 for Monday, I cover 25th, 2021 to order. Okay, thank you, Andrew. Any agenda additions or changes for staff? Any from board members? Let's see. This is shaking. Roger's hand up. Yeah, I was wondering if we could pull out the campus letter. Currently 70 to, I don't know if we'd want to make it 5D or put it earlier in that list. Just have a look at the questions. Andrew, you were the one that insisted we not talk about it tonight. Oh, by the way. We're saying that we can't talk about it. It was more so how to dedicate the entire from time to the correct. I can follow up the details. Yeah, it's awkward. It's really awkward here. I also wanted to make some comments on it, but I'm going to move out of the one on the agenda originally got moved out. We can ask questions. Yeah. So, since it's not wasn't warned as a business item and so the public may not be able to I think the intent is to not open it up to the public discussion yet because we still need more information ourselves, I guess. I also wanted to make a couple of comments there. All right, so no changes that move on to public to be heard. Public to be heard is a time for matters of the public to bring issues to the to both boards or either board. With regard to issues that are not on the agenda, you'd like to speak during public to be heard. If you're in the room, you can raise your hand here online. You can use the red hand function in the application here on the phone will allow an opportunity for discussion. If you'd like to speak during public to be heard, please be brief, please be civil, please refrain from using inappropriate language. I would like to address your remarks to myself as chair of the select order to Andrew Brown as president of the president. Please do not attack other members of the public or members of the staff. If you are attending online, please keep yourself muted and also keep your camera off if you've not been recognized as having the floor to avoid distraction from those. So I do see a couple of hands up online. I don't see any hands in the room, so I will go to the online Betsy Dunn. I'm very concerned about how many executive sessions that you have gone into. Plus, you have made decisions in the executive sessions, obviously, by letters that we have seen on the line and in the forum, that don't come back to the meeting to be voted upon. They're not supposed to be voted on during the executive session. They're supposed to be voted on so the public can hear your votes. And that's not what's occurring and that's troublesome. And so I would like you to refrain from going to executive session tonight at all. That's what I would like. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comments, Betsy. Marcus, go ahead and unmute yourself. Marcus, are you there? Not hearing any response from Marcus, so I will circle back to that. There is a hand up in the room here. Irene, you want to come forward to the microphone, please? Thank you. Irene Renner, this may tie into what Betsy was talking about. There was an announcement this Saturday on some private social media about the future of village management. It appeared to come from the select board chair and the village president. But I was surprised that it would end up being put forth in that way and not first announced at a meeting. So I have concerns about how that came about and I'd really request that going forward that things get announced at a meeting where everyone can hear them. Because anyone can tune in and log into these meetings or show up at the door. But not everyone has social media access to those from Fortune Forum and Facebook accounts through which I was able to access that information. Thank you. Thank you, Irene. Marcus, are you able to unmute yourself? I think I'm working this time. There we are. We can hear you. Thank you. I just wanted to alert you to the fact that in attempting to watch through town meeting TV, it's inaudible. The audio is very screwed up, so right now anyone who attempts to watch it through town meeting TV can't understand what is being said. I know that audio apparently has been an issue in the last couple of weeks, so I'm hoping that this week the microphones will be working a little bit better. But right now we can't hear anything that's audible on town meeting TV. Okay, thank you, Marcus. We are aware, the technical folks are aware of that and they are working to resolve it as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, we need to continue on. So, okay, I don't see any other new hands up. Greg. Just to be hard to hear this if you're watching on town meeting television, but if anyone can somehow relate to the people watching, trying to watch on town meeting TV, there is a call in option 802-377-3784. And the conference ID is 252-680-769-ashtag. You can also go to the town or the village website and go to the select board page or trustee page and find an agenda to this meeting where you can join via Microsoft Teams. All right, thank you, Greg. Okay, let's see. I'm going to scroll down and see if there's anybody on the telephone. I don't see anybody on the telephone that be wishing to speak during public be heard. So, and the hands that I see up have already spoken. So let's move on to the first item of business, which is the interview and potential appointment of Tatenisha Radita for housing commission. Last week at the meeting I had recused myself from the interviews because an individual who's a close friend of mine was on the interview list. I've since learned that they have recused themselves, they have removed themselves from consideration for the position. And so, although I recused myself last week, I didn't participate in the interviews. I no longer have that potential appearance of a conflict of interest. So my intent for this meeting is to participate and moderate the interview. But with the select board's permission, later I will not vote on the appointment. Select Board policy says that that abstention from any vote can only be the only excuse for abstaining from a vote is conflict of interest. But I think in this situation, because I didn't participate in two of the three interviews, I think would be inappropriate. And I have not had the opportunity to watch the videotape. And I don't want to delay the decision. So if the select board is okay with my abstaining from the vote later, I will go ahead and moderate the discussion. And then abstain later when we vote. I sealed nodding heads. You okay with that pat thumbs up. Okay. All right. So, so the, this is an interview for Todd Tanisha, Todd Tanisha, I see you are online. Please go ahead and introduce yourself. Give us information about why you'd like to be chosen to participate in the housing commission. And then we'll open up to the board for questions. Go ahead. Hi, my name is Justin. I am interested in being a part of the housing commission. Because I'm, people don't know, but when I got here, I was homeless. So I feel like I can give some perspective on different things and opinions. And I have a little knowledge on people that are looking for homes and things that I mentioned. So board members, any questions for Todd Tanisha. I see Patrick, go ahead. Thank you, Andy. You guys hear me okay. Yes, we can. Can you talk a little bit about the work that you've been doing in Essex in the community since coming here? I know you have some background in some other stuff. So I'd just like to hear about your community involvement. Yeah. I'm a volunteer coordinator for a year, but I worked before that I volunteered at Lucas Foundation and I also was a member volunteer for the Red Cross for two years. So I'm very happy about different things in the community. I wanted to learn different things. And I ended up being there longer than I was supposed to. And then I got hired in as a volunteer coordinator. So with the EDC also, I am familiar with talking to people, getting to know the people in the area. And I went out to speak with a couple of people and for their interest and what they would want to see in their neighborhood and their. Awesome. Great. Thank you so much. Hey, Andrew. Hi, Todd. Thank you for for being here today. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit as to what it is you would hope you could accomplish and or the housing commission could accomplish if you were to be a part of the commission. Well, I, I was told that we all have a they asked you are for opinions and what not or what you are need and the area and what is the need basically for people that are coming here moving here or just in the area period. And I have friends that have been here. I've been talking about different things about affordable housing. Also about what is being built here as well. And there's not there are not a lot of three bedrooms or four bedrooms in the neighborhood. And I have friends that want to move here, and they have three to four children. They may have more and I just feel like I can put a opinion on that and get them to see that I would be their voice basically. Thank you. I appreciate that. Any other questions. Tracy, go ahead. I asked this one last week. I don't know they're all blending together. Tatenisha, what do you see is the top three priorities for the housing commission in the next 12 months. Repeat that for me please I'm sorry. That's okay. What do you see is the top three priorities for the housing commission in the next 12 months. Well, I know they're talking about building some things so I will be interested in that. Also, I don't know. I know I've spoke with Emily. I wanted to do some work with people that are displaced. And just and also with learning what what goes on there because I don't know the full extent of what it what you all do. But that's just what I've seen so far. Great. Thank you. Hi, Tatenisha. Thank you for joining us tonight. I'm curious if you had the opportunity to watch the presentation from last week about the inclusionary, am I saying that right? Inclusionary zoning or if you have any awareness or familiarity with that and any opinion on inclusionary zoning? I have not. I am. I apologize. I am at school right now. I just left out of class to do this. So I have been swamped. I have not gotten a chance to look at that. But I know is that where the voting is coming as well. Thank you. Okay, any other questions? Okay, Tatenisha, we will, we will have an executive session later. You are one of three candidates that we've interviewed for the one seat that is that is open. And if we come to consensus or if a consensus is obtained during the executive session will come out of executive session and vote to appoint someone. So someone will, unless I guess unless the boards want to do it in open session here. No, I guess we're going to do it in the executive session. Yes. That's the more typical way. Okay, so someone will contact you tomorrow if we come to a decision to let you know. Thank you so much. Okay, moving on to business item 5b discussion and potential potential action on tentative agreements about shared services between town of Essex and independent city of Essex Junction. There were a, a number of agreements that were included in the packet. 8 of them. So, as we have done before, I guess we typically will go and page through them. Look at all the, each of the changes and discuss them. Is that the intent again today? We have some time. Let's see how far we can get. What we could also do is we could always just prioritize them. If there are ones that we want to get to sooner than then later. So is there a preference should we just plow through them in the order they're in the thing or should we prioritize? I don't have a preference. Does the trustees have a preference? What if we, what if we start off with the MOU and we then go through the order that they're listed in the, the MOU so police reappraise over in a first refusal store and water. So on and so forth. Okay, that makes it complicated because then I have to differently stop in front of me. We can do it that way. Yeah. All right. So, I don't know, Greg, if you can bring up the agreement, starting with the MOU. I thought we had already reviewed this. It's not clear to me what changes are new since the last time we looked at it, we did change the conceptual tentative. Oh, right. Here we are right on page two. There was another sec. There was a new paragraph added. Because the list of agreements is getting pretty large. I know there wasn't, there was a push to try to get agreements closed before that the villages vote. And given the large number of issues or items that the select board was like wanting to see closed before separation actually occurs. A second tier of agreements was established here so that, that, you know, that we think can close later that maybe are. Not as impactful to budgeting as some of the others. And so rather than listing, you know, a long, very long list of things that need to close before this agreement closes the select board proposed that we have a second tier of discussion items that can close. There's some time between now and separation actually occurs. Any trustee response to that. Or if I missed anything select remembers. Andrews and unfortunately, because I'm looking at the document, I can no longer see the meeting so Andrew go ahead. Yeah, and I should. I should also apologize as my tablet had had fallen and I lost the meeting for a moment in time. I think I gather as I as you were introducing we're talking about that portion of a second tier. So, Mike. Is it the intent of the select board that if we don't reach an agreement on let's just say the tree farm building use and maintenance that then everything else in this and will you all of the other agreements then are are not valid. I don't know how would we because my understanding is that's the way it's currently worded is if we don't reach an agreement on any one of those other things than everything else we will have done is essentially pointless. So we don't we don't want to end up in a situation without being able to resolve these. So yeah, I think that's the intent. Yes. If you just cheat if we cheat if they're if there's a, a, you know, a choice could be made to just not address these issues and then they just don't get addressed and then somebody's left holding the bag. And a lot of these we see as important things that we need to need to get addressed because personally I don't disagree that they they need to be addressed. I just have a minus or reaction was one of it seems odd to have some of these items listed as the same importance as police services. As that seems like it is absolutely something that is paramount to everything else that we have here. So maybe that's just just me and what I'm thinking. Trustees, I would be curious if you all had a similar reaction or if you all felt as if it's perfectly fine. Can I speak? Yeah, go ahead. Okay, I can't put my hand up electronically. You can raise it physically. Yeah. So I think the I think you're right, Andrew. I think the issue is, you know, in terms of the discussion we've had so far, I look at each one of these things. Senior center tree farm building and I've heard gotten your I've listened to your concerns and I think you've heard our concerns. I have confidence that within the framework of everything that's been discussed that we can reach agreement. The concern would be that just as an example. Before separation occurs, someone on either party says, well, actually, I've decided that tree farm building, we want something completely new and unique. That would be unacceptable to one side or the other that we haven't foreseen and then so everything else unravels. So I mean, I think I understand what you're trying to say. Maybe if we looked at this and reworded this a little bit and said, we agree to negotiate in good faith or something like that. We agree to negotiate and reach agreement in good faith so that I mean, is there some legal term that some new element, some new factor, some unknown things sort of comes out of left field that none of us are anticipating that we can't negotiate. And so the entire rest of all these things unravel. Is there some way that we can soften the language of this a little bit or do you understand where I'm going here? You understand what I'm saying? Yeah, I do. Because again, I think we've been very successful as two boards talking about these things. And I think we've really, I think we're very close, but who knows it down the road, there's some, we uncover some mine and it blows everything up and I would like to see if we can't put something in there that makes sure we don't uncover any minds. I hear you saying, I just, why does that only apply to these conditional items that we listed and not to everything else? Everything else could have the same exact scenarios where there's something that we're not aware of that gets uncovered that kind of blows everything up. Right, but I guess my point too is that is that everything else, like we have a pretty extensive elaborate police agreement. We have a pretty extensive agreement on, you know, for stormwater, we have a pretty extensive agreement on finance, but we really haven't even got anything in writing yet about some