 We'll call the blackboard meeting to order first up is public comment. It's coming on anything not on the agenda Seeing nobody coming off mute All right, good evening So my name is John Kaplan for the record I guess So I just wanted to publicly I guess state my opinion about the police district But that's that topic on the agenda Well I mean there's a bunch of speak to it then. Yeah Pardon we're gonna talk about the police. Yeah, and can I just I mean I do have a conflict also It starts at six o'clock, so I was hoping to well We're gonna come right down through the agenda and we should get to it before then Yeah, okay Any other comments about something not on the agenda Seeing none approval of the agenda and the one change that we'd like to make is swapping the highway and the police fund order See you should have my name tag Opposed motion carries consent calendar Second those in favor I Opposed motion carries Under business first up is the RACDC neighborhood development area designation expansion C2 RACDC Accounts on I guess one of them's Julie. Yeah, I'm Julie and my colleague Diane Nelligan who's gonna walk through the The proposal that she put together I believe so Diane are you you're muted so Well, I can do it if she can't get on so but I know she's probably more prepared than I am so basically We're requesting and have prepared the amendments for The addition of a few parcels to the neighborhood development area that was Proposed by and approved by the select board and ultimately the state I think it was finalized in 2021 As you probably know the neighborhood development area is one of those areas like the downtown Designation area that confers certain benefits to projects within those designation areas One of the benefits conferred especially for priority housing projects is exemption from Act 250 jurisdiction in those areas We're working on a project now involving Project owned by us that heading drive Plus two parcels that are currently owned by capstone as affordable housing that we would incorporate into this upgrade and new construction and Those one of those is in the NDA designation one of those is just outside it and For the purposes of these projects every parcel in the project needs to be within the NDA in order to be eligible for exemption from Act 250 So we're asking that the boundary be extended to include 18 Forest Street Which is two properties away from the existing boundary and then on heading drive for some reason one of the pieces of the heading drive the current heading drive Parcel is in there, but part of the other piece is not so we're asking that that that piece be included the whole boundary on that piece be included as well. And I think we we've been in touch with the state. They think that this is a not a problem. They're actually they didn't see any Issue with that being approved by their board if the select board approves it and just one final mention about this project. This project would ultimately in two phases involve the rehabilitation of 25 Units of housing that hasn't been upgraded in between 30 and 40 years in some cases and the creation of 28 new units as well. If everybody's got any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Just we pulled this up. This is the heading parcel. Julie described right here. Yeah. And here's the forest one here. These light blue lines give you the Yeah, amended boundary proposal. So it sounds like it comes under the category of, well, of course, we should do this. But I do have a question which is, I'm not sure if if Julie or Trevor was the right person, but maybe we'll meet both of you. But there's, there's a lot of What seemed to be like sort of neighborhood type areas which are not included in the NDA. And it's just, it just, the boundaries just seem kind of odd in terms of why they stop where they where they stop and and I know we're not, we're obviously not going to fix this or do anything about it tonight. But I'm just sort of wondering if we know anything about the rationale for for why some of these areas weren't included. And if and if and if there is a Argument to be made for looking at this and and what the possible, you know, if there's any benefits to looking at expanding those areas given given the benefits that that these areas do have that that Julie just talked about. I could take. I mean, I could give you my answer to that. Um, that I think when this was being done. It was brand new. And it wasn't 100% understood. I think what those what those benefits would be. And in fact, some of the benefits has expanded since we started this work. So for now and maybe in the future, the NDA areas are also going to be eligible for the downtown tax credits. And so it's kind of an evolving thing. And I think one of the reasons the heading drive parcel wasn't in there, for example, was that Um, was that it was assumed that there was already something on there and it couldn't be expanded, but rehabs count. You can you can get, you know, exemption for rehabilitation as well. So I think absolutely this could be looked at again. Um, with that, you know, with what we know now in mind and, you know, open it up to discussion in those other areas because those weren't in the hearing when this was proposed. Um, but yeah, we and we'd be happy to be involved in that because I think there are, you know, benefits outside maybe the existing lines that that might be worth looking into we can look into it see what the benefit be the why not only because we've got, you know, with the heading drive 1, for example, we create this odd shape. And they just kind of kind of one lot there. Same thing. You see there's all kinds of little little gaps that you could fill in depending on which way you want to go. Yeah. There's a sizable development on the other side of heading to if it's rehab that develop on the other side should have been in there. Yeah. Yeah, there are reasons for some of it like what that is commercial that little parcel on the corner which probably wouldn't wouldn't reap the benefits, you know, so some of this there is a rationale for some of it maybe it was just like we didn't know at the time, but I think revisiting it would certainly be a worthwhile thing. We hope that you would approve the amendment tonight because we have an immediate need to go through that process in order to be eligible and competitive for some of the upcoming funding we're going to apply for for this particular project. Who was involved in getting this. Expansion to this point. The expansion we're proposing that was our request because of this project. The original one was. The commission benefit table for this. I don't we we conferred with mark. So I don't know if the planning commission was also involved. But in the original one it was Josh, mostly Josh, I think in the. I'm not sure if the planning commission was involved in that one either. So they haven't weighed in at all on this change. Well, I think I'll take that back. I think they might have been involved in the original one. I don't know if Marcus has conferred with them on this one. I don't think so based on the timing and not meeting commission as a whole. Mark wasn't even involved until late. So this had already gotten quite a ways through the process by the time Mark got told about it, which is concerning. It's a town plan, a town designation and we find out just before it's ready to be approved. Is it a change of use? It's a change of designation. So it's a. It would have been nice to have the more holistic look at it. Not be a bad idea to wrap it into some of the town because we're you're saying what last time last week we're we're getting close to town plan revamp time. So this might be the kind of thing that fits well. Within that framework. The two are designed to work. Some level of concert with one another. Yeah, agreed. And there are some things that certainly, you know, the NDA would look at like it looks at sidewalks where the town might say well in that area. We don't want to expand sidewalks, but the state would want us to that was some of the rationale I think in some of these areas. In this case, there's already sidewalks where we will build them in those areas. So it's not like we're not we didn't see any. Trip wires in the original intent of the original application. That would make this something that would be a head scratcher at all. It was just they missed the boundary by like 1. Two lot lines. Any other areas that you're planning to try to pull into this or into any of the other designations. I think the downtown designation would be very difficult to change. We haven't thought about that too much in a while, but it probably be worth looking at. We don't have any immediate thoughts about that. There's some parcels that I think are up in the air about potential development areas that might be outside the boundary. And I do think it's a worthwhile thing to look at, especially now that. You know, we'll know more especially this session about what the legislature intends to do going forward with this designation, like whether the tax credits are going to be a more permanent benefit here and things like that. So yeah, I think I think we don't have anything specific that we're thinking of beyond this. And initially we weren't we weren't aware that all of the person's had to be in the NDA to be eligible for those benefits. So, so we don't have anything else now, but I think it's definitely worth looking at. I think so too. I think the planning commission probably ought to have this one when they do the town plan. You set the town plan and look at all these other special designated areas and how those all fit in. Any other questions? None from the board? Any questions? None online? I'll make a motion to approve the amended NDA boundaries to include the two parcels listed. I will second. All those in favor? Aye. Opposed? Motion carries. Next up is the police fund. Thank you folks. Appreciate it. Thanks really. Bye-bye to you. So I'll just scroll down then we'll stay up and running. Scott, I think I saw you jump on. There's an indication proof of life. Yeah. Scott is home ill. He's unable to be with us but he's in physically but he's here with us digitally and certainly in spirit. So tonight... Barely hanging on. Barely hanging on so it'd be nice. Ah! Playing out our sympathy, huh? So tonight, before you were continued by what we had scheduled, police highway and the capital improvement program. You amended the order a little bit so that we could get Scott on and through. So the police district budget is the one that we're starting with just to go back to the same summary sheet that you've had before. This is the budget approved last May I think we ended up doing this our startup foundational budget. And then here is what's proposed for fiscal 25 until we can see the different categories. Administrations were most of the personnel costs are so understandably the largest. The operation hits sort of other areas of need such as uniforms, training, general liability insurance, dispatch and a whole host of other costs. And the $25,000 in other when we get into the lines will be for that proposed transfer to the capital reserve. You'll see this in the capital table later. It fits into other conversations we've had. We know two of those vehicles are toward the end of their useful life would really need replacement in fiscal 25 to stay on those types of schedules. $25,000 will be the first $25,000 into the police reserve so there's not enough to buy $135,000 worth of vehicle fully outfitted. So we've got in the capital plan showing that as ARPA funds as was proposed in December. If we don't go that route, we'd have to figure something else out. Most likely you're looking at some sort of debt financing and how we pay for that would be part of that task. This adds two officers from the current footprint. So just so everybody starts, there's chief, two officers and Rose who's the dispatch admin. This would add two more full-time level three certified police officers to mix. Chief, four officers and Rose. Four all full-time. There's a little bit of part-time capacity still left in the budget for whomever fills those roles at lower rates. We haven't seen great utilization of that just from personnel interest hours kind of standpoint, but we kept them in there. So there's at least that capacity to fill a random Friday night shift, for example. This is essentially the same version the police committee has looked at, the numbers lower. I'll get into sort of why that is different, but it's basically the same existing district model that the committee's been looking at since September of October. And so they've looked at three models. The existing district is this footprint. What we have now, there was the expanded and there were the townwide. Those were the versions that were shown at the forum. So this is a little different. I'll get into the non-tax revenue side as to why this was and some timing related to one of the two cops in terms of when they join on. So I'll just get down into the lines there. We can go through that and then Scott, at any point, if there's something you want to point out or jump in on, I'll be afraid to shout over me here. If you can. If you're able, yeah. I'll try my best. So much like we did last week, start on the revenue end. Like every other budget we have, most of the revenue comes from property taxes. And the rest of it's made up of in this case, non-police district revenue. The reason I say that is because the general fund payment for services that's shown right here. These are all taxpayer dollars, property tax dollars as well. So it balances out this is the amount of the budget. This amount is subtracted from the overall budget amount. It gives you the to be raised by taxes number there. So it's about $134,000 change. There's a slight increase in this. We carry this just as sort of an example as part of the conversations that have evolved. The committee when it was talking about its recommendations landed on a number closer to this. So for a question for the board is to, if you go with this proposal, do you want to leave these numbers where they are? Do you want to do something different there? Special policing gets into if we are hired out for events, any sort of other traffic details, anything else we're able to. Again, some of our ability to collect some of this revenue depends on having those bodies. Fingerprinting, we've been really good at being able to make some money there. Special detail reimbursement to participate in Governor's Highway Safety Program. So when you look at the actuals, you'll see some money drop into there. Sort of event staffing. Contracts for service, we've kept it there. We'd like to be able to do a little more of that. The COPS grant, these are $125,000 maximum awards. You've got three years to spend the money. In order to try to mitigate this impact here, this budget proposes using most of that funding in fiscal 25. The idea being that we've prioritized getting to that four officer footprint. One of the things the police committee looked at as part of its work and that we've looked at internally, Scott has done, I don't even know how many different iterations of schedules showing how we would cover seven days a week in any model with what number of officers. If you put four officers in there and a couple of shifts for the chief, you can make a seven day a week, not 24 seven, mind you. Model work with four plus chief. Somebody gets sick, which we've experienced. Somebody goes on vacation. We have a vacancy. Now you've got white spaces in that schedule. So these are the minimum staffing levels in a lot of ways. They do fit what we saw when we talked to other communities, benchmark data, per capita data. We talked to St. Albans and you talk about what you spend per capita. We're actually a little bit lower than their number. So we get into the expenditure end here. This is the officers plus chief. They're all right there, including the part timers. We've got admin dispatch there for Rose. The increase there is tied to those different pieces. So we're carrying the cop's grant will cover that amount across sort of those employee categories. So that's salary, health insurance, retirement costs, all of those pieces that it's helping to cover. We're starting the fourth officer in January one in this model, much like we did in the current budget with the planning and zoning position so that we can try to wiggle a little bit of extra capacity out of this in terms of mitigating how we mitigate impact. Overtimes just an assumed factor as we gain more data on what we're doing. More officers hopefully means less overtime. But we're still trying to work this number out as we go. The insurance opt out. This ties into, if you don't take our health insurance and you have coverage somewhere else, you're eligible for an opt out payment. They vary based on whether you'd be on a family plan, a two person plan or a single plan. So we have one employee opting out who'd otherwise be on a family plan. We like these because at $4,500 we get to thank the employee for being on insurance in some other manner because otherwise that family plan is going to be about a $34,000 to