 August 17th, 2020, Verone Select Board meeting to order. My far left is Justin Lawrence. My left is Flowsmith. My right is John Quinn. I'm Brad Town. This also our Tom Bodowski, our town, Ackentown Administrator, and Diane Isabel, town trader. The conditions are changes to the agenda. I have one on mark on your brand of fire department. Public comment. Any public comments from people attending this meeting via conference call? Moving right along with Treasury report, I guess. Final day pay taxes was today because the 15th fell on a Saturday. Money has been coming in the year to study. A lot of people are paying it for all court orders. But I am going to ask this time, again, if you want me to put back the penalty of interest for one month until September 15th. And I only asked if you did last time it seemed to work. I think money is coming in. I don't know how you feel about it. But at least they let me answer that question. And I did plan on running the link of tax bills. OK, so how does the board feel about putting back the penalties for another month? Do you think that spurred people with a sense of urgency to actually get the payments in the last time? I guess I want to be able to answer a question if I asked. That's my reason I bring it up. Yeah, I know. But do you think it made them any faster? It's hard to tell right now because I still have a lot of payments that the checks came in. But today, late today, we have to open those up. Right now, we have a pass through like 445, but it's very easy to have 100,000 checks that are waiting to be opened for tomorrow. So it's hard to say. I have not had anybody feel really complaining at all. The only ones that have been called are those that normally get state payments. They did not file their taxes on time. And there's been maybe 10 or 20 of them. What's your recommendation that I have? To do it or not to do it? It's not really up to me. I know. Well, what's your recommendation? Any motion from the board? I don't know what you guys think. What do you do? I have a curiosity. Do you have any idea how much the penalties would be? That's for dollars? Yeah. Personally, I think that we should have the penalty. Is that? I think we should keep the penalty. So not delay it another month. I don't think we need a motion for that, though. Right? No, because we have to have a motion to extend it. Because we leave it as it is. That's my goal. All I've got, anything else I have is in the agenda. OK. Fisher Road, Colbert, Robert Park, and Steve Kelsen? Steve, do you want to come up here and grab your chair? Robert, are you there? I am. OK. Do you want to talk to these folks about what we've discovered in the last week or so with respect to Fisher Road? OK, so my name is Robert Clarke, project engineer, project engineering, and we're assisting the town of Berlin with a sewer project on Payne-Tour-Pike-North. And the contractor, Du Bois Construction, has been actively working on that road. And while they were out there, we had a pre-construction meeting. We happened to notice that the Fisher Road, Colbert, near the intersection with Payne-Tour-Pike-North had completely deteriorated at the bottom of the Colbert Club and eroded away, eroded away. And I took some photos, they sent them to Tom and Dana at the time, and just started a conversation about what we could do to line that structure if it was possible. The challenge with it is that there's a lot of water that comes through that structure. And because of that, the regulators at least wanted some engineering analysis done to confirm whether or not that existing structure with a new liner in it would be able to adequately handle the type of storm that we typically see. And in this case, it would be what they consider a 50-year storm event. So I ran the crew into that analysis. We submitted it to the state just for a quick review that would pass their standards. They'd get to respond to that. But concurrently, we started engaging with Du Bois and with Steve Wolfe at contact on putting together some process limits for lining that existing Colbert. And Tom, have you shared the photos with the board? I have, yes. OK. So that's a little bit of where we're at with that right now. We had a meeting last week with Du Bois, Tom, myself, and Steve Wolfe from Cup Deck. And talked through just the complexities of the project. The water level can rise up to the existing structure height, which is roughly 12 feet. And so it makes it complicated when you're talking about doing a repair project in the fall which is when we typically get a lot of rain events on the October, the month of October, and late fall. I believe Du Bois provided Tom a range, cost estimate, order of magnitude of what they thought it might be. Tom, have you shared that with the board as well? Not the number specifically. It was in the high $200,000 to low $300,000 range, exclusive of the sleeve, which Steve is here representing, contact on that sleeve, which is about $75,000 sleeve. So I wanted to, I'm viewing this as an emergency repair. I think it's probably, if not the most critical piece of this infrastructure in our county, it's very close. After the sewer project is done, it'll carry two water force mains and a sewer force main. And it's the main ordinary to the Central Vermont Hospital. So I'm here to get the temperature board of funding for replacement, assuming we can get agency and natural resources permitting and get this project done, this construction season. And so I shared with you, I can't even remember now, maybe Friday, it was a list I had put together of potential revenues that could be used. And to the tune of, she gets to base $340,000 to $390,000, depending on what that savings can be used. So I'm just here talking to you folks to the board about how do you want this to proceed. We want to continue with our engineering work. I don't think we could really come up with a design per se in a timely manner. Robert, you can speak to that. I don't know. Yeah, I would say the decision is to move forward right away under an emergency situation. I think the town is working directly with Du Bois with some assistance on just getting the permits in place is probably all that's necessary from an engineering perspective. I think there's a couple of potential permits that are needed, the most important being approval from the state's river management engineer that hydraulically to cover. But they agree with our analysis that the cover can handle the storms that we see. Right now, do you know the flow capacity of that cover? Yeah, well, Robert looked at it. So the existing structure is it's a 150-inch vertical ellipse multi-plate. So we know what the area of that was. It's 124 square feet. I believe what we're proposing to line it with is the exact same shape structure, but smaller. And the new structure is 100 and 4 square feet. And what Robert does at Otter Creek is he can run, I think it's called an HYA analysis or some sort of an hydraulic program. So he determines what the headwater depth for the 50-year storm is for the existing structure. And then they run it for the proposed structure, which is less area. And then they compare those elevations just to make sure it's not flooding Robert. He's upstream, like increasing the flood point too much. And I think Robert, you can chime in, I think, on what the difference in the headwaters were between the two structures, possibly? Neither structure resulted in a headwater condition that overtaught the end-wind of the structure. And I'm trying to open up, as we're speaking, but I believe the resulting capacity of the new structure exceeded the Q50 storm, which is roughly 900 cubic feet per second. Yeah, the other thing, so this greening area comes out of Berlin Bonn, which is my familiar water supply. So theoretically, Berlin Bonn's acting like a big stormwater management pond because it's storing water and it's meteoring it out in a certain flow rate. So even though there's a huge greening area, I think it's, what was it, 15 square miles or so? It's a huge amount of greening area, but the flows are not as flashy as they would be known in a regular culvert with 15 square miles, where you don't have a big historic pond. So growing pond, the outlet culvert goes under the fruits, that's your structure right there, right? That's what, if this culvert can take the flow of that, or at what size is that, you don't want it to go under the interest rate. It's probably a vertical ellipse, because that's basically a, because we've wound a lot under the interest rate. I think that's a cement box. Cause we've, a lot of the ones under the interstate with a lot of cover of these vertical ellipses, so the ones that we mostly wind for the, for the chance are the same shape as what you guys have. So that's why I was just guessing that it might be a vertical ellipse, but we have to do a box of a little bit. I'm pretty sure, I'm pretty sure that a box called a vertical ellipse might not be able to get the, right, you're right. Cause we're, finally, it's not a lot of fiber in the road all the way, so a box might make sense, whereas a lot of the ones are deep fills and then they do the vertical ellipses because they think that, back in the 60s when they built them, they thought they built the vertical ellipse that all the fill would squash them down the round, but they never swashed down the round, they stick vertical ellipses. It was just what people thought back then. So I really see three options for the board. The first one is do not think, which I don't think is an option. Like, the second one is, is we could, you guys can't not, not do this emergency work, this instruction season. Get some further analysis and some hard design from Otter Creek and did this for 2001. And then I would encourage the board to look at putting a bond vote on the November election to come to this box election. And