of these things. So I don't know what you have in mind. I think I know what you have in mind. We've talked about them a little bit, so that's what that's my concern. There's an administration transition. You know, we haven't, we kind of talked about that in terms of finance, but is there something else you guys are thinking of that we are not aware of that you're going to, that you could bring out and you assume that we knew this and we didn't and it blows everything up. I mean, I think we would work very hard to reach agreement. I think we all want agreement on this, but I'm just concerned that we could find something that just snags us and we can't, we can't resolve it. So I'm wondering if there's some lawyerly way of phrasing this so that that doesn't happen or other, we find, you know, binding arbitration to work out the tree farm building in maintenance or something like that. Yeah, we can go back to our legal counsel and ask. I mean, maybe I'm maybe I'm being maybe I'm like, you know, other other people, let me know, maybe I'm being a little part of what we were attempting to do here is to separate. I mean, we were feeling a lot of pressure to get agreements in before your vote. Right. And with this, the list that as it was before this edit, it was much long. There was a very long list. Right. No way we're going to get all of those we might even get these, these, you know, seven or eight that are already there. Right. I don't think we're going to close them tonight. I don't think we'll close it tonight. But I mean, let me give you. We were trying to take a handful of them that seem like smaller things and just push them out into the future. Yeah. Okay. It's yeah. And I get your I get your point that right we could. I mean, let me give you an example like we really want to have the senior center at Lincoln Hall open back up. That's our vision that that's where the senior center needs to go. That's where we want to have the senior center because it's accessible in a number of different ways. You don't need to have a car to get there. You might have you kind of raise the issue. You might want to open up a separate senior center in the town. So what looks like right now could be a relatively benign issue could turn into something that we can't find agreement on. You see what I'm saying? Yep. Yep. I see another hand going up. I was just going to point out the same thing that it's sort of like at the time of MOU and then further down the road as we have time to look at these additional ones. So we're not. Holding up items like was pointed out the police services agreement, which. You know, is a higher priority. Amber has your hand. Sorry, go ahead, Amber. Roger actually had his hand up before me. Go ahead. Well, I was, I was just going to piggyback off of George's comments and Sue's question and say, I guess to get the same thing that basically George was saying, which is the differences. We've had extensive conversations about all of these items and I know we briefly touched upon Indian Brook and the items listed in the as a condition precedent section. But we, and you guys can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that those were started by us. We had a very brief discussion and some of those fall back to the select board to come back to us with proposals for what the what you guys were looking for. So I'm okay with George's comment regarding words such as good faith negotiations, but I agree with Andrew that as a condition precedent doesn't sit well with me. All right, thanks, Amber. Go ahead, Raj. Thanks. I'll just try to be brief and say that I'm agree with with George and what's been said so far, and that, you know, we've come a long way on these other things. We're going to do some more work tonight. And I think if we can, if we can do these in two parts, I think it's going to benefit all of us. If we get this, like, for lack of a better term, the second tier done. It's I don't think it getting it done doesn't just benefit one party. So I think there will be strong motivation to to return and answer these questions. I agree with the priority level that they've been set at. It's just just the only reason they're there still is just it's the process. It's, it's how we have to get together to do it. So I appreciate the amount of work that's gone into everything so far. I think if we can, if we can separate this out into, you know, something like what George was describing, Amber. I think that that would help us move along. And I think we can do it. I think we'll, we'll all want to need to come back to the table to finish it. Can I just throw one, one other question out? I, yes, thanks, Andy. Amber, I don't want to take advantage of the fact of your, your background, but it does, it does the frayed, what does frayed faith negotiation or negotiating good faith. Does that actually mean anything or is that just a happy, a little happy phrase that doesn't really. Well, you know what, we have three lawyers on this call. So you know, I'm going to be happy to deflect that to one of our two. Okay. Okay. I didn't realize you were on the call. Sorry. Because I was just thinking if we put that in there, that might achieve what we want because as Raj said, we are as motivated to solve these things as you are. It's in our interest too. So I think we are aiming at the same goal, but it seems a little, a little too binding to say that all of this has to be worked out or everything on rambles, you know. I think Andrew's hand was up first. Go ahead, Andrew. I'm okay if Claudine wanted to weigh in on that question from George. Hi, Claudine. Sure. So good evening, everyone. Hi, George. Hi, everyone, trustees. So I think, you know, my opinion on that is it's a it's a little bit of a mixed bag of both George, I guess this is my opinion, you know, I think that certainly if someone is not engaging in good faith negotiation if someone is refusing to attend mediation, if you if you've committed to mediating it's one context where that phrase is often used. If you've put forth several propositions and there's been no response. If the requests on the other side are so completely unreasonable that, you know, no reasonable person would think that it's something that you could foresee doing, I think all of those would be unreasonable, you know, not not negotiating, not negotiating in good faith. So I think in that context, the phrase has meaning and I think you could use it to to enforce that the other side engage in those negotiations at the same time it leaves open what it really means to, you know, negotiating good faith. If you're just simply not coming to an agreement, because you have a different position, then I think the phrase hasn't really done you a whole lot of good. So I, you know, I think, does it add value. Yes, on some level it adds value for sure. Is it going to ensure that there's an agreement that's reached. Absolutely not. But I do think that, you know, I very much in this what's been raised tonight has been my recommendation to the board I reached out to Andrew prior to the meeting and said I am very concerned about this language as a condition precedent. There's been a lot of discussion that's gone on a lot of hours spent by both sides by not only by the trustees, but but also by the select for a lot of public input, a lot of time, noodling over language and terminology and these agreements drafting and going back and forth between council all that time translates into into money spent. And so, you know, it's that language that's been added effectively invalidates all of the hard work that both boards have been done so I have some great heartburn over that language it makes me extremely nervous. But I do think that it's effectively the language that you proposed is almost to the T what I sketched out in my highlights and my notes going into tonight's meeting so I think something like that would be frankly more appropriate. Thank you. Thank you, Claudine. I appreciate that. So what I was going to is, while some people were talking I was starting to to divide up our list of agreements into those two different tiers. I don't know if we want to go down that path right now. Although I think that may also then help with how we prioritize the rest of our time tonight and moving forward, if we can agree on these first tier, like let's dedicate the time necessary now to get those done. And then that second tier of as we have time let's get through them but if we don't complete it before the legislature has a vote and that's fine we'll just continue to work on these as time allows. So I guess I would ask our boards do we we want to go down that path right now. I'd like to hear from Bill Ellis before we make a decision. Yeah, Bill's got his hand up to. Thanks. I just want everyone to remember the first night we started talking about these agreements. And I thought I made it clear the select boards view, which is that we can reach agreement or tentative agreements instead of conceptual agreements, but there needed to be an entire package before you had the support of the select board. So that's the genesis of that language. And I just wanted to remind you. Thanks, Bill. Tracy you had your hand up or question was answered. Okay. So Andrew your proposal is that we, we look at the list of potential agreements and priority and prioritize them now and then to inform how we move forward. Are we moving off of the MOU because I know we're still we're still talking about where we're still, we're still the issue right the issue about the M. Well, because we're on that list because that list right we may may determine whether things some things may. Some may see things more important than others. So the list may maybe adjusted. So Andrew, is there a proposal for what could move one way or the other. Sure, I'm happy to to go through just what I jotted down as people as we were talking. So the first in what I think of as a first tier. I think of the police agreement tax delinquencies reappraisal and appraisal shared financial services and it. Everything else to me would go in that second tier. So from the list as it's written today, you'd say writer first refusal and storm water. Correct. I think writer first refusal might already might be pretty good then. And yeah. All right, so that's your, that's your suggestion. So I'm fine with not looking at those two agreements tonight. Anybody else have an opinion. Select word wise or trust you wise. I gotta go back to look at the meeting so I can see hands. That seems reasonable. And just to make sure I'm explicit when I'm saying that I'm saying that that first tier are the level of agreements that we we really need to reach as soon as we can. And the rest of them are as time allows, or as we are able to come to agreement. And if we don't come to an agreement on those things and that's fine. We just move on. Let's see what you're saying. We eventually need to come to agreement on these things, but. Right, we basically we either agreed to work together or we agree not to work together or we disagree to agree to work not together. However, that then logically works. You want to whiteboard that. I thought it was just a discussion for tonight that we were going to prioritize. One of the ones that Andrew listed and the C and D, we would say we don't since we have limited time, we're going to try to get through the others tonight and those will look at the next time. Well, I think the clock and see where we are in a situation. Fair enough. And again, just to piggyback on what Sue said, my, my thought was twofold so it's yes on the first part that yes, it's prioritized for tonight. And I think one of the things that's really important to that is those second tier items get removed from that, that first tier list and become their own. I don't know if the right phrasing is that collaboratively work together that George had mentioned. So Andrew is suggesting that writer first refused on the storm water get moved to the second tier. I'd like to know bills. Perspective on that. Well, I think before we, we, the approach that I would suggest is that we do the discussion as proposed and then we can have our own select board meeting to discuss with our legal counsel how we want and whether we want to move things around. Unless, unless folks are comfortable doing it here. This almost doesn't matter, but I took over the ones we've already worked on. Yeah. The other ones in the future. That way we all right so Andrew will take under consideration your request to move those two items into the second tier and will proceed with having discussions about the documents. Sue, you raised a question saying that you're serious. You said that you had a question about the an additional about the MOU. Yeah, just a, I guess more of a logistics in the in the document. So under item number two and under item number five, contain termination terms. Yep. And I didn't know if it would be more clear if there was a termination terms versus them being hidden in other items. I guess we can ask, we can ask Bill about that. And so I don't recall Andrew whether we spoke about this, the terms of termination the select board added in a very discrete end date for this MOU. The end of the 2021 2022 legislative session, which is the current biennium. So it ends when this year's legislative session comes to an end. I did see that and if I remember correctly, we did talk about that at one of our previous meetings. I think I may have even proposed it. I will say that I do get nervous about it. As that seems awfully short. I have much more than that. I would say trustees if, if anybody, as far as I'm concerned, I think 2021 2022 is okay. Trustees be a strong reaction for a longer, please say so. I would prefer another biennium one and a half instead of a half because we're approaching this in that, you know, for only half a biennium. So if I had my druthers, yes, but we have to get back to I think Andy's question. We did discuss this for at least one meeting, maybe two, it's gone the round. As far as I understand it, but I would, you know, if you're asking, I would love to have a whole nother biennium to or at least at least the first half of the next biennium as well. So a full two years to give the legislature a chance, especially during a pandemic to approach this. So I think our concern is that conditions on the ground may change between now and you know, a year from now. As far as our, our view of how our positions and taxes and whatever might shift, right? I mean, be bound for a very long time. I mean, because if you put it in for another biennium, that's, that's two and a half years. I just want to have this. Could I go ahead? Yeah, this speaks to your concern about not binding the hands of future boards. Is that it? Yeah, because you agree to something here. By July, June, there could be a kind of a different tone and texture on the select board that has a different ideas. On the other hand, and that, and that makes sense. I can see that. And on the other hand, there's nothing saying we can't say we're just going to keep this at the end of that. You can say, you know, well, we don't want to renegotiate this thing. It's going to be good, but they're having made a decision yet. So it's not necessarily saying it is going to cancel, but it could be. But the boards would have the option of continuing everything at that point. I think it's, I appreciate what you're saying, Andrew. It's a little risky. We wish we had more time. But on the other hand, I think this is one of those. In my mind, this is one of those things where we have to understand the select board's reasoning too. All right. So anything else in the MOU? Let's see. I guess you can frame your question to Bill. You can get it offline. And okay, and then we'll consider the question of moving the right of first refusal on stormwater into the secondary list. Okay. Having said that then, where do we want to go? Amber has her hand up. Amber has her hand up. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Amber. Sorry, Andy, I had two very minor changes to section five, the one we were just talking about, adding the language unless, unless terminated earlier is set forth. If we're going to leave that language, throwing that out for the attorneys, but because it would terminate upon the execution of the agreement or at the end of the legislative season. So kind of minor, I don't think it's really a huge deal. And then to be consistent with all of the other agreements in section six, notice to the party delivered to hand delivered to the other party at a meeting of the select board or city council. All right, so Amber, you're asking for language to be added in there. Okay. Yep. And yeah, you're right. You're pointing out the fact that there's two different, right? There's two different termination terms. One is that if the agreement, if we, if we close all of the agreements, then the MOU is no longer needed. I think that's what that, that section five implies, because this is, this is an agreement to, to generate agreements. And so I guess the question is, is if we get to the point where all of the agreements in both the first tier and the second tier are satisfied, then we no longer need this agreement. The union no longer need the MOU, because we already have the agreements. Right. I think that that's correct. I think the only change was the addition of adding the termination effective at the end of the session, which then added so basically two provisions for termination. Correct. One, the other. Correct. That's right. Right. And that's where I was headed with putting them in one place. So you can see the Oh yeah, that is kind of odd, right? Because if you don't ever, if you don't close the agreements by the end of the legislative session. And this is, this is a, there may be some conflicts in how this is worded. Good point. All right. Thank you, Sue. Thank you, Amber. I think that you're asking the same similar question. Yeah, coming out of different way. Yep. All right. And then, okay. All right, anything else on the MOU and I will go back to the meeting so that I don't miss any hands. Raj, is your hand up? Yeah, I just want to ask a clarifying question. For next steps. Sounds like the select board's going to consider Andrew's proposal to move right a first refusal in stormwatered tier two. I was wondering if we're also, we discussed this, is that also the intention to discuss whether tier two will not be a condition, condition precedent to hold up the MOU and the previous agreements. The list, for instance, if you are approving of the list of police tax delinquency reappraisal finance and it. If tier one does not hold up to your one tier two does not hold up to your one. So it's sort of a two part consideration as far as I took from this last conversation that moving those two and then removing the condition to reflect more of a good faith understanding that none of us want to blow up the work we've done so far. So, logistically, we, we will likely both end up standing before the legislature and saying this is what how we're going to run the two communities. And so I think we can't not answer the questions. I don't, you know, you know, unless we unless we believe that the legislature is going to offer us a solution, which appearing that legislature is not going to answer our question, you know, decide how we're going to run it. They're going to just say go away and figure it out. And so we're all we're all absolutely motivated to close these things. And I think we need to close them all. And that's that that's the that's the intent that bill was getting at when we said okay yeah we'll have tentative agreements but by gosh by golly they all need to be closed. When we get when we're standing before the legislature or they're going to tell us to go away and come back. If we choose to. I understand that I think some of these have some implications for budgeting that we have coming up in a very, very short amount of time. And we need to move on and we need to kind of confirm for our entire community that we've. We've come to agreement as two boards. We feel it's solid in terms of a tentative agreement. The other ones will get worked on over the next weeks and. A few months, you know, not too far. I don't imagine this stuff needs to go. Very far, but we do need to probably take a break for budgeting. And it would just be a shame if we couldn't proceed as George described and, you know, good faith and. As you just described, you know, we need to get these things done. We need these questions answered. For different reasons, perhaps, but we do. And it would so I just want to clarify is that what the next step is that both considerations or is it just simply moving the two to tier two. So we'll have further discussion with our legal counsel about. The position we've stated. And I see bills hands up and is up. Is that a residual ability? Did you want to comment? I didn't think it was up. Okay. Okay. All right. Andrew, go ahead. Thanks. Just to your point about going to the legislature and concerns about how our community is run. I wholeheartedly agree with you. And especially when it comes to things like tax delinquencies. That's absolutely something we should have figured out before going to the legislature, but in terms of whether city residents would have access to Indian Brook. The legislature is frankly not going to care. So I think we can certainly say some of these things, the legislature is not going to care about it doesn't really have a policy decision to it. I could possibly see the committee's commissions being something that the legislature may care about as that could have impacts on our communities from a legislative standpoint right at a policy level. But the rest of them, I really don't see it like the right of first refusal. The legislature's not going to care. Unless one of the other party says no, we're not in agreement and this is our issue. Yeah. So, right. And if what we come to is that we just don't agree on it, then that is what it is. And we just move on to the bigger issue. Right. Right. And right. Some of these issues could be closed to say, okay, we're going to take it off the table. We'll address it later. That's that's an acceptable answer to that. Right. If we both agree that it's something that doesn't necessarily have to close. If we get to that point, I'm not saying that. I'm not suggesting that you say put your foot down that you're not going to address any of these things and then that we're going to cave to that. Because some of them we could hold up and say, you know, hey, you want this, we want this, you can have this, we could, you know, some of these are trading cards, right? I get the analogy. Yeah. Right. It's not up anymore. All right, so yes, Raj, we will have some discussion about that. But again, it's, we were, we put a pretty firm point on that earlier. I'm not sure we want to back away from that. And we, but again, if you look at the, if you look at the items right. If, if, you know, in Indian, Indian Brook access and or support for the, the repair of the dam or whatever, whatever the discussion goes to there. It could set we could get end of agreeing know the town's just going to pick it's, it's off the table. That could be part of that could be agreement could be we take it off the table. The other the other concern I have is what happens if we come up with something that's not already listed in the MOU, right. That's the warning. We uncover something while we're moving along and say, oh gee, we missed this. You want to talk about agreements or around about this summer. I think we're good to go to police. Okay. Agreement, please agreement. So, I had thought that I'm trying to. The challenge here is I can't tell which of these edits we've already discussed. I think the most recent changes involve. When we, we've got the per capita numbers now. And then we also added in the 3.5% direct cost. And there might be some discussion about what mutually agreed upon costs means. I see Bill's hand is up. Yeah, I just wanted to point out when I was working on these documents. Sometimes it showed as cross out and sometimes it just wrote over so I want to point out in that section above. Previously we had a review at three years. I heard some concerns about that being a little too long and that we may want to check on whether per capita or some other metric or some combination of metrics is more appropriate. So I put it in as two years. I just wanted to flag that for you. I don't know if that's too soon or not, but that was an issue that was raised by some select board members. Yeah, I remember Bill we did. I thought the discussion we had was for three years this that yeah, and I did notice that this is second anniversary. Anybody concerned with doing it after two years rather than three that was what I think in the in the document the last time we looked at this. No, not a concern with two versus three, but there is a reference. The last line in the paragraph under item number three before it gets to the red text that says the per capita basis shall be reassessed every 10 years. When the new census data. Yeah, yeah, that's that's the that's a no the the what's being. The background for suit what's being looked at after the the second or the third anniversary is the cost model that we're using with regard to are there other factors that should be considered like number of calls. Miles traveled miles or miles coverage or whatever is there some other cost metric that we should be including. I don't believe the intent at that two or three years is to. I don't know maybe it could be brought up with just based on an interim census assessment, I don't know. We haven't talked about the specific details we're not we're not I don't think our intent is to constrain future select boards or other boards who, you know, but it will be the 10 year one is based on the census. That's when the census is definitely changes that. So anybody have any concerns about 2nd year versus 3, 2 years versus 3 years. I know we had 3 in there. I'm not sure who asked for it to go to 2. No concern for me. I'm good. 2 years to me seems awful. Awful quick. It does. I think we barely get our feet underneath this by then. So I'm okay with going back back to three, which is what I think it was last time we reviewed it. Anybody object. Well, this way this reads as it's the first review isn't on the 2nd anniversary. But then the cycle after that is every 3 years. Yes, and then every 10 years there's a since there's a new census. So there's a. So the only one that's 2 years is the first one. Right. Concern some staff. I just think the intent was just in case something got missed. 2 years was okay. If at the 2 years you guys throw up your hands and say, I'm good and they say you're good. You move on. Just in case. It's a very complicated thing. That's what I remember. And just with. Number 13 amendment, I really don't think it matters because we can agree to look at this anytime and review it and amend it. So. I think whether it's 2 or 3 and the at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter. Just pick one. Well, yeah, this, this force is a review. And it forces as much as the document can enforce any. Pay attention to it. Okay. So it sounds like the request might have come from staff. The suggestion, I should say might have come from staff to do it in 2 years. Where do we want to go? If there's nothing like Evan said, it'll be a quick meeting. Yeah, 2 years is fine. It could be as simple as a check in everybody good anybody having the issues chief. Select board. Village president, any board members, if not. We'll move on. We'll see you next year. Do you want to, do you want to do the, like the first one in 2 years and the second one. 2 years after that. Before you go to the 3 year. Like, does that then. No, okay. No, I think that I think the, the intent is you just do the one. The suggestion is to do it do the one in 2 years and then every 3 years after. You can do that. You can always do it early. I guess if you have an issue. Everybody's looking at me. I would also think the intent is to do it well in advance of the budget. So that if there are going to be any changes for whatever reason. It gets in the budget. I'm not hearing anyone have any strong reactions whatsoever. So I think that it's. Whatever works for staff work for us. I think that's 2 then 3 years. It's 2 years first and 3 years on and after sounds like it looks. All right. Roger's holding up 3 fingers before. I'm just one person. Yeah. There's a boy scout. All right. All right. We'll leave it at 2 then. All right. We'll do that. I don't care. It's not that critical. Okay. Thank you. What else we got in here. I have another. I was going through an order. Is it an art? Is it? No, it's under item 11. So I'll wait. Okay. I have something under number 2. Go ahead. Tracy. The very last sentence. Is it defined anywhere? What constitutes a material event? I think that's left the board interpretation. So now. We want to ask if it needs to be clarified. I don't know if it needs to be clarified. I don't know if it needs to be clarified. I don't know if it needs to be clarified. In one of the other documents, there was a very clear. Definition for that material event. Right. We can ask that question. In costs and payment. There's a phrase in there that says. We paid on a quarterly basis around such other schedule as mutually agreed upon by the parties. They kind of leaves it open. It defines it explicitly and then leaves it open. Okay. So the question was. Any given finance organization may decide that billing works better in a different way. Yeah. And ask for it to be changed. Rather than have it be fixed by agreement. Any concerns from the trustees on that? I think it makes sense. I think it makes sense too. All right. Okay. Moving on down further. There's the three and a half percent direct cost adder. Any concerns with that? Nope. Okay. And then the, the next section talks about the true up at the end of a fiscal year. You're asking the trustees were asking for it in the. First quarter of a. New fiscal year for the prior year. The. Select board expressed concern that the. Internal audit may not be, it's not likely going to be complete by the end of the first quarter. But. The paragraph after it says that when that audit is complete, if another, if a discrepancy is found in it, then the group would be adjusted. In the second quarter of the fiscal year. So I guess the question is for the. Select board, are we okay with. Committing our finance department to having. An assessment of. The over or under. Expenditure for a given fiscal year within the first quarter after that year ends, or do we want to push back and. Allow. For the future finance organizations to. Have a little more leeway to finish the audit. Go ahead, Tracy. Given the amount of work that finance will, well already does and likely will have on their plate. I would like to suggest adding some language. Such as as soon as practicable. Just so that if their workload is. You know, I think it needs to be. Probably more explicit than that. I think it needs, you know, we need to be at least by second quarter. But, you know, again, it's the question of, you know. By signing by having the agreement, the way the trustees asked us to word it. It would, it would. Commit forever, forever more in the future that they would right need to have that done in the first quarter. Need, need to know what the assessment was. And I know, and I know, you know, our current. Finance department staff was asked that question and said it could be done. You know, it could be done, but. Doesn't mean it can always be done. Forever into the future. I had a little concern about making it that first quarter. I was proposing we make it the second quarter. Any kind of in there for a moment. Yeah, go ahead. So I don't trust these correctly if I'm wrong. I don't remember being too direct or being too specific on this one. I think we've generally taken the position of as long as there's an annual reconciliation. When that happens, this is fine. If it works for staff, it's great. That's what we want. We don't want to require them to do it in a quarter. That's, you know, the busiest quarter of the year. It's. That's generally been the position we've taken. So again, unless trustees, I'm wrong, or if I'm misremembering something, we're not advocating strongly in any way for that first quarter statement. Just that it happened. I guess I misunderstood something was said previously. Andrew, I'll jump in and say I agree. But the other point I was going to make too was. That brings us to September. And September, which I would assume that they would have a very good idea of where the previous year finished off as they as they begin budget season for the for the next year. So, but there's two sides to that argument. If they don't have time because they're trying to prep for the next budget season, it's bottom line is it's not that huge a deal. But I also would assume that they would have a solid to handle on the books by end September as they prepare for the November, October, November. Basically, what is the beginning of November budget season? So, Raj, historically audit completes in November. Okay. And second. George, did you have more to add? Yeah, I agree with Andrew. It's I think the might my ideas as long as there is a true up as long as it does happen. And I'll only add that my experience with and this is an analogy with water bills. I have watched them over the years get get reconciled from a schedule and from twice a year to three times a year. Four times a year back to twice a year three times a year because it just kind of varies. Other things happen. So you want to have some flexibility in there. What sounds good to us right now. If we try to nail it down. I guarantee you the finance department a year or two from now is going to want to do something different. So I would just had a. Okay. It's not a big issue for us. Okay. As long as it happens. Right. That's what I think you're saying. So do we just strike the language about when it gets done? I think we make it by second quarter. Yeah. And then it can happen in the first quarter if it's available if it's able to be able to happen then. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that. Next. Question I guess is around. Again it's hard to remember which of these we've already talked about. Special events I know was a was of concern. I know we went away from a fixed number of events went away from a fixed dollar cost of events. And essentially went to a need to be planned in advance and budgeted for anything that's not included in the budget would be built separately. One potentially question one potential question is the trustees added a phrase saying that special events do not include school crossings. And this goes to the whole the question of police presence at five corners every school morning. And anybody have any concerns about any more concerns about special events or the definitions there. We want to leave in the explicit. Non inclusion of school crossings. I think we were okay with it. I think go ahead. No, I just as a recall from the meeting where this was discussed. I thought we had a general agreement. That the school crossings is a predictable is a is a tradition or is a predictable occurrence. Whereas say a some kind of a special rally or event that's occurring. That's not something that's a known, you know, activity that would would require officers to be tied up unexpectedly. That is a different that's that that's where I thought we came down to the understanding that it's not not the things that they can predict and they know, you know, it's there. It's the unusual that's going to tie down for whatever amount of time and a day or hours, how many hours, whatever it is, those type of events. I agree with Dan and I I'd also say I I know that we've talked about the police presence at five corners, but I don't think it's something that the village I think you'd have to probably go back way into the last century to understand the genesis of it. It wasn't something that the village specifically requested in my knowledge. I think it's done. I think it was I going to guess it's probably more for the school districts benefit. Then for the villages benefit and only because you can't put a civilian crossing gosh five corners that need that person alive. So you need to you need a policeman there. And I think that's really the whole point. It's not really a benefit. It's a benefit that's going to the Essex Westford School District as I see it. True. That's a good that's a very good point that we are on the same school district so that right. Yeah. And the way this is written it wouldn't include if there was a over time a similar complex crossing the police would be deployed outside you know in the town outside of exactly. Right. You know you could find the town needing needing exactly the same thing at some point in the future. So yeah. Or the school district needing it in the town. That's the way to phrase it. All right. I'm not hearing any other select word comments on that. So I think. Just. Sorry. Go ahead. Tracy I found under the second paragraph. On page three. It ends with the for the purpose of this agreement of material change shall be a change. More than 10% of the approved budget. There it is. I think that's specifically relating to material changes to an approved. Yeah. I do too. But that. Yeah. And I also had. That second to last paragraph. It seems like the last three. Sentences of that paragraph. Don't really fit with. A town representative just going. To a meeting. It seems to be more toward the substance of. How the budget is created how it's approved and what constitutes. You know the more the greater than 10% threshold. So it just seems like it's it's buried in a section that is actually. Relate. In the beginning. Yeah, this is a, this is a different material change than the other material change. The other material change I think refers to, you know, if there's a. Big sports arena gets gets. Built somewhere in the city and. If the police around it all the time or somebody opens a strip joint or. Don't you can do in this town. It's a different material change than this. This is a specific if there's a big change in the budget, we need to have some very explicit reason to claim, you know, discussion. I agree. What I was. Is that at this for this one. It was explicitly defined for the other one. It wasn't explicitly defined. Yeah. All right. The. Select board also added a section. I'm referencing the situation a situation where. If a. On budget fails. And the. Choice of the select board to address. To make change if the select board chooses to make changes to police services in order to get the budget, a budget to pass. If the city fails. If the city fails. The level of service may not be. Maintained that the city is asking for. I didn't say that very well, but I. I don't know if you get the gist there. So that the scenario is if the. If the town budget. Fails in March, the city will have had its. City vote. Before the town would likely get another budget passed in which case. police services as a result of a change in the town budget that passes after the city budget does. That's what this is trying to get at. Dan, go ahead. I hear what you're saying, but I assume what you would mean is that maybe you wouldn't fill vacancies that are occurring in a timely fashion or something to that one. Whatever, budgetary issue might come up, but as I see, I don't see as big an issue because as we all know, vacancies can occur and it's difficult to get replacements and the level of service that you can provide is based on the staffing you have to provide the services. And so it's going to, I mean, it's going to fluctuate. I think there's going to be up and down to the degree that you can provide services as we know during this pandemic. Right, but I'm not talking about services we don't provide because we don't have the staff to do it. I'm talking about services that we choose not to provide because we had to make adjustments to our budget in order to, we felt we needed to, the board and place at the time chose to make changes to the police budget in order to get the budget to pass. So George, go ahead. Yeah, I think with this, which basically what you just said, Andy, is that you the town can't guarantee that there's always going to be a certain level that the level of service available in the police department is going to be what the city would want. You can't guarantee that. And I think that's the inherent risk of any kind of an agreement like this, that we, the city has to take understanding. It's not our police department. And so there might be changes in it that we can't stop from happening. So I think that's part of the, that's an acceptable in my mind. That's inherent and a necessary risk that we have to accept. I'm actually looking at the next one, the next piece of this paragraph, and I get it conceptually that if the town wants something more, but it's only going to benefit the town and not the city, that the town would therefore pay for it. I get that conceptually, but I'm actually trying to think of an actual example. Can you provide one just so I make sure I understand what you're talking about? You know, what would be an example of an additional police service that the town would have that wouldn't benefit the city. It would benefit the town. And so the town would only exclusively pay for that. It's okay. I'm not saying take it out. I'm just trying to think it through. If the town or the village wants a third or fourth officer on the night shift to traffic patrol, that's on the top of my head. I take a picture either part of the community saying we want more traffic patrols. Okay. I'm just getting into where this gets, and I don't want to belabor this. Maybe I should just, maybe I'll just stop talking. So in other words, I'm just a little concerned that we did say we want the, to give the police department a high degree of autonomy to shift their staff around to meet changing the dynamics. And so suddenly the town has a great big traffic problem on Suzy Wilson, and they want more patrol down there. I don't know. You really want to put yourself in a position where, yeah, you have to pay for that, or the police can say, hey, you know what, we're not seeing a lot of activity in this part of the city or over here in the town. We're going to shift. You know what I'm saying? It's fine, but I'm not totally understanding what this is, but I don't want to belabor it. I hear what you're saying, George, but a lot of the stuff, it transitions. I mean, traffic, it's more than likely it's going to be residents from both communities are going to be, you know, benefiting, whether it's technically within the confines of the city or just outside in the town. I appreciate the fact that there's police patrolling Route 15, you know, 117. What have you? Suzy Wilson Road in the areas 289 where there's multiple crashes. I want safety for my friends, the family and community as well. So to say that they're benefiting, I don't see the direct correlation between. So we added that clause because there was a clause already in there that the trustees had put in that if there was some item that benefited only the city, the city would pay for it. Okay. And so we put in this clause as a counter to that to say that, yeah, and likewise, if we decide to do something, then we won't pay for it either. Or we will pay, we'll only pay for it. So it's, if we take it out one direction, we're going to take it out in both directions, I would think. Yeah. Let's just leave it in. I don't see it's not doing any harm. I'm just not sure exactly what it does, but it's not, it doesn't bother me that it's in there. I'm just thinking it. I'm not sure how it works, but it is a very good point. We don't want to put ourselves in a corner where we say, okay, well, we're having issues in this part of town. Oh, no, we can't do that because then we'll have to pay more for it. We don't want to do that. No, we do not want to nickel and dime ourselves into that kind of corner. And I guess we should probably think about whether this language does that to us or not. That's a very, that's a reasonable thing to make sure we don't hire ourselves and not trying to figure those kind of things out. Yeah. It's not necessary. I don't have an example of it. Yeah. You'll have, I can't come up creatively on the spot with an alternative. So yeah. And I'd love to get, you know, get this agreed to, but that's, it's a little, it's okay. I mean, it seems like a good point to some problems. It comes down to the other thing I said before, you get a major case. There's a, say there's a major homicide as we, as we had here within the Essex. And, you know, it occurred in the town, but it taxed the police department, you know, many, many hours for a homicide. And do we, we say no, because the homicide happened in the town, we're not going to, I just think we can, like you're saying, Andy, I agree with you. We can nickel and dime this to death. And I just think that's not the intent. I think we accept that there's going to be some fluctuation in it for a balance and room. Yep. Okay. Sue, I saw your hand first. Yeah, I was just thinking, I mean, possibly we get some input from the police department on like a, you know, appropriate thresholds for what would be, you know, something above and beyond unique that would, would not, you know, unnecessarily control their, their, I think it would have to be something that's proposed to be put in the budget. So it would be discussed as part of our budgeting process. Do we want to do this? We're just the town or just the city. And if we do do that, then that's where the, the, the costing would come in. I don't think it's a matter of, you know, you spent last week doing, you know, in the town. So all your, you know, we're not going to, we're not going to keep track of where everybody is all the time. So I think it's more of a budget thing discussion that allows either of us to ask for additional services. I think that's the intent of it. Yes. But I don't want to also don't want to end up binding some other way that we didn't think of. So, okay. Tracy, go ahead. The intent wasn't around routine services. Andrew, I think you initially brought this up with the example of if the town wanted to institute a rental registry that the city shouldn't be responsible for paying for that. So that's the type of services that we want to be scalable enough to, to respond to and budget accordingly. Andrew agrees. Yep. Yep. I remember that conversation now. So many details. All right. A lot of the rest of the changes in here are, are fairly minor. There was a discussion about termination being three years, but not more than four years. I think we already talked about that. I guess, I guess I'll open it up to, if there's any, any questions anybody has anywhere else. Sue, you said you had someone all from Section 11. I did. Do you have something before Section 11? No, go. Oh, sorry. Just the, so the section, this agreement may also automatically terminate upon any of the following events. And under there is the, if the, the city has established their own municipal police department. And I'm just, I mean, I think it's, that's definitely oversimplified. And that, you know, I, I guess automatically terminate to me means like, you know, on a dime. And I think that there are some, you know, timing considerations that would have to occur and in that kind of thing where there would need to be some advance notice so that we could kind of make that transition. I kind of think that we would catch on if the city decided to start its own police department long before it actually opened. And the paragraph ahead of that is that four years. Right, but this is not underneath that. This could put on a, you know, potentially put on a shorter timeline than four years. Because it's segmented out from the ones, the, the other where there is more of a timeline that's identified. This is just automatically terminate. I used to say that the two parties had to agree on the timeline for such a thing that it's been changed to be an independent act. Yep. I can elaborate on that a little bit if you'd like Andy. Go ahead, Andrew. The intent of that was when we read that statement of the date by which the parties have agreed and resolved that the city has established a police department. Theoretically, there could also be a situation where one side could say, well, no, you really haven't done it yet. And so it's really to just prevent that from happening. If you want to put some kind of a provision in there of, you know, a year's notice in terms of the city creating a police department, I think that's entirely fine, given the fact of the amount of money that we would likely need to raise from the city to build a police department, possibly have a bond vote to build a police station. It's not the kind of funds that we would likely just have lying around and capable to do within a short time period. I will take that into consideration whether anything needs to be changed there or not. They can keep track of these. All right. Tracy, you said you had a comment. I actually had the same concern with the phrasing of automatically terminate based on notice. And I would like to see potentially two years notice. Or if the concern is just that, let's see here, parties agree to enter mediation, yada, yada, yada through the end of the paragraph. Maybe we could just copy that language and leave the mediation piece out of it and still adhere to the no less than three, not more than four. I'm not tied to any timeframe, but the automatically terminate was a little, gave me a little bit of heartburn when I read it. Quick question on that, Tracy, if I may follow up. Are you saying the heartburn is about any automatic termination? No, just automatically terminating based on notice. So if, for some reason, we weren't paying attention to another municipalities conversations and investigating standing up their own municipal PD, just receiving a letter and oops, we automatically terminate, sorry, because we miss things from time to time. Got to. Any other police agreement concerns? So the questions that the select board raised are whether there needs to be a definition for material event associated with a review of the costing structure. The other question is the clauses about unique services for either the city or the town and whether that binds us in any way. I think it's probably okay, but we'll take a look at it because the question came up. And then this automatic termination upon notice, we'd like to look at that and see if there's other language that would help us feel more comfortable with that. Other, the other change, the trustees who said they were okay with pushing the true up to no later than or by end of second quarter that have been the first quarter and requiring it in the first quarter. Those were the changes that I noted from today's review. I miss any or the changes necessarily. But just things that we'll we'll we're at further discussion. All right. I've gotten to this point. Should we move on to another agreement? The delinquent tax agreements, which I think is directly after the MOU. Okay. In the delinquent tax agreement, the way this has been edited has now become very confusing because there's edits upon edits. But my view of the one significant issue that the select board has is