 All right, we'll call the meeting to order for the first select board meeting of November 2019, November 4th. Somebody would like to make a motion to approve the agenda, unless there's any addition to the order. I'd like to add, I'd like to add something. Okay. I'd like to add some information that I have about speed bumps versus speed tables. Also called the speed hump. In relation to Guptal Road. Is there any other additions or changes? Seeing none, hearing none. Somebody would make a motion to approve the agenda with that change. Make a motion to approve the agenda as amended. Is there a second? Second. Okay. Motion has been made and seconded. No further discussion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Next on the list is the consent agenda item, which is just simply the minutes of meeting, minutes of October 7th and October 10th meetings. Somebody would like to make a motion to approve the consent agenda, please. I'll make a motion to approve the consent agenda items. Is there a second? Okay. Okay. Motion has been made and seconded. All those who wish to approve the consent agenda items, please say aye. Aye. Public is the next thing on the agenda. Is there anybody from the public who wishes to speak at this time? Go ahead, Steve. Oh, should I go to Mike? Sure. Okay. I'm not sure if we want to get this going on. Yeah, is this, I don't know, I think so. No. So I just wanted to make an announcement and let everybody know that the Community Center Feasibility Study has started. We hired GBA, Architecture and Planning, as you know, and we have a holding meeting that has been scheduled for Tuesday, November 19th, and it's going to be here in this room from six to eight PM. They're adjourning a listening meeting. It's basically to present sites that they've looked at, narrowed down and then hear from the general public about their ideas about a Community Center. So I just wanted to make that announcement and I'll send the flyer out to you as well. We have a flyer here. Which date was that, Steve? Yes, on Tuesday, November 19th from six to eight PM and it will be here in the room. We're serving refreshments. And so our steering committee and GBA architecture is going to be, we're all going to be leading the meeting basically. Thanks. Very good. Thanks, Steve. Anybody else? Seeing no one, we'll move on to the next agenda item. Consider an appointment of the zoning administrator. Dina, that must be you. Well, I'm in the zoning administrator, but I'll tell you about it. Okay. So, Dina has been our zoning administrator for a little bit more than three years now. And well, a little bit more than that. Since, so three years and six or seven months maybe. And the, somebody wrote an email to me back in August, I think it was, maybe September, but I believe it was August. And I asked a few questions about what was happening in the zoning office. They had a few concerns. And when they exchanged information with me and I took that question into mind, it dropped my memory that I said, oh, the zoning administrator has a term appointment. And she's, the zoning administrator is the only employee, the only employee that's not elected that has a term of office, as opposed to you're hired and then you have your job until you resign from it or are removed from it. But the zoning administrator has a three-year term. So I went in time with Carla and realized that Dina's term expired in March 1st of this year. And now it's August. So I said, well, okay, do we have a zoning administrator? So I called Joe McClain who's to its own page's office and explained what had happened. And I explained to him, I said, you know, I think Dina is the first zoning administrator that I can remember that's made it through three years. We've never had this, at least in the past 15 years or so. Maybe there's some longer though that I can't remember. But anyway, we forgot. So he did a little research, got back to me and said, yeah, the Vermont statutes are pretty clear that the person who's holding the office is in the office until the successor is appointed. And I guess the law contemplates sometimes people forget things and they don't want to set out the situation. There's been a void and all the work that has been done in months goes by the board, permits not being legal in the lake. So anyway, that assuaged my concerns that we didn't have a zoning administrator. And then I talked with him and said, do we have to go through the same process as when she was first appointed, which is the planning commission nominates the zoning administrator and then the select board appoints. So he said, yes, that's exactly the situation that you're in, you better go through that process again. And if the planning commission chooses to nominate her, they should make the nomination rental active to March 1st. And then if the select board decides to go ahead and make the reappointment, the reappointment that the selector would make should be back to March 1st. For those of you who are new to the board, this is a kind of a two step process. The select board is the appointing authority. However, they can't make an appointment on their own. It has to be after a nomination by the planning commission. So I guess it's a safety valve, if you will, trying to take politics a little bit out of this process. It's a little cumbersome, especially when folks like us forget about it, but that's where we are. So the planning commission took a long time. It was on three or four agendas, five agendas, and for a variety of reasons, it got pushed off until their last meeting. Steve, I think you have the motion that the planning commission made. The planning commission did move to rem nominate her. And Dean is here, if you have questions, Steve is here, so I'm down here. Just to make sure, you know, full disclosure, there was a little bit of, there were some concerns expressed and issues that were raised with regard to some of the, I don't want to say performance, but just Dean is administration of the job, and whether there were shortcomings or where things might be improved. And I've addressed that with the planning commission, and there'll be a little bit more reporting, not only to me from the zoning administrative, but also to the boards. The DRB and the planning commission, at least the DRB gets, maybe it reports now as the planning commission gets assigned. And Dean and I have talked, and while the planning commission's motion included a progress report will be made to the planning commission and select board by the end of October, 2020, I think what Dean has suggested, and I think it's a good idea, is that she will include the select board in the distribution list once she does her monthly report. So if there's any issues that come up, I know zoning sometimes can be a lightning rod issue. And I know all of you have probably been talked to by some people, because it's the only position in town where somebody's making a decision about what you can or can't do with your property, and people take that seriously, and it ruffles feathers from time to time. So anyway, with that I'll stop and recommend that you accept the planning commission's motion that they have nominated her for re-appointment and that you would appoint her for term beginning March 1st, 2019. And it is still a three-year term retroactive to that date, and the lawyer recommended that's how this be handled. He said, even though nothing that Dina has done is thrown out because she wasn't appointed, and he said that's really in case she doesn't get re-appointed. So the nomination should go back to Dr. Jones. I just want to speak in behalf of Dina. I was on the DRB for a good portion of her tenure. She was very professional, very thorough. She has a great knowledge of the law, and sometimes the committee may have disagreed. I think she would explain things very well and why we're doing things. So I would highly recommend her continuation. Would you like to come up and speak it off Dina? Or are you happy where you're sitting? I'm happy where I'm sitting. Okay. Any other comments? Sure, hang on just a second. I do know that not knowing the broad scope of work that you have to handle many, many evenings after leaving meetings and whatnot, I've seen you still at your desk here. So I know that you're not goofing off. I'm sure you're probably overwhelmed at times with the amount of details that is involved in your type of work. You had to be here for the entire three-year term. When past years other people haven't made it, says, don't say something for you. So I'm glad to have your board. Yeah, I'll need to come up to the board, Mike there, please. I haven't worked with Dina professionally. Our roles don't overlap much, but I kind of wanted to, I guess echo what Chris said, is that I'm sometimes here early-ish and sometimes here late-ish and Dina is the person who's here so many hours and just putting in, seems like 110% to her job. So I mentioned that to her in the parking lot the other day, like I see you here all the time, you're all in the first car here, the last car leave, so just wanted to say that. Good. Yeah, I think I'll just make one. I've heard some issues over the last couple of years and I think a lot of it has to do with the different people that have held this role and how hard they held people to the rules that are written into the zoning. So I think some people are surprised when they're told no or, I think some of the things that I think maybe we've already learned from is verbal versus written answers on yes or no. I can do things I think came up that I've heard about that I think moving forward, we need to make sure that people want to pull one thing and then find out later that they can or cannot do something. And then the other thing I think that I think Warren Ray's doing a good job of that I just want to make sure that. And I think it's Steve, you have the same challenge too, is how do we hold people to the rules but make sure that we try to help people accomplish the goals that they set out? Maybe that has to be a slightly modified goal, but I feel like years ago, we had a little bit of an issue of people being told no when they wanted to try something that maybe was just a little bit unique or I think that the changing business landscape, especially in Waterbury, I think it's just gonna continue to have people try to be creative and try to come up with different ways just to do business in Waterbury. And I hope that we try to review what is actually being requested and then hopefully work can see if there's repetitive requests and maybe we have to look at changing some of those rules to make it a little bit more favorable to some things that are probably reasonable requests. But I think that would be my one comment, is just making sure that when we're telling somebody no, try to work with them on a solution that still gets them to their ultimate goal, I think it's something that's important. And I think a lot of the people that have given me feedback, that's all they really needed, but when they just get a no, maybe they feel like they're just trying to do right by their business and there's a rule that says they can't do whatever they were trying to do. So I don't know, I guess that's my one comment, but thank you for sticking at it and I know it's not easy, so. All right, if everybody's side-to-side, somebody'd like to make a motion to accept the recommendation of the Planning Commission to nominate Dina for the next three-year position, retroactive of March 1st, 2019 and will be a three-year term to March 1st, 2022. Somebody'd like to make that motion? I'd make a motion to reappoint Dina as zoning administrator for a second three-year term. Is there a second? I'll second that. Okay. Any further questions or comments? See none? All those who wish to approve, say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Welcome back, Board. Three more years. Okay. You can make it to the early night and go home. You can make it to the early night and go home. You can make it to the early night and go home. You can make it to the early night and go home. My name is Director's Quarterly Report. Tell me. I don't think there's no microphone over there. That works, that works. I don't think I've ever heard of it. Oh, it's okay. That's a hot seat. I didn't even see over it. Save you from standing. Good evening, everybody. I'm Allie Landauer, Library Director. Those of you watching later. So, I am going to give you a brief report about the Library's activities in the third quarter, July through September, this year. And then I have a couple of handouts for you. Thank you for giving