 We're going to call the meeting to order. First order of business as always is public comment. Is there anybody in attendance who wishes to make a comment on any issues concerning this? Seeing no one, is there anybody online, Eric? No, no one online. OK, brings us to the next item. Fiscal year 25 budget revote planning and work session. Sarah, you're here. Thank you. I'm wondering if you will take you first so that you can adjourn. I've been invited, Sarah, in the helpful board of the logistics discussion at your dates and ballot areas. Sarah's the expert behind the scenes for the elections. Well, a little bit. So I guess basically there's a few two different options, which I sort of put in front of you if you want to go with a ballot that is read by a tabulator or one that is done by a hand count. So the sample that most people are used to seeing is like this. It's got the ticker tapes around it, which is made by somebody else. And it is read by the tabulator. Is this OK? Yeah. The other option is that you make your own ballot. And then we count them by hand that evening. And the timeline, let me move over. Great, great, I'll just. I'm always watching people like, get on the microphone. So the two different scenarios are those two. Would be kind of the first thing to decide if people think that a tabulator will be much easier. You'll have an instant answer that evening, then that is one route to go. The other answer, like I had shown, is going to be having one that we make, we count. It's going to take a little longer, but we'll still be done that evening. It just won't be an instantaneous tape that comes out of the tabulator. Some drawbacks to going with the tabulator route is that that is really going to put a crunch on the timeline. Because if nothing's going to be sort of decided until maybe the 18th, which I think is the Thursday after the 16th, turnaround on this is a problem. Because my proof wouldn't even get to them until, I mean, at best Friday morning. And then it's a few 40 hours to get that back. And then your 7 to 10 days of getting your ballots and your memory cards back will start. So that puts you right into the very, very end of April or almost the beginning of May, which, if anyone is shooting for a May 7th day, that's really just not going to happen. The flip side being if we went with a hand count and in-house made ballot, those can be ready the morning of the 19th, and we can be ready to just hit the ground running. So those are kind of the two different scenarios that I sort of laid out here as kind of what we probably need to decide first, the two different routes and those being the big decisions. One being very expensive. This is not cheap. Getting that many ballots and memory cards and paying the shipping for all that to get up here is thousands of dollars. This is just going to be the cost of paper, really. We're paying postage either way, so that part doesn't really matter. It's just literally the cost of getting this done. And on a yes-no question, lots of people that I've been talking to on my list serve and everybody else at small town is like hand counts the way to go. It's actually faster. If you remember the recount for the Select Board last year, we were done in, I think, less than an hour, maybe. The tabulator only reads 300 an hour. So it's definitely maybe not the best way you want to spend a night after being there all day, but I think a couple of hours at best with two teams of eight or whatever we had last time. We should be able to power through that pretty easily. So let's see. Those are sort of my major points on the difference between the two. Does anybody have any questions on any of that just yet about how it would actually work or different drawbacks or pros or cons? Well, the people who count the ballots, they get paid by the hour. Yeah. Yeah. Even with that expense, it's still a lot cheaper to do that. Oh, I thought you were being funny, because it's going to be all of us. And if you want to get paid, I can. And if not, I thought it went on general election. I do pay election workers that come and work the check-in tables. And then most some BC members do get paid. A few said that they would rather not be paid, because you see it as part of your job. So this is going to fall into a little bit of a gray zone. Like if we're going to take this on and we want to do it, I certainly can pay BCA members to be there for two hours. And that's not a huge expense compared to what it would cost us to go the other route. So yes. And again, it doesn't have to just be BCA members. I can have other people help, like we did for the recount. But I would plan on working. So hopefully, people are around whichever date it can come and be helpful to get that done. But I'll certainly have others to get us to, like I said, two teams of eight works really well. Other question that I think was. So any other questions on that part? When we did the recount, roughly how many ballots did we have? I was thinking back to that, Terry. That was like an average town meeting turnout, or kind of high average, because it was kind of a fun one. I would say it was like 1,700 in there. And that, like I said, so I think we'll be in the same ballpark. I don't see this turnout being anywhere near like it was March 5th, which was pretty high. So I don't think it's anything we couldn't handle. I think, like I said, average town meeting is 15, 16, 1,700. So I'm just trying to picture it like in my head. I'm kind of picturing 15 piles of 100 ballots. It's not that bad for people to tackle in their teams of two and get them into piles of 25 and count and sign off and then trade with your partner. So South Burlington did hand count for their school one last week and Holly said they were done in