 call the meeting to order, 6.02. Before we get into the agenda this evening, one thing I wanted to bring up to the select board was in trying to be as most efficient with our time as possible, and we always seem to have new audience members every week that don't always necessarily understand what the rules of the select board and when to interject to not interject to when their time is and how much time they have. As I thought maybe it would be helpful maybe going forward that maybe we can just read off like a one paragraph what to expect at the select board meeting and how the select board meeting kind of runs. And then the other thing I was thinking about is looking around. I know there's different meetings where at times like say, OK, public comments only 15 minutes or 20 minutes. And I don't know if I wanted to necessarily handicap the time on it, but maybe just build upon time per issue. So maybe a cap of time of five minutes per thing that comes up from the audience. And then if more time is warranted, maybe it's better served as an agenda item at the next meeting or something where we can more thoroughly talk about the item. Because it seems like sometimes we get through the public comment period very quickly. And other times we're here for 45 minutes to an hour. And you don't normally know what the public comment questions are coming. So I wanted to kind of pull from the board what we thought on that, if we're good with a public comment of three to five minutes per item that they bring up. And then if more time is needed, we can either grant that or continue it to another date or something like that. And just so we keep things rolling because especially as we get going right now, we're going to have a lot of budget discussions and warning pieces and stuff that probably will take some significant amount of time. Not to mention there's often people that are sitting in the audience or maybe at home. Once we get it all figured out with Leonard there is people that kind of sit in at appropriate time thinking that they're going to be there for a certain topic rather than have to wait like an hour to get to their appointment or agenda item. So I think one thing I just wanted to just review with everybody tonight is, so select board meetings are really the meeting of the select board. So it's the meeting of, in this case, the five select board individuals as well as town manager to go over operational policy type driven information that's happened over the last two weeks since the last one or continuance and on a certain issue that we've been talking about. And these are held in public session. So the public is welcome to attend the meetings and in most cases, like you'll see, there's public comment. And our board is really good about even though there doesn't need to be any public comment during each action item, we're usually really good about answering questions that people might have. So what I would just want to do, and then once we get on to the Zoom piece of it, it'll probably get a little more difficult because we're going to have to tend to audience plus tend to the Zoom piece of it. So I don't know, I mean, maybe something to think about down the road would be, do we have two public comment periods, one for the beginning for just any randomness and one maybe farther back in the meeting to, I don't know, take on other tasks or something, but. So just make sure for the meeting that you're signed in so that we have you for the public record. And sometimes there are certain faces that are here often and sometimes there's not, so just make sure when it's your time to speak that just your name and usually your street or road that you live on is the easiest because a lot of people are like, oh yeah, okay, we know what that is, if we don't know the face. And if we're all good with it as the board wise, we'll just keep each individual public comment action to three minutes or five minutes. What do you think? Like five to seven. And then if more time is needed then. I just lost 50 minutes, so. Right. I like the idea of keeping it so that we're not wasting an hour of our time to public comment, but I also think that having some flexibility, so if there's something to just, that we know we'll wrap up within 10 minutes, we just let it go through and actually play its course and not just cut it off because we've hit time. Right, okay. I would also suggest that we might have an order of the day so that if we have an appointment with someone that we might sustain the public comment. Sustain or hold the public comments, let that appointment happen and come back to public comments or put them at the end. That's the way we do it now. I put the appointments before public comment for that reason because you're right, if we gave it six o'clock and we don't get to seven thirty, I feel horrible. Yeah, if that makes, that makes sense. I think a five minute with the option of extending if we're close to a. Yeah, I mean, and I think over the years, I mean, a far majority of the time, it's within the realm of time, but once in a while, once in a while, something comes up that we didn't anticipate and it can be pretty lengthy, so. Well, I think too, this is the only time that the five of us are allowed to be in the same place at the same time, talking about town business. So. It's true, that's a good point. We can't gather on the street corner or have another meeting to elsewhere, so this is the only time that the five of us can actually get together and discuss, you know, town business or whatever comes up. So it's important for us to have our discussion and do what we have to do. So public comment period is anything that's not on the agenda items for the night. And once the action items are going, if you do have a question or a comment to it, you know, you don't have to, it's not school, you don't have to leave your hand up, but maybe just put your hand up to one of us sees you and I'll just write it down and then at the most appropriate time, we'll ask for feedback, because I don't want people to think that we're not calling on you type deal, so. All right, so we'll just move to the agenda for this evening. Is there anything that needs to be amended to the agenda? No, Teresa got a couple of things. Yeah, for the town by the VOREC, letter of support, I think after that, one of them is a project, it's a long title. So project resolution of commitment from municipality. So that would be a motion to adopt that resolution. It's for projects involving class four town highways and we need to have board signatures on it. And then there's also another letter here, I just want to let you guys know about, that's also part of the VOREC grant, which says that either myself or Chris is gonna decide, saying that we'll allow and maintain public access for 10 years on the trails and five plus years on any kiosks if we get that VOREC grant. But they want all of this paperwork together and since it's kind of coming to fruition at the last minute, those are so adjust, those are additions. And I think we can just do them after the VOREC letter of support since they're all VOREC items. Okay. For that, I think we're still writing for the whole $500,000, but I'm not positive right now. All right. I would like to add an item about climate change that may have an impact on the morning or the evening. So it might be the climate change coordinator. Yeah. Okay, perfect. Did this like we're gonna get that because I made copies of that if you could just email that to everybody. Okay, good. And I did make copies, so I'll just see I'm here. Just as a discussion point only. Under any other business or? Or under the town meeting morning, right? Wouldn't it affect? If we choose to have something authorizing a town coordinator, that would need to go on to the town meeting. So I don't know if we wanna discuss it, act on it tonight or take a look at it to more depth on the side with it, act on it tonight or. Well, the only reason why I ask that is that I think that probably the most appropriate way to do it would be to have a discussion in regards to at the board level tonight. And then if there's the potential of acting on that, we should give the public the opportunity to weigh in on that, would we think? I mean, typically in the past, if we're gonna act on an issue, we have it advertised for a period of time where if we add a board item tonight without it being on there, there may be some people that wanted to talk about that aren't here. That's just gonna. Yeah, I think it's a good discussion at least. Because I can't figure out what we'd have to add to the warning. So I don't know what it is exactly would be adding to the warning. I'm looking at the sample for the brand off. So I don't care where you put it on the agenda, but it'll be good conversation to have. Well, my proposal is that we actually ask for a town resolution that the town would act on. To do through the town. At the town meeting, and that we ask for preparation of that proposal. So do we want. The request is to prepare a resolution to go before the town meeting. Do we want to just talk about it at the town meeting? You can talk. Warning, yes. Okay, all right, I'll just write that in there so we don't forget about that. And we didn't have any appointments, however, Jessica's here in her family in regards to their place on Dart Hill. So if. Can we add them as an appointment? Yeah, so I was gonna say, you know, rather than them have to sit here any longer than they do, if we could get them in so that they can talk about the issues that they have with their land on Dart Hill and at least get the information of the board on that. Raise good with that. Good with that fall? Okay. Anything else to the agenda? All right, just need a motion to approve as amended. So moved. Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. All right. So we will move right on to our first appointment. I apologize, I talked Jessica a little bit. She had messaged me two weeks ago. I think it was on the day of our last meeting. So we didn't really have time to get her on to the agenda. So they have recently acquired a property on Dart Hill and we currently have some infrastructure that's been in place that there's some storm water that comes out of those infrastructures onto their property. Kind of in a nutshell. And I apologize, we didn't. I had talked to Terese after talking to you saying that you guys were looking to get on to the agenda. But then we didn't hear anything else from you on like any extra documents or pictures or anything that you wanted to put before us. So I don't want to say like forgot about you but I just assumed at that point that maybe you weren't coming. So, and you probably saw Terese and I poking around up there today just looking at things. But typically to get the documents to the board prior to the meeting that way we can make copies and all the board members can see them especially what now with the COVID and moving people in and around the meeting isn't as safe. This is our first time so there's a lot of communication to documents and if we have to come to another one to revisit it it's safe to respond but just kind of get it rolling. Yeah, so if you want, why don't you just briefly state the issue that you're having on your property and we'll open it up. So I need to ask, and we live on Dart which is basically on the corner of Brank and Dart. So coming out from Canbrook. Where we live, there's a covert that is basically pointing directly at our house. It is the runoff of two separate fields above us including the two roads and it all gets narrowed down to that covert and dumped on our property. And when it first was in there from when we had the engineer talking to us up there he was explaining how it works when it comes to absorbing the water on the runoff and after a while there's only so much that the land will be able to absorb and then it will start just bringing its own path of destruction in which is what's happened. And so now over the last I'd say four or five years it's been creating ultimately a brook and dividing our property down the line and also bringing a whole bunch of road debris on our property. It's been digging up the electric as well so it's really not a safe situation. We've tried talking to the town and it's nothing that they were interested in helping us with and that's why we talked to the lawyer first and he brought an engineer up and he suggested to talk to the board first just to kind of play the roles and see if we can do it in a peaceful manner. So that's kind of what we're doing to see if there's a way that we can divert that in a correct path that isn't facing our house and property because we're trying to fix that piece of property up. It did get hand down and it was just a junkyard. Everybody knows. On the right? Correct. On the bridge? Yeah, so now I mean we're at the point of picking up the rest of the scrap. I'm hoping after the snow goes away this year and our finances pick back up we'll be able to continue the project and we're putting a new house up there. But this is just kind of a huge bird and that's offsetting us. And if we're focusing on the property we're not gonna be able to afford focusing on the diverting of that brook ourselves. So if there's a way that we can do it we have documents, we have the name of the engineer that talked to us. We have photos also from the last few years because we've been meaning to do something about it but just didn't know how. So we have progressive photos that you can actually even see where the damage is starting and now it's looking way worse. So I had taken a quick visit up with Therese today because I was sitting there and I was looking at my agenda items and I didn't see you guys on there. So I said, well maybe they're not coming but anyways I wanna go up and look at it anyways. So Therese and I took a venture up there to look at it. So it, and probably one of those cases where it's probably best that all the board members take a drive up there just so they can see themselves. But so from talking with people and looking at it. So originally a majority of the water that comes off Dart Hill. So if you're going up the hill it comes down on the left side of the hill and it used to come from looks of it. Looks like it came all the way down to the bottom culvert which then comes out kind of right in the middle of what they say is like the residential part of their land. And then a period of time, maybe Doug knows cause he's got a lot of knowledge but a period of time ago, this looking at it it's years ago, we install the culvert up from there at the next driveway that now looks like it