 I'm just going to open the meeting because they are not actually sworn in yet, so that's going to be both on the agenda. But I'd like to welcome you all to tonight's Select4Meeting and I'm going to ask that if anybody else comes in, if you could help us make sure they sign in so we capture everybody and attend it. It's on the chair next to you. All of you have signed in, but if you could help us with that. So why don't we go down the road very quickly for those of you who don't know our new income Select4Meeting members. We'll start right here. I'm Margaret Butler, and I'm your assistant down clerk. Jordan Geese. Gabrielle Molina. Ann Tulane. Jamie Morby. Ananna Winchester. Woohoo! So first up on the agenda is Additions for Changes to the Agenda. Does anybody, yes, any? I have two things that just came in today that require action before our next meeting. So the first thing I'd like to add is the road crew has gotten a bid for pavement crack, pavement crack. Okay, would you speak up please? The road crew has just gotten a bid. They sent this out to bid and it's for, let me just get these words right, pavement crack ceiling. Paid pavement crack ceiling. And that needs to be authorized for them to accept the bid immediately. So I'd like to add that to the agenda. Okay, and do you know where on the agenda you would like to try to fit it in? Oh, yeah. What did you say Jordan? Is there a section for new business? There is not. Oh, that's a good thing to add in the future isn't it? So why don't we... I would try to get it in in the six to seven o'clock slot if we can. The six to seven, okay. The road crew. And it's a pavement crack. Is it a sealant A&T analysis? No, ceiling, because they're going to crack, they're going to crack, I'm sorry, they're going to crack. Crack off. They're going to add, they're hiring somebody to do it. Okay. Or that's what the bid is. Okay, so we'll do that at the end of the six oh five bullets. Yes, we'll try. Okay, you have a second thing. I have a second one. The Woodbury Fire Department is currently working on rebuilding their fire station. And they would like to ask our federal senators, Senator Welch and Senator Sanders, to put on the earmarks that they're allowed to get each year, the senatorial earmarks, they're going to ask for 15% of that cost. And they would like a letter of support from us. And they have to have it by Thursday. So I'd like to add that to the agenda too. And they told me that about two hours ago. So why don't we add that at the end of the seven o'clock, at this last bullet of the seven o'clock hour? Is that okay? Yep. Okay. Anything else then? Okay. Any other changes to the agenda additions? Okay. There are none. We shall move on then. Okay. So we are now going to swear in our new select board members. So Jamie and Anne actually got sworn in a couple of days ago. So they're all taken care of. So we're going to swear in Jordan and Gabrielle and Anne. And so you have your oath of office in front of you. We actually fill it out twice. You sign it twice for the town of Alice twice. And so what they, this is their oath of office and we will get them to all agree to it after I've read it to you. So I or he, Jordan Keyes, she, Gabrielle, Malina, she and Tula do solemnly swear that they will faithfully execute the office of select board, state of Vermont, and will therein do equal right and justice to all persons to the best of their judgment and ability according to the law. So help me God, as they say, under the McCain's impilities of perjury this day in palace, March 13th, 2023. Do you all agree? I do. Agreed. Okay. So I will sign it twice and then pass them back to me. I will notarize them and buy them in the town office. Congratulations. And thank you all very much. Okay. And so next will be the election of officers. The select board will elect their own officers. And so we will, what's your pleasure? Would you like to do chair, vice chair in that order or do them together as a slate? Do you have any guys, do you have any? If not, I'll just run it. Okay. You choose. So we're going to open the floor to this group of five people to not make any nominations for the office of select board chair. Do we have any nominations? Everybody please speak up. I nominate Ann Winchester. Okay. So we have Ann Winchester. Hold on. I'm taking minutes too. Okay. So chair is Ann Winchester. That was Gabrielle with a second from Jordan Keyes. Do we, any conversation, any discussion about that nomination? You might want to ask if there's another nomination. I'm not going to make any discussion about that nomination. Okay. Any further nominations for the office of select board chair? We have a nomination and a second. If elected, would you be willing to serve? You accept a nomination. Yes. You accept a nomination. Thank you. Okay. So we have a nomination and a second. Do we, do I hear a motion that Ann Winchester serve for the ensuing year, a one year term for select board chair? Do I hear a motion? So. Gabrielle. Thank you. Second. No second. Okay. Thank you. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Hearing none. Ann, congratulations to you. You're the new select board chair. Would you like to do the vice chair election? Okay. Thank you all. We're daunted. Speaking for me, I'm daunted. So. Yes. Do I hear any nominations for vice chair? Rock, paper, scissors. I would nominate Gabrielle to be vice chair. Do I hear a second? Second. Okay. Are there any other nominations? Okay. Then all in favor. Aye. Aye. Should we ask if she wants to accept? Is that okay, Gabrielle? Yes. All right. Congratulations to you. I see Jeremy isn't here. And we were going to talk to him about training the town, the new town clerk. So let's put that off for a minute and move to the next one, which is candidate for office of interim treasurer. And she has made a proposal. Sandra has come forward and made a proposal. She would like to return on a consulting basis. Now you guys all have copies of the document that Sandra sent us. And Jordan, can you get that up for people to read? So she's made a proposal that she would work at a rate of $75 an hour for 20 hours a week on the condition that we, she has an assistant who does some of the work and that we keep an emerald on as payroll. And she has done a really nice thorough list of what she sees as the duties, which she says she can do in 20 hours a week. I don't know how you're going to read that whole document up there. We have a few extra copies if anybody would like to see it. Don't we, Barbara? Yes, we did. Ashley, they just came down to the end of the road. Here's one. Yeah. And we all have these electronically. So yeah, we don't need to. So Sandra is standing by so that we can talk to her. Are you ready for me to give her on the phone or not yet? Let me just ask, does anybody want to comment on this before we get Sandra on the phone? I'm sorry. I'm having trouble hearing you. What did you ask? If anybody wanted to comment on before we. Thank you. And Scott said it's about time. Anybody else? All right. Yes. Can you get Sandra on the phone please? So this may require going into executive session. We'll see. Sandra, you're on speakerphone. This is Anne. I'm hi there. Is that you? This is Anne of Winchester. But you're speaking to all of us. So Jamie, Antulan, Gabrielle and Jordan are here. And a few people are out in the audience. Okay. And we've all had a chance, I think we've all, I hope we've all had a chance to look at the proposal. And at this time, what do you want to say anything, Sandra, before we open it up for questions? No. We can use them ready to take any questions you have. Okay. Questions anybody? Hi, Sandra. This is Gabrielle Molina. And I'm a new select board member. And I'm being unfamiliar with the way Treasurer was the last time the town had a treasurer. How many hours a week did you work then? I worked anywhere from 40 to maybe 55, depending on the time of year. I had the way it was set up at that time. I had an assistant treasurer for basically four hours a week. But most almost all of that time was used during tax time. So I did everything I could to not. And I was able to accomplish the task that needed to be done. Coming back to this point, I'm not, I do not have the time to come back on a full-time basis. I can come back on a half-time basis as long as the supports are in place that have been in place for this for the year that I was gone. The assistant treasurer picked up a lot of slack in terms of what the other tasks that I used to do. And I can, in order to work that 20 hours a week, that support would need to be continued. It's not doable otherwise. You're working 40-plus hours a week and you had an assistant treasurer? Well, yeah. And again, as I said, it was, there was tons of the year. It was more than 40 hours a week. I had an assistant treasurer for four hours a week. That was what was budgeted. And that time really was confined to tax time. It's about 250 hours. Let's see, four times 50. Yeah, it's about 200 hours a year. And most all of that was used during the three or four months that we collected taxes. So I'm not, yeah, I'm not coming back as your permanent treasurer. I'm coming back to, well, you guys have asked me to come back. This is the way that I can do it. I've been gone a year. And so it's just, this is how I have the time. Yeah, yeah. And you could potentially put systems in place for the future. Right, exactly. Okay, I'm done. Anybody else? Hi, Sandra. This is Jordan. Hi, Jordan. Good to meet you remotely. I was curious, it seems like your preference is to try to work as remotely as possible. I'm just a little concerned whether or not the infrastructure can be actually set up to accommodate that. I think it probably can be, but it might take some time to get that set up in the interim or in the events that we can't fully implement it so that it's fully remote. Would you be willing to come into the office and get the files that you need or work a couple of hours in the office? Well, that's a great question, Jordan. When COVID hit in 2020, I was, for all intents and purposes, fully remote for two and a half years, until April 1 of last year when I retired. So it is absolutely doable to, for me anyway, to function remotely with the understanding that I will have to come into the office and I believe I came into the office one day a week during that period of time and during tax time of course, and budget time of course it was more frequent, but the setting up of me remotely is very simple. We have, I turned it back in, my laptop and monitors, what our IT people do is, you know, assign me an APN address and I can access the account server. So we actually had systems that played for me to work remotely for two and a half years and if I remember just working remotely now for much of what they do. So if we can do it, but I do anticipate having to come into the office, you know, very frequently to grab checks, make deposits and so forth. Okay, thank you. Okay, thanks. Anything else? Anybody? Questions? So would this be a one-year contract? I think we're thinking one year, but it can't be shorter than that. You may hire someone during that period of time and their training can go very quickly and if it's less than a year, that's fine. I kind of view it as something that would, you know, within that period of time we can see what systems are in place, what systems need to be retweeted and get your position of treasurer sorted out and then get someone hired. So, you know, I don't see this as an actual period of time of a year. It could go out a year. I would like it not to go out beyond a year and it could certainly be shorter than a year. You know, that suits the board. In your opinion, Sandra, would we no longer need the services of a contract, the contract that we have with NEMRIC? Yes, that contract for them to be performing the basic treasurer duties would no longer be necessary. I do see them continuing in their role as payroll support. On average, that takes about eight hours a week and when you look at tax filings up to 10.99, all of that is part of payroll. Onwarding people into the software and offboarding them from the software, that type of thing really sucks up a lot of time on average. So I think they should stay in that role and I would expect them to stay in that role and that frees me up again to get things and order in that 20 hours a week. But you wouldn't need them otherwise. There would be some sort of a handoff. I would need to talk with Wed. She should close your March general ledger at the end of your quarter. There's reporting that would have to be done by her and then theoretically she would be finished. Okay, Gabriel. Jordan, go ahead. I need a minute or two to recall the question. Oh, Donna, go ahead. This is Donna Fitch. Hi, Donna. Hi. We do not have an assistant treasurer now, correct? And why not? I think Barbara continues to operate as an assistant treasurer. I don't know what or if her title was changed after I left, but I know that she provided support to Nimrick to keep the financial aspects of the office going smoothly. It wouldn't have worked without someone fulfilling that role. It just couldn't work. What was at that time when I actually was an assistant treasurer and that I would say she continued to operate at least to be paid out of that sale for some period. Our auditors wanted us to have an official assistant treasurer, correct? I did not hear that. Our auditors wanted us to have an official assistant treasurer. I'm just repeating Donna's question. That's a question. Just one assistant treasurer is absolutely, if you want somebody, if you want to back up in that position, just like you would want to back up an assistant counselor, well, that's statutory, but those roles are important to have some redundancy. Okay. I didn't answer Donna's question a little bit more fully. So I resigned as an assistant treasurer after Sandra left without a treasurer. It seemed a little strange to have an assistant treasurer without a treasurer to report to or supervise. So I resigned as an assistant treasurer. However, in the absence of a treasurer and an assistant treasurer, I have continued serving, fulfilling those functions for the past year wrapped into my role as assistant town clerk. They actually increased because in the absence of a treasurer, I actually did all the data entry of all the tax checks and so forth into the Nimrod system and in cash receipts and then transferring to GL and tax administration. So my hours and my participation increased without the title, but the function was being, we kept the lights on. Well, do you have any questions? Jordan, you got this. Yeah. So the proposed rates and hours are associated with the tasks that you outlined and that was pretty comprehensive. Thank you for putting that together. I'm curious whether or not you thought shouldn't we hire somebody before 12 months with that same kind of rate and fee structure applied for hours that would be spent for training or passing off as opposed to the higher level report generation and system generating or is there some room for, should we get traction and momentum kind of revisiting those fees for later duty work? That's a hard question to answer, but as long as I am in the interim role if I'm training or if I'm working that would be the rate. Thank you. Other questions? All right, then I'm going to ask you guys what you'd like to do. We could go into executive session if you want to deliberate. If you don't feel the need to deliberate we can go ahead and entertain a motion now. Or would you like some more time to think about it? Kind of feel the need to deliberate. Okay. All right, with Sandra or just us? I think with Sandra would be fine. Okay, how would we do that logistically? Would we take the phone into the closet? I don't know, I was assuming that yeah, I've never been there. No, I can't expect you to answer that. I think that's... Are you okay? Well, it's not that cold out. If there's not the phone, we retreat to the back. With the phone, we can't do that. Having said that, I would entertain a motion to go into executive session for the purpose of discussing this further with Barbara. And we would be doing it under... It was one BSA section 313 where the heck is my... Oh, here it is. 313AB, Labor Relations and Agreements with Employees. Will somebody... So moved. Second. Okay, all in favor? Who was the second? Thank you. All in favor? Aye. All right. I will now entertain a motion to accept