me time on the agenda. I appreciate it. Starting with some highlights. So, the Library's staff was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend a national conference this fall that was held in Vermont for the first time. It was the Association for Rural and Small Libraries. They moved to a different state each year. And as you can tell by the name, it was extremely pertinent and applicable to Vermont as a whole and to our very particular, because oftentimes our national conferences for libraries, as you can imagine, have lots of information for big libraries, for library systems that don't necessarily scale down to us in a helpful manner. So, this was really wonderful and we had, it was a three and a half day conference. I attended the whole thing and see, I think two of the other staff, the full-time staff attended the entire conference and then some of our part-time staff attended parts of it. And we've been sharing what we've learned amongst ourselves and implementing some of those ideas. So, that was really great. One new thing that I worked on during that third quarter was I created a new page on our website called Resources and it's a collection of links that are organized into a wide variety of issues for people to find the resources that they need, both in our community and in Vermont. And there's some regional or national resources as well, but I tried to really focus on local and state ones. So, a wide variety of issues starting from news and education, mental health resources, job hunting type resources, consumer resources, local history, links to arts and outdoor opportunities in Waterbury and the area, government and veteran services as well. Let's see, we had Bill McSales. No, if any of you have met him, he just became this summer the security in charge of security for all state buildings. Prior to that, he was FBI and Homeland Security person and his wife works at the Williston Library, so he's over the past several years become interested in helping libraries get trained and address security type of issues. So, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop of his at Vermont Library Association conference several years ago and I thought he provided some really important training. So, we brought him here and all of the staff and one of our subs attended a two hour training with him where we looked at our particular building in the library and he gave us a lot of information about how to respond to active threats, what to do in different types of scenarios and he helped us, he gave me information that helped me update and create some new standard operating procedures for situations that either could turn into something threatening or are threatening. And I think everybody who works in the library feels really good about having those in place. And that was in August. Another highlight for the three month period was that we had some new bookshelves installed that were paid for by the capital campaign and built by VCI, which is the Vermont Correctional Industries who built most of the rest of the furnishings when this building in the library, when the building was built and they do a great job. These were bookshelves, these are bookshelves that our new book sale is on. So, if you go into the library and go up the stairs in the front of the library and the landing at the top, you'll see them there and they look really great and they match all the other shelving in the library which is nice and we've, the friends have been, we have a couple of volunteers that run the book sale and the friends have been glooming about $50 a month from the book sale and these are all books that are donated to the library. They're most, occasionally put a few weeded books in there from our collection but it's mostly donations. So, it's been good. So, I think I've mentioned before that I'm working on doing outreach and integrating the library more into the community and some of the activities that I've worked on in the third quarter include, I helped run the Sunzilla Contest down at Rusty Parker in September and that was a really fun community event. I don't know if any of you have gone to it but it was a lot of fun. We've partnered with the food shelf to have a permanent collection box in the library's foyer so people can drop off food there for the food shelf and I think people appreciate it because of the library's hours and it were open a lot so it makes it easy to combine that with other errands. I also reached out to the Waterbury Center Church and we had a donation box for their winter clothing drive in the library and the same with the Harwood Union Refugee Outreach Club. We offered to have a collection box for their fall clothing drive in the library as well and I think actually that's still going on. We also, I did do a light weed of fiction books this fall or started to and some of those books we ended up donating to the food shelf. They have a small collection of books that people can grab when they come for their food. So we gave some to them and then we also gave some to a group home in Waterbury that is just starting to have their own sort of small lending library and they kind of needed a seed collection so we were able to provide them with some weeded books. Something that was a little different and interesting, we hosted some students and staff from an independent school called Mountain River School in Morrisville. They are in a new location in a new building and are starting up their own school library and they had a lot of questions about how to set up and run a library. So they came and visited us and the students asked some really great questions and we gave them a tour of the library and gave them a little tiny bit of information about library science and how they might organize their library. So that was really interesting. And then this month is Domestic Violence Awareness Month is October and we partnered with the Central Vermont Women's Giving Circle to have a display of books and brochures and other resources and information upstairs in our display area. So I'd like to highlight a couple of programs. First we had a really nice email message from a patron after he received our November newsletter. We send out, Judy is our program facilitator and she sends out a monthly newsletter that lists all our programs for the upcoming month. And he brought us back and he said, wow, Go Waterbury Library. This is an amazing email full of so many great events and thoughtful details. We are lucky to live in a town with a vibrant library led by a nice team in a clean building with amazing views and a great selection. Thanks so much for all you do. So it was nice to get a little pat on the back from the people we serve, so I wanted to share that. We have a number of ongoing programs that happen either monthly or weekly in the library for adults and children, including Food for Thought Book Group, Storytimes twice a week, after school programs once or twice a week, depending on the week. And then new in the third quarter, Judy added a chair yoga, which happens weekly. This is a program that started in the senior center and then they needed to find a new location this summer because the summer camps were using the senior center for their food programs. So they asked us if they could use the Salroom Library and ended up liking it so much that they wanted to stay. So we have accommodated them and they continue to come here. We also started a weekly beginner's bridge lesson, which has been very popular and they seem to be having an awful lot of fun in there. And a monthly tabletop board game that also meets in the Salroom on a Saturday. And all three of those, the chair yoga, beginner's bridge and the tabletop board games are led by volunteers from the community, which is nice. And then some of the single events that we had during this last quarter included, we had a tick smart program. It was actually two programs, one for kids where they played some games and learned how to ID ticks. And then one for adults that was more geared towards live disease and identification and prevention. And the friends kicked in some funding for tick removers for everyone who attended the programs and also that we've had them at the front desk for giveaway and they look like this. They're a little plastic spoon kind that has a little tip at the end, you can use that to remove a tick and it comes with a little informational card. So if you would like one, you can come into the library and get one. Kids also participated in programs like making air gliders and live animals from the Southern Vermont History Center came up and brought some live animals, which is always a big hit. They made Alka-Seltzer Rockets, which they shot off from the picnic table out back. That was the kit. They made duct tape crafts, duct tape crafts. They had a music program, a book group this summer for kids, a puppet show that's put on, I guess it's an annual sort of tradition while one family in town puts it on every year. They did origami and we also did our own version of a breakout room, which was fun. In the adult arena, about 60 people came to a music program and talked about Erin Copeland's America with Michael Arnawitt, and that was a Vermont Humanities Council program. We also had another packed house at an author talk, Megan Price, who shared her hilarious stories from behind the scenes with Vermont and Maine Wildlife Rangers, and she's written a whole series of these books. I brought one to show you because I thought some of you might be interested in reading it. One of them, this is, what number is this? This is volume two. I think it was the only one that was in when I went looking, they're very popular. And she just has all these stories of mishaps and people running a fowl pun intended with the rangers. So it's a fun book. And she, I wasn't there, but I'm told her talk was, had people in stitches, so that was really fun. Our technology librarian, Delia, met with 44 different community members in her one-on-one tech sessions over the course of that third quarter. And she also runs a monthly class, technology class here at the library. And her topics this time were citizen science, how to video chat, and maxing out your library card, which was all about the resources that taxpayers can access with their library cards, online resources, mostly. And then finally, I would like to just end with a fun story, and then any questions that you have. So in July, I received an envelope in the mail. I opened it up, and it was a check for $500 made out to the library from somebody named Susan C. Schell. And that was a fun envelope to open, but we didn't know who she was. Even Jill, who seems to know everybody, didn't know who she was, except she was a little suspicious because of the C. She thought maybe it was somebody who she knew that had changed her, got married and changed her name. So we later learned that the C stood for Campbell. And I was able to contact the financial agent of the account that this came from and get the name of the account manager and find out a little bit more about this. What was this all about? So he told me that she was Susan Campbell at the time, and she lived in Tottenweiger in the 1960s. She's now in her 80s, and every year she is selecting various charities to give her money to, apparently she has no family left. And this year, she decided to give her money to each town that she had ever lived in during the course of her life. And so, in Waterbury, she decided to donate money to the library. And that's why this nice check came in the mail. But no strings attached. So our plan at this point is to help us complete a project that has been in the works for a while and kind of sitting on the back shelf for lack of funding, which is theme bags. And what that means is it's a bag or a backpack with a number of different items in it, like some books, a game, maybe some flashcards or different educational items that all revolve around a theme like frogs or letters and numbers or human body or different things like that. And it also comes with some instructional materials. And families can check these out in the library. Childcare centers can check them out at the library. So, before I got here, Mary and Michelle had purchased the bags that they're gonna go in, but they didn't have the funds yet for the contents. So, we are thinking that this $500 will go most of the way to filling these bags and having them available to people to check out. Were you able to send her a thank you note? Yes, I was able to get her address and send her a thank you note. And she just sent the check and didn't tell you anything about the purpose, just yeah, good detective work. Right. Is she still living in Warbury or is she not? No, it was a little hard to tell. The return address was like Idaho or something and then, but then the financial agent was California. So, I think she's living in California. I'd be curious to know when she lived here. In the 60s. In the 60s. Yeah. For how long? It didn't sound like too, too long, but I'm not sure exactly. A question going back into, I can't remember the name of the gentleman who you said, the FBI guy who? Oh, Bill McSales. Right. Did he say anything about the library or anything about in this building, vulnerabilities that we may have? Yeah, he pointed out a few things. He's gone into all different kinds of buildings. And I mean, a public library is meant to be an open space open to the public. And so that inherently has some issues that other types of buildings might not have. It's very open. There's, he made a couple of small recommendations like putting a blind on the office doors so that if we're in there hiding, we can close those kinds of small things like that. But we actually, I was actually kind of pleasantly surprised, I guess if you can use the word pleasant in such a situation, that he was able to really give us some good tips about where to go and what to do and how to hide and how to get out of the building. We do have a lot of exits, which is good. Right. So it was very helpful in a practical way. