 Call the meeting to order is 7 o'clock and welcome and happy holidays to all of our viewing public and everyone here. First thing on the agenda, of course, are the minutes and we have the minutes of December 5th, but not the 12th tonight. So, is there a motion? Second. Age one. Age two. Age three. That's all the pages are. Hearing no questions or additions. All those in favor of approving the minutes of December 5th, 2017 say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No abstentions. So, we go on to public comment. Does anyone in the audience who wishes to make a comment on anything that's either on the agenda or not on the agenda? This is your opportunity. And seeing no hands raised, we're going to postpone sewer allocation request until a little bit later in the meeting as the Planning Commission is meeting right now to make a decision as to what to recommend to us. So, they'll be here, or at least we'll be here a little bit later to do that. So, let's go on to the budget review and we do have Chief Oley here a little bit ahead of time, which was great for the police budget and both the operating and the capital budget. So, we will start with the operating budget. First of all, Jennifer is the backup person for our budget. Yes, this was a team effort this year. So, we're going to do this together this year. Excellent. Good evening. Good evening. As Jen was saying, this was a work in progress, a joint effort. I'm in my second month now and coming into a budget process right off the bat was interesting. And considering my budget down in Massachusetts was a simple level funded budget with not a lot of trinkets in it. So, I'm learning the ropes and it was good to have Jen and Mr. McGuire and even Eric sat in during our discussion and all that. Basically, the police department, our biggest hurdle right now we're dealing with is a shortage of personnel. I'm not sure if you're aware, but my administrative assistant stepped down. So, that was a priority. I decided to do my priority of filling that position first. We've gone through almost 100 applications in the last three weeks. We've done three readings of them. And this morning, myself and Eric came up with a finalized list of no more, about 10 good candidates that we're going to be reaching out after the new year to do interviews. And hopefully within a couple of weeks we'll have a very good candidate that I can pass to Mr. McGuire and get that done. Once we get that person in, it kind of takes a lot of pressure off of me, but also I'm down three patrol positions. As you go through the budget, you can see that currently we have no detectives. Those positions have been vacated for almost two years, I believe, right close to it. I can't put people in detectives because then I'll take away the patrol site. So, I've met with all the patrol officers. Within the next week or two I'll be meeting with the supervisors and the dispatchers. But our number one priority is filling those positions. So, they're kind of like doing recruitment for me, reaching out to people. We're going to try a different way of attracting people to get them in. And hopefully maybe we can get some lateral transfers, some agencies that maybe want to come to Williston and work for the department. But it's a process that because of the way the academies are set up, the police academies, there's only two classes per year. The one that begins in the end of January, 1st of February, we already have a candidate in there. He'll be going, so we're going to try to gear. At least probably get two people into the August Academy. So over the next three or four months, we're really going to be doing a full court process to try to get some people up here. It's a very long process, a very demanding process because of what they have to go through to be certified in the state. And likewise, that's what I'm doing in between all my other duties is get my certification back up. So our budget has not gone up that much. It's less than 1%. Can I ask a quick question, Chief? So you mentioned the year AA left. Did we announce this in the meeting, Terry? The AA, the administrative assistant left. That's been advertised to believe, hasn't it? Yes. No, but did we know that in the slide board? Yes, we did. We did? Okay. Was our reason better offered? I think her background is domestic violence, where she came from. She was a domestic violence advocate, an opportunity to come get into that position. And I really, you know, in the short time I worked with her, I found that she had very good, you know, good potential. And I wish I could have kept her here. Opportunity? Yes, she went to something that she's really, really good at. And, you know, I've done some work in the domestic violence field teaching, instructing. So I understand when I talked about that field, I knew she was very, very versed in that. So it's good that the department, the agency that hired her is getting a very good person to take over that. Good for her and them. Yeah. And now we're back to, you know, retraining somebody to come in and all that. But as the budget says that, you know, it's only going up, you know, 20,000 over last year's budget. We made some changes to the budget. We moved some funds in areas. But basically the biggest increase is the partnership we have with the Howard Center. I know we're trying to get that off the road coming in January. We met, we had a very good meeting last week with the state on and how they're planning it. I know the Howard Center has already started to advertise and come up with their process. So hopefully they'll benefit too. It takes the burden off the police side because there's certain things that even though we're always getting the calls to help people out, a lot of us don't have that type of background dealing with mental health issues. You know, we know how to get people to the hospital, but you know, how do you deal with the families afterwards and whatever the issue is. So I think that's a plus that was started before I even got into the process. So I think it's a positive for the community of Williston. That's great. And that's what we approved two weeks ago, right? Yes. You approve the portion for this year because it'll start in January and then the amount for next fiscal years in this budget. The other thing we're looking at is that currently we contract with a cleaning firm to do our cleaning next door. And the town manager and us talked about the possibility of bringing on a full-time custodian that will be able to carry both buildings. So again, if that works out well, that's a plus for us that we can have somebody every day here doing things without, you know, piecemeal and all that. They can do other things within the buildings and all that. So that's another, you know, good hurdle that we're accomplishing and all that. Yeah. And so the way that we put that into the budget is you'll see the full portion of that person's salary in the public works budget. And it looks like it's savings here in the police budget. But once that position is approved, it'll be allocated out to the different departments that it supports. But right now it's just in that one budget. It's a half-time position. So right now we have two half-time positions. Yeah. And one of the half-time, one of the part-timers has been here for a very long time, does a great job. And that second one has just been a revolving door. We are not able to keep somebody in that position. And we feel like if we could get somebody there full-time, full-time benefited position year-round, that we'd be able to make that position more attractive and get someone that can stay in there. So would you thought to take the part-time position, the person that's there and offering them the job? We have discussed that. It would be an option for that person. He's not interested in... He's semi-retired right now. Yes. He's not interested in doing a full-time position, but he figured it would be an attractive position to put out. So what you were saying is that the cost for that position that you're anticipating during next fiscal year is not reflected in the police department budget? It's shown as a little bit of savings because there wouldn't be the contracted services. Right. And the full amount of that new position is in the public works budget. So if that is not approved in the public works budget, then we would have to increase a portion here in the police budget. So if it's not approved, it would just be done before the final budget is submitted. Just following up, is there a net savings or add as a result of taking two-half? Because I assume the two-half time don't have benefits. Yes. So it's about... And I think it's on your adjustment sheet. The public works position is like 30... I think the net of that is about 26,000 is what's sticking. More will be paid out. Yes. So the savings that the police department would have from using an internal person and hiring that full-time person. That nets together to about 26,000, I believe. Is that what you're saying on the sheet there? It's 27 here. 27, sorry. Those are the highlights that I would have touched on as well. Yeah. Yeah. You know, pretty much we didn't change anything. You look at the capital expenses at the back. We probably both have different pages as of generally. But we didn't change any of those over the next... Let me just ask you some more questions on operating, but before we skip to capital. Well, just quickly. One thing, Eric or Jennifer, would it be possible to get is a listing of the... Which police positions are currently filled in which are vacant? That would just be helpful to me. Sure. Right now they are all patrol positions, which is why you'll see patrol here is fully funded. It looks like it's gone up. And what we're anticipating is that investigative will be able to fill out one of those. And then the administrative sergeant will be able to fill that. That's what our hope is within the budget. So filling two of those three open positions over the next fiscal year. We've done three patrols, yeah. When I took over on the 16th, there were four positions down. One was a dispatcher and three patrol. And then we were able to fill the full-time dispatcher's position. And then my administrative assistant left. And she's still on. She's doing part-time work for me right now to do the payroll, the vouchers, the billing, things like that. That, you know, I have no concept of what she's doing. So rather than try to teach me, it's easy to keep her on till we get somebody, then she'll transition the new person coming in. But my goal is to try to get at least two of the three full-time positions filled. That way I can see which strengths I have to put somebody, at least on a part-time basis, into detective work. Because right now, everybody's the detective. If you catch a case, you're going to have to do the follow-up. You know, depending, if it happened on the midnight shift, like the seven at night to seven in the morning and you can't do follow-up, then we'll assign to somebody from the day shifts to do the follow-up. But it's nice to have a detective who can go around different places and not, you know, de-police the staff. So once I get the people in, then I can build on that. And likewise, with the administrative side of this position, we've already started some minor discussion about maybe changing that position to do more of a manager's position to give me, you know, some support as an administrator. But that's probably, you know, six to 12 months down the road before we even get to that follow-up. So I want to eventually, maybe after the, we start this new budget in July that we can start having some discussion and some planning on how we want to go. Because I will not be, if I lucked out and got a transfer officer, that'd be great. But we would still have to, you know, acclimate them to Welleson and how we do things here. But if I don't get anybody who's, you know, a lateral transferer who has no certification and if I take somebody from another state who's a full-time officer, they'll have to go back through the academy to be recertified. So it's a process, it's a very long process. Jennifer, I must admit, sorry, I'm a little bit confused. That's okay. With me, easily done. The three currently vacant patrol officers, the anticipation of hiring those three officers is shown in the, I'm on page three of the police budget, operating budget under patrol salary. Is that correct? I think if I'm hearing your question. I'm not trying to stump you, I'm just, what I'm ultimately getting down to is when I look under the line that says investigation salary, and I see it's a decrease, a significant decrease, and that's because you don't anticipate being able to hire that position. Not hire, yeah. I'm sorry? That's two people. The 112,000 under investigative salary is two people. Right. We're hopeful that we can fill at least one of them. Okay, and why not two? If we don't get the three bodies to fill the vacancies, and I only get two, then I can only do one position. If I get all three, then I can do two detectives. Part of my, the word isn't concerned, part of my questions are along the lines of, this works well for the budget this year. When we see this decrease in half, next budget season, it's going to be the opposite because we're going to see it go up to, right now you made the point, our budget is only going up 20,000. That's great, particularly given the size of your budget. But part of that is because there's a salary decrease in the investigation salary. Next year, the opposite will happen. Instead of it being a decrease, it will go up, I assume, to be two positions shown there. And then whatever increase needs to happen because of wage rate adjustments, what have you. So I'm just... It's actually level funded. If you look at the patrol salary, that has gone up 57,000. Okay. And investigative has gone down. And this is where I get confused. It's because right now what we have is a full staff of patrol sergeants or 13 patrol sergeants. If Chief was fully staffed, he would have 13 patrol sergeants, which is what he has now. But he would also have two detectives and an administrative sergeant, which all three of those positions are open right now. So it's the two detectives. Right. I'm not talking about three vacant patrol officers, but it's really two vacant detectives right now. That's part of why I think this information about what positions are in the police departments, which ones are filled, which ones aren't, would help me out. And that's the 112 for next year, right? That's the two... That 112 was last year's budget. So that assumed that there were two investigative sergeants. I assume it's the third. We're in the third of the 2018 budget. We are in the sixth period of... December is the sixth period of the 20th. Six months. Right. Six months. Six months. Yeah. We're halfway through that. Yeah. I