 Good evening and welcome. I'm Diane Meyerhoff, host for tonight's Candidate Forum for the Essex Select Board. Candidates are vying for two seats for a term of three years. Tonight's show is being aired live on Channel 17 and streamed live on YouTube. We welcome your comments and questions. Please join the conversation at 862-3966. The ground rules for the forum are the candidates will make opening statements of up to two minutes each followed by prepared questions for also up to two minutes with a possible one minute rebuttal. Tonight I'm joined by two of the three candidates, Irene Renner, the incumbent, and Patrick Murray. Thank you both for coming out tonight. We appreciate it. Thanks for having us. Annie Cooper will not be joining us tonight. We're gonna begin with opening statements and we're gonna let Patrick start and we're gonna ask why you're running and what qualifies you for the position. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, my name is Patrick Murray. I've lived in Essex for just about 10 years now. I was originally grew up in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. So I lived in the state for quite some time and moved over to the Burlington area when I came to attend UVM, got out of school and went right into the workforce really after that. So I bounced around Chittenden County quite a bit, you know, Burlington, South Burlington. But when my wife and I were looking to have our first child, you know, really, we were looking for a place that was going to be, you know, home to us. You know, the schools in Essex were incredibly appealing. The nice mix of rural area and a little bit more suburban closeness was also, you know, a big drawing point for us. So we purchased our house and have been living here since. After that, I've always been involved in, I've done some charity work, I've done some different productions theater, you know, in the last decade or so that I've been living here. And I always really appreciated the sense of giving back to a community that came with the charity work that was involved in that part. So I began at that point looking at the ways that I could help out in the local government. That, for me, began with the school board. First, I served on the Prudential Committee in Essex Junction, which was our local K through eight district. And then I ran for election for the Essex Westford School District. And I've been on that for two years now, which is where I'm sort of picking up all of the day-to-day for, you know, formal local governmental meetings. Great, good, okay. Irene, tell us why you're qualified to run for this position. Thank you, Diane. My name is Irene Renner. I'm completing my fourth term as a select board member here in Essex. Having a seat at the select board table has helped me to appreciate the vital work that this board does, setting policy for 21,000 people and managing a budget of close to $15 million. It's also given me the opportunity to represent voices of constituents that I think would otherwise go unheard. I've spent 12 years here working to rebuild trust in public servants by setting example through hard work and integrity through listening more than I talk, and by seeking to communicate with different generations through different media. Always a challenge. My kids use different media than my parents and we all use different media than each other. So that grows even more difficult than when I first set it 12 years ago and I suspect if I'm on the board again, it will remain harder in three years when I'm still here. What I discovered when I first came into local government was that we have a fine group of staff working at town hall, but they're so busy serving the public they don't have time to toot their own horns. So I found it was very important for me as I learned step by step about local government to share what I was learning with my constituents and sort of help people understand even as I understood through the town government, the village government and how they fit together and things like that. Because politics hasn't ever been a career goal for me, I have felt free to ask unorthodox questions and use uncommon sense to approach issues and the majority of constituents have said that resonates with them that helps them understand things. So I'm running again to continue to do more of the same hopefully and also to tackle new projects. Good, thank you both, I appreciate it. I don't know if you were both here, but earlier we had a presentation from the select board chair and then in the town unified, sorry unified manager. And so we talked a little bit about the budget, obviously the big issue, increase of about 2%. So tell us if you support that, that Essex town budget for fiscal year 20 and we'll start, I mean with you. Okay, I absolutely support the budget for fiscal year 2020. I have seen firsthand that the town staff at the Essex offices are not overstaffed and the staff there are not overpaid. And I understand that as I hear from constituents, everyone would rather to see a 0% increase in the budget. Frankly, that's not possible. The town purchases lots of services and goods on the open market where prices only go up. That's a stark reality. The 2% budget increase we're seeing this year is the lowest I recall seeing in the past 12 years. And that's exciting to me. And it is, however, also very forward-looking. For example, as if you were tuned in to the half hour show. I'm sure they were. Right before this. I'm sure everybody was tuned in. You heard that we were proposing a part-time supervisor for our buildings. We've never had one assess and address the state of several dozen buildings that the town and village own and I think it's past time, but it's definitely time to have someone do that as a full-time job in the budget as proposed as part-time for now. But