 20th are here for your approval. I'm looking for a motion. I'd move to approve the minutes for October 20, 2020 with any amendments. Let me see your second. I'll second. Page one. Page two. I do have one small correction under number six. The next to last line, it talks about to address perpetual affordability, convents, it should be covenants. We used to have a convent in town. And also, page two, page three. There are no other corrections or laws in favor of approving the minutes of October 20th, 2022. Raise your hand. One, two, three, which is all we needed and Ted's abstaining because you are here. Okay. Moving on to the minutes then of October 26, 2020. Is there a motion? I'll move to approve the minutes of October 26 with any amendments or changes as noted. Is there a second? Second. Page one. The only page looks like there is under item number three, the very last line. There's an extraneous word on. Yep, I must have forgot my sentence there. I'll just delete on. Go ahead of myself. Anything else on the only page? If not, all those in favor of approving the minutes of October 26, 2020. Raise your hand. One, two, three, four. We've done it. Very good. Public comment. Eric, is there anyone on the line that's indicated they wish to make any public comment on any item? I checked earlier and I just typed in again to see if anyone would like to make a public comment. It doesn't appear so at this time. Nobody on the line? Okay. Then we'll move on then to regional dispatch. Capital cost share. Eric, you're on. I think the two chiefs are going to join us remotely. Chief Oli and Chief Collette. Yep, I'll get the chiefs connected here. Then I can walk the board through this and I'll ask both chiefs to join this evening at the board as questions about dispatch operations that the chiefs could have made and answered the questions here. So I'll just get them connected. All right. Good evening, chief. And I have chief Oli's on the other line here, too. Good evening. So I'll introduce to the board back at the end of October. It's continuing the regional dispatch discussion. The Chittenden County Public Safety Authority is continuing this conversation about how to stand up a regional dispatch center to serve communities in the region. The CCPSA board chair has asked for each member of municipality to provide an update at the November 9th meeting coming up next week on the participation for capital investment in the outfit cost of the dispatch center for next fiscal year. There's a space in the dispatch center found in the same facility that houses the South Burlington Police Department and that will soon be owned by the city of South Burlington. And looking at what Wilson's cost share would be, it would be $34,000 at this stage based on an assessment of average calls for service the last three years among these member municipalities. There would be needed additional capital investment in the future, including technology and the CCPSA is exploring grants and other financing tools available for those phases. If we were to advance with this and a financing tool like a lease purchase was used, the debt service would be shared among member municipalities. We're not there yet, but that's something that would like be coming up down the road. I would staff here and regional dispatch remains a good option for the town to consider moving forward. Participation in the building up that costs provides a space capacity for Wilson to receive potentially police and fire dispatch service in the future. To move forward with contracting for the service, the when and if available, it would require an agreement between the town and the public safety authority which the board would approve at a future time for consideration. So we've looked at this $34,000 would be able to be funded using the fund balance. This winter I'm tasking a staff committee to explore all options for Wilson and fire police dispatch moving forward, including regional to then report back to the select board. So this evening I'm looking if the board has consensus on any level participation of towns willing to commit at this juncture if the board wishes to provide that guidance at this time. So I could inform my report to the CCPSA board as the town's representative this coming Monday. And I've got both chiefs here this evening to answer any questions the board has. So questions from the members of the board for Eric or for the chiefs. So Eric, I'm on page two or three of your memo. Second paragraph, last sentence, where you talk about their legal mechanisms, we could explore to recoup this capital investment. And could you just expand on that or? Yeah, what I was thinking there, yeah, maybe just the right word with the legal mechanism, but I was thinking more of a contract agreement and I had a kind of preliminary conversation with some folks on the board about this. If they have a time besides down the road that police dispatch wasn't the right fit for CCPSA. And we've made this initial investment in order to have that capacity available, should we want to do that in the future? There be the way for the town to recoup those funds. If, for example, we found another partner municipality to take essentially our spot in our capacity and then they would pay us back for that. Okay, I see. Some ideas considered perhaps. Yeah, okay. Well, I'll just point out my initial and emphasis on initial thoughts are, it sounds like we've spent about 10K so far, participating in the work so far and that I'm comfortable with, but once we start to get up around 34,000 without knowing whether this is the avenue we're going to pursue is when I start to get uncomfortable. So just throw that out or see how others feel. That's a fairly sizable investment for the town to make. If we aren't sure, this is the avenue we want to pursue. So we suspect that the legislature will allow the public department of public safety to charge towns for dispatching, which they're currently not doing. And presumably within it could happen within the next year, not this July, but probably the following July, if it's going to happen. That would be about $30,000, just to give us essentially the same service we have right now. So is a regional dispatch something that we continue to support? And if it is, maybe this is the amount we have to put into it. Other thoughts? I support the concept. I like the concept. It isn't that. It's just the concept of spending this kind of money with at this point, not a lot of confidence. I don't know what the right words are. Sorry. That's still with these select board meetings at seven. I'm tired, but without the risk risk and there's risk that will lose that. And that support that makes me uncomfortable. Could I ask the chiefs to weigh in on this? Is it their hope that we do ultimately use this service? Because that would be something I'd be curious about. Sure. Let's go to chief Oley first. You're muted, chief. Very good. Sorry about that. Regional dispatch, if it's done properly, can work. That being said, is that we've already been involved in this for three years now. And we're still in the early planning stages. I ran a central dispatch, Donald Windsor, when I was the chief down there quite a few years ago, 13 agencies in two states. And if it's done properly, it does work very well. My concern is that we have an established daytime dispatch. Dispatch is no the area very well, no landmarks and all that. And to join another entity where there's a lot unknowns, I feel it takes away. We're going to pay somebody else to do our dispatch. We still need somebody in this building to answer the nonessential emergency phone calls. When the pandemic goes away, we still have a lot of walk-ins. We do a lot of fingerprinting. We do a lot of record requests. We have a CJC in the building. So there's a lot of variables for us to be operational. We have free dispatching services at night time. We know the commissioner of public safety is looking at tasking or making those communities not paying right now, pay their fair share. And I know the legislation wants to take a look at that before any fees are taken. But I think myself and the time manager and the fight chief had meetings. I think if that $34,000 gives us a seat at the table to protect our