 The President, my name is Ryan Barr. Hi, Brian. Could we get you to sit over there so we can get you on camera? All right. So super quick background. Well, as Vice President, last term, so last two years, took over President after Joe in May. So it's my first time really going through it. So bear with me, but I think I got a good team around me. Does everyone have a copy of? Can I just print it off? Thank you, Ryan. Yeah. So what you'll see on the cover page, where it says expenditures and income, that's our cover. That's our older format that kind of does a basic breakdown. To start off, we're looking at a 9.61% increase over last year, getting into it a little bit more. We'll run through some changes that are kind of notable. In the income section, you'll see that our donations are down 50% from 2000 to 1,000. And then down a little bit lower, various fundraisers is up 100%. We doubled from 3,000 to 6,000. That's just a wide item change. We did a really successful fundraiser that we think we're going to continue. So overall, we're looking at a 6.3% increase in our income. How much did you make during that successful? Between our two successful fundraisers, one being a letter campaign, and one being a pie breakfast. We made about $12,000. We don't want to count on that every year, because that was the first time we've done it in a lot of years. But we do plan on doing it again, both of which from the letter campaign, we made about 11,000. And then from pie breakfast, we made about 1,200 somewhere in there. That's why you'll see 6,000 for the fundraisers. And the donations, we feel, are just unmarked in donations. So someone sends us a check and we cash it, whereas fundraisers are more of that. And then moving on to admin. You'll see a new item. Various fundraisers are expensive. That's to go with the fundraisers that we just talked about. Annual dinner has a 33% increase, as well as computer and reporting software right below that, which has a 30% increase. Both of those are kind of just out of our control. The cost of food and renting locations has gone up as well as the cost of software. We use the same software. We're not purchasing anything new. Just the cost went up. Moving down a little bit more. Insurance is a big one. You'll see about $10,000 increase there. I will circle back to that when we get down to benefits a little bit more. But beyond that, there's not a whole lot of increase. That 10% increase is mostly due to that $10,000 increase in the insurance growing down a little bit more. Vehicles and emergency benefits would be the next one. Retirement went up 20%. I believe that's just the cost of it. I don't think we've changed anything. I'm not saying we're safe. That's due to the number of individuals that are enrolled and also the number of individuals who are collecting. So that number is all dependent on whose on our departments and collecting benefits. Urine stipend is where you'll see the biggest increase overall. We did this because we felt that a lot of our people in our department spent a lot of time outside of the responding, as well as responding. We did roughly 800 calls this year, with 300 being fire service and 500 being FAST squad, which is our medical side. We also have a lot of roles, so President and Vice President and our assistant treasurer, Secretary, all of that. They spent a lot of time outside of this that isn't necessarily reimbursed. I know I spend 15 hours a week, 20 hours a week, 20 hours a week. I know our treasurer spends more than that some weeks and a little bit less some weeks. But there's a lot of time that isn't necessarily reimbursed for. So we're hoping to start incentivizing that. In the last couple of years, we've had a lot of problems just getting people to sign up for them because there's a big time commitment and not a lot of reimbursement for it. So we decided to increase that by 18,000 with the hope of trying to shift our plan to incentivize those positions as well as continue to incentivize respond to calls. I should backtrack a little bit. I don't know if anyone, does everyone know our system? So we have the stipend check budget. And then for every two hours, you put in one point, round it up. So if you put in an hour, it's still one point. And then at the end of the year, all the points are totaled up and then divided by that number. So on average, it comes out to, in the last year, I think it was $6 a point. In years past, it's been $3 a point. So $3 for two hours or $6 for two hours is kind of how it breaks down to. So everybody gets the stipend based on their number of hours. Correct. But the officers are going to get more? No. So we do currently have the plan in place where the president or the vice president, whatever, they get a certain number of points for being in that position. I think right now, the president gets 30 points at the end of the year for just being in that position, which doesn't break down to a whole lot. For the time spent. So the hope is to re-ship those to be more concurrent. I know we haven't changed those in a lot of years, and the workload's kind of increased. Our call volume's