 I'm sure it was finished. Likey, ready? You get it. All right. Welcome, everybody, to the Essex Junction Trustees meeting. Please join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And welcome. And if you haven't signed in, please do so. First order of business, do we have an agenda addition or change? We do. We have one new addition under new business. I'd like to add this under 6C. It is the Code Generation Insurance Coverage and Replacement of a Failed Unit. OK. I'm sure everybody at home understands exactly that. And Mr. Jutris is going to explain it all and make it all clear to us. In five or seven minutes or less. On what we amend the agenda, as requested. Second. All in favor? Aye. Thank you, folks. OK, so now we are on to members of the audience. Anyone have something to comment on that's not on the agenda tonight? Just a quick comment? Yes. So I'm Joe Cudderly. I live right in the junction on Grove Street. First, I want to thank the trustees and Evan for the work they've been doing on the path putting in the bushes to help try to stop the folks hanging out along the wall. Unfortunately, I think of the 30 plants that were planted, about 10 have been ripped up already. Really? Exactly. We found a nice pile of vomit this morning next to a bunch of beer cans, or maybe a yesterday morning. And the scariest thing is within the last week or so. And granted, I think I escalated it too. But my wife and I got into a pretty serious altercation. Bad altercation. She's yelling with a group of folks that were back there. We were just frustrated. And I just I hope the village and the board knows how problematic this is. OK. I think somebody will eventually get hurt back there. I don't think it's a safe place. And so I really just want to stress that. This is the first time my wife turned to me when we got home and said, I don't feel safe in my house. OK. That made me very upset. OK. All right. I appreciate that. Just wanted to share that. I mean, I appreciate everything you've been doing. I know there's certain limits on what you can do. I'm going to go out on a limb and say there probably are some other things. I mean, I think we went for see if this would work. But I think we're all prepared to. We're not going to back away from it. I'll put it that way. I appreciate it. Yeah. And I did. We spoke to the police again after the altercation. And as I said, I think escalated it just out of frustration. And I mean, they said, don't engage with these individuals, which I know I shouldn't. But it's still frustrating. Sure, of course. OK. Duly noted, much appreciated. And know that we're not going to back away from it. I talked to them the other day. I'm glad you said something. And I thought, oh, they must just not have planted all of them. Because they weren't. It was really random how they were pulled out. So thank you for bringing that up. Yes. Yes. I'm going to drive two things. This is a request that I've replaced on the agenda for your next regular meeting to discuss the request that Rivendell Drive be considered a critical school connection under your sidewalk policy, which would allow and require the plowing of both sides of the street. And in addition to that, I think I would like to discuss with you just the need to reexamine that policy that was adopted in 2005 in general. My second comment or my second issue is just a general comment that I saw the discussion about possibly co-locating the recreation departments at Maple Street Park. And in reading the manager's report, talking about the administrative sort of struggles and being in two different buildings, I think part of that should be looking at locating the village and town offices together, probably at 81 Main Street just to ease some of that administrative burden and make one stop shopping for village residents as well. Okay, thank you. We'll put you on the agenda. Is that the process? You know, I'm talking to two managers here. So that's the process we put on. We go on the agenda for a sidewalk proposal to put that. I'm not, you know, forgive me if I'm not completely familiar with how we go about doing it. Steph has looked at the issue. We have a different proposal than we proposed, but we're welcome to have a conversation. I can have Rick Jones here, who is the one who will do it. And then we can have a discussion about the policy. I've spoken to Todd as well. Okay. I don't know if he was coming tonight or in two weeks. Did you want to add something? Well, the reason for my request is that under the policy, the only provision for a change is switching the side that the village plows. In order to do that, you need to get everyone on the street to agree to do that. I don't think that's appropriate in this case. I think plowing both sides is the appropriate thing considering the provision about a critical connection to school. So that's why I'm coming to you. It's your policy. It would be up to you to make that decision. I have to just say, I'm surprised that Rivendell isn't considered a major school group already because that's a connecting route into all the other residential roads. So basically you're looking to get both sidewalks, both sides plowed. Correct, under the existing policy. But I also think a lot has changed in 13 years and that the policy in total should be re-examined. Okay, that's a good point. Thank you. Okay, we'll put that on the agenda. Thanks. Thank you. Anyone else? Okay, so we will move along to our next piece. We have a presentation from Lauren Glendividian and Dan Logan about Channel 17. Welcome. Thank you. Good to see you, too. I'll use the mics. You can use mine? Yeah. You can use mine too, actually. It's easier. There we go, that's on. So good evening, everyone. I'm Lauren Glendividian and Dan Logan is with me. Dan is the channel coordinator at Channel 17 Town Meeting Television, which is operated by CCTV Center for Media and Democracy. And we sent a memo to you prior to the meeting. I'm not sure if you had time to review it. Maybe for the viewers, I'll just give the highlights and then we can make the, we can also answer any questions that you have. So as you well know, because you've all participated in one form or another, and thanks so much for Elaine Sopcich for serving as our representative from the trustees and the select board. She is a great asset to our organization and very helpful leader. So we're very blessed to have her working with us in addition to the trustees that are recommended and appointed by each of the member municipalities. So Channel 17, which was started in 1990 allocates its resources and its votes based on its subscriber numbers. And so for example, Essex Junction, Essex, Niske and Williston receive three meetings a month of coverage. And we also allocate votes based on that. And then South Burlington receives five meetings and Burlington receives six. So when we allocate resources or we ask for increases as we are in this case, it's based on that framework and distribution of subscribers because five, actually six and a half percent of every cable subscriber dollar is put towards the Channel 17, Channel 16 and Channel 15. So the good news I think is that we've had, we're having some good success with your live coverage of your meetings. As we noted, you may not have earth shaking numbers for live viewers for every meeting, but when there's an important meeting, this resource is here for people to tune in. And people are also referring to them, the meeting coverage and the archives like they always have. I also want just underscore to make sure that you saw that is that each of the YouTube meeting coverage comes with transcription. So you actually can search the meetings based on keywords and that will bring you to parts of the meeting if you wanna find things. So that might be a good feature to let people know in your newsletter and of course we could not do it without Mike Cosmet who is our able camera person. So we have expected since 1990 that cable revenue