Sandra's proposal as written. Oh, did we vote on going and coming out of executive session? I'm sorry. All in favor? Aye. All right. Okay. Now a motion, please. Awesome. Okay. So there's a motion to accept Sandra's proposal to come back sometime between April 1st and April 15th as written in the contract or in the proposal that Sandra gave us. Is there any discussion on that? Any, including folks out there if anybody has anything to say? Jeremy. I think it's an amazing idea. Okay. I'll just leave it at that. Okay. Hearing no more discussion, I'll in favor. Aye. Aye. Aye. Sandra, welcome back on board. And that is going to be deep cow. Okay. So that's exciting for that. And please sit down. All right. All right. Thank you. So have a good evening. Have a good night, everyone. Have a good Sunday. Oh, good. Okay. How do we do this? I'm sorry. Are we finished? Yeah. Bye, Sandra. Bye. Bye. Is Sandra cool? Our former treasurer. Now she's our third treasurer as well. Oh. That first act for this select board, right? Next, we're going to, and we're already way behind schedule. I'm really sorry. But let's turn to training our new town clerk. So you've all met to him. Yay. Our new town clerk. We're so happy to have you. He's been working hard since Friday to come up to speed with Jeremy. Jeremy's been helping her. Jeremy, how do you want to do this? We could just go into executive session and talk quietly or privately, or if you would like to make a proposal in public. Okay. Yeah. My proposal was essentially we have only, I started my new job on the 20th, so we have a very short period of time. My proposal was to pay me double my hourly, if you calculate it as a 32 hour a week job, on a temporary basis. And that would basically make me available through next Monday, and then available by phone or in off hours or whatever, until she feels like she's up to speed. So that was essentially it. So what's the number, if you, the sort of number? So 54 an hour. Okay. For how many hours? I wouldn't think it would be much more, I don't know actually, but I don't think it would be like more than 1200 bucks worth or something like that. I think between now, we're up to seven hours right now. And typically we haven't been doing eight or 10 hour days. It's three or four hours. And then it's like, okay, let me do that for a while. So hard to say it, but 20 or 30 hours max, I would think. And then that would allow, because of the cyclical nature of it, I know that there's other folks around who can help out as well. But whenever you paint yourself into a corner for a second, it's nice to be able to reach out and have a phone conversation. I was able to do that with Judy, where we'd be like talk for an hour and the phone in the evening or something about how to address an issue or how to, whatever. So there would be some amount of time available for that. All right, questions for Jeremy. So you'll be in the town office this week. And you'll be in the town office this week? I'll be there. I'm planning to be there eight to four or every day of this week. All right. It will be one 32 hours for a while. And you have resigned your other post? Yeah. Yeah, I guess they kind of knew who was coming. They allowed me to do a letter of resignation pending election results. So I was allowed to be more than two weeks. And then if I hadn't come, they would just let me slide back in and on. Other questions. Then I would like to suggest that we do go into the two executive session for the purpose of negotiating. And I would with Jeremy a little bit. And therefore I'd entertain a motion. So Jordan made the motion and Gabrielle. Thank you. I'm sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. It's just us and there's no phone. Should we just go in the utility? We can do that. Yeah. Somebody like to make a motion. Oh, sorry. We have to move to come out of the next session. Somebody make a motion to do that. Second. Okay. All in favor. All right. All right. Now somebody like to make a motion. I would like to move that Jeremy be hired to. Train the new town clerk. With a max budget of $1,500, which is roughly 30 hours of training at $50 an hour. And a Tegan, we would ask for you to manage those hours. Okay. There's second. Is there any discussion? Sorry. Okay. And just a moment. May I just read it back to you? Thank you. Okay. So the motion is to hire Jeremy twice to train the new town clerk with a maximum of $1,500 at 30 hours at $50 an hour. Okay. That was the motion. Seconded by Dan. Thank you. Any discussion? Okay. Hearing nothing. All in favor. We say aye. Aye. Okay. Congratulations. And thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Jeremy. Yeah. All right. Let's see. It's seven o'clock and we're supposed to move on, but I think we could probably bump some of the administrative stuff a little bit if we need to talk to people. So let's talk about candidate for interim treasurer. And sorry, we did that one. Select board administrator, is that what's next? Yes. And also assistant treasurer while they're at it. And our assistant town clerk has offered to take that on an interim basis. And Barbara, would you just like to tell us briefly how that would work? Yes, certainly. So I'm just going to pass down the road of my resume as well as how this references. So I see, and I select board administrator, first of all, you've got to come up with a job description. This is an interim. We do this until that time. As you actually have a job description and the fuller understanding is to your goals and expectations of this person. But at least here in the early weeks, if it extends to a couple of months, okay, of just trying to help you guys get organized, put structure around your work, keep track of tasks, deadlines, where paperwork is, when paperwork needs to be signed and submitted to other third parties and so forth. Just trying, basically being your executive assistant, I think is the easiest way to say just trying to help you guys get yourselves organized going forward and not lose track of deadlines and tasks to do. Questions for Barbara? So Barbara, you envision approximately how many hours that you would be taking on? We had at one point talked about three jobs. What do I remember? Sandra, my understanding was in her proposal to you, one of the conditions for was to have me back as her assistant treasurer. That's it. Assistant treasurer, select board administrator and assistant town clerk. So tell us how all those three would work together. Okay. So for again, I see my primary job is assistant town clerk. The assistant treasurer, I've basically been doing already. So I'm already like in the groove with those two jobs. This is just adding a new function. I think it may be much more busy here at the beginning while we get the systems in place. I don't see it being more than a few weeks of just trying to figure out how we're going to get this, how we're going to get this structured and what's the tracking mechanism to keep everything on track. I think maybe 10 to 15 hours a week. And I'm just, we're fall parking here and we've never, none of us have ever done this before. And did you say your rate that you want? For the purposes of interim, I would just say the same rate that I've been paid as assistant town clerk and assistant treasurer. Just keep it all. And it would be to spread out on my time sheet as I turned that into Nimrick to run payroll. How many hours I did assistant town clerk? Now I'll start logging the hours for assistant treasurer. So it comes from that line item. And then when I'm working for you guys, it would be a third line item on my time sheet to Nimrick. So whoever's running payroll, be tracking each of those line items. The one question, one thing I would like to request is a separate select board administrator email account so that it's separate from my assistant town clerk. To keep it all separate and easier to organize. And I would like to point out that this would give, easily give Barbara enough time that she would become a full-time employee and therefore begin to receive benefits. Yes. Yes, please. So Barbara, is it your intention to do this on an interim basis? I think until you are, as a select board, are ready to post the position, I would encourage you, just as a matter of principle, I encourage this select board to post every open position, not just hire somebody because it's a live body and she agrees to do it. So when the job description has been written and you guys are actually ready to appoint someone long term, that it be posted. And at that point in time, I'll decide if I want to apply, along with anybody else in town. So I see it as interim until 6-5 is the select board and I are ready to reevaluate. One thing I envision is that it would be useful to know the hours of the three different positions and you've suggested that you would separate it out on your time sheet and you may, being a community-minded person that you are, want to make sure you don't go over 40 on your time sheet at least, but I would want to know the true amount of hours that it takes. So would you be not worried about the, and I don't even know if that gets into overtime or not, but it's important for us to know in the future how many hours we're hiring for it if indeed it becomes not one person. So I already, at times, work more than 40 hours a week over the last six years. I've never been paid time and a half. I just get paid straight time, even if it's over, like last week I was over 52 hours. But it was town meeting, it was the election, it was a long, long day, plus other long days. And I've never expected time and a half, and I don't expect time and a half. But I do understand you wanted to know for the purpose of it. I'm less worried about time and a half. I will tell you, Sandra as treasurer and Wendy as acting treasurer has never paid time and a half. Yeah, but Sandra might have been on salary. She was. Well, no, no, no. I'm saying never paid me time and a half, even though I was turning in more than 40 hours. So that's a governing issue for this group. Well, it might be a legal issue. Yeah, I think we should probably look into that before we make a final decision because there's definitely a difference between obligations to pay for extra time with salary positions and hourly positions. So I just want to make sure that for one, it's compensated for extra time. And then we're tracking the real costs of those hours to get real to your point, I think. And to answer your question, I will definitely track the hours so that when you're ready for job description and to post it, you know, depending on how long we've been doing this, it may be several weeks. It may be a couple months. We don't know. By then, you'll know how many hours I've been spending on this job. I'm wondering how to do it now because we really need to get Barbara on board now. So could we do something like say, please don't log more than 40 hours until we've had a chance to look into this time and a half? I think if our intent, I mean, if she could be backpaid for hours over 40, I think she should report for true hours and she should be paid accordingly. No, I had put that in the form of a motion, please. Well, Jordan, you were the one that was concerned about that. No, I mean, does it allay your concerns if we knew that we would be doing the right thing upon the right thing? Yeah, you have nothing to do with it. I know that we hire Barbara Butler as the assistant town treasurer and assistant town clerk. Actually, the treasurer appoints the technical assistant treasurer. Got it. So you guys don't need to do that. I'm appointed, take it appointed me assistant town clerk. I work for the treasurer. The treasurer will appoint me. Okay, so we don't need to hire you at all. We do for the select board administrator. Okay, I nominate Barbara Butler and I rescind my former motion, by the way. I nominate Barbara Butler to be the select board administrator. Do we hear a second? Interim select board administrator. Commissioner? Okay, let's say appoint as opposed to hire, is that okay? To the point Barbara Butler is interim select board administrator. Yes. Okay, at my assistant town clerk assistant treasurer pay rate. Do I hear a second? I second. I would like to make a friendly amendment. Barbara, I think we need to also state that we're ready to contact Wendy and tell her to start to put you on the benefits list. Is that correct? That needs to be part of this motion. If I am now moving, I'll fill you in a little bit. Even though I've been working full-time for the last couple of years, the previous select board never approved my hours because they didn't want to pay any benefits. So I'm working full-time for the last few years at part-time, half-time benefits. So that's why we're putting this in the minutes so that Wendy knows that we need a full-time roll call. So help me structure my amendment to Gabrielle's motion. It would be something like and that Wendy be notified that you are now on payroll? Something like that? Considered a full-time employee ineligible for benefits. Okay. So Gabrielle made a motion to appoint market butlers in the select board administrator at her current pay rate and that and and and added that Wendy Wilton had never been notified that this moves her to full-time status with full benefits. Is there a second to my amendment? I will second the amendment. Sorry, discussion on the amendment. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Okay, now we're back to the original motion as amended. Discussion on that? All in favor? Aye. Congratulations. Thank you. Who seconded the friendly amendment? I did. Thank you. I think we can finish the rest up pretty quickly even though we're already 10 minutes into the next item which is, Rose has volunteered to be our recording secretary. Rose, you have a problem that you cannot be here at six on certain, except for certain days. Right, right. I worked at the hospital, I worked till six and so today I got here just shortly after 6.30 so we would, if you choose to appoint me to that we'd have to work on something that I wouldn't be here until about 6.30 or maybe 6.40 or something like that. I do not, I usually don't work on the fourth Monday of the month because when I work the weekend I have Monday off and so I think we're talking about maybe one meeting of the month. Questions? I don't think I've officially met these three people on your select board. Can you tell me your name please? I'm Anne. Tulane. Hi. Gabrielle Molina. Hi. I'm Jordan Keyes. Hi. So nice to meet you. You too. I was with the select board for 18 years. I served 11 years as the recording secretary and eight years on the board and I had an overlap of doing both. So pretty well first, my minutes are in the office if you want to see. And you took minutes at town meeting also. And yeah, I just did town meeting and they're almost done. I just need to just do a final read through and so I'll send them to Barbara ready and then you'll send me to the board and then they'll get our kind. Questions, discussion? Did you say there was a 48 hour window because we have to, does the select board have to post its minutes for you? You have to do five days. Last time. Draft minutes. Draft minutes have to be posted within five days. Yeah. Right now it's 10 days due to the, there was another wall passed which is similar to last year that gives more flexibility to various boards allowing them to another additional five days and then there's other like, Zoom meeting things that can happen as a result so I think it's 10 days for the next year. Hi, I'm Mark Malawi. One thing, congratulations everybody by the way, it's just great to have set eyes on you all here. One thing you should think about but it's not the kind of thing you have to decide instantly if you decide it over time is what do you want your minutes to look like? You know, there's this huge variety, some organizations and select boards have minutes that are like, you know, motion, the motion, the vote, and that, you know, discussion without any summary just really short. The advantage of that is it doesn't take so long to get them out and all of that. Other people want them almost like verbatim and anything in between and it's really up to the select board kind of this working with your clerk to kind of decide your recording secretary decidedly. So I'm glad to brought that up. Barbara does have a model and we were going to bring it up at their meeting on Sunday and it's like, just what you're talking about, it's