guess, yeah. We're right there. Yeah, so back to Jeff, your original question about this 50,000 pickup, I think we're concerned about fully saying that we're going to be fully staffed in the police department, saying that all of these positions are filled, because if you look at the 2017, what we approved in the budget and what actually happened, we under spent in the police department by $300,000. So if we continue to fund and say we're going to fill all these positions, well, it's great if we do. We're asking for additional dollars, additional tax revenue that we... In the best case, we would need it, and we would be over budget in the police department, in which case we would use fund balance to take care of that. And we'd communicate that with the select board all along that we are fully staffed. I would love to come to you and share that information. So you're just being cautious, knowing that we have the money if we need it, but you're thinking that... Right. Based on our history. Hopefully we can fix that with the new chief. Well, she'll tell you the same thing, because when they explained that to me, I was like, okay, and I'm like you, is that okay, if I do fill everything, and magic happens, then am I going to get that money we've cut back? So I won't, you know... So I understand having a surplus and it doesn't look good that much over the last few years. I understand that. And I refer them to as vacant positions, because even though they're detectives positions, I can't fill the detectives. I need a patrol person first to get them trained to move somebody that's already certified into detective. So I look at it a different way, as three vacancies, rather than, you know, so... That's why I call that way. So... Okay. Okay. I think if I could... If I could maybe... I'm sorry, I don't mean to take so much time. There are three vacancies. You anticipate filling three patrol officers in fiscal year 19. Come fiscal year 20, probably at least one of those patrol officers will change their job title from patrol officer to detective. Correct. Okay. I think I'm understanding. Still having that list of positions and who's vacant and... Any information you could provide in that about how those positions will morph, if you will, for lack of better words, from being a patrol officer to a detective to help my P-brain out, understand this, particularly, you know, as we're getting further on and Rick's coming to us and telling us about positions being funded, that would be great, that would be filled, that would be great. Thank you. Any other questions regarding operating? Let's go to... So just, I was just looking at the... I closed my book, you can't even know. And maybe I'm looking at... But your utilities were flat funded from 18 to 19. But I'm just wondering, you know, when all this, you know, we're talking about saving money and we're talking about conserving and our 17, and I wasn't around for the 17 budget, of course, or proving the 18 budget for that matter, but it went up from 12.7 to 16.9. It went up significantly between 17 and 18. And then we flat funded for 19. Do we think the utilities costs are going to hit that higher number when they come back to where they were in 17? Just if we're being more... So if you were looking at the second column over is the 2017 approved budget. So that's where we had the 16.9. 2018, we approved 16,900 again. Because we didn't have a lot of history in 17 yet. But when you look at that middle column there, that's actually what we spent last year, which was 12,750. So we're saying we're not going to increase that because actual experience last year was lower. Doing a nice job in the building about turning off flights and conserving energy. And I think you had an air conditioning problem that's now been fixed. So you don't have air conditioning running nine months out of the year when you really don't need it. It's just a fairly small number. I just caught my eye as to why we wouldn't lower it to the level that we think we're operating at. We are lowering it a little bit. We're being conservative with lowering it. We're going to go on to capital. So capital in your books on page 46. So for this coming fiscal year all we're asking for for capital is to fund the equipment savings for the different projects that we have, different pieces of equipment that we have in the police department. The first one being the chief's vehicle. The second one is your eight patrol vehicles. The third is technology. And fourth is traffic safety equipment. Are you in the capital budget? Yeah, I looked at 46 as well. I don't see those cameras. Forty pages of technology. I've got it as 46 for the chief vehicle. I've got the chief vehicle at the top, right? Yep. Next page. The rest of the stuff is in it. Sorry, I was flipping through four pages at once. These are sinking funds. That would be appropriate way to phrase it. There's money that gets sunk into a savings account and then used so that we don't have to take them. Exactly. And historically we've been doing these over the life of the vehicle. So the chief's vehicle, I believe, is on a five year cycle. So when we buy that vehicle we say this is how much it's going to cost when we replace it in five years and we put a portion of that aside for five years. Then the key question for me is there's no change from last fiscal year. At the top of my head I think it looks a little different because last year we added a vehicle. Right. That's for the tweet. So we had it separately. So we had the savings of seven vehicles and then we had a brand new vehicle that was separate. Okay. This year all eight vehicles are in the fleet replacement. This is just, this comment means nothing, but it just, if you don't mind, it amazes me that Williston needs nine police vehicles. But I guess we do. Population. But how many offices around the road at any one time? Three. Three. And on days it's four with me out there. So does each police officer have a car associated with them? We try to assign a minimum of two officers per cruiser and the max is three. And we know, you know, we're in tear. You get a little better miles out of them. You get a little more maintenance free. And the way they do it, rotate them every two years, you get some sort of resale value because we just traded, we got a new one on the road and we're going to send the old one out to auction. So that money comes back into the year because it's got less miles on it. So you're not in top miles. And they get, you know, you know, there's a lot of roads here. I'm learning. And so, but it, it's, it's nice. You're not having, you know, 13 people drive two cars because everybody breaks a certain way. Everybody uses the gas a different way. They move the seat a different way. And what I used to tell people is that the way the cruisers are run, you know, come home tonight and leave your car running in the driveway and go out eight hours later. That's basically what they're doing. They're running a minimum of eight hours of shift to 12 hours and figure out how many times you open and close your door, you know, and add that up during the shift because they're working 12 hour shifts. So they're constantly going. And some parts of this community, it takes a little while to get there, especially the climate weather. So it's the process they got and turning them over. It's good. It's a liability. It protects the offices because, you know, you're going to have, you know, you're not replacing things that shouldn't be replaced so things are getting damaged. The warranty is there. It's a good warranty. So it's really the cost coming to the community is basically the oil changes, the brakes, the replacing the tires, the snow tires, and, you know, minor maintenance and what a good warranty. And we talked about it that maybe to do maybe a little extended warranty the next time we go out, they give us a little more benefit if we have to keep them all longer. It protects the community that way. It protects the vehicles. I think what you're saying is from an efficiency and overall cost perspective, having more than just the number of cars for the number of officers on the road makes equal sense. Yeah. Maybe safety as well. Yes. I just get this image. You know how cars have those automatic seat positions so you can press one, two, or three? Our police cars must have like 15, you know. I'm number 15 for this car. And the thing is, is that if you notice we're kind of like transitioning more towards SUVs, utilities, explorers, because they give you more room and the equipment they carry in the cruises, you know, try to dig around the trunk to get them. And, you know, you could probably sit in the Dodge Charger but carrying all our equipment, our vests, the guns, everything we carry, it's a tight fit in there, you know. And that's just in the driver's compartment. Sitting in the passenger side and with the laptops there, the radars, it's not really a comfortable ride. So they're learning that, you know, once now we got two explorers out there, you know, that these are a little roomier for you and you're not worrying about, when you open up the rear tailgate, you can get your equipment out. I've showed them things that they should start looking at based on my experience and how to outfit these cars. So I think it's going to be more user-friendly for them as we go down the road. No thought to going back to the crown, Vic, with the... Ford doesn't make them anymore. They make the so-called toruses and they're a little, like, narrow. The thing is, is that the body frame on the sedans is the same body frame on the explorers. It's just the body itself. It's a little bigger. Well, if you're not going to do that, you can at least go back to the whip antennas. I miss those. But we're talking a long time ago, yeah. Any other questions on capital budget? All right, thank you, Chief. Thank you. And I wish everybody happy holidays. Thank you, too. We don't expect Deb Beckett in tonight. Thank you. I am prepared to step in for Deb tonight. For a treasurer's elections budget, then... I don't believe there's anything in the capital budget for that. No, they have nothing in the capital. Only the operating budget. Yeah, so first section for the clerk's office is revenues on page five. Legal revenue, we're keeping that about the same. We are anticipating an increase in passport revenue that's more in line with what we actually experienced in 2017, our office... Clerk's office? Nope, not clerk's office. Revenue section, page five. There's a revenue tab there. All right, not that. In the wrong place. So issuing licenses, this is passports. So we're upping that budget to be more in line with what we actually experienced in 2017. We're still one of the only offices in the area that doesn't require appointments. So we have a lot of traffic in our passport office. We're open 8 to 330 without an appointment Monday through Friday. So it's very accessible for people and they can fit it into their schedule. So we're seeing a lot of people there. We are budgeting to be down slightly in legal document revenue. Oh, that's 93,000 to 90,000. Let's see what she said here. The state has moved back to Waterbury. So we're seeing that go down. The state did a lot of recording here in Williston when they had offices here. And then if we flip to the clerk's election section of your book, there's not a lot here that has increased. So wages have gone up. Just our cost of living increased. Nothing too substantial there. One area that we missed last year in the budget was equipment rental service contract. We do rent a copier. For some reason we'll blame that on the new girl last year. There is nothing in there. So we just put that money back in there this year. So the slight increase is just based on that. We missed that last year. We're budgeting for a little bit of an increase in postage. We did see a lot with the elections this year of people wanting to vote. Get a mail ballot to them. So we're counting for that. And then if you look in elections, we will have a general election, both a primary in August of 2018 and a general election in November of 2018. I'm sorry, just a question on the postage. So people get ballots mailed to them? Yes. If you request a ballot. And then you mail it back? Yep. Yeah, if you call and request a ballot, we'll send it to you. And yeah, so the general election salary has gone up. Last year we didn't have a general election in 2018. So we put that money back in there for 2018. That is it. Questions on the operating budget. What does that go up by about? It would always be good just to understand what the percentage, you know, is it a couple, 258 to 277, about 20,000, 19,000, 8% maybe? Something like that. Yeah. What's difficult though is the different fiscal years have different election requirements to them. So just factor that in as you're doing your evaluation. Yeah. Following your early. It was very flat for the last three budget. Oh, two budgets were actually pretty going down from fiscal year 17 to fiscal year 18. Yes. 18 went down because this year we don't have a primary or a general election. So if you look at the election. Okay. Right. So yeah, so it went from just about $5,000 budget to a little over 12 to account for extra ballots that need to be printed and things like that. Any further questions? Thank you very much. Great. Thank you. And we'll skip back then to sewer allocation requests and all of us here. And I think Eric may want to speak to this as well. Yep. I can introduce this. So the board with her tonight, the Finney crossing hotel projects requested a 10,000 gallon per day sewer capacity allocation. This request falls under subsection 5.3.9 of our ordinance because it exceeds the annual commercial and industrial category allocation and schedule a. This capacity included in the categories available for allocation on a project by project basis upon select review and approval to encourage specific types of development in town, provide the project meets identified goals within the town plan and schedule a for sewer allocation in our present FY 18 has 10,000 gallons per day allocated in this category. The planning commission did that to discuss this item just now and Ken Bellevue's here after attending that meeting. I also have Andy Rowe project engineer here and I believe some other folks from the project you can answer questions the board has. So can you give us the reader's digest version perhaps? Sure. Well, as I think all the select boards aware, we have what's called attachment aid to the sewer allocation ordinance. There is a budget of a portion of the town's sewer capacity that's placed in that most of that capacity and that is given out over the upcoming fiscal year. Most of the decisions about that are made administratively with the exception of one line item in there, which is the one we're talking about tonight, which is