 We'll call to order the Town of Waterbury Select Board special meeting for Tuesday, February 23rd, 7 p.m. First order of business is to approve the agenda. Can I get a motion? I make a motion to approve the agenda as presented. Second. Second. All right. The motion has been made and seconded. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Next portion of the meeting is for public comment. Do we have anyone from the public that would like to speak before we get into the meeting? All right, not hearing anyone. We'll go ahead into the public information meeting. This meeting is in lieu of us having a town meeting in person. We're hoping to help answer questions and just lay out how the Australian ballot's gonna work and yeah, I will hand it off to Liz and she'll do an introductory comments and we'll go from there. Hi, everybody. I'm Liz Schlegel. I'm the chair of the Board of Civil Authority and offered to help out a little bit with the meeting since it's a new format for us. This is an informational meeting. So it's not town meeting, not a group back and forth. And the way this is going to run is that we'll be going through the items on the warning. Bill Sheplick in particular will be the star of the show presenting lots of budget information and after each item, we'll pause for questions. You can put your questions at any time into the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen and we will ask those when that topic comes up and you can put other questions about how to ask a question in the chat. Then we'll allow the folks on the phone to ask questions on each topic. And so that will involve Karen unmuting them and you will have to hit star nine on your phone once you're unmuted, but we'll remind you of that. And then other folks can use the raise hand signal after we help the folks on the phone if they have any questions. So it'll be a little bit going through like chunk by chunk, right? We'll do a chunk of the agenda, we'll stop for questions and then we'll move on to the next chunk for the agenda but we're just gonna make sure that the people on the phone who can't type a question into the question box get the opportunity to ask things. And just a reminder that this is an informational meeting so it's not the time to try to convince other folks of your point of view or convince them how to vote. And if you are speaking, we ask that you keep your questions brief and to the point so the meeting doesn't go on for too long. So if we find that things are going on for too long, we'll ask you to shut it off after two minutes. So if you have any other questions, please put them in the chat. We'll also drop a link to the agenda and the town meeting report there. And thanks and take it away. Thank you very much, Liz. We'll start with the reports of the town officers, events and spending of the past year. Any of the select board members wanna say anything before I chime in? Yeah, I think hopefully you have a copy of the report. I think the important things that, the major things that occurred in the last year, obviously with COVID was decisions to curb spending as quickly as possible. The town approved a tax rate of 55 cents, but quickly with concern of affordability and community concern on income, we made the decision through Bill's suggestion that we drop the rate to 51 cents, hoping that that would help. We also changed the payment to a single payment in November, but with those cuts, forced each department to find ways to curb spending and we did have to do some layouts for a period of time, not knowing exactly how this was gonna play out. I think the moves were the right thing to do and Bill will talk more about where we are financially. There's still some questions ongoing in terms of pilot and what that means for the town, but our hope is that the decisions we made and the tough decisions we made this year will hopefully allow us to control our costs and our ability to pay bills and hopefully not increase the tax rate and we're proposing a tax rate that's actually lower than the 55 cents approved last year. So I think that's my main comments. Great, thank you, Mark. Welcome everyone and thank you for tuning in or zooming into this webinar, this most unusual way in this most unusual year to talk about the town's budget for the upcoming year and to report on where we are now. Just to amplify a little bit on what Mark said is exactly right. It was about, well, a week and a half or so after town meeting when the governor decided to invoke his emergency order, stay home order and immediately we kind of swung into action and decided that we needed to conserve cash as much as possible. So while we had a pretty robust budget that had been approved last year at town meeting where we were anticipating spending a little more than $5.5 million in our operating funds and about almost $2 million in capital improvements we decided at that time that we needed to reduce that spending as much as we could afford to do while still getting some of the more important things accomplished and continuing to provide services that allowed the community to continue operations. As Mark indicated, we furloughed almost half of the staff of the full-time staff for highway department employees were furloughed, several municipal office employees were furloughed fully. There were a couple of others that had hours reduced rather dramatically by more than 50%. The library staff was furloughed, some of them full fully and others partly as well. And that was done mainly to save that money as I described. When you look at our budget, if you look at it line item by line item you'll quickly see that personnel expenses are the lion's share of our spending, especially in the operating budgets and there's no way to conserve cash if you don't make those cuts. At the same time, and I won't go into great detail on this but the EFUD commissioners also made some decisions to help both residential customers and business customers in particular. Base charges for water and sewer rate payers were eliminated for one quarter last year and that was about a $210,000 give back to the people of this community. And then as Mark said, when it came time to set the tax rate in July while the select board had the authority to set a 55 cent tax rate, they chose to set the rate at 51 cents which was the same rate as 2019. And that reduction in taxes left about $305,000 in the pockets of local taxpayers. And a little bit later, the select board decided to cut penalty for late payment of taxes in half and they eliminated interest on tax payments. So altogether those cuts gave about $330,000, $330,000 back to the community. So between the steps taken by the EFUD commissioners and the select board, over a half a million dollars of revenue was foregone by the two municipalities. And as we said, we knew that giving away, we knew that it was gonna be difficult to collect our full taxes anyway in that we were deciding to try to leave money in the pockets of taxpayers and ratepayers. It was another big reason why we had to make some cuts. As I indicated, the CIP budget a year ago was $1.96 million. We actually spent 1.57. So we cut that by about 20%. We spent 80% of what we anticipated. We did at the behest of the select board do all the paving projects that we had anticipated last year to try to continue our catch up with that. In the three operating funds, the general fund, the highway fund and the library fund, the budget was $5.5 million. We ended up spending a little bit more than $5.1 million. So we saved $380,000 there. So that savings was slightly more than what we left on the table as far as our taxes was concerned, assuming we collected everything. I'll pause there to see if anybody has any question or if any other board members wants to make a comment. I, in a minute, I'll share some screens so we can look at some things, but I will pause for a second to see if anybody has anything to ask or say. Okay, I'm gonna attempt to share a screen now and please bear with me. I've got several screens ready to go. I'll show them one at a time. It takes a few seconds between shutting it down and being able to open the next one. So if I seem to go away for a minute, you'll be unlucky enough that I'll be back shortly. So hang on. The first report that I'd like to talk about is this delinquent tax report. And it is, it can be found on page 15 of your annual report if you have it. And actually I found a mistake in this this morning, unfortunately, and I just wanna talk about this a little bit. So it shows here, I better shrink it a little bit so we can see the whole thing. It shows the homestead tax rate for 2020 was $2.25, $2.25 cents. That is the education tax and the municipal tax combined. The non homestead rate was $2.24, $2.24 cents. And you can see