 We'll call the meeting to order on this sweltering second day of July. This is Monday, June 18th. Well, it's definitely not Monday, June 18th. July 2nd. Sorry about that. Okay. It looks like a fairly reasonable agenda if there's any, if there isn't any additions. I've got one addition. Okay. Eden Specialty Ciders is looking for an outdoor consumption permit class 4 license for a pop-up tasting shed up at Pete's Greens. Eden. Who again? Eden Specialty Ciders. Up at Pete's Greens. Yeah. Is there a date for that? Well, you've got to put it on the agenda first and then we can get into it. All right. With that addition, would somebody approve the agenda please? Move that we approve the agenda with that one addition. Second. Second. I think the motion has been made and seconded to approve the agenda. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Consent agenda items, just the minutes from the June 18th meeting. I'll make a motion to approve the minutes of the June 18th meeting. Second it now. I'll second. Okay. Is there any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Public. There is none. The rest is up to you, Bill. Okay. Why don't we take care of the consumption permit first? So this came in today. The select board really ought to give its blessing or not to it before Beth can sign it. So Eden Ice Cider Company doing business as the Eden Specialty Ciders is evidently working with Pete Screens and they want a pop-up shed and a Princeton seating area. There's an aerial view of the mat. Is that the shed that's out there by the way tonight now? I haven't been up. So I get off at 100 as fast as I can. It's nice. So they are asking to be able to do this from July 1st to October 31st inclusive. So it's every day until the end of October, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. and they will be providing, I'm sure they'll be selling the class for a license, says application for a license to sell by the unopened container and to distribute by the glass with or without charge manufactured beverages by the license under accordance to Title 17. So anyway, this is where I want to do it. I don't know any more about it than just this. Beth gave this to me this morning and fenced it attached to wooden shed on one of Pete Screens. Is this the best amount of beer and cider producers continue to pour into the state? Yeah. They've got the shed out there by the roadside now and it's facing in so the service area would be in here. Yeah. I don't see any reason not to do it. So having said that, would somebody love to make a motion? I'll make the motion that we approve the request for eating specialty ciders for a class for license at Pete Screens in Waterbury. I'll second that. Okay. Is there any further discussion? If we all approve, say aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. Great. Thank you. Tax right. So what I'm going to hand out to you is more than likely going to be the tax rate. If we get lucky, maybe the school tax rate will be lower. I doubt it. But as you know, you know, the budget wasn't approved until Monday last week. In fact, it was probably Thursday by the time it became law because the governor didn't sign the bill. And if he doesn't sign a bill, it comes into law within five days of passage or after five days of passage by the legislature. So the tax department has been pretty concerned that they weren't going to be able to get their work done and get the tax rates out. Typically, I get a form like this from the tax department that has the education tax and everything on there for the homestead and the non-residential rate. I did not get one like this today and neither did Beth or Carla. Dan Sweet, the appraiser, got an email from the tax department and forwarded it to me. So I have this information. Now, I was concerned because we all heard how the governor talked about wanting to keep the tax rate level and what happened was the non-residential tax rate stayed the same on a statewide basis. I mean, the residential homestead tax rate stayed the same on a statewide basis and the non-residential tax rate increased by about 2.5% or so. And the homestead rate is always adjusted. There's two adjustments that happen with the homestead tax rate. So if the legislature sets a rate at $1.54, what then happens is they look at the school spending in a particular town and if it's 10% higher than the block grant that you would get if you set that tax rate, your tax rate gets adjusted and it goes up by that same percentage. And then they also adjust it by the common level of appraisal and that is to equalize the taxes across the state. So our common level of appraisal is probably 98. something percent. So there is an adjustment. I was a little surprised, though, when I got the email from the state that the homestead rate is 7.1 cents higher than last year. So $1.61.83 as opposed to $1.54.73, which it was a year ago. Michelle Baker, the business manager at the school, is on vacation until Wednesday this week. I know that. I emailed her and the superintendent because I want to make sure that they think this rate is in the ballpark. And the only factor that I'm wondering about is, you know, the Legislature Act, I can't remember, Act 46 or 146, the consolidation. Remember, they held that carrot out that if you consolidate, you're going to get a discount on your taxes. And I think it was a $0.05 last year. And I know earlier this year there was talk about that they kind of, you know, played their shell game and that went away or went away partially. So I emailed the superintendent and Michelle to say, do we have a, is this $1.61.83 correct? I haven't heard yet. I'm almost certain it won't go any higher than this. So what I want you to do tonight when you set the tax rate is to set a school homestead rate at no greater than $1.61.83 and a non-residential rate at no greater than $1.60.13. And then if some reason between now and Thursday when we print the tax bills, I find out that this is wrong. I can adjust it. I think I'm holding out hope that is going to really be unfounded. I think this is probably the right rates. But in case it's not, I'd like to have the flexibility to lower it if I can. So you're hoping for credit basically based on this merger? Right. So-called merger. Yeah, we consolidated. We consolidated and I believe it was supposed to be a three-year benefit that your tax rate was going to get a benefit. And maybe it has. I mean, maybe it's baked into this number, but I just don't see it. And I don't have the means to calculate. All I get is this email. It's frustrating because I know the tax department wasn't happy that they had to wait because, you know, they didn't have the tax rate until Monday and only because they started working when the governor said, well, I'm not going to sign it so you folks can go ahead and assume that it's, you know, five days will go by. So they started work on Monday. So they haven't had very long to do 246 different tax bills. Anyway, so right now the homestead rate is four and a half, almost 4.6% higher than it was last year, $1.6183, $1.445373 last year, the non-residential rate, $1.613, and that's 4.67% higher than last year. So there's not much we can do about that if it's lower, I'll set the lower rate, but I think this is going to be it. On the town side, we also had some disappointing news. The grand list went up a half a percent. We had hoped it was going to go up one and a half percent. You can see there the grand list for $2,018, $7,462,230, that's 1% of the total property value in the town. We estimated 7.5, 7.3 million. So we're below by a considerable amount about 1%, 9.5% lower than we thought it was going to be. There's a couple of things I talked to Dan Sweet today. We didn't have too many. We had three grievances. They made two minor adjustments, I believe, that don't amount to a hill of beans in the grand scheme of things. The state helps with the assessment of electric utilities. So the electric utilities, Green Mill and Power, there's two different lines. And last year, the value of the electric utility for Green Mill and Power was over $32 million. Now it's been dropped by $2.77 million to $30 million, $30 million, $210 million. $30 million, $210,100, I'm sorry. So that's 1% of their value. And Dan isn't sure why that number was dropped. If we had that $2 million, we'd still be below our estimate, but would be about 9 tenths or 1%, as opposed to 6 tenths or 4% up from last year. There were a few other ups and downs here and there, but we didn't make the grand list. Moving down the page, the general fund, $1,598,705, which includes all special articles, and then you see the highway fund and the library fund. And those total to $3,424,280. I'm going to ask you to allow me to set the tax rate, however, on the $3,386,780. You made a motion, Chris, at town meeting to add $37,500 to the budget to maybe sweeten the pot on 51 South Main Street. That didn't happen. It's not going to happen, and there's really no reason to raise that money just to set it aside. So what we will do is take the $3,386,780, which is the total of the $57,000 worth of special articles, excluding that you made for the parking lot, plus the general fund, plus the highway fund, plus the library fund. And if you... So we're raising about $61,000 more in taxes than we did last year. So we went up 1.83%, which is a little lower than the rate of inflation. Inflation was 2.1% year over year going into the first of January. So if you look at the black line right in the middle where it says 2018 tax rate, you take that number, $3,386,780, divided by the grand list, 7462,230, and it comes out to 45.38 cents. Last year when I did the calculation, it was 44.83 cents. So about 1.22% higher just on what the math is. Last year I recommended rounding down to 44 cents. The select board said, no, let's round up to 45 cents. We need some additional money in our paving fund if we can and with our fund balances and what we did for the budget this year. We did put more money in the paving budget this year. So I'm still going to recommend that we set a 45-cent municipal tax rate. That's 38,000-10,000 of a dollar lower than what the math comes out to be. And if you take that 0.038 and you multiply it by the grand list, if we round down to 45 cents, we could have a deficit of $28,356 if everything all year long came out just right on the money. We have a few places where we're going to get a little bit more money than we had budgeted. We're going to get about 6,000 more in pilot money than we budgeted. We're going to get about $6,800 more in current use money than we budgeted. I haven't got the Forest and Parks number yet but I think we'll probably be a little bit on the plus side there. And I'm not saying $28,000 isn't real money but if we end up the year with $28,000 in the red, we're not going to die. It's a manageable number right now. I showed you the budget report at the last meeting and our budget through half the year were a little better than we expected to be. So I think we can stick with our 45 cent tax rate. And if the school tax rate was staying flat, maybe I'd say, well, let's take the additional 0.038 but it's a higher increase than I think anybody was anticipating on the school side especially given all of what we've been hearing over the last couple of weeks. So my recommendation is that you set the municipal tax rate at 45 cents and then establish the Homestead rate at no greater than 1.6183 and the non-residential rate at no greater than 1.6013. And if you want to take it from there, ask questions, I'll be happy to help. But I think I've given you as much information as I have. Was there any suggestion from Dan as to maybe why a grand list didn't