expense for us to cover our premium share. So we make out well in that deal. As you can see here on the health end, this is where this is fully illustrated. We've budgeted a mix of plans. We have at least two folks on family plans. We've got a couple of folks budgeted for two person plans and one person budgeted for a single plan. That would be a fairly representative sample. The danger in that is that if we don't find a cop on a single plan and we're providing health insurance at the more expensive rate, that's tied to the six month a year position too. So some of that is mitigated a little bit with that. We budget health insurance in two chunks, six months based on the actual cost, six months based on an assumed increase. So this is done just the same way that we do it for all the other employees with that piece there. Retirement, we're at that 21.4%. It's our employer contribution because we're in the state employees system. So that's why that number is larger than you might see. And if you looked at somebody else's police budget and they're in the VMware system where the contribution rate could be between eight and 10% say depending on which group they're in. And then workers' compensation numbers, those are from VLCT. They're based on our anticipated payroll. It's a per 100 metric. We are lucky in that we don't have any sort of negative claims history that would affect our experience rating. That's one of the benefits of being brand new. But if somebody goes to the academy, gets hurt, hurts a shoulder, this seems to be a common occurrence. There's some workers' comp costs. We get to pay for that for the following three years. So this is just at where we're at based on where we're starting. And we generally see we've got a pretty good experience rating. It goes to that one target figure that they want you to be. A little bit less than that. You're on the good side of it. A little bit higher you go up in that number. The more expensive it's going to be. General insurance costs. This is our general property casualty liability insurance again through VLCT, through passive, the fund. Then you get into some of our operating lines from here. There aren't really any changes from those prior budgets. You can see some go up, some go down. Vehicle fuel, just if we've got more cops, we're going to be on the road more often. You'll see this in Highway 2. One of the things we switched out that I want everybody to remember, this year we're using sort of historical averages. Next year we'll have a full year plus with our new fuel system, which lets us know by vehicle, by user, by time. We'll be able to really accurately say what's our usage and assign those costs, which helps when we want to bill, say, the school for the fuel that it uses. I think we suspect based on early returns on the data we've been subsidizing fuel use for a little while, fairly substantially, with the old system that wasn't as accurate. It's nothing crazy in the budgets, but we'll see a little bit probably come back. The contracted services this big, this is where we've put the money to work with, say, Clare Martin Center for a crisis response worker. And to pay for some of the costs since the dawn of that, that's been the number we've carried since early on in the conversation. It's there for the forum. Came out after we talked to St. Alvin City about their program there. So one of the things that we need to clarify on that, that's not to actually pay for the worker. That's to pay for the extra training and gear they would need. The worker themselves would be paid for, hopefully by Clare Martin Center. So the other misconception that's out there quite a bit is that it would replace an officer. It will not replace an officer. It's in addition to. So we're not going to gain any staff hour savings with that person. It's just an additional service being provided at the call. Supplemental not supplanting was the thing we heard when we talked to St. Alvin, for example. The rest of the costs there are more marginal. We know better what things cost us. You'll see the repair maintenance for the building. It's an older building. It's got a lot of needs. We've done everything from door casings to lights to plumbing related stuff, I believe. And so older buildings in that state require more maintenance. So that helps us get all of that done. Dispatch, we've got a little bit of an increase sort of factored in. I've got to fix, go back and make sure that all of these formulas are working. These are still newer lines. But a little bit of an increase there. Just because we're expecting a small one based on that. This keeps us with Barry City. We've talked about potentially switching. We've been approached by some of the other dispatch units, but Barry City took us in when we didn't have a home. And like I said last week, that counts for something. And then $25,000 is that capital transfer. And so that's how you get to 721-838. So the real big change from what we're living under now to what this proposes to do is those two officers. Like I said, $25,000 starts that equipment reserve. But at $25,000, it's probably three fiscal years before we got enough money to replace a vehicle. We know that we've got two due. So that probably gets us to the replacement date for the one that we have that we bought new or thereabouts. We really should increase it incrementally if we can over the next couple of years. But we'll have to figure out how to pay for those two new vehicles at some point. So operationally, yeah, existing districts, Scott can answer any questions you have about what we do, how we do it, where we do it. Those are the basic pieces. I think it's also good that if Scott could, if he could explain kind of why the additional two officers are needed just to cover the services you're doing today. Sure. So even with just three officers going on right now, I mean, there's, there's holes in the schedule. I mean, honestly, we're only on until at least 10 o'clock at night with no coverage from 10 p.m. to about 730 with an additional officer that will give us coverage to at least zero two. And also on the weekends, they're, they're shy. I've got both my guys working every other weekend, you know, but it's a split shift model. So your hours are not covered in any shape or form. The other end of it is sickness. Key some point today. I'm home with COVID and we're going to call at the school for a kid with a gun. I had to call out Chelsea because she was about three hours before the start of her shift and she had to come out with that awesomeness. It's coverage pieces is kind of what we're looking at in regards to the additional two officers. You know, at some point, we're going to have to try to think about, you know, allowing officers to take time off. You know, so we want to alleviate any burnout. If an officer takes time off currently in this model, what we got going on, that means there is nobody covering the shift at all. So we're, we're less than their bones with this current model with three officers. But there's a lot of overtime hours right now also with the count that you have, correct? Yes. So I mean, I'm doing a lot of the overtime. You know, I'm taking a, you know, I'll some comp time. So I'm really kind of getting boned with it, but it is where it is. The other end of it is, you know, it's, it's that coverage, you know, where it's not just an officer safety piece. It's more of an officer safety piece all the way around. But having those additional officers would be a huge cost benefit for that overtime. And so we've seen some folks express opinions that we don't need any more officers, but we could go townwide. What would that do to you and your staff if you became the primary law enforcement agency with no additional stuff for the entire town? So I mean, if this model isn't working for a two square mile area, how is it going to work for a townwide model? You're adding almost 1,100 calls, you know, per VSP, what they do in the actual town on top of the 1,700 calls that we did in the village alone. You're just asking for officers to burn out faster than anything else. It's near impossible for a townwide coverage with only three officers. This fits a through thread that we started last year when we were talking about the amended budget that was building the foundation at some point that house was going to need walls, going to need a roof, going to need windows in the form of officer counts. This was the number that was highlighted in the original draft. This is the number we keep coming back to. It's the number of the benchmark support. It's the number of the committees come up with. I'm still just scraping our belly on the runway trying to get in the air. Can I ask a question? Yeah, go ahead, John. 1,100 here, Scott, say 1,100 calls by the state police in Randolph? Yes, sir. When we did the tallies for the year for both Randolph BD and also VSB, their total for calls for service in the town of Randolph was approximately 1,100 calls. But is that like, would that include like a stop they made on the interstate that happens to be in Randolph? I could go through the data. Some of them were a lot of them were traffic stops, but a lot of them are, I mean, for out of 1,100 calls, it's not that much for traffic stops on the interstate that happen to be in Randolph. Okay. So the one piece that needs to become key in a bit in the one piece that folks keep forgetting is soon as we vote to go townwide, Scott's group is primary. State police are no longer primary. That's why the calls become his. And so it's a question of if suddenly that volume is his to manage, is he set up for success or is he set up for quicker burnout? Right, but the state police would still respond if it was something not just a traffic stop. Depends what it is and how quickly they would respond. Maybe a murder. Okay. That's what we have. That's just it. That's just it. We don't have serious crime that in any great length outside the district. So hence we look at it and actually break down that data and see it and then you know that then you well know that and you've seen that data on the committee if you will. I think it depends how you define serious crime. We have a lot of activity in town, but we have a lot of activity that the state police wouldn't respond to instead they would put it on a list and when Scott comes in in the morning they'll give him that list to respond to. So now he's got the next day's calls plus backlog. So can I just ask one more question? Yeah. So currently like in this fiscal year there's $100,000 from the general fund. In other words people both inside the police district and outside that it's going towards the police. So if a call comes in now that's outside the police district, Scott's responding to it, right? Not always. He's not the primary right now. The state police would respond if they can't respond they'll reach out to Scott and ask him to respond. I understand it's a choice. It's not a requirement. It's a choice. What do you mean by that? What I mean by that is the state police call and say could you help us out here. The difficult part for me to understand is that if three officers cannot cover this town in the original district and there's a need for five officers to cover the original district, how do we make the choice to respond when there's an accident on the highway and I happen to see one in the last weeks, happen to see a young lady that went off into the medium. The state police were there in about seven minutes followed up by another state trooper in that time. So I think it's somewhat selective on that regard. Yeah, I guess so what I was going to say at the start and I'll just, I won't, maybe I'll say the whole thing, but you know, obviously I am in favor of a townwide police department because I think that is the equitable way to do it. I don't think it's ever going to be the ideal time where we can ramp up from where we are now to eight to ten officers or whatever. I forget what the number was for a townwide that was in the police committee's proposal. Eight. Eight full time. So, you know, with new building vehicles, blah, blah, blah. I understand there's all those expenses. You know, I still think, you know, what you're asking taxpayers to do with the budget as proposed, if you're in the police district for a $350,000 house which is our property, which is the average for Randolph. You know, if you're in the police district, you're going to be paying about $1,200, which includes your 98 from the general fund. If you're outside, you're going to be paying $98 versus at the proposed budget, which is the chief and four full time. If it went townwide, it would be $456 for that same value property, which is $38 a month. And I know I've heard speculation about whether that would pass as a vote or not, but I don't think there's ever going to be a way to know that for sure up front. No one's going to ever be able to guarantee that until the select board decides that townwide is the way to go and puts a budget together for that and puts it out to the town to vote. I think you can speculate one way or the other, but you'll never know up front whether that's going to pass or not. I'm not in support of that, and I'll tell you why. We are setting Scott and his guys up for failure, and we will not have a police department if we take this budget and mandate that he cover the entire town with it. It will not do it. I guess I haven't seen, I don't think it's been explained why you feel that. Like why do you say that? Because under the existing budget, that's just going to give him what he needs to cover the town inside the district. For 24-7 coverage. No. It's never been modeled on that, John. But you just said that this chief plus four officers is enough to make a 24-7 schedule. No. I said not 24 hours. It's seven days a week, but not 24 hours. OK. I'm going to start you then. Yes, you did. It's a lot of open space. And now if you take that number of officers and you have to cover townwide, you're in even more gaps. I just don't. I don't feel like people have been presented the day before that. I don't understand what is going on. Can I speak? No, I'm not in the room, but I've had my hand up here and I would like to speak. Yeah. Just a second. And we have people here. OK. Yes, part, but. So I can tell you in the committee we met and we talked about a lot of this stuff and a lot of these details come in. And the problem we have right now is we don't have enough employees in the department right now to meet the demand of in the village only. I understand that. And so well, then now multiply that out across the whole town. How do you think you're going to do that with the same number of officers? But the proposed budget allows for two additional officers. It does, but that's not that's just going to meet what's the demand in the village. I hear what you're saying. Yep. So if I now say you got to cover the entire town, I'm right back to not enough resources, too much demand. Plus, I've eliminated the state police as the primary responder. So it's kind of like expanding your school district if you think of it in that way. So all of a sudden, instead of just having the kids in the school district in the village, we're going to have the killets in the whole entire town comes in one building. But we're not going to increase staff. We're not increased building space. We're not going to get them extra school supplies. We're just going to expect them to meet the demands of everybody instead of just the smaller area and be their primary. And so you're creating a situation where you're not providing the support needed. And then you put on top of it that it's a life and death situation that points, right? I mean, today with the school is a perfect situation where there's a gun in the school. I mean, that needs demand. I mean, you're just putting our officers in these situations and burning them out and expecting them to perform well. It's not just... it's not an easy job to have in the first place, but it's just a little one adding way more responsibility and not giving them any support. Ann? I will go back to... I have not heard... I'm hearing there's this huge demand in the village. But what I'm hearing is there was one... I'm hearing there's no crime outside of the village. And yet I'm hearing we had a hundred... eleven hundred calls outside of the village. I don't know what to believe in terms of what the demand is because it doesn't seem a hundred percent clear. I don't know if we need 24-7 coverage. We haven't had that in the police district is what I'm hearing. And so do we need it? Do we need it? I mean, Joe himself will say we don't really need 24-7 coverage outside of the police district. And in my own communications with the police barracks in South Royalton, what I found out was yes, our police department would be the primary, but if they need support from the police department, they will come. If they can and sometimes it's more... It depends. Again, they're going to probably do a little triage. And if it's something that's super serious, they will drop things and come. If it's not, they're going to... And the reality is no one has a full Cadillac budget and even the state police are