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Just don't hide behind the chain saws. Watch it too much to you. I was going to ask you, is it starting to get a little crowded in the library? As far as people or materials? Everything that you seem to be bringing into the library with all the programs and all the other items that sounds like it might start get a little bit crowded here before too long. Are you suggesting that we put an addition on the library? No, I'll be strung up for sure. We definitely, we sometimes run out of space. The sour room is booked. The two study rooms are very heavily used. So sometimes that does come up. And we're open three nights a week, which is nice. But those nights are pretty packed with different, you know, different things. Both library programs and other people wanting to use our space. So from what I understand, a typical reputation of a library is you're supposed to be able to go in there and sit down and literally hear a pin drop. It doesn't sound like perhaps this library is quite so. Yeah, that model has kind of changed over the years. I mean, in general, not just in our library, they're not necessarily quiet spaces. And occasionally there's a little rumbling about that, but we do have the two study rooms and we try to accommodate some quiet spaces. It's a pretty open, as you know, design. So that doesn't really help with the noise, but the sour room does have doors that can close. So after school programs, for example, or in the sour room, the doors are closed. So yeah, we make it work. Yeah. I think it works. Yeah. How's your telescope doing? Oh my gosh, it's out all the time. Yeah, yeah. So it was going out pretty regularly and then we had this shout-out in front porch forum from a patron who used it. It was like, oh my God, did you have a library as a telescope? This is great. And then we got all these, you know, holds on at people, five or six people that said, put my name down for that. And then since then it's out more than it's in. Like when it's on the front desk, we're like, oh yeah, we have a telescope and then it leaves the next day. How long did one person keep it out? It's a week. Okay. Yeah, and we used it for a program last month. The Vermont Astronomical Society came up. Some of their members brought their own telescopes and took our telescope and went out to the fields and the lights were off and did a program, you know, just pointing their telescopes and telling people what they were looking at. And I think almost 60 people showed up for that. All different ages, you know, parents bringing their kids and older folks. And so that was fun. And we hope to do that again during Winterfest as well. Well, it sounds like you're having a lot of good fun and keep it up. Thank you. I'm very impressed at the educational component to all that and the diversity of topics, but I'm just very impressed. Thank you. Good job. I'll pass it on to the staff. Yeah, as well. Thank you. So I wanted to share with you, this is similar, you might remember I gave you this last time for that quarter. These are just some really basic statistics about what's happening at the library, door count, how many materials have been borrowed, how many public computer uses, new patrons, those kinds of things. And then this is a new handout that we have for our new patrons that come in and old patrons if they need some information that kind of puts all the information about what's available at the library in one place. It's rather long, but I wanted each of you to have one of those. And our new employee, Maggie, was really the one who did the most line share of work on that. So I'm going to give her a shout out. Oops, thank you. What is that for? You've seen it. I see what you're doing. Let's get some more questions. How are these statistics compared to, did you have this data for last year, 2018? I probably have most of it. I wasn't here for the whole year. So my plan is at the end of this year, or maybe early next year by the time I get it all together, I'll give you some comparisons. I have folks like myself, I've been in the library, but I don't really take out materials. I didn't count for people. I know you have the door count, but other than that, how do you know people like myself were using the library? Well, it's not something we count. We don't really have a category for that other than the door count. We have a category for the door count. We have computer users. We know how many people come to programs. And that's pretty much what we count. We do keep track of reference questions, too. So if somebody, I actually haven't been doing it this year. I just realized that it's something we're supposed to report. And I was like, oh, we haven't been doing that. So I'm going to start. But I think Mary did it before me. Reference questions meeting. Anybody who is, not like where's the bathroom or something like that, but anybody who's using the library staff as a resource to find out something, even if it's a visitor to a library coming in and saying, like I had somebody recently saying, stopped here because they couldn't find the welcome center at the train station. So they stop at the library and they say, where is the welcome center? So we tell them those kinds of things. And then, of course, the traditional library questions about books and authors and those kinds of things. Well, that's the most important thing to me is some of the information that the librarians do provide is guide you to where things are in the library. Even though I may not be taking out things, I'm usually using things there. Otherwise, a lot of times, just go home and you go on your computer. Well, there's a saying in the business, the librarians are the original Google. Yes. I have a cousin who's a librarian in Chicago. Yes, he's a strong believer in how important libraries are in our society. Hopefully, he's shared some of that with you. Yes. Can you tell me the person who does the computer information session? I have a tablet that seems to be a mystery to me. And it's getting more mysterious all the time. Do you have to sign up for a one-on-one? Yes, she takes appointments. She's here three days a week. And she usually has two appointments each of those days available. So you can either stop by the front desk or give us a call and see what's available. Thank you. She'd be happy to help you with that. She's here in the evening at all? Yes, she's here on Tuesday evenings. That's when she usually holds her classes, but the other three Tuesdays where she's not doing the class, she has some appointments available after six. She can help unlock the mystery in this town. Yes. Thank you. My name is Delia. Okay, great. And all of our emails are our first name at waterbarrypubliclibrary.com. So you can email her, Delia, at waterbarrypubliclibrary.com. Thank you for that. You can dispel out waterbarrypubliclibrary. It's a long one. All right, thank you very much. You're going to be good to tell me. Thanks for coming in. We appreciate your time. So the first thing I'm going to ask you to do is reconsider your approval of the agenda, because I just realized while I was sitting here that there's nothing wrong here about health insurance rates. And I can ask you at the top to add it. I assumed it was on there. It was a bad assumption. So if you need to talk about health insurance, you can put that as last on the manager's right. I just amend my motion to include that. Good. Is there, well, do we need a second? Yeah, yeah. Okay. All those in favor of the change? Say aye. Aye. Thank you. Okay, Steve is here for a couple of things. This is a contract for refining kiosks and then there's one about the passport preparedness and the passport preparedness. So I can go ahead and see. Okay, good. So we're actually just going to do one. We're working with Ironman Forestry and quite honestly there's an issue that Tom Sweet was uncomfortable with with the conflict of interest since Dan Sweet is a municipal employee. And I thought about this, but, and I discussed it with... We have a grant. Yeah, it's federal money. The grant is federal money and it requires us to have a conflict of interest policy which we have. And the policy says that you can't have a contract with somebody if they or a family member is an employee of the town and Dan Sweet is our assessor. And he is one of the principals of Hungry Mountain Forestry. So Tom has... We just learned this today, but we'll be able to get the contract approved tonight. You might want to just tell them what it is and then Tom is going to be recommending another forestry. Yeah, it's all amicable. I've talked to both Tom and Dan about it. They're familiar with the project. This is the Emerald Ash Borer Preparedness and Management Plan. We've done a ash roadside ash inventory working with the Central Mont Regional Planning Commission. And this was done on tablets with the treaty committee. And Jane was involved. And we've got virtually all of the wooded areas that have a fair amount of ash inventory. Literally hundreds, probably in the five or 600 ash tree count at this point. So that's being mapped. And then we'll be coming back to you with... There's a $2,000 grant, which will pay for the preparedness and management plan. And I learned about something very interesting. There's research done that White Ash, which is the predominant ash tree in Waterbury and, quite honestly, most of Vermont has shown some resistance to Emerald Ash Forest. This is a fairly new study, but this will be worked into our plan. So we'll be coming back to you once we have another consultant have a draft contract to hire them. The other project is our Wayfinding Science, which is in conjunction with the Main Street Reconstruction Project. You've got a draft contract in your packet. And we made sure to include that. And it's with Land Works. Land Works is a landscape architecture and planning firm in Middlebury. They're the ones that designed the original wayfinding system. And I believe we briefed you about this about two years ago when the Main Street Plans were being finalized. On the back side is the graphic for there are five kiosks that are going to be placed in the extent of near the roundabout and post office all the way down to Demeric Place. And the front side is going to be Wayfinding with Mapping. The rear side of each, actually a four of the kiosks is interpretive information. The one that shows on this graphic where the science's information is about the history of mainly the first block in Stow Street. So we're going to be doing four total, we have a committee that's working on the content, and then we would like to hire Land Works to do the graphic work. And then because they did the design work, we've talked to VTrans with their design engineer through Cannonball, and they are allowing us to do an inspection of the final product, if you will, the actual kiosks. They're going to be fabricated this winter. And so we think it's important to have a designer actually inspect those. This is commonplace. Make sure before they're installed that they meet all the specifications that the craftsmanship is good and that the graphics represents