 Welcome to the 227th Berlin Town Meeting. We begin with a flag salute. This flag is over here. Please join me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, liberty, and justice for all. Thank you. We are starting on page 2 with article 24 to elect a town moderator for the year ensuing. Is there any nominations? Thank you. In the exercise of discretion, I'll turn it over to Tour Nelson. Good morning. Are there any other nominations? Hearing none, all in favor of Paul Ghillies, as town moderator, indicate by saying aye. Aye. Any opposed, say no. The ayes have it. Paul Ghillies is elected town moderator. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's my 18th year, and I love this job. My job here is to help you decide what you need to do. We have a very short agenda today, but we also have other business, and I think we'll look forward to having some talks about various things at that time. The first article after the first article is article 25, and it says to hear the reports of the town officers for 2017. This way, I will go through the booklet. If you have one, you can follow along. And if you have questions about any parts of it, it should be addressed to the person who knows about it. But if we can't find a, we'll try to find the answer to any questions you have. Last year's minutes show that there were no comments during this section, and so I'd like to see you get a little more involved this time, if you can. But that's just a recommendation. So we have the select board report on pages 8 through 10. And you may have read that. It deals with some of the issues. Any questions for the select board on this? Or does the select board want to say anything about it? Nope. Then we have the general ledger, which goes on for a while. And then we have that goes to page 20. Any questions raised on that? The auditor's report, which takes up most of the pages from pages 21 through 71. We have the assessor's report on page 72. This is the person. Yes, Matt. So Matt, can you go just going at it? There's a page in there where the auditor has a letter that says if there are any problems or not. And I think I found it. And I think it said that there weren't any problems. But it'd be great if you remember this like what we just did. It looks to me like the report is on pages 70 and 71. I saw the same. But if, Tori, can you have an opinion as to whether we're in complete sync with the auditing standards? That is correct. There were no findings this year. Nothing that required a response from the select board or changes to the it was a very good audit this year. We're very proud of our staff and the job that they do, especially Dynas, both the town treasurers. She's put a lot of good processes in place to ensure the internal controls. So assessor's report, page 72. Any questions on that? 73, the town clerk's report through 75, listing total births, deaths, and other critical information. Delinquent tax list on 76. Speak up if you want me to slow down or stop somewhere. Public Works Board, 77. Board of Abatement, 78. Highway Department, 79. Yes. That's a great question. The Highway Department report does a good job of covering the repairs and work that has been done in the past year, but doesn't mention the plans for the upcoming year. I think the select board and the Highway Department could speak to what's planned for upcoming year. Who would be best to answer what we're going to do in the highways in the coming year? Jim Wancher? Jim? Tim? The question is, what are we going to do in the roads in the coming year? I don't think that to be comprehensive. What's that? We've got a paving project that we're putting in a bid for, which has stayed a long. We've done it for four years in a row now, and they've denied us the money because they don't have the funds. So that's one project that we have if we get to the bid, and then we're just going to do some paving wherever we need it if we don't get to the bid, because we only have $150,000 to spend on paving. And I'd like to do a lot more grappling this year than what we have done in the past, because it's paying off big time for the month that we've had this year already. So that's a project. And then we've got to put a bit of ditching and call reports to be done. Good. Any other questions for Tim? Yes? So I'll take that. I should, just before you go, I made the mistake. Tim, you are not a resident of the town. Does anyone have any objection to anyone who wants to talk, as long as they identify themselves as a non-resident, to allow them to talk to us? If not, what? It depends. OK, would you have any objection to Tim talking? OK. Who has a non-resident here who might be speaking today? Don't raise your hand if you don't. Yes? Bill, all right? Any objection to Bill speaking? And our state representative? Seems only fair. OK, we're not going to worry about that again. Now, Matt. Thank you. Can you tell us about the plan for Route 12 south of Montpelier, the second phase of the project, is it going to cross over into our town and the plans for Dock River Road and so on over the summer? Do you know anything about that? You're talking about the city of Montpelier? No, the recating of Route 12, Montpelier to town. Last time I heard that that wasn't on the schedule for this September. Any other questions? Yep? And a further Mike's question. One thing that's in the budget, or starting to be in the budget, not really just as part of the Highway Department budget, is we have two major culverts that need to be replaced, one on Richardson Road and one on Mirror Lake Road. These are both going to be major projects, and expensive projects. We're starting to set some money aside in the budget this year under the capital budget. Hopefully, we'll get some money from the state under the Highway Structures grants for both projects. But if we don't, it's going to be a Montpelier project to finance it. Plus, it can be working in the Berlin Pond, which is a public water supply. So just the permitting on that alone from the state is going to take some time. So we have the engineering contract out for both projects. Once we get the results back from that, give us a little better idea of what they're looking to do with those projects and give us an idea of what the final cost will be. Yeah, V-Trans came to us maybe about two years ago now, I think, a year and a half, two years ago, looking to do the bridges there at exit seven. They came to us with a couple of different proposals. The first proposal was to route traffic on Kraus-Ton Road to Paintern Pike and to build a temporary entrance to the interstate there by the Berlin Pond. That would involve a lot of traffic along those roads, full-size tractor trailers, the slack board, and I think everybody was in agreement. That was just not a viable option. That the engineering and the increased traffic was just not a doable option. So the second proposal they had was to close the southbound exit seven on ramp for a period of 21 days. And we felt that was a better alternative. That was our proposal back to V-Trans. They indicated initially that that's the option they would go with. We've not heard anything more from them on that. That's still a couple years down the road. I think 2020, 2021 is sometimes these projects kind of slip back before they're actually looking to do the work on that. Any more questions for the highway department? Thank you, Tim. Board of Abatement, page 78. Jump back a little bit. Zoning Administrator, 8081. Planning Commission, 90. Police Department, 83. Yes, Carl. 83 through 84. Hi, Carl Barton. I noticed or I understood last night at the pretel meeting that the town of Berlin Police Department lost a contract for security at CDH that results in a loss of revenue as well for the police department. I understand. Was there any reduction in the size of the force with fewer duties involved because of the loss of the contract at CDH? That's my question. You want to answer? Sure. The police force did this as an addition to their normal duties. So there was no reduction in the police force. It does make their day. Some of the officers work many, many hours. If you look in the employee salaries, you'll see some of the police officers had quite a yearly income. And that was due to all the time they spent in addition to their normal duties at the hospital. We have a very good relationship with Central Vermont Medical Center. It was the hospital's cost-cutting choice to end the contract. I think they felt badly to do that. And we certainly understand that. But no, the police force was not reduced as a result of that. Other questions about the police report? There's a town employees list on 87 and 88. Cemetery Commission 89, Conservation Commission Committee and Recreation Board, Development Review Board, Emergency Management, and web page. Beyond that, there are private organizations. And we can take up your concerns with them. I don't think there was quite a good number of people last night at the pre-town meeting from the various social services. And that's really becoming quite the meeting to attend, if you want, or maybe we should have it televised. So we're done with Article 25. One last chance to ask any town official any question on your minds. Article 26, shall the town collect its real and personal property taxes to defray the expenses of the town for the period July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019 in installments? 1 fourth of the taxes to be due by delivery or by US Postal Service Postmark, no private postal meter postmarks. Honor before August 15, 2018. 1 fourth of the taxes due honor before November 15, 2018. 1 fourth of the taxes due honor before February 15, 2019. And 1 fourth due honor before May 15, 2019, with an 8% penalty and 1% interest per month or portion thereof to be charged for the late payment of any installment. Who will move that article so we may discuss it? Bob? And the second? Any discussion? Yes. No? I saw a sign. No? Are you then ready for this question? I have to read it again. Sorry. Shall the town collect its real and personal property taxes to defray the expenses of the town for the period July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019 in installments? 