then another $500,000 that I don't know about. Well, the third one is to act with, as it says, it is an emergency situation and use some of these funds to offset the cost of this work this fall. So those are the three options I see. And the first one, as I said, it's not, I don't believe it's a viable option to do it. But at this point, we don't know what the exact cost would be. Which I don't know what to do. You said it's between $340 and $390. No, no, no, that's what we had in reserves. That's in reserves, yeah. Oh, okay, well, yeah, I mean. So it was, it came in. The material was $75 and he said it was like $310, right? So whatever that is, $385. I will, let me add, I've done probably 40 of these with VTrans over the years and this is the worst one that I've ever seen as far as the current condition. A lot of them VTrans will line them under the interstates that aren't even rusted out. But this thing, there's really no invert left and there's a lot of failures. And I'm surprised that they haven't had percentals. Especially on the upstream end, it's completely failed for like 30 feet in on the upstream end. So you know, the thing, really, you know, the big storm to really take down the road. So then, you know, you're into a $2 or $3 million project plus you're gonna get fined for like sewer releases or the stream of that sort of stuff. The, what is involved in lining the coal? What kind of equipment? Really just, you know, he's gonna probably have a, you know, a pump going, sandbags, excavator. And then he's gonna have some, he's gonna have to grab some sheeting to remove the upper 30 feet of it. Because it's so bad that you really can't line the upper 30 feet. It's gonna be a correct area there. And then he's gonna have to pump concrete down to get for like a concrete head wall on the upstream end. He's gonna do a half concrete head wall that downstream and we'll just call it a tow wall. So, so I was looking at the estimate and it looked like it was, you know, just the head walls are probably almost 30% of the project. But they're, we're just going the way V-trans does them. V-trans always puts a nice and proof head wall on the upstream end. Currently there is just a little tow wall upstream end that's been detached from the pipe structure. If I could add to that, the head walls, at least on the inlet side, it's helped with some of the structure, you know, as you mentioned earlier, like the smaller waterway open. So improving the way that the water enters the structure does help. Have you done one for V-trans like this recently? Yeah, we did one up in Georgia in March and April with 600 feet under I-89. It was the only project that V-trans had going on in March and April because they got a sink hole in the shoulder from the line one. It was a 108 inch diameter. The new pipe was a 108 inch vertical ellipse that went through the existing vertical ellipse. Yeah. So what I'm looking for here is like a comparison in cost. Okay, well, that job ended up costing V-trans close to $3 million. But the reason it did is because the base flows there were amazingly high base flows and they had the directionally more three 30 inch pipes under the interstate. They were also 600 feet long and then they were running three 24 inch pumps. They taught the new boys on this and I think he said he was just figuring like a 12 inch pump to handle the base flows here. So the base flows are quite a bit smaller than what they were out in Georgia. So there was a huge drainage area. Maybe you guys can speak to the cost that if this fails and then they require a box culvert rather than the sleeving of this culvert, but that cost would be. Yes, that's a good point, Tom. You know, I think one of the things that's challenging from an engineering perspective now and we see it a lot on projects is if you get a structure that's undersized or that it hits to a point where it's completely failed, the state requires you to build it to the most current engineering standard for design and often what controls with that now is a term that they use called bank pull with which essentially represents the natural width of the water line that's running through that column. So we had engaged the state river management engineer and we noticed how bad this was, had it come down and take some preliminary measurements because he would have to concur on that with and essentially if the structure needs to be replaced, he estimated this span somewhere between 30 and 50 feet. So that doesn't really even allow you the opportunity to do a traditional concrete box culvert with a flat bottom. It would be a bottomless arch structure of some type or a traditional bridge and the cost of that would be substantially higher. I would say without any plans, over a million dollars probably. So it makes it challenging and Steve actually just did some project with me in New Hays and Vermont where that was basically the situation. They had two six foot diameter steel tubes that went across this road. I first looked at that project probably a decade ago and at that time the state would have approved an 18 foot wide or 20 foot wide concrete box culvert. They let the things go because funding didn't work for them and they didn't advance some other priorities that they wanted to work through and when they finally failed, they needed to be replaced and the span was 30 to 50 wide and in their case, they were able to go with a metal structure and it was much simpler process. There wasn't a lot of traffic on that road. It wasn't a difficult excavation but they were over a half million dollars in doing that structure very quickly. So I think that's the risk you run if you do nothing. At the top's point, it's only a matter of time before it completely fails and one of the things that makes me nervous is that everybody talks about spring, but still melt and ice, ice outs as being a big water of them. We get a lot significant flow in late fall and I think we're coming into those two seasons, late fall and next year in the spring where that structure is certainly gonna be put to the test. It's already underlined and with significant flow, it could wash out the road. Okay, so can we as a board rule out that we're not gonna do anything just as a straw full and then figure out what our options are? Well, as I see it, we have two options. We need to sleeve it now, we sleeve it this morning. Right, I just wanna rule out the other piece so we can stop talking about all the scare tactics. What if, we know we have to do something, right? But I just wanna move on and maybe you could help us with what our options are as far as spending. What if we were to spend now and then we still ask for a bond to repay in November? Dad, I don't know. Okay, I'm trying to think of a way to, you know, still bond for it, but not use up every piece of, you know, every line item that we have, every reserve penny that we have to do it because we could put ourselves in a really bad situation then. The trouble is that the money that we do have to spend, some of that is the greater fund also. And I don't believe we can bond for equipment. So that leaves, that leaves it so that we have to either bond for the structures and buy a greater or we have to take and figure out something else to give us everything we need. Right, and I think the way the greater was set up, it was lease payments for 10 years. So you wouldn't necessarily have to bond for that anyways. You didn't make a payment one year, they gave it back, right? Why am I saying you can't bond for equipment? No, I understand. We wouldn't want it because the funds are free. The greater we take and do it alone, that's not a problem. I can take a problem if we can't take it and spend the money twice. So I'm just, the public's work has gone out to a couple of long folks now and they may need a little further search upon my part, but my sense is if tonight, you folks said that you were going to bond, whatever, of a bond vote, that you couldn't start incurring expenses against that motion in anticipation of that happening because you always have expenditures before you have a bond vote. You have to do your engineering, you have to do all this. And so I would encourage you to make it put together at $2 million maybe because you have Richardson Road, you have some other things that you could probably do, some TLC and then this coming week, I could start talking to the bond bank and whoever else is out there and see, what do we truly need to allow us to start spending money? But my sense is maybe if you make a motion tonight, that may be enough to start allowing expenditures. Can I have one thing? Yeah. So working streams in Vermont, rather even correct me if I get this wrong, is June 15th, October 1st, but in a situation like this, the River Management Engineer would probably give some sort of a reasonable extension into mid-October, maybe even late October to finish up the project. But if you were going to do it in the spring, it would be challenging to start it before June 15th. Now, the VTrans project, they did in March and April because the interstate was collapsing. But the other thing that my dimension is, Robert talked about the New Haven project, that project had no utilities above it. So the other thing with this is you have some important utilities above it, the two force mains for water, the sewer force main, which makes it even more complicated if you were to do a replacement one day. So yeah, just food for thought. So, and I'm not sure what Du Bois' schedule was, and I don't know if you guys are constantly doing the work around here anyway. So it's pretty much already mobilized in this area. So did I get that right, Robert? Yeah, you did. Okay. So you haven't heard, so no visitors back from the state on this project. We've talked to Jared though three or four times. We really did expect something last week, but