that's the one thing on the budget I would change if our king would be to have it a full-time position so the person hits the ground running and addresses as much as possible in every hour of the day that they can. I think it would also be easier to hire for a full-time position right now out of the gate rather than a part-timer now and then down the road, perhaps a full-timer. But I do want to mention that we are indebted to our public works director for keeping an eye on our buildings all these years. He's done it on the side while he's managed roads and sewer and water and everything else that Dennis Lutz does, but it's time to have more than his watchful eye on it. Have two eyes, two ears, and maybe two arms around those investments that we have as taxpayers and have someone really full-time monitoring those things. Okay, Patrick, do you support the Essex budget for 2020? Yeah, actually, absolutely I do. It's maybe less exciting if Irene and I are in complete agreement, but in this particular instance, yeah, the budget is absolutely appropriate. We all want to look at our tax bill and not see any raise at all, but realistically, Essex is no different from the rest of the United States in that we do have aging infrastructure. We do have needs that need to be addressed, and for a long time, we've kind of all been looking at let's keep our taxes as low as we can because we know that we're in a recession. We know that it's been difficult to put that burden on the taxpayers, but at some point, that infrastructure bill comes due. For us, I know that in the town that for a long time, we made do with a police department that was arguably understaffed. In recent additions in the last few years have really helped with the police presence and that's something that we see, I certainly see day-to-day driving through five corners. Before this year, I would never see people who are running red lights get pulled over, even in arguably the busiest intersection in the state during the busiest traffic times, people would block the intersection, they would go through that and there would be no consequence. This day and age, I mean, I see police pulling people over, it's made for a much smoother driving to work, bringing my kid to school, so I'm really very appreciative that over the years, the tax increases have been relatively small, but in this case, where the efforts are being focused with police, with infrastructure, it's absolutely worth it. Great, thank you. Let's talk a little bit about consolidation. I'm afraid to say the word merger, I don't know, but also from the earlier presentation, we talked a lot about the departments, how they're co-locating, or they're working together or combining, so tell us your opinion of the town and village consolidation efforts to date. Where do you see it going and do you support a full merger? And Patrick, I'm gonna start with you. Yeah, I do. I do support a full merger. Consolidation in and of itself, I think is the ultimate goal and certainly what all of this is kind of leading towards, so it would be almost counterproductive, I think at this point too, have gone through all of this work, putting in the effort of combining the departments that have been combined, moving parks and rec together into the same building, over the years, the various different departments that have gone together. Certainly there, at least in Essex, has been a past, a history of how fast should we do it, how quickly can it be done, what's the most effective way, the most effective strategy. So I don't think that there are very many people who would completely disagree that that's where we wanna end up. It's really just the timetable that I think is the most difficult part for people. And what I think is sort of good for us to look at is in my experience, when we merged the school districts Essex Town and Essex Junction, Westford, all came together, and then Merger certainly has had his bumps because nothing that large, we're working with a budget that's north of $60 million, is ever going to be completely 100% smooth. But there has been nothing that's come up that I don't think that we, as a community, haven't been able to handle, and I feel the exact same way about merging the town and the village. It's a process that we all wanna get to, it's just a matter of getting there. Okay, Irene, town and village merger. So I think a merger in two different ways. You can merge all at once, as the EWSD did, right? Merge everything. Eating the elephant all at once is one of our select four members used to say. Or we can do it bottom up, and we decided that it might be more helpful for the municipality since we had the luxury of having these individual departments with extremely different functions to merge them one at a time, consolidate as a word we are using, and to thoughtfully just consider what's easier rather than more difficult to combine. And I would never say that merging the finance departments was easy, but they don't have the same loyalties and some of the same relationships with the community that, say, the fire department does or the recreation departments. So I think that we did some of the lower-hanging fruit as far as consolidations, and now come some of the real hard nuts to crack. And so that's the challenge for those of us on the board going forward, is just how do we thoughtfully, carefully, painstakingly do this, keeping the communication lines open with the public to make it happen in a way that works for everyone? Okay, thank you. And I just wanna also remind folks, we'd love you to call in 862-3966. Let's talk a little bit about the town center. You're doing an ETC next process, which is mapping out the future of community development in the town center area, and that's from the outlets to the town green. What do you see are the opportunities and