 Okay, I'm going to call the finance committee meeting of the order on May 16th at 5.30. And this is a meeting that is being held by zoom and consistent with the amendment to the meeting law. The public have access to the meeting also I assume, as well as by telephone. Everybody should be aware that the meeting is being recorded. I want to go through first with the committee members, make sure that everybody present and hear me and be heard. And then we'll check on other counselors and see if we have a. Yeah, you'll have to sideline a few of the form of the council need to call a council meeting. So going through the midi. I don't have one got here. Present. Lynn Griesburg. Present. I'm Hegner. Present. Matt Holloway. Present. Thank you. Present. Thank you. Any staffer. Very could be a present. He said. Yeah. And welcome back. And Alicia Walker. Yeah. So we have all members and I'm present. So if all, these are the committee present. You have a call with a council at this point. Pat has joined us. If we get to a quorum. That can you hear. Yes, I can Andy. Thank you. Guilford. The other one I wanted to check on. Hi. Is there anyone is Amy or anyone else coming today? No. Okay. So. Let me just. Review agenda for a minute, which is. Part of the first item on the agenda, just called the order and review agenda. And then I'm going to see if there's any public comment. Is the next step. But. Billford there's. Well, this is. A meeting all about you. Because it's a. We're going to be reviewing the capital improvement program. D.P.W. operating budget. And enterprise fund. There's actually other parts that we. Reserve because there was some questions. That came up when we were reviewing the capital improvement program. Regarding. Issues that. Purchases. That's from. D.P.W. And rather than. Hold it off because we don't really have to make enough to make recommendation. For schedule a separate meeting. We just thought we'd come back to that today. And the same thing happened with water and sewer rates. We did have a discussion on water and sewer rates with Sean. And we decided also. To hold the vote on the order until after. We had the presentation of the enterprise funds because. The enterprise fund budget ties in. Totally with the. Water and sewer rates since it's the major revenue source. So. There may be questions that come out of the rate memo also. We have scheduled just so you know. You did not have to attend. But our next meeting on Friday. Then consideration. Of approval order. 2410. Which is the approval order. Right. For the water and sewer rates. And to make a recommendation on it. So that. Gives an overview of the sections we're going to talk about. So it's. You could have the operating budget. The enterprise funds. Questions about the. Capital requests and or. Sean has, I think all has questions and. I don't know if he's had a chance to go over with them with you or not. And the rates issue. So with that said. We do always start the meeting by seeing if there's any members of public who wish to offer comment. And comment can be on. Any matter of relevance to the finance committee. It does not have to be restricted to the. Issues that are on the agenda of the day. So. If public. Member of the public wishes to. Offer public comment. Please raise your hand so that we can bring you into the room. Okay. Seeing none. I think that we should just go on. To the. Order of the day and Sean, did you have anything that you wanted to say in the beginning or do you want to go into. Prepared questions to start. How do you. I was thinking since this is all. Go for it will handle his operating budget. Water sewer solid waste. I'll probably take transportation just to. Give go for to break. But he will stick around for that because there's some things that. Cross over. So. Go for it. I don't know. Typically what we do is a kind of a short overview of each section. And then we can dive into the question. So go for, do you want to give a start with a quick overview of maybe the DPW operating budget and the different divisions and. Maybe some of the projects that are coming up. Actually, my. My allergies are really acting up. So I'm only just jumping to questions. Sounds good. So I posted the list of questions in the packet. And I don't know if it's helpful if I just. Put them up on the screen with the responses or. If you want to go through them, go for it, whatever's given your allergies, whatever's most helpful to you. So do you want to start with, you don't want to do the capital improvement. We could start with those questions. Some, some of the carryover questions. So one of the carryover questions was about the. Trash truck. And how the trash truck sort of. I think it came to be a priority because it wasn't in the initial capital improvement program that went through JCPC. But it was in the final version. That came from Paul. Okay. So. There's a lot of disconnects and how we run this town government. One is budgeting and purchasing with capital items. I hate to say it, but I'm just going to. I've been here for a while and it's just always a disconnect. So. Yeah. We put together a, but we try to put together a budget last year. That you'll approve for. June or July 1st. And sometimes things come up and things become an issue. The biggest issue we're seeing in equipment purchases right now is it's taking anywhere from. 18 or 12 months to 18 months to get a piece of equipment. So we had to move it around. We had to move it around. We had the request last year for two trucks and parks, tree and ground. And as we were getting to the point of getting ready to order them, we had been having troubles. Trouble with one of our other trucks, which is actually the trash truck. And we could actually move, move it around if we wanted to, but then the crew brought the issues of. It's a hard truck to use for some of the members. Because you have to lift the containers up into the truck. And show you a picture of what we're using and what we're talking and what we're hoping to get. But you want me to share that with you? Yeah. I think it's helpful to see what people have to do to get trash into the truck if you have it available. Hopefully this works right. So you're seeing the picture of a. Of a truck with a person staying on a trash can right now. So this is the truck. It's basically your basic. It's your basic 4500 Chevy. Pick up the dual wheel pickup truck. It can have a trash body on it. We can actually take this body off and change it. But we haven't. We don't do it anymore. So the person who one of the people who actually do do the trap does the trash most of the days is this young lady here who's lifting the trash can up in. And it can be, it can be a hassle and it can be a problem. So the crew was pointing out that if we were to replace this truck, we should probably go with more of a traditional style of trash truck instead of what we're using. So. This is the. The vehicle we're looking at now. It doesn't require a commercial driver's license to drive it. It requires a regular class D license. And it's a four yard. For four yard truck holds four yards of waste in it. And it's easier to load because you load it from the back. It's a back as a rear load truck. One of the other issues that was brought this to the forefront is COVID actually has made our parks very popular and we have not seen the popularity diminish. So there's a great deal of trash, which is generated at the parks that have to be picked up every day. So this is the truck that does it and this crew does it. And this is the truck that does it. And the crew goes around every day. Seven days a week in the morning and picks up the trash at downtown. Some of the bus stops and all the park areas in town. And this is the truck we use for doing that. Or. This is the truck we use for doing it. And we hope to use the other truck. So this is kind of why this came to the forefront. We also. We have a truck that we've ordered and I'm looking for people to buy them. So we actually had the ability to jump on our order quickly. The trucks are not here yet. So we haven't purchased it and we haven't truly committed to buying it, but there is a truck available, which is slated to come to us if it's approved. If it's not approved, he knows he hopped to sell it to somebody else. But this is the garbage truck. And if there's any questions, I'll answer that. I'll stop sharing. And go for this role is the, is a responsibility of the tree and ground. It's not a solid waste. Correct function. It's tree and grounds, which is why we're not, this isn't being proposed from the solid waste enterprise fund, but it's really a tree and grounds vehicle. Correct. The tree and grounds has always picked up trash. And these, well, they've always done it since I've been here. They did before I got here. So this is what. As part of their duties is picking up trash at the parks and commons and we've added bus stops in the downtown. Yeah. And so just to round out the explanation. So we thought about bringing this as an off cycle request to the town council, but ultimately we decided to put it through the capital improvement program. But again, it didn't come in the normal sort of flows, capital projects in terms of how it was put forward. So that's why it came in after JCPC. But before I went to the council. Okay. Let's keep going and just leave it that. Anybody from the council or the committee who raises a. Here's a question just raise your hand so we know, and as we're going through items and we're not going to stop and ask your questions every time, but we'll continue to look for hands. So Andy, one other question that might be helpful. Yes. If approved. Will this. Free up that other truck. To be used for something else. So therefore you're not adding a vehicle to the fleet, but you're, you'll be able to repurpose that and not. And then therefore not have to replace one. Well, actually. What'll happen is the truck you saw, which you use now will be the trade in for the trucks that are coming from 23s budget. So your total number of vehicles will stay the same. Yes. All right. I'll keep going. Oh, there's a hand. Is it appropriate if I ask Gilleford sort of a general question. I'm wondering what. How many positions you have in your departments. Vacant right now in how. Recruiting has been going. If the salary amounts are sufficient to attract people in. Your department competes a lot with. Instruction companies. And. It's always a concern of mine that. We can't hire people. We're down 10%. Which is six people. We're missing three people in the water treatment division. We had a retirement, which caused a promotion. And then we had two employees who resigned to go do something else. Totally different. So we have three vacancies and water treatment. We have two vacancies in the highway division. And we have one vacancy and tree and ground. We are interviewing a lot of people. We're missing three people in the water treatment division. We had a retirement which. Caused a promotion. We are interviewing a lot of people. People apply. People are asking for the top step of. What we advertise. They do not want to. Start at the bottom. We've had people ask for signing, signing bonuses. And we've had people just flat out. Say it's not enough and turn us down. A lot of people, we've had several people just ghost us after we interview them and talk about salary. Amy can. Yeah. Amy would go on for an hour or two talking about the great challenges I'm interviewing right now. We have one person we are looking at for the tree and ground position. He looks like he'll be a good fit. But we'll see how he responds to the salary. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Jennifer, do you want to. Address the recreation equipment and. With what I said last time when that question was posed on. Whether additional staffing were being added, the answer was no, we're not adding additional staffing and that to use the recreation equipment. Would require trade offs. Do you want it? Can you address that a little bit more? So yes. We broke the request for field maintenance in the three, three sections of equipment. The equipment that's in the capital plan is the equipment. There's two, two, actually two sections of equipment. One section is the largest number. Is the equipment we would definitely need. And then. The smaller number for field maintenance and equipment is a, is additional equipment that we could get by if we had to. The second part of that request was for materials. Material to be used and maintaining the fields. That was left out. Left out because. We probably aren't going to get all the equipment we need for a year. So we have time to adjust our budget and see what we can free up and adjust a little bit and see what we truly need. For. What we truly need and what we can move around. We're not going to be able to move much around, but it gives us a little time. So that's, that's what we're going to do. And the third part of it was a. We had requested additional staff member to help with the fields. This is going to. The field maintenance that the community has decided on will require additional staff time and labor to do. So it either means we take somebody off of doing another job to do this job, or we add additional staff member. But then. That's the rate that we're getting equipment when we buy it. Thank you. And some of this connects to with questions that Mandy Joe has asked in the past, which is, are we going to set up a billing arrangement with the regional schools. To. For TBW to basically use this equipment on their fields. They currently they pay. They provide some of the supplies. I don't know if they provide all but they don't cover any of the time or labor that's used there. So that's something that we'll be continuing to look at. Kathy. Yeah, just following up. Thank you, Guilford. As you know, we got some of this information when we were doing the capital review. So if you don't get the equipment, the new field equipment now right away, so you don't need the supplies right this coming year or the person. A year from now, and this is, I guess I have to look over at Paul, a year from now, are we likely to have the money for the supplies and the person? Or do we have a piece of a reasonably expensive equipment that we're not staffed to use or we're, and the supplies, just what we were told, it's the types of plugs you aerate the ground with, it's stuff that goes into the fields to make them healthy and strong. So that's my general question of thinking, not just this one year, but the equipment now and then later and my other that I asked during the meeting and I've just never been sure what might be possible. UMass has a field maintenance training program and design program. And is there any possibility that the town could get in-kind support from UMass for any of this? Either are they already buying a lot of the stuff we would wanna put on our fields? So could they buy, I don't know whether it's a ton more or two tons, so it's just, and then, or do they have staff where they're trying to train people because this is gonna be their profession going out that could be use our fields as training grounds. So that's my, do we have a way of getting some synergy out of having this giant university sitting in our midst with this program that's very specific to this, they're maintaining fields. And I won't look over at Amherst College because that seems to be a bigger stretch where they also clearly have a lot of fields. So I'll stop. I'll start with UMass if you want. We do have UMass trained employees in our staff who have worked and gone through the same programs that these people are going through right now. We have reached out to them on multiple times to set up some internship programs or summer programs for their staff who are trying to look for jobs to work experience during the summer and work experience during the year. We find that we cannot compete without other people for those people. Salary-wise, our just is too basic. What we do is very, is a bit basic and some people want to do more. It's not golf course maintenance we do. It's just general field maintenance and athletics maintenance. We don't go to the level that an NCA division school would go. Some of these people are looking for those type of things, those experiences. There is not that many people out there. So bigger schools and bigger community colleges, golf courses and country clubs. So they usually hire the people away in the bigger landscape companies. Usually hire these people for internships and so forth. So we don't have much experience or much luck getting those people to come help with us. During the school year, during the school year, you get this fall and you get a spring semester, which is they're willing to do theoretical stuff, but then again, putting it in the play is the, but then again, our guys know exactly what they're doing in the class because they went through those classes as well. We have two people who went through those classes and graduated from the different programs there at Stockbridge, so they know. So that's where that is. I don't think we would ever be able to borrow people or equipment from their field maintenance because their field maintenance people are always going and always working. So that would be, that would be, we haven't even approached that. I mean, that'd be probably a little too difficult, probably. I wasn't saying that our staff weren't trained to do it. I was looking about getting the extra hands. You answered the question thing. And then my question about if we're getting equipment and it's not gonna arrive until maybe the end of this coming year, will we have budget room when we've got it to be able to use it? We kind of have to figure out, yeah. We have to figure out what we can put off doing and adjust to make this work if there's no more funds coming. But we haven't got there yet, so we're still just trying to figure that out. Yeah, and we are looking at how we manage our fields. We utilize our fields for private programs quite a bit or for recreational programs and there's fees collected and such. And so we are reviewing the whole process around field management and potentially how some of those funds could be diverted for the materials that need to go back into the fields to keep them in good condition. There seems to be a logical connection between collecting fees and putting it back into the fields. One additional question along this line and that is appearing that around the high school and community fields, the land is particularly wet because of tan brook and will these efforts and this equipment do anything to take care of that underlying problem? Yes, it will. I mean, deep tide narration does a great deal for helping encourage drainage and root growth in the zone for the grass and everything. So most of the things we'll be doing we'll help with drainage and we'll help with that. The actual, the two fields at community field, which is a town field and the fields over on the high school, they actually do have drains installed underneath them and they do work pretty well. Pictures we took, we had taken with a drone during the 2016 drought, clearly showed all the drain lines and the other drains on those fields. So it was really kind of interesting to see that and they do work and then the deep tide narration would actually encourage that and make it work better. Thank you. Sean? Guilford, do you know roughly the number of vehicles that DPW operates throughout the year between the enterprise funds and the general fund and do you know how that compares as it changed over the years? The number of vehicles we have has been pretty steady. We're around, we're between 50 and 60 and the numbers change every so often because we get rid of something. But then in the vehicles we operate include loaders, we have two loaders, we have two backhoes, we have some small loaders we use for some different things. Our mini excavator, our large excavator. So it's not all just vehicles that everyone drives in every day, there's some specialty vehicles in there, there's the sweeper. I'm talking about the mower already, there's the large mowers for the fields, there's the small mowers for the field, those