struggling for staff so what I'm fundamentally arguing about is that we are choosing as a town to say that public safety from our police department needs to be primarily funded by a third of the taxpayers in the town and that we're going to sort of piecemeal together coverage. It makes it so those folks who are outside of the police district really don't get a whole lot of say in what's going on. And it's very confusing and not very transparent. And I don't know. Of course, we don't know how many calls or what's going on outside of the police district because no one's really keeping very good data. And right now we're saying that the police department doesn't really have to go outside of the police district because they don't pay the primary portion of the service. And it's ludicrous and it's a community service. Everyone benefits from it. And so we all ought to pull together and pay for it. And yes, Joe, that does mean it is partly a financial thing. But I think you would agree that for a community service, everyone should pay for it. And I think we can make it a community service. I'm not saying we don't hire any more police officers, but I also question whether or not we need eight full-time police officers. We aren't living in a crime-ridden, violent area. So there are some things that we need to kind of balance out. And lastly, there was the, not a student at the school with a gun. There was a student who reported that there might be. The school followed its safety protocols and investigated. It turned out there was no gun in the school. So there, again, that's teaching students to act as a community. We're all here as a community. We're all going to protect one another. We're all going to look out for one another. And if we see something that is questionable, we're going to speak up and we're going to support each other. And that's what I'm asking this community and the select board to stand behind. If Scott needs a few more officers, I'm willing to pay. But everyone in the community, and I think there's a way for us to support the whole town. It's just like the roads. It's just, I don't understand this. So anyway, that's where I stand. I still stand that way. I urge the select board to think about a full-time, town-wide police department funded by everyone. Thank you. Thanks. So with that budget for full-time, town-wide, how much was that budget that was proposed? It was. One million. It wasn't full-time though. It was just town-wide. About $1.3 million. Does that include any extra cruisers? No capital. None of these include capital. So I just want to make sure this is crystal clear to the point of being repetitive. This at any point has ever talked about a 24-7 police department that has never once been on the table. No. This is not a Cadillac. This is the 99 Corolla that won't die with good snow tires. That's what we're asking you to approve. The thing that will go as long as we need it to go. When we did the shift modeling, please. When we did the shift modeling, if you have four officers seven days a week town-wide, you don't have enough to cover the shifts from eight in the morning to two in the morning, which is when we cover most of the days. You need at least five different officers, or four different offs, five, I'm sorry, I got the count off, on each of those days except on the weekends where you might scale it back. You can't just work one person seven days a week for people, all of those shifts. So you need that just to provide the basic coverage in the hours we've been talking about all along. Agree. It's a 99 Corolla. When the engine light comes on, you keep driving or because it's going to turn itself off the car, keep going. That's what we're talking about. That's what we're asking for. Is the bare minimum to keep people safe and not burned out to do the freaking job? That's the number. How you pay for it? That's a policy question. That's the number of officers to get the job done. And so I think part of the other piece here we have is this committee did look at high users. We had those folks come in that had been expressed as being high users and what their use of the resources is. And we started the discussion with Lane because our officers had been at the school every day since school started about them getting a resource officer in. And I know they had the first hearing. It was mostly students that were in attendance. It started as very negative and started to turn to a more positive discussion by the end of the meeting. But the conversation is taking place about the school hiring a resource officer, having somebody at the school to help deal with some of this stuff on a day-to-day basis, which would then free up hours for the work that the police department has to do. And that was kind of the idea of scaling it up, right? So we need another amount of time to figure out if a resource officer is going to be hired, if Claire Martin is going to add people in to help us, right? And so that was kind of part of the conversation of, like if we did want to go town-wide, at some point we would have some of those other supporting resources that would help our department. But that's going to take time. The recommendation from the committee was to go forth with the existing district budget at what Scott needed to survive, but also put out to vote an expansion of the district and to expand their service and their area over time so we didn't take the bite and have responsibility for the whole town at one time. At the same time, have some side discussions and there is a... I got an email from Corinth. Did you get it? From the town of Corinth? I don't think so. They're reaching out to town managers and select board chairs to bring them together to talk about beefing up the Orange County Sheriff to get them back into a functioning mode, which the committee was not very friendly about, but we did have the conversation about a more regional model for this. State of Vermont towns cannot afford to pay their own police service and all of them have their own police departments and do this work themselves. And that's just a fact. Was there in the discussion about incremental growth, was there a timeline set in place for when there might be a vote to expand the district and what the boundaries of that might be? The proposal, the recommendation that came out to you a little bit yesterday, was to take the vote at Town Meeting Day for the expanded district. And the committee needs to define those boundaries a little better because we think they're kind of challenging the way they are going by property lines and what we're looking at, but it was to move forward with the budget for the district but take the vote on Town Meeting Day also to go to the expanded area, which is up to East Bethel Road and Randolph Center, Windover Road to make that loop that they're doing anyway and then down to the Bethel line. If that passed, then the question is out right now to attorneys on can we then take a vote for an amended budget that would go out to cover more resources to cover that area. So can you do that kind of that budget for the existing and then amend that budget through some process to cover the expanded area? Is the attorney also looking at, rather than taking an added vote in this fiscal year, simply, and I would assume it could be built into the question, look at doing it in fiscal 26, rather than, you know, hurrying up and doing it. Yeah, we could definitely delay it. We could take the vote to expand and have that expansion be effective in 26. That's what I'm getting at. The thought was that the areas that are being expanded are the businesses that are screaming for coverage and are have a pretty high demand as it is, so why not let them help pay for it? Okay. You know, you're talking about Shaw's, which gets a fair number of calls. The barn, those are the two big ones that came up. You know, the hotel will go online. Gifford's facility up there has some activity. So if you were going to be providing that service, then why not try to capture them participating and paying for the piece? That's the only reason the thought was, take a vote on expanding and then... So is the legal question really amending the budget? Is that what the lawyers or the council's looking at? Yep, can you then go out with a vote to the expanded district to amend that budget? My question about the expanded district would be, it makes sense that we would want to include all those businesses and the property taxes that would help support the police. But those business owners might want it, but they're not going to vote on this. We're going to have a very small number of residential properties. They're going to be the bulk of the voters. I don't see... It just seems to me that... Why would these residential property owners choose to tax themselves to expand the district just a little bit? They're not going to perceive any benefit. It would really be out of the goodness of their heart and their communal good nature. And I'm not sure I see that trumping the economics of it enough to get us an expanded district. It's the process that's there in the merger document. I understand we can do it. I would be extremely surprised if we could make that happen. So if the people don't want it, you've just made the case for that. If the people don't want the expansion in a separate vote and forcing it upon them isn't a wise thing to do. Let's talk about this a little bit. If it goes down wide, your seven properties seek to reduce your taxes $2,770. Mr. Ayers, are you going to reduce your taxes $440? Have you looked at your conflict of interest policy? I think you should look closely at that policy. This is not a conflict of interest. This is not a conflict of interest. I would suggest differently. That's your opinion in my opinion. It's not an opinion. We've looked into conflict of interest many times since we've been on the board and this is not one of those. I would suggest differently. We'll let the courts figure that out. That said, the people don't want it outside the district and you're admitting to that. That's not the point that I was making. The point that I would be making is if you're a person who lives on the boundary basically right now you would be asked to shoulder an additional amount that should be shouldered by the entire town but you would be doing that on your own and so people's basic sense of fairness would not allow them to say, well why should I do this when my neighbors who also live in town who also benefit from the police who live next door, why are they not paying for it? But if they went to the whole town the fairness of it completely changes around. Let's talk fairness though. The bus is driving the kids over the hill for recreation from East Randolph. Why aren't they? Because the people here can walk to recreation. We get a swing set. They're collecting trash in East Randolph and trash barrels but they're collecting it here in the town yet we're paying for it from outside of the town. So tell me where fairness really gets in there. Are you running this water pipe? No, it's the town that retains this. We're talking about fairness here. When you bought your houses did you know you had to pay this police tax? If not then you got to get a new lawyer. That said, I bought my house because no one I wasn't in the police district. What you're looking to force upon people and that's what I see what's happening what you're looking to force upon people is for a service they're not asking for. People from outside the district... It would be a town-wide vote. That's it. It should be a separate vote on the expanded district. Not a town-wide vote. Because who in the town would not vote to reduce their taxes? It's not going to reduce. If you look at the cost of the budget and the expenses associated with the town-wide police district all the taxes are going up. They're going up. Even if you're in the district. The problem is not policing. The problem is budget. The problem is all of a sudden folks figured out that they can't afford tax. Maybe you should take that back. It really has come to a head because costs have increased so much. And if we take the numbers that were there before that we're looking at for this proposed budget for five officers I think that's going to be a pretty hard sell for the members of the district. We saw a very similar budget not pass last year. And why would a new budget that does the same thing why would we think that that's going to pass? We're in a very tough spot. You would hope that there is a greater understanding of how we're operating and how we need to operate whereas last year the whole thing launched and had to get airborne in a relatively short period of time. Amen. And you've got the police services committee that's now put in 15, 17 meetings. I'm not saying this is the magic bullet but the field is very different. Orange County Sheriff is not an option the state police haven't staffed up. You might be right I have no idea it's just a different field. I understand but my sense of why that budget didn't pass was that was there were two parts. One was it's just a lot of money to ask people to come up with in addition to the increase over what people had been paying and then the other part was this perception that people in the district are paying for a service that benefits the entire town and it's a lot of money and people are like well this just isn't fair and I don't want to vote for something that's really gets at my sense of the justice of the situation not me personally I'm just saying that's what people are feeling and those things have not changed and that's what makes me very concerned that we could put together put a budget in front of the police district that won't pass. One of the things that is different is that we know from a year of operation trying to continue with the foundational model deviating from the models that we've laid out the schedules for the committee that doesn't work that's not sustainable so the cost is what the cost is. But we knew that that wasn't going to be sustainable when we put it in place. We did setting up this very conversation. But we felt like we had no choice because we had a budget that just went down. And no other options for policing. What I'm saying is I think this part we're in the same spot. Maybe you're right and we're not. Maybe there's some perception on the part of the public that's changed. But I'm just not seeing it. It's my understanding. I'm not trying to argue for a particular position. This is the information that and the sense that I'm getting from what I understand. But you've got this other side too that's saying why should I pay for it? It only benefits the village and it's always the village and some of what Joe brought up about it. That's why we're in such a... There's all that piece too and what you're seeing is it's a topic that's starting to split the town again and that's not cool. So I'm saying we're in a very tough spot. No matter which way we go we're going to make a lot of people unhappy no matter what we do. I think one of the things actually, one of the things that I think we're getting really tied up in is who's paying for it and it's not fair to me and it kind of sounds like people are just throwing fits at this point and what's really not equitable is that if we just want to fight about this and just have no police department the people who are losing out are the people who are vulnerable, right? We have the people who are calling because of domestic violence. We have the people who are calling for support, welfare checks, all this stuff happening and we're just going to just kind of blow it up because I don't want to pay because that's not fair and that's kind of the part that's frustrating me at some point too. I have a question. Has anybody figured out why there's a difference between the police department service and the fire department service? We don't have this question about fire, right? Do we? Do we have a question about coverage about fire department? I mean, it's part of the budget. I live out on Stock Farm Road. I don't have a question about the fire department. Why should I have a question about the police department? What's the difference? They're both... There's three fire departments and they're throughout the town. I don't care if there's seven fire departments. Why is there a difference in the perception between the fire service and the police? I don't think there should be. I think we all pay for the fire department. Why don't we all pay? There's got to be an equitable way to come about it. So until somebody explains to me why the police guys are different than the fire guys, I'm always going to have a problem. Somebody explain it to me. The police don't... We have three fire departments. Let me finish, please. And they cover the entire town. So East Randolph's primary for their area, Randolph Center for theirs, but they all back each other up and whatnot. Their budget is also a lot less. But the police district doesn't have the staffing to cover the entire town. They don't even have the staffing to cover the village right now. So if you want a police department that covers the same town equitably and takes those calls, your