that the city is proposing to collect taxes for the town during its first year. And the select board is uncomfortable with that. We'd rather just collect our own taxes. Understandably so. I'm not sure why we have the city collecting taxes for the town. I don't recall talking about that. Yeah, isn't that the way your charter is written? I'm not sure if Brad may recall something that I'm forgetting. Yeah, so it is sorry. It is in the charter. It was previously written differently that the town would collect them. I think the select board expressed some concern about whether or not it was legal for the select board to be collecting taxes from people who were no longer residents. And so it was changed. And that's what's currently reflected in the charter. And there cannot be any changes to the charter at this point. So the question, I think that's an interesting and it was just interpreted maybe differently than I remember it. The question was whether you could become residents, whether you could become city residents before you finish paying your town taxes. I mean, the question is, so, you know, we're starting our budget season here in March. We're going to have a town budget vote. The entire town, including the village, is going to be able to vote on that. I don't know if it's position or our understanding or our view, I guess, is that residents of the village would remain residents of the town until the end of that the fiscal year for the budget that they voted for. And that your first July 1 of existence would be after that year ends. And I think you've proposed it the other way where you become citizen, you've become residents of a city on July 1 of a year where you have already voted on a town budget. And even in that scenario, we, well, yeah, I guess that's the question, right? Are you city residents or your town residents for that year? I can. Go ahead, George. Brad, and get me if I'm, tell me if I'm wrong, but I think the discussion, the point was, it's not a question of what would we like. I think if the legislature approves the new city charter, then, you know, and then it goes through the rest of the steps of the state, when the state, when the state signs that into law, every S6 junction resident is now a resident of the city. It doesn't matter. It's not determined by whether they owe money to the town. And I understand what you're saying. So at that point, it would just be the understanding that would be the city would then be obligated to collect taxes, those taxes from the citizens of S6 junction and hand them over to the town. I don't think, as I understand it, we don't have a choice. I don't think we can say, hey, we want you to sign this charter, but let's all pretend we're still town residents for another six months. I don't think you get that choice. So the transition agreement that's part of that charter could have a future date on it, though. Maybe. So that's the, right, that's where we're concerned. Is where is the, if they're town taxes, we want to collect them. Well, the practical matter is, is that who's actually physically collecting the taxes? It's the same. The finance department. It's the same people that are going to be doing the same thing. So it's just a theoretical overview. But maybe the lawyers can weigh in on this. I don't think we have a choice. I could be wrong. I would just add that it looks like the language was struck, but it did say that the, the city would pay the full amount due on the town taxes. And then the city would be responsible for collecting those from its own residents. The city would have the power to set the tax rate and they would include the town tax rate in there and as they set the tax rate. Go ahead, Tracy. I had a question on that. Number one, how I read that was, and I think this is how the trustees were understanding that as well, that it would basically be a pay and chase scenario where the city would pay the full amount of all of the taxes for those properties located in the city to the town. Right. And then if those were delinquent, the city would chase, so to speak, those properties to collect those taxes to make them whole lack of a better term. Right. However, it just says shell purchase. It doesn't give a defined date, so I don't know whether that's beginning of the fiscal year, if it's in keeping with the identified tax deadlines when those are due. And I had a note that it might be good to have a timeline identified as far as when that will happen. Yeah, right. Payment terms, they're not in here. You just say, we'll pay during the first, sometime during that transition year, so it could be the last day of your transition year, which would make us significantly short. Question about can you do anything with those dollars while you have them in your possession when there's no terms defined here about those kind of things. You know, if this is the, you know, if it's, I'm still in the position where I think the town should collect the town's taxes, but if we're forced to do it this other way, we need many more details about how you're going to make those, at least some details about how you're going to make those payments so that we're not, it's not ambiguous. Go ahead, Dan, sorry. No, I agree with you, Andy. And, you know, from what, the way it reads here in, you know, basically if lawful, that it says, the village's share of property taxes, regardless of delinquency, and may continue collection efforts, including tax sales, delinquencies, beyond the effective date of the city charter, if lawful. In the event the town cannot lawfully, you know, pursue collection of the delinquent property taxes in a separate municipality, the city shall purchase, as we just heard, shall purchase those delinquent taxes. It doesn't give the exact time or date, but it may be a moot point if, like you're saying, if you're able to collect those, if it's, if it's, you have legal standing to pursue tax sale or what have your possession of property within another missed value, I don't see that happening personally, but obviously it would help to clarify the time so that you can, you know, have a date to know that this is when you're going to get those funds. And I don't know, Andy, Andrew, maybe you could weigh in on it, but I don't see a big issue with that, but not language in on a date or a time, whatever, you know. I just made a note that the select board would like payment terms for the transition year when the city collects and pays for town taxes. So there's, there's two questions here though, right? There's two questions. There's one is current taxes and there's also delinquent taxes. The paragraph that talks about purchasing, that's the delinquent tax section. And so that's where it says we don't know whether it's legal for us to have a tax sale in your municipality, whether it's legal for us to modify our tax sale policy to target your municipality, right, to get them off the books. Or, you know, I'm, I'm not saying that's something that we would do, but it's a possibility. It's a thing that could happen, right? I think we need to think about more, more about how these terms, and it's also the question, right, if it's not legal for us to do it, then we'd like you to purchase the, the $270,000 of delinquent taxes from village properties that, and, but, you know, that, again, it's two different things. There's current taxes. We'd like to collect our own taxes. Our preference has been for a while for you to purchase your delinquent taxes, but if it's legal for us to collect them, you know, delinquent taxes are an asset. Right? It's money you're going to get someday. Some of it is interest-bearing. It's not a, it's not a happy or fun way to make money. We do not, by any means, pursue that as a, as a revenue source. Make that clear. But, again, there's two different things going on. And I think there's some detail missing from this or not. Go ahead, Sue. Thank you for that summary. Just clarifying. So on the delinquent, where it does reference if lawful and if in the event the town cannot lawfully pursue, who, who, who is the authority that can determine if it is lawful or like, it just seems like, I mean, that's very kind of vague writing because we don't know if it's lawful or not. So is there a way that we can get that determination? This is, this is, this is one of those questions potentially we need to ask the legislature. When we, when we get there, we say, okay, we have this. This is one of our outstanding items. We have these delinquent taxes. The town is okay with holding them and collecting them. Is it okay for us to do that? The legislature may say, yeah, it's okay. Put it in there so it's in writing so we can, we can actually do it. The legislature says, no, that's a, that's a crazy thing. Then they will ask the village to buy them out and they'll have to forget how to do that. We could work out terms or whatever. So I think that's, I think really that's, there's no, there's no statute on it. There's probably no, I don't, there's, it, it, you know, cities and, and towns and, or towns and villages don't separate every day. So there's not a lot of case law about that. It's also something that's not going to continue on very well. So this is a, it's a complete on now. It's complete. Andy, can I open real quick? Yeah, go ahead, Andrew. So just going back to the, the earlier portion about the city collecting taxes from city residents that city residents would have voted on as inherently being town residents for that one year. That whole process, this is what was given to us from Sarah. So in terms of how, you know, we would, as what George was saying before about how it's all happening within the same staff, this is what she had said would be the easiest thing for her and her staff to oversee for that one year time period. So that's why that's included. The other thing I would say is in terms of whether or not something is, is legal about collecting taxes and or having a tax sale on a different municipality, we do have our attorneys who I would prefer we ask our attorneys to give us their legal opinion on that instead of waiting until the legislature presentation and or until this gets to the legislature. Well, frankly, that's why we have attorneys. My, our legal counsel told us that this is something that the legislature is going to have to tell us. So we've, I've asked that question many, many times. It looks like Christian hand up. Go ahead. Jump in. Hello. And just, I guess agree with what Bill is saying that it's just not really clear. And there's not examples out there. You know, other other municipalities collect within a separate municipality, you know, for utilities, for example, like, you know, the city of St. Albans provides water to the town and can collect delinquencies within the town. But that's really their own ongoing delinquency at that point. So it's a different situation. But there's not really a good precedent for this. So I guess I would agree with, I'd love to give you a yes or no answer, but there really isn't one. So so my only concern though is if there is no law around this and there is no precedent around it, then for the legislature to approve of that statement, they would need to then introduce new legislation and a new law. Our charter isn't a new law and asking a, well, our charter is a law. So I mean, approving of the charter would be one portion. But if you are looking for specific state statutes to address this, then that would have to be introduced at the legislative session, which that wouldn't necessarily be during our our charter hearings in the legislature. Correct? I think and Claudian and Bill can jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think just by approving the charter and sorry, I see Bill raising his hand there too. Bill, do you want to jump in? Sure. Okay. The charter is going to be voted on by the village residents. That doesn't mean that's what ends up being the law that is passed by the legislature. I have seen on several occasions where charters that have been voted on by municipalities are changed significantly by the legislature and they can pass laws in connection with the adoption of that charter. Amber may remember Burlington Telecom and what happened with the charter that empowered the city of Burlington to start a telecom business and what by the time it got done with the legislature, it looked nothing like what the voters voted on. So in my view, it's not as restrictive as you think, Andrew, that process. George, you got your hand out? Yeah. I just wanted, how is this different? The voter, the citizens of property owners in S Extension are going to continue to pay the police bond. So the police department, a building bond. But who's collecting for that? Who's collecting? Is it the city is going to be collecting the money and handing over a chunk to the town? Or is the town going to be sending out separate bills? And I think it's the four. So the city is going to be collecting on behalf and sending that and giving that money to the town. And I think that's established. And so how is what you were talking about now very different? It seems like it would be the same. Because when that's happening, you will have a city approved budget. Right. A city budget approved by your city. Right. But the city budget in March, we won't be able to this year, you will have a town budget and a village budget. Right. But the amount of money that that is owed is not going to be, we can budget all we want. And so and I'm just saying this is like a bill that the city will owe. The bill, the city of Essex Junction will owe a certain amount of money to the town of Essex to pay off that that portion of the bond based upon grand list. It's not a variable amount. It's a fixed bill. Right. And the town's not going to be collecting that the city is going to be collecting that on behalf of the town and then handing it over to the town. I'm just not so you're going to add the towns, the villages portion of the town's budget to your village budget next year and collect those taxes and then give them to us? I'm sorry, I didn't hear the person. That's what I thought you just said. No. So we're going to have a town budget hopefully approved in this coming March. You're going to have a hopefully have a village budget voted in April and you're hoping by July 1 to become a city. Right. So you won't have a city budget on July 1. You'll have the remnants of a town budget and a village budget. That's correct. And so what you're saying I think applies to year two when you have a city budget and you have not had the opportunity to vote on a town budget and we have our own budget and we're collecting our own taxes and we're moving along. I get that part. I'm just getting, it seems like the hang up is what you're saying is you're not sure does the town have the authority and the right to send tax bills into the... No, no, no, that's not at all what I'm asking. That was Brad's interpretation of what we said. I'm sorry. Okay. My question is whether you can become a resident of a city when you still owe taxes to the town. That's my question. I don't think we have an answer. Right. Exactly. My response, my opinion is, but as Bill just said, we don't know what's going to happen. But my opinion is, yes, I think that the approval of the charter supersedes all other... I don't think you stop being a citizen. You delay your citizenship of this new community that the legislature just approved until you've paid off all your taxes. I'm not sure about that. That seems what you're kind of saying. And I don't know the answer. Right. So my proposal would be that you don't become a city until the following year, that there's a future date on that that allows you to close out your obligations to the town by paying your town taxes as you approve them and as we've all been going forward with. That's the way I see it. And that's the idea. And maybe the other board members don't see it that way. But I think that's a question that we absolutely have to have an answer to. And I think it's just like the question of who can collect the link when taxes. Yeah. And so that's where that's my big sticking point on this. One of my big sticking. Yeah. Early conversations, I thought that was kind of clear and the purpose of that first transition year was to sort of end out that year with the town and village budgets and then the city budget would start the following July one. So I thought that was pretty clear throughout conversations, but I guess not. So big disconnect there. I think we've beaten it to death. I'd say the bottom line is I think the town will get its money regardless of. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And my only other comment was if staff had seen this and what their input was and if they had any thoughts on not only this item, but the entire proposal. I don't think we've heard input directly from Sarah on any of these. And I think that would be helpful. So I think Brad would tell you that she proposed the tax delinquency thing that we at the town would just continue to hold those and go after them, I think. And I'm okay with that as long as like I said, as long as it's legal. The go ahead, Greg. Yeah. I mean, I've obviously been part of these meetings and following along that way. Sarah has been doing two budgets and two audits and keeping the finance department running. So she has looked at these. Not sure the last time, not in depth. So she's seen them, but she hasn't really had time to pour through them. And that's pretty much the case for the rest of staff as well. Got the other evidence. I'll let the lawyers jump in on this. But one of the things we mentioned is when the town collects taxes for the village and the school district, we're under state law as to when we have to remit those taxes. I would assume it's just an assumption that if the village collected it on behalf of the town, they would be under those same obligations. The other part is back taxes. There's always been a discussion of they are taxes that are due to one or the other. And then the town is currently it makes the school district whole and it makes the village whole and any other taxing district we collect for at the given time. The process by which the city becomes independent, I think is one of the questions and can a municipality collect taxes or indebtedness in another municipality? That's one of the questions that was to be asked. We can go and do it in the village because you were part of the village and we made you whole. We can do it in the school district because the school district is in our district and we have made them whole. Again, I don't want to, I think we have all the, we probably have all the mechanisms. We just probably need to clarify it with the department of taxation and what is the mechanism? I'm sure that was almost as clear as the language that we all have. And if we can't go, here's one last thing. If we can't go after them, we are, the town would be relying on the village to go either go after the back taxes or make the town whole. Do I have that correct? The last part? There's some conflating, though, between current taxes and delinquent taxes that we need to make sure we're always carried on. Because over the years, there are delinquent taxes still on the books from people who have not paid. So Kristen, is your handover at a residual? Here's to be in a residual. Sorry, I think mine shows it as down. Maybe it's a problem on my end in teams. Sorry. All right. I haven't had that problem before. Okay. So Andrew, I don't know. Where do we go on this one? I think we keep going. How do you mean keep going? Keep going through. Anybody have any other issues they want to bring up on the delinquent tax agreement? Let's see what else we got in here that needs to be talked about. Go ahead. I do have a question. Yeah. So a lot of people when they become delinquent, we set them up on payment plans. Yep. So what happens to those payment plans when the people that are on payment plans in the village, I mean, they're currently paying it to the town? Yeah. If they owe the taxes to us, I think there's two scenarios. One is they continue making that payment to us or the village has to buy out the difference than the payments would go to the village. Okay. So I think most of the changes that are shown in the document right now are associated with the question of who collects whose taxes and who collects delinquent taxes, which is what we all talked about. Anybody have any other comments, questions or concerns about what's in there? So this one is very difficult to understand what next steps are. I'm not sure how anyone, Andy, honestly, is going to be able to alleviate your concern until separation happens. So I think we either go forward and try to come to an agreement and hope for the best or we don't have an agreement on delinquent taxes. I think those are the paths. So go ahead. We can't approach the appropriate area of the legislature until there's a bill before them. Yeah. Is the concern that the town is not going to ultimately get its money? Is that the concern? Because if it's only a concern of the phrasing, who's theoretically conceptually correct, does citizenship begin when the legislature declares you are a new community or does it begin when you've paid off your taxes to the old community? That's something obvious, as Bill said, and I think we've established, that's going to have to be decided by the legislature. We can't answer that, but I think if we're in agreement, generally speaking, that this satisfies the financial obligation, the town will get its money, delinquent taxes will be handled in the appropriate way, I think we can move on. As Mike was saying, we're going to have to finesse the higher-level conceptual aspect of this until we get an answer from the legislature. Right. So if we need to, if we have more clearer terms of how payments will be made, who, you know, how they're going to be, then yeah, we can probably move forward, you're right. So then who's going to do that? Do you want us to come with a proposal for terms or do you want to make a proposal for terms? I think it may make sense if you were to come up with the proposals for terms. We'll have a discussion separately about how we want to, what kind of framework we want to use around this, all right. Whether we make an assumption and develop the terms based on that assumption. Yeah, or we, or we have a lot of places where it says if legal. Yeah, yeah, none of the next agreement. Which one's the next one? Hi. Oh, Tracy, another question. If I may, it's 20 of nine and just being conscious of people's time and the public's ability to weigh in. Previously, we have stopped about every two or three proposals just to take public comment on the previous ones we've discussed. I would just like to suggest that we do that, keeping it to what we've just gone over. Yep. Okay. Thank you, Tracy. Anybody have any concerns with that? All right. So if there's anyone who would like to make public comment on the agreements we've talked about, that's the MOU, the police agreement and the delinquent tax agreement. If you're in the room, please raise your hand. I don't see any hands in the room. We'll check again later. Anybody online? Go ahead and raise your hand or type in the chat that you'd like to speak. I've not seen any. All right. So what's the next agreement then? The next one in the MOU list would be IT. And that's still within the first year that I proposed earlier. Okay. The select board is recommending some additional language in the initial whereas adding another new one to give some background. We're still, the request from the trustees was to give your consultants access to our staff and equipment. We've reworked that to say the town agrees to work with the city's IT consultants to plan and facilitate the necessary migration. Any concerns around that language? Change? No. All right. We are requesting that your IT consultants prepare a written plan for the migration to be reviewed by our IT director. And there's a statement in here that says if our IT director approves it, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work. We want to understand what the plan is before any work starts. Any concerns with that? See Amber has her hand up. Amber's hand, yeah. I am definitely not going to pretend that this is in my wheelhouse. But I guess the question that I had reading this is I don't think we, I don't think I fundamentally disagree with allowing to see a plan, but why the approval piece of it? Because if it involves access to our staff and our equipment, we want to agree with what's going to be done. But then you guys added language in the separate area. And what is now three basically saying we hold you harmless from everything that happens, basically? Yeah, but we don't want, we don't want your folks doing something stupid either. Not, and that's, that's an, you know, that's an inappropriate way to say it, but I apologize. Tracy, go ahead. The written plan in number two, I do do this. It's so that you have a clearly defined scope and requirement. So everyone is on the same page. Everyone's aware of what the expectations are and everyone sees the same rough timeline and the milestones contained within that. So it's just to ensure that, you know, you don't get into a situation where you have a bunch of scope creep and then something this big turns out to be something this big. Yeah, I don't disagree with the scope. That's not, it was the word approval. So we can show you the plan, but why is it based on the approval? Why is it based on the town's approval? That's where I was getting tripped up. Because it says staff and equipment and we need to make sure we have the budget for it. We need to make sure we can support it. We need to make sure that it doesn't interfere with our ability to run the town. Because we, you know, we can't lose access to our servers while your consultant's working out on those kinds of things. We want to make sure that we don't hurt ourselves by not being fully aware of what's going on and agreeing to it. I see Suzanne and Greg. Yeah, I mean, you kind of hit, I hit on it. I think that approval is around ensuring that the plan that the consultants that the village is hiring are designing a plan and architecture that is agreeable with the town IT. And you know, so thinking about firewalls that will need to be up because they will need to be pinholes will need to be created. There will be things that the town IT will need to weigh in on. And to see that in an overall plan and make that weigh in up front is is a desired way of doing Yes, security is the only other thing that would add to that. You know, Rob and his team are big rightfully so on security and Amber's not my wheelhouse either, but I just have terrified of the UVM situation. And so I think Rob just wants to be comfortable knowing what security measures are going to be put into place so that there's not some sort of security breach. See the Claudine has her hand up. Unless I'm, unless I'm seeing things. Bill, I use your hand up. No, no. Thank you. I'm going to invite Kristen also to jump in here. Our suggestion is to add language that says the approval shall not be unreasonably withheld. Kristen, I'll be to talk a little bit more about that. But I will just also add that when this is along the same vein, although it's in the following paragraph begins with the language regarding damage the IT consultants enter the city shall be responsible for any damage to town infrastructure caused by their access to same and shall indemnify and hold harmless to the town. So I just this paragraph, I really want to caution leaving that in there. We strongly do not advise any municipality to pledge indemnity into the future. This is directly out of a concern that has been already raised about binding future boards. But this particular issue is a pledge of financial expenditure into the future, which is very distinct from some other issues in terms of binding future boards. So it is a pledge of a financial expenditure without voter approval. That's what indemn, pledging indemnity is. So we absolutely advise all municipalities in all circumstances to never pledge indemnity in any agreement in the future. It's just a blanket advice that we give. So we could not stand by leaving this language in that agreement with respect to the indemnity. Kristen, do you want to, make any other comments on the approval of the migration plan? No, I think you covered it. We saw this and we're concerned. We understand the general the gist of it, but also would hate to see something where the city is approaching and with a reasonable plan. And for any reason, a different board, different staff, whoever keeps coming back and saying, no, this isn't okay. We need some assurance that if it's a reasonable plan, it will be approved. So it's similar language to negotiating good faith, like we discussed earlier where it doesn't have a very specific definition, but it would make us feel more comfortable, I would say here. And while we're here on screen, just one more addition down in number five, I would add just to include some language saying on a reasonable hourly basis in terms of reimbursement for costs incurred. I think we'd use that in language in another agreement. A similar idea of just to keep things within reason. That's all I have. So I'm not sure I understood completely what you're asking for here. I think you're asking for a clause that says approval shall not be unreasonably held. And then I thought there was also that, where's the other piece that Claudine mentioned about indemnity? And number three. Yeah, I'm suggesting that the paragraph or that the clause, it's more of that clause, it's an entire sentence of about one, two, three, four, six, six and a half lines begins with the IT consultants and or the city. That to the conclusion of that paragraph, our advice is that that needs to be struck in its entirety. Go ahead. So is it correct in understanding that if there is a breach of data, be it HIPAA, FTI, any other federally protected information that your stance is that the town should bear the full brunt of the violation and penalties that result from that? That's not at all what I said. No, it's absolutely not what I said. Okay, well, if we're str- Town is not subject to HIPAA, by the way. I'm sorry? The town is not subject to HIPAA. We're not a health provider. HIPAA doesn't apply. But that's not what I said. I'm not at all suggesting that if there's something goes wrong with what the IT consultants that did, that that's the town's responsibility. I'm simply suggesting that that language is entirely inappropriate and we cannot stand behind the inclusion of that language into this contract because it is- Is from, because after that comma, including any violation of state or federal regulations concerning protected data, that's the part that I feel should remain in order to address that specific concern? I think if you have that concern, we could probably, you know, the perhaps Bill and Kristen and I could work on some language that could address that. And certainly if the consultants cause a violation of state or federal regulations, there's going to be larger issues, right? But I know I'm not suggesting that the town is responsible for something that the village's consultants do. I'm simply saying that we can't include indemnification language in there. So as it is drafted, my suggestion is that it be struck. If there's something short of that that you're concerned about that you want to include, we could, you know, play with the language to suggest something different. Okay, great. Thank you. Okay. So the, there's a clause in here then that says that if the migration doesn't complete within the first year, the city will pay. And I think there was a suggestion to add some additional language about the reasonable hourly rate. So this becomes, this is a little challenging for us budget-wise. So you're fully expecting the IT transition to happen within a single year. And you expect, you want us to budget that way. Yes. Because at this, at that point you're not paying anything except your town taxes for them to do work on top of their regular jobs. There's no payment terms in here during the transition, during this whole IT transition. That's the problem. That's a problem. Yeah. And I would say that that's highly aggressive to expect that to complete within a year. We've been saying that for months. This is in my wheelhouse. This is exactly what I do. We've been saying that for months and Christie's say, no, it's going to happen in a year. But there's no payment terms here because you're saying that your town taxes are essentially paying for this work. One thing I want to be clear on is we're not saying it is going to happen within a year. I think what we have said is we don't know if it's going to happen within a year. As I don't believe this is within any of our wheelhouses, possibly Rajas. But no, we haven't, we haven't expressed, let me try that one again. We have not expressly said that this will happen within one year. We would like it to. This actually raises a bunch of questions is you're not going to pay for any of these so-called shared services until the end of your transition year? Is that what you're stating? So like with this, which, yeah, so that's an odd thing here. How's that going to work? If you're already a city on July 1, but you're still paying town taxes for your police department support for that first year, you get the discounted rate of still paying the town taxes. You don't start paying for your services as a city until the following year. The way this is written, you're saying that the intent is to have the IT transition done in a year, and then you're going to just pay hourly after that. So there's no, you know, part of our hope, I guess, regard to these agreements is that it will somehow dampen the ramp rate of our taxes. But if everything, nothing, you're not going to, we haven't gotten to the finance one yet. When do you start paying for the finance contract? We haven't talked about that. I'm thinking about it in there. I don't remember it. We're jumping contract, Andy. We're jumping contracts. I'm talking about payment terms. And yeah, okay. So I've got this general issue that I want to bring up. I'll bring it up some other time. I think I hear what you're