 Start the meeting for Monday, September 17th, 2018. First order of business is to approve the agenda and I would entertain a motion for that. I'll second that. Any discussion or changes for the agenda that we need to have? Already. Okay, all in favor of approving the agenda as presented please say aye. Aye. Consent agenda items, the minutes of the September 4th meeting. I'll entertain a motion to accept the consent agenda items. So moved. Second. Second. All in favor please say aye. Aye. All right. Public, time for the public. Any member of the public for commentary tonight? All right. They're being done. Tracy. Hi there. Could we have you move up to this seat here Tracy and we'll try to get you set up with the microphone. Okay, so Tracy you've indicated interest in being a member of the Conservation Commission and from the perspective of the board we'd just like to know a little bit about you and what brought you to our doorstep. The commission, what is your interest in that? What's your background? How does that all fit together? What a very proper, Sara Lee's proper. About a year and a half ago. I wanted to get involved, went to a couple and went to that one in particular and raised awareness within the town. Skills, I'm not a biologist. I have skills that I think are good with. Working with homeless veterans you can also work in any group and any committee to help smooth things and find some common ground. Good. Any questions for Tracy from the board? Well we certainly appreciate your interest in joining in the town's endeavors like that and welcome to the community and welcome. I suppose we'll make a motion and go through that process. Okay, Mark. Am I near any of you? Tracy. I will make a motion to appoint, is there a time frame on this? I forgot to look it up, I can fill it in. To appoint Tracy Sweeney to the Conservation Commission for the said amount of time. I second that. Alright, any further discussion on the nomination? There being none, all in favor of appointing Tracy Sweeney to the Conservation Commission for the term to be determined here, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Very good. Thank you Tracy. Thank you. Hopefully I'm allowed to come. Yes. It's a start. Thank you. Welcome to the community. Yes. Thank you. Thanks. I'll let you know what that term is. Okay. Right. They were Megan's term. Yeah. Most of these are generally two-year terms, what is that? Most of the term is four. Four. Four. The remainder of Megan's term, I don't recall what that is. Okay. Sounds good. Oh wait, I can fill you in then. 2019. So just one year and then you can be appointed for another four year. Okay. Okay. So I'm not even going to be next. It'll be April 30th, 2019. Okay, great. Alright, manager's items. Yes, sir. At your places or distributed by email, there's a draft. It's headed to current policy and then proposed policy. And attached to it is a copy of Section 5 of 32 BSA. This deals with tax bills and their confidentiality or not. A number of years ago, there was issues raised in the Vermont legal community and throughout municipalities from folks wanting to get information on tax bills. Typically, the people looking for information are escrow agents or attorneys that are working for somebody either buying or selling a property. And there was some gray area when we Act 68 came into play and what used to be pre-bates that were sent directly to homeowners for their property tax relief were turned into state payments that credited your bill. So even though it would be very difficult, some suggest that you might be able to figure out somebody's income by looking at their property tax bill, the value of their property, and then whatever state payment you receive. So the legislature clarified a couple years later that these tax bills, the information regarding the, if a tax bill has a credit on it, it becomes a confidential tax bill. So in response to that, a number of years ago, we, well actually in response to the fact that they were confidential or the argument they were confidential, we passed a policy that basically said you could come to the office and get your own tax bill or we would mail it to you. We would not provide it to your attorney, we would not provide it to an escrow agent. And so the current policy on the front page is what we live by now. And for a variety of reasons, customer service, I think highest among the reasons, we're asking that we change the policy. What happens now if an escrow agent calls and they want a copy of your tax bills so that they can make sure they pay it on time, we tell them that we can't send it to them that the tax payer has to come in. And the tax payer will come in. We end up making a photocopy of it, giving it to that person. That person faxes it or emails it to the escrow agent. We do all that work anyway, but we're making it very inconvenient for the tax payer. So what we propose is we will still not provide the information by phone. If we get a request in writing and that could be an email stating that they are one of these authorized personnel that we will then, for $2 a parcel, send that information out. And it's important, the $2 per parcel is, and Carolyn may know the name of the company, but we get escrow companies that call and they want 150 tax bills. And it does take time to process those. So we're asking that you allow us to do this. I think it will make our residents and taxpayers happier because they won't have to come down here to get them. They can just be sent to the people that need them. There have been times where, you know, people are on vacation in Florida and their tax accountant is wanting this information and they call up and