 Welcome to the Essex Select Board meeting. Please stand and 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. So first item on the agenda, additions and changes. Greg or Evan? I have a few additions for you. Nothing to add to the, no new items to add to the agenda, but there's some materials from Channel 17 in response to their presentation. There's an email from Charles Cole about the V-Tang FD 2019 Mutual Aid Training, BTV Mutual Aid Training, that was the attachment, and that is part of item 7B from the reading file. And lastly, there's an updated memo from Tammy Getchell about meeting schedules and events. Also in the reading file, item 7D, and that was just correcting, fixing a couple of corrections or mistakes. Do I have a motion for additions to the agenda? I would move approval of the additions to the agenda as stated by Greg Duggan. Thank you. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes 4-0. Next item is the public to be heard. We welcome your comments about anything relating to the town and its business, except those items that are on the agenda for tonight. If anybody has anything that they would like us to know about that is not included on tonight's agenda, please raise your hand and leave. Thank you. Item number five, first class liquor license approval, the Whitcomb House LLC doing business as the Whitcomb House Bed and Breakfast. Ms. Whitcomb, please join us. So we have reviewed the application, and I would like to open it up to the board for any questions or comments that they might have on the application. The only question I have is there's no outdoor consumption permit. Just wondering if you don't plan to have any outdoor. No, we do not. Thank you. Good question. Irene? We're putting some black marks on the application. I was just wondering why the junction part of the construction seem to be... That was my request in the past. We've had some applications where it goes to the control commissioners of the town or city of Essex Junction, which has been pointed out doesn't exist. So I asked the clerk's office to take out the junction piece. Any other questions from Ms. Whitcomb? Who are all the officers? My husband and myself. We have a report from the chief that says there's no issues, which is our standard moves, and therefore staff has no issues. The reason we asked about who was, if there were any other officers, was your husband, David, I believe, did not fill out the same section that you did as far as officers. And the only thing that would be different, I think, would be the date of birth, perhaps. That's why we asked the question, because his name appears later on in the application. When I originally brought the paperwork in, I thought I could do it all. And then the town clerk told me, no, he's got to be added on to that as well. So then I had to submit the background check for him as well. And then they said I was complete the application forms. I can grab you afterwards and just have you fill in the... Sure. It's a knit. It's not a big... Okay, perfect. Any other questions or comments? Andy? I move that the select board approve first class liquor license for the Whitcomb House LLC doing business as the Whitcomb House bed and breakfast. Elaine, thank you. All those in favor of the application, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes 4-0. Would you take a minute or two and tell us a little bit about your business? This is our 10th year. June 8 was our 10-year anniversary this year. And it has... My husband doesn't like to travel that much. So it's been really wonderful for me because I get people from all over the world that come and stay. I've traveled virtually through them. And we've made really good friends throughout the years. And I love to cook. And it's just been... It fills your cup. It fills your cup. I mean I have routine regulars that come back either they've got grandchildren in the area. So it's just nice. They become part of the family. So enjoy what I do. We're happy to have you here. There is a quick admonition that I have to give you. The town takes the awarding of liquor licenses very seriously. And so we ask that you take good care and due diligence as far as exercising the use of alcoholic beverages. I would just like to be able to offer my guests some Vermont wines or a Vermont beer. If they've traveled like a long day so they don't have to leave because I've seen it happen over the years. So I probably between the two application fees probably will not see a return on this in a couple of years. But it would be nice. And even like a champagne mimosa in the morning with breakfast that would be nice too. Sure. What time will that be? Well thank you very, very much. Thank you all very much. We appreciate you being here in Essex. Thank you. Appreciate it. Okay. Item 5B presentation of the Channel 17 annual report. Lauren Glenn-Davidton. Davidian. Davidian. Thank you. These are very comfortable chairs. You can sit in them for your long meetings, right? I'm Lauren Glenn-Davidian. I'm the Executive Director of CCTV Center for Media and Democracy which operates Channel 17, Town Meeting TV. Dan Logan is our channel coordinator. He's with us this evening. He's the man that schedules the coverage and makes sure the field producers have everything that they need. And periodically we come and we provide an annual report to the various municipal members. Elaine is our representative from the village as well as the town. Thank you very much. She's also our fearless president. TD, is there anything you wanted to open by saying or is there any comments you wanted to make before we started? Either at the end of the beginning, I'm just speaking for, as the representative of the community, thank you for the coverage you provide. It gets used a lot and it's a service that we really, really need. And I'm also proud to be one of the first communities that I'm allowed to do a lot of live streaming and live streaming at annual meetings. And it's a great service so we're really happy to be a partner of Channel 17. Thank you. So just, there are some follow-up questions to the presentation that I'm happy to go right into. But they also raised a couple of points that might just be useful by way of background. So Channel 17 is funded by cable subscribers. And in 1990 there were 30,000 cable subscribers in this service territory, which included the member municipalities as their name, Burlington, South Burlington, et cetera. And when the, when we first came to the town of Essex, Dave Rogers, I want to say was the, Rogersson was the town manager so we're talking then. And Dave Crawford, no, no, no, no way back. Marty Myers was the head of