 So they'll be calling their meeting to order a little bit later, but we've got a few items that we need to take care of first. So the first item is to improve the agendas and I think there are probably no changes from what was advertised. So yes? Except what I just mentioned to you. Except for that we can deal with that when it comes up. So without objection we're going to consider the agenda approved. General Business and Appearances, this is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on some matter that is otherwise not on our agenda. And if you would like to say something, if you would try to keep your comments to about two minutes, that would be great. Public. I would like the Montpelier City Council to especially take notice of the problem I discovered this week. I reviewed the meeting of the design review board on video and I confirmed that indeed our city planning director informed the design review board that the finished garage was 37 or 39 feet tall as a way to dispute whether or not we needed to do the balloon test. The drawings clearly state that it's a 54 foot garage, 54 feet 4 inches. And then when I wrote to Meredith, our zoning administrator, to ask that correction be made to inform the design review's deliberations, I was told that process is closed. Do not write them and we cannot pass them any more information. So you got a real problem created by your own city staff that misinformed a critical decision on the design review permit process for that garage. So I don't know how you're going to handle it, but I'm also informed that the city didn't comply with separation of the building in pushing for approval of article one, that there was lobbying within the building, the voting area that is prohibited by, I'll let you investigate that too. Thank you. And also could you say your name? That's why you may. And where you live? Whitaker Montpelier. Great. Thank you. We'll look into it. Sam's working in Montpelier. I just wanted to, one, thank the city for its work it did with how icy it was the last couple of days. That's very good. But also to ask the city council to do what it can to encourage folks to pay attention to winter parking bans and such so that particularly folks who have difficulty getting in and out of buildings or vehicles are still able to get around, especially when it gets icy or snowy. If people could just make an extra special care to not be taken up those spaces that people with less physical ability may need. Great. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay. Moving on. The consideration of the consent agenda. We have a motion to approve or remove anything. Move to approve, to remove item D, proposed settlement of property tax appeal. Is there a motion for the rest of it? I move to approve the consent agenda with the exception of item D. I'll second. Further discussion? All in favor please say aye. Aye. Great. Should we deal with D right now? I'm happy to deal with it now, I'm happy to deal with it later in the agenda after all the people who aren't here because they have to be here. Fair. Okay. Let's do that. We'll take that up at the end. It's going to be a long discussion, Jack. I don't think so, but I don't know. Okay. So we have some appointments to make to the more pillow transportation infrastructure committee and I believe there were five seats and four applicants. Are any of the applicants here and would like to introduce themselves? Yes. I think there was a string of emails today about all the reasons why people couldn't attend but they're all interested and it was a fairly lengthy one from Heather really talking about the viability of what the transportation infrastructure committee does and how much she wants to be part of it. Great. So anyone here from the MTIK? No. Okay. What is your pleasure council? I'm not going into executive session, we appoint all of the applicants. A second. Further discussion? Do we need to have particular terms for any of these applicants? Nope. Anything else? No. Thank you. It's a great question. Okay. We have a motion. And it was seconded. Yeah. So okay. Further discussion? All right. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great. And then the complete street scope, the name the path contest, it assumes either Gary or Jamie or someone is coming up to tell us about this. There. Here's a group of you. Thank you. My name is Gary Holloway. I'm the chair of the complete street group. John Snell on the complete streets group. Thanks for having me. I was expecting to be here later in the agenda and I realized it would go so quickly. So this is terrific. So thanks for giving us a moment here on the agenda. Back this summer the complete streets group who advocates for kind of awareness and education and safety around alternative transportation for the city took it upon ourselves. Just to have a contest to name the path that runs along the Winooski River. You mean the bike path? The bike path. Yeah. Shared. So we recognize that the bike path was really used by many forms of transportation and wanted to kind of educate the public around the use of the path for all modes. But also to kind of select a name that we could be proud of and that we could use and learn and know recognizing that really no one really knows what the name of that path is. So especially in light of it being expanded very soon. Right. Right. So as you all know we're going to be expanding the path from Stonecutters Way out the Gallison Hill Road and have it run all the way out to towards Dog River Park there. So we had a contest that ran from essentially 4th of July through Labor Day. We received over 200 name submissions so I thank the public for engaging in our contest. There was a lot of terrific suggestions, some honoring those who contributed to the trail. You know a lot of John Snell recommendations to name the trail after him. As well as others who contributed to the path. But in the end we narrowed it down and it was interesting I don't know that we thought we were going to go down this path in selecting the name that we did. But in the end you know we felt it was important to kind of honor the river, honor the path, honor the water and the connections to their cultural past and so we selected the name Sibawina Bay Path which means River Water and this was a name that was that we chose from our very own Jamie Grandfield who's here in the audience so thank you for for taking us down that path. But before we chose this name we thought it was important that we approach the Abadakki Council and ask them permission to make sure that this was the right use of the name, the right pronunciation and meaning. And they were very pleased that we were giving consideration to you know to their tribe and in the fact that they've you know they settled in this area you know long before we walked the path along the river. So I'd like to read a quote that we're going to include in the press release but I thought you would enjoy hearing what Chief Donald Stevens said regarding this. It is refreshing the people in Vermont want to acknowledge and celebrate the Abadakki people as the original Vermonters by using our language to identify various places. Partnerships like these are to be cherished and bring hope that our children will have a future path where all can be accepted and proud of their heritage. Education is the only way to bring about lasting change and this is certainly a step on that path. Just a couple of other things I want to just mention in terms of opportunities in using this path. One is we talked about maybe our next step in looking at some signposts similar to what was installed in Hubbard Park that we might be able to identify and locations along the path pointing to different things. We also thought there might be an opportunity either in existing parks such as Peace Park or maybe the Confluence Park where we could put up a little bit more information about the meaning of this, of Sibyl Winnabee or the Abadakki or other settlers along the Winooski and Montpelier. And then we're planning to have a ribbon cutting and a little bit more of a formal ceremony where we can be inclusive of those that were involved including the Abadakki tribe maybe in the spring or summer when it's a little bit warmer. And Jamie. And Jamie. So anyway I just want to share with council this was this is our recommendation to select this name and thank you Jamie Granfield for proposing this thought and taking us down there. Yeah Donna. As long as I don't have to pronounce it and you are going to have to record this on the city website. You know that was one of the things that I struggled with initially and we realized that it's not that big a deal once you have it in front of you and repeated a few times and then it's really important for us to take that in and really have it be a part of that river and are walking along it. So we'll take care of you and me both. I'm phonically deaf so good luck. But I would like to make a motion that the council accept this recommendation for the name of the path that runs all the way along the Winooski River. Thank you. I'll second that. Further discussion? I guess before we vote I just want to say thank you to you and the committee for running this competition and to all the people who submitted to suggestions and I'm just really excited for the bike path to be done and then we can be talking about it and know how to refer to it. So it's great. Yes. I just wanted to mention that as I've been talking to friends around town about this extended path a lot of folks who I generally think of as you know pretty well keyed in to what's going on in Opelier were totally unaware that we were extending the path out to Gallison Hill Road. So I'm hoping we can get your help you know as we announced the name and you know as the path is built to promote it a little bit more and I think it's a really exciting thing and I want everyone to know about it. Great so further discussion right on favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. So that brings us up to the central public safety authority and I'm going to turn it over to Lucas. Sure. So just for our record it is 645 and I'll call the meeting of the city of Berry Council to order and we do have a quorum it is being recorded Carol be watching the video to take oh Carol is here she sent me a message I didn't know if she'd be making it and we do have a quorum. Councillor Bouton is walking this way we have Councillor Batham we have Councillor Higbie and Councillor LePage so thank you and I'll turn it back over to you. Oh okay well I'm just going to invite the CVPSA to come and give us an update. I have one actually thank you I have the whole thing. I have a PowerPoint presentation as well. Oh maybe I'll take one. Thank you. We have a brief first of all I want to thank everyone for coming here. If anything having both city councils together is a success for CVPSA. Thank you all for coming you know you know we keep having the every year we keep slightly changing a little bit but I think the message is relatively staying the same but we've tried to flesh out a lot of the questions that came up over last December and we meant to get fired. Sorry before you get too deep in it might make some sense here you were just introducing some people from your council and I think it might make sense for us to just go one more time just everybody say your names as we go around and then and then even down with CVPSA folks as well so if we could start over there if you would just say your name yeah. Michael Bouton. Rosie Kruger. Jack McCullough. Brandon Batham. Lucas Harry. Ann Watson. John Odom. Salveen. Golan Hutchison. Big dad John LePage. Connor Casey. Donna Bate. Tom Golonka. CVPSA. Pakha Lawmond. Tim Jeanie. Sam Dworkin. Martin Prevo. Great sorry you were saying. Okay so I have a slight, a small, a short presentation which I was going to go basically just to summarize what we've done over the past year and also to set some parameters for newer council members here to understand what we've been working towards over the past couple months as well as to sort of frame tonight's discussion. You know ultimately we're looking for guidance in regards to what the step forward is. We haven't generated any type of specific budget request for this year pending this discussion. You know it could be as little as nothing to as much as whatever you want us to put on to utilize the central public safety authority structure or framework. I do want to start by just thanking the commitment of both the cities of Bury and Montpelier in this effort. You know regionalization is never easy. Change is never easy. We've tried to take the perspective of what will improve public safety and also try to take it from a position of strength where it's not broken, where we haven't had a significant failure or we haven't had any type of problem with the current system. So I think it's from this vein of thought we've tried to put together a plan that we view as a possible step forward possibly with alternatives or changes from the different cities but we think it would be a good exercise to go through this and go through the process of what we've looked at over the past year and to thank the board for their commitment over this period and to thank the the communities for supporting us. I have this presentation it's up on my screen. I don't know I don't see it up there. Is there anything John I need to do? Turn that off earlier. And everyone should have a copy of this so I'm not going to read it all completely but I think I'll just go to highlights and what I'll do is I'll turn it over to Paco to get in any more specifics or to answer any specific questions you have and hopefully start the conversation up from last December. It's doing things that are different. It takes a couple minutes. Usually this happens circuitably. Oh yeah yeah. Thanks John. So I figured I'd start tonight's discussion to kind of review what was asked of us last December and what we asked the voters back in March to approve for our effort for this upcoming fiscal year and the first item was really to encourage and include an additional member and particularly to look at the capital fire west structure and see if there's a way to integrate that into the CVPSA model. We also wanted to come up with a plan that we could recommend to these councils review potential budget with some of our assumptions. Review the simulcast digital upgrade project that capital S is currently looked at so we wanted to have some sort of idea of a timeline and implementation plan for that. We were asked by council members to incorporate community and staff recommendations in public safety. We think we feel we've done that with numerous meetings and we'll enumerate a lot of those over the next couple minutes. And we also wanted to identify the role of the CVPSA and any future governance or public safety and to sort of get some feedback in regards to what it could be used for in the future. So basically to summarize in regards to the first item in regards to getting a number of member. I do want to announce that we were successful in obtaining a positive vote for the capital fire mutual aid system to join us as a active board member in the process. They just started participating in our board function back in September. As a reminder, this body's contract up with Montpelier is up in two years. So I think it's integral to have them at the table to have them working with us in any of these solutions. They also are integral in the decision making in regards to the simulcast digital upgrade process. So having them at the table I think is a significant step forward. It positions us to really help Montpelier and Berry really identify some of the infrastructure needs over the next couple of years. What we are asked to obviously is prepare and recommend a plan for the future of dispatch operations as our first entity under advisement. And I wanted to clarify these four sort of things that we wanted to include into our plans. One we felt that it had to be in our opinion in the best interest of central Mont, not just Berry, not just Montpelier, all communities in this area. We wanted it and the chiefs insisted on that a plan to show improvement from both of the situations would have two people, two dispatchers on at all times, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Right now you do have gaps in both cities and each city really, I don't think has the ability to have two dispatchers on at all times. And we feel that's an integral safety goal that we would like to prove in our plan. We also were committed to coming up with a plan to improve technology. We think a lot of the technological problems could cause significant problems, particularly if you were to add on any new contracted members with extra revenue. We think your capacity at this level but extra technology would help improve that and could potentially offer significant revenue opportunities. We were also committed to recommend a plan that allowed for this expansion as well as allowed for potential shared savings, whether through grant writing opportunities or whether through purchasing opportunities, the CAD system being a primary example, by using it through CVPSA, you really only need one license instead of two. And so at a price tag of $125,000 a pop, you can see how those savings can add up. Just in this one project, if you look at others down the road, you can have significant savings. What we've come up with as a transitional plan and ultimately we feel having dispatchers work together is the best solution. And so our recommendation from the CVPSA is to explore a single size dispatch center. We're indicating that it should be leased in the early years because we figured there really wasn't the appetite to purchase a building. The bond costs of that would be too extraordinary. Long term, we would like to see an own facility, but we figured based in Berlin would offer the best opportunity for both communities, as well as our contracted towns. Obviously the benefits to which we've listed before, I won't list all of them, but I've said some before, the technology, the grant opportunities, coordination of resources, I think are tremendous opportunities for all involved. Looking at the budget, I want to explain this a little bit because we wanted to compare apples to apples. Right now, you aren't paying for a CAD. We assume in this budget model that both Barry and Monpeter will have to assume CAD implementation in their models at some point. We put it in year one just to compare apples to apples because our recommended plan is that CAD will be an integral part in our budget process. So if you notice, year 2020 has a leap, but it's the capital leap, it's not the operating leap. And if you can see in that graph, the CVPSA model is slightly below in all categories. And maybe that's generated through operational efficiencies as well as some overtime savings. And Pako will go into that in more detail and explain some of the estimates he's used in that model. So just as a point of how we're going to go through this, do you want questions at the end or do you want questions along the way? Well, I have questions at the end because then Pako can get more, if you have more specific detail work in regards to the proposal, he can break these down. But I just wanted