1 fourth of the taxes to be due by delivery or by US Postal Service Postmark, no private postal meter postmarks. Honor before August 15, 2018. 1 fourth of the taxes due honor before November 15, 2018. 1 fourth of the taxes due honor before February 15, 2019. And 1 fourth due honor before May 15, 2019, with an 8% penalty and a 1% interest per month or portion thereof to be charged for late payment of any installment. All those in favor say aye. Those opposed, no? The article carries. Article 27, shall the town of Berlin enter into a communications union district to be known as the central Vermont internet under provisions of 30 VSA chapter 82? Who will move that article so we may discuss it? I will. Jeremy? And second? Sir? Why don't you start, sir? Hi, everybody. I don't know if you've seen the news coverage of this either on the radio or in the newspaper. I actually have a short presentation if you are interested in seeing that. Otherwise, I do have a shorter list of frequently asked questions if you are so inclined. Do folks want me to give my full presentation? Bill, can I borrow your projector and screen there? Thank you very much. Do you want the microphone? I think yes. I need to do a little bit. I think it's totally maybe your best guess. Listen. OK. Thank you very much. OK, so this is something that I brought to you last year. I don't know if you remember this. And I asked if Berlin was interested in investigating this sort of thing in the past with the unanimous vote. So I'm hoping for a second unanimous one here. But we'll see. So I'm on the select board in Berlin to teach computer science over at Norwich University. And this backers into it because what we're talking about is creating a community-owned internet service provider. And there is a facility in Vermont statute that allows us to create this. It ends up being something not unlike a sewer district or a water district. The thing I have to come on and say, first of all, no tax money can be used to create this. This is only paid for with subscriber fees. So at no point would you see a property tax increase, would you see a fee appear anywhere other than the bill that you would get from this internet service provider. And this idea is not a new one. There is a group of 24 towns just to the south of us in a district served by something called EC Fiber. And they build high-speed internet to give you a bit of speeds to their member municipalities. So to give you a sense of what's possible and what's not, a lot of people say, well, Vermont's too sparse for us to have high-speed internet. EC Fiber is building up all of Brookfield this year. All of Brookfield, which is far, far more sparse than Berlin and some of the other towns that we're talking about. So it turns out that on the state of Vermont, we have something called a telecommunications plan which says that by 2020, we're supposed to have more than 50% of all addresses in the state connected with 100 megabits per second connectivity. And that's not what happened. I think we are at something like, we're at about 13% or 14% right now. And there's not many groups making any moves to make things any better about this. EC Fiber, this is how the bus is doing this. There's some folks up in the kingdom. You have Berlin's telecom, which comes for most of those 12%. And then you have the effort that I'm trying to spearhead here in such Vermont to get gigabit speeds to everybody here. Just as a point of reference, gigabit internet speeds would be about 100 times faster than a DSL connection and about 10 times faster than a cable network connection or comparable prices. So this is a picture, this is actually, I didn't have an easy picture of. Okay, so that's Northfield, sorry. But you can see part of Berlin there anyways. So the red lines, you can't see that very well. I apologize. The red lines are where there's at least cable infrastructure. So getting towards 21st century infrastructure. But all on the black rows are places like my road up the closer to the pond, you can see Berlin Pond and kind of northeastern most of it there. There's still a lot of central Vermont that doesn't even have the ability to get cable internet. So we're gonna leapfrog all of that and go to essentially the fastest option that there is right now. And what's been the fastest option, it's been being deployed all over the country, not so much here in Vermont. So, and this should say Tommy and Bella, this is left over from Montpelier, but so what I'm asking of the 13 towns and cities is essentially just to trigger the statute, to trigger the law that says we can create this district. There's no money involved yet. There's no anything involved yet. This allows us to create a board to start talking. It's essentially the first paperwork step. So you'll see this, Paul just read this. This will be voting on shortly. I wanna reiterate the number of towns are totally insulated from the financial activities of the district. You can't use any tax money. The town's not gonna be reliable for something bad happening. So you remember the Burlington Telecom fiasco? We had like late, late Monday night meetings and city counselors scrambling around in posture and doing all sorts of wonderful things. I'm not interested in late Monday night meetings at the Burlington slide for it. I wouldn't be voting for this if I thought that was a possibility. I don't want that. That's not something that's gonna happen with this setup. The statute was written specifically with that money fiasco in mind. The only book in here, this is, here's the downside. The statute says that each members of each town should make available some space that this district can use for the telecommunications equipment. So that could be essentially, will the town office host a router? And it might not even come to that. We have a server closet. We're talking about something the size of that projector, small like a desktop computer. That would be it. And they would be able to charge the district for that. It's not like they're giving it away. Each town then appoints a board member and an alternate and that's really it. So it's democratically controlled. It is a municipality. It's required to provide open meetings, public records, all of these sorts of things like the select board in Berlin has to. So my motivation for this is that I heard, I don't know if it's Jerry D. Monteebis here, any chance he's the Berlin resident that kept kicking at me and kept pestering me and saying, this is something you gotta do. We gotta do this. We gotta move forward. He counted me long enough eventually. So eventually we moved forward with this, but the existing ISPs don't really have any plans to expand any part of the ART path. They already picked the low-hanging fruit and it's not profitable for them to expand any part of it. But because we don't have a profit motive and because we can take advantage of municipal revenue bonds, we can do this more cheaply than the bigger for-profit folks can. We will also uphold network neutrality. So no filtering or throttling of traffic that could be coming on the pipe in the bigger folks and won't be reselling subscriber behavior, subscriber data, because this is a public service. You wouldn't expect the sewer department to start thinking about different ways of adding revenue and profits. The job of this district would be to provide internet service, and that's it. There's some good reasons to support this for economic development purposes. Telecommuters, Jerry D. Monteebis who lives on the street from me, oh man, we just walked in, I was just picking on you, Jerry, sorry. He telecommutes to Virginia and there's a lot of things that he can't do, not to speak for him, but if you're a telecommuter, there's some things that you just can't do without a truly high-speed connection. So he has DSL, I have DSL, and that's fine for watching Netflix, that's fine for being a passive consumer of media. But if you're going to do actual office work, if you're going to try to upload videos, like I record videos for my students in Norwich, I recorded a 15-minute video and it took me three hours to upload it to YouTube. So I was up late into the night to make sure that it all made it over there and that my students had seen it. Internet-based companies, a lot of small businesses start out as home businesses. So this really creates a possibility for legitimate internet-based companies to start here in Central Vermont, and then drawing people to Central Vermont. I make a joke to Realtor sometimes, groups when I'm talking about this, is that if you've ever been on Realtor.com, you see like three bedrooms, two baths, you've got 1600 square feet, the next thing they're going to add is the internet speed. So three bedrooms, two baths, 10 megabits per second. So there's a colleague in my neighborhood who's trying to sell her house, but she's out in the far west fringes of Northfield and then people come and see their house like, wow, this is exactly my price range. What's the internet speeds? She sort of widely looks down at the ground and troubles her feet a little bit, says. And then they don't come back. So, people expect to be able to engage in a modern economy, to be able to have modern internet access. So here are, here's where we are on the ballot. So we are right at SmackDown in the middle there. These are the 13 towns who are talking about this today or in some form at other times, very towns actually may, but they have an advantage they get to see what the rest of us do before they make a decision. And then I had some interest for more time in Elmort too. It sounds like they want to be, they want to join after the fact. So this could, this