the, it was even before he was the head of the Select Board in any event, 1990. And Essex was an enthusiastic charter member of the Channel 17 trustees. And we took those 30,000 subscribers and we broke them down based on the municipalities. And we use that as the foundation for the trust agreement. So there's, there's a trustees agreement that manages the channel as a kind of regional entity like the Solid Waste District. And we also use that breakdown to allocate resources in terms of coverage. Because the trustees said the most important thing we want to do is cover public local municipal meetings. And then we want to do election coverage. And then we want to do some regional coverage. And then we want to do legislative coverage. But it was, the priority has always been the municipal meetings. So the allocation of those resources and the votes came from that first 30,000 subscribers cox cable. And we've used that formula ever since. And it has been periodically updated and we're waiting now for some new numbers. But essentially it means that Burlington, which obviously has the most subscribers, it makes sense that they do. They get six meetings a month. South Burlington gets five. And the other member municipalities, which have comparable numbers, get three. No one gets less than three. And those are covered by cable subscriber dollars. So the municipalities until 2006 didn't contribute anything towards the operation of the channel. It was all cable subscribers. In 2006, we built the website as a place to record and upload the meetings. And that was the first time we came to the municipalities and asked for some additional support because it was a non-cable use. And we felt that that was appropriate. And over that time, we expanded those services to include clickable agendas. But we didn't come for annual increases. And so the next time we came, it was a pretty big adjustment. And that was when we made the pitch to start live meeting coverage. So if you can imagine that in 1990 when we started the channel, we were just doing analog video production. We were coming, shooting the meetings, putting them on TV. And for roughly the same amount of money, we've now added a whole digital overlay in the last 10, 12 years. So the services of channel 17, we have been able to provide more. We've been able to provide more services because we've become more efficient, right? So we know there's not a lot more money. We know there's a threshold in terms of cable dollars. But as I think Elaine will be the first to say, the technical needs of running such a channel are fairly significant, as you can imagine. It produced 1,300 hours a year of new programming, which is a phenomenal amount of production, if you look at any other television outfit in the whole country. And so everything has been pretty fine, except that our technical needs are increasing and the cable dollars are starting to decrease. And we had a pretty stable arrangement until January when Comcast's accountants made them reclassify income because of new gap requirements. And that impact was a 5% loss of income for channel 17 and for RETN and VCAM, our sister operations, which was about a $50,000 decline. So we've been managing the sort of steady decline through efficiencies and starting to diversify our annual giving. But this is a big jump and the trustees determine that if we ask the municipalities to help support this and each municipality doubled its current contribution, we'd be able to make up that $50,000. We don't see them making that adjustment again. They've assured us that was kind of a one-time bump. It's not to say their income isn't slowly going down, but this big gap. So that's why we're here, is to ask you to consider that. Now one of the questions that came up is, are you going to keep coming back to us? And Elaine has advocated for a long time that we come back annually for a modest increase, so we don't see these big increases. So that may be the case. The trustees determined to do that. I will say that I would mentally prepare yourselves over the next 10 years to be making bigger and bigger contributions if you see fit to operate Channel 17 because the cable dollars are going to decline. And the cost of providing this service is about $36,000 a year. That's just meeting coverage. That's not running the channel and all the other programs. So I think to be completely forthright, it is important to think about how the municipality can ultimately contribute to this channel, and if it wants to, and if it finds this service valuable enough as the cable revenue starts to decline. So that's a longer-term trend. I want you to be aware that that is also the case. I'm not trying to muddy the message, but I think it's important that we're all aware that that's where this is going. So without further ado, happy to answer any specific questions that you have. The Channel 17 Board and CCTV are in the beginning stages of putting together a new fundraising model. So we're hoping to move towards something more like a Vermont public television or a VPR kind of a model. So we know that fundraising is going to be a significant portion of revenues in the future. But it will take several years for it to get to a sustainable level. We've been thinking about this question of diversified revenue since 1990 when the phone companies first got into the business of television. So it's a long time, and we've created a number of different kinds of projects to diversify revenue over that time. So we've been fairly entrepreneurial and I'm confident that we can diversify our income further. So it is not going to be solely on the burden of the municipalities. But I think that the bigger picture is important because I think that was where some of the questions were going. Floor is open. You mentioned the funding source and I guess just for clarification, the funding that you currently get from the cable, is that a federal thing or a state thing? So there's a Cable Communication Act of 1984 enabled the local franchising authority, which in the case of Vermont is the Public Utility Commission, to require up to 5% for operating funds, plus additional funds for capital, as well as set aside channels for public use, public educational government use. So the language is in the act, franchising authorities may or may not activate their option to do this. And in the state of Vermont, it's the state of Vermont, not local municipalities, that function as a franchise authority. So since 1984, we have been the 25 access centers around the state because there are 25 centers that operate about 75 channels. You know, we're a movement that's significant in Vermont. We've