encourage specific development. The request for the hotel and Finney crossing, it's here under that request for a number of reasons. Number one, it would not fit in any other category in the schedule of allocation for attachment aid because the request is so large. But that in and of itself would not be a sufficient justification for the select board granting it. As Eric has already pointed out, according to the ordinance it needs to, you need to be able to make a finding that it's helping the town to achieve important goals in the town plan. So in that regard, both myself and Andy Rowe in his memo, we've referenced a couple of key things I think for the select board to consider. On page two of the memo that I prepared for you, there's an excerpt of the language from the town plan, the land use chapter of the town plan, which talks about the Taft corners and growth center. And it states that we're going to encourage and support a design conscious pedestrian friendly mixed use development and redevelopment pattern in the Taft corners area. So Finney crossing is a large mixed use project developing out with a strong pedestrian orientation. It arguably I think meets all of those goals within the town plan. A hotel in terms of uses that are not only allowed but really specifically called out for is identified in chapter 41 of our regulations. So under section 41.1.3.2, we specifically call out the need for a hotel, at least one hotel for the long-term success for the Taft corners zoning district. So the hotel fits sort of squarely within the requirements of the zoning district which are designed to help to implement the goals of that town plan. Can you just refresh me on the with respect to the goals and why a hotel at Finney crossing. I understand from a town goals, meals and rooms, taxes and all that. I understand that. But why at Finney crossing is it important to have a hotel just refresh my memory. So to achieve the kind of sort of vibrant, lively, really sort of downtown kind of environment that we're working towards over time, a hotel would be part of that. It like many other things that we desire to do within the town plan and our land use plan to have things be concentrated in the growth center. So you would have travelers whether they're business travelers or vacationers or recreational travelers would stay in a hotel. They would support activity in the restaurants. They would then shop in the stores that would be located in the Taft corners area. They would also be in a setting where they could potentially get around by foot or by bike and all of those kind of things that would be available. First two things, I agree 100%. The last one, we don't really have that good pedestrian friendly kind of situation between Finney crossing and retail centers, do we? Well, so if you haven't gone through Finney crossing yet, you should drive through along Zephyr Road. And one of the things you'll notice is there's a multi-use path along the edge of Zephyr Road. That multi-use path is there because it was built by the developer as part of the build out of this project. There, as each phase of the development gets built out, there are sidewalk sections and bike path sections, et cetera. There is currently a big missing section in the bike pad facilities in the Taft corners area between really the frontage of Finney crossing along Williston Road. And that would link up to say where Simon's Plaza is and there's a crosswalk that can take you from there over to Shaw's. And then there's a sidewalk over at the Taft corner shopping center. As Finney crossing builds out, that whole section will be built out by the developer. So is there a gap in that section today? Yes. Will that gap always be there? Not as the project builds out. So more and more of those facilities are getting built along with the buildings that come along. Is that whole center there, Snyder? That whole Finney crossing? Yes, yes. Thanks. Okay. So Ken, first of all, if this project meets the bylaws, I have no problem with the concept of they get the appropriate amount of sewer allocation. But what I guess I have a little bit of a question about and I'm getting hung up on is the process we're following. And you mentioned about how the hotel, you know, the concept is this 10,000 gallon encouraged specific development has to be around implementing a specific goal of the comprehensive plan. And really the crux of my question is a hotel significant enough, if you will. I don't know if that's the best word. I don't know if it's the best idea to achieve that designation. And let me give you a couple of examples. Should retail, would a retail use also be given that same designation because, oh, it helps create a lively, vibrant downtown feeling or a restaurant or a bar or a, I don't know what else. You know, something that, you know, people would attract people. I guess my question is this, why is this different than all of the other uses that might happen in that same tax corner zoning to give it this special sort of designation, if you will. Does that make sense? That's a great question. Well, I think number one, the amount of sewer allocation you need for this makes it a real outlier. It's just unusual that we get a request for this much. Most of the requests we get for sewer allocation come in in much, much smaller increments. So I'll just give you an example. For new residential in the growth center, on an annual basis, it takes somewhere in the order of 8 to 9,000 gallons per day of capacity for the equivalent of 68 dwelling units. So that's a whole year's worth of 68 dwelling units. And it's less than the amount of sewer allocation you need to support this hotel. So what I would argue is that that makes this unique, just because of its heft. And then secondly, hotels don't get requested and built every day. They tend to come in on an episodic sort of basis. I've been told that there's certain trends that exist in the hotel industry you'll have. There'll be a lot of activity in a short window, and then there may be a gap of years and years before you see another one come along. Certainly a hotel hasn't been built in Williston in over a dozen years, as just as a way of measuring that. Okay. So getting to that, I understand the concept you just said. It's for a use, it's a large generator of, or needs a lot of capacity. So that's part of what makes it unique. So it's the question of size, and in fact we didn't even allocate enough sewer capacity under the new commercial industrial in Attachment A to handle this project. So that gets to my other process question, is don't we have a process that we can deal with this issue, which is to amend Attachment A so that we would increase the amount of sewage capacity that we can allocate under the new commercial and industrial? Wouldn't that be a more appropriate way to allocate sewer to what I'm going to say is a big, maybe necessary, but not different than anybody else use in the TAPS Corners Zoning District? Well, you could do that. As a practical matter, what I would suggest to you is amending the sewer ordinance, which is what you do when you do Attachment A, that requires you all to make a decision. And so that's what's in front of you right now. It's an opportunity for you to make a decision. So either way, it puts the decision in front of the select board. This is a mechanism that was created, I think, for requests that are like this, things that fall a little bit outside of the ordinary. As opposed to all of the other decisions about selling allocation during the year, which are all just done administratively. An applicant fills out an application. Bruce checks it off. It goes by my desk. I check it off. Rick signs it. It all happens administratively. You don't see it at all. So if I could, the last time we did Attachment A, instead of putting 7,500 gallons under the new commercial industrial, if we had put 1750, this might have very well been handled administratively. It could have. I can't say that back last spring that we knew this was going to happen. I get why we didn't put it in there. It's, I guess you can probably figure out what I'm struggling with. And if we were to say, instead of allocating under the encouraging specific development, we went back and amended Attachment A to increase the amount in new commercial industrial. What would be the timeframe for that? Well, so you would have to, it's amending the ordinance. It's going to require a public hearing, meeting those standards. And then I believe there's an appeal period that follows that. So I would say we're probably talking about, I don't know, three, four months from soup to nuts. Okay. And I guess I'm asking, is that time delay, for lack of a better word for that, significant or detrimental? I would say that it is. And then again, it's a practical matter. So if this were all where to take four months, guess what we'll be doing in four months? We'll be doing Attachment A. Why you would want to create that much more work when we can do it this way? Because this category that we're considering allocating I look at as being for special type projects. And I don't mean this, this is not a negative comment at all, but I don't see how this project rises to that level. What we're asking to do is a normal thing, but consider it special. And I just, I'm conceptually having difficulty. I understand what you're saying in that trade. On the other hand, what I don't, as I said before, if this project is, meets our zoning regs, as an appropriateness going through the DRB process, obviously it deserves sewer capacity. And I'm also not interested in unduly holding up a project or holding up an allocation. On the other hand, one thing you've probably learned to me is process is important. And at times I'll be a stickler to stick with the process that we put in place that's in our ordinance. I'm wondering if we're following because of giving this a special designation. Is that a good explanation? Okay. I'm not sure I necessarily agree with that. Thank you, I appreciate that. I can understand that. I think commission has taken this under advisement and met tonight. They met tonight and they made a recommendation six to nothing that the allocation be granted under this category. So is there, for the questions for Ken on this? So Ken, just I'm looking back at the, I think it's the March document that we reviewed here. Attachment A. Sewer Allocation Ordinance Attachment A. And our allocations are in the order of 28,000 per year. Well that's how much gets placed in there for new allocation. That's not necessarily how much we sell. No, no, right. We only sell, we sell less than half of that. Correct. And the reason for the bigger allocations is that come up, right? Having that larger allocation. And hotels don't come up every year. And I assume that's why it's special, because this is a once in a decade kind of a situation. That's, I mean, when I looked at it, I looked at it as special from that perspective. And I think I, you know, I do want to emphasize that the idea of this mixed use development pattern in the Taft Corners area is very important. And it goes to the heart of the land use plan. It's one of the biggest objectives that we have in the land use plan. Finney Crossing, the way it's developed so far, does have a variety of housing types in it. It provides bike pedestrian facilities. Some of the design in there I think is very nice. It has a lot of nice things in it. But in and of itself, what it's been built out as, it's not really mixed use yet. The hotel is a really key part of the, really the mixed use pattern that I think where we really want to be when we get there at the end of the day. So the hotel comes in and the hotel bequeats or facilitates the construction of a restaurant, which may facilitate the construction of an office building or some retail space. So all of those things fit together. So it is, in my view, it's a key part of all of that. It helps us to realize that goal that's articulated in 3.1 in the town plan. As well as the fact that it's unusual in its size and that they come along infrequently. And I'll just make one comment and then I'll stop there, I promise. If we were at our limit for what we could allocate under new commercial and industrial, we were at 7,500. So you couldn't allocate any more in a restaurant. In the tax zoning or retail establishment come in, would you be making this, not you, would the same recommendation be coming to the select board about giving them allocation under the encouraging specific development? Because those uses also add to the vibrancy and the mixed use of the tax corners area. That's a good question. I'm not sure that I would. And it's much easier to meet the sewer allocation needs of a restaurant than a hotel. Even though it uses a lot of sewer capacity, it's still just a fraction of what it requires with a hotel. And under most normal circumstances, we would be able to grant an allocation like that out of the ordinary supply of sewer allocation in almost any given year. I think I remember talking to Bruce and I think my recollection is if you look at, say, like chilies or longhorn, they use somewhere in the order of about 4,000, 4,500 gallons of sewer capacity a day. So it's less than half for one of those restaurants. And based on past, you know, what we track in terms of how much allocation we actually sell on an annual basis, under those trends, we would expect to be able to have enough allocation to be able to meet a request like that. Historical footnote. When I was first on the select board, chilies was used as an example over and over again that we had extra capacity from Essex. And development was about to come to a halt in the town because of that. So it's a good problem to have. Any further questions for Ken? Chair, entertaining motion. I would. Move to approve a sewer capacity allocation of 10,000 gallons per day under subcategory 5.3.9. Of the sewer allocation ordinance as recommended by the planning commission to Finney crossing hotel. Second. Discussion on the motion. Just quick. I'm playing on voting no. And I just want to say it's not against allocating sewer capacity to this use. It's just that I am having a little bit of trouble with the process we're using. Okay. For discussion on the motion. Hearing none. All those in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. No objections. So thank you. And it's eight o'clock. Perfect timing. Thank you. Thank you, Ken. So we'll go on to the public hearing. The North Williston Road Scoping Study. Yeah. It's totally fine. And I just, I'm a stickler for process. And I don't think. Oh, I believe that. But it's also interpretation. You know, how you interpret this use. I just interpreted it differently than the four of you. And that's fine. About attachment A and mark. It seemed like we had that specific kind of. That was my first meeting. Yeah. It could