turn out as anticipated? Yeah, like I said, I think there's two things. One, that 2.77 million that we lost on the Green Mountain Power, that's more than half of the, almost half of the loss there. The other thing is that our common level of appraisal is creeping down a little bit. So I think he's when he is out in the field and if people raise questions, he's tending to maybe drop it a little bit because what that is, well actually that's the wrong way. We're at 98% as opposed to 100%. So that would be, that scratched what I just said there because it looks like overall we're a little bit under appraised because if we were at one, then it would mean we're right on and if we're at 98%, that means they think there's more value that we should be taxing. It looked like last year we were a little bit over 100%. Yeah, we may have been. I quickly looked, Chris, there's a few little ups and downs here and there. It's hard to say. Last year we were up a little more than 1% and this year, earlier in the year when I talked to him, there were things going on and I thought the one and a half was reasonable in good years in the past. We budgeted too. Now of course the higher grand list gets, the harder it is to get a higher percentage because that's just a lot of growth that you have to have but I don't have good reason except for the electric utilities, Chris. And that would come from, when you're saying green mountain power that would come from the dam? Yeah, there's the dam and that's where most of it is. I'm sure there's taxes on their power poles and lines as well but the vast majority of it, I'm sure is from the generation facility. And we knew that it was going to go down a little bit. Dan has asked the state for some explanation. Part of the explanation might be the fact that it's moving toward this kind of river operation that they can't store the water behind the dam and make peak demand electricity anymore. They can basically, what comes in, they got to keep a certain level on the dam and what comes in goes out. So they used to be able to stack it up a foot or two and then make power and bring it down a foot or two. So I think they had a two or three foot head that they could make peak power on and they can't do that anymore. I thought the discussion back when we had it about them because they were still talking about putting a different turbine in. Yeah, they've done that, I believe. And the gates have been repaired? No, the gates haven't been repaired yet. When the gates get repaired, then that's when they're going to just leave the summer pool. It'll be a year round at that pool. They won't drop it down in the winter. But I believe they are already operating on a runner river basis now, not a peak generation. So that's not as valuable to them, obviously on a day like today. If they knew this heat wave was coming, they would have stacked up that water over the weekend and then let it out. Yeah, what we knew it was going to be an appraisal loss. Right, so that may be part of it. So anyway. But from our perspective right now, I think we're doing well enough with our budget that I am comfortable recommending that we stick with the 45 cents and at least we hold our portion, whatever. I don't know what is it, $2, 50 cents. So it's pushing like, there's 70% goes to education, right? I know that when I stopped in to see you there a while back, I'd mentioned maybe getting a, and I know this will be in the next few weeks there if you get a chance. Try to get some kind of a consensus because we've held, you know, if we hold this tax rate at 45 cents now, that would be three years in a row. And we know that can't last forever. We know we've got responsibilities coming down the pike and I had suggested to you try to get some type of an idea of what perhaps maybe next year's impact. I'm starting to look at some of those things. You know, we know what the full year police contract will be next year, you know, so it'll be another $180,000 so over what we have this year. So I'm beginning that work. It'll probably be into August, maybe, you know, before I can do anything, do anything really substantive that we can talk about. But yeah, I'm starting to gather that information and look at things. Yeah, paper projects and whatever, how that's all going to be handled. Okay, well, so then we need a motion to set the homestead tax rate at $1.61.83. Yeah, no greater than. No greater than $1.61.83. I think that's great enough. And a non-residential tax rate at no greater than $1.60.13. And a municipal tax rate at $0.45. Somebody like to make that motion? I will make that motion. Okay, you second it now? I second that. Before we leave this, there's just one minor other thing that we need to do. Down at the bottom of the page, you see in red there the people in town who live in the village that won't have a village tax now. They're going to save $0.13 on their village tax, so there'll be still some people in the community that will be feeling that they're getting a break from what they paid last year. But at the very bottom there, you notice that the veterans, and mainly for Matt's benefit, the state law exempts the first $10,000 of veterans homestead from taxation. So if you're a disabled veteran, I'm sorry. So if you're a disabled veteran and you own a piece of property that's $200,000, you get taxed on $190,000. The town a couple of years ago, it's probably more than five years ago now, I believe we exempt the first $30,000. We voted to do that on our own at a town meeting a couple of years ago. And the state allows you to do that, but if you exempt more than $10,000, you have to make it up locally. So down here where it says veterans 2016, you can see last year there was $667,300 worth of property that was exempted by the town above the amount that the state allows for exemption. Over that $30,000. Over that. So from