 to order and start out with the first item of our agenda which is public comment okay so last week you should just introduce yourself first. Oh yes, so I am the university and I am the assessor and lister for the town of Randall and last week we got our the equalization study CLA letters were mailed to all the town. It is going to say that our CLA is 78.71 but I want to remind everyone that we are in a re-appraisal and so we are going to have a temporary CLA. We don't know what that is it's going to be like in probably close to a hundred it's going to be like the state's going to assume that we're going to be close to our equalized value so this 78.71 will not be our CLA applied to our like education tax rate and I just got this information and that's why I'm doing it as public comment. So help me understand how the state's going to assume something that's different. Well we're in a re-appraisal here right so we're going to have a new grand list that grand list should represent our fair market value which we're supposed to be at 100 percent for fair market value so our CLA could be 100 percent could be 103 105 but the state is going to assume that we're going to be closer to 100 and that's what's going to be applied to items that the CLA is applied to instead of 78.71. Because that's assuming that the re-appraisal process will be in place and we'll be able to use that for the next fiscal year. Yes for the 2024 grand list. Did you that was looking down on the county share the county budget is the other piece the county share of budget yes so when we get closer to that the equalized education grand list that you'll receive is not going to be the same one that county sheriff uses they're going to use the one off my port 11 and those are two different lists they'll be close in value but they will be different so when that bill does happen we should all talk to each other and make sure that our numbers match there are numbers with the equalized grand list because we look ahead yeah we got a larger than anticipated bill for the last year in large part because of the statutory provision using equalized equalized grand list that's where the CLA and kind of a I'll call it a sneaky way but an unanticipated way kind of came around and cost us some money in a year where the county provided less service than ever before we had a greater our bill was larger than it had ever been at the same time so it was a weird little quirk of timing and circumstance and statute so this will should help us in terms of yeah the bill will we just want to make sure it reflects my public comment thanks me and our CLA other public comment seeing none I'll um entertain a motion to approve the agenda I'm sorry I'm sorry I missed your question I'm your agenda you're going to be discussing the issue of appointment as opposed to election and is the public going to be allowed to comment then or do you want me to comment no you'll definitely be able to comment when we have that to come up on the agenda that I'll hold off into that okay so moving on to approval of agenda I move we approve the agenda second second all in favor all right motion passes consent calendar just the warrants you've seen and admitted from last time if you're okay with those all right I'll move the approval of the consent calendar all in favor hi hi hi motion passes um and then we'll move on to um consideration oh I'm going I'm skipping one here we're going to consider approving um liquor license renewals so one of the things you should do is a process thing and we usually call it out separately for you is just convene as the local board of liquor liquor control commissioners so open that part of the garage we usually have that as a separate agenda as usually a separate agenda yeah yeah I put this together fell down fell asleep on the job on this one so okay good so yeah so if you can thanks for taking responsibility now it's my turn over so yeah I got um so yeah just maybe you'll break for a moment convene so the recess we were recess okay and then open the board of liquor control so we can just call recess we don't have to have a motion right yeah I believe yeah so we will we will recess the select board meeting and we will call to order the board of liquor control right and then we will consider well I guess we would typically have a public comment period for that meeting as well right so I'll open up to consideration of the any public comment for liquor licenses oh come on folks really thirsty so seeing seeing seeing no no comment for for public comment for um the liquor license rules we'll we'll move on to actually considering the rules in front yeah probably a few tobacco licenses stuck in there as well tobacco and some of this is where m re's been working with liquor control so you'll notice those of you that were on the board a couple of years ago the forms are different the timings different we used to do these sort of post town meeting before they expired in April the applications sort of called things out everything's moved to this online system it's become more of a rolling process and even with some of these because the flood damage some folks have some extensions so this could be something that you see in pieces over the next few months as opposed to that we used to have I think one or two meetings where you hit them on yeah so they look different and the timing's a little different but everything else about it in terms of yeah we've flopped out for what two years maybe three I don't recall doing them in the past it's been like at least 10 15 years since the licenses were approved last spring we did what is it yeah it was like it was like a part pretty much so yeah we got cumberland farms in here and we bird bagel cafe for first class yeah so i went and grit in there up chef's market the summit stores went through that last year let's see if I can find those two here in a second but I think that was the barn yeah that's the summit stores that's it yeah yeah so we just need a motion to approve all the liquor licenses that we have in front of us I would make it to say all of the liquor licenses with outside consumption permits if indicated and appropriate it looks like it's the common customers and tobacco licenses so good second all in favor hi hi hi the motion passes and our next agenda item is to consider appointments so now you'll close adjourn the liquor control yes we will adjourn we need a motion to adjourn as well yeah sure why not we get warmed up for the meeting the liquor control board second all in favor hi hi we are adjourned we'll drink to that so then we will we will we will reconvene thank you thank you choice we will reconvene our select board meeting and consider appointments to boards and commissions we just have this one just yeah right there um so you can do your very difficult interview process make everyone sweat and turn and yeah and then decide what to do so this is for planning commission we have other options if you've changed my system we got a few different ones okay yeah so I don't know if you want to come on up and somewhere in the front or I hope a chair yeah sharp tank and uh are you on your seat right here sure yeah might as well you're sitting in a chair yeah yeah you move up you move up quickly yeah take a typically just like a couple we've all seen what you what you presented the letter was is in our packet but just to briefly who you are and you're interested in being on the board yeah everyone my name is Alejandro I I do a lot of committee work despite my best judgment um no that's a good time I work so I'm currently the president of a workers cooperative uh review engineering um so I oversee I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars which is this probably should help um and I also work a lot of NGOs a lot of grants you know these things go um and it's all fun and good but um it's also very international so I thought it'd be cool to get on a local committee and do something a little more material to my life instead of just you know always working with people like the Hague it's pretty far away so I thought it'd be nice to get involved with something in town so here I am maybe also for not much of a speaker that's fine is anybody does anybody have any questions for our what's it just what's a quick example of work that you do internationally as part of the cooperative yeah so I work my one of my main uh jobs one of my clients is uh this organization called global rights compliance and stop stop me if I start going on attention but this is they do on human rights work specifically they do work around um so if you know if you live somewhere and there's a war right Canada invades America commit all sorts of atrocities horrible stuff there's actually not international law is like a specific field where like your local your local police and your local lawyers aren't well equipped to do that so there's international legal experts who you call it and you're like hey we think a war crime happened we need to investigate that we need to properly have a decision to go for the Hague so we'll think that's who they are that's like that's their bread and butter it's like piece of reconciliation projects look like that um and they have a big vision for like hey maybe like digital technology could help with this process you know it's very complicated so I sort of I work with them I work with the ICC um and I work with a couple other religions like that to sort of like help them navigate like you know this is a very weird use case three high stakes um there's a lot of stakeholders right there's like like there's stakeholders in like on the ground in Ukraine there's others in Yemen there's the funders there's philanthropists and there's government agencies there's non-government agencies so I like work with all of them to like make a piece of digital technology that hopefully one day will be useful to someone our stakeholders are wrangling but also a lot of coding I'm primarily at least from softwares yeah thank you there's at least yeah this would be we've indicated there's a term that expires in 25 on the planning commission that's the one that's been posted on the website at least for a bit yeah I think we have two openings I think yeah this thing based on the numbers you have two seven number board that currently has five people so we can very much use I think more folks would certainly help with some of the core challenges and just having more voice with some more people that you know we're I don't know if folks realize it but we're the planning commission right now is going to be starting our new town plan process because it's a it's something which needs to be redone every five years and we're getting towards the end of our current time interval so we're going to be creating a new town plan and so there's a lot of important work then the more sort of eyes we have on it the more voices and understand the better a plan to make so I'm welcome all into the board be there for more I'll make a motion that then we appoint a hundred leads to the planning commission second so I'm stable this was going to jump on it all in favor and I had a another planning commission vacancy related question we have one more open spot and it's it's been it's been recently brought to my attention what the role is of our representative to two rivers who does planning for our whole region and I'm wondering if it makes sense for us to think about having a member of the planning commission be our representative to work since it's all closely related you know in terms of you know how the because the plan isn't presently Ramsey no it is presently Chris sergeant yeah okay and so I'm wondering because we yes it was for a while he applied for the position just last year I think and I think maybe he'd been there's sort of two spots there's two spots there's an alternate as well I think I don't think he'd started there and so um and and I remember looking at his background and thinking oh he would be a great person to have in that role and we appointed him was he did he do it on the DRB too yeah yeah so back in the early 2000s he was on board this this just recently came to my attention so I haven't had a chance to do any reaching out about this but I'm wondering if we might ask him if he wanted to be on the planning commission as well yeah and have that more you know that closer connection between what's going on the regional level yeah that can be really helpful especially since we're reaching our town plan and not just going through other more mundane type you know stuff yeah ask to fill the slot and then that's when you point annually so there's a swap a roue that you want to make oh you mean the the yeah with the reptiles he worked it's appointed annually I used to be a rep for that you see a rep for Randall I did for one year for one year Chris sergeant's wife was there before I was oh really yeah yeah yeah yeah I did that it's um it's it's busy and it's important work and I agree with you that I have a person on the planning commission they could call us with with what's happened originally would make a lot of sense yeah and Chris was like I said he was involved in the fact of 2000s he used to work for the right and he was yeah he was working on the plan as the same as working for them okay that's really great to know some deep institutional knowledge here thank you for that I almost forgot it myself to be honest and then we move on to our budget well let's see do we have I'm trying I want we've been thinking about moving the agenda around a little bit apparently well you haven't heard from Trini have you just as you said to go ahead and get started she might join us or no update there yeah but I'm thinking so since we're still hoping that she joins us I'm wondering if we can move around a couple of agenda items of the certain conversations I'm sure she would like to be a part of if possible do you want to move D F and G yep so this is the domestic violence policy for the police department appointment the zoning administrator E-91 and then the 24 mileage certificate yeah yeah yeah let's let's let's do that they're all actually statutorily required it's more of the impression of choice than an actual choice where like like like like not it's not really considered it's like you kind of have to do this do this by this deadline or yeah and so do we need a motion to change the agenda around or uh no you can once you get into it you can sort of mix it up we'll record it in the minutes and we move stuff around we've I was also going to suggest that we can deal with this after D F and G but in in in deference to people being here who want to stop talk in public comment about the appointment of town clerk and treasurer depending on treaty's timing maybe we could move that about we could we could yeah I think that makes sense yeah okay just in reference to choices being here yeah absolutely yeah so I'm hearing you say D F and G first and then once we get through that we'll see what we do we'll go with E yes all right so D is and I get Scott on the board if we need him but this is we have to by statute adopt this policy I think it's by July 1 2024 part of some statewide changes so this will go into error um policy portfolio on the police end all of the ones that you've adopted since we've restarted our up on the website now and available to the public and this will go up there with them should you choose to adopt you have questions about the meeting give me a second and we'll yeah I'm just skipping ahead here to all the budgets yeah so so basically does anybody have any questions on the proposed change in the approving the police department domestic violence policy so this came to us from the law enforcement advisory board statutorily mandated so it's just so everybody knows kind of its story of its creation uh-huh law enforcement advisory board is uh I don't know how many folks know what that is it's a mixture of folks from the law enforcement and non-law enforcement community I don't know if I was formally appointed to it at one point but when I was at VLCT I was often at at the meetings so you've got local reps county reps state police are involved state public safety personnel so it's it's got a pretty broad set of folks producing from the law enforcement community and they may have expanded or changed membership I haven't been to one since oh nine so this may be a little bit tangential but not having read the entire policy and just there's been a significant amount of domestic violence in the state perpetrated by either former or current law enforcement personnel um just a lot of it um and I'm just wondering if this policy or if this law enforcement group addresses that in any way yep for example in section two on hiring practices this is about when agencies want to bring officers on um and it goes through a list of questions so you're asking the applicants if they've ever been served a protective order related to domestic violence there's types of abuse or assault stalking it does cover those ends early warning and intervention is in there um and some you know pointing towards some resources types of those things employee responsibilities employer responsibilities are in there