be. My name is Lisa Sheffler. I'm the assistant director of public works. And I'm assuming everyone that's left here tonight is here for the North Williston Scoping Study that we're working on. As you know, this has been an ongoing project. We had a nice lovely room filled meeting last May. Some of you were here. I recall. And I am not actually going to do the presentation, but Jason is with the chicken County regional planning commission. And that's who we're coordinating this with. And they have contracted through RSG, Corey and Roxanne. So they're going to, Jason is going to give you his spiel as to how regional planning. Works with this with us. And then they're going to go into the presentation. I hope you guys were able to look at the presentation and the information online. If not, it's available on our town website. Comments we will accept up until January 31st. If you have any concerns or issues, please feel free to contact myself or Jason. And we will take care of those and we will incorporate those comments and report. Jason. Thanks Lisa. So as Lisa stated, I'm Jason Trest with the chicken County commission. And I just want to take a brief moment to explain who we are. We're your regional planning commission. We work for the municipalities within chicken County. And we're doing this work because it was work program and approved by the committee that oversees that process. And eventually our board of directors. And we hired RSG to do this work. And here they are tonight. And I'll leave it at that and take it away Corey. Thanks Jason. Again, I'm Corey Mack with RSG. We're a transportation planning and engineering firm in Burlington and also in White River and other places around the country. This is Roxanne Muse and she and I have been working pretty hard on this project for the last couple of months. It was about six months ago I think in May when we did the first meeting where we got a lot of great feedback and we're going to really touch on that. We did some online surveys too and hopefully you all got a chance to do some of those. But tonight we're just going to go quickly through about why we're all here today, what we're doing on North Williston Road, what we learned at this last meeting and how we're applying that into these alternatives that we've developed to here. We're going to talk a little bit about the impacts and effectiveness of all these alternatives and how they're addressing the issues that were raised at that earlier meeting. Then we'll get into the next steps a little bit. I'm not sure if everybody has had a chance to take a look. These slides have been posted online I think at one point and there's a couple of reports that are available. Through the month of January next year we'll be taking comments. This isn't like your only opportunity. We're really hoping that you'll listen and ask questions and talk about it a little bit tonight. Then the following month we'll get a really great opportunity to discuss. You can give us some feedback and we can address that and put that into a final recommendation. As we were talking about, we're doing North Williston Road from Route 2 where we are now all the way up to the river. It's a pretty diverse corridor. There's a lot going on in all that area. Where we are now, as I was just saying, we're doing what we call the Alternatives Presentation Meeting and we will then in January of 2018 have this period opened up for everybody to email and we can email directly, review the reports online and provide that feedback. Then in February, I think we're trying to get on schedule for the 27th, so you can mark the calendars now, where we'll be presenting really the results of this meeting, all the feedback and trying to put together an alternative that addresses all these issues that we've had up till now and maybe shorter term implementation and then just having a longer term vision of what we want the road to look like. Just to back us up and ground us a little bit as to why we're here, we're really trying to get a resilient corridor, one that addresses the needs of all travelers on the North Williston Road. So right now we have a lot of three travelers there, we have a lot of people who live there. On the southern half, or really third, from south of Mountain View Road, it's a much more dense residential, but then north of that, you get into the more rural character and then you get into the historic North Williston Village. There's a lot going on there. We're trying to address the needs of that whole corridor there with a comprehensive plan. What we've heard from the May 2nd meeting is people drive it too fast. It's particularly an issue in North Williston and that river section going up through the curves and what we're calling the hollow and then as you get into that rural flat area at the top and approaching Mountain View Road. As you get into the residential area we've heard that it slows down a little bit more and there's just more going on so it just feels a little more comfortable there for everybody. In those areas in that rural section and the river section there's been complaints of aggressive driving like people passing right out of the corners doing some unsafe behaviors. North of Mountain View Road there's really no place to walk or bicycle without being in the road. There's basically just a fog line. It's not really even a shoulder. It's just basically a struggle and it's just a lot of things. So that's something that people don't necessarily feel comfortable walking on. And then another common complaint is that this is a regional traffic route too. It's one of the few crossings of the river and there's a lot of people from Essex going through, from Jericho going through. It's a through traffic. One of the unfortunate things is there's nothing we can really do about that. We can't put a toll on the bridge to pay or something like that. So we're going to try to work with what's presented with us. And that is the reality of this is a road that a lot of people use. It's of regional significance. And I think that the RPC has recently recognized that by having it as a collector road which has a different significance in how it's being used. And I think that one of the comments we got from the select board I think it was like after we said the meeting was over it was picking up and somebody from the select board I think maybe that is it possible to maintain a sense of like a livable corridor and also accommodate these traffic needs. And that's really where this poll is. You have people who want to get through there and want to get through quickly. But there's also people who live there, people who work here and people who play here. There's people who live here who want to be able to walk on the road safely and feel like they're getting rushed off by all the traffic. So just some more results from the survey that we had there. These are like the most common concerns from hopefully some people here that were taking the survey. High speeds was definitely one of the by far the largest complaint along the corridor followed by pedestrian safety and bike safety. So those are like the three things that we really picked up from that. And then as it tapers off the issues they're a little bit more esoteric perhaps. The site distance and volumes and crashes these are a lot of engineering terms. So I'm not surprised that it kind of drops off there because what we have really experienced as drivers or walkers or bikers on this road is just the environment there, the speeding vehicles. And another concern that has been brought up before is just getting out of their driveway sometimes. If you have to back out of your driveway on a busy road it can be a bit challenging. These are all things that have been brought up. And just geographically where things have been brought up are specifically in the corners in the steep area that we're calling the hollow. The rural section and the river section those flat areas outside of that those are kind of like the shoulder areas of where the concerns are. And interestingly the residential where most people live like that's not where a lot of the concerns were brought up and I think that's a reflection of how people are driving and what the condition of the road and the environment is there. So I think these last couple of sides I think are kind of important in leading us towards the alternatives that we're trying to come up with. And so when we ask people what kind of roadway improvements they'd like to see not surprisingly traffic calming getting people to drive slower that's a big thing that was brought up. And then followed by facilities for people to walk and bike on whether they're on road like a bike shoulder that people can walk on it's not great but it's something or an off-road path like what's being built at Finney Crossing. Williston has such a great progressive network and I think it's a really testament to your planning and what you're doing. But like North Williston Road here it's a constrained corridor and it's not there yet. And there's kind of like it's a spur it kind of goes to across the river and then it's out of your control. So it's an interesting opportunity. So you know that kind of leads us to where what we learn from that and like my key takeaways of that are people are driving too fast so what can we do to get people to slow down and then what can we do to get accommodated by sports and pedestrians. The other thing that is included in all of these alternatives is you know that roadway resiliency piece of it and so that really to me means drainage and making sure it doesn't wash out and high storm frequencies and that's really going to be something that's incorporated into all of ours and is all of the alternatives we're proposing here. You know one of the key things that we're talking about are you know replacing the culverts that need to be undersized. That to me isn't something that we can choose to do it's basically saying this needs to be done and it will be done it's just about prioritizing it and that will all come out in our final recommendations. So I'm going to let Roxanne talk about some of the traffic calming enhancements. So how about that. Thanks Corey. So one of as Corey pointed out one of the biggest concerns is high speeds and that was proven with some tubes that were put down recently just south of or just north of Mountain View Drive Mountain View Road sorry. So people are definitely speeding it's not just your perception it's happening and this series of traffic calming enhancements try to address speeding also some of the driver behaviors that's another form of traffic calming and Corey will be getting into different cross sections after this. So for now these are mostly sort of spot treatments and you'll be familiar with a lot of them you've seen them around there's a tons of different types of ways to calm traffic and we picked out these eight or nine that we think are most appropriate for North Williston Road. Some things are better for urban environments and stuff so this is a narrow down group and I'll go through them. So the first idea the first enhancement are curved medians there are some on Skunk Hall Road right now recently put there and they've been pretty successful as volumes have gone up on Skunk Hall Road after it was paved the speeds stayed the same so that's a pretty comfortable roadway to North Williston Road these medians can be along the roadway in between intersections to deflect traffic around them it kind of forces you to slow down as you're making a different movement than like shooting forward that can also be used at intersections so one possible location for these is at Mountain View Road intersection this visual years of Skunk Hall Road Do you mind if we ask questions while you're going? So just I'm familiar with the Skunk Hall Road the curved median but I can tell you those are frightening spots for cyclists as you approach one of those and you know a car is coming up behind you you kind of get squeezed because the car can't cross the center line and it's kind of an anti-cycling calming measure if you will I don't know if you've ever gone up Skunk Hall Road but it's you basically I think I know what you mean because the road narrows Well what happens is the cars have no ability to move and give you the three feet because it's taken up by the median there the space where they could go So one thing that could be done is make the road a little wider to accommodate that Also Cory will be talking about potential for on-road bike lanes so that we we're definitely considering bicyclists here and the alternatives across sections would need to adjust for this so that it does give bicyclists some more space You say and I read it in your report too earlier when you said you would put this at the intersection of So leading up to the intersection because you couldn't put it at the intersection because you couldn't get across Yeah not through Just leading up to just because it would also prevent cars from if one is waiting to turn left it would prevent cars from going around them that's one possible impact of it or advantage and it just again slows you down right before an intersection makes you aware of where you are and gives maybe cars coming from Mountain Viewer Governor Shinden Road a better chance to get on to North Wilson So the next couple have to do with rumble strips they can be placed on the edge or on the center line this slide is about the edge we would only use these where there are full bike lanes because we know that bicyclists are on the road in whether the shoulder is one foot wide or five feet and if these are placed on a shoulder that was only one foot wide then that would really screw up bicyclists in their paths they don't want to bike on this So one of the alternatives will be to have a wider shoulder so in this way it may even protect bicyclists and there would be gaps for driveways and cross streets of course so that no one is crossing daily it's to keep you on your lane while you're driving along the road One issue with these is the noise so that's something to think about but it's also something that can be tried out and if it doesn't work out they're not too expensive to get out of there so they can be placed on center lines too and we were thinking these would be especially helpful in the hollow for keeping cars within their lane as they're taking those tight curves so that they're not if you're taking a wider curve that means you can take it faster so it keeps your lane and yeah slows you down perhaps Next one, speed humps and speed tables the difference between these is that speed humps are a little more collar and quick steep they slow you down more and then speed tables have a flat top so speed tables will not slow you down as much as humps do and that actually might be really appropriate for north Williston Road speed humps are usually used