challenges for this area? And Irene, we're gonna start with you. Okay, well, town planning may sound innocuous, but it's not. If you've grown up in New Jersey like I did, you know that you can turn a state into a place that's paved over with lots of highways and malls and not much greenery and not much that's distinctive anymore. And so when I moved to Vermont, I thought it was very important to get involved locally to make sure that Vermont didn't turn out to where I left. I think as far as ETC specifically goes, I'd like to see some zoning changes, incentivize developers to include things like workforce housing in the new town center. We keep hearing how Vermont needs younger people. Vermont needs people to fill all these jobs we see in the classified ads. If we can provide some housing that people can afford to move into, it will lend some socioeconomic diversity. It will fill those empty job openings and I think it'll be a win-win for everyone, including the developers. So I'd like to see that happen. If you do dense development like that, of course, you'll need some infrastructure upgrades. Dennis Lutz came to our money meeting and talked about that recently. All kinds of impact fees have been stashed away in preparation for changes like this. So it's just once again taking the time to thoughtfully consider what needs to change and it's not just as he was saying the other night that we need to bring more water in and take more sewage out. It's really things like water pressure you have to be aware of. If you build a one-story building, I just learned this the other night. There's very different water pressure constraints if you start going up two or three stories. You need to pump the water that much faster and make all kinds of adjustments as the people in charge of the infrastructure. Thank goodness people like him pay attention to these things. But there will be some expenses and in addition to that dense development that's probably ahead, I think it's also important as I start going back to the beginning of my answer that we preserve some green space. You've got to have some visual and natural breaks from all that dense development. I don't see what good it is to live in the Green Mountain State if you can't see the mountains. So thank you. And on that point, we have a phone call. So we're going to take that and we'll hop back to the question, okay. Hi there, you're on the air. Hi there. I had a question. Let's see. For Mr. Murray as a village resident, what does he see as his relationship to town government and for Ms. Renner as outside the village resident her relationship to village government? Okay, so in other words, their relationship to the governments that they don't live in those areas, is that sort of a fair way to describe it? Okay, we'll have them both answer that. Thank you for your question. Okay, so Patrick will let you go first. Sure. I mean, it's kind of quaint to say, but I am a town resident. Even though village residents can say that though, I think that town residents understand that there's a completely different dynamic when you live in the town. You know, the rural versus urban is a, it's a real difference and people feel it. You know, when the development up at Saxon Hill happens, you know, when people are seeing acres of land being cut down, that's not something that a village resident is typically ever going to have to deal with. You know, being sensitive to the needs of individuals who live in the rural parts of the community is something that I'm very aware of. One thing that I think really honestly can sort of unite us as it were because we have had a us versus them mentality certainly at points. And I haven't lived in Essex long enough for me to honestly consider myself an us or a them. You know, just long enough to fall in love with the community. But what we really, I think, are doing is that it's gonna be advantageous for us to remember that in a state that is honestly losing population whose population is getting older, we do live in one of the few counties where we're attracting individuals who wanna come and live here. So we need to compete not necessarily with one another, but you know, we're one of the few towns that I think can provide either an urban feel or a rural feel and you can still come to Essex and you can still live here. What we need to do is equalize the opportunities that either the town or the village is not getting. Internet infrastructure. I'm a telecommunications guy. That's where I've worked at Sovereignet for 15 years and I work for a company called First Light Now so I'm pretty familiar with the internet infrastructure across the state and right now large swaths of rural Essex don't have internet. They can't get a high speed access which is in this day and age, if you wanna attract someone youthful, internet is as important as electricity was in the last century. I would love to see a part of the town governments working together towards bringing something like that in where we can expand the sort of infrastructure base for what I would consider to be basically a utility at this point. So I think it's a long answer for me saying that I'm aware of the problems that those of us who live rurally in Essex have to deal with and I like to think that I'm a good enough listener that when someone comes to me it's not gonna matter where you live. Irene, you live outside the village. Okay, so then your relationship with the village, yes. Okay, I think that's what the question was. Yeah, I think so, okay. So the first house that my husband and I bid on when we moved to Vermont was actually in the village. We were attracted to the locability and so many of the other amenities but that was not meant to be. So I have had a little village envy over time but I do live outside the village in a fairly walkable area for