that the taxes build there both in the yellow highlighted section and then the line that's two below that $15,476,000 is what we build in taxes net of the pre-bates that many folks get from the state. We ended the year, the current year delinquent taxes was 148,235, not the 125,744 that is in your books. And if you move over a couple of rows, the total delinquency for all prior years is $187,000. And that's almost, I mean, it's still a 99% collection rate. You can see that uncollected column there, almost 1% of what we build is uncollected, which is pretty darn good, I think, in the general scheme of things. But as you can see, it's much higher than what we have been delinquent in the past few years. Now, part of that is the fact that you can see there that every year from 2016, the amount of taxes that we build go up. So even the same percentage of delinquencies would leave a higher number of total delinquency. But it's 187,000 that's delinquent now compared to a year ago at the end of December 2019, and it was 138,402. What is a critical number for me is how much we collect by the end of February because the audit rules allow us to consider as revenue anything that we collect in the following year in the first two months. You can see a year ago, we collected $65,000 out of that 138 before January, before February 28th, which was 47% of what was outstanding was collected in the first two months of the year. This year, we have five days to go before we get to February 28th, but we've only collected 40,000 of the 187 that's outstanding 22% collection in the first two months. And this is what's outstanding right now. And the 146,612 and the 187, that's penalty, interest, and delinquent taxes for all past years. And the point that I'm trying to make here is that this really goes to show what I think is going on is that there are a number of people out there, businesses and just normal regular property owners who are having a much more difficult time this year to pay their taxes because of the pandemic. Excuse me. We know many businesses are way off in terms of their normal foot traffic and revenue and this is telling. So we're coming a long way and we're starting to see some good numbers from the governor's office about the improvements as far as our health is concerned, but it's still gonna take some time for us to get caught up and get anywhere back to normal. So I think the decision that the select board made when we put the 2021 budget together, they first instructed me to try to come in with a budget that had a 51 cent tax rate. And it turned out that that was gonna be just almost impossible to do without significant cuts to our staff and to the projects that would like to do. So in the end, they agreed that we should build a budget that would require a 53 cent tax rate. So that's two cents higher than it was last year, but two cents higher than the select board decided to charge last year. They had the ability to charge 55 cents. They dropped it to 51 cents. So we're at 53 for this current year if the budgets pass as presented. And that will allow us to do what we think we need to do, especially in capital projects and then still allow people to have some savings. Again, I'll pause to see if anybody has any questions about that. I'm just gonna remind folks on the phone. There's a couple of folks who are dialed in. If you wanna raise your hand, you can hit star nine on your telephone keyboard and then star six to unmute when your hand is raised. Okay, so this is the summary of the operating budgets that we have for this year. Mark, I'm not sure. It's hard for me to keep the agenda in front of me. So I've kind of made my comments about last year. If there's no questions, are we moving on to the next section? Bill, we did just get a question about the delinquency penalties. And Dana Allen wanted to know if they will go back into effect for the coming year. I believe the answer to that is yes. When we, I think, let me see. Looking at the warning, and this may have been an oversight. And I don't know, you know, we, the select board recommended, well, the select board decided we waited until the tax collection date happened. And they did not want to decide early that we were going to have no penalty or interest on taxes because they didn't want it to be an incentive to people who could pay to just keep their money. So after the tax collection date, while we had the authority from the voters to collect an 8% penalty and 1% interest on the taxes, the select board decided to waive the interest. The interest is waived through April 1st of this year and they cut the delinquent the penalty in half. They cut it to 4%. When we put the warning together this year, I'm looking at article five, which is on page one of the annual report. And what we have said is that taxes will be paid when due without discount and that interest will be charged at the maximum allowed by statute, not to exceed 1.5% per month. And a late penalty of 8% will be charged as allowed by statute. If we had open town meeting this year, maybe, maybe one of the board members would say, gee, let's, let's, you know, we should have maybe left that at 4% for the coming year. It's not an open town meeting. So the budget and the warnings and the articles as are printed are what we will be voting on. We will be authorizing a 1% interest on the first, on the installments through the end of the year. And then beginning in January, we'd go up to 1.5% and the 8% late charge will be, will be in effect. Now, we're not sure yet whether the legislature will allow select boards to have the discretion that they allowed last year. So last year at town meeting, we voted to have an 8% penalty but due to COVID, the legislature passed laws that allowed the select board without having to have a special town meeting make some changes. My guess is that many of those laws will probably stay in effect this year, but we won't know until a little bit further down the road. So right now, we've never discussed that. I didn't think of it until just about two weeks ago. But that's where we are for now. And then another question in the Q&A set with a tax increase is the feeling that delinquencies will be less. Well, we hope the tax delinquencies will be less. You know, let me, let me share another, the other screen again. So this delinquent tax report, you can see here that, you know, the delinquencies have generally been declining. In this area here, 2016, 2017, we really decided to change the way that we approached the collection of delinquent taxes. We, we've had a tendency to change the way we, we've had a tax sale or at least a scheduled tax sale every year. And that has helped drive the delinquencies of prior years down this year because of COVID. And because we know that there are a lot of people struggling. We're doing our best to collect the taxes, but we don't intend to have a tax sale this year because that would really be difficult. I think rubbing salt in the wounds. But, you know, the, the delinquency, the amount that's going to be delinquent at the end of the year, I think is less dependent on, on an increase in the tax rate than it is on how the economy does and what happens with businesses in particular. The tax rate is going to go up about 3.9%, but 2 cent tax rate increase on the municipal side is a 3.9% increase. Of course, we don't know right now and we can't speak to what the education tax is going to be this year. But this, this tax rate that we show here is the combination of both. And if the school tax rate goes up at a significantly higher rate than the town's does, the aggregate tax rate will go up more than that 3.9%. If the school holds the line and the tax rate doesn't increase a lot, it'll be a couple cents. But I think that the delinquency is more a function at this stage of the game. It's more a function of how our economy does, how quickly businesses recover, how quickly people who have been furloughed and laid off or are underemployed get back. So get back to work. So that, that is how I think about that. That's great. Okay. One more follow up on the, what happens if article five is voted down? Well, would have to have, would have to have another town meeting, would have to call another town meeting to vote on that. I don't want to speculate on what happens if people just continue to vote that down. But yeah, we need to, that article is kind of perfunctory. We need to have a tax date that the taxes are due. And we'll see. I hope that doesn't happen. And I think that there are ways that we can mitigate that, that 8% late fee, if that's what the issue is. I'm hopeful the legislature will allow us to have the discretion that they allowed last year. Okay. They're going to move along. Yep. I think we can, we can move on. So we'll present the