could expand to cover nearly all of Washington County and even into a bit of Orange Town with Williams and Elmort too. So some criticisms, I'm going to try to anticipate some of your questions. I don't want my tasks to go up or something I don't want either. This is written in the statute. Even if the town of Worcester voted to give this district $10,000, it would be illegal for them to do so. The district could not accept that. I don't want to be in the same position as Burlington Telecom again, me either. The town is insulated in the activities of this district. And then here's why I ended here. If there was truly the demand, the market corrective provides high. So it hasn't, it hasn't yet. It hasn't corrected and I'm like two addresses down from places that do have cable and they say something along the lines of, well find a bunch of neighbors at $10,000 and you can make this thing happen for you. Oh, because I have $10,000 line around. So everybody essentially gets involved. Not that we have to pool resources initially or anything like that, but we work together and create this district. We as a collective group of 13 towns can actually make this happen. Are these towns covered by satellite while it was broadband already? Probably. But those speeds are low. The amount of data that you can transfer in a given month is capped. And it's not really effective for doing modern home office stuff. We are, I'm just gonna skip down to number four. So actually I'll skip to three. So supposing this gets approved in at least two towns, not pretty confident that it'll get approved in all 13 towns, frankly. Each select for the city council has been appointed representative to the district. Roxbury's gonna be on the same footing as Berry City with the number of districts. It's not official by population at all. Throughout this, we're gonna start talking about sources of seed money. We can't go to the bottom bank unless we have some solid financials over a few years. So we're gonna look for people to invest early. There are anchor institutions who want to be built up first and who are willing to put their money over their mouth this and help the community to start this. Again, following the model of EC Fiber, who did exactly this and after three years are cash flow positive. And then number five, the first annual meeting is May 8th. So all of these representatives would get together and we sit down and start doing the actual challenging work of figuring out how the district's organized, where we're gonna start, who's gonna do what work. And then we might consider adding additional members. So this would be where Elmore and Moretown and any other folks have it, or a member that might be looking at doing a feasibility study where we start first to where it doesn't make the most sense. Looking at it, dropping a business plan in the budget and then kind of filling in all the blanks. I mean, this is a small business that is a municipality. So we have a lot of unanswered questions still at this point. I ask my ideas about how we proceed, but these are things that the board, that hopefully 13 of them will ultimately be responsible for answering. And then everybody asks this question. So, great, great, great. But when do I get past internet? So at the earliest, I'm imagining, wherever we start, we'd be starting in 2020. We'd spend the rest of this year working up the kinks and getting the structure in place. We'd be working on getting the funding the following year and then we'd look at the 2020 construction season to start running the wires along the utility poles and actually connecting people and getting stuff, getting stuff rolling. There's the lego's on the ballot that Paul mentioned previously. So I'm gonna tell you what my initial mission statement is for such a commodity that this is mine, this is not approved by anybody except for me. So I'm gonna provide recently priced, high quality, community-owned, ultra-high speed internet access to all homes, businesses and civic institutions in our member towns. And that's all I got for you. Questions for Jeremy? Wait for the... And you had talked about using a municipal bond. I just wanted to confirm that that has no relationship with the town of Berlin at all. Has no relationship to the town of Berlin at all. These are such different bonds than what was used, for example, to renovate the school here. These are revenue bonds which are borrowed in anticipation of the monthly membership fees. So knowing that there's this income coming in can borrow in anticipation of that. They don't issue those unless you have two years to solve financials first. So we would still need some seed money for grants, donations, individual loans in order to get things running on a smaller scale first before we can go and go to that. I should mention that when you speak you should give us your name so that the clerk can make sure she annotates your... Dear Lord my sir, Jeremy are you talking about servicing the entire town? Initially probably not, but in the long run yes. In the long run servicing all 13 of the towns. Every address that's my vision and that was EC Fire's vision when they connected or when they agreed to all the 24 towns. Their member towns agreed to join the district. So I believe you're familiar with my road and my farm. And on that road there are four buildings all with DSL service right now. Three of those buildings belong to me. We're about a mile from Route 12. About a quarter of a mile of that is the private road that I live on. And on the farm most of the utilities with one exception, telephone and electricity are underground. So how would that all play out? That's a terrific question. And the answer is, so the cheap answer is I don't know because that's a decision of the board. However I can tell you how EC Fiber does it. The way EC Fiber does it is if there is an overhead line of no longer than 600 feet from the public right of way they do the work for free. If it's farther than that the costs would have to be borne at least partially by the resident. If there are underground runs and it is easy to run the fiber through existing conduit if there's room in the existing conduit it's and it's of again 600 feet or less we can pull it right through there without too much issue or we can provide the cable to you and you could pull it through the conduit. Otherwise there would be if there's additional trenching required or any additional construction required that would have to be borne by the individual resident. Sure. So Matt Levin, so it seems like this seems pretty simple and seems like I'll just say seems like a good idea. The approval of the town since we have basically no liabilities to responsibilities beyond having someone on the board. So why is it sort of a technicality that the town has to approve this? I mean I know that in the South Waste District which I'm the town representative to there are some embedded in the statute. There are some language that says if we ever wanted to not be in the district we have to vote in there are certain ways that the town is involved for expansions and so on but that's because the state requires us to manage our solid waste. So we have to do something. So we're connected to the municipality in a complicated way. There's no requirement here. So should we think of this as something of a technicality for the town to agree to it or is that the wrong interpretation? No, I think that's right. We're just essentially triggering the statute. The statute says if towns want to opt into this structure this is what they have to do. There is a facility if you want to leave the district that there does have to be a vote a similar vote to exit. It gets a little stickier if there has been investment in the town first and the town decides to leave because of the investment of the district but it's pretty clear and it's not onerous or anything like that. But no, we're not required to serve everyone in the district. That's something we're just intending to do. Carl? Hi, this does sound like a great idea. As somebody who uploads video I like the potential. So I have a couple questions. One, does this prevent in any way in the statute free market competition of whatever charter cable coming in with fiber and giving it to Berlin cheaper in their locations? And is there a risk of cheaper market competition or technology making this not worth doing? So I'll take your second one first. Is there a possibility of technology in the future making this obsolete, essentially, if I'm hearing you right? And absent a crystal ball, I can't say for sure. Knowing what I know of the technology everybody's using fiber. It's gonna be fiber from here for very, very long time. When somebody is building out the modern like 5G wireless architecture that's gonna start being deployed around the nation the eventual, the backhaul essentially carrying that traffic somewhere. It's all done on fiber. So it's been fiber for quite some time and I expect it's going to be fiber 10, 20 years into the future. Now, will this prevent competition? No, no, it certainly won't. As a matter of fact, and it's sort of an unfortunate turn in EC fibers territory where they have a bunch of gigabit fiber to the home available there are, I'm trying to think was fair point was taking a bunch of federal money and overbuilding. So building in places where the fiber was overbuilding DSL, which so for $10 cheaper you can go from a gigabit down to eight megabits, right? Which doesn't exactly make sense, why is use of our federal dollars and whatnot. But no, I mean there's nothing preventing one of the big incumbents or another provider from coming in and building their own fiber or doing these other sorts of things but given that they have not bothered to invest in that so far I'm skeptical that that would ever happen. They have a lot of investments in the existing hardware, the actual routers and the copper and the wire that they have already