are all included in those numbers as well. Okay. Have you considered a regional approach to roads such as a shared crew that could more economically address some of the larger projects? We had a little bit of a conversation at the during the capital improvement program about, you know, and I think we've talked about this before, would it ever make sense for the town to have its own road crew to try to do more, get more accomplished and rely less on contractors? And what would we have to do to make that a reality? There would, there are only three paving, or three asphalt plants in the local area. You're kind of watching how stressed one of them gets when they have a lot to work when you're watching Route 9 right now being paved by Mass DOT, that company is paving Route 9 and is also working for Hadley at the same time right now. And some of the changes we've had to make to the scheduling is because that plant cannot wouldn't be able to take on much more than it's already doing. So there is a limitation to what's available in the area. The town would not want to get into the business of running an asphalt plant. So if you wanted to do a regional paving type thing, that's something that possibly could happen. It's been done in other communities outside the state. I don't know of any program like that in the state. It does run up against a little bit against some of the theories and beliefs that New England has about small communities can take care of themselves. I mean, there's no county governments where I've seen it work the most. It's when a county government runs it and the county government would take care of us, several communities in the county and do their paving for them. That's actually one of the jobs I started up when I started doing this. But if we wanted to invest in some more equipment, we needed to invest in more people. We would have to actually hire people who are qualified to operate the equipment, which we're having a hard time even finding people who could possibly do that at this time. Okay. See, I know. I just want to add to that. So when we add staff, we also add health insurance, pension and all the ancillary costs to go along with it. So these are long-term investments and people who are going to maintain a crew. It's a long-term liability that we're taking on as well. So it's not just the salary equals. And a lot of those costs are built into the contractors when we hire them. And so we can only utilize these crews. If it's a paving crew that you want to have them develop experience when, and you can only pave during certain months of the year or the winter, we have other, we'd have to figure out what else they would be doing. So the next question, and this may be too early to say, but the money that's in this capital plan for roads, Guilford, about 2.2 million for roads, do you have any sense of what roads that will cover? No. What you're approving this year is for next year's paving plan. So you would not put that list together until at the earliest November, December of this year. So we could try to get it bit earlier in the spring and move with that. Okay. Len? Yeah. Oops, excuse me. Since we're on roads, I might as well go ahead and ask my questions, which is there any benefit to us having a multi-year plan and bidding it at once? Or is there any benefit to us working collaboratively with other cities and towns and doing the bidding? Working together, I mean, it can be done. I mean, we've been doing, we do things for other communities all the time where we bid it and we help supervise the work. We did the water line elaborate. We're doing something, we're designing something to possibly do in Hadley and designing something to possibly do in Pellum. Working collaboratively does work and we can do things like that. We actually put out our bids for paving and we manage them and it works pretty well. If we wanted to try to do something collaboratively, it's something we could possibly talk to some other communities around us to come in and try. But they would have to be willing to do it as well. And we have to set up the rules for how it works. Doing a multi-year bid for paving, the big paving we do, the maintenance paving is not that advantageous because when we bid, we need to actually list out the roads and list out the work we need to do. We've added one or two roads that we're paving this year because they've just gone downhill so fast. They weren't on our screen earlier in the year and they wouldn't have made it if we had bid at a three-year bid and those roads wouldn't have been on it. So it would have been harder to change the road if we had a three-year bid. Putting a bid out every year and just being proactive and getting them out is the best way we found for doing that. It does, I find it interesting that I understand that each road has a different estimate on them and so forth but it does seem to me in a multi-year bid, there would be some ability to add or subtract a road in terms of the way the contract's negotiated. I just, it's no secret. I'm feeling we have a serious problem on our hands with roads and I think we need to think extremely creatively on how we can get ahead of this over the next five years. Kilford, if we, let's say we had $10 million to bid out for roads and would we be able to get $10 million worth of work done this summer or the following summer? Is there, do you get a sense there's an upper limit on how much work a contractor can do for us? I was just going back to Lynn's point about a multi-year. The only advantage I might see from that is trying to get ahead of the contractors in terms of their schedules piling up, like maybe if we go out three years we can get more in the queue and get them to lock it in before other towns bid on it or send out their bids. So one of the other issues we run into is state work. So right now we, right now, can everybody hear me? Okay, I'm getting messages on my computer about unstable. Okay, right now we run into the issue, we're running into the issue where the state hasn't bid anything recently. They actually have a vacancy in Boston that coordinates and pushes out the state workload and it doesn't, it seems like that's affecting their ability to bid on time. So we're actually benefiting from that because there's not a lot of work out there. So the contractors are bidding for us. The thing we run into those sometimes is we'll bid jobs and then the state will start bidding jobs and the contractors will bid the state jobs. The state jobs, they'll work on more diligently and knowing that we can work around and be a little more open about how things get done, which actually gets our work done, usually gets our work done in the time period we give them. But we have to worry about the state, taking all the capacity or shortening the capacity. The most we've ever done has been $4 million and we ended up finishing that contract really late. We were paving, I think, after Thanksgiving, which we don't like. We've actually, we've had a couple of contracts which have gone over into the next year because of that. So it's not, it's really, there is a capacity issue and the contractors, if they, the money's there, the contractors will invest, but the contractors don't see the money to invest, to build up the crews and have a bigger workforce in the areas where it's kind of the way it's going right now. They think they've optimized it. But clearly, if you look at the condition of our roads and those of our surrounding communities, there's a lot more work out there. And so how do we incentivize them to, you know, become larger so they can take on more contracts? Now I know all of this is money and it means making it a priority. It has to be consistent too. It has to be consistent money. The contractor is not gonna invest in the equipment and then have a crew that works for two years and then there's no work for that crew and they got all this equipment sitting around they're paying for. So it's a multi-year thing. It is a bigger issue that needs to be looked at. I mean, one of the issues that's hurting us, I believe is just what we do in the winter. We spend all summer repairing roads or trying to repair roads and then we spend all winter destroying them with putting down more salt to keep the roads clear so everyone can drive as soon as the snow stops. If we actually changed our theory in how we approach winter maintenance, we might actually see our roads last longer because a lot of the deterioration we've seen, I believe and many of us believe comes from the fact we're using more salt than we did in the past and that's just causing, it keeps the water from freezing but it allows the water to trickle into the cracks and when it finally freezes, it pops more than it would normally. If we went back possibly to a sand salt mixture, you'd have less salt, you'd have less water that freezes or less water that can filter in and freeze, so you have less popping. But then again, we're also getting global warming and we got less than, we got probably less than 12 inches of snow this year in our area. So there's a lot of things that factor into the roads and how long they last and how long we need or when we need to work on them. It's a lot of things going in and some things we can't control, some we can. And Lynn to your point earlier, we're spending more on roads, but we're doing less roads in terms of the amount of work and in terms of put another crew, we're just everyone's paying more for fewer roads. That's one of the struggles. I would just tell you that there is no question about it that when counselors go on the campaign trail this fall, this will be probably the number one item. Because it's in everybody's backyard. And again, I just really encourage us to think creatively in every possible way of how to be more aggressive about what we do. Technically they're front yard, but. Front yard, fine. In most cases, but not all. We are gonna put out our normal crack ceiling bed, which we do every year, we do it for three years. The crack ceiling bed actually has a couple extra treatments on it this year. We're gonna try to siphon off a little