 And the agenda is to approve the agenda. Is there anything that anybody wants to add or amend tonight? The only thing I just wanted to add, maybe we could have a discussion towards like after the hybrid meeting cost, if we could just have a brief discussion on the emergency weather preparedness. You know, the reason I had kind of chatted back before today on, you know, luckily we didn't get anything, but you know, what did we learn, you know, what do we still have that we could. And I had a town manager's report, but you can add it. Sure, yeah. Let's talk about it. And I had a response for Tatro. David asked a question, I'm gonna answer for that from the town manager's report, but. Yeah, so we can just add that. I have another little thing about the Tatro that I'd like to ask. Okay, do you want to do it then? We'll cover it all. We'll do it all then. Sure. That's under the town manager report. Yeah, yep, cause he emailed me a question, so I got an answer, okay? Anything else? I just need a motion to approve as amended. So moved. Second. Okay, all in favor? All right. I just want to make sure that everybody, cause there is public hearings tonight on two issues is to make sure that everybody has signed in so we can put you into the record. If you haven't done it now, do it so on your way out. So first, first up is our public hearing and public comment period for all interested persons related to the draft analysis of ground fields cleanup alternatives. For anybody who doesn't know, that is the former Valley Motors property, located at 207 Pleasant Street in Bepple. And I don't know, was it about a year ago when you guys were here? Probably about that. So currently the site is owned by Green Mountain Economic Development Corporation. Before they had brought through what the site's gonna look like and then develop it on the site and then it'll be turned back over to... Yep, absolutely. It won't be GW plastics anymore. It will be... Milotto. And it will be Milotto. Yeah, Milotto and L.A. As soon as it's cleaned up, and we're gonna get it back for a dollar. Right. That's a great idea. So if you guys want to introduce yourselves, that would be great. Bob Haines, former Executive Director of Green Mountain Economic Development. April 2nd, we stepped down in our often teases that current Executive Director of IM, managing special projects. This is one of the lots that's been on the spectrum head. It's one of our physical events. Steve Shaw is here with us. He's gonna do the whole presentation. Weston and Samson, they are our environmental contractor firm. So they've done the assessments. They did it for GW plastics before we acquired the property. Our arrangement is, once this is finished, and we get it signed off by the EPA instead of Vermont, we need it back to GW plastics. So it's a federal grant. It's gonna pay 80% of the costs. And we understand the property pretty well. I don't think we've expected it quite a lot. And, but at first, like you said, we appreciate working with Bethel, your staff, and more than an extremely helpful sponsor. And it's a pleasure to work in town and try to help introduce some things that they would like to see done. So as Bob said, my name is Steve Shaw. I work for Weston and Samson Engineers. I work on the site quite a bit now. So over the back story, the site was originally first, but you know, GW plastics, and they wanted to tear the building down and use it to expand some parking, use the space and the strategies to their property right there. And so they did a series of environmental investigations on the property, and we found there's some light contamination from hydrocarbons. It's a low level, plus the paramount hydrocarbons, which are also called PHs, and polyphoric light, highly chlorinated light from most of the PCs. All those are very low levels below residential cleanup standards, or sorry, below the industrial cleanup standards. But because they're low residential standards, some corrective action is made. Well, just over a year ago, GMEBC purchased the property in order to clean it up, and as part of that, they applied 4-in-1 EPA in the grant. And so there are some obligations that we need to go through in order to expend EPA money. And one of those is to develop a small analysis of what is corrective action on treatment. Basically, what it is, is it lays out several different options for what we can do to clean up this site, and what those would look like, what the most efficient way to do it that works for all parties and policies that detect sensitive receptors. So people use the property, trespassers, ecological receptors, things like that. So what we've done is we've prepared this document called an analysis around those criminal alternatives, and it's available for review on GMEBC website. And basically it lays out three different options. So, as I said before, the site adds some low-level components and soil below the building. They also add what we saw, what we found were PCB-covered paint, or PCB paint inside the building on the floor. This gray area here. And again, these are at low levels, but high on the levels where the paint is mobilized for continued use. So building can't be used as it currently exists. And it's part of that sense when we also found, as best as containing material, a lot of the building materials, so we can paint them. So in order to do the cleanup, we have to pose three different alternatives. The first alternative in the EPA plan is always do nothing. So they say, hey, you put out, well, we're gonna do nothing, and nothing's gonna do anything to protect our software, so the environment. So we're not gonna do the reception. The second option we looked at was what it would look like to take down the building, make these vessels, take down the building, remove the PCB concrete, and then cap the remaining load of the contamination and so on. And so it'll have a sense of receptors. The contamination and so on will be protected with a sense of receptors by an empirical barrier of six inches without geotextile membrane. Membrane to load. And the third option would be to take down the building, remove the PCB concrete, and then dig out all the contaminated soil so that there's nothing left there. And so the difference is between those and those second two options, which are really the real two options. One is that the second option would cost about a million dollars, and this is the third option to remove all the material that would cost about a million dollars. And the second option would cost about $500,000 in that whole part. So it's much cheaper to leave the material there. And it's also protected with a sense of receptors, so the contamination is low level, so it's low industrial standards. So as it exists, you wouldn't want to have some kind of it, but if you cap it, you could then detect all the sense of receptors. And so for the low level of contamination, it doesn't make sense to remove half a million dollars from the dirt. You can cap that dirt and then geoplastics or other user could use it for a long time. So you can tentatively accept option two as the clean alternative, and then develop the corrective action plan. This meeting serves as a public comment period for both the corrective action plan and the app that proceeds the corrective action plan. So you can read them both together. The app is available on GNBBC's website. The corrective action plan is available on my conservation website, on their environmental research tool. So you just punch in the site name, which is Don Newer Sales, and it will come up and it will have the document there that you can look at and review. And basically what it does is it writes out all specifications, all the engineering that's gone into how we would move the building, how the specific material will be removed, how the PCB copy will be removed, and lastly how we would cap the damage as well. So at the end of all of this, what it would look like is the building would be removed, this area would be capped with some sort of impermeable barrier, either an asphalt or a forced impact, like a sure-cap, like impact level, and then at that point, the site would be clean, it would be issued with a certificate of transmission by the ADC, and then the ADC would be able to sell the property back to GM in plastics, they'd be able to do parking work for another use of data inside of them. So you're saying, just for the minutes, I just want to clarify this, so there, you're removing the building, you're removing the concrete, and then you're capping what's there, but they could build a building over that. At some point in the future, there's no reason that they couldn't do that. But you're not moving all of them. We're not moving all of them, we're moving everything, helping to put down all the routes, we're moving the capping, and probably it's in the frost wall. That's the answer. You wouldn't see it. Yeah. If we had a small area, you'd be shown that in a PCB. Correct. Yes. That's a good point. So the PCB concrete needs to be removed separately, and it needs to be disposed of separately. But everything else is just standard concrete flooring, and you can remove the video, the standard PCB where it comes from. The capping, I'm assuming, but I don't want to make an assumption. The possibility of leaching those contaminants out because they're still in the ground, and relatively close to the river, is there a leach risk? Yeah. So the answer, the short answer is no. There's two reasons for that. The first is because the cap itself is impermeable, so we're not expecting to see infiltration through the cap. We'll also give geotextile barrier between the actual cap and the material band and the contaminants below. And the second reason is that the type of contaminants at the levels we see, the type of contaminants that are remanded or disolved is because they all tend to be even exposed. And also the low levels. So there's two, there's really three lines about this to suggest that we don't expect to see a leach. These plans are reviewed by the EPA office in Boston, and also by the Department of Environmental Conservation and the Department of Labor. And so, as you mentioned, I guess they're also there. So the public comment period runs until September 6th. You can send comments either to Bob, who's the official representative for the site, or if you read the correct action plan online on the DEC's website, there's a place there that you can make comments or support as you see the correction. So upon approval, what is the schedule of work look like? Guys, is this gonna be a springtime event or? We're hoping to finish up before the snow falls. Oh, this fall? Okay. So we're working towards that. We have a schedule we've been more active and we can get it done. It will tend a little bit on what our block rating. And I'm trying to retire, so. I don't know. Soon as I win, Bob's gonna knock my case and make sure that he's done my new part. Here, check in on the schedule. So where do those contaminating materials go? Yeah, so the PCC concrete, we'll go to a landfill, a house or space next to it, and we'll be in here. And everything else can go to the CLE waste because we're at their CLE. And that will depend on the contractor that's sold right now. Right? So the contractor has to be sold right now. Not for the PCC concrete, but it's gonna be as fast. There's more to that than it's gonna be. The PCC concrete is gonna go to the CLE just because that's the nearest place to the steps. So you're gonna have a lot of equipment coming through town. Just polishing the materials and whatnot. We don't think it's on the town. It's a pretty small place, but it's got a lot of small wood. So we don't have to stay big in that area. That means, and there's a safety plan that will be flagged out on the territory. And we've also been talking to see if we can include school children as a teaching exercise for interested residents about this process and what we're doing, why we're doing it. Basically, GWA should learn in here. And this will give them some options for circulation. They don't really know exactly what they wanna do in the future, but it would be amazing if they did need to do something there. At least parking. So they're looking forward to continuing to add to their infrastructure there, which is pretty important. So if you can have a worldwide distribution of products and no customers in town, whatever they've built is going to be a lot of work on there. Now in the Swedish company, very, very strong. So we can go after new projects that they feel and like to with their backings. I think the only concern that I have being the time here and what you're looking to do the work on the site is that in front of, called the Valley Motor's Property, that is a major pedestrian for children, artery to and from school. So children use that side of the road to walk to school, but also the northern corner of that property they use to come down across to go to the ball field. So I guess I would just emphasize that in the big process that the contractor has it set to make sure that pedestrian traffic is well protected there because it is going to be children. We feel exactly the same. Okay. Yeah, one of the, and you'll see it in the current national time, we have a investigation. And if you have flaggers, you have to walk pedestrians across the street anyways, I think is about the MATCD standard. So if there's flaggers, there has to be someone to, so I thought. So, you know, we've heard a rumor, Bob, that that Geobu plastics was looking for people. They were so desperate for people that they were actually busing people to work from Boston and then putting them up in hotels. And, you know, I'm not really sure how the town can assist them. I do think that that GW has reached out to VTC and is working with a program there to get more trained people involved, but we were really surprised to hear that. I'm sorry to hear that, but it's difficult for Bethel. Not like we have a place to put up a lot of people, but I'm not sure if you see how the town could be helpful in this case at all. Well, Kathy Tempest as HR director, she's on the GMC board. Yeah. And Ben Rayl, the president, will tell you the answer. He'll tell you if you don't ask him. The first two reasons they lose a prospective employee are housing and childcare. Yeah. Childcare and housing. Sure. It's usually both, and if it's not one person, it's the other one first. So one of the other things that will be working very hard on as a child care center and ran off that the economy, 86 kids with a lot of family services, is critically short everywhere. It is. And so that's something that there is very hard on. It is, and it's a huge issue. Hey, you know, we've been talking about that and looking, Bethel, you're sitting next to the chair of the planning commission at Rick Benson. We've been talking about, we're meeting in September with the planning commission to look again at Bethel and how it's laid out and where can we encourage development and move zoning so that there's more development so people could build multi-family dwellings or subdivide to add housing. So we're looking at that. We need to grow the grand list, but we want to be able to provide housing and opportunity in Bethel. Well, there's some resources that are probably looking in your way that might be helpful in that, in terms of working communities and housing program. I don't know if you recall, in the last year, there was a regular value consortium. Yes, yes. Right, Bethel was part of that, yeah. Well, that is being revisited under the governor's request with the Boston Fed and they're in the process of revising that now and it's focused, the focus, compelling cause is entry level workforce, housing for everyone, entry level workforce and watch the nearest housing. And GNAC is sponsoring a VISTA volunteer, American VISTA volunteer, the Mara Corps VISTA volunteer, just going to be working with the Fort Towns Coalition as well as the waiters and waiter consortium to look at assessing the regional needs by the township, because they're all going to be different and then also what the opportunities are. So I think it's going to be good for some help in figuring out specifically how each municipality can maybe look at what they've got going already and for that. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's good and our timing is good because that's what we're working on. But I feel like the past couple governors have been talking about, and for a while they termed it worker housing, so it wasn't low income housing. Yeah, and so we've been talking about that and so that's something we're going to start revisiting in September to see where we can make it possible for people to subdivide into more. I wondered, so that is true. It's sad and crazy, but hopefully people are enrolling in BTC and working, because obviously GW has a lot of benefits and it's a great workplace for people, so that's a lot of work. And Pat Moulton, the president of BTC is also one of the board members. Nice. And I go into this, it's never been a better time to be looking for grant funds and planning funds and supported loans for these kinds of problems. So the philosophy is that the state government wants to know what the town wants. They don't want to say, okay, we're going to put something here, here, and here. They want to know what the communities are looking for and they want to support that. That's great. Thank you. Is there a plan here that we can see due to low student enrollment? Is this a running out form for temporary housing? It's entirely possible they've looked at a lot of it. Yeah, they have made a deal with the law school to house students there and also visiting nurses coming in through, I'm not sure it's the V&A program or the Department of Health, I think. They made an arrangement to house nurses up there, too. That's a great idea. Yeah, yeah, taking in quite a bit of money on it, too. Sure. But their own student enrollment, resident student enrollment, is increased over what they expected it to be, too. So they've finally created ways to use their housing. That's terrific. And the child center, I mean, if that goes through, they've bought the buildings and they have an agreement to buy the building. We have an option on the lower building at the University of Brexner, which is $10,000 and $730,000. Yeah, need some renovation. They'll be taken apart and put back together again. And that's a big front. But for 86 kids, a lot of the families are in a cessation program. And that costs the $89,000, it's a no-brainer. You know, Governor, Senator Sanderson, Senator Sanderson was here two weeks ago. And this is one of the staff members here. It's so close to exit for us, it was here. So he said, boy, it is close to exit for us. They can swing right into McDonald's and get a Happy Meal for the two of us there, you know? Well, you know, you could live in the White River and work in a hot field and drop the kids off and pick them up on the way home. Yeah. Or you could live in a hot field and work on that for her or her, you know. They're much anymore. So it's not just a no-brainer. It's gonna be for anybody at the time. Exactly, exactly. Thank you, Steve, for answering my questions. And the material that Steve mentioned is all available online and it's under a website and our copies of the product. Yep, it's available, yeah, I have it on your website. And, but yeah, excellent, thank you. Governor, how are we doing? Absolutely, yes, thank you. So we'll send you a copy of the minutes that way you have them for your process. Appreciate it. Yep, absolutely. Thank you. It's nice to meet you. Yep. Take care. Yep. I'm sure. Next, thank you, Bob. Any further discussion in regards to the Plesic Street property or, okay, we will officially close the public hearing on that portion of it. And we will now open second public hearing, which is the Pat of Ethel's Zoning By-Law amendments. So we have the proposed amendments have been available for some time now and this is now the hearing process for those. Because we had our planning commission had a public hearing already. So once they did the report, now they can get to you. This will officially close in 30 days from now. I think so, yeah, sounds fine. I suspect we should re-visit them. I mean, I know we were talking that, you know, I mean, the by-laws are, you know, rather unpersonally through, but you know, it wasn't really any major changes done to the by-laws this time around, like there was five years ago when we had the river corridor pieces and others to examine. So a lot of the changes were smaller in nature this time around. So hopefully everybody had an opportunity to look at that. I know Theresa had reached out to the board members ahead of time of your meeting to say, do you guys have anything? Because, you know, I don't know what the fine line is between a small adjustment and a major adjustment is, but if there's a substantial change then it has to go back to the committee. I don't know what that definition really is, but if it's minor changes that we can do that at this level and continue the process without, you know, without setbacks. Yeah, so as we reached out ahead of time, like if now is the time. I don't really know what the definition is between two, like where you start that line, but. Yeah, I think if it's something small doesn't really change the meaning I think then if we would have a case for having to go back. But yeah, we've had information out, we've had in the newspaper for both obviously public hearing, there's a whole section of laws and rules laid out that you have to follow very specifically about how to get zoning amendments passed for Rick and I. Rick, God bless him, is also the chair of the DRB. So he and I sat down at one point and I, you know, on the zoning administrator were like, look, there's just some weird stuff that you could tell was a mistake or a misprint or we had defined, for example, roadside commercial, but you didn't allow it in any district. So we kind of, there was just a couple things that I think the ones who enforce the zoning regulations, that's kind of the thing about it, the planning commission writes the zoning regulations but the zoning administrator and the DRB enforce them. So there was just some, some of it was just clerical, some of it was, you know, clean up, attend and you know, that we just felt like we really needed to kind of square away and we are writing a planning grant because we are gonna do an overhaul, a bigger overhaul of the zoning regulations. There's been state statute changes. We tried to pick up some of those and Kevin Geiger of Two Rivers reviewed it and gave us some suggestions and, but then like I said, we wanted to try to open up, look at opening up and changing some of the districting and so, but that'll be in the next round. So hopefully I think what was the October or December, we have to submit the grant and then we'll get approval in, get approval in January and then we start the process. And that'll be a little more involved. Oh yeah. So there'll be more input on that. Yeah. There was a couple of topics that came up that we had said, okay, we're not, that's for a bigger rewrite. These are just kind of the low hanging, for things to want to clean up. Yeah, we did get into a couple of things. A couple of things here that needed to be addressed that was a little more involved, you know, private rules and just really just making them more readable and making, having the document make more sense. It was kind of convoluted in my business. Gene's great as far as giving us good feedback on that as far as readable and understandable. So it was really just from the DRB doing what we do and finding little hiccups here and there. The record was a small part of that work. One section was actually not following and another section, you know, we're being across some few new things like timing house litters and just not addressed that. The definitions, we've really done a lot of that and added some, new some. So I think it's a more readable document that we'll do with it, but it will have to be a little bit of a loss. I think we all had some kind of question marks or Kelly or I would call Rick and get, what does this mean? And we kind of said, okay, well, this is how it has been interpreted in the past. So, you know, trying to be consistent, but there was some couple things that were just, you know. And that was just a result of going through the zoning rights and the subdivision rights. That's right. We're still, you know, we're still things that we're trying to do a little bit about. Well, things like tiny houses and the Airbnb's weren't, you know, a big thing back five years ago. Right, short term, short term, yeah. It wasn't something to get concerned about. And short term rentals, that's a big hot button issue right now, short to like Airbnb's is a big issue right now and part of it is because of housing. There's a big fight going on, you know, City of Burlington doesn't want a lot of Airbnb's because they feel that's taking rental properties away from, you know, maybe working for monitors so there's, you know, so there's stuff like that that we hadn't tackled or that we did here. We did here because it's coming, it's more. Yeah, it's more of a town now than people know. Absolutely, I agree with that. Yeah, having sat in a good bit of that on absolute, the changes may get easier to enforce and administer the zoning, both from your perspective and from the zoning officers, I think that's, why and share of what was done was to clarify so that if a person came in for a permit or needed a permit or whatever, there was a rationale that was much easier to understand. Okay, is there any questions? Anybody from the board have any questions in regards to it other than what had been mentioned? Can you just see what's going on? Seeing God and building a very small amount of us that we've come here to see what's, one thing that's been a little bit challenging is it feels like we're in a, feels like we have to leave a forest and we're not like we've got to go there to be and stuff. It feels like everything's becoming more and more expensive wherever we go, the food is always based towards forests, but that makes us have to pay more for everything. I know, of course, that's what brings money to our community, but it seems like everybody's jumping on what's kind of the forest. And then when you can't go out and you can get a quality amount of food, because everybody's basing it as the one that's coming through or passing through from the living, the community, the support for the community and this kind of realizing that everything is going to be more expensive, I think that's just a starting to build up a lot. First of all, seeing what kind of impressive houses that we've got in the market is where it's more important to build. And so, not a certain life, but I think there are plenty of rooms. As far as that's a bigger question, of course, you know, for the local families. Parts of that, I think a lot of us, how do we get their prices to be more affordable? How does it get to the share? We want the travel businesses that are around make it more affordable for them to be in capital and to create a drop on people come here. We don't want to see the restaurant fail. We don't want to see our piece of place that not lose what it will say when it comes to it or we want them to survive. You know, we've talked about not getting help, but, you know, somehow I'm just curious at how our community is like working to help some of our, therefore, very more previous to our town by possibly, what cost of business is going up so much that everything business that can't do anymore? I think part of it, like we were saying, is one of our plans is to help increase the grand list, which would take some of the pressure off some of the businesses as well as some of the residents if we could open up some land so that people maybe who have 10 acres could sell some off if they wanted to, to develop their property where maybe current zoning regulations would prohibit them from doing that so that way it increases the value of the grand list, which helps with that tax base, certainly as well. And, you know, been trying to really push during this water project signage, we got a grant for $7,600 for free advertisement for some of the lower smaller businesses to try to advertise to get people to shop locally. Certainly during COVID, there was a big push from the state which we participated in and advertised for people