run on the poles here and it would cost a lot for them to essentially tear that all that stuff out and build new things on. Any other questions for Jen? Yes. Hi, my name is J.C. Earl. I live on Darling Hill Road with Darling Road. I just want to make a comment real quick. I'm a real estate agent and I've multiple occasions have had what Jeremy's talking about, people that wanted to live here in central Vermont and they are moving to Vermont because they can work from home and I ended up selling them houses in Waterbury and Chittenden County because we can't support that. So between that and yes, I'd love to be able to stream a couple of movies but that's not the big deal to me. The big deal is we're not attracting the entrepreneurial businesses of the future and for the vibrancy of central Vermont's economy, I think this is a huge slam dunk. So not much of a question there but thank you for spearheading this. Hello, I'm Sister Lorien and I live off Vine Street. And I was really excited to hear about this because I had DSL for three months and I had 10 days service in those three months. So I went back to the telephone which is pretty reliable as long as no one sends me a picture. And I'd really like to be able to get some pictures occasionally but I am a very occasional user. So when I heard $66 a month I had sticker shock and I'm wondering can this include small users as well as giant users? And that's a question I've gotten before and it can at least initially though we have to build this out and sort of get on our own two feet before we would be able to look at cheaper options. The $66 a month is me sort of closing my eyes and imagining that we're an exact copy of EC fiber. That's their price. If it turns out that we get 80% of residences that the fiber passes, if we manage to get more people the price will be cheaper. Because again as this is a community owned enterprise the more people that we have, the more evenly that we can essentially spread out the capital costs of building it in the first place. On the other hand things could be more expensive if fewer people sign up. So it's kind of a chicken in the X sort of thing would love to be able to provide cheaper service but at least initially that's not, that's probably not in the cards in the first year or two. Josh Fitzhugh, have you done any financial analysis to decide whether this business makes sense for Central Vermont? So yes again using the financials from EC fiber and all of their financials are public on their site ECfiber.net. So if you wanted to look at their last few years of revenues and expenditures you can do that too. The numbers that I'm working with is, and this is a high number so that it's not, so that we're not surprised, the total cost, the total capital cost of building this network out is about $30,000 per mile. So per mile of town road that we run the fiber along. So in order to have that work we need a density of six subscribers per mile of cable that we're running. And then we can make the payments and it ends up working out. So if we're running it along 20 miles of road in 20 miles of town roads in Berlin or Northfield or wherever we would need roughly 120 subscribers to commit to doing this. And I can guarantee you the bond bank when they look at the application to see whether they're going to fund something like this they're going to want to know that they have a good chance of getting their money back. And EC fiber has actually done this in a slightly lower density in part because some of the people that they've gotten to sign up for the higher tier service, the much faster service. I'm happy to go a little bit farther into the weeds if you're so inclined in terms of the cost of the house and devices or the actual process of how these things are constructed. But if you have any more detailed questions I can try to dive in more if you like. So I'm trying to determine how you are going to find out whether there's a sufficient demand to justify the kind of infrastructure or cost that you're talking about because that's significantly significant. Sure, which is why one of our first steps tonight sort of glossed over one of our first steps is to conduct a feasibility study. And that could be done formally by contracting that out with companies that do such things. Or by simply doing something more like what Granite City grocery did and just going and shaking the trees, knocking on doors, talking to neighbors and getting people to commit to joining this. It's not an if you build it, they will come. We have to make sure that they're going to come before we build it. And getting people to commit either in writing or by donating or loaning $100 or whatever it happens to be to guarantee that it makes sense in a certain area. And those areas, at least initially, that are more, the people are more kind of ravenous for this sort of connectivity are going to be the places where we start. Now if a big business comes out or a big landlord with businesses or tenants, whatever they say, I really want this to attract more people, more businesses to my commercial properties or whatever. If they're willing to put down a stake and help us get going with this, then that can help things too. But yeah, the feasibility study and just finding where the people are. Good morning, Mike Strikesburg. A comment and then a question. Comment, one of the things that stands out here even almost as much or more as the speed is the privacy. I really like the idea of getting away from the monitoring and data collection that a commercial service will subject you to when you use that type of service. So for that reason alone, I would support the concept. My question is, I can see this being a huge benefit to schools, libraries, public institutions. And as a municipality, is there an agreement there where they get service at less or reduced or even no cost because it's a municipal service? That's a great question. And EC Fiber does something very much what you're talking about and I hope that we can duplicate that as well. And what they do is for schools and libraries, they offer the highest tier of service for the lowest price. So they essentially offer, for $66 a month, they offer 700 megabits per second, which is actually going up to a gigabit this year. So yes, there are those similar agreements, although whatever the board decides, it could be different arrangements, it could be free, it could be otherwise subsidized. Sure. Quick question. Linda Maraboli, this is a terrific idea. Can you clarify what you mean by community-owned? Like subscribers wouldn't become members or owners. I mean, does EC Fiber own this? Just a little clarification. Sure. So it's community-owned in so far as that in the same sense as you in a sort of abstract way own the highway department trucks or the town offices. So you don't own it directly necessarily, but it is ultimately the control of those assets ultimately devolves to the folks in the member towns as they have democratic representatives on the board, that if you have some issue and you want to change the way things work, you have the ability to change who those people are on that board. So similarly, things that are owned by the state or owned by the school district are in some indirect way also owned by the community, owned by us. So because it's a municipality, it's not community-owned in the same sense as a co-op where like at the Hunger Mountain Co-op you're a member owner and you get like a dividend check at the end of the year or something like that. Could that structure be put into place once everything's built out and there's revenue left at the end of the year? Sure. EC Fiber is mumbled about that possibility in the past in conversations that I've had with them that when they have money left over at the end of the year they're ready to check to the town. So it's not something that they're doing, it's just something that they're thinking about. Does that answer your question? Rob Griffin, Richardson Road. I'm assuming that one, since you mentioned adding Elmore potentially in the future that one can add additional towns to existing municipality. Why have you chosen the approach of building a new municipality rather than adding to EC Fiber? This is an easy one. EC Fiber didn't want it. They have 24 towns and they're saying, stop. We're gonna build out all of our towns and get them set first. We're gonna build out everything in our member towns first. And then we can start thinking about the future. But that's, I mean, they're not gonna be done building out their member towns for another three or four years. So we could conceivably, we could conceivably wait three or four years until they're done and then petition to join. But we're going to be low, low, low on the priority list. I could probably ask, check this question on the internet, but my internet speed is really slow. So I'll ask you, so I get the quick answer. EC Fiber, do they have an average installation, turnaround time from order to install for their, in their experience? And do they have maintenance and customer service satisfaction rating at all that you know of? So I'll start with your second question again first. Yeah, so, if you've ever been on social media, you'll know that sometimes Facebook and Twitter can be a bit of a cesspool. I'm being totally generous here. EC Fiber's Facebook page, on the other hand, if you check it out, it's like puppy dogs and rainbows. So everybody's like, wow, I just got hooked up. This is so great, this is amazing. I love my installer, all these things and five star ratings across the board. And it's really, it's really impressive. And having visited their offices, they're really, really lean operation but they do a terrific job with what they have. I don't know the specific numbers for the turnaround time. I know that they do schedule these things as far out as they can. So if there's somebody in Brookfield that wants to get hooked up and who knows