incident response protocols spelled out right all the way through follow-up there's victim safety and protection as a section and then post incident administrative and criminal decisions so what do we do after if we've had it um a scenario arrives what do we do after question address thank you any other questions or concerns i'll move that we adopt the Randolph police department domestic violence policy i can favor hi hi i'm very excited for both of these i get you off it even farther away it takes one of them away from me and puts it even farther away from me on the other one so very excited so the zoning administrators formal appointment that you make this currently it's mark so we'll appoint um jeff to that role and then if you want to keep mark as sort of the um a deputy zoning administrator basically to provide some excess reserve capacity may not be a bad idea case for some reason jeff gets a free ticket to space say he's going to be gone for a month somebody's going to have to be able to issue permits coming up on the show so i think something jeff would like and maybe do so there might be that you don't have to do that part tonight but appointing jeff so that way when he hits the ground on wednesday he's been fully sort of blessed by any reason why we shouldn't just do it all at once i would do it all at once and then even i don't want one coordinators one that you appoint he'll assume those responsibilities they would take them from me i don't know that we need a deputy we don't have that many of them and oftentimes as long as we have somebody appointed if something comes in off-cycle somebody's not available and we can provide the details increasingly used to be that you went out we grabbed our what we call our wonder wheel and you measured from point to point on that picked up stuff normally now if you can get it from some sort of gps related map individual we work with the state we send them whatever information we have we get a number back without ever breaking the wonder wheel out so we're usually able to keep it moving to the appointments of the zoning administrator and the e9-1-1 coordinator require a separate motion i would do them separately just in case and then a third motion to name mark the deputy zoning administrator i might stack them to make jeff the zoning administrator to make mark the the deputy zoning administrator and then to make jeff the e9-1 coordinator unless there are any further questions almost that we appoint jeff grout as the zoning administrator should that be effective wednesday or is that effective yeah might as well make it wednesday which is the 1717 i move that we appoint jeff grout as the zoning administrator effective wednesday january 17 second all in favor hi hi and then i move that we appoint jeff grout as the e9-1-1 coordinator effective wednesday january 17 second all in favor hi hi motion passes go tell them remember i move that we appoint mark risalvo as the deputy zoning administrator effective wednesday january 17 second all in favor hi hi hi motion passes wow it's been a while 2024 v-trans mileage certificate this is another annual required task this is where we certify essentially what our road mileage is the reason we do that is our state highway aid calculations are based off road mileage by type class one if we've got that which we do main street counts as that class two which is the bulk of our along the class area the bulk of our roads each one has its own calculation set i think in statute if i'm calling right if not there's some other mechanism at the state level and then we get about we're thinking about 208 thousand dollars based on mileage and current rates and what we received for the current fiscal year and last so it's a pretty big deal for the highway fund budgets the major non property tax source of revenue these are all funds that are raised through the state's transportation fund so by and large you're talking about fuel taxes uh mobile fees those are the big things that kind of go into the mix that then come back out of state highway aid their federal funds headed in a different direction so these are any state raised revenues that then this is really the only direct state aid municipalities in vermont receive we've got some other states where they have revenue sharing or other aid payments and things like that this is the closest we really get pilot payments you could argue might be but they're really how the state pays its property taxes by not paying its property taxes by paying something else it's not really aid it's we have no changes in mileage you haven't accepted any roads you haven't discontinued any roads that's been the case more often than not at some point after a while i think when the two of you at least were on the board maybe just before that but i don't remember when tom jumped on but you were going regularly through a list of roads had a list that went was contested in court some of them were so it'd be a good project to talk about again this spring to see if that's something you want to do go through the remainder of the ones on that list so generally you were looking at roads that maybe were about three class four or somewhere in that category that were functionally long driveways things where there might have been a safety other concerns talking about throwing up if we have some odd segments and or old pieces that make sense to at least look at to see if are they classified right do we need to do something different we did that right after i got on the board yeah so i think just i think the only folks who did went through that process were training in me was it that long yeah it was a good five five years ago it was right after i got on the step board and i got on six and a half years ago and if i remember but the most of those roads that were on the list or they were safety issues because if our trucks went in there's no place to go and most of them were just over driveways yeah they were they were mostly long driveways basically single single house on the road yeah yeah there were various historical reasons why they kind of became a public road and depending upon the property it was it was pretty interesting and contentive pretty intense yeah yeah i got on the board and was thrown right into that fire yeah okay so i guess um i need a motion i'll motion to adjourn i'll take that one yeah it sounds amenable don't you yet consider adopting i move that we adopt the 2024 v-trans mileage certificate as presented second all in favor i question passes right let's see if i can grab so we can grab the form for you to sign tonight we're having issues with the cyan toner maybe gamely chide they will only print in fashion like right now so it's a form that needs to be printed out in color i think we could get away with black and white so maybe i'll reprint it yeah just gotten these little pitch colors so before you go let me reprint it and if we get your three on it we can go ahead and get it to emory to sign get it sent off and make sure that we had get those data we have until february 20th but i'd rather not get it done yeah so we'll move on to our um continuation of our conversation around time clerk and time treasurer so we have been talking about trying to get you a timeline together um and focusing on some of the other stuff we don't have that written out for you um today tonight we're talking before the meeting and i know she has to be during the public comment but she had some interesting um process related things in terms of how the vote would be conducted how it ties into some prior decisions made in randolph so we want to go through that first because really it set the point that or i don't know if we want to go through we'll want to go through that at some point and then but if you want to talk policy if anybody has sort of a policy practical consideration you may want to start there and then we can talk mechanics but um just want to make sure we get sort of that lost in the mix because we talked a little bit last time about timing holds from statute if voters do approve it when you know what's the overlap when you start talked a little bit about what the question would look like based on how others ask the question we didn't get sort of fully into the mechanics of how people vote on it um and some of those pieces and that's where there could be something there to to consider and run down yeah so we can start to see if people had any other thoughts about policy we had a pretty good conversation last meeting about it we did you know i don't i don't have anything to add but happy to hear from other members so timeline wise we have there is an assistant and what would happen is we would is that where we're heading is proposing that the assistant kind of helps through the transition uh yeah i think m re hat is able to currently be able to help there's a provision in those sections of statute um that says that the term of the office on the date a municipality goes to allow the legislative body to appoint shall expire 45 calendar days after the vote or on the date upon which the legislative body appoints so that provides you a little bit of overlap overlap gets you through an appeal window too because that was part of the conversation last time about practical timing in terms of if you brought somebody new in um how would you structure that on so it allows the elected clerk from before whoever's the sworn clerk to serve for an extra 45 days um to facilitate that transition i think in the towns that we looked at as examples last time they had an assistant clerk who was moving into that role so it moved a little more seamlessly and quickly um based on conversations we've had i don't know that we're gonna have that way just based on on interest um from the individual i'm trying not to speak out and turn on someone's behalf but i don't you know mary's not that spot where that's something she's expressed wanting to slide over to do she's brand new yeah and so we probably use that 45 day window in some form there's also the good practice of waiting out an appeal window because then we know for sure that we're offering somebody a job that they'll actually have in a month the appeal window you were referring to is our decision to move to an appointed it would be uh yeah so say you get to town meeting the voters approved on town meeting day there's an appeal window for the vote right yeah 45 days right i think it's 30 for the appeal window and then this gives you the 45 days and i think where we're thinking about the 45 days when we've talked about ordinances it's a 60 day effective window but a 45 appeal so this would carry us two thirds of the way through the appeal i'm sorry trevor can you say that one more time so so for this one 30 day appeal window 45 days is the overlap period for the elected clerk yeah previously elected clerk to be able to serve without doing anything else okay so there's this 15 days past the appeal window to have coverage and what happens at 45 days is done yeah i mean his the term to which he was elected would expire and if nothing else happens then he'd no longer be clerk so we want to slide board appoints them to be filled right right so then you get into a scenario where if emory is able and we need to extend maybe we appoint him to continue on i mean there's different ways to kind of fill the gap how often can we appoint somebody like in a year is there any limit or anything or is it just like whoever we point quits or can no longer fulfill that then you get appointed person every week if we want to or i mean like like we're not going to add up terms or anything all right well how long is the appointment four right it doesn't have a term limit with it based on what i'm seeing here okay it would be like yeah you'd appoint they'd be in that role and less or until there were some they left or there's some cause for removal and there'd be a process associated with that more akin to to an employment process so the types of hearings we do if we need to separate with somebody we've hired to work in a department say and this applies only to the clerk's position in our case we have a combined clerk treasurer well they're two separate positions they're two separately elected positions right with one person but do we have to ask the public in the warning to approve appointing a treasurer as well yeah there's two separate questions enabled in statute so it's that twenty six that's what i thought yeah yeah if you remember last time we looked at the heinsberg questions there were two they had asked right you know bridge water dealt with the same thing last two meetings so so treasurer my my questions are around the process if so we let's say we we decide that we want to appoint both positions and so we're either one or the other doesn't really much matter and then so then it gets on the ballot and on 10 meeting day it gets voted on and presumably hopefully you want to jump in there rice the process this is the process why don't you go ahead and if i have other quite if i still have questions then i'll ask them after you to give us your process the town of randolph in october of 1991 voted to go to australian ballot to like officers and budget monetary questions they did not vote to put public questions to australian ballot so any vote to change the position of town clerk and treasurer would have to be a vote from the floor of the meeting i was wondering about that it would have to be a vote from the floor of the meeting and as far as when it takes effect i can't tell you about that but it would have to be from the floor of the meeting not be an australian ballot vote you know this week we asked this question last last week and i i have very strong opinions obviously because i held the position for so many years um that at least for the clerk position i i truly feel that it needs to be a separately elected position it gives some autonomy um but also it gives an independent voice within the town offices on process of how things are happening because the duties of the clerk are all laid out in statute and sometimes those statutes come in conflict with whatever this elected is looking to do and so i i truly feel that at least for the clerk portion of it it really needs to stay independent and separately elected the treasurer piece i understand because um you're dealing with money you're dealing with finance um that and and the person who holds that position should truly have some financial background in order to have the position so that being an appointed position i i'm less objectionable to that happening but in randolph the treasurer is not doing the same amount of work as a treasurer in smaller towns in many smaller towns they're doing the whole gamut of what our finance department does okay in in randolph the clerk by the treasurer is only doing the statutory requirement which is signing the checks and you know keeping track of the warrants and you know as far as keeping them available for people to see um it it's not the same as where you're actually doing the actual accounting and tracking of all the finances and everything else we have the finance department they do the reconciliation of the the bank accounts that gives you your your checks and balances to prevent fraud because the treasurer is the one who's signing it but the person who is auditing those accounts and tracking what is happening with those accounts is happening in your finance department so having a separate person as treasurer being appointed you know that would be all right but then that opens the door to the fact that you're now going to have an extra salary to have to pay if you have a separate third separate treasurer that becomes another budgetary item that you're going to have to add into your budget um but i truly believe that that the the clerk position really does need to remain in the like separately electric position and i know right now it it may be hard to try and find the right fit for somebody um you can do what happened for me when i was appointed time for the select wards knew that doris bowman was going to retire they put out an ad on the paper they listed the part qualifications and details of the position of what they wanted people applied for it they went through an interview process and somebody was selected and in that case it happened to the youth and i ended up being here for 23 years so i think that it is possible to find the right person and the right fit um it's a matter of people out there knowing that it's there and what is entailed in the job um and i you know i truly believe that you could you know find somebody you may be interested in doing it um you know because the position of the parties is extremely important because the clerk is your presiding officer that person is running your elections and the laws related to that you have to be very careful to be sure that you are adhering to what the law says you're supposed to be doing and this day the way people are jumping all over elections and claiming fraud is happening it is very important that you have somebody who's independent and that is not going to be influenced by others in how they are doing those elections um and i believe that having that that clerk being separately