less than an hour and they've got five precincts that do it. So if they can do it, I have a feeling that we'll be able to. I wouldn't let that scare anybody. Like I said in the beginning, I was like, oh, it's really going to be awful. We'll be there till midnight. It shouldn't be that bad. So my other question was the day of the week. I'm pretty adamant that it stays a Tuesday. I think voters are just creatures of habit and if you try to use Wednesday, Thursday, Friday of any given week, I think it's going to be really confusing. Again, to go back to South Burlington, their vote was held on a Thursday and in a raging snowstorm didn't help, but people were confused. I think that they had to field a lot of questions about that and also selfishly on my end, which actually their clerk pointed out, when you don't have a weekend butting up to like a Tuesday, it was really hard. She had 400 people vote early the day before because that's what people love to do. Like they just don't want to go that day, so it would be before. So I would be a little scared of getting hammered really badly on like a Wednesday or a Thursday if it was not on a Tuesday. So again, just the optics and the habits of voters, I think is something to really consider that they are used to a certain format and how it looks. This will be enough of a difference to handle that this doesn't look like a ballot that they're used to, but I think that's, we can get over that hurdle, especially if I put in some kind of note that goes with your ballot, which I often do with people that vote by mail. I often will put in a reminder, like return this by this date, return this in the Dropbox and do not forget to sign this. So I think there'll be plenty of messaging to make them understand why this looks different than a tabulated ballot. So Tuesday I would say is important to me and I think it's important in general. So that's just my one plug for the seventh or 14th or 21st or whatever the Tuesdays are that fall in that next range there. And we checked and the armory in the school are generally available, but we have the sixth and the third that we're talking about. So that we hold those dates before thinking about options there and when you want to make it. I'm a creature and have it. Me too. Me too. So do you just want the consensus from us then basically like hand or tabulated or ballot and then? I mean, I don't need that this minute. I think my role here was just to give you a little bit of the background of what the two different scenarios are and the price tag and the timeline of waiting on LHS to do that and mail memory cards and sort of be at their mercy of when that actually gets here. And the day of being the Tuesday thing. So those were my two major points. The timeline will be a little shorter. People are used to a full 20 days but we don't have to follow that as a special warrant election as opposed to town meeting and even a federal elections 45 days of early voting and then it's 20. So this will be shorter than that but still doable. As far as the ones that have to go out by mail, the good news is that I have just about everybody in what's called a date range request. So if you have opted for any ballot to come by mail, you're already in there. So once we have an answer of where we're going, I will have, those people are in my hopper already, it's a matter of printing 500 labels and then getting things folded and stuffed and that'll take Jen and I two full days at least and then maybe I'll call in some help but that part as far as the mail and the turnaround was a little discussion that we had sort of had about people do need enough time to get them and get them back but I think that either of those dates that window is dealable especially since I can get them out, you know, PDQ once we have an answer to some of our open ended logistical things that are out there. But again, now it's a great answer question. I don't need an answer right now. You guys can certainly talk about it all during your evening. I can, you know, Eric will let me know. I'll hear it eventually. And then we will be able to go from there just looking at any other notes that I may have written down. I am hearing that if we go with this ballot we probably have to come off of the May 7th. Right, yes. I would say that's the big takeaway. And the financials in all honesty, I mean, you know, obviously this is coming, you know, this is a big expense and we're talking about cutting, you know, cutting expenses. So yeah, people don't understand that this does the election costs a lot of money like that. The bill from them from March is a lot, let alone what I paid people and this is a double we have a November election this year. So. Right, and like that stuff was all budgeted for. I don't budget for your votes. This definitely doesn't, this is new sort of territory. So this will just be coming out of somewhere. But that's, no, they are expensive. So the more times we do it, the more we're spending. So I've mailed 603 and I have 307 back for next Tuesday just to give everybody kind of an idea of where people are at with that. Anything else? Anybody? I guess appealing this ballot is easier for you, correct? I whipped that up today, Mike, right out of nowhere. So yeah, no, that'll be, like I said, they have to print and I got to get envelopes ready. And you know, worst case scenario, if I was in a pinch, I can, I could use a local printer, but then again, we're getting into costs that I try to just do everything myself. And that's just how I like to do things. So yeah, all righty. So sounds, I'll just stay tuned. Okay. Okay, Sarah. Thank you. Yep. So brings us to the actual assumptions of the budget. Eric, did you have introductory thoughts? Sure. Yeah, I can just kind of walk