increased, our workload's increased in the last couple of years. So that's the hope behind that. The points, if you don't mind, like cutting in. The points program gives points for the recording. My name is Nick Karbalacic. I've been on the Berlin Fire Department for 30 years. I've been a town resident since 97. And I'm actually the initial proposer of the point system years ago when we came up with this plan. The idea and the intent of it was that guys, people, firefighters, responding to the station were burning their own fuel, using their own vehicles, coming to the station and doing work. And it was to help reimburse people for the fuel used back then. And so the plan was a total number of points for the end of the year, with a fixed dollar amount to be divided up. And the more the people do, the more they get out of that portion of money. And that way, it was a fixed dollar amount that wasn't necessarily by the hour or an hourly rate where an hourly rate with a minimum wage cost and whatnot could be blown out of proportion with a disaster event and could really kill a budget with a disaster event. So the points program was to help pay the members back for the time that they committed to various tasks. So any meeting they attend, attendance is kept, business meetings, trainings, in-house of the department, out-of-house of the department. And people doing administrative work have provided that they document and submit a point sheet for the tasks they're doing. It is submitted for approval by upper management. And basically, as long as what they do took longer than an hour or so, they would get a point for that. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. So I'm going to keep moving forward if we can sort back to that in just a minute. Anyone has questions? We, Paychips is something we implemented last year, last budget. That's essentially on the weekends right now. We pay someone, two people, four hours each on Saturday and four hours each on Sunday to be in the station doing some of the things that might not get done throughout the week, whether it be checking our trucks or doing paperwork or whatnot. Anything that might not get done during the week. And the whole plan is that we get those things out of the way and we can post our Tuesdays on training some more. And in the change, you'll see that last year, last week's budget, 2024, we budgeted 25,000. And in 2025, we actually dropped it a little bit and then moved some of that to insurance. We didn't quite proceed a $7,000 increase in work that's gone, which is what we had, which is in the insurance section. So we moved it to insurance and then bumped down the budget to reflect that. So when we came up with the $25,000 number, that was for the shift itself, plus some extra insurance increase. We didn't quite proceed $7,000, which was a bigger number. So that's why it went down and then insurance went up. Does that make sense? So that's why that number, that line item for that section is our biggest one, with a 26% increase. And then moving on a little bit more, building. So our building is getting older and there's some more things that need to be kept up. So that's why our building maintenance has gone from $8,500 to $12,500, which is a 47% increase. There's also some things that we're planning on doing, flooring the hallway or the tiling the hallway. We've talked about doing the stand-on building, that kind of thing, that will need to be done soon to keep it functioning. Kibble on the internet, increased by 1,020%. Our electric, 6%, heating, 20% increase from $25,000 to $30,000. Most of these are anything on our side that we've changed. The phone, we did switch phone systems to a newer system. But most of these haven't changed anything on our end. They're just increasing over time. And then moving on to vehicles emergency response. Communications equipment has gone up 33% from $7,500 to $10,000. Everything's getting more expensive. I can go back to that, but unfortunately, it's the truth. We have a plan to purchase X number of radios and pagers every year. And this kind of falls that guideline. I don't have John here. I don't remember what that number is, but it's similar to what we've been doing every year. I think it was $12,500 on the budget line. Probably the number of radios and pagers. I just don't know how many pagers that is, videos like this. And then our dispatch, 4% increase. That's a year over year, 4% increase. And then, which is out of your control? Correct. OK, correct. That is something that's set by dispatch. That's under control of the Capital Fire Users Group and with negotiations with capital dispatch. You'll see a 30% decrease in funding purchase. We're trying. Last year in 2004, we are trying to outfit our utility to be more of an all-purpose response. That's why we pumped it up for that one specific year from $12,500 to $18,000. We're just going back to $12,500. We just actually, this week, outfitted that utility, which is getting older. And so we're trying to increase the lifespan of it, as well as our rescue, which is our primary response for a lot of calls. And so we're trying to transfer