budget is going to be jacked much higher. So if you want to take on a town-wide police department, that's good. But the budget has to go up to about... I think it's 1.3, 1.5 million for operating. And then you still have the capital side to it. So it's... There has to be an equitable way of providing police service the same way that we provide fire service. There is. Get the numbers and the number of... There is. There is. There is an equitability and it's already in the budget. This year, the budget from what I saw last week, the general fund went on the police services to $125,000 from $100,000. Am I mistaken on that? That's amazing. So that was the budget that at least the select board looked at last week. 65% of that money is paid for from outside the district. Is there $65,000 on $100,000? Is there $65,000 worth of policing that's done outside the district and where the numbers for that? So outside the district is actually paying for their own policing because their need, as Larry had stated, their need is much, much less. So because of that, if you took East Randolph, North Randolph, South Randolph and the handling of a Randolph Center and you compared it to a Bethel pays for policing, because remember, they're all rural, just like Bethel is. Bethel's budget is $75,000 for their constable. That's what... That's what it covers. So that's the police services that are actually needed outside the district. So they're saying we're going to get an equitable service outside the district? I think your answer is to revamp the state police. But I don't know that we're going to get that in one day. But that's the problem. The problem is these local communities cannot afford a level of policing service they need, which is why there is a state police. I guess I wasn't talking about affordability. I was talking about perception and I don't think people concentrate enough on the difference between police and fire. You can work the numbers out. There's got to be an equitable way of working it out. But we haven't gotten past this mindset of police are bad. I don't think it's a police are bad. We didn't get that in the committee at all. It was a... What does that look like? What do you do? And the fact that right now the state police are your primary responders to a lot of the town. Doesn't it seem like police firemen are good guys and police are bad guys? I mean isn't that part of it? Not to me it isn't. Not to me it isn't. There is an undercurrent of that I think. And I think there shouldn't be. Maybe you should have been there and knocked down that march that went to the police station there a couple of years ago. Maybe that should have been a good pet pot for our town. Okay. Do you have another comment? I'm wondering why if the Vermont State Police are getting 11 or... Could you state your name? Andrew Terry, sorry. Sure. If the Vermont State Police are getting 1100 calls for the town of Randolph outside of the village and that compares to roughly 1700 calls I think. Scott said for in the village. I mean that seems to me to demonstrate a pretty significant need for police coverage in the town. I mean the state police might be handling it right now but at what point do we decide as a town that we need to take responsibility for our own policing and nobody wants to pay for it. Obviously it's easier to let the state police handle it because it you don't get some bill for that but they can only do so much and you know as a town we've got to take responsibility for ourselves. We can't expect the state police to do everything. I also want to point out that the cost increases are substantially above the rate of inflation and I've looked at the cost back in the 90s all the way up through 2020 the 10-year averages have compared to what the budget you're proposing for next year. The costs over and above inflation are like 50% over what we used to spend and what we used to spend like when Chief Molliter was here we had 24-7 coverage we had six police officers a full-time dispatcher I mean we were paying for a lot more police with much less money. It wasn't much less. No, it was a lot. The budgets don't run on a straight inflation line either. You budget an officer at $27 and have to hire him at 32 you've just changed the cost equation because that's the rate for an officer that's what's built in there is a realistic look at what we can turnkey operate, drive off the long-term aren't healthcare costs going much higher than inflation? 10% in this year we budgeted another 6.5% for the following six months. So that's what we're saying if these costs are going through the roof these are not just normal increases and so that's, I think, a big reason that people are in the village are saying we just can't afford this anymore the costs are too great. So I have a question in terms of what I'm hearing is people for spreading the cost across the whole town but if what actually we're saying is that we're not decreasing the cost for anyone in the village we're just making everyone in the town pay the same amount to have the effective police department that we need right about I haven't seen how much like everyone's taxes go up if it's the model but if we did the whole town with eight police officers then the taxes in the police district go up as well as the people outside of the district right that's not my understanding if we go from five officers in the village to eight officers town-wide then that's not going to double our police budget or maybe let's say it even does double it maybe it doubles it 550,000 but then we have three times the grand list not twice the grand list so the average taxes should in the village should go down that's just the way the it's not going to because you have all the capital needs and you need a new building but we're going to have you're going to have to you have to add all that but no because you have eight officers you have more equipment that you need but it's all proportional so do we have a model that is saying how much about like what that would look like we actually were able to pass eight officers full town we did for the forum try to model it out for $200,000 so if you went to the full town-wide as seen by the committee in those budgets you're talking about $71 is the annual increase inside the police district and there's about a $590 increase when you're outside for that value of property that's based on grand list values such as we know them with some average increases baked in that number we don't know until August so that is a back of the envelope so if the people I'm hearing that live in the village are for spreading the cost across the town and actually it just means the cost go up equitably everywhere is that really what that's what you're in support of so you want your taxes go up I don't think that's what's going on I don't think that's the way the math works okay I'm confused Trevor just said the number would go up but that's from the current small budget that we have now if we're going to we have to compare apples to apples if we go to the five officer budget that's going to increase taxes substantially in the district and then if we go to an eight member budget from there that's not going to increase the police department three times in cost but we're going to have three times the amount of grand list to pay for it but we're also going to have higher needs too because we're going to have more crews but not three times as much but we're going to have a lot of gas money increased but it didn't scale up the same way that there's some dispatch there's the workers cost change the retirement cost but there was also equipping each individual so we're covered up to a certain point so when you look at going from scott two and plus two to four we have some extra equipment that we purchased during start up that covers some of that but you start to scale it out from there at I forget what it was scott three or four thousand dollars an officer just to equip them that then plays itself across the remaining five officers or whatever it works out to be in terms of equipment so it's a small example of how it scales out a little differently before you get to that when we did look at it when we did look from current to each of the models and so inside the district it depended it was anywhere from five sixty to on the existing district with that eight hundred and almost sixty thousand dollar budget which were less than as we described here to that seventy one dollars in the townwide model and it goes from zero basically from current to five ninety outside the district because you don't start to flip the cost equation until you get to the townwide one none of that model the extra twenty five thousand dollars is a point in time from the end of November so just as we get a little fuzzy because numbers have already been used fuzzily tonight in magnitude there's some point in time differences here so just want to point out that that's where we were at with some thinking in November we're on January 18th two weeks away from we have to Warrantown meeting so some of why if I seem a little stressed out as you're taking me down to the very wire with both the language the budgets there's stuff that we have to do internally to make sure that we're ready to hit all the legal markers so you have a limited about a time to pick whatever path we're picking for fiscal twenty five that clock is running out let's make one more quick comment yep well first of all I'd like to express appreciation because I understand that it's a complex issue and has lots of moving pieces and you know implications like Trevor just talked about I just wanted to reiterate I mean I one of the reasons that I'm in favor of townwide is that it puts the police services on par with all of the other townwide services that we have recreation the library you know the roads everything else and I don't think it has to do with where the calls are coming from I would argue that if you live in East Randolph you benefit from there being a police presence in the village where you might come and shop or you know go use the library or whatever you want it to be safe here as well as everywhere else in town so you know it's not like a fee for service model you know like the water and sewer districts where you know literally you're paying for what you're using it's very different and I mean we're a great example you know we've lived here for 28 years and I don't think we've ever called the police so I don't think it really where you live and where the calls are I don't think that's the point I think it's a townwide benefit and therefore it should be paid for townwide and I understand the complexities last thing I would say is if it's going to stay as a police district budget at this increased level I think there will need to be some very good public information to support that because I have not heard in the this is the first time I heard that we're driving the 99 Corolla with the engine light on even that two additional officers so I think that really need for people in the district to support that budget that should be explained very clearly why that is needed and what it's paying for because I think it will be a hard pill to swallow especially because I think a lot of people thought that we would be going to townwide this year I don't know there was ever a timeline or a guarantee of townwide I understand that I'm just saying I think the perception was that that's where we were headed I would also say that if you feel like it should be like the rec program and the library and some other towns that participate in it and I think there's a large contingent of this town that doesn't like and doesn't feel like those services are townwide we don't live where we can walk there's no way to get kids there and there's an added cost for some of those families to participate but it's I also don't live somewhere where a third class road needs grating by $75,000 I'm drawing that number out to write on the back cost but by a $75,000 town road department greater either but I'm happy to pay because I'm a member of this town and so I think that you know I chose to live in the village no conflict of interest involved somebody else chooses to live in a rural part of the community where we have to maintain their roads as part of the education as a town but we maintain yours too what? we maintain yours too in the pavement paving it's more expensive than grating it I'm outside of the village and the state you know maintains my state route same fun same years yeah but what I was going to say I mean I don't want to complicate things but like I live outside the village I would I guess going to what I was saying I would be willing to maybe not have it increase my taxes the same because of and the like is was it looked at to like look at a way that townwide there could be a contribution to pay to like a fund and then the district not change the size that's kind of the model we're in right now with the general fund line sort of I mean no I'm saying like I'm not contributing like $100 instead of $600 and I don't feel like I need to have the district expand right so the model and then we still have state I think you're making a really good point and I think that would really could really help this conversation if we could explore some of that idea some more right now we do spend out of the general fund a small amount of money for and I know Trevor hates this for the police right now it's proposed the budget proposes $125,000 from the general fund right one that's a pretty small amount of money compared to the whole budget the other problem is that a third of that money comes from the police district where the rest of the budget so we'd have to figure out I'm not sure this is another whole conversation we're not going to figure this out right now but the idea of potentially having the general fund pay more into the police district somehow I think I'd like to hear more about how that might work and the other thing right now is that we're estimating how much the police in the district are serving people outside the district and that's where that number is coming from still being paid for a third of it from folks in the district and what you're saying is slightly different which is it's not based upon how much people are using the service outside the district it's just we want to help the community I mean it's what I hear from what is that number I don't I mean I don't know and we don't have I mean we don't have time to figure it out but yeah I mean it's at a certain level something known as a hydrant fee and you'll see it come into play with proximity to a hydrant so you might be outside of fire service area but if you're within the next hundred feet of that you might pay a fee to support that what I don't know charge a hydrant fee out to the town boundaries for some level of baseline contribution to service absent a charter provision that enables it but I think this is where we went with that conversation early on in the piece was could you set a varying rate and that's where we got I think we got didn't we get the feedback that was very hard to do and you were we were kind of setting it into two zones we probably need to enable us to to vary from and that seems more complicated I mean I'm thinking like if it was aligned in the general fund and then you know they're kind of two different budgets for like the overall service versus the actual like district yeah what we've talked about is building it out along the Woodstock model lines where you have the police department belongs to the incorporated village so you have a district also residents of the town so they pay town taxes so in that very same model they pay a percentage of that town outside the village policing they've tried to tie it to some level of service with ours cruisers we have the capacity to replicate that model based on recent hires and financing you know it's always familiar with that from her tenure in Woodstock so when we think about fiscal 25 and that amount and also where we model to follow and then we can say you paid this you got this for service based on these needs while still having some flexibility to deploy limited resources where you need them and so that's been the thought in terms of how we shape the existing payment for service into actual service so I'm going a little further when we were talking about how to fund the additional officers needed a source officer in during the summertime it's not a lot of demand at the school they can help with some of the other pieces out there and then you could get into that we were seeing like if you have $100,000 outside of the district then we talked about maybe some contract services with a couple of the neighboring towns that would actually fund a position that could do some of the stuff outside of the district but that's been asking breaking wouldn't those people have to go serve in those communities we wouldn't get the benefit of having them in our community you would because they would be here also so you wouldn't get 100% of a position but you might get 80% of it in your town whatever percentage is in is that's okay like we still have support from the state police if the district outside