 Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. I'm Paul Gillis, your elected moderator. Tonight is a pre-town meeting, which means we're not voting on anything. We're just here to fulfill a legal requirement that a hearing, public hearing be held before a vote, which is now scheduled for tomorrow at 10 a.m. And the voting, Rachel, is here. It will be here. Now, I think I have to ask Sarah a question. Are you a resident of this town? I am not. I'm a resident of Berry. And would anyone here object that she has something to say? She could say it, even though she's not? Absolutely. Good. You're fully qualified. Thank you. The first article and the only article is Shell the Town Appropriate $21,600 to the Montpelier Senior Activity Center. And I will recognize Sarah Lipton, the director. Thank you. We're extremely grateful to be able to have this special election. We recognize that it's putting everyone through extra hoops and loops to be able to come to do this. But the Montpelier Senior Activity Center really is the hub for Central Vermont, for services, resources, engagement, activities for older adults. And that's really serving anyone 50 and over. One of the core services that we provide are Meals on Wheels. And we have roughly 20 residents of the town of Berlin that we serve Meals on Wheels to. And those meals are served four days a week are delivered, but it's up to seven meals a week for residents who need that service. Meals on Wheels are recognized nationally as a vital, essential service for older adults who are homebound. And unable to shop, unable to cook, are unsteady on their feet and, you know, can't prepare a meal. There's a variety of qualifications for older adults who need Meals on Wheels. And there is a Meals on Wheels provider in the city of Berry, who serves Berry in Berry Town. There's Meals on Wheels provider in East Montpelier. Well, they're sort of on the border of East Montpelier and Plainfield, but Twin Valley Senior Center. But we at the Montpelier Senior Activity Center, we're really fortunate and honored, honestly, to be able to serve Meals on Wheels to residents of Berlin and Montpelier. There is a senior center in Northfield that provides some of your residents with meals. We have this weird sort of split because Berlin is really long. So we serve the parts of Berlin that are closer to Montpelier. The funding that we are requesting is an increase from last year because the cost of providing meals is ever-increasing. The funding that we receive from the Central Vermont Council on Aging has remained static at $3.80 a meal. I'm pausing because I want you to hear that it's $3.80 a meal that we get from federal funding. It actually costs us over $14 for every meal that we serve. And in order to make up that difference, we rely on folks like yourselves who allow town funding to occur. We rely on lots of grants, so I'm constantly writing grants. We rely on donations from our members. We did a really robust March for Meals fundraiser campaign in March. We raised over $17,000 from the community around us. But we have to constantly work to make up that gap. The other really challenging factor for us with Meals on Wheels is that though we are part of the City of Montpelier, which is awesome and helpful, the funding we receive from the City of Montpelier only accounts for just under 25% of our budget, and none of that actually covers Feast. So we do ask for more funding from the town of Berlin than any of our other surrounding towns because we serve meals to you guys. We don't serve meals to any other town. We do have a wide variety of programs, classes, drop-in groups. Hopefully soon again, foot clinics, tax clinics, you name it. There's a lot going on at the Senior Center. We're about to host the first hybrid version of an AARP town hall with Senator Sanders on June 9th. And so we're opening the doors up and hopefully lots of people will come out. But the reason that we really, really are grateful to Berlin is that you are able, historically, $20,000 last year, I think the same the previous year, you've shown us that you're able to support the Meals on Wheels that we serve to your residents, the senior services and resources, classes, drop-in groups that we provide to your residents, and maybe some of you sitting in the room right now. So that's, I think that's really, I'm happy to take any questions. Any questions? Yes, go ahead. I just would like to make sure you understand. Yeah. The numbers get confused. Yeah, sure. So you said that your federal funding is $3 per mail. $3.80 per mail. Don't forget the $.80. That's important. But the actual cost per mail is 14. Yes, and I can explain that. Okay, do. Yep. So as I mentioned, the City of Montpelier does not provide any funding for the Feast Program. And what this, just so you understand, the City of Montpelier's funding only counts for the director position, the admin position, and the communications and development coordinator position, and none of my Feast staff. So the cost of a meal, actually, when it's all broken down, is covering two and a half Feast staff positions and benefits. All of the overhead expenses for, you know, propane, to run the stove, and composting, and garbage. And of course, all of the costs associated with purchasing ingredients for the meal, as well as the containers that we serve them in, and all of the costs. So if you look at all of the costs to actually serve those necessary meals, it's over $14 per meal. So, and that does or does not include transporting the meals? It does not. We rely heavily and entirely on an incredible constellation of volunteers. We have over 35 volunteers