been receiving up to 5% for operating funds and another half percent each for capital funds. We split that money, Channel 17 does, with the Caminari TN, who are the public and the educational government. But this is pretty much standard operating procedure in the state of Vermont. But the Public Utility Commission doesn't, can't change the rules. They can only interpret the act. Right. And so what I mentioned in the follow-up notes is I think it's time for us to go to the legislature and talk to them. I don't think they're going to change the rules. They may decide to allocate some legislative funds towards these purposes. I think we have to ask. But I think, as I mentioned also, I think it's a multi-year campaign. There is a lot of erosion of cable rights. The FCC has got two notices of proposed rulemaking that are very threatening. One, the filings were due this week and that has to do with any payment that a cable company might make to a state such as discounted cable service for senior citizens. The FCC is arguing that that should be subtracted from the franchise fees. So that would mean less money for a peg. I'm not sure that's a immediate threat in Vermont, but it is nationally. There's a second notice of proposed rulemaking that I'm going to bring back to you that has to do with municipal control of public rights of way. Which again, the FCC is trying to erode on behalf of competition in the telecom marketplace. So I think it's something you're going to want to be aware of and possibly send a letter. That'll be coming the next month. So we are very awake to all of these threats and we've been trying. You know, we talked about this every time we leave a meeting, Dan says, well, why can't we get a percentage of internet revenue? Well, you can't. We've just foreclosed on it in the FCC and in Congress and there's just no way to move on that one. And we tried a long time. So, you know, cable as a future revenue source for peg access is going to be just be smaller piece of the pie. And were those answers helpful to you? Did you read the person that had those questions? Yeah, okay. You mentioned the possibility of coming back periodically or more frequently asking for smaller increases. I read through your, the trustee agreement says that July, you know, January 1st. Within 30 days of January 1st, you have to provide the municipalities with the, you know, the budget which I assume would include the funding request. And my concern is that if you provide that on January 30th, we've already set our budget for the coming fiscal year. And so I'm wondering if there's any possibility of changing your timing so that we get that information sooner so it can be appropriately reflected in our budget process? So our timing actually, our budget is October 1 in reality. We haven't updated that trust agreement. That's a good catch. So it's October 1. So we, this is the current budget we're asking you. Thank you. Does that address that? Yeah. You had other good questions. Did you want it? Or anybody? You answered many of them, but I did have another one. I noticed that in the documentation that we got that Colchester doesn't have one of these, isn't on the list of, is it? Colchester has 500 subscribers. Colchester, in the 80s and 90s, Colchester was mostly served by Ray Peacore's cable system. And only a few hundred people were in the COC system. So they bought it. Adelphia bought the Colchester system, but we only serve 500 people in Colchester, whereas there's thousands. And that's, they're served by someone else. So it's a little hard for us to go to Colchester for an appropriation. We also don't have a rep from Colchester. We haven't had one for a little while, so we don't have an advocate in there. We only do one meeting a month for them. So we don't do the full three because LCATV serves them. Yeah. There were 50 cable companies in 1984 when we started in Vermont. So that gives you an idea of the consolidation that's happened in that period of time. It's a different environment. I know you do more than just tape our shows. You have some other services that you provide. Can you elaborate, including your YouTube? Yeah, I can take that one. We'll start with YouTube. We curate a YouTube channel as well, and that is where all of our live video recordings of the meetings go for all the municipalities that we do. We have a lot of people that are automatically uploaded to YouTube, so they are readily available for viewers that want to see them after the fact, even if they haven't tuned in live. So that is a big part of the meeting coverage that has been grown as we've introduced live streaming. And YouTube is a duplicate in a way of our archive system just for the meetings. They do live in both places, but the YouTube is just a considerably more accessible location for people because everyone knows where YouTube is. They want to find a video, is going to search it there, and that's where it'll land. So for us to have a duplicate there, it just makes sense. But the archiving is a big part of what we do as well. And that's everything we film in our studio, everything we film on locations. Every forum we host and every meeting that we record all lives in our archives forever. They're going back to 84, right? And we still have beta disks. We still have VHS, all of which are being archived right now in digitized formats. So that's a big chunk of what we're doing right now as well. We also do studio shows. We try to do a live show every day as long as we have people that show up. 525, we go live, and these are community producers that come in with ideas that they want to share with the world. It's part of our open door policy to promote free speech. And we also send a camera whenever we can to any community events that happen. We're at the parade out here for more of the... Yeah, we were at the march in City Hall for the firing of Jeff Sessions. We try to get cameras out there to document everything that's happening all over Chittenden County so that we get a little slice of history, I guess, as we archive all of our content. So on top of this, and I mean, we're talking about funding for these meetings, there's a lot of stuff that we film out here that has relevance. And there's a lot of things that we film that has relevance to all of Chittenden County, including viewers in Essex, like all of our forums that we do for Town Meeting Day, for every election cycle. Solid Waste District. I mean, there's a lot of regional programming. And then we do the studio programs and the elections. And then we do baseline video training for young people. Yeah, we have a summer camp in every year. Right, sir. We have a summer camp that comes in every year for a week as we train. I think we had 15, 20 kids this time. People from the colleges come in. We've had journalists class come in last week. We've had journalists from Africa came in and journalists from, what was the other country, do you remember? Iraq have been there all over. So we're pretty busy. I mean, we're providing a lot of community service in that respect, right? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Irene, did you have a question? I'm good, thank you for answering my questions. Any other questions? No, but I have a comment. I mentioned this at the village board meeting last week when Mike was the cameraman and tonight it's Scott and it's almost always, if not always Scott here and Scott is a valuable asset to this production as Mike is to the village production. We have come to know Scott very well and rely on him. And when we've gone on location, Scott has to learn a new AV system and audio and kind of saved our bacon at least more than once with somebody else's equipment. So we really appreciate the people that you send to us and how well trained they are. Thank you. Scott's a pro. He's a total pro. Yeah. Yeah, we're lucky. He's worked with Channel 17 for a long time. Thank you, Scott. So any other questions or comments? Okay. We have their request and we... This is informational only, I think. Beginning of our budget process, we'll just pass the beginning, but we'll figure something out. Very good. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you very much for coming. Thanks, Dan. Thank you. Okay. Next item on the agenda is 5C, Approval of Grand List Errors and Omissions for Cloverleaf AM Essex LLC, also known as Blodgett Ovens. Mr. Duggan. Yes, so this is an error in omission to the grand list brought to our attention by Blodgett. So Randy VNZ Assessor put together this memo. Basically, we had the property assessed at almost $11.7 million. Blodgett got that tax bill and reached out. I thought it was higher than it should have been. And lo and behold, Randy went out there and it was. He had calculated the whole property as light manufacturing. Once he took a closer look at it, was able to do it. A walkthrough of the building, he noticed, realized that it was 55% manufacturing, 45% warehouse. So this number adjusts that. The new grand list value would be $6.685 million. So coming down a bit, no tax impact to the town in this case, it's because of the tax stabilization agreement that was entered a couple of years ago, a year and a half ago. And for the school district, because of the statewide funding model and calculation, the statewide grand list has not yet been calculated. So this will get in ahead of time. So it'll be no impact to what the state has on its books. Any questions from the board? Just a quick question. Sure. So after this tax stabilization agreement, and it's a 10-year agreement, is that correct? 10-year agreement, the first five years, there were no municipal taxes. After that it ramps up 20% of municipal taxes, 40, 60, 80, 200 in the 11th year. That's plenty of time. Correct. Yes. If there's no other questions. I would move that the select board approved this correction to the 2018 grand list. Second. Thank you, Irene and Andy. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion passes 4-0. 5-D. Presentation of management goals for fiscal year end 2020 for the 2020 budget. Evan. Well, as you just had a presentation from CCTV, you know, from Channel 17, it's budget season. Staff is feverishly preparing their budgets. And so it has been my practice to give them goals and some things to either think about or not to think about as the case may be. So we told them to target a operating budget of no greater than 4%. That staffing our priorities were going to be police officers, some type of building superintendent position and no other full-time positions. And so we did not say they could not present to us part-time, but no for them not to consider not asking for full-time in this year because we wanted to focus on police officers in particular. And the chief has done a great job of filling the vacancies that he's had, but we have, per him and other conversations, he has several officers behind in a long-range plan for covering 36 square miles of the town. Good. We continue to work on alignment this year. This year's budget includes aligning fire department pay with the village fire department. As you may recall, some of them, they do it differently. One of the departments pays for training and the other does not. And so to get them more aligned, they will both pay for one hour of training but mainly base their pay on the calls that they go on and they will have an hour minimum for that. So they will start to align in that way as well as their policies and practices of the departments. And then as you'll see in the last item, we have the fund balance. We talked about this a little bit. We put the budget together, I don't know, about 14, 15 months before the actual 16 months before it goes into the event. We take a lot of historical data and what we know from requests and we put them together in a budget. And out of about $14 million, if we're 97% accurate, sometimes you're, you know, so if you spend 97% of what you thought you were going to spend, you're still going to end up with about $400,000 a surplus. That doesn't happen every year. Some years you don't, you actually are closer to 99% and some years you may go slightly over depending upon what happens. But this last year we were at about 97% accuracy in expenditures and revenues. And so you'll get a surplus. And so you will see us come to you in the next couple of meetings with what we think should be done with a recommendation of surplus funds. And spoiler alert, a lot of it's in capital. We don't necessarily, very rarely will you see us come to you for any operating expenses with surplus, you won't see that. But it's mainly capital and any long-term expenses that you have identified over the years that need funding, including our general fund reserve, which we hope to keep at 15%, which is the cap per the charter. And I'll take any questions. Yes, Elaine. Evan, at some point in the future when it works in the agenda, would you present information about our retirement plan and what our obligations are and what the plans are for fulfilling those obligations? Just informational. Clarification. Do you mean the Fiemer's Plan, which is the Vermont Municipal Employee Retirement Pension Plan, or the town's retirement payouts when people retire that the town's on the hook for? Town retirement payouts. Having Fiemer's information would be useful, but it would