would decline and it has flattened essentially for the past several years with very slight decline overall and that's a combination of people cord cutting. Well it's probably primarily from people cord cutting and watching their programming on the internet which we also provide. But in January Comcast had a major readjustment because of gap reallocation of revenue. We're still not entirely sure of the explanation except that it was a one time event but it resulted in about a $50,000 decline in the revenue to the channel. As you can imagine our biggest cost for providing these meetings to you are labor but also equipment. So our capital needs are fairly high and there's no, how do I put this? We're quite economical in how we use our capital resources but it's not like we get cheaper stuff because we're community access. So the cost of maintaining infrastructure is fairly significant. So we're here to do our annual how's everything going and also to make a request that the trustees increase the allocation in this year's budget for channel 17 basically essentially doubling it from six to 12,000. And if each of the member municipalities agree to do this we can make up that 50 which would be important. Was there anything you would add? Just to add on to the technical aspect of what we do and where that money goes. We've recently started streaming which I think is within last year, right? Which necessitates this higher level camera and necessitates new gear and within specifically time in advance to pre-plan everything and stream on YouTube and resources allocated to that. So that's kind of an above and beyond thing we've added. So I think that is also important to factor in when we consider what is provided meeting by meeting. So we're glad to answer any questions take any feedback on any aspect of our operations and we're always interested to know how we can serve you better. Do not take this as anything that we would do but if you're asking for 12,000 from the six what if the village says we can give you 10? What happens then? I think we'll go with what you can manage. But what would you... We'll have to fundraise more. So we have a concurrent building of our fundraising strategy. Along the lines of a public radio fundraising strategy and we're really at the beginning. I mean it's a five year process for us to be getting up to significant amounts of dollars. Our goal this year is 35, next year it could be 70. I mean we're not gonna see these massive increases but we need to do that too. So our preference is that if you could provide the full 12 would be fantastic but if you could decide that 10 is what you can afford and we would be very grateful. Another question. In terms of long range plans one of the things I'd be curious on is with the advent and the further to advent with the increase in use of social media and whatnot where do you see Channel 17 or CCTV in trying to help leverage that in terms of helping to participate like live events? In the previous candidate forums one of the things that has been interesting is the ability for people to call in and trying to integrate those features into meetings like this for those who can't physically attend these meetings can be a great value add. So I was curious in terms of how that may work into your future plans. Thank you. One thing we've talked about in our coordinated committee recently has been bringing in some internships through the colleges in the area to do some marketing because that's definitely something that we at the moment don't excel in but we realize that we should. It's definitely a way to reach, I guess, a younger audience in a way but a group of bigger audience as well. And I think that's something that we've definitely been talking about the importance of as we've been kind of sitting down month to month and talking internally. I was at the conference at L.A. held for the film and TV industry in Vermont and met a couple of people from universities who after chatting with them I think the internships opportunity is a really good idea for us to get some kind of youthful take on marketing especially with the social media aspect of it and try to get what we do not necessarily out to more people but more people interested in watching it. So it definitely is factoring, we're definitely discussing that. But we do put a lot of Facebook stuff out and I honestly think streaming on YouTube has been a big step. Our viewership is just, yes it was already available on our website but it's not available on YouTube which is a considerably wider, more widely used website. So just that step of streaming and then the second mic turns off the streaming it is uploaded directly to YouTube as is in full titled in your as playlist. So that alone increased viewership. And like little things like that, I think add up. So it's definitely the plan is to start using happily but we should have an Instagram account. We should be taking pictures at meetings like this. We should be tweeting them and tagging you guys and then you can share them. Little things like that I think will grow our viewership. And it helps to have the municipalities also doing this work at the same time because we found that that helps. I mean we all can get more sophisticated in how to use these tools. So we're happy to work in partnership with you to figure out how to do it without a lot of burden. And we also need, as Dan's saying, we're working to get more sophisticated in how we use these tools. I should also add, I think it's a bear of 10 hours a week. Yeah, 12. 12, yeah. So our current marketing is budgeted at a 12 hour a week position. And I mean these things are fairly simple but when you do add them all together and especially having somebody in meetings and getting an uncoordinated committee and talking about how to move this forward, there's a couple hours of per week right there. So just based on our quite limited budget it is tough to find people and time to kind of grow those areas. So I think that's why the internships are a great idea but I also do think that that's something that kind of butts heads with our limited resources too. Yeah, just letting that last piece for the, for future, if there's any capabilities of exploring how we as municipalities could take advantage of people who can't physically be here and have to involve them in these meetings that could be a great future of service. Yeah, I think you could pretty easily, we don't have to problem solve right now, we're happy to talk about that more but you could add a phone, you're live, you could have call us in the next 10 minutes if you have a question or people could just call during an agenda item. I mean that would actually be great television. Phone rings, hello, I have a comment. Not sure. But in any event I think that is worth talking about and we can be more creative in that way, happy. And I'm sure you could follow up with that and then talk about it. Yeah, and I also think that with the YouTube streaming people can, we can comment live. So if there was somebody here monitoring a live stream and people did want to like kind of chime in through a YouTube comment, I mean, the comment section can be a dark place but it can also be a place where somebody tuning in with a legitimate question could throw one in there that could be addressed, so thank you. St. Mike's intern. I know in the past there's been a push to try to get Comcast to not cut. Is there anything happening now? Conversations with them, things we can do in this quality? Trying to get things coming back? Yeah, there's a couple things. Well, we're right now in, Channel 17 is private from One Access Network, so we pooled our resources as a statewide association of 25 organizations and I'll go quickly to basically make a case for continuing funding, which wasn't the issue, but also to get on the electronic program guides and other baseline access issues. Initially, it hadn't been already in the past. Yes, so Comcast does not