to give a big overview for, mainly for the public as well as the council as a whole in one shot. These are the assumptions we made. Five-year combined savings of $271,000. The CAD system upgrade is assumed in all projections, and that's $125,000 per contract. We list an excess capacity which we don't include in these models. One of the questions from Mayor Lawson a year ago or two years ago was that he wanted to see what's the opportunity for expansion. Right now you're at a cap at both towns. You'd have limited capability to add extra revenue. We figured in a single site with two people on at all times and have a more professional staff, we've identified about $600,000 in additional revenue which could go directly to the bottom line to lower these costs for all towns and all members in the plan. What that looks like in terms of a digital upgrade. The next option in regards to here is a digital upgrade. I think one of the slides is missing in this thing that you have. This is an older version that I have listed. The city saving slide which we added in, it shows it breaks it down by barium up here. You have it in your copy. This one that was downloaded, I must have grabbed an old version. So I apologize for that in advance. I'll go out this model. Looking at the simulcast digital upgrade, that was another one of the requests that the towns asked us to look into. Ultimately this is a Capital West process but it's integral in regards to Montpellier's way of providing a single dispatch system. It runs upward of a million and a half to two million dollars. How do we afford this? How are we going to, as a community, look to finance such an expensive undertaking? We feel it's essential to review. We're not ready to recommend how we're going to do that. But bringing Capital West into the model I think is a great first step in regards to addressing this issue. We've developed an initial cost model using Capital West's model. This is it. We basically took what the cost would be, a $1.6 million bond at 3% over 20 years would cost the towns about $109,000. We plugged in this number into all the member towns in the Capital West network to give us a starting point of what potentially it could look like. We're not saying this is what it's going to cost each of the towns but I think using their model gives us a really good starting point of how they've already fleshed out the details of what it would look like. You can see it breaks down into ranging anywhere from a thousand bucks to $20,000. If you break it down amongst these 20 towns it becomes more easily recognizable that this could be attainable to benefit the whole community. Leading to my last assumption as well and what we want to get to the meat of tonight is what is the role of CVPSA? We think this is the best direction that both Barri and Montpelier and the outside towns should take. Ultimately we would like to see CVPSA take a more active role in dispatching services. What that means and what time that means is to be determined. Currently we view staff transition as employees of CVPSA. We feel that this coordination of the CAD system and simulcasts radio plan will be a significant benefit of utilizing CVPSA even if you just use this for financing or grant writing capabilities. We feel debt issuance, no one town is going to issue this debt that's potentially needed. We feel you could use this vehicle in regards to debt service but we're at that point where we need more unless we have direction for the councils in regards to where you want to go. Is this feasible? Should we explore this? Do we need more answers? Do we need benchmarks in regards to when can we move forward? Because I don't think any one town can do this individually. And I leave us with a quote basically by John Kennedy. And I think it's really apropos to hear change is a lot of life and those who look only to the past are certain to miss the future. The future of dispatching is working together. Montpelier cannot afford to do it alone. Barry cannot afford to do it alone. I think utilizing the benefit of us working together can really benefit all of us. And I think it will provide the 60,000 or so residents of Central Vermont with something we can be proud of, what we can expand on. And you can feel confident in that if you call that 911 number or you call that emergency dispatch, you're going to get an answer. You're not going to have interference. You're going to be able to be confident that you're going to be responded to. And I think if you don't do that, we're going to go down this slippery slope where eventually you're going to come to a place where you're going to be at a situation where it's broken. And I'd hate to come back to this table in a situation where somebody's either had an accident, where the system failed, where the simulcast system doesn't work. It's going to catch up. And it's going to be a lot more expensive. It's going to probably won't be done as thoroughly or thoughtfully. And I think you'll be remiss not to miss this opportunity. So with that, I'll throw it to Paco to answer any questions or to any other board members who have any comments. I appreciate all the effort and time and meetings we've gone to. I want to thank the staff for all their help and participation in formulating these ideas. It's always fluid. There's no set and stone right answer. But I think working together will get us to the end point in this mission. So thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, good. Some questions. Yeah, so looking at this the five-year budget projection, this initial 2020 year estimate that you've put together. You said assumes capital costs in the overall cost. Is that this number, the status number for 2020? Does that include the tech upgrade that we're talking about here? It includes cat. So that is an assumption that these two municipalities would Yeah, we wanted to compare apples to apples. You can take that off for if you don't do it and Barry doesn't do it. Take that $125,000 out. And can you speak to the disparity and the city savings? What is, what's to account for that jump between fiscal year 20 and fiscal year 21 between the two specifically for Berry City? I mean, you see marginal savings in that initial year and then a massive jump. I'm trying to figure that one out. I'm not sure what you're looking at. The city savings city savings why is there no savings this year versus this year? Well, I'm less concerned about why there wouldn't be as much savings in fiscal year 20 as much as I am that, like I said that disparity between the two years it's just a sizable jump. The other explanation I have is in fiscal year 20 is where we invested in capital expenditure extra $125,000 and the cost savings formula was derived from taking taking the percentage that Berry City contributes now or would save after you subtract your revenue and factor it into this formula. It lies in the capital expense associated in fiscal year 20. So in fiscal year 21 the capital expense goes away and there's a jump in savings for Berry City. I'll have others. Could you talk a little bit about the enhanced, oh, could you talk a little bit about the enhanced grant opportunities that you've described or alluded to for the sources and why do you see that as being enhanced with this operation? Any grants will ask who are the members that are applying for the grant and I've been informed that you have a better chance of success if you have multiple communities applying for the grant in one package and so we haven't identified specific ones that are going to pay for this yet but we anticipate that a application from a joint entity would have a better chance of success with specific ones, even sources potential sources of funding. Sources of federal fundings whether it's federal or if there's state or if there's Homeland Security grants available we don't have any right now that are on the table but it would be ones that we would explore through our operation. So you're speculating that there could be some grant opportunities that are enhanced? Enhanced by our application as a group versus Berry versus Montpelier. Thank you. Would we envision any reduction in forest and current public safety staff in either city? We were anticipating utilizing existing staff in the capacity with this total number. In terms of who they would come depending on the structure who signs their paycheck would change depending on CVPSA involvement but the physical people who are answering the dispatch calls would go from this production would be to keep all of them. Sir, just following up, is the FOP supportive of this plan? They've been active in our participation Fairlines here to represent them but we've actively engaged them in discussion. We anticipated that and we voted as a board that we would not reduce forest. That was one of our discussions we did have that we integrate the existing forest as is because we will need them if we're going to have two people so just going on from Connor's question if you're going to have a different entity being your boss basically, that hiring process are you going to basically slot into a position that you previously held that is looks like your old position or is this another hiring process where you have to basically go through that process to keep your job? It's our intent to take the existing employees and slot them into the new jobs to honor their seniority and to develop a pay structure that is fair and equitable. Now, beyond that I don't want to go too deep because there's a collective bargaining process that we have said that we would honor and work with them but the idea is to move the staff and to our best effort honor their existing seniority, their existing benefits and enhance wherever possible. Yeah, and I think that gets to my next question. In earlier discussions there was some talk about kind of trickle in the shift from the employees being employed by the municipality and then moving to CVPSA and then there would be a gradual shift in that and I was concerned at the time that it seemed at the time and again this may have changed as the proposal has changed so I guess maybe my first question should be are we imagining everybody's shifting on the same timetable and everybody's negotiating their contract together as opposed to what that initial plan had been was okay well we were going to have superior dispatchers move over first and then very city dispatchers were going to gradually move in and would likely have shifted over collective bargaining negotiations would have taken place. So is there still that gradual shift from the municipalities as the employers and then CVPSA? That's really a question that's yet to be nailed down. We don't have a labor management plan but to answer your question based on what I believe is the plan is we would have to bring them over at one time when I say one time as employees of CVPSA now the plan if we move forward is to work to transition the actual dispatching function. We plan on cutting one pillar first and then a few weeks later cutting very city over but the staff would be employees of CVPSA and to the extent that we can do this and work on a collective bargaining agreement to allow it to officially happen that's what we want to work towards. Is it fraught with hurdles, stones potholes in terms of actually figuring out the steps? I think it is but our vision would be to if we get a notice to proceed would be to start working with the employees in a collective bargaining collective bargaining organization. We can't necessarily assume that it would be the FOP we have to let the employees decide that but we would want to start that process as soon as possible to see what the land mines were in terms of making it happen. Ideally we would like to pick a cut over date that has a collective bargaining agreement in place and employees starting on day one. Speaking of day one, when would day one be? July 1 of 2019? We specifically didn't list a date we listed days of timeline implementation. I think it's important to that's a difference from last year where we said we want to do it on July 1. We understand that there's steps involved that there's benchmarks that need to be met either through Barry or Montpelier and so our point is to say this is the plan we'd like to proceed on. If we do I think it's important for both Barry City and Montpelier to understand this so they can integrate it in their budgets and if there has to be some type of inter municipal transfer six months after the fiscal year starts I think that's doable but you need to know about this is what we're thinking so when you go back to your budgeting process over the next couple months you include it because we're not putting this in a CVPSA budget because we don't have that July budget in the past. There's too many variables that could back things up you know it's not ready the negotiations with the unions hasn't been complete. I think the go no go date would depend on benchmarks and parameters that are set by the chiefs and we'd be beholden to that and that's what we kind of why we didn't want to put a set date. In fairness to explain the board's planning process in mind back in time I originally had put together a Gantt chart of tasks with a timeline that targeted July 1 2019 that was predicated on finding a lease entering into a lease agreement with the facility it was predicated upon moving staff over more importantly it was predicated on a notice to proceed at this time frame and that we would meet all these benchmarks. I have been told by people that a best practice is to implement some technologies the CAD system that you've heard about there's no way that that could be done in my opinion now based on some things I've heard by July 1 but our original, my original planning process included a July 1 2019 date if we met all of these benchmark tasks but the board and myself realized that we were probably better off creating months to completion when eliminating the hard dates because will we get a notice to proceed or when will we get that notice we don't know but safe to say that the timelines in terms of days and months in the plan is predicated on starting the process. Chancellor LePage I'm very pleased to hear a lot of in the remarks, the muses the questions about some uncertainties and such and the quote that I want to share is from Michelle Rilke French poet and writer from the turn of the 19th century to the 19th and that is to value your questions and we are here to ask questions and answers are not certain at this point and I haven't seen anyone introduce themselves here tonight as a registered psychic so obviously we're not going to have anybody say this is how it's going to go now I'm not in a position of or against at this point but my sort of ponder is has there been given any thought or any plan a discussion to assessing this assuming we have a go ahead some sort of consensus that says this is where the direction we're moving that to review projections in comparison to what's actually happening has there been any discussion about presenting that in a very readable form for average citizens without going through the graphs and things in other words we are projections were for X and here we are at 90% of X something very basic has there been any discussion or plan to present that to the public assuming there's a go forward I think that would be a great opportunity to engage the public in regards to getting further information we just don't need we need to know from the cities if there is an intent to proceed and from Barry's perspective I see your concerns what do you do with that space and how much does it cost to keep it and do we want to do you want to hire someone in that space and is it going to cost you more we tried not to go into the Barry budget or the Montpelier budget for residual costs that could impact your decision we just want to say what we thought was in the best interest to provide the level of service we think is needed in central Vermont and from that framework I'd be happy to go present more simplified slides or benefit analysis of what you're going to get better than what you are right now I think the dispatchers do a great job I think they're understaffed I think they're overworked and I think they don't have a backup that a single site with duplication and career advancement would allow for them but I don't know how you prove that until you actually get into the model but anyway I was just sort of pondering the public safety authority as being in a position of issuing a self grading report card not necessarily that you're going to hold joint meetings which I think is great has this ever happened before Berry City how long has it been since this happened two years precedes my I'm one of the greenest I am the greenest horn on the council here there is one that's newer than myself on the council and so it's something I had not seen and I think it's a wonderful thing it should happen more than just for this issue this is a community this is not I mean there are separate council meetings separate dates and all that but Central Vermont is a little bit like this list of towns involved as I read postings on front porch form I read all my neighboring ones and I am so impressed when I see here's my appeal with a smaller population than Berry and the postings on front porch form are three to seven times as many as we have in Berry there's discussion it's lively be careful what you wish for be careful what you wish for well I assume some people don't like it if you end up getting your ears burned on it but it's an incredibly valuable resource to get a pulse and I'm sure it has bickering but so does the city council meeting and so I'm just sort of wondering if there's a real clear intent to issue a self assessment report card without being complex without you know this is what we projected and this is where we are that's what I would like to see a commitment to that consolidating anything in Central Vermont is challenging if you wanted to ask me what our my self assessment of CBPSA over the past number of years I'd probably give us a low grade but we haven't been able to prove what the value would be we have a lot of these theories and ideas and a lot of it in order to get that proof of value is to actually take the leap and implement them and it's hard to do it's hard to ask a council to give up control without having strings attached and so an entity like CBPSA is great in theory but until we actually have teeth or ability to influence decisions we're going to go nowhere and that's kind of some of these sessions I think are great but I'd rather you say no we don't want to stay with our very model or our Montpelier model or yes go ahead it's this middle ground that is is very difficult it's very frustrating so I'd give us a low grade but I'd you know maybe well thank you for your candor hang on I think we have a line here we could go Glen Glen what I think was next then Susan Donna I'm curious about you mentioned something like 600,000 new possible revenue can you go into some detail on that yes it is on page 6 of the report if you look in it now part of it Tony will probably he's back there yelling at me getting in a peace app and I don't think Tony wants to do that but it identifies new unidentified town it identifies Barry town police department fire down