of the district are just paying to keep the village safe and to have a you know to have the service within the town and available if needed it's a way to help fund it to keep the actual entity up and running it's how do you bring in other revenue sources to right so can we can we increase the general fund line item for police for Randolph police without tying it to a certain level of service outside the district outside the police district right no I don't think you can and that's where we got into that legal opinion I don't remember having this conversation before the district the reason we got away with 100,000 was it was the outside part of the town was contracting with the village to provide that service for them and so Scott's been tracking hours and the time they've been spending outside drawing down on that money I don't think you can just say here's $500,000 from the general fund to go to the police district and just hand them a lot of cash it's got to be I would like to know that for sure we want to make at a minimum we want the connector to service it's a cost for service and so that's what we've been trying to figure out how to make happen hence the reference to the Woodstock model where the hours are tracked and it's right so what what we're talking about is trying to not have it be like cost for service it's not cost for actual service it's us but your challenge is as long as you have the police department that's formed under that merger document Trevor is this something that we can ask the municipal attorney we can and some of it though is also I mean there's a larger policy question you'd be creating $200, $500,000 I'm in the general fund that doesn't equate to anything that you get back from a level of service everything else we do in there is driven at providing service to everybody who's covered so there's a little bit of a literature there it just depends on how you define service I mean right now I think people who live outside the district are getting police services for free from inside the district because the value of having the police in the district is not tied to it supports our downtown it allows our businesses to function better it supports our hospital it supports our schools these are town-wide values and so there's a payment for that service in 24 in the form of that $100,000 no that $100,000 is for police services that are outside the district that's what I'm saying that's the connection point to the general funds and they're also used but I'm saying something different what I'm saying is that when you're saying that if the money comes from the general fund that the folks outside the district have to get value for that money what I'm saying is they would get value for that money right now they're getting the benefit they're getting value from police services in the district people let me start again people in the police district didn't mess it up people outside the police district get benefit from the policing which happens inside the police district right now Joe I'm not done right now those people get those services for free when they're providing inside the district just to make sure I'm with you Larry we have it down I'm talking about the services that happen inside the district just a second all the services all the police services that happen inside the district are paid for by the people in the police district right now but the benefits of having a downtown the benefits of having a hospital the benefits of having Clara Martin and the schools are I mean they're town wide they're beyond town wide really they're region wide we're the hubs the whole region we can't do anything about outside of our borders but we can at least do with inside of our borders of the town of Randolph the whole town of Randolph benefits from having a commercial district extends to people outside the district and they don't pay for it they get it for free and all I'm saying is if the general fund then were to pay for part of that now they wouldn't be getting it for free anymore they'd be paying for services that they're receiving I know you disagree Joe we're not going to come to an agreement on this but that's what I think that's so bold yep people so when we look at those benefits though how do we quantify those in a contract we can't but that's what you got to do I mean all these these benefits aren't quantifiable that way though but that's what you got to do no I'm saying what I'm saying is I'd like to hear from the municipal attorney whether we have to quantify them from our legal counsel yet I've got a nice conversation together with Mike here so I think I've got your question I'll add it and we can see for next time essentially what the question boils down to is can the general fund pay for a contribution to police services inside the police district and not run a foul of articles of merger any other statutory prohibitions because it's a little different so we were now I think is that essentially the question did the services police services committee look at the Woodstock model in the context of whatever the merger agreement was however many years ago between the village and the town in Woodstock because it seems like they've figured it out I had the same thing in Essex before they had the separation between the town village dynamics at some point there was an exchange in terms of who owned the police department they just hired a new chief they just hired a new town manager too and he landed into the chief not that I'm suggesting it just seems like they've figured it out and I don't know how this compensation works I know it exists I spend a lot of time over there writing about Woodstock issues but I just don't know our focus was the reverse as you had it was on how are the services provided outside of the village and how do they account for that time cost split that out how do they sort out car all of those pieces in their cases dedicating a car that apparently sits there for a good chunk of time but they're town-wide though right no their village contract for service where they keep track of those hours to provide that coverage the police department is officially known as the police department of the village of Woodstock the village of Woodstock trustees hire the police chief and the police force our employees of the village of Woodstock which then builds the town of Woodstock do the state police cover outside of their village like they do here I think they may provide gap overnight covers like they do for us and for others but I don't know to what extent we didn't really dig into how the state police fit we were more concerned with how do you take a district service and cover they also have more of a cost but there's still a village town like municipal split right they're two separate municipalities essentially so it's kind of ours then it's very similar to ours I don't believe the state police are primary in Woodstock because they've created that contracting relationship for coverage so I think they're just providing the gap and extreme case back up really be the same as if we just went town-wide with our police department no how is it different then more limited contract-based footprint would be the difference I don't know whether that's on a per-call base sorry get out there and run that greener town I was just playing you know nervously I don't know whether that's on a per-call basis I mean I'd understood to be a number of hours per year kind of a thing and they'd base it on that and they had some equipment and other pieces factored into a separate car set of sites to incorporate the model how to build one of the cars I don't think we go buy a car just to come drive in step out of one crew to get in the other and go up the hill and come back I don't know that you wanted on a call basis either because there's a certain amount of patrolling and just being present I'm not suggesting that I'm saying that they don't know how they know I was just saying like they don't know what the capacity like right like we could then approve what the current police department needs in this budget that's being proposed keep support from the state police in the rest of the town to increase that if you could you mean to increase the general fund payment in that well increase for outside a little bit decrease inside I mean it could just be that and then incrementally could be grown yeah the amount to be raised it can get a little wonky in this year for two of the reasons we've talked about the reappraisal piece in terms of trying to figure out the impact but if you remember the general fund budget and taking the auditors recommendations it looks like we are raising that service payment or the expenditures we also took that revenue so we filled it with some of our other staffing needs so we've already got a healthy amount to be raised by taxes in there to make up for that difference such as being there's an impact it's just where are you comfortable with it landing I guess is sort of the point if you take that number somewhere if you can but I've got three or four things that Mike and I are going to have to I'm going to do school drop off tomorrow I usually run into if it's warm if not I'm going to call them later in the morning but you'll be calling after the car you'll be calling I'll just get him to climb in with you go for a ride I know but like 15 is comfortable before you're starting your shift you're heartier than I am I would like to say one question that keeps coming up is where are these numbers coming from and why are you coming to these conclusions and a big part of that is Scott experiences this and I have not talked to anybody in this town who does not respect everything Scott does and so I think that if everyone wants to know where these things are coming from it's coming from someone who knows what he's talking about and is actually doing the calls all the questions of is this really real is this really happening Scott knows what he's doing and so I think that'd be something that I'm going to start saying to people when they ask that this is where it's coming from is dedication or papering over what you would otherwise see as impact sure yes the short version of it yeah yeah it's not just made up because we want to put numbers down these are real information that Scott just needs to get by and to do what he knows needs to be done for our community but I believe right now he's on salary he is on salary it's overtime that he's working to carry the weight well that in addition to it yeah it's like people just keep being like is this really do we really need the please they're really calls like this is somebody who everybody loves and respects in our community is saying this is what I need for my department and this is what our department needs it's not just made up I guess it's just adding some validity to the numbers and but I think just saying that because Scott said so is I hear what you're saying I think it needs to be more detailed than Scott says he needs this it is a lot more detailed okay but that's I'm just clarify that everyone wants to take any data point that you give or the unknowns right and so we have this number from the state police and we know the state police are saying this is the need outside of the town and then we have questions like well how much is actually on the interstate how much of that is actually how much of this data you can do or whatever perception but that's like people who are actually doing the work right now are saying this is the need and the community in order to do the things that are just the bare minimum to keep our community safe we need this money and we need these officers and we need these equipment one of the things that might be helpful to pull and make available those schedules that the committee looked at because they show the numbers assigned how you cover that period of time between 0800 and 0200 the next morning Last year we had some stuff published on the website too for information Depths all still we left it up there as sort of an evergreen Is there any additional things that we could pop up there too as like more detailed I think for this year for the budget we might look to augment with some of the stuff the committee's looked at yeah I mean some of it's not really tangible like having conversations with Safe Line and what they do it doesn't always translate into hard data you know and that's it's really hard to quantify a lot of this stuff too but some of it doesn't always involve law enforcement either so what we had to weed through was the need of an organization and then figure out how much of that sifted down also like predicting the weather though so if we have we're the number one call for Safe Line for example out of the town they offer their services too and not all of that is law enforcement but some of that could be law enforcement too or the trends could change and it could go way up or it could go way down and so like you know like a lot of it is so hard to really predict absolutely and that's why I think what this proposal calls for even though it's not ideal for everybody right you know I understand that I understand that John's and Ann's objections and I hear Larry and I agree about the equity of townwide policing but we can't wave a magic wand and get there overnight we've got to do it incrementally we're going to burn our current force out we don't have to do it yes I like this idea of three months six months down the road asking a town meeting if we want to expand a certain amount and then you know honestly pie in the sky my best of all possible worlds would be to have a regional police department in collaboration with maybe Brookfield Bray and Tree I like a beating for you I've got any Clayton stuff you know essay done first you got your petition already no I haven't turned it in yet well then number one I don't have a beating for you I just think there's a lot of conflicting opinions there's a lot of conflicting interests here we're not going to make everybody happy we're going to make everybody happy we need to approach this in a thoughtful incremental way and I think this is a starting point and I will go on record right now saying I am a firm believer that where we ultimately need to arrive is at a townwide police department but I don't think we get there overnight yeah well I came into this wanting townwide too and I still do and that increases my taxes so conflict of interest whatever in the opposite direction I would be more than happy to pay more taxes to have a townwide I think the problem is been doing so right now this year we're going to burn it down to the ground it's too complicated we need to do this step by step so we have Scott wanting to jump in on this conversation oh Scott raise his hand go ahead Scott I'll pull out thanks guys no I didn't you guys are having great conversations and I want to thank you guys all the way around you are already talking about things that I was just going to talk about and I just want to echo Tom that you know I am all about a townwide police department you know I think that's the ultimate goal logistically you know currently where we are right now it's just it's not going to fly and I'm only talking on a department level you know if and Trini has said it you know that say July 1 we go townwide we now are the primary law enforcement entity for the town of Randolph and only have three guys it's just it's impossible to do and I agree with Tom I think incrementally I think this will work we just we're going to take it smart we just have to be smart about this and but I want again I want to thank you guys very much everything that you guys are talking about or is exactly what I'm thinking so I appreciate that thank you guys and Scott some of the logic behind adding the officer starting in January is because it is so challenging to find an officer right we anticipate it's going to take you quite a while but we got a good lead on one it's not like you know I'm advertising to work at Home Depot you know unfortunately I'm fishing out of a fished out pond and you know and if there is an applicant a qualified applicant that has no law enforcement experience in any shape or form honestly between startup where he where that person passes in the application to when they are ready to go on their own takes about a year that's with the full-time Academy that's with the full-time Academy the FTO Program all the above that officer will not be on their own for until about a year so there's a huge huge lag I think there's a lot to be said for that and I also think there's and this may be a little bit of a tangent but I think there's some truth to what Michael said earlier that we look upon our first responders on the firefighting world a little bit differently and it ain't an easy world to be a police person in these days they're on the firing line and don't mean that as a bad pun they don't have the level of respect they're being you know the whole Blue Lives Matter movement it's not an easy world to be recruiting for police officers it's terrible it's terrible and so to think that we can somehow just expand to the full town and everything's going to be Uncle Dory just doesn't make any sense part of the