no, we have not heard the opinion of him. Not as a opinion, if you did indicate that, you know, we provided him the information that I did, that it should meet their qualifications for lighting. What was the board's pleasure? Tom, are you sure that we could start to spend money against the future? I'm not positive, but I thought, pending a vote today is a placeholder that I'm thinking it does, but then between, which tonight's vote in the next couple of days are going to confirm what, you know? So we're not going to be, we're not going to. Yeah, I'm just thinking like, we didn't have enough money, right? And it actually collapsed and we needed to do something. We would have to figure out how to do it. So there must be a mechanism financially for us to be able to get it down. I just don't know what it is. Barrowing, I don't know the borrowing mechanisms that the town has. Well, a bank will only borrow up to 10 years, so that's how. So you have to maybe get that and do a bridge financing to take that note out. Possibility for a grant or anything on the back end. Not in this time frame. I don't know about, Robert, your sense of grants post-construction? If you grant post-construction? Yes. I would say no, in my experience, typically they'll give some grant for engineering and planning. If you're a couple of years ahead on a project and then they'll give you, you can get up to $175,000 in a structures grant from V-Transfer projects like this. I mean, that would be the preferred route in a situation that's a little bit different than what we have now. And there's no money coming from state for this project at all, what I understand. That is correct. No, we got a post-construction grant for the Mayor of Lake One, right? Was that because it collapsed? The Mayor of Lake Calder? The Mayor of Lake Calder. We got a post-construction grant on that, right? We gave it around $175,000. And so that was that because that had completely failed? I don't know exactly why, because I didn't get all of that work, but I know that we could apply for a grant and give it a grant. And Richison Rodney was not able to do it. We will pursue all avenues of post-grants, but I would not count that chicken if I were you. Somehow or other, we're going to get a motion that will take and allow us to go forward. Got a lot of caveats there for waiting for monies and try to do it this fall. The equipment's already there. We don't have that expensive move to get in next spring. The only trouble is we do use the cash on the hand to do it, and then the greater fails are going to be wrecked in the machine for a while. It becomes a lesser of two evils, I think. Yeah. I would think we should probably look at the Richison Road culvert, this culvert, the bridge. Well, that was what we were talking about today. Would that be the thing to do is we'll get them all and get them all and we'll get them done. If I could just add a comment to that. We just helped a client do that. They didn't realize they had so much to fervor agents on structures, and they ended up putting together a, I think it was a $3.5 million bond to do basically what he just talked about, which was replaced a couple of very key structures, that four or five of them over the next two years. How long does a sleeve last? What's an aluminum structural plate in their 100-year service life? So the structure in there now, I don't know what year it was built by. My suspicion is it's probably 30-40 years old, 35-40 years old, it was galvanized steel. And when we sleeve one of those big structures, we use aluminum, which basically they made like main DOD puts them into the ocean. They do very well out of bad water and abrasion and elsewhere and so on. Was there any corrosion from the zinc to the aluminum? No, no. It's between black steel and aluminum. So like for example, we have a structure in a close domain it was put in in 1966 and it's that galvanized steel bolt that's holding it together. And it's aluminum structure, they're doing very well because the zinc is an insulator between the aluminum and the black steel under the aluminum. What this points to is when I talk to Tim, we're going to do an inventory of all of our structures. And these need to be on a capital asset account where you're putting money aside to replace this. So hopefully that's going to be in the future. No, I get that. I get that, but the future is right now. It's not very pleasant. So you guys mentioned a couple of different projects that you may be going for. What are the projects? Richardson Road has a very similar culvert, but significantly less. There's 10 or 15 homes on that culvert. And there's a bridge deck, Lover's Lane bridge deck and that's just decking though, right? Yeah. That's probably speaking, that's a big ticket item, but then you have the two culverts that go underneath the cross-couch down here. The same people that click and said that the Fisher Road project was over, that culvert was over, I said these two culverts out here were fucked. Right. So I would take and have Tom, Tim, walk those culverts with a bar and just make sure there's no soft spots. This one you don't even have to find the soft spot. Yeah, we saw the place. It's pretty scary. Usually I walk through a lot of stuff. I've been doing this for 30 years and it was one of the worst ones and I'm surprised that it's still functioning. So remind me how much Richardson Road was again. Let's order that then. The prediction of the 225 to 250 shaft prediction. Right now we only got $8,000 into it. It's 10 to the total of three there for the time being. Then if you're looking at the, what you're actually following for, you're looking at, most of us call 400,000 for Fisher Road and I would say 100,000 for that bridge deck. We use a bridge deck that basically wood with some steel understructure that needs a little work but that's not terribly expensive. You don't have any estimates on that bridge though? I think they were supposed to look into that. You didn't give me any. Maybe I should, yeah. So, but the only thing with Lumber's Lane is, is that they send those dump trucks across to keep them up across to Comstock. Not Comstock. Chandler. Chandler. There we go. Chandler. So, that's the importance of Lumber's Lane really. And the unknown culverts under Crossdown. Yeah. Right. And probably each of those are $400,000. Well I would imagine they'd get the same cost to do this one here. Yeah. And there's two of them. Yeah, right. But I only do that big. I think they put two in to keep the height there. Right. Spread it out sideways. Yeah. I mean, the way to do that is just look at the diameter of what's there in the drainage areas and stuff. The material that we're proposing here is the same material as, was it mirror pond road? Mirror lake road. Mirror lake road. That's a box culvert. This is just a different shape, but it's the same material that has been there. But then this one concrete that was. Yeah. And you're saying this has a 100 year service point. Yeah. Yeah. The mirror like the same thing. If the foundation holds up, it's underneath of it. But it was there for 100 years before that, right? The foundation of the road. You take it and do the, I got $1.6 million from these projects under just $1 million. So I'm a noble for that right away because we haven't even looked at the culverts. We haven't looked at the culverts. No, I'm saying like, you can bond, you don't have to spend it. Yeah. We as towns always find a way to, I feel like. And the higher the number, the less likely we're going to get a confirmation that we actually get the bond from the town, right? Or from the citizen. So, you know, I don't mind asking for some cushion, but I think we either need to check out those culverts and then, you know, make a motion or ask for what we know now. Well, I mean the culverts. Tom, it'd be happy to help you guys do an assessment of these. If you have a handful of them that need to be looked at and we do these all the time, I can give you an extra opinion on those. Yeah, but I'm really on the mindset that we go with what we know today and you could always do another bond vote at town meeting. Hey, Greg. All right. I would hate to take and go back to the well on the bond, but rather take and overdo the first one and have to go back and ask for more. I agree that I'd like to know what we need. Well, perhaps what we should do is do have that assessment done if it can be done right away and then we'll just have a select, especially meeting next week. And also have we run it through our town attorney yet? The potential of this? I do note on the form that it said if we come to a vote tonight to redirect the funds to verify with the town attorney first, have we done that yet? That was for a portion of the funding though. I'll have to. So I don't know we have it. No, okay. So again, all the thing that I would recommend is since we know we got to do something to Fisher Road and I asked my plan a couple of days ago and I forgot if they sent anything back, but I thought we could just send a ring out of the proposed liner, so just like a four and a half foot section of it and have the two boys or somebody put it together and just kind of like walk it through to make sure it's gonna fit, because rather than sending 100, was it 100 in some feet, make sure it's gonna fit all the way through and that can be done with a small piece of equipment like just a walkway seat seat or something. They can push it through the ring on the left. It might be worth just doing that just to make sure. So let me investigate these other culverts and I will get back to you here in a couple days. Would you find out if you're sure, let me know and we'll set up a meeting for next week. I don't know about being sure, I'll have that in front of me. So what's the schedule if we do move forward with Fisher Road replaced McHolver or liner? Is this something