 Okay, I will call the August 21st, 2017 Select Board meeting to order and invite you to rise and join me in pledge of allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I can welcome everyone to tonight's Select Board meeting and just remind you, everyone, if you have a cell phone, if you could please put it to silent or turn it off, that would be greatly appreciated, so it doesn't go up during the meeting. Okay, next item is agenda additions and changes. And tonight we don't have the town manager as we normally do. He, his wife had surgery today and he's attending to her, as he should. So, Greg will be covering. So, Greg, do we have any additions and changes before us? We have a email from Susan Kissel. You saw an email in your consent agenda, but this is addressed more to the Select Board, so just formalizing that she is stepping down from the Conservation and Trails Committee due to moving to different parts of the state. Okay, and if she'd like an opportunity for an exit interview, it would be great to ask her if it's obvious why she's moving, but I mean why she's leaving. Sure. I'll offer that. And so that can go into your consent agenda. Okay. Also because Pat Scheidel is not here, you can delete the evaluation of the municipal manager from tonight's agenda. That's 5J and we plan to reschedule that for a time when Pat is here. Yes. And it looks like we have one of the captains, Rick Gehry, talking about dispatch discussion. Okay. Great. And we have some minutes changed. Yep, some minutes changed as we usually talk about those during minutes. Okay, very good. Okay, so we have those items, the note from Irene and the note from Susan Kissel, the ad, the agenda, Andy. The email from Susan is already in our packet. It's a separate email. So one went to, originally this did, this in your packet went to Darren Shibbler, who's the staff person for the conservation interest committee. And I just asked him to ask her to send a formal resignation to the board. So that's going through the manager's office through Travis. Right. Same thing. Okay, nothing else? Okay, so I need a motion to add those particular items to our consent agenda. Thank you, Irene. Do I have a second? Second. Sue, any further discussion on the many of the agenda to add those? Mine is actually not going to be to consent it to the dispatch item that's on the docket. Okay, thank you for that question. So it would be 5D. Okay. Thanks. Sue, I assume you're good with that. Yes. Okay, thank you. All right. All those in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, most passed is 5-0. I'm going to move on to the next item which is public to be heard. That's a time for the public or select board to speak to the select board on items that are not on the agenda. Is there anyone here tonight wishing to speak during public to be heard? Hearing none. Then we're going to move on to our first business item, which is kind of a fun one. We invite Chief Charlie Cole up here to just introduce it. This is a fire truck presentation tonight. Good evening, everybody. Show and tell. I'd like to invite the members of the board as well as the members that are here in the audience tonight to come outside if you would like. The two new pieces of fire apparatus that were ordered last year have finally arrived. We've properly equipped them all in their own service. We'd like to show that if you want to join us, you can do that. Okay, is there anything in particular, Charlie, that we should be looking at as we're... We're walking around one of them in the fire engine. A particular note to that is the brand and size of that truck is consistent with the village ladder trucks. Here's manufacturing. Correct. Our one of them has a commercial cab just because of the size and the weight of the truck. We couldn't put it on a custom chassis. So that one's a can worth. That's the tanker that's out there. The engine, the fire engine has the same pump module and the cab and general design as the village ladder truck, which is also consistent with a new truck that they've just signed paperwork to order to replace one of their older trucks. So we're trying to standardize the fleet that helps with training and familiarity with all of the trucks. So it's also the quality that goes into the manufacturer that we've chosen. So, Charlie, we've got 10 minutes to it, you think? Sure. Okay. So we'll be back here by about a quarter after? Yep. Okay. Great. Let's do it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Shut that. Yeah. I'm okay, I'm a kid at heart. I'm not saying anything. I'm not saying anything. I'm pretty well. Yeah, I'm just being born on. Yeah, okay, how about you? Yeah, okay. Fire trucks are not my thing. My dad is hurting. Appreciate it. Let's sit around for that. Oh, dear. Let's see if there's a discussion. No. No. There. What's your name? Bobby. Paula. I'm going to come into the news. Actually, I guess it started last week here because of the J.R.P. last week. Oh no. Oh yeah, one last break. And then I kept coming just to know what was going on. Yeah. Do you live in the town? I live in the village. I actually live right up in the house. I have two friends on Athens Drive. Okay. What's your name? Have you been here long? Yes, I grew up in... Oh, okay. I grew up here. I grew up in a house. I grew up in... Well, that's nice. It seems to be quite a few of the families. So many of them are inheritable by... Yeah, that's... I've been told that. Yes, we have a few families. Like, kids that I... It makes some continuity in the neighborhood. And there's most places that live in the whole of the place. The most visiting relationships. How are you? I've been running around. Physically running around from no place to the next. Is that more in there? I'm usually very sensitive. So it's a lot of money to notice. Okay, so maybe I'll come back in a minute or two. Actually, it's pretty comfortable. Is that okay? Yeah, it's indeed great. Yeah. Let me take something about you. That's right here. He's an... He's here. He's here. Yeah. Can I have a chair for both eyes? A lot of bells and whistles. That's not the answer. We are good. They look about the same, you know we're changing. No, we are good. Thank you. There's the next year, it's that meeting on the development. I'm going to come back next year. Right now we can't build that high. We want to... Do you want to pull up this eight storey building down there? It was a big one. Three. So, generally speaking, I live right behind here. So, I have a lot of questions. I've been seeing a lot of shit in the major business. They don't always take large portions, but that's one that takes a lot of shit. What are the buildings that they put in storage? What are the buildings for? Well, we carry down half of them all and put in the apartments. Not downtown. The building last week was three-quarter. I had been told about it before then. But maybe they're lower about eight minutes ago. And it was kind of denied. And so, nobody heard anything else about it. It was an accident. Oh, I know. It was somebody else in the economic development commission. It may or may not be. And that's not the clear open paper. I need to read that. I'm going to read that. You're pretty cool. Well, that was very exciting to see that new apparatus, very impressive equipment. Supplied care of the Essex residence, so thank you. All right, the next item of business is five beads. We have a number of interviews today. We'll go in order on the agenda, and in the case of the Library Board of Trustees, since there are more applicants than there are openings, our practice has been to ask the first person on the list, just in this case, the IRS, to stay, and then when the time comes, we'll have Lorna and Joan exit temporarily, and we'll call you in, but welcome to stay until that time. So the first item interview is Melinda Monroe for the Economic Development Commission, and so I'll invite her up to the table up here please. And full disclosure, she's a Rotarian, which I am as well, and Mike is too, so very excited to have you here tonight. First of all, thank you for wanting to volunteer for our community. That's really greatly appreciated. So what we'd like to do is ask you to give us a little bit about your background, what you'd like to share, and then what is your interest on being on the Economic Development Commission, and then we'll open it up to questions from the board. So a little bit about my background, full disclosure, I'm originally from New Jersey, but both my mom and my brother graduated from UVM, so we spent tons of time up in Vermont as a child. I ended up marrying someone who grew up in Essex, we met in Montana, so I spent about 10 years in Bozeman, Montana, after transferring there in college. I got a degree in accounting, undergrad, and also a master's in accounting, and I'm now practicing CPA. I've worked for publicly traded clients doing auditing, I've worked with non-profits. Just recently I was an industry in a hospital setting, where I was an accounting manager for two hospitals in Spokane, Washington. I have moved around a lot, my husband ended up joining the Air Force, so I kind of moved with him along the way. We recently, he recently got hired by the New Hampshire Guard, and we just had a two-year-old, so that prompted our move back to Vermont. We're here for a long haul, I don't expect to move anytime soon, we've purchased a house on a lost nation road, and I actually work at Villa-Duel Wells right on Main Street in Essex. Wonderful. So my whole entire life was fantastically shrunk into this little area between Colchester, where my in-laws live, Essex and Waterbury, where some friends from Montana actually ended up moving. So it's been fantastic, I've really enjoyed it, and I've really gotten to know the area, and the different parts of Essex and the whole entire interaction between the Junction and Essex is still very hard for me to understand, not growing up here, but it's something I'd like to learn more about and understand more about. Very good. Thank you. So I'll open it up to questions from the board. Any questions from the board? Okay. I know that we have members of the Economic Development Commission here tonight, and I believe they helped recruit the Linda. Right. Was that? Right. As in the pre-printed recorder, you don't necessarily generate interest. A personal touch reaching out is great. Yeah. Well, I mean, just what Linda's got, she's an accountant, she's doing business work, and seems to be interested in understanding the Essex economy better, and that's exactly what the EDC needs, and so we're really pleased that she's interested in joining us. Yeah. Ways to diversify the tax base is... Yeah. ...is vital. And what about the time commit? Greg, could you tell us how often you meet and where you meet and so on? Yeah. Mondays at noon, every other Monday, second and fourth Monday of the month. Okay. Does that work with your schedule? Yep. It works great for me. Definitely. I have plenty of... With my husband's traveling schedule, really, my limiting factor was full disclosure daytime meetings because of the availability of daycare, and so I've been looking for a way to get involved, basically, since we moved to November, but realistically evening meetings are hard for me, that's kind of family time for us, so anything during the day really works great for me. So it's a good match. So... Great. All right. Have you had a chance to go to any of the EDC meetings? No, not yet. Okay. No. Hopefully soon. I know, Greg kind of breathed me. It's only been really in the last, probably, month or so that Greg really kind of filled me in on it, so I'm just excited to get involved with it. I mean, we live, right, we live five minutes from Essex Junction, or there are the outlets in Essex, and that whole area is just, since I moved here, it's been really fascinating for me because I've seen it kind of just change over the years since we've returned home to visit family versus kind of where we are now, and it seems to me there's just a lot of opportunity, but a lot of open space there as well, and so that's really kind of concerning and exciting at the same time, just kind of figuring out where that's going to go, and then seeing the nest open, and jewels on the green that's right there, and kind of just the reinvention of laying farms has just been, I think it's been amazing, and so seeing all that, I just kind of want to be a part of that, and I want my community to thrive because I think a thriving community, and like you said, a thriving tax base kind of makes the place what it is and where you want to live, and so I kind of want to be a part of developing that for me, and like I said, with the sun on board, you know, that's usually to have a great for the community, for a lot of people. Wonderful. So Greg has been chair of the EDC for quite some time, and he works tirelessly, so do expect to be very active in that, along with the rest of the team, and Jim's here too from the EDC as well. We appreciate that. Okay, any further questions? Thank you very much for stepping up, and expressing a willingness to serve. Yeah, we appreciate it. We're very excited. Yeah, we all appreciate that, thank you. So the process is, the select board will at the end of the meeting go into an executive session, have discussions and then come out of the executive session to make a motion, and then somebody from Pat's office, probably Greg, will contact you tomorrow about the decision. Okay, so thank you again for wanting to come forward. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, next up in the interview list is Jonathan Peach Kenworthy for the Energy Committee, so I'll invite him up to this table as well, and ask you the same thing, if you could give us some background on yourself and what your interest is on being on the Energy Committee. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. Just to give you a little background on myself, but I just bought a house in Essex with my wife back in March. I work, I grew up in Montpelier, so moved up to the big city, pretty happy with that decision, been very happy with Essex. I've worked at Global Foundries. I worked for the State of Vermont at Global Foundries as a benefit program specialist in the Economic Services Division. I started back in 2012. My expertise is an energy assistance program for low-income customers that saves them 25% on their Green Man Power Bill. We also run a program with Vermont Gas that gives people with an income below 185% at the federal poverty level a discount on their bill as well. My kind of expertise is technology. I like using technology to make things better, make things more efficient. About a decade ago, everyone was trying to make things faster, but these days it's all about efficiency. With the LED lighting, computers you don't see the gigahertz increases that you use to see now. It's all about making chips that are faster and use a lot less electricity. So this is like my first time volunteering for anything. I'm a little bit nervous, so I do apologize if I'm talking a little fast. I usually also work in Global Foundries in a call center setting, so I don't normally see this many people on a day-to-day basis. That's why I'm interested. I love your enthusiasm. I'll open it up to the board for questions. Anybody? Yeah, there's five open seats. I think it's been very active lately that concern you. It does not concern me. Like I said, I saw this opportunity and I said, I want to get involved. I looked at what has happened in the past and I was like, this is it. I'd like for it to be more active. I'd like to... be a thrifty guy. My wife would be a little embarrassed. I'm all about making things more efficient. I'd like to see projects in the future that Essex is involved in to get people on board. Things are happening so quickly. When I go to my friends' houses, when I go to my parents' house, I say, oh my goodness, what are you doing with these appliances? Things have changed so much. Things have been so much cheaper. I want to get people... I want to see change. I want to let people know the programs that are out there. Just going on front porch forums, I see a lot of questions about electric bills. There's a lot of programs people just don't know about. I'd like to be a guiding force in making people aware of those programs and making them available to the public. I would paint maybe a slightly different picture than Andy. I think that there is a lot of enthusiasm in the folks that are ramping the energy committee back up have a lot of really good ideas for projects, but they need enthusiastic members that are going to be committed to being a part of that. So my question is the meetings are in the evenings, Wednesday evenings, twice a month, once a month now. Any challenge in getting to those meetings, because it's really important that you participate in those meetings. I've got a pretty free schedule. My wife and I, we don't have kids right now. I spend a lot of time mowing the lawn. You know, these new homeowner things mowing the lawn. I've got a whole Ryobi set that I've been trying to use every chance I can get. I blow the driveway off my neighbor right now. I live on Park Street. My neighbor is, he goes, oh my goodness, I can't believe that, you know, now I have to go and mow my lawn every time you're out there. So it's not time commitments. I can make every meeting that's not a problem. Good to know. Any other questions to making the rest of us look at? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. You know, maybe, maybe I'd be sick. You just want to turn it down. We are, we are excited about rebuilding the energy committee and getting really motivated people on that. I'll tone it down. One notch. No, no, no. Just the honeydew list. We'll get enthusiastic about that. And just to clarify, there may be five openings at the moment, but two of those openings are sort of spoken for but the folks who committed back in June to interview for them were unable to make a Monday meeting until October. They've been making the energy meetings on Wednesdays. They just couldn't get to a select board meeting. Well, I'm glad that I, you know, I was nervous. I'm glad that I made it. Under the wire. Thank you. Anything else for General? Okay, and you heard the spiel about the session and so on, so I won't repeat it. But thank you so much for wanting to step over and volunteer. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. You're welcome to stay for the rest of the meeting. If you like it, you're welcome to go. It's your choice. I'm very excited. Maybe I'll stack. Maybe I'll stack. Okay, so the next interviews are for seats on the Library Board of Trustees. There are currently two openings and we are fortunate to have three wonderful candidates tonight. So when we have that situation, our practice has been to just go according to the agenda. It's not alphabetical, it's just according to the agenda. So tonight we have Lorna Swarhorn. Is that right? Okay, great. And Joan Janssen. Okay, so what I'd like to do is invite Iris up to the table and then if I could ask Lorna and Joan to just kindly step outside into the foyer for a few minutes and then we'll have ask Lorna to come in. So Iris, hello. Hi. Thank you for coming forward. Full disclosure, you and I worked at the Red Cross. Back in 2006 in Binghamton. Do you remember that? The two weeks there. So again, thank you for coming. Full disclosure? Yeah, another disclosure. My wife is a Library trustee. Yes, and we're happy that she is. Yes. So we're going to ask you, obviously, but you know by now, your background and then your interest of being chosen to be a member of a trustee for the Library. So just asking me about my own background. Yeah, just about yourself. Maybe about how the qualifications fit in nicely with this. Okay, let's see. Well, we moved to Vermont in 1986. But, and lived in Wilson for a while then moved to Essex and have always been very involved in the Library as a family. My voice were major consumers in both libraries until they left home and still I really enjoy take advantage of a lot of what the Library has to offer. I'm in one of the book groups. I attend programs always bit of the sale and I just enjoy spending time there. And now I think it's such a wonderful resource for the community. I've been on a number of boards over the years at my synagogue. You know, I've volunteered at BPR and different organizations. I've done everything from interviewing candidates for positions at an organization to writing. Thank you guys for donations. I like working with people and collaborating with problems with organizations that I volunteer with. What I do, my job is I have a business. I do vocational evaluations. I work with people who are unable to go back to a job because of an injury. And I help do an in-depth career assessment and look at their education, work experience, interest, temperament, and I just try to help figure out some career options for them going forward. But it's my own business. I have a lot of flexibility for time. I don't think I have any difficulty getting to meetings. I live really close by, which is nice for me. I occasionally walk to the library too. Part of my walk. That's nice. And I hope that answers the first question. Thank you. Hey, open up questions from the board for Iris. Anybody have one? What do you see as challenges for the Essex Free Library in the years ahead? So, I would suspect that a pretty frequent challenge for a lot of town departments or a lot of the resources is just something that's available, trying to provide the best service that they can and meet the needs of the community and just maybe creative ways to reach out. I think it's constantly, the mission would be to try to have more people as many people as possible or always have more people using the library. I think over the years I kind of take a look at that in the annual report and it's just interesting because I think it's pretty much usually they're making games and that's a good thing. But anyway, so you know also the fundraising, like I said, the Plan Big Sale, I'd love to be a part of that and I think there are other programs that they're looking for input about ideas, I guess, about other ways to increase participation or library visits and all that sometimes that wouldn't cost a lot of money necessarily. It wouldn't cost money at all. I've been to the adult coloring and I think there have been some really interesting ideas and things I've tried over the years too. So anyway, I think that's probably an ongoing sort of challenge. What can we do with the resources that we have? What's the most efficient of what we have? Okay, thank you. Any other questions from the board? You mentioned fundraising and with the advent of electronic books, the book sale sales have been going down considerably in recent years. Any thoughts on other fundraising options? The one fundraiser they do over here is that book and plan sale. Well, I think that it's going to require thinking outside the box really just because of what you say things are changing and people are using library resources differently. Most of the books now that I get, I would say I get as e-books or audiobooks, so not the physical books are right. People are just using the library in a different way or using the resources in the traditional ways. But as far as fundraisers I need to think more about that. I don't know. I think you have to also, one idea I was just thinking about is some kind of a particular kind of movie series or something like that, something that might bring people that might have other interests that some kind of event, but I think you have some limitations around space too but maybe another venue could hold a fundraiser where the money would be for the library. I guess I think there's a lot of possibilities, but that's something for sure to think about. I'm sure that's going to be a big part of the task. A library governance in Vermont is kind of unique. There's some independence from the town. The trustees have different powers than say other committee members might have for a different kind of committee. One thing that we might have before us is discussion about consolidation. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or maybe this is... I do. I've thought about that because I know that's come up. I would hope that there would be a way to at least keep both buildings functioning because I think it's great to have a library pretty close by. If there were just one state open, that would be really unfortunate. I don't know enough about what's involved in administration and staff positions. I don't know. Maybe there are possibilities for some consolidation around that. Maybe sharing some resources that are not shared now. I feel that if I had more of the facts, knew more about that, it would be... I'd be happy to help brainstorm and research or just put our heads together about something. It's possible that there can be some money that can be saved, but I hope both buildings are still going to stay open and would be available for the community. Anybody else? Other questions for ours? Irina, want to thank you again for stepping forward. Appreciate that. And you heard the spiel about it. I will contact you tomorrow. Thank you again. Appreciate it. Good to bring Lorna. Hello. Welcome. Sorry to keep you waiting. Suspense. So if you could give us a little bit about your background and tell us what your interest is on becoming a trustee of the library board. My background is 40 years as a healthcare administrator. We moved here to Vermont, my husband and I, 10 years ago by New Jersey and previous to that was Canada. We've lived nine of those 10 years in Essex and the large part was because the library. It was the library that made us choose Essex over where we were renting at the time in Shelburne. Once we arrived here I became very active with the library. It became sort of a lifeline for me because we have no children to meet people. And also I'm an avid library person as one could attest by my fines in New Jersey. I probably paid for a whole new wing. And I came here and found out that you don't have fines which was probably the worst thing for some like me. Change. Anyway I became very active with the friends of the library and became on the committee that was involved with dealing with the bake sale, the plant bake sale which is the largest fundraiser and so I did the marketing for that. For I think three years at which time I chose that it was time to move on, I've done sort of how many times can you do the same thing again. So my interest in the library is I believe the library is a huge component of any community and I think that this library has some great programs that it does within its limited funds and I'd like to see it sustain and actually even develop even more activities into the community. So that's it in a nutshell. Wonderful. Thank you Lorna. I'd be interested if you had a fire engine committee though. Okay so I'll open up to the board for questions for Lorna. Harry. What do you see the challenges for the SXC library in the years ahead? Money and the internet. Money and what? And the internet. The internet is taking away books from us in our hands and along with it people don't see the need to support, to sustain the purchase of books and yet realize there's a large community that still wants books and I think particularly for children. Not every child has an iPad. And it's not good for their eyes. Thank you. Any other questions? So Mike go ahead. Do you see an area for growth with audio books? There is actually quite an extensive library of audio books at this library and they do have the program through the state where you can take on my difficulty but that program is that you have to wait sometimes two or three weeks and if you're anything like me that when you've got the mood to read that book you want to be able to access it tomorrow and not three weeks from now. But I think they do a pretty good program and I think that it'll just continue to develop as long as there are CD players available because those are a dying audio machine. No I just had to get one because I needed to have my books on tape. I'm a huge fan of books on tape. They're a big deal. Thank you. Eddie? You mentioned the books out. With the advent of electronic books there's fewer and fewer books get purchased each year. Any ideas or proposals for how to improve the fundraising opportunities with the librarian? I think that's something that I would defer to the chief librarian for activities in terms of what they would need. I think though while the plant and the book sell it's been my impression and I've certainly seen the figures has been a huge thing. The bake sale and stuff. People that contribute to bake sales are getting smaller and smaller in terms of that community. So I think that the challenge for the library will be to find alternative ways of raising money out there be it lottery sales or something like that. They can have a big wine tasting night in the library or have a book where you have a cooking show that night. There's lots of ideas out there. There isn't anything you can't take from another library to use as one razor even if it's in another state. Sue? I'm just curious. I don't think you touched on it. What kind of experience do you have working on volunteering on a board and what role do you tend to kind of play when you're in the board? When I was in healthcare in Canada the board I served on was the Missing and Exploited Children's Board for Canada and for the province and I have served in a number of executive capacities with that. I've served on a number of other smaller boards and usually ended up in some executive capacity with them sometimes by default. Thank you. Anybody else? Andy? Yes, we're moving forward with discussions with the village. What are the possibilities of future library consolidation discussions? Any thoughts or about that? I think it's a hot potato I'd rather not touch. I'm well versed with politics so far. Anybody else? Other questions? Okay, so Laura you will go into executive session at the end, have a discussion and come out and there's again three candidates with two openings to make a decision and then somebody from the manager's office will contact you. That's why. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for stepping forward. It's greatly appreciated. Another committee. Okay, hello Joan if you would take a seat by the microphone over there. I'd like to welcome you and we all thank you profusely for wanting to step forward to volunteer in our community. So if you could give us a little background about yourself and what your interest is on becoming a trustee of the library board. We'd like to hear that. Alright, well I am retired from Verizon 36 years and then I work now for Pearson Professional Center where we test people like doctors and nurses and EMTs but also I go to school at Johnson still and so I have two degrees there but I'm a late starter so now people who are 65, I think it's 62 they changed it can go there for half price so I'm going for fun and a few years ago Senator Doyle's class and I was in it made a film about Chittenden County he's made films about every county and then the last one was I think Johnson but the one before that was Waterbury. When we did Chittenden County Bill said you take Essex because you live there so I did the investigating part about the cemetery and the library and where the plot map was and the charter and it was just great. I've always liked libraries, I may. One of my passions is genealogy so I spend a lot of time in the library all over the country and this library because I've lived here since age five I've spent a lot of time in our library too ever since it was in that little building across from where it is now so I saw the sign and it was when I go past the library sometimes I think she had my door and then I saw the sign that said there was an opening for the library board Here you are. Here I am. Thank you. Thank you Joan. So I'll open it up to the board for questions for Joan. Anybody have questions? What challenges do you see for Essex Free Library in the coming years? You know it really kind of scares me a few years ago they were talking about the merge between the village and the town and why do we need two libraries? That was really frightening. I mean that library is every time I go in there there are a lot of people there. The parking spaces are you know maybe just one or two I think that it's essential to have that library there I think that the programs for the I have friends who bring their children to you know the programs for the children I've been there for the Newfoundland right along with the kids who's there when they leave the store and I've been to lots of programs I think that a lot of people are invested in that library and so I think that with the food in the plant sales the bake in the plant sales and especially the craft I think that brings in a lot of people are there more things that the library could do? I'm not sure that I could think of just right now off the top of my head what it might be but I think they do a really good job congratulations on your retirement oh well you know I've been retired since 99 that's still fine congratulations on that what did you do for Verizon were you part of any committees within the company at all today did Verizon do any of that kind of stuff and were you members were you a member of? no Verizon didn't do too many committees the only committee that was the union you certainly were we were open from 8 to 8 so I was 11 to 8 because during that time I hit Sharpey Rescue so it was important that I be and I had a fairly young son right there weren't too many committees any other questions from the board she answered both of mine already I think it's a similar question to Mike but have you volunteered? I volunteered for the ego restoration program for four years and