considering where it is. As someone who got involved in local government before I was elected to the select board it was interesting to me that at the time that I was thinking about running for office there were no village residents on the select board and I thought that that was unfortunate because I kept hearing that it was a time-wide board and I thought this has to be remedy. And I did some research with the town clerk at the time and she showed me that yes, over time there had been village residents so that proved to me that that could happen so I worked very hard to encourage village residents to vote in March because a lot of folks thought, well, that's the town election, it doesn't have anything to do with me and so I did a lot of outreach just as a private citizen to say to people you really do need to vote. It is your town, government as well. It includes you and in fact you can run. So I'm glad you're right. Oh, thanks. And others from the village who have stepped up to make sure that our town-wide decisions include input from all parts of town. As somebody who nevertheless lives outside the village it's very important for me as a select board member who has village constituents to pay attention to what's going on in the village and although I do a lot of business in the village like everyone else going to the bakery or going to the dentist or something. There are things like the village governing issues that I pay attention to by going to the village trustee meetings and I make a point to be a regular attendee there just so I'm extra tuned into what the governing body is doing there. Especially should we be merging with them anytime soon I'd want to be up to speed. Also, as an elected official you probably know this already we have access to all the from board forums. So every day nine forums flood my inbox but it's a great way to see what's going on because people outside the village aren't usually bothered by train whistles but the people in the village might be. And so you get a really good sense of just what the issues are in the distinct neighborhoods across town. Okay, great thanks and thanks so much for the call and we appreciate it. We're gonna hop back to our discussion about the town center and the ETC next process and sort of the future of community development in the town area and Patrick you're up. Yeah. So I spent some time going over the large 100 page document that contains the recommendations for the ETC next and one thing that kind of struck me as I was looking through it was the scope of it. Extending from the outlets all the way out to the town center that's a large area to consider as part of a development. This is not walkable like Church Street in Burlington. It's not a mall area like South Burlington. I mean arguably it's even difficult for us if you're gonna be shopping up at Haniferns. I can't think of a single person who's gonna walk down to the mini golf course to just do that. There's a fundamental lack of connectivity there and I worry looking at the project and the recommendations about just the sheer scope of it. I do agree completely with Irene that we need more worker housing. It was something that some of our representatives Bob Vancroft and Linda Myers had brought up relatively recently at a community forum that we attended in Essex. That the number of families who are getting jobs, jobs very similar to mine. They're good quality jobs but I'm not going to go buy a million dollar home anytime soon. I'm also raising a family. So one bedroom condo isn't going to cut it for me and what we need to do is we need to be able to provide that interim space. I think that the project is perfect for that. I just worry about the size of it, the scope of it. I think that we should focus on a smaller area for those surrounding the outlets where we can really sort of make a walkable sort of neighborhood in some place where you can go and do your grocery shopping and then walk over to the movie theater and then maybe catch rock climbing which is all within probably 30 seconds of one another but I can't think of a single person that actively does that right now. It's just the infrastructure is really not laid out terribly well and I think that it needs to be sort of redesigned and re-looked at and taken a look at in a smaller scope maybe than what is currently being thought of. Good, we've talked about infrastructure. We've kind of gone around it so let's talk about infrastructure. Both the town and the village have aging underground infrastructure as many towns do and miles of both paved and unpaved roads to maintain. How should these projects be prioritized and financed particularly in light of the consolidation efforts that are underway and Patrick, you'll start us off. So I know that we, the town and public works department has sort of a four year plan as it were. There are efforts where they'll go out and they'll rate the roadways and they'll decide what needs, what improvements, at what point, what's sort of most critical. There are a lot of factors that sort of go into that decision and those are made by people who honestly have much more familiarity than I do but I think it's our job as select board members. We don't go out to make those decisions. What we do is very fond of saying this as a school board member is that I don't run the schools. I make sure that the schools are run well. The important part for tackling these infrastructure problems is not me going and taking a look at a roadway and deciding there's a pothole here. We really need to get on top of this quickly. It's in the managing of the department, the oversight and it's in talking back and forth with public works to figure out realistically from the experts what needs to be addressed and what needs to be tackled when. We do have some pretty devastatingly bad roads especially