what's designed in the bid package. In other words, this is all in the bid package for the Main Street Reconstruction Project and is being bid, or was bid, and Wood and Wood signs out of Warren is going to be the subcontractor that will do the work. They did our municipal sign out front. So the contract is pretty straightforward. It's going to occur in two phases. One will be this fall, which will be the design phase. And again, our subcommittee will be working with Land Works to do that at Spark Far and Karen Devin and myself. And then the second phase will be later on in the winter or early spring, which will be the inspection of the wakelining signage. There'll also be paddle signs that I call them paddle signs that give you directions to different parts of downtown and the Main Street area. So the total contract is $4,960. And so what we're asking for tonight is that you would authorize Bill to sign the contract on behalf of the town and then we'll be able to move forward to the project. So are there any questions or clarifications that you need? Steve, is Land Works the same company that did the byway? They did the byway quarter management plan. I think you were involved with the conservation commission at the time. They also did the consult work for our original on hillside seatblocks overlay. They're an excellent firm. They do a lot of great visual work, graphic work, visual analysis. And so it will be good to have them be consistent and have them do the design work as well. Thanks. Are these kiosks lit up as well? They're actually not going to be lit. There's one ambient light with street lamps in the areas where all of these will be. They're going to be in the road right-of-way or the adjacent town property and there will be street lights, either the period lights or existing LED street lights in the area. I can say I didn't see any lights on the drone. We consider that and consider a solar light panel with solar lights for the one that will be down by the roundabout, but ultimately decided that it really wasn't necessary. It was just more technology and equipment that we would have to maintain. It wasn't necessary. Then there's three of them. There are actually five total. Very quickly, at the roundabout, Bidwell Lane and Stow Street in front of the former T.D. Bank parking lot. There will be one in the front of Rusty Parker Park right in front of the mailbox and demerit place out in front of the former Freedom Chevrolet. And the money to pay this contract comes from where? This is the Main Street Reconstruction Project. It's non-participating parts of the project that are funded with talent. So the cost is as described here, additional costs. Right. All the rest of the cost of fabricating and installation is part of the Main Street Reconstruction Project. So we're paying for the design and the installation will be a participating item. Well, we have a Downtown Transportation Fund grant which has matching funds. I think you approved it's been about at least two years. So it's actually being funded through the Downtown Transportation Fund grant. It's an ancillary grant to the Main Street Reconstruction Project, some of which we have funding for the business work that we've violated and what we're doing and things. So it's not the 2%, it's part of the cost to help with the non-participating costs and this is one of them. Right. And a lot of Downtown Transportation Fund grant is being matched by the VTrans funding. So this is, I think it will be a good deal. Any other questions, comments? All right. Seeing none, would somebody like to make a motion then to authorize the acceptance of a contract between the town of City and Land Works of Middlebury for the construction and design of the kiosks, five kiosks. Well I think it's not the construction it's just the professional design. I'll make that motion. Second. Any further comments? All those in favor say aye then. Aye. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Do I have the original, do you want to decide it now or tomorrow? This one is dated today as opposed to the number one that I took draft on. That's it. Yeah, just the one. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Steve. Thank you. Okay, that comes through to your items there, Bill, I guess, huh? I put it on here just for process reasons. We have a random understanding with revitalizing water rate and in that MOU which I did not print out just to save the piece of paper or save it. The MOU requires us to inform revitalizing water rate in the fall before the New Year starts if we're considering not putting them in the future. They have not put their funding request together yet. That will be probably in December. But as the MOU requires us to let them know if we're not going to fund them, I just wanted to get it on the agenda and give you the opportunity to say that and then tell you that my recommendation is that we do need to fund them. They are an integral part of the Lane Street Reconstruction Project. I just explained to you one of the grants that we have where they're providing you know, business assistance services and other functions during the revital during that project. So I don't expect that their funding request is going to be significantly different than it has been in the past. It's finding them correctly. So, $17,000 or $18,000 for their what they call a traditional budget and then around $54,000 for the Economic Development Director. And I think that in particular the Lane Street Project going on and the fact that we are relying on them to provide public assistance during that that this is not the year to even think about cutting that out. If you're not going to not fund them, then we can move on to the next item. I definitely can do it. Is there out any outcries for not funding them? No, I'll echo that. I think it's going to be really important especially next year when they get into the core of the downtown. Okay, thanks. Yeah. Did we miss a B? No. That was a conflict. I don't know. Sorry about that. He took it first. Yep. Anyway, at your places you have the August and September reports from the state police contact and you also have it says the first quarter report it's the first quarter of the state's budget but it's really out third quarter so the period of July through September is included there as a whole. I won't spend too much time on it all of our charts look very similar. I mean the high charts look very similar to each other compared to what they've looked like in the past. I continue I don't get any real feedback one way or the other the public isn't calling me every week or even every month saying what about this what about that what are the police doing my sense is that from what I see and from what we're that we're getting what we anticipated from the service I do see the officers around both here in the village and up in Walgreens Center I did reach out to Major Jonas Henry Jonas Major at the State Police she is one of the folks who oversees this contract is the highest direct ranking person that I have access to with regard to this contract and and simply asked whether the state was considering anything but renewing the contract if we wanted to now just to remind you the contract runs through June 30 so at the very least we have to pledge it for six months worth in 2020 she responded to me and said that from their perspective it's going very well but she would not be able to provide me with a definitive answer about whether they would be willing to re-op until probably in December probably and clearly they as the Balanc State Police have to put their own needs first and she talked about the vacancies they have in the entire system and what they are going to be asking the legislature for and whether or not they can continue this contract and still meet their statewide vision she said that from their perspective it was going well and our thing is being equal the state police view it as positive and she doesn't see why they wouldn't be interested in moving forward if that was our choice but they can't say that for certain yet so when I know more you'll know more but that's where it is right now we would still be in the midst of budget discussions we'll definitely really study our budget maybe the second meeting in December when we're getting to some of it in January in earnest but I didn't want to wait until very end to ask I thought getting some information a little bit earlier especially if the war was no so right now the word is of you know as a blinking yellow light toward green now I'm saying but that can change and I didn't tell her that the select board had decided to go forward I simply asked if we want to would you be willing to so I didn't commit us either because that's for you folks to decide we put the budget together next year very antidotally from what I'm seeing and what I'm hearing around town I don't hear of any real complaints I think we had more complaints when we had our own police department to be quite honest and I think it's the relationship with the Vermont State Police is working well you know I keep on saying I need to attend one of their monthly meetings it always seems to come in a bad day but I think the troopers I've spoken to them at various town events and they seem to be very happy I think most of the town is very happy with the service we're getting probably with the exception of the people on Gupta Road with speeding so speaking of Gupta Road speeding do you want to have a discussion about your speed bump there Jane? or do we want to go ahead and help each other first? well let's maybe we should jump through this speed bump thing there first okay well you know I realize that I just think I'm home from work I don't generally drive down Gupta Road I go on a ruin I don't even turn on my street and then my husband said did you driven across that speed bump? so I had to go check it out and you know there's been some comments which I haven't really been reading as much as I usually do but I've seen a few I have some experience from my job and years past on traffic coming and and I did review some sources of information which is easy to do online now and what's then now is a speed bump and I think that they're good for a temporary measure or because you can purchase them and put them out there made out of rubber but I think it's more appropriate to have a speed table there's actually three devices there's a speed bump which is very small and it forces you to slow down you can't really even go over that thing a 10 miles an hour barely, it's more like 8 miles an hour and the data that's online says from 2 to 10 miles an hour and the speed bump is so small it's very abrupt and it jars you in your car as well as if you had something in your car you might shake it up and it's not recommended for emergency vehicles because of that and it's not really recommended for streets it's recommended more for parking lot or private driveways or something whereas the speed hum so we have three different things the speed hump is larger than the speed bump it's more flatter and you can go over it a little faster I think from 10 to 15 miles an hour and it's more of a rocking motion it also could be purchased and there could be made out of rubber if you'd rather than a permanent asphalt one and they are generally used in a series on a roadway but often with curbs we don't have any curbs so the third device that I think might be more appropriate which would require I don't know if you can purchase them I have to build that on asphalt and you have to be very careful with the geometry of these things so they work properly as a speed table which is wider and flatter and then it has a gradual slow and either side and that's recommended also for low roads it's flat in the middle local and collector road it's not for an 85th percentile at 45 miles per hour or more and that's not what we have the posted speed is typically 30 miles per hour or less so that seems like a more appropriate place three to four inch height I don't disagree with anything that you're saying so after the meeting we had when all of the folks were here from Guctell Road and told us that we didn't listen to them we didn't hear them we heard them and listened to them this time we happened to have a portable speed bump that we were able to we had an opposition and we were not able to get the state to authorize the blinking sign and it's not going to happen until next year so to do something I told there were riffs to get that speed bump up there and yeah I've driven over and I don't think any of them are ideal for Guctell Road I think that that road where