in more quiet residential settings not a ton of traffic these little neighborhood streets as is shown there but speed table could be a good way to slow down traffic on this roadway that's accommodating a lot of vehicles I was just going to say on skunk hollow medium they use these I would say they're humpson because they're pretty steep and they're pretty short so I would expect that those are moderating traffic more so why wouldn't you want to put the humps on north Williston Road because you definitely want to slow down for those you want to go airborne there's just generally more traffic on north Williston Road than there is on skunk hollow road and you know we're trying to also learn from that installation and I think that these can be just as effective at maintaining a consistent speed rather than having people like go to the speed bumps slow down fast what we're trying to do is get people to drive a consistent 35 miles an hour rather than 25, 45, 25, 40 that's a good point yeah that's about that some negative aspects are you know it affects plowing and emergency response times but plows can deal with them these are used in places where that's always going to be a small issue but we'll have to weigh the benefits radar speed feedback signs there's one on north Williston Road in the south of Mountain View in the residential section so we could add more of these not too many or else people you know it won't be effective but in strategic places one spot might be for the south bound traffic across from where the current one is they can also be placed towards like the north Williston village part they do seem to be most effective in more village environments whereas on those long straight lines the speed tables might be better but that is something we'll continue to look at this a warning sign with the beacon a place for this might be ahead of the hollow and you're right up Peterson Lane basically before you take a deep steep sort of drop big curve into the hollow this would give advanced warning it kind of just confirms how important it is to just be aware and practice safe driving so rather than it flashing all the time it could be a smart beacon where like with the radar speed feedback signs it detects how fast you're moving and it could be set so that it really blinks when cars are approaching from above a certain speed so that it's not always flashing at you and then it you know there's a higher likelihood it would lose its effectiveness so it's one way to do that one this is sort of a fun traffic calming feature is the idea of putting something like banners on utility pools if the utility pools allows um so this is kind of it's called placemaking is the urban planning term giving some notice whether it's more artistic like you know a banner or something it just adds context to where you are it says you're driving through a community there's a place where people might be out in the street going for a walk and that it's a place people care about that it's a neighborhood not just your commute to work so something like this it's small but it can add a little fun a little whimsy and you know a draw attention to where people are and last but not least this is not too much a traffic calming per say but it's kind of fit into this section RFBs rectangular rapid flashing beacons are used at pedestrian crossings when other pedestrian markings or signage are not enough so one idea was Fairway or Fairview Drive was called out and a lot of comments people had that cars don't stop there for pedestrians despite there being a crosswalk there already is one of these at Mountain V Road so there are chances to use maybe one more of these because again you don't want too many or else people can get desensitized to them but they're also only on when pedestrians are at them which might be more often or less often depending on what new pedestrian facilities we might add stuff like that yeah here's a little summary table it's hard to read it's in the report but what we'll point out basically is here it says kind of the effectiveness of these different measures based on past studies it can vary you know in our Philiston Road so it might act differently but some of these you know they have a big range of how effective they are they might reduce speed by one to eight miles per hour so it really depends you don't know for sure but we have some idea there's research out most of these don't affect the right way they're within the roadway and then cost wise they're not too bad relatively speaking like five, ten, thousand dollars each I have a question on that last slide why does a speedy path degrade general safety? so the concept there was that it would be too sharp of a change in speed transition one of the things about what Philiston Road is is it is a bit of a through route what we want to do is maintain that ability to be a through route you know degrade might be a harsh term it's not going to necessarily be less safe but it's going to be more impactful than if you do that with a speed table any of these should be cited in appropriate locations like specific locations so like with a clear line of sight you know where it's coming you have your appropriate sign and pavement markings so I mean a speed hump could be implemented with minimal impacts to you know surprise effects but that's just what we're, that's really what that reflects does the just look at the cost of speed posts and tables include the cost for signage? yes and then so there, you know we listed out a whole bunch of options some of them you might choose one or the other but what we did here is put a potential layout of these different traffic coming measures so don't get too caught up on the locations of them they can change but if you have any opinions on where where you definitely do or definitely don't want one of these we're open to hearing that what we're really trying to get from this meeting is to say hey you know I think that you know the what they did on scum call of road was great except for but let's try to replicate it in this way or say that it doesn't work I don't want to see any of those kinds of things and so basically once we get some feedback from you on those ideas and we can kind of mix and match and if this were a smaller group and we're sitting around a table it would be fun to just have these little pieces that we can put on the road and say like let's do it here and here it's a little harder to do in a larger group format so really what I'd like to hear tonight is like you know perhaps the speed tables and the road wide or the curved meetings are good but only in this location let's try to find a place there where you know I'm sick of seeing all those radar speed feedback signs everywhere I don't want any more flashing lights telling me I'm going too fast so I mean that's another thing that's a perfectly legitimate concern or if there's something in that you've seen somewhere else that you'd say would be a great alternative on this road too I mean that's where we're totally open to other things we picked out I think what seven or eight things that Roxanne just went through and that was out after a much larger list that we discussed as a team internally will be most appropriate for this corridor so that's essentially what we're hoping for so I don't want to get too bogged down on like this specific application here this is a rough idea so as I pointed out before like one of those warning beacons right before the hollow some speed tables in those flat long flat straight away areas where people are prone to driving faster and yeah it really it's a little bit of mixing and matching so and there's some visuals there we put in the idea of like the centerline rumble strips as like you go through the curves of the hollow but you know there are a couple houses right there I think at Peterson Lane so they probably would be too happy with having a bunch of speed some of those rumble strips noise that they're not used to but maybe it makes more sense when you're in the actual hollow the walls of the canyon there damn the noise but there was a question over here I was actually going to have just the opposite argument that when the hollow actually is like it's like reverberating yeah it'll like echo out in ways actually the noise reverberates and depending on the time of year so my concern is the rumble strips you know folks are going to just go open under their cars they don't care that's my sense and what it's going to do is increase the noise that's already been issued so I'm just curious like it seems like that curve the way people whip around there is a high concern that's where a lot of the crashes occur I'm just wondering about having some enhancement that is actually beyond the rumble strips that would require people to pay attention and slow down in that vessel coming through that curve whether they're going north or south so in the northbound direction that's really what that idea of that curve and sign is we would have like an advisory speed and if people are exceeding that advisory speed that's when the light would flash at you so that was one of those concepts speed tables really do require people to slow down but you don't really want to put those in there while you're already turning like corners and going down hills and stuff so I wouldn't suggest anything in the hollow so it's really about getting them to enter the hollow in an appropriate speed I'm sorry the woman next to you the speed is more of an avenue higher than south it depends where north of Mountain View but generally in the south of Mountain View where it's denser people are driving a little slower the speed limit sorry it's all the same I believe 35 miles per hour were you to stop everyone at say a four-way stop at Mountain View in North Williston would that affect the speed going on? Not necessarily it would probably get people to stop at that location but they would probably continue their driving pattern and behavior once they get through that and stop signs are generally used not in like a traffic calming scenario if there's a constant stop they always have to come to the stop sign but there's never any reason for them to stop at like 10 o'clock at night it breeds sort of a disrespect for the stop sign and people start rolling through it and that's like a learned behavior and then it starts precipitating out of nowhere for a four-way stop to be installed there was generally some warrant analysis and there was a study done a couple of years ago that looked at whether a four-way stop or signal or roundabout or any one of those alternatives was really warranted here and that through the volume warrants and the crash warrants and all the other ways that we look at an intersection that wasn't warranted at this location and we were really hoping to not have to study that it is one of the major complaints used it was still it yeah we had a list of ranking of the intersection of the problem that was the number one ranked intersection that was the problem I just want to second that I mean full disclosure that's my intersection I go through it every day but to not have this study look at that intersection I would look at it as a deficit to the study I just want to chime in and maybe defend that we studied this intersection with RSG I think back in 2012 and came to the conclusion to leave the intersection as it was with some enhancements that I think there are more to come there but right away it needs to be acquired to fulfill that report as far as I know was put before this body and approved so we didn't think it was worth our while to reopen that can of warrants when there was already an alternative selected by this select board my comment still stands and the I saw a couple hands were here but we'll get there in just a second following 2012 study and then now I think it was 2013 when there were some improvements that were done there and we actually looked at the crash history taking a look at the 2012 crash history and then the crash history at our current year and we've seen a pretty large drop in crashes it went from 17 in five years in 2012 to 8 in five years in 2017 so I think that we've seen a very a very significant drop in the number of crashes there and that's great that there's low in crashes but it still is a dangerous intersection it's a difficult intersection during the critical times of the day which are the commute times I would push back a little bit and say that dangerous doesn't necessarily mean difficult or difficult doesn't mean dangerous but adding a four-way stop there you can be creating more of these transitions of speeds which leads to crashes I don't want to suggest I know the answer to what's the best alternative for it just I know that it's right there I don't feel it works but that's my opinion maybe it's time to investigate implementing the ones that were approved by the select for back in 2012 implementing more of those issues that were addressed then but like they said it's going to require taking right over there and as we all know getting right away is not an easy thing to do so I think that's what needs to be done at that intersection more than anything to be changed at that intersection good thanks I'll vote this gentleman close in a row the haul of repaid a few years ago they put rumble strips down through at northern part of it there what were you going to say it lasted a very short time it was extremely noisy and the neighbors complained they got paged over and I don't believe it really impacted driving enough to stay so that's interesting to hear that it was already tried there and not worked so that's a good good feedback thank you for that you had your hand up a second go too yeah back to the intersection I would like to go and reach it off of go and reach it then row and I will second it back that it's a dangerous intersection and it is difficult it's difficult made in part because of the speed that people come and if you are coming off Governor Chittman looking to your left has a stockade fence so you have to be very close to traffic to be able to get it and then it turns and it goes down so the combination of the terrain with the fence with the traffic there can be a line almost past plus makers from people coming out of work and I feel sorry for them because some of them have been in line for like 15 minutes you are trying to get across and those people don't know if you are going to go and so it causes even more delay or you might it is definitely dangerous intersection I lived there long enough to see it and to not do anything I think is taking a risk just because we haven't had accidents or there less of them that study was done 5 years ago and the study needs to look at 5 consecutive years and in 2012 it was identified as a high crash intersection so it's already been identified as such I think it's worth it and I understand there is no easy solution and