 Good evening and everybody, welcome to the Joint Select Board and Trustee Meeting for Tuesday, today's Tuesday, April 9th, 2019. Please join us in the touch of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I'll call the Select Board meeting to order. And I will call the Essex Junction Trustee meeting to order. First order of business is agenda, additions and changes. And Evan and Greg, I believe we have no additions from you. No additions, but I believe you're going to change the order around just a little bit. Getting right to that. Items 5D and 5E, we're just going to swap them. We're going to tackle 5E first and 5D second. So that's all that is. And then we will be being joined by a guest, Dan Richardson, an attorney from our career consulting with the boards on our governance conversations. And he'll be joining us shortly when he gets here and we get to that part of the meeting. So, Select Board, can I have a motion to approve the agenda? So moved. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. And I'll make the same request to the trustees. So moved. Second? Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. And I just, I'll just add for the trustees. Trustee Lurie Houghton will be joining us shortly. She's over at the high school. Thank you. So the next item on the agenda is public to be heard. This is the part of the meeting when the public can speak on items that are not already on the agenda. So if anybody would like to say something regarding something that we're not going to cover tonight, please feel free. Parker. Just a reminder, please speak to the microphone. Elaine, I'm having a hard time hearing you. Thank you. Sorry. We're sharing this one. I know. I know. Still. Okay. Thank you. Anyone else? I would ask that I don't believe when I was reading the paper about what all the governance issues you're going to do, but are we going to also have a conversation about Australian ballot versus voting at the fraud budget? I think tonight we're going to talk about the many different things we're going to have to ask the voters at some point and how we vote may come up. Okay. It might not be here tonight, but it's most definitely a conversation for the future. Thank you. Other members of the public have anything to add? Any other questions, comments? Okay. Next. Irene. There was an issue with the mic on Monday night. So I'm glad to see there's a mic for the audience tonight because people called and complained they couldn't hear the audience comments on the video tape. So for future reference, we'll keep writing it. Anybody else? Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So our first business item is discussion about the unified website. Greg and Rob, can you hear me? So I just wanted to keep you fries to the progress that's happening with the unified website. Basically, Civic Plus, which is the company that's been working on it, has drafted up a template, a color scheme that was included in your packet. Rob and I can speak to that. If there's any questions to it at this point, the staff, the communications team has been working on the website and submitted their comments on that template back to Civic Plus. We have also collected input from department heads and board members, which we will be organizing and going through and figuring out feedback on that. How to best incorporate that in the website. The comments are included in your packets. We have a draft survey that we'd like to put up on the websites for residents to get some feedback from the public on what they would be looking for in websites. And lastly, Rob has put together a list of web addresses that the town and village own, do not use, and other ones that might be options that are out there that are not yet owned by anybody. So that's basically a quick overview, but we can fill you in and answer questions if there are any. Thank you. Any comments, questions, thoughts? I was just wondering if it would make sense to sort of do a pilot program with the change in habit just on the town side first. And the town one really needs an update for sure. And work out the bugs on the town side, and then say in a year and a half or so, maybe we'll be able to, you know, to merge the two into one website. But I was thinking rather than trying to do the whole thing together, and I know there's some issues on the village side with some of the existing websites that are already out there, if it might make sense to approach it as a pilot project on the town side. I think that's a good, that's a great idea. I just don't know in terms of complexity, how that works for you, Rob and Greg, what do you think about that? Yeah, it's certainly we can update the town website on its own and see how it looks and see how it feels for the public. The challenge there, it's only part of the issue. A big picture looking at the website update is part of a broader communication strategy to help reach the entire community. Part of it is administrative. Rob and his team are, they're managing 14 websites right now. So revised, updated look to the town website is only part of what we're trying to do. It certainly can be done. It's just, it only resolves part of the issues that we're trying to tackle. And then there's the cost piece of it too. The contract that's been signed at this point has been for a comprehensive website for both municipalities. And there would be a cost, Rob can probably tell me better what that looks going to be, but there would be a cost associated with doing part of it now and part of it in a year and a half, two years from now. Yeah, so one of the other issues is that by having it separate, we're definitely losing a lot of the benefits of having a unified website, search capability, the consistency that the user has as they're going between the pages. The, as far as the cost is concerned, depending on how long it's delayed or even if it's a one year, one year out, year and a half out project or delayed for that long. It's, Civic Plus would be charging us $150 an hour for that additional work. So a big chunk of this is by designing it at this point is to kind of keep that cost down so that we're not having to spend for a complete redesign in a year, year and a half. And part of one of the benefits of using them, and I know I've highlighted it in the past is that in four years we're able to do a redesign and part of this website, while it's a unified website, you can really look at it as multiple websites. So it's really not a matter of just a website where it's for the town or for the village or for both. It's, you can look at it as essentially four different websites that we're going to have, but all combined, all interacting with one another. And we would definitely lose that. And on top of it, the Plectreg was saying the administrative piece of it is quite a bet for us. Well, the only thing I, Andrew, I was curious on, as you mentioned, about using the results from the survey to help inform next steps, and I think that's how I understood it. When I see the feedback from the board about what we want to see in the unified website, I see three out of four comments say that we don't want it from board members. So I'm curious how you would use that to inform this process. I think we would need to vote from the boards for one of the boards in a motion to proceed or not proceed. There were four of you who responded, even on one board that's a quorum, but I think that's between the two boards. I hope you don't need a motion tonight, but we'll be in the near future, so we're off and figure out what he's working with Pacific Plus on. I want to go back and just discuss Max's idea for a second, because it also gets around, you know, the main item we're talking about tonight is governance change. And a year from now, two years from now, we could be, it's conceivable that depending on how we change our governance structure, you could wind up having to completely reconfigure your website. So, you know, maybe Max's idea isn't that bad, not only for the reasons that Max gave, but also because it might bring you, by the time you get done doing this pilot, you might have a little bit more clarity about where we're going. So, you might have a little more certainty about what ultimately, if you're going to, this is going to be a big expenditure, you probably want to have something that's locked in for many years. And it's something that could potentially change significantly depending on how we, where we decide to go with governance. Yep, I do understand that. And that's kind of why we've designed it this way, where we separated the website. So, the way the pages or sites are laid out, each municipality would get what's called a department header. And under that is that municipality's entire website. So, while it could change in a year and a half of governance, the website itself would still be a separate component than a unified site. That's kind of the, that's part of the reason it was designed this way. So that it was never intended to completely to put into place a unified, or just one website. And I know that was mentioned early on, but that was now certainly never the intention. Ralph, I could just clarify that. It'd be one platform, but it'd be potentially different home pages. Is that a fair way to say it? Yes. I have two things I'm looking for clarity for, not exactly for myself, but more for people. Maybe watching Channel 17 later on or now. My first question is, Greg, your final sentence before involved, I couldn't decide. It seemed to me you were either speaking to gathering all the websites that we have out for a variety of different reasons, and making sure that they're gathered in correctly. But were you also speaking, and I see I'm correct, were you also speaking about a domain name, or am I confused about that part? No, at some point, there's a list of all the domain names that are in use right now. At a certain point, I guess two steps, and jump in if I mispeak, there's going to be a home page, basically an address where the site can be built. And so let's just call it, let's call it Vermont.com to be more simple. Pacific Plus can build it on Vermont.com, and it would be template and be built on the website. When it's ready to go live, that's when it would link to a name, and whether that's sx.org or sxjunction.org. And the way it's set up right now, jump in when I'm wrong, but it could be set up so that if you type in sx.org, it would take you to the town portion of the site. If you type in sxjunction.org, it would take you to the village portion of the site. Depending on how you want to structure it, if you want to have one landing page for the Essex community, you could come up with theessexcommunity.whatever, and then from there, go to the town piece, the village piece, everything else. Is that right? Does that answer your question? What if the village and the village website maintained as is? You kitted it out so that it was possible. You utilize the information on the current village site. Format it out without too much effort. I'm not talking about spending a lot of time or money on that idea. Conceptually, you kitted out so that it could pull that stuff in. Don't send it there yet. Know that you could. Keep the website you have. Everybody stays happy that part doesn't go live. It's not too much. You don't get too invested in it. But you take the time to make the possibility be there. Well, also doing that idea, whatever. And then everything just kind of sits still until such time as we want to go forward. Am I making any sense? So I feel like everything can happen for everybody because I don't understand how hard it is. To do the part from the back end. But I'm thinking if you could kind of sort of conceptualize it, but not kitted out completely, just kind of format it. Let it live there not live. Let it be a possibility. So keep the village site as it is. We figure out what we're doing to move forward. And then such time as need be, it's not that hard hopefully to do. Is that silly? I understand. So basically build a new website. Kind of do a rougher framework of the village portion of that website. But keep the current village website live. Is that interesting? That's kind of the approach we were going on already. So it was never a point where we couldn't turn on this new site and continue to operate with the old site working. But certainly part of bringing stuff over is using the current stuff that's there, using features that people have positive feedback on, content and stuff like that. So that is definitely part of the plan. As far as the village site is concerned, we literally could take that whole site and just drop it into the Civic Plus site. And it would look exactly as it is now. It would just be on a different platform. And so it certainly doesn't take away from the existing look or feel to it. But it's just on a different platform. I'm kind of just saying yes, I'm in agreement with that. But maybe before we move it, we make sure what we're doing. So that you're over there with them, hey, I'm ready. And they're over there with we're not ready yet. And then when everybody is agreement. I have a question I apologize for being late. And I am a very optimistic person about our future. But I have to play the devil's advocate. So what happens if we move forward with this unified website? And in two years, we aren't together. What happens then? I would ask, are you going to separate your, separate into IT departments? So then managing two websites? We don't know. We don't know. And that's my point. And so that was my point when I brought this up at the last village meeting. And we just don't know our future. And this is our public face. I'm responding, but I'm going to be over here. Well, here you can. I can do this. Okay. I'm trying to, the thing is, I, what I would, the way I'd respond to it, Lori, is I'd say that what we're anticipating is when we, if we put a governance option on in front of the voters in 2020, and it is not approved, then what we would in effect be voting for is to maintain the existing status quo where we have a shared administration. So we continue to have a shared administration. That would be the default. And I think that a continued shared administration to say we would continue to have a, then you'd have a shared, you wouldn't have a shared website, but you'd have one administration operating the website that they're talking about now. I don't see, I mean, do you really think that it's a likely possibility that we would split so far, suddenly split so far apart that we would no longer have to share the administration? Based on our history, based on our, based on our history of these discussions over many, many, many years, I thought by now we would be one, but we're not. Okay. So I would hope that what you say would happen, but I'm not banking on it and I'm not ready to give up the village identity to gain some efficiencies when in a year and a half or two years we will have a much better idea of our future. So I'm hearing that the trustees might need to do a little bit more discussion on the matter than we have time for this evening. I think you guys need to have a more substantive discussion and then Greg needs official direction from the trustees. I don't know if you want to do that tonight or if you want to do it at your next meeting. Well, I'd like to hear from the other trustees. Dan and Andrew, what are your thoughts on this? I hear what Lori's saying and I agree to the extent, but I also understand what you're saying, George, that are we really, do we need to? I'm hesitant to give up too much right off. There's a lot of things I question, you know, the control over the website, just knowing our practice on doing things in the village and the way the town, that my experience, the way they do things is not the same and it's obvious polls and everything else we've seen. So it's not that everybody's going to do that and the process for controlling this system, you're ultimately going to be the webmaster or whatever your title is, right, for this? I mean, we're the IT department's ultimate chart, but yeah. But you don't, right now, well, you do with our website as it is now, Rob's controlling our website now, so I guess it's... Right, I mean, it's... The difference would be, I mean, we're... It would be, I don't think that the people feeding into the website, putting, posting things on the website is, would be different. I think that's, there's two different components. In terms of who's posting information content on the website, that's one, and tell me if I'm wrong, and then, but Rob is, they're basically providing the platform. Yeah, if I could. IT does not control content. Right. They control the, well, they administer the contract, they help the departments, but in general the idea was there'd be communications committee and people from the village and the people from the town are responsible, the departments, are responsible for their own content. IT doesn't create content for their or anybody's site, but let's just say for instance, administration says, hey, we need the following minutes put up. More than likely it would be Darby, or Tammy, or someone else. It's not going to be IT that does it. IT will do it if nobody else is available, or for the sake of meeting a state deadline, let's say we needed the minutes up on Friday, everybody went home, we could contact IT and say, we have these minutes because they could do it remotely, they don't have to be in the office, but they're not creating the content. The village wanted to do a poll. The only thing the village needs to do is contact the person who's actually responsible for the village website, which in this particular case would be Darby and or Tammy and or someone else and say, we'd like the following poll run. That's how it would work. Earlier Greg said something about, when Annie asked a question about developing this new website for the community as a whole, and maybe keeping in the back set not active our website so that when, like Annie was saying, once we decide as a community to come together that they can merge the system so it activates all together. But you said something Greg about, it's going to be on a different platform. Can you explain when you say different platforms, what do you mean, what defined platform for me? And I just, my concern is people out in the village that are used to seeing the village website have now this new system, or new, you know, address or website, they're going to go on, they're going to see something different, it's going to be confusing. I think people are very comfortable with what they have now and they don't want to see it change, whether it's a website or whether it's the highway department, the way they do certain things in the village and, you know, not saying that they're not working together as it is now, but some things are done differently in different places in this system. Yeah, so speaking to the website. Again, Rob, can I have a minute? Time to speak. But there's 14 different websites right now. I don't know how many different providers we have, how many different structures and management, web management, languages that... When the IT department has to post something, they post it differently on, I won't say 14 different ways, but a lot of different ways depending on the website. So going to one platform is basically having the same provider, the same architecture for every single one of those websites. You can still set it up when you get there. You can still set it up so the look can look like the current town website, it can still look like the current village website, it can still look like the current fire department website. The look of the website can be tailored within a platform. The platform isn't going to be something anyone on the front sees. It's all on the back-end steps, so that's the only difference. It's a single platform versus 14 different platforms where none of those sites are communicating to each other. Having this as that one benefit that the residents are able to really kind of get out of a single website, a search function that actually finds stuff, not having to go to potentially 14 different websites to find information as it is now. I mean, you could do a Google search and find stuff and sort through it, but if you could just go to the one website and do a search for it, that would be the ideal situation. This agenda item is there's nothing for the select board to vote on here. This is an information-only kind of discussion, so I just want to wait. Check in with all the select board members. See if you have any further