then I volunteered to be directors at Shelton Farm I volunteered I was the veteran and I would like to volunteer to clean the cemetery stones and rocking him but I'm working on that yes and maybe be on the cemetery board here right another possible opportunity hearing none again we want to first say thank you for being willing to be a volunteer and I think you heard that we'll have a discussion later and then somebody from the manager's office will contact you I really appreciate it so the next interviews there's one opening and it's on the for the Essex Rescue Community Advisory Board and it so happens that they're two selectmen that are willing to put in time on that myself and Irene so since one of the people to be interviewed what I'd like to do is pass the gavel next year and if you would run the final two interviews I think I can do that thank you I think we just learned about this opportunity at the last meeting because the gentleman that was in the position but yes he resigned so there was an opportunity I'm curious if between that meeting and this meeting if there's been any public awareness of the opportunity to volunteer it's been advertised in our typical places so online there's a bulletin board up like you heard earlier it's not huge but it has been posted for at least a few weeks well this one's new but it just came up two weeks ago it might be a month I'd have to double check I just heard about it two weeks ago but we heard about it from Ben I think in July at some point I guess my point behind the question is although I am very thankful that we have two existing volunteers that want to volunteer more I think that's great but I also think it may be an opportunity for someone else to get involved if there's any way that we can what's the board's pleasure? I'm sorry thank you for the reminder I think it's been a duly advertised if we have viable candidates to interview we should interview the candidates and that differ with the possibility that someone else in favor of moving forward I would concur with Susan's recommendation that Essex Rescue itself as an organization is about to have a full-time executive director as of September 5th so they're in a big transition mode themselves I do not expect the community advisory board to be meeting anytime imminently so I think if the select board wanted to put this off for a few weeks or a month we wouldn't miss the next quarterly meeting for not having a rep that would be my preference and I get that maybe the venues that we're using to advertise it are not going to reach any additional people but it just feels like this one was kind of a short one great just for your information we did have one person who asked about it apart from Max and Irene and the person spoke to Ben Gillum the former rep and got some more background and decided not to apply at this time so but it has been out there and people have heard about it but we can certainly keep it open if that's the board's desire and see if anybody else steps up I mean and when you mention the usual places that's the bulletin boards themselves or has it been on from which form where masses of people might actually see it in their inbox I don't recall seeing it on from which form and I get all nine of them so I usually by the time I read it the ninth time it sinks in oh yeah there's an opening Max? I'd be fine I think just posting it again wouldn't be helpful but if you wanted to do the personal reach out kind of like what Greg Morgan does on the EEC then I think that would be a worthwhile thing to do but to just post it I would just rather go at night but if we're willing to reach out we think we have someone then absolutely I'm curious I'm not really quite sure I understood that is there someone that you're aware of that is just two of us okay I haven't reached out but if we agree that that's the thing we want to do then I would certainly give it some more thought and see if there's somebody else that we could convince to volunteer would you like a motion to that effect the table in or to postpone it how would you like to handle it everybody's had their say then yes I would I would move that we table the interview process for the ASICS rescue community advisory board until future date pending more outreach to people who aren't already serving on committees and that outreach you referred to is by the select board we're not asking staff we're not asking staff to do that outreach absolutely yeah anybody that wants to do it but I need to staff count if they'd like to but no pressure do I have a second? I'll second it's been moved and seconded to to table this agenda item all those in favor of tabling this item say aye aye any nays motion passes 5-0 thank you Mike Mr. Chairman okay then we're going to move on to the next item of business which is 5C and tonight we have Charlie Baker who's Executive Director of the Regional Planning Mission for Chittenden County and he's going to give us an update on the a lot of work that's been going on for regional dispatch so we have your report but I want to summarize it for the folks here sure to do that thank you for the introduction and thank you Pat on the committee and Irene I think has been at every single meeting in which I have not so she may be able to fill in some blanks that I might have so in your packet I think you got the little memo you got a PowerPoint and you got a draft agreement about creating Chittenden County Public Safety Authority and a draft MOU about cross-sharing for member communities I'm not going to read in detail those last two because I care about you I appreciate that but to the chair's point there really has been a lot of good work done at this committee a lot of hours have gone into kind of turning how to make this work it's always challenging we have six to eight communities trying to figure out how to do something together and I know you guys have a lot of experience in these kinds of conversations so I'm going to kind of use the PowerPoint to talk from and kind of review the topic and what's in front of you and hopefully that helps anyone else who's interested understand it so what we're talking about is creating a Chittenden County Regional Dispatch Union Municipal District and I'm going to give you kind of the introduction to what this is the first next slide kind of talks about why are we doing this one big reason is to reduce the amount of time that occurs now between column nine on one which is answered by the state police in Williston and then the transfer and handoff of the call to local dispatchers and so you'll see the latest that we had was that at seventy one extra seconds each call question I'm sorry yeah is this available online that we can pull it up so that the audience can also see this as you work through these slides I am not aware that this is available online unless it's in your packet online so I think it just kind of went out email good question thank you no problem also see some other stats in there about trying to get more consistent with national fire protection association standards that map there is the map of all the public safety answering points so you see the light blue area which covers Essex but most of Chittenden County all those areas in light blue are actually nine on one answers out of the Williston state police barracks in the dark blue which is the southern part of Chittenden County Shelburne Hinesburg are answered by Shelburne is a PSAP public safety answering point the next two slides talk a little bit more detail about why we're doing this also staffing six of our municipalities typically only have one dispatcher on staff any given time there's no redundancy so doing this consolidation for increased staffing efficiency time for supervision quality assurance more training and career advancement also for dispatchers mutual aid is a second issue right now there's kind of a manual sequential process where dispatchers have to see which provider is available we're looking at getting through consolidation having a collective view of participating agencies available services for computer aided dispatch the third reason is really about fire EMS calls we're really not up to national standards in terms of how we handle fire EMS calls dispatchers right now kind of hand it off and the person then out in the field kind of on their own the best practice as I understand it is for the dispatcher to stay with the call stay with the emergency responder and then really the fourth point here is the same point about moving from a two-stage system when you call 901 to a single-stage system when you call 901 that same person can dispatch the emergency responder to you thanks a lot great whichever way you want to go next slide thanks so we're talking about a union municipal district which is really creating a new legal municipality so that looks like it's going to be really helpful but now it's got really distracting so a union municipal district is not a it's not a new idea in Chittinac County we have several Green Mountain Transit, the Champlain Water District, the Solid Waste District are all union municipal districts who is working on this we kind of mentioned the joint survey committee the RPC has not a voting member of that committee but really we serve as staff support minutes where the kind of the fiscal office for it so the money that has been collected to work on this has been going through our office and the legal services have been contracted with through our office the joint survey committee the next slide kind of talks about it just gives you the statutory reference of where that authorization come from it's a funny name but that is the name and statute that they say you must have a joint survey committee to examine doing a union municipal district the next slide really gives you just the link to our website where information all the joint survey committee meeting agenda packets are there's also a technical committee that's been working and there's also some background section that has some of the history of this topic this is not a new topic in Chittinac County I think we saw the first article about this the pre-press from 1968 saying maybe it would be a good idea to recalculate this batch so what is in the agreement so the agreement is basically like a charter it's called an agreement though to form a union municipal district it's been drafted I mentioned with support from legal council and some consultation also with legislative council and the attorney general's office one of the formal steps in doing this is to have the attorney general review this and make sure it is in agreement with state law and then the next few slides kind of go into a little bit more detail about how sorry so this is an agreement but do you have plans on turning it into a charter should this go forward it's technically by statute as I understand it's just called an agreement but it's the same as a charter so we've been kind of using those terms interchangeably it is the governing document but I thought there was a little different process between making an agreement versus making a charter so if you're asking if we're going to take it to the state legislature to have the legislature create the agreement or charter that is not such totally required and that is not contemplated at this at least at this stage yep thank you thanks for asking that and so the next slide talks about at least this stuff is being drafted right now with the idea that with select board support that this could be on the ballot for 2018 town meeting day and the governance structure talking about having a board of directors made up of the chief executive officer of each member of municipality and then the staff really led by a public safety communications director the reports to that board the next slide gives you a little bit more detail of kind of the thought about that with so you see the kind of the top box the board 5 to 8 of the member of municipalities to the left there is the notion of having an advisory committee which is really made up of the police fire EMS chiefs the orange box in the middle there again is that public safety communications director and below that we're talking about shift supervisors training in QAQC type of supervisor professional on IT telecom professional and then the dispatchers at the bottom with maybe some targeted roles BPD is a burlington police department because they are so popular they get many more calls than the rest of the town so maybe one just dedicated to the police general police dispatch for the rest of the county dispatch fire EMS dispatch and fire EMS ops and then that one circle which is not really part of the organization but a little note on the right hand side that oh yes there are assessments and bills that go up to the 5 to 8 member municipalities and who we're talking about members at this point is any community in Chinda county that currently runs a dispatch center or has formed an inter municipal agreement to be part of a dispatch center so those are the municipalities of Burlington Colchester Essex, Milton, Shelburne, South Burlington, Wilson and Lewinowski and second there's an and call here and has voter authorization to be a member which really means at town meeting day the voters have decided the regional dispatch group so by the structure right now the police chiefs, public safety chiefs who report to managers or mayors are responsible for good management of public safety dispatch the legislative bodies have the authority to control the budget obviously and right now we have separate operations in each municipality the model we're talking about would be having the chiefs play an advisory role but again to the manager or mayor as a director and being responsible for good management of public safety dispatch operation and similarly with the legislative bodies having the authority to control the budget of the public safety operation but instead of multiple operations a single operating entity so trying to keep basically the basic structure pretty similar to how it works now just doing it together as opposed to separately the next page we've got into more detail about budgeting and this is to do this in a way that works for the municipalities means that this authority would have to budget earlier than towns do so that you can take a look at it consider it in your budgeting process so we're talking about a schedule where the public safety authority would draft the budget and get it to you by the first Monday in November and have an initial public hearing then try to then adopt the budget by the first Monday in December and then it gets brought back to you you kind of get two shots at it so it's not in this slide but in the agreement you'll see there's an actual extra step in here of having a public hearing in November but the member of the legislative bodies would have the opportunity to vote on the budget within 30 days and then of course and so this would kind of get it done for you in January before you're finalizing your municipal budget going to town meeting day and that has a nice note invoices get sent to you after that for the following fiscal year so we're trying to get the budgeting all really done by January so you know what the budget is for July 1 and then cost sharing this is also the big challenge how do you decide how much each municipality pays so in the MOU for the cost sharing MOU the model is that the first one to two years would really be based on what you spend now so and I think there's a lot of notion about trying to keep this pretty stable for municipalities so keep it to what you spend now finalize this cost sharing MOU and then ultimately base the service and the expense to towns based on your calls for service with a three year rolling average so that you know some big incident happens one year you don't get a huge spike in your cost but we try to smooth that out over a few years and also you'll see in here the notion that even if one town pays a lot less initially and it's getting brought up to the average no town would be asked to do more than 4.9% jump in any given year so again trying to keep things stable and smooth on the cost side and then if there's kind of a second step to joining so if your residents say thumbs up join there's a second step where the legislative body needs to approve the MOU so I think this is a little bit of a safety valve for one of the municipalities the financials just don't make sense you don't have to join until you approve the cost sharing agreement and say okay now we're in we're going to pay our share into it and on the flip side if you don't approve that within two years then you're basically out of the union and not incur costs or receive services until you approve the MOU so again we're trying to stage this through so that there's and I think this is a large response to comments that were made at this table over the last number of months to make sure you have some check points where you're not jumping into the deep end but you