budgets operating funds. Oh, sorry. Presentation of capital budget for the town. Article six. Okay. So this, what I'm showing you now is page 16 in the annual report. And a couple of just. They're really kind of in material, but. This number here, the negative 44, 161. That's the deficit that when we put this report together, we thought the general fund had a. A $44,000 deficit. It turns out partly because of the mistake that I had made on those delinquent taxes. And a few other things, you know, when the year ends, there are bills that. That we get and pay in January that have to be posted back to last year. We also receive revenues that. That we're really last year's revenues. And we have to post those back to last year. So. There's a few minor changes here. This 44,000. Negative number of the ending fund balance for the general fund was really negative 58,000. And. The highway budget, we actually received the state payment for store, storm water work that we do. We received a payment of about $14,750 in January that was posted back. So the fund balance of the highway fund is really 157,925. The library's fund balance is right on the money here. So the. Those three items. Basically add up to the same amount as, as they were before. So it, it doesn't really change the numbers too much. The summary of the operating funds and if you have your town report. The budget. The general fund is the general fund. The general fund is the general fund. And it starts on page 19. For the general fund. And then the following pages. And it goes over through. Page 31. And that would be the library's budget. So the, the general fund, the operating, the highway fund and the library fund are the operating funds. So this is the taxes that we need to raise. For the highway fund. And these are the taxes we need to raise for the. Library fund. And if all the special articles pass. $56,900 worth. We'll have to raise. That 56,900, which will ultimately be up here in, in the general fund. The total taxes that we need for the year. Are 4,039,000 610. You can see that. You know, here are the departments that we have in the general fund. We did just last night. Approve another three year contract with the Vermont state police for providing police services. And that can be seen in the general fund budget. On page 22. And the, the contract for that is modestly up from last year. So we're happy that the state police were able to come to agreement with us to continue that program. It provides us good. Good police presence and coverage. Without the overhead of running a full department, which if we did, instead of a $385,000 budget, it would be well over a million dollars. I'm sure to provide the coverage now. Thinking back to what the village spent just three or four years ago. And I'm happy to provide the coverage for that service. The tax rate here, you can see. The assumption is that the grand list. Will be 7,635,000. I'm hopeful that maybe it will be a little higher than that. It's a, this is a modest increase. And what you do is you divide the taxes necessary to be authorized by the grand list and you come up with the tax rate. So we're thinking that the tax rate is going to be 53 cents. And in fact, I think that's how we've asked for it to be authorized in the warning. As opposed to an amount. We're asking the voters to authorize. Pages one and two, an article seven. We're asking the voters to authorize raising up to 53 cent tax rate. But anyway, that's about 3.9% higher than last year's 51. But it's, it's about 5% lower than the 55 cent that we had set a couple of four last year. We're trying to be as judicious as possible. I'm going to close this out and move to a different. Screen. This is the general fund budget. As I said, it can be found starting on page 19. This column here is the column that we're really talking about now. I want to point a couple of things out here. Pilot payments. This is payment in lieu of taxes that the state of remote pays to us. And that is for the, for the state complex, essentially, there's a little bit of money that comes from buildings that are owned by the state at the state park at little river state park. But the lion's share of that 234,333 is from the buildings that are at the state complex down on main street. The pilot payment that the state made to the town last year was actually 334,033. The other 100,000 of that payment is deposited directly into the paving CIP fund. You can see here that in 2021, we're budgeting only 160,000 here. And in the paving CIP. We're budgeting only $20,000 this year. So a year ago we got 334,000. This year we're budgeting 180,000. And why such a huge decrease. The state generates the revenue from that to make that payment to us and other communities that have state buildings. They use the 1% local options tax that the 13 towns across Vermont have. So if you shop in Williston, you know that the sales tax there is 1% higher than it is if you shop in Waterbury. And it's a 1% higher rooms and meals tax there and it's a 1% higher alcohol tax there compared to Waterbury. But the 13 towns that have that local option tax, which can be on sales rooms and meals or alcohol, that money is collected with the state sales tax and it is sent directly to Montpelier. And the state does the accounting for that. And what they do is they turn around and they send 70% of what's collected back to the town where it was collected. So if Williston collects a million dollars of that local option tax, they receive back from the state $700,000. The remaining 30%, the 300,000 from Williston, if that's the right number gets distributed in that pilot formula that I talked about. So the state takes the insured value of their property. They factor in what the town's tax rate is. And then they use the amount of money generated from that 1% rooms and meals, I mean that local option tax, and send that money out to the towns. We know that that revenue source is down dramatically from a year ago. People have not been going to restaurants. They're not, you know, we're not sure about the shopping in terms of sales taxes concern because a lot of that can be collected online as well. But we know that revenue is down. We don't know how much it's down. So we've tried to be very conservative here. And my hope is that we've been too conservative. And if we actually receive more money than the 180,000 that we've budgeted, that will fall to the fund balance that will be excess revenue. It won't change what we do this year as far as spending is concerned, but it will be more revenue above expenses and our fund balance that we carry into next year may be higher. But I didn't want to estimate too high just for the purposes of keeping this year's tax rate low. I thought hedging our bets was, was better. So that's the explanation there. You can see these two line items as well are significantly lower. The state does pay Waterbury. You know, we have about 60% of the land area of Waterbury is in the Mount Mansfield state forest or the Putnam state forest all around the Waterbury reservoir. The state does pay us a modest amount for the forest land that they own, that they own here in town. Last year it was a little more than $91,000. I'm budgeting less here because we know the state's general fund revenues are down. Same thing with current use. Again, I'm hoping these numbers are much closer to these than we're budgeting, but I want to be safe. We can't afford right now to overestimate revenues. So you can see here this other government revenue is down dramatically from a year ago from what we budgeted. We received more here from the state than we thought we received more here from the state than we thought. So we're budgeting about four sevenths, five sevenths of what we got last year. Any questions? You do have a few in the chat. So let's start with the first one. Lisa Scolodi asks you to talk about the police contract. The total, how it compares with the previous contract. Is it the same level of service or more or less? And how many officers, for how many hours per week does that amount to. Okay. So let's go here. This is 365. 