thoughts or questions. Matt? If it's transparent to the user, so they won't see a difference, but it's easier for the IT department to maintain. It sounds like a no-brainer to say, get to the same platform, but don't change the look and feel of the village website, at least not the live version. Maybe do what Annie was saying, which is what you're going to do on the town side anyway. As you're working on, it's going to be offline, so kind of do what you plan anyway, but maybe just bring the town one online first until the trustees are ready or we have better headlights as far as what the governance structure would be in the year and a half or so. I would think it's a no-brainer to go to the same platform if it's transparent to the user. I mean, that's definitely certainly to do that. Okay. I mean, there's definitely cost associated with it, though. Okay. Part of the plan was to eliminate some of these other sites. So, you know, recouping that amount that wasn't planned for. So, I'm guessing I understand that there was a kind of a plan of moving ahead, keeping the village site intact and not changing anything in terms of what the village website is doing right now in terms of our ability to put content on it and so forth. But you're going to move ahead with the plan to just develop the town website first. That's the concept right now. We could basically build both websites on the new platform. Right. Make the town website look different. Give it the upgrade that it needs. Okay. Keep the village website basically looking the same functionality that it, since it doesn't need the full long revamp that the town one does. Okay. I'm thinking we can probably come back at a certain point and say, here's the template on one platform. Here's what it's going to look like. Okay. If the trustees are happy with it, great. If they're not, it's there. The current village site stays live. It stays active if and until the time comes to slip it off. Let me stop you there. So, if someone out in the world, not in this room, someone out in the world, Google's sxjunction, they're going to go to sxjunction.org and see an sxjunction website. Is that correct? That's still going to be there. They're not going to go to an sxcommunity website and then have a sublink that goes to sxjunction. Correct? So, trustees, what do you think? You want to just give the, I don't know if we need the voter to sort of give a non consent to move forward with this concept and then we'll see what happens in a month or so. What are you thinking, Andrew? I like the sound of sxjunction being its own website, its own organization. I frankly don't understand how the back end of things work. Okay. So, as far as I'm concerned as long as we have our own community website, our own sxjunction website is fine by me. Okay. Well, what direction do we want to give to, because I think we need to kind of wrap this up when we make a decision and go on here. My opinion, I have no problem with moving forward with what we've just discussed, the whole thing of moving forward, developing a unified website with both, but keep ours active until such time that we decide that, okay, we're comfortable enough with, and maybe the people inside the town residents within the village who are, when I go to the website for the town right now, I think it's terrible. It's something that I can see a kid in high school developing. Now, this thing, Actually, give them a credit. Well, maybe, yeah. They do better than now. But I'm just saying that once the people see what they, what is put together with this, you know, new website that town has, they may say, boy, this is quite nice. And maybe I'll get some feedback from other than just us, the residents outside of the village, in the village, whatever, the residents within the village may compare it to the village website. I don't know how much use their village website gets from people outside of the village, but who knows. Okay, sad. Do we have a club? Do we have an answer? Is there an answer in here? We get it. Yeah, Annie. I think that it wouldn't hurt you to also be able to get to the Essex Junction website from the town one. Sure. It wouldn't hurt. That if they were looking for you, they could find you either way. Well, they can do that. Interim, there can always be a link. Yeah, that's right. They can do that right now. They can do that now. There's no problem with that right now. So, do we have an answer here? Okay. You have some guidance from us, Lori? I'm with Andrew. It has to be a challenge. I don't know the back workings, but it has to be ssjunction.org until there is a governance solution. But it would be ssjunction.org. Okay. So, we're agreeing to one platform. Yes. Okay. Ready? Okay. I don't know if we need to vote on this, but let's just give the nod and see where it goes. Okay. I'm good. All right. Rob, thank you very much. It would be a hard work. All right. Our next item, approve the schedule for future joint board meetings. Greg has come up with a nifty plan to help us work more efficiently and to not put the staff through multiple hoops to share information with both boards. So, share with us what you have, what you come up with. Sarah had a lot to do with this, too. Oh, thank you, Sarah. I visited him on the spreadsheet, probably. It did. He thought he was going to get involved. You know Sarah. So, staff's been having a lot of conversations lately about what we can do with the boards to kind of, I guess, meet more often. And as we look at it, there's just more and more overlapping issues that we need to deal with. Website being a prime example. And being able to make sure we get the appropriate direction from the boards that we're looking for. Make sure that staff can bring the boards materials in a timely manner. And if we keep doing the current schedule is basically, select board meets the first and third Monday of every month. The trustees are the second and fourth. And every other month, the boards meet jointly. That a lot of time to, if there's something that is really timely has to go to both boards. Staff is presenting materials twice. For example, Sarah gave a presentation to the trustees two weeks ago, maybe, about electronic AP, feeling and invoicing. The select board is going to see that one on Monday. Sarah's going to do that twice. Really, it'd be great to have it those types of things once. Also looking at November 2020, which we'll be talking about shortly. That's coming up really, really fast. And if you meet every other month, it's going to come up really, really fast. So we looked at, staff looked at some options of how to be able to bring you material in more timely matters. Have some better decision making. Be able to get some clear direction as quickly as possible. And we can keep doing the same schedule. I could also look at meeting, keeping as clear existing individual board meeting schedules, but meeting jointly once a month. That's more meetings for everybody. Staff's recommendation is to get rid of the every other first Wednesday, every other month meeting. Keep your current schedule for the first and third Mondays, second and fourth Tuesday. But have the boards meet jointly within that schedule. So the first Monday will be a select board meeting. We would stagger it so you could still do individual board business. Probably take 30 minutes, 45 minutes at the beginning of each meeting to run through any board specific business. Then after that, meet jointly and do some of the joint stuff and get the updates and the decisions that are happening on a joint level. Whether that's budgeting, whether it's governance, the many topics that are overlapping and intertwined right now. We're looking at the first meeting of the first Monday being select board and then joint meeting, second Tuesday being trustees, third meeting being select board, fourth meeting being trustees, followed by a joint meeting. In doing this, they will be pretty busy meetings. Staff would probably be looking to put more items on consent agenda. We're going to pull that off. We can talk about that. Discussion a little bit. We're going to pull something off consent agenda. You'd be feeling out that process a little bit as to what you want to see, what you don't want to see. Some of the meetings might run late. The boards might have to meet, continue their individual meetings after a joint meeting, but that is our recommendation and hopefully the boards are amenable to that or something like it. We're going to open it up to discussions, questions, anything else? Thank you, Greg and Sarah. It's been challenging to try to make this work and I appreciate especially that you gave us two different ways to look at it, one with text and one with calendars for visual. Thank you for appealing to the visual learners on this. I think this is a great suggestion. We have a lot of work to do. We have only a limited amount of time and we have two very committed boards. I would not want to waste anyone's time and I think this is a convenient option. It actually works out better for me because from the last year I've been attending all those meetings. I actually can do less meetings with this way that you're recommending. I would like to open it to the select board members for comments and questions about how you feel about this potential calendar. Pat? The third option by far works the best for me, schedule-wise with my work schedule and with the WSD board meeting stuff that can't be moved. The third option is just by far my preference as well since that seems to be the staff recommendation. I'm 100% behind it. Great. Andy? I just realized as you were going through it that I don't understand it anymore in option three. So is the intent to have two joint meetings a month? Yes. On Tuesday and the first Monday could be six days apart? Is that it? Could be. The other option is if you did it always on select board, it'd be two weeks apart but it'd always be a select board. Same if you did it always on trustees. If you did it in the two middle meetings you're potentially six days apart. Pick up the first and fourth and occasionally there's some of those long months and it might be a week we can have in between. Four months to two meetings a month that's four times as many meetings to joint meetings, right? Do we really need that? I'm not sure I see that for four times as many meetings. But, I mean we had the topic this morning or this moments ago that I think was only a trustee issue. I don't know, I'm wondering what the content for that many meetings. Are you feeling it out? I think you're going to be plenty busy as you look at some of the stuff later on in this agenda and as you start to talk about outreach and governance proposals and everything else. Once you get into budget season so much of the budget is intertwined now so we start planning for that in September and October meeting pretty much through January, February on budget stuff. I would think if there's a night where there's nothing to put on there to clarify the boards that there doesn't need to be a joint meeting for anything. For the website stuff, from staff perspective we did need to hear from both boards on that. Things will change going forward but to us that is an intertwined thing and we're getting different sentiment, different feelings. It felt like that way to us from each board. We wanted to get you in a room and have that discussion together. I think one of the things with those boards, whichever one's board meeting it is you can cancel the other half and enjoy your night off. But there's lots of things that as you move forward there's going to be discussions on everything. Policy, procedure assets taxation, tax equity any subcommittee or any committee of the boards that you put together is probably going to do a report. You're going to have public input. You're going to have reports about any of the public outreach. I just think you're going to be very busy and we'd like to be productive and I also think that as you meet every other month things get lost. I would agree that we may need to meet more frequently but I would rather see it go to more than quadrupling the number of meetings we have to do it one meeting a month and we can alternate between first select board meeting and first trustee meeting. First Monday and then one month and then Tuesday the next month and then assess whether or not we need yet again. I just I don't know that there's enough content and as I said we're quadrupling the number and then the other thing is I don't want to short change our normal business either if we have pressure to finish a regular single board business agenda in half an hour I don't want to tell people we can't we can't take your input because we have to start a joint meeting and I guess maybe that's the part of the discussion we need to have is how do we do that transition how do we manage because I look at agendas all the time and I say oh this is going to be an easy one we're going to be done really quick and it takes three hours right never made a dime betting on the length of meetings right and so I have a concern about that running into a time constraint feeling pressured to limit comment or discussion because there's a following meeting we've got other people waiting so I'd rather not have every other meeting have that pressure on it to schedule 10 people at a meeting is difficult to do kind of spot things I agree it looks like it's a big increase but our workload is going to be getting larger as well I'd like to see us go forward with option three that on everyone's calendars and if we don't need to meet for a joint meeting then I'm sure we're not going to meet just because it's on the calendar but if it's not on the calendar and we need it to schedule it is almost it's very difficult and to to be able to do the select work business before a joint meeting we need to do more consent items too and that's tricky business too because some of that does need discussion so we need to be careful about that minutes can go in there things like that unless there's a big change that are needed there but I'd like to see us get this on the schedule and say we're not going to use a date with as much lead time as we can give everybody but rather than say oh something's important we need to get everyone together because I do think the workload is going to increase pretty quick here November 2020 is not that far away I have so many thoughts I respect and hear what Andy is saying I do think I would very much like to try option three but keeping in mind Andy's concerns because I do think that sometimes time management becomes things can become more effective and efficient once you kind of get involved in that kind of thing and I think both boards are so widely respectful of people's need to speak that we would figure out those pieces so that we never ever lost that that ability so I'd like to try but I'd like to keep in mind Andy's concerns so that we grow forward intelligently and respectfully for all I'm in agreement with Andy and Max and Andy but I'm going to suggest a tweak I like option three but how about something a little bit different I do agree the select board starting at seven and they've got a half an hour to get through a pretty big agenda and the select board agendas can be pretty substantive in half an hour puts you under a lot of pressure the trustees meeting at 6.30 and the joint board meetings at I'm wondering if it might be better to tweak option three and have Monday first select board meeting just as usual and then second Tuesday trustees start meeting at 6.30 and then we have the joint meeting at 7.30 at the trustees meeting and then and then the third Monday the select board you do the same thing but you have maybe have the select board meeting at 6.30 and have the joint meeting if necessary start at 7.30 and I agree with the sentiment that we should schedule it and build it in but try very hard to just have one joint meeting try to when we can limit the joint meeting stuff to one of the joint meetings one of the monthly joint meetings the second one is on the books if necessary but we would try to have our joint meeting stuff handled the joint meeting that we have on Tuesday did I make sense to everyone that makes a lot of sense the select board has already determined that due to work commitments by some of our members we have to stick with 7.30 but I do like the idea of trying to limit it to one joint meeting but having two just in case but we can't start any selfishly I'm super nervous if we move it from Monday to Tuesday for the joint the second Tuesday is my favorite Tuesday I have another commitment but I can give it up but I don't want to but I could since I have the select board is that we are all Pat, Annie, Max and myself are in favor of option 3 and Andy you have a concern about having more than one joint meeting a month how do you feel about having them on the books and then if we don't need it we don't do it the challenge I have is I also have work related meetings it's difficult for me to keep a lot of Mondays and Tuesdays available because I can't have Friday work meetings so then it cuts the it severely impacts my job but I guess I don't have to come to all the meetings which is the answer we can work within quorum just in the same way we don't all vote yes on everything sometimes some of us can't be there so I just want to make sure you'd be okay with us moving forward on option 3 we can cancel a joint meeting if we need to later in the agenda we're going to be talking about the government subcommittee whether it will continue I don't know if all the work is going to be done in joint meetings then do we need that government subcommittee still where is that discussion going to go there was some comment previously that it was felt that things would move along quicker with the subcommittee doing the work so why do we have why do we have the concern that we have that much workload related to that coming into this meeting but we don't we're not there yet because a lot of discussion at the joint board meetings won't be necessarily just about governance, it's about alignment of policies and other things that we would do even if we're not going forward with a merger and option 3 works for you and I know you have been alternating shifts but I think it's important to get them on the books and not use it the other thing I wanted to say is last year we talked about we wanted at least four members you mentioned a quorum but we said during the joint board meeting do we want to make sure we had at least four members still going forward or are we comfortable with just a quorum if one board only has three that's a great question I kind of like the idea of four members I don't get I kind of like the idea of four as well I hear what Andy is saying about his schedule and anybody else here of their schedule right now we're the trustees there's one person who's going to be a new trustee coming up right in our next anyways and we're having an opening that we're going to have to fill for Elaine's seat on the board as well so we're going to have two new trustees we don't know what their work skills are going to be like so to start getting into that and saying well this doesn't work for me this doesn't work for me we can play this for eternity because one of you doesn't get re-elected or somebody else this board is constantly dynamic it's going to change I don't get hung up on whether everybody's there or not the wheels of government will come to a halt we're going to play this game we have more than one we're not going to get anywhere let's get this rolling can I ask the two boards indulgence because one of the new trustees is sitting in the audience tonight and he had his hand raised a little while ago so I'm going to ask him what he had to say did he want to weigh in on this one congratulations thank you very much Evan said what he said earlier prior to the selection all I was going to say was can we try to schedule joint meetings no later than 7 with everything that's been described and how long these meetings can go 7.30 turns into quarter of 8 before the first meeting is done maybe 8 and you've got 2 or 3 hours welcome aboard there's some false advertising going on it's just a thought but obviously there are a lot of issues with scheduling do you want to vote select board everyone's good you want a motion I would take a motion another option another half an hour is can be tight no rush you said he started at 7 o'clock we could start with 45 minutes with this first meeting then the joint one an hour I'm sorry to complicate things but I just want to throw that