can kind of wade in as you feel comfortable and the MOU kind of gave you the basics on that but it's really to get that initial funding and also talk about long term funding also a provision about how to onboard additional members it also talks a little bit about towns and public safety services that would contract with the entity so there are a lot of towns in Chittenden County that well there are other contracts so if you kind of go outside the urban towns most of those towns contract for service some just get it directly from the state police so there's a provision in there and then there's some public safety services that just contract directly with town or with people for dispatch like the sheriff's office and the cost allocation and stuff for last and I don't know how well you can read this and I'm going to squint a little bit myself but this is a kind of initial estimate and I should give a lot of credit to Aaron Frank assistant town manager Colchester and I think we all owe some debt to Colchester for the amount of time that they've invested in working on this he's spent a lot of time working with every town and your staff kind of getting the details of the existing cost this is his best guess on the long term funding for FY22 you'll see total calls including contract service calls are 158, 159,000 calls contract calls are 11,000, sheriff calls are 3,900 so member towns have about 143,144,000 calls a year and you can see the breakdown based on the calls so this would be in the long term when we go to the calls for service model it would look something like this estimating a total budget of 3.1 and you can see the breakdown Burlington 961,000, Essex half of that for 43, pick your other favorite town and so anyway that would be kind of the all in budget and Greg if you can go to the next page Aaron this is current existing costs so in the case of well the total is 3.5 we were looking at 3.1 for the budget so for most of the towns it goes down some it's up a little bit for instance Colchester so Colchester, Colchester staff mostly drafted this their number actually goes up your number based on 443 in the future is $80,000 less than the 523 that you currently pay so do not take any of this to the bank these are estimates, initial estimates but I think it's showing two things one trying to keep some stability for town budgeting but also the belief that there is cost savings here in the long term maybe in the order of 10% or so maybe not huge but for cost savings and getting a much more effective efficient service safer service really does that mean those are estimates? that's a good question I don't know what that used to refer to but let's go with that and I think probably the there's probably an answer because it's a little bit challenging in some of the towns to get pure costs dispatch is not budgeted as a separate department I don't think in any of the towns so you really have to do a lot to figure out how much time is each dispatcher working at dispatch sometimes they have other duties that aren't really dispatch duties would those stay in the dispatch center or would they stay in the town so there were a lot of kind of assumption decision points of allocating costs and even other costs like where you have police officers who are filling in at dispatchers sometime that's a dispatching cost even though how budgeted are the police officers? is it fair to say that if if all eight municipalities do not participate that you're still looking at the 3.1 that you want to get to but obviously being divvied up between only say three or four municipalities if they're the ones that decide to move forward no I think we would be trying to scale it back we wouldn't need as many dispatchers depending on which municipality it is so it wouldn't be the full 3.1 cost because it would be I guess look into the previous page or whatever the estimate of what you might be paying you might still be paying what you're paying and so that cost that staff wouldn't be part of the regional center so it would be a reduced cost in the draft agreement you'll see there's a provision I can't remember if it's in paragraph 21 somewhere in the 20s almost 30 paragraphs there's the notion that at least three of the municipalities need to agree to do this together to stand up the organization so I think they're realizing nobody's prejudging exactly how this will go if at least three municipalities voters decide to do it they'll go forward I think they felt like if there's only two easier to do contracting with each other then get into trying to set up a new regional government and then the last slide is just a timeline I think again trying to step through this interim test dispatch absorbed into regional entity trying to do that body next July so I think Pat may have shared with you some information about Colchester and South Burlington are kind of doing some pilot work over the next few months to actually combine their dispatch operations already I think some of the towns are moving a little more aggressively trying to figure it out Burlington is investing a lot in a new computer aid dispatch center to try to front forward that piece of major upgrade that would need to happen so anyway there's a lot of pieces moving here I'm not going to pretend to be an expert on all of them but the general timeline is trying to get started with the regional entity in the community every three to six months as they're ready including contractors with the hope of being completely done after 18 months in December 2019 so that all the communities will be onboarded by then and again to your point that depends on how many communities are going could go faster or slower so that's the basics there's a lot of detail in here I think the big point at this point in time I know this was a concern I think maybe when we were here a few months ago about the agreement was the concern that the joint survey committee kind of approves the agreement and then you're stuck with it so where we are right now in the schedule is to actually we've inserted a step in the process to bring the draft before the joint survey committee acts on it so this is the draft for Select Board City Council review over the next few weeks so we're hoping to get comments back from you over the next few weeks and I read that for all of this content they did put a deadline that I've seen I know we moved our meeting from this Wednesday to next Wednesday hoping it would be we'd already have some initial comments but I haven't seen that since if you could think about it in terms of I would say one of your next two meetings do you have any feedback by mid-September so that we also wanted to take it through Attorney General review so any questions or issues you see in these draft agreements this is really the time to bring them up so you said by mid-September so September 15? sure let's go with that unless your meeting is Monday our meeting is actually September 1 perfect I thought we were going to provide feedback tonight so I had to we're just saying if we come up with additional feedback after this meeting we can still feed it and I want to know at what time is it then done but yeah absolutely tonight too we could get about the 15th would be great happy to take comments at your pleasure I don't want to yeah so there doesn't appear to be a defined quorum for the board in the agreement it just says two thirds of the directors present and I have concern about what that might mean can you tell me what paragraph you're looking at well it's hard to point to a paragraph that's missing there's nothing that says what the quorum is but I guess it appears a number of times when it says that a vote is being made by the board it says two thirds of the members of directors present in no place in the document does it say how many directors need to be present in order to hold a meeting we're held to a quorum here I think there needs to be a quorum for this group as well that seems like an easy one okay one if you want to know where it is it says in here I'm looking forward for my reference here which municipality so it's page 8 it says 15C2 yep it says that there's only one vote for municipality we have run into situations where Green Mountain Transit comes in here to review their budget with us and they tell us that it's already been approved by the majority of the other member communities and so we really don't have any input into the budget and given that it's one municipality, one vote we're in a similar situation here where other municipalities could vote a budget on to us that we then have to pass on to our our taxpayers so I don't know there's another way to do that I know when there's a proportional I don't know how that would work I guess so I know we were kind of looking at some of the models right now it's typically most of them are one town, one vote GMT actually is, Burlington gets two votes and then it's one town per vote for the other towns CSWD hasn't waited to vote so we'll look at that I know we were kind of following how CSWD because we were getting some feedback that sounds like that CSWD came comes kind of in their process to ask you to vote on their budget before they finalize their budget so we're following that model but you're wondering if there can be some more waiting or is it a timing question or a waiting question so waiting question again we've gotten GMT budgets in here and they say well we're only here as a courtesy to you because it's already been passed we have no say at all in that budget if you were the first town they came to you get to be the one who takes the lead I suppose but then we're short changing somebody else possibly that's where I get concerned the second largest municipality in the group and you don't always really get any say and to say, your presentation does say that the legislative bodies get a say in the budgeting it's difficult if you're left in line the other provision that's in here is I think maybe trying to address this concern a little bit is trying to get a written statement of the objection so the conversation around the table has really gone like it's in everybody's interest for everybody to be happy so I think the other towns are very interested if one town did have a concern about the budget they wanted to make sure they heard it and understood what the issue was so that they could try to address it so I don't think it fully solves your issue but the rest of that paragraph was an attempt to try to make sure they heard the concerns and had the opportunity to fix them rather than you just get stuck voting so I think it was a real earnest effort to try to make sure they heard about issues on the budget that's your question it answers the question it's still uncomfortable with but your influence depends on when you have the opportunity to come to our meeting or what our meeting schedule is with other municipalities meeting schedules everybody's on the same room at the same time and I think all the regional entities are kind of messy this way I wish there was some easy answer for that but I don't know what that is do you have additional ones? so another point is you've mentioned several other regional organizations that all have their budgets that they hand to us that we need either we have some opportunity to vote on them or perhaps they're approved by others there are we're adding to the list of regional entities that can generate taxes with no elected officials necessarily operating those entities my question is whether there's any any discussions at all anywhere maybe this needs to go to the state about aggregating those regional entities so that you don't have duplication of services amongst yourselves you know Green Mountain Transit has a lot of machinery they need to keep operating so the CWCSWD can they have the same mechanics can they have the same IT organizations can they have the same payroll departments can they have is there a point where these regional entities we're getting so many of them that we need to start consolidating them I think it's a really good issue there are certainly other models and other states that are used some of us went to the legislature a couple years ago to talk about what that model is it's typically called the council of governments even in New England it's a model that's used which would have more of the elected officials at the table as a governing board for those regional services and frankly I think we got some significant pushback from VLCT about doing that in Vermont and so we got kind of a watered down version which allows basically the regional planning commissions to do some more regional services but it's not truly what a cog could or should be which might be like the select four chairs all sitting around the table at one time right is a different feel than what we're talking about here with other models so I'm very familiar with that issue there probably is opportunity but not so far in Vermont other questions for Charlie anybody Charlie I have a question for you as you know Essex built the new police facility it's run by some incredible staff yep so it would have to be in my opinion something very compelling for us to sort of take a risk with this new entity what about the opportunity it sounds like it's there but looking at your time Charlie maybe not about being able to sort of watch how it forms and be able to at least let you be in full swing for maybe a few years so that we could then actually not kind of speculate what the data would look like but actually get real data because personally I don't feel we're broken I mean we're looking at consolidation between the village and the town the police department is already there yep and this is sort of taking the step beyond that which if it saves money and provides a better service you know that's something we want to consider but right now there's a lot of speculation about it's hard it's not blame it's just it's a difficult thing you try to predict the future how do you do that so is that I mean let's prove this once and for all with some real data have maybe three, maybe it's Colchester and Burlington it's got to be the towns that want to do it I mean I think this agreement is set up and I'm certainly not encouraging you to wait but I think the agreement the way it's dropped it allows for a town to say we're not ready to put it on town meeting day yet we'd rather wait a year or two and see how how the leading towns form it and it works so I think there's room for that in here it's really a choice you'll have to make as a legislative body that's a fun you get to have and so I think the other towns are trying to be very careful not to push any town or pull whichever way you want to think about it a town in a direction that they're not comfortable in I think really trying to get to a situation where the municipalities that join feel good about the value proposition that they're looking at and do it and I can't speak about whether that might be true for Essex or not you know I think at least from our best estimates maybe you could save 80 grand so that's the trade off what are the error bars on that that's pretty big yeah it could be I don't know if it's 10% or 10% of the total which is 50 something grand so yeah these are not promises by any stretch but it is the best estimate we have right now and you're certainly going to have to make a decision and I think the important message for you to hear from me is that the other towns definitely do not want you to feel like you're forced into a corner this is an opportunity to do something a little differently and we don't have to and if that happened and we said no we want to wait and get the real data there's a process that allows entry at a later date yep I believe so and it's in the agreement if for our collective wisdom we say no we don't want to put it to a vote the citizens can still petition the agreement doesn't preclude that at all however you put things on that's just Tom eating that they can come to us okay so that's alright I thought that was taken away at one point at least that's what I think Irene brought to us it has been taken away by the warehouse it's at the bottom of that first page talks about approval by the legislative bottom it's also in section 22a further back on the document I wanted to get clarification about it I'm really not happy about so in 22a okay there's a double-edged sword here I think I think this was trying to make sure the legislative bodies were okay but you're saying even if the legislative body was opposed to putting it on Tom eating dinner if the residents you'd like to house the opportunity for the residents to put it on the ballot absolutely it may be inconvenient for us but that's not the point so that's kind of a showstopper for me anyway okay interesting I don't know how the others feel I think I raised that at the board meeting and the only other person in the room interestingly who sided with me was another select member and I think it is maybe it's the professionals