want anyone fiddling with their set-top box. They don't want the state requiring anybody to have an electronic program guide as a matter of fiat. So they went to court, fiat, like requiring. So Comcast has negotiated with other communities in the country as a side thing to get on the electronic program guide, but they don't want to be told, they have to. So they've gone to court and argued that it violates their first amendment rights, which the judge doesn't agree with them on that, but there's gonna be another year and a half of court cases before we even get a new contract with them. They've been responsive to questions that we have, I have to say, but they're not gonna budge on giving us much of anything other than we have right now. And in fact, when we started in 1990, we were getting three channels. There were three channels on a 75-channel lineup, okay? We don't even have channel capacity now. We're just served up from the computer. So they have hundreds of channels. We don't even have a percentage of territory anymore. So there's a lot of ways of Comcast. And then finally, the FCC is gonna be looking at a case and recommendations to limit municipalities' controls over their rights of way regarding wireless communications. So I'm gonna bring that to you because I think it's something you will want to write to the FCC about. So there are a lot of threats to what we're trying to do. And I think it's important to know that this is a little bit of a hand grenade, but the time is gonna come when the municipalities are probably gonna end up paying what it costs to do the production. So you may be, at a time in the future, paying $30,000, $50,000 for this coverage. Now, we're not, that's not our secret agenda here, but it's important to know that the funding threats are gonna be so acute that if this service is deemed to be important, we'll have to come up with some kind of arrangement in addition to the philanthropy and the membership and the other things that we try to do to supplement. So I'm an optimist, but I think we just need to be practical that this may be the direction that we're going in. So. But specifically with Comcast, we're looking through some data about us. Yes, we are. Short answer to the question. Yeah, that was all good. I just wanted to calculate it, thank you. Lauren, this is sort of drifting off into a cyber subject here, and I'm sorry. I remember this, my communication law from a long time ago, but the initial deal was to cable companies, you've got a monopoly in an area, but, and so we'll let you, the government won't let you have that, but in return you gotta give something for us. You gotta support public access television. But Comcast no longer has a monopoly, so how does this work? Well, they don't think they have a monopoly, but they are using the public rights away, which is actually more of the argument than the monopoly argument. Okay. In exchange for using, allowing you to string your cables in our public property for no money, this is your give back. So that's kind of the fundamental rationale of the Cable Communications Act, but there's just many kind of sideways arguments that essentially Comcast is making, which is the fundamental one, is the First Amendment argument. But they're, but they're, the regulation of their cable access, is that federal or is there any state, is there any state influence on that? The state influence is significant. The Cable Communications Act allocates, says there can be franchising authorities who determine the terms and conditions for doing business in the state, in the case of Vermont. That's the Public Utility Commission. Where I'm going with this is there's something that the legislature could do. I think it's worth talking about. Okay. We'll leave it at that. Let's, and I think that is a good road for us to start to go down. Okay. There's also another side part of that where we're still on like a standard definition channel. I mean like these documents were written up when a SD channel was one of 75 that were available and things have changed so much since that was agreed upon. Right. Like we are massively outclassed now because we don't have an HD channel. I mean I don't think anybody in this room has watched anything in an HD or an SD unless it's an old movie or our coverage. So like the things are just very outdated in that way and additionally like all those lines that are being laid out on public land are internet lines now and fiber lines and we use all of that as well to broadcast what we do. So the playing field has changed a lot since that was agreed upon. You're, I just say you're entitled to ask them to come and talk to you. You could ask them these questions. Like how come no HD and how come you know and I would that they say that they will have those meetings in there in the room. Sorry. No, I just, I was just gonna say you're talking about Comcast and like Gertz says that there's spectrum over in of state of New York. It's not like the old AT&T that's the same company across the country. But there's also now in the last 20, 30 years satellite TV and you guys have not said satellite is nothing that you guys are gonna be available on anyways, right? So it's regulated in a different way. It's a broadcast silo, not an information. So, and that's Comcast's other argument which is we're competing with satellite and they don't have public access requirements. Well, the other thing is you're talking about there's two different things here. You're talking about cable and then Xandra brought up and you mentioned something about with YouTube and that's web-based. It doesn't have to be cable per se, you know? So is there another, I just see things, right now I think it's easy to see all the doom and gloom here maybe with what's happening. But as we've said, things have changed over the time when you're talking about not being high depth. But I just, I agree. I'd like to see more availability there but I also, I think, yeah, but don't give up but realize that I think things will change. I think there's gonna be, as we know, they've brought up the whole thing of social media and then people are going, people aren't reading newspapers like they used to. So I think it's, it changes and we'll see what it is. I'm not, I agree with you. I'd like to see more access to it but maybe it'll be in a different format. I think you're absolutely right in terms of the distribution of community media. I think the fundamental threat is a funding mechanism is hooked to cable and there isn't comparable regulation that controls internet. So they're using essentially the same infrastructure and the same rights of way to do internet and cable. They're required on the cable side to fund a percentage. They're not required on the internet side. Correct, but with internet, internet does not require a direct wire connection whereas I can get this tablet or my cell phone and I can do it via signal, like not a wired signal per se, you know? And that would be a different aspect as far as the lines and all the cables that you see. I think eventually in a hundred years we're gonna let people say, oh, look at all these power poles, these utility poles. It won't exist anymore, you know? But that's in the future. Well, you're right. The industry is being disrupted and that's what we're dealing with. Absolutely. I just wanna point out one thing in our packet that with CCTV and Channel 17's report on page four, the requesting member municipalities to increase their annual contributions. This is a request both to the village and to the town. So it says a case of Essex Town but in our case it's the village and then a separate request will be made to the town. Yeah, gotcha. Another 6,000 for them. Did I make a tight bug there? Oh, it's just that you said Essex Town. Yes, I'm sorry. That's okay. That's okay. I just wanna make sure they realize that we're talking on two different. That's okay. Personally, I don't know what we'd do without you. You're