interests, that's all well and good. But I think we need to look at the other two possibilities is that we have a standalone dispatch within this building. Expand our daytime dispatching to a 24-hour day, seven days a week service. Look at what the charges could be with the state police. I believe we could do that type of service here. And probably at a lesser cost than what we would probably end up paying if we joined a regional. But I think we need to look at all the variables before we make a concrete decision. We might end up in a regional dispatch. But we still need somebody in this building Monday through Friday, at least from eight o'clock in the morning to five o'clock in the afternoon to answer all our incoming traffic. So I will say that I think fire situation is a little bit different. We contract out to what one could say is essentially a regional dispatch of sorts now with Shelburne dispatch, understanding that they have a number of agencies there, up to 30 plus agencies, I believe, that they're dispatching for. I see the value in regional dispatch in that the services that you get and the quality of services that you get all have some correlation and importance for us, specifically the ability to get resources on scene. And so in a fire situation, such as the one we had today, the dispatch center has to call up to five other agencies. So that's five physical phone calls that that dispatch center had to make to different agencies. That's not including the agencies that they dispatch for. So five phone calls at 30 plus seconds or 45 seconds, that's quite a bit of time to wait in a delay to get those resources. So if you house them all in a single building with a single agency, then and you had control over that, you could eliminate a lot of risk, you could eliminate a lot of time and have quicker response and ensure quicker resources are going to get there. With that also comes some advancement, you know, looking down the road, as far as town manager Wells know, I believe in data and data helps drive need and shows the importance of how we're going to advance our town or our fire department and make sure we can protect our community. And right now, we need to start working on that. And if we don't start collecting accurate response times, accurate numbers, we'll get a service for sure. But I think the importance of a regional dispatch will allow us to bring a professional level of service to record data and times and numbers and get people on scene quickly. So the fire department speak, you know, is fully in support of a regional dispatch center. And I think the chief fully's point about looking at it here in our own town to evolve that there's still going to be operational costs. There'll be the cost for a computerated dispatch and the like. And so you could either we could bear those on our own shoulders and build, you know, some sort of a silo of dispatch, or we could share that amongst the group and build it out together as a system. So I would advocate for the system. Thank you. Chief Collette. Hey, Jeff here. Could you? How are you? Could you talk about the issue that Chief Foley was talking about, which is, you know, the concept of knowing our community versus a regional dispatch, which probably wouldn't know our community nearly as well. Yeah. And so I think, you know, the best answer for this, Jeff, is actually, if you look at the 911 system as a whole, when you call a public service answering point, they don't necessarily know exactly where the Smith farm is. They don't know that. But through technology and through their advancements, they're able to do that. There are a lot of resources that we could use in that regional model that I think that it's not a big fear for me, especially in a way the fire departments operate in this mutual aid system as we know it. So when the address comes out, you know, as you know, I'm new to the community. But when an address comes in, I could simply, it pops up in my car on my tablet and shows me turn-by-turn directions to that location. I can look into the computer. I can see overhead imaging, and it will show me what that site looks like, what that building looks like. It shows me my nearest water supplies. So to that end, I think technology and the local resources, you know, the institutional knowledge and the knowledge that the incumbents have at the fire department or the police department helps guide that. Good. And Chief Foley, could you talk about, Chief Colette talked about the concept of the time delay. You know, you get these five calls and each one adds time delay. Are you experiencing the same issue with using the state police for dispatch? No, no. Again, you know, they're basically, you know, at night time. It's, it's, certain nights are a lot busier than others. But yeah, again, the officers know where they're going to be going. You know, it's not where it's a guessing game and scratch your head and try to decide, you know, what streets you are. The thing is, is that we are different than in the fire service because if we're going on a call and we need mutual aid, we just, you know, call, you know, who's ever dispatching is a daytime dispatcher or evening dispatcher with the state police and ask them to send, you know, additional help. And they know, you know, where the call is going to be going, which agency, you know, are going to respond. The only issue is, is that after 1.30 in the morning, we're the only full-time police agency south of, of this Chittenden County. You know, Richmond is not 24 hours, there's nobody in Bolton. You get, you get to go all the way down to Stowe before you pick up another full-time agency. So again, we're a little different. I understand what Chief Collette says, you know, you know, to make multiple calls. It'd be nice if, you know, when, if we do end up going to a regional dispatch, you know, everything will be in one computer system. So if he, like today, he called for a second alarm, depending how they're going to have their matrix set up. If it says second alarm on, you know, Oak Creamy Road and Knott Hill, you know, that dispatch, you can bring that up and should be zoned out or, you know, quadrant out and says, okay, your second alarm companies will be X, Y, and Z. They hit one tone button and everybody comes without making single, you know, five different phone calls. That's why I say is that a regional dispatch can work, but we've been here so long as our own individual dispatch, we should look at all the variables to see what the final course would be. Other questions, comments? Eric, so the consensus or opinion that you want from the board tonight is whether or not we're going to go forward with this for one more year and, and then that would be the $30,000 that we'd need to invest in the capacity of the building. Yeah, kind of looking for this next phase here of capital investment. And today we've invested money as the municipality and the consultant study saying what it would take to get this up and running. And now the Public Safety Authority is looking to put those startup costs in place. So this sets up the building space, but it's just one phase and multiple to get the technology in the center up and running. And then we would ultimately need to decide whether we want to contract, receive the services from the center. But it's that type of thing where we're building this from the ground up. We have a seat at the table on the government's board. But if as we start to just point earlier, if we start putting some real money and capital investment into this and build that capacity, what's kind of our thought down the road? And the town's looked at this the last few years with the fire and policing needs with fire already being contracted through Shelburne and receiving the free service from state police for half of the time for us here on the police side. Kind of what's that longer term goal for us? And I don't know what I want to do this winter is take a closer look at that. But at this point, the CCPSA board is trying to plan ahead for what it can budget for its next fiscal year as well. So if we gave you the word tonight, that would commit us to spending that money? We would have to have it approved in in our FY 22 budget. I think what the board is