saying. You're concerned about if we're asking town staff to do work outside of their normal job, that you're feeling the village slash city resident should pay for that. Yeah, that's the whole reason. Do I have that right? That's the whole reason. Well, not the whole reason. That's one of the big reasons for the agreements is so that we have an understanding of who's paying for what work and we still have, we're still able to be whole to, to run a town. So if in IT's time, since this is highly hypothetical, since none of us have an IT agreement in hand, and so we don't know the scope of work involved in this. So since we're living in the hypothetical world right now, if the IT staff are able to do it within their normal salaried work life, and it does not take any new time, should they be compensated extra for that? So during that first year, they're going to have to be doing the all the work that they're currently doing. And I think that we should not start the IT transition until that next year, so that we can budget for it. We're not going to be budgeted to support running a town and running your village because we're going to have to continue to run your village during that transition. The IT department of your village during the, that first year because you're not going to have an IT department on the first day of that fiscal year. We still have to run two municipalities and do all this work. And we haven't budgeted for it. And that, and that separation work is going to be a big draw on the IT staff. I see that I have two other trustees that have their hands up. Okay, so I'm not looking at the meeting thing. Sorry, I'm looking into space. My comment a bit is about something else. So I'm going to defer to Raj and then you come back to me later. All right. I think I'm going to drop it. All right. But George. Yeah, my only thought, which is just to your comment, Andy, the town IT department will still be managing town IT services and providing services to the village, but it will have been paid for that, that services is providing to the village. Yeah, but you haven't paid for the separation work. But we don't know how much that's going to cost. And I think what Andrew was saying is that we're projecting it's going to have this huge cost. And if they can accomplish this transition for relatively little or no cost, then how are we going to know, how can we anticipate, you know, put some, put money in there that's going to, when we're going to be paying for something, we don't know what the cost of it is. Yeah, that's a problem. But we can't, sorry. Go ahead, Sue. Can't we put language in here to recognize that there is going to be a cost associated with it, and that we will need to accommodate that cost once it's known? Right. I mean, you could recognize that there are, there may be additional costs beyond what the IT department has is going to be paid by the village. And that we could, you know, we would compensate you, the village would compensate you for that. I mean, are we, are we talking hundreds of thousands of dollars or are we talking, you know, a couple of thousand dollars of overtime or something like that? I think it's the latter. I don't think it's, I mean, I saw the two communities go from no IT to having full service IT. It happened relatively quickly. It didn't, it wasn't all that painful, I don't think. So I'm not sure. I don't know. I, again, I'm talking about stuff I don't know, but my initial point was that the town IT department has been paid for the work it does for the village. Yes, absolutely, it will be, but, but, that the separation work is on top of that. And we've only budgeted to do the work that's planned. We have not budgeted to do this work as well. And that's, that's the, that's the issue. And you won't have budgeted for it either, unless you choose to, right, because you're, you're operating that first year on the, on your village budget, which you're going to approve this coming April, which, you know, you have your first meeting on a week after next. Right. So you're going to have, that budget will have to include money to support this effort. And you're going to have to, you're going to have to allow us time to, if we need to hire more people to do that work in the timeframe you're asking for it, we're going to need to have that time. And we don't have the budget, we don't have the budget to do that. Right. And so that, that's where I'm, I'm wondering if we got the cart before the horse here that you, you can't start this transition until we both have budgets that support a transition like this. Well, I just, I'm going to throw it over to Andrew and Brad and just ask them, are we, what is the, what is the anticipated, but you have a kind of a draft budget made up. So have we anticipated IT cost and would the, is there money in there that would pay for some additional level of service from the town to help us make the transition? I don't have the budget directly in front of me. And so Brad, if you do, I would appreciate your thoughts on that. Yeah, right now we have two quotes from from outside IT vendors who are prepared and able to stand up the village IT. Those numbers are being included in next year's budget in anticipation that that would need to happen during NFI 23 in order to stand up the city IT. The contractor wrote that the, you know, the town there, this will probably require some work on the town IT's part. And they just need to provide the data in some way on an external hard drive or some other media. And if they don't want to allow them the contractor into their servers, and so they would be responsible for pulling out the village data and providing it to the contractor in a usable format. And then it would be on the contractor to then migrate the data onto the village server and stand up any equipment. So Brad, as a follow up to that, are you saying that there may be little to no need for town staff if the contractors were given access? Yeah, I mean, I think they would still need to consult obviously with IT staff, but they're fully prepared to purchase what they need to purchase, install what they need to install, but somebody does need to provide them either access to the data or provide the data in a usable format so that they can reformat it to work just for the village. Neither of the contractors expressed any concern in accomplishing that during the next fiscal year. Thank you. Seeing some hands up now. Hey Amber. I'm just going to take my down and so we move past this discussion topic. I'll put it back up after. Alright, then Raj. Yeah, I guess, you know, it will take some, you know, in that scenario we'll take some time for town IT staff to pull that data. It will take some time for them to be there. There must be some language we can put in here to assess either quarterly or some other way. Or perhaps when the plan, if we move up a little bit to the plan being approved in the first place, potentially make that part of that plan process where the IT director and maybe in conjunction with management or whatever, after a review by the consultants and the IT director, you know, a reasonable estimate of time is developed and reviewed in six months and a true up just says we're truing up for other things. For instance, in the police budget occurs you know, in the second quarter of the following year, if there's a true up to be needed. You know, that that sort of thing. So if it or sooner or whatever works, that's just a I'm just throwing stuff out there. So that there's a mechanism to understand what those fees are going to be, what that time is going to be when the plan is presented or approved or proposed for the transition. But we are, while it will take time for town staff, I believe the city villages prepared to hire contractors to do a lot of that work. It's just a matter of the plan, the quality of the plan, the comfort level of the IT manager, and you know, the relationship that they develop in coming up with that. So I think it's doable. You know, the other point that the rest of the points have already been made, so I'll drop it. So Patrick, your hand was up. Have you withdrawn your comment? Yeah, I'm taking it down. I don't think it's necessary. We've labored this enough. All right. Sue, go ahead. Just real quick, because Greg brought up that the IT team mentioned security. I think that's, you know, I don't know whether if this is being written at such a high level, and that's not included. The other pieces that I saw as not spelled out were product licensing and vendor support, which will need to be, it's not like, it's a whole nother customer, right? So licensing can't just be extended and the vendor support can't just be extended. It would need to be renegotiated. Right. Yeah. Thank you, Sue, for reminding me that there's the question that's not included anywhere are all of the existing contracts we have for fiber, for phones, for copiers, for printers, for, you know, those fiber contracts, my understanding is they'll be very expensive to break and renegotiate. Is that what we intend to do? Or are we going to allow them to carry through and then we negotiate when they close? Or I don't know how, if you've considered any of those things. Thank you, Sue. I see Raj, I don't know if your hand is up or if that's a residual. No, my system is on matrix again. Bill Ellis, I see your hand. Is that real? It's real this time. I've tried or attempted to put a placeholder in that last draft about the concern that Sue just raised. And we had notes from, we're going to need to get a list of items from the IT director as to what contracts we have right now. But the language I believe I put in was along the lines of if there are early termination penalties, et cetera, that's going to be on the village slash city. The last sentence and number three. Last sentence and number three. Yep, yep, there it is. Yep. Amber has her hand up. Okay. Yeah, I'm sorry. Amber. That was the exact clause that I wanted to talk about. And my concern about what does this mean and what are we agreeing to be paying penalties for. So I think Bill hit it. We do need a list of what are we looking at so that we can budget accordingly or make some other decisions before I would feel comfortable signing off on this. Raj, I see your hand, but I'm not sure if it's real. Not real, sorry. Patrick. Mine is real. Yeah. And yeah, Amber just mentioned it. But I think a lot of people have talked about this isn't their wheelhouse. This literally is my wheelhouse because my company provides the fiber to all of our buildings. I would caution the trustees not adversarily, but rather just as a point, getting that information is going to be crucial. I do know off the top of my head what some of our early contract terminations are through the company that provides fiber to all of our buildings and they can be very substantial. They're usually a significant percentage of the remaining of a contract, which usually runs anywhere from three to five years. So it's yeah, absolutely information that we will want to have or rather the trustees will want to have as soon as possible so you guys can make an adequate decision. All right. Thank you, Patrick. So, Amber, I see your hand, but I don't know if it's real. Yeah, it's real again. I mean, I'm just going to second what Patrick said. While IT is not my wheelhouse, fiber contracts are as well. And I've written these contracts while I didn't write the ones for the fiber here. I agree most of the time they are the balance of the contract. Now, while we're not terminating the entire contract, there will be some conversation there, but just to reiterate, we do want to know what those are soon. Yeah, and let's not just limit it to the fiber, right? There's probably a whole bunch of different vendor support and licensing agreements that have been signed by the town. So anything that the town is going to put us on the hook for, we want to know. We'll qualify it that way. Yep. Okay. Number six in here says this agreement shall terminate at the time the city notifies the town the migration is complete. This is another termination based on notification. I don't know if it's a big deal or not on this one because I don't know what the dollar level is going to be. If the intent is truly to do this during the year that we're still running under FY23 budget, we won't have budgeted for it. And for your hands up. Oh, sorry. I'm not looking at the game again. Oh, you're fine, Andy. I was just going to say that this was, I requested this particular addition because I just want to have a finality point to all of these MOUs. And it seemed the cleanest because when the migration is complete, then migration is complete. I mean, I don't know if this isn't a comfortable term for the select board, then what would your thinking be as to when this particular agreement would terminate? I would think we would need to define some criteria in terms of that the village is running its own IT infrastructure, that there's no more dependency on the town. I think that there's some criteria that could be identified. I think the plan probably would include that. My only concern is the budgetary one because this can end arbitrarily at any date and we have no idea. Again, I'm concerned about the funding of this. Given that it won't be budgeted for us anyway, I don't know. I don't know. I guess we're going to have to think about it and talk about tracing. I'm not entirely sure it's a big deal because in the first year, we are still working under one budget. And especially if we put in a stipulation around any overtime if we need to hire like our own consultant or part-time help in order to help with the migration specifically, if it takes longer than a year, there's a clause in here around reimburse the town for costs incurred. So at that point, I don't think it matters if it terminates just whenever it's done. The problem though in my mind is that we won't have budgeted for that extra person if we need it. So how do we know when to? You're planning on doing this during FY23, which is a town. We're still operating under a full-town budget and we will not have an extra IT person in there because unless you've got more information to share about your IT transition plan today that we can use to define a budget for next year, we won't have budgeted for the effort it's going to take to do this migration. And so if we don't have the money to pay for the termination, it can't happen until after we pay for it. But I don't know how that plays out. Am I missing something? I'm sorry, does that number five cover what you're asking them now? Number five is in the event that the migration is not complete by the end of the last physical year, fiscal year, which the city residents pay town taxes, the city shall thereafter reimburse the town for the costs incurred. Something we didn't budget, here it says they're going to take care of it anyway. I'm worried about that fiscal year that they're talking about this work's going to get completed in. We haven't budgeted any additional headcount or any additional overtime. We haven't budgeted anything to pay for any extra work that might be necessary to support separation. My thought, I haven't run this by Rob, but I don't know if Evan has, is that this is going to have to get tacked on to IT's existing work? Probably without a headcount. Seeing if Rob can and his team can track the time they spend on this, have the village pay four times spent on the migration versus the day-to-day operations and reimbursing the town that way. Having an understanding and expectation that it may not be done as quickly as possible if there was an extra person doing it, but that avoids the extra person. It keeps the budget intact. There's some reimbursement for the cost of going above and beyond the normal stuff. Like most other things, the staff will sacrifice, take on other things, won't get done for the time being if this was happening. This interferes with the normal operation of our running our town. As Greg says, we won't have budgeted for that extra person. We cannot guarantee it's going to happen in that first year. If it goes into the next year, I would rather have it say that we put each of us put something in our budget to support it in that second year rather than just say it's time and materials because that's totally arbitrary. Then you've got a totally arbitrary termination date that you can put on us. We have no way to plan around any of that. So, Andy, I hear your concern and I wonder if what might be beneficial is if we have those contracts or we have those proposals from some vendors. If Brad were to talk with Rob about them and if they were to talk about what types of impact that may be and to have some of those conversations so that that way those who do this for a living within these organizations can have that conversation and help to judge what kinds of impact there may be instead of us thinking and using our own experiences, which may be right or wrong. Yeah, that makes sense to me. As I said, if you've got more information than we've seen, we haven't seen any of these sizings or proposals. So, yeah, I think that we need to have some assessment of the effort