my feeling is that if you put stop signs there that would eliminate well I don't want to get too far off the rails let me just check in on that with stop signs were you in the 4 corners traffic just backed up the old state road at the same time so the 4-way stop doesn't actually increase the speed of traffic given through the intersection if you come through here any school might it's all going back to the old state road and I do think it's important to let us hear it so I do want to hear what you guys have to say so you've had a quick comment I turn left in the mornings and I take a deep breath and I look many times because it is very dangerous so I don't know what the other alternatives are that haven't been tried but it is a dangerous intersection and it seems like that 4-way stop worked beautifully yes it backs up but it keeps ruining people and people avoid the busy times drive in stunk hollow every day I would agree that the median things really don't slow people down they just do the bottom leave it would be tough but the tables seem to work beautifully on the road good thank you I just wanted to thank you for all the work on this because it's interesting and great to see what possible what could be so one question I have to know is there's obviously all these options but why not reduce the speed limit just a blanket reduction on the speed limit won't change people's behavior when the police are actually out there so it won't really get people to slow down that's really one of our charges I mean we could recommend more enforcement and that's always an option but that's only a short term people know when the police are enforcing certain corridors and they alter their behavior so they don't get a ticket but then when the police are gone there's only a short term as it can be it makes sense to me 25 to 45 back and forth I think that's important to remember but something in the hall specifically I think maybe where you propose to speak and be reducing the speed limit in the hall because coming down the hill people gain speed really quickly and when they're heading up into the hall they tend to rev up because they know on the commutes they know that they're going to be having to go uphill especially in big trucks will really crank it going up the hill and cruising going down the hill so that might be something to add we definitely want design to reinforce what the speed limit is something like that flashing warning beacon if it's meant to slow people down maybe it could be a lower speed limit but we can look into that yeah so I just wanted to say I really appreciate that you're focusing on the hall because my house actually I had a person drive into my house into my bedroom yeah and they were coming right around that curve that's the curve and my house is where it straightens out but driving in excess of 70 miles an hour through my bedroom so I think it's really important I so appreciate that we have the speed tables and the signs and the sign about the curve I'm wondering about the speed table I'm just thinking about where the train tracks are and I don't know where it is in relation to that but I can tell you the cars that come over those train tracks they don't fly and they don't even care so I'm wondering if we could have it sort of near there that would help we'll use it as a free speed bump speed table a natural speed bump that's something that we've definitely recognized is that the tracks there kind of are a bit of a change in elevation across over and how we position these elements I think we would want to be sure that we're positioning them properly by those kinds of features so yes the other thing I wanted to add is that my house was built 200 years ago and this is like a horse and buggy kind of road I have no front yard these cars are in my window driving by and when you're talking about the rumble strips and all of that is it going to be even further on the line? so the rumble strips would be within the pavement limits so no not in that situation but I mean you probably don't want to ride outside your bedroom window right which is where it probably would would be so my question is about rumble strips but the other day I was driving south so I turned up river road and read your report and I said okay so I'm going to drive I'm going to drive sort of drive through the hollow but what I noticed was a lack of signage and I know it curves because I live here but I'm just thinking you know I've seen a lot less curves as big arrows at certain points and the other thing is the surprise when you get to the top the surprise turns to get to the top again without a sign as you will I think that's something we might consider doing but less costly and maybe I'll put some more signs in there I like the flashing sign so I'm one of those drivers that feels compelled that the thing says speed limit 35 and says I'm doing 36 I slowed down because 35 I don't know what's wrong and then I look at my speedometer and it says I'm doing 38 and I know I got 3 miles an hour on my speedometer but that would work I think it works so we live in the south part so I see we have a pedestrian issues there and I think there's less pedestrian issues people aren't necessarily walking in the hollow back up into town and so we have now we have traffic traffic there and so I think that the speed bumps could work but I think the signs put in enough places and also I remember the road there was like potholes like the moon and then I turn around and there's a permanent sign that says both I'm like wow if this road is that bad and they didn't tell you what is the bump going to be like so I'm slowing down and I'm not going to have a party or something so you know people don't want to speed up I think some more arrows in there are not going to impact neighbors so I've got to remind those who are supposed to do this regularly oh yeah I'm slow to curse and those that aren't are going to go I've got more than that one curse sign so I've got a bunch of curbs I think we should think about some more signage in that area and I'll just take a second but another blinking light down my fairway drive so look you can cross there's one that is not confused but coming back down can I stream the blinking? yeah put the button across because I know my neighbors people come up with a little time on to the road and the signs or whatever and I've seen people try to cross I try to cross and you stand there and wait and so I was an advocate for the ones who use it I didn't think another one might help us but again it's only one that's being used so it's not impacting neighbors so I'll shut up I haven't heard from you I'm sorry so I I was at the beginning of the holidays and I had drive mountains turn off the mountain it doesn't scare me nearly as much as the turn of my driveway and once a month I kid you not a car will reach on their brakes and end up in my front yard because they don't stop for me to stop it so you're at Peterson Lane like on the upper Unity Lane first car where it says looking north okay that's my house and we've got this and you're saving they come on your they come up to my tail so fast that they end up screeching on the brakes swirling left and down coming traffic and ending up in my yard yeah and it's once a month to me and my wife I live in the farmhouse yeah between Mount View and you and the same thing every time does it matter if they're heading north or south or if you're heading north or south oh dear guide you just cross in the either direction if I'm coming up the hollows if you're going from Mount View to the hollows dear guide please don't like me today I notice that one of the traffic is heavy Saturday afternoon I'm concerned so it's driven by a human behavior folks that wanting to get to work late and turn the blinker on by your place start slowing down they'll just pass me on the plan so I can't do that yeah so another comment about the the hill as you're heading the first first fur that you went to in the summer is especially bad because the sun is over the trees so if there's anybody on the side of the road I often go into that thinking I really hope there's no bike there because I can't see I'm just taking on faith that I know where the movement goes so to this point about having maybe those arrows indicating random curves would be especially helpful in the summer if you can't see anything but what are the possibilities of the flashing speed signs that actually capture your license plates so you can be sent to the driving authority unfortunately Vermont does have legislation that will allow that at this time there is a study that's going on with VTrans and a couple other agencies to try to get legislation for that I know as well as you guys do you'll see the camera looks like it's taking a picture and we can't but we don't have that authority yet in Vermont so that's not coming up anytime soon I don't want to be rude and cut anybody out from questions but it is already almost quarter of nine and I believe we're only on until 9.15 and I know Cory needs to get through a bunch more slides that's why I said the comments are available we're accepting comments until the end of January so if we don't get to you tonight because we've got to get you to the presentation please feel free to come in and talk to me my office is next door upstairs I'm going to talk to you my office is next door upstairs or you can speak to Eric and he can call me over and I'll come down and see you or Jason can take comments through the email so I just want to take one more question and then we're going to continue on where is the data on crashes by the area where is the data on the speed data that you found what's the average speed what's the median the ranges that was in the existing conditions report that was it should be online also I apologize it's on the website as of today and that data can't be found there in the website and it's also online if you know where to find out from VTrans too we posted yesterday on the town's website the existing data information so I have a quick process question I would like to come to you directly and ask a question is there going to be another before the final report will there be another opportunity for there'll be a draft report that'll be created and developed and available for you to review and comment and if there's something that we absolutely missed and was shot to the moon instead of Saturn then we would incorporate that before we come into the select board with a preferred alternative analysis but there will be a third meeting upon meeting before this body where I imagine we'll be able to get to the select board some comments and feedbacks on the alternative so we do have alternatives that we're going to go through to discuss in regards to not just traffic calming measures but other measures in regards to the world itself so that's kind of why we want to get to that too because that's just as important as traffic calming measures yeah so just real quick so for the people who wanted to send further comments Lisa is there something on front porch forum there's been a bunch of posts on front porch forum I've seen those but I mean with the emails in them I haven't noticed I've got my card here I can leave it right on the table if anybody needs it and you'll find me also on the town's website under public works on the assistant writer so if they can't find me I'll Eric or Rick they know where to find me alright well I don't mind being interrupted but as Lisa is saying I think I only have 10 more minutes here but we can we'll see so like those traffic calming alternatives are like the simple things that we could probably build next year you know if the will was there and the funding is found these cross sectional alternatives are a little bit larger scale and are going to be a bit more of an impact so we basically broke this section up into two areas based on all the comments that we received basically applying that south of Mountain View Road it works pretty well but north of Mountain View Road there's a lot more going on a lot more that we need to like address so south of Mountain View Road we limited it to two alternatives you know the existing roadway is 10 foot lanes and 3 foot shoulders and that works well the traffic speed is pretty low you can bike in that 3 foot section it's kind of not really a bike lane but it's enough space to feel comfortable in our early stages of this project bikes through there we biked all the way to the top of the hill into the hall and we were like no we're not going down so we turned around and yeah exactly and we had a great time in the residential section but you know so the two alternatives here are basically the do nothing alternative which we always like to study so we know what the baseline is and then like what a 4 foot wide addition to the sidewalk there would be and that would bring it up to kind of what a shared use path is so you know right now we're familiar with what it looks like you've got our 6 foot wide asphalt sidewalk in the roadway but unfortunately it doesn't meet the project goals of what we identified earlier of having the you know a full like path there so basically just widening out this path is our alternative you know it does have that improved pedestrian and bicycle network you know the crosswalk trail runs right through here and along this path and you know I don't know if the crosswalk trail is supposed to go on the road or if it's supposed to go on the sidewalk but it'd be nice if it connected all the way up to government Chittenden Road and continued east you know the thing to say about this though is that this was only built 15 or 16 years ago I think and if it was easy enough to build a 10 foot path back then they probably would have so the reasons were only a 6 foot path you know it's going to be impacts of landscaping they already had to get a lot of right of way in some places it was already squeezed up to the road as far as it could go to minimize any impacts of people who didn't want to see the sidewalk built in the first place so there's going to be a lot of pushback for that kind of thing you know the examples of this there's many of these examples but you can kind of see like right here this is directly across the street the sidewalk kind of comes close to the house along the road there and that's to avoid impacts to the stone wall and the trees there so this is the sidewalk and this is the road and this is the curved section in other areas you know there's some wetlands that would probably be impacted you know there's utility poles that would be impacted there's going to be a number of these along the corridor so that's the alternative south of Mountain View north of Mountain View we extended our scope a little bit into two distinct alternatives and then basically a combination of those alternatives so one is where we would widen the road enough to put