bit of big paving money and do some more maintenance. Maintenance treatments. The only thing is, is that like crack ceiling, maintenance treatments only last at the most five years. So you're really just making up a patch. Some of our payments aren't lasting more than five years either. So it depends on what's going on. Thanks, Andy and Gilbert, thank you very much. And I want to just echo what Paul said about sort of the investment in staff to operate equipment. But I think Sean's point about spending more for less on road contracting is really troubling. And so I think, I'm not sure that region when the question came forward as in terms of a regional agreement, I don't know that we were necessarily talking pooled resources as opposed to, at least when I mentioned it at our previous meeting, as opposed to potentially contracting out at times. So, and I appreciate the philosophical concern around avoiding county formal government. I don't think that was the intent of the question. And I just really want to encourage us to potentially the council could call for a study for, I think growing in-house talent really does seem to be a major concern or a major area of opportunity maybe for this. We're talking about the shortage of labor, regardless of the available funds across the region. And again, to Paul's point, that talent, if we were to bring in a road crew or somebody to oversee the road work specifically, they would have to have four seasons worth of work and that would have to be baked into the job description. But I just want to encourage all town staff as well as counselors to sort of think seriously about if we can move forward with a plan to address this systemically rather than through contractors per job. I love a level in suggestion of the potential multi-job bids and such like that. Anyway, thank you. Okay. Yeah, I realize I mentioned UMass a lot when I talk about these issues, but I would bet we have about 20,000 cars and innumerable large trucks and delivery vans on our streets that we wouldn't have if we didn't have a flagship here. And the state, as we know UMass is not paying into our infrastructure, but somehow making an argument through Mindy and Joe that we need specific allocations because of who we are as a town for our roads. The wear and tear on our roads, Gilford, you said it was the ice and storm, but if you watch what's happening all around here in the north part of town, it's at eight in the morning and at three in the afternoon, it's cars going back and forth, lots of them and some major large trucks coming in. I don't think they're delivering food to black sheep downtown. I mean, it's big equipment. So just it's a wear and tear on our roads that's quite different than a small college would generate. So just trying to find a creative way to say our chapter 90 money hasn't gone up at all. I mean, it's this fixed dollar amount, but there should be a special allocation in some way when we are talking to our representatives. And I don't know what we would call it. So Kathy, Paul is working on a outline of reforms we'd like to see with the state-owned land or advocate for state-owned land. And one of the arguments in the document he's working on is around roads and infrastructure and how many more vehicles. And we did reach out to PVTA to get some anecdotal data. We were trying to get traffic counts and looking at like when COVID was here where the traffic count significantly lower than pre-COVID, it was helpful but the data wasn't consistent enough to really draw any direct conclusion. So this is actually a question for Gopher. Do we have any ability to do sort of car counting or traffic counting ourselves? Are there logical access points to the campus where we could get a sense of how many vehicles kind of enter and leave throughout the day? Or would it be expensive to commissions sort of a study like that? We have the ability to, if we wanted to spend some money to actually have continuous counting every day at all our traffic signals and then to set up some remote sampling spots using some of the software that is used to control our traffic signals, we would just have to invest in some additional additional software and additional support. There would have to be a mechanism for actually getting the data back to us. If you drive through one of the intersections that does the cameras that actually is controlled by a camera that actually can count cars and it can classify cars. We just have to buy the pieces to tap into that data and then pull it back. And you could have, you could, for us, it's probably anywhere from that quarter that a half million dollars to install all this stuff but you could have a traffic center like you see on movies and stuff where people are watching cars move. So could we do the, could we do just like the little strip that goes across the road that hopefully costs a couple hundred dollars? I mean, I like your idea too but I'm just thinking of that data would be helpful for what Paul's working on if we were able to put some more concrete numbers and just around how many vehicles sort of cross over. You can also ask UMass for, they said they're filling up every spot on their parking lots and ask them for a count of all those permits that they've got because they empty out at the end of the day. I mean, not some cars are parked overnight but a lot of them are coming in. It won't get my truck issue that these big trucks are coming through too. Kathy, I have those numbers somewhere from when I did the rail hearing. Let me just look really quick and I can tell you. So I'm just saying, you're right, Sean. It's like piecemeal right now on a few intersections and some volume. Very good. Yeah, this might be a sarcasm warning. Amherst isn't unique. It doesn't do us any good if we're less than one half of 1% of the state's population. So thinking that we're gonna go to our rep and senator no matter how competent they are and somehow tap into a new flow of money from the Commonwealth is a waste of time. What we need to do is to look at other communities in the state and there are others that have large state facilities whether colleges or prisons or something else that run into these problems and form a larger group and push on it. You know, this thing that Amherst can do better, I really appreciate it, but we're part of a large, we're just one small speck and a fairly small Commonwealth. And if we form a group, we'll do much better. I mean, as our little Guthrie said, one person does it, it's an accident. If two people do it, it's a coincidence. But if three people do it, it's a movement. We need a movement and there are other towns that are in our position. The second thing is, is I came to learn sometimes painfully paving a road is a lot more difficult than it seems. There is an asphalt and type of asphalt. There are types of asphalt and what the asphalt companies are producing may not be what you need at the time you need it because it's a chemistry experiment. It's oil-based and so the prices are very volatile. It's the same thing with all the steel and other components that go into putting things in the road. And I understand that people are upset about the street. I frankly like the potholes in front of my house because it slowed everybody down, but, you know, Guilford came through and fixed the street, what can I say? So, you know, the town does have a, we have a pavement banshee clan. It's, it might be helpful to, I think, Guilford, I think you've done one or two releases of the findings from the pavement management plan. It might be helpful to share that with the council so they understand how these decisions get made about paving and how much can happen. So it's a complicated messy situation and I just wanna acknowledge all the work that goes into this. And I also wanna encourage us to stop thinking about just us. Thanks. Paul? Guilford has handed up, but I'll speak since she caught on me. So, yes, we did do this pavement management plan. Jason's skills did a terrific job and we've actually, that's on our website. We've actually packaged up his presentation and the council's response to that is a little video that people can watch in the council. The TSO committee has asked to have that done again, which we will update so people can do that. The other question that Lynn has raised with me, which I haven't heard or raised tonight, is Guilford first state numbered roads, we maintain some of them, some of them the state maintains and how is that differentiated and can we have the state maintain all of the state numbered roads? So if you want to petition the state to take over all the state numbered roads, you can. It's a process of petitioning the state. They have to decide. So that would be 116 all the way from the notch to back to Hadley. And it'd be route nine from South Pleasant Street all the way to Belcher Town Road, I mean, Belcher Town. Those are the only two that state routes that aren't main sections, aren't maintained by the state. What about 63? The state to all of 63? State does all of 63. I like Paul, thank you for bringing it up. You know, in realizing that half of route nine in Amherst is state owned and half is town owned. And what I've been able to gather is at some point the town said, okay, we'll take it over. I mean, I'm sorry to say, but why are we maintaining a state highway, a state road, excuse me? So based on your community size, the state gave communities of ability to maintain the roadways in their central area. And this was done quite a while ago. So that's why we have a section of route nine and that's why we have a section, we had a section, just one section of 116. 