that they would be able to do in September or October? We could get it to you when Blue Boys Instruction wants it because they might be able to keep it critical bad because they have to come in and drive some sheets and set up some sand bags and some tires and stuff. I think people probably from the time you guys tell us to go on the 150 feet or whatever it is take us three or four weeks to make it and get it here. But like I say, you know, then we're starting to see it's August 20th this week, right? So you know, you're four weeks, you're getting into late September already. So by that time, we would hope that you boys could be mobilized, drove the sheets on the upstream end so that you take out that 30 feet on the upstream end and then have the liner arrive and get it through. But doing the test piece might be something that would make a lot of sense that even tonight if the toll is getting up, get a test piece made up and out here, then they have it, they can put it together and just verify that you have the sheet. The reason I was asking was just primarily around the vote and whether or not we really needed to wait till November or we could hold a special vote in September or the very beginning of October and that way we have more certainty probably before the work finishes and that way we're not depleting all of our funds that we have. There's certain timings to get this public notation and I think we're close to the deadline being on the November ballot bill. Okay, I know there was 30 days, I just didn't know. Yeah, there's more than that. Okay. As well. Okay. I defer to Rosemary. I'll talk to her about that tomorrow. Okay. So we could potentially have the project pretty much all wrapped up before we even know if we got the bond. Yeah. Yeah. So Tom, have you got the directive now? Okay, so thank you. Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Robert. Thank you all. Thank you. I just want to thank you. I think we'll take that test piece here. Alex, I was just looking through my emails to see if they actually responded to my email. And just for clarity for all the people in TV land, just to be a no bid because we already have someone outside doing work. So that's the only reason that we wouldn't bid it? Okay. They even set a rumble card to get up here. My truck's in the shop. Oh. They tell me it should be cruising. I don't even know what they're going to do with it. So this is the conclusion, Steve. One of them, I don't even know what you're talking about. I don't know. We sat around like this and we... Okay. I think so. Steve, do you need any action for this piece? Do you need, what do you need? No, I think, I mean, we'll... When I can find out about the test piece, I'll just get that on for the smoke. You know, we'll have that all on, Steve. We'll do that and have it all ready for next week if we have a special meeting. Yeah, yeah. But if you're making, you need the, or you need reallocating funds to this test piece, that's what I'm trying to find out. Well, yeah, I mean, it's... Yeah, so... I have to put it in at something. Whatever the total, we don't know why, but... Could you send me tomorrow what... It'll be four and a half feet out of the one piece. Yeah, so you're... So we just go... And I can try to parlay it with something in it this way. Or even send it on an LTL, and then we can always just unload. You know, I can come help you unload it in the evening. Okay. Just gonna make it look like 10 plates. Okay, awesome. Thank you. You're welcome. Good evening. Thank you for coming in. Good to be here. Okay, Randy Saxton, Burlington Center. Hey, Randy, still with me? All right, good. So, you saw the agenda that I sent out. And it includes three items for the select board's consideration. The first one is the draft authority to adopt town plans and et cetera. This is, I think the third time now that the select board has seen this, this in effect would ask the voters to give back the ability to make changes to town plans, bylaws and such to the select board, rather than having them going to a town vote. And as we met back in late July at the range, it's an imperative need when you're negotiating contracts or trying to get commitments from contractors to be able to move sometimes more expeditious than a town vote allows. It still allows the select board to do the things, major components of items to go to a town vote. That's always the prerogative of the select board. So, what I would like you folks to act on tonight and act in an affirmative is to add this language that was developed through the November vote. Do we need a valid through date? I'm sorry? Do we need a valid through date? We need a valid through date. Why would we make it just for a few years if this is a project that's gonna be a couple of decades? You know what I mean? Like it says valid through 2026, or a comprehensive. So that's the town plan that's valid through 2000. Oh, okay. I'm sorry. I'm trying to make this. Okay. No, this is in perpetuity. Okay. Okay, thank you. You have petitions that haven't changed you. No. Correct. Jump that bridge and we'll get there. Yes. And what's, I'm gonna assume that if the select board would like to do this, we really need you folks to reach out the constituency and explain why this is needed. Okay, it's one thing for me to do it. Plenty of work, it's all I'm doing. You folks are elected officials, work your networks, get them going, get the buzz going, and explain to them. The town center, I think, in my personal opinion, is the biggest and broadest economic development plan that we, as you folks, will probably see come down to path in a long time. And I hope you embrace it. Carl-Elizal is here with the planning mission, and this is just one of many, many steps to come. But this is a critical step for the process to continue. I would just add that I don't think it's just necessarily town center directed either. I think it's something that's needed just by virtue of the, you know, for instance, I think a bigger, it's getting to be a bigger town and more is happening and more is going to happen. And I think that it's necessary for a number, just the zoning alone, okay, so the zoning, it's frustrating to have to make minor changes by both and to have to redo that every year. And I think it would be beneficial to the town to be able to make those changes through the slideboard that are, you know, and again, like Tom said, doesn't mean the slideboard has to decide to approve everything. It just means that they have that option and they can choose to not approve wider, you know, larger topics that they want that to go to town vote. And if the town constituents have a problem, they can petition for it to be re-voted on. So, you know, that particular item to go to a town vote if they disapprove of one of the decisions that you make. So there's mechanisms for the public, there's regress, so I don't see it as taking away voters' rights because of that. I think it's just streamlining operations for the town as the town grows and it just becomes unmanageable. And I do have, I think most, Brandy was frankly, you know, surprised that we had that option because most towns now, other than very small towns, don't. So, that's my piece. Thank you, Karla. Okay, I think it makes sense. Yeah, put it out to the voters at least. Yeah, well, the thing is that public votes for the most part are pre-unwieldly as far as retirement is concerned. And the thing right now is that the voting form of this is we need to be able to react quickly. I think this is a good idea as far as streamlining coming. I'll make a motion to give the authority to adopt town plans to the select board. Through the discussion. Now, I probably didn't say that as well as I needed to. The board, right? Okay, this can be put on the November ballot. Yes, okay. So there's anything else on this? All those in favor? All right. All opposed? Motion carries. So thank you. The next item that we shared with you and I apologize for the scale of it, but this is brand new for the select board. I have a larger scale drawing there. If anybody wants to gather around that drawing, one of the items for the application is the official map. And this is a draft of the official map. There's actually two maps. It's a map area on your right of your paper of the more concentrated Newtown center area. And the one on the left shows a larger section of town that we believe can participate and benefit from the town center designation. And what the official map does, it just lists town assets, it lists transportation, lists municipal infrastructure. These maps show a series of paths ways leading from Berlin town center up to a Berlin Pond and up into the greater town forest areas there. And I think our consulting team did a pretty interesting job on getting pedestrian foot traffic through a very somewhat unfriendly pedestrian foot traffic area to Berlin Pond. And that's really came from the virtual meetings that we had with our constituency that they were asking for these items. What's not on here is the boundary of the Berlin town center. That's not on the official map. So this is just, as I said, listing infrastructure and such. And again, I apologize for the scale of this. This, we're still tweaking this and adding items to it. Brandy, you wanna speak to the official map at this moment? I think you did a pretty good job summarizing it. We still need to add the water and wastewater infrastructure components to the map. And the planning mission did discuss a few modifications and we wanted to show us to the select board tonight to see if you guys had any red flag questions that we can deal with now. And then this map will give one of the items that needs to be adopted in order to get your city town center designation. So it would go through a process to be adopted just like the zoning. So the planning mission needs to hold