that they're on the construction route, they can turn it around pretty quickly. Once the infrastructure is there, yeah, I mean, I have to imagine it would be within a couple of weeks. I mean, if you're not in part of the original build out. But they get super high marks in terms of customer service and they're like call center, essentially, tech support. That's what I was looking for. Bob Ornick. Does the town voters get another bite of the apple? Once this concept is approved today, for bond votes or how does that work or is this it? This is pretty much it. So this essentially allows us to create the district. The town could have another bite at the apple if they decided to leave the district. That would be the other vote that's there. The bond votes, because it's insulated from the town, the bond votes, as far, when I'm reading the statute correctly and I'm reading how EC fiber is doing it, that's managed by their board. That's not brought to a town by town vote for each of the bonding opportunities that go forth from there. I hope you aren't going to take your town reports and start throwing them at me. But I'm an old geezer, an old crony, that goes to Dunkin Donuts and we solve the world's problems, it's not. Well, this will eventually come true. Who knows how many town means down the road, but it will eventually come true. But in weeping your rewards, we're also going to bring penalties. And penalties is this whole area is not going to be the same anymore. Now, I live on Scott Hill Road. The paper, a piece of property across from me, that wide open land, a farm land. All of these people from New York and Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami that want a place, a summer home or a winter home, that farm will be cut up like a jigsaw puzzle because it's going to be worth money. And you spoke about it earlier this morning, how someone is going to come and say, do I have access to, oh, I'm sorry. Well, that same person comes back and finds out he does. Oh, they're going to be all kinds of people going after properties. And the farms that you used to see, oh, they're going to start falling by the byway because that property is worth so much more. Cut that up. And I drive around Vermont to just discover Vermont even though I've lived here my whole life. Go down to Sharon and go up on them back roads and already find farmlands that are gone. Go up onto Spear Street outside of Burlington where you over look like Champlain. What used to be farmlands? It's nothing but houses and houses and houses. Well, you can start throwing your books at me now or later, but of course, this will come to pass sooner or later. Just an old geezer or old crony, not a Dunkin Donuts, but a town meeting. Thanks very much. And I'll be short in my response to that. I don't think that this is an either or sort of thing. I mean, I think that farms and modern forestry and agriculture can coexist with modern internet infrastructure as well. I think the place for us to put our efforts into thinking about how we want our town to grow and how we want to preserve farmland and direct the way that we want development to go is through our planning commission. We're in the process of updating our town plan which has a lot, it's a big plan and it has a lot to do with how we imagine Berlin looking in 10 years. And that's from the planning commission. Bob, that plan hasn't been approved yet. We're still working on that, right? Okay, so that's still in progress. So we have the opportunity to say we don't want the farms to be divvied up. We don't want the large blocks of land to be split up and sold into residential developments. We have that opportunity as residents. And I totally hear what you're saying. I'm still of the personal opinion that we can coexist both and not either or. But that's just me. I'll have to meet you at Dunkin' Donuts sometime to continue. Question in the front. John Friedrich Chase Brook Road or at least, that's what it said on my deed but I think they renamed it Chase Road. Anyway, the end of the road and so very slow internet. But nevertheless, two lines bonded together do a little bit better. I am one of those people who came in from Texas, settled here and planned to die here and love it up here. Vice President of the Software Development Company. So it is very important to have decent internet and I'm finding it all the time. And if I weren't part owner, I probably could not convince the rest of people to allow me to live here. So I think there's huge opportunities for this. But the other thing I was going to say is you're looking for money then. Also, I want to support it with that too. So count me in, thanks John. Matthew Polk on Barley Hill Road. I just wanted to clarify that this public utility district would be accountable to the people in local towns here. Whereas those of us who may have Ryzen or Charter or something right now, those utilities are corporately owned and they're accountable to that corporation, is that correct? That is true and it turns out actually that internet service is not regulated the same way as telephone service and cable TV. So if you have an outage on your phone, if you can't get your phone service for a certain amount of time, the phone company is required to reimburse you for those times that you were out. Internet service though is not the same. So if you have an outage or you don't get the speed that was advertised to you, they say, oh, sorry. And that's all you get. There's very little, I don't want to say no accountability, but there's very little accountability from the larger companies. You would at least have the ability then to call tech support in central Vermont or call your board member here in central Vermont and complain directly to them or have, you know, have lunch with them at Dunkin' Donuts and let them know what's what. It's, and that's not something that you can do with your average, you know, Comcast VP or network engineer. Any more questions? Yes. My name's Steve Bushman. I live on Chase Road but on the Jonesbrook side and Jonesbrook Road as some people know it starts in Berlin, goes into Moortown and then goes back into Berlin. So my first question is, are we gonna be not able to get service because we have to string line through Moortown and not able to offer service to the Moortown people that live on that road? And my second question is, I understand the subscriber cost if we elect it to join and to get service, but the bonding costs, I'm a little bit confused about if the community joins this, if they create this, does every household get assessed a fee for the bond amount or how does that work? Because this is a different kind of a bond, sorry, because this is a different kind of a bond than the bonds, like I said, to renovate the school, this is a revenue bond. So no, people who are not signed up for the service don't get charged. There's no additional assessment on your property taxes. There's no additional fee that gets snuck in anywhere else. Essentially what happens is when you get a bill at the end of the month and it says it's $66 or it's $100 or whatever tier you've chosen, you pay that and we would use that then to pay the bond. And that's it. The question about Moortown is a good one and one of the reasons I was happy to talk to the Moortown Select Board. And actually one of the Moortown Select Board members works for the town of Berlin, so I had a quick in. Well no, they're interested too because a lot of the folks in Moortown that are underserved are actually on the eastern reaches of the town that border Berlin. So there are other folks right down the street from you in Moortown who want this service too. And it might make sense for us to run one of our main lines right past your house to feed Moortown. I haven't looked at the geography of it in depth but that's one thing that I did consider at least as I'm looking at the maps and where people are not covered. So even if Moortown decides not to come in though, we still have the ability to go through segments of non-member towns to serve members, to serve member towns. It's gonna come down to the calculus of how many miles of roads we're talking about and if you and a whole bunch of Berlin neighbors are there or on average, however many people we have in the member towns, if it's far above our target of six subscribers per linear mile, then we can probably more easily stretch out into those places that are a bit more rural, that are a bit more hard to reach but that requires some smart initial investment so that we have the wiggle room to go and branch out to those places eventually. I'll remind you we're on article 27 which reads, shall the town of Berlin enter into a communications union district to be known as the central Vermont Internet under provisions of 30 VSA chapter 82? Are you ready for that question? Yes, sir. If so, all in favor say aye. Aye. Those opposed, no. It passes unanimously. Article 28, the final article to discuss any other business that may legally come before the meeting is by law intended to prevent binding articles but non-binding referenda or questions or announcements are completely available and who would like to speak first? Thank you, Chair Nelson, Chair of the Select Board. Usually we take this time to have a quick update from the State Legislature's representative. Lewis is not able to be with us today in sincere regrets but we are approached to have Representative Van Donoghue with us today. I'd like to give her a moment to give an update on what's going on in the legislature. Thanks very much for a few minutes of your time and I will stay on after the meeting so if anybody has questions or input or thoughts you wanna share, I'll be here to hear them. But I did wanna give just a brief update on probably what's the most important issue we're dealing with this year and that is reconfiguring the whole tax structure. Both income tax and property tax in terms of the education tax. And