that are delivering our meals, and they're amazing. So, again, please, and somebody else take a turn if you want to. No, all evening. I just want to be sure I understand. I do not understand why Montpelier does not participate in this program. We do. Montpelier residents do receive meals. Yeah. That is a nut. I don't know how to explain. I think that what happened historically about 10 years ago, Meals on Wheels have operated in Montpelier for over 30 years. And I actually have one of my drivers who has been delivering for all of that time. But the city only took on Meals on Wheels about 10 years ago by the Just Basics Incorporated, if you're familiar with them. They founded the Montpelier Food Pantry, for instance, and they run that awesome organization. They came to the Montpelier Senior Activity Center and said, nobody else is running Meals on Wheels right now. Let's do it. And so the former director and Just Basics collaborated and they launched Feast as a senior nutrition program to provide Meals on Wheels, congregate meals where folks actually come in person to eat together. And pre-pandemic, it was like 100 people twice a week. It was a very exciting everybody got together twice a week for lunch thing. And then the curbside meals, which we switched to for the pandemic. We've just switched away from curbside. We're back to congregate. So come eat lunch on Thursdays. But the city, the funding is a little bit clunky because the Montpelier Senior Activity Center, we are operated through the city of Montpelier, but we only get that percentage of funding that we get. And for whatever consolation of reasons, they just never incorporated the financing. We get the funding from the Council on Aging, which has been pretty static. You know, I think a couple of years ago we got a 40% increase. It was, yay, 40 cents, but you know, still nothing close to what we need. But they're limited because it's federal funding. And so there's only so much. There are lots of people working really hard at the state and federal level to advocate for an increase to that funding. So if you ever want to plug into that, please do. But it's static funding. So the city just, it's sort of only, you know, we're not roads. We're not DPW. We're not fire. We're not police. We're the Montpelier Senior Activity Center. And so I think it's going to be a long, slow journey for the city to understand the full value of the community services that we provide. If I were a Montpelier resident, however, and I qualified for Meals on Wheels, you would provide it for me. Absolutely. Yes. And you do. And we do. And so there's 20 Berlin residents coming to Montpelier. Yep. So we currently have 65 clients. So we have, I guess if you divide that, it's about 45 Montpelier residents who receive Meals on Wheels, about 20 who receive Meals from Berlin. And then that's not including all the Meals that we serve at the congregate Meals. Yeah. So it's not including. Correct. Yeah. And that just simply varies. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So I wondered if you could explain why you couldn't ask for this money at the normal time. Yes. Instead of making us have a special... I know. And I'm really sorry about that. It was a combination of reasons. My first time through the town funding process, my boss was new at the time. And so I didn't quite have the oversight to know what timing I needed to get the signatures done by. So, and then I got really sick and then I didn't have the volunteers that I needed lined up. And so I missed the deadline. Long and short of it, human error. I'm happy to say that we've got really strong plans for the next go round. We will not be making you do this again. We already have the volunteers all lined up for going up to get the petitions in advance next time. It will not be any of the helm. I'm actually leaving my position at the end of June, but I'm setting everyone up for success next time. So how many meals are we actually providing with the $20,000? I mean, there's the Berlin residence, but then there's the Wall Street residence, and how many others are there? Yeah. It's a great question. There are also many provided meals through this $21,000. Yeah. So, and just to clarify, the funding from Berlin, it comes into the pot for MSAC. And some of that supports fees. Some of that supports our basic operations. Roughly said, though, and I wish I'd brought that form with me. I did the math. Someone has a calculator. Did you do the math? Is this the form? That's one version of it. Yeah. I don't know if that would help you. Yeah, it might help you. Yes, it actually does. Okay, yeah. So it's 6,700 meals for Berlin residents annually. And that's a guesstimate based on, or a rough guess based on how many clients that we serve getting seven meals a week. But not all of those are Berlin residents. Those are Berlin residents. So annually. So a couple of things happened. We have our contract with the Central Vermont Council in aging is to provide 14,500 meals a year at that $3.80 reimbursement. The pandemic happened and the need for meals increased. Frankly, not only economic need, but also a wide variety of reasons. More folks moving to our community who had need. Some folks who were unhoused who had need. There was a really big influx of clients and we maybe cared too much. And so we said yes to a lot of people and we wound up serving over 20,000 meals last year. So we are currently trying to reduce that number because we don't have a guarantee that we'll get reimbursement from the council in aging. So we're trying to reduce back to 14,500 meals, which doesn't mean taking away any Berlin residents. It's more