a hearing on it. It would need to come to you and the select board would need to hold a hearing on it. Unless that vote is successful in November, the voters will ultimately need to vote on it. If your vote goes through, then select board should adopt it. Brandy, you see this vote having to occur before November or can it be on the November ballot? The question about voting? The official note, I think the question is about voting is gonna be on there, but we still have to vote as a town on items up until post-November. So will this map be on the vote for approval by the constituency in November? I don't believe it will because we haven't started the hearing process. So the plan is the same process as the zoning. So there's the warnings and the hearings and there's a several month process. Yeah, okay. We'll probably start that process right after the November election once we know which way the vote has gone. And if it needs to go to the town why voted until in March. Okay, thank you. So if you have questions and concerns on this map, we can make larger scales for folks. Get me those, get me your questions or concerns and we will get them addressed on this map. I'll bring it back to you sometime in the relatively near future with it cleaned up to a point where we think it would be ready for a final decision. I don't know what you're looking at because I haven't seen your materials. I just wanted to go up to your car. Well no, I've seen the map. I didn't know if there was something. I just wanted to make clear that because I didn't hear it in the video I wasn't listening properly. But the idea of the official map is that it's got the existing assets but it's also got future. So the trails are future proposed trails. And we could add a lot of future items on there but we chose to be relatively modest so that they were doable, hopefully attainable items and not to go too far into Wonderland about what might happen. So I think that's why I just wanted to add that. So the last piece I shared with you here is the, I think it's 29, yep, 29 items that we need to complete this application. You will see the various stages of them. There's a good bit of green which are complete. A good bit of magenta, I guess it is in progress. And just a couple that are not started yet. So we are going to share this with the select board on a regular basis. We want to hold the Planning Commission speak to the fire on this. You want to get, you want to have a draft ready application in October, November timeframe. And so everybody is doing a lot of work and we include you folks as partners in what we're doing. And we hope to share not only the accolades but some of the work. I also just wanted to add that they followed from last week and we did, with Brandy and I met with Wayne virtually last week and we had a conversation and the ball sorted in his court to take a look at the two designations of the Neighbor and Development Area versus Town Center and kind of get a sense of what he would prefer. We don't know exactly what would happen once he makes his mind up, but just so you know we aren't in conversations then. Thank you. That's being appreciated. So this official map doesn't go into the boundary of, okay, good, no. Okay. That's fine. If there's no further questions for Brandy, like to let her go. What was that? What was that? Thank you, Brandy. Good. Yep. So Brad, I know we have Tim up on the agenda next, but we do have Keith. Yeah, I understand your chief and he's not a paid employee. He's available on here. So maybe we want to thank you, Farrell. Good night, Farrell. Thank you. Yep, our department, come on down. No, no, no, no, no. Joe, Joe, are you on? He is and I'm going to try to stay right now to have him call in. Thanks for coming out. You're welcome. Thank you, sir. So I can kind of get it started. Absolutely. We had a meeting for the board of directors with the fire department last Thursday. And a couple of things I wanted to bring to the board's attention. One of them I think might actually require some action. So I wanted it out into the agenda. And the other one's just to kind of fill the board in. So with the project that's going on with the water and sewer over there, right by the station, they want to connect to municipal water and sewer there. And I guess two comforts stop building back. Joe's coming. Oh, OK. I might be just late. No, I was stuck, Joe. I was Joe. You have a just late up here as well. Yeah, Jeff's probably, you know, heard it. Anyway, so they want to connect to the municipal water and sewer when they talk to, I forget one of the people over there talk to the Du Bois. Yeah, I think so. They send all the change orders and everything. It might be a good idea to, since the Maryland project, see if they could have it added to a change order and have the fire department reverse the town. So I wanted to talk about that. I don't even know if it's possible, but it would obviously require. I'm sorry, what are you looking at me? So when the water system came through, we had said to the board that we would join on the water system and we actually haven't connected to the water system. So we want to make good on that promise of connecting to the water system. And the most economical way we can see that right now since Du Bois is already working over there is to basically have Du Bois do the work for the actual water connection. So we have, as part of our contract with them, is for, because there are a handful of customers on GameCurve like now have decided to join water. So they have given us a cost to connect these folks. So if you want to do that, then fine, we'll just invoice the fire company for whatever that is to connect to the water. And that's what we're looking for. So they can do it while they're there. And then we'll just get the invoice and put it in there. I don't know if that requires a loan or if that's already been dealt with or what, how do you, so. From the public board, they have, it's part of their contract with it. So, and we put a line item in Du Bois' contract and they've already given us a cost. I can't remember if it's a per foot or whatever. They give us a cost. It sounds like the change order is not even necessary. It is not necessary. Yeah, okay. No, no, you can go. Good news. Yeah. Perfect. That was quick. I'll take care of it. Yeah, good. Yeah, because we, I'm actually not gonna want to hear from the town instead of us. Yep, yep, yep. And you'll be automatically connected to sewer, so there's no change over for that. Right, because the sewer goes into that pump station already which is part of the plan, so. The pump station will be removed, it will be eliminated, so you're not paying for the power or anything anymore, it'll just be gravity, so. So there's nothing, you don't have to do anything on the sewer or something. On the water side, I'll get that going. Yes. Thank you. The other thing I wanted to share with the board was maybe the board would want to look at some of it, was the potential fact finding that the fire department's gonna be doing. Yeah, back that time meeting day, I had a discussion with Dana and Brad after the meeting and they had basically requested us to give them a fact finding or a study along with potentially merging the fire department to the town government. And we haven't started that yet because of COVID and all the other fun stuff that's happened, but we've got the group together, we're gonna be starting to meet this week and our schedule is to have that, our portion of that done November, and we can bring it up back to the board in December for your part, whether you want to even potentially put it in the John Report for the end of the year, that's possible if you have you. So, this is more of an informative as to our schedule and we haven't forgotten about it. Okay. Thank you. Let's see. And Justin, the only other thing that Joe had mentioned to me about was when the school board event happened and the lease of the fire department section of land. I don't know if you want to address that or talk about that at all. I don't know what we can do about it. I did ask if they were making a water connection in the building since technically they lease from Washington Central now. They had to get permission from them, which I wouldn't imagine, I don't know. But then it made me think, I wonder what happened with the one time we were still looking at taking that piece off and turning it back into a town I sat in, where we actually had that with the fire department was sitting. If we had thought about that anymore, if anybody had heard anything. I haven't heard anything about that. I wonder if, I just wanted to keep the conversation going. I kind of forgot about it myself. Little bit of background in Joe, are you here still? I'm still here. I can kind of follow the conversation. Okay, little bit of background on it basically is when the station was built back in 89, we obtained a lease for one acre of land from the Berlin School Board for a term of 99 years. So we're talking like 20, 70, 20, 80, something like that when that lease is out. So maybe 30 now? Yeah, possibly. I don't know exactly when they put the lease out for that. So it's not like it's something that's been in for a problem. We don't actually pay for this lease. It's just how it had to happen for building this station. Hold on. And if everything, if they decided that it made sense for them to be part of the municipality over the years, municipality decided to own it in part of that somehow, some way or anguously, we put it in a town center and cover it up, wouldn't it? Yeah, but it's not planned to be in a town center. The same issue. But there is a new superintendent. We have a relationship with him from the, from the Berlin Town Center. I'll reach out to him and maybe we can get together and just go visit him. I know they got a lot of COVID stuff going