medical and it lists them dollar amounts and then it lists Berlin ultimately there's also state potential revenue so it's broken down in fiscal three three four and you can see how it gradually increases that number is minimal right now I think with the lack of a round the clock two person set up I think I think and without having the technology to really do it more efficiently but you know I think that's a goal I'm we didn't include any of our models but it's something that Mayor Lausanne asked us a number of years ago and I think it's important to realize that if we build it's not just they will come but we'll be the only ones in town and if the state requires certain things or changes the way they give free dispatch service it could open us up to really I think tremendous opportunity if we have it ready to go at that point if they suddenly say well we can't provide Berlin but we'll provide X number of dollars for you to provide Berlin I could and I can entertain those as options in the future but I don't want to guarantee any of these revenue streams are guaranteed Councillor Higbie have you considered a different implementation schedule sometimes changes happen a little bit more easy if you phase in slowly and it seems to me that you're asking everyone to leap in you've implied that we could have catastrophic circumstances arise that we don't leap in which I have to say I'm not comfortable with that style of approach either by front porch form I understand there have been some postings or just even implying here in this meaning that the things could get really bad really fast I actually am very proud and pleased with the service that we get in Berry City and I'm sure you are equally pleased with what happens here in Montpelier we could articulate the need to look at the changes I don't think that we should necessarily jump to the other side of the coin this quickly having said that I wonder if there is a different phasing in of this of this idea so that we have a huge organization in place in Berry City we might have an easier time looking at the budget figures and making some changes internally we've tried the fades approach at the board level it's been met with lukewarm reception and it's caused us to go back and forth and whether you do Montpelier first I know there was a period there where we were going to do Montpelier first and then phase in Berry in year two that was rejected for different reasons I don't rule it out I think anything could be on the table I think moving the step forward I think will benefit everyone so a phase approach would work in my mind it doesn't seem to work with the board at this point okay for myself I would push back at the comments I just heard you make counsel or that this is a strategy or a way of trying to push action from my perspective I think my comments have been consistent for the last year or year and a half both in this council and at our meetings that whether or not things move forward with CVPSA we have a serious need for massive infrastructure rehaul and repair that haven't been done in decades and that there is a significant weighting risk of serious infrastructure failure this is based on discussions my interpretation of discussions we've had including with capital fire mutual aid folks people do the dispatching with the chiefs of police with people who do policing on a day-to-day work and interact with the equipment we're discussing we're using 20 year old technology in 21st century it's bound to break just a point of information are we hearing from the chiefs tonight as well I think we could I just want to get a sense of where the discussion is going to take us I'd like to address that last question and I understand and agree if we go back three years when the CVPSA together its original business case for wanting to do this our recommended course of action was for CVPSA to take over governance and management and direction of both cities dispatching as they existed today so that we could work on trying to standardize policies and procedures minimize the impact of any transitional move to the employees out of their work environments take some time to work on collective bargaining agreements and really get a handle on costs and how to share calls for service between the two centers that was in my opinion the least invasive approach to doing this it caused for really a phased in approach which this board CVPSA endorsed 110% and that was rejected by staff and the councils at this time during the course of the last three years I have worked on putting together many variations of the original concept the original alternatives the original alternatives is in the business case for moving forward with trying to consolidate regionalized dispatching was keep the two centers operational as one alternative collapse one center into the other center another alternative was to build a new site and the last alternative was to do nothing alternative that was always recognized as an alternative we have gone through and I think done due diligence in exploring every single one of those options and we're at a crossroads at this point to either look at this plan go back to the other two or go to alternative D which is the status quo Donna do you thank you because that was going to be one of my points the other pieces I would like to go back to the question about self assessments and although I talked about I didn't refer to page 31 which is sort of the project timelines and there are estimates there of days of endurance notice to proceed how we would do things and for sure I would expect us to assess how we're doing are we taking longer what went well what didn't go well and all along the way to be very clear that we would do self assessment and we'd be very public and very transparent about it so I just wanted to get to the next question thank you and I would like to follow up on that because on page 16 it talks about management and staff shall also work together to develop performance measures for the dispatch function baseline measurements will be established and tracked over time one of the key components of CBPSA assuming responsibility for the dispatch function is to measure performance or halter shortcomings and and I didn't include it in this plan but in one of the first iterations of the planning process I took the time to develop performance measures that addressed benchmarking calls for service time response cost of service etc and it was not put in here because many of the staff at the time thought it was overreaching and a little unrealistic because we don't have the we didn't think we had the capabilities to identify those benchmarks and hold people accountable well quite frankly it was intended to hold CBPSA accountable as to show progress in how we develop so tweaked it a little bit for this version of the report downplayed performance measurements and made sure that I included staff being involved in helping us guide these performance measurements one of the guiding principles of CBPSA that we've documented is try to be employee focused and I've heard that loud and clear over the last three years from city councils and to the extent that we can we have tried to include that in our written material you know that's always I'm sure staff may be sitting back saying you know that's nice to hear and the proof is in the pudding but the proof is in the pudding and that's one of those performance measures that I think we need to we need to be accountable for Councillor Batham so just I think so I'm clear as to what it sounds like you're hoping to get out of tonight it sounds like you're looking from the council members present for a general do we see a path forward with this approach or not based on where we're at tonight is that an accurate assessment of what I think we've explored every possible option for consolidating dispatch in central Vermont and if you're not even willing to consider moving it forward we should just call it a day we can say and it could be yes we're interested but you need to meet this benchmark by this you need to do this by then you need to do this before we're going to give up control of any type of employee relation that's fine it's a commitment that you consider during your budgeting process that there is a need for some capital investment in both towns why not do it together and B should we do this in a single site is that the solution because I think in our mind it is at least at this point you know unless Barry is going to say well we're going to double the size and we can throw everything over there and you're going to put a million bucks into it or something and conversely if Montpeliers willing to invest a huge amount of money to add a third floor up under their police building and expand that way you know other than that the other option is to build a new facility and spend ten million bucks and I just don't see that as an option I think we're out of crossroads and it's either you do it or you don't and we hope you at least move the process forward so just to clarify that a little bit I think there's the seating of authority which is one question there's also the other pieces which is Simon cast and the other abilities that we could entertain through the public we've kind of proposed Simon cast it was proposed last year that we'd investigate it and what we've realized is bonding one point six million of those amongst twenty towns is going to take more than just us at the table it's going to take a road show between CVPSA and the capitol fire mutual aid group to go to each of those boards and say listen this is what we've come together as a board and if it's that breakdown or not I don't know it may be slightly different based on what we negotiate or what we figure out is valuable that's going to take a twenty town tour to get back to Barry Montpelier with listen we have a town signed up for a bond would you agree to us putting it on our ballot and so that's a year-long process that I don't want to even start unless you guys say that Barry Montpelier would be okay with us pursuing that because that would be the worst we go and promise all these towns that we're willing to do some digital upgrade and then we come back to Montpelier and Barry and they say no no way it's just wasted effort we lose good will and you jeopardize relationships but you know we may have built up with them being on the board and working with us so we're not proposing that here other than if you want we're willing to start that process and I envision that as a long process about at least a year so similarly an interesting question I think is how a la carte is are any of these choices right like so in my and we've got at least three things at play right single site and then where is that single site there's you know CAD and there's simulcast so my assumption is that if we're still two separate sites then we need two separate CAD systems but I'm not sure about the simulcast two separate CADs to me is a mistake because you're going to be paying two times what you could be doing jointly and if you both need it and you're going toward a single site then why do it in one versus wait until you get to that point I know it's a necessity but they kind of go together can I CAD is a computer dispatching is a best practice I don't want to I don't want to say that the best practice is something that has to occur today I don't know I have to acknowledge that the two centers now have been operating for years without an official computer rated dispatch system CVPSA has determined that that is something that will help increase the efficiency of dispatchers in a consolidated environment it's just a position the Board of Directors has taken as far as simulcast go I want to point out that simulcast is a radio project is a project that really belongs to capital fire and capital west it has maybe little impact on Berry City except in the context of CVPSA manages what would enhance radio communications look like for Berry City I don't know what that is today but we're looking at the best interests of everybody in central Vermont does it have any impact on the city of Montpelier today and does the city of Montpelier have any obligation to fund a radio simulcast system I don't know the contract with capital west says that capital west is responsible for radio communications what I do know is that over the course of time that I've been around that I've listened to is the interference that is caused with the radio communications of capital west is very frustrating to dispatchers and we are trying to recognize that another best practice in a regional center is to create the best radio communications that we can and that's something we would want to do for the dispatchers other questions oh the chiefs if the chiefs would like to make any comments we received an email yesterday or the day before regarding whether or not we go dark in Berry City and the issue at hand was the administrative positions and I wanted to know if the central Vermont public safety authority would be handling those admin functions that currently the dispatchers and Berry do such as record keeping and Park we talked about that did you have an answer to that well yeah yes we have we have said and I looked through this report and I didn't necessarily highlight in this current report the administrative functions that we would envision dispatchers assuming in the consolidated site we would assume we have said before that we would assume as many of the administrative functions that was reasonably responsible to take over in a a site that's not in the police departments we would provide assistance to the police departments and the police officers were appropriate we would also take over to the extent that we can all of the criminal justice database responsibilities as well so are there certain administrative functions that still would be required in the two cities police departments I think there may be and I don't know that we could do them all but we would make every effort to manage what we could there would be certain things that would not run in your jail is not dispatch related we could put video technology for like a door so if somebody came up to the door they could video link up to the single site with the dispatchers we wouldn't have a person there downtown so calculating the dark cost Steve's been great he's come to our meetings and we've tried to we didn't want to get into policy issues in very city in regards to what do you want to leave there or what do you require there and then try to incorporate them in our budget we figured it's easier to say we'll do whatever we can that's currently being handled by the dispatchers in this other site but stuff that needs to be handled in the very city area right there whether it's the jail we mainly talked about the jail function but the other administrative tasks I imagine we would continue as is that's why I had Poco answer anything else okay chiefs if you want to come up and make any comments I'm sitting next to Poco here let's put some Chief Brent want to be up here too or if I don't he will kick me under the table hard to do that from the other side of the room I do those are mine and I don't have another pair on me who is your letter to they all have a copy of your letter so for my council members they've heard a lot of this last night one of my first questions is if CVTSA was to go forward is the question of does Barrie City go dark does Montpelier go dark and what does that look financially and what are our citizens expectations when they see the police sign and you go to the front window and nobody's there at 6 o'clock at night that is a policy that the councils have to make independent decisions on but it also comes with a financial component depending on where you want to go with that in Barrie City that can be as simple as and to answer the council's questions I think two administrative people and the way I came up with two is I look what happens around the state and the state police consolidated into the peace apps and put admin people in the barracks very familiar with that I did almost 27 years with the state police so they have admin staff during the day but at 5 o'clock the place is dark so admin staff to the day would probably be a dollar figure in the 150 to 160 range for two people for the week then I looked at what if we kept the lights on and we ran our jail etc that takes the price up considerably things that we don't consider that have nothing to do with money absolutely nothing to do with money on going dark closing our jail and requiring that my officers have to transport people granted there's overtime money involved in that that's not my biggest concern I have concerns about finding officers available to come into transport prisoners to St. Johnsbury and or Chittenden County and then what does that look like if you have a night like the night before last where it snowed all night I worry about my safety of my officers I worry about the safety of my prisoners do I pull staff that are supposed to be patrolling the city to do these transports so those are other concerns and in Berry City PD did 199 lodgings that's 199 transports am I going to burn my staff out by calling them in at all hours so those are some of the other concerns and I don't have an answer from the Berry City Council with regards to do we go dark do we stay open I know from my conversations in Montpellier that Montpellier had a building for a dollar and chose to build a PD downtown so that you have people here I have my own thoughts on what it's like to go to an office and not have anybody there but I'll keep them out of that part the other thing is we talk about dispatching for Central Vermont and Montpellier and Berry going into one location and opening the doors for these other services when we look at what people have for options now as long as the Department of Public Safety is giving dispatching away for free you are never going to be competitive if you're charging those conversations have been taking place in Montpellier they got benched last session I'm sure they're going to be coming around again this session but as long as you have somebody out there giving dispatching away for free it doesn't matter what we do we're never going to be competitive you know that's like a free bottle of water with no label on it versus one that says it's from a mountain spring in the Adirondacks I'll take the free one and this one's 10 bucks so that's a concern and then when we talk about patchwork and I've heard the different comments I've heard comments from my staff about the patchwork services I want to be clear in Montpellier if you are a Montpellier citizen or visitor or someone in need in Montpellier and you call for police fire or EMS you get Montpellier dispatch you get Montpellier police fire or EMS the same holds true in Berry City the same is true in Berry Town except for your dispatch is all from LaMoyle it's our other little communities that we haven't bought into the fold and haven't got buy-in that are the communities that are patchwork the patchwork for our communities only comes in in a mutual aid situation and that is always going to be out there particularly in law enforcement if our mutual aid as it is in Montpellier times is state police I believe are always going to dispatch for themselves okay