looking for for direction from the member municipalities that we're interested in making this investment, but ultimately we would need to have it approved in our FY 22 budget to move ahead there. And if we went ahead and said, yes, this is something we'd be interested in, but then later decided not to use it, there is a chance we'd be able to recoup some of this because we could sell our seat at the table, so to speak. I talked to that preliminarily with another manager and it sounded interesting to look to set up a potential arrangement like that. We could, if the board wanted, pursue that a little more detail before we wanted to commit these funds and see what the public safety authority full board would think of that. I could bring that to them Monday to get some feedback on that piece. Thank you. Other comments or questions? I'm not exactly sure where we're at as far as the board goes for a consensus on this issue. Eric, what pot of money would this come out of? I would recommend we use the fund balance for this. We have a lot of funds there. Okay. One of the factors I think we can't ignore when we're trying to come to a consensus here is we do know we're going into a budget year which is going to have some difficulties because the current budget was around $500,000 underfunded right now, not underfunded, but revenues are not expected. I just feel I would be remiss not to mention that. That's our best guess at this point and as for the rest of the fiscal year, it's a total guess as well. Yeah and we're looking at, if I remember correctly, I mean the thought is to actually reduce the expenditures in next year's budget where what we're talking about tonight is a $34,000 increase. Do you want to make sure I got that correct? Well possibly. We'll be discussing budget all of December and January to figure out if we can what we have to expend in the next year and try to keep the tax rate at a reasonable level. So that's going to be a big guess. Okay. I was going to say if the board doesn't want to provide that level of fiscal guidance at this point, I can report back to the CCPSA board one day that we the board like to wait until we go through the budget process in more detail as well. That was going to be one of my questions. Are other municipalities in the same boat? We are kind of realizing why you would do it and why you want to continue your seat at the table. But on the other hand, there are some fiscal constraints. They are, but I would say the other four towns on the board have vocalized a commitment to making this this investment at this stage. But certainly our needs are a little different with the policing side that we've had all along with the state police question as well. Okay. And at some point it could be a hybrid approach for the town down the road where we do the regional dispatch for fire operations, but then police operations have a different approach. Yeah. Eric, I'm going to reach back to a point that was made earlier. So if we were to reach a consensus to move this forward this evening and decided at budget time that we wanted to recoup those costs, is there a percentage that we could get back? I think at this point, we would be making that transfer out of the FY 22 budget. And that budget isn't approved at this point. So I would say if the board wanted me to go to the CCPSA board and say, hey, we're willing to commit these funds, but we want to have an agreement in place for us to get these funds back should we decide not to contract with one or two of our public safety agencies. See what their reaction is there, have a little more detailed conversation. And I could bring that back to the select board and see how the board would like to proceed. Yeah, it just seems like a pretty big variable out there for not knowing. Can we prolong the agony until the CCPSA board that we're still celebrating this? I'm not sure we'll know anything more in two weeks or a month. I can report that back to the board. I can have a conversation with the chair as well this week just to just can we play out? I'll try to be quick. A quick scenario, which would be just hypothetically, let's say on November the 9th, you tell the consensus of the select board is we want to move head. But then during the budget process, this cost gets cut. What would happen then? I think I would have to go back to the CCPSA board and tell them what Wilson has decided not to include this in his FY22 budget, then the board would have to decide how it would want to proceed to make up that funding amongst the other municipalities. And part of it would also be looking at what Wilson's capacity would be at that point if it wasn't providing the buy in capital money at that stage. I guess part of my point is this, it would seem to me that the regional dispatch board or the I'm sorry the CCPSA board would recognize that it's putting a town like Wilson in an awkward position heading into asking for a commitment for this money before we head into the budget process where we would decide if that money is available or not. Sure. I expect my fellow board members would certainly understand that position. Okay. I'm not sure why other boards, other town boards wouldn't be in the same position that we are in. I know for example, I think the town of Colchester has a public communications reserve fund they put in place a number of years ago and I think they're intending to use those funds for as one example. Okay. So where are we as far as what we're going to tell? The consensus if we don't want to say anything. The safest thing to do is say we have a made a decision and we'll get back to you. Which is also true. Yeah. Is that agreeable with all four of us? Yeah. Does that work for you, Eric? Yeah. I'll relate that on Monday and I'll have a conversation with the chair this week too. Great. And I can report back to the board after our meeting on Monday. Okay. We'll move on to Bill Hinman and errors and omissions for 2020. We do have a document. Thank you, Chiefs. Appreciate it being here. Thank you. So when Bill Hinman is ready, we're ready for you there. Okay. And we have two things for Bill tonight. One is the first one is the errors and omissions document, which we do every year. It looks like he's just connecting Terry, I think. Bill, if you can hear me, just need your camera and unmute. Not sure if you can, if you can, there we go. All right. Welcome, Bill. You're muted right now. You're still muted, Bill. There you go. All right. Good. Sorry about that. I'm creating you with this. There we go. All right. So errors and omissions, stop me if you can, if you have questions as we go. The first three that we have, or first, excuse me, two that we have have to do with a new property on Chum Pike Road, which is a self storage unit. A couple years ago, we added self storage unit winter sport lane LLC. And I'm not the best expert on the commercial database. So the first one, when we have changes, we usually consult with our consultant Russ Bowdoin. But this looked pretty easy. And I put it in as a mini warehouse and or put it in as a storage garage where it should have been in as a mini warehouse. HDA properties brought this up to our attention at grievances, at which time I told him that we would start looking into it, which we did. And now we have found that we need to make a couple of adjustments. One, two winter sport lane LLC to turn it from storage garage to winning warehouse. And the same thing for HDA properties LLC. That would now be in line with the other mini storage units that are in town that were done for the reappraisal where Russ had assigned the type of building correctly. So Bill Jeff here. Yep. It sounds to me like the mini warehouse has less value, I don't know if it's per square foot or per whatever, than the storage garage does. That is correct. Okay. What I did, Jeff, is I looked back and there's several other properties in town that have these type of facilities and I looked at those and those were done as mini warehouse buildings. So we need to be consistent with these two as well. So everybody's being treated equally. I absolutely agree with that. Okay. Okay. All right. Good. Thank you. Okay. It's second one has to do with the Robeir property. Pigeon farm properties purchased a portion of