say, our policy is we can mail it to your home address and if they're in Florida that doesn't really help them too much. So I think this would be much more helpful to the taxpayer and the burden won't be any different on us except we'll get paid for a little by a time. There'll be no charge to property owners. Right. So if you come in looking for your own bill to do it yourself, we'll just photocopy and give it to you. Is that stated anywhere other than just practice? No, but we can add it. Because that was my only question with this. Well, in the original policy, you've got, it's basically addressed to the property owner and then the proposed one, the property owner is not listed there. So, yeah, with that addition that covers that and also deals with the fee. We are one of the very few municipalities, evidently, who have such a direct honing policy. Carla has looked. They're pretty, most internationalized are pretty tight, but this is like zero customer service. Do you need a motion to adopt the proposed policy? Yeah, with your additional language that we'll insert. Is it still available that you can look up tax bills on that online? Yes. Is that something? Where we direct escrow agents and real estate people. That's the redacted copy. It doesn't have, obviously, doesn't have a state credit on them. That doesn't limit who can access those bills. But this would be a limit of who can access the counter. We're limiting who's allowed to access that information at the counter. Yeah, if you come in and ask for my tax bill, you can't see it. Anyone online could do it. You could go online and see it, but the information about my tax, my state payment and the net tax won't be there. The background for the inability. Right. I'd make a motion that we allow Bill to put into force the proposed policy. I'll second. I'll second. Written but with a change of your language. I'll second. Any further discussion on the issue? There are being none. All in favor please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Good. Got that. The police report is under managers items, but you can take it if you'd like, Mark. Sorry. Okay. We were discussing it a little bit earlier when Mark arrived. I not had the opportunity to transfer this over into the graph form. However, you can you can see from the report here. More activity by the water bearing troopers that that shift occurred that we anticipated where the number of calls handled by the resident troopers compared to the calls handled by the middle sex troopers has has shifted to that that balance that we were actually looking to see. We did have some discussion earlier about the the increase in in the enforcement activities. It appears to be a very smooth transition as they become a presence in the community. The first month was more getting folks acclimated to the new presence being available. And now the activity level was is beginning to to shape itself up. The out of out of district calls were were limited to one assistance on a fatal motor vehicle crash. But no, the community based activities they did they they had a meeting at the Waterbury car show. And they also adjusted the workday hours for the first day of school to have a presence around which was something that we had expressed as a matter of interest for us. And we're more than willing to do that. In addition, Bill, did you want to mention the the discussion regarding CrossFit Brook? Yeah. I think you all remember when we entered into the agreement and we talked about schools. I did tell Lieutenant White that even though CrossFit Brook is in Duxbury, there are watery children that go to that school and I didn't think we would have a problem if they would pay attention from time to time to that area. Rick Ostrom, the daytime trooper was in to see me while he brought this to me early last week. And then he was in on another occasion. And I asked him about that. He'd been over there a couple of different times. I noticed on Front Porch Forum one day last week someone wrote in expressing concerns about people doing Carla's favorite move passing on the right. She chastised me for that one. Anyway, as people are waiting to turn left into the CrossFit Brook school from Route 100, a number of people from the through traffic were going by in the breakdown lane on the right-hand side. And they just asked people to pay attention. They didn't know if it was illegal. So I forwarded that Front Porch Forum comment on to President White and said, you know, this is an example. He got back to Mark and me on Friday, I think, and indicated that he had passed this information along to both troopers and that they would pay attention to that. From my perspective, this is working out very well. The daytime trooper, I see him fairly regularly. He comes in. I had occasion to call him on an issue last week. He came right in. He dealt with it. Got back to me later in the day. So I think there's good communication between staff and the troopers out there. According to Rick, there's a lot of interaction between the public and the troopers. He reports that Joe was the afternoon nighttime guy has the same experience that people are very willing to flag him down, call him, interact with him. So I've heard no complaints about the service. What little I've heard is good. Most of what I hear is from the troopers themselves. So it seems to be going well. If you didn't notice it, it's right on the second page. About 44% of the tickets that have been issued were issued under municipal ordinance, which means once they filter through the system and if they are actually paid, the money or a portion thereof will come to us. For every traffic ticket, if you get a $100 