15, 16 years ago, 17 years ago, the town asked to get another section of 116. So we, the town physically asked for that because they didn't like the standard mass DOT road design at that time. So they asked to get that section. It was the section from Snill Street to Country Corner. That used to be state maintained when I first got here. But then the center part, the little section from Snill Street to the center of town and route nine from the center of town, the Belcher town road, that was decided a long time ago based on the size of the community. North Hampton, they maintain route nine through the center of North Hampton. They maintain part of five and they maintain part of 10 as well. So it depends on the size of your community whether you were given this task, I guess. Hadley, they don't maintain anything, any number. Well, they actually do. They maintain 47, but they don't maintain route nine. So it's, I don't know why Alex came about. But if I could plug Bernie since I'm talking, Bernie's right. There's all these little programs that all these people make. There's complete street program. There's Safe Roots to School program. There's all these little programs that there's money for road repair in, but you have to compete for it. The state says we're gonna put more money in the paving, but they make these programs you compete for. So to compete for money, you have to go hire an engineer or somebody take time to design something so you can go compete. And then you stand there at your competition like you're in grade school saying, please select my project. And they selected or they don't select it. If they actually take all the money they put in these little niche programs which the majority of these little programs it's the bigger communities who can afford to apply for them and win stuff and get the money. So it only benefits a small number of large communities. But if you took all this money and you put it into the chapter 90 formula which the chapter 90 formula is based on population which includes part of UMass's population. It also includes, it also includes income which we have a lower income because it includes part of UMass population and then it includes road mileage. So chapter 90 when chapter 90 was invented it was the coolest, slickest, best way to equally pass around money. But then they started adding all these little projects all these little programs on which siphoned off money. If we could get our legislators to come forward and say, stop all this put it all in chapter 90 and divvy it up on the chapter 90 formula we would get more money based on our population. And it would have benefit every community in the Commonwealth and the smaller communities would jump on the bandwagon with us and it'd be the all the little Goliath, all the little Davids fighting the big Goliaths which are really only about far five communities in the state. So that would be the way to push for more money in my opinion. And since I, this kind of is just a piggyback on what Bernie said. Sorry. Do you want me to keep going Andy with other questions? Yes. You want to stay on roads. Paul, do you have something else? All right, so what are we switching to? Do you have any updates on the phase two stormwater program and how it may impact town expenses in the future? So right now we're still on the gathering information part of the phase two program. We don't foresee that we'll have any real big capital projects unless we decide we're not going to be required to do any really big capital projects unless we decide ourselves to do one. So that's where this is kind of going right now. So we probably have four to five years, maybe six before we actually will be seeing larger projects that are coming out of the data collection and the problem identification that we're doing now. Do you anticipate that utility costs will continue to rise and impact your operating budgets? Yes. Yes. Even I could answer that question. It's a question I'm just telling them to ask me. We're not judging the questions. So this one you sort of said depends on the request but maybe you can just give a quick overview for resident work requests, an overview of maybe the range of how much time is devoted to responding to those requests. It definitely depends on the request. Pothole requests we spend a lot of time on and we really appreciate people calling them in. Someone questioned why we just based our list on people calling things in but people calling in helps us because we don't really have the staff right now to go around and patrol. We haven't been patrolling as much the last year or two because of not having enough people but we take those lists and they get put into a prioritization and they get done. There are some pothole requests that get put on a bigger list which is part of the paving list, the maintenance list. People who call those potholes and get frustrated with us because we didn't come patch their pothole but we come and we do a bigger repair job. Tree requests are handled pretty quickly. The problem is though there's not enough resources to prune everybody's tree. If you think it needs to be pruned, yeah, so we'll get put on a list of pruning which will probably is a very long list and that is not a priority. If your tree is dying and is dropping a lot of big limbs and looks like it needs to come down and Alan Snow goes through his process. It's a very formal process of identifying which trees to take down and he'll take the tree down. We also, some of those tree requests get put in the list which actually Eversource does for us. Eversource is, we can't work near wires. That's not in our job. It's not in our ability. We're not supposed to work close to wires. So Eversource has tree crews. They come in and they work really close to wires and they take care of those for us. Those usually take a little longer to be taken care of and some people get a little upset because that takes a little longer too but we do use Eversource as well. So those requests are taken care of. Request for things like stop signs and traffic calming and we want a speed limit. Those things, those requests come in and we look at them and we try to figure out how to address them but on many times those are the ones that sit on the back burner and keep going around and around in a circle as we try to address them and figure out what to do. So the things that really need attention right away, dead animal or our special package service we call it where we pick up packages on the side of the road. Those get taken care of pretty quickly. So there are some things that are like really quick things that get done and other things take a little while. Okay. So the question about personnel services increased significantly due to step increases cost of living adjustments and new collective bargain agreement. And the question was about highway went up 11% street and traffic lights was 17% and what level do you anticipate in future budgets? And I'll just note Gopher and I took a closer look at this today. The street and traffic lights going up 17% was due to a position reclassification to make the position more competitive and more aligned with what that type of position gets paid in the private sector. So that increase was a little larger than other ones but that's a one-time thing to reestablish that position. But in general, Gopher do you anticipate I assume we anticipate wages will continue to rise? Yes, we do. We still have two groups of people or two sections of the association that we're working with as part of the collective bargaining agreement that was signed and we expect some increases there as well. But there will be wages going up. You talked about snow and ice removal a little bit already. The timing of the central fire station electrical service upgrade replacement. Any update on that? So when we ordered it, we were told 12 to 18 months. They called to check on it a few months ago. They were told 12 to 18 months. We expected to just mysteriously arrive one day like the last one we ordered did but the last one we ordered actually did show up about 14 months after we ordered it. But once it shows up, we've worked out how to do it with Eversource and it'll be a little project for the fire station building unless we build another building faster. All right, keep going. You've spoken about this in the past but can you talk about the potential, at least in the future, to replace some of your gasoline or diesel burning vehicles with either hybrid or fully electric options? We still look at this and we actually have a vendor who sells landscaping equipment. Landscaping equipment seems to be the area that's having the biggest changes in electrical use. I think mostly because they come do a small thing and then they pack up and leave but then they can recharge as they're traveling. So we're seeing some advances there. Alan Snow, the tree warden and tree and grounds division director wants to try some and we've actually bought some for the dog park. We have some electrical mower and some electrical equipment there. We're also looking at putting in a solar panel on the building there to charge the equipment. So we're exploring it. The problem with trucks are you gotta, if we're plowing snow, you can't stop for 20 minutes or an hour, eight hours to recharge a piece of equipment to go plow snow. So from that standpoint, we're not there yet. Tree and grounds maintenance. The town only has six cemetery plots remaining. And in previous budgets, the finance committee raised the issue or whether the town should continue to offer the service. Where do you see, what do you see coming down the road in terms of the town offering these services? Well, we do need to talk about what we wanna do. Do we want to continue offering the service? Do we wanna merge with another cemetery in town or do we wanna buy land next to the North Cemetery to expand? There is the possibility. That's the only real possibility is to expand in the next to the North Cemetery. I do not think there's any real place to start a new cemetery. We're having a hard enough time finding a DPW site. But although the use is pretty quiet. So I imagine it might fit in next to a neighborhood somewhere. It's a peaceful place. A lot of reflection. All right. That brings us to explaining what a wood bank is. So we do cut down a lot of trees. And most of the trees are ground up and made into woodchips. And some are processed in the compost, some are given to people. But a wood bank would take those larger diameter pieces of wood that we chip and bring them back to a central location, probably someplace