100. So the contract that we had with the state police that started in June, I mean, July of 2018, I think it was. The contract was. $91,275 per quarter. And that got us. That got us 80 hours of coverage a week. The contract that the select board agreed upon last night is very, very similar to the contract that we had a year ago. For the last three year term. Same 80 hours per week. The same shifts that we've had in the past. We have a little bit more flexibility to ask for. Some. Some juggling, if you will, of that. Of the times that the officers work, but essentially the contract is the same as it was. For the first three years. The contract. This year. What the state did. What the state did. In the first contract was set the price. And that price stayed in effect for all three years. It was. At 95, whatever the number I was. The contract. If you multiply it by four come came up to $365,000. We had that 365 for the full year last year, the year before that and year before that. The contract this year for the first year is going to be 95,850. That will start in July. The contract is 95,850 times four. We actually won't spend this whole amount in 2021. However. Again, I hedged my bets. We were in negotiations with the state. I didn't know where we were going to come out. The ultimately asked for about a 5.6% increase in the, in the cost. In the first year. But that 5.6% increase was going to be all in the first year. I worked with. Major Whitcomb and. We were able to negotiate the same three year expense, which is about $1.5 million over three years. But we've. We've had some very modest increases in the next two years. So this number that we spend in 2021. Will actually be less than, less than the 383 400 because the 383 400. Is 95,000, whatever times four. We actually will pay the first. In the next two quarters of the year at this rate. And the second two quarters at this rate. So it's going to be probably in the. Three hundred and 70 ish, $1,000 range. Three 75 probably. Does that answer your question, Lisa? And I think the rest of that question was, um, is the same is a level of service the same. Yeah. It's 80 hours a week. The same shift says we had last time. Yeah. Okay. So here, your next question. Is, and Lisa says, thank you. Your next question is from Dan Allen that says, um, so the tax rate is conservative in light of pandemic concerns, but real estate transfers are up 20% and average home prices are slightly up as well. What's the thinking regarding this and the tax rate in future years. Um, I think that's a good point. I think that we adequately addressing maintenance concerns. With these relatively conservative rates. So the first part of that question is about, um, you know, or that is the tax rate taking into account, the, um, increase in real estate transfers. Okay. Um, Let me. Go back. You remember here, I said that the expectation as far as the budget is concerned that this will be our, our grand list for this year. And I apologize. I don't have last year's grand list right handy, but I think this assumes just a 1% increase in the grand list. Now, Dane is right. Um, and I'm going to move off of this because, uh, I'm going to go back to the one that we were just on, but this budget, uh, this amount of taxes divided by this grand list will rep, will result in a 53 cent tax rate. Now, um, if we go back to the, uh, I can't find the budget that we were just looking at the operating fund budget. Oh, here we go. Maybe it's doing here. Um, well, hang on a second. I apologize. All right. I'm going to try again. Can we see that now? Yeah. Okay. So. This is the revenue section of the general fund budget again. You can see here the town clerk fees. Uh, we budgeted $87,200 a year ago. And even though the town clerk's office and the rest of the municipal building was closed to the public for the, uh, you know, three quarters of a year almost. Um, you can see that the revenue that the town clerk took in was significantly higher than we budgeted. And this is, this speaks to what, um, Dane is question is that there were, um, um, quite a few property transfers above and beyond what we would normally expect in, in a year. Um, and there's some refinancing. I'm sure that was happening as well as, uh, mortgage rates were really at all time lows. So today in his question, uh, the budget and the tax rate is built conservatively. Um, you know, how much of the grand, how much of the values of those properties are really going to hold is the question. So Dan sweet or our appraiser, he works through gets all the information about all the, all the various sales that have happened. Uh, he does cops with other communities and sees what, what things are going. And if the grand list goes up, if the grand list goes up higher than that, 7.6 million that I'm not going to put back up on the screen now. Uh, and we set a 53 cent tax rate. We will collect more taxes than, than we have now. So it's one of the reasons why we're asking the voters to set a tax rate at 53 cents as opposed to set the tax dollars that we need to raise. Um, we, we, for those of us who are living in the properties that we have, maybe there'll be an incremental increase in the value of our properties if we sell them, but pretty typically, uh, without a reappraisal, uh, our, our, um, our own tax bills are not going to change significantly. So if we get a 53 cent tax bill this year on the same value of our property that was a year ago, we'll pay on the municipal side 3.9% higher than we did a year ago. But if the grand list increases by, um, five, you know, it won't increase 5%. If it increases 2% instead of 1%, uh, where that increase is at the 53 cent rate, they will pay more in taxes and we will collect more than this number, which, well, that's only, you know, you got to add the highway in the library to this number, but all the numbers together were that 4 million, um, Oh, 39, I think it was. So if the grand list is higher and we set a 53 cent tax rate, we will collect a little bit more in taxes. And, um, to the point about what about maintenance, again, the select board was pretty clear to me that, uh, and we're not going to get to it yet. But if we move to the highway fund, um, oops, I got to go to a different, I'll get to that in a minute. But, um, I think Dana that, you know, our infrastructure, the select board is definitely trying to make sure we do the things that we need to do. Now there's some things that we didn't do a year ago. Um, you know, there was a bridge that we had hoped to do last year that we didn't do. Uh, there were some culverts and some sidewalks that we had anticipated doing and we didn't do because we needed to save the money. But, um, you know, we budgeted this year, uh, about $1.2 million in infrastructure improvements. And I think that given that, uh, last year, I told you it was close to 1.9 million or almost 2 million. Uh, we had some big equipment purchases last year, a fire truck for half a million dollars. Uh, uh, uh, town tandem dump truck, um, uh, roadside mower, those big equipment purchases are not in the, in the budget this year to the degree they were last year. So more of the money is going to be used for infrastructure paving bridges culverts and sidewalks. So I think, um, the select board really tried to balance the, um, the, you know, how much people could afford to pay in taxes with what we need to get done and I think we put ourselves in a pretty good, uh, physician. Any other questions, Liz? Go ahead, Chris. Uh, if you don't mind here, I'd like to make a couple of comments. Um, went forward that might, might be good information for whoever's listening as we move along here. Um, so I'm going to jump back a little bit. Uh, what there was a couple of considerations that the board looked at that brought us to a 53 set factory. Um, if we'd left it at 51 cents coming into this next year, we would have been, uh, had a deficit of over 200,000. Um, the fear there was, um, not knowing what, not being able to predict what other shortfalls coming through this budgeting process that you made, uh, you know, certain considerations about, um, to hedge, to hedge the bets that, you know, uh, that we might not receive the revenues that we would need next year. Um, the $200,000 shortfall was, was a concern. Um, the increase to 53 cents wiped that 200,000 out, gave us a clean slate, kind of moving into next year with the bets that Bill hedged on, uh, could go either way, meaning the pilot program, you know, the pilot money and other, um, line items that he hedged a little on. And the other consideration that some of the select board that swayed some of the select board members to go to 53 cents was the, 2% cost expense involved in our part of the, um, reconstruction project of Main Street that town has had to, uh, put forward 2% of the total cost of the contract, I believe, which was about $160,000 the last couple of years. Um, that's been in the budget through those budget seasons. Moving forward, um, that line item is somewhat less this year. And I think Bill probably show you a little bit about it, but next year that 2% completely goes away. So that 2%, which represents 160,000 plus or minus dollars also equates to two pennies on our tax rate. So the consideration was to move forward with a 53 cent tax rate this year, wiping out that $200,000 plus deficit. And then with any luck with the, you know, the considerations on bills, hedging some of these line items, plus the two, the 160 that