diverts I don't know, a majority of the water to the back part of their land that isn't buildable. Does that sound right? So we've helped out one part of shedding that water from what we saw today. But there's still what we call overflow water that comes, continues down to the juncture of Dart Hill and then that culvert is right where the paved apron is. And then that culvert goes right directly and there is no real outlet, it just spills into their land. And from talking, and again, Doug might have some history on it but it sounds like over time, the residents that were there had always done some of their own ditching to get the proper flow of water to go, which was actually I was having a hard time trying to figure out where it went. But it's cut right across. And there's pictures in there too of that. I had a. Which is now when I drive in, I actually, I have, it bottoms out my car because there's a huge puddle that occurs every time it rains. So then like in the winter time, I actually have to like scrape it to like go down so that way it just flows because if I don't it just puddles. Because there's no driveway culvert there, right? We looked for that today. So there's no driveway culvert, I think so. Last year it covered the tires of two vehicles, a truck and a car that were parked over there. And it just eroded right around them and sink them in. And they had someone come and get them and get rid of them because it ruined them. And then another thing is when the engineer came, he said the way it should be done is the culvert should go drainage on the other side of the road with rocks down to the river. And then that way, if it does that, then it's not going to want the property when destroyed and go right at, and they have kids that play there too. So that's not safe. So his suggestion was basically to cap that culvert and then keep it on the other side of the road, install it under culvert, under, which would be brink, and then clean as someone did all the other side. Because that culvert that we're talking about has obviously been there for at least 20 years. You can tell, because it's under the pavement. We never... The state of Vermont is giving money to towns to fix up properties and things too, for like land that culverts and roads and all this other stuff, because the federal government is giving that to the state of Vermont. I'm not sure how all that works out of place, but it's all over the news where they're gonna be giving money to people. American Rescue Plan money, maybe? Yeah, and this place here, if you remember, in 2011 was completely with Irene, really eroded and everything. So I mean, these are big things that we could look at to help pay for that stuff that really needs to be done, because this is not safe. And the electrical's getting eroded up and you've got kids living there. And they're trying to make it a nice home so people don't go by it and have an eyesore. And they're slowly working on it financially. Like when we all started, it was very hard. When we all started, money-wise, and they don't have the money to come out and just dump it like that either. And it looked like from viewing it in the field, as well as knowing a little bit of the history of the properties. And correct me if I'm wrong at any point, but it seems as though that the culvert in question, that piece of infrastructure was put there before any development on that property before you owned it, right? So if I get it right, it sounds like the culvert was put there. And when the culvert was put there decades ago, that there wasn't really any building or any dwelling there, it was just a piece of property that the stormwater was discharging onto. And then as the property became inhabited and there was a dwelling that was put there, it seems like that's the point where, at some point there was an issue there, the town put a culvert just up from it to try to divert a majority of the water so it wouldn't go right through the dwelling. But there's still water that will go onto the dwelling now that might have not have been a dwelling years ago, I think. I see a couple of heads nodding, so I'm assuming that. Back in 2000, when Irene hit that road actually, but you rode it out and they actually had to fix that culvert. That one right on that? Yes, so I know that they have done some work to it, but they haven't upgraded it or done anything to fix it. And this is the problem, because the Irene is, whatever happened with Irene is what triggered the issue there because if that is the case, which it could very well be, I would have been there, but since that long, but if it was there for decades, this didn't start happening until Irene. It started trickling down and creating more problems year after year after year. And I started, I personally became a part of the property a few years after Irene. So basically it's basically something that's been starting since then. So the previous owner prior to Irene. I've been there since 2007. There was no issue prior to that, you know? And we would have the puddle that would occur in the middle of the driveway, but we didn't have the erosion coming in like it is now. Did you see the original Mr. Hill? We'll come to the original Mr. Hill. Who owned that, is Reginald maybe. Did he used, I was under the impression that he used to trench it, maybe a little bit where it came down, that he used to trench it down the hill a little bit from the outfall on the property to- There's no- Did he used to maintain it? There's no ditch on that side of the road. If you- No, no, I meant on the property where the eyeball is. If you walked on our property, there's literally no ditch over there. It's literally just our flat land and it goes up on a hill. And it goes right across the driveway. And it just, the water just, it's made its own course down to- I mean, looking at it today, I mean ideally what needs to happen there, and I guess that's where the question is, is this a property owner thing, or does the town have responsibility, or is it a joint thing? Is ideally it looks like right now, if you leave the culvert in place, then there needs to be some work done on the outflow of the culvert that could drop that stormwater in a safe ditch that would basically would come around the bottom side of the road. And then there needs to be a driveway culvert that the water could go through the driveway culvert and then it could come out by the bridge. I like the idea of her though, capping him up on that side and then running it on the other side because in that way it's not on their land. And when those kids go out to play in the driveway, because they don't have a lot of land right now- The real problem with that is, is half of our property would be ditched at that point because if you walk down the driveway and you have the brook right here, it goes to our driveway and then we have all of this property to the right that we can't utilize and if we had a ditch it, we'd still be losing and there's a lot of property we'd have to ditch from the driveway down to the brook. I mean, you see the distance from the other side of the road, right? Where that bridge ends, that's not where our property stops. Our property stops about halfway through that bridge on that side. So if you go over and look over it you're gonna see that we're gonna have to ditch all the way from that cover. I can't, I'm not good with distance but that's a long way is that we're gonna have to ditch on our property just to flow it from the cover that's emptying from two hills in the two fields down to our property. Like that's the biggest problem is- That is a distance. But it's also coming down the driveway and then coming down the driveway as well so it's causing the reps. I mean, I don't know statistics or how to do it exactly but ultimately instead of going this way you just go this way and then you trench it down. Like I don't know why that's a big problem. I mean, you guys have the equipment as the town to be able to do something like that and the resources. I don't know how much material or how much it would actually cost but the point is is we're gonna have to take up even more of our property just to make it happen. And the cover does one of the town. I think in the best interest of educating the board members as well as, you know, Chris and the public works getting a second look at it is why don't we plan to have a follow up with you at our next meeting. And I know you have kids and stuff and you don't want to have to be bothered by coming to meetings or whatnot. We can either, we can If you go to help us. Yeah. Well, I'm just saying that We're asking for help. It allows the board members to kind of look at it and see what they think. It allows us a little more time to investigate. Is there an option to keep it on the other side of the street? You know, that type of thing. I can have that kind of attitude to get a cause. Cause it's not always, believe it or not it's not always like when it comes to storm water. So when it comes to storm water, once you have your systems in place then they're kind of grandfather end. So that's where your storm water is allowed to roll. Like you can't just randomly put a culvert in somewhere and pipe the storm water somewhere else cause you need permission. So, you know, if it had to go on to another land then we'd have to get permission to do that. You know, so that it can be convoluted may not be as easy as you think but we can definitely look into the options I think. That's a great idea cause I think this is a different situation. Cause if you look at it, there's just a hill right here and then you got the road. So there's literally nothing. Nope, if it is the person's property up there it's literally just a hill with trees on it. So there's no reason why there couldn't be a ditch dug in there. That's all. I can ask. So I'll have Alan take a peek at it because we would have to cut. We'd have to actually, couldn't just cap that culvert. We'd probably have to take it out so that it didn't collapse over time and refill that culvert. And then I'll take a look. I'll get Alan, we'll go up and look at it and see what it would take to put in a culvert and just see what it would take to put it in on the upside. We appreciate your time in front of you guys helping us with this because like I said, these guys are new. We all have our own property. I purchased that property for tons of money. Okay, and I paid for that piece of property. And I'm telling you, I own 136 acres in South Royalton and I've never done as much work that we're gonna have to do on that property. So I mean, if it was your land, take it home with this thought. If it was your property, would you want that happening to your land? Because I tell you, I wouldn't want someone, I wouldn't want my land eroded like that. And having to drive, we've driven down in there and just belling it out and if it wasn't eroding, if it wasn't eroding anything, we wouldn't be here. No, and I went out to look today and I mean, there's no doubt about that. And it's taking up the electrical wire? Water discharge is happening and it's eroding the land near the house. I mean, it's very easy to see there. It just becomes who's responsible for that water and how do we come to a solution like we're talking about on- The last time they went down and looked at it, they told us that the town is the town stuff and then the state's not responsible. Yeah, there would be nothing involved with the state up there. That would be a town slash president. I would really have to, if it came to my responsibility, I would really need to try to understand why that would be because you've been up there today. I mean, it just doesn't make, it wouldn't make sense to me. If it would be my responsibility. It's a law that's getting dumped on two full fields. And yeah, they installed the covert on the backside of our property, but that's still cut in the land. So even if we owned all that, that would still be cutting a land again in that spot. You say that's unbuildable, but still regardless, my property is getting destroyed in two different ways. One to divert the section in the beginning or in the end for cutting off the flow of the four out. So I wouldn't understand why that would be my responsibility. And not to get in, I mean, those of us that serve for legal end of things, but the thing in our case that we would look for is, was that structure there prior to you owning the property? Because when you buy a piece of property, you're taking upon anything that was there prior. It's a very easy thing if we just went up there like last night and put a covert in and then all of a sudden you're like, what are you doing? Like there's all this discharge on our property. That's an easy fix because we didn't get permission from you, you know what I mean? So it becomes a little bit of a convoluted issue there, but I don't know the issue to it, but I'm sure that we will be more than willing to try to work through it and see where we can go there and see what our options are. We might say it's an easy option. We can go across the street or it may say, we're gonna have to do something different with that covert on your property and try to make that work somehow. Also call JMP and ask them to take a peek at what they think, but what's the stability around the pole and what's going on there? So I'll call Carol and ask her to take a peek at the JMP. And then we can get some more information. And we have stuff here for you guys. We can leave that with you. Yeah, if you wanted to leave that, you can leave that with Theresa and she can make copies. After, please? Yeah. What's that? You turn it to us after, please? Sure, yeah. I don't know who you are and... Sure. We can make copies and you can either pick it up at the town office or one of us can try to get it to you, but... That works. We can pick it up at the town office. All right, we'll make copies and then leave it out front with Kelly. That works. Or Pam, whoever. Sure. Yeah. Thanks. Just to clarify, I turn off the camp broke on the very hill. You're the first right. First one on the right. First building. The old Scott Hill residence. Calm down a lot. With the women? The old Scott Hill residence. Calm down a lot sometimes. Okay. And then between you and Dark Hill, is Sadie Tetrow? Actually, I'm Sadie and what happened was I purchased the property for like 10,000 something dollars and then I ended up paying taxes out of my fanny after that. Okay. And I just turned it over to my son and his wife. So they actually own it. I'm just, we're just waiting for the taxes to start for you. Okay. So then we're talking about those two parcels. Yes. We're