this time of year. I mean it is absolutely horrific and pretty much every part of the town. Yeah, unless your road was repaved a year ago you're gonna see potholes, you're gonna hear that clank as you go over it and you apologize to your car even though it's an inanimate object for devastating it so much. But what does that end up boiling down to? I mean cost, price and we talked about how we're trying not to raise taxes terribly much but I worry about us tackling the infrastructure problems and not being able to do it in a timely enough manner with how minimal we're trying to keep the tax increases. One idea that's been proposed that I think has potential but is one that sort of needs to be studied would be looking into a local option for a sales tax within Essex. I would really love to see a study done on the numbers that that could raise because right now all the communities around us do have that local option in place. When you're going to buy a TV at Best Buy you're spending extra money and that's going to Williston. I mean we do have the Essex outlets, we do have shops in our area and if there's a one cent tax on goods that are purchased then that might be a way for us to sort of close that infrastructure gap which is something that I would love to take a look at. I think it would be a way for those who kind of have more of the means, those who have the ability to make larger purchases or typically would do that. We're putting in the tax burden for that on the people who are most able to make those purchases and it's something that makes sense to me but I know barely in any planning stage right now but it's definitely something I would like to take a look at going forward if I were on the select board. Okay, thank you. Irene we're talking about infrastructure, how to prioritize it, how to finance it. You're up. I too, like Patrick, won't second guess the priorities that our Public Works Director has set. Of course when there's an emergency we certainly need to fix the force main even though it's below freezing temperatures as it was last week or stopping the sewage from flowing up through the sinks at Lincoln Hall as they were in December. So yes indeed we have aging infrastructure and when people wonder why the budget goes up we can certainly point to some of these things and say well, pay us now or pay us later. Sometimes we want to be proactive about these things and that's where some of the extra costs come into. It's not just fixing emergencies. So there's this juggling that goes on and we hear pretty often about what it's gonna take to fund fixes before they become dire and then of course there are always surprises that are coming up. I guess this harkens back to the buildings manager that we've talked about hiring. Once again if we have someone who's on top of that who's looking at the new buildings and tweaking them to make sure that they're running primarily and then looking at the older buildings and making sure that we're not pushing them beyond you know, when it's time to have a new roof. I think that's just a really smart decision. As far as the local option tax, I believe it was 2009 town meeting. The population of Essex was asked to vote on that and it was resoundingly defeated. There was a very strong feeling that Essex wanted to be different so we didn't need to tax people any more than they were being taxed and the select board originally was very strongly behind it but that's the beauty of town meeting. If people don't feel heard, they come out and they let you know and so we can repeat history or we can learn from it, we can re-examine what brought it down that time and try again but it has been tried and not that long ago. So it is working for the other towns. There just was a real reluctance on the part of at least the population that came to town meeting which granted is a small population but it's the vocal population and when people get the chance one day you're to act as legislators in their own town. They like to legislate. Okay, I like to act as legislators. So we're just about out of time so I wanna say to remind everyone to vote on Tuesday, March 5th and let's remind folks where they vote again. Essex. Depending on where you're located, you'll actually vote in different locations. Village residents vote at Essex High School and then town outside the village residents go to the Essex Middle School and we'll vote there. Okay, and that's 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. but you can vote early because it's always your mind folks because we heard how popular that is. Maybe the town clerk would prefer we don't say that but of course at both the village and town, or just the town hall. Town hall. Village and town hall? Or just town hall. I believe just town hall. Just town hall for the balance. It used to be both but now centralizing that. That's one of the consolidations. All right, there you go. That's how we're gonna, you're gonna save money. So that's good. I believe maybe you said this earlier. It's Valentine's Day that the balance are in, is that true? I believe that that's the date. Oh, so the next week, within a week. I keep forgetting. Within a week people, I believe can, at least I don't know that the ballots are in yet. But they're coming. Good, they're coming. I don't want people to go there and expect about it because I'm not sure they're in, they may be, but I haven't gotten that official word yet. So give a call to tell them before you head down there. Okay, fair. And of course you have to tell everyone to stay tuned to channel 17 because we're gonna continue our candidate forums and our in-depth presentation of school and municipal budgets. So vote on Tuesday, March 5th, and also watch our live results show that night, beginning at 7 p.m. So we look forward to seeing you then. Take care, good night.