 Good evening. I am Kiruva Webster and I will be your moderator tonight. Welcome to the ongoing TV meeting day election coverage by Town Meeting Television. This is one of a series forums and we are bringing you in advance of Town Meeting Day on Tuesday, March 7, 2023. So Town Meeting Television hosts forums with all candidates and covers all ballot items you will see on your ballot. Town Meeting Television election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with issues that shape your local community. If you're tuning live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. That is 802-862-3966. So if you're watching Town Meeting Television live on Comcast Channel 1087 and Ballington Telecom Channels 17 and 217 as well as online on YouTube.com Town Meeting TV. So without further ado, I would like to welcome our guests for tonight, Mr. Terry McKag and Jean? Jensen. Jensen. Yes, I didn't finish. And it's for the Williston Select Board. So without further ado, I will begin with you, Jean, and ask you to open with your statement and tell us why you're running and what will be different for Williston if you are elected. And you're welcome. Well, thank you. I'm running because I believe I have the experience and the skills to help keep Williston moving forward in what I see as a positive direction. My career at IBM provided me with experience in problem solving, financial management, and strategic planning. I spent a decade representing Williston on the local school board at the CVU level, at the high school level, and it taught me really how to listen to the community and constituents and how to work effectively as a member of a board to make positive change. And finally, the last six years, I've been the Chief Operations Officer for the local school district, where I got, it put me in a position of really having to make hard decisions about resource allocations. And during COVID, I got a lot of experience in emergency response management. So putting that all together, I think I really have a unique set of skills that I could bring to the town. I can't really say what will change. My predecessor, Jeff Fares, was a long time an excellent select man, and I would be, I can't possibly say that I will do a better job than Jeff. He was really very good, and I really hope to, he has big, those are big shoes to fill, but I think I can fill them. Thank you, Jen. And now, I welcome you. Well, thank you to Telemedium TV for hosting tonight's show. I really appreciate that. So I'm running to continue my commitment to Williston by giving, continuing to give it in service. Since 1974, I've been involved in things in Williston with Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Little League, and Girl Softball. I've been president of the Historical Society for 13 years. I've been on the Regional Planning Commission for, I think, nine years. I've served over 30 years as both deputy and health officer, which I continue to do. And 21 years on the Select Board. So my goal would be to continue to listen to our new members and learn from their new ideas that we get, as well as continuing on with another two years for my term. Thank you very much. That's pretty impressive. Would you like to continue and just tell us a little bit about the budget? Will you be supporting the school budget this year? It's pretty hefty. And what will you be doing exactly to support this year's town budget? Well, the Select Board, including myself, voted unanimously for the budget of an increase of about $130,000. And that follows an increase in the consumer price index that we try to do each year with the budget. So we're within the range of the CPI, which is a little between 6.1 and 6.5%. So we're looking at a 6.3% increase. And most of it's connected to wages and benefits for town staff, about 60%. And that keeps us competitive for staff. And you know, it's a tough job market. So it's important for us to maintain the staff that we have and keep them relatively happy. We have no new employees in this budget, which we contrasted what we had last year with a number of new employees, nine for the Fire Department and several others. So there's no new employees, but there are some expanded hours for three of our employees that, one, a position is being vacated due to a retirement. That's the assistant librarian position. And we're like to make that a full-time position instead of a half-time position. We also have a finance and treasurer's position already exist, but in order to help out the finance department, we're looking at expanding the hours for that and then converting the part-time, building the grounds position to a full-time one. And that would assist us with doing winter maintenance and more summer maintenance as well. So the tax rates proposed to be just over three cents, I think 3.2. And that rate won't be established until June, but that's where we're looking at at this point. And that will increase the tax base for a homeowner with a roughly $300,000 home, less than $100 per year or about $8 per month. Thank you very much for summarizing your proposal. And I'd like to invite Jen, please, too. Yeah, I absolutely support both the town and the school budgets. We've just been hit by the trapezoid of bad news this year with the inflation rate. The health insurance costs are very high for us, but we want...that's an important thing for our staff to have. And also the tight labor market. It's very expensive if you lose people and then have to rehire and retrain, and it's better to just keep the really good people we have. And so all those things have lined up to make it hard. And my understanding is both the school