it is now it's in the 30 mile an hour zone I think it might even be 25 but I'm not sure that a speed bump hump or table is really ideal for Guctell Road that one will be coming out within the next couple weeks it's not something that we can plow over so it was meant to just get out there and to do what it's doing is to get people to notice and slow down a little bit we put signs up people read the signs they should know that there's one there and if they hit it going too fast maybe they won't go so fast the next time we're still planning to go forward with the road program that we talked about next spring I don't believe there's a speed table involved we have speed tables on Ramble Street right now and I believe there are tables on Butler Street as well but as I said I don't really believe Guctell Road is an ideal spot for any of those three items just to try and get a job there I'm just so concerned about the fact that it's not recommended for a public road and it's not recommended for an emergency vehicle it's going to go over something so if you want it out we'll take it out but we're trying to do something that concerns it's not ideal and it's not meant to be permanent and it's going to be coming out in a couple of weeks at the latest if you're concerned about it we'll take it out this week what have you received comments I saw a couple of comments on front porch form no direct comments nobody's called I mean I've gone over it a couple of times I've seen the sign there I slow right down to almost a dead stop and of course I look at Bill Minters house on one side the post office on the other side and my truck goes over the top of it and I think to myself I imagine some of them bigger trucks make some awful good noises going over the top of that thing so I'm wondering if if there's any distaste for the banging that goes on when people hit it it'll seem like if we had a speed hump in our in our front porch wall that might be more appropriate because it can go a little faster if you don't want it there we'll take it out we're almost at the end of the summer season and like Bill said it's going to come out of there in order for the roads to be cloud anyway maybe between now and next spring we can get our hands on something different or make reservations to do something that do you know the possibility signs that we're going to be getting through each other I think we had so many of the flashers like $5,000 I think it was a little more than that $6,500 brings it down I think is there something that you could I know in the past sometimes these have been available to borrow from other communities and they model what we want from stores right up there do we know the Jane yep thank you healthcare I don't want to talk about it because I know what it means I need more money out of our pockets out of employees pockets too more money for less service this gets more difficult every year and I try to be I try to be fair and creative at the same time and it just makes it a longer task every time because it's costs keep going up if you look at the table first I'm not going to go through everything but the plans that are highlighted in blue are the plans that our employees actually choose so there's 13 plans available through Blue Cross and our employees there's 19 of us in 2019 that were eligible for health insurance 16 actually chose it and the 16 people who chose to go on the health insurance chose one of those plans that's highlighted in blue and you can see there that the the largest increase is over on the left hand side for the plans that our employees take 8.33% for somebody who takes the bonds blue rewards plan high deductible plan and that's 8.33% that's a single plan the highest percentage increase is at the top right on the second plan down that gold that word gold should be in blue we have a couple that take the the standard plan gold family plan 10.3% which is a huge percentage increase the next car to the right where it shows 10.82% that is the average increase of all of these plans so it all adds up to 562.78 and if you divide that by 52 plans 13 different plans offered each of them has 4 different plans available single 2 person adult and family so the average increase that Blue Cross has across all the lands is 10.82% and then down at the bottom you can see there's another sum of numbers there 210.13% divide that by 52 not by 52 I'm sorry by however many of them 13 and the plans that we take are 13.13% increase so looking at that it's hard to say wow this is a simple solution because unless we offer nothing you know our costs are going to go up considerably so in the memo I've given some history of where we came from how we got what we were going to have and what I think is a reasonable thing to consider the in 2014 when Health Connect came into being the state's plan that implemented the Affordable Care Act the town moved away from simply picking you know two or three plans and telling employees choose one of these three and we'll pay this amount for it we tried in 2014 to allow employees to choose any plan that was offered through the health exchange there are only two companies that offer plans in the health exchange Blue Cross and MVP that first year the state had so much difficulty getting the Health Connect website and all of the stuff that goes on in the back computers to work correctly we ended up having to scrap the you can choose any plan that's offered to you can choose Blue Cross plan that's offered so that's what we've been offering since 2014 some things have gotten worse over time with the Affordable Care Act it depends maybe on your political persuasion but the current presidential administration continues to take action to gut the plan the individual mandate is gone now which in my estimation and I'm speaking for myself encourages young healthy people not to buy insurance because they'll take the risk and what that leaves you with is older less healthy people trying to buy insurance and what happens is when only sick old people are buying insurance costs go up so premiums go up but one thing that has gotten better is that both Blue Cross and NDP now have good buy by plans so if we can work it out and it's still an if I don't think it will hurt for me to make this recommendation now because it doesn't come to pass we'll just will offer Blue Cross plans but I'm about 90% sure right now that we can offer allow our employees to buy any plan on the exchange NDP or Blue Cross I worked out that with NDP they are willing to allow us to offer one of their plans and if any employee takes it even if it's only one employee they'll be willing to sell a plan through the town of Waterbury until you do this but even for one employee I have not finalized everything with Blue Cross yet hopefully they would do the same thing and allow it the reality is that Blue Cross has still got the heavyweight name behind it and sometimes people especially people who might like to think about their health insurance decide well I want Blue Cross because I know my doctor takes it I don't have to move the network whatever but I would like the board to allow me to offer to employees either the Blue Cross plan or the NDP plans I don't have the NDP plans shown here the way our system works it really doesn't matter that I'm showing those prices to you because the recommendation is as it has been since 2014 not that we buy a particular plan but that we simply offer our employees a monthly allowance and let them buy the plan that works best for them and if they buy a platinum plan from either Blue Cross or NDP frankly they're going to probably have to pay something out of their own pocket for that premium and if they buy a you know bronze high deductible then the premium is less than the allowance and we allow them to use the remainder to put into an HSA or people who buy plans that aren't HDHP compatible can have an HR rate to reimburse some of the other pocket expenses so with that flipping to the second side of the memo I've explained what the range of increase is so last year for the first time the town gave equal weighting between CIP and the increase and the increase was much smaller last year it was in the three or four percent range from the health insurer and last year the CIP for the year and the September was 2.3 percent so we kind of used both of those factors gave them equal weight and we increased our premiums by 2.85 percent if we did the same thing this year the CIP for the 12 month period ended September 30th is 1.7 percent we use the CPIU and always have so that's 1.7 percent interestingly if you look at the breakdown in the CPIU medical components medical costs altogether are running I think it was 4.4 percent doctors were at 0.9 percent and hospitals were at I think 2.3 percent so I think the reason medical is at 4. whatever it was 4.0 4.2 I didn't print that sheet out my guess is that prescription drugs and other time imaging and the like are driving that cost up but anyway the CPIU is at 4.7 percent and our average premium increase for the plans that the town employees take at 13.31 percent if you just added those two together divided by two it'd be a 7.51 percent increase as I said last year was the only year that we gave it one-to-one rating in the years prior to the increase a 7.5 percent increase is a big pill to swallow especially given what we've done over the past five years it used to be we often had double-digit increases because all we did was we paid either 100 percent or 90 percent of whatever the premium was and if the premium was 1 out of 10 percent that meant that your costs went up 10 percent since we started this method of providing insurance to the allowance we've given greater weight to the CPIU so here's where it becomes an art rather than a science so I say to myself well what do we do can I ask the board for a 7.5 percent increase I'm sure the employees would like it if they got a 7.5 percent increase to help them with their 13 percent average increase in the premiums I think for the taxpayers that's high so I thought about it and I said well if we if we give the CPIU three ways the increase in the premium one so a 3 to 1 weight and if you do that and I ask you to add 1.7 or multiply 1.7 by 3 and then add 13.31 to that and then divide it by 4 you end up with a 4.6 percent increase and if you give it a 2 for 1 rate 1.7 plus 1.7 18.31 and divide it up by 3 it's 5.6 percent so I look through the compensation benefits report that VLCT just put out they compile report from trying to get as much information as they can from all 251 Vermont municipalities there's probably 45 of them or so who actually have employees so I look through this and for the health insurance portion of this report 128 towns reported and of those 128 towns that reported 56 percent of those 128 towns pay 100 percent still pay 100 percent of the health care now there's a wide range of plans that they offer there's some towns like us that allow their employees to take everything and the ones that do offer it like us do similar to what we do and say here's a monthly allowance and you go and use it to buy what you want but still I was surprised that 56 percent of the reporting communities and that's over half the communities and I think it's probably a representative sample of even the ones that didn't report so 56 percent of the reporting communities are still paying 100 percent of the costs if you drop the percentage to 90 percent of the costs being paid by the employer it's still 71 percent of those consultants up to 71 percent so at the bottom of page 2 of the memo you'll see where I recommend at least a 4.6 percent increase I would have you know how it would be before we say that that the second paragraph from the top in addition to the sizable rate increases that the employer and the employee will share assuming that we don't pay the 100 percent of everything the employer are going to share a significant cost increase employees also have additional cost shifts in these plans so the deductibles are going up, the pocket maxims are going up co-insurance is going up so for somebody like me and I won't get it right but in 2019 for instance for wellness preferred drugs it's 12 dollars then 40 percent and 60 percent that was what is in place for 2019 for 2020 I have it here somewhere you know it's gone up for that one to well it stays the same on that one but the individual out of pocket for prescriptions have gone up and even if you take a high deductible plan like I do you get money going into your HSA but I have a family out of pocket maximum that's about $15,000 so it's a risky plan so the