we talked about simulcast I had a long conversation with the deputy chief chief Brent the city manager last week sorry I have been up since 4 last week about simulcast I think there are some great benefits to simulcast the question is do the communities want to pay the price for it I think it solves a lot of problems I do agree with Tom that someone has to do a horse and pony show to all those small communities under capital fire mutual aid but I don't see the the figure for the added income I don't see that coming as long as DPS is willing to dispatch for communities free I have communities around here they are dispatched from three different entities but Montpellier, Berry city and Berry town are not those three or any of those communities so I think that takes your money down and I think your savings go away when we look at what is available out there and I think until the question when we talk strictly money until the question of what the city's expectations are of their departments on do I go there at 9 or 10 o'clock at night and find nobody there until those dollar figures ironed out this has the potential to cost you a lot more money might be breakeven might cost you money is it something that's going to happen in the future I think it will but I don't think it's going to happen until DPS stops giving dispatching away other chiefs touch upon also the what is the current condition of capital of capital fire mutual aid structure and there is no question that it is very old it does need to be upgraded and replaced at some point is it are we on the virtual catastrophe no we are not but it does need to happen I don't know and again in our letter we talked about who does take the lead that's something that we're you know given our contractual model Montpellier might not be the lead entity I just want to make clear that it's only it does need to happen but again how it's not an emergent crisis because for the public safety people need to be reassured too that they're also redundant systems in a crisis but it's something that needs to happen Montpellier we're really very fortunate that we were able to upgrade to a digital assemble cast system on the police side we do have very current technology for the Montpellier police department but it's still without we're still working through some bugs some of that has to do with our inability to do single site sourcing on the grant at the time but that makes sense but again putting that in the proper perspective of what we're up against and as far as we don't operate at jail in Montpellier so some of our operational challenges and needs are not the same as Berry City but they would impact us to a certain extent and I think as Chief Bombardier said especially here in Montpellier that's a community conversation to what is the level of service and that expectation for the Montpellier police department at different hours I think the culture is different today and the acceptance of technology then certainly that Chief White was faced with back in the late 90s on whether or not do we build out the armory on East Montpellier Road as the new public safety site where we would have been co-located or just the police department and the community was very very clear that it is worth the investment given a small footprint that we had to build our police department that we beat downtown is that the same today? I don't know and I would really there are technological solutions and Essex Police Department as an example from Montpellier that I would certainly see where you could come into a lobby there would be a virtual presence where the dispatcher could see the person you could see what's happening they could read their facial expression on an immediate danger or someone chasing them in there there are technological things that they can do they can control remotely the door access there are options but again that would be I'm speaking solely from Montpellier and what those implications would be in service delivery and right now as I said and I'm also in agreement with our folks from Capital West that's really Montpellier's partner right now they're also a member of the board we need to see and for me to make a recommendation something with some degree of specificity as far as what is this plan or option going to be equal to or ideally better than what we have exist that exists today given the partnership today we don't have very town we don't have Berlin although Montpellier does provide the dispatching as part of Capital West rather we do provide the dispatching for the Berlin Fire Department the Berlin Fast Squad the Northfield Ambulance Service and the Northfield Fire Department State Police provide free dispatching to the Northfield Police Department after hours and on the weekends so that's kind of where we're at when you look at one of the potential partners also we provide dispatching for Waterbury Fire Department Ambulance Service so again we also have to be careful this was stated in the past as well that through with Capital West and the 17 communities that we provide service for in Montpellier we need to make sure that we don't build on infrastructure, hire employees and do everything based solely on contractual relationships and that's something that you know very proud of our collective work collaborative work I should say with Capital West that even though it's still technically yes it's a contract but it really is a partnership the input that they have provided and working with our dispatch supervisor Fred Cummings to improve especially on the fireside systems you know so there's been a lot of things happening that's what a partnership does how do we improve public safety whether you're out in Calis, whether you're on Main Street in Montpellier and that's something we're proud of and it's not a broken system and you know as Cummings pointed out but is it the best system there's always a better way of doing things it's usually a price tag attached with that but I am committed to working and staying with Capital West as I've said both in council meetings as well as in the authority meetings that's where we're at and lastly I just want to also add just a few points that I'm really no matter what happens the work that was done by this board was not for nothing and I really want to drive that point home because it has provided training opportunities we just had two dispatchers we're just in Montreal at an APCO conference to specifically look at and learn more about CAD CAD systems introduce new ideas and new ways of thinking and I think one of the biggest ones even though Chief Bombardier I have worked since I was a rookie auxiliary trooper in 1985 so long we've been around but it really pushed us further to the continuity of operations planning the bridge system that's now at least creates a redundant ability so if something were to happen we had to evacuate the Montpelier police department we could dispatch all of our clients out of the very city police department and vice versa that's something that I think happened a lot sooner because of a lot of conversations there's a lot of ways of looking at because of the authority and they brought a radio console for our police department and a radio console that was needed and I think overall I was kind of counselor you alluded to the relationships of communities and I think those are all things that I'm very grateful for even though I don't think right now depending on what level you want to you know I just if it's just turning over the authority of what we know and what's at stake to an unknown at the moment that's what makes me nervous a full seating of authority at this time because again limited partnership of other communities and that's what is the more detailed plan because I'm pretty nervous about a leasing site moving everything into one area you know there's a lot of physical security requirements for the staff in particular as well as the technology and the redundancies from whether generated power which definitely would be part of that proposal to then moving again to a hopefully an owned location so again and thinking what do we currently have right now and also we do not know what level of leadership the legislature will or will not take you know in kind of leveling the playing field if you will and all citizens I do need to consider or whoever is in my position or leads if we go to a single site that person may have to consider it being a single stage site with a PSAP again there's a lot of unknowns there and I think and lastly I just want to say no matter what happens there is now a foundation there is a roadmap for how communities can come together on this and I just hope that's I know I kind of said a lot of things here but that's what we've been it's consistently been with board meetings and our participation with this effort do you have something to add? I want to spring board off two things that you take those things other things that have come of this and before most of the CDPSA board members were around I've been involved in this conversation for almost 11 years now and the two things that we said from the start that weren't there that are in place now is an equitable sharing plan and a governance model which are huge don't want to harp on dollar things but one of the things that's in here that nobody's mentioned is the thought that our two communities would maintain our radio systems that we have in place at our departments now that comes with a fee right? okay come here so current state when there's a problem in the jail cell what actually happens right now? so it depends on what the problem is honestly if it's a medical problem if it's a medical problem we would call medical staff and an officer if it were a fire dispatch would let people out I mean there's a pamphlet that's been approved by the federal government to operate a jail those are the procedures all of those require people inside the building okay and I think you asked last night we don't have a death sergeant and we see on TV where they have a death sergeant somebody that's in the building all the time we don't have that type of setup okay and what does Montpelier do with when you have arrests if you don't have a jail cell? most of our arrests do not require lodging and we use the detox whatever possible and again that's the Washington County mental health call but we use the lighthouse if there are going to be a low risk person for us you know where they can go to be safely and we will transport and we have also used Berry City and but again we're used to the you know in many cases if we have a difficult prisoner chances are we're going to take them to one of the correctional facilities because what we cannot happen is you know one ship will bring that prisoner to Berry City and there's a problem now it might be four o'clock in the morning there's two police officers on for the entire city of Montpelier and now we've got to transport that person because they can no longer stay at Berry City to St. John'sbury which is the usual spot okay because we were and we'll just do that you know we just deal with it and make a call on folks and we'll do the transport the email that we received we have about 199 prisoners in a given year so that if I was reading the email correctly would that be correct that's the way I read it that day would be 9 we were told last night too those are our prisoners Berry City and that's a huge difference between Montpelier and Berry City when there's only like 2,000 difference in residence wow so to rephrase the question so basically why are we arresting 199 people so 199 prisoners are both detoxed and the county mental health did not feel we're safe at the lighthouse because we do the same thing that Montpelier doesn't bury is bring people to the lighthouse when Washington County mental health says they are other people that need to be incarcerated or can't make bail conditions we will hold them in Berry City for up to 72 hours we very rarely transport people to Chittenden or St. John's Berry unless they are unmanageable from the start and we have exactly what Chief Fakles is talking about we have been caught second third shift comes in and somebody becomes unmanageable and you have to call officers in and transport them to a regular Department of Corrections facility so the bail piece is that more consistent with the courthouse everything? we call for bail on people when it's appropriate and if they make bail they get a citation to appear in court based on what the court conditions of release were but there's also another 60 roughly I'm going from memory now 60, 60 plus people that lodged at Berry City for other departments I want to make clear too as far as it's for models of criminal procedure it goes out what shall be done when we have somebody that's arrested so it's not a discretionary difference between Berry or Montpelier I just want to make that point clear it's rule 3 and we follow rule 3 with regards to people in custody and setting bail etc and it's trending that fewer people will be incarcerated I think that's a general that's where it's kind of for the record I wasn't insinuating that what my concern was is that you don't have any and we have 199 which is a huge difference I was not asked and I've not supplied the number of people that we lodge in Montpelier so let's just be clear we do, people do go to jail sometimes we do go to Pasco we have two holding cells so we still have to but they're just that they are not considered a longer term so they're just basically there until the paperwork is processed and then they either go on to either release or depending on a correctional facility to which would include the option to go to Berry City which we also will take advantage of as well about how many of those do you have? I don't have that number I can tell you that roughly we arrest anywhere from 250 to 300 people annually but the vast majority of those are not lodged that does not include detoxes and would we be in a similar position if we went to a single site that would not become available that would not be an option yeah what it does it would just then anybody that we would you know on the criminal side they would need, they would have to be transported to most likely St. John'sbury with a transport team which is you know is two officers to transport and women would go to the Jenin County Correctional Center okay well so there's oh okay yeah go ahead so I'm just trying to wrap my head around the different options here and can you clarify a little bit the so 125,000 dollars initial investment for the CAD either together 125,000 or if we were to do it separately we each pay twice is there any way to use CVPSA to buy it once for both of us under our existing if we did nothing else under our existing structure yeah and I kind of left that out because I didn't want to continue to talk when I thought Councillor Bratham had another thing to go but what I have is more discussion than it is a question so with regards to CAD and I talked about this last night so I attended the statewide VALCOR meeting with the Chiefs any VALCOR users so for people that don't know VALCOR it is a police record management system that was developed in Vermont it was the brain child of Mike Shirling who was the Chief of Burlington PD and some of his staff members they went to a company in California said this is our vision can you build it into a record management system that is Vermont based we do things differently in Vermont in case you haven't noticed that serves Vermont law enforcement with regards to what we're trying to get out of our records when we do searches and how we want to store things VALCOR has just taken some huge steps and moved people staff people to Vermont with the idea of servicing Vermont and keeping the VALCOR Vermont model going while developing it outside of Vermont for sale to other entities outside of Vermont we are a partner agency so Montpelier, Burlington Berry City the Sheriff's departments that are using VALCOR are a partner agency and we have a governance board that when we want something new we bring it to the board they decide one of the things that's on the table is CAD and part of that discussion has been driven a lot by Chief Locke of the fire department in Burlington but based on the conversations I heard two weeks ago CAD in some form connected to VALCOR is in the future what it looks like total cost don't know, is it going to be VALCOR CAD or is it going to be an outside vendor partnered with VALCOR that has connectivity for sharing information but that is on the table and part of the discussion with VALCOR so that $125,000 for each agency could be greatly reduced so I guess I would ask Tom to comment on that because the report really implies that you think that this probably isn't likely to happen with VALCOR in your term well VALCOR I don't know much I know we both use VALCOR so if there is some entity that some new product that comes out that can integrate with VALCOR obviously we have to investigate it and see if it's worth it in terms of your question in regards to licensing fees I can't imagine CVPSA could purchase one and use it for both Burri and Montpelier even though they're just members of CVPSA I think they would have to be licensed for I cannot imagine that we could share it and then share it with our member towns but that's something we could look into I think it's worth looking into because if that is an option that makes some of this math very different for us we're not just blindly saying we're saying this is the worst case scenario we think could happen in either town if we go it alone and if we can find savings either working through VALCOR or getting a cheaper alternative that can integrate easily that can solve the same problem I think we'd explore that but you can't do it unless you're at the table and you're working together to work through these issues and I think that's where we felt CVPSA provides that bridge Other comments or questions? Okay I just want to say thank you so much to the CVPSA board for doing so much work on all of this and to the Chiefs also for spending time and working through all these great questions so I think it's probably about the time for us to as our respective councils weigh in at least I'll speak for Montpelier in saying that I don't anticipate any vote tonight but I think it would be good to give a general sense of what you're interested in moving forward Does that seem fair Montpelier? Do you want to say anything about that? I mean if you want we could actually just go around the room I'm wondering if it makes sense to do one council and then the other I don't know just because otherwise you have to Are you going to hear any public comments? Oh yeah, that's a great idea Please do Sure and not just Steven but if anybody else from the public has comments now would be a great time Steven Whitaker Montpelier I have been engaged with this process not as closely as the CBPSA Board members I've spoken to both this very city council prior to your joining but on this topic I've suggested that you be more engaged more than at a drop dead date I want to acknowledge and commend the work that Paco's governing advisors have completed so far but it is far from sufficient or actionable this started as a failover redundant two-site concept where either site could carry the