that we have to sort of rebalance. The big thing that shifted with the pandemic is when the pandemic hit at the federal level, I'm not sure if it was through the Older Americans Act or who exactly ruled this out, but the qualification to receive meals on wheels expanded. It opened wide. It basically said anyone over the age of 60 who needs access to meals. Wide open. So we saw lots more people coming in the doors. And then as of April 1st, a month and a half ago, it came down, nope, not anymore. The restriction is you have to be homebound and there's a number of sort of like poverty index, qualifications, and so we're in the process of doing reassessments with all of our clients. Some are coming off anyway. We're about to actually meeting tomorrow with Twin Valley over in Plainfield, Eastmont failure. They have a new chef. They want to take on some of our meals that'll help us reduce back. So we're trying to get ourselves into a more sustainable situation and your funding will help us with that. Does that answer your question? Yeah, how many meals were you serving to like the hotel people over here? It was pretty minimal. I think we at one point, maybe the most clients we had was five, but it shifted kind of every month and some of those clients were coming in through the Vermont Center for Independent Living. And so those are for clients that are under 60 who qualify through all the different ways you qualify for VCIL support. We serve meals on wheels to VCIL clients. So a number of those folks were through VCIL, but I think at the most we had five. So now that the state's closing those down, that's not going to make a big difference for you both? It probably isn't. And again, the qualifications for meals on wheels have tightened so much that I don't know how much we can help with that situation. Yeah. I thought that people could get meals on wheels and pay for it. So that is something where actually we haven't, yes, and we cannot charge for our meals. For our meals, it's a federal stipulation of receiving the money that we get. We cannot charge for our meals on wheels if someone qualifies. However. Well, I'm telling you, that's someone who doesn't qualify. Right, right, right. So that's actually the model we're shifting to. So because of the restrictions shifting and tightening, we're looking at the possibility of being able to sell medically tailored meals is how we're framing it. So our meals are cooked to the specifications of the Older Americans Act. So there's strict dietary guidelines, low sodium, high protein, whatever. You have to ask my chef for the actual information. But we cook them to that standard and our chef is trained in how to create medically tailored meals. So say you just got out of the hospital and you need a renal diet or a diabetic diet or a vegetarian diet. We do vegetarian and diabetic meals now, but there was something more restricted. We can make those meals for sale. Our challenge right now is that we don't have enough funding to hire a lead cook to prepare those meals right now. So we're kind of in a waiting time to be able to achieve the amount of funding we need through some grants that we're working on to be able to hire that lead cook so we have enough capacity to make meals for sale. But yes, you're right. If someone wants to receive meals on meals but does not qualify, they can certainly purchase them. Any other questions for Sarah? Yes. Have you looked, because you say all money given goes in a park? Yeah. Okay. Have you looked at other means of stopping other opportunities or other classes or whatever that maybe didn't fly well or whatever? Sure. The good news is we don't have any classes that aren't flying well. We don't have enough students taking classes because people still aren't returning back from the pandemic. What we're doing to, we're doing a whole lot of things. So we're reducing costs for Feast by soon we're going to be shifting over to three days a week, three out of the four days a week that we deliver meals on meals, they'll go back to, we're going back to what we used to do which is reusable trays instead of wasting a lot of money on non-reusable trays. So that's one reduction. We're partnering with Bob Woodard at the very, I forget what it's called, hotel meals on meals, very meals on meals program which I can't remember the name, City Hotel Cafe. So we're working on partnering with him to do cost reductions in bulk purchasing together. So that's one area. Another area as I mentioned is essentially giving clients that are extra for us to Twin Valley to have meals made for. And some other sort of cost-saving measures. And one really, really beautiful one we have which I forgot to mention is the parks department launched a farm for us a number of years ago, three years ago called the Feast Farm and that grows five to ten thousand pounds of free produce for us. So we have beautiful, locally produced, organic produce in our meals throughout the year because we work really hard to put it away for the winter and use it all year. So there's a lot of, we also work very closely with the community harvest of Central Vermont and their local folks for you. So we incorporate five to ten thousand pounds of produce from them as well. So we've got all of those kinds of cost-saving things and then the other side of things is how do we bring in revenue. So again, we're looking at medically tailored meals to be able to sell meals to clients and we will certainly be reaching out to Berlin residents for that and through CVMC and other areas to see if we can come up with some partnerships that will allow us to really, in collaboration, that will allow us