bicycle lanes essentially a wider shoulder a narrower travel lane so it would be a 10 foot traveling and a 5 foot bike lane on both sides right now what it is is an 11 foot traveling and you know a 1 foot sort of shoulder overall it's a widening of 6 feet I think so like 3 feet on either side the second alternative would be a similar path to what south of Mountain View road except we're planning originally for a 10 foot path to see what that would look like and then the third alternative is basically both of those combined that's widen the road and build a path because why not right you know that would be the best alternative for bicyclists pedestrians for everybody walking and driving or walking and riding bicycles you know it would be a bit of a wider road so there might be some concern of you know people like increasing speeds because all of a sudden there's this great big road and no more bicyclists on it so I mean there's a possible trade off you know those are the things to consider similar to the south of Mountain View road we know what it looks like it doesn't really meet the project goals what bike lanes would look like so if you're kind of lucky the very simple illustration here shows where we add in these bike lanes what we end up doing is filling in these slopes here so there will be some slope impacts and maybe some ditching and that's sort of where we can fix a lot of the drainage but you see now the utility poles are already pretty close to the road and they're going to be a little closer to the road so as we make the wider these already close utility poles are going to be that much already closer and you know there may be some desire to move those which starts getting to be a pretty large project for that you know specifically down and this is in the river area I think close to your house that is my house this right here that's not too bad that's a big crash into your gallon so there's also a utility pole it's a good ballard there keeping people from driving too close to your house hopefully but that's sort of exactly what if this road were to get widened it would get closer to this utility pole it would get closer to your house and they'd be peeking in my window laughing but it's true and there's very we looked at what would happen if we were able to shift it widen all these six feet on one side of the road so perhaps on the north side of the road that sort of has like this waviness effect to the road you can't just like shift over one spot and then like 50 feet down the road have it back to where it is because that's like this kink in the road and people are driving it's got to be a smooth transition so it's not quite as simple as just like shifting the whole thing over it'll be worse for the next house down so it's just limited space there going to what the shared use path would be this is still a same 11 and 1 so there's minimal shoulder here this is an existing roadway but we'd be having this path that goes down down we kept it on the west side of Mountain View and that's just to line up with the existing path that's down there that's where most houses are that's where most in woods like communities on that west side of the road so it would be like one less road for them to cross it doesn't really have any on-road facility for bicyclists but there would be the opportunity to get off the road so great for kids great for less confident bicyclists good for pedestrians but you'd have a much larger right of way impact where we were going on 3 feet now we have this 5 foot buffer plus this 10 feet into the neighboring property there really isn't there certainly isn't oh my goodness how did you know so I was actually surprised at how flat it was through certain parts but then there's a couple areas one of my colleagues at RSG lives off this driveway right here because they saw what we were kind of drawing sketching up that's not going to work so the way we designed it is we had the path kind of hugging the far side of the I don't have a cross section here the far side of that slope in between would be a ditch for the road for the storm water drainage and there's usually a pretty good swath of land there until you get to a couple of pinch points and that's like right when you start going down the hill and turn left that would be your property right there there's a big slope up there and not much of a ditch that we could really work with and it kind of widens out as you head down the hill and there's actually a fair bit of space up until about the Williston Woods area and then as you continue heading north up the down the hill especially past this driveway there and close to and that's when you start getting that pinch point where it's really squeezed together so that would be I will give you the swath alright well this is a public meeting that's now in public records I'll tell you the other way I've got four really big bold maple trees and there's like a path that's going to go right through those are the types of things that we've identified as being some significant issues and there are ways to work around that I think that we could actually for this alternative avoid any impacts you know we can also reduce the 10 foot that's like the big ask to 8 feet we can put it up against the road sort of like what was done in the southern sections I think that there's ways that we could move forward without any significant impacts of some of the landscape but we would still have similar issues on the eastern side of the road as we get towards like the railroad and into the north Williston Village there's one house that has that big rock like right there on the side of the road so that would require some bit of work to it that needs to protect the house yeah so it's a constrained roadway so the idea is that we can I think that it could be worked out but nothing comes of the price tag so we'll get to that in a minute and then the third alternative is basically both of these together and as you'll imagine the issues of one plus the issues of the other equals the issues of a lot so we still have the 5 foot bike lane we have the 10 foot path you know it's just a lot more red so you have a lot more of these issues we have the same issues at certain people's houses in bedrooms and then we have the big boulders on the one side of the road and the driveway impacts so there's no easy solution we knew that going into this I think we had the same conversation like what are we going to propose here and it really comes down to what you're willing to put forward into fixing this problem so just a quick recap here south of Mountain View Road we have the do nothing and then just wind above the charity's path north of Mountain View Road we have the do nothing we have the bike lane alternative here so this is like what it would look like in the hollow with a big ditch on the left hand side it's exaggerated a little bit and that's in the flat area the second alternative being the existing roadway but with a path on the slope of the hill or in the flat section we have to channelize the armor and channelize that ditch and stream and the third alternative being basically the two other ones combined and so to get to the slide with a lot of text you know it's exactly what you'd imagine the impacts get redder and redder that's what this column here is so this right here north of Mountain View Road is this is the do nothing with all these zeros the shoulders only would be a fair bit of impacts the path only has a lot of impacts let me combine it together and it's a big bright red column and then south of Mountain View Road these are the impacts associated with just widening that path right there and the other numbers of interest here are the costs at the bottom we have a range of plus or minus about a half million dollars in each direction and just at this level of analysis that's really as close as I'd be comfortable really saying but what we're looking at is widening the road and doing the drainage stuff there we're looking at close to two million dollars for that and then if we want to do the bike path alone it'd be close to three million dollars and if we're going to combine it all it'd be close to like five million dollars those are expensive options those are big numbers I'm just throwing out there and I'm just dropping them I don't know how many people are but that's sort of where that landed and I'll let that sink in for a second and going to the next steps here which is what we talked about earlier I'll go back and we can talk but I know that some people probably may want to get out of here it's nine o'clock now so we're compiling the feedback so I think if anybody, there's a couple copies of the presentation that were up on that table which is our emails also right here so get in touch with us Lisa can compile all of these you can reach out directly to me and I'll just do whatever we can to figure out what you're trying to say and how to best incorporate it into this project and then what we're going to do is we're going to draft the final scoping report put that up for public comment for a couple weeks and then we have that public meeting on the 27th of February and then at that meeting we're going to have that suite of alternatives that we'd like to put forward as a preferred alternative at which point the select board you would have an opportunity to say that's a great idea let's pursue that or I think the road's fine as it is so that's hopefully what we're doing so now I would like to say just get your feedback on the concepts and what we've done wrong what we could do better what needs more study that kind of thing let's hear some feedback from the select board before applying 15 works out but I do want to make sure everybody knows that we're taking comments till the end of January 31st my card is there I'm here all the time the town's not going anywhere so feel free to contact me at any time and we can incorporate your information into the study and include it in with everything else too so the question I have is for right now tonight a limit to one is I guess I'm a little bit skeptical how should I think of the potential how potentially successful traffic calming can be to me this road is a road that really suffers from commuter traffic is the big for lack of better words user of the roads that are causing the problems and they're probably that those type drivers are probably the least influenced by traffic calming because they're late to work or something like that can you I don't know if you can really evaluate this or answer it but what would be my take away from the potential for traffic calming to have a significant impact on this road so my immediate like recommendation would be to give like Todd Oda at Jericho Call and that's what I did when we were doing this process time manager and he was he's been around for that whole paving and it's going to call up really the very similar roadway that compared this to it's really close by it's probably people are taking the zigzag through there to get to where they need to go and what he had relayed to us is that while he saw the following paving he saw the volumes go up but the speeds say about the same which you know you think if you had a new freshly paved road and people are wanting to drive it they probably drive it faster and so I think that's a real testament to the ability of these things to actually work like some people have mentioned their speed umps and not speed tables so you know maybe they're that much more jarring so they do drive them slower you know our intention would be to not make something jarring but something that you recognize what the intention is and would naturally come to that so on this right here there is very well documented evidence of what the effectiveness is of these speed limits so you know like the curve comedians one to eight miles an hour reduction the speed tables four to ten or eleven miles an hour and those are from FHWA studies but the most significant evidence to me would be what our neighbors are seeing and Jericho did I think a really good job of you know trying something different and it wasn't a really popular idea at the time either but I think it's a pretty good example of what we can do in an urbanizing you know Chittenden County oh I'm sorry ma'am did you have a question can you tell us people from the church to the bridge hold a meeting on our own maybe right after the new year but before the comment period because there's already some stirring that we could get together and I think we'd like to talk to each other more your more anecdotal really look at I'd love to know if all these studies that back in the May report you said you were going to use observable site features mapping resources historic maps and reports past studies rates of way of utilities and wetlands streams rivers stormwater drainage animals forest lands public lands there's the new forest there's the study you talked about there's the study at the other end with the potential roundabout to me there's also fire department coverage and the fact that there's not city water there there's stormwater issues that are increasing the soil the sand in the healing areas not some dollars for the study and I think it needs to be more than I this is some loaded more than boiler plate traffic calming devices that we have seen in Stunk Hollow and we have seen roundabouts and we have seen over by Best Buy and I think and your study says there's no holistic quarter plan and one of your earliest slides and that's what we really deserve not to hear that the reason you can't put a rumble strip in front of the Claros houses because it's got a fence and a tree when really it's got a house with children just you know less than 25 feet we've never even talked about setbacks your list was big and I don't think we've had a chance to cover that we can't do that in two quick one hour meetings so I know a bunch of organizers here and if we hold another meeting and we invite you to have time to do that I can even think of a woman at the end of this row who has a place she would be available any of the town public meeting spaces are available to the community all you have to do is go online and reserve them at any time and yes I would be more than willing to come to one of the meetings unfortunately RSG the engineering firm that costs additional funding so I myself would be more than willing and I'm assuming Jason would from regional planning so if you guys want to plan something you know I'm thinking of something to take care of because I know that there are so many more people and that was one of my concerns especially having the meeting at 8 o'clock 3 o'clock 5 days before Christmas not getting the material creating another meeting as we can announce in our front porch form and my message to you is I think the select board and the town not just residents and locals in the road deserve a more