who maybe had arrearages with rental or taxes or water. And we did end up getting residents that we were able to get about, I think it was about $16,000 to battle residents to help them clear up past, you know, delinquent or late water utility stuff during COVID. And there's another round of that out now that we're helping to advertise. So we were awarded a Better Connections grant and 30,000 of that's gonna go towards developing a stormwater plan, which will be helpful for businesses, you know, like somebody right here near the river, of course, will be Bethel Mills and some different areas in town. And then also with that Better Connections grant is to get some information on maybe bed or wavefinding signage, certainly accessibility to open up because it's like Bethel for all ages eight to 80 to try to see what can business owners and building owners do, but what can we do, you know, as a municipality to help make things more accessible, to do what you're saying, which is encourage more people to come and shop here, whether they're tourist or local, you know, to make sure that we're open for everybody. So we're certainly, you know, we've got a paving grant this year, a structures grant this year, two Better Roads grants, and you know, certainly, if there's a place to have our hand out, we have it out. So to do exactly what you're saying, Mariah, which is try to bring some of those funds into town so it's not taxpayer dollars, a 20% or 10% match is a heck of a lot better than foot in the whole bill. So you're certainly right about that. It's really a shame that such a beautiful building you're feeling, and you know, we see a lot of people with side by side that they need access to town somehow to create, you know, more people to come here, their own roads, just to come and spend money and go on other than money to spend. Yeah. Are you talking about Tessie's Tavern? Yeah. Yeah, because they're open. Yeah. And they were closed for a while because they needed staff, but now that, well, and they also had a little restructuring in their business, but now that they've done that, they're back and certainly, you know, reach out to the people. We have Chuck Lyman and, I can't work with his last name? Carter. Carter, thank you, part of the local, you know, who does the BASA. And they come in every year, ask for permission to drive on the trails in which the select board always gives them, and, but certainly reach out to one of them and see maybe there's, you know, to present your ideas about, hey, you know, is there, they know all the trails, is there a way to get people to the gas station or things like that? And they have great communication. They come to the select board every year and they've always granted them what they asked for for. Yeah, they hand for this pretty good. Yeah, they do, you're right. Create stuff, create things. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the challenge that we have in a small town of Bethel, especially Bethel where it's really unique with the river corridor systems is our footprint is, we have, our footprint has pretty much been maximized based upon what the river and surrounding areas is. And, you know, and then, you know, we saw it, you know, back in the, I don't know, it was around the late 70s, you know, a lot of people used to shop locally. And then, you know, late 70s and 80s, you started seeing things like, you know, the West Levinans and stuff, the box chains come in and then it drove, you know, citizens out to the big box stores, which then left the, you know, the smaller downtown shops struggling to sell the same shirt, right? And then now, you know, most of the, you know, they can't compete with the big box stores, so they have to get creative. And usually the creative ideas end up to be more touristy, you know, end of things, which is great for tourists, you know, when they're coming in and spending money, but like you said, then the local citizens end up, you know, having a harder time of either paying more for something or, you know, it's kind of a, it's a struggle there, you know. Because everything, you know, once you get ready to do, you know, you realize every single thing used to be more or not, you had more or not, you know, everything you buy, you pay more, you're getting less. You know, it's just kind of, it's kind of getting old. Yeah, and I think what we're trying to do right now, like what Theresa's saying is, you know, how can we better maximize our footprint that we already have? So, I mean, we're, you know, we're very limited on everything when we talk about, like, water customers, like, how can we get an extra couple of water customers, right? I mean, we're just, because, you know, you can't really expand the system much, and the same with the downtown area, it's like, you know, you can't really, it's not like, oh, look at all that property across the river, like, it's not there. So, I think, you know, talking about the planning commission, how can we, in some cases, make some of our bylaws easier, well, still have the same effect, but easier to open up some of those properties that right now, maybe, you know, you couldn't, you know, break apart to, you know, hopefully either if that's either a business or if that's housing or, you know, whatever. So, creating events that bring stuff into our community is important. And, you know, all kinds of nice events, nice property, street gansins, and what other people would come. Yeah. You should reach out to Mary Floyd or Brad Andrews at Mills Hardware because they are working this year on ForwardFest. Obviously, COVID, we didn't have it last year, and the year before it went really well, they did a street dance, and they're really trying to expand the ForwardFest. That's always good things, and I learned about going to its economic development class to kind of take one event you already have and blow it up a little bit. And Deetree did only a couple of family fun Fridays this year, but there was like a drumming thing, and next year she wants to do more, but coming out of the gate was very difficult to plan because of COVID, we weren't sure what the rules were gonna be. So she did a couple, but she did have youth feats in, which was a great program, and she certainly has all these, she had all these great plans for this year, and they're all on tap now for next year. And the select board wants Deetree and the rec to, to develop some programming to use the hall more, whether it's movie and working with a business down, so it's movie, dinner and a movie. So if you get a pass, you go work with a local business to go to dinner there first, try to make some creative partnerships, and certainly BRI is another place that's always looking for volunteers, the Bethel Revitalization, that you could talk to Lindley or Kirk White or Rebecca Sanborn Stone about getting involved with that, because honestly, we need volunteers. The planning commission needs people. I can't think of the BRI needs people, Board Fest committee, they need volunteers, and if that's not a year on commitment, that's just like a commitment. For that timeframe, we need bodies and people like yourselves that are interested in the community and stepping up and getting involved because you know what happens, otherwise it's the same things, fall to the same people over and over. I planning commission could have nine people on it, and it's myself and Rick and Denise and Zoe and Kyle who are kind of one because that's it, four people, we could have nine. So we have sent personal limitations and ads and talked about it in town report and that town meeting and for some reason volunteerism is really low and we certainly need more, so it's great that you guys are thinking about that and there is plenty of space, but yeah, if you swing down in Mel's Hardware Bradley, sign you right up, I'm sure, to help with the Song for Board Fest and now be very good to start. There is a forum here tomorrow night that will be brainstorming ideas for recreation. For a specific grant that we want to write around trails. For a grant, so you know, can you come and listen and join that? Yeah, I am doing a lot with the other thing that works with her. Dietrich? Dietrich Feeney, yeah, she runs the pool direct, she runs the pool at Elvis Skate Park, she's on the Recreation Committee and, oh, Ellie Griffin, yep, yeah, yep. Yeah, she has a good chat with her. She's great. Well, anyway, Mr. Moderator, I'm wondering if we could go back to the planning commission hearing and then reopen for public comment? Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I think his discussion, you know, was kind of in and around zoning and planning, which is good and we definitely hear, you know, hear what you're saying and I think we are trying to take some of those steps. All of us have really gone through the rigor and the bold and stuff and just kind of a lot of the different things between the whole, our whole public life is different. You know, we're all included in the OCR and doing things and making your own fun. You know, when we were stuck at our homes and not able to go anywhere, it was very important to be able to create and, you know, do things on your own property and have hope for years. Yeah. Well, thank you for your comments this evening. Did you have anything further in regards to the Zoning By-law Amendments? Are we good with that portion? We have to make motion to accept them. So we just need a motion to accept the town of Ethel Zoning By-law Amendments. So moved. Second. Okay, all in favor? All right. And now we'll open up to public comment. So if there's anything that's not on the agenda, if anybody wants to talk about, now's the time to do it. Well, I just want to take a couple of minutes. I drove by the town officers yesterday afternoon and guess who's there, you know? Therese and Kelly here. And putting out all sorts of information on the town's website and the Facebook pages and coordinating amongst the various groups, Bethel Strong, Bethel Community. As someone who got caught in Irene in a bad way, we got taken out in a rescue boat. Whenever we have an event like this, I start getting like this. And it was good to have that information there because it was current and it gave me a good update. Plus I was looking at the national weather and that was all tied in too. So my compliments to you and Kelly and everybody else who put that together. Thanks, yeah. And helping, it was reassuring and it fed the information on a current basis, not looking at Burlington TV station or something. Right. That has no idea what's happening down here with us under the state. So thank you. Yeah, it was, you know, we, Kelly and I started talking about on Friday and then we just started keeping that information and I think it's a tricky balance where you've been for me personally where people have been through a lot of trauma for Irene and it was really devastating. So you're trying to find that balance of giving people information to encourage preparedness and self-reliance without actually alarming and panicking people. So, you know, and obviously we didn't really know for a while what we're dealing with and so we, monitoring on Friday and then, you know, Saturday I talked to Chris and then, you know, but then Sunday still weren't quite sure. So I was on the phone, you know, I talked to Alan and so I talked to the road foreman and the utility director and the fire chief and then I called Kelly and said, look, I'm going to the office for a few hours. It's easier to do this stuff here and kind of lay it out and, you know, would you mind coming in and, you know, for half an hour an hour and help me, you know, I wanted to get some forms copied and signed printed and going over the rules of FEMA and if we had to just, you know, how do you track the information and all those sorts of things. But yeah, just kind of, you know, trying to feed it but I was glad I got your email and you'd opened that culvert up and it was funny because I had thought about that. And I checked my email like, yes, well, because Richard was gone. And so it was really good that you had done that. And I think it's a line and I think, and we said this today to Dylan Kelly. I said it to Calvin, whatever Calvin's last name is from CAX today. People need to sign up for Vermont Alert. Every, and I said to them every, it's Calvin, I said this is not just every resident in the state of Vermont needs to sign up for BT Alert. We have very few people signed up in Bethel. And, you know, we can put the information out there but, you know, the more people that get those alerts if you're busy and you're not using, don't have a radio on or you don't have a TV or TV's not going, you can miss stuff. So it's still a big, encouraging and we've talked about a town meeting and a town report and we'll talk about land and, but, well, it's good. I'm glad that you found that it was a right balance. So that's what I'm really thankful that you did. I did not live here during Kyrie, but I was, didn't happen to be here that weekend. Oh wow. You ran away. So I have some idea of what was in Dale. But I just wanted to also, I want to join the chorus. It felt comforting when I was anxious about the possibility of Irene. It was comforting for me to have emails or communication from the town saying, look, the town's getting ready and you can do your part. And I did forward that first email on Friday and I received a boatload of thanks and appreciation because people, because it says you can do this. You should have food for four days, et cetera, et cetera. It was very helpful and much appreciated. Laura Prez was nice. She reached out to me on Sunday, I think, saying, you know, pointing, saying there was an article at 2017 or 2018 FEMA article about accessibility and the information and things that people maybe with special need might need. And so I said to her, that's great. If you give that document up and form and get it to me, I will do it, which was nice to be able to give that factor to say. And she was very kind and took care of it. She said, I'll have it in the afternoon. She did. And so it was something nice, something with some tips that we can incorporate into future. So I still have a stack. I kept every note. I was dating, you know, this is the date and time I spoke