challenge though is to get a law enforcement officer that can start from the day you start them you're paying so your budget's going to have to go up because you're going to have to out pay the other people that are trying to get that person that's what it's into it's you're bidding basically on that employee Scott came out in a meeting in our meetings and we discussed pay and how we kind of equate and he said we're at best low to mid in the range of pay challenge that with the state police who certainly pay a whole lot more who also can't get officers and challenge that with other municipalities such as Burlington or you know which is kind of the big sign or St. Albans and those folks you know we're not even close and pay wise so attracting that talent when the pay rates aren't close you know people have their choices retention can be quite difficult when the town up the road says you know what I'm looking for a police officer and we're going to pay $5 more an hour we're the money of all these not the Yankees Scott and I will pass back a GIF or a GIF I've never learned how to say that that's basically from that movie it's one of those it's one of the two I don't know which one it is but I think you know what I'm talking about I don't know what movie it was oh Moneyball these two only the baseball fans that's how we have to think a little different we have to look for sort of the under the other piece you have to look at is the equity of the pay within other municipal services believe me you say okay we're going to all of a sudden pay police officers whatever the higher rate is do you think your highway department do you think do you think your fire department do you think other services are going to say hey if you can pay police officers why can't we get a raise too so this you know you so you have other pieces that it actually affects complicated complicated right yeah great so I think we hammered this one we're kind of coming back around to the same topics and we haven't even touched the highway budget yet or the capital plan so I think we've given Trevor some stuff to look at and I do think you know the committee has said they they got work still to do so it's worth handing back some of these topics to that group and say look at this or look at you know what you want to do and we've got another week right yeah but the committee can go on from there until we get through this year's budget process and then what do we do from there and I would say that it's not townwide that's our ultimate goal it's regional or having some influence at some level on the state of what are you doing if the state police are 40% understaffed what do they do with the money for those positions right like why are the municipalities having to raise taxes to pay for services that we're not getting because the state police are understaffed that we're already paying for the rest of the taxes yeah like why that to me seems like we're part of the problem is and how can we access that money or should we be looking at how the state police are providing services also I think it's so much my guess though is that that's going to be an uphill battle if only because they would like to be able to provide those services so they don't want to send us money one year saying you know well it's just going to be for this year and then next year you're on your own like because once you start sending people money they expect it to keep coming then they need to get there you know why aren't they able to hire I agree with you Trini I'm just saying I think that's where you're that's going to hang up or can we borrow some cruisers too that we're going to sell eventually here when they get replaced maybe they can buy one we should say thank you Scott and good night if you want to get on offline so Scott until next week yeah yeah go get better that's an order all right yeah the one time we can boss you around you must get well two shift two shift ooh all right all right um I'm going home right now John's got the rest of the meeting for you sweet I'm feeling so good ha ha ha been hanging out with Scott can you look in a little tail I'm just kidding all right let's move over to the highway budget so I'll do kind of the same rundown same setup should be getting used to seeing all of these different ones as we go so again the tax revenue this is the same as in this case although those everything's tax rather than at some level subtract it from the amount to be raised or the amount of the total budget we get our amount to be raised by taxes right there these three right here are state highway payments we've just breaking them out we are just breaking them out English can be hard um into the different categories first class roads this is basically main street from about the hospital I guess about where that is but most of our roads are in this second third class category highway supplemental we don't have this is if we had different categories if we added lanes that kind of stuff OSU mechanic we have a billing arrangement with the school where we work on the buses it's mag's favorite portion of his job except it's not garage rental types details $40,000 and then he goes back to fixing the buses transportation maintenance that's just clean up around the air sale of supplies this is everything from the gas we go out to others to if we happen to sell materials of any sort grants and aid we've started to book this in they become annual we don't normally budget for grant revenue but the grants and aid are an annual program we've taken advantage of them to get back to the ARPA conversation in December these are really great grants so we get $20,000 we match it with ours we provide material equipment and we go out Howard Hill or some of the others and we'll do everything from improved road surface crowning ditching stone lining ditches culverts headers footers for those culverts and the sections we did held up really good in the July storm for example so these things have already been approved for this one so we can put that in the budget with confidence say that that grant revenue is going to arrive they are my favorite grant and I am known internally as the guy who just hates grants I was just noting that I was like he's excited but these are actually like here's your money go do it yeah they are so easy this is the half thing we're all like this we'd have a million grants and then we do some general fund transfers for administrative ask your question sure okay so our first class roads we get revenues I'm sorry the state pays the state pays okay that's that's your town highway funds that you get we sign off and certify the mileage we just did that yeah last week we did right then there's a calculation the legislature puts a value in and then it's allocated by the mileage across the state do we get a benefit for the amtrak no no but it's not going anywhere thanks for explaining that the town doesn't provide the town has a lease I believe okay for that but the amtrak pays for all the maintenance and tough keep over it so you'll see here much like with the other budgets this is where all of our people costs are so everything from pay to health insurance to retirement here we're getting a hell of a deal with this number by the way I just want to point that out and then this number's up here for a couple of different reasons one of which is that we change pay rates in June to try to retain some guys and to make it easier to recruit that helped us out we had really good luck in finding super quality individuals to join the team their pay rates are higher baked in there much like there is for just about everybody else as well and so that's why that number's up there so we've got a crew that is how it's the base they are incredibly capable and consistently capable and that hasn't always been the case in terms of we can get out there they can operate the equipment they can operate the trucks they can jump down from there and operate the shovel and they do all of it the benefit the benefit of that is we used to have to hire a contractor to come in and do a lot of the work and so these grants are going further because we're able to use our own staff and equipment to do the work our pool of equipment operators within that too we had a couple that we would trust that could go out and do that and now we've got multiples that can run different pieces of equipment and are learning to do that a lot more capable but majority of them can already do anything and everything we ask of them to do on a daily basis and the beautiful part is they're all in their 30s late 20s versus retirement age so we're on the good end of the curve when you look at municipality statewide in terms of being set up for the next 20 years say hopefully yeah so over time just because we're fully staffed we're hoping this number will be down John does that mean with us? no 30 it's gone for 30 unlike our presidential sorry not for anybody's heart but no unlike our presidential retirement age as far as the age spectrum that's too many years we're going to be fishing they're a good group of people and they're willing to do anything like I said and everything but they make my job a lot easier and being able to work together working through any kind of situation I mean you look at from mud season two weeks ago to now two and a half three feet of snow you know I mean they're ambitious and they want to make sure they want to they want to make this down a better place as much as I do so it's nice to see so yeah it's awesome health insurance is another one this is again this is more about changing plans in terms of employee mix bringing folks on who are on two person single plans where we had buyouts that we've talked about a few different times retirement this is tied to these numbers up here and so at 21.4% we contribute quite a bit and then again same thing with our workers comp rates based on what we got back from VLCT it's based on these payroll numbers times a per 100% what we do at the end of the year with all these so we try to budget really conservatively we'll put in those estimates kind of on the high side of things but for anything if we happen to pay in advance for stuff so we usually make it up based on actual numbers at some point occasionally it gets charged to us in the next year but we don't generally get caught that way because we try to be a little beefy on the estimates if we can general insurance is here this property casualty vehicle fuel we increased a little bit like I said again the difficulty here is if prices go through the roof looking at five year averages we've been closer rather than shorter to our numbers we've had some years we've missed 23 is a hard one in the mix because it fell sort of in between our capability to bill for fuel usage along with the system we used to track fuel usage with its age 23 is going to look a little wonky when you see anything or anything it's just we didn't maybe get all the costs assigned everywhere or haven't yet when we get to the end of the month and we know what the schools and we bill them is it a do we put that revenue back into that line item it'll go into that sale of supplies sale of supplies yep so yeah so it's Ben Kayla so she'll have a key code basically and so we know who's using what fuel first few bills we sent over to the school were kind of funny because they were like I think your machine's broken actually it's fixed no I think maybe you're using more fuel than you thought right I mean so we had to recalibrate it just a little humor you in it I calibrated twice twice yeah because they were complaining about it and it is what it is so it's not leaking it's being burned you know but yeah it's quite a bit it's crazy how much fuel we go through between you know the highway wastewater the police the school bus the school you know I mean there's a lot of people that but we still have to show what we what we're paying for the fuel for the whole year you know what I mean so regardless of how much you know they reimbursed us so there's a lot of fuel and I just had 10,000 gallons put on the ground and it'll be gone in two weeks lots of two weeks so so I think we can make it with some of these basic materials here we've increased culverts in recent years some of it is also some of our culvert work we've got a few replaced post July storm event I mean that accelerated the process a little bit we were able to go up at least one size some of it we get through the Grants and Aid projects gravel road resurfacing so we pick these up as we go so this is sort of a general line but a couple of years ago we inched it up we could probably inch it up again gravel we're leaving it where it is we use our gravel road reserve for a lot of these different things you'll see again when you look at 24 in particular and we get farther out into the audit that number is going to spike because that's where we paid for a lot of the gravel for storm response but we'll also see a FEMA reimbursed and then it's pretty vanilla all the way straight through we're excited to have a crew that can get out there and get after it kept equipment rattles the same just to see we've generally rented what the excavator's been the primary piece of equipment we talk capital a little bit it's not in for 25 but one of the things that we do want to talk about sooner than later is we've got some sort of storm response through the ditch work we're doing through the grant work we're doing all the water quality stuff ditching even as a regular maintenance some sort of rubber-tired excavator actually might be a better option for us more flexible and greatly both improve the quality and speed up the work especially in terms of the ditching and some of those projects that's not something Chris needs so we might split him off we've got an excavator and an operator we can send down and the guys all work really well together so as we think capital not necessarily for 25 but at some point those are the places we want to go from an operating standpoint how old is the backhoe? yeah I'd ask I don't I think it's is it old enough that we could get one of the diesel grants? I think we could it's probably I think it's a little newer than the it's what's that? cat in the village is a 05 right? yep so it definitely is in that ballpark where we could do that so I just think I mean for what we do on everyday work the backhoe just it works fine when you need it in an emergency but as far as the ditching and culvert repair it's just not for the amount of dirt roads and the amount of roads we have in general track the excavator is nice when you need it you need to pay either you gotta pay someone to haul it so you gotta move transport there and from rubber tire and excavator you can drive literally from the shop to wherever you so be want to work and then drive it back for the day so the transportation you cut that out of the cost and you're more flexible than you use it you can because you don't have to wait around for somebody to come and get it you're just like I don't know you just but then you can also I mean we have quite a few paved roads as well ditching needs to be upgraded and redug out and rubber tire as you can literally dirt pavement pretty much anywhere you want besides down over a bank but if you need something like that if we need to do that that's when the equipment rental comes into effect where we could go the proper machine we need for the job and a good investment for the town in the future there's a rubber tire excavator nothing huge I mean it doesn't need to be small you need to be able to pick up blocks and certain type of material but definitely we'll do something to look into good so highway made is that I mean this is pretty much to all the mechanic and we split out differently for a variety of reasons and which is that it makes a little bit easier to build the wage adjusting sees a little bit sort of goes back to those June adjustments that we made for everybody and health is just regular plan increase I don't think Reg had any change in plan he helped us out in a prior year and when he went from a family to a two so we benefited from a change in plan go in the other way here just some basic material supply small tools equipment so we might be able to take care of other things if for some reason we have staffing issues we have other needs if we're just that busy make sure we've got enough to get the job done these orange lines that you've seen you probably hopefully remember them from last week when they're in the general fund this is where we've talked about with the auditors recommendation there was a section of transfer out where these appeared where they went into the highway fund out of the highway fund they went into the general fund and got paid out of the general fund now they're converted to debt service payments right out of the highway fund like the others there's no net change to the highway fund we just moved these lines from here basically to here the same dollar amounts the truck lease this is the final year of that so when we talk capital plan we think about truck replacement those two trucks will come off the books here in 25 are the final payments this debt service one we're talking about in other