a critical leg in our communication strategy and you're essential and you're the one completely unvarnished. Like even when we put our own stuff in we have to abbreviate it but you people just get the raw data here and that's the best way to do it. So thank you for everything you do. And by the way, Mike is awesome. Thank you. So he's been great. We like Mike. Yeah, that's great. We do too. We're lucky. So thank you. Other questions? Yeah. One last thing. If you won the lottery, what would you do? I mean, not you personally. But you probably wouldn't be with them anymore. But if you could do anything you could. If you could do anything, what would you do if money, if these constraints weren't? What would you be doing more of? Well, I think we would be paying the people that work there more. I think the benefits are good but the wage rate is low for the work and it's hard to keep people in senior positions. I think we would continue to upgrade the infrastructure and then in terms of programming, which is what, you know, that's the back end. But what difference would we make? I think we'd be out in the community a lot more and we'd be doing a little more live coverage in places where things are happening. Because it's cheap for you to come to the studio. That's not expensive because it's already operating. It's expensive to relocate the whole infrastructure. But for example, Dan's planning a legislative series it's legislators in their native habitat as opposed to in a studio, right? Let's do that in the studio. Let's do that in the studio. I don't know what it's. You know what I mean? I think you understand what I'm saying. There's one now. Shoot her. So, yeah, so instead of doing 13 interviews, legislative interviews will do a half a business but they'll take more time. Other questions? Everyone good? Thank you very much. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, it's a pleasure. And thank you for everything that we've all done so far. Thank you. Yeah. Have fun at your next meeting. Yeah. Any of you have one? We'll get to that. Next up, we have an EV charging equipment grant. Darby. Did we skip the... Did we skip something? Yeah. We skipped the copiers. Uh-oh, uh-oh. Wait a second, what do I... Oh, okay, you're right. Sorry, sorry. Let's do... We're gonna do the lease agreement first then. Sorry, Darby. No problem. So what you have in your packet, I'm filling in for Greg who's filling in for Rob. I'll Darby's next. So, in your packet, you have a request for approval of a copier contract. What has occurred is Rob, a little bit of the IT director, was cold called for one leg with things saying, would we like to buy copiers? And originally he was like, no thanks. Cold called. He said, we will do an audit of all your stuff for free. And lo and behold, their audit showed a lot of potential savings. So he looked at this, and with this company, we would replace every copier in both organizations, Village and Town, about 16 or 17 of them, including the pay copier at Brinell Library, all the maintenance and the new copiers and the toner. And we would still save somewhere between $9,000 and $10,000 a year across the organization. We would have one vendor, one maintenance agreement, one phone call. Right now it's the Wild West and there are organizations and they would be on a schedule to be replaced. So, the town approved this last week and it's now here for this one. As you can see, the savings is about $9,009 on bid. And then those savings get apportioned throughout the organizations. Departments in the organization, correct? All right. Yes. Sorry, can you grab a steal? Oh, no, it's just going to be a comment. It sounds great. I'm not opposed to the idea. I'm just curious that there are a lot of vendors out there and this guy comes in and gives us this evaluation and buying a car or buying any item that I'm going to use or making an agreement for somebody to do something. You can release something. I could go to a lot of different places and see who's going to be, have you looked into other options out there? So, when this person came with a current vendor, they're like, no, we're not going to do anything like that for you. We called another vendor, they wouldn't come and give us a quote. And some of the places there and they're legit and a good deal. In fact, so many of our copiers were different brands and different things. One of the things we, you can go from one building to other and then you need a new day of training to figure out how to use them. So we did a bunch of those things and Rob did check on that and believe it or not, there's that many vendors that want to come up into this area because there's just not that much of that but he did do that. Thank you for the question. That was a good one. I haven't, the only thing I wonder, this is probably more of a statement than a question, but a lot of the time when you do a global change over a lot of different departments that have different uses and so forth, public use over in the libraries, different use of different, is there something lost in sort of little bits and pieces of local control that departments have over their own stuff? By globally replacing everything at once, have you thought about that? Also a very good question, before we did this Rob met with all the departments to talk about their copier needs. One of the things that's actually occurring over at the library is the heavy coin-op machine. Currently, the money doesn't go to the library. It goes to the company that does the coin-op. In this new thing, all the monies go to the library. So we're looking at the usage, we're looking at the needs. One of the things that we're looking at is the use of color copies versus black and white copies, the cost disparity, and a lot of times people have overbought their copier because they've been told, oh, you can get, I'll make up a number, 100 copies per minute. They never use 100 copies per minute. They have no need for 100 copies per minute, but would you buy the XL 5000 instead of the XL 2000 and you pay it for the upcharge? Rob worked with the departments and with the vendor to size the copier for the stuff that they would use and the rates. Okay, great. Great, thank you. Good job. Because we have somebody in IT who understands those items. Okay. Any other questions? Do I hear a motion? I'll move the trustees authorized unified manager to enter into a lease agreement with National Business Technologies to supply all of the copier needs for the towning village. Second. Lower seconds. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? All right. Thank you. So now I believe we're onto the electric vehicle charging station. All right, good evening everyone and thank you for having me here. So this is a little bit of a repeat of what we did about six months ago for a grant to purchase a charging station across the street from the Amtrak station. However, there are a few key differences this time. So just to do a recap, this would be a charging station across from Amtrak for people who use like vehicles. We do have one currently in the Lincoln Hall parking lot. We've had it for a few years and it's been growing in popularity steadily, surely, but steadily. And that's been a really good thing and we're very happy with that. So we were planning on putting another one in right across from the Amtrak station. Now the state is issuing a grant that has something to do with the VW settlement and this one is really good. It's a 90% match, which is almost unheard of. And the grant will cover 90% of the cost and since we're going to be excavating Railroad Avenue anyway as a part of the road work, the remainder for the village will only be $465, which would come for the matching grant fund. And I also wanted to note another change from this new grant is that this grant only funds dual charging stations, which would mean that instead of allocating one spot for electric vehicles, we would need to allocate two spots for