to people. This is the things we discussed now. And I want to kind of look those over, type them back up and next time we'll have more of, okay, so now these are things to add. Besides, make sure you have medication. Make sure if you have a dog, seeing my dog or whatever, do you have, make sure it has a tags on it. Make sure that you have all those things. So there was some nice tips that she incorporated from an earlier FEMA article that I think we'll now be able to put out with those tips that will have another layer. So, and it was nice to her. Cindy was all set to go with emergency shelter and have that conversation. And so it was nice to know that a little bit of, you know, you had a little bit of a plan at least. And luckily you have so many people that have been through it before that were totally prepared. And, you know, I called a few people and said, okay, what, you know, during our, what would you wish you knew in advance? What are some things we should incorporate in this? So that was kind of as the fire chief had been through it, the utility directors. So they had some good tips to say, oh, hey, this is what, and so, and then in the end it was, you know, the fire chief was like, you know what, Trice will do all this and it was great. He's like, but in the end, take a deep breath, we'll deal with it. Whatever happens, we will, we'll find it, we'll fix it and we'll put it back together. So, which was also nice to know you had experienced people, you know, with you in it. So, it was nice to see you. Thanks for this. Yes, yes, yes. A lot of prayers, please no. Well, thank you for all your work on the, the document and we're gonna, we'll just start again in September. So I did find the meeting on my calendar. So I will do, we'll have to do an agenda and all that and get that out, but, so, and then maybe it's in bigger maps or two rivers and a couple things so that we can write on them. I think Pam would yell at us if we wrote on the one of the comments. Good, any further public comment? You're talking about the rain, I guess, all right now. I just wonder what the person's raining though, what we're thinking about with the fires and stuff and the old and how wet is that, if you do anything, how do you fire it right now? Not, not specifically like a, oh, I wouldn't say not specifically wildfire, but, I mean, I know there are some scenarios in there on some preparedness, not necessarily at the town level, but at the fire department level and I will only say that because the town of Killington experienced a wildfire outbreak back in June, I believe. And probably the most active fire department that fought that fire was our fire department. Given the town of Killington pretty much refused to fight fire. So it was neighboring towns that came to the aid. They only had like three, they only had like a couple, three people. Yeah, they didn't have heard of anybody. So Bethel took a larger stance in that and I know that they do, the good thing about our fire department is they have trained in multiple scenarios of whitewater rescue, forest fires and other similar events like that. I would say a large scale, I mean, I don't think anybody's prepared for any type of large scale event, kind of like an Irene thing, like you just never would have thought that that would have ever happened until it did, but. And depending where it is, you can reach out to the national or to the local community for it. Local EMS has some plans in place in case there is any type of large fire event on how they practice all the time on who responds and who helps out to sit at that location in case there's a local emergency issue. So they practice those quite often. There is a national parks. Yeah. If there's an office in Rochester, they have about 40 people who participate in wildfire all over the country. If something were to happen here they would already weren't out there. Yeah. They would, I'm sure they would be here. I'm sure it's like anything else too, whether it be the state of Vermont, be the national guard if you needed them, it would be national or the state forest service and things like that. So. We have, next on the agenda we have, there was a resignation in there and Jerry Thomas from the EIC. So he had sent along his letter. So we would just need a motion to accept his resignation. So go. Second? Second. Second. Thank you for participating. Yeah. I guess I didn't understand that. He had taken another position and he wasn't in the area. It says Washington State Court of Appeals. I mean that's close enough, isn't it Washington State? I mean we have Zoom and stuff now. For a while he was still signing into their calls remotely, but I think timing wise it just. Well when I read it I saw Washington State I had to reread it again tomorrow. He hung on as long as he could. Yeah. Yeah I saw that. Oh three hours, you know it's about three hours or something. Well yeah, it's not just the time difference. It's five a.m. right? Well he was, in the last few meetings he was actually sitting at work. Yeah. On the call so it was clear it was not gonna last much longer. So we had motion and a second and we were all in favor so we're good to be there. And then we had another resignation, David Aitken from the South World to the senior citizens board of directors. That was a letter. The year 2020 was not a favorite of mine. Beginning on February 8th when I died in my driveway. I'm like that is the biggest uppersavement of the year. I had to read it three times to realize it's like you know that's really what he's saying. Massive, it's hard to tell. I know and he comes in with you know jelly he and me always and he comes and distributes it and we talk about the clock up here. And but when I read his letter I was like it's just the wording of his letter but what a nice nice man. Now Paul Baylor came on that board of directors. Yep. We need to appoint a second. That's what I was gonna ask. Maybe Carol might know. I was gonna ask Carol yeah and we do but I just wanted to. I don't know how active Dave was. Yeah I didn't know either so I was curious about that myself. So we thank him for his service and we just need a motion to accept his resignation. So moved. Second. Okay all in favor. All right. Hi. Thank you. I love you. Take care. Thank you. Next we had the better connections grant steering committees request to hire. So there I have a letter I talked we've met. The voice of gang, right? Yeah so there was a couple we met on Friday but over the results and Lylee had input myself. Nicole, Cindy Metcalf, Owen, Daniel Carter and so we do it and then so Nicole wrote me a nice letter today for the board. She had checked references and the selection committee. I'll just read you the little piece here. One paragraph the selection committee recommends of the town of Bethel hire the Du Bois and King consulting firm to manage the better, Bethel better connections. Planning process we felt their proposal embrace the project goals outlined in the Bethel for all RFP. We appreciated that their application was well written in detail. Additionally they have previous experience with better connection grants. Their average application scores 94 out of 105 giving them the second highest score during the reading and scoring round of the selection. But during their interview they provided specific examples of product projects which were innovative, inclusive and community led. Our team was receptive to questions asked by the selection committee and expand upon their planning experiences with enthusiasm. Most impressive was the ability of their in person representative Dayton Crites to assist with facilitating the hybrid in person virtual interview. So everyone that was present felt really engaged. And we certainly all the selection committee agreed that in during the interview round the Du Bois and King had the best interview. So Nicole checks the references and she said as far as DNK goes they describe the team as receptive to the needs and requires the various stakeholders including municipal staff, steering committee members and residents. They felt as though they got their money's worth and would feel comfortable hiring them again. And so I went to both interviews with Du Bois and King and Tool and read the proposals. And I certainly agreed with them and in the end which was just a coincidence that Tool and DNK had the exact same price. So it wasn't a low bidder, high bidder type of thing. It was funny just the way it worked out. 982. Yeah it was interesting the way it worked out but certainly they nailed their presentation and the only question I had, so this is a plan, this is not actual work, this is a development of a plan that will then lead to suggestions or development of construction opportunities. So a lot of this is really that it expands what grants we become eligible for by having this master plan. And I think it's a lot like you know, Teresa Opton says with our road projects, the shovel ready projects. This is a really similar concept except that I think it goes even sort of one step further that the state actually puts out specific grants for towns that have done this planning process. And so then we go into an even smaller pool of eligibility and we're only competing with other towns that have done this same planning process. So then we're, it's not an assured thing, but it's- And those grants would then be converted into actual fiscal changes. Exactly. Those become implementation grants versus the planning grant. So money for this, the $98,000 is from where? It's from the state, the $7,000 we've been carrying, remember that said that we've been carrying forever? So that's our match. And maybe it's 7,400, but very close to that. And 30,000 of this is for the stormwater master plan which we had originally wanted a specific project done. And then the state reviewed them and said, you know, yeah, cool, but you can do a master plan. So which is honestly is good. They'll come out with three to five, probably three really flushed out designs probably places that we need stormwater issues that we're aware of and they'll take a lot of the doubt that we've already had done. So we will definitely have a stormwater master plan that we will definitely have, which is terrific. And then, yes, we have talked about multiple times about this economic piece. I will say I really loved the guy that Du Bois and King had, I think his name was Tripp, and he had been through this process before and so there'll be some economic indicators and helping the businesses, where are your shoppers coming from and some very specific information for them to help them with their own business model. We also were hoping that some of the businesses, Main Street or buildings, not just businesses, would maybe get a little bit of information on exactly, here's some things you can do to increase accessibility to your building now. Some pop-ups, different ideas that they're gonna try out and certainly that's where the select board deadline comes into play as they need volunteers to help man those so if you can't commit, obviously it'd be on the steering committee, which nobody did, so at least you could maybe help with some of these different events, I'm just saying thank you. So we're not, we're committing to Du Bois and King only if the grant goes through. We already got the grant, we already got the grant. We were awarded the money, yeah, so then they had to go through this whole RFP process. Are we taking any action? Yes, yes, we have to, because we have a very quick time on here, yeah. I will refuse myself because my daughter works at Du Bois. Oh, okay, that was a good one. In particular reason, okay, that makes sense. No, I think the plan is overall is good. I mean, I was kind of picking through it this weekend on, you know, some things in here would have been done anyways, right, like Theresa and I have been talking about the sidewalks and Pleasant Street, you know. Well, we're talking about Dave. And Kevin wanted to put in his ramp, you know, up front this would kind of fall into that. You know, there are some things in here that I question, like, will they ever happen? Like, you know, once you start taking the dimensions of the downtown, like, the road is not wide enough to have appropriate parking and travel ends. It's never will be that unless we went through some like major undertaking to make the road wider, which would just be astronomically expensive. Tear off the front of these buildings. Two layers. So it's, you know, so I mean, it used to be an overhead, excuse me, it used to be an overhead trolley system or something through. So some of those other things. Some of those other things that they had pointed out from here and some of the other products they have done where like, you know, maybe have like, what we better block when there was like a walking lane and you know, things like that, it was kind of neat. The thing is, you just don't have the width and the only way you could do that is you have to close like parking on one side of the road or something to be able to access that. Because right now, I mean, we're not legal. Like the park, you know, you're supposed to have, you know, 11 and eight and, you know, we probably have like 11 and six, you know, I mean, the parking stalls aren't wide enough to accomplish those things, which then it complicates things like accessibility to businesses and the ramps and things like that, because when your downtown is too small to begin with, then it affects everything else. Bethel has a great history of picking up buildings and moving them. I think we just pick up all the buildings and move them out a little bit and then put them back down. So I think there's good intentions, but I do see some roadblocks here. And I think too, you know, they're just doing an RFP. So when they come out, they're answering an RFP. So obviously they're using historically, historically what they've done in different places. This was because somebody... Like this example of construction signage, I'm like that you... Yeah, I understand it, but like having installed temporary signings on poles, I mean, that's never gonna happen, right? Never would happen, because we'd have to move that thing every day, you know? So just some of those things. But it could have been a history, I think was their point, but... I think overall it's good, I just wondered. If some of it is that they have to, they're answering RFP information, stuff they've already done. They haven't come in and done the work to analyze Bethel. They realize there's been challenges we have, so they're gonna come up with some creative alternatives to say, okay, you know, your traffic line is different here, so these are other ways we're gonna have to do it. So I think, you know, and I think that's part of the discovery process, right? For them to say, Bethel is so unique. What we've done in this town won't work for you, or maybe this piece will, but this piece won't, and then go from there. So I think it's actually great timing because we've been talking about downtown, pedestrian safety, and all those things. So I think it'll be interesting to, you know, to come together, if so. So, unless anybody opposes to it, just need a motion to accept the proposal from Du Bois and King for the Village Accessibility Plan and Stormwater Master Plan. So moved. Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. All right, all right. And we had an ongoing discussion for the hybrid meetings that we've been talking about. Let's see if that's... Yep. So we, I met with Rob from Orca Media. Learned one day last week, anyways, I think. And nice guy. So he came in and he said, his opinion in the owl would not work for us here. He said, you know, with the ceilings and the acoustics, but what Orca can do is, they come with the camera like they do now, and they come and they bring a laptop. We would have to get a subscription back to Zoom. And then they just put a cable in to the computer, so the video becomes their video. So as some people talk, they can pan to them, which is a lot of times what they do now anyway. So then they can do that. One thing he said, we might have to do is either another monitor or... And we've already kind of been talking about a television so that out on the road crew, anybody could do training, they could come here, so they've weren't at the town barrage, having a TV then. What happens then is there's a TV there, so it's like a big monitor, so you can see who you're talking to. So if someone is at home or whatever they're talking to, you can see them. And a first suggestion was, first, you can buy a TV and see how that goes. Then if that's not the best acoustics, we might have to buy some separate speakers. But you would also, you'd have to subscribe just when we have to buy a TV and we could start with just a computer monitor and then some portable speakers. But like I said, the TV may be in our future anyways, or at least a bigger monitor because of trainings, so that if Gabe, Richard, Alan, whoever myself were doing one thing, we could all sit here and look at one thing. So that was his option. So he's saying, no, I will, and this is, so far, this is the cheapest option. The cheapest option is the Zoom subscription, which was attached to my credit card, so it was like 12, something like 13 a month maybe, and we could buy a year subscription and purchasing a smart TV. And then see how that goes. And then after that, we have to, we could add speakers and he said you could start with even cheap $40 computer speakers, and then if that didn't, you could kind of upgrade from there or just buy like a bar or something, but that was it. But he did not think the hour would work. So Pro is... You have a funny speaker right there. There you go, that was a great day. It's right in the middle, so it's amazing. So the power, so that's one option, but and that takes care of only the select board. So if you had Equal Inclusion, Planning Commission, whatever, that wanted to do a hybrid, they would be back to the, they could plug your laptop, they could plug a laptop into the television so you could see better, but the visual would still be, somebody's sitting here with a laptop looking at the audience. Did you have a thought around just, because I know part of our discussion was we hadn't budgeted for a larger purchase like a TV, were you thinking about like maybe splitting that across departments since the road crew would use it some, but we would use it, like kind of split it up so no one entity is bearing the burden of that purchase, or had you not gotten there yet? Well, I wasn't, you know, honestly, I hadn't really thought much about it only because it all comes out of the general fund. So, you know, Alan doesn't necessarily have a budget anything in particular, computer specifically. Probably what we would do is just take it out of the computer budget right now, because I think myself and Deetree, I tried every year except, but somebody has to get it in computer, so nobody crashes, we stay up on technology. So I think it's myself and Deetree, but they're not that, because we don't need monitors, we don't need keyboards, we just need that, so I think I could just take it out of that, and I'm assuming we could get one for $500 to $700, because when we got the price from Vermont Digital, I think he had to like eat something and he thought we could do better than that. We can get a big enough phone, we can show football games, and we'll talk, we'll talk, we'll talk together. There you go, all right, so we have a charging mission, we get our money back. So, like I said, then that is with the help of Orca, that's great, if Orca somehow could make it, then the hybrid would be, again, a laptop, which wasn't bad, and you said you could hear, we were just pointing it, and it would be, again, because we'd have to put the laptop here in between the two of us, we'd have to be checking who was there, it would be easier if I wasn't also taking the minute, so if Julie's able to do that, that'd be terrific, because I can't take them in as from the Zoom, and do all that, so maybe we can take turns or something figuring that out. The TV and or monitor should be as large as possible. Right, so I'd have to look around for pricing, and I'm not even sure anybody wanted to do that, so I haven't spent any time, because in the meantime, I have one extra computer monitor, so if currently, if the road crew was doing it, I could put, Alan could have his laptop, somebody looking at it with him, and I could set up another monitor over there for two more people, so I don't need to do any of this, I could make what we have for existing technology work if I needed to, it's really a choice of the select board, and I have made my case from the get-go that money, and I do not begrudge them, so just remember, we've already, the historical side, we 3600 for back rent, we wiped out their 2400 of rent, now we're looking at a television, retirement, you know, because we are already off of retirement, and I don't know if we had a budget, say the TV and Zoom and stuff is 1,000 bucks, obviously I can look, I haven't spent any time looking to see in the budget, I'm gonna come up with that money, because I'm too busy trying to find the 30,000 per time, so, and I don't know of a grant that's out there that's gonna help us with that, frankly, at this point, maybe if we bought one before, maybe during that COVID relief thing, we could have got it then, but who knew? We bought a laptop, we did think to buy a laptop, so. I think, like I said before, I think the idea is a good idea, and worth exploring, but I just, like, the urgency of having to do it now, and the only reason why I say I want one, I mean, I think the costs are sort of petty to get it started, but my experience with being remote versus in person has been the same amount of people, like, you know, if when we were doing Zoom, if we saw 50 people on Zoom, but when we were in any person, there was only three, then, wow, there was a lot of benefit to that, but, you know, every time we signed into Zoom, I mean, there wasn't any more people there than the usuals that were here, you know, and, you know, so, I mean, in some cases, I'd almost rent a, like, town meeting day, put it on the, you know, on the warning for whatever, $1,500 for communications to upgrade to meeting, you know, select board meetings, and put it back on the voters, because they're the ones that actually would be using this, right, and I mean, I just don't see the urgency, like, it has to be done, like, right now, I think it's a great idea, but I just don't see, like, spending, you know, I don't want to say spend $1,500 and say, I told you so, look, I mean, people are dialed into this thing, right, just five, you know, but, I mean, that's been the reality, and I, you know, I sit in on the school board ones, and, you know, they have both in-person and Zoom now, and there's nobody, you know, I mean, it's, you know, and they've spent money on technology for that, and I just don't see the, unfortunately, the, you know, I know everybody talks about accessibility, but when you give it to, in this case, the accessibility, we didn't see anybody take advantage of it, and a number that was worth spending the extra money, I don't know, that's just my opinion, but I mean, I would rather put it into the budget we got come in on a standalone vote and let the voters, you know, do they want to spend an extra X amount of dollars on technology to be able to communicate with their select board better, you know? I did get an email from Lenny and said that he had some blank now on the word I want to use, but in a conflict, there we go, phew, and I was about who was, so he was couldn't be here for maybe only every other meeting, and he did say in his email, he asked me about hybrid meetings because of the new Delta or COVID variant that he was a little nervous about, select board meetings, and I just emailed him back and said, you know, basically thanks for your attendance and see when you see it, and the select board, as you know, has been having discussions and looking into this, I've met with Vermont Digital and Orca and we've talked about it, so. Help me, because I don't think it's an idea. I think it's a horrible idea. I think if you're really interested in what these folks did, you come to the meeting, you'll talk with us, but if you had a conflict, how is this money we spend going to help you, I can't come to this meeting, how can you go to a meeting that's on television? You know, we just- You just told me you had a conflict. I mean, certainly. So the problem is not the communication or the TV, it's you have a conflict. Yeah, he was one person, but- He's one. And the Orca media does have, so if you wanna participate, you know, in real time, then that's an option. Otherwise, of course, Orca has done a nice job of filming your meetings and having them out there for you to listen to in a, in a, like a couple days later, right? Yeah, but I'm, I'll tell you right now, my vote's known, I'm not, I can't support something that I've been in this town for, it's not a voting age. And we have nothing but less, fewer, and fewer, and fewer people participating. We've changed meetings from evenings to weekends to different days, days of the week. Nobody more, no one else comes. Well, I think- I don't believe you'd set this TV up if you get, regularly, five people regularly. You'd be damn lucky. Well, I think that, you know, that's kind of, to my point, is put it back to the voters on a standalone item on town meeting day to say, this is how much it's gonna cost you, right? Because we don't have it in the budget right now, because we're already behind, unfortunately, with the retirement, you know, from our retirement system, all of a sudden, saying, here, you need to come up with X amount of dollars that we don't have. So we're gonna be pinching our pennies anyways, and then, you know, like we talked about, you know, with the historic society and things like that, and who knows with what we'll have for other grievances and things like that. So, you know, we're already behind about two pennies on the tax rate, you know, that we gotta find creative ways in our existing budget to try to get to even. But I think it's, you know, I'm all for presenting what the realistic cost is to do this. Put it on the ballot on town meeting day and say, you know, this is what it will cost if the community wants to have the option of the hybrid model where you could participate more. And then at least it's their voice, right? I mean, their one's gonna vote it in or out, and then it doesn't become us dictating. I agree, but I don't. We, I don't know if I've said this here before or not, but when I was a pastor in Woodsfield, Ohio, maybe four years ago, we had an addition to the building. And in the process, we removed a four inch curve that made the building accessible. The number of people that I had to visit because they were shut in was cut by 90% because of that four inch curve. And we never had anybody come who was in a wheelchair. Now, we couldn't have, you know, if we had been arguing about, well, we don't have any people in a wheelchair and we don't think it's gonna make any difference, we never would have had that experience. I think that being accessible is more than who will take advantage of it. It's an image that the town has of being open, accessible, and inviting. Julie would be here tonight if we were hybrid. That's just a fact of our own, our own personal life and experience. But I also recognize we don't have any money right now. I do think that it's appropriate to put in the budget something that's relating to communications, public relations, community relations, however we label it that provides with the capacity to let people know what's going on and to participate in real time. I think that that's important. But I understand everybody's saying what they're saying. I just wanted to get my two cents in. You don't know what you don't know. We don't know what we don't know in terms of somebody out there who doesn't drive or somebody out there who's elderly or whatever who might want to come. So you just had a charismatic drive through every minute. So you don't think that because you've already done Zoom for a few months, you don't think that was a big enough test sample, if you will? I think that that's an example of being, of having done that. We know that we can do it. It's the technology. We have the technology is what I'm saying. Yeah. It doesn't, but going hybrid now becomes a learning from COVID