a chart and it's just very simple and it makes it very easy to take minutes. So one possibility would be that one of us would take minutes for 40 minutes while waiting for Rose to arrive. Is this something you would like to decide tonight or would you like to put table this one, say until next Sunday to give us a chance to talk about it and think about it a little more? I'd love to lock in having a note taker. So, you know, I can see figuring out the logistics of what we do for the first 40 minutes. How many Monday do you set? So the meetings are, the regular meetings are only the second and fourth. Well, that's something we have to decide. So we can move those around. I think it would be nice if you want to just kind of summarize your specific limitations so that we can kind of take those into consideration and we might be able to shift things around a little bit. Oh, yeah. So which is the Monday that you might... The fourth Monday. I wouldn't work. So I wouldn't have a problem. I'm not getting into that. Tegan, did you want to say something? Yes. And I also wouldn't let you know that she has offered to take minutes on your long six-hour work session on Sunday the 19th. She's already offered to be available to do that for you. All right. We don't have to decide tonight. Yeah. I know. That's what I'm suggesting. Would you all be more comfortable waiting or are you ready to vote? If we're ready to vote, will somebody make a motion and then we can see where it goes? Can you take a comment from the audience? Yes, I have been going in. A big problem in town is new communications on the select board. And I've used Barbara's format before and it's official and it meets all the requirements. But it's not very informative. Yes, but we have... Sorry. We have the organ tapes that you can always go and watch. Well, they've always been there. I would appeal for more detailed minutes always posted in front of porch forum. The agenda for this meeting was really good. That's another really good way to communicate with your guests. The people who elected you. If you, for some reason, needed to have those skeleton minutes immediately for some people reason behind Soviet, but people that can't come to the meeting and want to know what went on are going to be pretty frustrated with no mention of discussion or who said what the kind of minutes that Roosevelt was done. I would appeal for the detailed minutes. Marge? I just have a comment. Are you allowed to... Could the person who's doing this also be recording? Since we're doing the organ is a recording that would just be useful for them to kind of repeat. If they have to go back in here they couldn't hear or didn't write it. They can't read their writing. I just wondered if that's a possibility if they could... They have these little recording things that could just be a few... I've heard about it in the past. Scott used to do that. But I mean now you don't even have to have tapes and all that kind of stuff. It's pretty straightforward. I didn't know whether that would be something that would be worthwhile to make. You mean just an audio recording? Yeah. And what would that be available to the person taking minutes? To have both the minutes. I just wonder if the worker recording could just be made available to a note-taker sooner and it's made available to the public. You can buy that little recording things for $40-50 and then she doesn't have to rely on someone else's schedule. But that'll actually hold a very good audio recording that's under the counter over there. I don't know if that just would make it easier. But Donna... Could you vote on having Rose be the recording secretary and have the discussion about the minutes on Sunday? Yeah, that's... I was just going to suggest that. Would you be willing to vote on Rose now? So will somebody please make a motion? Do we discuss an hourly rate or anything? It's in the... It's $20 an hour, isn't it? It's in the budget. I believe so. When I started Woody Bear Plain in 2003, it was a $1,000 a year. And so, I'm really not doing this for the money. $20 an hour is just fine with me, but I'm really not doing it for the money. I'm really not. And so, I don't care what you pay me or what you don't pay me. Did you get your question? You got... Waiting for a motion. I would make a motion that we hire Rose as our recording secretary at $20 an hour. Further discussion. I guess a friendly amendment. Or I guess to recognize a commitment to kind of discussing the minutes in the formatting of the minutes in greater detail at our next work session. I don't need that to be voted on. I'll put it in the agenda. Who took a second? It was one of you two. It was Gabrielle. Gabrielle, thank you. Okay, further discussion? You really shouldn't rush to absolutely... You can change your mind about what the minutes look like. You might not know how you feel till you see the first set of minutes. Well, it didn't go 11 years. There's a lot of people... You might just don't... So I'll put it at the list. Yes, Barbara? Can you suggest a fewer motion which is going to be used more to hire a point per as a recording secretary for a one-year term? Do you accept that as a friendly amendment? Okay, thank you. All right, any further discussion? All those in favor? Aye. unanimous. Good. So we have our people in place now. This is amazing. It took us 20 minutes longer than we scheduled for it. I think the people involved... There's a whole bunch of things now that we've lumped in for the next 45 minutes. And most of it is just things... You added a letter bullet to this section? Yes, I know it. But two, actually. You added the road to this section that you just finished. Right. I did? We did, but we shouldn't push that to the end. Yeah, I would like to... I think for all the Curtis Pond people who want to speak here... I'm just here to be available. There's not the left. I mean, we can put it off and do some of these other things, but I thought since you're here... Did you do the Lister? Yeah. We'll do the Lister. Okay, sorry. We'll do the Lister next. That's at the bottom of this 7 o'clock item. So, you all got in your packet a memo from Christine Chamberlain Mapping. She has been hired for several years now to update the callous parcel and data maps that are created by the Listers. She's asking for $3,500 that money is in the budget. She's also asking $60 an hour for corrections beyond that. That's not in the budget. John, do you want to speak to this or do you just want to take questions? No, there's really not a lot to say. It's a hand in someone like Christine and it's an absolute necessity. The $60 an hour for consenting beyond what she's asked for. That usually comes out maybe three or four hours working with the Listers, but she's great. And it goes on, she corrects parcels based on the descriptions, surveys. It's absolutely essential. It's not like whether we hire someone in dollars or hire Christine or someone else. She knows the town very well. Anybody got any questions for John? She's served in that capacity for us in the past, right? For quite a while. Yeah, yeah. Like 20 years, right? Yeah. So, is her addition of $60 an hour for come what may, is she, are we anticipating that, the need for that? We probably need to wait four to eight hours in any year. There's one time during the year when she'll send us a list and the Listers will do their best to try to rectify errors, find where discrepancies lie. But at some point, we end up in a conference call with Christine and that might go on for half a day. Other questions? Discussion? She has asked that we actually sign this. So you all have seen this document. We could sign it tonight. There's not a hurry, however. We can put it off. So, what is your pleasure? You want to make a motion, somebody? I'll make a motion that we accept this contract as written and we sign it this evening. Do you hear a second? I second. Further discussion? Questions? All those in favor? Aye. Okay. I'm going to pass this around. Yeah. I'll sign one back. And we'll get that to her. Yes, thanks, John. Would you want us to do something? Would you tell us what it is? Actually, I can start. We want you to consider it. We don't want to ask for any particular action tonight. But what we do first, we're going to welcome the select board, the new select board. I'm Hans Sweeney. I'm the treasurer. Mark Mahaly is the executive, I'm the executive board, I'm the media's secretary. I moved her. Kali's coming. She's the president. And why would she be? How could I be? I can tell I'm having a brain fracture. It is the vice president of the Kurdistan Association. So what we would like to do tonight is let you know, first of all, I think you're quite aware that we've been working on this for a couple years and we have the bond approved by the voters on the town of New York. And what we've been doing with the prior select board was we were pretty much doing all of the work associated with it. We had a couple people assigned to us who were liaisons from the board. And we worked with them to go back to the select board when things were ready for the select board to work on. One of our next top priorities is to go out to bed on the construction. We still have a very ambitious goal of doing the construction this summer and that's due to our concern about the day out. And so one of the things that we, in order to go out to bed, would be that we would need to get a bid ready document for the select board. And we've been doing this as a co-group, Kurdistan Association, and the select board have been working on it together because we've been providing a lot of funding to do things, but we've been doing everything together. So one of the things that we'd like to do is as soon as we can go out to bed for the construction. And what that means is that we would have to have an RFP or a bid notice, a bid request sent out, and we would meet, we would want to work, we would be willing to help put that together and then have the select board presented to the select board and they could sign off on the bid request. We're ready to do the footwork for that. I did, I'm going to, this is for your review, not to make any decisions, but we did contract over a year ago with Du Bois and King as the engineering firm. The town and the Kurdistan Association together, we both signed up on contract with them to do, to prepare the design, do bid-ready document, that's like about an inch thick of all the instructions on what they have to do, and also to shepherd the permit applications that we needed. We had six permit applications outstanding right now, which would be quite, before construction could begin, we would have to have those permit applications approved. Two of them, the DEC dam safety permit applications and the Army Corps of Engineer applications, would, what we want to do before we actually go out to bed and what the engineer has asked us, is before we actually went out to bed, we'd get the comments from these two organizations to make sure they weren't any last minute tweaking. The engineering firm has been working with them to make sure they met what they thought, but actually throwing it out into a review process that might be some more comments that we might have to adjust. So we want to be able to tweak the last bit of the bid-ready documents before we actually went out to bed. So we wouldn't be ready to go out to bed for a couple of weeks anyways, depending on how quickly we can get these last few comments out of the organizations. So I didn't make a, this is kind of a generic, bid-format template for, sorry, I don't need that. This, and these would be the kind of information we would need to have for the bid-ready, for the bid to go out for bed. And, things like dates and who wants how you decide. DuBois and Kane has prepared over like a hundred and fifty page document on the technical specifications and a similar document for the bid, bidding process, what would be our evaluation criteria, what would be probably in a contract. So we have those documents, they have readied them and they're 99% complete, but they don't want to actually do anything to get those last comments. So I just, this is more just to kind of prepare you for what we're going to need from you to keep on this deadline, so I'm not really asking anything tonight except to be aware of us. And Mike's going to add a couple of things to this. I'll help you get to the record. Quite a bit of background. The bid process itself, it's a pretty structured process and the first step is to issue bid documents. Generally the better your bid documents are, the more likely you are to get a good bid back because they know what they're getting into it. Don't do that. Issuing a bid document does not commit the town in any way to the project. Then hopefully you get maybe even several people interested enough to submit bids. Before they do they have a conference with the bidders. And that's where Du Bois came in who you have a contract with and it's joining. That's part of their job is to be involved in that because usually the questions about the bid are very specific. They're really, you know, engineers to contract with. And then they go away and then within a certain period of time 20 days or whatever up to that point the town is not committed in any way. Then the town can hear from them or whatever and let's say you accept a bid. It's beginning to be looking like a commitment at that point but it isn't really. Where you really are committed is when you enter into a contract with one bidder. If you contract with them to do it, well then you're committed. Where, how that process married with Du Bois' issue of the process. I mean generally speaking I think you sort of land your money lined up before you enter into a bid. But that process that I described is not a fixed process. It can be fairly quick but it's as multiple stages. I also just want to say I'm really aware that although some we know a lot about this and Jamie knows a good bit about it we really recognize that at least four of you don't. And if you want us to be there on Sunday just to talk about what's happened and what, you know, a little of the history and how we got here, we're happy to do that in any way you want. I mean we'll just help you in any way you want. We recognize that this is new to you and that you have a lot on your plate besides this. If it's possible without, we don't want to rush this and make stupid mistakes. So, you know, that's important. You know sometimes if you do things too fast it really doesn't work out. But we don't on the other hand want to just sit or twill our thumbs and then there's a big storm in the winter and the day end looks down. So that's why we are just sort of would like to move ahead and what's the word all deliberate speed. I guess we're certainly ready to answer any questions that we might have tonight but we've got a lot to do tonight. I did want to make one more comment. One of the things that we will need to have in place is a lot of legal documents that say it's okay for us to do, for, temporarily to do construction and go all our people's lands. We have some legal documents that we're going to have to get. We've also talked about getting a quick claim from anyone who might have any chance that they owned the dam that they quickly cleaned their potential ownership away. So, I mean there's a lot of legal documents that need to be, and so that's something we're going to want to pursue quicker rather than, you know, rather have to be, probably have to be in place before we did a contract. I don't know. Yeah, but anyway, there's a lot of stuff that still needs to be done. And I do want to emphasize that we are being able to do whatever we need to, you know, whatever we can to help. We're not dumping it on you guys and expecting you to. However you want us to work. So, the bid is the issue of going forward rather than by the correspondence association? You know, I think so, because it could be jointly issued. Part of what you have to work out, and this is the kind of thing you guys want to talk to Joe, and you really want to talk through is what's the form of our relationship. Personally, I would like it to be a public-private partnership. I think that that's perfectly doable, and it's just to figure that out. But the town, at least, because in the end of the process, it's the town using the bond money and our money, which we do. See, we can turn over our money to you, but you can't turn over your bond money to us. So