in the room wanting to make sure their legislative bodies are okay I can see why they wanted to really want to do to our members understood the other question is the name Chinden County Public Safety Authority has nothing I mean it sounds really broad like there's bigger ideas behind this in the future beyond dispatch is that is that what I take the name this is very clearly only to do dispatch I think I guess maybe the clearest way I can say that is is at this time I think the other thing in all transparency that has come up you see this Maxon paragraph 2 that the purpose is to provide public safety communication services period so this is limited to that there were earlier discussions about animal control things that municipalities are struggling to do those services that maybe this could provide a framework down the road to also provide those additional kinds of services but this agreement does not is limited purely to public safety communication services okay but it isn't very limited to this service okay at the bottom of one of your earlier slides Charlie you had something about cross training and then it was the five dispatchers and one would be specializing in police and I'm just trying to understand what that means because I thought anybody who picked up a 911 call had to be certified to a certain level and that you wouldn't just be like this is a police call I'm going to give it to you I thought now you're adding another stage now it's coming to a three stage they were all they were all cross trained I think it was so you're saying they're coming maybe from the Burlington police department but they're getting cross training so that everybody who sits in that regionalized room will be trained up to a certain level which my understanding is currently we're not but that's the next thing on the agenda here in Essex we're not trained to a 911 level right none of the municipal dispatchers are to my understanding I shouldn't say none well shell burns are because they are a 911 they're a 911 call center so none of the municipal dispatching I know the dispatchers themselves may have additional certifications but it's not a function that they're asked to do in terms of answering 911 calls so they may have that training but they may not so that would lead to my next question which would be are we giving ourselves enough time anybody who buys into this is there enough time to get those people up to speed to that training level it's not just putting them in a room and telling them they're going to have a different commute for coworkers and by the way you don't have to go to the bathroom because you have people who can answer it now you're no longer solo on dispatch you actually are going to need quite a few hours of training it's my understanding to get up to that 911 script based response time answer that question I'm just bringing it up as some man occurred to me as I read through this thank you I think I had the same question last time you were here so I'm just curious if there's been any thought on how to address it and um the tribal knowledge the knowledge that exists currently within the people that are doing dispatch in their communities how do you transfer that knowledge and how do we ensure that the example I gave is that I have to move on a court that has the same name as a street and how do I know that somebody outside of this community is going to fill in information um so I will give you three answers none of them are perfect so I think the nature of the service changes a little bit right so your dispatchers would still be if your dispatchers joined the service they would presumably be in the room at some level maybe would be one I don't know how your number compares to the other towns or how those shifts and seniority there's a lot of issues about who's there when so some of it's that they're there I think one hope for improvement is that there's better systems in terms of the computer rated dispatching system to really be able to tell that stuff but it's not the same as having personal knowledge I don't think so there are going to be some tradeoffs here that's one of the tradeoffs pretend it isn't you know and I think it's also you know that will it will evolve you know people start to learn more about the other geographies or where frequent calls come from it will evolve over time we're certainly not the first people in the country that will look at a little bit larger geography for dispatch other questions for Charlie Andy section 19b talks about a reserve fund doesn't mention anything about a limit to the size of that fund we the select board of Essex has a policy we don't always follow it but that says 15% of our up to 15% of our annual operating budget is there any possibility of putting in some sort of limit there so that is that a recommendation for 15% that's a recommendation that I would like to make yeah you suggest 15% 15% what we call that being discussed specifically but yeah it's something that when we vote on the budget we may object to if you've got too big of a reserve fund another one yeah section 23 I guess it's 23a2 talks about dissolution that says if the voters of the authority present and voting at such special meeting of the authority vote to dissolve the authority so I'm just trying to get clarification of what that means does that say that the that this entity that's formed by this agreement will have its own special meeting will hold an election of all of the members of that entity or is this a municipality by municipality vote couple of aspects of this question is right who gets to vote yeah this looks like the board of directors which is a one so a a one is one place where it says of these two thirds present and the directors present but a two talks about about dissolution and it refers to voters in which voters is it referring to is this a public you know it says it at special meeting so I assume that's a public vote is it a because it talks about the board presenting a plan of dissolution for submission to the voters of the authority at a special meeting of the authority but yeah isn't it an authority wide vote and it's the majority of all votes or is it a again a community by community of three of the eight municipalities vote to leave but they have the majority of the population or the majority of the voters that vote that turned out how it could go a couple depending on who goes out to vote you know whether it's again if it's a municipality has one vote or is it actually individual votes catch it it's not clear thank you do you have additional questions Eddie? no I think all of mine that I want to have addressed or addressed thank you any other questions from this level okay so I hand out to the audience sorry I'm sorry section 24 amendments to the authority agreement this is yet another place where it says two-thirds of the directors present this says that the agreement may be amended in whole or in part any proposed amendment shall first be adopted by two-thirds of the board of directors present my question is does that mean that only the board of directors can amend this agreement this goes to possibly one more time it says any proposed amendment shall shall first be adopted by two-thirds of the board two-thirds of the directors of the board present so again this implies that only the directors can initiate an amendment can any municipality initiate an amendment can the public initiate an amendment that's not what this says only the board can it's another place where I think a petition or whether the municipalities should have some input into amending agreement okay there's one more concern I have and that's the fact that the chief executive officer of the municipality is the board member so to some extent they are appointed by the legislative body because they hire that person but it's simply a part of their job description at that point right and I'm I struggle with the question of whether that person should be somebody appointed by the board and not specifically the CEO of the municipality I mean it may be as you saw earlier sometimes it's hard to get volunteers to do those kinds of things so maybe I'm just raising a question that's foolish but I did have that question as to why it specifically is the CEO and not just trying to be addressed in the presentation I think they very much felt the responsibility that they have in their charge for public safety services and of course dispatch is fundamental to providing those public safety services so I think with more of a management control issue if the police and the EMS are fired depending on the town those are town employees or to make sure that this service is doing what it's supposed to do and the towns that are paying for or getting what they're paying for right the philosophy I don't know but I think they were kind of concerned about it going in what the other direction you know that they were concerned about the really the risk to the municipalities of that in a very real way I understand it could be a very difficult situation if you don't get a volunteer to come forward and then who do you appoint or even if it is a group of volunteers that maybe aren't familiar enough with the issues involved and end up putting the community and the municipality at risk both from a public safety standpoint and a financial standpoint any last questions from the board okay Colin you had a hand up that cost yeah just to clarify that doesn't take into account the FTE's that they might potentially have to backfill right because that 400,000 savings I'm assuming that doesn't include what the various departments might have to spend on the tasks that dispatchers were previously doing yeah I cannot remember that was an issue initially oh yeah okay it does not include that pure dispatch the question was what is the cost to a current day business yeah okay the other questions from the audience okay so Charlie it sounds like you want any additional concerns or questions we have to have them to you by September 11th on the 11th right here not unless Pat tells me I am that's going to be how that worked this time so would you like to hear from us if we have any last minutes to send them to you gather them up yeah either way however you want to get them from Greg or Pat to me we can collect them and bring to the board on the 11th to finalize the possibility yeah and the only reason I think I would love to get a little bit definitely questions and clarifications and things are easy to deal with I think if there is a policy point it would be good to have a group opinion about which direction it should go in okay so Greg we will collect those and then we will have them on the 11th so again I am probably on the 12th as opposed to the 11th yeah sometime that week would be fine thank you so much I appreciate the time for all the work that you try I will just take the credit or blame it was a good effort thank you okay we are going to move on to the next item of business which is 5D in that discussion about dispatch procedures and Essex and we are going to ask Police Chief Bradley Rose to join us at the table and Rick Gary, Captain Rick Gary got invited Rick to join me tonight Rick participates in the supervision of dispatch and he has a keen focus on the training requirements and the training programs that are delivered okay so welcome to both of you so did you want to kick it off then I am really looking to answer any questions folks had I know Irene had a question she was gracious enough to form in advance we can start there if you like what do we start there do you want to give the question do you want me to paraphrase it sure I passed on a memo to the folks here at the table so they are also looking at it I hope it has a picture of a man on the top his name is Jim Page he called dispatch the last frontier of emergency medical service he says it is not a matter of fixing a bad system in most cases but to make good dispatch systems even better tonight is how do we make our very good system that much better and I hope it doesn't involve necessarily regionalizing dispatch although it may but if we don't for example decide to regionalize how do we bring our systems and our people up to a state of the art answering system if I understood your memo correctly state of the art is connected to essentially script detailed dispatch this can get a little bit confusing so bear with us when we refer to the script manner or system of dispatching we are referring to a 911 call taker once they understand what the nature of the call is and if they can lend assistance as dispatch services are being provided they do that such as walking through the steps of instructing someone how to perform CPR in order to do that we would have to increase staff if we are going to do this in house because once you go down the road of delivering a script or instruction cannot alter you can't back away from that you can't take a radio call you can't take another incoming emergency call in any of the 911 centers that are out there and your focus is once they get into the script focus on the script and they are not interrupted does that pass it off to you additional? you would take at least two staff to do that once you got into that script you wouldn't stop giving whether it's first aid or CPR or any of those instructions as you still got emergency calls that are coming in we don't have one dispatcher at a time we don't have the ability to do scripted calls because we are answering multiple phone calls so is that something we can do? yeah we require additional staff and actually another dispatcher on every single staff on every single strip and this does also as a point of clarification not that it needs to be made but to make sure everyone is understanding if SNCCS does not opt at this point to join the regional dispatch system our 911 calls will continue to be answered at a PSAP center and that's not 145 maple so we would not be losing that service calls before it again to 145 maple rather than regional dispatch center and dispatcher continue to take it from there so the currently depending on where you work depends on the training you get as a dispatcher most municipal departments have in-house training for dispatchers and then there are classes that are offered down at the police academy for dispatcher so most police departments do the in-house training and then also have send their dispatchers down to a dispatcher training if you're a dispatcher in a PSAP center there's an additional certification which is actually, I believe now a 40 hour certification part of that includes dealing with scripting types of calls but it also deals with the 911 systems that most departments don't have if they're not part of the 911 work I believe that I made a phone call today to find out I believe they are actually now combining the 911 class with the dispatcher class so we may not have a choice in the future once I know more about that we send this dispatcher down they may get trained as a 911 dispatcher to get it I just haven't had a confirmation on that one but there are different classes depending on what organization you work for and what class you're doing what about the time savings that we're being told about doing the the regional dispatching it's somewhere between 60 to 90 seconds can you tell us about that and how does that understand 90 seconds the 71 seconds figure that Charlie offered earlier is a result of a survey that was done at a request of Steve Locke the fire chief and the study was done I believe the fall of last year over a few week period if I remember right it was six weeks and it involved 16,000 calls statewide and the 71 second time interval was from pick up at the 911 call center to pick up at the local agency so it would be say if a call came in to Williston and it's an Essex matter it's from the 71 seconds it's from the time the 911 call center operator over Williston sends a call to Essex and Essex dispatcher picks up the phone now this is where it gets a bit confusing the way our dispatchers are trained in the way they operate once they understand what emergency service is needed they push the tone button which alerts that agency to start heading for your truck because you've got a call coming also in the system the way it's designed is once a 911 operator understands where the emergency service is they alert that agency to pick up the phone and join in on the call I'm not connecting a 60 to 90 second time savings naturally there will be a time saving quantifying it is a bit difficult I'll talk to Steve Block about this just a bit ago Steve not to oversell that figure yes there will be time saving how much I can't tell you here today any other questions for Steve so who do we currently dispatch for Essex PD for rescue and two fire departments in a westward fire all the other municipal agencies water sewer public works and so Essex Rescue wherever they go do all their dispatching yes so there are two municipalities that aren't on the list that Charlie was showing