full load for the entire authorities jurisdiction that's a fundamental design principle that we have strayed from we have to move back to the idea a full failover potential either site could be damaged by bomb, flood, fire, poison, whatever and you need the full capacity to exist both in equipment and personnel at the redundant site the technology and communications have to be designed that way as well the technology and communications between all the repeaters need to be designed in a ring architecture so one tree falling doesn't create a huge dead zone among the transmit dispatch area that type of planning has not been done that the local presence keep alive concept the idea that people who have been here living sometimes on the margins know that they can go behind the building here to the police station and get help if that were to go dark it's not sufficient to have a video camera if you can find your way to it and figure out how to engage it you imagine the scenario that comes to mind is an OD victim stumbling and hoping to find someone and they see a TV screen and they're dead before the people arrive Steven could you speak to the mic thank you that's okay so there's no telecom plan fundamentally we need to inventory where our repeaters are where there's fiber where there's not this plan refers twice to relying on consolidated communications we're talking tens of thousands of dollars per month at least in communications costs here that's a significant percentage of these budget estimates you're seeing we've also just formed a fiber district that could and should prioritize building to the needed sites for this public safety imperative we don't need to be hemorrhaging a million dollars a year or two out to consolidated communications it just doesn't make sense the planning is the simulcast plan I adamantly reject soul sourcing anything especially just on the thin concept that we have to choose one vendor Harrison motorola both make good stuff other vendors can provide motorola I haven't heard any sound reason for not using standard bidding processes especially on million dollar purchases there's no labor management plan the failover resilience plan there's no plan for a PSAP I did I do commend chief fecos for bringing that up tonight Montpelier was a PSAP when I helped the first 901 system in the early 90s and it should be a PSAP again the reasons it got out of PSAP were related to politics and mismanagement of the state 901 governance issue both Barry and Montpelier could be PSAPs and fail with full failover capacity for each other there's no political legislative plan there's no no one has yet articulated that we need the legislature this year to weigh in and resolve whether or not the state police are going to give free dispatch to towns that want to freeload and whether or not it's okay that lamoille county sheriff can dispatch marginally effectively for a town 35 40 miles away and basically disrupt the economics and convening of this district the concept of the district Barry town needs to be an essential partner here but we're not going to get there until we create the uniform training standards and great get the uniform quality control of everybody's services up to where Barry feels safe that that's fundamental and it's probably not okay for Barry to well I don't want to get too mired in it because I know I'm you had about four minutes right now well I just wanted to ask you it's okay just want to be conscious of the time I've asked to come in and speak to you for half that's fine I'm not cutting you off I just want you to know there's no privacy plan I mean we hear casual references to Valcor and CAD but I have done my own FOIA request of the Valcor system there's 20 years of erroneous inaccurate unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo in there and there's no provision for public access to it or expungement of it fundamentally need a privacy plan we are not building a big brother you need strict standards on what's collected, what's expunged, what's accessible what's correctable the short hold and transportation plan they've covered it as well this will not work CVPSA is a consolidated dispatch and consolidated call answering, single stage dispatch, PSAP answering and dispatch is a good concept it is where we need to be headed but we're not on that track yet this will not work if we do not get the economics of Waterbury, Berlin Northfield and Burry town at the table it is insufficient to create the illusion of a bigger membership by roping in capital fire mutual aid and giving them two votes for 26 towns the governance model is not cooked yet the CV fiber governance model the communication union district is one town one vote and I've continually pitched that but until we get Berlin in which requires secretary of administration the legislature resolving whether they really do get 20 years of free dispatch for hosting a battle hospital until Berlin's at the table this will not work but Berlin, Northfield, Waterbury Burry and Montpelier and Burry City Montpelier that's a viable economic model to pay for the simulcast system to do what you're trying to do the telecom plan needs to be both for public safety and for broadband we cannot ignore the gaps in both the public safety radio, LMR or the cell we need to integrate this we need to quickly fill the gaps in the cell covered just so people can call for help if they run off the road these priorities are not even visible in this plan so I'm trying to say keep up the momentum don't just call it all to a stop it will not stop here but the current path we're on is not well I have more to say but you got to make a special meeting or invite me I sat here for 35 minutes of housing advertising I anticipate we may have other meetings too and we certainly want to hear your thoughts but just out of respect for everybody's time too please feel free to write to us sure that's fine other public other comments from the public okay specifically I mean there are employees of the various departments here and so if I want to invite them to speak and us to hear their voices if they would like to I don't want to put anybody on the spot but I they're not just members of the public they're very impacted by this or miserable if you have anything no how much more you got Stephen one minute fundamentally I want to second that point having the full buy-in from the people who are doing the work and seeing this as a advancement path an upgrade and better pay and higher skills in a path to management level that's fundamental and that's not here I would say plan first set aside the discussion of ceding authority just that's a year two years three years out get the legislature to resolve the issue of poaching long distance dispatching and free ride confusion if we do the telecom planning for our member communities both for broadband LMR cellular that's going to build the trust and the cooperation from which you could then get closer to the point of people ceding authority integrate the functions incrementally as you inventory the telecom infrastructure you can inventory the trucks and the specialized equipment that different departments have don't lose momentum let the momentum that has been built here throw us into the next phase but it's going to take some real diligence on all of y'all's part more so than CVPSA to define what that next stage looks like thank you Stephen yes I would just like to one final comment I'll be quick it's a personal note then before the two councils for the last three years produced varying documents you have all listened attentively and shown a lot of courtesy to my efforts personally you've provided me with direction and constructive criticism appropriate and I want to thank you for that thank you Paco so oh Donna yeah I mean I was just looking at the agenda and maybe Barry City has it to it but we have an agenda item it has a little sheet and on the sheet I just want to read this because I don't see any asks for succeeding authority is shall the city council support CVPSA's timeline as presented and support the plan to move forward with this implementation or attach any conditions to the CVPSA's planning process deemed necessary by the city council so it's more of a nod do we keep moving ahead or don't we and if it's a nod to move ahead then what do you need to make that possible so we can follow and insert what we need to in our own timelines and measure whether we're getting there or not as we move forward to what your input is thank you so I wanted to defer to Mayor Herring's idea here and just go around to that well and if Donna started then we could just work around the do you have anything where you want to add to like what do you think I support this statement that we encourage them to move ahead and if other council members want to insert conditions that they should be looking for benchmarks then great sure so I'm trying to be pretty brief here and just wanted to say I think the committee's done a tremendous amount of work here and really appreciate the time and effort that's gone into it you know I support upgrading the technology no question I support the look at regionalization there's no question of my mind on that either I think the uncertainties are still in my mind outweighing the benefits of adopting this timeline at this point you know I've spent too much time over in the state house to have any confidence that in the next biennium we're going to get many answers to these questions and I do look I come from a labor background I look at sort of equating the act 46 you know collective bargaining structure to this it makes me very nervous to be honest so I you know I'm reluctant to say like stop what you're doing you know but as far as like giving a green light to the timeline at this point I'd have to say I don't feel confident it's ready for prime time so that's just where I'm coming from but thanks very much everybody all right I guess it's time to echo the thank yous for people's time and effort in this and multiple presentations under a lot of circumstances and I guess I'd have to echo my previous speaker my previous city council about my hesitancy in the face of it seems quite obvious that there is more research related to a lot of nuts and bolts in infrastructure I would like to acknowledge our member from the public I thank Donna for her term phonetically deaf so I can't really get your name out of that Steven Whitaker I think your comments about the nuts and bolts aspect of this are very appropriate and need to be looked at quite seriously and given that I am reticent to say hey let's jump in and see where this goes as another green council member all of this is pretty deep and detailed for me I can't say that I grasp everything fully I really appreciate all of the work that everyone has done for sure as far as I can see it at the moment the the CVPSA plan is something that I'd be happy to support at the same time I really hear the chief saying none of this is going to work well until the state makes its move and in some ways I'm hopeful that all of the work that the CVPSA and everyone else has done over the years will mean that when the state clarifies we will be in a great position I hear CVPSA saying we need to do more than that beforehand I don't see that we have the will to do that as a group now that's my sense of the broad position but I would say as far as the report of the CVPSA tonight I think it is satisfying and great and I think that the idea of consolidating makes a lot of sense to me for a lot of reasons for now I would defer to the chiefs a very ambitious and lofty plan and thank you for your work I find that I tend to be real meat and potatoes in my personality so when I see faults in the business plan and projections of revenues and expenses that don't seem to be explained with clarity I kind of put my fists down and I start to wonder about other aspects so I think that the idea is good I wonder about how some aspects the most important ones could potentially be phased in but at this point I don't feel like this is a document that I can support because I see that the projections just don't seem to be based in material that I accept to be forthcoming and it needs more work but thank you very much so I'm very interested in continuing the conversation I think there's been a lot of great work done and I think this has a lot of potential and just as far as where we go from here there are details that we should probably be fleshing out further and I think where we are right now actually makes a lot of sense because you probably wouldn't want to get into too many of the weeds and doing all the work of research if you were to find out that neither council wanted to do this so I think we're at an appropriate pace right now and I would love to have more conversation about it and find out those details okay so I'm going to radio the thank you so thank you Paco for all the work that you've done the CVPSA board Martin the other members that are here that we've appointed to do the work on our behalf the chiefs in general the chiefs I know that you've been spending a lot of time with the board to get all of the work done and it has been mentioned but the city managers that are in the room along with the other staff that have been a part of the process the dispatchers themselves as well as the supporting staff that represent them and actually thank you to both of the councils we do have some people that are newer some people that have been here for a long time listening to the different iterations of the process so it has been a good conversation and the report itself it actually states some items that I think are what we're addressing here so on page 5 I was talking about the governor's veto of S273 the wish means that there was future conversations that were needed and I think that's what we're basically saying here is we like what you're doing we like what you've presented but there are still more discussions that are needed on the details of what that's being presented to us so I don't want to belabor it by just repeating everybody so with that I'll pass yeah and repeated thanks all around for this work I think I'll be abundantly clear it's a very firm no from me about going dark in Berry City and that's a policy discussion that the city council will have to have in the future but it will be opposed by me and I think if that is a step on the road to the actualization of this plan I don't see how I can support it I think conceptually the regionalization of public safety makes absolute sense it's the future we have to do it we can't keep going it alone at the rate that our communities continue to get smaller and we are some of the largest among them and I don't see how continuing down this road in the long term makes sense one of the intangibles that came up tonight was thinking about the impact of our local prisoners in Montpelier if pursuing this model would mean that Berry would go dark and that there would no longer be a jail there we currently do have a benefit of transporting our prisoners there not just an impact on our force here but also on the prisoners themselves and thinking about them as members of our community and now there is an option to be closer and to have to go to St. John'sbury or to Endon County and safety and just going through a traumatic experience from their perspective as a prisoner so there are these intangibles and I want us to take some time to really evaluate them and compare that to the benefits and I see that there are a lot of there are wonderful benefits here you know having two dispatchers on staff all the time is obviously a thing to work towards so it's not a no for me but it's not as much of a yes as I sort of expected going into this because I think we've got some more work to do here internally one sorry one final thing is I really want us to collectively work together on simulcast improvements I understand that this is more of a concern for Montpelier being that we are currently responsible through a contract for all the folks in Capital West but it's more than that it's being a member of this community and driving through all these small towns in a car accident out in Calis or one of my constituents gets in a car accident out in one of these small towns we are impacted even though we don't live in those towns we're impacted because we travel through them so I do think that that's a regional problem and I absolutely want us to be pursuing it I'm excited by the potential of sharing that cost certainly the $20,000 seems totally doable from our perspective as one city included when we divided up among all of us so I really hope to see us move forward in that direction so count sorry Mayor Herring had mentioned there's some that have been here since the beginning I am one of those counselors that have been here since the formation of the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority I supported it then I supported it two years ago when I seated authority in Berry City and I support it tonight you know and unfortunately the thing that we've been doing is every single time you hit a goalpost we decide to move it really? I haven't noticed give it an opportunity let's see if we can move it one more time if you could in your next presentation include video kiosks at the police departments and now that the jail cell issue is really coming forth why not have the jail cell at the new facility that would take care of that problem it would be more centralized than what it is now because you're looking at probably Berlin to have the dispatch center that would take care of that problem and the kiosk the video kiosk would take care of the going dark problem with that my support Paco you know that I've had many conversations with you I've had conversations with Martin I've had conversations with Mike I'm very supportive of the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority and that's where I stand so my worry at this point is that we haven't I worry that we haven't been clear enough about where we go from here or what happens next I mean one I'll just speak for myself and say what I can anticipate is that at least from up here I feel like we need another meeting about about these costs that Rosie brought up or what this really means for us and what we're really interested in or what specifically like what details we might need further and that doesn't necessarily give you a direction at the moment but it at least from our end it feels like there's more conversation that needs to happen Montpelier does that seem reasonable or do you if I've got that wrong somehow that's okay any comments about that coming from Montpelier that we need to put this on another agenda and talk about it again in some time yeah I know that there's discussion earlier from some councillors about appointed members I'm an elected member or you can stand over there I'm like back to many many people so again Sam Dworkin I'm an elected member of the authority at large I'm not an appointed member so I may be able to speak more differently but what I've taken from tonight and I know there will be further communication but what I've taken as a whole from the councils is that on the whole they prefer to be regional public safety is important yeah sorry regional public safety as a goal is important but what I'm hearing