there's been a fair amount of talk about one of those pieces and that's the education tax. But sort of at the last minute, last week the proposals that were being discussed were taken off the table and a new proposal was passed by the House Ways and Means Committee that also incorporated a restructuring of the income tax system for Vermont. So that'll be coming up before the House and then it goes over to the Senate. But basically what it includes, it puts them all together in one bill and it has three main pieces. First of all, for those who weren't aware, the federal tax change, Vermont's income tax currently is directly tied to the federal tax. And so the result of the federal tax changes, if we did nothing as a state, it'd be awesome because the state coffers would grow by $30 million and we wouldn't even have to raise taxes, we'd just have all that new money to spend, which I think would be sort of cheating if you like a secret tax increase. So nobody wants to do that. So the first part of this bill would be coming up with a mechanism to change the income tax structure so that the state coffers do not surreptitiously benefit from that. It's a little tricky to make it exactly precise that no one has a change in their state tax because it's not really a one for one, but they've tried to align it so that everybody would be sort of held harmless and it wouldn't change what you'd be paying in state taxes. But another aspect to it, which would obviously affect other taxpayers because there's so much money, if it's not coming out of one pocket, it's coming out of somebody else's. The proposal does incorporate tax relief on social security benefits so that for 45,000 for single filers, 60,000 for two member filers would not be taxed for state income tax. That puts us in the same place as lots of other states. We're one of the very few, if not the only remaining state that still taxes all social security benefits. So that would be a part of it, rolled out immediately in one year rather than over several years because there's sort of some money to play with because of the federal tax changes. Play with meaning your money, but that's what happens in the political process. And then tied to that in the same bill rather than separately, is this whole new structure for the education tax. The proposal that got a lot of publicity and a lot of attention was one that would reduce property taxes, the education component by roughly 25% and shifting to making that up through an income tax surcharge, specifically identified as a separate line on the income tax. That has been rejected as they couldn't figure out a way to do it that would sort of hold people harmless in terms of not increasing what some middle or lower income people might pay in some categories, not in all. So the new proposal actually would reduce property taxes by approximately 10% and would still shift that to an income tax a surcharge. And the proposal right now is it would be 0.1% on lowest brackets, 0.5% for middle brackets and 1% on highest income brackets. We haven't had, I got a one-page handout the day before we left for town meeting break. We have not had a whole drill down, so I can't tell you for instance what constitute those brackets that are being discussed. This is really just a big picture. The rest of it really is just shifting money around to make it a little more direct. Instead of a general fund transfer into the education fund, there'd be a rerouting of 100% of the sales tax instead of just one penny on the sales tax going to the education fund instead of that general sales tax. And also 25% of the rooms and meals tax. So that's just kind of shuffling money around. That doesn't have a direct impact on the taxes you pay. It's just the rooting of them. So that's the big picture. It would eliminate the excess spending penalty that in the system currently, but more directly tie the increase in that property tax to local district spending decisions. So it doesn't come with a direct cost reduction plan as a part of it, but the idea is if it's more directly tied, people will be more conscious. It does not eliminate the income sensitivity. The original proposal was gonna eliminate the income sensitivity because enough of it would be being paid by the income tax surcharge that low income folks wouldn't be paying the income tax surcharge. And that would have taken, that would have replaced the income sensitivity provision for low income folks. But now that it's not shifting as much, the income sensitivity piece stays in. So the goal of kind of reducing the complexity sort of isn't really happening because it's keeping much more of the existing system in place. So that's the broad overview. I can try to answer questions offline or as I get more information, pass it on in my updates that you can get by email or I try to give at least abbreviated versions on Front Porch Forum. So thanks very much. Thanks, Anne. Tour Nelson is finishing up as chair of the Select Board. I'd invite you to join me in thanking him. There was an announcement from a lady from the Unitarian Church, I know. Come right up to the microphone here. I'm Sally Shartran, Berlin Church. We are going to be having a soup, sandwich, dessert luncheon on Saturday at noon. And we're going to be, also we're going to have chili. And we are kind of short on reservations. And if anybody would like to come, it's $7 per person. And thank you. Thank you. Anyone else have an announcement or anything to say? Tour? Guess it's my last act as the chair and being on the Select Board. I'd like to thank the town staff that we have. It's really made my job a lot easier over the years and I'm sure the Select Board agrees with me. We've got a great staff in place. But we do have a few changes during the year as we do every year. Mary Whistle retired from the sewer commission. She's been there for several years and often joining her retirement. Her duties are kind of absorbed by Tom Badowski, who's now splitting his time between the water and sewer departments and the zoning department. Also on the police department, we had a couple of police officers leave during the year. Kerry Tucker, Kevin Blanchard, and William Pine. They all left to pursue other endeavors. But we did add a few police officers during the year. We added Ben Cavaretta, who came to us from the Harvard Police Department and officer Stephen Tiersch came to us. Stephen's in the back. He's the one with more hair than the other. Everybody, feel free to make your way back there and welcome him to Berlin. Thank you. Anything else? Hello, I'm Pat Barbera. I live off Hill Street extension and it's just a couple of comments. I'd like to thank the highway department for the wonderful job they've done all winter. When I'm safe and warm in my bed and those plows go by on my country road, I just say how fortunate I am that I live in the town of Berlin. And I also would like to thank the police department who helped me out with the nuisance problem that I had and they were very responsive to me and I'm very indebted to them. I noticed in the town report that they're encouraging the use of surveillance cameras on our property and I might put in a request that maybe the town could do a workshop for those of us that are technologically challenged on how to set up these surveillance cameras on our property to help ourselves and our neighbors and maybe it could be on the website or maybe at a town meeting, whatever. But anyway, I think it's a great idea. Thank you. Thank you. Corinne? Hey there, Corinne Stridesburg. Just a few announcements. I want to make sure people know that the PTNA is having a seed fundraiser out in the lobby. It's high-mowing seeds. You're not actually getting them, you're ordering them, check or cash. Also out in the lobby, we have some Girl Scout cookies for sale that we haven't the last few years. Historical Society has a display out there. We hope you'll take a look. There's both some stuff on poster boards and a couple of interesting binders. Also, the Historical Society this year's potluck meeting will be, well, potluck presentation, I should say, will be Wednesday, May 16th, over at the Congregational Church and it will be Sally Chartrand and David Perrin who will be giving some history of the church. We have some other meetings lined up. They're on the screen paper out in the lobby. Dog licenses are due, on or before April 1st. It's $9 if they're spayed and neutered, 13 if not. And one other thing to mention, I haven't seen many of you at the Capital City Grange. The first Saturday of the month, they have a potluck. It's great, 6 p.m. first Saturday. Who doesn't like potluck? Anything else with that meeting? Chairman? Corinne just reminded me too about the Grange. The Grange offers all residents of Berlin the opportunity to use their facilities for free. So if you wanna have a birthday party or a wedding or host your favorite punk rock band or something like that, you can call and schedule a time to use the Grange and they, because they're in Berlin and they're thanking us for the tax abatement that we gave them a few years ago, you can use their facilities for free. So keep that in mind. Good. We're about to end town meeting unless there's something else. I would entertain a motion to adjourn. And second, all in favor say aye. Those opposed, no. We're gonna start the school district meeting in just a minute when we change boards so you can stretch your feet. And the first order of business, Article one to elect a moderator for the year ensuing is there, are there any nominations? Okay, scripture. Are there any other nominations? Hearing none, all in favor of Paul Gillies as the town school district moderator, indicate by saying aye. Those opposed, no. Paul Gillies is elected to the town school district moderator. Congratulations. Thank you, thank you. The article two as before to hear and act upon the report of the town school directors, this booklet contains