some of the response away from that rescue, which is a really expensive piece of equipment that's starting to get older and starting to break more. We just spent $12,000 preparing the suspension and all that and then a couple more thousand on the generator. So that piece of equipment is getting really old. And we're trying to transfer towards the utility and get some more life out of rescue. The rescue is talking about about 20 years old. Our gear purchase, again, that's three sets of gear, I believe, for the $14,000, which is what we've been doing in the previous year. And then another big change, post-testing. So that's something that we have been trying to do at house. It went from $1,500 to $5,000. It takes a lot of manpower. It takes a lot of hours to go through all of our hose and test it in-house. And the hope is that we can have a company come in when they're servicing other providers in the area. And we can have them test it in one day versus us spending an hour and tying up a bunch of people and spending a lot of time. It's multi-hour, multi-people. So that's why we increased that. Beyond that, there's not a whole lot of increase. The vehicle and emergency response section actually went down, I'll also present, which is pretty nice. I think, I'll go back, I'm just summarizing it real quick. We're looking at a 6.3% increase in income, our department income, with a 9.34% increase in total expenditures. So we'd be seeking a 9.61% increase from the town. How come the insurance went up so much? So that goes back to switching some away from the paid shifts, which, again, was that $7,000. But what was the cause of the increases from the league? Do they say why it's more expensive? So we don't use the league. Oh, you don't? We are insured by VFIS. I don't believe we're able to use the city of town because we're a private organization. But either way, with having people in the station. That's what caused the increase? Yeah. So the more that we're in there, the more liability there is to the more increase there is. So when we went to this paid shift program on retail, my understanding is that being that now we have people working as a paid position that we're paying out of the rate, my understanding is that the insurance company looked at that and said, OK, you've got people actually working on the cloth. And therefore, our workers' comp insurance took a hit. Gotcha. And they increased the workers' comp insurance. Understood. Yeah, it's a double-edged short bar. It's nice to have people in there able to respond. Unfortunately, it costs a lot more to do that. OK, I just understood you. Yeah, there, thanks. Any questions? Any more questions for the board of fire department? Yeah, Tom. Thank you, Brad. There's talk of emerging the town and the fire company. Have you looked at the value of that with respect to this budget? I believe that's a couple of steps ahead. I hope that maybe the merger committee can touch upon that, as well as the short answer, no. I know there would be some savings in accounting and, potentially, insurance if you go to the league, but no, not like a dollar-for-dollar person. I would think the constituency would like to have that number when it comes to that time. I mean, I think it would be an important number for you guys to have in your background. I wanted to say that it was a good presentation and detailed. And also, I'd like that you're going to go forward with the letter campaign again and another pie breakfast, because they were very successful. Yeah, one of the things I personally love is community outreach. I love doing public event type people in the station. It also helps with the recruiting. The more people are familiar with our station, the more comfortable they are to come in and go on to at a time, whether it be an emergency response status or just helping out with fundraisers like that or helping out with it, something like that. That's a very good point. I would just encourage you that you don't do these things in a silo, because we have our planning mission struggles with this, our DRB struggles with this, is if we could act more as a community and so other entities, like the planning commission, can get involved in this thing, I think we have a greater reach in different social media points. Yeah, so keep that in back your mind. On everything you do, then you keep these, not just the select board, but these other groups involved. They have a, you're probably not on it, but the town has a distribution of agendas for these various committees, and I would just encourage you to get on it. You can always delete it when it's in your inbox, but there may be something that's on it that it's something that you could work collaboratively with. Thank you. Great suggestion. Any other questions or comments from the Brown Park Department? Here we go, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you all for everything you do. It's really appreciate it. Thank you. Very much so. Much appreciated. Next on the agenda is the Washington Unified School District to revisit mailing your ballots. Tour? Mr. Chair, we've discussed that the past couple meetings, we have special guests with us tonight. We'll let her go into the actual details, but just on history, we voted on this December 20th, which was the late meeting from the 18th, we voted twice in the 12th both times with a short-handed forward. Since he happened on December 26th, we were short-handed again, so we did not take a vote on that. So we're with it again tonight and I would like to turn it over to Floor from the Supervisory Unit to go over the more detailed, the proposal and everything. So take it away, Floor. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction. Thank you for having me with you. I'm sorry I couldn't be there in person. I love coming to your offices and I haven't been there in a while, but I think you guys will receive, I'm not gonna read the language. I'm just gonna explain why I'm here. So in order for us as a district to send, to have all of our school ballots send out, we need to have the agreement of all of the five towns. So right now we Wooster, Kalas, East Montpelier have already voted yes to send their ballots and middle sex too. So I'm hoping that tonight when you have a bigger turnout for your select or we could bring, we would be able to make this possible for our district. Expanding access to vote by mail has been a major step for accessibility for a lot of people. I know that we don't always see as much of the, we don't have the data really to see how much of an impact this has made on our district, but it makes a considerable difference for people that sometimes have no access to transportation or wanna avoid lines. It just makes it easier for people to make their voices heard. And that is really important for us at Washington Central to make sure that we have as many people represented in this vote. And we have done it this past few years. So I'm really here to really beg you to make this possible. So with one town withholding, we wouldn't be able to send any ballots. We need to be able to have all the towns in agreement in order for us to do it. So that's why I'm here. And I'm happy to go through the language, but I know that you have it there. And it's basically, we take care of the expenses and our clerk would be, it's still some work for Rachel, obviously, but it doesn't mean that you won't be open on town meeting day. Of course, there's some people that are gonna come and wanna vote there. And we can mail our carrier center ballots. So we still are, because that would require us to lobby 18 towns because I also sit in the carrier center vote board. So this is really important. And that's why I'm sitting here today with you. Just please help us make it possible. Since we had one dissenting vote previously, Tor, your thoughts on this? I'm still have great concerns about security associated with the universal vote by mail. I don't believe it's a proven concept yet. And I think for the integrity of the process, we should not proceed forward this. Okay, any other comments on this? I was comfortable with what Rachel said as far as the voting and how it's handled. And I'll move that we approve the mailing of the ballots. You're second. I'll second. Any other discussion? So how much work is it on Rachel? Oh, she's in favor of it. Okay. She gets paid by the hour. How much work is it extra for? My sense is there was really no additional because the folks who come to your ballots come here anyways and have to get process so there's really no additional time. I was the impression I had as well. Any other comments? Hearing none, those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? Aye. Motion passes. Thank you. Yep. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming, Laura. Thank you. Thank you, sir. Yeah. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Not a problem. This is the year 25 budget highways. Did we get the printouts for everybody? Got them right there. And did Tim show up? Yeah, he's here. It's all new to the folks tour. I think maybe they're looking for some guidance on where maybe some of the numbers came from. We have some color-coded things here. Maybe we start with that. I am trying to figure out... There, he's got it done, sharing it now. Oh, great. Is that coming through? It is, tour, yes. Thank you, tour. I'm not very good at this, though. I'm not going to highlight. Yeah, so we're going just to highlight. So if you go down, I always look towards you in the hallway. There's actually a couple sections of highways. You break it down into summer ropes. Starting there, 10-1-90-10. The wages for the summer roads, looking at a 3% increase, just like in the wages, just like we're looking at across the board. Overtime, just increasing a little bit. It took 2,500. Roadside mowing, tree trimming, small increase of 12,000 even. Chloride increasing a little bit to 35,000. Covert materials, keeping levels to 15,000. Summer equipment, maintenance and repairs, level funding at 25,000. And fuel increasing just a little bit to 35,000 due to perceived increases. We can just take it back. Moving on to the next section, which is winter roads. Here again, the wages and overtime, looking at a 3% increase in