ticket for speeding, the state takes, I don't know, $26 or something right off the top for the administrative fee. And then you get the rest. The only thing that we would get tickets revenue for would be for speed violations, maybe stop signs. But crosswalk violations, defective equipment, careless and negligent operation, those are all state statutes and the money, no matter which, even if we had a, you know, if the Montpelier police officer writes that kind of ticket, it still goes to the state. But they are writing tickets on our ordinance, which is good. I don't believe we have received any revenue yet. It takes months for that stuff to cycle through the system. Tomorrow night is the meeting of the community advisory board for the state police. Our feedback on this project is one of the high points of interest for that group as well. And from what I've seen, the presence throughout the community is the most noteworthy thing that I've seen. It's town-wide. You see them patrolling the areas throughout the town as well as down here in the village and any given point in time you can encounter them. When we have calls for service, as noted on the report, and it was pretty consistent from last month to this month, the response time is usually anywhere from a minute to 15 minutes. And that was really one of the strong things that we wanted to try to be able to create with this presence was just reduce the lab time for community response. And they've been dealing with general interest complaints because they are here in the community. They're able to take a much more intensive approach to being part of the community. And that seems to be working well. Yeah, I agree. I think everything I've read and what I've heard is positive. And the only question I do have, if we are sending them over into Duxbury, do we need to involve them in any way, the town? And how does that work when they're under our contract? Involve the town of Duxbury? Yeah, I don't know. If they're working under our ordinances over here, they're under a contract to... Well, that would be under state auspices. So they go over there, they're just... Yeah, Duxbury is covered by the state police out of middle sex. And this particular area is an area where quite often in the past when the village PD was here, things would happen there. The village would slide over and... I didn't want to cover it. No problem. Yeah, it's pretty much seamless. If they write a ticket over there, it's going to be on Route 100 State Highway. There will be no revenue coming here. And it's more... The idea of writing a ticket over there is really not the idea of it. When I first mentioned to the lieutenant and then to Drupal Ostrom that just going over there and going into the school, and I don't think Duxbury would have any issues with that, but it's all working well from our perspective. And if I remember the contract right, they should be sending us a bill soon, right? It's after the quarter ends, right? Right. So July... Yeah, in September. Because we haven't paid anything yet, so... Oh, sure. Yes, Ursula. Yeah. You see, Ursula Murray, Watergate. I start talking about this. It reminds me, and it's been kind of short notice, but we're having the bike and walk to school from Rusty Spanger on Wednesday morning and some of the emails that have flown back and forth. Someone raised the question, do we need to notify some police? Sometimes it goes, you know, the street up to... That's where I can be crowded. So my question is, do we, and who? When is it? It's going to be Wednesday morning. This week? Are they going to be primarily on the sidewalk? They're not going to be out on the street, aren't they? They usually don't have the street because they're riding their bikes. And they all go up at once. I've worked with things several times, but down there where you're handing out the goodies, and that's why all of a sudden the kids start the party after they announce, gather over here, and then they take off. I'm busy trying to clean up, so I don't know what else... There's two routes. One of which goes up Railroad Street and just makes the turn to Thatcher Brook, but there's also another group that goes to CrossFit. And so they go up and make the turn by snow fire. So they're gathering places at Rusty Park. Everybody meets at Rusty Park. And then they walk or ride to school from there. So what time, about 8 o'clock in the morning? Yeah, it's Friday. They call CrossFit kids first. And then Tom leads them. There's Frank. Yeah, over there. And also, well, if you're walking, you need to leave now. If you're biking, you know, five minutes later. But I've never been involved on that end of it. What happens is all of a sudden they're all gone and we get it. Yeah, yeah. We'll just make them aware of that. Rick should be on regular duty with that anyway and just be aware of how the kids... Probably be best just to have him contact Tom Drake and Denise Goodnow at Thatcher Brook directly. Any discussion at Generator? Yes. So in the budget this year in the Fund 76, which is a municipal building operating fund, we include $100,000 in there for new equipment. And I believe about $20,000 of that new equipment is a new server and computer equipment for the building that we'll need to put in probably before the year ends. And then the balance is mainly a generator. And I can't remember if the generator was 80 and the server was 20 or if the generator was 75 and the server and something else. I didn't dig out the detail of the budget. If you need that, I can go get it. The board directed the installation of a generator here at this building in order to harden it and arm it against loss of power for extended period