elected gives you that independence and and you tend to be able to handle those things if the clerk were in a point to position their answer both to the select board and so therefore there could be some undue influence in how they perform with their job what about the question of um qualifications and competence and leading that in the i i hear what you're saying i get what you're saying but um if the if the public is voting for the clerk on the floor of town meeting anybody can run right but we don't have them voting from the floor town meeting we vote our officers by staring about okay so they're they have to do a petition to get the name onto the ballot right and and then then they run and they're elected they're elected it has happened in the past that somebody who ran for the clerk in the treasure position um who thought they could manage to do it resigned within the month of when they were elected and then they the select board was able to appoint Doris Bowman who ended up being in that position for 24 years right so it's possible to find the right fit um it's just a matter of getting the information out there that the position is available and um and right but but it's not like we're making an appointment no so so the onus is on us then to convince the public that candidate a versus candidate b is the better fit i don't know well if you put the question on to the town meeting warning right if you're asking the public to vote on two questions we're going to ask them to be voting on the question shall the count of randolph change the position of town clerk from an elected position to an appointed position right and the same question for the church so it's going to be two separate questions that we have to be debated on the board meeting and then voted by voice vote from the floor of the meeting if you needed to you could have a paper ballot on the floor of the meeting it would mean that emory would need to bring copies of the checklist with them to to need it and then have blank pieces of paper for people to write yes or no on it and a bell box you put those ballots into the box and then go through the process of counting right i understand that but i'm going to the question of an elected clerk which is what we have now right and it's a matter of doing the petition to get the name of the hour yeah there there are you know by statute there are no qualifications listed okay um it's the same looks like like there's no qualifications right right we have to be a resident yeah that's that's the other thing with the let's so so but the skill sets required of a clerk are pretty defined right and i'm just trying to get to whether as complex as the job is becoming these is whether the electorate is best positioned to make that choice i'm not saying i'm not advocating for it one way or the other i'm just saying that someone who is completely unqualified could run for a clerk and because everybody loves them and that's not because of the villain person who ran yeah yeah and that has happened in some towns where right oh i'm sure it happens um and so then we're in a position we the town and we the select board are in a position of having someone in the clerk's office who may not be up to the task and so then what i'm i'm not advocating one way or the other i'm just saying that you know penalties laid out in statute for a clerk who does not perform the duties so you know that person if they're not doing their duties you know you would then have to to go through the legal process to to justify that and show that they're not doing these particular parts of their job and therefore should be penalized with whatever fines that they have airmarked for those things but in the meantime in the meantime you're stuck with that person until they turn those fires exactly but in general um a lot of those people end up very quickly deciding to resign because of the pressures of the public realizing they're not doing the job so then the select board can appoint somebody until the next election they're personal hunts to all of it and and and i i get that it would be nice to be able to say we know this person's qualified for this this and this but again i i feel that especially for the clerk position having that independent voice because you're separately elected and that you're not answerable to the select board you're answerable to the the voting public um is important as a select board how do you think that the select board could influence the elections that would that would still be legal right and so there's statutory limitations well you may be asking somebody to overlook part of the statute well that would not realize that it's part of the statute well that would be illegal though right would be fraudulent so then the select board would then be being fraudulent and that would be right and that that's putting undue pressure on onto your presiding officer but then that person who's appointed into the clerk position could then raise flags and then there's probably a process there right if the select board's asking them to do something illegal if if they are familiar enough with everything that they're supposed to be doing with the elections understanding why the election was you would hopefully believe that that person would raise questions to somebody but if you're in a position where you're you could be fired because you didn't do what you were asked to do you may choose not to say anything the town clerk also counts the votes and if the select board are voted in a resident could be like i think the town clerk you know it's that face it's that outward facing like it could also be the opposite to where someone could be voted in elected in as a town clerk and then decide to do whatever they want it to do and ignore whatever they want to know and then there's no one they're checking them except for the electorate which then isn't really paying enough attention so the argument goes both ways the person could be fraudulent and the select board would be more in the know with the town manager about the actual statutory but like the statutory knowledge lays more heavily with a select board in a town manager versus the common public that's voting but there are also a lot of different deadlines that the clerk has to meet in order to make sure that they're doing the reporting for the dog as this is for the marriage they have reports that they have to submit for the elections they have um you know lodging the grand list they've got to sign off on that if they don't sign off on the grand list you don't have a grand list of the tax bill so there's a lot of different pieces that the clerk is involved in and there's somebody else who's involved with the grand list listers are going to be there because they have to present it to the the clerk to be able to to lodge it and have it filed it so that there are multiple pieces where if somebody is not doing the job you'll you'll be able to see and you'll be able to see it pretty quickly I see going both ways I see the argument like yeah I mean we we're seeing elections where people are there not doing their job being fraudulent and are still in charge of things and there's nothing to be done without naming specific communities I could think of two communities in Windsor County and my own personal experience because I write about Windsor County issues for a newspaper where I hear what you're saying about this separation of powers but where clerks and select board members are running almost as a I mean everybody knows the townspeople know they're running as a team even though they're ostensibly running for separate offices and they're not on a partisan line and so in those instances the clerk gets elected and the clerk is basically in cahoots with the select board anyway even though they're in like you know they're elected so I don't think that having an elected clerk putting aside the truck is necessarily any any ironclad guarantee that they're not going to be politically leading they're bad actors regardless you can't you can't 100 guard against them but as a resident of the town I can say that it is vital to me to know that the town clerk is independent rather than answering to the select board for all the reasons that Joyce mentioned but especially when it comes to elections so that's so what would happen if a resident thought that there was fraud in the election so what would the process be if someone died the ticket to the secretary of state and the secretary of state would then do what they would do in order of the election and the jps are also involved too right yeah necessarily to take it to county courthouse to Amy's concern however so I'll play devil's advocate on both sides of the issue here Windsor school board this past year town clerk also running for school board present when the votes are being counted it turned into a you know sht storm in that town because there were allegations by the person who lost that the clerk was unduly influencing the vote by being present in her capacity as clerk while she was simultaneously running for school board totally understand and that question comes up a lot you know she has an she has an elected responsibility to be president at the polls right and run the election she's also a candidate for another office that's on the same ballot it just gets you know and what would happen in it Joyce maybe you could let's say there was a contested race for clerk and the incumbent is running do they have to step down from that particular race yeah they do they do okay it'd be the board of civil authority did that at point you did the assistant clerk or someone that needs it okay that that brings up my another question I've had is I don't I don't know the um how the role of the board of civil authority fits into this in terms of how much of a check do they prefer do they form as on the on the clerk in terms of making sure that the election is is run the way it's supposed to be run that it's fair we have to make sure there are at least two of them present when you're testing the ballot machine tabulator that's the extent of it well but also with the absentee ballots if there's anybody who has requested that a ballot be hand delivered you have one member from each party of the board of civil authority deliver that ballot to the individual so no party has influence over what is happening on that so you have one from each party and then if you have on when you're counting up ballots you're supposed to have one of each party doing the tally of the vote so that no one party has total control of how that vote can happen and then they're supposed to sign off on the batch that they counted so that if it gets audited you will be able to see who counted these sets of ballots and why not so in a sense we have built in elected independent observers of the election that can help hold but the public is also can observe the process of how ballots are counted it is open to the public they can come in and watch it they cannot interfere with it but they can watch it so the question that I had earlier I think I think I still have which is if if we were to go to a if we were to put on the ballot which would be from the floor that the that one or both of these positions you know we're going to now be appointed my question is about how we actually would go about timing the hiring of somebody so you know the presumption would be that if we if we put it on the ballot that that's the will of the select board that was we would like to see happen at the election right and so we would be planning for that position to become an appointed position and so we and we know we know how hard it is to advertise and go through the process of finding people to fill almost any of the municipal positions that we have no matter what they are it's a time it's a long time consuming process and so it's and it's it's more typically than 45 days for instance and so you know if we really wanted to have something in place we would ideally want to start advertising before we even knew the outcome of the vote right but it seems like that's a tough position to advertise for it's like well we'd like you to apply for this position that we don't know will actually exist and will depend upon what the will of the voters is on a particular day but that's very typical for town court voters actually meaning well I could tell you what for what I'm not sure you mean by typical like that for clerks that are that for clerks in treasure split when they're going to maybe appoint it to elected yeah yeah so I guess so how does so how does that work I can say what happened in Bridgewater last year and maybe this will clarify they had four four things on the warning or three three oh four they they they wanted to move potentially to an appointed clerk treasurer from the current elected clerk treasurer position they put both positions on on the ballot to move to appointed to authorize them to allow to move from appointed and then simultaneously they had candidates running for both clerk and treasurer as separate offices so in the event that the voters approved or disapproved going to appointed there was a sudden election by Australian ballot which and that's what what happened is they turned down the idea of having appointed clerk treasurer a clerk and treasurer and two people ran separately for each of those positions in Gotham so that's how they dealt with it right but I guess my my point is do we start advertising for this position before the election it seems like if we wait until the election to advertise like we're we're way too late to have somebody in place from when that 45 day period is over so maybe the thing to do is to just as I suggested put the question on the ballot but cover and Joyce I don't know whether you could speak to whether this would be kosher or not but put the put the question on the ballot as to whether first of all to split the two offices and then second of all have them be appointed well they are split already they're two separate offices right but yeah same person right now the same person holds them both so what I'm saying is you could put on the on the morning whether the select board is going to be given the authority to appoint a clerk and a treasurer it could be the same person it could be two different people and then if the public doesn't if the voters do not grant us that authority we could have a regular race for the clerk treasurer but you're going to have a regular race for the court treasurer because that term is up this year right and that would be on the ballot this year anyway so what happens if no one runs for a position like this so so there you have it if the public if the public turns down giving us the authority the voters turn down the authority of the select board to appoint the clerk and point the treasurer and somebody is running for a clerk treasurer and they and and we are not granted that appointed authority appointment authority then whoever gets elected is the clerk treasurer yeah I I think maybe what we should do Emery and I can work together I can get some guidance from VLCT and the Secretary of State's office yeah we're not breaking ground with this there were 50 something communities that had this vote last year and so I think really yeah oh yeah well that's that's that's a lot did all of them pass into the appointment I don't know how it turned out but I mean the other benefit of the appointment is they don't have to be read Randolph resident right they could be like a brain tree resident or something it creates a broader employment for sure yeah and but that would answer some of these sort of questions and we still have a mechanical timeline that might help you sort out your questions about the timing of that what do we do do we need to how do the different pieces fit together right I'm not advocating for one position or the other in terms of appointment versus elected although I do feel pretty strongly that the treasurer position should be in a position but that's neither here nor there but I'm just trying to figure out how the logistics of it can be a smooth transition one way or the other if that makes sense yeah it can't be without a competent clerk for very long well what happened though we did them every time with an income that's sort of a narrowed emergence well yeah I think the simplest solution is the average 10 year of a clerk is 23 and a half years so Emory's got to wait another 20 and a half if somebody doesn't write with this like we're still at point that's what happens if nobody runs and there is a right in votes if there's a person who receives at least 30 or more write-in votes that person is elected if there aren't well if there's write-ins but there isn't anyone that reaches the 30 vote threshold then they it's likely to be at this point but only for the term only for the term that person would only be appointed until the next election which would be the following every two days or every two years no three years three years but if the slight board points the appointments only until the next election the next election would be the following term meeting unless the slight board held a special meeting in which case they could have a special vote to vote that position