the Robeir property. Ignificent portion of that land. Almost all of it is wetlands that they purchased, but they did a boundary line adjustment, which we did not catch up on until now. And so there's just a, it's a housekeeping thing for the most part to to adjust that or put in that 19.7 acres as wetlands with one acre that appears to be available a lot, which is part of that lot line adjustment. And then the second one was another lot line adjustment for access to that property. Okay. Okay. The third one was on us. We missed an adjustment to Patrick and Wendy revocable trust the birds. And we needed to make a correction, a very small one, but we needed to recognize that there was a small error there. Another boundary line adjustment for 2.8 acres, 1.8 acres to be reflected as excess and not as an additional vacant house site. The property owner came to us and showed us that they have deferral permit for that land, which means it's not buildable. And so we can't treat as they can have site. Okay. This was a grievance that did not get transferred over. And I'm not sure if it was Dick or myself that missed it. Again, a pretty small one, only $6,760. But again, we need to try and correct it where we need to correct it. And then the last three are simply name, name address adjustments, which don't involve any dollars at all. Okay. So any further questions on this for Bill? Looks pretty straightforward. It does. The last page shows the total impact to the town of $1,534.25. Okay. Bill, just a quick question. This is independent of any increase we would see in the grand list just due to sales, new construction, that type of thing. Right. This is simply catching up with the mess during the maintenance of the grand list. I just never like to see the negatives, but in this case, we have to. Me either, Jeff. Usually I come in here with a positive. Okay. Any other questions for Bill? Can I be looking for a motion? Move to approve the corrections to the 2020 grand list as proposed by the listeners. Sir, a second. A second. Second by Gordon. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor of the motion raise your hand. One, two, three, four. Very good. So Bill, you're on now for the grand list potential COVID-19 impacts. Yeah. This is something that I go to bed with at night and wake up within the morning. It's, it is, it's spent a lot of time on it. I'm actually going to be attending a seminar on the eighth and ninth of December held by the Iowa Department of Revenue on specifically COVID-19 and commercial impacts. So I certainly could be gaining a lot more knowledge from a lot of experts during that seminar. But for Williston, this could be significant. I'm not going to, I'm not going to wash it or try to color what it's not. We potentially could be looking at if worst case scenario comes through roughly 50 plus million dollars lost in the grand list. And that what, where I get that number from is looking at the cinemas, looking at the hotels, looking at office space, and looking at restaurant and retail. Those are the four areas that we really could be looking at some grievances and people coming in. We had one this year for the hotel that never opened and the board of civil authority acted on that and changed the value significantly to assist them because in part they were never eligible for PPP or a very, very small amount of PPP. Whereas the other hotels and operations within the community were eligible for that money. So we didn't see them come in for grievances. This coming year, I think we're going to be seeing a completely different situation. Best case scenario and Eric, and this is my hope, is that our increases from the different projects in town that are under construction and being finished by whether the residential or commercial is going to be roughly 25 million dollars. If we can lose that much, then we're even, you know, our grand list doesn't increase at all. So we'd have to deal with, you know, any excess spending through the tax rate. But again, I think that's probably very optimistic. There is another side of the coin, but I want to stay on this to start with. I've explored, Jenny Lyons asked me during the BCA hearing, Jenny Lyons asked me to do some soul searching, some looking as to what solutions Wilson could be looking for. One of those solutions is potentially asking our legislature to treat these commercial operations much like they treat residential property owners on an income basis. Each residential property owner in town has an income limit as far as what they're allowed to spend on taxes and they receive what's called the state payment on our tax bills. What I think would make a lot of sense is to have the same type of application process for the commercial operations within the state of Vermont and allow them to as well get some type of relief through a state payment that reduces what their liability is. What that would involve, however, would be the legislature to freeze all assessments in the state of Vermont for 2021 because you can't change assessments and then get a state payment. It's either or either or, not both. So with that, I'll turn it over to questions. Then I have one other thing I need to talk about with regards to COVID. Well, I think you might have just answered my question, which is why is it that these industries, the hotels, the restaurants, I forget what else you mentioned, the four that we expected. If people are going to be coming in with decreased values, you know, the 50 million, what is it that causes those, what factors causes their assessed values to go down so drastically? So that's a really good question, Jeff. One of it has to do with occupancy and the vacancy ratios that you're looking at. The cinema, I'll give you an example for the cinema. We don't know if there's a loss in market value to this cinema, but the only stuff I can put my finger on is that cinemas now, their market capitalization is 25% of what it was pre COVID. So that means that literally these operations are worth 25% of what they were previously. And that's got to impact market value of the real estate. The other part of it, I'll give you an example. Downtown Burlington, there is a office space currently available for $130 a square foot. That is unheard of and it's vacant. And so the real problem we're running into here is two fold. Number one, that we can identify that these values are going down. But the problem is, is we don't have the sales because there's not a bank out there that's going to lend money on an office space or a cinema or a retail or a hotel because they don't have any cash flow. And so we don't have the sales to be able to say, oh, this one is down 20% or 10%. So it puts us in a difficult quandary in another respect. And I'll get to that in a few minutes because it has to do with our common level of assessment. Oh boy. So can us homeowners come in and claim the same thing? So yes, actually, because of what the way I have our income sensitivity set up, if you as a homeowner earn significantly less during the calendar year of 2020, then your state payment on your 2021 tax bill is going to be much less because your state payment is going to go up significantly. Okay. But I can't come in and ask for my property to be reassessed at a lower value because I can't sell it. Nobody will get a loan to buy it. I'm going to actually, I'm going to get to that in a few seconds, Jeff. I guess I want Marshall site first before we start talking about the residential site. That's another question. Other questions for Bill? I guess you can proceed on the next topic. Okay. The next topic is going to impact potentially the residential side. We have seen a wave and I mean a large wave of property sale, residential property sales that have been way higher than what they had been pre COVID. We had a sale in I think two weeks ago that was the assessment was 70% of the sale price. And I had another one was 75, 77. We're seeing a lot of these. And so what's going to happen to us is that as a result of the equalization study, not this year, but starting next year, our CLA is going to drop like a rock. And what that does is it increases the residential tax rate on all the property owners here in Wilston. And that could be significant because it's, you