that. The blue item, the wages on call. That's where there's somebody on call. You know, primarily on weekends, they're given $100 a week. I believe that may currently be included in the regular wages, in which cases just the double open can be eliminated, but just checking on the common practices on that. In the past, there was a separate line item, but I believe now it's incorporated into the regular wages. Sand, we're keeping level funding at 80,000, same with the salt, the equipment, repairs and increase on the winter fuel. Any questions so far? Moving on to Highway General, asphalt marketing, stealing, looking at level funding at 160,000. I know we have about 97,000 from the Pine Hill that we did not get done this year. That we look to carry over. This may be one area that we may want to look at in the future. Gravel, looking at a small increase in there, to 155,000, 1500 and bridge maintenance, which is level funded. This is something we may want to look at increasing in the future as we did get some bridge reports last year, showing some deficiencies, nothing major, but I'm of the opinion that we can be more proactive in this and take care of some of the smaller items now and keep them from becoming larger items in the future. Roadside, level funded at 4,000, and same with guard rails at 10,000. Now, the big item right there, the 795,000, that is a worst case scenario for what we will be out of pocket for with our major projects from the flood, the Painter and Pike North, we're looking at about 150,000 there, 160,000. We're starting to get some numbers from the Federal Highway administration on that. Plus, we've got the Darling, Colbert, and the Wurchton Road Colberts. So that front. Yeah, we're gonna have to do the Junction Road there. Junction Road Colbert, okay. So then the last item, a lot of blue, that's areas we're waiting on, numbers from Cali as far as the workers comp and the FICA and disability and all those items like that. I would expect there to be an increase in the nose areas, but not much, just in line with everything else. Going down further, supplies with more increase in mares from 6,500 to 7,000, advertising level funded at 500,000, training level funded at 1,000, small increase in telephones from 3,600 to 4,000, garage maintenance utility, small increase from 20,000 to 22,000, energy improvements funded at 5,000, small increase in street lights from 12,000 to 12,500, same thing with traffic lights, small increase from 2,000 to 2,200, miscellaneous level funded and the same with uniforms, 10,500. And then if you go down a little bit further into the capital budget area, highway equipment and structures I have in there, 253,000 for a new loader, that's been something that's been identified for a couple of years now that needs to be replaced. So I have a lot of money in there for that. So I will let Tim jump in with any comments he has. He adores everything that I thought and it's little increases here and there, mainly fuel when it went off, try to keep it somewhat small due to the fact of what went through this summer, we still got a little bit of work to do next summer, but by the sounds of it, we might be able to pass that back onto the FEMA side as far as like grappling some of these roads that we didn't get sufficient amount of gravel on. We just covered them this fall. But by the sounds of it, we're gonna be able to do a little quick math, figure out how much more gravel we're gonna need and then just kind of pat the, they're still waiting for an answer if that's how they're gonna do things through FEMA or not, but not much for increases. The salt prices staying the same? They went up a little bit more this year. Every year they keep creeping. Yeah. Well, it takes fuel to mine it. Well, last year when we had to switch companies, mainly because back in American rock salt went out and Du Bois went out, nobody picked it up. So without either coming from Massachusetts or Canada, Barrett's is really the only option we have for tons of Vermont. And they went up, it was $7 difference last year. This year it was a dollar. So every year they're going up a little bit. Good. Question. Just going back to the unreinversed FEMA flood damage, the $500,000 and then the paying term by local match, or match, sorry. Could you just go back and explain that again to me, to her? Okay, the FEMA doesn't cover 100% of our expenses on these. There is a local match, just like any type of dealing with federal or state governments. So the 795,000 is a worst case scenario at this point for the four major projects we have coming up that still need to be repaired. And that our local share would be the paying term by North, the estimate right now is 1.6 million total, which would give us 160,000 local match alone on that. Or does that include Richardson Road? That is included in that 795. So why she says 500,000, am I missing something? Yeah, well that's why I'm going at the 795. Doesn't say 795. I see five. I may be sharing the wrong screws then. Okay, that's why I was confused. So yeah, so I did break up that 160,000 from the 795,000. So there might be two lines. I would