you know I mean the quandary where there's nobody clamoring to be our new clerk either appointed or elected well I don't think it's common knowledge yet well they only have until the 29th of this month to file their petition so we better get it out there I do have plans to meet with Tim to put it into the paper okay but well timing could have been better yeah no no no fault no fault of yours whatsoever it's just we're down to about 18 days 18 days for somebody to file their signatures and I mean meeting with Tim is great but we should get it on the listserv which we should get it on it would be appropriate to put it on the website I mean if we do put a question about appointing the positions on the file we need to have some kind of a you know a backstop method for electing a new clerk treasurer well if you change it to an appointed position you can always go again and go back to the question of the position so it's yeah it's the authority to appoint is in place until rescinded by the board it's meaning a subsequent vote to go back to elect her VLCTs FAQs which are silent on the overlap elections other questions so that gets back to the we'll split those in terms of VLCT Secretary of State maybe or something Trevor when you're doing some of your background or research on this I wonder one of the things you could find out is amongst the towns in Vermont that are similarly similarly sized to Randolph how what what they're doing whether they're sort of like say in the four communities I work for it's an even split to elect a 2.0 election issues I mean that speaks to the individuals much than anything else they're always very good do you have any sense of what the numbers are like state one I mean that's something the VLCT could I wouldn't doubt they have that handy especially given the the large set of bones last year it's not like they had a a census essentially heading into that hopefully they kept track of it coming out of it too but off the top of my head I don't know it's such a hodgepodge even amongst the charter-based communities my quick research shows that that people are keeping their town clerks elected but appointing their treasurers because that seems to be more and more separate duty like knowing level funding instead of like on the side accounting that's like the typical yeah and I agree that the the treasure position we really do need to have somebody who's dealing with finances and dealing with accounting but you know again in our particular situation you know I could go either way with it because the way that our are currently structured here in the random you have some checks and balances so that you know there isn't the potential for it or it's greatly reduced because there's one set eyes for the one thing and another set of eyes for another piece of it but that happens when the town clerk takes payment for the line records that that those are those are fees that are collected by the clerk in the towns where you've got separately elected clerk that clerk does take a mess this review and then turns it over to the treasurer as to how when they do it there's different methods of doing that and I think that's probably why you can start with Randolph it ended up that the same person who's clerk ended up being treasurer to to ease the transition of collecting the fees and making sure that they got deposited in the primary matter from a just a practical question would be which gets the front desk the treasurer the clerk if everyone comes to that desk to put in all their payments and all their land records and everything like that in the dog license it seemed to be like that's just a question to consider if you split it and then with the assistant we put the assistant so if we vote it to appoint the treasurer but we kept the clerk elected it would have to be two different people but I mean there are different scenarios that could happen if you appointed the treasurer and the treasurer could become the assistant clerk there's nothing to say that the clerk can appoint the treasurer as the assistant and vice versa you know the treasurer can appoint the clerk as being the assistant treasurer we did that in Leedsfield but that was size of the office size of the operation and the individuals were appointed to each piece having had experience in the combined elected role prior so it was it's not uncommon but it was there were some other factors that went into it there but and then there was one kind of elongated front desk I mean those mechanical questions are not the ones that hold up consideration based on we can figure that out as long as the candy dish stayed accessible the rest is gravy frankly like we'll figure the rest of it out yeah that would be a hiring yeah we definitely want an appointment but we're even in the election that should be a question but by the way I'm meaning to say I'd like to see more chocolate in the candy dish there is some now that's all I do select board influence right there wait for it to be a 29th for people to turn in their petition and nobody turns in a petition does it still go on the ballot just a hundred percent writing mm-hmm yeah it's the same where we've had listerous positions you know it's on there yep yeah you know the trustees and public funds yeah there's a lot of playing there was there was nobody running for it but it's still on the is that 30 figure just a percentage of our registered voters or is that the state staff it's one percent or a maximum of 30 okay and we're over the right and because our checklist is over 3 000 it's at least so 30 is the yeah so if you like leave it the same and no one runs possibly getting 30 is fairly rare I would suggest right and so with it you'd be still doing the appointing anyways right unless unless someone decides they really want it and they can't but they couldn't get their petition in on time they can do a right they could advertise and say you know letters in and stop and say everybody please vote for me you can I think you can get 30 votes that way and that's happened before well I'm sure it's still but yeah I see your point maybe we had when we came close from Larry Townsend I mean he had inside of remember the name but it was the dentist that had not got right in votes it was it made it a very close no it's not really interesting stuff no matter how we work it out lots of pros and cons and lots of things lots of details to to consider other thoughts about um the club treasure position before we move on to the budget looks like we're ready to move on to the budget okay do you want to we rearrange that memory and Joyce thank you so much for being absolutely thank you thank you absolutely it's a much more deliberative complicated situation thanks Joyce we could uh vote Joyce then do a quiet writing campaign she's 30 30 she's getting clear that she's done so with the budgets and he's been sitting patiently do you want to start with the library since General Fund has most of the lines in it sure and in that way we can let her go of course I mean welcome to stay always but this looks after facilities that um drag this out let me see if I can get to the different tabs well I should have used this time while Trevor is bringing up the budget to invite Alyssa to come visit me at the library I don't know actually I still need to go too so maybe we can find a time yeah because that one day my kids had something I think my kids were sick the day we had it was a little oh right yeah I mean Larry and Tom you're also invited everybody's invited to the library so I don't know how you want to go through it we just have revenues and expenditures you've had a chance to look at the lines at this point I don't want to speak for you but it looks you look like there's a ton of exciting or unusual or there's a lot that's exciting that's let me rephrase that there's no budget fireworks but regular excitement at the library just as a point of interest the select board has the authority to set the amount that the voters vote on for tax revenue and elected board of library trustees are responsible for the most of the budget this number here's the one here yeah we posed the question in the way it shows you the total and then the amount to be raised by taxes roughly can you just so you say that number right there that first line it would be the amount to be raised by taxes right based on this 25 000 is the amount to be raised that's the change right there from here to here and the trustees are lying for 90 is that accurate name this is the revenue yeah that's somebody's been listed in the sheets that's the revenue that the trustees yes generate fundraising and development primarily from the annual fund raising letter that i hope i've sent to all of you and you know if you didn't get that letter feel free still to send a library a check so through here administrative piece if you have any questions 362 the health line much like we've seen in other budgets plan costs are up from year the year before um projecting increases for the second six i don't know if you've had a change in mix or not that was what whacked us in the other budgets was singles or buyouts becoming panic i don't know that that's the case though i'm trying to think that my staffing is stable and you never you never can tell but that's you know what we would i project it here is based on the current staffing and i think in the operating budget the the only thing that pushed this over-level funding was the building insurance which is the first line yep these went up this is uh property and casualty boiler and there's a third component to that too so that number came from the lcd 40 percent i'm betting that flooding has affected building insurance rates yeah that's a dramatic increase because we didn't make any alterations to the levels of coverage they're all the the standards and we see this throughout where the insurance numbers are generally up for the property casualty boiler this is all through our overall town through the lcd passive yeah sometimes at the end of the year we'll get a um contribution credit back depending on how the pool finishes so if we have a quiet year have we seen our other building insurances going going up like this yeah same same percentage uh not always the same percentage or similar yeah like oh you'll see when we get to channeler for example or example that one's up and it's just the primary categories it's still likely to be much less than we could find if we went self-insured private marketplace but it's unusual to have significant increases from the passive insurance pool every once in a while it happens but you know in general insurance costs property insurance costs have gone up because the cost of repairing or replacing structures has gone up so much recently but but but that's a that's even that's big what we we'll go back through the numbers with them too we found um it's looking different numbers there were some differences in the workers comp numbers based on we had submitted it back what was listed so we can make that round up again and just make sure but if for some reason it's found out much later on they usually issue a credit to us and we see that the keys scroll back to the top again go a little bit just to the revenue yeah it's a couple of questions for for any while we're here sure so the the brain tree um money that's through a special appropriation through them that's correct and so $12,000 was what the voters approved in brain tree last year last year and so and we're asking for a little more this year still less than what they ought to be paying and when you talk to the brain tree users of the library they're happy to agree um on the other hand there's a fair amount of poverty in brain tree and by doing the special appropriation but how make sure everybody can use the library without having to pay out of pocket so yeah that's why we get this I think it's great that it's a bargain contribute that that way it's just it's a bargain it's it's a bargain for that it's a bargain for them yeah yeah yeah no compare if you compare the population of brain tree to the population of round off and compare how much they contribute to the functioning of the library compared to what we contribute it's not proportional same no it's not that the town the building also belongs to the town or brand off so right it's just another expense for us well I'd like to think the library is something more than just an expense well no no no of course of course I'm saying I'm saying in terms of we own we own a lot of the building but that just means that we have we need to also pay to maintain it and yeah keep it going and all that yeah the library trustees contribute to that and I'll hold a lot of grant money pay just as much if it was a rental property yeah no I'm just I'm I'm just pointing out that the town of brain tree is getting quite a bargain they are they are um the other way to look at it though is that if we were to lose that special appropriation from brain tree our our cost of operating would not change and so the shift would be even further on the taxpayers of Randolph oh yeah yeah no we're getting what we can get and that's as good as we can know but it's just unfortunate that we're we're subsidizing Randolph Randolph taxpayers are subsidizing brain tree library users that's all um and then into library loan we don't pay anything for that anymore so that that is a revenue line that actually should go away we have um funding that comes through the not department of libraries through a grant federal grant program that forbids us from soliciting donations for interlibrary loans so we still provide the service and in fact we've provided so yeah I think we've done more than 700 items in interlibrary loan in the first six months of this fiscal year so it's used a lot yeah but we can't ask for donations anymore right but is it then so then is it does then that cost appear someplace else in the budget then um it appears in one place in the operating budget which would be in the postage line that's mostly interlibrary loan delivery through usps however the lion's share of our interlibrary loan traffic goes through a courier system so priority express comes to the library twice a week and we pay for that partially with that grant that I mentioned um but also with postage okay and how much how much of the cost of the interlibrary loan system that we use is is dependent upon how much we actually use the system like do we does it cost us more if lots of people use it does do we end up spending more money on this marginally like buy a dollar 88 a delivery so we're charged by how many stops the courier makes per week we get two stops per week and it's a it's a dollar amount for each of those stops if we exceed 50 pounds then we get this marginal like two dollar charge so in a way yes if we have a lot of traffic in a week we might end up paying an additional two bucks but yeah it's not by the case which is why it's so much cheaper than sending by usps oh and then um yeah go back up again that's why I have one other question the um McNair funds is that zero because those have been used up or because we're not using them this year? no the McNair funds are going toward a lot and we still have I want to say about $180,000 in those funds the stock market has been paid to us in that way so um about 30,000 of that we'll be going back to the town to pay the library share for the new heat pumps and energy recovery ventilation that went in last calendar year the rest of that was paid for by a grant um last year we used McNair funds to match a grant that paid for a wage for a staff member so so that's why I was in the operating budget as opposed to a special project like building improvement so so can someone someone explain to me why it's the McNair funds are $15,000 and then zero in the revenues because they're not allotting them for the general fund for this year any more okay okay thank you those are those are my my thoughts are there questions about the library budget for Amy or Trevor? scroll in through a little bit you can see nothing wild in the amounts yeah it's very low and there's your overall so you're actually projecting a lower cost for heating oil this year yeah and that's that's kind of a black box at this point yeah the heat pumps we think are going to offset some of the cost of heating oil electricity yeah we'll probably go up but it's hard to say we've only had them running for six months or so and we haven't been here all the seasons yeah evening how has that been working so far in terms of the comfort that they're providing the cooling is fantastic on both levels the heat pumps don't do us any good on the main level for heating because they're integrated into the duct work so if we were to use them for heat all the heat would be up at the ceiling that's a great sound but in the lower level the heat pumps are really nice supplemental on very cold days or in the shoulder season so that's it improves the comfort a great deal down there great and a ventilation that's the unknown too for electricity our bills have certainly gone up having mechanical ventilation on the other hand we had 47 people in the library this morning from the homeschooling co-op using resources at the library