we won't be paying next year for Main Street reconstruction. That comes as a credit to us. So we've got actually, we've got two cents perhaps to work with next year that won't be asked from the taxpayers. So that gives us some momentum, some momentum, positive momentum moving into next year where we are predicting through our conversation that we could possibly, uh, barring any unforeseen problems, uh, hold our tax rate possibly next year at 53 cents as well. No guarantees, but that's what we looked at. Um, so that's why we ended up where we did. And it's still like Bill said, it was two cents less than we were authorized to spend a year ago. Um, so that's a little information about why, why the 53 cents ended up being what it was. The Dana's point on, uh, on grand list and property transfers, I'd like to, I think there's three components of that. I think, uh, the transfer fees that were increased through the town clerk's office and part of the transactional fee of buying and selling property. Am I correct, Carla? I didn't hear your question, Chris. Oh, I'm sorry. The, uh, the fees that you collected, uh, through property transfers, isn't that part of the transactional fee when property is bought and sold in town? If you're talking about, if you're talking about the tax, the sales tax on the property, that goes to the state. My fees are recording fees. They're recording. That's what I'm talking about. Land transfers and, um, like Bill said, there was heavy amount of refinancing. And that is right here. Isn't it bill on the town clerk where it goes from 87, two to 105? Isn't that what the, that number represents? Or am I wrong? Yeah, that's what I, that's what I said that the point was that, you know, housing, that there's, you know, sales are up and the, the, this 105 for, for 28 is representative of that in that, uh, every time somebody, you know, takes a mortgage or whatever, Carla has to record that. So these are the, this is part of what you're talking about, Chris. Yeah. So that's the recording fees in the increases in the recording fees that doesn't have anything to do with, uh, with the actual appraisal of the property, um, it has to do with the value of the property, perhaps, but maybe not. Or is it just a flat fee for the, where the transaction? Yeah, it's a, it's a flat fee. It's a per page fee that Carla gets there. I think Dana's point was that the, the value that, that properties that were listed in the grand list for, you know, 250,000 we're selling for 295,000. And isn't that going to show up in the grand list? And at some point it might, but I think that there's, there's always a fear from the, from the appraiser side of things, not a fear, but they are going to try to be conservative as well. And, you know, you don't want to put into your grand list what, what is really a bubble, you know, the housing market, the real estate market is pretty hot right now, but it doesn't mean that those prices are going to hold up that high level for years to come. Right. So if you can just bear with me in, I wanted to make sure that that was correct, that those were basically fees for reporting and whatnot. So there's three components to that. If I'm correct, there's the reporting fees that helps us out. There's also the fact that properties are being constructed. New properties are being constructed in the town. That actually adds to the grand list number. Right. That in, we don't see any increase in those values from what people are paying. In fact, I had a real estate agent tell me today, he said, Chris, it's insane. I've seen properties go from 300,000 of regular value to, to people are paying $500,000, $300,000 more for properties that are worth 300,000. So that, we don't see any of that until a reappraisal. Correct. We don't see those, those values that, and again, the reappraisals process is kind of a, leveling of the scale of, of home values, which can tip the tide on, on property taxes one way or the other. You know, ideally, if your values, I mean, the way it works is you're, the tax rate is, is, is based on how is it I usually, that the tax rate is determined on, on your, your budget. In other words, it's simple math. Your budget is, your tax rate services, your, your budget. So, we won't see any increase. Well, in revenue from actual tax rates, until there's a reappraisal, you're seeing, you're seeing a revenue, expenses based on new, new construction projects. That adds to your tax base, but the reappraisal is what could increase the revenues, correct? Well, mostly correct. I mean, if somebody buys raw land and you know, it's, it's in the grand list at 100,000 and they pay 150 for it, probably the, the appraiser is not going to jump that, that parcel up by $50,000. It's going to be left there. And then if they build on it, obviously that's, that's new grand list, the building on it. Now, if somebody had a $300,000 house and they, they sold it and somebody bought it for $500,000, likely the appraiser is not going to put it in the grand list at $500,000, but it might be incrementally higher than the 300,000. So it doesn't require a full reappraisal, properties that transfer can be adjusted. And even, you know, there are times when I remember when Tom Vickery was here, when we had a hot market in the past, and if a certain class of housing was really hot, like, you know, the 10 years ago, the properties that were, you know, like $350,000 were all selling about $20,000 more. So he adjusted those things. So there can be some in, in stream adjustments, if you will, but for the most part, properties, you know, houses or real estate that has improvements on it, that sells for significantly higher than it's valued for, the grand list isn't going to go up accordingly, not the same rate. Okay. I think we can. Okay. One last point here on revenues. These, in this service fee, revenue you can see here are recreation fees. Somebody said, wow, you know, we budgeted $45,000 for swimming pool income, and we didn't even get 10,000. We must be under water in the pool budget. Well, no, we didn't open the pool. So we actually, we actually took more money in than we spent last year, probably for the pool. The rec program revenues are down. We had less, less kids than we normally are able to accommodate, but these programs, you can see the mini camps and there are programs that are running now pretty much year round. Nick and his staff in the recreation department have, you know, really stepped up and put programs in place to deal with the schools situation when we were just going, you know, one or two days a week and they transitioned to the, you know, four days a week that Thatcher Brook is, has been going of late. We have a program every Wednesday right now. This week is school vacation week. We've got 16 kids. If we had bigger space, more space we could, we could take more than 16, but to meet the COVID protocols and the spacing requirements that we need. But there's a lot of things here that are important to note. Nick did reach out early in the process and was able to write a grant application to the state for a COVID grant to support recreation programs. So even though most of these revenues are lower than they normally would be, the fact that we got that grant really helped us to be able to provide the programming that we need for the kids. We've already talked about public safety. Fire department is pretty much a flat budget. We did add a little bit of money to the capital fund transfer here just to help build up a little fund to be available when we need to do some work on the fire stations. So that's what that increase is. But most of the, there are other places the costs are actually down because that's a $20,000 increase there and the budget's only up by about $12,000. So there are reductions in other places. Here's the pool budget what I was talking about before. We had anticipated $91,000 of expenses, $92,000 of expenses. We anticipated $45,000 of revenue. So we thought the net cost would be $45,000. We actually only spent $22,000 and we took in 10,000. So, you know, we had a net expense for the pool of only 10,000 this year. And that helped us. We are planning to open the pool in 2021. We go back to pretty much the same budget as we had a year ago. The hope is, and right now the expectation is that we will be able to open. And we'll see, but that's the plan right now. The rec programming, this increase here is mainly, you can see it in the staff lines. This is one place where the increase in minimum wage really kind of shows up for folks like us. And I'm not trying to make a political statement, but increasing the minimum wage, we have to pay what the state's minimum wage is now. And I can't remember what it's gone up to, but it's gone up fairly significantly. So not only do we have to