be different from... Just for the people at home, we don't have any post-employment benefits. No post-employment benefits, but we do have people who have earned sick time and vacation time, and that's what I believe you're asking for. We can certainly do that. Anybody else have questions for Evan? It's my first budget here, so I'm learning lots of things about operations that I don't catch on the day-to-day, but I can tell you that as you guys have seen, Dennis has a book about this big, and he always just wants 10 minutes of my time, and you can't get through all that in 10 minutes. But it's a good group. They know what is needed of them, and you've been through many of them. Elaine, this is going to be your first town. I'm on the town side, yes. We'll get through it together. Okay. Thank you. Information will only, I believe, no action item there. Thank you for the copy of the fund balance policy. I appreciate it. Next item on our agenda is the presentation of the Winooski Valley Parks District's fiscal year 2018 annual report and fiscal year 2020 appropriation request. Thank you. Nick Warner and Lauren Chico. Hi, Lauren. Welcome. Thank you. Nick, do you want to toggle through? Oh, that's right. Is that wireless? Yeah, thanks. For those who, I've been here before, but those who don't know me, Nick Warner, Executive Director of Winooski Valley Park District, and this is Lauren Chico. She's our Programs Director. Also, Business Manager. Also, all things. She's actually worked there for longer than I have, and really wanted to be part of the game this year. So that's why she's here. And she can also add additional information about our programs and services. For those who are not familiar with us, we're a hybrid nonprofit municipality. We're incorporated under the Inter-Municipal Act, similar to solid waste districts and dispatch and so forth. We've been in existence since 1972, and we currently have 18 properties under management at about 1,750 acres total. This has been an eventful year for us, in a good way. In that, and I can send you this presentation, by the way. I should have, I tried to email it today, but it got gummed up in the works. I couldn't get it through. This is just a brief history of who we are. And this map sort of gives you an idea of what our geographic spread is. We have seven member towns in Chittenden County. And these are where our parks are located. And this year, really the biggest deal for us this year was the acquisition of a new park right at the Wynusky River Mouth. And if you look to the left where it says Lake Champlain, that's where the bike bridge crosses the river. And you go in towards this new park site and there's a 2.4 acre parcel that we purchased in August from a family that had been operating a marina there for 44 years. And the plan with the site is to really take all the buildings off and to turn it into a public park kayak canoe drop off site. And we're able to do this using VHCB monies, primarily a little bit of our capital reserves and then the Burlington Legacy Conservation Fund also kicked in. Is there a timeline on that? Yeah, well, we're working with FEMA right now to rip the buildings down. Then I've got two grant applications out there now for completing the park development. But after the buildings are done, we plan on opening the site because it'll be usable. But we're going to do a whole re-naturalization of the shoreline. And you can see right here, these buildings are still there. That traffic, this is like a gravel traffic circle that you can see in front of you here, which is going to be retained for the boat drop off. And then the majority of the site, about an acre and a half, is all going to be re-naturalized along the shoreline. So it's a great project. And it's kind of fun. I've worked on the development side for a long time. So going to get permits to taking buildings down is something that's a different experience, which actually the system's not really set up for. But we're literally, we're taking a site that's got, I think, six buildings on it, and they're all coming down. All the foundations are coming up. It's floodplain. So it's kind of a logical way to manage the site. And this is just an artist's rendering of what it might look like when it's done. It's a very exciting project. And then just in general, we do a lot of park maintenance. I mean, the vast majority of our operations are around park acquisition and maintenance. Our park superintendent, Tim Larnad, who's been with us for 17 years, I think we figured out. At least, yeah. Is a master of getting volunteer support. We work with a lot of youth programs. We work with corporations. We work with volunteer groups that help us exponentially add to our seasonal crew that comes in every year. This is some work done at McCray. We have a park in Colchester, which we are just about finished completing a trail system on that required a ton of bridges and stairs and punching and so forth. It's called the Walcott Family Natural Area. It's on East Road, and in the springtime that will be open to the public. So it's a very exciting development. This is just a picture of some YCC folks who are working on that project. We also have been continuing essentially side work with the city of South Burlington where they pay us an assessment for maintaining their parks like you guys do, but we also have a contract with them to do work on their properties when we have time to do that. And it's been a very successful relationship. We've learned what our capacity is. We had to grow it incrementally, but it's been able to bring in extra income to the organization, which is huge for us and has provided a good service for the city of South Burlington. This is a bridge we completed this past summer. We have a lot of collaborations. This is with the Winnieski Natural Resource District doing a tree planting down a Muddy Brook wetland reserve, which is on the South Burlington-Williston border. These kinds of events are very common for us. I like this photo just because this is the bridge. It connects the north and south interval in Burlington. It got totally torn apart with the ice this past winter, and we were able to patch it back together. And we're going to be replacing that structure in total sometime in the next couple of years. Really a big deal for us is the increase in our programming and really jump in any time, Lauren. This really, Lauren, has had a big part of this. When I first started four and a half years ago, we had a pilot program for a summer camp. It's now grown into a full eight-week program. We have waiting lists. We provide lots of scholarships. We have February vacation