know, even though it's income based, there are a lot of property owners that do earn more than $130,000 a year, which is the cap. And we could see these tax rates going right through the roof because of the CLA. With respect to the CLA, and here's the other part of it. The CLA is highly driven by the sales in the residential market. We don't have a lot of commercial sales on a yearly basis. And now we've have virtually none. So as a result, that common level of assessment when determining it is largely based upon the residential sales, which are all going up. That means an effect that the commercial operators, the people that are hotels and offices and cinemas and retail, are going to see increases in their tax rates because the CLA is going down. It's a bad situation. I'm not going to, but I'm not recording it. This spiral. Okay. Just is this something, I mean, this isn't happening just in Wilson. This is happening throughout Vermont, I assume. So the commercial side, definitely Chittin County is receiving the brunt of it. There's no doubt about it. We have the largest commercial database in the state. And therefore, South Burlington, Colchester, Essex, Burlington, we're all going to get hit. The caveat to this at a certain rate is that just so happens that South Burlington and Burlington are instituting a reappraisal next spring. So they automatically get 100% CLA out of the gate when they do a reappraisal. So when I tried to have a conversations with the Assessor time, the block in South Burlington and John Victory and Burlington, they weren't highly concerned because they're in the middle of reappraisal. But there is a valid meeting coming up for my association listeners and Assessors coming up on November 18th. I believe that is in Rutland. And I intend on attending that meeting and bringing some of this up because it needs to be on the table. I think larger picture is the CLA. And that's going to impact everybody in the state. My suggestion after thinking about it pretty long and hard is to try and have the legislature freeze our common level business assessments where they are or limit the decreases that we see for the next several years. Because all this could turn the exact opposite direction after everything gets back to normal, which is hopefully in the next couple of years. And so the CLA's could go back up. But if they keep dropping them, we're going to be in an 85% level and be required to reappraise. Whereas if we say, okay, we're at 95% right now, the state will say you should be at 91%. But we're going to put you at 93.5% this year, 92% next year and so on. So the brunt is not as extreme as it could be otherwise. It's not just Chittenden County, right? I mean, this has got to be happening all over the state. The residential market is absolutely exploded, Ted. Yeah, we're being invaded. Yeah, especially even in Southern Vermont, I understand it's really worse. It's actually worse in Southern Vermont. I know it's kind of beyond everybody's pay grade here except for maybe Terry's for another couple of months. But don't we, it seems to me there would be pressure in the legislature to do something about this. There will be. Absolutely. There will be. I think this has a better chance of occurring in the upcoming session than anything else. If, well, in the meantime, is there anything we can do? I mean, I know it just, it's not like we can schedule an assessment next year so that we'd be like Burlington and South Burlington. Is it, I mean? No, that wouldn't be possible. Number one, there's not the manpower. Number two is because we are greater than five years out from our last reappraisal starting next year, we can't do a statistical reval. And again, all the statistical reval, Ted's going to do is it's going to increase those houses from a $300,000 level to a $400, $450,000 level. And our CLA is going to go back to 100%, but that's tax bill is still going to go up. The phrase cascade failure keeps coming into my head. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not, you know, I hate to be the bringer of bad news, but I spoke when we had the BC hearing, Jenny Lyons asked me to do some some research to look at different scenarios. And this is pretty much what I could come up with was freezing the commercial values with the exception of residential apartments, because those are still high value properties, and obviously new construction would be assessed. But otherwise, everything gets frozen. And then we do things based upon a, you know, a state payment income type situation where the actual people that are being harmed by this downturn in the economy are benefited. So you shared that information with Jenny? I have not yet. No, no, I have a report. It's a couple of page document where I outline most of this. I hadn't gotten into the CLA thing, honestly, that had not really come up in my mind until recently because the market just, you know, I said, okay, maybe it'll calm down over the summer. And it hasn't. It's kept, it's kept going. So can we get a copy of that report? Yep, absolutely. Yep, I will forward it to you. I'll give it to Eric tomorrow or Friday, Friday. I'm from a budget standpoint. I've talked with Bill and thinking about projecting a flat grandmas for next year as we try to project FY 22 with the information that we shared tonight. On the revenue side, the revenue side is going to continue to be challenged to both project as we move ahead here. Any other questions for Bill? What good news do you have, Bill? I know this, I was thinking about this is the first time in 20 years that I haven't been able to bring the Wilson select board at a, you know, one, two percent in the grand list. This is, this is number one out of 20 years, 20 years here. Yeah. Well, thank you for your guys, Todd. Thank you very much for yours as well. I appreciate it. You guys definitely take care, Bill. Yep, bye-bye. Thanks, Bill. Moving on to the Emerald Ash borer update. Another good news story. Who scheduled, who put this agenda together? 20-20, baby. That should have changed the order here a little bit. I'm going to, I'm going to Bruce connected. He'll take the lead on this one. So we have Bruce Horrier with us tonight to talk about this one and also the next item on the agenda, but we'll start with the, the borer ash borer update. Bruce, welcome. My news is much better than Bill's although I have to do a little bit more damage to us in the long run, but the Emerald Ash borer has been discovered. Well, first of all, Emerald Ash borer has been in Vermont for a while. We have been proactive in removing street ash trees, trees in our right of way. Four or five years now. We have 476 street ash trees identified and our inventory that was done in 2014, we've removed 164 of those today. We planned 146 would have been just about where we were thinking we would be by this time of year or this time in the schedule had it not been for COVID and not allowing us to remove trees late winter last year. Excuse me. So anyway, now the Emerald Ash borer is here. We don't have another five years to be removing trees only because once they get infected, you can get to the point where our crew can't be taking those trees down. So what I want to do is accelerate the removal of the ash trees. There is a new tree warden statute out now that actually came into effect November 1st that says we do not have to have public hearings to remove street trees anymore. What we do have to do is give notice and only have a public hearing if we get somebody gets concerned about that and then we have to have a public hearing. But it also goes on to say that we don't have the public hearing to remove infested or trees that could become infested. And now that we're within the area for the ash borer, we can remove those trees. And that's what I want to do. I'd like to start getting them out of there now. We use our crew. So the money's in labor and equipment. So it's not like it's a big hit to the budget right now, but the hit to the budget's going to be that we don't have the money to replant all those trees right now. So we would get rid of the trees as quick as we can. The other good news and to some extent is that there's not any one neighborhood that we're responsible for that is 100% ash