the board through what I've distributed to last week. After your last discussion, put the feedback, recalibrated our spreadsheet here. The basis was working off of that two cent target tax rating freeze and then working on the expense side of the budget for that $300,000 range. So essentially, when you move from the four cent increase to the two cent increase on the revenue side, it's a $425,000 swing. So we use that as the target throughout here. So cleaned up this list of possible expense reductions from the last meeting, including taking, removing some things from this list that the board had consensus to keep in the budget like the police 18th sworn position and then the tasers. This is the removal list to be clear. HR director, that's been taken out. We left $10,000 for HR consulting. So that's why that's reflected within that number. Fund balance additional is built into this as well. So when, and I can answer any questions that the board has on individual items here, but when you get to the bottom line, trying to go for that $425,000 net target between revenue and expense reductions. Right now it's about 24th and thousand and change short. So the question for the board is you work through the numbers and the target you want to reach here is you want to do some more reductions? Do you want to use a little more fund balance? Where do you want to land on the target? Where it is right now, it's about a two percent expense reduction, which is about 7.62% increase from FY 24. It has that target two cent tax rate in it. If you were to say decrease this than another $24,000, it kind of lands at that seven and a half percent increase FY 24 number. The other piece, I left from the remaining list. I struck the fireworks after that discussion, but I left the other possible budget changes that I just had on the list in general. Environmental Reserve Fund, Community Organization Funds, Flower Planting, Left Orphan Alastal List. Essentially if you chose to use a little bit more fund balance at this point, if it was $10,000 or something like that, it's not a huge piece of the fund balance. You're trying to hit this target and think of ways to get there. That's essentially where we are right now. Numbers-wise with that tax rate if we're using our kind of comparative benchmarks here. Two cents additional on the rate, the estimate's about $20 more per 100,000 of assessment. With that median home at 300,000, that means about $60 more per year, about $5 per month. That's half of where it was at town. I'm happy to go into these items more detail. Any questions the board has? I'm going to decide where you want to land here. I know everybody's been going over everything here. I look at all the budget and a lot of things. I don't understand very well. Thank you for explaining the impact piece to me earlier. I was looking up page 143 of the roll maintenance. You had a description of overtime. You had a large, you know, you had to increase an overtime in the proposed year end budget. Sorry. I don't sit in the center of the table very often. I think that's the problem. Keep getting closer and closer to Jean. Yeah, keep moving this way. I know you have to just, you know, I think that's just your, you know, that is just your estimated what it's going to cost. Correct? Sorry, Mike, I'm just pulling up the budget here. What page did you say? On page 143, on overtime, description, overtime. Sure, yeah, I'll probably have you. I just go through, you know, I just went through all the budget, all the lines. I just look for anything that looked like an increase. Well, Mike, what I do with that particular line item is I look at three years by each person of pay rate in the budget. So that $50,000 number you're looking at. That overtime is usually for snow removal? I mean, in the winter? Primarily it's snow removal. Once in a while they may help with water break, the public works guys may help with things like that in the summertime, but it's mostly snow removal. It's not gonna snow next winter. I hope so. I don't wanna listen to you, Mike, I wanna know. Does that help? Yes, the three-year average. As in what we asked them to do as far as coming up with the reductions and they look reasonable to me, the only concern I have is the 24,000 and change that we need to address to make it a balanced budget. And I think that should come out of the out of the fund balance. It's a wider amount. I have a question about the reduction. A lot of these say defer for a year, like the police fleet replacement capital and most everything under public works. I guess I just wanna make sure that we're not, the assumption is not that we're absolutely gonna put these all in the budget next year, like double them up, right? I mean, this could be the other thing if I have to slide a little bit next year, right? Yeah, that'd be the intention. Like I talked to Bruce about the path paving, the sidewalk replacement. So we can get by with kind of moving that timeline on things. The intent would be to double those up. We felt we could zero those lines out for a year and kind of just move things. Because we're also, like the, when we're talking about like one time things, like fixing the, not one time, but it's not like we're hiring somebody, right? So this is something if the option tax come in better than budget, we can go ahead and do those, right? Make those kind of decisions on the fly because it's not like you're committing to a whole position that follows into the next budget and you're now committed, but it does take this down. That's from the budget though, so if you put it back in next year's budget, it's an increase again. Yep, great. That's correct. Yeah, and with the police cruisers funds, we brought up a little to 50 from 45 as we were working with