pay brand new staff a higher minimum wage, but kids who have been with us for two or three or more years have to get commensurate increase as well. So, you know, we're going to pay a little bit more for those staff members. Same thing here shows up in the recreation department. We did reduce this, you can see here the rec administration, $128,000 budget last year, $104,000 this year. The major difference is this, we have a significant transfer to the rec CIP a year ago to offset a deficit that we had there, because the lighting project that we did at the softball field in 2019 cost us significantly more than we thought it was going to, because once we got into it, we found that there was a certain code violations that, you know, we had to correct. So this number is lower, and that's why the budget is lower there. Parks pretty much, again, we cut a little bit in the capital fund transfer. There's a little less money in the part-time pay line here. We're trying to save where we can use existing staff, share staff. So it's a little bit lower. Planning, there's really nothing there. It's a very flat budget, a little bit lower actually. Debt service. This number here, $125,852 for interest on tax anticipation borrowing. The reason why that interest is so much higher is because we only had one tax payment in 2020. We didn't collect taxes until November. So we had to borrow money for a longer period of time. Our expenses run pretty normally, you know, at a fairly consistent level throughout the whole year, but our tax revenue is all back loaded. We don't get our first tax payment until August. We've got about $1.4 million in the bank right now. Next week, we'll have to pay the school the $750,000 that we owe them from last year still. So we'll have about $700,000 in the bank and more than likely we're going to have to do some tax anticipation borrowing to be able to pay our bills until taxes roll in. The reason why that's higher is because we had to borrow for a longer period. It's lower now because we have significantly more money in the bank at the beginning of this year than we did a year ago. So while we're going to have to borrow, we won't have to start borrowing as early as we did last year. And then these other special articles, this is we never fill them in here, but $56,900 is the amount of special articles that you'll be voting on next year. I mean for next year. And if they all pass, this will get filled in and this will be $56,900, as I said, and we'll have to raise that money in taxes. Any quick questions on that? Just a reminder for folks on the phone, you can use star nine to raise your hand. I'm going to quickly move to the highway budget. Can everybody see that? Bill, can I ask you a question? Yeah. Are we under the presentation for the budgets of the operating funds? Yeah. That's where we've been for the last bit of time. Yes. Sorry. We will go more quickly now, I think. Here's the revenues for the highway department. The taxes look a lot lower here than they were a year ago. If we went back and looked at the general fund, the taxes there are a lot higher. It's just how, what we have to do to retire deficits and the fact that the highway fund. Ended last year with. We thought $143,000 surplus. It was really 158,000. As I told you at the top of this meeting. So because we're carrying that forward. And because we've reduced spending. Pretty significantly. The amount of taxes that we have to raise in the highway fund. Are less. We've done the same thing here with Vermont State aid to highways. I'm hoping that we will, you know, the legislature is talking about actually putting a little bit more money in the budget this year for general highway aid. And if, if they do, that will be good. We'll. We'll have a higher revenue than this 85,000. And to Chris's point, a few minutes ago. That would go forward into next year and help us. To maintain a reasonable tax rate going forward. The spending plan is pretty similar to what we had a year ago. Except. Here, the transfer to the. Capital improvement funds. We borrowed a significant amount of money last year. To. To finance construction projects that we did. We've done a lot of projects and those purchases of. A million dollars worth of fire trucks in the last 14 months. And. Because we borrowed that money. And the way that the accounting works, we have a significantly higher fund balance in the, in the capital budgets this year. So we can. Transfer a lower amount and still do what we need to do. Now, the general hope is that on an annual basis. We're pretty consistent with what we send. To the capital funds. That way we're socking money aside to do the things that we need to do and to pay for the projects that we need to pay for. But in order to prevent having that big deficit that Chris talked about. We have a pretty adequate fund balance in the CIPs this year. We'll allow us to do what we need to do. And still transfer less money this year. So we can. Keep that tax rate at 53 cents. And if things all work out. The way that we hope that we get some additional revenues this year, we don't have any big surprises with. You know, flash floods or. You know, anything like that that will prevent a big overspending of our budgets. We're hopeful that when we go into next year, that will be in a pretty good position. To spend what we need to spend without having to increase taxes dramatically to do it. Any questions or comments here on the highway budget? Okay. The last one then for the operating funds. Again, it's a pretty. Similar budget to a year ago. But frankly, the library commissioners did cut spending. There are some line items in here that are not discretionary for the light for the. For the library commissioners. This line, for example. To the municipal building operating fund. The library fund pays. 53% of the operating costs of the building because the library space is 53% of the building space. So that's up a little bit. Debt service. This is the library share of the municipal. Building debt. That's going down incrementally, but. That's a number that they have to pay. So that's a number that they have to pay. That's a number that they have to pay. Insurances. You know, our unemployment insurance. I didn't point this out in any other budget, but you can see here. The dramatic increase in unemployment insurance for the library fund. There are similar increases in the highway fund and in the general fund. Because you got to pay your claims. And then there was a lot of unemployment that was paid on behalf of our employees. And the. From out league of cities and towns unemployment insurance trust that we're a member of. Covered those expenses. But they've got to read. Replenish their, their surpluses as well. So that they're able to meet future demands. This isn't as bad as it could be because the cares act. They've got to reimbursed that fund. 50% of the unemployment. Expenses that they had last year. So this could be actually twice as much. If it hadn't been for the cares act. But again, that's not discretionary. And you know, the liability insurance isn't discretionary. The library commissioners did. Even though their budget is the same as it was a year ago. They had a $40,000 fund balance that they brought forward. The commissioners agreed. To increase the transfer from the library trust fund. By about $12,000 or so in order to. You know, balance this budget. So. While the taxes are going down. The expenses are going down. While the taxes are going down. The expenses are about the same, but the fund balance and this additional transfer from the library trust will. Take care of that. So with that. Those are the operating budgets. And I'm going to stop for a second. And let Mark tell me where we go next. I don't see any questions in the Q and a. Did you talk designated reserve funds and special funds? We haven't done that yet, right? No, I haven't. Yeah. So that's a following operating funds. That's the next. Topic under item four. Yeah, I don't, I don't have a. I don't have a spreadsheet that shows, or a screen share that shows too much of that. I can put one up. Any while he's looking for that, I see you have your hand up. Did you want to say something? Yeah, so I forgot that some people are on the phone and they can't see what is going on in the question and answer. So Danny Kellman asked. How do you get a report? I didn't know the, the, the, the, the, the report was not a success of the Vermont state police partnership in some way. And if the select board was happy with the level of service, I responded. Saying that we did get a report and I forgained the gentleman who gave the report when Lieutenant White was here, it was in Mark Poguette. Could be. And he had like all those graphs of everything of all the calls and it was in a recorded