I think that since it's the town's bond money, in the end it's the town that will contract with the contractor. Whether we jointly did, we could jointly do it because it's our joint money, but the contractor ain't going to care. Yeah, as long as they know the money's there. So the partnership aspect is the non-profit doing the heavy lifting of the content, and we still have to and the select board has a lawyer and the non-profit has a lawyer. We can share a lawyer. I've spent a lifetime working in my prior existence in my prior life doing public-private partnership work, where let's say I was representing the city office of developer, developing a whole piece of land, and very often we would each have our lawyers and then we would jointly have a lawyer and work together or jointly have experts work together. You know, there's always the potential for conflict, but there's such an advantage to working together that it sometimes outweighs that. But that's the kind of thing you guys have to think through and talk to Joe or whatever, satisfy yourselves how you want to do it. Can I just say for a minute, we do definitely need to sketch some time to really dig into this. We're planning on Sunday to do budget financial issues and roads. Once we start talking about the agenda, we'll see if we can get some time in for Curtis Pond. We can do it over time. Yeah, so I guess one question I would have for you is, is there anything we need to know from you, say before the 27th? Well, the only thing with me is if we thought we could get all of our thoughts together and do involved on the police, but I don't think that's going to happen on our end because I don't think we're going to I mean, maybe I'm being pessimistic, but I don't think we're going to have all the comments from the permit people to be able to have the big, ready documents. It's conceivable that we could get comments back very quickly and give you the request for proposal. I do think it would be good if you figured it out because I can't remember exactly. Is there, are there special rules for the town over like where you publish, you know, stuff like that, but I think she's right. I think it's unlikely. Yeah, and that was one of the things I came down today to the and asked if there were some if Callis has special rules for issuing RFPs, does it need to advertise in certain places who have to be notified? Do you guys have a already procedure for doing that? And at this, you know, first day for Teagan, I don't think we'll find out. But we just can, I think we're going to try to find that out too. We'll find it out. Do we, are you going to actually answer that a little bit? Oh, go ahead. In your organizational meeting, I wasn't here for the beginning of it, but you decide where you're going to legally post your agendas and everything. So that would go along with where you would legally post that. And I know prior select boards have said our official stuff was in the Times. It's that front porch forum and then the general stores, I think for a dam, you know, I think the RFP could, you know, write for an RFP is kind of, documents are available for the town clerk's office. And then personally, putting together an RFP, I think Du Bois and King needs to do that. They've already done it. They have already done it and they provided it to us, but they don't know the specifics for Cal. Then it was part of their contract and they done it. It's night yet. Let me give the board a chance now to ask questions of these guys. So April 28th is aspirational or just impossible, right? No, April 28th. Yeah. It's the due date of the bid. Yeah. All the highlighted things would need to be concluded and actually the whole thing could be different. This is kind of what Du Bois and King has done in the past and they did like a generic template and those would be some of the key information that we'd have to decide on. We'd get a list of contractors from Du Bois and King, like let's say it could be the smallest group and send it out, and it's literally send it out to them too. Oh, we got that someday. We actually, we have we have the four contract including there. Before there were four contractors that Jeff Tucker, who's been our engineer on this project gave us that we were qualified for giving. That would be like a starter of whom you could notify. And he, Jeff said that we could let the contractors know now that we're doing this soon and but what we can't do is give them any of the details the technical details or any of the contract and bidding procedure details ahead of time that could disqualify the contractor. So we have to be careful with the details but we could start letting the contractors know now that we're hoping to do it this summer. The questions from the board? A million, right? Well I'm not quite sure how to form it quite yet but it may be worthwhile having gone through a similar process for another nonprofit in the advertisement to require an application that states the contractors. I mean, I think it's great to advertise and open bid and invite other contractors. I think it's great that there's a short list of contractors as there usually is but we're talking about public funds and there's no harm in advertising. And that's what you want for procedures. We want to do it how you want to do it. I agree with you that they were excluded. Correct. And it is within both all interested parties interested to make sure that there are qualifiers that are added to that. And I would like to kind of see us working towards that. It'd be nice to spend some time getting a little bit more information and familiar with the plan and the relationship with Du Bois and King and the document that they've prepared. It's great to know that that's in place. The rest of it can happen pretty quickly. And they expressed an interest in meeting with whomever to find out what Calis's procedures are. They did everything in the general they kind of dug a lot of municipalities in our case. They did it in a generic way now. But they need to know specifically what Calis is. One of the things you guys should think about. And again, it's just up to you. Whether you want to designate a couple of your members to be kind of like the point of people on this because it can be a little time consuming and some people have to be mastering it. Master it to the point where you feel it's not like we're the only ones who have all this information. So you can have a committee. I wouldn't have three people. I know I came in late. Did you talk about the informal request? Because that would address your concern. I thought it was a great idea to put out a really quick informal who's interested. Or just kind of we're doing this. Yeah. If you've already discussed it, I don't want to waste your time. But I think we should put it. It was proposed to us that we do an immediate informal, very informal in the Times Argus everywhere you ever publish. Where do we want to do this? Is anyone interested? And it's not that formal you're going to get the 700 page plan $75 fee. It takes to get those plans just a heads up. And it addresses your concern about what little guys out there might be interested. They could do it for half a... I'm putting words in your mouth. But you want to get it out there where everybody knows about this before the formal thing happens. What we came in what we did is what she's talking about is the request for statement of interest. It's a sort of pre-bid stage where the talent she's required or like the East Health Store could have done instead of not brought it. It's just a request for statement of interest. We were a little concerned that they'd be more free to do that right now. Yeah, I think that it would be a little premature from my perspective, a little premature to do that. I certainly appreciate the efficiency of doing that just to kind of get folks pre-worn. But I think one of the important parts of this is like managing expectations and then because we're taking a lot of really big bites out of a lot of business just trying to make sure that we are directing interest to the right person so that we don't lose track of anybody's interest. But also I think it can be a valuable process to just kind of put it in a box. You've announced it. You've publicized a process that you're going to be going through to kind of establish a pool of interested parties who will then at that point be locked in for consideration moving forward. And then you don't have folks coming in later or at different times of the process and reopening or feeling like they were excluded. I think what Mark said was we were trying to figure out what you guys feel comfortable with. Because one thing you do have to go back and speak to your legal counsel about signing these things and feeling comfortable. There's a lot that has to be considered by you guys and we are sympathetic to how much that is and we want to help you as much as we can. My question, you said using the term locked in about this informal there's nothing locked in about it. No, no. He's just referring to the whole process. His concern was that his concern was that we have to be careful to make sure that we broadly open up what we're interested in. But that can happen either or the other way. I just want to do when we do that I think it would be wise to define what that process is in advance and be prepared to engage with people I would want to rush into an informal announcement that then opens up a bunch of communication that we're not really prepared to handle and questions that we're not prepared to answer. Because in this process and these types of projects it's just really important to be explicit about the expectations and that's where a Du Bois and King is invaluable because they do this stuff all the time and they know how to be consistent in their communications. You want to make sure that you're giving the same answer to anybody who's asking the same questions. If we did one of these informal things you know that one was going to be calling Du Bois and King saying anything at this point okay guys we are scheduled now we clearly need to schedule a really big chunk of time to just talk to you are there any more questions that you'd like to know things you'd like to know right now can't wait for a deeper discussion I just want to ask a quick one of the permits my understanding was you needed to select more to sign some of these permit applications do we need to do that right now? No okay what we did because of the timing we wanted to get the permit applications in we have signed them from the CPA except for the main permit which is the dam safety permit from the Department of Environmental Conservation that one from the town and Du Bois signed them I'll have to track down on we'll talk about when we need to have you guys sign on to the applications okay I think we'd probably better schedule a little bit of time at least for you on Sunday to come back to this I don't think it'll be the deep dive that we'd like to do but we can at least do it a little more it's best to build the pieces okay alright I'd like to move on then unless anybody's got anything burning here oh jeez we've hardly done any of the administrative stuff let's at least try to set times and for regular meetings do you guys want to keep meeting on the first and fourth Mondays what's the second and fourth Mondays at six o'clock is that okay with everybody did we I'd be curious Rose is scheduled are you do you work by what days of the week do you work like if we did Tuesday instead of Monday would that be better for you most Thursdays I don't work okay Thursday is pretty good but you know I don't know personally I think Mondays are so ingrained for select board like he's not he meets on the first and the third catalyst met on the second and the fourth you know if you don't think it's going to be too much of a hardship someone to fill in for half an hour or 45 minutes until I get here just about 30 minutes right yeah I can't do Thursdays anyway I was just curious okay shall we do that then do we have to move that can we just say it yeah you just pose you know just verbalize that we're at one hour you also have to say where your public postings are we've got to finalize our rules procedure but I'd like to table that until Sunday and by the way I do want to say one thing we cannot do business by group agendas but you could send your comments on the rules procedure to me I can compile them all into one document I probably could use that on Sunday to work from and I think it would save a lot of time if you'd be willing to do that can you all get to the rules procedure that I sent you okay so if you wouldn't want to do that Gabrielle's already done it and if the rest of you would do it that would be great and I do need to resign I need to formally resign as my other two jobs and I sent you a sample posting in Front Forge Forum and tell people to give us a statement of interest by March 23 and then we'll deal with it on March 27 so what I would like you to do is accept my resignation and to authorize our new select board administrator to post this or something like it in the Front Forge Forum second discussion second okay, those in favor great this is the 9-1-1 coordinator is that like a let's get one super duper is it as important as it sounds oh yeah, they come in I usually, for several years I've had nothing in the winter I've been getting them about one a week all winter it's been kind of amazing so yeah, we do need to get somebody on board it's not hard to do it's just somebody, you just play with the maps a little bit and you go out and you measure things so would you remain on oh yes I'm sorry, I do need to say that I'd like my DRV resignation to be effective immediately and I would, because they're fine without me, and I would like my 9-1-1 coordinator to be effective upon appointment of a successor if you could add that to the motion I think we voted on we've got to appoint people to sign checks these are payroll checks all kinds of accounts, payable which I'm going to give you in a sec right now usually you have the treasurer authorized the town clerk and a member of the select board the treasurer does most of them but if there's a problem then there are two other people available to do it we need to remove the current authorized signatures we need to do Barbara will walk us through it and I would like a motion to well first of all we need to talk about which of us would like to be the backup and then I would like a motion to appoint Teagan, Sandra, and the select board member to be authorized and then Barbara will take care of it any discussion on that can it be electronic no we're not currently set up for that that could be something you could discuss with the treasurer in a later date but we're not currently set up for that what's to do with this may I please it's very rare it would be when the treasurer is completely unavailable and the town clerk is completely unavailable during the years that we had a town clerk and a treasurer you were never called on it's like we're just never called on we've had to call on the select board over the last year maybe twice because Jeremy was out of the office and there our treasurer will be the road for long change she will still, during the years two and a half years that she worked remotely during COVID she did all checks so this would be very rare and there's only one signer on the checks we don't need two signatures we just are looking for backup seeing as I look right in Maple Corner and I'm usually right around the corner I would be willing to do that and run down the hill when needed have a strong opinion one way or the other but I would be willing to I think that delegation is important but I think some things it's just good to to have a member of the select board performing and if providing that backup second to the treasurer I think that's something more will you put that in the form of a motion please yeah I'm not sure it's a backup to a signatory no we need to the motion needs to authorize the town clerk the treasurer and Jamie on behalf of the select board to be authorized to sign and to remove the current authorized signatory signatories I would make a motion to remove the current signatories authorized signatories from community bank community bank at the recently appointed treasurer town clerk and Jamie as the backup signatories authorized signatories do we have a second any discussion all those in favor this is a little awkward but these are all