camp. And we have in-school curriculum. And we also have a growing after-school presence. And we're discovering that we're really filling a need that's out there. I mentioned this in South Burlington earlier. We're discovering kids are not having recess time. They're not having time outside. They're not getting enough social interaction. And we're not just providing natural resource education. It's really turned into a multiple service, which we embrace. But I just mentioned this in public form, because I think kids are not getting enough playtime, enough free time, and anything we can do to supplement that is important. So we keep it fun, but we also have a really great series of activities and curriculum. This is the Seoul camp, which is our summer program. And it's been highly successful for us. And it's also brought in income to the organization, which is great. We've been able to add field trips and solve some transportation issues and built new relationships with other nonprofits. We also have a February vacation day camp. And full disclosure, it's rained the last two February's. I don't know if you have kids in school, but the February has been a washout. So I had to use this picture from an after school. This isn't actually during the February day camp, but in concept. A lot of the activities are kind of the same across the different programs that we run. A lot of hands-on, outdoor, experiential programs. And really the after school space is something that we feel is a real growth piece for us. And Lauren is finishing up a grant right now to the basin program that would fund an intervail-based program that would sort of combine service learning with a curriculum to bring groups of kids down and work on improving the floodplain forest and dealing with invasives and land use planning and that kind of thing. So we're pretty excited about that. And it's an extension of what we're doing anyhow, so it's not a stretch for us to do that. We have a great program in Jericho that's been going for many years. It's just more about our kids' programming. And our annual conservation field day with over 300 fifth graders is a real benchmark each year for us. It reminds us why we're in business and it's just really exciting and we've been really lucky with the weather. 28 activity stations over 300 kids. This year we'll be finishing the trail system at Walcott, definitely increasing our after school presence and service learning programs. The contract to work with member towns has gone extremely well. South Burlington has re-upped for another year. We've done some work for Winooski and we've done some work for Williston very recently. And we'll be finishing off developing, hopefully finishing off the new park, Doraway Cove. We have a couple acquisitions out there that we're looking at. One potential is in Williston. It's called the Jacob property. It's a 26 acre parcel. Another one is a larger parcel that's a quieter conversation because the owners haven't figured out what they're going to do yet, but there's a potential for a fairly large acquisition involved with that. And then the other piece is just our continuous search for new sources of revenue and ways to support the organization. So that's the quick and dirty of who we are and what we've been doing. And each year we ask our member towns to support us through an assessment determined using a formula that takes population in grand list and we do a recalculation each year. The last two years have been flat in terms of our ask. This year we're asking for more. Our overall budget has increased by a little over $34,000. And the main reason for that increase is well, really two-fold. One is cost of doing business and most of us who work there we cost a little more each year. But we also have hired Remy Creetsall so we have a new employee and the logic behind hiring Remy who is on an hourly at will basis, so he's, you know, he knows he's in a very flexible, we're kind of experimenting with it, is first of all he's been with us for five years in a bunch of different roles. He's been in AmeriCorps, he's been a camp counselor, he's worked on the crew and about half of his time so he's doing work, you know, the contractor work with South Burlington he's running our summer camp he's done the February camp he's helping out mentoring with the after-school program and he works on our crew and he also does natural resource inventory work around new park acquisition and we just couldn't bear the thought of him walking out the door after he finished with the crew last year and we did the numbers and I went to the board so we really just got to hire this guy because he's brought so much value to us I can tell you even if we hadn't hired Remy our budget would have gone up maybe slightly less than this but we've made an investment in someone who we feel can bring extra revenue and value to what we're doing just, you know, I mean, our whole organization there's three salaried employees and Remy and then Seasonal Crew and camp counselors so that's the extent of our organization okay, I've talked a lot so any questions or any questions from the board? Yes, Andy. You might have been forwarded this question and maybe you've already answered it the salaries is a big piece of the increase and that's the Remy it's the cost of living increases that everybody expects to get plus adding Remy to the okay. Great. As always, it sounds great and I'm sure everyone here is in support of all that you do but what we had happened, I believe it was just last year around budget season, there was a cut made to your line item in particular and so a resident had to get up and bag at town meeting for that amount to be restored is there something that you could say to us this year that we should be keeping in mind when it comes down to that time to cut the budget so that you don't face that again you're not the organization that potentially takes the hit? I could argue all night but I think my bias will show but we've really worked hard to keep our operation as efficient as possible and I feel very comfortable that we present the line items of our budget in total so people can pick it apart the concept of a regional parks district provides a lot of efficiency around the maintenance of these properties and if you don't maintain a conservation property it is not a conservation property it becomes something very different so we are at the core of our existence an efficient organization that can acquire and we are very active in acquisition right now so we're growing we're actually adding park acreage and I feel that there's really no fat to cut and when we first started this job the