and the ventilation is running and I feel safer knowing that we're getting fresh air that's great it's it's huge yeah yeah very nice yeah so that's worth the money in my opinion see any other questions or comments so we'll then go back to the general fund which we skipped over and yeah we were thinking we were gonna look at the entire general fund tonight where we are we're got a section or two that you were planning on focusing on yeah we're gonna go through I think as much as we could maybe cover the basics we did cover some of the introductory stuff last week when we looked at this summary here so just to sort of refresh where we're at in the aggregate with the different budgets but at the general fund we're looking at this percentage increase some of that is tamped down by this number right here if you recall from last week this is tied to the auditor's recommendation and so it's that capacity has been reallocated primarily through staffing I would say and staffing related costs but this ties to that we have two projects for which there's debt service there's a stormwater road improvement project and the replacement of some dump trucks the dump truck loan expires actually in this fiscal year so after this that number wherever it appears will be gone the other one we've got another 25 plus years on I think it is until that for Chelsea Mountain Road and maybe part of another project I remember them right so what this is is that what we had set up before this year was that those were in the highway fund as transfers out so we touched the money one time raised it into the highway fund came into the general fund as a revenue and then we paid the debt service bills out of this line in the general fund the auditor's recommendation was to essentially touch the money once since we raised it through the highway fund when you look at that debt service line there it was if you looked back to 24 this is where we've changed them to reflect what we're doing so they at least show apples to apples this number would have been over here last year if we don't change anything it's a debt service expense this year but it comes out of that those two loans total that amount we also will see when we look at the revenue it looks like we've lost that same amount of revenue that's why when we at some point if we're able to talk about sort of tax rate increases why there's a little bit of a bigger bite than you'd expect for a $58,000 increase because it looks like we lost $191,000 on the revenue end through losing that transfer so create some some wonky mathematics from that perspective but when you look at overall spending like I said that capacity has largely gone into people people we've already committed to in some cases I would point out that last year we had a large increase in the ambulance this year we've got another one based on per capita rates and other things so to try to absorb another $29,000 and this is rough order of magnitude pretty close to last year in terms of that so that's a two-year pre-sizable one I don't say that with any suggestion or historical overlay or anything else other than to point out those are consecutive sizable bites so so you're saying that in in FY 23 it was closer to the 330 in that area yeah well we had budgeted closer we had budgeted even less than that and the actual was closer to that so we made the 363 happen because that was closer to the actual and I don't if you remember last year we're talking about the methodology because they're on a calendar year basis we were always sort of looking backwards at the costs that were then putting into our budget for the year that's to come so what we did last year was try to split that put an assumed increase much like we do with health insurance so we've got six months of what we think the actual cost is going to be and six months with an assumed so we had a big increase but it was a little truer in the budgeting this year they provided us with a number based essentially on that same methodology where we got that number from them so that's where that 392 comes from so they charge us per call is that how that works per capita rate primarily yeah interesting so if this passes we're going to the taxpayers are going to pay close to 400,000 dollars for the ability to use an ambulance yeah there have been some other conversations about how to provide service to so Scott and his crew on the police end have certain first aid go bags those types of things we've been kind of looped into that first responder mix so then there's that larger conversation of if we're picking up initial triage but paying for paramedic level care to provide that that service and maybe we need to and as I understand historically this comes up every few years where these sort of competing pressures I'm not necessarily arguing against them just yeah fine so just for some of this this is a mixture of things from this is where most of the health insurance and the general funds paid for so a lot of that is in the health insurance pieces some of that's also in employee rates retirement there's the transfer or not the transfer coupon there's the general fund payment for service to the police fund is incorporated in this line so that is currently up from the year before if you recall from last week but the police service committee is working through its recommendations so that number is just a placeholder until we land somewhere there so there are a few different things in the stew in that number there this one is if you remember we budgeted for six months of the fiscal year for this position knowing that in 25 we'd have to put the other six in so that's where that's reflected there this looks like Harold's budget is way up it's really not if you remember last year we had taken of buildings and grounds individual put them over into recreation to do that that experiment did not work so these two numbers reflect to them when we get into the lines that we have reallocated those resources so Harold this just shows essentially that position moving back to Harold's budget and leaving recreation's budget and we were able to get more hours for some other pieces in recreation as well using the capacity that mark right that the other position had left sort of open with this move so it's it looks like a big increase really it's just moving it from one spot to the other such as a supervised like who's supervising that person basically so Harold hookers are building a ground supervisor he's in this line for example and then he's got two employees Ron Morrison and Dave messier and this gets back into as we've evolved from I don't remember when I started he had two full-time employees that were at the lower end of the way lower end of the wage scale and then to what we called hybrid employees that were shared with highway we split the hybrid employees out we had a hard time finding filling sustaining splitting so one went to highway one went to buildings and grounds we lost those two employees moved some other things around so we have three full-time employees to do buildings and grounds they do everything that we don't contract out which is basically the mowing for Randolph center east Randolph cemeteries but they mow pretty much everything else we also have a seasonal in the mix in here as well that's about 16 17,000 of the overall cost sky has been with us on and off through the years some of it's just the reconfiguration there and then the reserve funding we can get into the lines but it's up 4,000 this ties to when we bought the buildings and grounds truck in the summer we had a two-year payback plan where it's $11,000 we wanted to start that buildings and grounds reserve this does that adds that increase it's offset some by a decrease in the cemetery reserve transfer which is one that we don't use for that same purpose as the way we provide services of all so that goes back to a conversation we had in July or whenever we did that so those that's sort of the overview of those and I don't know if you want to go through any of the lines themselves no it hasn't been the longest period of time that you've had with it but much like with the library budget the number that goes before the boroughs member I had mentioned there's sort of there's a wonky impact because it looks like we lost $190,000 of revenue there because we didn't offset it one for one cut the budget down it's going to look like that we're trying to still Mimi and I talk a lot about the grand list stuff and how to figure out how to estimate tax rate impacts and if we can do that we certainly can have the reappraisal underway so in terms of the impact there I don't think I'd focus too much on it for now but it reflects that so that's where we have a $58,000 increase but it looks a little bit different on this end we looked at five-year trend lines for all of these numbers throughout all of the budgets so some of the adjustments where do you see them go up down some of the other places look at that five-year do the best we can to guess we know hopefully we're going to be a little more active on some of the delinquent tax collection pieces just because we'll have the resources to focus on it's not meant to be punitive it's just meant to we've seen numbers creep back up after Cliff was very diligent in working them down when he was here and through staffing and other focus areas they've crept back up so we'll a little more focus into that as you come through the other revenue not too many changes here general fund interest we're through the combination of different things from insurance fund reimbursements from the legal settlement for the village fire department to ARPA funds to some of the other things we're able to probably put a little more of this away this year and we have in the past we put in a new line for the cannabis control fee we do not get much originally this was 200 bucks but we had a run of applications for you to consider I think we're up to four there are various aspects of cannabis related businesses so this covers everything from the retail operations to anybody who needs a permit for any of the other parts of the operation there this is basically the mobile hospital trailer that we house at the village fire station but not too many changes otherwise this is sort of based on a reimbursement keys off some of the costs same thing there as we get down this is our contract with brain treating we build out annually we try to do it on the basis of the actual costs sort of going back for a year yeah generally hitting all those are the costs that we contribute to this is what we get in from them in return our costs are down RC these are running years ours will be down toward the bottom of the general fund there's a section there yeah and then in this section again looking at five-year trend lines pool because of weather issues with different physical elements of it we've inched this down a little bit but they've camp revenue has been really solid throughout that entire window same thing with sports program revenue so they're up a little bit there are they expanding camps significantly no we've just always been really conservative with this number I see and I think when you look at that multi-year trend line we can be a little more okay we can be closer to this one there was an increase in the costs for parents to put kids in camp last year that caused some feelings and so is that part of that that we're trying to raise more revenue for camps it could be that that's part of the performance over the years when you look at the absolute numbers this number is not based on an assumed increase again it's just looking at the trend line this burials number just when I don't know if you remember in the spring of 2022 when our buildings and grounds department was essentially hollowed out and we looked to do contracts one of the things we divested ourselves of were the burials the summer before we did 36 of them and they can be time-consuming you need multi-fazer if you're in Randolph center you're possibly dealing with ledge and some other things and so that's a game that's now privately done though we end up doing some cleanup helping out and we can that kind of thing this number right here this is I think kind of conservative I want to put in as we've added that planning zoning and grants position and we know that we're better be able to manage grants account for and collect management fees I think that's a safe number of $5,000 for most of the VCDP grants is the sort of maximum administrative fee so if we do at least four of those and we've got way more than that active right now we can be recouping those percentages this is every grant has some administrative fee and we're able to do this put this in our budget here solely and collect that money solely because we have a dedicated person whose job it is to work on this stuff now it makes it a heck of a lot easier we probably should have been able to do this before but it was one of those if we could to the amounts we could and then we recorded a revenue show up in audits so it was always accounted for but especially I'm sorry I interrupt you but if that's especially if that's a very conservative figure and we're looking at a pretty substantial chunk of the cost of that position yeah I think we could probably I'm interested to see what the performance is but based on the number of grants available the types that are available the types that we could do so some of this like I'm basing it on the maximum for some of the state grants but we not if you remember the 15 Lincoln Avenue buy out there's $12,000 in that grant allotted to administration oversight we decide to take that one in house we've covered most of that just from that one grant that's largely going to occur in this fiscal year some of it will occur before then so we'll see I don't know that we get anywhere close to say 50% of those costs but I could easily see it being in that 30 to even 40 range depending on how active we are so I'm just going to wrap my manner on that position because we've talked about that position for a long time and whether what kind of value we get out of it and if we're getting 20 or 30 or more just in terms of being able to get reimbursed for work that we're doing anyway right and then if that position also opens us up to being able to actually go for and get grants that we wouldn't have had capacity for otherwise then we are really starting to get to a place where we're like getting like pretty close to paying for that position that position paying for itself I guess as well and some of this will reflect the time that Zoe and Kayla and finance spend on reimbursements too we'll be able to build for that those include some time that mark for example has been the one handling the New England precision mark for grant and we're keeping track of those hours and we're going to charge one so because it's mark even though it's a wastewater activity we're using general fund resources for the grant management you know some of the the revenue that shows up there might be from these other pieces in addition to Jeff's position too okay interesting and we especially want to make sure we do quite a few pastor grants whether it be for GMEDC or RICDC in particular we should get paid for the effort for that and so yeah map sales or what you can largely go online and get your map so I think if you look at the actuals for FY23 it was one dollar yeah okay can you be a fun fact about access to the reimbursement yeah so access to reimbursement is what the state pays us per parcel to go into our brand list management and like reappraisals but not they give us eight dollars and fifty cents a parcel the reappraisal is custom as a hundred dollars a parcel this 850 that the state gives us was developed in the late 90s early 2000s this is something we should talk to our local state representatives about about funding our towns and our budgets because I spend a heck of a lot more than 850 per parcel on maintaining the grand list and it could be more and we've been trying to get the legislature for years to give us more per parcel but just keep that in mind and we could be like it costs us at least a hundred and minimum per parcel hundred dollars per parcel to maintain my brand list every year at the ma'am but we only get 850 from the state we're thinking what five six year cycles for yeah this new act that came through they're trying to get like six year cycles mandated if this goes all the way through um please do the paper we don't know how many how many parcels we have oh and the fun fact about the accuracy reimbursement is that's only active parcels so I am required all listeners and assessors are required by law to have a value on non-taxable parcels which are inactive um and anything else that's tax exempt I'm still supposed to work on in touch for the state but that eight dollars and fifty cents per parcel does not include my inactive and tax exempt parcels um we're going to put one way or another though right so just to follow up how about how many parcels do we have we have taxable about two thousand six two thousand and sixty seven taxable parcels um feel free feel free to send me an email describing what you just described me to me verbally