gonna connect the two properties. They're gonna connect the two properties. Well, I'll talk to them for me. Actually, I'm having paperwork. It's already in order. I'm just waiting for the lawyer to. Yeah. That's fine. I just want to. Yeah, I didn't even think about that. Thanks for bringing that up for sure. There's two culverts you might want to be looking at. One that goes on there from. No. The one that's fine. We already discussed it. Two of them. I'll just look at it and we'll let that out. I think, yeah, we need to look and see what we can. We really appreciate it. Do we have it? Do we have any information from the prior owner on any permission? No. I mean, you can tell the things, but they're usually 20 years because of the pavement over it and. Yeah. But no, I don't have any. I just said, I was just asking if we had any information regards to the prior owner. Like sometimes, like I was telling about if you want to put a culvert in, usually you get some sort of permission. And that can be a verbal permission, can be written permission. So we didn't know if maybe the town had permission before or not. But they may not have years ago, you didn't have to just, I think they just probably may have had to do that. All I know is they used to stuff campers and school buses in there years ago, just to live in. So I don't honestly know what happened way back then. That's neither here or there. I guess, right? Yes. But no, we appreciate you buying it and fixing it up. It's going to look good when they get done. But I mean, right now it's like, we need to get that fixed so that they can continue working on other stuff that they need to. Sure. It costs money for everybody. Absolutely. Awesome. Yep. Just leave that with us before you leave and we'll get copies to the board members so they can look. Thank you for getting us in early too. Sure. Because I told them, it says at my meetings, it was in Royalton, we sit there forever. Yeah. We don't need to sit in here. I told them, I said you've never been to one, I've been to a couple. All right. Appreciate you coming in. I tell them this is the last time I've been up in this place is when I was a child. Thank you. Have a good evening. Have a good night. All right. And now we will open it up to public comment. So if there's any public comment period, if there's anything that's not on the current agenda this evening that anybody wants to bring up, now is the time to do so. And Doug will time it at three to five minutes. Yeah. You need to watch. Letters on. Yeah. I just have an update question. Update on the constable, where does that come from? Well, we will be talking about the constable as part of our budget discussion this evening. Mm-hmm. Okay. End of discussion. Got it. Thank you. Yep. Thank you, Mr. President. Will it be, is there an idea that's thought that they need to move them down? Are you going to talk about it? Well, I think it can be a tough one, because the idea behind usually public comment is for somebody that has something on their mind, right, to come to the meeting and be able to bring that to the board's attention early in the process and not have to sit through a lot of business. One way, two weeks. Yeah. However, it works the other way around. Sometimes it's better served at the back half of the meeting, too. That's what we were talking about earlier. Regardless of where you put it, it can be positive and negative affecting the meeting. So Doug's got Christmas lights up. One more. And I see the lights on the railings of the bridge. Yeah, it's really been. Doug has been doing it. Deetree and Kathy Day have really, who else I'm missing, but I know the three of you have been really going at it and getting it done. I know that they asked, they want to do some on Fort Fortitude. And I think the owner of Green Mountain Feeds, I think, has agreed to maybe help them out with some power, because there is no power there. But I don't know if you've had other helpers, but you guys have been doing a great job. Yeah, yeah. Well, it looks good. Thank you. Yeah. I think when are you turning them on? Thanksgiving? Oh, it's after. The day after? It's Friday at the end of this Friday. Yeah, you're right. You got away. It was awfully warm when you were putting those up this year. Not at all. I know. You should be doing it in July, so you're all set for later. Well, we can leave them up, though, this time. Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm saying. It's for you. Well, thank you. Anything else, public comment? Here and none. We will move on. So the first on the agenda this evening is to continue our discussion with the budget. So I had talked to Lindley today and Chris, and Chris had caught, which might be all you did, except for I didn't, obviously, or were fixing. Under POL insurance, I had $40,000 instead of $4, which explained my number a little bit. I kept going back over and over it, but I just don't think I could see it at that point. I looked at it too many times. So I put on your table the updated budget comparison report and the updated budget with only that correction made in it. So I'd answered other questions. But so I'm assuming you just want to start on the first page of revenues and go through, and I can answer. Usually what we do in the past is, instead of going line by line, we go page by page. So if somebody has questions, they can ask. Now, the only pet peeve I'm going to have is, I don't mind back to back, but when you do back to back and flip, that became very, very challenging for me. I had back to back in, and then I would have to flip it. I'm sorry. I couldn't play a lot. That's when I made the problem. So when I was putting my pages together, I was like, oh, slide down. Sorry, yeah. That's about your printing settings, because I printed my own. Well, they printed it for me, so. Oh yeah, I printed there, so sorry. So they sent it to Linlin. She printed mine there. OK, I'll fix it. I got you covered. I will. Let's fix it. Sorry about that. So obviously. Were you at the revenue side? Yes. We're going to start with the revenue page. You know, I do try to put notes, as long as there's much for you as they are for me. But does anybody have any questions on the revenues? I mean, I just saw that the town clerk's fees, about $10,000 higher than we normally budget, but it looks like the actuals in the past have been higher than what we budgeted. So is that? Well, last year was due to COVID. That property changed hands like nobody could believe. I mean, PAM was straight out. It was, frankly, just unheard of. And it's still the property sales are up. So currently, we have the actual of $9,668,000. So I asked PAM, how are you doing now? And she's still busy, so we just took that number and multiplied it out to come up with the $276, because property is still turning over, but what's happening is inventory. There's just not much property to sell. So, you know, clerk's fees are hard. It's really, it's not driven by anything we do. Pool passes, I just stuck with what we had done in 2020. Obviously we didn't open last year, then this last year we were open, but it was kind of a slower start. So I'm trying to be optimistic with the 85, 75. This last year we also didn't sell snacks. We didn't do, there was a couple of things we didn't do because of COVID, so hopefully that changes next year. So yeah, some of the other stuff of just two-year averages is what I tend to do, base it on some sort of reality. There was another carrier added to the tower lease. So that's in there. I also noticed that you went from delinquent taxes, you went from 35 to zero. Right, so what's happening is afterwards, we talked about scaling it down every year, and I just, there's a zero here, which obviously we had delinquent taxes, but what happens is we change the way we record them with the accountant. So we could, I could put that back. I should have put that back. Well, I'm just wondering if, to 30, I know we've been talking about ratcheting it down because we're collecting our taxes, but... And we're having a tax sale this year, so we are definitely... I'm just wondering if maybe we... Maybe that would still fall into this current budget, the tax sale. Excuse me? The tax sale this year would still fall into the current. The one we had. Right, exactly, and then, which means it's gonna be less next year. So maybe what we need to do is, I can take a look, let me just take a look at this. Maybe this needs to be like 25. Let me look at the last tax sale. Yeah, I was thinking like cut it in half, like 20 or something. Yeah, let me take a peek. Because the way you had it right now was the revenues dropped by... Yeah, exactly. So I just need to go back and look at the number. Obviously. Four or 5,000 or something. Yeah, and I'm also slowing on the interest. Oh, I slowed on the penalty because people are paying their taxes. Yeah, that makes sense. And same thing with interest, I back down that number as well. So let me just double check these two. I can go back historically and just double check. Double check. I've done two with the change of the three day, giving people the three day window that also is gonna change for interest and penalty. As far as admin reimbursement for solid waste, sewer department and water department, those are based in reality. I take a percentage of each person's job that they do for maybe water, sewer, solid waste and allocate a number to it. And that's where those numbers are. They're a percentage of somebody's people's salary, so. All right, you wanna go to public works? So everything else there looks good, but. So as I was talking with Terese right now. Talk about. She has budgeted for, I don't wanna say the most extreme, but the higher end of the retirement extreme. Right, so. We're hoping that that comes back more closer to the 15% rather than 22%. Well, right now, currently we're at 19.5%. That's what the state hit us with. That's why we started the year with this $30,000 in the hole between all of our funds because we normally had 13.84 is what we were paying and I always budgeted 15% as a little bit of a cushion. Obviously I had no clue they were gonna go from 13.84 to 19.5, so luckily this year in public works, we're gonna be able to make it out because some of the people didn't need family plan assurances. But so I budgeted to go from 19.5 to 22 because I don't have a crystal ball. Kurt White has been helpful. He reached out to Beth Pierce at the state, it was a state treasurer. Beth was supposed to have a meeting that got canceled and then he was gonna follow up with her because we did get, I saw the V-MERS, Vermont Municipal Retirement, which we're not part of. So I emailed Kurt and said, hey, they got their numbers, where are ours? And he said, oh, I was gonna reach out. So I haven't heard back from Kurt if he had another conversation with Beth Pierce yet to see what this is gonna look like and even if she's even gonna swear to the state. Because that seems to be the largest, like normally we're talking about health insurance, but the biggest swing in our budget right now has been to retirement. Well, and of course too, because last year we budgeted 15%. And then we had to go to 19.5 in actuality, so I don't even know what to do. So hence why I said, well, all right, I'm gonna err on the high side and go to 22. Our premium increase for health insurance was only 0.1 out, which was great. So nothing, so I don't know if you have anything under public works. No, I thought it was all fine other than got my fingers crossed that the retirement numbers will come down so that we can better take, we can take that money and put it somewhere else. Yeah, I agree. Yes, I increased ditching by five grand. I wanna get more done because Chris and I, Alan, Chris, myself and Alan Patton met with Jim Gray of A&R. So obviously we pay for our municipal stormwater permit every year. And what comes with that is you have to have a percentage of your rows brought up to a standard by the end of 2022. And people forget that Bethel, and they are looking at class four rows. And Bethel has over 80 miles of row. We maintain about 65 miles. So I'd like to see to get more done. So that's why, yes, there's five grand there. Obviously I'm hoping that there's gonna be some savings in retirement, but the more we can get done, the better off it is. I just had a meeting today with Rita from Two Rivers. We do take advantage of every grant that we can get. We're writing better connections, or better connections in the brain. Better roads, grants, as well as grants and aid. Grants and aid we just did. We've done Hooper Hollow, we've done Sanders. We're gonna put Christian Hill out to bid. The next one is gonna be a sections on Findlay Bridge Road because we paid for Two Rivers to do a whole road erosion and culvert inventory. And they've done that. And that's what you use for data. And they pick out these segments and if they're hydrologically connected. So if your segment tubs into a river somewhere, culvert needs to be a certain size. You have to look at ledge removal, tree removal, and they stone line, they force you to stone line the ditches. As a side note, the state doesn't stone line their own ditches, but they make us trash. So anyways, so in order to adhere to this grant, so the next piece that we picked out today was for, was Findlay Bridge. And then we're also gonna write a better grants road, better roads grant for a piece of right roads. So what we're doing is we're taking the high priority items from this inventory and that's what we're trying to fix. So. Is there a particular place on this? Yes, there's certain segments that I can't describe to you right now as I would have to have my book in front of me. But there's certain sections and they were chosen by Two Rivers. They came out and looked at every road and did an inventory. So I have a book that's thick and it shows every segment. I think they do them in like 328 yard segments and they put them in to either red, green, yellow, either they don't meet so they're fail or they're meeting or they're almost meeting standard. So for Findlay, there was any sections that were in red or what we're gonna pick up. And it's $30,000 of work with a $5,000 match. So that's good money right there. I'm asking because that area. I can't tell you is what I'm saying. The area in front of Ray Straight's house. Yeah, I know where it is. And under the railroad bridge. Yeah, I know the first part is right after the bridge. That continues to be a perpetual problem with drainage and. I do know that one piece is pretty close to right near the bridge when you come off just because when Reed and I were