first thing you do is you pull out all your numbers and say okay how's this all work and I took a look at it and it's like there is no place to go in terms of cutting things so and I guess the other piece is we do have a system by which each town's ability to pay is at least we make a good mathematical attempt at determining the affordability to each town so have I missed anything that I should be I think that covers a lot of it it welcomes scrutiny it's kind of it's kind of fun that way in that when people call up and they ask about the organization and several times I send them a pdf the budget and they call them and they say you sent me your entire budget was that a mistake so no this is the public sector and I guess the other thing is governance and Tom Alanowski could not be here tonight and he's one of our more active, engaged trustees but there is a board of trustees that I work for, I'm an at-will employee if they don't like the work I'm doing I'm out the door so there's a very strong presence for each municipality at the table every month at the trustee meetings so thank you, is that some good material? Tom's been here many, many times we all know who he is he's crushed when he can't make it he's crushed he couldn't make it tonight yes, absolutely any other questions then I guess we will obviously take this under other advisement as far as the information you've presented thank you very, very much for coming in good luck with those future acquisitions thanks for your time next item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes I would move approval of the minutes of November 5th 2018 with select board member corrections second thank you Irene and Andy any corrections on page one page two page three Irene section that begins on page three at line 106 max summarizes like board's October 15th discussion there was an informal proposal so I'd like to change that word from proposal to discussion if I may and then on line 108 it says the proposal and I'd like to change that to that scenario once again emphasizing to the reader that it's not a formal proposal on line 113 on that page I don't know that we have an agenda items packet so if we could just say instead of in the agenda items packet as in addition to the agenda I think that's language I want more familiar with that's all for page three any other corrections on page three page four page five Irene yeah I know we were talking in the past about where do we put the misters and where do we just use folks names maybe the first time we introduce someone we use their name and then after that we call them mister except in this section where it gets a little bit weird on line 193 because we've introduced some of these people but we haven't introduced others and if we say Mr. Gentis referring to Albert who's already spoken his brother I believe Vilas also spoke soon after he did so I'd like to introduce Vilas' name but I'd also like to just take off all the misters and reintroduce all these people if we could using their full names and then on line 191 I'd also like to add the word discharge because we usually refer to as a firearms discharge ordinance and that helps when we're searching for it you said 191 that would be 191 191 thanks page 5 page 6 Elaine on line 238 there's only one C in my name so if you wouldn't mind checking throughout just to make sure it's SOPCHAK and then on line 280 to 281 excuse me that's the next page that's it for page 6 Irene on line 245 please at the end of the sentence I also mentioned that if a complaint was filed we would bring somebody back in and reexamine their permit so if we could just add after the period or before the period if a complaint were filed and also please on that same page on line 260 there's the word ready three words in and I just think that's a little awkward if we could change ready to and change prepare I think it makes for us when we go to read page 7 Elaine on lines 280 to 281 I'd like to clarify what that says Ms. SOPCHAK said that their policy is for overdue and copier fees to go to the village general fund I'd like to clarify that to say the policy used to be overdue and copier fees went to the village general fund comma but now the funds go to the Brownell library okay thank you very good anything else on page 7 page 8 page 9 all those in favor of approving the minutes of November 5th with the floor mentioned changes, please signify by saying aye opposed motion passes 4-0 thank you I believe the next item will be the consent agenda I'll move we approve the consent agenda thank you any comments or questions about the consent agenda items Irene, sorry I need some overlap on the check warrants but maybe that's something I just haven't noticed before there was a set of pages that was common to both, it was pages 5-8 of the page list and they were the same as 10-13 of 13 5-8 of the 8 and then 10-13 of the 13 I will look into it thank you Irene anything else in the consent agenda Irene, as member of the energy committee I'm very sorry to see Ambi Taikaki moving to Michigan sorry thank you I would move that we move on to the reading file but first we have to approve the consent agenda right any other comments on the consent agenda all those in favor of approving the consent agenda please signify by saying aye opposed passes 4-0 to the reading file would you like comments please after almost 12 years of not having a reading file someday I'll get used to it I'm still missing Ambi Taikaki even as she hasn't yet packed her bags for Michigan she's been a fabulous asset to the energy committee and for all you viewers out there and folks in the audience we now have an opening on the energy committee anything else in the reading file there's an email at our seats regarding from Chief Cole regarding the mutual aid training and I just was curious as to what the questions were regarding that that prompted the response sure there had been some comments I went to to the Air National Guard they had a tour for local officials and they showed us a whole bunch of the Air National Guard they're going to the F-35s coming up I think you're all familiar with that is everybody in this area is and there was a question as to our local firefighters having to go if one any of the planes or any plane in the area goes down but specifically is there any issue with any of the materials that make up the plane or any of the chemicals that are coating the plane and both well Chief Cole responded that the Air Guard is the first responder of any plane crash in the area of up to three miles away from the airfield and they are all trained they will try to save lives but in general in any aircraft goes down you