these numbers and it's thinking about, we try to replace two to three cruisers a year, try to get that life out of them, but given where we are, we feel comfortable in deferring if we only did two next year instead. The pricing is certainly escalating or is hearing their stats down out of the event in Massachusetts and talking to some vendors today and one of the vendors there said the price for just the cruise, you have to get the car and then we have to upfit it. We're able to move our equipment along the time, which is why we try to get the same model and so we can make the equipment last longer of the electronics, but they're saying today, like the price of this one model had gone up $8,000 last year and it's going up $10,000 this year just to get the car. So those costs will continue to go up like we see everywhere, but I'm just thinking of ways to defer and it's not gonna be a, it's something we're comfortable with just decreasing that for now, but we'll have to keep replacing and we've monitored that replacement schedule kind of based on use and mileage not necessarily tied to the vehicle itself because they can have different mileage and wear and tear. This is kind of a knit, but if you're looking for 24,000, you know, so we have a grounds person who now is freed up 10 hours a week all summer long and I was just noticing that we still have, we still pay for mowing at the fire station or painting at the fire station, you know, so maybe just take another look through and see if there's something productive we can do with that gal or guy who's now doesn't have to paint the lines on the field anymore, so they can, you know, not gonna ask them to go, you know, do the books for Shirley, but certainly something, you know, they might be freed up into something that's related since we're looking for 24,000. So Terry said staff, it is instructed and the 24,000 does not come in through sales tax or cut something I suppose as we go. I think we do want the number to be, we want the budget to balance with that 24 out, so budget-wise we'll say fund balance. Exactly. Okay. Yeah, they'll be the revenue in. Every revenue, yeah. It's balanced right now as it's presented, but this would get to that targeted amount of that. Sorry. That would be my purpose. Yeah. Relying on the local options tax is tough, difficult. Yeah. And just to remind the board, we bumped it up quite a bit in this budget based on the last two years and always being under. I think we have it at, increased about a half million. That's helping absorb the revenue for the added expenses for a good chunk here. Halfway through this year, we were at 2 million in receipts. We've budgeted 4.1 million for this budget you're looking at right now. Be closer than in prior years, but trying to true that up more as the reflect of the revenue. It's spending a lot of quality time with how Swazan means YouTube videos right now. And I think in general, there's a real concern about the property values of commercial buildings not going up the way that people are thinking that everything else is going up. And that that's true. We could be facing some real challenges down the road. Yeah, so the effect on the grand list and keeping an eye on that. Right. So what is the board's pleasure? Do we give our blessing? Do you have more instruction? Go to the final line, are there specifics of people on the cover? I think I agree with everyone. I think we set that target of 4.25 and like to meet it. And if that means taking as much as it pains me to say even to take that additional 24,000 on the fund balance, then this is the year to do that. This is the rainy day of fund. And as I think Jean said last week, it's raining. So yeah, it's time to do that. Is the, what was the next step? Did we vote in a public hearing last time? Yeah, this next week. We did, we did vote on it. Yeah. I do not read this, it's been a whole week. I hear you. Given the deadline for the observer, I put a notice and earlier this week's they'll be published tomorrow. And I left it without final numbers, but saying the board had targeted over 300 inexpensive decreases and cutting the rate project increase in half. And it notifies folks that staff will post a draft budget online by Friday. So then they can consult that for the hearing. Due to display add to, so it would be a little bigger than in the legal section of the paper. And we'll, we'll show that in other ways too, this week, once we get these numbers all updated in the larger budget document. Had some people comment, they had a hard time finding it on our website, finding the budget last time. So anything you can do to make it easier, more accessible would be good. Sure. You're gonna have Aaron just put a link on the homepage. Yeah, we try with the news brief and a picture. We can make the picture bigger. You are best there. Sounds like we should probably have a motion. For public hearing. No. Or for this. Well, that would come after the public hearing to finalize the number. Okay. We don't need any formal Roberts-Rolls type action. No. To be able to have this go forward next week. No. All right. How about picking the date? Is that something we wanna do? Or we didn't actually warn that we were gonna do it, but. Up to you tonight. What I was thinking is to make sure there'd be at least a majority of the board available on the 18th. You know, after the meeting on the 16th, close the public hearing or can make any final changes at that point after the public feedback. And then staff would get everything prepared to adopt the warning, probably on the 18th. So give us the data to make sure things are in order. And then when that warning's adopted, you'll have to certainly have the date at that point. You can either decide that tonight for the date or