electric vehicles. And of course, the price would go up as well. The price of what would go up as well? The station. Oh, okay. The usage of the station? Nope, they use to say the same. The physical station. The physical station, yes. We're still working out the housing with the grantee. It seems like it's a little bit, it might be a little bit differently, but we've been charging a dollar an hour here and that seems to be working out. Lane, you have a question? Yeah, just procedural. I remember last time when Darby came before us, this grant is being issued by the agency for whom I work. And I believe I've accused myself last time. So you're gonna accuse yourself this time? All right. With the dollar an hour, I'm just curious, is that to cover the full cost or does that just subsidize the cost for each hour? We pay for a yearly connection fee. I can't speak to what it does for electricity, maybe Lauren. We actually get the money back. Yeah. They send it to us. So in the end, but do we know if that's unpaying for that hour's worth use of the charger? It's the best guess of it. I'm gonna ask it slightly different. So it says here, there's a $1,200 commercial cloud plan. Is that a yearly cloud plan and does the dollar cover that? The commercial cloud plan is a, I believe a one-time thing, but there is an additional yearly fee. I know for this one, it varies based on how many years you prepay for. And I can't think of the figure off the top of my head. So maybe, China's the reason. Has anybody looked into, I haven't, has anybody looked into what it costs at any of the other electric vehicle charging stations in the area to know is a dollar an hour really high? Is a dollar an hour really cheap? Or are we in sweet spot? No, I don't think so. Okay. So that's definitely something that's worth looking into. I know we had a driver look into the idea of charging per exactly how much electricity you used, which would make sense. But upon talking to the state, if you can believe this, it's actually illegal to do so because we are not a utility. So that was a couple years ago. It's possible that things have changed since then, but that would make the most sense as far as charging, but unfortunately, it looks like it's not an option. But that being said, it would definitely make sense to look into other stations in the area. Yeah, that's a good question. You said it's gonna take two parking spaces? That's good. That will only be eligible for electric, so nobody can park there except for electric vehicles. Yeah. That's correct. That's gonna be my question, Lauren. We're, with the ramp going in, and Jim might be able to shed light on this, but I recall with the ramp going in next year, we're gonna be losing two spots on Railroad Avenue. And then we're gonna dedicate two more to electric vehicle charging. Is that, do you know, does that ring a bell, Jim? Yes. At least one, I think. At least one, and I thought it was two, but I pretty sure you're wrong with that. And that's not a deal breaker for me, but I'm just kind of raising that. It'd be great if we could take some other place to put this. Right, and I, so I was thinking the same thing, especially because this one is being used quite a bit. It's still only 21 monthly plug-ins on average a month, so it's not even being used every day. Do you have to have it, let me ask this question. Do you have to have the location before you can apply for the grant? Yes. And when's the deadline for the grant? The 30th. Of November. Yes, so I could look more into it, look, explore some other options, possibly something off the top of my head, Ivy Lane is coming to me. I don't know if that would be part of the reason we chose this area, because it was near the train station. And it would have to be somewhere in the village center. I do realize that the two parking spots is a difficult thing, and I did call the grantee about this and said, hey, this is a lot for people. And I know filling out the application, they did change a lot of the specifications that they're looking for, and look for quite a bit more information than they did in previous rounds. The other possibility too is by putting it in a very public place, in a high profile place, that people will drive by on a regular basis, maybe it would get more use, because it would be right out in the open instead of attached to the fire station around the corner that's now blocked off. So. So can I ask a basic question? Let's talk about this. As a municipality, what is the benefit to us to offering this? So someone in the program I'm in drives exclusively an electric vehicle and talks about the difficulty of finding a place, and when I mentioned that there is one that's attached to the fire station, she said, oh, I wish my community had that as someone who owns a vehicle where I could then park this and leave that and either walk home and or just park it on the weekends at every time of the time. So I think what it does, it helps to provide access to our residents and or those commuting here to have a service. So we have one. What's the benefit to adding another one? We have two ones in the town that the town needs. We just put, we took the one from the police station brought it over to 81 May. Oh, right. I thought that was six at hand. Yeah, Hinaford's just gonna bring that up there. So a lot of private properties that have them too. So it's not like they don't exist. Maybe not in the public, you know, road or a public, you know, right away, whatever, but in private it is. And then to regulate the dollar fee might be a little bit more, obviously. But, I don't know. Yeah, okay. I see Irene, can we ask Irene a question? As an energy committee member? What would your thoughts be on this using two parking spaces for a charging station when we have one within walking distance? We're doing it for the future. We're not doing it for today. I think that's the key, right? We're putting the infrastructure in so that in two years we don't go, while we turn it, while we tour up the road, we shouldn't have put this in. So I can understand that demand doesn't mean the supply exceeds the demand right now. Could, thank you, Irene. Sorry if you didn't decide. Could this one here ever be changed to a double one? I'm not sure. I would guess yes, but I can't. And I don't think so. Well, you're talking about, let me get this straight. So wait, you're talking about the grant, the application you need to put in needs to be for two. Yes. So you'd be talking about having three. Then if you're gonna use this, move this one. Right, what I'm saying is if we don't approve this one, and could we look into the possibility of changing this to two here for the future needs. But we don't have any parking room out here either. Right, you know, and it's tricky because we could probably sit here and think and go through all the places where she might be located. But you know, there's a, someone's, a business is gonna complain that we're taking a spot away from them. I think that's, is that why you've chosen this? It's across from the CCTA station. So we know they're not gonna complain. I don't know. So it was electrical power. It's electrical, it's the access to the power. Yes. And did the, did, I'm assuming, I know the answer, but did the planning, so the planning commission and Robin looked at this and they thought that's the, this is the best place for this. Robin did review. Okay. Well, how come the planning commission's on this? There's something about the PC here. Yes. So after, in the previous ones, I've just contacted Dave Mystico and he's signed off for the planning commission. Just because it's been difficult scheduling a planning commission meeting for us. Let me ask one last question, but not the last for the, just for me. Let's say we went ahead and did this, put it in, and then we discover a year from now, not many people are using it. Can we move it? You just said you moved one from the police station. We did. We did. And there's a