meeting when Lieutenant White did come, so I just wanted everybody on the phone to be able to hear her question and if there was an answer and there is information available to the public. So it's Mark Matier takes the written statistics from the BSP and puts them into a graph format and they're all located on our website under the public safety section. That was right with the mark. Right yeah the the contract that we have with the state police requires them to provide a monthly report to us. Lieutenant White who is the station commander at Middlesex Barracks does that. It is shared with the select board every month at least by email several times a year probably you know last year probably it was five times we actually put it on an agenda. We had one meeting in I think it was June where we spent a whole lot of time talking about policing issues and and parking and traffic on Wash Hill in particular but we do get a report and the select board does review it and I'll let the select board speak for themselves about whether they're happy or not with the contract they agreed to renew it for three years yesterday I assume that means they they were adequately happy with with it but maybe somebody from the board wants to say something about how you perceive the value of the contract yeah I can I can speak to that I think from the beginning there was a lot of conversation on whether or not we had created a police force for the town and concerns around the cost and spending as stated this was a pilot program a couple years ago I think there's still some conversation that I've heard surrounding you know some of the I guess relationship type stuff and there's certain aspects that the Vermont State Police don't do enforcement on including parking so you know we have talked about trying to hire somebody to help with those kind of items but really it comes down to whether we as a town would want to try to create our own police force and what that cost would be and as Bill mentioned it would most likely be significantly higher than what we're currently receiving services for the nice thing is these are contracts something like planning a brand new police force would take quite a bit of time and resources so I think for right now this is a good option for us as we move forward and continue to make sure that we do have police services for 80 hours a week with two officers there was some discussion around scheduling and our ability to have them be somewhat flexible so in the contract there is there is some of that to allow for some some small flexibility but um you know we do have coverage for quite a bit of of the work week or week in general okay um so a couple of the seven six is anybody else having trouble with allosing me about can you hear me yeah I can hear you fine Bill I'm not sure what the problem is yeah your video is not moving anymore either but you're stuck in a nice thinking pose though Bill definitely looks like he's froze I don't know if you could see it Bill but your screen is showing the municipal building operating fund revenue and expenditure at this point you're muted though okay is there still anything up on the screen share no okay I'll try again well so this is this is one of the designated reserve funds this is the municipal building operating fund if people look at there in a report starting on page 39 there's a whole list of a number of different funds that that the town has uh they're pretty much um special purpose funds we have a reappraisal fund the state sends us about $20,000 a year to go into the reappraisal fund to be built up so the next time we reappraise we don't have to come up with all that money ourselves we've got the tax stabilization fund which there's a separate report in the in the annual report about so I'm not going to go through all of those special and designated funds all of the spending in those special and designated funds you'll be authorizing that in the in the Australian balloting on the on the 2nd of March but if you look at that article it tells you that those special purpose funds where there is no additional property taxes that have to be generated so Carla has a restoration of records funds for example and she can tell you I don't know the amount but every page that gets recorded a certain amount of money has to go by law into that restoration fund in order that we can um uh you know maintain and restore land records and other records that we have so we we've got a account for those funds separately and you can see that in the annual report so I'm going to stop talking about those unless anybody really wants me to I think one comment I'll make back is back to what Chris mentioned that you know when we were trying to maintain that 51 cent tax rate we saw the CIP balance at the end of the year that I believe would have been negative or basically eliminated so we wanted to make sure we had a balance of the CIP or just being smart on having some ability to have some fund balance to bring forward into the following year um so with that I think we can move on to item five if there are no questions I don't see any in the in the box um so we're moving on articles eight through 33 and for the most part that is the special articles but I'll bring attention to article eight which is the cannabis article um the decision which was uh mark yep good can bill not screen share yeah bill if you want to go up screen share okay thank you so just uh let the public understand how Vermont has created a path for legalization for the sale of cannabis it's an opt-in program and we felt as a board that the voter should have the option to vote on this because of timing and when potentially I think it's October 2022 is the potential first opportunity to be in business it was a split vote we're not endorsing it as a board but we're giving the I believe the community half the voters have to vote it in it can't be done on a board level anyways as far as I know I believe so if it were to pass we would then figure out as a town how to organize and find out the details on what process needs to be in place um for that October 2022 date so I don't see any questions in the box on that one so I don't do you want me to read do you want to read through all the special articles is that where we'd like to go from here um so it's something unique to this here is that yep but I'm sorry this is Karen I do have a I do have a hand raised for a phone call do you want to take that now or do you want to wait until um yeah I'm assuming it's timing with the conversation so I think that would be fine okay um if the caller could just identify themselves because of course always see as your phone number we really appreciate that it shows muted yeah that's okay can you hear me yes yeah oh good hi this is Ann Gilbert and I'm with Central Vermont New Directions which is the community-based public health and substance use prevention coalition we're based in Montalier but we cover all of Washington County so um um I understand that the um that the opt-in option is on the on the ballot and one of the things that I just wanted to call the people's attention is that as a select board and as a community you can put together a local cannabis control commission which will be able to make some guidelines that you can also work with the cannabis control board which is at the state level but um that your local commission can be either made up of your select board members and or department of liquor control or um you know maybe public safety or some um health advisors or your business association but just some people to put together what you want cannabis retail cannabis to look like in your town if the opt-in vote actually does um pass for your and I just want you to be aware of that because I think that it's important to think about um local control um because the cannabis control board at the state level is still you know months behind schedule and all of the rules and regulations have not been worked out yet so it's hard for voters to know what they're really been voting on at this time at town meetings so um you know might bring more attention to each individual article um I'm happy to read through them if we think I need to do that um is that I feel like we could do that at the actual town meeting what's that there isn't a town meeting this I mean so I'm happy to read through them I'm assuming a lot of people have access to this um what I'm happy we do have a question in the Q&A um about the um retail license piece um do you want me to read that and answer that now or do you want to go through the other um yeah go ahead since we haven't really moved on um I don't think anyone can have applied yet for that we just got to read it so the people on the phone can correct so the question is um per statute with load-in