employees are taking the hit on that side as well so anyway my recommendation at the table at the bottom I recommended at least a 4.6 percent increase you can see there in 2020 it's in bold if we increase our single plan those who take a single plan from 753 4.6 percent those to 788 you can see the next one is 1483 1535 and for the family plan 1950 now the reason the 1950 is in red I don't want to minimize the generosity of the town despite what I just said about the employees having to suck it up and pay higher deductibles and co-pays as well as their share of the premium some of the communities listed in this report paid their contribution when they do it as we do at 85 percent of the platinum plan I thought that was high when I read it but I compared what we do in wearing that range now so 85 percent of the platinum plan for single would be 675 for the parent child it would be 1476 for the two person plan it would be 1530 and for the family plan it would be 2150 so you can see that if we go with the 788 for the single that's 88 percent of the platinum plan the parent and the child and the two person plan are right on the money at that 85 percent and the family plan is at 77 percent now it seems to me that Blue Cross must have had they must have under priced the family plan considerably last year the 84 percent that is under that 1950 in 2020 what that is telling me is just a note to myself is that a year ago in 2019 the 1863 that the family plan premium was that was 84 percent of the platinum plan last year now the platinum plan has gone up dramatically it's almost $2,300 so they they under priced it so anyway I'll stop there the last paragraph is I'm recommending a $10 increase on what we give to the employees who don't take it you'd be amazed when you look at some of our sister cities and towns they don't give as much as $4,600 was the highest that I found they offer their employees $4,600 not to take our land because they're trying to save the $19,000 it costs we've never had to do that here so how many employees did you say are not three employees who are eligible don't take it and how many total employees are there I don't know right now in 2020 the eligible employees are we offer health insurance to employees who are scheduled to work 30 hours a week or more and in 2019 there were 19 between the town and the neighborhood district okay so 16 took insurance and 3 out to that Bill I have about 56% do you have any sort of sense of are they bigger towns, bigger towns they all live a lot because in terms of maybe small towns who only have a few employees might be paying 100% St. Albans city 6,800 people they pay 100% St. Albans town they pay 85% a lot of them are smaller but Jericho 5,000 100% Johnson 3,500 people they pay 100% now again they may not they may be paying 100% of the service but still it's 100% of what there are they may be they may be handling some of their other benefits and wage compensation as well they may be richer towns than we are I'm not sure about that Chris I don't think any town is you could categorize as a rich town the challenge is we don't have a lot of turnover here our employees are valuable people we're glad that we have them but we have had turnover in some of the especially in the the water and sewer department in Egypt the sewer department in particular and that's not all about this kind of stuff but you know the challenge is that the unemployment rate in Vermont is less than 2% so people are looking at what they can get and it puts employers including municipal employers in a tough spot because people have the opportunity to grow up somewhere else now most of our employees I think want to be here a lot of them grew up here or around here and we don't have a ton of turnover but anyway we're going to stop there and ask questions or make comments could you just explain once again why I use a back to center plan as a that's kind of a model because there are some communities I think when I heard how is that relevant to us well when I heard I was at the their board meeting I'm not on the board any longer I've been on the board for years and years and they had a presentation and they talked about the fact that they provide their employees choice to do whatever they want or to buy whatever plan they want from MVP or good props and they at that meeting said our allowance that we provide our employees at 85% of the plan and I raised my hand and I said I think that that may be of concern going forward I'm not making any comment about how much you've decided now but if you pay it at 85% of a premium well if premiums go up 15% next year because automatically go up 15% and I explained how we tied it to used inflation and the increase and so on and so forth so I just said once 85% and I was surprised we're pretty close to that in some cases a little bit over it but we're not tied to it we're not tied to it and if it goes up next year by 12% or so 8% increase we're not going to be tied to it it just happens that's where we are Bill so just to remind me so in this scenario basically if you pick a gold plan or less you're paying in your single plan you would be covered 100% is that my interpreting I think that for single plans most of the plans that we give the allowance that we give would allow employees to choose almost anything but platinum plans I think there's a couple of them that if you get to the family plan if you're taking a gold plan you won't have enough money to do it but if you choose a standard silver for instance and you're a family it's 1812 and we're offering 1950 if you chose a gold plan it would be 2185 and we're offering 1535 and then if you choose a platinum plan we're offering 1950 I mean it's 2529 so some of the world plans are out of reach I didn't analyze every single one month all the silver plans would be close anyway if not yeah it looks like the silver plans everybody would be able to silver CDHP family 1770 yeah I think all the plans are available except the golden plan so Mark I was interested in knowing how you compensate your help for healthcare costs yeah we have it's basically calculated off the lowest salaried employee and then there's a calculation that basically sets the maximum we could charge for the employee contribution which ends up being like 100 gone off the top of my head but it's like $115 a month or something so that's and then they can pick that's the maximum amount of pocket employee can have and then they can pick a certain I think it's three different plans or something like that that's where this is kind of interesting to me I guess I have to remind myself every year that we do 85% of plat numbers just 85% of the chosen plan where it would be a slider where the employee would always have some contribution because in this scenario potentially the employee doesn't yeah I mean I think it's just like the same thing for me I haven't even seen mine yet this year but I'm sure they're going to go up an astronomical rate again too but yeah that's how we do yeah and again I'm not trying to say one is better than the other or worse than another but you've got to you've got to start from where you've been before and if you look at what we've done over the years we have we've bent the curve down compared to many other municipalities in terms of what we've offered over time and employees if they choose a lesser plan then they're going to face those deductibles and co-pays and out of pocket maximums that are significant you know for whatever reason public employees schools they manage to in the old days get these plans and it's just it's hard to move away from them dramatically if you want to do that it's your project but I would caution you about will the MPP rate schedule cover the employees at 100% but the MPP rates are lower than this that's what I thought so you're asking for a decision on this tonight I would like it if it could be if you don't you know we've got to at least make some decisions with the insurance company this week if you want to wait until the next meeting that doesn't give employees very much time 18 if you have to wait Mr. Fish anything you'd like to say I mean I think we're being consistent with what we've been doing it's I mean honestly outside of you know I don't want you to take any of this personal or it's not aimed towards employees but I'm not going to get into spilling my guts about the impacts of what's going on in this economy that is literally putting up people are against the ropes and I know that because it's affecting people who are personally connected to me and I quite frankly don't know what to do about it I've said this before there's people in the private sector that are not even allow these types of benefits and as this continues to go on at no cause of the municipalities it continues to put people further and further in the whole and I just quite frankly I'm at a loss as to what to do because I have people very close to me that are about ready to lose their own homes because the cost of affording to live period has become almost out of reach and I guess I don't know what to do I don't know what to do it seems like a certain class of people that are being and I won't say protected because I don't mean it that way but held harmless to a larger degree than a lot of other people and what I guess I'm saying is it's not fair and it's really getting under my skin well Chris there's a lot of things that aren't fair in society in some people's minds the economy is as good as it's ever been it's the best economy we've ever had in this country according to some people personally I wish that we would change this system and divorce healthcare from employment it shouldn't be up to employers to provide health insurance but it's the system that we have why do you think those companies out there are saying we'll give you $5,000 if you take somebody else's insurance when they do that we should send the $5,000 to the company that's paying it not to the person who's not taking it but everybody's trying to offload their expenses on to somebody else it's not a fair system but it's the system that we have to live with right now meanwhile I mean Mark you just said you didn't know how your health costs were going to increase this year and I keep wondering how the type of business that you're in can continue to absorb you know rapid costs oh I believe if you're offering a plan you've got to buy it through the exchange unless you have over 100 people we don't buy it through the exchange but we buy in a buyer's group or something like that but yeah I think I think we just will have to take price eventually right so we'll eventually raise prices on the menus adjust and hope that customers continue to come that's the scary part of all of that right but that's how we adjust for increases like this do you think it's a significant um and I think it's a nice incentive to pay people to not buy the insurance because it saves the town money but I mean that's $39 that's almost $4,000 a year if that were applied towards for three employees I don't know just do you think it would be realistic to phase that out or I hear what you're saying and I really understand this is like a benefit to it's important to keep good employees and you don't want to nickel and die people because then you lose them and that's one of the benefits people have of working for a town is that they get some decent benefit well I resisted offering money for those who chose not to take coverage for a long long time and I think it's only it's within the last four years I think that we did and you know and as I said it's a relatively small amount a hundred dollars a month and I think two of the employees are town employees and one is an E5 employee that is not costing anything but we're all in the same group for insurance purposes I had one employee come to me and say you know it's possible for me to take a single plan and my wife to take a single plan you don't have to be on the same plan and if I took a plan that I could get an HSA with I could put some money aside into that the town's money and whether it was an idle threat or what I said well maybe it's time we got to do something a little bit that's really a pebble in the desert sand of Ababa do you have a ballpark number of what this increase if taken I mean I know the employees haven't chosen their plan yet but if they chose it doesn't matter what plan they choose if you offer this per month I didn't do it I should have but I can do it quickly it took me two minutes to do it I didn't know what I was going to add to the overall budget in a sense just from a health care perspective I'd be curious to