the bills that have to be taken Barbara has put these together it's a whole packet of bills from the uniforms for the the road crew guys to paychecks for Barbara and the way they've always done this is we pass them around while we're in meetings and then we sign here and you'll see there's several packets and we have to sign each one Jamie and I have already done it because we were in the town office today I've got to pass these around and ask you guys to sign this don't we technically need just three we technically need only three so I'm going to hand them over to you and I'm sorry to do this I think that's something we need to talk about we want to keep doing it that way we've got big stamps it's not the act of signing I'm worried about I just want to correct that actually Wendy did all that that's the treasurer's job does all of this Wendy prepared all those packets and the auditors need to see three live signatures yes and it'll be Sandra will fix these in the future it'll be Sandra who will do this in the future okay oh Collie okay Bill LeFavre I think is next up there was an accident what about two weeks ago one of the town trucks in a very narrow point of the road they both stopped the town truck tried to go by this person hit Bill LeFavre's vehicle and did damage I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly there's an email that looks like this from our insurance company Denise filed the claim with our insurance company which is passive the municipal insurance company as Pam who is apparently the one who's on this case says in this email we are a consent coverage group and that means she makes a recommendation as she has in this email that we pay this we've got a thousand dollars deductible so this will come out of our budget the amount that in the that Bill got in his review is $540.80 so Pam needs us to just say yes for the nine minutes that we did this and then Barbara will let her know questions yes can I move to give permission to Barbara to contact passive and approve this expenditure any more discussion all those in favor aye I'm sorry who was the second George next up is talking about document sharing and at eight o'clock we're supposed to Joe will stand by to talk to us about the the horse issue Jordan can we actually do a 15 minute discussion on this or is it really a much longer discussion it needs to be a very brief discussion why don't you do it then go ahead so I've been trying to wrap my head around improvements standardization implement regarding email and other forms of communication it's hard to do that without being without having been appointed or any responsibility to do so so if everyone is comfortable with me continuing to beat the bushes a little bit to get better information already down the road and kind of valuating some options and like to bring those back for consideration as well as reach out to RB technologies and to get better services that they provide for the town and which may be built upon to kind of improve and centralize communications for us as a board as well as other town employees and maybe other committees as well so basically it's looking at like procuring Gmail locally administered Gmail accounts that are assigned to the town's domain that will come with a suite of other resources Outlook has a similar service that they provide we could bring it in-house there are a couple of ways that we could talk about it the costs are all pretty competitive it will likely come down to what our personal preferences are and another console that we would receive from RB and other folks who are familiar with it but I'm leaning towards a Gmail option I used Outlook before but Microsoft has made it so it's very easy to share documents unintentionally in some ways it's very intuitive in other ways that very intuitive operation kind of makes it messy especially if other folks are using it on the personal side so Gmail makes it a little easier to kind of segregate all of that and then we would have to decide how that gets administered so that there's probably not somebody from the select board who's doing all of the centralized administration and permissions for access and that sort of thing but we can kind of work through that more when there's greater detail and the idea is that we could probably move pretty quickly on that certainly want to I would think that we would try to move as quickly as possible so that we can kind of minimize the use of personal emails or establishing temporary temporary emails or holdover emails to kind of get us through that Questions for Jordan So we're talking about at atkalasbt.org or something like that So right now all of the Gmail accounts that are used for roles and positions within the town are more generic and individual or similar to what would be set up on the personal level but the downside is that the permissions for each of those is administered locally within those accounts and for security reasons and continuity reasons if it's much better practice to have that centralized through a more global administrative privilege and that would also include sharing restrictions and access restrictions for any kind of shared drive whether we choose to use the shared drive resources that would come with each one of with the new account basically is most familiar with how that gets administered I inherited an email account but it was 98% full and I'm willing to go in there and start deleting things but will you keep me posted on whether or not I will have more storage space for my clarity now Is the inbox full or is the it's probably everything There's like three pictures on there and there's not too many I don't think they can take most of the emails from you forever Let me let me look into that specifically just to see if there's a way to export it and we have an obligation to anybody who serves that has an obligation to keep records for I believe seven years either five or seven years And I wasn't going to willy-nilly No, I think there's a way that you'd be able to do like a mass export and create like an archive and then it would be safe to delete them from the local storage and then free up that space Another advantage for paying for the services and centralizing it comes with much greater storage capacity for all of that and most of these service providers have particular products and resources that are available for non-profits and municipalities so there are other new stuff that are using these things Do you know what is popular design? I do know No, my next one of my next steps is probably going to be to reach out to BLTC and ask what kind of best practices need to be considered about my initial kind of digging around and kind of berthogging on the subject is figure out whatever works for you and try to right size it to the best of your ability Most of them are fairly uniformly secure and frankly the central administration of the accounts like I've managed a job as the administrator, administrator of that account I get warnings of phishing emails that come in it automatically filters that kind of information out and there are much better protections for kind of flagging those types of things that could be security issues that you may not necessarily have eyes on if it's just a more generic process I just need to stop here for a second Joe asked me to text him about 10 minutes before we were ready for him and I just tried to do it and there's no service Can anybody text? I'm on wi-fi Oh, I should have gotten on wi-fi Do you have his number? I do Oh, thank you John John's doing it Just tell him about 10 minutes and then we'll text him again when we're ready He knows that was our deal I apologize for texting while you were talking but for trying to text Back to Jordan to this discussion Anybody have anything they want to talk about on this talk? I guess one thing that we talked about a little bit is my big thought here is that we do want to keep moving forward with this riskily I have a little concern about not having publicized ways for people in town to contact us for too long Do you think you'll be able to have a proposal for Sunday or for the following Monday? I think certainly by Sunday a lot of that will come into kind of we may be in a good position to take action on Sunday and setting up to actual accounts It takes a couple of hours as long as you have all the right connections and information to make those connections So not too concerned about that There is I think some discussion to be had around how many accounts how we set them up and who has the right to administer some of those accounts so that we have a comprehensive list because that's also going to influence the cost of any of those implementations Yeah So I think we could in the interim I do think it would be worth putting together a more generic either form on the website under the select board's main landing page or to create a hold over account just for contacting the select board that would likely go to Ann or making Ann's email address available No, I think Barbara can handle that We could set something up for Barbara They could go to her Can you write Barbara and then you could funnel them to the right people? Yeah I'd rather than not go to my assistant's email address if we could set up a select or an administrative email address I think they would be helpful to make it similar to the previous board's email so that people are familiar to form that and how those emails were structured What I don't know and maybe Johnny can speak to this I don't know if was there ever a more generic select board email that was created that was like callusbtjustselectboard.com So that's kind of what I had in mind setting something like that specifically up that we then put on the website immediately with right now the landing page for the select board has a preamble of how to get in touch with us and what types of things to get in touch with us about So I think we modify that as soon as possible on the website with that email address so that folks feel like they can reach out to us and then probably have that go to Ann and maybe we can have it forward We don't want to be careless like how that gets distributed for open meeting loss purposes but that should probably go to somebody and then that information can get filtered out and distributed from there but it would be its own email address that somebody would have to log into and check So at the moment on the website it lists all your names as the select board and it says in direct contact with them what we posted what's the sign and I have my current assistant telegram email address because the only email address on the select board page I can use it Thank you for clarifying Yeah so the question is could we just give Barbara a select board administrator email address instead of them all coming to me because she can then say oh these go to the town clerk and not bother us with them or the road crew or whatever and forward the ones that we should get to us until we get a board permanent system in place Oh sorry Just getting brought up the formatting until we get to the one form of the system what we use was CALS SP and then a select board administrator we could do CALS SP admin at Gmail as a first stab I'm hoping it's something that we can kind of move back pretty quickly and I also really think that there's all kinds of things to consider posting phone numbers and email addresses on websites there are very automated systems that can crawl websites automatically and pull those things and use them for spamming I don't want to kind of get a sense of how much of the volume of email what's our exposure to spam whether or not those email accounts when they are posted are getting picked up and spammed and we end spam yeah so it would be nice to make sure that we're maintaining accessibility and maintaining expectations of accessibility but not like going above and beyond to the extent that we open ourselves up too broadly to other kind of spam one of the things I think that I'll end with is phone numbers I think would fall into that this the makeup of this board has folks with cell phone number preferences and cell phone numbers that are also out of state numbers and anybody who's using a landline to call from from Calis may be subject to long distance fees for contacting us by those and those are our personal cell phone numbers so depending on who we have for a phone service as a town we may very inexpensively be able to set up kind of alias numbers that are local so that folks in the town wouldn't be subject to long distance fees also that's kind of that local feel and then those can be likely just push automatically to our phones without going through any extra steps to arrange or anything like that but phone numbers aren't posted currently are they previously they were posted with individual email addresses for individual cell board numbers and their preferred phone number I'm not familiar with what our obligation is to actually close those things we are not obligated yeah so I'm proposing that maybe we strike a balance and just kind of put together some thoughts about how we'd like to funnel those inquiries and how we might be able to limit the amount of exposure to spam and that sort of thing as well as standardize how those email accounts are set up for some of the subcommittees and provide resources at the subcommittee level that can be utilized in a more centralized fashion so the question is then what are we going to do for the next week for the next week I think I'll look into creating an account that will go to I'll provide Barbara with access to and then we'll probably re-edit the select board page saying that we're working on a more long-term and sustainable so I can put together the verbiage for that and we'll try to put that on the website as soon as possible with the update and either Barbara or I can post that okay your conversation started with I believe asking for a motion to appoint you as the select board representative doing all this work I don't know that I need to be appointed but I think it would be worth authorizing me to I'm not going to be taking any action on behalf of the board I just need to I guess just be recognized as kind of a point person on the project so I can reach out to RB would somebody like to make a motion I move that we authorize Jordan to represent the select board in setting up emails and cybersecurity e-mails and document sharing system oh that sounds great wherever you got that I think so so Gabrielle is making a motion to authorize Jeremy Keyes to represent the select I'm sorry Jordan he's to represent the select board to set e-mails and document sharing systems discussion anybody all in favor and then this discussion will be continued on Sunday am I ready to move on great thank you Jordan good work and that the next thing we need to do is talk to talk to our attorney about the ongoing court issues with the horse running in Calis you have received several documents and just to recap there has been we impounded the horses we took we took the the owner to court the judge issued a decision which authorized us to establish remedial items that the that she had to do before she could get her horses back Joe did such a thing and now her she is contesting our authority to set up the exact remedial requirements that we did that's a very short summary Joe is standing by to talk to us we need to have a discussion about it he needs us to authorize him by the 21st to respond to that if we decide we want to talk about content I guess we'd better go into the executive session if we're willing to just talk about it in broad strokes talk to Joe at that level I asked John to come because John's been the liaison so far on this and we need to discuss whether we would like him to continue on that role or whether one of us might like to take over but in any case I think he could serve as a valuable resource to us so with that are we ready to call Joe John you just I think I think I might have decided I was a little unclear reading kind of through the content about where we are it seems like we were the court decided in our favor in part to to issue kind of remedial action or take remedial action or request remedial action and we're now in an appeal process that horses are still impounded and there are still costs of truing associated with that so by the way FYI the locations of the horses the locations have been kept confidential with the agreement of the court for reasons that probably we could discuss in the