like Ruckston or maybe the transfer station. And then the wood would be available for homeowners in town who burn firewood or burn wood for heating to come and harvest it and take it away for us. There's two basic methods. One, you just have a pile and it's a free for all. And the other method is that maybe you have a pile and you coordinate and someone in town cuts and stacks it and people just take it away for a nominal fee. You do, they usually are offered to people who are on fixed incomes or qualify for housing assistance first. And then it usually goes to people who, other people. And Gelford, I didn't understand necessarily the context of that question. Is that something we currently offer or are you looking into? It's something that Tree Ward and Allen Snow would really like to do. He feels really bad about people not being able to use this resource. And we just basically grind it up and turn it into mulch. Okay. So something maybe to look into for the coming year. So that brings us to the end of most of the general fund questions. I think the other ones we've discussed that I didn't bring up explicitly. Again, the general funds includes DPW administration, highway, snow nice, treeing grounds, the garage that manages all the equipment and street and traffic lights. So if there's any other questions on general fund, that would be the time to ask. And then we'll be moving on to the water enterprise fund. I do have one overarching question which may be for you, Sean. It's the one department, of course, it's a large department, but we don't normally divide our department budgets into sections. Is there a legal requirement we do it? Do we find there's an advantage to doing it? Are there disadvantages to doing it? Well, so there's no legal, within the general fund, there's no legal reason we have to separate the DPW the way we do. I think it's more operational. That's how the work has been divvied up in each of those areas has sort of their own supervision and leadership within each of those areas, division leaders. So I think it's generally the way we've chosen to set up ourselves, go for the way in if you've got more historical context on that, but there's no legal reason we set it up that way. Yeah, except for maybe, except for Snownice, sorry. Snownice is the one area where you generally separate it out because that's one of the few things you're allowed to legally overspend the budget and make it up on the tax rate the next year. Sorry, go ahead, go for it. It's okay. It is basically to allocate how much one group has to spend and so we don't go too crazy and spend everything on something else and then we don't have any money for treeing grounds or recreation. So it's just been set up that way to give us guidelines and we kind of work in those guidelines and it also allows us to keep track of how much like electricity is tracked in treeing grounds and highway or treeing grounds and admin and then the enterprise fund. So it allows us to track which areas using the most electricity or stuff like that. So it does help us keep track of expenses per functional area and for individual places. Yeah, and public works is a little bit unique in that it does a lot of different things. Many of the other departments sort of have its, its narrow role where DPW does snow removal, paving, managing our parks, fixing vehicles, you name it. They do a lot of it. So again, we don't have to do it that way but generally that's, it's for an organizational benefit. And then the enterprise funds, the enterprise funds obviously those we set up because they have a revenue source that we can dedicate to it and track that revenue versus the expenses associated with it. So we ask a general question of the group and that is, are there other questions about the general fund sections of DPW budget that you wanna ask? Are there any questions about the capital of the CIP portion? Guilford, I'd like to ask you, what keeps you up at night? You know, what are you worried about the most in terms of the, the, the infrastructure in the town? So if I, I have to actually just go blank when I come home or try to go blank or else I don't go to sleep, I go crazy. I have, I have newer, I have a lot of newer division directors with me right now. Some of those, if you ask them that question they could just rattle it right off because they haven't compartmentalized it yet, I guess this is the way I, they call it but we do have aging infrastructure. It's all over town. It's all over the United States. We had a sewer break Saturday night. It was a collapse on, oh, well, it was a collapse. His mind went blank. North Whitney Street. Yeah. It was on North Whitney is where the actual collapse was but it blocked up a line and we had to come in and take care of it. We have several of those around. Some are worse than others. We're putting together programs for it. We're gonna spend money on it. We, we do know we need to do it. It's just a matter of getting there and doing it. But there's, there's things like that. There's Caracas working on North, North Hampton Road. They had an old, they, they were working over an older waterline and because they had a really big piece of equipment vibrating that waterline, they blew out a fire service for Emmer's College. Those things just happen, but because it's older it probably happened more than it would have if it was a newer line. So there's lots of things that can happen. The thing that bothers me the most to tell the truth is people just ignoring rules. And I, if people would just follow the road rules, the rules of the road, our lives would be so much easier in DPW. Drive the speed limit. Don't do the left hand turn when the light turns green. Don't sneak through the intersection. Don't turn right from the left hand side. Just those are the things that drive us crazy the most because people then make requests to us to say, solve this problem. Make these people stop doing this. And to tell the truth, I can't stop these people from doing. There's nothing we can physically do the road to make people stop not paying the rules. So that's the, that's actually the biggest one that bothers me. I'm glad you asked that because I got, I'm glad you asked that because I got, I'm glad you asked that because I got, I'm glad you asked that because I got, I got, I got popped into my head. Hope it doesn't keep you up tonight. So. If there's nothing more than. To anyone's task and any of the areas we've identified, I think it's worth going into the enterprise funds. Okay. So same thing. We've had a bomb. Thank you for sending in. Many of the questions. So. Just dive into those. We have a few for water. Yeah. So we're going to start off with, we're going to start off with water treatment plant as a large construction project. And we'll need close monitoring. Do we have the resources to adequately do that? Especially given how tight the DPW budget is. Yes, we do. In the, in the project for building Centennial, we built in a funds to actually hire an outside engineer to be the resident engineer and to be an onsite supervisor. So we have a lot of resources available to be there at the plant, but we hopefully will. Hopefully we'll have enough staff by the time of plant gets ready to start up to learn how to run it. But we did, we put the money in the budget and it's, there's a contract that's. Got to be signed and then they'll be doing that. Side note, we had the, we had the pre-construction meeting with the contractor this week. Or excuse me, last week, it went really well. We had a lot of people here. They're really excited to get going. We have a couple of little things we have to do. We have to have a pre-construction meeting with Pelham. And then we have to do some other stuff, but we're getting ready to start the project. And then probably before the summer is out, we'll see people up there doing demolition. Related question. Actually, we all year on that subject. And this is partly just something I noticed. And I was reading the budget book. And I was wondering, is there a way to make reservoir needing dredging? Is there a lot of maintenance of the. Oh, system in Pelham. That is sort of blown by the wayside because we have been using water from the system. No, no, we're required to do a lot of. We're required by our permit to do a lot of the maintenance and we do it constantly. So, yeah, we're required to do a lot of the maintenance. So, yeah. Such things going. We actually do just need to, we do need to do the dredging of their intake reservoir, which is something we've kind of put off until we get closer into the plant being finished. But we'll get to that. But all the other reservoir and all the other watershed issues up there we've been taken care of. John. So this one, you may. One letter makes a big difference. Sorry about that. No, no, it's all right. So we completed a leak detection survey of the entire distribution system, not lead detection, but leak detection. And do you, do you know the results of the leak detection survey? And were there any water lines that needed urgent repair? We do a leak detection every two to three years. So it's not one thing we do and walk away from, but you'll see in the capital. We pretty much schedule it in all two to three years. So the last one we had, we found a couple of leaks that were pretty large and they were repaired. We've gotten to the. Well, the best leak we ever found, just to tell you, remember in front of the Southwest dorms, there's a big field next to university drive that used to have like a wet land in there. That was a broken water line. And we brought the leak detection guy in and we took him on UMass campus and found it for him. And then they fixed it. But we do really catch a lot. Yeah. Next. What potential new sources of drinking water exists in town? So we completed a study back in 2016, 2017 of what we needed to do to build resiliency in our system. And the study came back with we need to maintain this, maintain the sources we have. We need to get Centennial back online. We need to automate baby, baby carriage. And then we need to look for a source that's in the western