say 500,000 and 157,000. Okay, all right, so yeah. So yeah, I broke that out into two separate line irons. So that doesn't equal 795. So is the 500 supposed to be more? No, it's just better estimates of what we're looking for. Okay, that's all right. You mentioned a 200 sum K for a loader. That's total costs. Are you, are you, are you fine and sad? So that's spread out over several years. We're going to look to try to avoid financing that, but that is an option. I know we've tried to get away from financing over the last couple of years. And here, without wanting to get into the options tax and everything like that and capital budgeting process, you know, look at the future. You know, looking at, you know, just taking, you know, doing the full purchase at this time. Any other questions for Tim? Yeah, street lights and traffic lights. Was that maintenance, repair? Is it a power bill? Is it a, well, all-encompassing? What is that? Three lights I can't, as far as I know, unless, I agree, my power bills us for the lights that are around here for bulb changes or maintenance on it. But street light, as far as traffic light, is the hospital light that we maintain. Fisher Road and the mall entrance. And they've been saying for a while now that that's getting to the point where at some point it's going to be even upgrade in the computer system. We keep going. Everyone's been a while, we'll have a little glitch and turn into a lot of shit and everything else, but also the bulbs, whenever they replace the bulbs now, they replace them without any fees or anything close to being out of all the old stuff. So it's maintenance and power bill all the way up to something. Yeah, but it is a power bill. Okay. And that's correct on the street lights, that is the power bill from Greenmont Power. Did you have a question? Hearing none, thank you very much, Tim. Thank you, Tim. Thanks, Tim. Thank you. Crew of licenses permits, vouchers and applications. I make a motion to approve payable warrant 24G15 with check number 23625 to 23646 in the amount of $15,477.98. Also payroll warrant 24-15 for payroll from December 17th of this year to December 31 of 2023, paid on January 3rd of 2024 this year in the amount of $59,444.91. So it was from December 17th of 23 to December 31 of 23. Just to clarify. I'll second that. Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Both motion carries. Round table, go. Yeah, so if you remember, probably about a year back, Deputy Chief Halsworth came up and gave a presentation on communication, communication, let's say, grant that he was looking to apply for. Okay. Went through the process and just before it was issued, basically the state pulled back. And so we did not get that grant money to do the upgrade that we were looking to do for now. There was two parts that communicate that presentation. One was the grant to do it now and also to then plan for the future and have something 10 years down the road. So Capital Fire is having a meeting on the 17th and we're looking to have all the legislators there and probably looking for some support from our local community to select board to go there to ask the questions. And this is important. Communication is huge. I don't care if it's fire, if it's EMS or PD. We've been struggling with that, with the PD and the new radio system. So that's, I'm just saying, I would really like to see a number of you there at that January 17th meeting, which will be at Alumni Hall in Perry. At what time? 7 p.m. Thank you. Can you send a reminder? I will. Ha ha ha. What's that? Slow? Nothing for me tonight. Thank you though. Carla? I can't think of anything. I'll have to come up with something for next time. Dora? Received an email from the town clerk. There are three select board positions up for reelection this year. Carla was finishing up the three year term, which is up and then Joe and myself with one year terms, give me instructions and everything on how to submit petitions. I think it was due by January 29th, if I recall, hang on a second. Also, talking with Rachel, we had moved a couple years ago. The town meeting, pre-town meeting will be Saturday, March 2nd, starting at 10 a.m. Hopefully the fire department lunch and the following are just keeping those states on your mind. I have nothing. Entertain a motion to adjourn? I make the motion to. Go ahead. Yes. Just last year, when we talked about a cross-down I want to ask you guys tonight, because that was going to come around sooner than later. Last year, when we talked about it, I believe it was under the influence of the guys who said it was up to me as long as I don't notice that everybody is still good with that or... Probably revisit it next meeting. I think that would be good. It doesn't have to be right off. Okay. I mean, it ain't going to be anything that happens anytime soon. You might be surprised. We just looked through it a week ago. That should have been closed. The roads were breaking up. That was awful. Okay, motion to adjourn. I make the motion to adjourn tonight's select board meeting. Check it out. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. We adjourned.