and what you think we need to change in statute and it's too late to do anything about it this year but we could start together we could start working on something um for for next year yeah I'm assuming I'm gonna I'm gonna run again assuming the voters will have me we could read we could do a we could we could introduce a a bill yeah I'd be happy to work with you on that but the way to start that process at least that makes it easier for me would be if you were to write me like a little no I said an email last year but we'll I'll rewrite it again thank you and from ballot too but just so you guys know we could have more revenue and I'm working on it okay well if I dropped the ball in the past I apologize no it's okay I mean you're not the only senator out there or representative out there he's got a promotion or a demotion depending on how you feel about it but it's something that you should be aware of we should all be aware of like everyone should be aware of the you'll see this throughout these orange sections just highlight that auditor space change so we call them out in this version so you can see each of the three places they are this is where they show us the general fund revenue um before we pay them out I'll show you where they go admin charges are for the back of the house services we provide for others by and large so we run payroll we ensure that folks have access to benefits those types of things and then you can see overall same as the increase on the expenditure end in terms of the amount our goal is always to end is zero it's a kind of a weird business model when you think of it we don't certainly want to be short on money or spend more than we pull in and we generally don't want to pull in more than we've spent though we've been in that spot a little bit the last few years in large part because of the vacancy savings we've had if there's been one benefit to that slog it's been that yeah and so now into the executive administrative there's sort of busy the catch all folks that are paid for out of this some of these are placeholders based on perspective hires and other resources such as this position so we may end up changing that depending on how everything goes um one of the things we talked about was trying to carve out a 32 hour a week position in finance in order to keep this budget the tax rate impacts kind of close we don't have that in here right now the idea being that some of these tasks that we're going to be there could be there in this sort of beefed up position so we may need to address that um everything else reflects hires this is just a placeholder number i'm trying to give myself a raise but at some point we will have to talk to talk about next year um so there's that insurance opt-outs we've had a few people take them but by and large we haven't seen as many folks head this way as we've seen them head here i've mentioned before pressures due to health insurance increase so you'll see there's spring code throughout 25,000 a lot of that so there are sort of two things that play i've mentioned it one is that we take we know we've got about a double we got a double digit increase for the premium year that we're in calendar year basis and so we've taken another six and a half percent of an increase and added that on to the back six so that's in there so it's more expensive and if everybody doesn't change and we've had a few folks that were on buyouts become two person plans through the years and or who weren't on our insurance initially jump onto our insurance so the balance of that has shown up in that number and that you'll see it throughout here's um in the health plan is there a pharmacy component to that yep so i am astounded at how much the pharmacy components of at least in my own case the medicare supplemental i keep coverages have gone up the arp i've checked on other ones as well and i mean my personal plan went up almost a hundred percent this year the one i've had for years at like 30 dollars it's 72 dollars it's come a month it's coming i was going to suggest that we could start hiring people who are all 65 or older but it doesn't seem like it's going to help well or that are 25 and other or maybe on there in my insurance yeah as long as we don't employ their parents too yeah we need just two brackets the higher people 65 and older it gets them off are i know it's a medicare problem it's a pharmaceutical industry problem is what it is retirement increase this is tied to those salary numbers it says a reminder we're in the state employees retirement system our contribution didn't change for the next fiscal year's forecast we've had some big increases there excuse me we pay 21.4 percent as our employer contribution that's tied to years of underfunding in the state employee system generally that to adjust rates contributions being members of the um non-represented non-unionized workforce we went first in terms of seeing those increases but the other groups i think are working on the same thing to get to those of funding levels that they need to be at so people are the main reason health insurance why we're up there i've kept the taxes here at 110 again we're not sure they don't always give us a number we should see it in a couple of weeks so hopefully we can adjust that one um and then coming through some of these slight increases in general insurance here so we didn't see it as much there as we saw in some other sections this NEMRIC finance assistance we added this line in 23 actually highlighted it as new because you haven't seen it this is when Cynthia from NEMRIC was serving essentially in the finance structures role on that basis we're paying for it out of this line it first started as technology which is where we pay for NEMRIC generally in addition to our managed services agreement for IT we've been way up when you look at actual three years but some of that's tied to paying for people we have had to replace computers we've had to do all kinds of stuff to ourselves we should be able to slide into a nice consistent spot based on what we're paying we've kept the line in case we need Cynthia for training or other things um so he came to us NEMRIC ready in terms of she used it for years before so that that helped bend that curve for us quite a bit are the are the two rivers in VLCT uh dues based on population I think they're both based on per capita rates yeah the VLCT one is for sure yeah as an alum I remember that one so some of these others this 12-5 this gets closer to where we're probably going to end up anyway for 23 and 24 and it's time to go back out go out to bed so this number could even be low but we're hopeful that that's that the single audit that we have because of the amount of federal funds we're taking in we're going to do one of those that's not shown here we have some federal funds which we can apply to pay for that makes sense to have one auditor do both pieces just because they're in there in our system but we could always have somebody else that utilities that's for this building primarily yeah um could be for any sort of other buildings um if they aren't included in their own budgets so I think the rec ones by and large are buildings and crowns ones are so you pretty much talking maybe here in a handful of other places this is the place holder I mentioned that was in last time police services committee is working through it so we could see some change there I just wanted to highlight that it's in there at that with the idea of being to tie it more specifically to ours provision of service really the Woodstock models I think you know the use way to describe that we're focusing on that we're drilling into that more next week yeah yeah police fund and highway fund are on for next week so no real changes like I said we use looking at those five-year cost averages over that so that's the executive session section here's how we get paid yep you guys get paid here's where they're being know that I just forgot it just came up that's nice here's the real money it's way below minimum I don't know it's pretty close here's where the real money is in this section of the budget it's not too many changes there town reports we're printing less of them and they're less expensive I think there's a real possibility we could figure out how to get them printed we could do most of it in house if we had enough people just do like on demand yep just because we provide a PDF that then goes and it's more or less a complete report at that point I mean they're not to say that they don't do things in the printing the binding to clarify things and do some reforming but we can easily print on demand from that PDF have it widely available some different options so but for now this is based because we've been keeping track we inched the order down each time we've done it since I've been here and then counted how many copies we end up with how many boxes we end up with so we keep just inching it down so that we always have enough we can always print on demand because and it's always on the website it's gotta be it's gotta be cheaper to print them to have a company print them and print them ourselves yeah and it's pretty nice we've had a good we're using repro graphics out of the Winooski Essex area cold chest I forget where they so since since we can't print them on demand if we have to it should and we always and we in the last few years we've had a lot of extras that just get recycled I imagine for 26 we could do yeah we I'm just wondering if locked in for 25 like like how many did we recycle last year do you know about how many a lot and there are a few check behind are the orca gentlemen sitting you go into that door you'll find boxes of both last years and prior years we got a couple of boxes we should cut cut it closer yeah what we could we're down to 500 in this order we went from 750 to 500 oh that's a big difference yeah okay and we still think we're gonna have some left over but okay well I think year one was we're closer to a thousand copies so so we've been inching our way now into the fire pieces there's really not too much in here the dispatch this reflects the cost with a little bit of an increase we had a little bit sort of built in we moved to berry city last December or I guess more than a year ago we did that as the situation at the sheriff's department at the county level started to change dramatically after the election fire needed to go first based on decisions related to duty clerks who pays for what between the sheriff's office and the side judges so that's how we ended up with berry city there and then brought Brookfield along with us as well in that conversation but we're not thinking there be any changes service has been solid I would not want to leave berry city I just yeah they were good to take us in and I the last thing we want to even though it's a small dollar amount last thing I want to do is head elsewhere that we've had others come and ask if we're interested dispatch for both fire and police but they took us in when we had no home and that should count for something firefighter wages those came from the wage schedule from the village fire chief in this case you can see there's a little bit of a hot in that generally programmed in 3% for the rest of them there really aren't a ton of changes here they're going to pay a little more for people to attend the meetings and trainings how much should they get individually is that kind of like a slide for things it's they each have an hourly rate assigned and then they when they put their pay things in so all three of them go in December so you would have approved that whole bunch right before the holidays and village fires paid twice so they'll go again in like June and with that you'll see basically payroll port that has hours you know hours worked based on the calls and the trains and I thought they got minimum wage most of the firefighters get minimum wage are very close to it and even for the officers you're not talking about a break in the bank I think there's only a handful of them that make more than $20 an hour for for what they're putting in so and then with East Randolph this just sort of came the ins and outs from them based on they think we need for the different pieces so really not too much of a change there and then here's Randolph center they had a change in chief it was spent in an angel for a very long time now Dana Williams is chief this was his first time through when he came in kind of late so and whatever we do to help them sort of work within and to these numbers and get set up we'll certainly do that and then just coming into recreation you can see some of these changes here these are all tied to that reallocation of people so it's not really that we're paying we paid our director that paying less that was the rec coordinator money was embedded in that number this was the maintenance personnel and then we boosted the coordinator money some of this is due to how we're operating this person in addition to taking on some of the coordinator steps taken on some of the buildings and ground stuff more of the building stuff so that's a full-time position now yep so let's move to that that's been something that was asked for for years and years even before I arrived this provides us with a little resiliency should we have any other transitions in the in between two and it's offset in large part by moving by that money going out that's really great we've been looking at when well for the years that I was on the rec committee that came up over and over again it's like we need more we needed more staff to do stuff that was really important and this has been the easiest year to get the rink up and running since I've been here I hear very little about it and that's exactly how it should be yeah other than updates about how much money we made over the weekend from the canteen that was more of an aside than something that was interested in but that's that's really great and then some of these increases decreases built on those five-year trend lines trash disposal that's what we're paying for that and we're keeping an eye on pool chemicals too that's been something so buildings and grounds again staffing how are utilities going down here but in general they've been going up we're basing that on the uses in some cases more efficient uses of the utilities they may lines might have been a little heavy before for example so just coming down to match trend lines okay with the pool we're also looking at sort of more efficient operations more efficient pumps some of those things was that the mark grant or was it yeah yeah the mark grant so some of it's it depends on the moment in time and whether or not they were overbuilt entering the budget cycle okay and some of it's also we're finding smaller pool windows in terms of window of operation we're finding smaller rink windows in terms of that sort of a weird combination of staffing in the pool case and facility needs and then with the rink it's we said we had mud season in december that's thanks for terrible skating so with the pool though we had the pool was i mean i know like the season of it is changing but we had less staff so the pool was open a lot less which um so are we just trending with that and just going to just have the pool open less in order to keep the cost down no i think if we could open it more often i still think we have enough money to to sort of accommodate that as well it's finding it's the lifeguards right i mean that's when we're talking about the staff are we trying to do more this well i guess this is the right question i think they'd like to yeah i think if we could open on time or a little bit earlier stay open a little bit later it was really that um where we saw some pressures in the schedule this last year on the august end of it as the lifeguards we had returned to college um indoor wanted a couple of weeks before they returned to college depending on where they were sort of in the life life cycle that was more the pressure this year in priors and total numbers it's been scheduling well there was a hiccup too when covid hit where last people were trained to be lifeguards so there was because of covid closing that down so i know that was a problem for a while but if we wanted to create a small but unique revenue generator we would essentially become water trainers yeah yep lifeguard and swim instructor trainers if we had those and then could hire them out i have this idea that we do that and then we somehow partner with btc to use their indoor pool during winter for town rec yeah that would be cool because that's something that everybody everywhere it's almost like um inspired by the fingerprint money going up when others can provide it how can we will it offset all this stuff no but we make a few thousand dollars out of it probably but if we can make a few thousand dollars and use that money towards programming by like renting the pool at btc then it's a it's a nice trade-off because we have younger people and ideally they're normally who are then getting great job training getting great life experience and then be able to give it back to the community so like my kids can go swim while teenagers are learning how to lifeguard and getting