out there I think we just need to be aware and flexible regarding what's on our agenda and I'm sure the staff will if it's just a short trustee meeting before a joint meeting that venue is going to be a little light and we'll do the best we can so are we talking about starting at 7.45 then for the joint board meeting Greg was just saying that it could happen that business takes us then we go over just a warning that that might happen so I would move that select board approve option 3 for the meeting schedule for 2019 through 2020 second please second all in favor 5 you didn't ask for opposed opposed no abstentions okay thank you 4-1 vote pass I'll ask the trustees for a motion both the trustees approve option 3 for the meeting schedule for 2019 2020 second any further discussion from the trustees I will say I'd like to just emphasize to staff because just because you got a bigger bucket you don't have to fill it try to keep putting the same volume in the bucket does that metaphor work for you thanks because I think we need to be sensitive that we have people that yeah we want to try to really limit that so I just make that point so trustees all in favor I opposed you're abstaining I want number 2 right Max or George I'm going to let you take on 5-6 okay true to the nation it's really great attention to one thing the select board find a different meeting date for the 2nd October I put that in there October 28th trustees being October 29th normal schedule for both of you and I won't be here so that's why I just wanted to point that out I'm hoping that's something we can address more particularly when we get closer to that or are you looking for some resolution tonight on that I would pencil it in if it's kind of changed or Sarah has to do the meetings by herself which is okay by us I think that would be great so much fun we have faith in her so I'm going to get on to our discussion the report from the subcommittee and the Dan Richardson is with us tonight and Dan I don't know if you want to join us up here let me see and what I'm going to do is I'm going to give I apologize maybe a little bit of a long-winded explanation of where we are and then when I'm done I will throw it open to questions but also perhaps ask Dan to comment and then have questions for me or the other subcommittee members and I also want to recognize that Irene Renner who was on the government subcommittee is in the audience so you might have some questions for her as well but I'd like to get through this I'll try to do it as quickly as I can and so I will start by saying can everyone hear me alright everyone good so I think we went from the government subcommittee went from I think we had 10 or 12 different models and I would say that we are recommending one model and I would say the model that we're recommending is a unified charter model is that we would continue the council manager form of government but there would be a single unified board one budget one charter one tax rate and so forth I can get into more of a discussion of that if you want but I think the concept if we just imagine Essex Town if Essex Junction didn't exist and if Essex Town was like Colchester or Williston that's pretty much the concept that the general concept of a unified charter model however going from where we are now to that model presents some problems and I think and some issues and some challenges and so the government subcommittee recognize that some of these challenges may or may not be significant it'll be up to the 10 of us to decide whether they're significant ultimately but what do I mean by challenges well there are challenges of representation currently we have two different municipal corporations and people in the village may identify with one corporation one they identify with Essex Junction people outside the village may identify with others another the town and so there's an issue of representation issues of identity and so forth but I think the biggest issue that we struggled with and have to potentially consider is tax equity right now and I'm going to I'm going to get back to the main point but let me digress for a moment a month ago the town or the select board asked town voters at annual meeting to approve an approximately three and a half percent I'm going to round off numbers and abbreviate things here but I think it was about a three and a half percent budget increase at annual meeting and it was approved the village asked village voters to approve a 4.1 percent budget increase those are pretty typical numbers I think if you went back over the last 10 or 20 years and looked at the average budget increase that town or the village asks voters to approve each year it's generally around the rate of inflation maybe give a take a little bit higher I know that a few years ago when we moved the s6 junction public works budget into the town budget it brought it up to a 7.1 percent I think it was around a 7.1 percent increase that year the town general fund and we were kind of sweating that out whether that was going to be acceptable to voters but max did a great job at annual meeting explaining we had a good dialogue with people people got to ask questions and so was approved by a pretty significant majority right now if we moved the village budget the s6 junction budget into the town general fund budget we would be asking voters to approve something like a 27 or 28 percent increase in the town general fund typically rate of inflation 3 or 4 percent an unusual circumstance 7 maybe 8 percent I've gone to most of the annual meetings for the last two decades I've never seen it get to 10 percent we'd be asking for about a 27 or 28 percent increase okay a few years ago when we bonded for the police department we took out I think it was an $8 million bond I can't remember how much it was why didn't we just why didn't the town just add $8 million to the general fund budget that year well there's lots of reasons that communities bond but the big reason is that one of the main reasons is it would raise everyone's taxes by five or six hundred dollars it would have paid off the debt you wouldn't have had the interest to pay off but there's a reason why governments don't just pump up their general funds by 20, 30, 40 percent and one of them is because voters don't like that so if we are serious about consolidation and we're serious about doing something like unified charter model number one I think that we kind of feel that we have to maybe think about what's going to happen when we try to unify the two budgets so we could take the attitude it doesn't matter our job as the two boards as the governance committee and the trustees and select board our job is just to figure out what's the ideal form of government we put it out there on a ballot and let the chips fall where they may bite the bullet rip the band-aid off whatever the metaphor you want to use see what happens historically what's happened in the past is that the it sets up a town versus village a diet antagonism and it has been defeated every single time I can't say it's always just because of the sudden increase in taxes in the town outside the village but I suspect that it was a significant piece so if we feel that we need to address this and perhaps we don't perhaps that'll be the decision of the board that we don't have to worry about this but if we feel that we have to come to terms with this there are some ways that there are a number of ways that we can deal with it and I think we've had some dialogue with Dan and we've had dialogue with staff one of the ways that we can deal with it is to have a vote that says four years from now we're going to have a unified charter we're going to agree to a new unified charter, a unified board a new electoral process but between now and then every year we're going to maintain the status quo the trustees will still develop the budgets for village services we'll still write policy for village services but just as we did with the public works department we will move the budgets for those individual village departments into the town general fund so we will gradually ratchet up over the course of four or five years the town general fund while reducing the villages general fund and then at the end of four years when all of the costs have been equalized and there's just basically just one unified tax rate then we would move over to the unified charter model so that's one possibility another possibility is to and by the way we digress a little bit in that unified charter model we could also include a provision that says when we go to the new charter we stop call it with the incorporated village of Essex Junction becomes the unincorporated village of Essex Junction it remains the village of Essex Junction the signs still say Essex Junction public works trucks still have Essex Junction and there's still a village of Essex Junction and that gets us away from the whole struggle over whether we're going to call the new thing we continue calling everything what we're calling now the town of Essex and there's the village of Essex Junction so that's one concept another concept would be to declare that the village of Essex Junction is we go to a unified charter model but the village is now a special taxing district in the sense that it has a higher tax rate than the remainder of the town outside the village and it just pays more taxes but that tax rate gets decreased every year while the town budget gets increased every year so over a period of four or five years you kind of phase in the tax increase the way that we did the way that IBM did with the village in the town where they just reduced the machinery and equipment tax over a number of years so that would be one use of a special district that's not really a governance model that's a kind of a finance scheme but those two schemes that I just mentioned they both entail a significant tax increase for home owners, property owners outside the village it phases it in it offers it it maybe eases the pain and maybe that's the way to go but if we think that we really need to permanently address the problem that we really don't we really need to maintain some kind of governance then we could have a unified charter model but we have a special say recreation and library district in the village a special library and recreation district in the town and everybody pays a unified tax rate for essential services there's still a unified board just as we laid out with the unified charter model but there would also be two special districts one in the village perhaps one in the town and each would there would be separate budgets for just those specific services recreation and library that if you did that then that would ease some of the tax shock of equalizing taxes and it would also give people and voters in the village and voters in the town perhaps a little bit of a sense of control maybe a little more sense of identity over their specific services and there are variations on how you could that would require two special districts and there are variations on how you could do that so then the question is who sets the budget for those special districts the library and recreation you might need to have one way to do it would be to have perhaps an elected and appointed board or an elected board in each of the special districts that sets the budget just for those special services sort of the way we have the brown ale library board works right now we have an elected people who run for the brown ale board they recommend a budget to the village trustees they don't have taxing authority we can reject their budget we don't have to accept their budget but we historically have accepted their budget and we just incorporated into the village budget and so the concept would be kind of the same and so that's the reason I we're not advocating for any one of these things we're just sort of mentioning what we've been talking about so the reason therefore we said special district model I put this here as kind of a catch-all a placeholder for a bunch of different possible concepts potentially using special district potentially requiring a slightly different or an additional layer of government then the unified charter model so that's why that model was here lastly we put status quo we're not recommending that we put status quo on the ballot in 2020 but we are recommending that we need to probably define and really come up with a good explanation and description of what status quo is because we over the last six or seven years we moved away from the traditional incorporated village we have shared administration shared public works we may be sharing some other things so we probably want to define that and as we do public outreach give people a very clear understanding of where we are because if voters reject our charter change proposal in 2020 in effect what they're voting for is the status quo so they should understand what it is they're voting for additionally as we do outreach we probably want to give people in the village in the town sort of a baseline a model to compare what we're asking for to the way we are right now sorry for being long winded I'm going to get to the electoral process very briefly what we thought was that we probably want to have two electoral districts I think we called them voting districts voting districts is a little misleading in a sense we have voting districts now whereas people in the village vote in town elections at the high school and people in the town outside the village vote at the middle school but we're all voting for the same ballot what we're really saying is that we would have two separate representation districts so that there would be so that the representatives to the new unified board you would have a two or three or maybe four coming from the former village and the same number coming from the former town and people in those two separate districts would only vote for those representatives so that's one concept the other concept of course is the way we do it now for the select board where you have just at large voting anyone from within the borders of the town can run for the select board so we those are the two models that we came up with we kind of thought that the first one maybe answers a lot of questions it addresses a lot of concerns perhaps people in the town outside the village would be okay with a pretty significant tax increase if they had the assurance that they were going to maintain always be guaranteed a certain number of representatives on the new board we don't know that's a matter of a discussion one of the drawbacks however of having a two representative districts obviously with equal numbers is that you wind up with an equal number of people on your elected board and that can be a problem when you need to have someone break a tie one way around that would be to have perhaps two in two and then one person running at large in the whole community that's one way of doing it however that person has to get elected from the entire community while all the other board members only have to run the campaign within the two districts so it's a bit of a disadvantage and you're asking someone to do a lot more work and unless they have some additional authority or power it's problematic but again something for discussion the next piece we just ranked these and we looked at the we had some previously and I think all ten of us well I'm sorry we knew members didn't help but the that came up with some ideas from previous joint meeting discussions about what do we want what do we look for what are the values that we apply to ranking and considering new governance models and the governance subcommittee fine-tuned these and then we ranked the different concepts special district versus unified charter versus status quo and electoral process and the ranking speak for themselves we just thought that would be helpful looking at this so in terms of next steps what we're recommending is this what I presented you with are a lot of we have a lot of questions we're saying that if we want to put something on a ballot in November 2020 then we have to have a pretty clear idea of where we want to go by the end of this calendar year because we think we want to take advantage of the annual meeting cycle next March and next April so in order to do that in order to get things ready for the next for our next annual meeting cycle we really want to have a clear direction by the end of this calendar year so that's our recommendation from the subcommittee and so how do we do that how do we answer all the questions that we're going to have and get feedback that can give us a pretty good sense of how we want to fine tune the governance model how for example do we decide whether the tax equity issue is going to be a deal breaker for people outside the village how do we decide whether maintaining village identity is a deal breaker for people in the village how do we get some feedback on those kinds of questions so what we're recommending is we want to do an outreach campaign we're recommending that we start that as soon as possible we're recommending that we hire a consultant someone who can run and work with us and coordinate an outreach campaign it has been recommended that we do community forums that's great community forums are great but keep in mind in November 2020 there are literally it's a presidential election we specifically chose that date because we anticipate that there will be thousands, hopefully thousands of people coming to the polls in Essex and Essex Junction and so we need to be able to reach thousands of people we need an outreach effort that goes beyond previous outreach efforts when we've looked at community forums and they're terrific but like the community forum we had last March I think we had 26 people I think when we did community forums for the recreation governance group they went to middle schools and I think they typically had audiences of 25 or 30 or 40 people when we look at heart and soul we had I think 400 500 people how do we reach thousands of people how do you really go out there and get to the people who don't look at front porch forum don't go to community forums don't look at the town and village website maybe occasionally read the Essex reporter but they really aren't engaged with local government but they're going to be coming to the polls in 2020 voting for the president and they're going to be handed a ballot saying what do you do you favor this charter proposal they're going to ask what is it about why should I vote for this and so we need to be able to reach them ahead of time and very clearly get some sense of what's on their mind and how they're going to vote maybe custom and inform the proposal that we put in front of them so what we're recommending is that as soon as possible we hire an outreach strategist and between June and September approximately maybe a little bit longer we conduct the outreach campaign and then in October November the joint boards will take that information and we will hopefully have a little bit more clarity about exactly where we want to go in terms of the charter proposal we want to put in front of the voters it will still require some fine tuning perhaps we'll still want to do some more community outreach but hopefully why not take advantage and take the time to reach out and talk to people talk to people particularly and I'm going to be very blunt here folks in the village are a little bit more politically active I think if you look back over the history of community forums and so forth folks in the village tend to get a little bit more involved I think it's perfectly related to geography folks out in the town harder to reach and tend to be less engaged we need to engage them we need to get them involved we need to understand what they're thinking so hopefully we will have input significant input from all corners of the community and then we can really fine tune the governance option that we want to put in front of the voters next year and so with that I'll wrap it up I know you're going to have a lot of questions for me but I would like to if I could just take a moment I'm going to switch over to Dan and ask Dan if he has any comments and commentary on what I've just said because he may have some additional thoughts and then I would also it's okay with Elaine invite everybody to also ask Dan we have some new members here who may have some additional questions for Dan we've had the luxury of being able to talk to an expert in municipal law some of you haven't so with that I'll throw it over to Dan thanks George yep okay you know the only thing