about a way to move forward and in a world that has changed in the last 12 months. Thank you. So that's where I stand. And all I'm going to say is I go to a lot of select board meetings a year in my business. And I will say that what we do, just what we do with Orca and the way the board is set up is we are way more transparent and inviting than the majority of the town to sit on. We are, to be congratulated. Most of them don't have even Orca. So if they want to know what went on at the select board meeting, they're going to have to wait whatever 21 days from now to what was in the meeting minutes. I mean, that's, there's so many towns like that. And I think we do have Orca, which is good. Our agendas are accessible. And we are very, there's a lot of boards that are really structured and don't really take much comment other than the public comment period. Anything else that's, this is our meeting type deal and you're right. I think if I personally was sitting here, we hadn't done the zoom, you know, let's say we hadn't done it as someone who brought this to our attention, I'd be thinking, wow, you know, there's probably a pool of people out there that really would take advantage of that. But having gone through, we'll call it a test sample of zoom meetings and witnessing other zoom meetings like school boards and other things like that, I don't see any extra participation. And I even went through some of the old meetings that we had just to see, like, am I wrong? And in some cases we had two extra people, but that was two people that I know was in the same household with two laptops. And I'm like, you know, I know they were in the same household, like. Chris, you're absolutely right. We have expressed ourselves and taken steps to be open and inclusive and inviting. This is just another way we can do that. Yeah. And that's, and I'm not putting down or denying any of that or the capacity for people to come to the meeting. I simply think that it's another step that's consistent with who we are and what we've been doing. And we're to be, we can pat ourselves on the back. I think we do a good job. Well, and one- You're gonna talk to BRI, right, or something. Yeah, and we actually canceled our meeting this past month, so it didn't come up. But I think one upside of this potential model is that we're sort of doing a little bit of both, right? We're not, we're not fronting this massive cost to invest in a huge system and having to figure out, you know, who's gonna run it during meetings, but by having Orca that's already here, you know, sort of being the assist on that, all we're investing in is the piece of infrastructure, which the TV I think is actually a functional piece of infrastructure that our town would utilize on many different levels. And so I can kind of see the argument for even though maybe we didn't see a huge spike, I would still say it wasn't statistically significant, but there was additional participation that probably would never walk into a meeting in person. And we don't know who's moving to town that might wanna get involved and it might be a great way for them to feel like from the safety and comfort of their home, they can kind of get to know the town and maybe those people then become volunteers, but to have to have the sort of the side of it where what we're investing in has multiple functions. It's not just for this one thing, whereas the owl really is just for the one function, right where the TV you've already been talking with the road crew about such an investment. And so I feel like if we're, if we're looking at it from that sort of utilitarian all encompassing perspective, I don't see the harm in it aside from our budget, right? The budget is sort of the big looming question and maybe it is putting it to the voters or maybe it's sort of Terese working her magic of, okay, you're gonna take 50% from the road crew budget and sort of everybody pitches in and then makes it happen without draining any of our department's budget. And I think, yeah, I agree with you. I think if we were sitting here, not, let's say we didn't just get the information from the state about the retirement differences and the historic society thing, and we're on a level playing field, it's kind of petty, right? It's easier, easier pill to swallow. But I think on the responsibility end right now and if we gotta come up with roundabout numbers, $40,000 for retirement and then we just lost our, one of our small revenue sources for the town and then we go buy something and kind of look reckless like, why aren't you pinching your pennies so that we don't have a deficit or have to retire or something or, we always have this group that wants it, they do a GoPundit page and they do a GoPundit. Well, the other thing, I hate to say it, but I gotta think that somehow, if we really wanted it, it could be a donor or it may not have to be a person, it could be a business, or something that would donate. It wouldn't break anybody's house. Some equipment or something, but, but worst case scenario, we could put it in the budget. They can have their, well, they don't have any money. I mean, down the road, it may have to be expanded into something different. But, so you're looking at the build it, if you build it, they will come versus if you didn't build it. You never know. It's certainly not gonna come. Yeah. You know? So, that's a better way to look at it and for the expenditure of the TV, I'm sure it can find somebody. I mean, I can get price. I'm sure it's more tilt than that. I mean, it's not just 500 bucks. And we're up and running, you know, great. Because we, I can get price. I haven't priced a television. I've got to actually go back and look at this in the package, but that's fine. I mean, I can get pricing to see, I can ask Vermont Digital, you know, look for a TV that was, you know, cheaper than the 800. And then you're right, you could add to it later. You have speakers and, and you just have to figure out all the cards. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not going to do the select board. We just talked about the work that we're going to do with the select board. We're going to do the utilitarian part. Do you want to be brought to people? Someone else will have to run it. Right. Well, maybe those individual committees decide internally, you know, if the EIC really wants to have a hybrid meeting, they can use our infrastructure, but they have to figure out, you know, their video equipment or their laptop, you know, connection, which frankly, every laptop now comes with video equipment in it. So is it perfect? No. I mean, this is sort of what Theresa was saying. Right. It's like, I was able to hear Lenny's comment in the back of the room from Theresa just spinning the laptop around. That's good. You know, I couldn't physically see him, but I knew his voice enough to know like, oh, that sounds like Lenny. Cool. Okay. It's amazing. Right. And so I think, you know, Dave, to your point, I think that we can offer up a piece of it and they can meet us somewhere in the middle. And maybe it is that we still reach out and find, you know, the community partners that help us match that cost to purchase the TV because then they do have that infrastructure accessible to them and, you know, I wouldn't give up on BRI just purely because we didn't have a meeting. I'm having to call the email team J at Vermont Digital and say, okay, what's a price for the TV, what's a price for a TV in the cart? And then he can. Yeah, that's a cost on the starter package. And then we can add the bells and whistles to it as we go. Right. As different community organizations. Yeah. You know what I mean, like, because he had given us the price originally and he was the one who sat, I can't remember if the car was 400, I can't remember, but he said, he's like, I think we could find a cheaper appell. But that's why it's suggested. It's like a build a car. Yeah, I was actually trying to think, it's like, do I want to try to have middle schoolers build a car? It could be an interesting design. That was my suggestion on BRI. Is it half the biz? Is it a smart TV or just a smart TV? It just has to be a smart TV. That's fine. Right, it just has to be a smart TV. But I'm not going to buy the TV. I mean, I want someone who knows what they're on. You're also looking, you're now looking at 45 inch, you're looking at 70, 80, 90 inch. Well, you know, I don't know. I mean, how big. But you are. Yeah. Well, the TV is pretty cheap. I mean, you can buy like those 80 inch TVs for like 500 bucks now. I mean, it used to be, that wasn't at all, it was a little bit of a long course. 80 inch, 80 inch TV? Yeah, you can go to Walmart. I mean, it's not the greatest quality one, but you go to Walmart and get one for a few hundred bucks. Well, but if you're thinking for this space for, I would say. You're going to be, I mean, if you're going to spend $700, you know, don't spend $550 and be, it doesn't work. So I can ask him for a different price on an 80 inch TV, a car, and then obviously we can price zoom. 80 inches is too big. It is. Well, tell me what's the size? I don't know. I don't know. See what they say. What's the next size? I don't know. What are the other times? Hey, I still have a 36 inch in my house and that would be big. It's like, you sit back in the back door, put that TV up here on the stage and tell me what you're 36 inches, what you can see. Well, you'd have to move. It's on a card. It's on a card, so. Let's argue about size once we decide to price. Yeah, I know, but I have to do the price on the top of my head. I don't know. Oh, yes you do. Given the dimensions of the town. He's been here. He's been here. Room here and what's his recommendations? He says, recommendations. Conference centers that broadcast use TVs posted to the TV. Yeah, he's, he was here. 60 inch was big enough. Okay, 16. Just give us a professional price on what it will cost and then we'll just hammer it out. Say yay or nay. I'll ask him to price a couple different size TVs. Maybe we'll do that and then three sizes, six to 80 and then the car and we'll zoom I can do, but I want someone else to make up the TV. My husband had TV for his 60th birthday and I was like, read so many articles I thought my head was gonna float. Oh my God, all this just so you could watch and now they're tanking it. So he's really not happy. Once you got something you can't really see from the sides. Exactly. Some of them are wraparound. And then wait until the sun shines in it. They don't even see anything. That's right. Then we're gonna need the lines. We're gonna have to have a sound bar. That works at 10,000. That's why you don't use the monitor. It is a whole TV. All right, wrap it up, wrap it up. It's a whole thing, Paul. So that's, yeah, so that was what I was thinking. We're good on that? So quickly, I just wanted to, just while it was fresh in our heads, you know, Terese and I had done quite a bit of talking this weekend and today on, you know, just kind of our emergency preparedness piece and, you know, and, you know, through the discussions that Terese and I were having, you know, she had brought up like, hey, we didn't realize, like an example was, we didn't realize that, you know, our fuel source for the town is at the town garage, which we don't have, if the power goes out, we have no way of pumping fuel. Yeah, I didn't know we didn't have a generator. So for instance, like some stuff like that. And maybe there's other things that we haven't thought of, but, you know, I don't want to say that it was like, you know, it was almost kind of a good, yeah, I don't want to say practice, but you know, we're never going to get it perfect, but you know, we've got a good trial run. What we're, you know, maybe it's a good time to audit our trial run of, you know, what worked, what didn't work, what do we maybe need to adjust? We do have our budgeting pieces coming here in a couple of months. So it's an opportunity to say, we need to buy something or start thinking about something. And Allen has the money for generators in his tool budget. And so we chatted about that, because he said, well, I can come and get your generator. I said, no, he can't, because I'm the emergency operation center. So then I talked to Dave Altragetti and he said, well, you can't have my generator. I said, listen, somebody needs to give him a generator, because I said, when you go to fill up your fuel trucks, you're going to wish he had bigs. He's like, Dave. And there'd be an option for like a hand crane. Well, yeah. I mean, you know, I mean, like, there'd be an option in this area. But Dave Altragetti luckily had two that he owned personally. And he said, if this happens, he said, tell Allen to call me. He was power. I will bring him in my personal generator. So then Allen had already priced one right before the storm. So he, it was all set to get a generator. But like Chris said, it was one of those things that kind of came up. And the listeners are cleaning out that office, Mo and Judy, and they had this, I'm like, hey, I'm going to the box. And so I was telling Kelly, we're going to put some forms in here. And Dave Altragetti had told me, I'll have those forms in my desk at the fire department. I think I already have 20 copies. Cause we talked about, you know, that you can't, you know, you have to be dispatched in order for you to get FEMA money and all those things. But Chris was right. There was some things that just going through the process that were okay. What I was saying, I know now we need to have a little tree. I have a little list already of things for, I think Alan should have a checklist of some things that he and I talked about. But if he wasn't here, somebody needs to know all the vehicles need to be gassed up. The chainsaw blades need to be sharpened. You know, everything needs to be ready so that you're not, you know, you're prepared. The other thing that I was thinking of, mainly because we were actually out of town when you sent the first email. And we changed our travel plans back so that we'd be back in town if the storm hit. Because otherwise we would have been. No, no, well we would have been traveling through the storm and we just decided that was not worth it. But one of the things I was thinking of was when I first joined the