 I'll make a motion to adjourn. Are we ready, Mike? Ready? Welcome to the Essex Junction Trustees meeting. Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Welcome, Harlan. Thank you. We like to thank our audience by name. Well, if we can, since we listened to it pretty narrowed down and I could just pick it out, it was easy to do. Evan, do we have anything to add to the agenda tonight? We do. But first, President Brown sends his regrets. He has a family emergency to attend to, or he would have been here. It is an additional item for consent. It is from the Burlington Gem and Mineral Club for a banner across 2A. And I believe it is the Village Board's prerogative to approve or not approve. And it is timely because if we don't get it done tonight, by the time you meet again, their event will be over. It's abroad to what? The Gem and Mineral Club. It's the Gem, Mineral, and Bossel show. Oh, cool. And maybe I'll give them the free plug at the Champlain Valley Fairgrounds July 27th and 28th. Fantastic. So we put this, I think we want to put this in the consent, we'll add this in the consent agenda, okay? So I'll make a motion that we add the banner approval for the Gem show to the consent agenda. As item D. I'll second as... Yeah, as item D. Okay, and Amber seconds. Okay, all in favor? Aye. And so I think that's it. We have to approve. I move that we approve the agenda as amended. Okay, I'll second. All in favor? Aye. Okay, thank you. So, audience to be heard? No? Just here to watch? I've worked so many hands now, I'm not sure I'm allowed to ever speak here again. Oh, okay. All right, okay. Well, if you wanted to, go ahead. So, on to our very first item of business, which is the public hearing, our second public hearing on the FY20 water rates and take it with you. So, this may sound a bit repetitive at this point, but as per the trustees policy on large user water rate setting, we are now having our second hearing on the water rates, the large user water rates. The large user water rate is for any user that uses 2.5 million gallons per day or more. We only have one of those in the village and after our calculations, our reconciliation on the year, looking at their actual water from last year and then the proportionate share of unaccounted for water, the rate has decreased from 0.078 to 1,000 gallons, 0.075, a 3.85% decrease from last year. Are there any questions? Are there any questions from the audience? Yeah. Sorry. So, I have a question before. Please. You all have heard the presentation before? Yes. Sarah certainly can go through the presentation or she could just answer specific questions and assuming there are none from the audience or you could ask, he so low could ask, we can move forward. Yeah, I don't, do you have any questions? And I think you cleared up all the questions that I had at our last public hearing for the water rate change. So, Dan, are you good? I'm good. Okay, so I will, I think, I don't think we need to move I think we just declare the public hearing for the FY20 water rates closed. Okay. And so, we will then move on to our first, a second item of business, which is to adopt the FY20 utility rates. And maybe just for the record, we should quickly go over these right, the 6A. Okay, I'm going to quickly go over these or do you want to do it, Sarah? Let me do it? Sure. Okay. In order to fund the FY20 water, the wastewater treatment facility and the sanitation fund budget staff recommends the village rates be set as follows. Water usage rate, 0.0188 per cubic foot. Water quarterly fixed charge, $26.86 per quarter. Wastewater treatment usage rate, 0.0098 per cubic foot. Wastewater treatment quarterly fixed charge, $25.82 per quarter. Sanitation usage rate, 0.0057 per cubic foot. Sanitation quarterly fixed charge, $24.48 per quarter. Large water user rate, 0.075 per thousand gallons. Wastewater treatment wholesale rate, $3.154 per thousand gallons. And the cost to the village resident using 120 gallons per day will increase 8.2% or $38.61 approximately, I will add that per year. The large user rate is decreasing by 3.85%, and the wastewater treatment wholesale rate is increasing 5.73%. And that pretty much wraps it up. So, do I hear a motion? Make a motion to adopt the FY20 utility rates as presented. Do I hear a second? Second. Okay. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. And so now we are on to adjusting the FY20 Water Fund Revenue Budget. Sarah, take it away. All right. So, when we first adopted the utility fund budgets back in the spring, we were still operating with approximate numbers for the large water user. And now that we have records out those to actual, there's an adjustment required in the revenue budget. Because the trustees adopted the budget with all of the revenues broken out and all of the expenses at the time when it was an approximate, this is a formality to make a small shift. The total expenditures are the same, all the expenditures are the same, total revenues are the same, but because the amount that's going to be anticipated from the large user sales is less than the original budget, that is offset by an increase in the residential sale of water reflected in the rates you just adopted. And I would look, I would ask the trustees to amend the Water Fund Revenue Budget to reflect that change so that we're on the right track as we go into FY20. Have the spreadsheets behind the scenes if you'd like me to hold them up. This looks good. Any questions? Okay, so I will make a motion that the trustees amend the FY20 Water Fund Revenue Budget to decrease revenues from water sales large users from $111,132 to $92,729 and increase revenues from sale of water residential from $1,068,385 to $1,086,788. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay, unanimous. And lastly, we are on to... Second, I want to make sure... Okay, revision to personnel regulation. Sarah? Not sure who's doing this. Sarah's going to take this. It's Sarah Knight. Sarah's showing this. So this is actually one of the items that Travis had mentioned at the strategic advance during his presentation. And this fall we have two employees who are attending a conference together in Chicago for a week. One is a village employee and the other is a town employee. The current personnel regulations in the village limits the amount of meals and incidental reimbursements paid to an employee to $15 for breakfast, $15 for lunch, $25 for dinner, including gratuities on a reimbursed basis. So you have to come back with your receipts and then you will get those funds. That's a total of $55 a day which does seem to be the general time rate when you look up the US GSA website. But for Chicago, the daily per diem is $73 and this is where these two are going. The town policy allows for an employee to request that per diem amount up front. And we think that that should be more of the standard where if you're just a day trip that you can come with a reimbursement after the fact, we think it's more equitable. It doesn't place a hardship on the employees if we allow for any overnight travel for the employees to opt to request the per diem in advance up to the limits established by the US GSA which we can reference in the policy as opposed to having the hard dollars and then they will do the updating on an annual basis. So the proposed language change is the second page in this two page memo and it reflects that. And this is in line with what the town, how the town is treating its employees and we believe, we the management team of Human Resources, Evan and Finance, we think that this is the most equitable way to go. So this aligns the two and it sets us up nicely for the future. Alright. Thank you for the explanation. You're welcome. I mean we have a few people that go to conferences out of state not very often but they do. It is going to, it probably was rare that we had people that went to the same out of state conference but it is not going to be as rare as it used to be and we just want to try to align certain things and we don't like having people that have to put money out of a bucket to go get education or training at our behest. I'll make a motion that the trustees approve the proposed provision to the village of Essex Junction General Rules and Personnel Regulations. I'll second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Okay. Thank you. Sounds good. Thank you for doing that. Thank you for updating that. It sounded like the village's policy needed to be revised. I'm glad you did it. So we are on to thank you. We're done for business items and we're on to the consent agenda. Is that correct? Yes. And will we approve the consent agenda? Items A through D. A through D. Yes. Yes. Including the mentioned addition. Thank you. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Okay. Reading. That included all of the minutes. Okay. I'll try. I was going to say, just in retrospect, there was one of the minutes that was pretty old. Didn't we approve that before? How did that manage to not be approved? You don't need to. If you don't have a specific answer, don't worry about it. I'm just sort of warm on my head. We normally, we pretty much keep up with it. It seemed like one of them was a couple of months old. The June 22nd. Yeah. No big deal. That's a joint meeting. That's a joint meeting. Okay. That's when you were in edit. Yeah. Oh, good. That's why it seemed old to you. Right. You didn't say that. So that's an old. Okay. And several of us lived it. You don't have to. You don't have to. I can approve. You can approve a meeting. I was going to. You can do it. Good. Okay. Let me know. So we are now on to the reading file board member comments. I'll make just one quick comment. The survey so far for KSV, the very first survey they put out about just a sort of general sentiment and understanding about consolidation and other issues relating to village town merger. So far, almost 500 responses. Wow. Yeah. And I think the, they're recommending that we, we, I think they're going to keep it open for like another week, but we're not going to keep promoting it because we don't want to get survey burnout because we're going to be doing a bigger survey. And so we want people to, you know, want to keep pushing it. So like, we only needed like 310 for a statistically significant response. So yeah. Is one of the questions, George, I can't remember. Was it where you took the survey or where you heard about the survey? Yes. Where did you hear or did you link to the survey is one of the questions. Right. We don't have all the data. Right. No, I understand. I just want to. There was just one, actually two age groups that we already knew we were going to get potentially a low response. 