executive session I would strongly encourage you to do that in the executive session so you have the freedom to have open conversations with the attorney but generally Joe needed I thought he filed the response to the appeal no he has not he needs us to authorize him tonight oh okay I worked on that with him oh okay but just so you know remedial actions if you will they did call them remedial actions or use term remedial involved shelter structure fencing and it's not like you're fencing cattle because there's a stallion involved that's a whole different ball wax and the town has on an ongoing basis engaged a highly competent vet that is steeped in horse veterinary care and with regard to the remedial fencing and sheltering and water and all that it was all vetted with the state veterinary at the Institute of Agriculture so I don't know how much the attorney for the defendant if you will knows about that we checked in with the state at the Institute of Agriculture I think they think some of our approaches were in the extreme can we go ahead and call Joe now or are you all ready for that and then John I mean we'll all it's a topic I don't know if you'll be able to talk to that attorney he just wants right now to just bring us up to speed and ask for the authorization if we get into any content and you guys can decide we can just say Joe go and do it we authorize you or we can go into executive session and we can talk content and then we need to do that privately are you comfortable with that otherwise we can go into executive session now are you comfortable starting the discussion outside the executive session yes can you thanks I'm so sorry I thought I thought I just wanted to make sure that you know that the defendants name first name has an s instead of a z because I saw it written somewhere so anybody take care thank you thank you very much oh nice Bartlett this is Tegan's oh he knows who hi Joe hi we're still in open session so I just want you to know that when we've started a discussion John Braven as you know is here we've started a little bit of a discussion and we're all feeling like we've kind of got what's going on so would you just tell us what you would like from us I will first nice to meet everyone by the phone thank you for taking the time I know you've had a long meeting and thanks for reviewing the background on this calendar and as you may have already been aware the calendar is involved in some ongoing litigation and most recently provided to an attorney a notice directing what remedial actions she needs to take in order to have the horses return to her we provided that notice to her on January 18th and about 30 days later her lawyer filed a motion with the court asking the court to review the notice that we have provided and arguing that certain of the directions that we've given her were beyond the scope of our authority under the ordinance of the court's order so we are now in a position where we need to respond to that the response is due a week from tomorrow on the 21st and since everyone on the board is new to this matter I didn't want to presume what I should do I thought I should get confirmation that the board wants me to file a response and sort of continue along the course of actions that the county has been pursuing thus far Questions for Joe at this point? Okay, do you guys want to talk about the content and go into executive session and talk about content or can we just authorize you to go for it? You can authorize me to proceed. I have based on my prior understanding I had already begun an outline a response and I am hopeful that I will have a draft available to board members who want to review it by the end of this week and I can email that to the board I would only ask that if any board members have comments that they contact me directly so that we don't inadvertently have a meeting by each mail and certainly open answering any questions responding to any comments to anyone might have but really what we are trying to do at this point is just have the court either rule that this motion that has been filed by this yet is effectively out of order out of order at this time or the draft that she needs to comply with the terms of the notice of remedial action and so I do know that unless board members have questions I don't know that I really need much more than just confirmation that I have the authority to go forward and prepare that to respond and ultimately get it filed. Clarifications? The only comment would be I think it's very appropriate to proceed with a response where we're kind of in a requires clarification and an issue that needs closure and we need to continue to follow this process and a response seems like a very natural next step. I understand and I agree like I said I just didn't want to move anything if you have an opportunity to proceed with all of this. Anybody else? Would anybody want to go into executive session to discuss things that we should not do in open session? Are you comfortable? Are you ready to vote now? I would like to go into executive session briefly I think to just talk through I think the rest of the discussion a little bit so without getting too far into the weeds on the content but I think content will come up in that conversation but I don't I'm not interested in lingering quite concise but it's not something I can oh okay no that's fine that's fine and would you I would like to invite John to executive session as well. All right I'll take a motion to go into is sorry what did you say Joe? I asked if you have the motion that you need to go into executive session. Not yet. I would accept a motion to go into executive session for the purpose of discussing next steps on the shed v town of callous um uh legal matter and we'll do that under section 313A E and F about pending civil litigation and attorney-client confidential matters. How's that Joe? That's good there's only one other part of that that you need to do. Before you vote on that motion you need to find that I forgot to acknowledge would place the town as a potential disadvantage by the closing litigation strategy and potentially uh confidential attorney-client communication. Then we have to do that in a vote? That would be the first vote. Oh okay. Enter executive session to um consider pending litigation and to receive um confidential attorney-client communication. It's a two step problem. Yeah. Barbara has a question. Either need to say that real slow or send us the text of that motion. I can give it to you slowly so you'll uh so you'll get it. Okay. The first part is to find that criminal your general public knowledge would clearly place the town as a potential disadvantage. At what disadvantage? At a potential disadvantage. Thank you. Okay. By disclosing litigation and confidential litigation. Too fast Joe. Too fast. Litigation strategy. Okay. Yes. Confidential attorney-client communication. The first part of the motion is that you would someone would make that motion someone else second and you would vote on that that's part one. Okay. Will somebody please move that so moved. Do we have a second? Second. Okay Barbara. Okay. Can I just read it back one more time uh premature general public knowledge would clearly place the town at substantial disadvantage by disclosing litigation strategy and confidential attorney communications. Perfect. Okay. Any discussion? All those in favor? Okay. Okay. Now. And now part part two of the motion now is uh considering what you said earlier and is to end your executive session to consider pending litigation and to receive confidential attorney-client communication. What was the word after pending litigation? Yes pending litigation and to receive confidential attorney-client communication. Okay. Can I read that back to you please to enter executive session to consider pending litigation and to receive confidential attorney-client communication. Correct. Oh so Joe we don't. Thank you would move and second and vote on that part two motion. So we don't actually have to cite the specific statute. We just can use the words. Is that right? We do want to find um sometimes we respect the statute at short hands but uh using the word make it clear that everyone understand what the reason is. Okay. Will somebody please move that? So moved. Second. You pick any of them Barbara they all second it. It's now 840. And that's the last thing you would want to do is just and you should invite into the executive session whoever you think is there for the executive session so it would be presumably John Gravan and me. Ah and do does that have to be part of the motion? No. It's good to have that in the restroom at the minute. Okay. So I would like to invite Joe and John into the executive session. Do we have to move that? Can that just that's just done. Okay let's vote on the motion. All in favor? Aye. And John and Joe have been invited in so um you'll just go back and can you turn your camera probably on Sunday. Okay. Okay thanks Joe. Okay I'll entertain a motion to come out. All in favor? Aye. This was a motion to come back into session. Yeah. The second is 910 911. Okay. Who made the motion? Jordan made the motion and Anne seconded. Anne too. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Would somebody like to make a motion? Decide. Do you have it? I think I have it. Go ahead. I would like to move to authorize town attorney McLean to respond to the motion. I'm sorry. To respond to the motion. Okay. To respond to the motion. To the motion. No. To the filing. To the filing that Elizabeth Shed's attorney made to the court based on our discussions in executive session. Thank you. Superior court. Yes. Superior court not in executive session. They made to superior court. Based on the Sorry. Based on the Yeah. Superior court based on discussions in executive session. Okay. Everybody got that? We have a second. I'll second. Discussion. All in favor. Okay. Motion passes. Now were we going to vote on yes would somebody like to make a motion about appointing liaisons? Do you vote on liaisons? Or are we talking about liaisons as liaisons? John's going to be special assistant. We're going to get him a badge. That works for me. It works for you too. I'm going to work for you as a Yeah, I think so. I'm just thinking through the logistics of the communication. But again, I don't see how there would be an issue. Yeah. Yeah. I think you'd be a good team. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'll make a motion to appoint Jordan and Ann to be special liaisons on behalf of the board. Hold on. This is cryptic to me. What you've just been saying. You're making a motion to appoint Jordan and Ann to as what? To work with the town attorney on behalf of the board. And to make decisions when there's no time to consult the rest of the board. Okay. To work with the town attorney on behalf of the board. On this case. On the shed V town of Calis Jordan keys and Ann to work with town attorney general playing on the shed V town case and to make decisions when this one is not available. Yes. I feel like that last part is totally no, you don't know. Yeah. There are very good situations where they would be making decisions. Strike that last class. So you just appointed them to be late. Yes. And I don't know how official we have to be about appointing you special assistant. Yeah. Is this a separate motion? I don't think that needs to be I don't think that needs to be okay. I'm not clear is John the main person talking to? No, no. He's just available. He's just available. He's just available. I don't know the point. John Frank. No, no, no. Okay. I do a question I just want to know is there a record somewhere of all of the neighbors who had to deal with this situation before it got to the point of passing an ordinance like is there a really good written record of that somewhere? Well, there was Wilson deleted it. Who's Wilson, by the way? Wilson was our constable for a very long time. And animal control officer. And animal control officer. And he was actually very well trained. He was really good at his job. But when he retired from it at the end of whatever he got was two years ago, he decided to delete all the emails. And that's why we need really good emails and record retention and stuff. But we have a lot of it because the emails were to us. And Denise, that has all been forwarded to Joe. Joe has all that. But he never constructed like a timeline as a work product? Upon his exit, he summarized the history in an email. And I find that and send it to Gustavus. Well, you probably submitted that to the court. Yeah, that was in the record. And it was testimony proof on that. And I'll just say frankly that it's a good thing he wrote it down and it's a good thing we had copied because Wilson ended up being a witness for the mischief. And his testimony directly contradicted his emails. And so on cross examination, he would say, oh, yeah. Yeah, so also what came out of court was that at the same time he was animal control officer in the hospital, he was being paid by Carl Shedfather to help assist his with the horses. So it was a very uncomfortable court hearing for a lot of reasons. Really, I'm sure they don't understand. So it just got weird and uncomfortable. But there is record. And that is in court. We have a motion on the table. We do not have a second. I made the motion, so I can't say. I will second that. All right, further discussion on the motion? Remind me of the motion. Just appointing you two. Is it appointing or? Barbara, will you read the motion? Yeah, appoint Jordan Keyes as liaison to the, oh, no. Jordan Keyes and Andrew and as liaisons to work with the town attorney on the Shed v. Town case. And that's been moved and seconded. Further discussion? All in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. And John, thank you for being standing by. I like the end, but she goes, end to end to end. Yeah. I really worked this for you. Yeah, you're welcome. Happy to help. I really, I'm really sorry. I did miss those two items. I think they'll both be very fast crack sealers. Pardon me? Got all those crack sealers. Yes, right. OK, so the first one we'll bring up is that roads. So we put 15,000 in the budget to do the pavement crack sealant. And they have put that out to bid. They've got a bid for 14,400. And they would like just to authorize that. Usually the road commissioners do that, but we don't have one right now. Something we'll talk about on Sunday. I suppose Rick is officially the road commissioner. But Rick asked them to just run it by us because he was trying to be sure that it was OK. So, any questions? So I'm not sure if I'm up to speed on the minutes here, because I think you're talking to a group of people who knows what you're talking about. So. Well, we're going to make a motion. OK, OK, OK. And that's all you need to put in. OK, thank you. OK. I actually wrote it down this time so that it could be fast. I would entertain a motion to move to authorize acceptance of the bid for $14,400 to be expended from the highway department budget for pavement crack sealing. Work for you guys? OK. Barbara, move to authorize the expenditure. Oh, you could just email that to me. If you've already gotten it all written. If you could just email it to me, I'll drop it into the minutes. Would that be OK? That's fine. Thank you. Second? Sorry, we need to move it. Who? I'm just going to move it. Discussion. Yes, thank you. Discussion? OK, all in favor? OK, last thing is the, go ahead. It's not going to be the last. You've got two more things. Two more? Yeah, OK. OK, the Woodbury Fire Department, I don't remember if I explained that. I sent some stuff to you. They are in, they have, they are going to build a new fire station. The fire station is going to cost 1.3 million. They would like, they would like to send letters and request that these, our senators, Welsh and Sanders, use their senatorial earmarks, I learned today that they're called, to give us 15%, to give the Woodbury Fire Department as a grant, 15% of that amount. They wrote this, one of the guys wrote this letter, I think it needs a little bit of work, that we would send to the senators. They said it needs to be sent by Thursday. So what we need to do, if we want to send such a letter, is I guess authorize one of us to clean it up a little bit. You want to take a minute to read it, or are you all OK? It's not a commitment. It's just a, it's an out and out grant. It's a letter of support. It's a letter of support. Yeah. I