looking at it today, that segment we were looking at. I know it's right near the beginning right there. Every time they. But where the other segments are, I can't swear. Yeah, no, I was curious about that particular one. That is on there. That was. Everybody that rides Finlay Bridge crosses that. Yeah, that's the way I try to triage. And that was the thing I said to Reed it today. We obviously, there's a place on Macintosh. There's on Trout Brook, which Trout Brook has three or four houses that, you know, I'm looking like Finlay Bridge is heavily trafficked. So I said to her, let's pick Finlay Bridge. So you're trying to triage or I'm gonna get the most bang for my buck. So that's something that's why I increase the ditching. I also, I want to get more done. So aside from these grants, we put this out to bid. With that stormwater, the, so the state understands that each town has a certain percentage of the roads that don't meet standards, right? Right. And what they want to see according to the A&R guy was 10 to 15%, 10 to 15% of your roads that don't meet standards is what you have to do a year. So I couldn't tell you what our, I mean miles of that it is, but they want to see 10 or 15%. So if we have 15 miles and they want to see us, you know, do a mile a year, fix it up. So they were, the good news was there's some sections that, so her, Rita and Pete from Two Rivers have been falling back to look at sections because there was some stuff that they missed. So obviously it throws it off. And she, you know, the good point at the conversation we had today is this is done by A&R and I think it's A&R. So anyways, and they don't talk to each other. So the standards that V-Trans is putting out and then the people who are dealing with the water issues aren't always on the same. And she said, we have said to them repeatedly, you guys need to talk to each other because you're saying you want one thing and you guys are saying another standard. So she told me today, look, don't turn yourself inside out because she said we're waiting for this and we think the standard is gonna change. So, and she said the other thing is too. I said, well, state statute says we don't have to maintain certain things on class four roads. She said, exactly. She said, so that's one of the problems is A&R is not, you know, A&R is not reading. The statute is clear about what we have to do but now they're setting this bar a little high but the other good things that are gonna come in this are anything that we have ditched that we have graded. Some of the roads just need to be graded in crown. So once we've done that, it takes it off the list. But in the meantime, you see it and you're like, oh my God, this is daunting. But so that's why, so yes, I did add $5,000 more to ditch it. Teresa, I wanted to ask under that area of the engineering services, is that for a specific type of engineering? Like you have on the side the note 15 hours but was that for something in particular? Yeah, so from, yes, it actually is. I had Ryan from Slack, you guys all know has helped do some of the road commissioner work and we were having this conversation. What we've done in the past with that 15,000 is we were doing stormwater. Remember we spent, we set aside 15,000 a couple years ago thinking we had to engineer some stormwater. Then we ended up putting it in the ground. So when we did livery and Avon, we did it on the fly. So that's what that money had been used for in the past but right now what I wanna do is get work with an engineer to engineer, I don't care if it's a half mile of like dark, pick like the worst or the steepest and have them engineer a piece so that then we have a plan. How should we build this road? How should we engineer? And then we can reuse that plan all over town by saying, okay, we've paid for this. So how we go about and do this is a standard we could use for the future for all RFPs and Fidward would say this is what we're gonna do and we had it engineered. So that's what my thought was when we, I was thinking, eh, 15 hours at this amount of money, well up until we did the storm water, the engineering services might not even been an item. Yeah. I think we added it there like three or four years ago just for the storm. Yeah. We were talking about the water. Yeah, I knew why that. Or else it had nothing in there. But then I wasn't sure what the 15 hours for this budget. I was just trying to think, how long is it gonna take them? Because they basically be revisiting a V-trans standard because V-trans can give you a cut. They can say, okay, this is, if you look at the better roads manual or some of the things that we look at, they could look at that, but I want someone to actually take a peek at that and lay something out for us. So I'm thinking, all right, 125 bucks an hour, do you know, or is maybe that's enough? How does the 30,000 for the storm water... Master plan? Yeah, that's coming. Like, how does that play into this? Or is that in this current budget cycle? It doesn't play into it at all. Because what's gonna happen is, as part of the Better Connections grant, we have $30,000 and they're developing a storm water master plan. So what that's gonna, we already have our match for that grant. There was no match for the storm water piece. So we'll tackle that in a future, somehow in a future budget, because by the time we get through it, they create a master plan. Then they're saying, it's gonna open us up because once we do this master plan, we should be eligible. I was looking for it. Eligible for more grant money. So right now, I have no idea what that's gonna look like. You're seeing that as separate from this engineering. Yeah, well, because, yeah, because there's no cost for us to do this in this master plan that they're doing right now is nothing to us. There's no match. So this, so I'm not looking for anything right now because I'm not gonna see that until into the budget cycle that, you know, we'll be into the summer before we ever see that thing. And then we'll be able to lay out, then we'll know what the projects are because right now I wouldn't even have an idea. And they're supposed to flush out the engineering on three to five projects. And Tim and I are thinking, well, I think we could do three and really flush them out. So we'd be in a better position to just go in and implement. So it's, it'll affect. So it really dials them into play in the next budget cycle or further out. Yeah, I mean, if something came up in the meantime and there might be a match, then we'd have to look at it from the capital roads. But I don't really know right now. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, no, so I'm trying to think about it, but it's. So you have the ERAF money in there for Pinello. I do. So this is that whole Pinello. So I don't know what this is gonna cost us. We're gonna, we're gonna have the engineer tonight. Thank God. And we're gonna get someone on board to figure this out. I don't, I believe that the FEMA, the estimate, the scope and cost that they give us is way low after having a discussion with the engineers on site and talking to some folks about it because of the bridge standard to which you have to build for. Because when you build a bridge, there's two different standards. One is, and it's H something or other, which doesn't really matter. But the standard that we scope for is the higher end because in one of the engineers said, well, the town could choose not to build the bridge to that engineering level. But what it means is the bridge itself on the basis table, but if somebody hits the railing and goes through, then you didn't build to the roads and standards in which you adopted. And I'm like, no way, because we know they're gonna put log trucks over it. And so my thinking is how we would be opening ourselves up to a liability if we didn't design it to the right standard. So I'm thinking we're looking at a higher number. So if I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But I think that what FEMA has scoped it out was low. And then there was conversation there about we had been planning to do this modular bridge just longer, 90-foot span, thinking we could get further and higher up and away from the river. And then a couple of engineers were like, well, if FEMA wants us to do abutments and then the bridge is shorter. And I'm like, oh, this is good. So the ERAF is. So it's over a two-year period. I'm saying we split it. I'm saying we pay half now and half later. But by the time it's done. Well, the tough thing we're gonna have is with the extra 1.7 billion that's coming to the state of Vermont for roadway construction, you're gonna see a lot more projects, which means the contractors are gonna be picky and choosy and prices are gonna go up, not to mention materials are up right now. So, I mean, it's just kind of. It's true. So it's kind of. Not a perfect storm for building right now. The good thing is this will be the last one. This is the last, this is actually the last project in the state for DR-445. So, but this is just where we ended up. So I'd say we put the ERAF over two years. At least we're paying for it. We're not gonna borrow for it. It will, and if it's less, it's less in hallelujah. I suspect that it's pennywise a pound foolish to go with a lower standard or a lower. I mean, you know, it's a bridge to one house, but we know they're logging and it concerns me about the liability. And I'm not sure FEMA's gonna go for it because every year we sign the paper saying that we're gonna build to the bridges to the roads and standards. So I think that's a slippery slope to, but it's something we'll flush out more with the engineer when we hire, you know, VHB comes on board. It'll be a conversation we'll have. And I just need more data from them to see what exactly is the difference. And we did make them go forward with the full design saying this is what it's gonna cost us to go to the high design and see. I think it may be even a question. Challenges is we had a very lengthy discussion two years ago here, but I mean, we have a million dollar bridge that goes to one house. 2019, Chris, it was one house. So it was in 2019. So we had discussions about, you know, should the town be responsible for the bridge or should it be a privately owned, you know, because if you go up through there, a lot of the bridges are privately owned bridges. Yeah. So we had that discussion, but in order to get FEMA money to temporary do it, then you have to kind of make a commitment that you are going to follow that procedure. Honestly. My only concern is that we could do something enough to get by and we might wind up paying more at the end of the day because of. Yeah. Honestly, if the state would give us that bridge, we'd walk away right now. What's gonna happen is. We wouldn't even take FEMA money. I'd say forget it. We'd pay for the bridge that was in right now. I have begged the state to sell that bridge. You can see the way the path of water, the way the water comes through there and you can see all the erosion that's happening on the upstream and on the house side is, I mean, good chances you're gonna build a bridge there in 20 years from now when we're building a new bridge there. Yeah. So the current. Not gonna be there. Yeah, the current. And the span of the bridge every time we have a flood event changes by like 10 extra feet. So a bridge that used to be 60 feet is now 100 feet, you know. Yeah. And the thing about the H&H study is they proved that we need to push it downstream a little, which changes our access from Gilead, but it's true. It rises it up. But yeah, if the state would sell us the bridge we had now. Oh, that would be nice. We wouldn't even take FEMA money. That'd be the way to go. We'd call it, but they won't. I have, the guy was retiring from the state. Well, we just buy and they call the company maybe and just buy one of their steel bridges and we'd pay for a full pop. So we've said to, well, we talked about that. And then they were telling me now the cost of, you know, steelness and that. But I even talked to Hoby, the guy was retiring. Like, what do you care? They were retiring. Sell it to me. You can cut that thing for 30 years, but you know. They just screwed us in the water thing. They can make it up here. They want it back, so they will. So they're saying we have to give it up. Yeah, so that'll be over two years then. Two years to make it up there. Okay. And it looked like the fire department wasn't really changing. Oh, so the cemetery is too. We're gonna put that out today. No, I think the fire department was pretty good. I think this is the first time in a while is they don't have any grant type matching stuff going on. Do they have anything at the fire department? No, I talked to, I had a meeting with Gary and Dave, I'll get you the other day. And no, because what happens is they got turned down for their other AFG because they don't, their call volume doesn't support it. They got that nice grant and they're still looking for, they still need to get their refill tank. But right now it's tough. And of course everybody has a need, but when your call volume is low, it kind of throws you out early in the process. So the constable, I just wanna explain this math here. So in the first column on the top, you can see I wrote one full-time, no part-time. The last iteration of the budget, I came in with per year request, one full-time constable plus 100 hours overtime plus a part-time constable that worked 10 hours a week. And then Paul talked to Paul about, he came in, we had a conversation about it. And he was like, well, what would it look like if it was just one full-time person? So 40 hours a week and some OT, what would it look like? So that's the first column. The second column where it's under notes, I have in staying, we stay at the status quo, which is we've budgeted for 20 hours a week and hopefully we can get it because at this point obviously we're not. Plus it includes a speed cart for $8,800 and two more flashing speed signs. So we could install one like on River Street and somewhere else. So you can see the difference. The one full-time is 141,545 and then the 20 hours a week speed cart, two flashing signs is 58,106. So that's why they're kind of, I wasn't really sure how else to. And then how we, and then just, and it probably will answer some questions that anybody has out there, but how we came to this, well, a couple of things. When you're doing the budgeting, you can start in different places. So like some boards will say to the town manager, okay, you need to keep the budget within X, right? And then after you do that, then we add or subtract