and the town budgets are, as Terri said, very insignificant in any changes. It's really just to maintain what we have now. So I would support them both even though...yeah, it's very hard to...families are all hit with this inflation rate, too. And so this is just another thing that's more expensive for families. So while I feel that, I do think that they're both responsible budgets. Yeah, thank you. So let's move on to the next item, which is about the Select Board. And I will still be on you, Jan. Would you like me to call you Ms. Janssen? Oh, Jean is fine. Jean is fine. Thank you. So the Select Board will see some changes this year with two open seats, and yet two of the three elections are uncontested. How do you rate the state of participation in the Select Board and local government for a community the size of Williston? Well, I think I don't see the competitiveness of a Select Board race as a good metric for gauging the engagement of the community. Williston has, Terri would know better. And I should say, luckily, Terri and I are not running against each other. We both have uncontested seats. There could be, I think there might be 18 different committees and commissions, and those are all staffed by volunteers from the community who are choosing a passion project. It's more narrow, certainly more narrow focus on a committee than it would be to run for Select Board, but it's really what they bring their hearts and souls to the things they care about, and they have the opportunity to deep dive and really make a difference, and then those committees and commissions bring forward those ideas which eventually get rolled up to the Select Board or the town manager. So I think the volunteering in the community service in Williston is robust. I would, there's always room for more. The holy grail of any public service board is to get more community engagement, and I think I have some ideas from what we've done at the school level that would perhaps help, or at least be a new change, to get people interested. But I think I've always been impressed. I actually, myself, started my engagement with the community on the Rec Path Committee. We needed Rec Paths, and several of us felt that way. We joined a committee. We were successful in working with the Select Board to get a bond together, and we made some real progress. So it's there. It's just not necessarily running against a neighbor for a Select Board seat. Would you like to mention one of those ideas? Real quick. What are the ideas for? Yeah, that you're having for. Sure. The front porch forum is a great example of something that you can leverage that people do a quick read on the budget, and I would like to do that. I also, running around my petition, a lot of people were interested in engaging and talking. It's just a matter of going to them, and that's, it just takes some thinking hard to make sure that people have, you meet them in a place in a time where they have time to engage. Thank you, and I invite you to give us what your take is on the Select Board. So as of March 7th, that evening, we're going to have two new Select Board members, and they'll take office directly after town meeting election is done. And since the pandemic, we've seen a dramatic increase in citizen participation in the Select Board through the Zoom, and also other board and commission, commissions have seen a great increase in attendance at input from the town. However, before the pandemic, we had more people applying for seats on the boards and commissions than we have in the past couple of years. Three years ago, we had a vacancy on the Select Board, and there were 11 applicants for that job for the appointment for the vacant seat. And I'm hoping that we'll have a greater interest in filling the seats now that the pandemic is over, things are returning to a more of a normal environment for the town. So as Jean has said, we have a lot of boards and commissions. Right now, we have a number of vacancies there on those, and looking forward to having more people involved. Thank you. So let's move on to the next item, which is the Vermont legislative initiatives. The Vermont legislative season is underway. What are some important initiatives to the community of Williston that you will be tracking and supporting as part of your work as a Select Board member? Would you like to share? Sure. Yes, Terry. So I'm a former state legislator. I ended my terms two years ago. And as a chair of the Select Board, I strive very hard to follow legislation that winds its way through the process of sausage making, as we say in my opinion. So along with the Vermont League of Cities and Towns, and the town manager and I have been kept aware of initiatives affecting the town of Williston. Last year, there was a bill submitted to provide revenue sharing, which means they would have taken money from the town of the towns with the local option taxes, such as Williston, and parcel it out to towns without such a tax. And of course, Williston depends upon the option tax to fund the infrastructure that's required to have the big box doors and everything else, the fire department, the EMS, the police department. So we were watching that very closely. It didn't pass. It really didn't make it out of committee. So we'll be watching for a reappearance of that bill, as well as other bills that are seen as either assisting or harming the town. Thank you. And I welcome Shin. What does it take? Well, this is certainly Terry's level of expertise, the area of expertise. I'm not more than mine, but I'm interested. There are some bills around increasing the housing stock or changes to Act 250. And those