mean, under ordinary circumstances, I'd want to think about all the other things we might want to support. But since it's the end of the year, we're not going to figure out anything else in the next couple of weeks, so. We're concerned about equitability between, you know, the services, if we've got a similar request before the end of the year, there's no reason not to, not to support them in their endeavors. I think for my perspective, but I definitely think of... Yeah, I should say, like, how much money are you asking for, for example, are you? Yeah, I think so. So the guy that sent it to us is Norm Etkind. I talked to him. He's working on it a little more. But I think if you authorize one of us to just clean it up with his help, we can do it. It's mostly that last paragraph that needs to be fixed. So, are you thinking for a volunteer to clean it up? Sure, I'll take a volunteer if somebody wants to. I'd be willing to do it too if nobody else wants to. Yeah, I don't mind. I mean, it's approximately this length. Just tightening it up. Yeah, I mean, support for the earmark. I mean, I would... You can clean that piece up a little bit. What they may have directed spending. Is that what it is? Not the earmark, no. I know. And I think, well, you have Norm's contact information. I called him and he answered right away. And you can work together on that. And I think then what we would need is a motion to support the letter and to authorize Anne to clean it up and sign it on our behalf. Since I can share with you all who for it. Well, no, because we want to be able to circulate. Oh, check, check, check, check. So, we have to authorize somebody to make... We could, we could authorize two people. Gabrielle, you could take a look at it. Anne has recently changed. I thought the issue was just that when you reply, you don't reply at all, but you can add comments. So, if she's not looking for approval from all of us, but she just wants to run it by us. You could certainly send her comments. That's, you're right, I'm sorry. That's correct. But we can't all... But we would still need to authorize her to sign it. I don't think we can do that via email. That's doing the town business. Yes, we would have to make that authorization now, but we could send input. I'm fine with authorizing and to sign it, it would be nice to get a final look at what is going on. Okay. So, would you be able to work with Norm and get us something maybe tomorrow night or the next day so we would have time to respond? Tomorrow night, probably Wednesday morning. Okay. And our between snowstorms and doctors. But, does that work for everybody? All right. Will somebody make a motion to that effect? How about this? Authorize Anne Thulen to write a letter of support for federal funds to support the construction of a new fire station for the Woodbury Fire Department and to sign on behalf of the select board. So, I'll send you that one too, Barbara. Okay, thank you. For the discussion, all in favor. Who seconded? I do. Thank you. All in favor? I do. Okay. And the last thing is agenda. Right, Barbara? Yes. Which is, does this body want to ask Orca to videotape Sunday's six hour session? Which is going to be just the best summer. Everybody's going to go to the bathroom. I think considering it is largely a bring us up to speed working session, I don't think it's probably necessary for Orca to participate in that particular one. Yeah. We all agree. I'm just posing the question. I just need to know whether to book or not. Not unless they come with couches and comfortable chairs. We'll just sit in our six hour session. Oh my God. I'm sorry. Any further discussion on that? Okay, I agree. I'm okay with that. I'm sorry, I'm not clear on who, so you're going to send me the vergerage on that last I will. Emotion. Who made the motion to second it? You made it? Yeah, I did. And I second it. Thank you. We need a motion on this one. You got the direction? Okay. Okay. Can we go to content of that meeting? I have done, I meant to send you this and I forgot. I would sit, given the way this one's gone, I probably am not allocating enough time for each of these things, but I was thinking of about 45 minutes on adopting rules of procedure, talking about who's going to take the lead on which issues, having our document and email sharing discussion. And we need to, we have a long list of our, I thought part of that meant each for those three things. No, this is for the whole thing. That's wrong, isn't it? No. It's going to take a lot more time. Well, this is what I see that we need to do in terms of getting ourselves organized. And the other thing, and maybe we don't need to do this that morning, but we have a long list of people, we don't have people, but positions to fill, like planning commission, animal control officer, and so on. And at some point we've got it soon. We have to get hold of that list, Barbara has it. And think about how to recruit people for those positions and make a plan. And I was hoping we would have time to dig into that. Who's the gentleman who said the thing about communication with the green sweatshirt, did you? Did anybody catch his name? What did he say? He said you need longer, more detailed minutes because of the message. Oh, that was Scott. That's Scott's message. Okay. Yeah, we're... No, no, I'm just... That's right, we need to have that discussion to what we want to do about the minutes. Well, I think we have a lot of stuff to kind of just get caught up on that are pretty important. Well, I recognize that all the appointments are important. I think they are kind of falling at a lower priority. And one of the things that I think would be worth having a discussion about is committee collaboration and some policy work on kind of standards of minutes across our group, their groups, how they're getting posted, where they're getting posted, and it'd be nice to put that into some of the appointment conversations. But you're saying we won't have time to do that Sunday or you're saying that should be an agenda in fact? I think that should be an agenda. I think it'd be good to review maybe the list of appointments and if there are ones that we can start soliciting because we should probably move forward with those. So how about if we devote an hour to this discussion and we'll prioritize things and get through it as far as we can? And I think priority is the document. That's one of the priorities anyway. The piece that you started tonight. And meeting minute. And strategy. Sorry, what, document? Document sharing. Document sharing and emails and all that. I'm sorry, what was that second one, Jamie? Oh, minutes. Minutes. OK. And agendas. Minutes, that's one discussion, yeah. Let's see. Rules, procedure, we have to get those in place. So maybe that's number three. I'd say we should probably just open that, just getting much dialogue around that. I'm having a hard time. Oh, I'm sorry. As you're saying, maybe you can have the voices would drop me. Do I need to be taking minutes? I don't think so, no. I think we'll just call it a discuss agenda. Yeah, and then I'll do up an agenda. Because I'm getting this. So may I? So one thing at some point, this board will need to approve the town meeting minutes, not priority. You've got a year to get that done. But that's over the side of it. But we might want to try to get this meeting minutes approved, because it's from this meeting's minutes being approved that I can go to the bank and get Jamie and Tegan and Sandra set up for check authorization. They're going to do that from the approved minutes of this meeting. So we'll put that at the very top. Yeah. OK. And then probably followed by rules and procedures. OK. And then documents. I think the email communication and shared stuff is going to be a fairly great conversation. Oh, OK. I think so. We can get into whatever needs anybody wants to get into. But I imagine at that point it's likely going to be a proposal and a conversation around budget and et cetera, et cetera. OK. So other things that I had, and you may have more, is talk about who's going to take the lead on various issues. But maybe we want to wait till we understand the issues better before we do that, unless anybody knows. One of the things actually, well, we'll talk about roads. So we can think about who wants to take the lead on roads when we get to that discussion. But other than that, I think the rest can wait. So OK. Were you going to have, for example, with grants, were you going to have Donna Fitch come in and talk about grants? Was that part of it? Was we bring and learn consulting experts, so to speak? Yeah. That I was, let me see now. We've made so much progress on the personnel thing that I had kind of bumped that one down now. Because I think that one's good for a while. But we are going to have to have a whole financial discussion. And I was thinking we'd talk about grants and that. I'm thinking we do this organizational stuff. We do a public hearing for an hour. Then we do roads. And then we do finances. And that's a very full day. Are we going to have a working lunch or just a lunch break? And are we having food? No, no, this is really important. I should have brought my dinner. And yeah, we should talk. What is the rule about food here, actually? OK. I was thinking of about a half hour break for lunch. And we're getting pizza from the whammy bar. And actually, Barbara's going to be in charge of food. She's going to get us some drinks and pizza and some snacks. I will make sure you got snacks throughout the morning, snacks throughout the afternoon, both healthy and not healthy. And beverages. So there will be things here for you guys to nosh on throughout the day in addition to the pizza from whammy, which was what they chose to go with. So I think you'll be OK. We'll try to take care of you. Is that OK with everybody? That's great. Yeah, pizza. That's good. We were thinking of, Jamie was suggesting a vegetarian pizza and a non-vegetarian pizza. Do we have vegetarian? I mean, I don't know. I have other drinks at the area, but I'll bring some pizza. Yeah. And so I just want to try to understand you're going to be feeding the seven people. Is that correct? These five plus the rows who will be working all day for you. And as we did, stay all day. So that's all. But then that's all we'll be feeding that day, right? If other people are in attendance, no food. They're not eating that. No food for them. No food for you. Oh, boy. Yeah. I think we should probably just put in a schedule kind of an adjournment, but a lunch break. A lunch break for select board and folks who are recording or something. You mean tell them that we've got food, but we're not feeding them? Well, they have lunch break food not provided. Because the food, yeah. I don't even know that we necessarily need to do that. It's our meeting to conduct business and we're inviting participation by anybody who shows up for an agenda item that they'd like to contribute to. So presumably it would show up to whatever relevant topic they're going to show up to and we're there to work through our business. So I don't think there's really any obligation other than to try to get a good schedule and try to keep to it as realistically as possible and make sure we're taking care of our needs somewhere in the middle of the day or throughout the day. OK, so we got the organizational part. I was hoping, and again, I scheduled what? Half an hour for this, which is probably wrong. Not less than half an hour. Executive session with town attorney to get briefed on Curtis Pond issues and road crew union negotiations. How long do you think we need for that? Is that actually the best work that the town attorney is supposed to do? Yeah, Joe asked for this. He wants to go into executive session and tell us all the stuff that's been going on in executive session that the town is all wondering about regarding Curtis Pond and the union negotiations. They just want to bring us up to speed on that. And after that, we can choose when we want to go into executive session, but we have to go into executive session to find out what happened in executive session. And as part of that, we're going to have to decide what to do with Jamie. Right, should I give my... So I am vice president of the Curtis Pond Association and have been part of this effort since the beginning. I chair the fundraising committee. My thought is that... I've been thinking a lot about the potential of a... Conflict of interest. ...which the word conflict or an appearance of a conflict of interest. I feel confident in my ability to, you know, act in the best interest of the town. I would like to offer that I will abstain from any votes related to the Curtis Pond Dam issue. But I would like to remain a part of the conversations and discussions of the issue because I believe that having my background knowledge and information will be beneficial to the conversations. Are you fair about this? I think at some point you're going to need to, you know, state to everybody that I have... Yes, yes. But be very clear that you feel you can, on behalf of the town in an unbiased way. And actually, the law is it's up to Jamie to decide. We cannot force her to do anything. And I think there was a previous agenda item of updating the conflict of interest policy for the town that I think we should visit sooner than later. There was one, I was fairly complete. I think it's a matter of kind of refining it, including it, but I just don't quote me on this. But I think there's a requirement to, a statutory requirement to say why you're recusing yourself, if you are recusing yourself from a particular issue. She's actually not recusing herself. No, no, I'm just saying as part of the conflict of interest policy, previously when other folks have recused themselves, they haven't always done that consistently. And I think that at the very least is important context for those conversations. And so, anyway, all to say that I think that's one of the policies that should be on the short list of, probably not, I wouldn't propose doing it for that particular reason. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. List's all over the place. Can I ask a question? Did we authorize a slack work order release insurance payment to Bill and Dave? We did. We did. But Barbara's going to all do it. We authorize Barbara. Yeah, many, many moves. All right. Then I was thinking, we're going to have to do that somehow. This may be too much. How long would you like to allocate for executive session on that? Is he on retainer or is it? That's something, oh my gosh. I'll share that with you another time. But they've done way, way over budget. They budgeted $10,000 for attorney fees. And as of right now, with still four months to go, four months, a couple of months anyway, in the fiscal year they've gone to, what was it, $80,000? $88,000 over. Is there a break up in what that is? It's all in the packet. Sorry, there's just the packet. No, no, no, what Jamie means is... The board orders, there's signs. Well, all you're going to see in that one is... This month. This month was the most recent month and I need to all rise. If you guys want an Italian report on legal fees, we would ask Wendy to provide that to you. I think that might be useful. Where is the packet? The board orders. So they signed things and passed them down. Oh, okay. Do you want this back right now? No, never mind. I just was going to show it to folks. If you want the envelope. But the short answer is, he charges by the minute. For every month we talk about it. And I think that the fellows with the road through, I think that piece is going to simmer all the way down. I don't think he's going to need a whole lot for... It's lovely. I think it's changed and great. I think it's going to be fun. And then the courtesy fund, maybe we could try to think of a time frame, because yes, it's going on and on. I think we just had a $100 conversation with Joe just now. That was about half an hour. Yeah, he charges $200 an hour. I think it would be helpful to work with Wendy. I don't know if it's realistic to have like an overview of how those charges have been broken out. But it came in one of the emails we mentioned that it was like fairly nominal fees for the shed case. And I find that hard to believe. So it would be good to see what the accounting is for all of the different issues. Just so that there's some transparency there from the town's perspective, but also in the future as we look at other issues and what are potential triggers. Also, is there going to be Joe at the courtesy fund issue or the other lawyer? He is going to want to bring in Bob Fletcher, who is the bond attorney. And then we're going to, so we're going to get charged for both of them. And they want to come in person and they will charge us half. They charge us $100 an hour for travel time. Couldn't we not have them on Sunday and still learn what we need to learn about Curtis Pond and the road crew? We can learn what the Curtis Pond Association can tell us, but they haven't been in the executive sessions. The only people who have would be other select board members and the attorneys. My concern at this point is that we've got a number of issues that are down the road. And we need to get brought up to speed and frankly trained on whatever those issues are and there's a learning cost that's going to be associated with that. So I'm not sure, be comfortable with signing, including them in there for financial reasons at this point because we at the very least need to be brought up to speed to where everything is. Including the attorneys, I'm sorry? I think we need to include the attorneys in the initial conversations before we can start investigating whatever our options are. Would it make sense? Particularly on the bonding side, I don't have any experience. Sandra has done municipal bonds before, so that is helpful. Would it be helpful to have an executive session with one or more former select board members to get their perspective, their interpretation of what's been told to them in the executive session to give us a general background so that we don't have to be asking really basic questions to the attorneys I would prefer at this point hearing the straight debriefing from the attorneys before inviting the other commentary. We can always go back and do that, but there's a certain amount of just, I'd like to hear what the attorneys' presentations are on these matters. I said that I wouldn't have to. I'm just wondering if you would want to consider what you can see here rather than having to break out your executive sessions during this six-hour workday. If you could book those with the attorneys those executive sessions one night next week and not make it be part of the long six-hour workday with people having to step in and out of the executive session, in and out of the executive session. And then maybe they wouldn't come in person if it was on a Monday night. They really want to see us in person. They're going to push for it. We can tell them no. They work for you. I'm sorry. That's what I'm saying. We can tell them no, but they want to. They want to meet us face-to-face. Yeah. And I would just say counterpoint to George's observation is I feel like we'd get more straight-dope from, say, Mark Mali than we would from the lawyers. But Mark wasn't in the executive sessions. He was. He was. Right. Got it. And I would want to handle them at least separately just because having a very large true conversation is going to take longer. So I think there would be some cost efficiency to splitting those up if we're going to care from folks who are involved in previous life work and lawyers who are probably trying to deal with this. OK. So if we wanted to do something next week, so between Monday we'd have to be, like, on Wednesday or something like that. Do you guys want to do that? If we can get them to talk to us just for the purpose of going into executive session to learn about the Curtis Pawn damage. I'm going to be traveling Tuesday through Thursday. I mean, back late Thursday night. So Monday would be my only option for, I guess, Friday. It's going to be kind of tight week. How about just have the next regular meeting? So the objection to doing it in the six-hour meeting is just the, sorry. I'm not clear what the objection is. Well, I think the logistics of, I mean, if I was in and out of an executive session, people are here or not here but by having an executive session during the week and the evening one might not have to have them travel. I guess I really want to do that. But in theory we could have them on the phone. We could be a tighter, more focused, get the skinny and move on. I mean, I guess we run the risk if they come on Sunday and retreat. I think they could be waiting and, you know. For both the executive sessions at the very beginning, your first hour at the very end, at that point your recruiting secretary would know when to arrive and when she's dismissed. She wouldn't have to be sitting around with your painter to be sitting around while you're in the executive session if you want to do it on Sunday. Well, can we just table that decision for the moment and I'll give you the rest of what I was thinking about and then we can circle back to this. Does that make sense? So, since we didn't get to do the public input portion I was hoping we could do an hour and I would ask people to focus on three questions. What issues do you think are high priority for the select board to address? Who should we hear from or consult with on those issues and are there other lower priorities that the select board should address to try to focus what happens? I was thinking of an hour on that where people would come and we would ask them to sign up if they wanted to speak and then we'll divide the time between them, among them. I was just concerned that doing it on a Sunday feels like hiding it or something and I replied only to Anne on that because my concern is about that because of the whole content thing with talking to everybody. So, I don't know. I would think that we would do it again another time and this would take the pressure so that not everybody wanted to come. Do you feel pressure to have the public input? No. What I think is if 30 people show up, we're going to have to give everybody two minutes and I would rather, you know, 15 showed up now and 15 showed up another time. That's what that was my concern. I'm hoping that folks recognize the kind of extenuating circumstances and the kind of scope of outstanding business and see that doing... I'm having a special meeting on a Sunday to kind of act as a debriefing opportunity and efficient standpoint. Just kind of recognizing that it's not some sort of subversive attempt to dissuade participation but as a really efficient way for us to get up to speed as quickly as possible and identifying what the priorities are. Everybody I've talked to has said that's a great idea. Yeah. So I'm not hearing anything negative on that. Then I was thinking about an hour and a half or so on roads and that we would have one or two members of the road crew just come and talk to us for about half an hour or 20 minutes about what they do and what their concerns are and what they would like to work with us and that sort of thing. Then... Is that another time? I wonder? Especially with the... Are they going to talk about the Virginia Union issue? Well, I was going to say at least prior they weren't able to... I think they had a previous posture that they didn't meet with select board members without the representation present. Oh, I've already talked to Tyler about it. He said he would go... He was fine with that. We talked to him a little bit about the Union and said it's going to be a while before we can get to it. He said that's okay. I don't worry about it. So I think we've at least got a little time to establish a relationship and figure things out. Then I wanted to... I was thinking of an hour or so with Rick and Toby. Rick has been acting road commissioner. He particularly wants to talk about some areas that are of concern like the Moscow Woods Bridge. Just bring us up to speed on the things that they're dealing with. Toby has been the grants administrator. He stopped doing that when last fall. In September. Nobody's picked that up. Toby has agreed to if we would want him to come back and pick it up again and get that part of the road budget stuff in shape. So he would talk to us about the grants that are outstanding, other revenue sources, the overall highway budget. How he might work with us and maybe make a proposal to us. So that's... maybe that's two hours. This is probably going way over six hours. Every Sunday. Yeah. Yeah, do it every Sunday. Do it every Sunday. And then budgets. Wendy has offered... Wendy is the number one woman. She's offered to come and spend an hour or so with us going through financial statements, walking us through the budget, showing us how to read the statements and just talking about how we would work with... Well, it wouldn't be her so much anymore. It would be Sandra. She'll come too and participate in this discussion. So I think we've got probably more than an hour there. So my thing about that is I feel like maybe the other stuff is more important, like the road people. And so if you need to cut time, I would suggest we just do that during one of our regular meetings, the budget walk-through stuff. Wendy really was anxious that we'd learn how to read those financial statements right away. So maybe we could at least just do that piece. Because she said she could do that in half an hour. And she would do it with her Molly. Yes. I agree. I feel less pressure on the finance side. The budget was freshly passed and we're presumably in a fairly comfortable position to end out the year. Okay, so try to cut that one down a little bit and really have a good discussion about the roads then. All right. And what about then let's go back to executive session. You want to try to jam some of that into as much as it pains to say that we should I think there's probably some efficiency to do that at the end of the meeting. We're all going to be probably exhausted. But I think that our week so is on association presentation on the agenda. No, I didn't have that on the agenda. I was thinking that would be the next meeting. Although they've kind of a lot of information to get sorted out and organized. So I think maybe table that. Except for the executive session stuff. Easy, correct. Okay, so executive session last. Or first. Oh, you wouldn't do that first before we organized? We could. The only thing about last is I give it a 90% likelihood that we'll go late. These done today and if they walk, if they come either way they're sitting around waiting for us to be ready. It might be worth having them at the beginning. It's going to be a nice good task sticking to it. To me it's a kind of ballooned because we had a lot of stuff and the scope of the conversations kind of cut out. This is the first time we've all met. I haven't talked to anybody about Sandra's proposal prior to tonight and it's a lot of money. So I would have like to have a much longer conversation about it honestly. I know it's just really important to move on it. And it's an interim. We wouldn't have done it that way if it weren't interim. We would have advertised it and interviewed people. I think we need to approve the minutes and go through the organizational stuff. But I think that can be a fairly quick one. We could do the executive session immediately following that. We could do that and then do the roads. It's just going to be so deflating. Wait, what's going to be deflating? Starting the day talking about legal issues and being caught on speed How can we limit their time? Like how can we be strict with them about time? How can we be strict with them? I would further ask how can we be strict with ourselves. Last questions. The first obvious one is they don't problem here. They need to do it by phone. We can make them, we can tell them to do that if you want. I guess maybe the thing to do is just tell them we're concerned about their time and we just really need to be efficient with time. That way if they want to come in person and they think that's important to meet us which, you know, I get that I just want them to be forward. Can we ask them to propose a sub agenda or organize a list of topics that they're going to talk about? Two topics. Or we can even say to what extent you want to get into each of those topics. Well, maybe we could say we don't want to hear about the union right now. What do you think about that, Ann? I don't think it's going to be a major hassle for them. Yeah, because they just stick to the bond issues because I don't know anything about it or that the town owns it or like so many things I do not understand about it. One of the things we're going to need to decide is whether the CPA has offered to give us their their bond attorney and we need to decide whether we want to do that and share with them or whether we want to stay with ours and let them have theirs. We need to have that discussion at some point. It'll be helpful to meet with the CPA bond attorney before we make that decision. Of course, yeah. Well, I think that really we're not going to have the roads particularly the employment conversation related to the roads. I think what we're going to do is is already engaged and willing to come and have a chat and Rick and Toby are those those are important conversations. I think to have we can table the legal conversation and then just really leave the legal executive session relative to the bonds work and then use that to inform a dialogue with the CPAs. Now I do have the bond attorney did send that to me it's a memo that he sent to the select board. I didn't share it with you because I wanted to hear whether or not we were going to share with Jamie first because they did not share that with Mark. He doesn't know what's in it. Well, he does know what's in it but he doesn't actually know the details of it. So I do want to send that to you and I are you okay with me sharing it with Jamie at this point? Jamie knows she can't share it with anyone else. I mean at some point we might even want to make it public. I don't know but I want you all to read it first and then we'll have a conversation about that. All right. So do I have this we're going to we would like to do executive session just on the Curtis pond issues with the two attorneys we're going to ask them if we can do it over the phone or did we make a decision on that? The executive session is going to be about the executive sessions that the select board had previously about the Curtis pond. Yes. I mean I can tell you what's going to happen. They're going to tell us every worst case liability scenario that could possibly happen as we go through this and they're good and Joe will tell you this right up front and they will give us a very conservative view of what we need to do to protect ourselves from any potential liability ever and then we're going to have to decide whether that's how we want to go or whether we're willing to be a little more creative or flexible because that's their job. Their job is to think of everything awful that can happen to us and that's what they'll tell us and they will advise us to stay away from that kind of and we need to hear what they have to say and their recommendation has always been that that should be done in executive session because we don't want to make that public as to what people might sue us for kind of thing. Okay. Is it possible that that can be summarized Yes. You will see a lot of that in the memo that I'm going to send you. Okay. So we're going to get we're going to do that first then we're going to do the organizational stuff and then we are going to do roads and then we're going to do a walk-through. All we're going to do is a one-hour thing with Wendy maybe or less. Is that right? So you'll invite Sandra and then it'll just be how to walk through the financials. Yeah, there may be one or two other things they want to do but Wendy said she could do about half an hour. I'm guessing with the way this group asks questions it'll be a little more than that. You said Wendy she could do a presentation in a half an hour. I think a conversation with Sandra about the kind of scope of her work and prioritizing some of the items on her list would be a whole worthwhile thing if she's going to be present for that conversation. I think I got enough here that I could put something and then we can offer feedback directly to you. We can have group emails in turn when we're doing organizational stuff but we can't do that if there's any business involved so for purposes of putting an agenda together we can have a group discussion about that. Should we wind down here and adjourn and finish that by email? I would love to make a motion too. I think we're ready. Please do so. Make a motion. I second. Okay, all in favor? Aye.