from it. In this case, we kind of just said, what are the wants out there? Or what makes sense? Let's put it all in the budget and then we'll start picking in, okay, this doesn't make sense or we need to add here or subtract from there. And how the constable piece came about was, in an ideal situation and talking with our community over time, ideally we'd like to see 20 hours a week of, patrol, education, visibility in the community. And the challenge that we've had over the last couple of years, especially the last two years, has been a couple of things. The first part is in order to do 20 hours with the work in the field now, it may take 40 hours with the commitment because of if you pull somebody over for speed, you might have to go to court. God forbid you pull somebody over that strunk because that might be a whole day's worth of paperwork and then have to go to XYZ court dates. So there's a lot of paperwork time behind the scenes because you can't just say, well, you just have to do that at your own time, right? You may have to pay for all the red tape that comes with things now. And then convoluted things is we used to have a pretty good gig in Bethel up until like three years ago where Hancock and Rochester and Bethel, we all shared one constable. So the constable was a full-time constable. He just spent a certain amount of hours in each community and we shared one, no, actually it was two cars, right? We had one, Rochester had a car, but Hancock didn't have one or something. So we had a system there of all of us pulling together and it was a really good gig. And then the gentleman went to Windsor County for a full-time gig. So now what we've been left with is it's very challenging to find anybody qualified to wanna just take on 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week of service. So what we've had, we did have, we got lucky again, we had Oscar for a period of time where he was splitting his time between Killington and Bethel and that worked out really well. And I think we saw in the community, we had really good present, well the two big things that we had going on at that time was we had a lot of speeding in around the village. When I say that from like the school down through, and we had a higher visibility of drug related issues in the town, like you clearly could see them coming out of buildings and the state police didn't want any to help us. So Oscar did a really good job of combating that for a period of time, of course just like anything, as soon as a full-time gig comes available, he went to take a full-time gig. And nothing against the individual that we have now, but now we're back into the situation of to fill just 10 hours or 20 hours a week, we're either gonna get somebody that can't quite devote their time to us, which is kind of what's happening right now. Or you have to devote your resources to say we're gonna pay you a full-time gig. Right, because Oscar was- To get some sort of work out of it. Because Oscar's full-time in Royalton and Justin is full-time with Rutland County. So obviously their loyalty has to lie with their main agency, so if there's overtime or someone's sick or vacation, they have to cover their home base, basically. And then, so we've been trying to get between the two of them, figure it out. And it's been tough and Oscar will do in the mornings for a couple of hours, sometimes on the way to his shift in Royalton or a couple of hours on the way home or whatever, and it becomes tricky. Because the goal. And the end goal, so two you need to remember, is a constable has to be part-time certified. That's a state law now, they have to have been through at least the part-time academy. So currently, so you have to have, you know, police officers and doing it. So anyways- So we were trying to go through that. We were trying to go through the exercise of, it seems though right now, in order to get somebody that's qualified that is gonna put the good time into the community and be the face of the community and be visible, that maybe we would have to look for more full-time thing. And what does that look like on paper? Like how much does it cost? Because it's not just as simple as paying somebody, whatever, X amount of dollars an hour. There's the, as we know, there's retirement and healthcare and workers comp. And then if you have somebody more full-time then there's more money when it comes to fuel, wear and tear on, you know, a lot of other things that happen, so. Thing too, as I know, is I did not raise the ticket revenue in here. Obviously, you would see an increase in ticket revenue. However, just to be clear, there is no quota. State law, that's illegal, we cannot say to an officer you have to generate X amount of tickets. You could say, hey, you know, we want you to make your presence known or we want you to make some contacts, but you cannot say that. You can't, you know, and that was never our intention. We've never done that, we never talked about that. Would you see an increase in revenue? Of course you would, it would just make sense because you'd have a police officer, you know, pulling more people over, but that's nothing. But in this iteration, I didn't touch the revenue. So, yeah, so this is what it looks like. Also too, you know, people don't, we get a ton of phone calls. I mean, VSP is strapped. People do not want to be police officers. And the VSP very easily can have one person on for a huge section of the state. So it's not they don't want to help us, they can't. They're also just short-stacked. So we are getting phone calls for whether it's not just dogs, but we get a lot of civil complaints. Somebody may be having a domestic issue and they need a police officer or constable to be there. Well, maybe they go home to get their stuff to be safe. You know, we have a lot of that. We have phone calls like that that need to be done. We have civil service processes. Oscar Justin can serve for people if they need to serve someone, whether it's divorce papers, court papers, whatever. That sort of thing. And people calling about drugs. And we are having a problem with drugs on our road. We really want a police officer. When are they going to be on duty? And or they want more targeted, you know, traffic enforcement. Or trash dumping. So yeah, traffic dumping is a big one. So I think what people don't realize is how many phone calls and emails we get on the town level, people wanting service, basically wanting, you know, some assistance and it's hard. We always refer them obviously if it's an emergency, go to state police, you know, if Oscar or Justin are on and we do whatever we can to get people help, you know, when they need it. But it, you know, it's difficult. I know Oscar and Justin field phone calls when they're on their other jobs too. Yeah, two questions or two comments were made last meeting that I think are particularly appropriate. One is, are we spending the money in the best way to solve the problem we have? For example, the speeding coming into town on 107. Is it better to increase enforcement or to put up signs and even add a sidewalk, et cetera, to make it safer along that stretch without having to, without putting the money into law enforcement. And the second was similarly and then restated with the notes from the DIC, the Equity and Inclusion Committee about whether for domestic appeal, domestic issue. For example, are the police or constable, is that the best way to respond? Right. To a domestic disturbance. And I mean, those are two really, really important questions that I think we need to ask. What do we get for the extra bucks? Yeah, so I asked, so I did ask the state about 107 and they said they would not pay to put flashing lights in there, but I could certainly right request a permit and pay to put the lights in and they would let us do that, but obviously they won't install them. I question because I don't understand and I don't know the data. When people say sidewalks help with speeding, people are flying down Church Street and that has a nice sidewalk and is in the middle of the town. So I'm not, I just don't get that. Someone would have to explain that to the public. You know, a sidewalk doesn't help with speeding. Absolutely getting the pedestrian off the road. Oh, I see. Oh, okay. Well, thank you. That makes more sense. Because they don't have to walk their dogs in the highway. Highway, of course. Yeah, that makes sense. Right, that was how I understood it. Oh, well, that makes sense, Jean. I didn't, I was, I kept thinking, it's not a bad, it doesn't slow people down. It's more about pedestrian safety than so it is. But it becomes an issue of public safety for the people who use it. Oh, thanks. To answer your question, I think the ideal situation is to have a combination of all, right? A combination of warning of I'm a driver and I'm going too fast. And there is a presence in the area that if I go by that speed cart, even though, you know, that I could get pulled over. You know, because you look at like, I always take Woodstock for a good example, right? When you drive through Woodstock, there's all these, on every main artery of Woodstock, they have speed carts. But it's not just like I'm driving by a speed cart and I'm just seeing how fast I'm going. Because you know that they have somebody in Woodstock that's on 24-7 that could be around the next corner that liked to pull you over, right? So you're more apt to go through Woodstock at 20 miles per hour when it's 25. You know what I mean? Like you put through Woodstock. Where I have the feeling that the challenge with us would be is I think a speed cart, you put it out there, it costs money, right? You put it out there. But over a period of time, if people don't see any enforcement, it's just gonna become, I mean it's gonna do my 40 anyways and it's 25 because I know nobody's gonna pull me over. It's lower on the speed signs up by the school. Yeah. And I think we're starting to see that again, especially the worst stretch normally is the Pleasant Street stretch through the school because it hits 50 out there. And I think, again, the challenge is, it's not that the constable that we have isn't a good constable. It's that he's not able to give us the proper hours of service that we are used to seeing in our traveling public use of seeing. So like he comes in on odd shifts, you know, you might be here on Saturday evening or Sunday evening or something. Right at 5 a.m. on Monday morning. People are like, before, they didn't know when Oscar was here. He might be here for a couple of days during the daytime or one in the evening. And now we don't, you know, I mean, how often do you see the constable driving to town? Not when I'm up, you know, so it's like, you know. Where's the data on that? I mean, that makes all kinds of sense. Well, I think the data is pretty common sense. I mean, it's like you're saying that's, you just put a sign out there. People are gonna do what they wanna do over after a period of time. Yeah, I don't. I think so from my own personal experience. I see one of those signs, I slow down. Oh yeah, right, me too. Now we could probably, so that there's a, in the interest of time, I think we can end this issue pretty quick. I know there's a million, million opinions on how we police things and do things in our town or our communities or other places. I think looking at the numbers, that there's no way that we can justify $80,000 to $90,000 of extra budget money to have a full-time person on it. Now, I don't think that solves our issue because we're still gonna have an issue of, you know, having some presence there. However, I do think it's a good amount of money that I think the citizens have definitely to understand that maybe to do things more right, that this is what that investment may cost us, you know, maybe not this year, maybe next year, maybe another year, because the days of just finding that person that wants to come in and grab 10 hours because like Theresa's saying, now they have to go through all the classes. It's not like, you know, those days may be over, you know, so then our choice might be a full-time officer in town or a no-time officer in town. But each one comes with its own set of, you know, issues. Because we looked at contracting, was it last year? Yeah, we've looked through Windsor County Sheriff's, we talked about maybe joining on with the town of Randolph, we looked at the state police. I mean, and those numbers are... Ah, I mean, it was, I think we were looking at about like 40 some-odd thousand. For nothing. For nothing. For 40 years. For 20 hours a week to contract with the state police, which is what we're looking at. And that didn't take care of, animal enforcement on top of that, so. Yeah, which they could be touched. And so, and it's hard, I think too with Bethel, been very lucky that you lived right next to the state police barracks, so I think that VSP has done very well by Bethel for a long time. Back when they were fully staffed. Yeah, but I can tell you, the VSP wants us to come up with somebody, you know, they're just like, look, we're, you know, they're... Well, we were lucky because we had two troopers that lived in our community at one time. Yeah. So we had that local presence all the time. If you look at the state police daily press releases, the drop off in this area is just, there's nothing there anymore. Because they're elsewhere. Yeah. The Rutland, you know, up north. Yeah, and if they... You very rarely see anything from this area. Yeah, no call. If VSP is, you know, they'll call to see if Oscar or Justin are on, so that they, in the state, you've got to call, you know, the constables on Gill and him, so. But this may be, Teresa and I were talking today and we'll bring it up at the town meeting warning piece of it, of maybe this might be a piece that we seek some information during town meeting day from our citizens on what would they like to see done going forward, you know. Because I think the days of the part time constable was kind of in the past. To find somebody qualified to do the work that wants to do the work. Yeah, I get a question. I agree with you, Chris. Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry, just a question. Have you seen the video that you've heard about any reduction of, like, sneaking into town with that new signal that you've got? I haven't heard anything. I mean, I always slow down whenever I see them. I think, but that's just me. Yeah, I do think that there's some faction of people who probably do, but no, I don't have any data on how much it's worked to slow people down. I mean, I think. Those little boxes have the data on the speed. Yeah, the other ones we have. Yeah, I don't know if, I don't think, I don't know if these do either. The other ones had a print off that we could get. I mean, it was hard to understand the information, but they were a print off. And frankly, it's difficult too, because there's always two schools of thought, right? Some people go as fast as they can just because they want to see, but they're not in process. And then other people do, I don't think these are data holders. I mean, it's hard to do much with it anyways, because I mean, we all know, I mean, I think first thing in the morning is tricky employees that are out that walk first thing in the morning, and certainly Church Street, Maine. So I don't know, Leonard, I like to think that they're a deterrent for people. I think my primary area of the day is how it feels to me to find more people in this morning. Yeah. And that's just the feeling I get after I've been through it, and you know, life is hard as well, too. Yeah. Where people are heeding to the speed limit in that area, I don't know. I'd like to see him at all the entrances of the town. I'd originally had three of them in here, but I was like, oh, I know we're gonna go for it. Well, by the school in the morning, there's a lot of congestion and vehicles there anyway, so it just naturally slows everybody down, going through there, but at 6.30 in the morning. Sheriff had one at 7 o'clock in the morning. It's a very different story. Yeah, and especially like, well, yeah, this time in the evening, the lion. The other thing, too, is if we continue to not be able to get the coverage we need with the constables we have, we can also look at, you know, we could reach out to the Windsor County Sheriff and see, but I mean, it's pricey. You know, cut what you have, but you might at least have a reliable amount of hours you're gonna get. So I had a conversation with Oscar about it, too, and talked to him, but so you wanna leave the 58106. I mean, I guess that's kind of where I'm at. I mean, I still think that there may be some discussions had around the $15,000 worth of signage, knowing the history of some of the town meetings, that that's probably gonna be in emphasis because 15,000 is three quarters depending on the tax rate, just for one item, so. Would you mind, I have some other suggestions if we're not gonna do the full time, would you mind if I send you those things via email? No, please do. Okay. So yeah, the 8,800 is the speed card and then two more of the other signs. That's what the 15,800 is. You're saying you were interested in a third speed sign. Why was? So there are about 3,500 each, is that right? Yeah, I was getting a little greedy. I was going through the question. They're all thinking the 8,800. 8,800 versus 5,800. I mean, 3,500 is only 10,000 hours. I know. I was like, I did my first iteration. I was like, okay, three flashing signs and a speed card and then I'm looking at the numbers and I went back through to go back and I'm like, oh, that's just getting all greedy. I'm not sure I could get that. Barrier has them and all the interest in this now. That's what I'd like to see too. I'd like to see them. They did and used to, but within last, this last year. Yeah. Wherever, whenever you end up and be one of them, they have a lot of interest. And the speed card too, so that we could move it. So if we have targets, then that's it. Yeah, that. So are we good with just keeping the 20 hour week with the speed card in the budget for now? Do that, Ro? Yeah. I mean, we'll have more discussions. I would definitely be interested in figuring out some way to get more information from the general public as to what they want, what they don't want, but also like, I love that the EIC outlined some ideas, but I mean, Theresa and I were kind of bouncing this around a little bit today that like, some of what's hard is just putting ideas in front of us doesn't give us a way to move forward with any of it and we're too far into the budget cycle that there's no way to add any of this now. So it's like, from here, do we then, do we go back to the EIC and task you with, okay, pick one or two models, do the research and get us some numbers by this date so we can entertain it in the next budget cycle and then use what we learned at this time meeting for public sentiment, integrate, just like start pulling all these pieces like we can recognize we can't make any drastic of people changes in this cycle, but we could do more research, figure out what the interest level is and then also what options are and then start putting those into the mix for the next year's discussion. Right. I think that makes sense. I mean, that's what committees are for. We can't do all the research, I certainly can't. So that's what normally what committees do is they do the research and come to you with thought out or some semi flushed out ideas. Just giving me names isn't, I got nothing. I don't have time to research. I would like to see as part of that. So what's been, what are the crime rates? What is, what are the arrest records? What are the traffic control records over a period of time in terms of apprehensions or whatever? Under, you know, request for assistance that we time from requests to somebody on scene. Those kinds of, that kind of issue to inform us rather than it feels to me like people are going too fast. Right. Well, we gave you some data. What's some data? I want some hard data about whether we are seeing an increase in need for police policing. That's not being met because of whatever, whatever reason. Alrighty. So we've agreed to the, just to keep the 20 hours in there for now. But I think the important part too, Chris, so it's not glazed over it at all, is bringing it up to town meeting and getting a feel because that's how this whole started. Well, I think that's what. Years ago and to bring it back to town meeting. Well, I think once we talk about the town meeting warning that. Theresa and I have an idea of maybe, because we can go back and forth on what we think we should have on the warning, not on the warning when I'm talking like the new things, as well as like constable slash police. I think there's some opportunities for the select board to reach out to the citizens during town meeting day to say, kind of like the Doyle poll, remember Doyle, like you put out like, 10 things of what was going on, but not really being dealt with, and get some information back, like what do our citizens think? And if overwhelming, they say one thing or the other, then that task to select board to start working on that, right? Or some of these other issues that we still haven't completed on the warning. My caution is these days, what citizens think is not necessarily lined up with reality. And so I would like to see this, these are the, this is the data folk. Well, we can probably get, yeah, I mean, and so we can probably get some data from, What's that present in your packet? I mean, we have data from the past on speed in the villages. We can get data from the state police on how to do that, and it's not just of what you all think. I wonder if there's a creative way to do this too. And I don't know exactly, I'm performing this thought as I'm saying it, so bear with me. But something more along the lines of like a community conversation. So that's what we were talking about. Well, and town meeting might not be quite the place for this, but just thinking outside of town meeting, like is it a Bethlehem University class that's co-run by the town and the EIC, or some experts are brought in to talk about alternative models that are successful in other communities and how they could apply within our community. And so it's for the conversation in a different way, where it's not just an ask at town meeting, but it's more informational. Here are some alternatives. How do you feel, how could this apply, and get it to be sort of more of a conversation than, I feel like town meeting's one venue, but it's also, it's a tough venue, because you're not necessarily. You're hoping you get a cross-section of this. You're getting a cross-section of the town by town meeting, but you're not getting every person. But one of the things that Rebecca told me about Sanborn Stone, which was very interesting, I'd never heard of it in New Hampshire. They do this thing called New Hampshire listens. There's a group that goes around, I guess, and helps facilitate these conversations, which is interesting. I don't know if there's anything in Vermont. She wasn't aware, but it was interesting, nonetheless, about it. So, all right, so the rec department, I got that, oh, the 10,000, or let me see. I forgot, I asked Ellie for a number. It's in there, she's in. So I couldn't remember. And so that budget is down a tiny bit, but hey, go ahead. I understand repairs and maintenance. Yep. Do you anticipate what goes into repair and maintenance that way, when you anticipate from repairs and maintenance? Well, I think last year we did, let's see, we stained the outside of the building last year, and we put some flooring in. I think this year we have to, what was the other thing? We have to do something this year. But we also went around and tightened all the bolts in the pavilion last year, the part that's out around to the skate there to the pool. And, let's see, I'm trying to think, I'm missing, so. You're talking about the ADA compliance walkway. We had some plumbing. That must be done. Well, if the ADA compliance walkway is going as part of the skate park, that's not going as part of this. So usually repairs and maintenance are something like, if we have some plumbing issue or toilet we need to fix, we had to fix a vent pipe last year, and we still have to maybe install, I don't know if that V got installed on the roof so that the snow doesn't take out the pipe. So we try to do stuff like that. I think last year we put in, the reason it's high is there was an expense in there for Paul Feeney to move the wreck equipment, but we offset some of that money with a grant revenue. So I know that we talked about if we have to seal the skate park, that's in there because I know that D-Tree said we have to put some sealant on the skate park. So that's in there. But we'd walked through it and she, because we were able to get quite a few things done this year, the flooring and things, we kind of, she felt like maybe we'd have a little savings there. Yeah, because it looks like, looking at the town of Fort, you've got 8,000 and you've only spent so there seems to be doing some savings on it every time. I was just trying to get a feeling for it because D-Tree did mention to the committee that she's not around all the time when she's concerned about the trash and the trail and the dog something. And I didn't know. I didn't know. So we don't chart, the mowing comes out of a different budget. So Richard comes down and does all the mowing and trimming. That doesn't come out of the rec budget that we pay him comes out of the park. Oh, like the parks? Yeah, so the mowing for the record comes out of the parks budget. I guess just the way it was where it's been. But yeah, so and usually you, I mean people that are down there a lot of times do good job cleaning up any trash. I mean, we talked about, well you guys have a big sign on order, right? Yeah. Yeah, I think it talks about the rules and pack in, pack out and all that. Yeah. And I just, I just, because the individual was concerned about that she's there at the summertime. Right, exactly. She's telling the committee and we want to be aware if there's some maintenance or things that we can do so that she's not so handicapped that she's worried about getting over there. Oh, that's nice. Because of the skate park is being used a lot. And you know, and you know we're looking over there. Yeah. Now I'm recently after 4,000 or 9,000, I've picked up a lot of trash. My bad. But you know, whatever. I know, I wish people would, you know, pack in, pack out. I know you have your sign on order. And so we really picked up a lot of the low, you know, the bigger project faster because we had a savings due to COVID. So we said, all right, let's do the flooring in the, in the pool, you know, in the office area. We figured out a plumbing issue that we had because as you know, that floor was crazy flooding. So we just ended up saying, forget it, we just shut the water off. And kind of people were happy because it ended up, you know, they're going to have, they had more room for changing. Yeah. Cause I know she went down from 8, 8, 5 to 6. Yeah, cause we were able to pick up some of those bigger pieces. But I don't know of anything right now other than, than the skate park itself because we got the building stained. I have a couple of trees to remove that if they come down, they're coming down on the fence. I got landowner permission in between us and John Gifford. There's a couple of tall trees right there that if they come down, they're on our property but between us and we have to access via his property. And he said we could, he's first going up Sand Hill, that big brick house. Oh, okay. Yeah. So if they come down, they're going to come down on the fence. So there's, that's the other, I know there was one thing, tree removal. We have to do a couple there. And to waiting for Justin Ford to come in. But we did get permission from John Gifford to go in and do it. But we, you know, so we didn't pick up some and like I said, it includes the skate park maintenance cause we got to seal that thing. So we, we have been here, or I have been here occasionally, that who will need some major work. Yep. And what if anything is being addressed or are we putting that off until it becomes, you have to do it and you should have done a long time ago? Well, right now we have put, we've thrown up for a number cause we didn't really, we're working on getting contractors together to come up with a price. We put $100,000 in their WREC capital plan to address pool needs because what needs to happen is between the, the side of the pool and the pool itself. We need to tear up all that concrete. There's some piping under there that all the piping runs along under the black top version around the pool. So what we need to do is it's going to be a project because we need to tear all that out. We need to re-pipe a good portion of that around. We think that we have a leak in one of the skin baskets and the only way that's going to get fixed is when we remove that. The other thing we've talked about is moving the concrete all the way to the fence line so that that way it's not this weird little strip of grass that keeps coming into the pool and clogging the filter. Also, because under