that report on pages four and five. Are there any questions off the top for the school board? You can reserve your questions about the budget till we get to that article if you like, but anything else? Then there's the school principals annual report. The budget, salary and benefit protection, pages 11 or 13, estimated tax calculations and the rest of it is U32. Any other questions, any questions at all about the school report? Article three, shall the school district authorize the board of school directors to hold any audited fund balance as of June 30th, 2018 in a reserve fund to be expended under the control and direction of the board of school directors for the purpose of operating the school? We'll bring this article before us so we may discuss it. And second, Mike. This is a perennial article. It's usually explained as if we voted down, then we have to send the surplus back to the state. So you're torn between your obligations to the state and to the town school district. So any discussion on this? Are you ready for that question? Shall the school district authorize the board of school directors to hold any audited fund balance as of June 30th, 2018 in a reserve fund to be expended under the control and direction of the board of school directors for the purpose of operating a school? All those in favor say aye. Those opposed, no. The motion passes. Article four, shall the school district authorize the board of school directors to borrow money in anticipation of the receipt of revenues for the 2018-2019 school year? We'll bring that article before us. Sir, and second? Somebody, good. Discussion, this is again a perennial article and allows for coverage of having adequate cash to cover the school district's needs. Are you ready for that question? Shall the school district authorize the board of school directors to borrow money in anticipation of the receipt of revenues for the 2018-2019 school year? All in favor say aye. All those opposed, say no. Article passes. The state law was changed a few years ago and allows us to discuss articles that are being voted on by Australian Ballot in this meeting. And I believe there is a presentation of the school budget if no one has any objections. So there are a couple of presentation videos. First we have a slideshow about Berlin Elementary School that the technical and library staff put together for us. So we'll go through the slideshow if there's no objection to let you meet some of the student staff members here at Berlin Elementary School. And then we'll go ahead with a YouTube video which you may have already seen. It was linked on Front porch forum and other media outlets here in central Vermont. But then we'll go ahead with that YouTube which does explain the budget. So this is our new staff members, Austin Jacobs, the chef, and Kate Lipteck, our new music teacher. This is the fourth, fifth, and sixth grade teaching staff team. The third and fourth grade team. The first and second grade team. And our kindergarten team here at Berlin Elementary. And these are our paraprofessional staff and our specials staff. That's our pre-k. That's our, oh, a pre-k, sorry. And these are our specialists, our interventionists that help with, extra help with reading focus and mathematics. Our special education team here at Berlin. And some behavior interventionalists here at Berlin. And this is a crew that we can certainly thank today. They helped us get everything ready today. So please thank Chuck, Jeff, and Steven, our maintenance department here at Berlin Elementary. And this is the administrative staff, our office staff, and our school nurse. This is a photo of some of our math outreach and special projects that the kids are working on. This is our STEAM, which is science, technology, engineering, arts, and math. Thank you. Some of the projects that our third and fourth grade classes are working on. And this is the writer arts, I can't read them. Their winter concert. We did have a music day. And here's grades one and two with some of their projects. Our kindergarten art extension projects. Farm to School, which incidentally will be on the next school board agenda at the end of March at U32. If anyone's interested to find out more about that, the Farm to School program will be coming to the board meeting and giving a presentation to help us learn more about that. This is a field trip the students took, gleaning apples. And I think it was at the VTC apple orchard. Some more farm to school projects and mentor learning activities for one and two. Getting kids involved in science in a way they may not necessarily fear it is always a good thing. So it's great that we are using nature to help the kids here at Berlin Elementary. Did have a robotics team and the junior iron chef project as well. This is PBIS Bill, stands for positive behavior interventionist support. And it has been great here at Berlin Elementary. We've had a lot of data showing that behavior has improved over the last few years here at Berlin, which makes for a better learning environment for all students. So here's our winter celebration, every maker space. I'd like to thank our technology staff here at Berlin Elementary for putting that slide show together. And there will be also a presentation about the budget. Well, Bill gets that ready. I just want to say last year we did have the bond go through and a lot of improvements were made to the school. As a coach here at Berlin, I think you're standing on one of the things I'm most proud of as a fifth, sixth basketball coach here. The kids fell and they had a spongy rubber surface to stand on instead of the hard tile. So just one of the many things, our new gym floor, a lot of painting, the great lighting here, the flooring you've seen out in the lobby, the heating, the ventilation systems were improved, the lighting in the learning center, the organization of the cubbies. So there's so much that was done. So again, a year later, this may be the first opportunity some of you have to come in and see what our positive vote on the school bond has done for the learning environment here at Berlin Elementary School. So if this is the first time you've seen it or you haven't seen a board member, community member or school member or somebody involved in the school, I want to say thank you for supporting that. And you're just seeing a few of the great things that we were able to do to improve what is Berlin's largest and greatest community asset, this school building. So with that, I think the Berlin Elementary School budget YouTube will come up, hopefully we have the sound and I'll take questions afterwards if you do have any about this presentation. Thank you for taking a moment of your time for this Berlin Elementary School proposed budget presentation for the year 2018-2019. Within this presentation, we'll be talking about the budgeting process, the components of the 2018-2019 Berlin Elementary School budget and the factors that impact the tax rate for Berlin taxpayers, the local budgets, the state tax rate, the property yield and the common level of appraisal. When creating a budget, there are several competing pressures as you see in this diagram below. First of all, curriculum decisions, the teachers and staff contracts, economic pressures. Educational quality is the foundation of all our decisions as school board members. Political pressures, revenue projections, federal mandates and benefits and of course the tax burden and student test scores. When developing the Berlin Elementary School budget there is a system and sequence. First of all, the principal and superintendent and business administrator for WCSU with staff input come up with budget draft scenarios. That budget draft scenario was presented to the school board for review and commentary. The school board makes determinations and evaluates those budget scenarios, deciding things such as should we add staff, should we cut staff, should we change programs and the Berlin Elementary School Board holds open meetings and community forums for community input on the budgets. Once a budget draft is approved by the school board it is then presented to the town of Berlin for voter approval. The proposed budget for the 2018-2019 fiscal year is $3,510,918. That's a total expense change of 1.74% increase. The net impact on taxes is 1.86%. The proposed budget educational spending per equalized pupil is down 3.51% this year. In 2017 and 2018 our per equalized pupil spending was $17,507, it's now $16,892. You can see in the graphs below the percentage of expense change in each budget category. You will notice that there is an increase in WCSU assessments. Those assessments were transfers from the decrease you'll see in the orange pie segment in special education. The special education budget was moved from the districts to the supervisory union level. Here are some of the budget change highlights for the 2018-2019 budget. There was a new teachers contract negotiated and the total salary increases were well below the CPI or the consumer price index for this year. The salary increases were $57,222. The benefit changes decreased by $17,921 total. So the total negotiated items is an increase of 1.14%. Non-salary items increased by $20,618.6%. The combined total is a budget increase of $59,919 or 1.74% increase. Our revenues decreased by $4,351 or a 0.13% decrease. The net impact on taxes is $64,270 or a 1.86% budget change. Berlin Elementary School enrollment stayed relatively consistent this year for 2017 and 18. The school year pre-K through six enrollment is 217 whereas the 2016-2017 was 220. Our pre-K enrollment is expected to be level and consistent over the next five years. In this chart, you can take a look at the other districts around WCSU and see what they pay per equalized pupil. It's the East Montpelier, Middlesex, Worcester and U32 all have higher per equalized pupil spending than Berlin. Here's the percentage change for proposed budgets