would, of course, affect Williston with all of our growth going on. So we're watching those with some interest. I hate to even go here, but the climate action plan, including the clean heat standard, there's a new name for it now, but clean heat standards, what I know it by, I do firmly believe that we have a climate crisis on our hands and we need to do something, but we can't do it in such a regressive way that people can heat their houses or drive to work. So I'm interested in how that moves along. And I look forward having more of a voice at the table to to influence how that is done. The one that's closer to my expertise is the changes in education funding, which will be taking place over the next couple of years and will have a dramatic increase in the school tax rate for towns of Champlain Valley School District, including Williston, and how that may or may not change over the next couple of years to fund schools in a way that doesn't cause us to have to either increase the taxes significantly or remove opportunities for our kids. Yes, thank you. So let's move on to development. What is your 10 to 20 year vision of growth in Williston? We know that Williston has certainly seen a fair share of growth and with the recent adoption of form based code for Tafts Corner is set to see more. So what is your plan? For the next 10 or 20 by you. You can answer first. The camera is still on you. You know, one thing I do like about Williston is incredibly well managed town. There's a very strong and well thought out and well discussed development plan for the town. And I'm only more impressed with the more I learn about it. So that plan has a horizon and I think the town plan actually has to get redone in a few years. But right now I think that the plan itself is very solid. The timing of some of the growth, we have to make sure that the town services keep up with the growth. We don't want that to get out of whack. I also would, I like the structure of how it is, how the growth areas are laid out now. I would not be excited about seeing them expanded. But with that said, the growth has to happen as it's there. We are in a housing crunch in Williston and in the community and the housing needs to happen. So I don't see, I see a moving forward with the plan we have and that may change as the community gets involved in the new town plan. But for myself, I think the plan is excellent and I would tend to follow it. Thank you. What's your vision? Well, since moving to Williston in 1966, I've seen a lot of growth in Williston. Chatting about that earlier on. So when I moved in we had somewhere around a thousand people in the town. In 50 years now we've gone from about a thousand to about 10,000 people. So you can see that the growth has certainly occurred. There was a large number of houses built in the late 1950s, early 1960s. In the past 10 years we've seen a growth of somewhere between 100 people and 200 people per year that moved into town. And I would expect that to continue to happen as Gene has mentioned with our growth control bylaws that we have in place. So I'd say that continuing and in 50 years I would guess we'll probably be up to 20,000 or 25,000 people and anyone that's hard to believe. But as growth occurs, as Gene had mentioned, we also have to look at the infrastructure. What do we need in terms of certainly housing where does it go? The new form-based code certainly is going to condense houses in a particular part of town. But again, they need to follow the bylaws that currently exist. The town plan, as Gene mentioned, is going to be up for renewal in about two years. And so we're starting to work on that at the moment. The Planning Commission and other boards in town will be looking at what we do with that. But there will still be some kind of growth control in the town of Williston. So for the love of Williston, I'm sure you have a lot of things that you've seen change over the years. So can you tell us a little bit about why you care about and what to work for the community of Williston and what are your favorite spots and why do you live there? Well, it's been a wonderful 21 years on the Select Board and it's been a labor of love, so to speak. So as with any decisions that are made, it's seldom 100% agreement or disagreement on them. We always strive to look for large majorities that support a particular thing that the Select Board is discussing and voting on. So we have great things in this town. We have lots of parks that people can go to. We have recreation paths, recreation activities supported by the Recreation and Parks Department. In fact, something just came out in the mail a few days ago, outlining all of the things that will be available through the winter and the spring. We have sidewalks that connect one place, one development to another. They connect with shoppings and we have lots of shopping opportunities in Williston, certainly. It's been a great place to raise a family or to retire. Thank you. So we don't have too much time and we have a few issues to go through, but you can quickly tell us why you love Williston. Well, besides the list of things that Terry has mentioned, my husband and I are very fortunate to raise our two kids in Williston. We have developed good friendships, it's a great community, a lot of deep roots in not quite as long as Terry, but since 1995 and think deep roots through the service. I'm really invested in preserving that sense of community even though the town is growing. Yeah, that's important. So let's talk about the all resident voting. A few communities around the state have implemented all resident voting in local elections, giving