that life experience too and then btc i mean we were just there for Girl Scouts and they had no lifeguards and it was just there and people could be using it yeah i think that's a neat opportunity both for community benefit and then we'd see a little economic benefit out of it it's just figuring out how to make the first step i think so with the Billions and Grounds piece we talked about how the staffing has changed just over the past few years so this all reflects how that all shakes out and you see a decrease in seasonal staff because we don't need as many of those or hybrid positions if we're fully staffed up Billions and Grounds has also taken on more of the snow removal and winter maintenance and so they were responsible for clearing hydrants and still are though Chris's crew will help with that like dying dusty either went out or just going out with the back out of clear some of the areas where it's heavy or wet or frozen but helping with bulb outs parking lots all of those types of things so that relieves some of that pressure on John's crew to try to either hit these places when they need to be making their loops in order to bring a bigger truck in there and so some of it's using that new truck that we've got keeping the old truck deploying those things and then you'll see run out there with this snowblower as well from time to time and keeping things open so we are also asking them to do more than maybe in winters prior and they've been doing great with it so and that's really helped out so we've reconfigured a little bit how we're providing services along the way i'd like to say it was all by design that we did this great efficiency study and looked at performance management measures this is all as we scrambled for our lives figured out what worked and what hurt and then avoided that stuff that hurt the next time around so this is one of those that hey this you know this has some so we just a little bit here um we're just seeing as this building ages we're putting more and more into it um we have a plumbing repair scheduled and have it for a while it's created some operational issues you've seen more of us more often i think you probably thought just is there any allocation to our building you probably could charge so that that should be resolved we're waiting for a schedule to plumber and wait for a weekend day um but it's just an example of of some of the age related stuff that we're going on to um i want to point out this downtown maintenance line for years has been underspent and we've hung on to it um when we talk about streetscaping bike racks street trees sidewalk repairs we have money already in here that we can deploy for all of that that's the idea you know eleven thousand dollars to go very far with sidewalks no but if we're talking about a five thousand or six thousand dollar line and we historically spend twelve hundred dollars of this money it'll cover that and there's still the reserve which has three hundred thousand dollars in it as of today yeah but in terms of like street trees like yeah we can spend that money just on trees yeah we we haven't we haven't but it was more the point i'm saying like we'd like that'd be great yeah we have a source of funds for this stuff already in here and that's part of the calculus as to how we balance all kinds of priorities needs wants desires i know our you know our assistant tree warden is very interested in planting trees yeah downtown this coming year and this maintenance care planting one i don't want to think this hasn't historically or at least in the last few years been used for trees some of the reason why we're taking this number down we were spending this much to maintain the flowers um that were hung on those hanging baskets a lot of that was personnel costs over time costs water trucks we had to come in early in the morning because of how high they were rigged them up it was pretty intensive and then we haven't been able to get the flowers and then it was also we had a staffer fall off a truck while doing watering it was hurt pretty significantly so we've looked at the program and the hope would be that if we brought back streetscaping say it might be something kind of ground bound a little easier for everybody and or that we might be able to be a garden club volunteers town staff engagement it's a little easier so it doesn't have to be herald screw with a certain truck with the tank in it they have to take it out and so that's in any of this budget fees for like matching community development grants or anything like that or does that come out of a different budget we could it would probably depend on the amount there's no real grant match set aside in here but depending on what it was we don't usually match any of the grants out of buildings and in grounds and we try not to budget for either the revenue or the expenditure unless we're pretty sure we're going to make it up so the grant revenue piece up above we're fairly sure we're going to be able to charge for that we haven't years past when you get to the highway budget there's the grants and aid revenue those are annual we've had them for three straight years they're not going anywhere we can put that in pretty safely that's something we plan to do but by and large we'll show them in the accounts is sort of grant money and grant money out and I think one of the things I'd like to do especially as we've staffed up capacity finance grants management and then with Mark's role is to be able to get a really good handle on how much what's the right amount can we prioritize them and then maybe we have a good sense of what is the grant what are we spending and an average year on match and what are we taking in and maybe we can show that a little differently so we've got the raw data it's just not been pulled together yeah yeah so planning zoning this is the other half of that position we've funded half last year here's the other half all of these numbers are up as a result of that there's no need to amp up any of the supply numbers we've got a legal expenses line here that we could use for specific planning zoning ones by and large we're spending most of the legal money out of the general legal services line up in the executive section at the very top and we haven't knock on wood seen a need to utilize it when we've had bigger cases to deal with such as the fire station or the accident out on rifle brook road those are legal services were provided through our insurer so we had attorneys that were set up through that process paid through that process represented us wholly but didn't appear on that general legal line so we've had those bigger longer term long year cases that's how we pay for those and what you see here is for the stuff in between so when we talk about 10 Dudley Street we get into we're gonna I think have a conversation about a blighted and unsafe property and and how to do that on manager's drive that'll be where we engage and use some of those funds so there's a line here and we've left it but it's if you need drb or other guidance but so there isn't really a need for supplies then in the Lister's budget again paying benefits moving Mimi up to a rate that both matches her abilities her continuous improvement in education where her peers are throughout the state very fortunate so that's why if that one looks a little bigger this is I think a long overdue move regression to the mean she's appointed by the Lister's and so this is one that we talked about together okay so she's yeah I think I actually said to them do you want to pay me more given how much she's put in I mean she's at the vanguard of continuous improvement education for us so really soaking up those opportunities for fun facts and then she brings you fun facts and so they got their own legal line this is tied to re-appraisal thinking there might be an uptick in that I think primarily the same thing with professional services looks like we have a line missing there from a formatting perspective but so that they need for some kind of follow-up commercial property appraisal could be what's most likely for that in the clerk treasurer's budget some of the decreases are these are simply tied to the fact that Mary makes less than it and was a tenured employee with a rate that was that sort of one in a scale Mary's new has a rate sort of mid-scale with some adjustment to have her position match some of the other organizational similar categories so there's a little bit even though it looks like a decrease there's a little bit more for Mary in there than just the three percent she's killing it too so it's also performance related in terms of being earned so that's why but some of that is just tied to one employee to another one making more one making less pretty simple and they're operating but we have a little more on election expenses 25 we've got everything from primaries to presidentials to town meeting and this matches where we've been a little bit in prior years where there are similar conditions so that's why there's that increase there ambulance services appears here on its own line like we said nearly 30 grand and we've highlighted the channeler one you can see the insurance piece here is up so we'll take back in because it's a couple of buildings but ours seems less effective it could be because ours is not of historic value those other pieces and then the fuel oil when we're leaving the same though now we're talking about sort of multi-year trend lines there in the debt service one this is where you see the three time again now so the orange ones these are the ones that are leaving the section for the auditor's recommendation all the rest of them stay here we've got a mixture of this highway or public works related stuff building stuff the channeler bond some splits these were the two that were highlighted with the auditor so that's why we're moving on those and not others some of these frankly given the lifespan we can look at that at farther moves additionally we don't need distance about that this is pretty well said we start to see debt retire in fiscal 26 27 in terms of debts start to come off the books channeler bond i think channeler bond gets close yeah i've got a debt service schedule close at this point let me take a quick look i think 20 year bond right i think that one was 20 yeah let me see here i gotta remember it's 20 or 30 channel is another even another three years so we've got you know in 26 we see that dump truck dump trucks i'd mentioned to you um there are a few others that come off and then in 28 we start to see even more of them but that's when we start to buy down some of the debt and as we've talked about probably one of the priorities if we pay less than debt service that's more money for everything else we have to do debt to expenditure ratios all that exciting not fun fact stuff transfers out we keep these lines they're we haven't really used them for a while and then in the reserve funding this is where we've mentioned in the summary the reduction in the cemetery the creation of the building grounds reserve and some of this is we had been there's sort of no unifying theme how we're paying for stuff there so this could be everything from you know the building they use down at the landfill has needing heating system stuff over the years and we should plan for something um probably a little more functional for them there's no restroom at that facility for example um it was meant sort of as a temporary thing that we've now extended into sort of full-time use um mowers need to be replaced those are big cost items um any other equipment that they use in addition to their own trucks so this creates a space for those to be paid for some of them have come out of the cemetery reserve through the years but um this is something that's we've been talking about since I got here when we did the truck we sort of turned the skis downhill and put it over the cliff so so we committed to it so it's only about a four thousand dollar increase overall and you get to as everything that's out about fifty eight thousand dollars no new programs no real new services we're trying to provide what we've provided with greater consistency and efficiency we've talked a lot about internally and in building this budget and generally um sitting down in February and creating a work plan for the year that we think is realistic that we can stick to some of that will include tasks for you all to agree with so it's everything from our personnel policy is overdue for our team we have ordinances that are 40 plus years old there are systems that we need to we could sharpen up um things that will then translate hopefully into when Joe comes in you need something for us regardless of who's here you can get it effectively and efficiently rather than waiting for someone to be here because this is closed that's closed you know stuff that's available online so just sort of taking that leap from I think we've got a group with a lot of potential we've got a high ceiling now we've got to turn into performance and consistent can we be a little more organized our grants management piece is a big one we're hiring capacity for that we're talking with finance for that so everything from how we manage the grants we already have how we pursue outside grants what's the right number of them for us to manage in a given point because we just tend to comes to grants we're like pack man we'll just if it's there and an art path will eat it it would be nice to be a little more thoughtful and to use that capacity for stuff that we want to make sure that we really want to do and so some of this all fits into that so that's why we're not looking for to anything new to build up the capacity we've been talking about for years one of the things that's not in this budget in addition to that 32 hour week position are any engineering services money so we might try to build those into project pieces we have a certain amount of that incorporated into the ARPA asks on the town list so if we have to take a seat on that one we're talking 15 20 thousand dollars there to get engineering capacity we're okay if we're covering it somewhere else for the things that we really needed for so there's some of the thinking in that so there's like I said this is a budget that enables us to be fully staffed to just get a little more consistent at what and kind of grow into it question so this so we're looking out of one and a half percent increase in the general fund budget which is way under inflation right last year we've increased salaries in some cases significantly we increased positions a bit we've had increased big increases in certain insurance medical and property and yet so where we're like it's that move of debt service is that the big that's the big difference so when you look at spending from year that's why it stays within 58 thousand dollars even though we've added that other capacities because we're not spending that back out on the debt service part of the reason why we kept it at that one six is because knowing that there's a corresponding change in the amount to be raised by taxes so knowing that those two in a normal year where we don't move anything around and we had a fifty eight thousand dollar increase whatever you're seeing on the plus minus is probably going to be pretty similar if all the other revenue holds but this is not that year in order to accommodate that recommendation which makes perfect sense eliminates the potential for error we raise it in a highway fund already anyway so there's no impact on that budget to move around so some of that's why you look at so less than an inflationary increase but it's knowing that that number is going to be a different kind of a bite if you take just the last grand list value that we had knowing that that's not going to be the same that's a five cent bite for example which starts to feel a little substantial okay so it's balanced a little bit about that throughout all of this we've tried to be thoughtful and balanced all the competing priorities and there's not enough room for everything but we made it enough room for everything that we could but yeah that was the factor in staying low because it's like you look at first I got really excited I saw it was 1.58 percent it's like we get 32 hour a week back in the engineering stuff back in a few things back in and this number kept gnawing at me right there yeah and it would even if we were able to calculate it to the penny I still think you know that's we just want to be mindful yeah especially because when we get to the highway fund we're going to see increases there slight ones in the library nothing big but there's still an increase there there's an increase in the request for special appropriations and whatever we end up doing with the police fund it's likely to be an increase of some kind for someone because the one thing I think everybody agrees on what we're doing doesn't work I don't know if everybody agrees on that's the one thing that's consistently come up as an area of agreement so okay and then that's before you get into the things we don't control school taxes right yeah right right we generally try to be mindful of it and use our 30 cents of capacity wisely or whatever