us any calls up in that area we dispatch rescue for so would we continue paying for their dispatch or how is that going to work in this under the current formula I believe so so so I guess the question is would you go to those municipalities and tell them we will not dispatch for you unless you start paying for because today they're not paying for any Essex Rescue dispatch that we do for them is highly variable how much it may work well I'm just I don't understand that answer they spend about $40,000 and my only point is they spend a significant amount on this service when you say they who you mean communicate directly with their fire I guess the specific question I have is we dispatch Essex Rescue to Jericho will they then have to contract with you to get that dispatch in Jericho yeah if they contract with the regional FD or if you guys are still providing dispatch they can continue dispatching with you they're going to have choices so free or contract from you the way we're doing it today they're not paying for we are supporting Essex Rescue yep so I don't know how to frame the question there's a lot of different models going on just in go to any of these adjacent houses the model is different sure no but I don't think it's worth going on again I don't want to see you know you've got the eight municipalities that you think should be here could be members I don't know if it should be the right word but the Jericho, Underhill who aren't on that list they don't provide their own dispatch right so and I guess maybe it's a discussion we need to have ourselves do we want to continue providing dispatch to Essex Rescue regardless of where they are going or do we need to start charging Jericho for that work maybe that's a different discussion I guess I just don't want people to lose their ability to have dispatching done for them I think that's really what I'm more concerned about whether who pays for it is it really just Jeff did you have a comment you wanted to make to that pretty much maybe it's a random thought I believe Essex Rescue does bill to charge for their services maybe somewhere in that billing formula they can incorporate in a fee to supplement the services to communities outside of Essex they're asked for a per capita is what they're going for per capita numbers so it's based on populations probably different talents they're trying to normalize it so that all towns are paying the same per capita but that money goes to them doesn't come to us that's what we need to start to go more to you know what sounds like that's it they only I think hey they transport somebody to the hospital right if they just go and show up and they don't really need to be transported out of the things they get paid that's a big expense for them I know other dispatch centers make huge money in all of this we've learned that dozens of contracts that they charge fees for to dispatch so it's an excellent question about how does that work in that model because as a dressier who now assumes that they're getting it for free all of a sudden being told it's going to cost you $40,000 all of a sudden they provide a vital service here soon maybe it's the same question but is it undertone of that question that it's going to have an opportunity to vote about this right so there's not going to be like a public awareness there so there's a community that's going to be potentially impacted that doesn't voice Charlie do you want to come in on that we've been in every sector to talk about this in Chidna County and you know I think they have the same voice that they do now right now however like I said the model varies from town to town to town some pay, something you guys are I think a pretty unique situation in that you're providing some dispatch services that maybe the municipality doesn't pay you for I don't think I've run into that in any of the other towns so that's one side of the unique thing and I can't remember Jericho they may get it from the state police and not pay anything so they are going to have some decision points you know Bolton on the other hand you know they have a contract with Shelvern I want to say it's $1500 I'll make that number up but I think it's in that ballpark it might be more than that so each town is going to have to make their own decision which they do in their normal budgeting approval process however they do that but yes you are right there are two different kinds of towns those that are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for dispatch currently and would be members and those that pay somewhere between nothing and very little for dispatch because it's not really a service the town provides and a contract for it I'm being pretty blunt and trying to be very blunt but that's true other questions for either Rick or Brett I'm curious about 911 as a service that the state provides going forward do you have any sense I knew for some changes proposed or done as far as how many 911 PSAPs there would be are either of you familiar or Charlie with the immediate future DPSD the federal public state increased their PSAP centers from four statewide to two but there are other PSAP centers throughout the state Charlie if you have a page the color coded mapping that Charlie has in his presentation that's correct St. Albans, LaMoyle Shelburne Hartford and they're expected to stay despite budget woes or whatever they're expected and all these other towns the return of that service is just from the state who has the choice to make they could contract with LaMoyle St. Albans as a matter of fact all the towns in Grand Isle County last year decided to move from St. Albans to Shelburne Dispatch so seven towns about seven thousand people but there was a contracting financial decision that those towns made in fact your PSAP centers typically had four dispatchers and they were in 911 centers and changed the trust thank you so the PSAPs at municipal departments like Shelburne and St. Albans get paid a fee by the 911 so yes so the town could say you know what this is too much of a headache and pull out so your answer to your question was could the PSAPs go away yeah it's a decision by the town or the PD to be a PSAP center and they come and they go but it's kind of a main actor to pay a fee to do that but there's nothing that says once you're a PSAP you have to stay a PSAP it's just another job that that dispatch center does unlike the full-blown PSAPs like I think two the list in statewide actual state PSAPs run by the 911 board two the rest are municipal departments that's second as a PSAP got it anything else any questions thank you for coming appreciate that very much we're not going anywhere you're not going anywhere right okay so this is by E&S the use of equitable sharing funds to purchase security camera the the system that we have in place now is coming up on three years old and life expectancy certain components to hard drives within the DVRs it's three to five years we're a little short of the three reflect them back on how we did business back three years ago maybe up to cost and down to a little higher quality we would have been more life life out of the current system but in any event the systems failing is crashing on a weekly basis has to be rebooted or losing we'll lose some time there we'll lose some coverage the proposal that we have for you tonight is to use up to $80,000 in equitable sharing funds which is the drug seizure money that the department brings in the drug work that we do it's not tax and the system that Rick has really sculpted out and presented as the best for us it's a it's an exact Z series whatever that is this system by it would buy it through PROTECT it's the company who installed the current system and they would install this system and I think that they recommend this system as well as one of the better quality systems and what the package that they propose to us would give us is Lucetta hard drives and replacement of some analog cameras with digital one thing that we did do in preparation for the future when the facility was constructed is to run digital digital cabling throughout the system planning for the future in the event that we could upgrade from analog to you know Rick was behind that move to so the bottom line request for the board tonight is to use up to $80,000 in equitable share of funds to replace the necessary failing component parts in our security camera system at the police station what would the timeline be for that how long does it take to do approximately six weeks in orders about two and a half weeks and then schedule and install what's the board's pleasure questions yes Sue I'm just curious any improved life expectancy with this new system well the difference between this system we went with the lowest quote that we could get at the time when we built the building trying to pinch pennies and we kind of got what we paid for the DVRs that we use actually have the hard drives built into them and the proprietary to the actual units themselves the DVRs themselves the new system we're getting actually has removable drives in it that we can remove a drive out when it fails and put it in it's not proprietary so yes it does work just like a server an industry standard typically is replace the servers three to five years before they start crashing I specifically ask that question to the manufacturer and they said three to five years you can probably stretch it to seven years but within that period of time you should be replacing hard drive so it is something that like a server that we are going to replacing you know three to seven years is probably the safe window how big are those hard drives? hard drives and cells are standard hard drives in a computer the DVRs look like an old VCR box this new one isn't five VCR the ones we currently have are five VCRs with fixed drives in them this is one box where all the drives slide into the other advantage of this system over the other system we are looking at is the storage space for this system is almost quadrupled and it allows us to use storage for other video besides just the building cameras so as we start to look at body cameras in car cameras another video that we need to store that we are kind of running out of space for this actually is going to be too purpose we actually partition those drives and use them for other video so we don't have to use them just for the DVRs for the building cameras so we kind of cut two things here okay so they are not solid state drives they are actually still there are a few that are solid state and then there are some that are actual spinning drives solid state should have a thing lasted a lot longer than the spinning drives they should and they typically do yeah but there is a limit to the number of times you can actually write to them correct there are no moving parts but there are limits instead of doing this it is a switch that is just going on and off so it does burn out you are charging an oxide you got it and did you say what you are doing with the old ones that are coming in the old ones are not we are basically throwing them we will wipe them and throw them away we have asked if we could get a credit on them they are not worth anything they won't resell them because they are failing so the cameras themselves stay it is the physical drives the DVRs that we will be replacing there will be one big box that drives them okay what is the board's pleasure Sue? I will make a motion we can have more discussion too afterwards I will make a motion to recommend that the psych board authorize the police department to use up to $80,000 in equitable sharing funds to replace components of the security camera system at the police station thank you Sue I have a second further discussion or questions hearing none all those in favor of authorizing the use of up to $80,000 equitable sharing funds for the security camera system at the police station signify by saying aye aye post motion passes 5-0 thank you very much good luck thank you that's all you do as well before we get it it seems warm in here and it was cool before it's been going up and down I tried to just turn it down a little bit it's not feeling like it's stagnant thank you I was a little warm myself guilty because I was freezing to death so I was looking to have it just tinkered with a little bit you're right now it is okay we're going to move on to business item 5-F and I'm going to invite Karen Dolan up to the table and this is a request to designate Essex as a fair and impartial community now I want to let Sluckmore know that Karen asked to meet with me a while ago it was actually July 18 I think it was I don't know the exact date July 18 to just tell me that this is something she was thinking about and so I knew that she was going to be coming to us to talk more about it and I'll let you take it from there yeah so I just wanted to start by thank you for the opportunity to present this resolution designating the town of Essex as a fair and impartial community and I wanted to point out that I'm speaking as an Essex resident not in my role as a town employee so I'm going to put that out there and I'm not exactly certain the steps I need to take with this I'm assuming it would be great for me to read the resolution that's there but before I did that or even considered that I just wanted to give some background information of how this came to be because I think that's an important piece of it it just didn't come out of anywhere that this resolution was drafted by a group of community members that organized within the past year in focusing on social justice issues and looking at ways to strengthen the community of Essex and a number of those folks are here in the room this evening to support this and it was during one of those meetings earlier this year that we heard a presentation as part of that we heard that the Essex police department had a fair and impartial policing policy and we were really excited about it that's great, that's wonderful it's strengthening the community and one of the pieces in it because if you go online you can see it's there the purpose of that policy really aligns with where we were going says the purpose of this policy is to communicate the requirement that all members of the Essex police department conduct policing in a fair and impartial manner in circumstances in which officers can consider personal characteristics when making law enforcement decisions and to reinforce processes and procedures that enable us to provide services and enforce laws in an equitable and impartial way so we were on board, like this is great, this is good, this is the direction we want to go where we're really taking into consideration everybody that resides in Essex and folks we're curious and thoughtful people just like you seem to be a select board members and came up with some questions this is great that the police department has this policy what about the rest of the town services, are they also being offered in that same means and so we didn't jump to any conclusions or assumptions instead we put a lot of time and energy into research and finding information out of what, let's read through that policy that the police department has what is the background on that having conversations with community members, what are other towns doing, has the select board already looked at this and I saw that there was somebody that came and asked some information about this before so we're really trying to be curious and make sure are these all of our services available and what we found is that Essex hasn't yet expanded that fair and impartial policy that's in play for the police department to other services and so we really thought that by expanding the policies it would build on that successful implementation that's already there in the police department, it aligns perfectly with the number of the goals listed in the town plan and I have that in the letter that I put out there that there's a number of them that aligns with the resolution and supports two core values that were outlined by the heart and soul initiative as core values of Essex residents being safety and community connection and it also is supported by the Vermont Attorney General's guidance to Vermont cities and towns as well so we're like okay this seems like this is something to look forward so with that we drafted the resolution and are bringing it to you as a select board so I don't know if we're hoping it to read the resolution is that helpful or should I just put the recommendation it's not a real long one I would before it's okay to have it read it so whereas the town of Essex is proud to be a community that values diversity and whereas nearly 60 million people worldwide are displaced by violence, political strife or natural disaster and forced to become formal refugees and whereas millions of additional people worldwide are driven to seek out immigration opportunities for better lives and opportunities for their well-being and whereas immigration has been the