overall from the councils is that they would prefer to be followers on that not leaders and that's just to the councils that's my take away as a member of the board that's what I've heard tonight as a whole from the board so if the message is different I would like more communication to me or to us as a whole I think we're not ready to lead though I think we'll see so for Berry City we did have a meeting last night we were provided some information some of that information which you hear is called going dark or keeping the lights on it really is the 24-7 services that are currently in place it range from 250 to 400,000 additional dollars to this plan here so when we're talking about seating authority it really is a much bigger budget conversation so I think we've heard a lot of information for our council I don't think we've warned it for a decision tonight either so we would have to have a meeting if we were to do anything further does anybody else on our council agree or disagree I think you basically summed it up pretty well right there for the Berry City side what would you think about do we need to do this together again or separately well it's a separate action for each of us I believe if one of us decides not to move forward it is a partnership that might be something that does make ultimately a decision for the other body you do have a third body at play now as well I don't know if you entertain other groups but that's some input that would probably be good for us to have but it sounds like if we're the two groups at the party here and if one of us decides no then it's going to be a no for both correct well Montpelier and Capital West are already a partnership so they could work in concert and utilize CVPSA in a way without using Berry you know the value of the envelope could help their governance structure formalize their contractual relationship so I don't necessarily agree with that statement I think Montpelier could utilize the CVPSA in a way without Berry okay noted thank you I just forgot to mention I gave two documents to Bill Fraser our city manager one of them is a memo that was referred to several times it was sent to the Berry City Council by their city manager the other is a 2013 report done by Captain Patch regarding dispatch fees and costs and I think they would both lend significant light to your deliberations thank you I'm sorry where did we land on meeting together or not I don't know if we need to meet together again I think that there needs to be a sounds like there's a ball in Berry City's court that it's got a clear and I think we need to make that decision before and if we make it depending on what that decision looks like we may not even need to meet again over this discussion or this topic okay the question for Berry if the jail is located in this single slight would that alleviate some of those extra costs I don't know that answer I don't know what that would entail but it's obviously more money to fit up and man but I throw that on the table I don't know if that's even a possibility I think I'd want some part of the bigger conversation I guess and it's definitely something I'd want to discuss with Chief Bombardier and other folks in Berry but beyond that I don't know that I agree with Chancellor Putin on the topic of video kiosk being sufficient no I understand the idea of housing I don't know a big shift which again I think is worth discussing and could eventually lead to a better result but it brings up our point we can't answer these decisions and that was our request we can't talk about the jail issue because it's really not dispatch related and so it's a policy decision from Berry City in regards to how you view that jail function and Steve and I have had that conversation so that's why I think part of this is a conversation that Berry City has to have that lights off is a big topic of conversation I think part of that too is even if the jail were to go you're still having the conversation do we want somebody there 24-7 just in case somebody wants to show up at the police station in an emergency situation so I still think that's a council level decision for Berry City to make the jail option may be beyond our decision making but if I don't even know whether some public safety authority would have capabilities or the authorization level to run a jail Tim would probably be better off to answer that but that was my first sense about a civilian run operation being responsible for a jail yep fair thank you further comment over here so currently it's housed in there but we don't have police officers in there really you have police officers who are responsible for correct I mean you would still have the police officers that would be responsible I mean that's an issue that needs further exploring and I could just see perhaps Chief Bombardier sitting behind me going no actually I'm still quite the opposite really of that is providing you the rules and regulations and the documentation that we provide to the federal government in regards to jail operation and there's another comment over here if you would come up to the mic and introduce yourself Steve Mackenzie Berry City Manager and I just wanted to give some thought to the council is I didn't anticipate either council would be able to make a decision this evening I think there was a lot of information to digest and that you need some time to digest that my recommendation would be is to put this on the council agenda for the 27th not next week but the 27th it would give me time to organize some thoughts and provide some guidance to that meeting as well as to collaborate with the chief I certainly think a second meeting or another meeting is in order for the Berry Council I'm just suggesting it not be next week fair enough we're just having a side conversation because for the next two meetings we have at least two councilors that will not be present so it would most likely be the December 4th meeting that we had okay that's helpful thank you okay well so further conversations to be had alright thank you okay so we have one other item between the two councils here which was about a recent trip that oh sorry can we take a break are you setting up the PowerPoint sure absolutely let's take a five minute break well okay are you are you running over there we're on we're live okay okay okay so we're gonna come back from our break and so we have one further item together to talk about which has to do with the discussion that Mayor Herring and I have been having for a little while now and actually led us to take a trip to Brattleboro just a couple weeks ago and check out their facility where Brattleboro has works with the Wyndham County Solid Waste District to have curbside trash recycling and compost and it was very interesting and do you want to say anything about sure so I think what kind of leads up to this conversation is composting law that is coming into effect that is a law that has been kicked down the road once before we don't know if they'll be kicking it down once again but either way it's something that we do have to look forward to addressing and no matter if it's Montpelier or Berry City it's something that's going to affect all of us part of the conversation when we went down there was the economies of scale so Brattleboro even though they're just a select board that oversees them they have 12,000 residents versus you know in both Berry and Montpelier where we're below 10,000 residents in each of our municipalities but there is an ability to have the economy of scale if we wanted to go and look into some of these services together so if you think about it right now we have a Casalo or a Myers or another vendor that's coming around and picking up the solid waste and the recycle compost is something that you know may or may not be popping up in our neighborhoods right now so if this is something that we're going to be looking forward to with the law that we have to comply with it would make sense that we address this in one way or another and this is what led to the viewing of the Wyndham solid waste management district area what they've actually showed us is that they make a profit on the composting side of the house because of the way that they work with their partners they're able to sell the soil that is created from the composting so we took a bunch of pictures while we were there it was a really good experience but making sure that we reached out to all of the council members to see if this is something that we want to address as a group and just to add a little bit to that I mean I think as we move forward it might be the kind of thing that we either look into now or it could be something that we look into as a council goal for next year but just in terms of the benefits you know it seems pretty clear that access to composting is not an equitable thing in Montpelier or probably anywhere and one of the interesting pieces of information that we learned on our trip was that there was about 12 pounds of compost per household per week and if you were going to compost on your own then you probably would not be composting meats and cheeses and that kind of thing and that constitutes something like 8 pounds and so you are actually able to compost more and the facility that they used could actually also additionally take cardboard and paper and in fact they also even took like gosh I want to call them like soy milk containers that have a very thin lining of plastic Tetropac Tetropac that's what it's called so thank you anyway so they take that as well and the product is not organic at the end but it is still viable compost so anyway there's a lot of pieces here and anyway just curious for thoughts and interests just a couple more notes before we entertain some questions so just think about it with pizza boxes right if you try to recycle your pizza box now you can't that ends up in the trash but if you were able to compost this is usually an item that you can compost because it has that food material on it it's usually a cardboard box and it's something that you could turn into a usable product afterward the residual effects with this too is right now say there is a Myers and a Cassella and they're driving on each of your back streets they have different schedules they're you know the beeping of the vehicles which can be a nuisance but they weren't here on the roads because of these big haulers that are traveling down our side streets and in our neighborhoods by having a agreement where possibly we could have one vendor coming down the street on a certain day you're alleviating that traffic you're leaving the wear and tear created by those vehicles and you're providing that extra service that could be the curbside composting and these are just some of the concepts they did have some barriers that they presented as well one of which is the wood chips as a commodity right now they have an agreement so that they can actually mix the material with a vendor that is giving away that product for free for them around here we don't know if we have that kind of partner to do that type of work with but you know we'll find out more about that as we move forward the other piece is the compact posting at home we found out in very city charter in our ordinance excuse me that the language is actually prohibitive to have your waste on your lawn it's actually stated that you can't put it there so we're looking into changing the current ordinance that's in place so that if somebody does want to do that home composting but at the same time you're usually not putting in your meat and bones into that compost it's something that attracts nuisance animals so this would be another way that you could take those items for composting and put them into an area where you won't create more of a nuisance so with that I'll turn this over for questions and comment Councillor Higbie if you could describe the model a little bit more was the district municipal resource a business opportunity or was it a profit and are there other models that fit into let's say a nonprofit mode of operation because that could be especially attractive so this was run by the Wyndham solid waste district and actually I'm going to ask Ellen Ellen do you mind coming up to the table here so Ellen is the Montpelier rep for the central solid waste management district so welcome so do you happen to know if the management districts are nonprofits or I mean there's municipalities sorry what do you mean oh you're municipalities right okay yep I'm not sure if that answers your questions it sets up certain certain regulations and barriers I was just trying to get a sense of are there some examples like the one that you examined that fit into the nonprofit description so what we provided was the information from that district so it was the PowerPoint that I forwarded on with the RFP process and I understand I was just wondering how far you took the examination and it sounds we're at a preliminary step and okay now I know more so okay the center for solid waste management district would not take this on that's we have a broad number of towns that are members and this would be something that would be run by the cities and not by the solid waste management district and I if the city council would like to hear more about why that would be and what the solid waste management district how they would see it they should have our executive director Bruce Westcott come and he can talk about the technicalities of it but this would not be something this would be something that the cities would put out RFPs for this would we as a solid waste management district would help facilitate but it would not be something in our purview that we could do so just to elaborate a little bit more on that one of the possibilities is that we could end up contracting with either a local hauler and or a local place that can take the compost so what will become compost the waste and either we can do that through just our own municipalities or we could do that through the central mont solid waste district but right there are people that may be able to do this for us that we could contract with you could contract with and we could help manage I mean there's lots of different ways this can be seen the city can manage it itself the solid waste district can be a partnership with it but we can't roll it and run it solely and sort of serve the communities but again Bruce Westcott would be much better at answering the technical questions behind that sure thank you Councillor yeah so I think preliminarily it's worth exploring just keep it simple I think John had a first I want to follow up on your mention that it's not a doable thing it's about solid waste management district and that there is there are some reasons why and I think that would be a valuable presentation at some point in the future and your offer to be of informational and technical technical assistance in approaching this is certainly a welcome offer and finally the concept of having curbside for waste recyclables and composting is hardly overdue I have I was kind of shocked to discover how many people when I brought up this concept I had a neighbor who moved to a next door who moved from Maryland said what is it with these towns in Vermont you don't have it's not like you're out in the plains of North Dakota these towns are close together what's the problem where is your municipal pickup and so I started mentioning this to other people and they said oh funny should mention that I sort of thought so it's the sort of thing that is certainly overdue and people are asking about and it's time to dig into this further thank you and then Rosie one of the top issues I hear from constituents I think why don't we have compost in a Montpelier and why is it not equitable exactly what you're saying here I'm a knucklehead on this stuff but I worry like if we put in a council goal for like a year from now it's going to take a bloody eternity to get anything rolling here so if we're going to do it like let's set up a committee with the two councils and get some like get some numbers on the table see how we move forward on it Rosie so I'm actually strongly opposed to this for Montpelier and I've let the mayor know this already Montpelier is a different city than Barry and this may very well make sense for Barry city but Montpelier has a large rural part of the city and we forget that all the time but we you know we've got this lovely downtown it's very dense but then we have a suburban and frankly rural part of the city as well and I live in that part of the city and I have lived in the denser part of the city so I've experienced different types of handling your trash and out in the rural part of the city it would be prohibitively expensive for me to get trash pickup I could I certainly could but I've decided it's not worth it to me so what I do is I have space in the rural part of the city to keep a tote of my recycling and my trash and I go to one of the many trash drop-offs around the region once every six weeks or so and I pay about five dollars and that is what I pay versus friends in the denser downtown who I think pay maybe thirty or forty dollars maybe fifty dollars a month to get pickup for them getting pickup is convenient it's you know it's worth it to pay that money for me it's not worth it and I love that I have the choice to decide how much money to spend I really don't like the idea that the city is going to choose for me that they want me to get this service that's going to cost me as a taxpayer and everybody else a lot more money because I'm way out in the rural part of the city where it doesn't make sense for a contractor to serve me I also feel like we don't have a broken system right now with regard to trash pickup we have competition we've got multiple companies that serve our area we have competition for compost as well I'm very concerned about the idea that Montpelier would become an entity that would make money selling compost and then become in competition with one of our own local businesses for my compost located in Montpelier you know it I the private sector is doing this why would we get in on that and there are a lot of small businesses that do act as the drops around the region and why would we put those folks out of business to take on something that I frankly have never been contacted by a constituent asking me why the city doesn't provide the service so it seems to me that the compost pickup and trash pickup would go hand in hand I don't particularly have a problem with Montpelier providing a central compost drop off or something like that I think that would certainly be worth investigating but I'm very much against us taking on a new city service that folks haven't been asking for with regards to trash hauling that would put other local businesses out of business and that would cost our residents more than we need to you know we've got this kind of calibration right now where people can decide what level of service is right for them and if the city makes that decision on their behalf all of us are going to be paying more finally I'm confused by this assertion that we need to be responsible for composting act 148 requires that the haulers be responsible for it and I know there's some concern that maybe the legislature would push that back or put that on somebody else but right now