projects where none of us in this room are going to see the end of that payment unless we work a really long time there's like another 28 years or something on that one so and then the administration expense because we handle all kinds of stuff through finance that's usually when you see those charges that's what we're talking about is sort of finance, department, town office level support for all the capital we're up a little bit in the aggregate and some of this fits into we talked a little bit last week and it's been brought up in other venues so the ones that we took down and the one that we tried to increase these both have healthy balances this one's closer to $500,000 and this one's closer to $300,000 as we sit here this one however we've depleted by being more aggressive with trucks and equipment because we need to do because we've gotten so in order to catch up we were really on it we also had a few other things that occurred truck gets ruined or at some point during the summer insurance covers part of it not all of it we used the reserve to kind of pay the rest of it off so that was an extra 40 or something thousand dollars that came out of that reserve kind of out of cycle so we wanted to boost that so that we can start to save toward equipment our goal would be based on the reserve and then pay as you go approach we're talking about trucks and equipment so we're on a regular replacement cycle we've got enough in the reserve it's time to replace a truck and figure out which kind of truck where we want to get it best price same thing with the backhoe excavator we're not there we won't be there in 25 when we get to the capital plan we've got to talk about a couple of trucks or at least one truck and those are our choices big increases at some point in the reserve transfers debt these one time funds until they go away and so we just have to at some point have that conversation but we're not even thinking about that for 25 though that would be a we had our druthers we'd probably try to do it all then if money were no object you'll see when we get to the capital sheets these can all be funded we didn't want to take the payment reserve this has been augmented by prior year surpluses that the voters have directed into that we didn't want to take the gravel reserve down because with these increasingly variable bits of weather doing some of these projects is a pretty good hedge climate resilience hedge in addition to saves our infrastructure saves the work so that's how we knit it out with these we took it from the places that had healthy balances and haven't been utilized tried to put it in there was a little bit of a change and there's no we don't ever budget for fund balance because that's a dangerous game you really want me to try to predict where we're going to be in 18 months and then and then bet on it when we raise taxes I would want to put you in that position you'd want to be in it is that something that we've done in the past that way it's on there as a lineup I bet you we did and I think at one point sometimes you'll see I don't know if Randall fell in but sometimes they're doing audits on the right schedule or they're trying to do their own audits they haven't got independent and suddenly they do the independent audit and find out they're sitting on a huge fund balance above and beyond anything they need and so they might spend it out over a couple of years as a way to fund activities I wouldn't doubt that at some point it probably developed because of a situation like that but if we're in a normal operation mode we used to vote on it the reserves and it would always be from a prior audit okay that we would find okay yeah same thing so explain just quickly back online 457 it's a transfer to highway capital and then it has ww and parentheses for 25 grand is that the incoming transfer from the general fund that you show on 568 on 568 transfer in from the general fund yeah this is a historic movement of funds I suspect it ties to these debt service bundles if I'm remembering right because in some of these projects here actually no down here sorry some of these projects we did combination borrowings we did one note but it's 73% this and 22% that something else I've always thought it was tied to that I have to go back and look that's not one I thought of this year but when you look at our debt service table we've got a few where we bundled enterprise and non-enterprise fund debt which I don't I would not suggest we try that again but I suspect it was to try to get the lowest interest rate possible most favorable payments sure it made sense in the context when we look at the amount of capital that we have for equipment and trucks in the highway side how does that compare to the trucks and equipment we have on the fire department side it just looks to me like we put more money aside annually for fire department reserve than we do highway reserve but it we have seven dump trucks three pickups well one you know 550 three pickups and then you know that's just the trucks not counting the sterling that's kind of in reserve or that's that is kind of that's kind of you know but then you know equipment or just trucks do the equipment real quick too two graders street sweep or back go class Eugene three bucket loaders good side of the machine but you know I think that's the answer to the question right like we have nine fire trucks which I think is more than a ton of our size needs but like nine fire trucks and we're putting $100,000 in reserve but we have all this equipment highway trucks and our reserve number is much lower than that yeah I think it's 110 for the fire this year and 100 for this and this is after we increased it by 20 and that's exactly why we won't catch up at this rate we'll never get into that pay-as-you-go model without some kind of intervention big increases miracle funds changes in technology self-driving self-crating roads we were joking around the other day we were talking about putting radiant heat up and down main street there and how we want to worry about the sidewalks or the roads we'll just adjust the thermostat good luck yeah if you were to ask me sort of long-term financial planning what's our area weakness highway fund budget it's in the then that equipment transfer at some point the good times are going to end with the pavement reserve with the surplus from the prior years in which case we'll start to get a little squeezed if we don't anything with that number especially as the asphalt costs go up per ton but we're probably a couple of years away from doing that and at that point we'll be all six years through the six years that we laid out together six-year plan and this year pavement-wise we've talked about wanting to do so I know we have a list of what we want to pave this summer but I don't know what off top my head it made a lot of progress on paving and where we were a few years ago like we're we've really done a lot I mean there's still a lot to go don't get me wrong but I mean we've made leaps and bounds you know and I just if we can keep pushing forward more manageable you know maintaining you know movement you know just if there's something we need to do but like we were talking to him me and Trevor were talking you know the roads that we want to pave this next time we want to make sure the DI's are good make sure everything underground is good before we pave it so it's like to have a brand new road and then you got to dig it out you know I mean then on our side that we can try to maintain and avoid that's our door for this year so you know so we've been pretty close I think we can based on some initial modeling this will we should be able to hold through 27 we might need to increase that transfer as we get into 26 let's put an eye toward 27 and then again there but this is the remaining three years of the sixth that we'd laid out trying to get a class 2 paving grant for Beanville Road if we can that's sort of the one in need those are 175 we might have moved them up to $200,000 max so that's reflected in all the capital sheets and then there's a whole bunch of smaller ones here so up on Hospital Hill and not too far off sort of the Pleasant Street corridor we'll knock a few more out finish East Bethel Road we'll be spot Beanville Road yeah we get that so that would all work nice and then the next year we move sort of these we always try to mix in sort of jump around so we're not just kind of pinpointing on one part of down you know what I mean spread it out so joy out wasn't was it fair for you we paved just like five years ago or less so we have co-location with some of these smaller ones but if we don't need to hit them then we'll take them out and move something up so that's sort of the basic plan as it is we've amended the plan every time when we've gone out to bid and we've seen prices and we've done those things so there's a good chance that we'll make adjustments based on conditions when we get there one of the things you'll notice that was a little bit of a bite but we used that number to then sort of play these numbers out hopefully they don't increase we just assumed sort of a five year or five percent per year some of these we took some of these other metrics from other towns in terms of linear foot costs or where we could find them originally when we started talking about it we were going to try to mix types really we've just gone from this entry point if we were trying to do some of the larger projects that would really slow us down in terms of getting that improvement everywhere the problem is I mean some people disagree with the shipment overlay but like when they milled Main Street and you guys remember last summer they were there in front of Napa I mean they only milled an inch and a half out there in the gravel there's not the base the base of asphalt underneath a base of asphalt so when we do need the mill to come through to give it a light mill to level the road back down get it where it needs to be we have that you know because once a mill once they get down to that black top it's like a it's like a dirt road you know what I mean just doesn't have the structure there to support what's above it so and this is all paid for we call it our capital improvement program I mentioned that what I wanted to do for you is maybe set aside some other stuff the one thing we can probably do with some little certainties get you on to fiscal 25 and keep building out what happens so that's been the focus there the green highlights are just where I took capital related or co-projects from the town's list and put them in there so they're all listed in one spot and show the source of funding as we scroll to the right this has everything that you've seen from transfers to reserves that's usually what you're seeing the fund funding same thing could be transfers we have a couple of debt service payments in there the vibratory roller and a front run end loader so this is our second of five payments there the police transfer at some point we're going to have to talk about those police vehicles I don't have another source of funds unless you want to go out and borrow for them we could lease finance all kinds of stuff very town we talked in the model the benefit is that you're replacing equipment on a reliable schedule but you've always got some level of debt service such a carrying as a result so nothing too wild or crazy we've got in there four side walks have come up a couple of times we've got the grant match this is the 12,000 when you play this chart over to the side here let's see if I can do that what's the way I've got you can get over to see the totals percent match of the $60,000 for that scoping study for the expansion of the sidewalks down to Shaw's down to Weston that was always a sidewalk reserve so we've got that in there this is for generalized repairs that we've got to identify so anything that's sort of of a larger scale we had that in the list for 24 it makes sense to just maybe try in 25 to do something a little bit bigger and then the $57,000 here we were thinking about doing John went out and priced out to do sidewalk machines same model that we already have we're able to get the state price because there's something that V-trans uses we've been pretty happy with the one we picked up an emergency situation a couple of winners ago the idea being that if we want to care for the sidewalks better we're finding especially with the very bold weather can take all the other attachments we already have a broom roadside and more I think is on it too or you can put it on it if I'm not mistaken so these are flexible little pieces of equipment for us at this cost it's been pretty durable seems to be pretty easy to repair we were buying sidewalk machines at $110,000 that broke every other day and then you couldn't get replacement parts more these have been pretty sturdy is the sidewalk machine we have now also a multiple use type machine so the one we priced out is identical to the one we currently have but there's just a lot of sidewalks spread out we try to get to our sidewalks as fast as we can I'm not commenting I'm just curious about the machine we have now we can use it for other things also and we do we put a broom on like we sweep aprons especially on approaching gravel roads especially after the winter time I just didn't know sweep the sidewalks really well especially in the spring time you know you get all the debris everything gets cleaned up go through sweep the debris off the sidewalks into the street then the street sweeper goes down through cleans up the street up so kind of take two birds one stone I don't know I just we have like I said it goes back to the crew we have and the people we have more versatile two machines I think we get you know the longevity out of them but we also be able to cover you know at the same time so the machine only moves so fast and then just depending on the the material the snow how heavy wet the other day I mean it was moving about like that just you know and I mean I wish we could snap our fingers and clean and safe to walk on you know but yeah actually since we're talking about now this isn't really totally relevant but the guy who runs the sidewalk plow through my neighborhood is really careful not to blow the snow from the sidewalk into my driveway or into the walkway like he's really like and that hasn't always been the case like in the past we've had operators who are just like they just run it and you know I'd be like he's running the driveway now it's full of snow again but he does not do that and it's obviously he's really paying attention and like trying to time it just right and it's anyway it's really appreciate the thoughtfulness that has been going into that and I know some of my other neighbors have noticed that as well and it's not the kind of thing you stop the operator and say oh thank you so much so I just I just want he should just know that people appreciate it even if no one's saying anything you know same as like plowing you know of course when we're going around during the storm the other day you know the plow truck's got to put the snow to you know somewhere right and people get mad because they're shoveling their driveways but you know a plow truck goes by we've adapted to you know like I said new employees new people train them the right way the first time you know when you plow on the road find the curb you know get over to where you drive way to find the edge of the road you know so unless they complain a lot right well you can't get something to complain about we're not there where there's a fickle thing it's hard to it's hard to tell where there's no answer I actually have noticed that it also seems like whoever's driving the plow trucks are doing a better job at keeping the plows actually on the roads and not yes it's you know on and not digging up long well right and that's who are some of the roads that we take care of with these dump trucks in town are too big you know like you go up like Belfort you know or just some of the really small tight roads and you put a six-wheeled dump truck with a 12 foot plow on the front of it I mean first of all we don't have a place to turn around we've got to turn into someone's driveway someone's lawn to back into another driveway to even turn around and get out of there you know I mean they're perfect brothers so what I'm saying is though people like it seems like that has gotten better they're really absolutely noticeably better that they're being careful they're just combination of more careful more skillful better you know just paying paying better attention but anyway but it's just again it's just it's appreciated really nice to thank you to see that level of quality of work come from the road crew it's just really great when you related to Josh and Deepo they were complaints about the sweatshirts that they wore I will tell them they're going to have proper repair that's right why? why? one of them is the Yankees fan the other one's a Lakers fan so we make sure they never forget ooh that Celtics fan unacceptable unacceptable but no it's their their phone group when we think about trucks too though like we mentioned you know it's a spot it's a what do you want to