I guess I would add is that you know there are ways to handle each of the issues that George raised under and still maintaining a unified town model that none of the challenges that he's put out there are insurmountable or there's only one square peg that's going to fit that hole and if it's not a square peg then all is lost I think there's a lot of different options because we've gone over with various of you that I do recognize some of the different options that are available one town that I was actually looking at earlier today is the town of Bradford that the 2004 merged the village and the town and they did a lot of very good creative things because of the same type of issues that are driving the things here the only thing I guess I would add on top of it is that one thing that when you're going to a town person outside of the village that you're going to be paying more taxes the question always be I always get it are what are the benefits and I think that has to just be made clear is that you know there are benefits that would attach and if they don't so say you have something fixed like sewer and water that just can't go to the far reaches because of the limitations of physics or resources you know that that can be set aside in the special district George alluded to that and I we've talked about this before but you know the special districts is really the way that a lot of municipalities are dealing with these type of issues as they arise where there are differences between various areas and how do you isolate those benefits and costs that are only so that only those who receive it bear the cost of it and so there's a number of those things that are available you know welcome any questions you have actually Dan before we open it up to questions I just want to add just a couple thoughts to what George's report was I was also on the subcommittee and there's a couple variations that I didn't hear George add that I just want to put out there with a unified charter model another option George has suggested you know in five years after we piecemeal move each department into a single budget voters could want to choose to merge the governance first and then work on a taxation plan and it's possible that we could work out I believe this is what was attempted in the last merger process a gradual overtime amortization of tax increases doesn't happen 25-28% at once but it could happen 3333 however that might work so that's also an option another possibility with the special district as Dan was just saying a special district of just the village services that just village residents pay for rec and library pretty much that could be the same we could establish a special district and then just the village that uses those district services would pay for them which would also protect the town outside the village from tax increases so there's a lot of variety within the unified charter model that we could work on and that's what we're going to come to you to talk about in the public over the next couple months that we can determine what it is you're interested in having happen and the other thing that we haven't talked about the workload that we have to figure this out over time is substantial and one of the things we're going to have to spend a lot of time on is taxation how is it going to work moving all of these departments together how are we going to our public works departments are funded different ways our capital budgets are funded different ways we're going to have to blend them and figure out how the financing is going to continue without negatively impacting one half of the town or the other and so one aspect of that we haven't even talked about yet is utilities and town outside the village residents have a significantly higher water bill than village residents so if we are able to work that out too the tax increases may end up being a watch you know so we really have to look at all of this stuff it's 453 dollars with the average household spends outside the village okay and so it's about two more so it's 400 and some dollars more if you're on water both water and sewer right and so when we have that conversation 70% more to take a shower than you take a shower you have less here so my point is there is still a lot of very important conversation to be had regarding these finer details and so we're going to want to hear from folks but we also have a lot of work to do and the other thing I just want to bring up I'm hearing from a variety of residents very very recently George was talking about electoral districts and how we were talking about two districts we're not limited to two districts we're also not limited to town and village we could do it the other way and have a bunch of districts that have town and village so we need to be very creative and I don't want to limit us to just preconceived notions and anything that might perpetuate the divide that we're trying to get away from I just wanted to add those comments so thank you so now anybody who has questions for Dan the only thing I'd piggyback to actually one of the notes I've made is that if you do create voting districts I would certainly recommend you create it with the ability to rewrite those districts over time because one thing that happens is population shifts so a district today that may be equitable tomorrow isn't either because a bunch of people move into it and so it needs more representation or a bunch of people move out and so you have to be population based by the constitution exactly an independent committee perhaps to do that so two questions and I guess one comment is that if you take away people's busing I guarantee you get hundreds of people coming to a meeting you know right it's a thought for us I've been at being on the recipient end of 250 or so people maybe not the best of moods but still the questions that I had the combination option presented here with one at large individual which is what the select board members are doing now anyway so I don't really necessarily see that as a dramatic burden on anyone but there's nothing in statute that says we can't do that have two members from one ward or district or whatever we're going to call it two from another and then one single at large person I just I don't think I've heard of that anywhere in Vermont before but if it's all kosher then I just want to get clarification sure this goes to the so in statute the general guidelines talk about select boards they talk about at large membership but one thing you would be doing is by creating a charter you can create the proportional representation that would have a mixture of either you know most cities in Vermont well I mean look at Burlington they've created both sort of micro districts and then sort of larger districts so that and they changed that over time but the charter allows you that flexibility to make those changes so as long as you put it into the charter and the charters approved it's kosher and then the second question I have and this is also maybe just for the board members as well but would this be a really good time for us to consider looking at the annual meeting model and incorporating that into a new unified charter because the the feeling that I'm getting and from individuals you know presidents of the community I talked to is the difficulty that we have in having such a small voting population actually able to make it to the annual meeting which I think is just becoming more and more potentially burdensome we have real difficulties with parents who can't necessarily be their kids alone making it to the one opportunity they have to have a say well as I say to have a say in the budget itself so I would like to include in any discussions that we have certainly looking at how we could streamline the annual meeting or maybe make it informational rather than a voting model I'm not sure how that would work yet but I want to make sure that's included within these discussions. That's an excellent question I'd like to answer that in more detail so you might recall the Essex Governance Group was a group of folks from four years ago I think at this point and they got together and talked about how we should do voting in the future and then we sort of they had a report and the boards accepted it and now we're here so now we can bring that report out and dust it off. One of the criteria that we used on the subcommittee to determine which governance models would be best was does it make voting easier in that context residents have to vote five times town residents vote three times so does it lower the number of times that you have to vote and that's one of the ranking requirements that we had and then in terms of making accessibility better for parents people who work second shift all that kind of thing is also important I'm sure that how we elect these people is going to also have to be a question we ask everybody because there's a lot of people who would like to change everything over to just Australian ballot and there's a lot to be said for that because we are a town of over 21,000 people and as research has shown town meeting is not the most viable option for us. However it would be of darn shame to let it go so the Essex Governance Group came up with a hybrid model which I'm not going to spend time on right now but it will come up in conversation and also consider the possibility of representative town meeting which is what Brattleboro does which I think is a model that's pretty neat and I would love to explore it in more detail so we're going to have that conversation and one of the goals of this whole process will make it easier for everyone to vote thank you sure you want me to talk so just because you just said that about three times and five times voting I really need to understand where those numbers come from I assume it's town meeting the actual annual meeting the day after which is the voting then there's the village meeting village annual which was today right? I voted today school school it's the same vote right yeah so I vote school annual meeting is different from yeah but you don't vote there right so it's village there's a lot of votes it's town annual meeting town elections but I'm also invited to that one too because it's the same school district now so I only vote one less time I keep hearing that it's three times in the town and five times in the village but it's only one different the only one I don't vote at is the village annual meeting just to be clear I've heard that for years I'm including the November general election yeah I vote then too yeah the only time I don't vote is the village annual meeting that you don't vote so that's where it's only one different that's I just want to clarify that I appreciate your attention to detail on that but I think we can all agree that we vote too many times I vote as many times as I can and I'm proud of it that's a different way of looking at it we want to make it more convenient so can I continue absolutely so it sounds like it's a given that the village isn't willing to give anything up you're talking about taking the village budget and putting it lock, stock and barrel into the town so I haven't heard and I don't know if this outreach that we're planning to do will include questions like if you live in the village are there any services or the town are there any services I think that's a fair question to ask and I'm not trying to pick on anybody or poke anybody in the eye I just want to say I could be wrong but I believe when we started all this we said that was one of the criteria by which we would proceed that we would not look at any model that said okay we're great but we're going to shut down the SSC library we're going to do this we're going to do that all existing municipal services and not eliminate anything that's why we wouldn't even go there that I don't think is true we had this discussion over Lincoln Hall and we had the discussion about definitions and one of the definitions that I brought up that I made sure we talked about was we talked about quality of services which I said this is a different thing than actual services and I wanted to make it clear and everybody nodded their heads and said yes you're right this means we're going to maintain the quality of services it doesn't mean we're going to do everything that we do in both organizations in perpetuity just because we've always done them and so I think it's a very valid question to go to these outreach things and say this is what the impact is these are the things that could get on our way are the costs and the fact that costs are shifting is there any way that you can imagine that any spending could be reduced on either side I think it's a valid and a fair question to ask and I understand there could be a lot of resentment around that but can I get clarification Andy? so when you started this conversation you said would there be any services the village would be willing to give up then I just heard you say on either side yeah it's true my apologies I probably phrased that initial question the question would be to both communities yes I would yes the question of having a special tax district which I think is different than a voting district because voting districts have to be proportional and they just happen to be at this point fairly, they have to be within 10% or something like that of each other but they could shift and so the question is your voting district your representative sorry your representative district doesn't necessarily overlap with your tax district the challenge there though I think is that if you have a tax district and it has a different tax rate than another part of the town you're likely going to want those people that are in that tax district to be the only ones to vote on that portion of the party and so you may end up with multiple tax or voting districts one for representation and one for taxing I don't know how you're going to work that I think that's a question we need to work through and thus my point of saying that it was sort of a catch all I couldn't really define it because there's so much there's so many potential ways of playing it using a special district model that I couldn't really say well here's specifically in exactly what's going to happen that's I'm giving it back I'm giving it back I'm trying to make it even more clear you've got so much more to say it's possible for you to bring through your questions and allow someone else to ask and we can come back would that be alright? Who would like to ask questions next? Do you have questions Andrew? Annie? So I didn't bring these as props but I used to live on San Hill Road in the town outside the village and now I live in the village of Essex Junction both times I'm a resident of the town except sometimes I'm only resident of the village and it gets complicated in ways I don't think it should get so my feeling is if we're going to become sorry about my voice if we're going to become one thing I think it's really important that we become something that removes the town outside the village and the village feeling so that whether I lived on San Hill Road or closer to five corners I feel as overall in the same place and so there's great value to designing that when we vote there's somehow a brand new way that we're all looking at what this is can we Dan? I'm like desperately I'm like I know his name I know his name can we do that can we be one thing and have a new way of dividing sorry I said really terrible word a new way of forming ourselves so that when we vote it completely blasts out this whole town outside the village can we fix it so that we can joyously be one so that I'm so that myself and someone that lives further up instead of feeling animosity I can say hey I want to vote for that I want to be on board with someone how do we do that can you fix that all right now? but I yes you can I think one of the proposals on a table would be to essentially start from scratch create a new entity rather than taking the town charter and pasting in village create a new charter create a new entity that would represent sort of a merger of the two and start with that and I think that's the idea of proportional representation could be both a good and bad thing I think you know one of the fears that you're expressing would be that it would entrench that separateness that you had your village essentially be this board formalized as a single body where you had the trustees and you had the select board members so in some ways what you could do is to make sure that you created voting districts that broke at that merger that created these new that for certain reasons might be more aligned there might be sections of what was traditionally the village that's more aligned with other sections of the town outside the village and you know you would create that new district to do that and then you can always have I think you know that one of the concerns that we had talked about before and that may be driving the proportion of representation is that you don't create a single voting block that votes everybody so that if you win you know this neighborhood because it has so many people in it you're guaranteed a seat on a select board and we don't have to go to this corner over here because there's only six people over there and I don't care what they think and it's this big block that's the danger of that large representation and you know there's there's a number of different ways to cut at this and I think it's really going to be that's the process that's in front of you to cut at these districts and create these voting I call them wards just to separate it from using district in another sense but create these natural neighborhoods where you could have this type of representation and going back to Patrick's earlier question there are towns in Vermont that try and balance out that mixture and that's the at-large seats they often call the person who runs for the whole city they do a mayoral system even if they keep a town manager the mayor then becomes the unifying person they're also the tiebreaker and the veto pen because they are elected from the entire town and then you might have counselors or select board members that represent various districts voting wards within a town should use my own no inclature a follow up question before you spoke about that they would need to have space to grow and change what would the rules of that be a number of different ways but you can do a sort of reapportionment that could be every X number of years where you would revisit that kind of the way we do it on a federal level every 10 years is a reapportionment so you have it as a trigger when certain neighborhoods became a certain percentage smaller it would trigger reapportionment or you could do both there's really no reason not to do that but you could have those type of triggers that would allow you to redo that thank you very much I don't have questions but I do want to say a couple of things one I want to thank the subcommittee and whoever was on it there's a lot of work thank you all I know there's a lot of work and hard to get to a consensus so I appreciate that I really appreciate that the recommendation is a new charter I think that's really important as Dan said so nicely stated we need to come in as one instead of coming in as two bodies so doing a new charter I think is great I appreciated a lot of the questions Dan posed in regards to the special district so although it's a neat idea when we were talking about the merging of the rec departments and having a special cultural district it could be a really cool thing for the village but I think the intent for that was something different than maybe the intent of this which would be to kind of keep the tax equity not such a problem so I would just really say we should really look at those questions and make sure we're honestly answering them and then lastly I will just say I'm really excited to be on the audience for this next conversation yeah Dan just a couple of things running through my head the whole idea of taxation, equity or whatever throughout the whole community is nice I think you started George it'll be difficult it's a lot to swallow in one fell swoop but I just don't want to see taxation without representation in our community that's the biggest issue that it comes down to I'm being taxed but the people that are governing this where I'm paying for it don't have to pay that tax that doesn't sound right to anybody that's not the way it should be and how you get over that it's not an easy thing to do as far as the hard feelings I love the villager thing there