18, 17 and 18 years of age and 18 to 35. We were kind of hoping to get a better response. So one of the things that we would like to try to do over say the next week is see if we can target that audience. And I was joking with George a little bit. If we could actually reach that age group better. They, you know, if we knew how to do that. Yeah. So if you've got an idea as to generally where that 500. So do we have a general idea as to where those? Yeah. A little under 60% from village and a little over 40. It's kind of trending around 60, 40 village town. But are they seeing it on Facebook or? We didn't get that. We'll know all that. We're going to get that in a few days. But the one thing was the first blush. It was an age breakdown and location breakdown. So if you know any 18 to 35 year olds have them fill out. Well, that's what I thought. I mean, that age range. I would think Facebook would be, you know, the place to be. And I know that. That's true. Yeah. I'm too old. I'm outside. All of old people are on Facebook and they don't want to talk to us anymore. Well, I think it's there because I don't want to speak about it. But a great response by the communities. Yeah. Generally speaking, it's a pretty good response. So it bodes well for further, you know, continuing participation because people are paying attention. Does the village have in the town have Instagram? No. No? They do. No. No. Which is unfortunate for most of the young people are. Yeah. Well, we can look at, you know, we could. I would have to check to see if the. We get the data back. We can try to figure something out. They just go Facebook. But it could just be, no matter what you do, you're just not going to get a response. I mean, they're just not into taking a service. It's grandmother. They don't, they don't feel anything, you know, could be, you know, we don't know why. I think a lot of recreation departments have Instagram accounts, but I don't know if they're down in the village. Yeah. No, if they, if the rec department, somebody from the rec department can start on their Instagram. Yeah, maybe they could link it up somehow. Yeah. I don't know. Way outside of my. We're going to see Brad tomorrow. Yeah. We'll figure it out. And so anyway, that was my only comment. Anything else? Everything good? Thanks again. The 4th of July was very well attended. Harlan, thank you for you and your department. I sent you all something, you know, 4th of July is very interesting. I don't know why it always has to be the hottest day of. It's either blistering hot or it's pouring in thunderstorms. Yeah. So I guess something too is better that it was just hot and not rainy, but it is really a team effort with the police department, public works, recreation, the fire department, administration, just a little bit. We're not actually on site. Nobody wants us there. But all those departments really put together an emergency plan and action plan, fencing, vendors, the fireworks show themselves. And then usually those 4 or 5,000 people all try to leave within seven minutes of the last shell bursting in the sky. We pretty much do it actually. Seven to 10 minutes, that place is pretty well emptied out. Yeah. Pretty amazing. Preferred to take 12 to 14 minutes, take your time getting out, but that's how it goes. Kids got to get to sleep. But they did a wonderful job and they really worked well together. So that was nice to hear and see. All right. Very good job. Great event, great community event. Any other comments, questions? Are we good? So last item of business is the schedule. I don't know if you wanted a discussion about this event. Was there some? No, it's usually, my only thought, if I can just throw it out there and I'm not looking for any action, but I noticed that August 13th is, we have a regular board meeting and that is just a regular board meeting with no added joint meeting. And I would suggest that maybe we could have that meeting not happen. Just a suggestion. If it gets to the point where I know there's a lot going on and I know there's other things going on in terms of our hearing here in the village relating to the present connector and I know there are things going on relating to our joint board obligation. But that looks like it would just normally be a trustee meeting and I'm just, you might want to just think about the possibility of not having it. So if your suggestion is that if at all possible, if I could move things before or after, that would be preferred. Well, I'm throwing it out there. What do you think? What are you thinking, Dan? I'm thinking we have enough meetings. I wouldn't mind having a little break in the action because... I think you're hearing the no. Between the joint meetings, between not being the alternative to the governance committee and the regional planning commission meetings... And I'm going to say, I'm going to get that President Brown and Trustee Chala would not really concur. I think it's unanimous. Is there a word as well? We can make it happen. If it can happen, if something critical comes up, we get it. Don't worry about it. So far on the work list, we have the second public hearing on the comp plan and approving the comp plan. So we'll see how that works. I don't know if there are certain restrictions. Can you find out about the comp plan and I'll send something? Yeah, there are. There are times, unfortunately. Okay, find out about it. But if it can happen, make it happen. Maybe we can FaceTime that meeting. From the beach. Maybe not. Or the pool. Yeah. It's just a suggestion. Okay, so I think that wraps it up. If there's no further business, do I hear a motion to adjourn? Do I hear a second? Second. All right, any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Okay, we're adjourned. Is that record timing? That one, that one, rocked and rolled. Could have probably cut it by another five minutes or so. Just missed it. In 21 minutes. But you did away with your next meeting completely. Thank you.