cost to do it. And we would need approval from the grantee. Theoretically, probably, practically, it would be difficult. We moved it because it just wasn't being used at the police station. It's being used now. I see it used. It is being used over at 81 Main. As a matter of fact, I bumped into the lady, one of the ladies of one of the first to use it. And I asked her, I said, I've seen you in this building before. She said, yeah, I just bought an electric car. I didn't realize you needed a special plug at your house to be able to do this. Yeah, you do. So the expense of putting in the electrical plug in your house, it's better for me to just come over here and do my business at the town. She was doing some records checks and I could do that in the hour my car's recharging. I don't go very far. So that's kind of a nice use. It's coming along. It's just not here yet. It is very hard to find an electrical vehicle station although there are apps that tell you where to go. There are these two spots. And I don't envy you on this decision. These two spots are in our downtown area and giving up parking spots are very difficult. So. Do we, sorry, can I ask a couple more questions? Do we have signs anywhere on the street that say there's a charging station back here? No, we've relied on, there's a pretty robust app and most of the people who have EVs have to download the apps to find them. And we've relied on, I know they comment on different things about the space and that seems pretty robust as far as. So if you have an electric car, you have a way to find the stations. Because they need a special payment method and everything and there's a map. Bunny, we should mention it. We just had someone a few days ago come into the office and say, is there a charging station here? I guess he couldn't find it, but he was pinning it on the map. So he knew it was around the area. Yes. Yeah, yeah. I'll just say I like that this really, as Irene said, it's not for today. It's for the future. In fact, the gasoline prices are what they are and they're not going down anytime soon. And to say to the community, if you are coming here, whether you live here or not, you have an electric vehicle, you're going to go visit one of our restaurants or one of our shops, you're going to place a park for the hour, charge your vehicle and go. I see it as a forward thinking win. Can you, I agree. I'm just a little trying to just see if we can't do. Now, if we put it in on Railroad Avenue, can you say EV charging station nine to five or nine to eight, so that at the peak hour, when people are trying to get in and drop off at Amtrak and pick up at Amtrak, it's a public spot, but can you limit access to it? Unfortunately not. You can't, it has to be 24-7. It can only be used for this. 24-7, 365. That's harsh. Yeah, good head. So I agree with Andrew. That we should be forward thinking and I think normally if trustees we are. Yeah. But we've had a lot of people come into this room and say we don't have parking in this village. Whether or not it's perception or reality is a whole different conversation. I don't remember anyone coming in and saying we need another charging station. So I have a really hard time approving this. Could I suggest the grant needs to be in on the 30th? Yes. And do we have another trustee meeting between now and then? Yes. Could we potentially table this and maybe have you, instead of us going all over Essex Junction, all 47 miles and thinking, where else we might put this? Could we possibly have it just give it maybe you and Robin and Evan give it just see maybe there's another spot somewhere because it's just making us at such a tight area and we're going to be losing spaces there too. You know, I know Ivy Lane is getting, that's filled up. As soon as we now strike that, that's filled right up. As soon as we create a parking area, it fills right up. So it's a little tight that area. And I don't want to spend the rest of our meeting suggesting ideas, but I'm going to suggest one. What about Lincoln Street in front of the Fish and Wildlife Building? So I mean, I think there are other places we could look at that would be helpful just to- Yeah, we can definitely take a look at it. I can get the electrician out here to give some more recommendations as to what, where we can feed off of and we can definitely see- And we don't want to stick you off in the hinterlands where no one knows where you are. I understand that we want to keep you around. We want to keep it not you. We want to keep it in the center and make it accessible and bill it and we understand it can't just be in a completely inaccessible area then it's no value to anybody, I get it. But maybe there's something where some obvious space we're not thinking about. Yeah, definitely. My last common question, does it have to be on municipal public roads, parking lots are going to be on private? I'm thinking municipal, I think municipal but I'm not 100% on that. I have to take another look at the application. Because it could be on private, maybe there is a business who'd be willing to offer up these spots. Yeah, I'll take another look at the application and then I'll do something I'll look for. And like for example, we own the Park Street School in the entire parking lot in front of that now. So that's municipal property. I mean there's probably a lot of little pockets like that around the Village Center that maybe we could think of. And then maybe we'd give us some thought if we can't think of anything maybe we'll go with railroad avenue, I don't know. How does that sound? Yeah. Is that a compromise? So we'll have to put this on the agenda and probably writing the grant, filling up where you're gonna have it is probably, we can cut and paste something in there. Okay. I can pop that in there. All right. Is that okay? Thank you, yes, all right. Thank you. All right, thanks. Have a good evening. How are we Jim? Welcome. We're always welcome. So this is about the Code Gen Insurance Coverage and replacement for the failed unit. Yes. Yesterday I was in at work and I so was our insurance carriers representative and she confirmed to me that they would be covering the loss that we had at the wastewater facility. On August 7th we lost our code generation unit due to a failed circuit breaker that allowed that motor to continue to run without its cooling system operating. So we smoked the engine, literally. We've gone through about three months of work to try to get to this point and we're into the middle of winter and the beginning of winter and heating season where we get the most benefit from this year. Sure. So what we're trying to do is get approval to circumvent or waive the purchasing policy and the specification requirements within that purchasing policy. The reason for this request is that it's a specialty item. Yeah. The motor is available through multiple sources but at the same time the motor is modified for the application. And it involves software. Software is only available to specific people that have been through the factory training and receive the credentials as well as the little maintenance toggle that's required to access and program and tune the engine for emissions requirements. So again, it's a complicated system and bottom line is we can't have a local company do this. It has to be an authorized service provider. There are a few out there but I'm not sure they'll be competitive with the manufacturer but we can certainly look into that. Okay. So the request is simply to waive the bidding requirements for this particular project and also I'd like to add into that and it's in the memo without a cost is to install the secondary circuit that will provide a second circuit breaker that'll provide a backup in case we run into this event one more time. I hope we don't but it'll be a second protection that should be well worth the investment and we didn't discuss this today operationally but I think what I'm collecting the pricing and I'm