have this thought you're going to go rushing in but you have to be very careful of the flammable materials and other things so they are trained with their I think it's called SCABA respiratory stuff so when they go in they have their hazmat suits they also have respirators so they are not breathing in those toxic fumes but he wanted to share that and sort of right thereafter he gets a notice that there's training so we shared that with that our fire departments both village and town go to a lot of trainings especially about airplanes because we are next to the Burlington Airport we are next to the Air National Guard and we do have a lot of overflight from other nearby airports I threw it in the reading file I'm not aware that the F-35s may be carrying nuclear weapons which would be new I don't think the F-16s are carrying those so that may be something else that needs to be trained for I'm sure they're on top of it but I just would love confirmation I'm not aware of their payload they we certainly can ask I don't know if they'll tell us what I do know from the military is many of their equipment and stuff have safety features but but I will certainly ask what their intentions are in terms of nuclear weapons and I think that's important for the public to know because the public in any of these cases may be breathing in the fumes from a burning plane or I understand that it's great for the first responders to have protection but the rest of us don't have protection so I think it would be really good if the public were alerted as these planes are coming next fall and one of the things I believe one of the things they do is in a case of this they cordon off a certain radius of that crash but that's with any aircraft that goes down but sure I'll do that a little bit lighter note I draw your attention to the meeting schedule I think there were two revisions on there instead of January the 21st the meeting will now be on the 23rd which I believe is a Wednesday for a budget work session and then instead of February the 18th which was originally listed that meeting has been changed to the 21st which again is another Wednesday that's correct and just to make it clear for anybody listening at home those dates of January 23rd and February 21st have been approved by the board back in April it was just typos in the memo so no change just corrections on information due to holidays if I'm not mistaken yes thank you on behalf of the citizens who in the past have said you shouldn't be meeting on a holiday I appreciate their feedback and I'm glad that we were able to accommodate their wishes anything else in the reading file Irene looking at this BTV airport master plan update there were some abbreviations I didn't understand so I contacted the consultant put it together and in case you were wondering what T's and R's mean on the 6th 3 nights slides they are the technical advisory committee or the regional advisory committee that recommended those specific findings I did attend that meeting and no tour but our local airport is doing ok one of the things when you look through that you will see that the number of flights don't actually go up very much but the passenger does and so one of the questions was how do you do that you do it with bigger planes and so you do it with bigger planes and basically what you are seeing is a lot more 737 type aircraft versus the Bombardier Canadian air type 13 row 3 seat across now you are starting to see more sort of 18 to 20 rows 737s and things of that nature which just means that we are more of a regional hub and we are getting more of the connecting flights a lot of our boardings are people going to New York whether it's JFK LaGuardia, Philadelphia or others we do get a couple of our own direct flights that originate here and come back and forth we do have direct flight to Chicago and they are going to be frontier airlines that will be going to Orlando and that sort of the mix that they are seeing and the FAA they try to get the airports to be more specific about their boardings because everybody says oh they are going to grow they are going to grow and that's how they do a lot of resources so they have kind of said no we want actual boardings and things of that nature not just plane capacity that comes here so that's one of the things that you see in there and as anybody who has been to Burlington airport is small it does not have a lot of land associated with it that is not then also used for another purpose already like the Air National Guard so they are trying to figure out how to maximize their space they are looking at a hotel that will be built adjacent to the property as that they feel will help with their travel and the other thing that the Air National Guard does is they are also part of the ground crew and they do a lot of the plowing and other things and they are also their fire department on site so this is interesting for that matter so they brought in South Burlington was there and Winooski was there so they are trying to do some public outreach have you mentioned possible flights to Boston we did bring that up and they continually try to find someone who would be an air carrier to do that that would be wonderful so in going to the bigger planes and reading through that report I didn't see anything about runway length being an issue so runway length is an issue the 737 there is one larger aircraft which is used for freight it's about the max that they can handle is that unless that depends on weight the ends of their runway are generally restricted in bad weather because a lot of their stuff is they have lights at the end of runways but the technical term something like a couple hundred feet of their runway is not technically supposed to be used unless it is in bad bad weather so they have certain restrictions and only FedEx uses a larger aircraft than 737 and the and the air guard but they have been putting a lot of concrete down they that is the air national guard has done some taxi way work the airport was doing a lot of the gate near the gates they are doing concrete work because once you get into a heavier aircraft the concrete underneath the jetway needs to be of a certain strength they are refurbishing their garage and it is a nice little airport and for those watching it it is about 12 to 15 minutes almost in any traffic but it is pretty convenient to us and when we were talking to some local businesses not only would they like a Boston connection but they would also like a Montreal connection questions on the reading file and if session I believe is necessary thank you Irene and Elaine all those in favor I opposed we are adjourned motion passes 4-0