comprehensive study that really understands we haven't talked about the farms the types of vehicles the commercial vehicles the residential we talked about we just think this deserves more than a quick yes so once you get to a final plan what is the talent that happens today for going through with any of these other budget considerations what is that next step beyond the timeline what is that process very long well I'd say that really depends on what the preferred alternative is and you know one of the things that we would identify are get the suite of alternatives that we want to address and you know we could put it together in like a phased implementation plan what each like level would cost some of it could be done locally without any other sources of funding you know maybe there's some even funding available to do this kind of thing others might require like looking for federal grants or something so I mean it really depends on the level of investment as Cory said earlier the traffic calming measures are something that we can do pretty quickly when we start talking about widening the road and doing drainage work like that we're talking structural issues that we have to deal with stormwater issues that we have to deal with because we can't just say okay just fill that in and make a ditch over there because that's not going to be structurally safe what's going to happen is it's just going to fall right back into the ditch we push that further so that's going to be more extensive more expensive time as opposed to the traffic calming measures this study may determine that you know for $6 million it's just not feasible to have a pedestrian path go all the way down to the bridge I mean that's something that the select board and the community has to discuss and review that may just not be worth it let's put our money some place out and a better investment as opposed to spending that much money for the 10 pedestrians that are going to go through there maybe it is the fact that we just make the road a little bit wider do some structural work on one side or the other and put bike lanes in those are all things that we have to look at until we come up with a preferred alternative we can't really design anything yet to know the official cost of it when we go to the design phase once we come up with the best alternative and like you said man there's a lot of balls in the air so to speak in regards to this whole entire section of road when we first sat down to start reviewing this and going over it the first thing we said is well there's no way we can stop traffic from using this road coming from other towns it's just not going to be possible but if we spend $6 million to have to dig up the road it will stop them for a couple months I doubt it will so those were all the options that we did have to look at and investigate after our main meeting it was very vocal that main meeting that we need more enforcement and police enforcement on that road and I did work the next day I contacted the police and I said hey you need to provide some more enforcement in there after listening to the budget earlier today with the police department they're kind of short staffed so that could be part of the issue also you know as you know as well as I do you're driving down the road whether you're going 36 miles an hour or 38 miles an hour and you see a police car you kind of you know you slow right down so that does make a difference but they do know this and we're trying to do what we can the best way we can does anybody have any more comments before we thank you for the presentation I'd like this chart though I don't think this was included in our package it wasn't I'm sorry we recognized that I was missing it this afternoon so we added it isn't the report though so if you have the alternative analysis report I must okay so Eric one of the things I'd like to understand is I wasn't on the board for this intersection at Governor Chittenden, North Williston and Mountain View so I guess there were a bunch of improvements or projects proposed and I guess approved but not executed for some reason and I think maybe that's one of the things I'm concerned about in this as well is if we pick something that has 99 impediments that we have to hit one at a time it could be 99 years before we construct anything and we I like the idea of a phased approach can we do something to help so a number of the initially preferred alternatives from that intersection study have been implemented so there's some warning beacons I think the approach cross traffic doesn't stop or something like that like supplementary signs on the stop signs and I think that that has made a real improvement so basically what's the easy the low hanging fruit has been picked it's just somebody's got to go get a ladder to get that fruit so just be good Eric I don't know if you can help us figure out what those things are that haven't been done because that's a part of this this roadway there's a copy of the report available I'll share with me the other day so we can share them I'm not a hundred percent sure but I believe it was turning lanes to provide for turning lanes better for people to get in and out off the side roads but unfortunately we needed additional right of way in order to install those I believe that was one of the implementation projects but we can definitely get you a copy of that and I want to make sure that we get feedback from the select board as to no way do I want to see the curve medians or we don't want this or we want that in consideration the communities input and then come back to you guys in February and you say no, start all over because we don't like any of that so we want to get everybody together on the same page and try to incorporate as much information as we can before we do come back in February and the reason we're waiting so long in February is so we can close the comment date on January 30th or 31st give RSG time to incorporate more comments and we can come up with a good plan a preferred alternative plan and have it available to you guys a couple weeks in advance before the meeting so you can review it and then you can come up with comments just in case you're out of town on some glorious vacation we don't get to go on we can get your comments before you go one of the things to maybe to validate if you're going to do another group study for the people along the road or any residents right travel the road in the town is understand the priority because I think the priority at least the way I look at the report it said high speeds are the biggest issue that's what this most common concern so does that reflect the feelings of the people that are impacted on the road itself high speeds pedestrian safety, bike safety I rarely see anybody walking on that road I wouldn't walk up and down that road I wouldn't ride my bike up and down that road it's scary yeah it's I think it's really important that you know that we are part of Williston and I think it's sort of we're sort of separate we don't have our own walkway it's and I think it's treated like that we're the third through way and when they get into the village it's like oh we're going to you know we're going to slow down and we're going to get caught I think for me that's the larger picture like community that we want to be part of all of this and connected to it and that's why I love those cross section alternative proposals because I think man if we had something that connected into the village what would that say to people who are driving on our road so I think that community thing is really important yeah that's great dear because one of the things I would worry about just to be voting for something that takes up some road some more frontage some of those houses that have none so just we would have to look at if everybody felt the same way that would be great that would be make things easy for easier we still have to solve the funding issue so so my card is on the table please feel free to grab it have an email address like I said I'm available online is it one request talk for the final report you know I've seen a lot of bike lanes in various places some bike lanes have things that kind of stand along the separated road from the bike lane it might be a way to get those people to one stone here because people can walk the bike lane feel a little safer while at the same bikes and people won't be able to sort of get in out of the bike lane wow it depends on where you're putting those as you know a lot of traffic accidents that happen through the hollow is because people do not slow down the next thing you know they're going off in the road so they would just be taking those out every single time they went through there we actually did discuss that in one of our meetings having those whatever you want to call them pillars posts we did look at that so the problem is that you'd have to probably take them out during the winter just with the plows the snow throw so the way that we were thinking about it would be like as if there was a main road that exists in how it is and you just widen one really wide shoulder sort of and then delineate that area it's kind of like a cheap bike path or shared use path kind of thing but the issue would be like once those posts are gone it's basically on this really wide shoulder there and then what is that a passing lane it's like it would be a difficult it's competing things yeah but when we plow the road it's just going to push the snow right onto them and I also think that gives the bicyclist or the pedestrian a sense of fault safety because of the car I mean those aren't going to stop a car from going off and hitting somebody that's in the bike lane or pedestrian you know I mean if there's somebody there and they go over those that's not going to stop a car unfortunately okay how much of a stop for a bike path I don't know how many people would use a bike and then do a strong bicyclist to come off the haul so I don't know if we're taking a plan or if we better just have a smaller path just for walking to connect to be off the expensive if we don't use the bike path well I see a lot of people do walk with their bikes I guess like I said I can't agree enough please feel free to contact us let us know if somebody wants to contact me to set up another meeting just for the community people not in front of the slide board maybe do it at a different time let me know and I will be more than willing to make a system out of it I'm totally unrelated comment if you are not handicapped please be aware of parking in handicapped spots save them for folks who do need to park in those spots there is a car with a cutting sticker in a handicapped spot in the parking lot please be aware of that thank you here where did I park I can't be that person that happens very often it does so I just try to raise the awareness thank you everybody we certainly want your feedback in this process too if it's easier to do after you've had a chance to review it would we do provide some sort of recommendation I want you to have some buy in it ready it's our obligation to give that to you absolutely thank you for the opportunity to present thank you discussions then next on the agenda we should have a motion to close the public hearing first of all second made in second to close the public hearing all those in favor say aye aye good we move on to the manager's report which will be given to us by the assistant to the town manager thank you just a couple brief items and Jennifer is still here to speak to the financial statements section of this part of the meeting but to remind the board the next select board meeting is primarily a budget review session and that will be held on January the second which will be including a public hearing on the budget for 8 p.m. the meeting will start at 7 p.m. as usual we'll have a public hearing at 8 p.m. we've also scheduled the annual legislative breakfast it will come up Monday at 9 p.m. what is the legislative breakfast I'm sorry you got to go opportunity to network with legislative all the members of the board and the commissions and the select board are invited to a legislative breakfast here RSVP so we make sure we have enough food and we have the best food for that breakfast great all of the Chittendon County Senators are invited as well as the two state representatives from Williston and we'll have a moderator breakfast is usually from 7 to 9 I believe chance to the 29th 7 to 9 thank you Jennifer's here if there's questions regarding the financial statements sure we'd like to have Jennifer give her overview of what we have in the memo and that would be great one of the things I have included in the report one of the differences when I talk about the police department is under budget I expect them to continue to be under budget throughout the year because of recruiting challenges the fire department is under budget by a similar amount but there's more of just timing issues so they will catch up throughout the year that is just a little further explanation on that area any questions on the financial so far this year just one quick one under expenditure highlights the first bullet it talks about due to the change in accounting for the stormwater project labor and requirements really it's a timing question when did those changes go into effect do they go into effect at the beginning of the fiscal year and so that note has been there for a few months now we're going to build this out quarterly so any work that the stormwater crew or that the highway crew is doing for stormwater projects will be built quarterly so we'll see increases in their labor and equipment expenses but it will be offset by revenue and you'll see that through the budget process this year budget that way thank you for the questions for Jennifer it's not is there any questions no what under the managed report item number C you've got you've piqued my interest can you say anything about what the petition is about or not yet or copy of it I did should have there's a copy alright I misunderstood what this was this is the one from Chris Roy I'm a change Chris Roy has a lawsuit against the town okay I'm sorry I did not see this and I'll read this it will be coming up for discussion at a future select board good to read it over any other questions for Eric or Jennifer is there go ahead this petition is the one that we write about in the paper yeah that's part of why I was asking it was just unclear from what was in the managers report but now this makes sense so we'll go on to other businesses is there any other business to discuss before we adjourn I can think well we will be the only select board that can say glad tidings of comfort and joy yeah and with that we'll adjourn thank you thank you so another four one what's that yeah but you know Kent seal is this all sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry sorry