hoping to put it into the capital plan and request the capital plan amendment for this secondary circuit as part of the budget date that we have coming up. Wow. So here's what the second piece reads like. It says staff is also further authorized to install a secondary power protection circuit with the unified manager's approval in order to prevent this type of failure from happening again. That's, that gets at what you're saying. That, yes. But if you're more comfortable with gold again I don't have a handle on the cost. So if it's more comfortable to go with the capital plan we can present no I think we need to get this done. My curiosity is if you think that that secondary power protection circuit is less than $40,000 and you don't need us. Correct. We just don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Questions? Do I hear a motion? I'll move that the trustees authorized the staff to waive bidding and to proceed with the purchase of a replacement cogeneration motor, generator and other necessary parts in order to complete the insurance restoration of the failed generator unit. Staff is also further authorized to install a secondary power protection circuit with the unified manager's approval in order to prevent this type of failure from happening again. Do I hear a second? Second. Lori seconds. Any further discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Thank you, Jim. Thanks on short notice. Sorry, sorry this happened, but. It's happened. It happened in one other place. It just happened to be Romanian. So, yeah. Yeah, at first. And for the board and the people at home, Jim has really been bird-dogging this through the insurance and lawyers process. As you can imagine, not many people are jumping up and down to take blame for what, a couple hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. At least a hundred and twenty-five right now. That's really something. So, the subrogation is a separate issue. We've got the coverage we're going to proceed with your approval, so thank you, correct? Thank you, Jim. Thanks for coming in. Okay. Okay, we're on to the manager's report. Mr. Manager. In your packet was, I believe it's about two pages, maybe some updates of where we've been. I'm looking up at what I wrote a couple of days ago. Sat down with MPATA's untimely demise. I sat down with the chairs of the Essex Free Library and the Brunel Library. Just wanted to ask, you know, after a little time in the past, if they had given some thought of any type of direction, the Essex Free might want to go in, whether it was to fill the position, to look at ways to work with Brunel. Nothing at that point, but we agreed that we would get back together in a couple of weeks. Right now, Caitlin Corliss has been, she's the children's librarian. I made her the interim director there. She's doing a very nice job. We've put in some temp staffing as a backup. So they're up and running for November 24th, where they can't find coverage. So they'll be closed that particular day. That's the only day they've had to close due to coverage and it's Thanksgiving weekend. Couldn't get anybody, enough people to come in to open the library. So that's where we've been at. And so we'll be working with them a little bit more on that alignment and where they may want to go with that position. It is my appointment, but they have their own library board and their municipal library. So they have different rules and laws that the Brunel library. So we work with them. Any questions you can ask me anytime please. The police department, I want to let you know. They are working on regulations on dogs. Mainly not all dogs, but they're just dogs. And so if any of you have one, everybody's got a dog. They never cause any problems until they do. And usually this is dog on dog violence. There are laws in the books if a dog attacks a human. There is very little on the books if a dog attacks another dog. So they're looking into that. Number two is new citizens and loitering. We have the gentleman who lives behind the wall that's on the multi-use path. Currently the village does not have a loitering ordinance. So there's very little to do for the police unless they are doing something else while they're loitering noise. One of the things they're working on is the village's noise ordinance is hard to administer and there's new equipment now that they can literally take their phone. And instead of it being subjective, they can turn the phone on and get a decibel reading or another piece of equipment. Our ordinance is not by necessarily decibel at a specific place. So they're looking at updating that. Last street names, intersections, speed limits. Every several years you go through these things. The village has changed where signage is or put signage out there and they update the ordinance. We have started putting in the do not block the intersection hatch marks. They need to put that into the codification. So then if you do block it, they can either give you a warning or a ticket if the proper signage is there. So they're working on those things. And then they want to make sure all the street names and all the things are in the proper places in the ordinance. Okay, you said something about the noise ordinance. It just kind of struck with me. Did you say that ours doesn't do decibel readings? They do it. As if I understand it, they do it, but it's based upon where you take it from. So what they would like to do is have an officer stand at the property line or on the street and say it's 65 decibels here, the ordinance allows 50, and go be able to talk to them. I just wanted to make sure that ours does have decibel readings. I think it does have decibel readings. It's where you take them from. Just to make sure that anybody doesn't ever see this understands that we do have decibel readings with it. And to like one officer, like if the officer comes out, he says, well, that's not terribly loud. And another officer comes out there and goes, oh, this is terrible. You got to stop this immediately. We want to take out the subjectivity. If it comes up with a reading at a specific place, he or she knows to go talk to you. I just wanted to ensure that it was known that we knew how to do it. We do have decibels. It's how they, I'm sorry, how they do it. Sorry. In the past, we've had very particular conversations about this very topic, especially when there are events at the expo and the expo has gone out and hired particular contractors to record decibel levels at multiple places to provide evidence that they're not violating the code to satisfy neighbors' complaints. I mean, this is a big contentious issue. And I'm a little concerned. And I think we would, and I'd have to talk to the Chief, I think we want to continue to do that for those who are attached. For that, okay, because I'd be very concerned that we would remove that level of particularity and go with an app on a phone. I think that would make some people very unhappy if we reduced it. I think this is, and I'll talk to him. I think it's more for the localized version of it. Stepping into Lincoln about five, six weeks ago, several senior staff members started doing some office hours here in this building. To my left, Lauren, is one of them. Sarah Macy, the Assistant Fight Instructor. Travis H.R., myself, Susan Hill, Gregory Hill, Greg Duggan. Somewhat mixed results so far is, one of the things is we do a lot of meetings. So sometimes we're in the building, sometimes we're at 81 Main, sometimes we're somewhere else. So we're here and sometimes we're not. But one of the things that we found out from some of the two Lincoln staff, and I'm gonna have a meeting this coming week, is trying to make sure that we have office coverage, not just the person who's here and in and out, but actually here to be able to answer phones, be able to take care of money transactions and other things and make sure there's two persons in the building at all times. So we're gonna try to figure