trees anymore. So it's not like we're going to be going into a running woods or south ridge or any other neighborhood like that and deforesting for lack of a better term the street trees. There may be some sections that have a length for a block or so where there's was a bunch of trees planted that will be gone. The intent is to always replant trees. It's just going to take us a little bit longer to do that. Unless we find a magic pot of money in the sense of me like that's gone the opposite way unfortunately. But we don't have if we want to be able to save ourselves money by our crews taking these trees out, we need to do that. An accelerated rate rather than letting these things get infected in two or three years down the road. They're dead at the top and we're not going to, we being highway departments not going to be able to take these trees out. They're very dangerous in that they die from the top down become very brittle and break even more than just a regular. So what about other dead trees? Well other dead trees, you know always a danger taking that a dead tree. But these have been known to really have been causing people damage because of the way that happens. So if they get too infected we've got to have contractors with cranes or but the trucks taking them down for us. So instead of $200 and some odd dollars a tree they end up being anywhere from $8 to $1600 a tree. Okay. So that's where we're at and once again our recommendation right now is to restart removing trees even if we don't have the money to start replanting right away. So the question is will the board agree with the recommendation on how to proceed this year? Like a no brainer. You know it's always a tough time anyway. The guys do this during the winter between snowstorms or as we have time. Let's hope that the other day is not an indication of what this winter is going to be like. We're not going to get a lot of trees removed anyway but you know I think that we can get started doing this fairly quickly. Obviously still got a lot of work to do but I really like to attack these and get it out of the way. So that would be great if everybody's in favor of that. The approach sounds fine. What do we have budgeted for removal of ash trees this year? Does anybody know? It's not a matter of the removal cost Jeff because once again that's coming out of our salaries, our payroll that we're paying the guys whether they're taking out trees, digging ditches or repairing catch basins or replacement costs and in the budget there's $10,000 for replacement costs. We've put in for a grant that's $23,000 and that's with us doing some match but think we get to use in-kind money for that so we might be able to stretch that money a little bit farther. Eric and I had some discussion today about that with the budget stuff too. Bruce, knowing what you know now, what is your recommendation for what's in the budget next year? Next year being fiscal year 2022? Well like I said Eric and I just met earlier excuse me today about that and Bo's right here at my lab. I'm hoping he's not getting ready to bark but anyway let's see. So we have it in the budget for $32,000 for that whole line item. That whole line item is landscaping without replacement of ash trees that's the flowers that we do that's for other hazard tree removal that we spend I mean this year has been a really hard year for a lot of dead trees we've been taking out regardless of the ash bore. So some of those things were contingent on the other things that we do or either decide to do or not decide to do. Okay and that $32,000 that's what's proposed for next year or you're thinking for next year. That's what Eric and I discussed today and as of right now and you know obviously that could change. Yeah we spoke about there need to be we have to look at some trade-offs next year we've been necessarily be able to offer the landscaping and that investment when we would need to look at some of this ash tree work as a priority. Okay so I don't hear any objections to going forward with the recommendation that Bruce has presented. Okay let's go on to Holland Lane. Great thank you Holland Lane. This one's totally different something I've never done in my career but that's okay it's always good to have something new come up. Holland Lane when Finney Crosby first came in Holland Lane was not going to be the through road that it has turned out to be. In the original iteration the original plot Holland Lane ran from one internal street to another it didn't make a connection like Zephyr Road does. With the new configuration over there Holland Lane now goes from the intersection at Williston Road so the second lighted intersection for Finney crossing all the way through to Zephyr Road. We were only going to own a very small section which didn't make a lot of sense anyway but we were going to own a very small section of Holland Lane that connected Stillwater and Seymour lanes and have private road on either side of it. Now that this has changed I'm recommending that we take the private private section of that road because it's going to it's going to act like a through road just like Zephyr does now the way it's configured and I just didn't think it was really fair given the fact that it basically is going to be this kind of through road through the whole development of developed state private. And I've included I'm pretty sure you have the plots to show the different configurations. We bring this to the board tonight versus preparing with his staff to look to accept a number of infrastructure items in Finney crossing and this would be included in that full package at a later date but it was a good time to check in at this one. Right this would come to you in January with the other roads we're getting ready to take Finney crossing in Hamlet so it'll be an additional a little over two miles of roads that we'll be adding to our network. So first question I have Bruce is what caused the change? The developer came in for a plot change and changed the way they configured what they were going to build. If you look at the plots there the original one the original one didn't go all the way through it went to where they were going to put in sort of kind of square or something in the middle of it. They decided that for that to go away that's where they had the healthy living and everything now that made through there before that wasn't going to be configured like that. Okay okay and this went through our development review process. Well oh yeah everything's gone through I mean this request to you guys for us to take that road has not gone to the DRB. I mean there's no reason for that but the design and the way it's built certainly has been through the DRB. Okay I guess you know I mean if we accept the road that means we accept you know the the cost of maintaining the road. That's correct. And you know the change yeah the change here is it went from a very short piece of road that it sound like we'd be responsible for maintaining which went from still water to Seymour. Now we've got a much longer road that we will be accepting. What are we getting from the developer? I guess that might be a way to put it. Well we're not getting anything. What you need to understand though is when that when that did change the section that goes out to Williston Road now of how and then it goes to Williston Road was not going to be private anymore. We were going to own from that intersection into that short section that we own between Seymour and Stillwater. The only part that was going to stay private was the section north of Stillwater and Seymour. Yeah so that's that's the only section and I'm recommending that seems to make sense to me that we take that because we're literally we're literally created a through road the developers created the through road whoever has we accepted it and allowed it to happen. It's going to become you know more than just a private road connecting two other small roads. It's going to once people realize it's there it's going to become busy if anything it's going to be it's going to make the intersection of Holland and Zephyr a busier intersection. I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second if you don't mind but isn't I mean the developer must have realized