this, under the fiberglass lining it's black top. So one of the things we have talked about is we, the fiberglass gentleman does us a huge favor, Mr. Petty, he doesn't charge us very much and comes each year and patches little holes. One of the things that has come up is if you're going to go in and this is what he was saying, if you're going to go in and do all this and tear this out, you tear out the fiberglass and it's, I think it's called gunlight. Gunlight, gun. Gunlight, thank you. We had gunlight and going in and basically, so spraying the whole pool. So we, to do something, and Ellie and I were having this conversation, I put $100,000 in there just as a, we don't know. And because Day Tree last year reached out to all the contractors and said, okay, if you did the plumbing and you did the, how much, what are we looking at here to pour this? And then of course, COVID prices go through the roof with concrete and so we are setting money aside for it. So that's this repairs and maintenance one? No, it's the $10,000 that goes into the capital improvement fund. It'll be. It's what goes in there. It goes that rec facility improvement fund for 10,000, goes into this larger capital fund. So it's, we're thinking about it. We are thinking about it. And we're obviously hoping we've, we looked at the Volret grant thinking, ah, this is the pool. We could do the pool and trails and wouldn't cover existing infrastructure. We're like, are you kidding? Because if it had done that, we could have, we definitely would have written the pool as a portion of it because that's a big, you know, it's a big draw and something that obviously has been there for a long time. We've, we've looked in this every time an opportunity comes up for money. I just didn't want to, I just didn't want to not see it and had it catch us. That's the long story. It's just a, it's a whole thing. And that liner, that liner, you know. No, it's just. They don't do it any, they're gonna get it back. Exactly. Because what they used to do was every year they scrub and repaint it. Before they got the length. The committee, the rep committee, they scrub everything and repaint it. Yeah, and the hard thing about the fiberglass is it can't take too much sunlight where there's not water and you have to find this balance and then when it leaks under the, it's a whole thing. So I, It's a whole thing. It's a whole thing. Right. I think within, you know, just 30 years ago, I forget the time frame where they decided, the committee decided, you know, we need an easier way instead of scrubbing and repainting every year. So they came up with it. All right. So that was liner. Yeah, it's a, it's a saga. Got it. It's a saga. But it's, we're certainly looking there. So that's the rec budget, parks and public places. We've been talking about last year we had $10,000 for the maintenance of the stone wall which will move into the capital fund and then I have 5,000 in this one. I asked Kelly today to track down they've got the Mason who keeps saying he's gonna come give me an estimate. I've met with masons and they're so busy. I can't even give anyone to give me an estimate. Also, there's a little bit of fence repair house to happen at Pevine. And then there's 5,500 in here, flower baskets. I mean, next year is the year. We have got to, we will be done with the water project on Main Street. So we need to get the buildings clean. We need to get, you know, we've talked about doing flower baskets and fixing that Mr. and Mrs. Taylor have, you know, lovingly been maintaining one of the triangles. And so we've talked about doing that some more beautification. So, and we've been talking about it. So that's money in there. So we go on above and beyond what we should be doing normally because we used to budget, I don't know, say $1,500 that was the money that went towards the individuals that were donating their time to do I don't know what you're doing. four or five different locations inside the village. And then they had come to us two years ago, right before, or right at COVID or right before COVID. You and I met with Mr. Taylor. And had asked that, well, they had said that they were more and willing to continue to help, but they could help as much financially anymore. So then we had to come up with the other match. I think that's when we budgeted 3,000. Yeah. And then I just saw that at 55. I was like, Right before COVID, right before the shutdown, like this time of year, they came to us. Yeah. And we had also, Chris and I had a conversation with Mr. Taylor, I think in the office. And so the thing is this is, there's, I'm not really sure what this is gonna do. I have heard rumors that there are already flower baskets existing, but some people aren't really sure where the flower baskets are. So if the flower baskets are, that come on the poles are no longer around, we're gonna have to buy those. I was hoping that we would get some sort of sponsorship. Maybe people for a little plaque in a basket, maybe, you know, somebody sponsors a basket. So they maybe paid a little money and we put some flowers in it, but we don't have anyone on staff to maintain them. So one thing Mr. Taylor had talked about was bringing chippers in or somebody like that. Another maybe somebody in Beppel that could do it to come in and water them and keep them deadheaded and maintain the baskets. And so I know that's been a big thing. We've seen the loss of momentum and people have been upset that the downtown doesn't look as fresh as they would like. And so we had been talking about this, but I don't know, you know, we may, if no one has these baskets, it's hanging baskets somewhere in the garage, we're gonna buy some. They're a good size monster basket. Have you or anybody asked about the BBA? Yeah, well, I was thinking we're lying. Like I wonder if they're stored in this building. I know a bunch of the BBA stuff is, I didn't think they were that. I guess that much I don't know. Then the I was under the impression that these things were only like a few years old, but I was just, I was like, but I didn't know that much. They were a few years old a few years ago. Right. And that's what I am thinking. It's more than a few years. Maybe he's been out of commission for more than three to five years. So they're saying they were a few years old, a few years ago. Right, and so. So they're probably like five years old. Nick might know where they are. Okay, well, so that's something, but if we don't know where they, well, we find them and they're not in good shape, then it's gonna cost to. But I was under the understanding that the 3,000 that we had in there was for the four common areas and maintaining the baskets because they had mentioned about having someone specifically come in and do some water. Yeah, no, because our budget, the number of Mr, the email that Mr. Taylor had sent us that he and his wife and their proposal was higher than that because shippers alone was fairly expensive was to come in and water everything. And we do have certain people, obviously a Chuck Davis and he takes care about here and waters, the flowers and stuff. So I just have no idea how much these baskets are gonna cost and how much is it gonna cost to get them on the poles? Do we have to, are the hangers already on the poles? Yeah, I don't know. So that's why I put this number in here because I don't know what we're dealing with. I have a question as to that. We're talking about making downtown more appealing visually and all of that, correct? Yeah. So is money being spent wisely on doing that and maintaining that? Because really the first thing you see when you come into that area are buildings. That's what you look at. That's what you see. Is there a way monies can be funneled to help these businesses improve the look of the facade of their buildings as opposed to giving all that money for constant maintenance on flowers and watering and this, that and the other has that. Can we look at- Well, there is a revolving loan fund Leonard. So people do have the opportunity to borrow at some sort of low interest rate that they can make with the town. But it's a slippery slope because for us to invest in private property, if I invest in the building, say for example, say we the town invest in a property down there, but I'm not coming to invest in your house. Eventually it's a slippery slope when the town starts putting public money into private buildings. But there is a revolving loan fund, the village is a designated downtown, but certainly Lindley is the best one to talk about that more so than me. So there's no way to offer like a grant of assistance to paint the facade of the building or anything like that, then which it would be up to them to maintain to get started. There's no way to do that. There's- Well, there is. I mean, we currently offer. Well, no, I mean- But we have a revolving loan fund. Yeah, we've offered zero interest loans to businesses to do renovations or upkeeps to the buildings. I mean, we have two of them, I think that are currently open. So there are some opportunities. I would say this budget doesn't address anything like that, Leonard. Right. These are normally what we would call the common places that the town owns, not private. No, I got you. Okay. I was just wondering guys, this is the question I'm posing just- No, and Lindley would be better off to speak on that topic than anybody sitting here. And I think we all agree that, now that we've gotten construction out of the way and things are getting back to normal in the downtown, that obviously we weren't looking good, banners in flower baskets in the common areas. But I was under the- I had thought that the 3000 covered that. I'll have to go back and find those numbers. And that was kind of what we had worked through the deal with the folks right at COVID. And then COVID happened, and we didn't do anything, and we had the waterline projects, we didn't do anything. My only recollection is that it wasn't, it didn't include, and I'm not even 100% sure on this, that it didn't include the baskets because we didn't know where the baskets were, but that it was the sort of the garden beds a lot. So there's like the one just past Brad's, between Brad's and Babe's, there's one on the opposite side of the street where the Richardson's, you know, it was like the, and then- Yeah, I know this corner. And then the triangle down there, and then up here, yeah. And I wonder too, Therese kind of mentioned that their proposal was higher, and we cut it down to 3,000. I wonder if we cut out the baskets because we didn't know where they were. I mean, I remember that being a part of the discussion two years ago. I feel like it was a bigger number. Where are these baskets? You've seen them. Yeah. So, I think it was too. And like we said too, we're obviously hoping that we could get people to sponsor, right? Oh, I don't know, they're named Dandelion Acres, Stitch Down Farms. Would people sponsor them if we allowed them to advertise their business? You know, like you see that in Williston, right? You drive down, they have all these tulips or different things, and they have little signs to give somebody. So, I mean, if you want to cut this to 3,000, that's fine. I had just put the number in here because I didn't know what you wanted to do. I mean, I love the idea of getting sort of the sponsorship, and even if it's not, like some businesses maybe can do monetary sponsorship, but maybe some businesses or local entities do sort of the volunteer-matched sponsorship of, will help maintain them if, you know, some of our businesses will help sponsor them. So, you want to go back to the 3,000? I'm more just saying, I'm feeding off your- He's over here with his pencil, so I'm not sure. I know. Well, that being up here- No, I just, you know, I'm happy to go to 3,000. Who's going to do it? That's right. I mean, that is the- Well, and that's kind of what we had worked out a couple of years ago was the town doesn't have the resources to be directly responsible for it, and the burden carried by the volunteers was getting too much, right? So we were trying to find a middle point, like maybe we invested in some of this that they help with the upkeep. I think it's what we kind of ended up with, because they used to do pretty much everything on their own. I think at one point we gave them like $500 or something, but it was pretty much on their own dime. Like all those were, correct me if I'm wrong, Doug, right? Everything was, all those common areas were done by volunteer. I don't think they received any money. And then we ratcheted it up at a stream, when you go from zero to 15 to 3,000, and we haven't done any of that level work yet. I guess that's where I'm at is, so now to see it from three down to 55, we haven't done any of that work yet. So we don't even know what 3,000 gives us because we haven't done it. So I'll put it back to three. Like the last two years we've done 3,000, we haven't done anything. Well, no, because we're under construction. Great, but I'll put it back to 3,000, that's fine. And I know when they need supplies, they would go in to see Brad, and then they would buy the supplies and charge them to a town accountant when the trip was, yeah. Parks and Rec, they're, but I think there's definitely some good opportunities there with local businesses and others' identities in around the local area to advertise and get there. But for those opportunities, the meaning was that we don't have someone who is going to contact local businesses, organizations, et cetera. And... Yeah, we'll be looking for a volunteer to see. All right, I nominate Gene, just in a second. Right, this does not, I don't believe this has a committee. No, no, it's completely 100% volunteer driven. Yeah, well, we have a couple people that made, you know, that made a couple people. Great ideas, but I would like to see some booth gonna follow through on it, if, if... Yeah, we might, you know what? Chuck Davis, maybe the tail is there, but there's a couple people I think that might be, that might step forward to help, kind of. Well, just the logistics of keeping those flower baskets. You're gonna have to hire somebody else. You gotta get somebody with a tank, and I remember they would come down with a tank on the back of the truck, and you know, be on a ladder. Yeah. You know, it's, doing the little gardens is totally different than what you had to do to keep those flowers and the baskets going. Yeah, so maybe it's baby ships, maybe, right? Getting the gardens done, and some other stuff up to, up par, and then adding on business owners, all this stuff, all that stuff. Well, you've got, you know, you get the