know that I was wondering that as well this looks really scary but maybe 4.6% is $5,000 or is it $30,000 we're talking about an increase on our tax rate just in health care costs it's and I'm not blaming any of this on the municipality I mean it's a health care system that's being created that is just out of control it's a societal problem you know I'm a fiscal conservative but I don't I really we have there's just a crisis in health care and I believe a lot of public employees some of them choose to work in a public sector which I'm including town officials because of other reasons and I think that's one of the benefits of working you know I know a lot of public people they could work elsewhere and get a bigger paycheck but they may not get the sense in doing things you know just by being a bean counter or something like that I think our town and I think if it's not a big expense on our tax rate I'm all for I don't think what Bill's presenting in a 4.6% increase with what rates are going out there is a lot just my opinion I'm interested to begin to see that what the raw number is and it's just you know this is just one drop in a bucket of water with everything that we're continually being faced with it's a whole I just know of too many people out in the private sector that are really really struggling and it's not getting easier for them and the walls are closing in on them because more and more is getting taken out of their pockets all the time and there's no way of recovering those losses 2019 $238,000 is what we paid for health and that there's probably a couple of other things in there in that line but 4.6% is $10,950 that does make me feel a little better I mean it's still an increase but it's not it's not like it's $50,000 again it's one of the drops in the bucket you know there's a lot of things that are going to add up to yeah you know I'll just say that the 85% of platinum I feel like pretty much automatically says that gold or below you're probably going to get mostly covered I I don't know I mean if we're already getting to that point you guys say 85% of platinum is always a question mark of you know your other towns if they're doing that they're pegging what they cover off of once and we can see all the difference and changes year to year so I think what Bill's doing is a much more difficult and consuming way to do it I'm just wondering in the future if we need to consider and I'm not saying we should do it this year but like do we consider going to always cover 100% silver and below and it's 90% of gold or something to start to well again I you know this was a little bit different memo until I said geez I wonder what 85% of platinum is and I saw what we were and and as I said pegging your premium to whatever it is you're going to give a percentage of that premium whatever that goes up your cost is going to go up if it goes up 10% so if we had pegged ourselves that 85% of platinum last year platinum you know the platinum plan the platinum plan went up 14.38% this year so if we had been pegged that 85% of platinum last year whatever 4.83% increase this year what I'm doing is saying use CPI use the rate increase so 4.6% if we keep doing it my way we'll get lower and lower we'll get further and further away from platinum I think what happened last year the rate increase was so low and inflation was that it was either the year before or now and we ended up using 1 to 1 ratio between the two we caught up a little closer but when there's big increases if you want to tie yourself to a premium and then it goes up 15% you're going to be changing your percentage and then that's going to cause consternation as well I think the way we do it is actually better it's just that I think last year we jumped up a little bit higher than we had been before but you know from my perspective I'm not recommending this but if you left it right where it is now I think that it's a good benefit something that I believe the taxpayers in the town is generous so if there's no increase just speaking for me you know I wouldn't like it but I would still be able to put people in the eye and say you're getting a good deal I'm not recommending that you do that but so it's you have to make the choice and I tried to work hard to look at it both from the employer side the taxpayer side the personal somebody who gets the benefit and trying to be as good to split the babies so to speak I mean we're well ahead of budget seating with this particular item so there's a lot of things that are going to come into play but yeah the unfortunate part about this is the way health insurance works the employees are going to have to choose by about the 5th of December what plan they want and they're going to choose based on what we're offering and I know you can't change it and unfortunately we canceled last meeting and if we hadn't I was away and that's just the way it was but the insurance companies have to get approval of their rates from the insurance I don't really renew the but you know they pushed back and this information wasn't available until the second week of October so getting it to you as quickly as I can just a quick understanding too so 788 if you choose a plan that's 560 we just cover 560 or are they getting the rest of it they get the 788 or the use of the 788 and I didn't I didn't make the full breakdown here but for instance if you take I take the bronze CDHP standard plan so that's the bottom plan on the left I mean on the right so I buy a plan and the remainder is left over and I put that while I was ready to have it I put it in an HSA and it's my money but there are some employees who don't feel comfortable with a high deductible plan they don't either they're they've got some issues and they know their expenses are going to be high or they don't like record keeping or what have you or they're just not risk takers they decide to buy a bronze blue rewards plan a blue page of the left hand column there that isn't a high deductible plan and if they choose that plan and they're a single person we would offer 788 and they would be paying a premium of 545 and the difference between the 788 and the 545 is available to them in a health reimbursement account but if they don't use it that money stays with the town so it's not that all this money goes out for some people and we've had this discussion in the past for the employees who feel that they're willing to take a plan that has a $15,000 out-of-pocket family maximum we said well we'll let you build up some money in your own health savings account and we'll pay for that for people who don't want to do it and that's money that goes in an HSA immediately as soon as it goes into their bank account it's that employee that's the town doesn't own it anymore it doesn't come back to the town money that is set aside is available for a health reimbursement account if those people don't use it at the end of the year that money comes back to the town it would need to account the number of people who take high deductible plans versus standard plans but it's about a 50-50 mix I think did you say the town paid about $219,000 last year? $230,000 to $238,000 did you have a question? so if there's no more questions or comments in reference to this agenda item somebody would like to make a motion authorize the increase of the recommended 4.6% monthly benefit for health care insurance to be made available to employees for the next year $10,000 somebody wants to make that motion? I'm going to make a motion a three-part motion as per Bill's three recommendations that the town and EFED continue to offer employees any Blue Cross Blue Shield plan or MVP through the Vermont Health Connect exchange I also recommend increasing the monthly benefit for health insurance made to employees by 4.6% and recommend that we increase the amount to $110 per month for those who do not take a plan is there a second? I'll second further comments? Hearing none, the motion has been made and seconded all those in favor say aye aye I want to just thank you because this was a very complicated issue yeah I did it unfortunately I was listening on the way over here to the meeting discussion about the fact that a lot of young people are opting out and I also defunded for Obamacare what was part of the original one it was also it wasn't just the gap years it was a mechanism to help people understand to give them guidance yeah that's right I didn't mean so that's all gone and they're offering it says you google it's all these junk plans they call them skinny plans and I said they could also just be called junk plans give you anything I guess my other comment is and I guess it already exists in the tax stabilization fund but maybe we need to specifically think about a health care stabilization component how it would even work yeah I don't know well if our great leaders in Washington all of them included could somehow bring themselves together to solve our national debt we wouldn't have to worry about the cost of health care because we'd be floating in money we could pay for it easily maybe they could offer us all the same benefits they gave yeah okay the last item on the list apparently has to do with Mr. Kildore greetings you'd like to come up and have a seat we'd love your company so I'd like to apologize to Jeff first of all because when I talked to you folks about my recommendation for a special town meeting with regard to the fire trucks I didn't even think to ask Jeff if he was available and he was only waiting for a text to be said should we ask Jeff to if he can cover a meeting? I was away when they planned the meeting he was away when I didn't have anything planned Jeff you weren't available did you have to elect a new moderator well you could elect a new moderator or the chairman or the chairman could point someone to do it okay well I'm glad well I shouldn't say it right I hope you're available absolutely good so is there anything we need to be informed about as to how this might all shape down? well I haven't seen I haven't spent a lot of time with a warning I don't anticipate that one of the things I was thinking about because it seems like everybody knows how to buy a vehicle that there's typically a lot of conversation and I strongly recommend that Carla bring ballots and checklists but she always does I'm going to check people in as they arrive yeah I think that's a that's a good plan and then it's just the usual it's an abbreviated meeting I'm not going to spend nearly as much time on the rules of the road as I do at the annual meeting because it's a it's a short meeting that I don't believe that the attendance will be as great as it is at annual meeting and I'll go through just enough of the rules so that I think we can get through the meeting you would think based on my kind of going over the whole scenario that when I look at things I kind of look at them in a broader sense with everything that's going on with the Harwood Union District potential cost increases there the fact that we're trying to get some of our infrastructure issues under control and now this having not necessarily thrown in our lap what was lurking in the background and was going to come to fruition at some point later than sooner I think but it happens to be sooner in this case and I'll be curious to see just how many people turn out to talk about you know if they even consider this issue and others that are surrounding them in their community that are going to continue to drive up taxes to the point where we're just going to lose more people more local people because it seems like there's a continuation of influx and I see it in my world because I'm kind of on the front line of that part of the development you know the plot selling and whatnot and I'm seeing a pretty active world out there in the real-estate business of people buying new lots and whatnot and I do hear in a lot of cases where they're from you know most of them I mean I just moved in here from bought a lot here from Indiana wanted to get away from the heat and the lots weren't cheap fine refugees yeah so this doesn't have to do with Jeff Jeff I don't know if you have the one in front of you but just as it heads up the article one which is the fire trucks is a little bit unique and just so you know about it beforehand one of the fire trucks has already been purchased so I have their last meeting authorized the purchase of one of the trucks the article asks the town to authorize the select board to borrow my bill for a period not to exceed five years one million dollars for the purposes of acquiring two replacement fire trucks through direct purchase or through