of time so the building could function. I talked with Barb. We applied for a hazard mitigation grant or another grant from... I think it was a hazard mitigation grant. Anyway, we applied for a grant from the state of Vermont as did many other communities. As far as I know, none of the generator grants were funded. It wasn't a high priority for the state to do a lot of grant money for that. So the budget did not include any grant funding. There was nothing... So we budgeted the expense but nothing for the grant. The grant didn't come through. So Bill Woodruff has been working with Brookfield Service and they've made a proposal finally. It's not as easy to find a place here to get a generator but the cost of the generator, even though they've been hit with tariffs now Brookfield Service will honor the price that they gave us earlier in the year. $71,595. That would be a 100kW diesel engine turbocharged six-cylinder generator. There's a 10-week lead time on the generator, six weeks on the automatic transfer switch. The generator will have to be located on a concrete pad elevated up above the flood water level and more than likely its location will be kind of in the back of the front building, the James building outside my office window near the cedar trees back there. So if we're going to do it, that's more than likely where it has to go and it will be a little bit more visible to Main Street than I wish it were. I suppose we can screen it down the line if we have to. I did talk to Dina briefly on Friday after Bill gave me this information. I don't think anything is necessary as far as may require a zoning permit, but she doesn't believe it has to go to the DRB. If it does, we'll do it. So my question is, is the board still on board with doing this or not? Is the 715 including, are they installing that pad? Yeah, that's all inclusive. And the connection to the panel and everything? Yeah, I believe that's everything, Mark. There's always some incidental things that come up, but I believe this is an installed price including the pad. And if it's not, I'll let you know, but I asked Bill last week and I'm almost certain it is. You know, we have a generator. It would look like what's outside the fire station here if you go in the back of the fire station. It's elevated up on that pad. You know, we hope we'd never need it. If you remember, we had a problem last winter with we had some freeze up stuff here and things weren't working right with the heat pumps. And we got a little concern saying, wow, if we lost power for any significant period of time. So anyway, that's what the deal is. It's not cheap and there's no money to do it except our own. What was that grant total, I'm sorry? There is no grant. I know, but what was the one that we were, what was the application? I think it would have been... Was it HNGP money? Yeah, I think it was 80%, but I don't... Yeah, I think that's about what it was. So the board has already previously approved going ahead with this. We put it in the budget. Yeah. And then the parameters of the budget and items. Yeah, this Fund 76 is a municipal building operating budget. We ended last year with about a $50,000 deficit. We're transferring into this budget the leftover money from the construction job. Fund 80, there's about $93,500 that's coming into this fund. And without the generator, I mean, with the generator at $100,000, it shows that we'll end up with the same $49,000 deficit that we had at the beginning of the year. But if the generator is only $71,000 or $72,000, that's $28,000 or so, some of these other lying items may or may not be as high as their budgeted. If we end up with a slight deficit in this fund, it's not a killing matter. We will carry it forward and eventually we'll catch up to it. But the deficit will not be as much as projected here because we have a projected expense of, well actually, $100,000 isn't all for the generator. That's for the server as well. So we'll probably be in that same range. Do you need any sort of motion from us with that? Since it's in the budget? Yeah. I think you should make a motion to do it just because you also agreed to apply for the grant money and now I'm telling you we didn't get it. So just to kind of confirm everything, we'll have new auditors coming. What's your feeling on that grant and the possibility of us if we were to reapply next year? Is that a yearly? I mean, I know it's, you never know with grants, but I'm just wondering. Yeah. We could, we can apply again. As far as I knew, you know, someone else who applied for generators got one. Barb isn't here, so I can't confirm that right now. You know, if we've been here since January 2016 and haven't needed the generator yet. So, you know, are we going to, is it going to be a killing matter if we don't do it? No, but the board... It's an endurance policy basically. It is and given any sort of extended outage and the need to use the building during that period of time, I think that's what drove the initial discussion about identifying that. And the hope was that we would be able to find some grant funding to defray that, but it sounds like that's gone by the wayside for now. And if you make the motion to go forward with it, you know, I can have a conversation with Barb and if she really thinks, oh man, we should just reapply next year and they already told us we'll get it. I can delay it for that reason, but because we budgeted it and then we authorized the grant application, I'm just like a formal motion to do it and if there's a reason not to, I'll come back to you, but I'd like to get going if we're going to do it. You comfortable with that? Yeah. Well, I will entertain a motion to