the 10% up to $30,000, that's $667,000. So this year, the $10,000 worth of exemption that the state allows, you know, we don't have to make up was valued at $288,800. That's not on your sheet. The veterans exemption above $10,000 that we do ourselves is this year at $793,100. There's a few more veterans who have become eligible for this. So when you do the math, last year the add-on rate was 0.0014 and this year because, you know, the grand list went up and the tax rate went up, it's 0.0017, which will be added to everybody's bill. That's the formula to make up that credit that the veterans get. Right. So you take the exempt amount that's above the $10,000, so $793,100, you multiply that by 1%, and then you multiply that by the homestead tax rate and that equals $12,834 and you divide that into the grand list and it's 0.0017. So at the very bottom here, you'll see that all inclusive in 2018, over on the right-hand side, the homestead tax will be 2.069 and the non-residential tax will be 2.053 and one of them is up 3.15%, the other one is up 3.6%. So if it's all right, Mark, I'll just include that veteran's exemption in your motion, okay? Sure. All right. Okay. Any further questions or comments? There is none. All those in favor? Please say aye. So we will be running our tax bills on Thursday and hopefully they'll be heading out in the mail if not by Friday, certainly by the first and next week. Okay. Anyway. Discussion penalties for late filing? Yeah. So when we all file our income taxes, if we live in Vermont and are declaring a homestead, we're supposed to do that by April 15th and then there's other times during the year that you're considered late. And when the legislature established the current tax system that we have where there's two rates, the fear was that in the old days, the homestead rate was almost always lower than the non-residential rate. So there was a fear that people would be filing homesteads and it really wouldn't be. So either way, you're supposed to declare your homestead and it says the commissioner of the Department of Taxes shall provide a list of homesteads to each town listers by May 15th. The listers shall notify the commissioner by June 1st of any residence on the commissioner's list which do not qualify for homesteads. And then we go on. So the state has established a penalty and it's really confusing. And I'm just going to read this to you. A couple of years ago we didn't have a penalty and we forgot to set it and then it was like, wow, there were a lot of changes. Leigh Ann can talk to you about all the downloads that you got from the state and there's a lot of work to produce a substitute tax bill, right? So it says the commissioner shall notify the municipality and the municipality shall issue a corrected tax bill and as may be determined by the governing body of the municipality it may include a penalty of up to 3% of the education property tax if you fail to declare your homestead. But then it says, however, if the property incorrectly declared as a homestead is located in the municipality that has a lower homestead rate than a non-residential rate or if the undeclared homestead is located in the municipality that has a lower non-residential rate than the homestead rate seems like both things they're saying there that the governing body may include a penalty of up to 8% of the education tax liability on the bill. And then it says if the commissioner determines that somebody actually attempted to commit fraud this way that the penalty is 100% of the education tax. If they didn't claim their homestead on purpose. If they intended to commit fraud and I don't know how one is oh well he just kind of decided to see if he could get away with it versus oh he really, you know, tried to screw the system. Last year we, the select board set penalties of 3% and 5%. And most of our people got the ones who got this at all got the 5% penalty. They were mostly people who should have filed homesteads and didn't and they had to get the penalty. So these folks could be folks that instead of filing as a homestead they took advantage of the lower tax rate of the non-residential. And for that there was a 5% penalty. But they didn't commit fraud. Otherwise it would have been 100%. The commissioner gets to determine who commits fraud. So we talked about this last year. To me, for this, this isn't like paying your taxes late. And if you pay your taxes late there's an 8% late penalty and a 1% interest and that applies to everybody. This one, if people really didn't do it on purpose and some people, you know, Karen showed me a bill the other day that I think we had six changes of the same bill. It was not declared as a homestead than it was and then it came through and it didn't have its state payment on it and then they applied the state payment and added a penalty and then the person appealed that and then in the end the commissioner completely. So I've always said and I argued to the legislature that why can't this just be a flat fee? I mean why does it have to be, you know, if you have a $10,000 tax bill and you have a $4,000 tax bill and you forgot to declare your homestead why is it 5% and 5% it costs us maybe 50 bucks to, you know, go through the process of changing it. So the guy from NEMRIC says that we should do with the state allows, three and eight and he said that way between the two you'll cover your time. I tried to, I didn't think to ask early enough today and I called Karen after the, after 4.30 and I thought she told me how much we collected in these penalties last year but she said no it was Michelle and Michelle had already gone. So last year this like would set 3% and 5%. I'm just wondering if we really think it should be a flat fee as opposed to a percentage and the state law doesn't allow us to have a percentage, why don't we just set it as 3% for both? Do we