are some people that are passionate about it but I think as time goes on things have changed if you look back what Vermont before 1791 we weren't a state we were part of New York New Hampshire I'm sure things are going to change in 50 years I'm sure things are going to change here but I hope it's not going to be 50 years but I'm just saying it can change and we'll get through it I think we really should go all I don't want to see a partial change go for a charter change that doesn't include everything I'd rather see it all go through and not this a little bit here and then we go back take another bite at the apple five years, ten years and try and get this thing through I think we need to go all for it I'll just ask another question but I'll just interject here my only concern and I will emphasize this is to be as objective as possible understand that the passions that we have the opinions that we have the strong feelings we have about consolidation may be in the minority when we look at 16,000 voters in S6 Junction and S6 Town and so we need to some way to get out there and take their pulse and what we really need is probably a way that has a two way dialogue that takes their pulse but also maybe in checks them with a little bit of our passion and a little bit of our enthusiasm but we don't want to go sailing on to the rocks and say we've got this beautiful thing figured out here and yet the rest of the community isn't with us because we overlook something so that's why I to get back to the issue of hiring someone who can really get out and take the pulse of the community really take some of these questions that we're raising and concerns that we're raising here and get out and try to get some feedback on them so that we don't go sailing in one direction and really we should have been going over here or we left something undone that's my only comment at this point Dan one of the questions I have is can a community vote to approve an interim representative district and then in the subsequent year should that pass then have an independent group to study what is the most equitable, most fair representative model for elections and then have that model become so similar to the reapportionment process of the State of Gloucester now Make sure I understand the question an interim government between what you have now and what you would seek to have So can the voters approve on November 2020 say yes we want this to happen and as a part of this when it comes time for 2022 2021 this is how then the voting districts will look like this way we understand that for this one time we're going to approve it for this method once the census data comes available that's where the population spread is we can look at what is the rates numerically proportional process to have for representation in our community yes as long as it's you know that would be a matter of just writing out so if you think about how this would functionally work what the end of this process before the vote in front of the the town and village the voters you've kind of come up with a proposal which is going to be a and you could certainly incorporate that into it how we're going to transfer from the current system towards the eventual system I would counsel fewer steps between what you have now and what you would eventually have but certainly if there was a need for some type of interim that could be put in if the voters approve the charter then it goes to the legislature they can tweak it as they see fit and if it's passed then it would go into place if you were clear in the charter that this is the process that we would follow for you know apportioning awards that's certainly a valid way to do it there's a different way to cut at it and I guess what I would throw back is to say check and see what your data looks like because especially a small area like this it's a fairly easy to measure and I think you could do that fairly fairly easily you wouldn't necessarily it's not like the national level where the ten years really does mean big substantial change as you're looking at even a small shift creates seismic waves and how districts are portioned but then in something like this you could have a pretty good idea by the time you start to come into 2020 what this was going to look like my last question I think this is more for Georgie Lane the item with the way that's worded on the agenda is to discuss and potential selection of preferred governance options does this mean that tonight we have a question to say these are the options that we want a consultant to have a consultant to move forward with and are we limiting ourselves tonight to say these are the options there is nothing else well the governance subcommittee is we are strictly advisory we can't make decisions for you all we can do is bring information and recommendations to the two boards and I guess what we're recommending that all we're saying the really the key recommendation is where we would urge you to make a decision on tonight is to hire or to tell to instruct staff to go to make some inquiries and go forward with an RFP to hire a consultant who can do the outreach for us that would be the most important thing so if there's something that we don't discuss tonight or say yes this one model that we're not discussing this one factor we're not talking about this one other question that we may sit on that's okay for today and it will get answered at some other point in time oh yeah oh yeah no we're not trying to I mean we can go down there's a hundred radicals we can do down here talking about electoral process talking about governance structure taxation no we're not going to solve any of that tonight we're not saying let's try to figure it all out tonight I just want to make sure that we're all that yes in case somebody misses something or we don't ask the right question we're good great I'm on the subcommittee I've asked my questions they're okay can I ask one question I want to get a little bit and Dan maybe can enlighten us and this would be more for staff but I'm just curious let's say everything works out and we consolidate so like in November we have a successful vote to create a new charter and so forth whatever the decision whatever the structure is and it's going to go off to the legislature but what happens here locally at that point and what I'm saying is right now we have the manager is in charge of two different governments two different bodies that are in charge of the manager legislate but who how do you what you're actually going to structure and build this new government how does that all work what's the process you want to lay that out in transitional transitional provisions in the charter so you know a lot of this I don't think will affect sort of the on the ground staff that are doing the day-to-day work you're not talking about abandoning the manager model form of municipal government so the manager be here before and after the change it's just going to be he'll respond to a different board after and usually what happens when you have this type of merger is you would have provisions to say that the day this would or the you know the first election after this becomes effective the new voting districts will you know a new board will meet for an election on this date and then so the new board takes over but until that charter passes the old charter continues so and even even after it passes the vote of the citizens it doesn't it doesn't take effect because it hasn't passed the legislature so I know Andy has a few more questions and there may be a couple others and then after we have exhausted our questions I would like to open it up to our guests because I see a lot of nodding heads and raised hands so let's just plan on wrapping up our own questions and then we'll go to public input brief public input we're the battery out so you know to Dan's comments there about the timeline is one of the things I wanted to bring up it sounds like you haven't stepped through it all the way to the end or because if we have a vote in November 2020 it's unlikely that the legislature will look at it until after crossover which is after town meeting so we've already approved a budget we already have a select board elected it's not really until I think and then the earliest the new charter could take effect would be town meaning of yeah I know so it would be vote in November 2020 town meeting of 2021 the new charter wouldn't be in place yet and then you'd have a budget that would take you all the way to June 30 of the 2022 so I think this new charter doesn't take effect until July first of 2022 and parts of it can think of when you have elections in March the new board members are bound to the existing budget from the prior year and they don't really until they take off they don't have a say in the budget but you wouldn't vote the new board that's defined by the charter because it hasn't been approved by the legislature I guess what I'm saying is that you might have the board take effect after you know in the November following the approval of the charter or you may have a call for a special meeting or you may wait until the following town meeting in March I mean I think you have a number of different options that sort of a nuance that you can look to see what I guess I would counsel is that you know depending on the size of the change that you're making that may affect when you want this to take place I agree entirely that if this passes they get on a ballot in November of 2020 if it passes the legislature moves slow and government ops is not the speediest committee to get through on either side of the legislature and so if that's don't antagonize them they're delightful committees both you know you're right you're probably talking about at least one more town meeting and so you know you would be bound by the old charter you would vote but with the understanding that it may be something that the terms would be short so somebody elected in March may not serve there is a hurtful term but you would still go through that process and then you know I think you have that flexibility is what makes sense do you want to hit the ground running beforehand and some of it just may simply be practical you know having them start earlier might be better having them wait might be better with the budgeting process with the other issues that they have to deal with you can certainly visit that but that would be in the charter those transition provisions that as of the date this became effective there would be an interim board and we're going through that with a lot of school districts right now as they merge and have special votes that's something you can certainly deal with so what many of the oh sorry when many of the merger plans that I've read the trustees joined the select board once it's approved by the legislature and then at the next town meeting everybody resigns you re-vote a new board which means then you have a new board taking over a budget that they had nothing to do with putting together but it could be a whole new group of people but with respect to and yeah you know you'd have some of the people on a one-year term two-year or you could decide what the terms are many towns that have five member boards will have three of them three-year terms and two of them two-year terms so that there's more you're not always running against the same but you know so it changes up but I'm with regard to select board membership or whatever the final the legislative body is I'm much more in favor of at-large representation because I think it it takes care of it gets rid of the animosity the built-in polarization and I think you also does two things you have to appeal to the entire community and get elected is one thing and then the other is there's more opportunity to serve because if there's only two seats from the village and two seats from outside the village there's only two opportunities for anybody to whereas today I've got five seats I can run for I would have a smaller number than I can run for and there's a whole question of who runs when and which can be worked out right my only quick response was I'll just let's do a brief poll everyone's every elected official in this room who lives in the village raise your hand every elected official in this room who lives outside the village raise your hand so wait one more question my point is is that it may not be we understand we understand all the new one we understand the whole dialogue but there are folks out there who say just look at where everyone's from and go I want some assurance that I'm going to have and is that a deal breaker for me do I understand completely I agree with you completely that it should be a I believe it should be a large but again I urge that we be objective and understand that for a majority of people particularly in the town outside the village they may say that's a deal breaker and there was a period of two years we had three select board members from the same neighborhood I lived equidistant between Sue Cook and Irene we were all in the same neighborhood and I don't think anything bad happened as a result of that one of the things we have to do is get over ourselves a little bit about that because Peter Welch doesn't live next to me but I'm pretty happy with how he's representing me we are a representative government but that's a very important thing that we have to take into account we just need to think about it we don't act on it I will yield when I'm not back keep going just a comment on the report on the last page and the recommended steps the last sentence of the second paragraph I hope it's not grammar related no it's not grammar related I'm just concerned about bias and we need to be careful in how we word public documents it says this could help mitigate disinformation and misinformation efforts by opponents of town village consolidation we need to also be aware that proponents of consolidation could also give misinformation so I think it's an unfair statement to say that only people who are opposed are going to have fake news associated with it other questions my apologies I didn't mean to it was a momentary thing just for the folks playing along at home on channel 17 to follow up with George's question every elected official in this room who lives in the town of Essex please raise your hand I'm not kidding people don't understand this we're all residents of the town I just really want to be clear because that kind of question is those who don't understand we are all residents of the town of Essex and we all pay those taxes I really appreciate that thank you just quick George you brought it up earlier about the status quo not being on the ballot to maintain status quo and it says additionally the committee suggests consideration given a model more sustainable status quo but anyways in the event that proposed is rejected by the boarders if you don't put status quo on the there is no option to keep the status quo you're saying it's this or that and there is no you have this type of a merge there is no status quo option I think what I was referring to is that right now we have a shared manager we have a unified manager by MOU between the two boards for our complex public works situation and so it's come up before about and Dan has answered this and said that MOUs are fine but I think there is a kind of a sense of saying do we want to build in if let's say charter merger is defeated do we want to build in to amend the existing charter as an alternative permanent commitment to this to having a unified administration and some other unified resources so because right now the MOUs both say either board can just next week the trustees could say we don't like this unified manager business we're out of here and boom we're out of the MOU it would be disastrous but we could do that although I think there's a window of opportunity on the public works but there's a little bit of instability with these MOUs and the idea is while we're going forward with all the big work here we may in the meantime want to be thinking about how we're going to stabilize these MOUs codify them into the charters or something like that so that in the event of a failed merger vote in 2020 we don't go all the way back to where we were in 2007 that's really what I was getting at any other board members with questions or comments Dan do you have any final words of wisdom for us good luck well you're not done yet please stay at the table so you have all been very patient can you raise your hand if you plan to speak ok so I'm going to ask each of you to do two things three things state your name keep it short and if you agree with someone who said something else just say I agree ok because it's nine o'clock and I want to respect everyone's time so please let us know what you're thinking Jerry um maybe I'm obtuse here when I lived 50 years ago when I lived in a village an urban guy and one of the guys I worked with at GE used to milk his cows before he came to work he was a very rural guy and I live in a village in a town my neighbors are all urban people and I don't understand why they have different needs for recreation than the village people do so I would like to understand tax rate is higher than the town tax rate because as far as I can tell we all use the same recreation kinds of things we all use the same libraries you know where's the difference I don't understand that part I think that's the basis of our entire conversation why it would be interesting to know why the village rate is higher what are the village people paying for that I in the town am not village is an incorporated village inside the town of Essex and as such village residents pay taxes to the village municipality but they are also residents of the town so they are paying taxes to the town as well that's why they pay more the rates not necessarily that different you are you are not using services that the village uses so village public works does not come out to the town and plow the roads out there it's one budget it's one budget but not one practice so we are starting to slowly merge those services and you know town public works is coming over to the village to do stuff and the village is lending their truck they're super sucker 5,000 we're starting to melt that but at the moment just the money has moved so village residents are paying for services that town residents don't get but they are also paying for services that the whole town gets so it's confusing but that's a very succinct way of putting it and we're trying to fix it and make it go away that's the salient point here okay thank you sir I guess if I understood you correctly you said the town rate would go up about 27, 8% or so something like that my thought always was that if you merge you'd have consolidation of services the overall cost would go down so can you tell me why they would go up by that much okay let's focus in on what Jerry said like the recreation department right now there are two recreation departments there's a town recreation department which is funded by everybody who lives in a six-junction or a six-town it's funded by everybody then there's a village recreation department it is only funded by people who live in the village and each one has for the sake of argument a $600,000 budget I think they're more this year but let's just say six so you merge the two so right now folks in the village are paying approximately half of the town department budget and 100% of the village recreation budget when you merge the two budgets village everyone now pays 50% so folks outside the village now their cost goes up people in the village their cost for recreation goes down fire departments planning and community development and those are I'm sorry consolidating fire doesn't drive the overall cost down it's the same dynamic the town fire department is funded by everybody every sx-junction residents pay for the town fire department as well as folks outside the village but only the village fire department but the village fire department is funded only by people in the village you consolidate those two budgets the costs get redistributed it's 50-50 village rates go down town rates would go up it's a completely consolidated budget you'd say everybody let's say the town general fund goes up for the average homeowner by $350 folks in the village would see that increase as well as folks in the town however folks in the village would see their entire village tax bill go away because the entire village tax bill now gets taken and redistributed throughout the whole community do you understand what I'm saying Betsy billadoo