it works out okay do you want to see the special appropriations there at the very bottom that won't be take very long quick look at that yeah but that was the third thing on here and this is what we expect yeah based on what they're not they haven't all come in yet nope there's still time to petition for increases so this is in the case of the senior center this is we've got a petition it's been certified validated by emory so we know that they're on the ballot for this a lot of the other ones most of the other ones they're just re-upping automatically yeah and we've got their annual reports and as part of that process they submitted us letters saying what they intended to do with their asks and the policy and practice is that if you're level funding you don't need to go through the petition process it's sort of a right straight shot onto the warning by policy because you can place them on or not but if you want an increase right for your petition so we're expecting everybody to come back with the same request except for the senior center yeah I'll go back through and we'll make sure that we got everybody's number but looking at this I've got nine or ten of them have confirmed you know through the stuff that they've provided us that they're looking for level funding and so this one unlike some of the others this is straight in terms of how this paid for there's no revenue offsets this is a straight property tax payment for these groups we had one small increase last year too so it's not like we often see requests for an increase I'm trying to the food shelf last year went up to 5000 from two or three thousand was the petition increase and based on need and utilization and that's what they were seeing so that's that piece we're going to do more capital improvement program stuff next week John and I have to sit down talk paving we want to cost out a sidewalk machine to provide better maintenance in the wintertime we're going to have more variable weather and it seems by all accounts we are this storm it was really hard for one operator one machine want everything to get around and get those things done in a timely fashion we get a second one we get some additional attachments and then we have two machines that can go out there and do yes the winter maintenance pieces but we don't have say a mowing device that's more like a brush hog for the other one keeps the cost lower gets a piece of equipment that's how we mow the landfill solar panels some of those pieces gives us another tool to deploy we already have a broom for us when we sweep intersections sweep prior painting sometimes let me put two people in them maybe pull some buildings and grounds capacity get out there and get those sidewalks take care of with that I think that would be really great speed so that that was one of the ideas that as we've juggled response to weather this season I mean we had this last year too it just didn't seem I think that December storm December rain just last storm it's certainly right there for us but even even last winter they were days where it just took a while to get to all the sidewalks and I know there was times where I saw people like you know walk me in the middle of Pleasant Street because the sidewalk on the side of Pleasant Street is snow that had just been plowed onto it you know from from the street and the machines actually we had the plows before which is a little faster I think depending on the type of snow but we've got the snowblowers now so heavy wet stuff takes a different sort of finagling with the wet but yeah when there's a snowblower pod just the idea that having more than one machine yeah to send people out on if that meant that those some of the sidewalks got cleared you know a little faster I think there's a bunch of people who walk around downtown and we really appreciate that yeah that's that's one of the thoughts that's an area of investment has a real impact has real benefits an area of need and we can make it flexible in terms of making it other usage out of it yeah so and and we've been talking about having more sidewalks not less so just even more need for time for that kind of service yeah so those are the pieces we want to make sure we have when we get to the capital plan we'll have open questions as to police vehicle replacement ties in the police services committee stuff ties into the creation of the capital reserve ties into where we're at in the process we're going to need to replace two of them one way or the other so there are those types of open questions more than I think I've mentioned a minor change we've done in five-year looks I kind of want to do a three-year look to tie it to our debt service to tie it to the allocation of our funds especially if we spend money on engineering and estimates so we have a multi-year plan that we can truly live out we do the five-year plans and then we do the year to the extent that we can we essentially start over again and either push everything out reconfigure some stuff and that is common most municipalities you should look at them every year that's the spot a lot of municipalities are in but it'd be nice to set a three-year plan budget to it and then it ties into some other projects that we want to do over that work plan here it's a long-term financial planning it's clever yeah and I stole it from Brattleboro but the idea being that we can seal over a longer trend line where we want to go and a better plan for it so then we can do more pay as you go whether it be things where we avoid debt increases or changes in service so it's really a lot of can we get better organized and more consistent because we proven really good at running around and running for our lives but now we're all tired and we want to plan and I've got a capital flow chart I had it in your amended packets I don't know if you want me to pull it up on the screen or review it was just to sort of remind everybody of how that more or less the money flows through that most of it's out of the annual expenditure budgets as reserve transfers and or as direct as service payments we also have grants on the water wastewater fund end those are enterprise funds so rate pairs pay those we've got some exciting things going on on those end especially on the water end not just the northwells project but if you remember we're doing that lead service line inventory too the state's covering that it's man it's again it's one of those choices it's not a choice but nice that they're providing the funding for it that'll be another piece of the discoloration puzzle because it'll identify those lines of a certain area that are likely to assist in you know we could upgrade all of our lines and all of our water sources and take out all the manganese and do all the stuff but if you still have service lines certain age of certain things individual users might see something different than their neighbors depending on and we get more of the lead out of the of the system so that's underway too and that'll come with a capital plan and those service lines aren't ours but it helps identify costs can help homeowners businesses other people plan like i said in most of the budgets there's nothing doing nothing exciting in that police budget there's all the excitement you're going to need for a second continue talking about your drama when you get on the select board what's that you were talking about the drama when you got on the select board yeah yeah that was might not compare to we will try to figure out some way to provide some range of impact for people too because a lot of times people will go they want to know what's going to cost them and totally fair totally normal question the reappraisal makes that harder to answer so we'll try to figure out a way to reliably say at a minimum what we're thinking is maybe range of outcomes even though the more information you provide the more it gets the more it can be twisted and misshapen but i'm not entirely sure how else to do it when you don't have a number at the bottom timing it just really comes together nicely you know like every meeting i was like i have not been in this spot 20 years so thank you for furthering my edge so just to yeah recap we'll do police and highway next week maybe on the 25th we can do water and waste water quickly even though they're enterprise funds they still go through the same process but they'd be the remainders and you've seen everything else and we'll do capital over those two weeks as well paving plans to big domino that was the one we pushed to the front I also want to take some time to think about gravel road projects in light of everything we've already done because of december and then equipment and some of it with the three year there's just some conversations there's information we need in conversations we've got to have that are bigger than this year Trini's mentioned it a hundred times the fire truck conversation is just hanging out there we've got nine trucks and it would take us 30 years and four and a half million dollars to replace the top five based on the exercise we did in august with the fire services folks right some go to just something's yeah we're gonna have to figure something out but it's probably not going to happen between now and february 4th so we'll keep building those reserves at least be thinking about the next truck because that we can reasonably do I have never been in a budget process with this many open questions this late so it gives me a little bit of a little stress i'm gonna have a question and a comment yeah go ahead question on the town report so a number of years ago the select at the town meeting they voted to just ban and distribute town reports to Floyd store East Randolph and that but you know there's a few of us a few people a few neighbors should I say they also agreed at that town meeting that if someone called to have one mailed that they would do that and I always had one mailed I get one from a property owner beckle as well you know it just gets mailed to me I'm not saying I'm gonna bust the line here but is that still an ability to be able to you know call the town clerk and say have a mailed just because I've got some elderly neighbors and they're not exactly computer literate either yeah you know I mean to be able to do that so can they still call to to get the town report mailed to them yeah you know it's just that's a that's just a question that I kind of had you know I can have you know the neighbor that you know uh get get into the town's website is not the easiest thing to do you know so I just want to understand that so there's still that ability there because that's the way it was kind of presented at at town meeting that year yeah yeah certainly willing to get them to the folks however they want to right yeah the other climate I have and Trevor you need to cover your ears um because the other climate that has a has a I really think the town manager's salary is under where it needs to be that's my own personal feel or the amount of FTEs that he has to manage or the amount that he has to manage there and what what today's salaries are um and I don't know what the today's salaries are for town managers and what is it 73 communities 75 communities that have a town manager formal government heartland just hired a new town manager at I think 118 or something like that yeah I just seemed you know but I I see him I see him at night at least at that one committee meeting well you know who he is at night here but you know the amount that has to go into to being a town manager I think that we sometimes take advantage of that bargain yeah yeah that is not an argument that falls on yeah and I don't know contractually or any of that where any of that stands I just I just I and I didn't look at the budget in the last couple years at least and it's actually not just the time manager we've been trying pretty hard to raise salaries for town employees in general but especially the um the department heads who are you know a bunch of talented people who work really hard and right and we really want to show how much we appreciate them yeah yeah because you see other line items and some of them in some people's minds I'm a conservative guy so some people want to say well why are we spending money on this arrangement on that but then there's other areas we have to manage that many people that many square miles there've been miles of road that many you know the waste there were the wastewater infrastructure that the granting and all of that you're going to you're talking to the choir here oh yeah yeah I feel like I certainly get no argument from me yeah yeah so I just I just I just think it's also it's a great thing for retention yeah there's a lot of open positions it's cheaper to pay people a little more than to hire new folks oh yeah in the training process because even if you just at least two years you don't figure out where you are right you know you're I mean in any industry you know so it's not it's just my comment yeah I appreciate it so um are we done with our agenda we're ready for manager's report uh yep sure that's have a good night to thank you thank you what what uh date next week is the uh is this this same meeting same spot yep yeah Thursday same time have a great day thank you thank you same great fun let me just look at my written report here same back channel for those of us who remember our show we're going to be there in person oh party um so Alyssa and I discovered that we are both turning 40 this year and within what two weeks of each other so you yeah we're in February right yep yep so my last night of being in my 30s I'll spend with you guys in the 25th so we got there and then Alyssa has a few wow beyond what a life I know I just want to let you guys know I think we should have pizza for your last night I think so we'll do the Essex style we could call it a budget workshop and we get pizza drinks and snacks we can find good pizza or we'll get through the agenda fast and I don't get it I didn't say anything so for real go to be there Alyssa we'll have some better ideas here so not too much to add to the written report um just want to point out again it looks like the December storm and mud season that fall will be eligible for FEMA reimbursement it's really good John and his crew they've just been getting after it we did some snow removal activity last week they were thinking about everything from places to store snow to places for the water to go um they are just this new crew this has been great um what they're thinking ahead doing all that we still need to get Chris another guy though they're still doing the same great stuff there um that's kind of our one short position other than the one in my office but it would be nice to fill too and then I think there's that with the FEMA stuff we're hoping to push to the stuff to the forward um to the front the stuff where we get reimbursement sooner or later um we're going to have the bylaw amendment hearing on February 8th it looks like just based on timing and notice stuff so we'll we're still moving that process forward there's just that piece to consider we'll keep trying to get you stuff these weekly meetings they're a little hard to generate content for you so I will keep trying to to do that get ahead there are a few pieces that wouldn't be able to get you like with the timeline stuff that hopefully we'll be able to do um we have another Monday holiday which I'm not complaining about but short weeks become short weeks um so I think that's I'm trying to think I feel like there's one other thing nothing major I have the revised loan documents you don't have to take any action we have to resign the ones that say chair I have to hunt the tree down here I think there's a resolution yeah to sign in here that you guys can sign and then this was tied to there's sort of two pieces for the three of you can sign um the repayment schedule it was showing I remember from last week less than the two thousand dollars in total per year which would have been lowly for four years it's really closer to the 27,000 we budgeted for that we saw in an earlier sheet so it was no big deal didn't impact anything on our end they caught up very quickly on the DEC SRF program in the bond bank end so I'll try to separate that out before we go and we can start getting our money back we had our first reporting timeline for that NEP DEC ARP program let's just say that the agreement that we forced everybody to sign became an hand mark was able to use it up and down the stream so with the business and with the state to keep us out of a sticky wicked so his application plus the way we decided to set it up it worked go go team that was all I had you did the executive session thing unless there's something you have that I don't know about um you appointed during the meeting so you're good to go I don't have anything else for it I'm okay with that so there's nothing else wait wait no this one's mine so I didn't need to jump in glory gosh I knocked stuff over okay um I would like to motion that we adjourn the meeting so listen do you want a second a second I'll defer my usual motion making the machine here you guys sure all those in favor hi hi we're returned thanks folks bye