authorize Bill to go ahead with procurement of Generator as outlined in his description and as provided for in the budget as approved at town meeting. So moved. Second? Second. Any further discussion with that point? All in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Good. Columbus Day holiday. Yeah, this is a little bit out of the box thinking. The town provides its employees with 10 paid holidays a year. I don't have to go, I can recite them all for if you need to, but Columbus Day is a holiday that we still get. We still call it Columbus Day here and that's October 8th. And years ago, we used to get Veterans Day in November as well. And as time went on, probably 25 years ago, people in the organization said, you know, we get a holiday on Columbus Day. We have Thanksgiving in November. Instead of having Veterans Day, could we work Veterans Day and have the day after Thanksgiving off to give us a four day weekend? And the boards allowed that to happen. One of the holidays, a day that is not a holiday for us is Christmas Eve. And I'm not asking for a permanent change, but Christmas is on a Tuesday this year. So that means Christmas Eve is a Monday. And I end up sending people home early. We have no foot traffic to speak of on Christmas Eve at all. So I'm wondering if for this year only, the board would be receptive to allowing us to work Columbus Day, which most of the rest of the world works, except for the post office and banks, to allow us to work Columbus Day and take Christmas Eve off. I know for the office staff, the likelihood that we'll be doing work and that there will be people here will be much higher on Columbus Day than on Christmas Eve. As I said, on Christmas Eve, nobody's going to come in Christmas Eve. And we end up, you know, Carla, you know, she's her own boss. If she decides, well, it's Christmas Eve and she wants to leave early, she has to feel guilty that she's asking Beth to stay until 4.30. So I think it would be better if we allowed this to happen. I also think that I haven't talked to the folks in the highway department, but the likelihood, if it snows, they're going to have to work Christmas Eve whether we have the day off or not. If they work Columbus Day and cross their fingers that it doesn't snow on Christmas Eve, we actually get a productive day because you can do more work outside on the road system on Columbus Day. Sure, we're not going to be paving on Christmas Eve. I'm sure we're not going to be paving on Christmas Eve. Maybe Cabricchi will be, but we won't be. So I would like to make it clear that I'm not suggesting that we do the same thing for the week later, New Year's Eve. You know, that's a whole different kind of deal. So motion you would be looking for would be for 2018 only, the exchange of the Columbus Day holiday with being able to provide Christmas Eve as that holiday off. And water, wastewater, and highways, they can take either? Well, they don't have anything to do with water and wastewater. I guess, you know, if the highway crew decided, oh no, we want Columbus Day off because we want to go hunting. You like that flexibility. We can let them deal with it that way, but... Okay. All right. Is there a motion to that effect? I'll make that motion. Second. I'll second. Any further clarification on that? Do you think anyone has any kind of schedule plans to leave since it's so close to the Ave? There are people that do, but they don't. But take a vacation day. Okay. They're not going to have a holiday taken away from them, you know. Sure. So. Good. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Good. Annual audit. Yeah. This is just asking you to update what we did before. When I presented the information about the audit to you back several meetings ago, what I said was, you know, it's significantly higher price than it was before. Starts at $22,000 in 2017. Stays that, I mean, for the 17 year. So this year and the first two audits would be 22,000. It goes to 22,7233 and 24. And what I suggested was perhaps we can just do this. And because we only had one proposal to re-advertise next spring. When I got back to Sullivan Empowers, and I didn't even ask him about that, I called him back and said, I accepted your proposal. Let's schedule a date. And I thought we'd be already doing it. And they said, well, we almost didn't submit a proposal because, you know, we're booked. So we'll probably be there around Thanksgiving. So if we have to wait until Thanksgiving to do this, and then you have to ramp up and you, it takes a lot of work to go from one auditor to another because they're going to want to look at the last audits. I just don't think it makes sense to bother with next year trying to put this out again. Because they would like to do our audits in March or April rather than the June-July timeframe that Yacoboni did it. So they'll be here in November, then they're going to come right back. I also talked to Bill Yacoboni and talked about the price. And he told me, he thought that the prices that we got would be higher. So he said, it's not a bad price. I would just stick with them. They're a good firm. So, you don't really have to make any motions. But unless you don't want me to do what I just told you I'm going to do, I think we'll just stick with them through this five-year term as is and we'll go from there. Sounds like the proposal was reasonable. And the problem is just the initial scheduling. And once we follow it as a regular client, that should smooth up. Yeah. Good. Sounds fine to me. Thanks. All right. So we are at the end of our agenda. Make a motion to adjourn. I second that. All in favor of adjournment. Please say aye. Aye. All right. Thank you, Ronald.