and the net impact on taxes for the towns around WCSU. Berlin's 1.74% increase was below all of the towns and districts within WCSU except for Calis. Calis has three kindergartners coming in and they decreased by a one full-time educator. So they cut a teacher this year for that budget decrease. If you'll note at the bottom as well, this change and impact on taxes also includes the 3.28% special education and transportation increase. There are four factors that affect the local tax rate, the common level of appraisal, the statewide education tax rate, the property yield which is a new feature of the education funding system and the Berlin Elementary and U32 school budgets. The Berlin Elementary School and the U32 High School Board of Directors only have impact on the fourth item. The only thing we can control is our elementary and high school budgets. Here's an explanation of what the common level of appraisal is. The common level of appraisal is an adjustment to the education tax rate to account for the gap between the appraised value within the town of Berlin properties and the actual value of the property. In 2018 and 2019, the common level of appraisal for Berlin is factored in at 102.45%. That's a negative 3.39% change from last year's 105.84%. This will result in a tax increase of 5.5 cents. The statewide tax rate the residential tax rate will stay the same as last year, $1. And to explain the property yield, this represents the amount of revenue raised by $1 base Homestead property tax rate. The property yield is projected to decrease by $318 from $10,160 to $9,842 which results in a tax rate increase of 5.5 cents. Once again, the property yield is set by the state of Vermont. The total amount of revenue they receive from property tax going into the education fund is divided amongst the school districts in the state. The changes in the CLA and the property yield total $0.11 tax rate increased. The proposed budgets at Berlin Elementary and the town of Berlin share of U32 have a very minor impact on the increase in the Berlin tax rate. The non-residential tax rate is projected to increase in Berlin from 0.079 or from 1.55 to $1.62.9. This combined with the change in CLA results in a tax increase of 14 cents. These rates do not reflect income sensitivity adjustments which are available to most homeowners with incomes less than $137,500 a year. You can look now at the tax rate impacts for 2018 and 2019 for the districts throughout WCSU. At $0.11, Calis, who cut a teacher this year is at 0.068 cents, 0.0944 East Montpelier, 0.039 for middle sex and 0.163 for Worcester. It's estimated that 56% of Berlin residents receive support for their property taxes from income sensitivity. 44% of Berlin residents pay the full tax rate. This graph below will show you the amount that Berlin receives in adjusted property tax rates. To summarize, this year's Berlin elementary school budget, we are proposing a budget of $3,510,918. This proposed budget is a 1.74% increase over last year's budget. I think it's very important to note that we, as a school board, elected not to hire a full-time educator this year. It was a very difficult decision, but we were very sensitive to tax payers, to property tax impacts, while at the same time keeping in mind that we wanted the best education for Berlin elementary school students as possible. So the passage of both the Berlin elementary school and U32 budgets will result an 11-cent increase in the local homestead tax rate. This translates into an increase of $110 per $100,000 of assessed property value. Our tax rate is projected to increase due to the change of the common level of appraisal and the statewide education tax formula. We, the Berlin elementary school board, believe this is a responsible budget balancing fiscal constraint with student needs. We ask for your support. We also invite you to the public hearing, which will be held at Berlin Elementary School on Monday, March 5th, 2018, at 6 p.m. We'd be... Well, you missed that. That was yesterday. We did have a good meeting, and we had a lot of folks show up and participate. So I'm thankful for those people who came to that meeting to find out more about the Berlin budget, and I'm thankful for each of you for being here today as well. I would, at this time, there's just a couple quick things I did want to mention that the 11-cent tax rate, the 11-cent tax increase this year, 5.3 cents of that is because of the Berlin elementary budget, and 5.7 cents of that is the U32 budget. So those are two separate votes on your ballot if you haven't filled it out yet. So I did want to make that distinction as well, although I know, as board members, we support U32 and making sure they give an excellent education to Berlin students that go there and Berlin elementary. We actually only had input on the Berlin elementary budget and not on the U32 budget. Does anyone have any questions they'd like to ask specifically? Would you like to... Any questions that they'd like to ask specifically about the budget, the presentation? Actually, let's get you the mic, so... Diane Nichols-Fleming. On CAX last night, they were mentioning something from Brad James saying that there might be a shift again in the state percentages. Have you heard anything about that? It sounded like it was a potentially positive move for schools, but I didn't know if anything had been said. I haven't heard about it, so I probably shouldn't comment, but the superintendent at WCSU, Bill Kimball, is here, and if you'd like him to try to answer that, does he need to get permission? Who would object to his talking at this meeting? Anyone? Bill? Thanks, Diane. The board developed this budget and recommended it to the community back in January. They did it through November and December. All the tax estimations that you see were from December 1st on. Since then, budgets have come in around the state. There was an estimation at December 1st that school budgets would increase at about 3 to 3.5%. It looks like, with a very preliminary survey, I don't want to say it's tight there, Diane, that it looks like the estimated change for school budgets around the state of Vermont average is around 2.5%. If the Berlin community or U32 weren't to change their budget at all, your taxes still can be affected by what other communities in the state of Vermont have. That's a long, complicated discussion, but you should know that your taxes are not only driven, as Carl's pointed out in the video, by what happens here, but what happens in every other town in the state today. Yes. I just wanted to thank the school board and for the work of this community. Our school is an excellent school. It has served our children well, and it continues to serve the children of Berlin very well, U32 as well. There are not only pressures on our financials, there are pressures on you as a school board, as to what to consider, and I appreciate that you put our kids at the center of it, and that we as a community, as a society, as a state need to not balance the struggles on our children, but to continue to provide the best quality public education we can, because that's the great equalizer for all of us. So thank you for your work. Thank you. Yes. Susan Wilson, Point Ridge Road, Partridge Farms. So I also wanted to thank you. I'm sort of a recent, you know, seven-year recent, but recent resident of Central Vermont and Berlin in the last four years. And I'm part of a group called Reading to End Racism, and I just want to say thank you to Washington County Central Schools, primarily because we've had very successful readings within Central Vermont, and we will be reading in Berlin actually on Friday. And we're just delighted that the reception from the teachers and the students, it's a volunteer group, but again, it speaks to the quality of the community here and the reception and the importance of cultural confidence. Thanks. Thank you for that program, and thank you for coming to Berlin to offer that service and outreach and educational opportunity. We appreciate that. And that might be a great segue and opportunity to say there are a lot of volunteer opportunities here at Berlin Elementary for community members. You don't necessarily have to have a child here at Berlin Elementary to help participate. You could come read to students. There are coaching, refereeing opportunities here. There are so many things that you can do to help out as a community member, a parent, a grandparent, or just a friend. The PT&A is very active, the Parent Teacher Neighbor Association here at Berlin Elementary, and they're always looking for folks that are interested in giving back to the community, helping out with the school to participate here at Berlin. Yes, you had a comment or question. So, a segment on Channel 3 News that was very, very upsetting. I've known school bus drivers, different ones throughout the years, and they tell me about situations of vehicles running buses. But I didn't realize how out of control it had got when they talked about how many buses cars, they just don't care. And I'm wondering how many reports in Berlin, and Union 32, do you have that someone's child may not be coming home tonight because of a careless driver? Do you have any input on how many school buses get run every day by a careless driver? I don't know if there's any data, but, Bill, would you have any numbers on any reported incidents? Any other questions? Thank you, Carl. We're on Article 5, the other business articles of Transact and the other business that may legally come before the meeting. Are there any announcements that should be made? I have the traditional announcement about the lunch, which is available here for $5. Egg salad, ham salad, tuna salad, corn chowder or a minestrone, and putting $5. Anything else? I'll accept a motion to adjourn this school district meeting. And second, all in favor of the adjournment, say aye. Those opposed, no. You are adjourned. Thank you.