you could wait until, you know, when you approve your warning next Thursday. And I know there's another vote next Tuesday if that factors into that thinking as well as waiting to see what happens there. Toilet up to the board. It probably is when you want to set it for logistics, including Sarah, who decided tonight. Yeah, I mean, I think the more, and for, you know, the sake of publicizing when it's gonna be, the longer, the more notice we can give people. Please show up on this date. The better. Okay. Perhaps just like we've sort of soft-blessed the numbers in the budget, we were soft-blessing the date too. Yeah. So it could be publicized as that. I mean, I guess it could be discussed as well. But I'm not sure a lot of people got to show up to argue for the 14th. Yeah. I feel the board wants to make that decision on the date. Probably want to stick with it, because I'll, I'd just like to kind of get it out there as it were. The other thing we should try to make that official. May 14th is what people are thinking. Oh, I was thinking the 7th. The 7th, yes. Yeah. I mean, personally. I feel, yes, pretty strongly about that. That's a Tuesday. Yep. Yeah. Is that, we have consensus on that? Yep. Then the, while we're here. Oh. Like, can that's something we can decide tonight as well? Well, I think we kind of have to, if we say the 7th, we, this one's out. Yeah. Yeah. And just monetarily, I mean. Yeah, why spend money? Right. Hand count. Hand count. Hand count, right here. I was, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just, having participated in the, the recount too. It wasn't nearly as painful as I thought it was going to be. And so, you know, yeah. I was on the board of civil authority in Richmond in 1986 when it was Leahy versus Snelling for the U.S. Senate. And you're out of there about two hours. Yeah. Mashed them up? Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay, all right, so. So, we'll plan on May 7th at the Armory. We'll plan May 6th, public information hearing at the school auditorium at seven o'clock. We just haven't had locations and routine. You have a select board meeting usually scheduled for May 7th and soon we won't have a select board meeting that night. Do you want to have a select board meeting another night that week or wait until May 21st for the next select board meeting or somewhere else in the future? I don't think that we do something I want for it. It depends on if there's anything pressing, I guess, so. There's nothing that couldn't wait until the 21st. We have to do a public hearing on the Home Act amendments but it has to happen by April. So, we made that on May 21st. That would be fine for that. We have a, yeah. There's certainly business that needs to be covered but I don't think it's correct. We need to do our enterprise fund budgets on the 21st as well. It's always sister custody of their budget. Maybe at earlier start. Maybe at six o'clock start on the 21st. So, you may have a busier agenda. Yeah. That night will be the trade off. Jean's going to buy some new tabs for her binder. I will. And 32, I'll get the 32 packs this time. But yeah, I mean I think even at earlier start time if there's going to be that busy in her agenda would be a good compromise between missing meetings. Six PM. Yeah. Six PM on the 21st. Okay, I think that's all my fund logistics right now. I think that takes us to the agenda. Yeah. No, very efficient. Management report, other business helpers. Yes, I didn't even bring my binder today. That's shorter one. Eric, do we have anything under management? I just wanted to recognize our staff's work for the eclipse. We didn't know exactly what the impacts would be on town services. And I just thought our staff did it out of the park with our police and fire and public works and admin staff. We had extra people on for fire and police to work. We held over all our public work staff. We had the crew actually split. Between here we staged a couple trucks full of gravel and the loader here and the highway garage just in case like something happened and we needed to throw gravel on a dirt road and then someone else was cut off highway garage. A lot of thought and contingencies went into this planning over the last three months. Aaron Dickinson led that coordination from the manager's office and had a good, we were monitoring ways for traffic. We were figured out a way we could always make sure we had cell phone service with a program that's out there for government. So it was a good exercise for the staff and I think we've built a good playbook for things. This is an unpredictable event. So they were all here. So in 2044 we're gonna be completely ready. We're ready. But they were all here watching the eclipse as town staff and just being available to support the community during that event. So just want to make sure that goes right. That's very, everybody was. That's all I have to say again. Okay. Other business? Is there any other business? I have a catering permit. May the third, a wedding at Isham Family Barn. It's from 802 Cocktails. Staff has no objections. That's made about 75 people at the wedding. What's the date of that one? May third. I don't think we have a wedding scheduled May third. Yeah. Oh, yep. You're right. Fundraising event for steps. Just fundraiser. Yep. That's all right. I assumed it was a wedding. Yeah. Don't scare me like that. Yeah. Fundraising event. Are you worried, Mike? Yeah. Wedding? What? So staff has no objections? No. Okay. So is there a motion? I'll move to approve. For a second? Second. Is there a discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. The other side. Okay. Final thoughts on the, any agenda items from this meeting? Hearing nothing, then I will declare that we are adjourned. All right.