thank you I was just looking at your I have a couple of points looking at your recommended timeline and I understand the tightness of it and maybe whoever you get for your public outreach strategist will point this out too but it just gives me a pause that much of your outreach campaign right now is scheduled for the summer one is really hard to pin understand but it's very hard to pin people down often in the summer so you had someone at one point maybe extending it maybe your person will say yes let's extend it I think that looks problematic to me the other thing that I just would mention is I think it goes back to what Andrew said and a little what Dan said about your when you're looking at governance and how this is going to go back to what Annie said ideally in my mind I would I'm on board I'd love to see at the end the governance model is something totally different than what we have now it's not just divided into the two separate sections whether it's five, six, seven sections whatever it is but maybe if we do look at like an amortization or a stepped program I believe it would be possible to say okay for these five years that we're stepping down we have this model which continues to be from these two entities and then after five years we move to this other thing I believe as long as it's in the charter so that was just something I wanted to throw up that's done in town I wonder if when you're looking at representation that you don't use the model we use for the state where it's for every 4,000 people you have a state representative you could change that to every 3,000 given it's a town but that would mean there would be like seven because we have 21 almost 22,000 between the two and that would make it equitable and I think that would be much more representative of the group if you had that kind of a thing and having I think Scott said that he was very disappointed in town meeting because it's not actually doing its job any longer in some ways and the hybrid system would still be able to have a town meeting and propose a budget and then make changes that night the next day let people know what it is and in April vote so I think that it's all doable I think and if you do whether you vote in the charter change and the charter change happens then there's a step pattern or a phasing in of the debt issues because I believe the junction has some debt as well and so that will counterbalance some of that money that you're talking about no? The village debt has to be paid by village residents so it will not be transferred over to anybody else So the village folks are residents of the town but as a long-time town resident I have never felt that I was a village resident so it doesn't go both ways we've never had the option to vote or run in a village election we've never used been able to use without paying extra the village rec department we've never had access to the village daycare programs it doesn't run both ways and it hasn't as long as I've been here it doesn't run both ways but I think we would say for example anyone who walks through the door of the brown ale library uses the brown ale library the village fire department half of its calls are in the town outside the village village recreation department is open to everybody but people who live in the village have special sign-up privileges and get a reduction in rates but the village as a municipal corporation defines a boundary within the town of Essex and the policies the taxing authority of the trustees only apply to that geographic area whoever lives in that area that's defined as the village of Essex Junction but I do understand I think what you're saying Mark you and 29 of your neighbors can start your own village you could seriously you could form another village within the town of Essex and have your own representation your own budget you can do that it's allowed it's legal well Andy the legislature would have to approve it that's a little caveat though we can't stop them from trying to form their own village the slight board has no say in whether somebody wants to open it no I'm just you couldn't spend any money lobbying against the village outside of your purview as a municipality but I have a lot of comments and concerns down the road but right now my main concern is the outreach piece of this and communication is extremely difficult in Essex Margaret and Don these are intelligent people and they don't still understand the structure and you know to me this is how do you communicate that and I'm not the professional you're going to hire I'd throw myself out in traffic if you did that but I really think that this has to be made clear I think people come into this thinking oh we can communicate this no problem I'm going to tell you it's going to be a huge problem and if you don't communicate it and you get to the 2020 vote your chances are going to be pretty slim so I don't know how to solve this problem whether it's a hybrid professional community organization that does this or the professional has the community to an advisory group or whatever you want to call it I don't care what you call it that says I need to reach those people out at the end of old stage road and Chapin Road and out there how do I do that and we might have suggestions we might have suggestions so I'm just I'm just trying to figure this out after having been in I don't know how many outreach groups here and not really doing the job in my opinion that's a huge problem as George said earlier we have 16,000 registered voters we need to talk to not the four to five hundred who showed up at heart and soul which is the best effort we've ever had ever so yeah we have work to do and we're going to continue the conversation. Brian you had your hand up and haven't spoken yet so please hi my name is Brian Sheldon I'm a village native but just moved back here so in 2012 I lived in Austin, Texas and they had we had five at large city council members and they changed to a 10-1 system with single member districts throughout the town and one of the reasons that they did that is everyone was kind of grumpy about a lot of things people have talked about here you know like all of the people were clustered around downtown so and the other thing that I wanted to mention about the way they did that is the referendum that changed the Austin Charter I'm also specified an independent citizens commission to draw the lines and you couldn't if you wanted to be on a commission you couldn't have been a politician and you agreed to not be a politician for ten years so that there was so the beauty of that is that I think it worked I mean frankly we should probably do it with academics or professionals because just because yeah there's only 40 people here right that said I mean I think it worked the elections the lines were considered nonpartisan by everybody more diverse candidates were elected everybody the whole city was represented if only because there were districts it was great and also one thing I want to point out is the line survived challenges for the Voting Rights Act right so they so whereas speaking of these a lot of these government proposals that we're talking about where you maintain the town and the village dichotomy I agree with Annie that we should try to reduce that going forward if we're going to be unified and I suggest that you direct such a commission to have all of the districts be single member and straddle the village boundary that way everyone who's elected has to be responsive to people on both sides of the town inside the district and the village there's a second reason why I think that's having the commission was a good idea is because you can get away with drawing separating the town and the village right now but I doubt you can in 2031 because right now by my math by the 2017 census the village is 49.6% of the town but it's probably not going to be in 2031 I don't know which way it's going to go and neither do you so it is anybody so if you create a commission to do that then the commission can figure it out as laws change and as population changes and you know maybe and hopefully what's contentious in 2031 will not be this anyone from the audience who hasn't spoken yet Mary I have several questions the first of which is to Dan Richardson if I may do you know what type of outreach was done by Bradford in order to get people to vote for their plan I will say just as a way of answering the question with something slightly different is Montpelier just went through a very long outreach process because they're doing a lot of building build out in the downtown and using public funds the garage the art and garage and it was really important I think for those who were in favor of the garage to do this public outreach for a lot of the same things you're discussing here which is you know when you talk about the status quo it's important to let people know the status quo because not everybody understands what the status quo is you know so one of the points that we talked about in the subcommittee as you remember was the fact that you have these MOUs that are really holding together the town which are band-aids not actual structural supports as George pointed out people can remove themselves from these and you know as we see on a federal level that if you rely on three commanders and moors it only takes one gay crusher to wreck everything you know you can have these you want these into a larger structure and so letting people know what exists today is a way of telling them you know why this is being proposed for tomorrow and outreaching to those groups and I know the city and some of the private partners actually hired different groups that was a lobbyist from MMR who did a lot of social media outreach to communicate not only the status quo but then the reasons why they were doing these things is a way of getting the messages out and a lot of social media, a lot of front porch form it was every time you open up front porch form on your computer burst into flames because it was you know it was not without controversy but it required that kind of constant communication of and you know everybody said well why don't we design this, why don't we do that which at a certain point you're going to come to an agreement of this is the way it's going to be and that's when those people will wake up and say well why don't we have this type of option why don't we have a Supreme Court of Essex instead of a select court or something like that which may not be a completely terrible idea but it wouldn't be there's probably good reasons not to and it's a matter of keeping people focused on this is what we have, this is what's proposed in favor explain MOU it's an acronym, could you please explain I will be happy MOU is that stands for memorandum of understanding which is a fancy way of saying it's a contract so what holds the village and the town together right now are essentially a series of contracts written documents in which each party comes to the table and says we agree to do this and the other party agrees as well it's mutual promises but there's no obligation for either party to stay within this memorandum of understanding this contract they can break it at any point in time and there's really no way to force people to stay in those memorandums of understanding other than public policy or it would be a bad decision to leave it's not a binding such as a charter, there's certain things in your charter you can't do it any other way you can't have you can't have your town meeting in July even if you really wanted to because your charter says March annual meeting and town meeting day you're bound by it in a more legally binding manner than the MOUs thank you I think Irene had one more question and then we'll bring it back home we just request once again that we not use the word town loosely I've heard it over and over tonight used to mean all of the 21,000 people as well as the 12,000 people outside the village if you could just say outside the village when you're talking about not the village would be extremely helpful for people who are especially new to this conversation but also to those of us who are familiar with the conversation because we know the town means a lot of different things to a lot of different people especially the school one I have many questions that's why I waited until now can I ask you to limit it to five minutes absolutely we have multiple agenda items certainly and we have another question we're talking about hiring a facilitator to get public input and I would offer that we hired a facilitator we got wonderful input and our board, at least the select board did not spend a minute of public time going over that data and there was lots of wonderful data there to be harvested so I would urge you to before we spend another taxpayer dollar to look at the data that we've already gathered and match it up with whatever straw man we expect to bring as the model to the public the next time we're going to spend money on a facilitator and urge people to come out and spoken and spend an entire Saturday with us giving us excellent input and I'd like to see that input in whatever model you choose can I respond to that please so we have a minute to that and we also have the report of the Essex Governance Group which is four years old that has never left our minds so I can assure you at all of the different input that we've received over time on this subject we will consider thanks for the comments tonight have not been shared and we love them so thank you and I would also second this idea of having words because that Brian brought up because there are distinctive characteristics of certain parts of town that need to be represented at the table and for example as you showed with your straw pole up front right now as one resident outside the village puts it there are eight people essentially from the eight two state district there is one person from the eight one state district and there's one person from the eight three district that's not comprehensive or thorough representation of the people in this town and I would urge you going forward to keep that in mind that we have to have voices from different parts of town and it is easier to run in certain parts of town than the other and it's no surprise to me that we have so many people from eight two at this table but we need to work harder to get a more diverse voice as a whole going forward thank you that's it thank you so we're just wondering are you moving forward trying to move forward with D we're going to try to and does that mean that it's not funny and if I read that that was for the facilitator is that what you're approving tonight yes we're trying to we're flipping D and E okay yeah I don't mean to get on now because like a few other people have said going back to the wreck thing and the experience there without reach and the difficulty we can't have Kale do more videos now sadly probably because Annie's here although who's going to do them now but that was powerful they're still coming up they're still popping up I don't know if the 14,000 whatever the figure was that was in the packet is your intended by or number for the whole effort but it is woefully low as far as I can guess as to the extent of media creation you'll need to do to educate the community on what exists now and what you want to do I'm not there yet but I would guess that that would just be the facilitator fee and maybe that's what it is but overall budget for the media creation and push that you'll need to do just to get everybody on the same page seems 20, 30 you know and Kale freelance that, that was amazing I guess we're not getting into anything else I have one more thing I apologize for not including that beforehand there's data online that talks about even number of boards and that was a concern when we spoke about it the governance group that conventional wisdom is you want an odd number the new thing that we may want to consider is that boards at Apple and Facebook for example have insisted on an even number of boards because it builds better discussion people don't race to a decision knowing that they can have an odd number vote so let's just get to that vote you have to tease out some of the nuances and diverse opinions at that table because you don't have sort of that crutch and so I just wanted to offer that because that was news to me maybe it's not to you, thank you George for the subcommittee report and at this point we're going to go into the next discussion that we need to have which is the governance subcommittee and whether we feel we need to continue it or not so George I'm going to let you talk about how you feel that might be how we might proceed there first I think I want to thank Dan for being here tonight I don't anticipate there will be any more questions for Dan so maybe we can let him head on back to Montpelier thank you Dan we'll be back like the terminator he'll be back one of the issues that we have is we want to continue the governance subcommittee model and as Andy referred to if we're going to have this more intense meeting schedule option A would be we just all handle this all ten of us during our joint meeting in other words interaction let me back up if we're going to hire a consultant's advisor facilitator type entity is it easier for that person entity to work with a subcommittee or try to work with all ten of us that's one of the questions and I because I think that's the important next step that we're looking at and so do we want to continue with the governance subcommittee right now the structure has changed and we are in a period of transition on both boards we have two new members on the select board and we are going to have definitely one and probably another new member on the trustees so what's the group's pleasure do we want to have some discussion about this right now the remaining members of the governance subcommittee are Max Elaine and me and Elaine was on the board representing the sx junction trustees she's no longer on the trustees so if she continued she would be representing the select board I guess so that's where we are so I think that's kind of a key step in deciding what we want to do next and then the next piece would be the RFP for a consultant to facilitate so thoughts Patrick so coming from a 10 member board I can tell you that those discussions get very very deep and they get very very long incredibly quickly it's rare that I get out of a school board meeting before 10 o'clock you know and we will sometimes regularly with executive sessions proceed past 11 I think that the governance subcommittee has done a pretty fantastic job so far with the materials that I've seen presented so my preference would be to continue that rather than having 10 members waiting in on this every time just for the sake of expediency it's just there's so many voices when it comes to this that narrowing it down quite a bit and then bringing it back to a full board when there are big decisions to be made just it seems logical to me I'm going to defer because I've been on it I do feel we should continue but someone else can have a comment Eddie what's the do we even talk about what the mission will be for the this subcommittee if we form it going forward is it to you know work with staff to discuss or to work with the facilitator if we hire someone kind of thing is kind of what I'm thinking and then does it continue on to craft the merger agreement based on the feedback that's gotten from that outreach or is it a one step at a time and then we decide later who's going to do the the merger agreement just trying to get the scope of what's being asked I think your ladder that choice which is that they work with facilitator and we work on the outreach and then we have a point where we come back to the boards and see the work that's been done and then talk about the next step whether it's writing the charter or whatever that is but if I could just finish for a moment the other role I see this group fulfilling is doing the really detail oriented work with the staff about modeling what the taxation scenario might be for the governance model whether we do it this way, how much will it cost if we do it this way so I think there's a lot of research that needs to get done and that's what I kind of thought that this group would be doing now I would see it like in small chunks I would say the immediate next step for the subcommittee would be to work with the facilitator consultant you know technically probably continuing on after that but if we got to the point by October where we decided I think we want to go back unlike