do we're talking a 10-wheeler maybe it's like a horizon and then 550 so I the current truck that takes care of the dirt roads in the village portion you know you got Spooner Crabapple Tatro you know Hunt Seymour Pinnacle on this end of town then you've got a couple little short dead end I've never forget them like yeah that road it goes like that but right now just it's really the truck's not big enough to do the road to carry the amount of material in the truck to sand the road right you know so the dump truck has to go up to the six-wheeler he goes up on a day truck he can only sand halfway three quarters way down day truck without hitting any of the side roads of the truck so you know we have a truck that needs to be replaced I would suggest replacing it with a ten-wheeler because he's tried it with the ten-wheeler out of the center garage just to see versus four-and-a-half or five loads of sand it's two loads of sand you know one on this end of town one on this end of town he also takes care of heritage you know holly hop flint or low bounty you know right out and I just think the proper truck very sized the holly amount of material would be beneficial and that smaller truck that's doing tature now can do Belford? that truck no but he doesn't go you know that's Belford's like you know pavement truck that's in town in the village but we also have a village truck that takes care of the dirt roads down on this end of town as well so it's three and then we have four dumb trucks that take care of dirt so three in the center one in the village is a 550 the right size truck to do Belford? yes going on vacation in July so we're going to start pricing trucks out now keeping it back here I can see you the truck went down the truck was on vacation last year so I thought yeah let's buy it it sounds like we need to extend Belford down through to south street so you don't have to turn around we're game for anything good luck on imminent domain on that one then I wasn't pinpointing single in that trailer I was just using it did you put a road right through our house he realized this gets out there on TV right? yeah I'm just joking everybody all five listeners all five listeners sorry I really do though I think is purchasing another sidewalk that would be very beneficial to the town I don't know which way we go about it like you said we got a couple different options but do we mow does buildings and grounds mow the wrecked fields and all that mostly buildings and grounds yeah there's some overlap where we paid for the wrecked fields in part out of the recreation budget but that's usually the seasonal that's appeared when it was con for years for example that appeared in the buildings and grounds budget so we have a separate lawn mower for that they have they've got just a couple of years just the ventrag mower was nice too right yeah and so well we thought you know just pricing it out a couple different attachments but like we have a finish mower that we got with the first one about we'd get a bush on for the second one just because the finish mower does do a nice job but it's just not really made for that type of grass because we have to mow the cells down at the dump at least twice a year twice a summer so so this here that we have full staff are we mowing the cemeteries on our own this here not East Randolph and Randolph Center this would be year two of the bid that we went out to do we still have that contract? same contract same contractor after we reset everything in August it got very peaceful and reliable okay not without some difficulty or consternation of course it did level out okay but that is a concern but we don't have the staff currently in buildings and grounds to take that on even okay we were doing all of them we had the two hybrids two seasonals Harold plus a seasonal we had Claude doing the wreck and cool stuff and occasion other resources so we're down to three in that department but they're all full time and we've deployed one of them a little differently throughout the winter so what do you guys know then like you guys on the side we do I do all the roadside moment okay okay thank you sorry question I had asked was on the bend track because they make a nice finish more could that be used to do the wreck fields also another piece of machinery yeah okay yeah that's where I started like mixing yeah yeah sorry no nothing I'm a newbie so I kind of like like like like building some grounds and highways highways use it when they need it and that's what we talked about I think if you say versatile for the town you know the town as a whole to use have the piece of machinery to use where we need it to be used not just necessarily to be like highways are going to stay there so flexibility has been our friend sure and we talk about the money ball aspect it's how do we take two dimes and turn it into a quarter kind of thing yeah well that can go too far sometimes though too I mean if like they need it every day and then something else needs it then it's not really helpful but yeah yeah we've tried to separate those shared things where that comes up if we can and it would be mindful of them yeah but the second bend track would be additional capacity for you not replacing something right right it would just have the grounds I would mostly need it in the summer yeah right so that's what we did you know in reality what we'd do is you know have them both through the snow blowing stuff in the water we'd have the suit one up to keep the cab on one and you know the sweep around the other to keep the dust and the silicone you know all that out of the from the operator the same for both of them we could you know so sort of buying trucks and moors while you're on vacation here what are you leaving I don't know I might keep that a secret now it doesn't take us long we're going to add additional vacation days we've got the naggers on the contract just so we can get more down got my way to the cable stop and get gas and I won't be able to tell you where you know I'm guessing all the baggage and the kids and everything would move it away kids like to talk on the phone when she's talking so you'll have a good tip Trevor you're not this isn't yours no you're all set fine it looks partially used so depending on your level of daringness I've got three kids I've already gotten spread my way anyways we don't need any of the projects in there for spending authority that are FEMA-based right yeah because they're we just got to figure out where the match comes from right and then we so we have the July storm and then we have the December storm which we just supplied all our stuff up at the state level and it looks like Orange County has met the threshold although it's on estimates so we don't actually officially reach it until we get to obligation yeah we've got to get them some follow-up they asked today it should be easy to grab yeah so those will still all show up when we get out and do all that there's a separate essentially FEMA account section that we've set up so the money will show up as the in-out and then however we figure out we want to match it it would be showing the flow of money but because we're not proposing use any of those general fund or reserve fund dollars at this point did we when you looked at the sites that we hit in December do we figure out if any mitigation is going to be beneficial in those areas because I know all we went for was the emergency repair but right right we did do some ditching we did some ditching and changed cover up the couple spots up on fish show and we also did some on Rand Road just try to help drain the water let the water drain out of the road you know and go somewhere other than just sitting there faster but I think doesn't like wouldn't that classify as a mitigation no that's emergency that's emergency that can hit in the emergency account but I'm thinking like is there clay in the road or things like that that you could get a whole new subvasive you know in some areas we had some ledge and the water came up through the ledge causing problems in the springtime so it was one of those sites where you know the damage to the road was because it was on in those conditions clay ledge or something like that and mitigating it would be taking it down and putting a new subvasive building it up through and we add that project in and ask FEMA to pay for that too great wow a tank little sections of fish clearing out that culvert seemed to help allowing the water to go somewhere really seemed to help a lot and then you did a little new try a new technique kind of thing too where we put some larger material down different smaller material up top and then fines over the top kind of layered it up so I mean what I what seemed like what we found turned to mud you know but also what we found is grading the roads I really don't know what's in the roads from the time I started until you grade the roads enough and see what kind of material you're turning around what I've noticed a lot is a lot of the roads just the rock is broken down it's just a lot of real a lot of fines in the roads and I thought I figured mother nature was kind of showing us her hand for what mud season was going to be like where the rust were really bad I went through and put an inch and a half stone in the roads and let the traffic pound it into the ground and then we put an inch and a half or inch and a quarter hard pack over the top of it to kind of trap it but bind it in so as they do thaw out the traffic will pound the rock back down into the ground and hopefully as we grade it this summer we'll mix it back in and have the rock fine ratio to hold up so I'm going to keep my fingers crossed hahahaha sounds like an art more than a science it'll just depend on the day any more questions on the highway budget want to do do you need any decisions on that or the money is sitting there we just got to decide what to do with it the later date you're on vacation hahahaha tell em on the beach then I'll be video agreeable agreeable to whatever you want to do. Oh, we aren't telling you. I'm happy to drop the truck back here. That really works. That's what we are. There's some grandson. Other two of you have some fun. Don't smart eyes and lay back. I heard the G word. Start twitching, did you see that? You're fine. We have a person for that. That's true. That has helped my... My grand acceptance level. So, I think just from a process standpoint, we'll have another conversation. Obviously, next week you're scheduled to meet. And then, if we had a minimum coming out of that, if we have a sense of direction and everything, we talked about doing a town meeting morning tonight, but with the open questions on some of the police stuff and the timing and all of those things. I just tamped it back down until we've got some answers from Mike, and then we can show you maybe a couple of different versions of that. But from a budget perspective, we don't have a sense. It doesn't sound like there's too much that you want to get into change, alter from the proposed budgets for, say, everything but police. That seems like that's the open question. So, if that sounds fair, what we'll do is just make sure all the numbers are where they need to be. Do kind of a double check, last check, and set those up so that maybe at a minimum on the 25th you get through the conversation and you're ready to adopt those budgets at the minimum. We have February 1st, but we get to that. We're cutting that real close if we just rely on Thursdays. So we may want to consider a different date if we get through the 25th and you're still not where you want to have that. I think we can finalize it next Thursday. Don't you? Yeah. And then that ties in nicely. That lets us get the warning. You can adopt that, sign it. We can go through it again. It's more than once it's saved our bacon in terms of there's some weird little thing in there. Even though we looked at it six times with six different sets of eyes, there's a thing. And once it's set, there's no way to change it. So that gives a little extra time on that. And then it ties in nicely with the annual report. It doesn't have to be the printer until the 8th. So we have to warn the vote on the 2nd of February, right? No, I would say no later than the 3rd or 2nd, I guess. The 2nd is a Friday. So that's the day that we have to have it. So the 2nd function, I would say, would be the... But what we'd like to do is sort of wind our way to that point where for some reason you're not settled. There's just one set of questions. Are you going to crash and burn or not? What are we going to do? You might be here all fally some night. Yeah, it's not closing business. We've got some in there. We're good. I've got snacks. But yeah, so we'll start to... I'll have it by next Thursday. I'll give you a week to... That'd be perfect. That's not that much open. Not really. It seems like we're pretty close. In terms of the numbers, just one humongous policy question potentially. The numbers are pretty well set. That's a big black hole, but otherwise it's over. That's right. All right. Thanks for coming in, John. Hang out with us. It's been fun. You made it. You're free and clear. I do want to thank publicly thank you though for helping Brookfield. That was absolutely amazing. And the fact that your guys showed up on their day off was a pleasure. Tell me more. I emailed you all. So the town of Brookfield this last weekend, at the end of the storm event, when it warmed up, snow rained, they didn't lose one truck, but they lost all their trucks. Just the whole time. They didn't have anything to maintain any of their roads with. They did their best they could with what they had for graders. And they communicate from time to time just to check in on each other to make sure everybody's good. My number one priority is Randolph, but also reach out because from what I understand back in the day, people didn't talk a lot from the neighboring towns. They reached out and they had a problem, had a couple questions at first just to figure out if we could fix all of everyone that works for us and I asked them if they would be willing to or had any obligation to going and helping sand their roads because their roads were nothing but a sheet of ice. Very unsafe to travel and I'm glad we were able to help. It didn't take very long at all but the six trucks we have and our crews, we went over and guided them and sent them where they needed to go. So That's great. I didn't see any email come through. You got it, didn't you? You were on it. We got a nice photo from the select board to figure out the guys. Real quick, I don't see it. Well, you know if I we don't let this out and that's what made me kind of realize and think about it. These trucks that we've got they've been maintained well from moving forward but the amount of electronics and just everything's electric on the motors. If we have a truck go down the truck we traded in last year for the new truck we got we shut it off on a Friday went back to a Monday to try to start it. The truck we traded we had to put a $23,000 fuel system in that truck and put it in. That's a whoops there? What's that? That's a whoops there. No operator, mechanical just done. That's what I just we were talking about. You can't avoid the electrical problems which you can at least have a warranty to kind of protect you. You don't protect us from having to pay a substantial amount of money to equipment failure. So we like that 5-7 mark for trucks. You'll see that as we talk trucks at any point. Because we could match it to the motors. Just turn them over. The drivers take care of the trucks really well. They maintain them. Their appearance is very good. I think that keeps us on the higher end when we turn them over trading them in gets us a better value. The next truck we traded in was the highest the towns ever got was toward a dump truck. But the sad part is what we had to put into the truck to get it to trade in. It didn't turn out like it was that much money. But a good dump truck 5-7 years old say 7 years old they'll give you 125 to $130,000 trade in. On a truck that we've ran for 7 years, 5 years towards a new one. The first jump is a pretty big leap but I think after once you start turning them over they almost take care of each other. And our electrical systems always stay under warranty coverage so we don't have to worry. It's scary. I used to work on them all the time but now it's like I don't even know what to do. Darius is learning in there somewhere. I'm not sure where. Well thank you. Have a good night. See ya. Manager's report. I don't have anything to add other than I owned a 98 Corolla, not a 99 to clarify. I got that. My apologies for getting a little face. Executive session. I don't have anything for you. Do we need to go there to talk salary information? For me? I was like we could cover everybody. I was like we could cover everybody. Yeah, that would be where you do it. Yeah, I think we should go. I would like to move that we go into executive session for the purpose of personnel salary discussion. 3 313 313 313 8 something What are these days? How that memorize. 8 So Tom, Executive session for that. I'll second that. Bye. Post. Motion carries.