opt-in town can identify who has applied for retail licenses can you identify for Waterbury as far as I know we have not had any applications I don't believe you can even apply currently as far as I know unless somebody knows differently so hopefully that answered that question um so is there a name to go with that mark um identifying who was the question was from Tom and Meg so moving on to article nine shall the town of Waterbury vote to appropriate a thousand dollars for the support of the capstone community action article 10 shall the town of Waterbury vote to appropriate 1,250 for support of central Vermont council of aging article 11 shall the town of Waterbury vote to appropriate 100 dollars for the support of central Vermont state police advisory board article 12 shall the town of Waterbury vote to appropriate 1375 for support of circle and remember in each one of these if you get the if you get the annual report there is some information on each one of these groups Shall the town of Waterbury vote to appropriate 500 to the support of the community harvest of central Vermont article 14 shall the town of Waterbury vote to appropriate 1500 dollars for the support of Down Street um downstreet housing and community development shall the town of Waterbury article 15 shall the town of Waterbury vote to appropriate 500 for the support of everyone winds, Vermont. Article 16 Shall the Town of Waterbury vote to appropriate $1,000 for support in a Family Center of Washington County. Article 17 Shall the Town of Waterbury vote to appropriate $500 for support of Good Beginnings of Central Vermont. Article 18 Shall the Town of Waterbury vote to appropriate $250 for support of our House of Central Vermont? Article 19 Shall the Town of Waterbury vote to appropriate $1,000 for support of People's Health and wellness clinic. Article 20 shall the Town of Waterway vote to appropriate 1000 for the support of the retired senior volunteer program RSVP. Article 21 shall the Town of Waterway vote to appropriate $200 for the support of Mosaic, the sexual assault crisis team. Article 22 shall the Town of Waterway vote to appropriate $500 for the support of the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Article 23 shall the Town of Waterway vote to appropriate $600 for the support of Vermont Center of Independent Living. Article 24 shall the Town of Waterway appropriate $1,500 for the support of Washington County Youth Service Bureau. Article 25 shall the Town of Waterway vote to appropriate $800 for the support of the Waterway community band. Article 26 shall the Town of Waterway vote to appropriate $2,000 for support of American Red Cross. Article 27 shall the Town of Waterway vote to appropriate $2,000 for support of the Central Vermont Adult Basic Education. Article 28 shall the Town of Waterway appropriate $4,000 in support for the Early Education Resource Centers, i.e. the Children's Room. Article 29 shall the Town of Waterway appropriate $7,323 for the support of the Green Mountain Transit Agency. Article 30 shall the Town of Waterway appropriate $3,000 for support of the Washington County Mental Health. Article 31 shall the Town of Waterway appropriate $20,000 for the Waterway Area Senior Association, in addition to the amount included in the general fund budget for such purpose. Article 32 shall the Town of Waterway appropriate $2,500 for support of Waterway LEAP, Local Energy Action Partnership. And finally, Article 33 shall the Town of Waterway appropriate $2,500 for the support of the Waterway Area Makers here cooperative to support the creative community for residents of the Town. Are there any questions on the special articles? I see one question. Special Article 31. In addition to the amount included in general fund, what is the amount of general funds for the special article? Is this unique? I believe this is unique to this special article. I believe years ago the request partially got put into the budget and it was $10,000 and I think that bumped up to $12,500, Bill, if I'm correct. This is about the senior center. Yeah. So, yes, for a long time, this goes back years. The senior center was getting an appropriation from the Town. They came to the select board and asked for a significant additional appropriation. The select board had always had a modest amount in the budget. They agreed to put a special article on and ever since it's been kind of this bifurcated process. So, the senior center presented to the select board back a few weeks ago, asked for an increase. The select board decided to increase their general appropriation from $10,000 to $12,500 and left the special article at $20,000. So, if the special article passes, instead of getting $30,000, the senior center will get $32,500. All right. Mark, I don't want to belabor this, but I think at the very beginning of the process, I jumped right to the operating budgets, and maybe that was Carol's question to me. I don't think we ever talked at all about the CIP funds. So, I'll quickly put this up here. Maybe somebody has a question. You can find the CIP budgets in detail in the annual report. They started on page 33 and go over to page 36, I think it is, 37. But anyway, this is the snapshot of the CIP spending. You can see here that the $1,215,920 is the total of what we're anticipating. I'll just make one comment about paving. The plan right now is to pave Stowe Street, the entire length of Stowe Street from Main Street all the way to the bridge at Lincoln Street. The bridge over the railroad track, the dry bridge, we're going to take the pavement off that, put a new membrane on it, and repave it. And then this $305,000 is to repave the entire length of Stowe Street. If this grant from the state does not come through, we'll probably shift gears and we'll do the dry bridge work and we will pave Stowe Street from the dry bridge to Main Street so that the Main Street portion is finished. And then instead of doing the rest of Stowe Street if we don't get this grant, we'll switch up and move to the class three portion of Blush Hill Road. But the idea from the select board is to try to be spending in the vicinity of a half a million dollars a year on paving. And if you add this $461,000 plus the dry bridge work, part of which is an overlay on top of the new membrane, it is about a $500,000 paving budget. So unless anybody has any questions, these are the things that we hope to do for this year. This should save $5,000 here. Some of these formulas are backwards. So this and this now it's equal. We have no grants in here. I don't see any questions in the chat box. So I think at that point we can discuss the instructions for how Australian ballot voting will work. And I believe Carla is going to help us with that. Sure. Thanks for the opportunity. We have been voting only by absentee request for about almost three weeks now. The time is running out for me to mail you a ballot. I see a lot of you have already asked for one. I'll probably mail them through Thursday morning. Your best bet is to drop them off in the drop box at the municipal center, as opposed to putting them in the mail just in case. And we will accept ballots through 7 p.m. on Tuesday evening. Karen is actually going to check the drop box at the office at 2 p.m. on Monday and we'll lock it then and people will be directed to bring their ballots to the school, where we will be voting on March 2nd from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. using the same safety protocols that we used in November. So I think that's about it. Carla, can I just clarify, aren't I checking the drop box on Tuesday at 2 p.m.? Tuesday at 2 p.m. And then you'll be directed to bring your ballot to the school. Thank you for that clarification. Any other comments? I don't see any questions in the chat box. I don't see any in the other chat box. Again, if anyone has any additional questions or concerns they can reach out to the town offices. Any additional comments or I think? Yeah, Mark, I'd just like to thank all the municipal staff and of course you the rest of the select board and especially Bill for his dedication and hard work that you know has kept us on the level and steady here. It goes without saying that they all go beyond their beyond the call to duty and serve this community well. I appreciate it. I appreciate every minute of it. Thank you, Chris. I echo that for sure. Thank you. All right. Any other comments or we can take a motion to adjourn? I'll move to adjourn. Your second. Thanks, Nat, for your service. Thank you, Nat. Maybe we'll see you on Monday. Second, thanks, Nat. Thanks, Bill, for a good meeting. Thanks for joining us tonight. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right. Have a great night, everyone. Thank you. Been a pleasure serving with you. Thanks, Nat.