to sell some meals and of course we do tons of work with grants and sponsors and looking for sponsors for events and programs and meals and all of that and then the other really big campaign that we're launching is a membership renewal campaign. So pre-pandemic we had about fifteen hundred members. Right now we have five hundred. Where'd everybody go? So we're working really hard to bring folks back in. Part of what happened is in 2020 we decided before I was there but we decided, you know what? It's the pandemic. We're not going to do a membership renewal. So I think people got out of the habit of being a member but it hurt us financially. So we're working on bringing that back and doing a shift and asking folks who can become a patron to become a patron and give it a higher level. We're also looking at shifting how we price our programs, our classes. We, before the pandemic we had seventy-five classes. I don't know how they did it per semester. And we have to pay our instructors but we never charged that much for classes. We charge about two dollars and fifty cents per class. It's crazy. You can't pay instructors and make your ends meet on that. So I'm working on shifting that before I head out to make not only it possible to pay our teachers an equitable salary but some of our instructors are volunteers which is amazing but some need the salary they get from teaching but also make sure that we've got income coming in to support the finances of the center. So how do you get, to be honest with you, how do you get information about the CAC? We have a website with all the information on it and it's on this if you want to pick one up, they're over there. Okay. Is the website listed? Oh, Valley. The website's not on there. Well that doesn't help. So you go to the city of Montpelier Montpelier-bt.org and it's a backslash Montpelier Senior Activity Center. We have a weekly e-letter we've got monthly newsletter chock full of information we work really hard to be super transparent about all the things and sort of engage the community I think the real shift in our community is that in the past a senior center type place was a service to the community type of place and I think the shift now is we need to be buying for the community so we need you to tell us what you want and help us make it happen. Yeah. Don't take this the wrong way but Berlin is a small town. Yep. Do you have any figures of other communities that you serve and other communities that you ask for money? Yep. And how does Berlin fit in there for dollar wise for the other communities? Yeah, sure. So we receive support from East Montpelier, Callis, Worcester, Middlesex and Moortown and this year unfortunately I missed the Middlesex funding process for the same reason I missed yours but from I think the next highest amount we get is from East Montpelier because we're a very high population of members from East Montpelier and we're able to track all the data of who's taking our classes, who's coming to congregate meals, who's coming to our drop-in groups and so in order to calculate how much we ask from each town we look at how much traffic is coming in from each town. So I probably don't have it all completely in my brain. $21,000 that you're asking for tracks for 20 people, 20 members? No, it's not the entire story because that's just the meals on wheels that we serve. We also serve a lot of your residents through our classes, through our drop-in groups and I don't have that at my fingertips but I can certainly share that information. So we're looking at the total not only meals served to whom, from where but also classes engaged in to whom from where. So could you give me a layout of every community and what they... that's what I would like to do and what they... I can give you my email address and you can send me a message or I can get that to you. I can easily do that. I just can't do it for the second. The other thing, forgive me if I ask another question that was asked before about my hearing. For the town of Berlin, why wasn't this on the ballot back then at the town meeting? So I did already explain that but I... human error, it was my... I did hear you say that. Now, having said that when we all get done here and we're gone and we're coming back to vote tomorrow night? How many people are going to vote? Well, I suspect probably 30 or 40. But what's the... what's the ratio that is going to go? It's just like one over half or... I'm going to... This is no way to actually do this kind of thing. It's just information. Right, right. But I'm saying to take it out of the context and... It's not at her fault. But when we have something like this and even to vote, do you expect you're going to get the same number of people? No. Absolutely not. State law says if two people... if three people show up and two people vote for something, that's... And to me, I'm not...is there some way... This is to you. Is there some way that we can say, no, let's not do this? Because again, we're not touching the whole town of Berlin when we...tonight, we're not. Tomorrow night at the vote we're certainly not going home. But yet we're going to vote, you know, just say eight people show up and seven vote, yes. Well, that's what you get. I know. You get that when we don't follow normal procedures. This happens in most towns. They always forget. Okay, but I am in this room and I don't care about most towns. I really don't. Well, we're like most towns for that reason. East Montpelier did this with the Kellogg Hubbard Library. There was a misstep and they went through the same thing. And I will say that in order to get this meeting we went out and we collected