on. But he seems like a decent guy. He's parole, he's like I do. He's got the same almost last name, so. He's a, we'll go sit out a little bit and just chat about it and see what we can do. Yeah, when you contact him, just let me know when you guys want to have a meeting. And I'll make sure either Joe or myself, we can make sure we get to it. Okay. And that was it for our information that we wanted to share with you. The water connection was the biggest thing is we can make sure it happens. It'll happen. Yeah. Did anybody have any questions? I just want to say that, Keith, how long you've been in your position, but it's been a real pleasure working with you. And you bring a lot to the table. And I appreciate that. We've developed a review. Review board appreciates that. And so thank you for all your efforts. Thank you. How's your membership doing? We're still fairly low on the membership right now. Our active numbers, 15 to 18. So if a plug for membership, if there's any residents who want to join the Berlin Fire Department Tuesday nights at 6.30, is when we meet every Tuesday. How's the Riverton Station doing? We are looking at that. We have somebody who is interested in leasing a portion of the building from us. And in with that lease, potential rehabilitation of the building is going along with it. It's been a long drawn out process where we're still in the discussion phase with that right now. So we did replace or redo the roof last year on that building because the roof was critically failing so that the roof had been taken care of to provide for the safety of the building. Is that a flat roof or almost a flat roof? Nearly flat. Yeah, that's it. Any help for Keith? Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome, Keith. Have a good night. Thanks, Keith. It's good to see you. Jim Davis. How are you? Good, how are you guys? Good evening. You're a junior. Not that complex? Okay. I don't know how you're junior then. Different middle names. So as we know, we're back to the topic of the grader. You guys got the new proposal from Kat. You sent that in the other day. Jim got a new proposal because thought that the idea of running with that, you know how we had the conversation about the grader that eventually grows, failed, whatever we ran with the grader there. And Kat, I think runs a grader skill, you know, we run long, we run long. If there was a way to eliminate that, if we decided to move forward, we'd be the decent equipment that you don't have to worry about. There's one in the meantime. What they do, they found a different grader with a little bit different setup of pretty much the same. It's the same machine, few different options, but it's actually made, it's in Brazil. I believe Jeff's online too, but the graders in Brazil, they have to, if we decided to purchase it, they have to put a scarifier, big mouth scarifier on it. Is he saying Brazil? That's where their factory is. Can we go down and visit this stuff? All right, I'll go get it. Long drive back. That's where the other factory is. Most of the manufacturing of the graders, I believe, goes on there. So they'd have to put a mid-mount scarifier, but so he's thinking, you know what I mean, before he was talking three, three and a half months, the turnaround for this one's gonna be a lot sooner. And then with this one, if we decided to purchase it, they would take ours. We would get a month's rental for one, three in the deal, and then a reduced, even more reduced rate than what he spoke of at the last meeting he was here. And he said that in that month's rental, they would drop it off for two weeks. Yeah, if we only needed it for two weeks, we could have it for two weeks, then take it back another couple weeks if we needed it, they'd bring us one back. I'd do some scheduling with them to get it here. And then that should get us into the new one arriving. And then hopefully. So you need, yeah, I mean, you need something like the month before snow flies, right? That picks, you know, level up the rents. So is that usually the month of October? Just a... Well, you'd like to think that it's, you know what I mean, month of October, last couple of weeks is September, usually by the end of October, depending on weather. Yeah, so that's free enough. You might only get the grade half a day because you gotta wait for, you know what I mean. It doesn't seem like it, but it doesn't take much to freeze the road down for an inch or two. Right, the reason I bring it up is we're halfway through August now, right? So, you know, by the time we make this deal, it'll probably be September 1st or close to it. And then, I mean, by the time we get done it with a month, a month use of a grader. If you look at the second, probably not. Based on the in-stock status or whatever, take 918, the total September 18th facility fabrication with an anticipated ship date of 9.9 or three week delivery time. Yeah, I'm talking about for the rentals out, right? Yeah, I wanted to say about this. So I don't, we wouldn't get it until the third week of October, best case scenario. So right, if you're relying on the rental, based on that is, I guess, my point. Right, but it's free for a month, right? It's included in the purchase price. That's right, okay. The main is both the Portuguese or... Yeah, have translated. But, you know, so it's a little bit more just due to the fact that it has some different options on it, but some of those options are actually safety features for the machine as well. It has the extreme duty guard hitch cover, which is in the center of it, so you can't get sticks there, snow, whatever else into the center of it. Keeps the articulation part cleaner. Anyone check with DuBois if they want to trade for labor? Yeah. It has a, it also has the blade lift... I thought about it. The blade lift accumulation in it. It's safety feature, so if you hit a piece of ledge, that's the fluid bypass on the cylinder, so the blade actually lifts up so it doesn't jar the machine. The other one didn't have that type of stuff. You know anyone that has that feature? I only ask, because it seems like it could be a pain in the butt. It's the same, it's the same, they all come, you know what I mean? It's just an option that you buy, but it's the same option that we would have had on the turntable, so the blade, if you caught something, it'll let it spin, versus, so it's the same thing, it's just like a hydraulic bypass. Okay. So it just, it doesn't jar the machine, it's just, it's just a break. Breaking a couple things like that. Justin, are you gonna make a motion to buy this thing or a table, I think? Maybe I'll also need the money. So, yeah, so I guess that was my first question is, we only have to come up with $28,670 to start. Was it, that's the way I read it? Is that correct? From what they're saying, I don't want to go to a lease, I just need to go to a loan. Okay. Because I can have a loan a year in a rears. Okay. I'll be back. If we could be proud of that for our success. Sure. And I'd be able to understand, which is very similar to what they're offering but I can do that. Okay. Do we have any current loan payments where we would be able to possibly pay off the donation payment since we out our annual bill so we can get it where we didn't, you know? Are you allowed to pay off early? Not yet? A lot of these things. A lot of them don't. I just didn't know. One of the trucks. I don't know what the next one I have to, how many more years I have on that. I forgot to look that up for you. Any loan we'd have to be on a truck? Yeah. So maybe what you could do is do a consolidation because rates are the lowest they've been but maybe you look at just doing a consolidation of all of your capital assets and look at, see what that cost is. I could look into that. I haven't seen this one yet. Because we have done that in the past. But the only issue that is that we did it in the past by the time the loan was getting done because like three pieces of equipment are still paying on that we'd already traded out. That's right. So that's where we're at. I just didn't know if we could just pay it simply to out one of our short, you know, loans that have a short link left on it and free up some. How long does it take? Any role on that? That's the first truck yet. How do you want a year and a half? I don't have that in front of me. I'd say possibly a year and a half to years. I'd say all pieces are following each other. But we had a good one year gap. So we got to say there's at least another year. So thanks for that. Look at this because we all principle things. You pay your interest. I'm going to make the motion to buy the greater for the $247,900 with the stipulation that I'd like Diane to come back next week and give us two options on the best way to pay for it. But I think to start the process. Please approve the order. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I can't. Yes. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. I'll say I never buy you another one. OK. Thanks. Remember, don't run that door. Straight or equal. No. I don't know who's just still on there. I didn't know if you guys had any. Yeah, I haven't heard from anybody I think. You guys have any questions for him? Thank you, Jeff, for all of your time and for taking our questions and considerations into factoring up this proposal for us. OK. So, Jeff, you'll go ahead and get that order. Yeah. So what we need at this point is we'll all forward each other tomorrow. But we just need somebody to sign up a sales order based on the discussion tonight. We'll get the machine orders. No funds will be required for, you know, well, probably a month after we deliver the machine. So we're in the off-border November before receiving funds. So you guys will have 100 opportunities to promote how you want to lead just whatever on your own. Jeff's looking for somebody to sign a sale order. Negative motion to allow Tom to sign the sale order for the lobby after the board for the new year. I second that. Any further discussion? All those papers? All right. You got it, Jeff. Send it to me. I'll call you tomorrow. OK, perfect. Thank you again. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you. Thank you. So just to touch up with you, Brad, do you ask for that second oil sample? Yeah, how bad is it? Ain't good. What? No, bro. I can't even pronounce it. You don't know the deal? I looked it up, huh? Malid deal? Sounds about familiar. No. M-O-L-Y-D-G? Alinda, no. Molly, but Jim. Alinda William. Yeah, that's part of the batting, the bearing. What is it? It's a crate bearing, the main bearings on an engine that are made of a babbit material on a steel sleeve. And the babbit is a conglomeration of many different metals. It's an alloy. And its big thing is that it holds oil, so it lubricates. It stays lubricated. And with just copper showing up, it's odd. But with all the other metals starting to come in, all the other compounds, that's. Yeah, because it's only got 110 hours on it since the last sample. Yeah, it is showing high. The copper is not as high as it was, but it doesn't have the hours on it. But it's up near 100. And then that other metal went from 89 to almost 200 in just 100 hours. So some things, she's getting ready. They've started to have problems with it than we do. So again, what are you going to get to yell over? I'll have to talk with Jeff tomorrow because I got phone calls today about road. Roadway and not rough and pothold. These 30-minute downpours are not helping the cause for the roads. It's creating a lot of potholes. Yeah, I would take it. They'd be very conservative to use that. I've been trying to, only when we absolutely need to. Just because. And then I got that just the other day. And then I was like, OK, more stuff showing up. Thank you, Jeff. All right, thank you, guys. Thanks for all your efforts, Jeff. Thank you. Please hang around. Yeah. I'll be here for a while. Here to listen to the job description for the police chief? Yeah. Why don't you walk in room? OK, police chief recruitment, uh, uh. I sent you, sometime, just a draft job description. I posted it to our website because we have an ad out there looking for a chief and saying, go to the website to see the job description. So this is on our, this is showing you the draft. If you had a chance to read it, turn the wickle, the Monkley city towns, law enforcement, consultant, former South Burlington chief police and current fellow Berlin resident provided this to me. And really the only thing he thought that the board may want to give some consideration to is on page three, it's highlighted in yellow. It'd be a higher level of education. Um, he said that, uh, if it was, if it was him, he would not put that requirement in for this. I agree with that. I think I would leave that out for saying, but that's my own opinion. So it could stay draft, but eventually I would, you know, think we should make up, this is, you know, this is what we're going to, uh, use and, and. Chamberlain of all sectors was, was it part of the rest? Yes, he provided this. We talked over the phone, you know, and, uh, that's the one thing that he said that may, may give some further consideration. Do you need a motion for us to go forward? I would, yeah. Yeah, because most of it. Well, take the draft off, but not clean up that, uh, that, yeah. I make the motion to move forward with the job description as presented. With that change, correct? With that one change. I'll second that. Any further discussion? I think, I think the only part that I really found interesting and, and maybe the, the former chief did it and in my previous town, they didn't really, uh, perform, um, much in the field. But I see that we are asking, asking of, of that here, which is good, I think. It's a working chief. Yeah. Yeah, I thought that was really good. Not great. Yeah. I thought that was really good. Yeah. Is this the salary position or is that still, well, I guess it's still be determined, right? By the board? Through the iron cross? The salary. It's currently, it's currently the salary, but. Okay. This is listed as exempt, full time exempt. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that. So then I thought that I put together some, just the hiring process. So you see that they're reached out to some, some folks. The chief police of the city very, Tim Bump, Bump, Bump Barrier, said he would serve on this committee. Trevor said he would serve. Tor Nelson said he would serve. So I had another community member, Bruce, from the. Where did we end up? No, no, it was from Wayside, the only Wayside restaurant. So he said he was, he was, he was committed. But someone mentioned that Pat McDonald's husband was a state trooper that I was going to reach out to him to be the second community member there and see if he would be willing to do it. So that, so that leaves the town administrator to Berlin, select board members to be on this committee. You can see the calendar I put together. And then six, assuming that you guys like this, I have, I have a draft of then six going down further on, on for your consideration. It's speaking to Trevor and as, as you know, we're in some changing times with, with respect to police forcing and, and such and, and so he just wants, wants to tell the cognizant of that and, and try to make the hiring process a more open process and it may, I don't, I don't know how it was in the past, just a more open, more public involvement in it and then what may have occurred in the past. So if you, if you like this, this formula, I'll continue with six through the balance of the higher and show something for you guys at your next meeting. I'm certainly happy with this. I think of the police liaison. So is there a second person that wants to sit on this? They call for two select men or select people. Is there someone else that wants to sit on this? I will. Good, thank you. And then just so I understand the last part here, the two finalists will both come to the select board and you'll help us with the process after that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome, Tom. Okay, thank you for that. Last meeting we opened the bid for the return of the clerk's wall. Carter contracting gave a bid of 31,000. There was some question on, on, you know, what the good specs were and such. So I sent that to you guys a couple of weeks ago. I hope you had a chance to review it. I did not put that in your packet. The longer the shorter I had a good conversation with John Connor, he shared with me, I think it was his January, February, very detailed quote. And I sent that off to you guys as well. And he said all aspects of that quote would be incorporated into this pricing. So we can write a contract that encompasses those tasks. And so I would recommend that you folks approve Carter contracting for the sum of $31,000 to do the repairs to the town clerk's office. There was a, I think, insurances we'll get after deductible about $21,300. $23,680. But I think there's a deductible there somewhere. So that's after the contractor contract. Okay, all right. The insurance company. Okay. So, yeah, they've given this to me. And what the only recovery they're gonna have and I'm sure that Connor will meet it is if they want it detailed, detailed by detailed, what he does for that wall. And so the insurance company's given this to me saying, this is just an affidavit saying the other, the damage actually is there, we're gonna fix it. So if you sign this, I can notarize it for you. And then they'll send us a check for the $23,680 one, which we can apply towards $31,000. Is there any way to get them? I mean, how is our policy written? I mean, it's the actual cost of repairs or $31,000 and we're only insured for $20,000. Well, if they have what they're calling replacement cost value and they determine what they're making the value of that wall, despite the fact it's gonna cost us more to fix it and they feel the value is for only gonna give us a percentage of the value. And that isn't this country you wanna look at it. And I doubt very much is their estimate takes into account the impact of COVID. I mean, there is a cost to that, right? It's probably Johnson for about $15,000, you know. But this is their final amount, if there's any differences. There's no one on the side. Okay, I'm willing to approve how much money is in the light on for town office. Okay, well what I've done is a bunch of reserves and we do have a reserve of $5,980. It has to do with the building modernization. It goes back to 2006. So I'm thinking that if we use that we only have to come up with $1,400 additional money as long as it doesn't go beyond the $31,000. And how much is in the, how much is in the account for the building maintenance? I don't care. What's the budget? 