board, Carl Russell had really recommended I get ICS trained. And I did the ICS there. He had, okay, the guy's name is escaping me, Richard, something, but he had the guy. Kubelianna. Kubelianna, yeah. He came here and did a training and so it was sort of Dave Aldergetti and Geary Kubler. They re-upped their basic. So he's ICS 100? Yeah, but you know, for me it was my first go around with it and it was really helpful to kind of know what would be expected of me in that situation and how can I be most helpful to the town at that moment in time. And so I sort of, in my mind, I was going through my checklist of like, okay, here's where I can plug in and I know how to get in touch with the people where I know I'd sort of be best suited to help out depending on what happens. But it might just be a thing for the town and board members in general to be thinking about it. Like, we are one of those sort of lines of defense and we don't have the same training as the fire department but they're gonna be needed in different spaces and where we can be is kind of here assisting you or in different little pockets around town and sort of be your assists that you can call on. And so just thinking about it from that perspective that it's probably worth us all keeping at least somewhat up to date or at least a few of us at any point in time on the board. Have you had the board training, the ICS-402 maybe? So there is a board training that you can do that I can get. What is ICS? The incident command. So it's incident command system. And so I can make, that's a great idea. I actually, now that you said it, I want to say I think I did the board one because it was a 400 level. Yeah, so that would have been the board one which is good because I've done ICS-100, ICS-200 and I actually had talked about 300 and he's late and which I was a little nervous to take because it's pretty intense. When I did 100 it was easy, it was not a big, I'm not easy but it was online and it was easier. ICS-200 I did with a group of firefighters and police officers and you did scenarios and it was really good and horrifying and scary and informative all at once. But there's a board level so that's great, Lindley. I will look at that because you should because ICS is like that. There's the emergency management person director's is me and then you have the offshoots of that and who's gonna do planning and who's gonna do, that's why we do that local emergency management plan and that's what I was saying to Alan over the phone. I was like, all right, if you, I have three contractors on standby so no other town will stop them up. They will come to test first but you can't call them, you need to call me so that that way I know where you're out and then we can keep track and the paperwork is insane as Chris and I can attest. So it definitely is a system so it would be great if the board could do that. So I'll look at that because I'm sure now I'm sure it's online and people could take it in their leisure. I mean, you wouldn't think that in a natural disaster situation that documentation and paper would be like your top priority would think it would be. Secondary. But if you don't, if you are not documenting and filling out the right paperwork, even before you dispatch people, you will not get paid anything like nothing. And that's kind of the last thing you would think about doing, you're thinking about fixing, dealing, not, you know, okay, let's get to town, but there's so much paperwork in this. Because I had a conversation with Alan on Sunday morning and I said, hey, do you guys still have notebooks in all the trucks? And the committee's like, oh, I'm not sure. I said, then you need to go run right down right now to write a, and I'll reimburse you later and you buy one subject college notebooks and you make sure everybody has one because we will need to know exactly where they were. What were they driving? Where was that material going? How much of it? I said, if they were operating a hand shovel, that's a different FEMA code. So like, you need to have this. And he was like, okay, I said, remember when you had to go back and sit there? And the four, you know, when it was after the April 2019 and a couple of times they were like, all right, they had to remember where they were, where all of them, you know, looking and I'm like, mm, sometimes you need somebody standing out or taking load slips when you're in a happened in Bristol. You're building a piece of, you know, Lincoln, Narrow to Lincoln back and you got somebody just, Johnny, nope, you know, anybody standing there collecting load slips, make a note so that it's, and it's crazy because of the documentation. But I think it's a great time. You can fix anything, you just can't do the paperwork. I think like Paul had said earlier, I mean, I think the nice thing and, you know, years ago, I know when Irene hit, you know, a lot of the anger in the community kind of got focused on the board at the time. And, you know, but I mean, sitting in the same chair now, you know, how much could have the board really done? You know, I mean, I know it was easy to blame the board, but, you know, but, you know, the biggest thing that has come out of that is how do we prepare ourselves as a town but also as individuals for, because we have to be, you know, we have to own our own individuality of what's going on and preparing ourselves. But the information, getting out there to just remind people that, hey, you know, if you haven't already, make sure you have, you know, three days of this and three days of that and, you know, just, you know, because again, we were talking today with the reporter, like, can you sit back with all the people that have come into the community in the last 10 years and then people that have left and, you know, there's probably a good amount of people that didn't experience it, you know, other than hearing about it or, you know, that weren't here or, you know, you hadn't officially moved here, but, you know, so there's probably so many people that, and I know myself as a citizen, like the night before when people were, you know, you're watching the TV, these people like going into box stores and buying everything and I'm sitting there like, what, a bunch of idiots, like this, you know. And then the next day, like the rain starts and 45 minutes later, there's trees going across the fields and then it was like, wow, like, okay, it's too late for me to do that. I need to go to shots, yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, until, you know, Paul was right there on the front lines until, like, you actually saw the events unfold, like, so fast, like, watching on the TV last night, we're down in Tennessee, they had that flash flood. Like, I mean, you know, until you're in that position, like, you have no idea, like, so at least in this case, we're able to, you know, information, preparedness information of, you know, and this was, you know, two days ahead of time, like, just a reminder that this is gonna hit, make sure you have this, make sure you do that. This is where you can go for help, you know. I still, I did have to say, well, how can I be personally involved and assist whatever had to happen and paperwork is something I could do, but that's a question that came to my mind. So, training, so that training, and then... Yeah, I'll look for that. But that just gets you thinking, you know, I think we had a pretty good trial running, I guess you could call it, and, you know, how can we improve on that? Cause we all know that once the storm hits, it's hunkered down, right? There's really nothing you can do. You're just hoping for the best, and then afterwards, then you started to, you know, taking care of immediate emergencies and then rebuilding, right? I think one of the things, you know, we talked about, I think maybe Dave at United Talked About Force, like, people maintaining their own private driveways, and I think that's something I'm gonna spend a little bit of time talking about. Yeah, in town and port this year is, I personally, well, we would visit it. There was a couple cases where some of the damage that we sustained in that April 2019 was because people hadn't maintained their own driveways. They hadn't crowned their own driveway. They hadn't taken care of their own ditches. So all that material comes off their road, plugs our culvert and the road's gone. So I do think that's something, I actually made a note for Kelly, we did town, of course she has a little ongoing binder, and I put a sticky note in there that said, you know, community, you know, volunteerism and also, like, driveways, because part of the thing I think that we talk about is people being responsible for themselves and self-reliant and saying, okay, you know, like, you take care of your drive, you keep it ditched, you keep it crowned, but people don't. And then that wipes out the infrastructure, so because you didn't take care of your responsibility, which is clearly your responsibility, your neighbor can't, you know, just lost something. So I think that's a piece of that. And then I don't even know how we hammer home vetealer. We've pushed that through town meeting, through town reports, we've got it on the website. Kelly today, we were putting out a little thing saying, hey, we're lucky, this was a tropical depression, but did you sign up for vetealer, you know, and kind of putting that last in the pitch out of Facebook, but it gets a little frustrating for me personally, probably because I've been in this government a long time, but at some point you're just responsible. If you're part of the community, you have the right to vote, it is your responsibility to be educated about the issues. We can post it and write about it until the cows come home, but until you decide that this is your responsibility as a citizen, as a registered voter to follow the issue, I just can't spoon feature. Under the meeting, so you're informed. Yes, and it gets a little frustrating. You know, if you can't come, read the minutes, send an email or whatever, a phone call. So this was a piece of it too, it's trying to get information, but at some point, if you've lived anywhere, you face some sort of natural disaster, no matter where. But even the simple form that came from the town, you know, that one page form of what to have and what to expect, it was so easy to forward that on to like, your family or friends or your neighbor, you know, where normally, normally when this happened, you start thinking about yourself, right, like, how am I going to prepare the outside and it's not that, you know, not that you're trying to forget about your neighbors or your family, but usually sometimes that doesn't come to mind right out of the gate, or you say, okay, what do I tell them? Or, you know, it was easy just with a click of a button, like, boom, forwarded that to my dad and it all over your neighbor or, yeah. So we're going to fine tune that a little bit, Laura Perez had had some stuff, so we'll kind of fine tune that a little bit. So the other thing under the town managers report was two things, one was Tuesday night, tomorrow night, 5.30 to 6.30, so there's, it's the five, six million dollars, Paul, you've been looking for from the red, is finally released on the how to, there is a letter of intent due this Friday and it's an online form and it's funny because I had reached out to Chris Fours and D. Tree Feeney and he started looking at the trails for behind school and the rec area and so we were gonna, you know, we hadn't heard anything from anybody, I reached out to the conservation commission, hadn't got anything back and said, okay, well, let's just file for this project then so that way we don't miss the boat and then we got a bigger email from Rebecca Sanborn-Stone saying, you know, we'll think really big and what about this and connecting with these other towns and then a couple people came back and said, look, you know, we could make it Bethel-centric but let's think a little bit bigger and so I put out an email saying, okay, then you need to come here between 5.30 and 6.30 on Tuesday, if you can't come, give me a detail of what is it you'd like to see and the order you'd like to see it in and I'll put it up on the whiteboard and this is what's gonna win and while we're here, who's gonna file the letter of intent, who's gonna write the application and when this thing comes through because you wanna go so big, who's gonna manage it, you know, when it was a smaller piece for just this, you know, Chris, Beatrice and I, he'd done so much of the work between the school and the trails and Carlos Meadow was gonna be doable but if it's huge, it's doable but it's not doable for me, I can't do it and so we're gonna meet tomorrow night so we will be submitting a letter of intent on Friday but I don't know, I know part of the project is gonna be the school, behind the schools and connecting the trails and hopefully some weight-binding signage and Carlos Meadow and that so we'll see how big it gets or what it gets to be. And those grants, is there a certain match? So right now it's no match, there's no match and so right now what happens is the letter of intent is due Friday, August 27th, you send that in and then you wait. If you get okay, then you apply for the grant so they kinda sort the lead from the chat early on. Who's the grant through? Or who's sponsoring you right now? That's fine. I can't remember. I feel like it's in my email, I just haven't called all the way up with it. It is in the email, you're right, I didn't write it down. I don't know if it's Department of Tourism or who it is actually but it's a lot of money but they're looking. Is this the Borek? Yes, Borek, they want bigger grants. It's kind of in a way, I think. Did you get that question literally that they want bigger grants? I was kind of a little disappointed, I was thinking they should have looked that much money, they could have done a whole bunch of 100,000 dollars. I honestly, I hadn't read it yet because it came in well. It was a lot of money. I was trying not to read email at all. Yeah, I was thinking John has money but. So anyway, so we'll see what we see and part of what we apply for is gonna be who steps up and says I can, this is what I can do later because we can't, this isn't we'll