it's going to take on our part and we're going to have to consider whether or not we can just squeeze it in or whether we're going to say, no, you can't do this till your second year and allow us a chance to budget for it. If what Brad says is it's just throwing a floppy disk into a drive and then handing it over, that sounds pretty simplistic to me. If it's that easy, then it's that easy. But if it's a lot, more complicated than we need to know. So, he is saying that information needs to get on that disk. Yeah, I know. The first question is, has the way that the IT was developed, was it structured such that the village's data is separate from the town data? I guess it's probably not. I don't think we can answer that question. And I think that we have two kind of extremes here. One, what you're saying, Andy, is we could, you might have to hire another whole person in order to help the village do this. And what I'm hearing from Brad is, so far it looks like it will not be that impactful and won't require a lot of that extra. So, we don't know the answer, right? Right. So, we have to get the answer. I mean, and I do think that it has to be done sooner or later. You can budget for it. But budgeting for a whole other, I do have to say, I have a gut feeling budgeting for a whole extra IT person to be hired by the town in order to help the village migrate its data. I'm not sure. Maybe that's what's going to have to happen. I'm not saying it has to be a whole person. If it's a portion of a person, we still have the budget for it. But I think it's something, once we get, maybe the IT people can give us a little more focus and a little more nuance and clarity about how much work this is actually going to entail, along with the cost of disrupting or canceling or shorting some of the contracts we have, if there are, I'm not sure what there are. So, maybe we just need to get that information so that we can have a better, more coherent. Instead of trying to wordsmith some clause in here that accounts for all possibilities, let's get a little bit more information and then come back to this. All right. Any other specific comments on the agreement? Tracy's raising her hand. Oh, sorry. Just in general, not specific to IT to this proposal, but if we're requesting information or data from our staff, my absolute preference would be, let's request it once and share it with both boards at the same time. So, there's no confusion, there's no passing back and forth of emails, and everybody's receiving the same information from the same source at the same time. I think that would streamline the process and send things up a little bit. All right. Thanks, Tracy. So, what I have written down is there's a request to add a comment that approval shall not be unreasonably held. There's a question about the indemnity paragraph, but also consideration about issues associated with state and federal law. See if there's a way to reword that section to cover things in a way that's comfortable for the village legal counsel. We need to ask the IT staff for a list of licenses and contracts and I don't know how easy it is to assess the cancellation costs of those. Is that something that we can ask for it, I guess? We'll ask, yeah, we'll look into it. It also depends on what year. Yeah, right. Is it the third year for five years? It's the second year for five years. Right. You may decide, well, maybe we'll just keep that connection for one more year or three. It might be cheaper. It might be cheaper. Right, but we should do that intentionally, not with an agreement to do it. And who's going to pay for it? The question about whether we need different language regarding an end date or regarding termination, some thought may be there. And then we've asked for a reasonable estimate of time required by town staff based on the inputs you've gotten from vendors already. Did I miss anything? Just to clarify that statement about indemnification and being and holding harmless. Our attorney's recommendation is to strike that essentially that entire blue text. Right, but there was just not just a statement. There was some content in that paragraph that I think Tracy raised a question about, that Clydeen agreed that potentially there could be some other language to cover those concerns. That was the part about state, federal requirement. Violation of state or federal regulations concerning protected data. Okay, I just want to quickly look at my notes and make sure I have a time. All right, no, I'm done. All right, any other? Hey, what's the next agreement then? Do we want to go to another agreement or I'm not sure how long this executive session discussion on personnel is going to take? We have an appointment to do and also personnel discussion. And Raj wants to talk about that. I'm sorry about Raj wants to talk about the cannabis in the reading. Right, right. Yeah, yeah, we'll get them. Yeah, we'll finish the rest of the agenda. Yes. So just before we do the trustees, are you okay if we end the agreement conversation now to the other items on the agenda? Yes. Yes. Yes. Select board okay with it? Yes, I just have one question. I didn't see anything about liquor licensing. Is that something that? Well, if they're their own municipality, they would do their own liquor license and I don't know how they would transition if that's up to the state. It's not our problem. Liquor license issued by the town once they become a city. So that just happens organically? They may, they may just, I don't know, they may just have to blanket approve them all. I don't know. I believe liquor licenses are issued on a per year basis. They would probably, we'd have to discuss how they would transfer. I don't think it's much different than you register your car per year. You move to southern Vermont. It's still on file with the state expires you give them the new information and where you go. Yeah, I think you just, you could just have a long way. We'd have to just address it at the time and I believe there's somewhere between 30 and 50 liquor licenses throughout the entire town. So I can't tell you how in your village. So yeah, that's good, good point though, but that's yeah, there's probably handfuls of those kind of things like JPs that were elected by the town become village JPs. I think we issue more dog licenses. There's this dog named Blue that's trouble. We have to deal with them. He's operating on a license. Okay. So Andrew, we're going to move on to other topics. I know Annie Cooper has had her hand up for a while. Should we open the public comment here? I think we should since we just, we did that after the other agreements. So let's do it again. Go ahead, Annie. Hi. Thank you. Thank you, Andy and Andrew. Respectfully to the select board, a gracious and gentle reminder that I as the village resident am represented by the five of you equally currently until such time as any change occurs. This evening, I didn't fully feel respected and represented. And I asked that you just keep in mind that you are all five of this select board members elected and set, including Sue Coke at large as representatives of the entirety of our community. Thank you for hearing me. All right. Thank you, Annie. Good reminder to all of us. Any other public comment? Okay. I'll see if I can find my agenda page again. So there's no need to go into executive session to talk about the agreements, correct? Select board didn't want to go into your own. No, anything's all good. Okay. Then the next thing on the agenda after that is discussion of personnel. We will go into executive session to have that discussion and then moving on to consent agenda. And we want to make a motion to approve. Move to approve the consent agenda. Thank you, Tracy. Do I have a second? Second. Second. Thank you, Sue. Any further discussion from the select board? All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. Select Board approves the consent agenda 5-0. Trustees, entertain a similar motion. So moved. Second. Thank you, George. And thank you, Raj. Is there any further discussion on that motion? Hearing none, all those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody post? Okay. That's new. Thank you. All right. Thank you, Andrew. Moving on to a reading file. Any board member comments on these or any other topics? You wanted to talk? Yeah, it was just a couple quick questions. I guess I missed, I was so wrapped up in these agreements, I missed the fact that we're going to talk about the cannabis memo tomorrow at our trustee meeting. I guess I saw it in our thing tonight. I was just, I don't know what I was thinking. But Mike, and we can continue this tomorrow night. Really, it's fine. It's getting late. But I was wondering, you know, what's being sought from the public and what, you know, about this website and kind of where we are with seeking public input when we haven't had much of a chance to discuss it either. And we seem to not quite have a plan yet that I'm aware of for talking about zoning and any kind of overlays. So I was just curious about the seeking public comment seemed to me to be a bit early, but I was more looking for answers on that. And lo and behold, staff had planned on providing some of those answers, I bet, tomorrow night when we get together as trustees. So my bad for not noticing that. And I guess we'll talk more tomorrow. I don't know if you had more on that, Andy. Greg's got his hand up. Happy to provide a real quick overview now, Raj. Basically, yeah, early days, trying to hear from the public about what questions they have, what concerns they have. Does the public want to opt in or have a vote to opt in in March or April? And starting to think about the zoning piece of it, what concerns do people have? I know there's been some talk about distances from schools and safe walk to school zones. Just trying to get a sense of where to focus efforts and where to try to answer questions to help people make informed decisions about whether or not they want to vote on this. And if we get to that point, how they want to vote on this. And I can add that this last week, the cannabis committee of staff members and a couple of citizens discussed just the same things. Should there be some type of restriction from zoning sitting at the distance of schools? I know that the village has maybe made a suggestion on walking paths to schools. And just today, I think I sent all of you to, it was either today or yesterday. The state's cannabis control board has made a ruling that there's going to be a 500 foot buffer from any schools. So that's their zoning, one of their zoning restrictions. And so this is all kind of fluid and we were going to discuss some of that tomorrow night. And then the idea of public outreach is just that if there's any other concerns that should need to be addressed either through the land development code questions to the state or of a policy nature to the village or the town. And then one would hope that we can do one vote with all of that in it for the town slash village. And so instead of having two different rules, two different things, just one vote. So that's what we're trying to put together. And hopefully that public outreach could happen with both boards inputs. And then we can go back out to the public. That helps. Oh, one last thing. Hopefully everybody understands the way we understand this now. The state is the driving force. They are basically about 90% of the rules and enforcement and the villages in the towns are only going to get little pieces of preference. It's either going to be opt in or opt out in a little bit of zoning and a little bit of control as far as we're hearing it. I'm also hearing the state's cannabis control board will take input, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have to do it. That's what we've kind of heard. Thanks. Thanks, Greg. Thanks, Evan. I need to say that I've been informing people incorrectly because I for a long, long time or until just yesterday or the day before understood that the default was that everybody opts in unless you vote to opt out. And now my understanding that during the last minutes of the not last minutes or last discussions or negotiations between the Senate and the House, it was turned around the other way. So the default is that everybody's opt out unless you opt in. So the pressure that I was feeling to have a vote in March was driven by the fact that if we didn't under an earlier iteration of the bill, we would have been opted in automatically. And that's no longer that that's not the case. I missed that important small little detail at the end there. The issue then is if we don't vote in March is we could end up paying for another election at some other time should we choose to then vote. So the driving force is probably more financial from this standpoint of only paying for one election because we're going to have an election in March anyway. But again, we probably shouldn't rush into it if we're not ready. That's why I was asking the questions of is there a limit to actually getting the appropriate zoning in place before town meeting because my understanding is that if something if the if the vote passes saying yes and a business is established that violates the zoning the zoning we intended to have that they get to stay because it's basically the zoning and the vote need to be insane. But maybe we're having too much discussion. Go ahead. And I can ask this next week. I know it's stated to be on our agenda next week, but I was always under the impression that there was a hard deadline when we had to vote. But according to this memo, there is no deadline for a vote. It's changing. It keeps changing legislative level. And that's why I know I can keep track of it. And as of now it's it's opt in when you want to opt in. And real quickly that's that's part of the website too is just trying to create a kind of centralized location for people who might be interested in this and how it applies to Essex and, you know, latest up to date, what's the legislature doing? Okay, great. Thank you. All right. Any other board member comments? I don't see any hands up. No hands in the room. I'm going to sit on my hands. Okay, then I guess we move back to executive sessions motions. We have two executive sessions. We have to do one is to appoint for the housing commission and the other is for the personnel discussion. We have the motions up. Don, I move it's a select board and trustees enter into exactly a session to discuss the proposed public official appointment in accordance with one dsa section 313 a three and to include the unified manager deputy manager and or assistant manager. Seconds. So one one change to that is you we can't we can't make a motion to get the trustees out on just the select board and I just read what it says. Yeah, and then we need to have the invite the trustees to our select our executive session. Let me try this again. All right. I move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss the proposed public official appointment in accordance with one vsa section 313 a three and to include the trustees the unified manager the deputy manager and or the assistant manager. Thank you, Don. I will still second that. Tracy, thank you for the second. Any further discussion? Those in favor favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes five zero. Do you have the other one? Let the trustees go first. I'm not sure where. The same motion on behalf of the trustees to and also to invite the select board to the meeting. Second. Thank you, George. Thank you, Dan. Any further discussion on that motion? Hearing none. All those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Pass your name and say thank you. Go ahead, Tracy. I move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss the employment of public employees in accordance with one vsa section 313 a three to include the trustees unified manager deputy manager assistant manager and HR director. Oh, second. Okay. Thank you, Tracy. Thank you, Sue. Any further discussion? No. Those in favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes five zero. I'll make the same motion on behalf of the trustees and to invite the select board to the meeting. Second. Thank you again, George and Dan. Any further discussion from the trustees on that motion? Hearing none. All those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Yeah, stand to see again. Thank you. Okay. So will we come back to the public meeting after to do our appointment? Yes. Yes. Yep. So a question that happened in the previously when we went into executive session during a hybrid meeting that was a request from folks online that we come back and also rejoin the online meeting. I think we did this last time. I can log off here. We can come back and I'll log back in. So Scott, no need for you to stick around though. All right. So for those viewing the town meeting TV that's we're going to end that session, but we will come back and reconvene to do our appointment. Should we come to an agreement on that? On teams. On teams. On teams. Yeah, we won't be on. We'll come back to the room. Yeah, we'll be, yeah. Do you think five minutes is enough time for a break? Yep.