tax paying non-citizen residents a chance to participate in local votes on school budgets, tax increases and candidates. Do you see this as a path to a more robust democracy in Williston? What is your take? Well, I have to say that I have not in depth studied this one, but it just seems on the surface to make so much sense and be so fair to the people who live in Williston that I would definitely support it. Thank you. What about you? Interesting. When Jim Nicola and I used to go campaigning door to door for state representatives, we would meet a lot of people who were not voting members of the community because they didn't have U.S. citizenship. And so as we told them that, you know, while we knew that they couldn't vote for us or against us, we still represented them as Williston residents that were very interested in their opinions on both towns and state matters. So I believe that, you know, the select board should consider putting on a ballot a charter change to allow these residents to vote on local issues. Thank you so much. All right, so let's move on to the next item is the racial justice. Where do you see opportunities for addressing racial justice in the community of Williston? So over the last two years, we've been working with the so-called racial equity partnership in Williston on these very issues. Williston was also selected by the Vermont Legal Studies in Towns to be in a cohort study in addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion. And in fact, there's been several meetings of that group recently. The Community Justice Center director has recently received a grant to attend Cornell University remotely to address all of these issues. And we have adopted already adopted town values and goals and will continue to receive input from all of these resources. Yes, I'll ask Jen what is your take on this one? So just really two things to add. I think as people who serve the town, either employees, elected officials, appointed officials, we have an obligation to educate ourselves just so we better understand the impacts of our actions. I also think just more practically or practically, I guess, housing and transportation are certainly social justice issues that need to be addressed. All right, but what do you feel about climate change and what role does municipal government play in mitigation of climate change? Can you be specific about initiatives? Well, I'm firmly against climate change. Now, I think that municipal governments can do a lot. As part of the operations job, my job at the school district, we brought in two electric buses, and we really prioritized energy saving issues at our different buildings. So you can certainly, by doing, the town can provide infrastructure supports, could provide education and policy, such as incentivizing green building standards. Thank you. And how about you? What would you encourage through your role on the select board on climate change? So we certainly need to do our part in the mitigation of climate change. No question about it. We adopted an energy plan a couple of years ago, and we've formed an energy committee. And we also have hired a person in an energy and planning position to assist the energy committee in all of their plans. So we've received updates and recommendations from the energy committee. And we have budgeted for increased energy efficiency in town buildings in the current budget. And we hope to have electric vehicle changing stations in Wilson, especially around town buildings that are well used at the town hall and the annex and places like that. Okay. Thank you. So we are all about to wrap up. So could you tell us about the challenges? What's the biggest one that you see facing the community on how you would use your seat on the select board to address these issues? What's your vision for Wilson? So we're at the current time we're addressing two major challenges. And one is the need for increased library space to provide for the increased use over the over the years since with the last edition was put on, and also the possibility of having a community center. There's been great interest in doing that, in particular, putting together a place that has a indoor swimming pool. And we've hired a consultant to study both of these issues. We appointed a citizen committee to work with a consultant. And of course, we're looking for a location. What size should it be? How do we staff it? How do we maintain it? And what will the cost be as the driving force to move forward, which would include taxes, growth, infrastructure, and what what do we need for those challenges? Okay, what about Eugene? A much shorter answer. The biggest challenge I see the town facing is balancing growth and town services and the town's tax rate. That's a tricky, it's a tricky challenge to meet. And I love what Terry said. I see them more as opportunities. So the pool is a great idea. Well, it has been certainly a pleasure to have you both tonight and listen to what your proposals are for the Williston town. And I thank you all for listening, for also being with us tonight, and tuning into the town meeting TV's ongoing coverage of the local candidates, local budgets, and ballot items. You can find this and more forums on www.channel17.tv. And don't forget to vote. That's on or before March 7th. Ballots are not mailed automatically. So please check with your local clerk to request a ballot to make sure to get to the polls on March 7th. Thank you again for watching and sharing town meeting TV. If you're not already, please subscribe to our town meeting TV YouTube channel. Thank you again. This has been your host, Kerubo Webster. Good night.