they haven't it's on the haulers to do it so if somebody has Meyers or Cassella act 148 requires that those entities would provide compost pickup in the next couple years so I don't see why we're rushing to do this when it's already been provided for in state law if at some point that changes then sure we can look at it but I don't get why we're doing this so that's my piece that's fair thank you other comments can I just want to make some clarifications and just answer some questions the way that when I said that the solid waste management district wouldn't run this is the city has to write an ordinance and the city would regulate which hauler or haulers are contracted with the city and there would be rules around that and so that's what I mean by the management of it that the solid waste management district would not those laws that you have in ordinances would be written by the city and not by us so that's his clarification on management and this discussion has come up in the solid waste management district throughout the state of having centralized trash and recycling pickup and now adding the composting and Rose is absolutely right that the reason it hasn't moved forward sooner is because there's a large rural areas that have no reason to pay for this and they can compost themselves that said there are ways to write in for the rural members around the composting that they can opt out if they can show that they have composting or sanitary composting however you want to word it on their own property this is a model that's used throughout the country as composting is becoming more and more of a thing and is more regulated by the states than it used to be because we have too much garbage and we have nowhere to put it the other thing is a lot of cities are doing this for environmental reasons because you have a lot less traffic on your roads when you contract with one hauler and one hauler going to one site to pick up and deliver garbage and recycling so as the mayor was saying we'll have less traffic and less wear and tear on the road so that's one of the pros and of course but the con as Rose was saying that there is a cost to the tax base or what do you put into a city fee however you would write it in there is a cost so people who already have haulers the cost would likely go down but people like Rosie the cost would go up so there's a lot of discussion around that there are lots of models to look at there's lots of cities that you could ask for ordinances from that already have this in place across the country it can ultimately be much more efficient for the entire trash system the thing about the composting we much like contracting with a hauler you could contract with a composter so there's grow in more town and there's Carl here and you could contract with them requirements for taking on that amount of compost taking on City of Montpelier and the City of Berries compost at once is a huge huge amount of compost Bruce could probably get into exact numbers but you would need a very professional composter to have a facility like they do in Wyndham County is extraordinary it's a unique facility we don't have anything like that up here that can compost things like plastic bags and cardboard and the plastic bag the compostable bag issue it doesn't work really well anyway and they've run into a lot of problems with that and that's one of the reasons they give away the wood chips for free is because they're contaminated so there's a lot of issues to consider with this and it wouldn't be financially feasible for City of Montpelier to create a composting facility and it does make sense if you do go that route that you would contract with someone who could handle it just for clarification Councilor LePage I appreciate the take on the reality of a lot of moving parts to engage in something like this and addressing the concept expressed about the rural nature of some people as opposed to people in a city it's really one of those things in my mind that could be looked at as is this broader than on an individual situation is there a public need and it's the case that we have public schools that we're all paying for not all of us send our children there now I'm not a raging socialist but I'm also not a right-winger that says if I ain't buying it I got no part of it so perhaps the discussion has to be a little bit of afforded is this a public need and that I don't expect to be settled right now at this moment but it's certainly a concept in the context of it's not a different approach than we have had for other things like road maintenance in schools and libraries that not all of us use but we all support great thank you so one possibility that Mary Herring and I had discussed was looking into just getting some more information from potential companies that might be involved and the thought was put out there like what if we had a committee we could wait until next next session basically to see if we want to make this a council goal but if there's interest in forming a committee either collectively or separately either way whatever looking into getting more information it's not committing yourselves to anything but finding out how much might it increase some people's costs or how much might it lower other people's costs I don't know what do you think is that a value is that something people are interested in the central Vermont solid waste management district would heavily assist with that process I'm never going to come out and say don't get more information I think that it's I would need to be shown that this is better than what we have now I'm kind of like Rosie although I've never lived more than a mile away from city hall and yet I've never had garbage pickup I've always driven my own garbage and we do composting in our yard when I remember to carry it out from the kitchen to the composting bin so I would need to be shown that this is better than the present Rosie I want to caution I don't feel like without setting this as a council goal I want to dedicate any staff time to this so if this is something if you're taking this on to work with with the district directly sure more information is always good but I do not want to spend staff time researching this because we have not set it as a priority and have not evaluated against our other needs that seems fair other thoughts yeah Donna and I do think it goes under headaches but tonight with my head I couldn't tell you which one can you speak into your mic Donna I do think we need to look at it and I do think that within our goals don't ask me to ask specific which goal but that under the whole healthy living and climate it's all in there and the one thing I think it would do is I know most of my neighbors still put all their food in their trash and I know they'll keep doing it and that's one reason I supported the clear plastic bag because we nothing helps us to be embarrassed in front of our peers and so really until we get enough conversation going in the community and as well as educating ourselves I think it has a lot of good rippling effects so I would support a committee to add to that the solid waste management district could work towards helping to find a grant to pay for a study so that's a possibility as well I'd like to be the first from the very city council to say I'd be part of that committee in the Connor I think I heard you say that for Montpelier as well no I'm out you can never you know when you actually hear Connor say something you know any other thoughts I'm not sure that I've heard enough from Montpelier are we forming a committee or not what do you think team I'd be in favor of forming a committee I think without some kind of a vote it sounds like gathering more information is in order so do you want to do this jointly I mean as well we can and I think it's not one for that properly for this meeting we have to do that at another meeting but at least we have the interest that's shown we have a partner that said that they might be able to work with us for grant funding for possible feasibility study and we can go forward from there great so we'll put something on a future agenda item to formalize that okay sounds great awesome thank you and with that if you do not need city council from Barry anymore so I'll make a motion that the Barry city council all those in favor signify by saying aye aye no nays 920 we are adjourned thank you I just want to mention how honored I am to be here in this group people that most of them I've never met before I am so honored to have done so I'll say the opposite I've met almost all of them we're okay this was pretty easy great perfect absolutely but I'll be back what do you say up for this what do you mean I mean it's okay you should just do it so team team up here my player is still here we're just transitioning we're not done no he's my brother I'm going to move over thank you thanks so we have a presentation I think just a second I want to take more than a few minutes I mentioned this a while ago as you all have no idea what the election trends are I feel like I do everything in the dark so I just thought I'd give you all some numbers to give you a picture of what's going on with elections here alright let's see what we can do alright we can do it this way interestingly enough it's not letting me go did you turn that back on this thing is not letting me go full screen on this anyways I turned it off forgetting that there was another one coming this one property one this is elections report on elections you do the property one while he's setting up there's a small item well he's the consent agenda item oh yeah there we go oh I see it's got a different display down here cool great alright so I just want to give you a quick look at the elections and where we're at there's a note up there for each slide turnout early vote the election day registration that is new the automatic voter registration that's new and just a sense of security here alright so this oh boy that's hard to see let me try to explain what this is I thought it would be clearer than that just did this a few hours ago so this is a look at turnout by election type over the years you see each little line coming down is a thousand votes and what I have them is a lot of information at once but it's to visually give you a sense of how these elections tend to clump in terms of turnout if you look at the bottom where we have so many it's because every year we have a city meeting so that gives you a sense of where the city meeting turnouts tend to be they tend to clump around the low and there's that one outlier that spikes into 3,000 and that was actually the city meeting that we had with the with the presidential primary up high you see the general elections tend to be the big ones obviously general elections on a presidential year are higher sustained but you see that one up on top that general election non-presidential election you're right on top of what we just had and it's right there comparable it's right there behind the last time we had a general election in a presidential election year now the presidential primaries see we have that spike from when Bernie was involved the one that's going to match down below but notice the August primary here those are in the past those have been tiny teeny teeny teeny there's that little one there that's something like 600 people and now that most recent one is the dark one they are spiking now they are spiking to as much or more than city meeting turnout so people have discovered those and that's why that was such a crush this last time but anyways this is data going back basically since I've been here just to give you a sense of where the trends are the trends are going city meeting getting a little more consistently in the higher zone but staying in that zone going through the roof and our general elections whether they're presidential or non-presidential starting even out at a very high end early voting this is going back over the years this was actually surprised me to see our big spike in early voting was the 2016 general election where it was actually higher than this we we experienced here it was roughly in the low 40% of our total turnout was early vote and it was more like 37% this time part of the reason then that this general election was so much harder to handle than the one two years ago was that we had it concurrent we had two elections going on we had the special city election too the ballots were done at different times the legal requirements the legal deadlines were different so we were running that in parallel we don't have a solid early vote trend yet it's all over the map and it's still mostly low so we can get those numbers to stay where the general election takes them then we're going to completely change the way we do elections around here John not an interesting take on that these are raw numbers to look at what those were as percentage of the total vote cast to see how if we're more consistent because the total votes go up and down too well I can give you a little bit of that the reason why you're not seeing some of that information is because of the dynamics of the voter checklist you know we have depending on when you look at the voter checklist well let me just tell you like right now if you just looked at raw registration names on the voter checklists it's going to tell you about 7400 the city has about 7800 now you factor out the challenged voters that brings you down to about 6200 every two years when we run a real comprehensive challenge process it brings it down to around 5600 which is more correct so some of these percentages if you look at them just as percentages they can be deceptive I actually just meant a percentage of the total vote cast well if you see the high of the 2016 the percentage of the total vote cast there was about 42% compared to about 37% my point was some of the years we have lower total votes we also have lower total vote cast so what's the percentage of only voting oh I hear what you're saying it's not that urgent okay yeah anyways yeah I should have had that number up there you're absolutely right that is more interesting okay election day voting registration trends and this another quick one it's easy this has only been in place for these last few elections here you see the special city meeting where it first became active we had virtually none and as word gets out we've gotten up we've had 40 or so roughly election day registrations the last couple of elections until boom this time around we got we were ready to absorb it for the most part although that's where there were lines on election day is when people were um we're looking to get registered and we kept them running through for the most part but that's changing everything right there to I mean there's a lot of ways it's a much more efficient system and I love it I lobbied for it hard but it's definitely changing our workload does that basically end up replacing provisional ballots like we don't have provisional ballots anymore because people are able to register that day it's the final nail in the coffin provisional ballots provisional ballots had already been virtually eliminated and that's because we're very you know the benefit of the doubt goes to the voter in Vermont more than most states but also to the extent there was a problem it would generally be around for example the DMV somebody registering they're not getting their name in and then they show up and they say I did everything I did everything I was supposed to I should get to vote and they would be deferred to by an affidavit they could sign which basically said I did everything I should have I did everything right give me a ballot and then we'd give them a ballot so those provisional ballots had already been largely eliminated by that process so that right now they're still in law but we only give people provisional ballots if it's somebody like Will Sening says when he does training the election director if somebody comes in you know completely drunk from Charlie O's and is belligerent and demanding you give them a ballot and you don't think they should get a ballot give them a provisional ballot just mark on the ballot I don't think this one should count but that's it we just don't use them anymore and it's a real point of pride with Vermont actually that we don't there was a role for them in the past and now you see the more progressive states they're going the way of all things here what else we got here now local law impacts of automatic voter registration I find this interesting this is my environmental slide you can start to see and this is just in Montpelier this is let's see this is a slide I had I didn't go over this one too well because I had this for another presentation but you can see where you have new voter registrations over the last few years and they start to come back up and they start to split their 2013 the paper registrations start to peel away and that's when the online voter registration system started and then here in the last couple years as we've had automatic voter registration where you just go in and get your license you have to opt out or you're automatically registered BOOM! our registrations have gone up and our paper registrations have actually started coming down so it's increasing registration and it's also decreasing paper and it's cleans up our lists at an incredible rate it's the greatest thing since sliced bread ever since they've had that the quality of our lists the number of duplications the correct address information correct date of birth information has just been improving dramatically and I love it we were finding a lot of the same names but maybe the initial was different Donna can you speak into your mic we were finding a lot of the same names twice and just be the initial difference it would be the same address the first one looked down or the name Anne Marie would be together and in one place it was apart we thought it came because of that no that's cleaning them up they said oh I renewed but I didn't mark it I didn't realize I had to mark it there were several of them that we noted if you mark it you opt out so they were already registered and they came through twice but because the initial was different they appeared on our list twice well if the initial is different then yeah they're going to get on a second time and I'm certainly going to be reticent to tag them because you do get people with the same names with different initials so that's tough that becomes then a process for when we go over to the Board of Civil Authority with a fine tooth comb to really look at those manually so I'm not surprised I'm sure there's at least two dozen of them I've never had that many everything the address was the same except some difference either initial or the first and middle name were put together but it didn't happen before this was the first time it happened to them oh it's always been like that for sure that is a perennial problem I have with the lists is there a way to get that cleaned up just more looking at it more practice we come around we can't we don't make wholesale adjustments of the lists when a lot of these mistakes start to crop up which is during this dense election season where from one year to another you have four elections or more and then we look at them as a group as a Board of Civil Authority