cornerstone of our town, region, state and nation development through our history and whereas Essex, Vermont has a long and proud tradition of being a community that welcomes immigrants and refugees as new Americans and valued members of the community and whereas Essex residents identify safety and community connections as core values and findings from heart and soul and as included in the 2016 Essex town plan and whereas Essex has a foundation of ensuring protection and public safety for all within its jurisdiction through the Essex Police Department's adoption of a fair and impartial policy in 2016 and whereas the town of Essex has no other formal existing agreements to enforce immigration policy through all municipal services and whereas the town of Essex is resolved that federal funding may not be held based on the municipality's under-agreements regarding the enforcement of immigration policy now therefore be resolved by the Essex Select Board of Essex Vermont the following. The town of Essex formally announces its intention to operate as a fair and impartial community and as a fair and impartial community the town of Essex will adopt policies that direct employees to refuse the application of any request from a state or federal agency that requires the identification status. And the town of Essex shall refuse any request to be an extension of any federal immigration policy enforcement action and shall not enter into any agreement to carry out such enforcement. And as a fair and impartial community information regarding immigration status will not be required in order to access municipal services unless immigration status information is necessary. And the town of Essex requires all municipal departments and divisions to develop and or codify policies by June 30th 2019 that reflects Essex status as a fair and impartial community and we will further resolve our status as a fair and impartial community upon codification of these policies. Thank you for reading that. So with that I just want to put the recommendation I have thanking you for this opportunity and our recommendation is that the select board make a motion to approve the resolution as read designating the town of Essex as a fair and impartial community. So that's what you're looking for for us to approve this. There's a lot of questions out there beforehand. So how about we open up to the board to questions, comments who would like to go. I see Sue's hand first and then Irene then Mike about that. So we had somebody in here maybe about four or five months ago pitching Sanctuary City. How is this different from the Sanctuary City? Seems very similar. Yeah and I guess I would need to have the definition of a Sanctuary City. I think it could be very similar to it but I think the definition of Sanctuary City is very loose. There isn't a definition of it. So I would need to know what is the definition of the Sanctuary City. I guess I would have to pull. I didn't pull out my notes from that one before but it was very similar text. So is there a connection between your group of people and the group of people that were interested? No. Can I ask another question? Sure. So a number of places in your memo you referenced that you're representing other residents and a number of community members can you provide any specifics to it? How many are we talking? Yeah. Ten. Ten is the number that I've given and we have a few of them here in the room and they're significant others and then we've been having a monthly meeting and I would say there's probably around eight, ten at that and it varies each meeting but we've shared this throughout and we have an email group as well. So I would confidently say ten community eyes have looked at this but it's likely more. Good. And then one last question. You referenced similar efforts and other Vermont municipalities can you provide any specifics to that? Yeah. So the specific one I can speak to is Montpelier. I actually met with one of the city counselors in Montpelier and they have adopted a resolution and they are very similar to that. If you look at their resolution you'll see that the language is very similar to it and it's being received well there. One of the pieces that they did in Montpelier is they they refer to theirs as a sanctuary city and did not do this and that because I feel like it's based on the fair and impartial policy that's in place for the police department and it's building on that. I read. In the final whereas I'm concerned about the way this is worded. The town of Essex has resolved that federal funding may not be withheld. I didn't know that it was up to us to not have funding withheld by a federal administration that we have no control over so maybe you can help decide for that for me. So that is stating that this is also through the support of the Attorney General and through the guidance that his office put out of saying that if policies are worded in this fashion that they are meeting the criteria that is in place that you can't be you can't have your funding pulled for being called you're not using the word sanctuary city you can't have your funding pulled because you're meeting the criteria that they have in place for it and he has also shared that he is willing to hear any of these cases and support that. So it might be that the wording could change with that but I think it's knowing that this resolution follows the guidance that came from the Vermont State's Attorney's Office saying that if this language is used it's meeting the criteria that's in place. I'm concerned about the date of June 30th 2019 sounds like a long time away. I would agree. I'm happy to have it be sooner. I think that was taking into consideration that there's a lot of transition in the town right now with the town manager with different departments and kind of wanting to meet folks in the middle of it and not have it be and we want this to happen in a month from now realizing that folks need time for change like drafting their policies. What if they just did their policies and they're going to have to renew it giving some leeway to each department to be able to do that. So would be happy to have it be sooner but also want to meet people halfway. Appreciate that sensitivity. Thank you. Mike. Like Irene I have I have problems with the last whereas in that language I also have a real problem with the second one under the be-it-resolved that begins as a fair and impartial community the town of Essex will adopt policies that direct employees to refuse the application of any request from the state or federal agency. I don't believe we have that right and I also don't believe that our town attorney has reviewed this language either. So I'm uncomfortable I'm uncomfortable doing something with this tonight I also don't think it needs to wait until June 30th of 2019 I don't it's either going to be approved by council or they'll come back with some kind of language change or whatever the case may be but I don't think it needs to wait until June of 2019 but I do have specific issues with those two parts of this. I think our intention is not to create anything that is against federal, law, state law whatever it is it was taking from the language that already exists in it so if it doesn't match exactly with what's already in the police policy I think certainly be open to amending it to fit what's already there in the police policy. If I thank you because I was going to ask the chair if I could ask. It looks like Brad's hand got up before I asked him. Chief? Police department's fair and impartial police policy really continues to exist in the manner that it is intended the purpose hasn't changed but as a result of the bill S79 that took July 1st of this year I had to go back to our policy and remove a couple of sections which doesn't really change much to make our policy the conflict with federal law. If we look at S79 and the manual put out by TJ Donovan which Karen's already made reference to and I could set that up send it off to Bill Ellis or someone down at Attorney's office to review this so that if and when we do put a resolution policy or what have you out it doesn't conflict with federal law and we have to back up and undo it. Thank you. I just wanted to make a comment on this June 30th date. This is 2019, this is to have all departments modify their policies it's not a date, a target date this resolution I think there might be some confusion that that would be when departments would have all of their policies updated by them. Thank you for clarifying that. The other comment I wanted to make is I'd love to read that document that you have there from TJ I'd like to read that before approving this and I included it in the letter there's a link to it it's online, happy to give you my copy and I can look it up and I'd also like to Sue's comments, we did have other people come in previously to talk about this I'd like to make sure that if they have other components that you didn't include that we also consider those and then as the chief said if the police policy has changed I think we want to see that too before we go forward so I think there's a couple pieces I'm not against this at all this is great thank you for bringing it forward but I think we need to do a little more homework before we happy to have it start the conversation we don't want to approve something and then have to back out we want to make sure that it's good so there's nine whereas if we go to number seven where it says Essex has a foundation of ensuring protection and public safety we can't assure it but we can certainly promote it okay because things happen we can't guarantee but we can say that we have a foundation of promoting it let's see in eight the town of Essex has no other formal existing agreements to enforce immigration policy as you know the town doesn't discriminate based on immigration status and that is the piece like I would agree with that and I think that's part of our conversation is saying you want to codify that I think that's the piece especially in these times now of uncertainty of having it in writing you know have things in writing it's not just somebody remembers it it's there this is what we live by and it's those values so on eight maybe I could say the town of Essex does not enforce immigration policy and it's not one of the things that is in our service that we do here mm-hmm as opposed to saying it has no other formal existing agreements to enforce immigration policy you can just say that we don't enforce immigration policy okay so so again yeah the town doesn't discriminate right and you know that you just want to codify that similar to the way the police did anything we approve we need to make sure that legal says we're not violating state or federal laws so we would need them to review it I would also suggest that maybe staff could do some more research into the fair and partial status what it would really mean to us and how it would affect how it has affected towns in positive ways and maybe we can have the full 360 as Pat would say if we were here to do on this because I don't think anyone's against the general idea is the implementation of it to make sure we don't accidentally do something that's conflicting with state law or so on and it's probably worth too that if you were agreeable to those changes that we talked about in 7 and 8 you know then we can have the department heads look at it too and put their feedback on what they might do and then put this on if the board wants on a future agenda to discuss again and have more information and maybe more confidence in what we're being asked to do I think that would be wonderful and I think from one of the takeaways that we've been having in this group is it's not just we need this action item and it needs to happen it's more of having these conversations especially in our community where it's growing it's one of the few communities that's seeing growth of having these conversations so I think having the conversation with department heads with other it's only going to make things richer back when the conversation got started previously there was a gentleman that had a point of view that we tried to get in I guess and failed I don't know whether that was our schedule or his schedule yeah I believe Pat has reached out to somebody who spoke at the village with a different perspective and I'm not sure if he hasn't been able to follow or if Pat's outreach was never responded to or if the person did not want to come back and say to you I'm not sure either way but it sounds like it's kind of fizzled out one way or the other so if I can comment on the date I greatly appreciate you not putting a gun to the head to do this and I think it makes sense to be able to move it out some to allow it to happen as policy needs to get updated perhaps because as we said the town is living up to this as it is it's just that your request is that like the police department have the other departments codify it so by not having it done by the 19th doesn't change how the town is behaving as far as you know being fair and partial but knowing that hey let's get it done before the leadership changes or staff changes so that it's documented about how we want to operate going forward into the future right so my point is I appreciate you moving that date out to where you did to allow because there is a lot of churn going on here with staff and Pat leaving and consolidation services and so on so I appreciate that so what's the force pleasure you want to have legal look at this to get their input make sure we're not doing anything accidentally incorrect against state or federal law reach out to other communities whether it's Winooski Montpelier Montpelier or Burlington or even beyond that if they want to gather input about the pros and cons and again because we're acting this way anyway it's just about codifying so I'd like to just get all that data yeah Do we want to ask Ms. Dolan to come back with the language revisions that we've talked about tonight rather than having I'll let us look at this in its current form yeah I guess that would work they're pretty simple changes that we talked about but it might be good to have that draft done and then we meet again on the 11th maybe that's the one that we could say yeah that's the one we want to share with our legal council with our department heads to go get information about is that reason chief so if I can help out here get the word in okay great perfect thank you yeah and along with the others who said whereas number nine that's that really needs a lot of help either needs to come out completely or get really reworked okay reference to be taken out completely I don't think it really adds okay okay anything else from the select board okay yes open it you could just say your name for the record too my name is Jill Adams I just wanted to point out that Burlington only just recently adopted the police policy it's they have not adopted it as a city thanks for that clarification so I don't think any motions appropriate at this time but we thank you for bringing this forward a little more work to do thank you for the opportunity thank you don't let us drag our feet don't let us drag our feet on okay okay we're going to move on to business item 5G and that's trail mapping and public land history projects by UVM students and Greg could you tell us what that's about so the recently formed conservation and trails committee working with the Chittenden County Forester have identified a couple of opportunities for looking to getting some free help from UVM students they have two projects that they want to pitch to UVM the NR 206 class is a senior capstone project one of which would be mapping trails mostly in some of the public parks Saxon Hill, Matthew Town Forest which has a light trail system that's not used and not very well mapped but also potentially if they can do it looking at trails that run through town easements the property or public access points try to update the trail network system or trail mapping systems that we have and also just get up to speed and get a better inventory of what's out there second opportunity this is more through the Chittenden County Forester who's working on management plans for a couple of the town parks is to have UVM students research those properties and kind of figure out just the history of those sites it says in the memo from pre-settlement to the present just wanted to run it by the select board and make sure the board is okay with hopefully some free help if it comes to fruition before the new planner in the county forester making presentation to UVM on August 31st and as long as the board is supportive of that we will send them forward to see if they can convince UVM to come to Essex and help us out if you're asking us if we want some free help correct so looking at the board is supportive to authorize the chair to sign a letter of support for those projects which Darren and Ethan as the forester can take to UVM so just a quick