this when they were proposing this change because they wanted a specific entity to develop in their property. It seems like the town is getting left with you know some additional cost so that the developer could you know the owners of Finney Crossing could make money doing what they do which is develop you know it's not going to be the the developers aren't going to own the road when it's done Jeff it's going to be in the residents of the town of Wolston that live in there that are going to own that section of private road it's going to act more like a through road for everybody not just them. Let me ask the question maybe a little bit differently if we if we determine that we do not want to take over the road what would happen what would what would be the result. Oh it stays private and they have to do their documents that way when I come to you guys with you know all the documents and everything you don't have to take any road. Yep right it's so you know that's it'll just it'll just stay back in the you know we'll have a deed but we don't have to accept it and it'll still be up in responsibility the HOA and however they have it set up now to be taken care of but I do believe that you guys would probably be hearing from them and they'd be coming in and saying well why not. Well I guess my answer would be back is because that's not what we agreed to initially and you know I'm not seeing a strong reason why we should increase our ownership of roads because you amended you wanted to amend your site plan to accommodate a business that you really wanted to locate there. I don't want to take any roads I don't want to take any roads Jeff so I'm on your side I'm just and I'm really actually the one that brought this forward it wasn't even brought forward to me by the developer I looked at this plat this plat and looked at the road in a way it's functioning and said look it only makes sense that that last little private section here because of the way things are built now is going to end up being acting more like a public through road than a private road. Most private roads aren't through roads at a junction like that that's all. Sure it makes sense so let me ask a question maybe a little bit different when the amended plan was approved by the DRB was it either their requirement or did the developer offer or know that they had no choice but to do it to build a Holland Lane from route to all the way to Zephyr Lane to town standards. Every road is ever built and any development is built to town standards whether it's going to stay private or become public. Oh interesting okay I didn't I didn't realize that I thought it's a state of private road. That's in our public work standards doesn't matter whether it's private or public it has to be built to our standards. Interesting I did not know that learn something new every night. Well that's why we don't we don't have a gravel road standard so somebody can't build a gravel road and try to we don't have a standard in our public works for our public work standards for for specification for gravel roads. Okay so Bruce what's the the difference in mileage from the original proposal to the proposal now double from a quarter mile to a half a mile or it's more than double I'm sorry what was that so how much is it increased from the original proposal as far as the amount of mileage that or when it would be proposed to increase. Okay I don't have that number right in front of me I can certainly get you that but just looking at the plot it would look like we're taking half again as much because the amended plot once again made how in public from route to still water so it's just that stuff north of there so just looking at the plot it looks like it's probably the same distance again I don't have that road broke out as far as I have that information Kelly I just wasn't expecting that tonight. Yeah that's that's fine so theoretically then by them doing additional things to the road they're putting in additional buildings and therefore increasing the grand list for the town. Yeah I think the I think the amended plot I mean it still would increase the grand list but the amended plot yeah they built one or two more big buildings on that for residential but the rest of that would basically through the commercial area. So we don't need to make any decisions tonight but this is just the information that we're we're getting. That's correct you know I was just trying to bring it forward to get your feels for it if there's really if the sentiment is that you really just don't have the feeling to do this then you know I could just say tell the developer right now don't bother because he's got to change the deeds. Yeah right now the deeds aren't set up for us to take that section. This this is clearly a time I'd like to invoke the two-week rule part of what's driving me tonight is oh we've been hearing his bad news about the budget and so I'm not in I'm not in a mood to accept something that causes the town to incur more cost. We get a little money though by taking it remember that the state yes yeah we get the state funds yes and it's a new road so it's going to be yeah I don't know what it's going to be years down the road. Yeah Bruce can I just it makes it as a matter of public policy one of the reasons that we accept roads as public roads is because that gives the town gives it the responsibility but it also gives it the opportunity to make sure that the the road is up to standards in terms of safety in terms of maintenance and if this is going to be a through road you know then there there does become a public safety and a public policy reason to do this so anyway. I would agree we we are we get calls every winter right now on why isn't that in the howling and good a shape as the other roads through there that we're maintaining and my answer to them is it's not our road we're not telling it yeah call your call your association or whatever. When I was first on the select board Southridge was still a private road the whole thing and then they connected it up so you could go for a mountain view through to us route two and we had so many people coming into the meeting saying can you please do something about those people are speeding and our reply was no it's private property we can't we can't do anything about it until it becomes a town road so it having it be a town road does have its benefits so and just in that regard to Southridge you know Northridge is another example of that right now Northridge was being built but the spur on the northern end has a leg that goes out toward Mountain View Road and if anybody if the golf course ever decides to do anything with the rest of that up there and that road gets built through Mountain View Road you better believe that they're going to be coming in saying why why isn't this a public road now Northridge as it's being built to our standards but going to be a private road initially. Any further questions for Bruce tonight we'll be discussing this again at some point in time okay so moving on to health insurance plan renewal that's Eric for a brief discussion on this I'll try to bring some good news hopefully that are we're recommending to stick with our same health plan for next year the mvp golf group plan um I guess the good news I can share is the the rate increase is about four and a half percent across all plans which which is lower than we've we've seen in other years um ductible went up slightly but we'll we'll continue to cost share that with staff we we do um we pay the first 85 percent essentially um through a health reimbursement arrangement then staff will pick up the last 15 percent to meet that deductible and just as a reminder the police union in their in their contract for this year moved off the group plans and they get the individual contribution plans the defined contribution for we've set that based on a percentage of this town plan the gold three and they can then use that percentage to select any plan they would like um I think most folks are are sticking with this plan so we may have everyone back on a group plan at some point but this would be for non-represented and uh fire union staff next year okay any questions for Eric on uh his request no I'm looking for a motion then move to offer