then after this is over because you've got to have full 90 days before you make any kind of purges or challenges so that's why we usually wait then in one of these cycles until after the last election which is going to be the March 10 meeting that person tells which one is the official one and we mark the wrong one out are you ever going back to look at that yes okay it just seems that it's just continuous it is and it will be but the times we can make big leaps on that are on these off years where we sit down and we go over them okay now for accessibility we got the new machines we had one person use them it didn't go very well they weren't happy with me but once we get the hang of these things these are our new accessible machines they can be used by anybody and they produce about that's then run through the machine but they they're one stop shopped doing everything they have audio they have headphones you can use a touch screen there's an eight key navigation pad or three button switches depending on whether you're visually audio impairment you know mobility issues there are neat things although right now they confuse the BGC's out of me but we will get the hang of them and they are there and they are very cool John I heard a news article about translation and how we're not really prepared as a state to offer translation services when it comes to voting and the Secretary of State's office hoping that maybe these could be used for that do you know anything more about that or is there potential for that I don't I mean it's something we've talked about I've had the conversation with staff here over the last few years you know and we've talked about our own election reforms which we've done writing in the right to have a ballot in the language that you're most comfortable in it's something that came up when we've had international observers it's one of the only ways we they'd given me that little sign shaking their head when I said no there isn't there isn't a ballot I'm not sure what Secretary of State's office is referring to other than it's programmable so you could presumably program anything you wanted into it I think the idea was that while doing that translation is beyond the means of towns that probably don't have people who speak a lot of different languages having this be a central resource would enable that need to be met even if you're the only person who speaks your language in your town I think I haven't heard this but that would fit into with my sense that they would I think at some point like to see these more broadly deployed for use not just by for accessibility purposes but by everyone else and so that would be consistent with that we'll see if that happens I don't know I'm not sure if there's the clerks feel about them yeah I guess I would just I would like to see us do everything possible to provide ballots in other languages and so if this is an option that we can pursue either as a city or as a you know a constituent of the state I would like us to do that I before hard-wiring it into a charter I mean I almost made that suggestion a couple of years ago I feel pretty strongly about it too I mean I don't know what I would do if somebody the one time they had an issue like that unfortunately had a Spanish speaker around who was helpful but I mean I guess worst case scenario if somebody were in that situation I'd be hitting Google translate and bring it up which wouldn't be very good but maybe better than nothing but I do think folks have a right to that expectation I also just want to ask you said that the one time that it got used this past election it didn't go all that well but that was more because of the situation than because of the technology no it was because it was brand new to us yeah and we our first run it was like where's the power button that kind of thing with a little more experience you're confident that this should be able to oh yeah it's a great machine no complaints about the system at all it's a good one so yeah last thing I would mention just security to think in terms of this is something I talk a lot about I talk about to an extent around the country I write on it you know there's three points and this also gives me a chance to tell you a couple things that are just bouncing around my office right now you can look at the three point attentions here where there's potential security issues there's here locally there's the Secretary of State's office where they have the statewide checklist that we're all working into and where they collect those results and then there's the handshake in between right now you know the quick and dirty way to think of those things and what's going on you've got the Secretary of State who's really hardened the online the access to the online voter system the hosting of the voter lists could he do more access but he's done an awful lot instituted two factor authentication for any of us who want to even access the system even as clerks we have to put in our password and then get sent a text with a secondary password to enter it to get access done a terrific job locally you know we're trying to steer away from you know the obvious low hanging fruit like you know wireless networks and such we're always going to be very vulnerable to you know phishing attacks, social engineering we're only going to be as secure as our least secure user and as secure as our local network we do pretty well in Montpelier we are all in one system I'm not necessarily totally sanguine about how good we're doing across the across the state now as far as the handshake goes you know that's where you get into cryptography stuff like that the communication from here to there we're not doing a lot of that but I've been approached by a company actually it's their Swiss company called Guard Time which is promoting their own private blockchain that they want to use as sort of to be the the ether in between the local site and the final administrative site and they approached me about doing a having us join one of their their pilot programs in March and I'm all for it I think we're going to give it a shot they're doing pilot programs at Orange County as well and they just want to demonstrate how this would work at a smaller level so once that crystalizes a little more we'd have to get the gym to give us you know access to be able to work one-on-one with the vendor or the statewide checklist but that may move in the next two or three weeks so that could be happening also with the local level right now I'm talking with Noah Prates who's the head of elections at Cook County Illinois and the head of the Cyber Policy Institute of the University of Chicago and we're talking about creating a certification standard for users and for network admins of election systems at the local level that could be a way to start educating and tightening up that system so you might be hearing about that some more soon too about how that conversation goes but yes that's a snapshot of what our elections look like and what we're talking about in the office alright thanks y'all I think we can probably turn the lights back on and I think we're just about to we have that one item D John do you want to talk about item D Jack Jack well the first question that occurred to me when I saw it was whether this should be it's a possible approval of a possible settlement of property tax assessment appeal and the first question that occurred to me was whether it should be an executive session because it relates to pending litigation to which the public body is is a party I think the thinking with this was yes it's litigation it's an appeal hearing and this was basically a proposed settlement it isn't going to sway the appeal hearing one way or the other it doesn't weaken our position the fact that we're considering except this or we don't so we did talk about that and had no issues just putting it on this way I didn't see anything but the one page thing that says there's a possible settlement is there more than that that we should have gotten I don't think so the assessor drafted this up basically as I understand it they were there was an appeal the board of civil authority made a decision it was appeal to the state and it has been taking forever and so it was sort of is there anything we can do when they reached an agreement and because it's it's an appeal that only the city council can settle them I think so our choices are we take this or we just let it go through the appeal process so if it went to the BCA Jack then it it did and I I was it was that property up off Townhill Road at the end of the road and the guy has a very fancy garage in which he keeps antique cars but that really didn't enter into the appeal because I think the property owner and the assessor came to an agreement on that part of it but I was on the committee that viewed that property and I'm pretty sure that I'm the person who actually wrote the the decision and I meant to go back and look it up to see what we said about it but I think we probably denied the appeal maybe in whole but maybe just in part and I thought the reasoning was well founded of course since I wrote it but but before we approve it I'd just be interested in hearing someone tell us this was star right that something just came into my office regarding this like yesterday but before we approve it I would just be interested in having someone explain why the proposed settlement is in the city's interest as opposed to sticking with the decision the board of civil authority made and see what comes of the appeal so if we could put it on the agenda for another meeting and I'll ask Steve to provide more info. That sounds great. I'm right there with you. I didn't realize what that was. Does that mean we need to technically table that item? Postpone. Do we need to vote to postpone? You can do it by unanimous consent like anything else. Any objections to that? No? Great. Super. Postpone that to the next meeting? All right. So council reports. Glen would you like to start? Sure. We'll go out. So as usual I'll be at baguitos tomorrow morning 8.30 to 9.30. It's been good every time so far and I anticipate it should be good going forward. Now that it's gotten cold I'm also thinking I'd like to start something like weekly walks to spread my attention a little bit. I find that I see all kinds of stuff that I haven't been thinking about at all when I take a walk and it's fun to walk with people. So no move on that yet but I think I'd like to start it. I want to mention that election was a ton of fun last week and thank you John and all the other volunteers and residents. I encourage everyone to volunteer for elections. It's great. And I was recently at the T.W. Wood Gallery as council member ex officio member of the board something like that and it's great there and everyone should also go see the Wood Gallery shows. Right now there is a really impressive show of paintings by Mary McKay Lauer and Elizabeth Nelson and it's open Tuesday through Saturday 12 to 4 so go see it. That's all. So the scooters will be flying south in the next few days here. I'll have some analytics to share at the next meeting with the council and may or may of course. But great job everybody on the election who volunteered. I thought it was a really smooth election just haven't seen them in the past and I think it made a world of difference having it upstairs in Lost Nation even though I know that's a bone of contention sometimes just being able to stretch out a bit there. Yeah it's never a bone of contention. The only reason why we had it down here is that historically we had in the other one historically we've had the August primaries down here and that is history that has now come to a roaring end I think so they will all be up there from now on but no the regular general elections city meetings they're always up there. I'd like to remind us that way back when I asked was interested in the council doing a self-evaluation and some of you other expressed support for that but haven't done anything so I'm trying to gather some information and whether it's on the next meeting or the next but be thinking about it if you come across anything about self-evaluation of boards just send it to me and we'll try to integrate it all and come up with some good questions for ourselves. Also just from the Montpellier Transportation Infrastructure Committee they were a little disappointed not to be talked to about the e-scooters and the parking garage and the rail but they realized they also need to make themselves more present to be a better resource for the council and to sort out how much of transportation issues they can help the council with so I think the council will be hearing more from them. Great. Sure, go ahead. Couple things one is that the Kellogg-Covered Library is having their evening at the library Gala on December 1st and it's one of their major fundraisers and this year they have a donor they're trying to get younger people involved and they have a donor who is basically willing to split the cost of the Gala ticket for people under in their 40s or under so I guess in your 40s is a young person OK. Slime me up. So I have information on that or I'm sure you can call the library and ask them about the information if you are a in your 40s or younger person and interested in still paying to go to the library Gala but paying less I guess that's an option and then I wanted to mention that at a previous meeting where we had discussed what we wanted to talk to League of Cities and Towns about I had briefly mentioned wishing that public meeting law would allow us to have an electronic forum where we could kind of hash out some of the details of things in a public setting where people could read what the council was posting so it would be very public but that would be done electronically so we could do it from home and as we had time and kind of that would help us shorten our meetings and it would even be more accessible to the public because they could see some of our conversations in our thought development as we're thinking about things rather than just having to sit through meetings to see what we're thinking about and so but current public meeting law I believe does not allow us to do that Glenn had expressed interest in us exploring that further and I was thinking about what we could do to change that law to allow us to do that and I think that one of the steps was to send a letter to our delegation in the state house and let them know that this is something we might like to pursue and this is the change that we would need to the law to have that happen and then potentially forward that on to League of Cities and Towns and ask them to support that so I would be happy to draft something Bill had said that he would work with me to help figure out what exactly we would need changed in public meeting law to accommodate that if this is something that interests folks and if there's support and of course we would bring it to a meeting but before I go draft something I just wanted to gauge support for that I'm seeing some nods I'm just not a writer I never did well in chat rooms it's painful it takes too much time Donna how about emoji can you participate but I understand all you writers go for go ahead and draft something and we'll look at it and the last thing I wanted to mention is the Human Rights Campaign Municipal Equity Index scorecard came out it's actually a little it was a month or two ago but I missed a meeting and Montpelier was scored a 50 out of 100 which is not great and I looked at the actual scorecard and there are some areas I've spoken with Bill about where maybe they didn't get the right information we feel like we've done some good stuff that wasn't reflected in the scorecard but one of the pieces and so we're going to do some work on that and see do we need to do more work in these areas or is it just some incorrect information that we need to get to them for next year's scorecard but there is one area leadership's public position on LGBTQ equality and we scored a 4 out of 5 on that leadership's pro equality legislative or policy efforts we scored a 0 out of 3 on and that's one where I think we should be getting full marks and if we haven't been as vocal about our support for these members of our community I think we should be more vocal my initial reaction was well I don't need to make a statement in support of the LGBTQ community like of course I support them and they're full members of our they belong here they're us but back and thought well this is what this community is telling us they need us to do and maybe it's not obvious that we're supportive and welcoming so I would like us to be thinking about that and thinking about what we can do so that next year we are getting full marks and not a 50 out of 100 I wonder if like a resolution something to that effect anyway we can keep talking about it just a couple of things I echo what other people said about the election I thought it was great to see new people who have not been involved before come out and work on the election and be volunteers and particularly young people I have a number of young friends who are out working on the election on Tuesday and what I heard was they enjoyed it and they're going to be back and do it again and I think that's great also we had someone from the Solid Waste Management District here tonight and while I was listening to the presentation and looking up stuff online I see this Friday is America Recycles Day and there's going to be an event over at the recycling center in Barry including free cider and donuts when you bring additional recycling items so if people aren't already aware of it it's online, it's on their Facebook page and there's always a chance to get donuts okay well I just want to thank everybody who came out to vote it's past a couple of weeks and yeah just regardless of how you voted on anything I think just the fact that we had such great turnout it's wonderful and there was something else I was going to say I can't remember so yeah thanks for coming out to vote oh yeah I remember yeah if I am continuing to receive some emails from people who have continued to have some questions about items and that's fine so if you have any questions further about where we go from here or what happens at this point please feel free to email happy to talk more about it that's it for me I want to thank everyone for helping out in the election everybody was involved and it was great and I think we had about three dozen volunteers move through that day the day was I won't say that the days leading up to it were that smooth but the day itself the day itself went really really well I felt really really good about it so thank you all so much for that and then I also want to thank Glenn for his suggestion that I do the minutes on Google Docs which should have occurred to me ages ago and I have and now all I have to do is put a link that I'm going to post right now and the minutes of the working product are right there so anyways I should have done that ages ago me I know I don't have much of anything that we didn't put in writing for Friday I've had kind of a crazy week so no I'm good okay so I don't know if I'm good or not actually I haven't really been here much alright well then without objection we'll consider the meeting adjourned super thank you