reimbursement of a purchase advance from the town's capital reserve fund so I'm talking to Paul Giugliani before the last select board explained that we had two trucks that were out of service and down really couldn't wait until March meeting to order a new one because if you order a new one in March it takes until about the next February before you get it so it's in the other room I didn't bring it with me Paul recommended to the select board that they adopt a resolution of intent to reimburse the capital reserve fund with borrowing so he said you don't have to explain to the voters that we gave this purchase it was rather an emergency nature so I just wanted you to know one of the trucks has been purchased and we're asking them to authorize it will be the second truck and if they want to finance that and then they're authorizing the reimbursement of the capital reserve fund by borrowing from what's already been spent so it's a little bit of a different situation so if people say no to article one altogether that means we're going to buy one truck and we're going to pay for it out of the CIP and that money's going to be gone and we're not going to be able to finance that truck over five minutes so the truck that you authorized to buy at the last meeting we're going to pay cash for it when it comes we've got enough cash in the CIP but we prefer to pay for it over five can we amend it during that meeting to half a million or whatever you can amend it you can I emailed Gary today I talked to him after the last meeting and this is getting a little bit away from what Jeff is here for but I talked to Gary after the last meeting in fact he was here and after that meeting he was here for the regular meeting he didn't come to the special meeting when you actually bought the truck and I said you know there's people talking about can we do something to stretch out the life of one of these trucks to get it off of this by two or one year scenario to your point we're just a few months ahead of where it was much meeting we're going to be going to buy two fire trucks and because both of them broke down and one of them in particular but I did ask Gary haven't heard a word from him yet you know how much would it cost to just fix the tank of the truck this week and a quote to follow up to that is are these two trucks that are down the same trucks about the same year are they the same model could we take the tank off of the one that has the blown engine and put that maybe yeah I was going to ask you if Gary could have that information available what it's going to cost to take two and put them into one take the motor out of the bad one the bad motor out of the one with a good tank take the good motor out of the bad one with a bad tank stick the motor in either move the tank which ever is easier and cheaper probably use the motor and perhaps buy us a couple of years which would do two things help you know postpone the revenue spend or the spend and then possibly distance our purchase time frame a part a little bit and you know get us by for and again like I said that the last week it's a double sort because the longer you wait the higher the price goes you know you wait two years down the road three years down the road truck's going to be another 40-50 thousand dollars are you really gaining any ground there but that was if you remember that was the rationale was that this demonstration vehicle was out there and we could buy it at 465 versus 535 or whatever it was and then you know he's frightened maybe we do the same thing with the second one we'll get that information and I've tried to share I've talked to a couple of different firefighters and said you know the fact that we've got these vehicles on the same year schedule is you know it is what it is and it's as a result of the fact that we had two fire departments 20 years ago when we bought these vehicles we had the town department and the village department they both needed a truck and it was cheaper to buy two trucks at the same time off the same assembly line one and two and you know people like Ray and you paid for one truck and people I don't know were you still in the village 20 years ago you know Jeff paid for two trucks and so you know now we're in a situation where we're asking all of us to buy two trucks but it would be nice if we could you know ideally it would be great to get one of these trucks to last 5 years longer and then we could be on a schedule where you know in 2030 the one truck we bought 10 years ago would come up in 30 35 the one that we could make last 5 more years and then you know the question mark of are we getting ahead by doing that I think the answer is yes if as long as the truck basically outlasts what we amortize the potential cost of the truck going to zero over its life span right so if it's a $25,000 a year basically depreciation of value and we hope to get 20 years out of these trucks 2 years is $50,000 but say the truck goes up $50,000 you're starting that you spread that $50,000 over the 20 years ongoing so even if it went up $50,000 I still think there's a way that it still makes sense to try to look at those options because I think you are saving because you're starting the 20 years 2 years from now instead of immediately starting another truck right now and if we think that a viable option is to do something like that then we already own the engine it's really mostly labor and probably not a lot of parts it's probably not that big of an expense well my bigger concern is the headwinds that we finally have gained on dealing with some of our infrastructure I don't want the purchase of two of these fire trucks to have a heavy impact on lessening our ability to continue to try to gain speed on our we talked about how there are loans coming off and the net impact isn't as bad as maybe it sounds I'll come back to this Chris I think it's helpful it's not taking anything away from what you just said but it's not all necessarily doing boom but anyway I just wanted you to know that that article 1 is a little bit hard and I'll have with me the declaration of intent that Paul had signed just in case anybody asks us about it and I talked with him and I said I'd like it to be as simple as possible I didn't know if we should have articles but he felt this way that this article 1 did the trick it's the first time I've ever seen an article like this but that's what we want so we're going to have to deal with it there'll probably be a lot of explaining especially if we decide not to buy the second truck then we're really asking for financing to basically reimburse ourselves for the $165,000 that we're spending by this truck we posted by the last meeting what possible impacts could you foresee happening if we ripped the Band-Aid off and just paid for one truck the first year I mean would that really set us back for the next couple of years well we can get there in a minute I don't want to Jeff is certainly welcome to stay for all the policy but I want to make sure that he's squared away and if he decides he doesn't want to listen to local politics he can go home no I'm I'll stay longer because I think it's an interesting discussion and it helps me get a sense of how it's going to go in eight days but I think one of the silver linings analysis if you're a village resident you're going to pay less than you would have otherwise go right I support just what was the discussion about getting options because I think the public needs to know we need to know too I can explain that we're telling Jeff unfortunately and I say this I'm not casting explosions at all but I talked to one firefighter and I said look if the whole fire department shows up you're going to have to wait the whole meeting there's 55 firefighters and if we get 55 people at a special meeting it's a lot and the person I was talking to said well I don't think that we've ever tried this strong fire on the town and to do anything and I said no I'm not saying that but I want you to look at it not just as a firefighter but just as a general taxpayer and let's try to do what's best all the way around for the fire department you know I think we've got a good record of supporting a very strong fire department and what we do pays off you can count firefighters in a lot of the towns around us and they don't add up to 55 and I told you before the payroll costs that we have 55 firefighters is about $90,000 and if you had one full-time paid firefighter you got to pay more than that between salary and benefits so we're getting a good deal and having good equipment is part of why they signed up to do the work so it's a symbiotic relationship but anyway Chris you weren't here with a special meeting I passed this out and Jane you weren't here either there's a lot of information on this page but I wanted to understand it and since I looked at it a couple weeks ago I'll be taking a second to figure it out but at the top left in 2017 the town was $853,300 that's dead to us the town had total debt in 2012 $3117 of $6,098,300 that's the green column there four columns over from the left so a little more than $6,000,000 in debt $5,245,000 was owed to either banks or the bond bank and $853,300,000 was owed to us we've done interfund borrowing so 14% of the debt that we had outstanding we owed to ourselves if you come down the same columns at the end of 2020 well the end of 2019 the year that we're in right now our debt is going to be $5,142,300 so 5 million yeah 5 million so almost almost a billion dollars less than it was at the end of 17 and if we didn't borrow any more money at the end of 20 would be at $4.6 million and the debt to others will have dropped to $4.4 million I think that's in 2019 and the debt to ourselves $5.74 million and it's about the same ratio as it was before between the two but the table at the top going out to the right goes out through 2026 shows you what we owed in principle in the interest on each of those debt instruments that are out there so in 2018 we owed we had a budget of $688,892 for principle in interest in 2019 it's dropped to $6.53 if we don't borrow any more money it's going to drop to $6.31 and so on so we're retiring debt as time goes on and when our outstanding principle goes down even when we haven't retired the debt interest on that principle is lower amount of money we're slowly moving in the right direction and you know we would get from $6,098 and $17 at the end of 2026 it would be that $5.4 million so at the very bottom of the page really quick these are not changes over the previous year so it's cumulative great that's important so they're not huge decreases but you know between from 18 to 19 $35,000 dropped off so that's about a half a penny on the tax rate if you go down to the bottom and I just said let's assume we issue $1,000,000 of debt in 2020 and whether it's for these both of these fire trucks and it won't be $1,000,000 even if we do buy two fire trucks we won't need that much but whether it's two fire trucks one fire truck some paving whatever if we issue $1,000,000 of debt in 2020 we won't have any payment at all the reduction from 19 to 20 which is up at the top of the page we've got a $22,000 reduction in principle and interest expense that's on the books right now since we won't bother anything until 2020 we'll still realize that $22,324 savings next year compared to this year if we then refund the note we're not saying we will but if we refund the note we're asking the voters to authorize borrowing not to exceed five years the law allows the select board on its own motion to convert a note into a box and we did that with Perry Hill fund when we paid a couple years ago so if we refunded the note in 2021 and we made no principal payment and if we were paying 4% on $1,000,000 we'd have an interest payment of $40,000 would still owe $1,000,000 after 2021 and compared to what the table shows at the top we'll have whether we need a special meeting before the top meeting and I'll as early as possible I've got to get some numbers first but as early as I can and certainly no later than Friday I hope and I'd like to do it by Thursday I'll try to get answers out to you all in an email and maybe I'll have a recommended motion that I think works and I'll send it all out to you I'll include Jeff and then if you decide that it's good and you want to just show up on Tuesday night we'll wing it and if you decide that this requires more discussion you'll have to decide that and decide when we're going to meet we'll have to decide that on Friday though to warn it yeah if that's it I'll take a motion to adjourn second all approved thank you thank you