the mvp health care gold three hd hp plan to eligible employees for calendar year 2021 zero second I'll second is there any discussion on the motion and hearing none and all those in favor of the motion raise your hand one two three four we've done it uh it was very good thank you and we're ready for the managers report okay um actually surely I'll be able to connect you as well to to go through the finance report here and I'll I'll get surely connected and that's my reporter she's really promoted here uh so just a couple things I'll touch on tonight um are the water the water um lamp light waterline bond both passed um by a three-to-one margin last night um 46 56 to 1535 um please report that to the board this evening and take uh Wilson residents who who voted uh the selection season um you will see in my uh written report the legal issues report for um the last month and there has been a subdivision appeal of a recent d rb decision matt may be aware of this last week and um we'll have some further conversations this week on on how the how the town's gonna gonna look um to proceed in that case but brings the board's attention tonight that that was filed last week uh against the d rb's decision there okay um I'll probably have uh Bruce come back on this at some point but him and I have been talking about winter operations this year too in light of covid and trying to think of possible scenarios where if we had staff who were um who had come down with covid and need the quarantine or um we're asking staff with any illnesses to stay at the workplace that could affect our our staffing for snow removal operations moving forward so Bruce's got some creative ideas where we're trying to kick around a little bit still and see what might be our contingency planning if we've gotten a situation like that so um part of this will be letting the public know if we do get in that situation there'd be a level of service adjustment um to go from there and I guess some other good news I can share d trans has informed us we're gonna get uh $43,000 um additional highway aid money that's part of the cares act money so that will um help lessen the deficit that we're that we were projecting for for this fiscal year and I see Shirley's connected now I'll turn over to her for the finance report for September hi how is everyone thank you so I'm I'm just going to point out a few of the um major discrepancies and um I'll try to find some good news for you Jim okay good thank you um so I'm just I'm looking at the um line on them that's penalties interest and other tax looking at six percent right now um a big portion of that is about 77,000 are in our own local options tax that we bill the um solid waste district and the state rest areas I'm just waiting for one number in order to give those to Mary to go ahead and get those bills out so that's just we're later than a month later than last year we also know we're getting an estimated 30,000 hold harmless payment from the state and 30,000 in a state pilot payment so those things will be coming so it's under right now but it's just a tiny difference um public safety revenue I mean it's five percent um when normally we'd be looking at something much higher but again it's it's all those little services programs fingerprinting um um there is a piece that was budgeted in there for the fire department um that is not it's a program that's not going to happen it's they were going to do their inspections so that's not going to happen but um so those things probably aren't coming back um rec revenue was just as we've talked about before just you know smaller smaller camps smaller number of programs so um you know we'll we won't see that change much through throughout the year there's contracted programs that'll still go on um but they tend to be smaller anyways and they're now a little bit more limited as the winter rolls around and we have no inside facilities to use um highway revenue I guess first we have some good news here but that's 57 percent of the budget right now but um a big piece of that is because the highway guys did a lot of work for the stormwater utility this summer so essentially they've already charged about a hundred percent of the budget we expected for the year which is about 65 000 they've done that in one quarter um in regards to expenses um highway looks really high at 34 percent of the year but the big item in there is retreatment with a $480,000 budget for the year and $441,000 spent to date um I'll pick on the select board here but not that you really managed these expenses too bad but 39 percent of your budget but 12 000 of that is the town meeting television that's a one payment of fred at the beginning of the year so some of these things are just timing issues when they happen um technology same thing 40 percent of their budget for the year um part of that is NEMRIC um their fee went up by about 3000 and it's paid once annually at the beginning of the year and the other part of that is an integrity invoice for 5000 um that Eric has talked about before it's part of the change we're making in our um the fiber line that's connecting the police department to the town hall the annex and the library so it'll um so a 5000 well it's going to be 6600 um investment will recoup itself in a year because we will be able to eliminate the Comcast bill for the town hall which feeds the annex and um the library so we'll we'll get our service to the police department bill and and and Eric Shepard um of the police department um we're awful lucky to have him here because he's done all of this um he's worked with Comcast and he even managed somehow to reduce the police department Comcast bill that we'll see in the future even though we are we're cutting what we're you know paying them annually by a significant amount it's about um crackle in it the other day it's about $4500 a year between what we pay for the town hall and the library that we'll be saving so um it's a huge project um so Eric has spearheaded it and again many thanks to him um the last one is the regional social services health at 36% of the year-to-date budget but again that's just the county tax payment we pay twice a year and half of it's paid in July so it's just an upfront cost and those were my things to report to you tonight do you have questions questions or surely thank you very much you are welcome I have nothing else in my uh manager's report for this evening Terry so um before we go on to the final item which is the Trader Lane project is there any other business to be brought forward tonight before we do that okay um then Eric we just want to introduce the subject and then we'll entertain a motion to go on to executive session yep um so tonight um I'd recommend the the board invite Bruce, Matt and myself to join executive session to discuss um terms of a memorandum of understanding to establish a cost-sharing relationship with private entities in the construction of of Trader Lane we can update the board that this would be a contractual agreement or premature public knowledge with um let's put the town at disadvantage in our negotiations for this agreement so I'd be looking for um well by the rest extensive motion here and at the bottom of page three to get us into executive session I'd move that we enter into executive session to discuss the town's contract with private sector partners under the provisions of title one section three three thirteen a1a of the Vermont statutes and invite town manager Eric Wells planning director Matt Boulanger and public works director Bruce for to join further move that premature that we find that the premature general public knowledge regarding the town's potential contract to share costs with private entities to start Trader Lane would clearly place the town at a substantial disadvantage because the select board risks disclosing its negotiation strategy strategy if it discusses the proposed contract terms in public is there a second I'll second is there any discussion on that motion if not all those in favor of the motion raise your hand one two three four we are now in executive session and you'll need to change uh from this program to uh one that Eric has given you does anyone need me to resend it I believe I have it okay and uh