even having an MOU I think it would be dissolved at any time the rest of the 10 member board said yeah we want to take it from here but I think the immediate next step for the subcommittee would be to work with the facilitator other thoughts? are you done? I'm not I feel good about the subcommittee obviously we need to determine what our members are it's got four we want to keep it at four I think those are and the presentation is coming back up I feel good about that committees should continue with specific time slots on each agenda for updates so that there's a dedicated time I'll just add my two cents is that I think that who is on the subcommittee should be decided at the next trustee select board meetings I don't think we should decide that here we're going to have you have new members so I think it should be an internal board discussion about which board which members of your own board want to send does that make sense? so we don't have to decide that tonight but I think we do need to decide whether we want to continue with the process I appreciate the work the subcommittee did one of the reasons why we created the subcommittee was for the expediency sake and if my memory serves me correctly and I don't mean that to be critical but that it took a while to get the final report and we just created additional meetings for ourselves frankly I did it because I thought we would just be that subcommittee so I'd actually rather just see it be us I see the workload being such that the subcommittee is needed but they can't as we've been not making decisions but bringing it back to the full board and that generates a lot of discussion in and of itself but to have that discussion and expect all that extra detail work to be discussed I think is unrealistic so I think the subcommittee is an important piece to move this forward particularly for November 2020 target I concur with Max I think the idea of continuing with the subcommittee is a good idea I hear what Andrew is saying but I think there is so much that the subcommittee can weigh out or filter out just little questions that need to be researched so then you can bring back facts that the whole board together can just look at the facts instead of delving down into little things that could make a meeting super long like Pat is saying you go until 11.30 at night I don't want to see that and wherever we can do to get this going the only piece I would add for Andrew to say is that consider that we are anticipating hiring a consultant let's call it a consultant we don't know what that person's needs are we don't know what that person's schedule so what we would be saying is that our interactions with that person would be tied to a hard schedule of trustee select board meetings so that might make it cumbersome the subcommittee perhaps just four of us would have a little bit more flexibility to meet during the day or on an evening or something like that when it's going to be so are there other comments and discussions about this can I just add one question so we are going to go to each board separately to discuss who's going to make up the committee because we have new members to take care of I would also like each board based on the comments that we've heard from the audience we have allocated $14,000 to this each board should discuss whether that's sufficient and whether we want to increase that or keep it the way it is you're saying the number of people on the subcommittee no no no the fact that that I am no longer a trustee so I am no longer on the subcommittee and our other former member is no longer on the select board so each body needs to choose a new person I misunderstood I think the decision for us tonight is do we want to continue a four-member subcommittee with two members representing each board sending two members that's the decision before us as I understand it I understand there are questions in the audience but I think we've got a board action here that we need to have a dialogue on and have a vote on I'd be happy to have the subcommittee continue going and appoint new board members and what not as long as the first meeting could happen before the end of this month if that can't happen then we're going to have a joint meeting again at the beginning of May do you want to take it from the select board sure so select board I'd like to hear a motion about continuing the subcommittee excuse me yes Andy I thought I saw a hand of the audience we're voting I agree it's not an audience discussion opportunity yet so okay it's true Betsy you had your hand up I'd like to know why you consider on this subcommittee that you're going to have have another resident from the town outside of the village and the village be on it because you're going to be looking at communication you might have another input I don't think it should just have to be your board members that are on the committee speaking only for myself the subcommittee has been contrary to popular belief efficient at doing the work that we need to do and we have focused very very long on this and what I would like to do is work with our facilitator whomever we contract with to do a very robust public input process but the committee that works with that person needs to be from the boards alright so can we have a motion from the select board regarding maintaining the subcommittee I move the select board to continue with the government subcommittee meeting is there a second second sorry okay all those in favor aye opposed okay thank you I'll ask for a motion from the trustees I move that the trustees continue to provide members for the government subcommittee second any further discussion all in favor aye opposed alright item 5D which is now 5B approve the RFP for public engagement for the November 2020 vote on governance change so Greg would you mind walking us through the draft you provided in our packet yes so very much a draft request for proposals but basically just wanted to give you something to pick apart and start to talk about and how you want to do the community engagement and outreach around getting ready for the November 2020 vote based on some of the governance proposals that were talked about earlier tonight I have an answering question about it I do want to call attention to a couple things a few things when it's timeline the date in there talks about November 1st as being a deadline for the facilitator the professional to get something back to the boards just trying to balance a whole bunch of stuff Georgia's timeline the concept of people being way for summer not wanting to extend it too far before you get into budget season meeting preparations so that's something that can be a little bit cost $14,000 is the proposed cost that might be a little bit ambitiously low sort of looked at the TGIA process the firearms process and tried to get an estimate from there thinking about it more hearing about it more in your conversation tonight maybe up that to the $18,000 $20,000 range also the selection process put a note in there that the select board and trustees would choose the candidate based on evaluation criteria don't know if you want to keep that that's something you want to delegate to the government subcommittee and also there's mention of a steering committee in there some sort of advisory board my recommendation would be that you have some sort of focus group sounds like that might be the government subcommittee but do you think there's some value to having some group that can work more closely with the facilitator and the professional beyond that it's kind of an RFP to get out there and start looking for a professional who can do that and then hopefully work closely with whether it's staff the entire boards more focused committee but you kind of really then shape what the engagement is going to look like finalize the timeline again, this is just a draft to start talking about don't know if it's something that the government subcommittee wants to pick up and focus on if the boards want to do it but this is something to get started because I mean it's coming up fast I have a question about the budget is that for the facilitator or is that for the tools that this facilitator would also be using to do public engagement depending on who you select it could be a negotiating point I think it depends on the facilitator depends on the proposals, sometimes you get proposals back and it's all inclusive other times you get something back that's the cost of the professional it doesn't include materials doesn't include other types of things because the importance of this and the need to kind of go where we've never been able to go before I think yeah, 14 is not probably enough, I don't know if doubling that is even enough but at least I would think double so that we have options to be able to really find creative ways to get out there again I don't really know what the number is but my cut tells me I'm going to agree with Rasha that's probably too low I do within our community we have an extraordinary amount of talent and intelligence for media if we're trying to engage our community let's not bypass our community in the process at Essex High School we have an extraordinary amount of video talent amongst the students if you want to engage our community hire the facilitator but also bring on board all those who have this opportunity that need this opportunity but involve our young people in civic engagement and that involves their parents and that involves there's so much interaction that can occur through this and I'm not talking about it as a means to save money I'm talking about as a means of engagement but also I feel it strongly that's all I'm going to say now but I have a lot to say about it what struck me in our discussion is that it's really important that we reach thousands of people and not hundreds of people and so in the second paragraph in the overview where it says the facilitators who are organizing an overseas public engagement process that reaches as many residents as possible to vague in order for us to ascertain and for the people who are replying to say can I do I have the experience to reach thousands of people so I apologize Greg I don't know how to change that we had had a I forget who I had this conversation with but we could sorry in the RFP we could stipulate that candidates could demonstrate or at least propose that they would reach x percent of households or x percent of registered voters we could set a target and they would have to be able to prove that they could meet that target it would be a performance measure and the success of which would be measured by the success of the initiative but there are some measures we could put in here I think we should try and do that I look at the proposal requirements and I'm looking at a list of recent public so if we say the ten of us are going to choose the person or the company or whatever we would see what they've done and look and so that would be we'd make a judgment on the basis of whether we thought they would be able to do the job so I think that would be it well and I agree to some extent I think being able to verify that a little bit better we'll send the message to the person applying to the RFP that we are we want something big here bigger than our municipalities have ever done and probably bigger than some of the facilitators we've had could effectively do could we say a significant number of voters would that make it be a little more clear yeah again I don't thousands of residents across all of Essex just something a little I mean we could be that I like what you're saying Greg and then once those candidates come in we can ask them specific questions like what will you do for the rural area of our community what will you do for our dense area of the community I mean just when you talk about reaching people in the community like Annie said I don't know what percentage of the population has kids going in whatever level of school whether elementary middle school high school but that reaches many many households you could do a mailer a mailer is you can mail it to every address business residential in the town including the village and reach everybody if you call that reaching everybody you don't know if they're storing the trash I mean but it's going to be a combination of a bunch of things that from and everything I mean I don't think it's that daunting a task I look at obviously it's not the same scale but with the police facility thing with the bond issue that we brought up earlier I think it was 8 million George but anyhow that passed and I remember working with a bunch of people on that going to the senior housing developments because those people aren't able to get out a lot of them they're inside but it's important to reach everybody and we did it we went to the high school we went to some events it's possible to do it I don't think it's that daunting I'm not saying it's daunting it can't be done but we haven't done it effectively on this topic so I just think it needs to be very clear to the people applying to this RFP that we expect a very high level of engagement and if you haven't done it this is not so opportunity to try it so maybe to say to reach thousands thousands would be great how do you quantify what's the metrics you use to determine they reach them they gotta come back they gotta signature on a piece of paper I mean what when you say reaching what's reaching making a phone call and leaving a message that's reaching I don't know there's some things you can't measure you're right sending home flyers with the kids in their Friday folders not necessarily the most effective way social media has very specific measures that we can employ to see at least how many eyeballs have seen these things and if we repeat it we will look to the person we hire to guide us on those kinds of measures and they will recommend the things that they in their expertise will penetrate the most can I just make a I have one comment about the RFP that I would like to change first page third paragraph it says the facilitators will produce a report by November 1st 2019 that details the results of the engagement process and recommends the final governance option to bring to a town-wide vote in November 2020 I would like there to be a period after the word process and then drop the rest of the sentence because it's these boards that will make the final determination about what governance model we come up with and the facilitator will gather all of the information and bring it to us and then if we see in the materials that they bring that there's an overwhelming sense of what the community wants then we will go that way but I don't want it to be I don't want it to say in this proposal that the facilitator makes the decision I just want to be very clear on that I have a couple of questions one going back to the reaching people I think maybe some of the issue is that word or that phrase of reaches maybe if we replace reaches with solicits input from so that way our people are having eyeballs on so we're actually getting information from thousands of residents and then with the second line of the second paragraph going into the third line it talks about governance structures and governance changes based on three potential governance change options what I think I recall from our conversation so far is that much of the conversation has been around representation and taxation and less around governance structure so are we saying governance structure is inclusive of representation and taxation or are we saying governance structure is one charter are we saying special tax district and that's it well that's a hard question to answer because your governance structure depending on how you want to deal if you don't see if you don't see the taxing issue as a big deal at all and you don't care about representation you're just going to say we're going to at large voting and that's it we're not going to worry about districts then that takes you to kind of one maybe point you to one governance model versus another I mean how you address some of those underlying issues so I don't know how to answer your question I think you just want to be able to ask a number of these questions you want to say yeah I think you want to say look we've got two charters right now we're going to think we're going to we're talking about consolidating you know you in favor of consolidation you have one charter one governing board you like that idea so governance structure maybe inclusive of and list off some to get to Andrew's point how about under proposal requirements you have one of them that says a a demonstrated ability to solicit solicit input from thousands of people and that would be a proposal requirement so they would they would have to show you that they've got a track record that they're not just beginning to do this they know what they're doing they know how to reach a significant number of people solicit and receive input yes yes good call you got that correct yes go ahead if I could jump in back to Andrew's point about the issues of taxation representation do you need that to be in the overview is it okay to put something in the background that elaborates on some of the likely issues that are likely to come up include representation, taxation some of those things I think that that's fine as it will also be in my mind we're talking about rating we're talking about rating the proposals if I was going to apply for the job as facilitator I would and then if I got the job I would go to Hannaford several times a day I would go to soccer games there are ways to find our community where they're already gathered and we all know what that is you know what time you don't want to be at Hannaford you do want to be at Hannaford you know what I mean and there are places that we congregate as a community and the person we hire needs to go to where a community is gathered it's the most important way to find out who we are anyway I agree with what Elaine said with regard to not asking the facilitator to provide to come to the final recommendation in the scope of work section section 4 also refers to that another change that needs to be made and as I recall from when we hired the facilitator for the firearms discussion the facilitator specifically said it's not her job to make the recommendation she's only going to find information and bring it back so I think we have that facilitator shouldn't be making that recommendation. The other thing is we haven't talked much in this discussion about what's referred to as the steering committee here and I can only assume that it would be the government subcommittee but I would also like it to include staff so that there's folks available to and I don't know if we need to reserve rooms to help with audio visual equipment or whatever needs in discussions or have hire lawyers or whatever we need to do I think we need to have some staff on there but I don't know if there are two decisions just two votes that we need to have do we need to have a staff or can we just say this is what the steering committee is going to be there's a reference to a steering committee we need to know what it is I think Andy, I think we want to change the phrase steering committee and change it to governance subcommittee first of all so that we know that that's the steering committee that Greg is referring to that's going to work directly with the facilitator and I agree we should absolutely add in here that the facilitator would work with the governance subcommittee and select staff that we can designate or we could say the unified manager and his designee or we could say anything like that to make sure there's staff involved for sure Alain, you mentioned heart and soul as probably the largest outreach that's been successfully happened before and that was four or five hundred people, is that correct? I mean hitting thousands of people is a score even the school board doesn't hit that much in much of what we do and most of what we do I know it's been mentioned but I would stress it as well someone who does this has reached thousands of people is going to need access to not just social media but print media potentially radio media television media I mean looking at streaming media it's, Raj mentioned it as well and Matt said I want to stress it that this includes the budget for outreach someone who like Annie suggests would go out to Hannaford's multiple times a day I mean we're looking at a person and probably some person who has staff members to actually get thousands of people it's a realistically large jump if we're seriously considering engaging