signatures and we had, I think, 132 signatures, but more than that signed, but 132 valid signatures of people, so there's that Berlin voter, so there's that much awareness from the people that we met and signed. But I'll bet you out of that 132 with those people that signed it, 10 will show up. We have a lot, we've been connecting with all of our members, our meals and meals clients, as well as Corinne, I can't think of her last name. Who does the Berlin need to know? Yeah. So we've been posted there and from first form I think I had a bunch of people approaching, so. I just don't think this is the routine to go because 21,000 for the services and I'm not sure are we getting $21,000 worth of those services? If you want a perspective on the cost of the meals that we provide to your clients this just barely scratches the surface. It costs us about $95,000 to serve your 20 residents. Really? $95,000? Go play special My lord. Well, we have to pay our staff an equitable rate. That's what it's doing. It's helping to pay for staff, meals and everything that goes into that. So the support that we get from your town helps us to be able to ensure those meals. And if we can't supply We'll still serve them but we will be strapped and that's just the reality. I'm just curious about all the other towns it just seems like Berlin is getting a big trunk. Because we don't serve meals to anyone else. We do not serve meals on wheels to anyone else other than Berlin and Montpelier. So that's why the funding from Berlin is a higher request than any of our other supporting towns. To me that's not right just because we don't have that many people that do the meals on wheels but yet we need to pay more than the other municipalities and they probably got more people involved in the meals on wheels than Berlin does. Well, yeah because our meals on wheels clients only come from Berlin and Montpelier. We don't serve meals on wheels to anybody outside of Montpelier or Berlin. That's our contract with the council on aging. Correct. Okay. It's befalling but... It's complex. It is what it is. It's a complex system. I've heard rumors that there may someday be a meals on wheels site here in Berlin but we're not there yet. And in that time and place then we'll shift away from offering your meals on wheels and those will shift over and our town funding request will change. So, and historically we've been serving your meals on wheels and we operate even though we're part of the municipality of Montpelier we operate essentially as a non-profit because we don't have full funding. Do you get funding from Montpelier? We do but it only accounts for about not quite 25% of our budget which only accounts for core staff salaries and benefits which does not include increased staff salaries which is why the meals cost... That's a severe process of voting on their voting day. Yeah. And do you remember what the figure was that you asked for Montpelier? Yep, so for many many years we received about 134,000 for years and then two years ago when I came in as director I shifted it up I got an increase to 154,000 and this coming year starting July 1st we're getting 185 which is historic but still doesn't cover feast. Roughly figuring how many Montpelier residents take advantage of about 1,500. Okay. Any other questions for Sarah? There's another financial issue here and that is how much is it costing the town of Berlintet have this vote? Would you be... I know we all got postcards. Yeah, I didn't bring the dollar amount with me but my estimate would be probably right around $2,000. We did get postcards for everyone advertising in the newspaper trying to cut costs by using paper ballots instead of the ballot counting machine so it'll all be hand count. Trying to save money where we can but it is an added expense. Of course it isn't an option but we have this or not because the petitioners came in and that required the select work to call the meeting. Another question. The congregate meals, those are purchased meals. They're not necessarily meals on meals. There might be some people... Some people can't pay and that's fine. Those meals are also subsidized at $3.80 per older adult. Who fails out a nutrition survey, we can get reimbursement for that. We do ask for a donation at the door of about $10 if folks can. Some people are more generous than that, others can't be. And that's fine. $10 per meal. Which still isn't the cost of the meal but it helps. It's a tricky one. Honestly, I don't know whoever designed this program just didn't think it all through I think. It's substantial. It's substantial and it's also continuously growing because if you think about it not only have groceries actual products to make meals increase but we now have to pay a fuel surcharge with every bill that I sign for a delivery a shipment of food there's a fuel surcharge. It just keeps going up. And the fresh products that you were speaking of you do not have a cost correct. Which is great. We do a lot of fundraising work to support the parks department so they can run the farm and we have starting June 21st you're all invited. We have on Wednesday morning starting June 21st from 9 to 10 30 we'll be having our annual second annual feast farm stand so that'll be every Wednesday morning and though produce is for sale for a dollar or something ridiculous beautiful fresh farm produce available with music and good sound. Anybody else? Once the question is over we're done except we need a motion to adjourn. I so will. And is there a second? You can second it. All in favor of adjourning say aye and those opposed no. Meeting adjourned voting begins tomorrow here at 10 o'clock.