part of the community. So we're working on getting Centennial back online. Baby carriage has been automated. We actually run baby carriage for the last, last three or four years, we've run baby carers 24, almost 24 seven where it used to be only a August, September, October facility. And now you'd run it pretty, pretty continuously. So all those are in good shape. We are working with Hadley on a joint project that may, we hope comes to fruition, but they want to bring their Mount Warner wells back online. And then we've talked to them about that being a possible backup supply for the town of Amherst if we need to. We have one interconnection right now with Hadley, but we would need to build a second interconnection with Hadley to use their water because they have a lower water system pressure than we have. So we have to boost their water to our pressure. Or else if we open the valve, we just drain into Hadley. But we're working, that's, we're in pretty good shape. And we actually have more, we have more capacity than the actual state will allow us to withdraw at any one time. So we're sitting much better in several communities in the Commonwealth. So that's it for water enterprise fund questions. If there's other water enterprise fund questions. Yeah. I just go for, do you mention Hadley and their wells? Do they treat water the same way we do? So fluoridation or whatever we add to our water. So would there be any integration issues? If it's there? Well, is this a source? They don't fluoridate. So when they, when they take our water, they, they have to tell people they're fluoridating. Thanks. Other water questions. Is there any water rate issue questions that people had from. Did you can recall? Did you want to ask about the water rate memo? I don't have any. Unless I'm forgetting, I don't have any separate questions that weren't discussed during the. Yeah, I just didn't. Yeah. I didn't recall any leftover questions. We just sort of held it aside. Do you have to ask since we made a conscious decision to hold it aside? You want to go on to sewer? Sure. All right. So sewer. Same question. Guilford about. Somebody to oversee the gravity belt thickener and represent the town and monitoring that project. We did the same thing. We actually put it into the project to have the engineer to give us a project engineer and onsite engineer to work on the project. And that's how we would do it. Update on that project. We had the pre-bid. We had the pre-bid. We had the pre-bid. Update on that project. We had the pre-bid meeting. Last week on that project. And we got several, several good contractors who came. Water line industries who's doing a water treatment plant in Deerfield. We actually had RH wide who's doing our water plant. They came. So we had several good general contractors and several good subcontractors come and walk around the plant and look at things. And we had a lot of, a lot of good, a lot of good, a lot of good. Bids will probably open in. Late June, maybe early July. And we should be having. In August, September, we should start, be starting that project. And that's it for sewer. I'll just say. Again, water sewer. These two funds. We provided the projected rates in the future. They're largely influenced by utility rates. As somebody noted earlier, especially electricity. It's a lot of water that's over two thirds or about two thirds of our total electricity consumption. For the town. So. As this past year rates really skyrocketed. We're looking to lock in some lower rates in the future. But yeah, driven heavily by utility rates. And then the other thing is sludge. We talked about sludge. So we don't spend a lot of time on it, but that's also driven by fuel, fuel costs and how much waste is made. We're seeing both of those on the rise. As far as the electric rate question. The first counselors. Several people who are asking the question, which I. Channel four, which was. Solar and Centennial and mode that's possible and. Sort of. Complicated answer, I guess is the best way to put it. But the building is designed to take solar panels. So we could put solar panels on the, on the building. The issue is, is that the buildings. Generation capability of solar is not very large. So you would not be reducing your electrical load very much, but you, you could do it. And then it actually may be something we look into because. We don't have any behind the meter solar. Currently where we actually take the electricity, which is more beneficial than the alternative where. You send it back to the grid and you get a credit. So even a small amount there, depending on, on what the arrangement is could help. If we could actually directly sourced electricity. And then I know you've talked about this. And I think there were some permit issues, Gilbert, but looking at wastewater. It appears there could be space there for solar, but I know you've looked at that had some concerns. Yeah, at the wastewater facility, the only real place to put solar is on top of the building. The open space at the facility is meant for expansion. So if we need to expand the facility, that's what those spaces are for. Any other questions on water or sewer. Any great related. Questions also. This is not a good thing, but I'm sure many of you have seen other communities are dealing with the same issue at Pittsfield, I think was one. It's my hometown. Most recently that had some large, larger than what we're looking at increases to their rates. Okay. Go on a solid waste. Yes. So solid waste fund revenue from the solar array on the North landfill is being credited to the solid waste fund. What we're looking at is this amount before after the sale of electricity to the town. And is the 75,000 and FY 24 are going to stay steady over time. So the. We bring in the way we benefit from that solar array. There's a few different ways. So we get a net metering credit, which is a direct credit on the electricity bills. It's one penny per kilowatt hour. And we allocate that to our electricity bills, proportionally based on how much usage there is. So it's not a huge that that piece is not a huge revenue stream. It's maybe $30,000 a year. Benefit, but it's allocated proportionally directly to the electricity bill. The other bigger piece of it is that we get about. More than we were expecting about $120,000 per year. In terms in a direct payment. And that direct payment is broken up into three different buckets. So part of it is property taxes that the company pays for. The land. And that is like any other property tax revenue that goes into the general fund that doesn't go to the solid waste fund. There is a pilot payment that's for the equipment, a payment in lieu of taxes for the equipment. Same thing that goes into our sort of property tax bucket doesn't go to solid waste. And so, and those two things are dictated by. Those two things are set. They're based on our tax rate or based on the agreement. And so the balance of what they owe us is what goes into the solid waste fund. And so that was the number that was about $75,000, $80,000. And it will get a little bit lower over time as our property tax rate rises. Or the property tax bill goes up a little bit each year. It's not, it was not going to rise a lot, but if it as a rise is a little bit. That payment that goes into the solid waste fund will shrink a little bit. The total payment will stay the same. They're going to pay us the same total amount of money. More or less for the life of the, of the. Agreement we have with them. But the amount that goes into solid waste fund will slowly decrease and the amount that goes into the general fund will slowly increase. But again, it's, that's been hugely beneficial for the, the solid waste fund going forward because that fund has really struggled for many years and this will. Definitely give it a lifeline for a while. And any other questions on that piece? The next piece is about entrance fees. And please confirm if the revenue from the sale of the transfer station stickers. Oh, sorry. Is an entrance fee that the revenue from the sale of transfer station stickers. It's not, is it? Or is that the. No, the entrance fee is from the transfer station stickers. It is. Okay. And then explain how the proposed trash hauling bylaw would affect entrance fees and the solid waste fund in general. I'm not really sure. We do know that we're going to have to keep the transfer station open. Unless we find a hauler who comes into town and is willing to do curbside everything. We, we get a lot of construction and demolition debris at the transfer station. We could stop taking that and send it to North Hampton. We also get a lot of mattresses. Mattresses are actually a really big product for us. Mostly in the next two weeks. And around Christmas time before Christmas. Those are mattress. Donation times, I guess you call it. So that somehow we got a, somehow the transfer stations got to stay open for some of these special ways we have because of who we are. So we don't really sure how the entrance fee would change. I mean, there's a possibility the entrance fee could get added into the, into the costs of the entire system that we put in place. And then everyone can just come and just pay for their disposal, what they bring. So those are things that I'm putting together as I. Put together the RFI and I'm. Orally putting together the RFI. I know that. So. Okay. So that, that was it for questions for solid wastes. Any other solid waste questions. I guess that. You're saying something a little bit different than I had assumed because certainly from the TSL side, we've been hearing a lot of comments from people. The segment that uses the transfer station, they would like to have that option remaining available. I think that's generally been. What the. Discussion has. Been running in that direction. And I was sort of surprised that you said something as strongly as you did about. RFI looking at not continuing. There's. Yes. I mean, we know people would like it, but to tell the truth, if we're going to provide curbside service to everybody, there's no reason to keep the transfer station open