apply and then figure it out later because I know I can't fall back on me because I don't have the time to do it and I don't have it in the town office right now as the time Dietrich could help once, now the pools closed and stuff but we can't manage a huge grant like that. Is it a full repair, something that could be in that? Well, at first I didn't think so because, but Rebecca seems to think so but I'll be honest, when I read the parameters of the grant, I didn't walk away without feeling. To me, I felt like it could be, it was kind of new development of trails and accessibility and signage. I did not get the impression that it could be the pool when I read it. So I'm hoping someone else has interpreted it differently because I'd like to add the pool to it if it could because that's a big, that's at least 100,000 dollars. I wonder if you could somehow vaguely word the pool structure in there and then if we get put into that smaller pool to plug in the grant and then you could, maybe there'll be, maybe the literature will be easier to figure out. Well, I'm gonna go through the information again. I've read the whole thing but I've gotta read it again because that's what I thought about was my original thought when I saw the money was, ah, Paul's money is here. And then I thought, okay, how can we get the pool fixed? Everything I saw was focusing on trails and development of trail systems and recreational facilities but it never said anything about pools or not pools. I didn't get the impression we could rehabilitate something we already had but that's just me and so I'm gonna read it again and we had a project that was pretty much ready to go because we'd already written two grants for that project. So we already had the description. It was really gonna hit the easy button in a way so but now, you know, making it bigger and that's not a bad thing necessarily as long as we have people willing to help. Rebecca Sanborn Stone sent me a nice email because she can't be here with all her details that we'll share but so anyways, that's tomorrow night here from 5.30 to 6.30. We'll hammer out the details so we will submit but there is no match and so I haven't filled out a grant application yet because I don't know what it is we're building for. Would a river walk along the outside of the, they actually already planned it out. The five million dollars to do it. And all of that, would it be a trail? Yeah, we have a drawing for that and then. Well, it could probably be considered connected to the trails. That's right. Just say it. I don't know. I don't know. Connect Peaveyne to the rec center. Yeah. That's right. Then, Tatro had said completed their portion of the water project and then Tim had put out a note and then Dave Eddy had emailed me his concern because the horseshoe pits, one of them was appeared to have been, I guess was damaged down back. So Tim met today did a walk through with John Hubbell, the head of maintenance for school grounds and there was two concerns. One was straightening the horseshoe posts of which two feet of them are bent and the other was about cleaning up some dense, great stone around one of the bent stakes, which is pretty obvious. And so we're hoping that this work can be fixed. That's what Mr. Hubbell wants. And so we're gonna get that work done. He actually had said he's completely forgotten because they weren't such tall brass that he'd even forgotten that there were horseshoe pits down there is what Mr. Hubbell said. And. I'm working on that. When they do the moan, they gotta move that. Yeah, but we don't. That's a school property. But yeah. Yeah, so when we, you know, we put in a bunch of material back dragged in and Mr. Hubbell was very happy. He said that it looked better than it had. He was very happy to have had Techo as tenants and he said he didn't care. He said just have him rebend it and clean up a little stone. And that was all he wanted done. He was very good with that. And he said, oh gee, we haven't moaned over here. He said, I forgot we had them and. I haven't seen people using them. Oh, he couldn't. And there used to be up until maybe three or four years ago. There used to be actually quite a bit of activity. It is, yeah. But in the last three, four, five years, maybe now, I haven't really seen a whole lot of activity. They did a different aspect of the baseline video. Interests, I put those in there. I sweat. Oh, yeah. I really have got to stick to the game. Yeah. And that's where kids that can't play baseball or basketball or whatever, they can pitch for sure. Yeah, yeah. So you've got an athletic director, the subject that says, okay, we're not going to play the jocks. We're going to get everybody involved. Yeah, some more shoes, yeah. So he was thrilled, though. He was just really happy and generally said it was better than before. So they're just going to do that real stone, rebend them, and they're good. But you said you had another question about Petro other than the Shoreshoe Pins. Yeah, there's, was there always a four-inch pound of water here by the muscle? You know, that's actually a question that I had. I don't think there was a point upon there always. No, there's not. And I don't believe so either. I'm going to, maybe, but I'm, maybe it's, you know what happened. It's been there for a while. It could be because we repaved that before there was a nice pothole there that absorbs some of that water. So now it's not, but I was going to, I have a note when I pulled in, I wrote down when I pulled in a pair. We'll ask him about that, about that. It could be one of the areas where, you know, there's some places where there's no storm drain if there wasn't a storm here before. Water does always collect, right at that spot, but it did drain out. And I can't remember what I was told, but when I first bought the honor block, that was actually one of the questions I'd had. And I think it was Tim had given me the back story of, yes, it does drain. We did this thing that makes it drain, but it'll drain slowly. But I wonder if maybe that got paved over in the renovation and now it doesn't drain? Yeah, I don't know. Because it's always had that issue. It collects it, but it would drain, you know, it'd take about a day. How don't the guys drain? Yeah, no, I would agree with you. Well, they must still have a final walk-through. We already did the punch list. We had a huge punch list, and they've gone through some. Because usually they'll have like a final walk-through. They did, Tim and Aldrich Nellie, a walk-through and did some stuff. But I'm not sure that's necessarily Tatro. That, you know, we have fixed a bunch of storm drains as we went through the project and they fixed the one on the other side. So I did see it today. So when I pulled in here, I pulled out my packet and wrote, I asked him about this. And I meant to ask him the other day when I came over and met Orca, there was rain and it was a puddle there, but I didn't write it down. So I will find out what the deal is there. But we do have, you know, we know there's a couple of places that we don't have stormwater infrastructure and we have issues, so. But it's on my list. Of course it would be nice at some point if our storm drains did connect to the curb lines. Yeah. Having a storm drain that's, you know, two feet off of the curb line kind of defeats the purpose of the curb line. But in fact, like, you know. I don't know why someone would like that. Yeah, I don't know. There was some weird stuff that we found, especially about the storm drain. Maybe that'll come up in the stormwater aspect. Because it's like, it doesn't flow with the curb line. Yeah, we do have money in this year's budget. We deal with a couple of these issues that we have in the bill. There was still a couple that needed to be. Yeah, you got a good sized one in front of the post office. Yeah. And we still have a couple. I think they're on main to have to be rebuilt. So we did put money in the budget that passed to line one or two and rebuild a couple where the bricks are all kind of caved in. But that's on my, I made a note. So because I saw the drill can be found out. So we'll find out and I'll let you know. Anything further on your entries? Nope. We have the select board meeting minutes from the night of August. Unless anybody has any amendments to it. Okay, I just need a motion to approve. So moved. Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. I'm staying in West Virginia. No, I'm not. Okay. Two waves of the ocean. Sea, I'll let you know. Sea goals. And if you sit down by Mascoma, you can do it at right now. Yeah. So I didn't, were there minutes from the BRTS? Last year, you know. No, I asked Elias, you got any minutes here and she said no. So we didn't have, we haven't received any. And then Facebook spotlight. Kelly has started back up doing the Facebook spotlight. And this time it was, it was Pam, it was very nice. So she's kind of back, they were doing, I remember they did them when I came. And then, I don't know when she said she, she had done one, I think, for Jean or something. Rose, I will be here four years in September. I'm just glad you're having fun. Well, it's like the whole thing about Irene and 10th anniversary. It's like, you know, it just didn't feel like 10 years. Or maybe it felt like 10 years or like 10 years ago. About four months in, it felt like 10 years. Yeah. It just, when that was going around about the 10th anniversary, I was like, yeah, it's been 10 years, like. I don't know if that was like, wow, it's been 10 years and there's a high water mark on the bridge. And it's River Bridge, done by my place, 2011. Chris had a comment about the minutes and the length of time. And you just said you didn't get it, the RTS minutes. We had a big deal when I was on the school board that according to Vermont statute, you've got five days. And it's true, I don't know where their minutes are. Yeah, we, we had hear to that. We, but you're right, I don't know because I asked Kelly, I said, did you get any minutes and she said, no. But the RTS person, I think is David Barker. And I spent a couple of times, she's had Kelly's gone looking for them and said, hey, I haven't seen your minutes in a while. So it's something I think the board meeting Wednesday, you might want to bring that up and say, hey. What's interesting is he's. I think there's a storm going on right now. David Barker's actually mentioned the five day draft and so I don't, I don't know if maybe he's just giving them to Victoria and assuming she's passing them on to you or if he should be passing them on to both of you. He should be sending them to Kelly. Right, but if he just thinks he's doing all he needs to do and, you know, there's a. Yeah, that would be great if you guys, we don't know. It could be done and just sitting on somebody else. Yeah, because I know the planning commission, we didn't have a meeting because we're not meeting until September and, but yes. I was also wondering if there's any tentative discussions about having a group get together again like we had planned at the last combined meeting of Bethel and Roy up in select board. Oh, oh, I'm sorry. I haven't heard from them. David Barker and Jerry, they all said that in three months they were going to have all this information and then it was pretty apparent that wasn't. We had talked about it. I thought it was something that we had thrown. It was kind of stuff. Well, I think they were very ambitious in what they thought they'd have together and were. But there's a history of us having these discussions and then some reason or other, it just kind of falls. Well, until they have any information, we don't have anything to discuss. All that information you can gather in that time. Oh, and I will say too, as far as we understand. Just an update as to where things are going. I mean, it seems like things are turned around in quite a bit. Yeah, then Dave should bring that up and find out what they want to do. Well, I did just get the documents at the end of last week from John Duddy from Bar Harbor. So I just sent those to the lawyer out for the lawyer because obviously the transportation is paying us bill. And I asked Jerry, so what we had to do was we had to decouple them and I think I already told you that that Roy doesn't have theirs, but I said to Jerry, I still think yours need to match ours. And he agreed. I said, you're paying for the lawyer to review these because the select board is not consigned. Anything until the lawyer signs off on it. So I did forward those documents to attorney Bob Pletcher. So once we get his edits, then we will go back to Bar Harbor and see what they're willing to make for changes of any. Because at one point, John had said, some of the stuff to the boilerplate we're not willing to change. So if the lawyer says we're not excited, then we'll reach out to another man. It might be worthwhile. Maybe Dave and Linley can bring it up at your next meeting that the budget season is coming. So it'd probably be nice to have another joint meeting if it's necessary, probably by the end of October. That way, if there's anything we need to start affecting ourselves and the budget or thinking about to put on the warning or, you know. Because they're budgeted by the interlocal agreement, they have to pass their budget in October. So I don't know if you guys are starting with that. Surprise! I don't think that's everybody's surprise. Surprise! It might be something to maybe bring it up about the potential of a joint board discussion. So that case might want to have it by. This is Jerry. I'm sorry. I don't want to have it by the end of September, then. If the budget has to be in October. I will say this, Dave, that if, I mean, I know that's the case, so, and I think Jen, I don't know where you all stand on that. Last time I knew from Jerry, he was a one person finance department. And... David likes to help. Oh, okay. Well, they have the spreadsheet. I sent it to him. So they certainly could build off from that Excel document. And if they want my input, I'm happy to give them my two cents about how to budget for retirement, how to budget for health insurance, that sort of thing if they want it. Otherwise, the formulas are right in there if they know Excel, so. Thanks. Anything else to come before the board?