cover our expenses at 3%? It's hard to say, I can't answer that. I guess that would be my only question with it. I understand the length of the latitude but if it takes that split of three and five in order for us to cover our expenses for, because it's not the responsible taxpayers' responsibility to pay the burden of somebody else's mistake. But I guess my concern is that for doing the same thing one way or the other and you know I've read this a lot of times and I still, but one of them says the municipality shall include a penalty of up to 3% and the other one says of up to 8%. So we could have it 1% each, but I'm not sure where we're gaining in fairness if we set one at 3% and one at 5%. It doesn't cost us any more to move your bill from non-residential to a residential and yours from residential to non-residential. But one of you is going to pay 5% from what we did last year. One of you is going to pay 5% and one of you is going to pay 3% and you've cost us the same amount of money. So maybe you want to make it both? Well one of them can only go up to 3%. So you can't make it any, you want to be fair, I mean if you want to be fair. You've got to say split the difference and make it four. But one of them can only be a three. What is the 3% one? What's the criteria for that? If the property identified in the declaration of this section is not the taxpayer's homestead or if the owner of a homestead fails to declare a homestead, the commissioner shall notify the municipality and the municipality shall issue a corrected tax bill that will include a penalty of up to 3% on the education tax of the property. However, if the property incorrectly declared as a homestead is located in the municipality that has a lower homestead rate, which we don't, we have a higher homestead rate. Yeah, for now. However, the property incorrectly declared as a homestead is located in the municipality that has a lower homestead rate than a non-residential rate or if an undeclared homestead is located in the municipality that has a lower non-residential rate than a homestead rate, I'm lost. You can say. It really sounds like if the rates are the same and you claim it's one and it's really the other, the 3% applies. And if you have differentiation in the rate at all and you're making a claim that is going to be advantageous to you, that that up to 8% then applies. That's what I'm kind of hearing out of that. So it is really that 3% penalty is, you know, labeled the burner in the wrong way. But there was no advantage to doing it. Doing it was wrong, here's your 3%. The other version is you're doing it to take advantage of the differentiation in the rate. So for that, you get to pay even more. So the 3% penalizes you for screwing yourself, right? For you screwing yourself. For not being able to figure out what the heck you're getting at. 8% is if you intentionally try to screw that. Well, not intentionally, because that would be fraud. That would be fraud, yeah. Anyway, if you want to do a three in five like we did last year, I can, you know. You know, I don't think this makes a ton of money in one way or the other for us. I don't think so. And as long as it's covering our expense. I'm not interested in making a ton of money. I'm just interested in what you've just done. All right. Our expense. So. Keep it at three and five. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, because, I mean, from what I'm hearing and what my mind is putting together on it is, there's somebody that's trying to take advantage of the system, they should pay a higher penalty. Right. Okay. Yeah. All right. So you made that motion? Yes. You seconded it. Okay. All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Okay. Thank you. 100 on 100, huh? Yeah. I mean, that's not the day. Oh man. I guess so. 100 on 100 relay race. It's a road race. It has been going on for the last 13 years. This will be 14. It is on Saturday, August 18th. And they are running this year from Trap Family Lodge in Stowe to Okimo Mountain in Ludlow. And we'll run through 18 transition points along the way. I think, you know, for the most part, they're on Route 100. They go down Stowe Street and then down Main Street. They do go down Stowe Street. They don't really cause us any issues. They sometimes put a porta-potty up in the Watery Center someplace. They're going to have their transition point this year. I can't remember where it was last year, but they're going to have a transition point at the Hunger Mountain Church. So they're going to start at Trap Family Lodge and then I guess the next runner will meet them at Hunger Mountain. They usually have their porta-potties and stuff at that transition point. They used to transition at Hope Davy field years ago. And then their next transition point is at Crossbrook School in Duxbury. So, you know, it says they're going to have one vehicle per team plus a few volunteer vehicles passing through the town over the span of a number of hours. They will have traffic control as needed. They typically don't need much. They've been advised about the Route 100 painting project. They're in contact with Barb. They have emergency medical teams that are available and then they do come through after the race has gone and kind of police the town and they'll pick up their signs and any other things. So, I don't see it's a big deal and I would just ask if you would authorize it. I'd like to make a motion to approve 100 on 100 relay for Saturday, August 18th. We can wrap it up. I'll make a motion to approve the 100 by 100 relay for Saturday, August 18th. I'll second that. Okay. Any other questions, comments? Being none, all those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. That's all I have. Early one for everybody, a motion to adjourn. I will so move. Aye, aye. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Thank you. Thanks man.