out how to do that a little bit. And one of the other things that we said with staff is when we are here, or if you need us here, like if you specifically say, hey, Terry Haas is gonna go out into the field or she has a conference or something. Can somebody be here between the hours of 11 and one to cover lunch periods? We would be here for that and how to do that. So that's kind of ongoing, but I just wanna let you know that we've been doing office hours and breaking in as she is breaking us in, Tammy, the new Patty. So we're getting through that. Can you go for a little bit? The building superintendent position, we are working internally to do a job description for that position. We are looking to have that in the budget for discussions. And in addition, I have a meeting scheduled next week with Brian Donahue from the school district to talk about how we can potentially partner with him. They have that position, but theirs is a much broader position. They supervise staff, they employ a bunch of staff throughout the district, but they have a lot of experience with this position and the need and why they do it and give us some direction and how to get up and running with a new position. So that's where my meeting comes in. Also in the future, they've said, while it's early, we could think of ways we could work collaboratively, village and town to school district, including some positions in some of their trades that they have on staff. So it's worth the conversation. Subcommittee on Governance, they are meeting tomorrow night at 6.30. Here. Here. You all did hire Dan Richardson. He is diligently working on producing the answers. He did. And those... Well, no, he's finished those. We should have everything, everything should be done by now. And one of the things that he did as sort of an extra is he even is posing questions to the board members, not just the subcommittee, but the board members of things you should be thinking about as well as you go through this process. I thought they were spot on type of questions. And probably the types of questions you want in your mind as you go through your discussion on the scenarios that you pose to. Next one is handicapped doors. Worked with Dennis Lutz, Luanne and others on the senior center doors. They were here a couple of weeks ago. They did identify what needed to be done. That work is about $7,000 to $8,000. Originally, we looked at the possibility of using village funds in talking with Allie from the town rec. She has impact fee funds from the town. Many of those seniors are town residents as well. So she recommended that. I worked through Lauren and we agree that that's a great use of recreation and impact funds. And so I have a meeting. It's either this week or next week with some of the seniors that brought up the issue to tell them what's coming on, what we're able to do. And then once we get that, we will sign a work order and put it in the hopper for the installation of those doors. Okay, so thank you. Thank you. That's the last one. And I guess I can, if you want to take a minute, if I have any questions of other activities, other dozens of meetings I go to on a daily weekly basis. I'll just take a moment and add that the subcommittee, the government subcommittee meeting, it is absolutely appropriate if one of the trustees or a select man wants to come and sit in the audience. They're not sitting at the table, but any member of the public can come and sit in the audience and ask a question in the audience to be heard. That their presence does not violate open meeting law. So in case you're just got nothing to do tomorrow night. It's probably the only night there's no football. But thank you, and thank you to George for reminding me to do an update here and there. Thanks. Trustee comments, questions? I'm just gonna add one thing. I think in regards to the retaining wall on the multi-use path, I think it's time to, you know, we tried the low impact thing with the bushes and I went over there and looked at them and it was a great idea, but clearly some folks are determined to not, to have their way. And I think we, I really do urge staff to maybe think of a physical barrier. I don't think that we're gonna, unless it's outrageously expensive, but I think a fence or more masonry over there that makes it inaccessible. I really think that that's where we're gonna have to go with this. Yeah, and I agree and thank you, George. And the only other thing I would say is, and I don't know how this can be fixed, but part of the issue is not just the wall, but that you really cannot see. If you're at either end, you cannot see by that wall. And I will say, if I see, if I start walking down the path and I see someone I turn around and go another way. So I don't know if it's more lights or camera. I mean, I know all the stuff is expensive, but that's part of the issue too. People are, whether there's a wall or not. I think it's happening during the day, Lori. It's happening all the time. Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think with the changing weather, I think that's one good thing. It's gonna lessen. I think with warmer temps, you got people hanging out at night. As soon as it's 10 below zero, 20 of them reach out there. I would highly doubt they're gonna see many people hanging out there, because unless they get a little stow over there to keep them warm. Don't get in my way. No, but I agree with what was said here. I think about things I've seen in different communities around the state and other cities around the country, but you can do things. One issue is not necessarily with people sitting on it, but in Burlington, where I used to work outside of the state court, they put the metal, I forget what they were, but it was just to just, to keep, dissuade the skateboarders getting up there and sliding their skateboard around there, and it works. And I mean, I don't know what I'm sure if you talk to somebody in the construction field or someone, they may be some kind of a thing. You go to national monuments or into DC or any major cities, they have things, just as they do on the cornices of buildings to keep pigeons away, they've got the spikes there. I mean, does it look great? No, but it works, and it's something to think about. Any other trustee comments? Anything on the reading file, correction of minutes, anything like that? Yep, go ahead. The minutes are in the consent agenda, don't we need to... Yeah, we can move on to the consent agenda. Oh, you meant the minutes for the other things. Yeah, sorry. No, I'll move the consent agenda, but that's where we were at. I jumped the gun, I was thinking about trustee minutes, not the minutes of the other committees. Yeah, I'm just making sure because anyone has anything there. Okay, so we're on to the consent agenda. Okay, I'm moving forward to the consent agenda. I'll second that. Any further discussion? I have a correction to the minutes. Kathy, at the beginning of the, where it says other is present, the first guest's name is Joe and his last name is start to the K. Okay. It should be KUD, R-L-E, Cudderly, and his name appears in a few other places in the minutes. That's it. Okay, do we need to... I would accept that, friendly amendments. Okay. I'll second that. So I'll move that we amend the minutes as... I recommend that you just add up. Are you just add up? Okay. I thought you were going with this, with the consent agenda, trying to not pick it up. Okay, all in favor of amending the minutes. Aye. Anything else on the consent agenda? Okay, now go ahead, sorry. I'll move we approve the consent agenda. Second. See, I thought we had already had that motion on the agenda. Yeah, me too. All right. We did. All in favor. Aye. Okay. Trustee Brown really wanted the consent agenda. I want that thing done, all in favor. No, it's like, what do you got against the consent agenda? By the way. I'll move me, Joe. I'll second. All right, all in favor? Okay, we're adjourned. I thought you...