question I think it's a great idea just a question on who would be responsible for overseeing the work is it town staff they would have a contact with the town and most likely would be the town planner who is the staff person for the conservation and trails committee and he's run by he's talked to parks and recreation he's talked to the GIS coordinator they're all on board with this but he would probably be the primary contact person he's got the bandwidth he'll support that other questions Irene you mentioned the town trails in here does that mean trails as well as outside the village or just trails outside the village good question I don't have the answer my expectation is that it's just outside the village but that's kind of where I look at the bigger parcels in town and that's where the bigger trail networks are but good question the parcels that the school also owns outside the town I would say school-owned trails are some by a large school district in this area so I think that would be really important to spell out here I will pass that on there are questions comments what's the board's pleasure on this one I'll move if you wish Mr. Chairman okay I move that the select board authorize the chair to sign a letter of support for both projects contingent upon acceptance and signing of a memorandum of agreement thank you Mike and that's with the seeing about the how expansive this do I have a second on that thank you Sue any further discussion about letter of support to have the UVM students do some free work those in favor signify by saying aye aye most specified is zero all right we'll move on to business item 5 H and that's notice of real estate conveyance for parcel 3 well number 7 structure number 2999 so Greg what's that about this is a small piece of property Aaron Barton, town engineer so it's about 28 by 20 feet and it's actually in Colchester it's in Colchester because it's part of the infrastructure in Fort Ethan Allen which even on the Colchester side is maintained by the town of Essex it was transferred to the town of Essex from the United States in 1984 Essex has leased it to the Champlain Water District since the 1970's town doesn't do really anything to maintain it so Champlain Water District they've been asking for this for a while and finally all the right parties came together to finish the request for the potential transfer Public Works is saying that we really don't have much use for it it's really Champlain Water District's property for the lease that they maintain it they do everything with it it serves no real purpose for the town even though it's not even in the town there's no no value to the lease we're not getting any money from it it's pretty much questions if need be but basically looking to transfer piece of land over to somebody who uses it okay, last six comments about this one I can't make this stuff up can ya 1964 one comment in the conveyance should we approve it can it be very clear that it's as is there's no warranty on it can they get it sorry I'll reject that's explicit I'll reject to Public Works and the town attorney to make sure that's clear that's definitely the intention but you can see if we can clarify that language that would be great because we're not going to expect it before it's turned over we have no idea what condition it's in I would think that's important I would move that the select would approve the notice of the state conveyance that gives notice of the town's intent to convey a parcel notice parcel three well number seven structure number two nine nine nine and appoint the town manager as the town's agent to execute all necessary deeds and documents for purposes of completing this conveyance do I have a second on that second Mike, okay any further discussion about this conveyance of the Colchester property the Essex asset there okay, hearing none all those in favor signify by saying aye opposed best five is zero moving on to item five, aye and that's the designation of delegate for the VLCT annual business meeting great it's that time of year again where VLCT it's annual business meeting it's part of the town fair town fair workshop two-day workshop last year was in Essex this year something goes you're going to have to travel down to Killington problem area the actual business meeting will be held on Wednesday October 4th that's when VLCT looks at its municipal policy adopts new changes to that that is free free to attend for select board member VLCT recommends that representative from each town go this will be one to stick around for the Thursday workshop the attendance is $60 per person that is part of the budget part of the select board budget each year so money is available for that probably some big workshops but yeah, VLCT recommends each town to go somebody has gone in the past I believe it's been worthwhile and if somebody wants to go this year we're going to have the chair authorize or sign the designation form annual meeting is to approve one of the things they do is to approve the policy and that meeting is going to be October right it's the date September 4th correct so I was wondering if the board would like to have the opportunity at our September 11th meeting to review at least the changes that are being proposed have a discussion about it and then Andy you'll have a much better idea as to what to bring down so there's a couple of challenges around that I don't know I got copied down the link sent to me to the policy I don't know if everybody else did but I can send it around the two possible concerns one is that they have in the past they used to send out the policy with the strike-throughs and track change so the last year's meeting the members present approved a new procedure whereby they strike the entire document and rewrite it every year so it's essentially all new content every year so that it's not, there's no track it's hard to change did you hear that last year I don't recall whether I voted for or against that change in the policy but that's the way it's being done now they say it's a new policy every year so it's okay and they're saying that it'll be less cumbersome that way but as you said it's just going to be challenging to understand what's different from last year you don't have a copy of last year so that's one challenge the other is they want feedback by September 1st they pulled this same thing last year where they don't actually distribute the proposal in time for select boards to have warned meetings to have a discussion about it I complained to them last year about that I will complain about that again this year that they really need to get the policy out sooner or they have a lot of discussion about it at the board level to strike out the whole thing and rewrite it is painful for those who need to review it that might be back to go back there and say no good track changes or somehow to highlight the content that's new that's different from at least the prior year it would be so transparent yeah it's too easy this is a challenge doing it on the 11th is futile last year when I raised the same concern they said you can get your input to us late so we could still have the discussion on September 11th I would certainly take folks comments and take those forward it is possible to bring up right in updates day of the meeting they prefer to have them ahead of time that they can have some time to react to them yeah so they want time to react to them but we can't right that's exactly my concern that I will raise again so would you like to see it come back or we can just that was just the background but yes I would like to see it come back I'll send out the link I don't know if we want to input it in the next package is it really big I don't remember okay so it's not so bad it used to be a lot bigger it's 13 pages if you send it to Greg Greg can include it in the packet for September 11th and if the board wants to receive it early it's an electronic piece FYI we can come to us sooner I'll send the link to everybody anyway just don't comment to me electronically and we can have the discussion on the 11th that way folks want to read it ahead of that okay and then we can have it as an agenda item on the September 11th even though it's not ideal from what BLCT would like but at least it gives us an opportunity to weigh in a little bit and give you some feedback so does everybody okay with Andy doing it yes we thank him gone past that you want a motion yeah I think we would I think we need a motion just to appoint Andy tonight and the request of staff is to put it on the agenda for the moment I would move that they select where to point a delegate namely Andy Watts for the BLCT annual business meeting and authorize the chair to sign the delegate designation form as well as having staff distribute the document in here actually Andy was going to email it to everybody okay okay do I have a second on appointing Andy as our BLCT annual meeting delegate thank you Sue any further discussion of that yeah I do want to bring up the fact that because it's a two day event rather than driving back and forth I'd like to request that the town pay for my hotel accommodation so I can pick it up the next day and I'd like to sign up you can make that happen that sounds reasonable we don't want to put you at risk not only asleep coming back there's a really nice campground right near there did you want that 11th date in the motion too I got that okay so I already made a motion Sue seconded it's to appoint Andy as the delegate thank you Andy annual meeting any further discussion all those in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed okay Andy you're it appreciate it don't forget to send the form okay now we're on to business item 5k we're skipping 5j and that's approval of the select board minutes of August 7th 2017 do I have a motion on that I would move approval of the select board minutes of August 7th 2017 was like board member corrections thank you Irene do I have a second second Andy let's start on page 1 page 2 hand up on 1 or 2 1 please line 33 Paula actually started off talking about 3 people who didn't have a ride home 2 of whom were disabled okay so that's line 33 change 2 to 3 please change 2 so I handed out a little page of additions and this will be the first one line 72 I want to insert a paragraph that said Irene asked if town staff had worked with any of the candidates Pat confirmed that he had but said he wasn't part of the decision making process and wouldn't be making any recommendations and that's related to that's related to the search for a head hunter 2 page 3 line 144 the sentence that ends with the last 4 or 5 words that says in attendance were not the worry in other words Mike Plegman recalled there was agreement by the select board after last public hearing that the people in attendance were not the worry I'd like to add because I distinctly said this right after that period it was the people who owned guns who were not in attendance that were the people that we were trying to reach so how do you want that to Sam's heart can you say it again Mike it was the people who owned guns who did not attend that were the people we were trying to reach that was that good that's not good sorry that's right thanks Irene this is the second of my suggested edits causing lines 121 to 124 to read as follows and I'm using my title here because normally in the minutes Sam your procedure is to call us Mr. Miss and the person doing these minutes just didn't do that so I'm just requesting that throughout the minutes first of all we use people's titles rather than their first names over and over. Ms. Renner urged acting on the well thought out recommendations from the police chief now rather than put the results of another study on the shelf beside the study done eight years ago as Renner said representation will likely be one sided as it was before because people are afraid to come forward they have been threatened as well as physically prohibited from attending such a past Line 127 would be inserting a new paragraph and again Ms. Cook this would be with your permission perhaps you have other ideas I'm in a chance to match up to yours on the videotape I noticed that Ms. Cook wanted all voices to be heard without putting this process off any longer as it's been nearly two years since a bullet went through the lodge in the family room while she stated that different people may be prevented from coming at different times and I also had addition and I actually struggled a little bit with this whole section when I rewatched the video a couple of times and the way this is laid out is not the order that the conversation actually took place during the meeting but I didn't have a time to I didn't have time to do the whole restructure of it but anyway there was definitely a fair amount missing so that's the piece of paper that I gave which I guess I was following the standard here which is yeah do you want me to read it or yeah so I wanted to add in at least somewhere before 142 if it's Sue Cook stated her position in opposition to further delaying public engagement opportunities on the use of firearms in the town of Essex she would like to proceed immediately with the RFQ as we have already delayed a response to issues brought to our attention public safety is a responsibility of the select board the RFQ includes content explaining the need for the facilitator to identify creative approaches for ensuring that all community voices can be heard which is extremely important okay anything else on three four all right online 155 at the end Ms. Davis said she would like this to happen ASAP anything else on four page five page six all those in favor of the select board minutes I'm sorry page six 263 just a small grammatical issue is that supposed to be recur instead of reoccur I don't know what was said but I I'm just looking at the spelling of the word anything else on six here you know all those in favor of the select board minutes of August 7, 2017 corrections I post the motion passes five zero we're on to consent agenda do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda I move we approve the consent agenda with select board member comments I have a second on that Mike okay comments on consent Sue I read through what Darren had submitted here I mean this was kind of a request that we had follow up on the other utilities and I appreciate this level of detail I'm not really sure what practically non-toxic means to me that was I read it as, and I can follow up with Darren if you want but I read it as at the level that's being used it is non-toxic is that a that's for this Garland for ultra and then for the method 240SL it says practically non-toxic or slightly toxic I didn't know if those were like official qualifiers I do not know but I can check it Darren and find out on that memo yeah I'd like to also thank Darren for the follow through and the level of detail he was telling excellent other comments on consent we did get a thank you from Tom Sullivan and I guess that is directed to the hierarchy is that right so thanking Charlie for the support that he provided in the UVM's unfortunate event the historic Corey Hall was had a fire so I'd like to say thank you also to Charlie it's great to see our folks like that get recognized for their excellent work any other comments so Darren's other letter which just reported someone moving away from the concert and trails committee when I looked up their roster online she wasn't on it so I'm wondering how to date their roster is and I did send Darren a message to that effect just asking if he would please check to see who's on it and who isn't to make sure it's current whether or without Susan it was just concerning that she's been on for a year and a half but she wasn't on the website as being a member she was just really efficient and got it removed you know knowing Darren probably yeah yeah other comments on consent okay none all those in favor of the consent agenda signify by saying aye aye most investors 5-0 now I would propose we go into the executive session to discuss appointments okay great there's somebody that would make the appropriate motions right here I'll go thank you I move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss personnel in accordance with 1VSA section 313 oh wait a minute is this the wrong one I'm sorry I'll try again I move that the select board make the specific finding that premature general public knowledge of the select board's position concerning the proposed public official appointment would place the town at a substantial disadvantage thank you Andy do I have a second on that one second quick Mike all those in favor see if I can say aye aye I'll specify 0 to discuss the proposed public official appointment pursuant to 1VSA section 313 A3 to include the deputy town manager second thank you Andy I read okay any further discussion about motion number 2 for executive session very none all those in favor see if I can say aye okay we're in the executive we'll go