1,400 grand. Right on point. Right on point. Right there, everyone. I'm gallying. It's just amazing. A building, you know, we used the building maintenance last year for the door, so it was $7,000. So right now what we have available is a $5,980, almost $6,000. We're about $2,000, so we should be able to find that somewhere. Yes, I can take over. Make the motion to approve the proposal for the repair of the wall in the town clerk's office presented by Connor contracting the $31,000 to repair the wall in the town clerk's office. Second that motion. Aim for the discussion. I think we should have had the motion to have also had you to be able to sign me after David. Doesn't he have to sign me after David? So we just put that in the motion too. Okay, second on the amendment. Aim for the discussion. All those in favor? All right. Those opposed, those carries. Thank you. Thank you all. Real quick here, I gave you a copy of the bid advertisement for the water project here on our campus. We are having a pre-bid Wednesday the 19th at 10 a.m. here. Yes, you're more than welcome to come along. There's not more than two of you. And then the bid openings on August 28th at 2 p.m. Question I have for that. Do you want Diane and I to open those and put together a tabulation of that or do you guys want to open them at your next? I'd say open the tabulation. I agree. All right. Anything else on that, Tom? No questions. I might have here, we spoke about the vacation rule. You asked me to find out the impacted employees under that issue was Diane, DJ and myself. I'm recommending that boarded change their policy for hourly non-unionized employees, vacation crew from 220 hours unused to 400 hours for hundreds. And this is just because we're starting to run in that COVID, you can't go anywhere. And we're down some personnel here as well. And so I hope you get that consideration. I do believe the staff here works hard and would appreciate the phone. I agree with you and the fact that we need to do something about the vacation. I thought my only concern with the 400 hours, Tom, is I'd almost rather see about my payment for any time carrying over, because I think that puts us in a position where if somebody has 10 weeks of paid vacation, and we already have staff shortages, I mean, it could put us in a position where we're really short on the money. So I think we would be better as a town, personally, that would be easier to manage if we just said, okay, well, I mean, you can't carry that much over. You can check for an hour that needed to be, I mean, is that the same reasonable as well? Yeah, that's what I suggested, so yeah. I was concerned about the long-term liability on our books of more and more people having 400 hours on when you leave and that's money out the door rather than just time off. So I would be okay with paying out of those hours. I think, I don't think we should make it a long-term thing probably. I think we want people to take vacation, right, we want people to get re-energized and you guys have been super great through this whole thing and certainly stepped up and so we don't want to, in any way, de-centivize you from doing that, but we don't want it to be a long-term process. You know, I think really you folks could revisit this at any time. You change this policy after this settles down and everybody gets normalized, you could change this policy in the future. I mean, could we make the exception for this year and then see how those move forward just the way you are right now? This year being defined as the end of the 20th. What about going to Fiscal Year? Right, end of Fiscal Year, June 30th? Is that? June 30th, 2021. Yeah. So folks could take a payout? Is that what you're saying? I would say they could take a payout of anything over there. Over the 220? Yeah. Weekly? Or each paycheck? Or are you talking at the end of the time? I would say, my vision would be to take in, once they get to the 220 mark and they keep accruing and they start getting, they take a payout on anything over the 220, but they hold the 220 to go. They have those hours to take it. Right, so they get 220, they get 10 hours in the next pay period, it would be paid out in that check or the following check. You're saying in each time after if they didn't use them? I think so because that keeps the bookkeeping a little simpler. Is that having it added up? I am, what do you think? I don't think it's simpler. No, I'm sorry. I'm the one doing the payroll, so. I would rather see that maybe at the end of the quarter, if the quarter is going to end in September 30th, if you have more than 220, then you can have to get paid out up to the 220, the same with me and the same with TJ. And then the next quarter, end of December, let's look at it again, if it's still accumulating. That sounds like a good plan. I agree. I want to take the promise. Yeah. But right now I'm sure. I like quarterly status. I think that's, I think I ought to make the motion. There you go. All right, so I moved to change, temporarily change our personnel policy section 402 with the maximum of 220 hours of unused paid vacation in the room. Anything over 220 on a quarterly basis, we cut the check to the employee that's over. But, okay. Over June 30th through fiscal year 2021. Your second. I second that. Any further discussion? All in favor? All right. Opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. We'll have the approval of the second one minutes, July 20th, 2020. I move approval of the second one minutes of July 20th, 2020. I second that motion. Any further discussion? Hearing none, those in favor? All right. All right. Motion carries. Thank you. Round table, Justin. I think I was just going to address, but Carla spoke to it that she had already talked with Wayne came to our last meeting about the town center. So that was the only thing I was going to bring forward. So that was nice that she followed up. Go on. I have a question from the warrant. Specifically around it looked like we took our delivery of winter sand, about $20,000 from Northeast industrial materials. But we had $30,000 in Newton cost. And I'm assuming that was for the delivery of that material. It seemed high. Yeah, they do all the trucking. Okay. Yeah. All the materials. So we paid more in trucking than we did for the material. An extra 10,000 more. It is what it is. I was just, I just wanted to see if they went together. Okay. Okay. Inhale. We also had the payroll. I was kidding. Yeah. Nope. I just have one more thing. Sure. Conversations about the town forest and the vast trail. Two separate, right? We have the town forest conversation with the carborist or the tree person that was going to go up. Probably. Yep. Have we heard anything back from her? The only thing I heard back was an email from home buddies of Northwest Woods or something like that about his proposal to us on the town forest. And I said, I knew I haven't seen the proposal. Will you please send it to me? Yeah. And I haven't gotten anything. Right. You don't know if that was compensation for damages or a proposal for will. And in my note back, I said, I believe that that town has hired somebody to go up and look at illegal tapping and or damage to our problem. Right. But have not heard that. And then the second piece was about the bridge, but furthermore about the vast trail. Have we had any additional conversations with anyone about connecting Northfield in Berlin? So maybe by the last last I heard from the rent board through this conversation with Tom Willard. Yeah. And I believe we talked about it not meeting at the board, but last time I had a recreation committee or more didn't want a wider bridge there to be able to connect with the vast and want to have, they wanted it to be a more private and they wanted to keep the wind. They were concerned if they had a wider bridge and truck traffic, as you guys recall. So it's going to be really hard to get support to tie those two together. But when I think about it, it is Darling Road. It's a class four trail that's approved. And so I think even if we can't do the ridge line because maybe they don't want us up there for whatever reason, I think number one is really a safety concern to be able if the mountain bikes and the people up way out back to be able to get side by side through there. And they've got outdoor recreation is huge, especially now that people are not going to be there going to malls, going to places like that. Not taking vacations, right? Yeah. I mean, I haven't heard anymore. I don't know if anybody else has but I really would like to figure out a way to be able to tie. I think that's a huge piece for a lot of the girl. But you know, I think there's a lot of potential influx of recreation potential for a lot of users. Yeah. I think it would be a really, I mean, it could be a great thing. I mean, it could. So I wish the board would try to push a little harder on the rec committee, maybe to get a. I'm still new, so tell me where I'm off. The rec board makes a recommendation to the town select board on what to do. The town select board decides, is that correct? Okay. That's what I believe. Okay. But it's the next time everybody on the same page. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it makes things a little easier. But yeah. We approve them to create a lot of money on the bridge. That was a safety issue. But encourage them to build it out of it great enough to be able to get side by side through like that through for future use. Have they not? Have you walked up there? I have not. I don't even know it, but the last time I was up there was when Josh Walker and I repaired it, I'm not sure. I didn't see anywhere that we had expended any funds on it, right? We would have seen that even if the funds for the bridge, we would have seen that in the war. Yeah. Yeah, we haven't seen that. They haven't done anything yet. And we asked them to come and do our next meeting to make sure for discussion. Yeah. That'd be great. At least one of them. Right. Okay. Thank you. How was that? Okay, approved license permits, vouchers, and applications. I make a motion to approve payroll warrant 21-04 for payroll from August 2nd, 2020 to August 15th, 2020 paid on August 19th, 2020 and the amount is $39,564.08. Also payable warrant 21G-04 with check 2422 to 2481 in the amount of $104,541.05. July reconcile bank statements, general funds or commission and water division. Also the July general journal entries and the July trial balance budget staffs report and bill input tax report. Second. Any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. And there will be an executive session tonight on legal and personnel. Like Senator Davis and myself have been invited to that executive session. Special. Move to an executive session for personnel and legal issues. Second. All in favor? Aye. All right. We're in an executive session.