not just eyeballs on but actually facilitating input from thousands of people like I run an event that would get twenty five hundred people to it our budget was eight thousand dollars for media and that was just media and we were volunteering yeah I mean qualitative data hundreds of hours hundreds of hours if you get a thousand comments how many hours will that take to collate those comments into a usable form of data I mean in November it was 150 days away and we're looking at thousands of people I mean that's ideally starting even from today 30 new people a day 40 new people a day that you're actually getting the impact from input from I think the budget is not just really low I think it's honestly almost absurdly low like if we even need to reduce the scope that we're looking at here of actually receiving input from thousands of people or we need to make sure this budget number is much much larger than it is now I a number of years ago and I don't I understand this isn't a valid comparison necessarily but we did a survey in the village where we mailed we had like a two page pamphlet survey questionnaire with a including a self-addressed envelope stamped envelope and we mailed it to every village resident every village household we sent out I think around 4500 and we got back 1200 that cost that cost a little over $3000 and it took probably about two months now again we had we had a group that we didn't have people could put comments at the end of the survey but really we ask questions you know check this box check this body so we didn't we didn't have to go through lots and lots of comments we made it easy for ourselves when you do that obviously you lose a lot of information that you know you're not there's nuances in there you miss but just as a just as a frame of reference just to mention it and I agree with you I I was going to say we should probably at least go with I'd recommend going with Max's recommendation that we double the budget 28000 I would want it before agreeing to raise a budget I would want to know that the person spending the budget is effective efficient and really friggin good at their jobs can be used in that language because I refuse to spend money on something that's going to net us the same thing we've already got agreed but we do have to have we have to have a ball party to put in the RFP so and whoever applies they're going to cost exactly what we put in there great you know so they'll just say great great hold on just to say alright have the as everyone had their say on the Dan one last thing about the whole thing of when I know we're talking about thousands of people why do we have to have thousands of people we go to the annual meeting and we have 300 people they vote on a budget okay I know I understand what we're saying here okay I just want to give it reference compare it to what's happening out there so you get annual meeting you get 300 people they vote on the budget yay or nay you know and now we're saying we need thousands of people all we need is the amount of people more people to vote for it than against it and that's all we need so to say it's thousands I just I just want to put some bearing on this people get hung up on numbers and you say 400 people with with with heart and soul how many of those people were the same people over you know because I went to a lot of events I saw the same people many times over so I don't think we really had to say it's this late how many thousands we need the majority of the voting population that show up to vote that's an excellent point you're absolutely right but I will say that I want everyone to know though I wouldn't be aware but key is getting those people to vote we have spent so much time and effort on this I mean I've spent 10 years of my life working on this I mean it's important and it is really important to every resident here who either their taxes might go up or they may not get the representation they feel like they need or people just can't understand why we're taking so very long to do this work we owe it to the community to knock on every single door and and do what we can so I totally get what you're saying we're going to set a parameter what the vote will be but we have to make that it's too important if I can add one comment if we're doing this in November 2020 there will be thousands of people voting okay so that's why we chose that day so it's 10 o'clock Greg has his hand up another option for the budget is we take it out we do a request for qualifications it's so open-ended and you might get back some that are 20,000 you might get some back that are 100,000 looking at the select board and trustee annual budgets for fiscal 20 you probably have more in the 25 to 35 range if you stretch it but if it comes back and you really love the project and you want to negotiate and pick into fund balance or find some other source of funds that is something that we can consider Will that add to the timeline of the search? No I think the selection process to drag it out a little bit longer we should briefly talk about you might get two or three applications and be able to interview all of them you might get nine or ten and if you get on the high side I'd recommend that somebody narrow that down somehow whether that's staff or the government subcommittee or some combination there up to bring back the top two or three for the board to interview if the board want to select it on their own kind of like that sounds good that concept so we'll do a request for qualifications as opposed to a request for proposals and then they tell us but included in that they're going to give us an idea of what they think they'll be asked to submit a budget that's a great excellent suggestion thank you should we take a vote on that we need to vote on that or if we just all nod our consent seeing nods of consent all around here it is recommended that the trustees to authorize staff to issue a request so how about a sense of each board select board how do you feel about an RFQ I like it I'm confused what you're asking are we going to actually vote whether or not to authorize staff to to issue this RFP RFQ excuse me so well the staff has not asked us to vote on it but if we want to vote on it we can since we're talking about an appropriation we should probably vote on it yeah can you make a motion to issue any request for qualifications as amended that would be appreciated any further questions before we vote can there be a motion for the select board Andy I move that the select board authorize staff to issue a request for qualifications for a public engagement facilitator in preparation for a November 2020 vote on governance second please all those in favor aye opposed trustee I move that the trustees authorize staff to issue a request for qualifications for a public engagement facilitator in preparation for November 2020 second any further discussion aye opposed we're in the home stretch next item item 5F approved date and prepare for joint board strategic work session thank you very much the end of the night boards need more something got lost in traffic not over the top thanks for coming everyone sorry I said it I'm a little bit tongue-in-cheek we would like to talk to the boards about having a strategic work session going forward the focus would probably be less actually less about the governance piece at this point and how recent communications more so on how do you want to jointly run one and a half two organizations however you want to break down the town and the village that has one manager and a lot of unified staff across the board there's a rough draft agenda in there certainly be tweaked and finalized but the alignment group that we have is staff has talked a bit about just the amount of work that different departments are doing as we move towards alignment consolidation if there's going to be merger sometime after November 2020 what that might look like I think it's important for the boards to see that just how complex it is we talked about just some examples tonight the AP processing that Sarah is going to present the website getting into budgeting some of those decisions that really need to have input from both boards that's when we get into budgeting stuff like that some of the cultural differences expectations of staff when to approach the boards but not to approach the boards but really just kind of touch base and as we've been doing this for however man however long you want to prioritization of what we're working on and what you want to see and when you want to see it so those are some of the issues and then looking to start with scheduling a date and time to do it and then we just start to flesh out and see the agenda and authorize staff to find a location discussion thoughts and a facilitator yes nothing that'd be our recommendation our thoughts are in looking at the locations they all sound fantastic at the same time the more we can keep our money local the better in my opinion lastly of the three days proposed the 15th is the only one that worked for me the others I'm at state the 15th is S.S. High School's graduation that's not going to work because some of us go to bed and I have a gig that day with my band that's why I bring this and because getting ten of you in a room plus any sound how about we not settle a date tonight how about we have that be part of the the grand question that we're going to send staff on you're going to figure out the date you know we want to do this sometime in June you're going to get in touch with all of us and figure out a date that works for everybody it's going to be easy the concept we're really just going for the concept I think we've got a lot of tweaking here as you said the agenda would be and so forth the concept is everyone like this concept that we would we get out of town for the day we get out of and we don't need to maybe go to the base in Harvard Club I agree with you Andrew but maybe we high tail it out of Essex for a day you know it might be refreshing for those of us that don't get out much I can't sit at this table for eight straight hours I'm sorry I mean it's just the idea that we don't want to meet the cafeteria because we're getting out of staff we try to have a more congenial collegial kind of encounter thoughts I think as I've said before with meetings moving out of the norm getting out of these 81 main and 2 Lincoln getting out to some of the parks a rec area or something or a facility that we can plug in things and do things I'm all for particularly if we're going to give up one of our wonderful Saturdays in June it better be good the last time the select board did a thing where we talked about select board priorities I think was December of 2015 or something like that September I think and we had a facilitator there and I guess the question I'm asking is what will be the role of the facilitator because when we had that meeting we went through an hour and a half or two hours of these feel good exercises and then for the last half hour we stood in front of a chalkboard and wrote down all the things that we thought were important to work on but it was a nice effort but I think all the work happened in the last half hour I just want to understand what the you know we're going to have a facilitator I think it needs to be useful not necessarily a feel good exercise I agree with you I kind of said yeah I get the facilitator but I'm looking if you're going to ask each staff member and each elected official to kind of speak or do something what exactly is the facilitator going to be doing for us by the time just we go through all those people it's the things going to be over with I'm not sure we're not really trying to achieve a final statement or a goal I think it's really just a kind of an we're introducing and talking to each other and I look at it for trustees particularly we'll have two new trustees and for the select board opportunity to meet staff staff to meet us staff to talk about something not just how they look at alignment but just what's important to them you know what's going on so I think it's just the dialogue is really the more important piece if you play an instrument we could have a jam session exactly we could bring if you don't mind yeah so we're thinking maybe more of a neutral moderator to keep us on task because if all 18 department heads come and speak to you for ten minutes each which would be a miracle if we all only spoke ten minutes that's three hours out of the day with no breaks and we absolutely are looking for some goals and directives at the end of the day some really concrete things like what does this joint administration actually look like which is a question that came up recently we realized we hadn't talked about and so we're hoping that more of a maybe more of like a moderator to keep us on task than a facilitator somebody who's not associated with us as you can imagine we can't give each department ten minutes because it's going to have to be short and we need somebody who focuses us moderates us takes specific notes and when somebody needs to say something but doesn't we have seen someone like a facilitator go I see you you want to say something and draws it out of you and or you are not specific what do you mean by that and we need to get to that what do you mean when you say this what do you envision this to look like and act like over the next whatever period of time until you get to a vote and then pass that because staff needs that direction we need to know what you are in for what your priorities are and what you don't want to touch and everybody needs to hear it at the same time that's what we need from a moderator facilitator I'm not asking them to do some lovely let's go around the room and do some fall back into my and slip we don't need that we need to get going and we are thinking somewhere in the area say an 8-8-30 start and like a three o'clock hard stop so that you are not burnt out it's collegial you all know each other it's not that big of a territory and then have a product that can be written out at the end because when we are participating in it we can't take notes so we need somebody to also be able to do that and summarize what occurred how many did you say how many people need to how many departments we have 17 different village and town departments I'd have to think of and I think then I'm 18 and I don't think all of them are going to be able to come whatever Saturday you pick but they might write a short report I would say if we got 12 of the 18 we'd be locked and if we got 8 of the 10 we might be locked I would only say I would think about it a little bit more if you were saying what's the overall administrative what are the limits when we talk about unified administration what are the outer boundaries of that what does it touch on do you need the police chief to be involved in that discussion probably not I think you can eliminate maybe some people right off the bat not that they aren't valuable but if that's what you're trying to achieve then there are probably some departments that are so self functioning that they don't need to be part of that really need to be part of that conversation I'm not saying I'm just sort of throwing that out there and the other piece about it in terms of the facilitator I get it for part of the discussion but when you're talking about current and future roles in municipal space discussion about governance options I'm not sure do we want to talk about governance options at that point we're going to be talking about that a lot probably not this needs a lot of tweaking but we definitely want to have a conversation about municipal spaces I feel a little bit George has been turning toward me we read looking as I'm sorry if I'm talking too much it seems to me that some prep that staff could prep by combining some things that are being they're concerned about or want to know about or want to present or tell and so maybe there's some and then I'm imagining it to be like a storytelling event where you have five minutes there has to be beginning and middle and end to what you're saying and there's a timekeeper and when you hit the five minute mark there's the bell and so the facilitator so I feel like yeah and so that we can stay on track stay on pace, stay on time but also feel like you were heard and got done and then the same would be true back the other way so when I first read this memo it wasn't clear to me that this was going to involve as many department heads as could arrive which I'm thrilled to hear that that might happen I think the agenda should in the interest of making sure that everyone's time is being respected and it's a summer day in June it feels to me like the first three bullet points are ideal for a group conversation with as many department heads as can make it but the bottom four I envision those discussions being with senior staff I don't know that the department heads need to be present for that stuff and some of it I envision for just the warts so I would like the specifics about each bullet item the purpose of each bullet item to be itemized as well because I don't want to waste anyone's time but we also don't want to a retreat is a valuable thing and so we want to maximize the board time as well as the staff time so are we saying yes for a facility or not? the way Evan put it with that size we need somebody to conduct so you're going to send a doodle for the date alright and we need to I think our goal would obviously our goal would be to have all 10 elected officials we may have to settle for something slightly less than that and then obviously there's senior management and then catches catch can with some department heads but at least get at least a summary report for a packet absolutely so we're being asked to authorize the unified manager to hire a facilitator so are we ready to vote on that? alright so select board would one of you like to make a motion that to that effect? I move that the select board authorize the unified manager to hire facilitator for the event that's for the strategic work session for the strategic work session event thank you I'll second that all those in favor aye opposed trustee same I'll make the same motion for the trustee I'll second that any further discussion? all in favor? aye you can still come opposed? does that include the first recommendation for the date? they're going to send it to an old person I would just also mention the basin harbor club is kind of pricing kind of far grand isle, lake house or some other place maybe the end of justice would be quick but again, is there an openness to a weekday retreat all day? alright we'll see thanks everybody that was clear I have zero Saturdays in June but I have a lot of Fridays we'll throw Friday into throw some Fridays in okay thank you you realize that alright that was a long list of things to talk about thank you we have just two more items would anyone from the select board like to move to either remove an item from the consent agenda or approve the consent agenda remove the select board approve the consent agenda with comments anyone left a second left? second thank you all those in favor any comments okay point of order some new here if we're I asked if we were going to approve or take anything out so now we're going to discuss whether we're approving or removing well we can have discussion if you have questions about it any discussion of the consent agenda hearing none all those in favor of the consent agenda please say aye opposed thank you do I have one more I'll move and approve the consent agenda second I'm just going to abstain you don't have to you don't have to abstain you can still vote you don't have to abstain all in favor all right and the last item is the reading file with the first portion being board member comments Andy did you just did this I was just just a slight impropriety because if they wanted to if the trustees wanted to make any changes to the minutes that were in the consent agenda we would then have to approve them afterwards but it didn't happen it didn't happen but something to think about for next time trustee's already approved yeah have you guys already seen those minutes no no any comments board members I just want to say thank you Laurie this is your last meeting with us thank you so much especially with the trustees and the staff we'll miss you good luck at the State House yes thank you for all you do all the time please keep coming back oh I'll be in that audience too I look forward to it all right I'll entertain a motion to adjourn so moved second almost in favor of adjourning bye second bye thank you everyone