except for this, these special waste we have. So then we really have to look at what we actually do with the transfer station. I think that's the question. The decision part based on. Cost to them. And cost us. Those of us who use the transfer station. It's a lot less than the cost of the current pickup. And we assume that that would. Still be true, maybe not quite as big a difference, but still be true. Yeah. Whatever it's decided we're going to have to, I think, give people some either clear opportunity or clear instructions. On how you get rid of the mattress, how you get rid of the excess dining room chair. How you get rid of the, the skid that came in with your, your wood pellets. If we don't accommodate for that, we're going to find those things in wooded areas. By some extent, I think that's really the unfortunate fact of, unfortunate fact of life. And so it does. Does make life a little more complicated. Do you want me to go on to the last enterprise fund, Andy? Yeah. Cause I think this is a really a discussion for a different place to be on, but we just head. So the last one is our transportation fund. And there was this one question about. Developing a plan for replacing on street meters. meters? Is it mainly reduced labor, double sale of overlap parking time or some combination there of? Gilford, if you want to start, I can add on as well around converting the single meters to the pachiasks. Yes. So with the desire for people to use credit cards, you're kind of phasing out single use meters without having to. I mean, you're phasing out single use meters. The single use meters we have now cannot take credit cards. So if we want to stay with single use meters or you have to buy and completely new meters. So no matter what you what you want to do, if you say with credit cards, you're getting new meters. Every single space meter or most of the single space meters, you do two spaces at once. They have to have their own connection to the Internet to work and take credit cards. So there's a fee for every one of those meters. Or if you use a kiosk system, system, each kiosk has a fee for using a credit card system. So if you have two hundred single space meters, you're paying two hundred times the fee. If you have 30 kiosk that you're paying 30 times the fee. So we're actually going to probably definitely move away from single space meters and have to go to kiosk if we want to continue the credit cards. Yeah. And the other reasons are when we looked at this, it cleans up the streetscape quite a bit as you can pull out all those, you know, cut throughs into the sidewalk. If we can just have one kiosk, it's usually for 10 to 15 spots or something like that for every kiosk. It definitely cleans up the streetscape and also gives us better data on utilization of parking. Right now we have three or four different ways you can pay for parking and the on-street meters. We don't get any data from that where we can get data from the kiosk and from our from the app, but you can't get much from the on-street meters. And it also I think somebody referenced it does save on labor having right now every Thursday, we have to go around with a big bag and collect all the all the coins. And at the time consuming process, the bank will probably well, the bank may not appreciate it. I don't know. But yeah, any other transportation fund questions? The transportation fund is doing a little bit better. It hasn't it's not spiking back to where it was pre pandemic, but it's doing a little bit better than last year. We have seen the intended effects of increasing the permit rates. We increase the permit rates and that's a three year transition. So they'll go up again for next year for based on the schedule that's in the new permit regulations, but we have seen that revenue number go up in the magnitude of what we were expecting. So that was good. We're thinking of some additional parking changes that we might bring back to you sometime this summer related to ways to maybe increase in parking, looking at parking rates and so on enforcement hours. We'll try to bundle those things that we think would improve the system. Again, looking looking to the report that we got several years ago on ways to strengthen our parking system. And I think that's it for transportation. Hey, I want to just raise one issue that I've noted, and that is there's a parking lot at the station road end of the rail trail and that's get overused on weekends. I mean, if people are parking on station road, it's really not adequate for the number of people who are parking there. Is there any other place we could work out? I mean, I know like Amherst College has a parking lot right next to the trail. I don't know if we could work out some parking there on the weekends or something like that. But I mean, it's just obviously it's not something for this committee, but it's just I just want to put that out there that it's a it's a real problem and it will, you know, it'll prevent people from getting access to the trail. Yeah, it's not it's not a it's not necessarily a transportation fund because we don't enforce or that I assume that's free parking, right? We don't charge for that parking. Maybe something Dave could take a look at Paul in terms of the use of that that trail with the same thing around that. I'm trying to go for it. It's a state. It's a state lot. Oh, it is OK. Yeah. Yeah. No, no. I mean, I'm not suggesting that the town do anything to replace to there's nothing you I don't think you can do anything with the size of that lot. But I mean, it is I just want to let people know it's a problem that there it's people are parking on Station Road because there are no more spots left. So yeah, I've seen that with what's the one heading up into Belcher, Tom or into Pellum, the trail. Amethyst. Yeah, I've seen that as well. There are some types that gets jammed up and people start parking. You know, sometimes it's it's it's a control the use of the facility as well. So you if you have endless parking, it'll be endless people. So in order to manage the number of people utilizing amethyst in particular, but also for the bike path, I think that might be purposeful. We have more parking if people didn't park there overnight. I'm just I just wanted to say I live across from Amethyst Brook parking lot and there are several pretty sure students who park there all night long, etc., on a regular basis. So it's an interesting it doesn't bother me. They got to park somewhere, but it does take away during the day if they have not moved their cars. Yeah, right now there's nothing that prohibits that right, Paul, in terms of Yeah, and the other questions on DPW or any of the enterprise funds. So I think that if we do anything else. People have because we should let Jiltford go then. Since he's seems to be suffering. I'm better now. So looking to see if there are other questions that people have with Jiltford all all these with us and I appreciate all of your responses and wisdom today. Thank you. You're welcome. I know it's really wisdom, but we you like us to believe that it is though. I'm sure. Anyway, thank you. So here we are is we're getting to the end. We have one more regular day, which is can be Friday for the community and development sections. And then we have those two leftover departments to take up a week from today and start to work on our recommendations. So Andy, Andy, Friday, well, that's actually general government. That's right. Yeah, that one will probably be a pretty busy because there's so many departments and so many transitions between departments that seems to take the most time. So Friday will be pretty busy. I don't think I've got any questions. I don't know who's general government, but that's OK. Kathy, that's understandable. We don't we don't need any. We can we can just we can give over views of the department. No, I did I did a quick look and I have a few. So I'll get you I'll get you some questions, hopefully tomorrow. OK, so general government on Friday and then Tuesdays is C and D. And we've added we've added the fire department and D.I. to that or sorry. No, D.I. is Friday. We've added fire department and public health to the the Tuesday, the May 23rd meeting. Yeah, there may not be much time after all this departments go to start the recommendation discussion, but there should be a little bit. So I was going to do on my because I had schools as I'm starting to think about what it is that I might want to say about schools and to identify as I do that. But I think of the discussion points where I can identify issues that the committee is really going to need to give some additional consideration to and to sort of to get my mind working in the direction of where the section that I'm committed to writing. So I would encourage you notice if you're. If your department's already presented to give some thought to that, even if it's not presented to think about the, you know, as you're doing the questions, you're probably going to be also thinking about the issues so that we can start moving in a direction. Because what we want to do when we get to the final discussion is to try and identify the areas that need to be separately founded on and then what we're going to say about the recommendation as a whole. And that the I can give the obvious example for the school, which is the additional request from the school committee is we had the same thing last year. So that's kind of where we're at. And I don't know if anybody has any questions or comments about the next stage of the process that you already asked today. But I think everybody looks pretty exhausted and ready to. Do we want to vote a recommendation on water and sewerage? We can't vote it today because it was not on the agenda. OK. So it's been added to the agenda for Friday, so it has 48 hours to notice. And I think it's good to care that already. But I assume that it's going to be pretty quick discussion. We just be emotional to vote for that matter. Anything else that anybody thought of that they want to raise? There's not. So I think we should adjourn. Yay. All right. Welcome back, Kathy. Thanks. Bye.