.tv, or on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel. And most importantly, don't forget to vote on or before March 7th this year, and keep in mind that ballots are not mailed automatically this year in many towns as they were in the past couple of years. So please check in with your local clerk, as Terry mentioned, around mid-February or so to request a ballot or make sure that you get to the polls on March 7th. Thanks so much for watching and for sharing Town Meeting TV. Have a great evening.