gardens done, you've got flags, you've got banners, or you know, freshen up the banners if you need to. Yeah. Start with that. So is that the only, so far, just change that to 3,000? Is that the only size we're looking at? Well, just remember, it's not like, tonight's the end all, but tonight's the end. No, I know what I'm just saying, if you've got other changes, you want to. Yeah, I mean, we'll be looking over this thing a few times. I know, but I'm just saying, if you have any others, I'd like to get them in to see what it looks like, and set up. Because I guess the way I see it is after we get down, I mean, at some point, we have to then decide as a board, where do we want, where do we want to move the needle this year, right? Do we want to, you know, we always seem to use the 3%, which is close to 3 cents on the list every year. Last year, I think we were at two or two and a half. Yeah, I think so. But, so we actually thought we were going to be raising rates to over 2 cents last year, but then the grand list bumped up at a rate that had canceled that out. So we ended up being like zero. Of course, the grand list always kind of falls behind us, so we don't know, unfortunately, what that's going to be. But I think we've always had that starting point at like 3%, 3 cents, you know, and then we try to keep it in there. Yeah, so now I'm just saying if you have any. It might be something we come back to, you know, a meeting or two from now and say, we get a little extra money, let's add some money in here, you know. So the municipal office budget is up, there's one of the things, again, we're still with us 22%, hopefully I'll have an answer before that about retirement, about what to do for next year. So I put in $10,000, I contract labor. So just so you know, I did not include this $10,000 in my calculations for Social Security Medicare or retirement, as I was looking at this as a contract position, if you disagree, then we can do that. Right now, we have Rebecca and Chris are writing the VORAG grant. We were lucky enough to get, for me to get to VHB was one thing they recommended and we were able to get money with no match to pay for that service. And I do the road grants, structures grants, better roads, you know, work with Rita and we can get that done. And we did, you know, and we'll do reasonable grants within the year. But what's a common thing is everybody, every time somebody wants to do something because their grant for that is their grant for that. We don't have the staff to write a bunch of grants. So hence, I put a number in there thinking, okay, there are contract grant writers out there so that if we had, you know, grant opportunities, right now there's a bunch of money that's coming to the state for transportation. I had a conversation with Rita today from Two Rivers and obviously my first thought is that they're going to funnel, they've got to funnel some of the money through existing things. Maybe they increase the amount of paving grants, structures grants through a process that they already have in place. But they also whipped out the VOREC grant saying, oh, we have $6 million and, you know, but not really tight parameters on how to apply for it. So I don't know how all the money is going to get funneled to us. I would like to see them go through, you know, some of the existing stuff, but it's hard to know right now what they're going to do with the money. Within reason, I think, you know, adding money in there for grant writers is a cheap insurance policy for getting grants. I think typically, yeah, in a way it pays for itself. The only thing I would be cautious on is not starting a new position in the office because then you have benefits in retirement and everything that gets compounded so that $10,000 position turns into 25, you know. So however we do it, I think it will have to be like either you contract some pieces out or somehow do it where you don't have to. And that's why I put it in this way so you'd be issuing a 1099. They wouldn't get benefits because they already have their own business. So that's the way I looked at it was this was a contract position, not somebody else paying retirement on. So there's that number. Or if you have somebody in the office that could pick up extra hour, I don't know, I don't know how that works. I think you're definitely right. There's going to be a lot of, over the next five years, you know, that money that's coming, there's more, more, more, more. There's going to be a lot of those like sudden, here's a big pot of money, do you want it? And you've got like 10 days to get it in, you know, type deal. Yeah, so, you know, that's, and so. And in worst case scenario, if you don't spend it and you. You just sit there. You're right. It goes into the un-designated compound. Not a terrible thing. It's not going to spend it if I don't have someone to work. So the rest of it, I gave you explanations if there was an increase, I told you why. Town hall budget is actually down a little because I, we had this big building repair. We don't tend to do it. It should come out of the capital fund anyway. So. Do we kind of look at, I know we, it was a good thing because, you know, when I came onto the board, man, I don't even think we had any funds. Like, I don't know, I'm trying to think. I'm looking back and forth to see who was on. I guess Paul tonight, Paul was with me soon after, but we might have just started. No, I think we were talking about the capital improvement fund at that time, but we didn't have any funds. It was whenever it was budgeted for that year, it was budgeted for that year. And we went like this every year. And Bill Hall actually started this. I think he did. And the funds are really good because you can future cast things. But sometimes if you get too many funds and you're like, oh, we'll get a fund for this, a fund for that. And then, you know, it gets a little, then I guess the perception is, is that money really getting to the side? But I wondered like the town hall, this building has been another one where we've had like nothing and then all of a sudden $10,000 and nothing and $10,000. So is it worthwhile at this point? Or can we make it so that the money that we put in our current capital improvement fund would include any type of futuristic repairs to here? Because right now the way we have it is, it's really for, if you re-deal on this, town garage, the municipal office, and infrastructure. It was like water sewer. Now, I mean, I was- If you look at the original one that was drafted. So they did, we've been doing it as a capital building fund so we can deal with repairs. My feeling is you should be funneling all that. So like any fire department, looking at all the need, fire department need, the town hall need, town office garage should all come out of that capital building fund because, you know, that way their capital funds that they get amortized because otherwise we budget it and we lose it because if we don't use it and currently I'm not aware of, well I have an electrical, I was getting some candle lights prepared downstairs, had some light bulbs removed, that helped. There's a couple of candle lights. Then the outside light over the candy cap entrance was apparently a whole bag of cats because I had Dave Eddie look at it and we finally found the as-built today. So I got to email Dave and have him come in and take a look because he can't figure out where the wiring goes. We changed the light bulb and that didn't do it. So we're not sure if the fixture needs to be replaced but then Dave can't tell where the wiring was. So we do think we found the as-built today. So- But I just didn't know if maybe- There's a plan for the capital, capital building. Like the easiest thing is to just put it all in one fund but I know the concern that the citizens had when we started these funds was it being a slush fund. Right. That just gets put there and then the money doesn't get appropriated correctly. But there's a plan. I mean there's a special plan. Where if you had a, like we have been doing, if you have a fund for this, a fund for that, at least you know that that money is appropriated to the rec committee or it is appropriated to the town hall where, you know what I mean? Yeah, so well here I just cut the budget by $2,000 because I'm not aware of- I just didn't know, I mean- I'm not aware of any issues that I have to fix here. Just might be something we'll think about going. No, I'm just thinking down the road it might be something that we talk about. Yeah, I mean it would make sense. Setting aside money in there because like it's an off year this year we're not doing anything but next year all of a sudden we might find out the paint's peeling on the building. You're saying you just took 2,000 out of the building repair line, I don't- Yeah, that's all I did. I just cut it because I know we need to have the front of the building repointed in several places around the building. We may be able to get a historic preservation grant I can't even get a mason to come look at the stone wall. So, but we do know this place on the building we found it last year while they were doing working out front. Tim was noticing it and I came down and took a look so we do need to have some work done to have it repointed before it gets bad, but- And the insurance is going up again? Can't find them, I assume. Well sometimes the insurance for here, is it here? Cause it took a big jump a couple of years ago here. How's we're trying to fine tune the allocation working with VLCT to get once we have the right value so that when they send me the schedule that I can figure out what the percentage is, the boilers and this and that goes to the right place. So a little bit of that sort of out. So I've got a question going back to the capital improvement issue. To me there's a difference between a capital fund and a maintenance fund that is built up in order to cover unanticipated maintenance, high extraordinary maintenance expenses. A boiler blows up, a pump burns up. Yeah, we need a new roof. That's what we do with the capital fund. I mean, cause you really can't amortize anything. I'm not going to put an expense in there that's under generally five to seven thousand cause you're not going to capitalize on depreciating expense that's less than that. So we have a schedule. So the town barrage is in there, the roof of the town office and some other stuff. So we do, I do have a schedule for the money and how it can be allocated. And I asked the fire chief if he had any need for his building, what was he going to be looking for? So to have some sort of master sheet. So yeah, if it's a maintenance, it comes out of a maintenance line. But if it's a bigger expense, it's coming out of the capital. I'm in my, if I, if I, I don't put money aside every year to replace my water heater, but I know that it's going to go. Right. All right. That's the kind of, you're saying that's a capital expenditure, not a maintenance. If it's over a certain dollar amount, that's what really drives it. Yeah. If it's a smaller. As long as we're. Yeah, if it's low hanging fruit, if it's a few hundred bucks when you do replace a sink or do some lighting. Right. If it's a bigger deal. A major for a homeowner or a major appliance. Oh, sure. A furnace or a. Absolutely. I do with my, my equipment. Yeah. My business. I have an equipment stash. You don't need to be willing because I know someday and I'm a lawyer. Someday you're going to have to do so often. Something's going to happen. But then what we're going to have to do at some point with the board here is that capital improvement fund when it was put together because I was on the board when it was put together. The verbiage clearly states what it's used for. And it's not used for any of these things that we just talked about. But I think it's. It's clearly in there. It says it's a different municipal building. The public works building. And it says for whatever reason, I don't know why it was put in there. It says water and sewer. Okay, I'll go back. Those are the only things that we're supposed to use that. The town hall itself doesn't fall into that. Town hall doesn't fall into it. None of these other things, like part, part, none of those things. So that's where. Okay. Either we need to sit down and recategorize that. That's why I'm raising the question. Or we need to have more of these little funds for each one. Okay. You know what I mean? Let me go back and look at the warning. Yeah. Because we changed it a lot. We did fix one. So let me go back and look at the warning. Because, you know, I understand what Gene's saying. If we budget $6,000 for potential building repairs this year, right? Right. And we only use a thousand. That money goes bubby, right? It doesn't. You don't get to carry that over, you know? Right. Where if that $10,000 boiler goes, or something, you know, you need to, you could have carried that money over two seasons or something, you know? Yeah. I think the, No, I get it. We've been through that. I'll go back. But we might want to just retake a look at that. I will. Because I know we've looked at it. But anyway, so that's why it's at four because I'm not aware of anything other than some small lighting structures of repair. The roof has to be repaired over here. I know that Bob Conniff is going to come in and do that. I was thinking of the things we can't think of. And that's in our $6,000, you know, budget. And then I've got a contractor prepared to come in and fix the wall where the roof is. So, but for next year, I'm just not aware of anything. Thank you for putting them up with me. So I can put it back to six, but that's the only reason I've had it before was I wasn't aware of anything in the coming year. So town officials, we talked about leveling these out, kind of making everybody the same. So I was like, okay, if the trustee of public funds and the health officer, and you're going to the cemetery commissioner because it was that one got one amount, one got another one. We wanted to add for fire warden, tree warden. So I thought, well, if we're going to go across the board, then the select board should be the same. So I just went blank it across the board and said, everybody gets the $600 a year stipend. And then that took care of everybody. Are we missing? I know we added the fire warden and tree warden on here. Are we missing any identity right now that? Not that I can think of. I know we had talked at the beginning of the year about either some people that didn't have any now that probably deserved some, or some that had a very low, like it didn't make any sense why they were getting. Why one was getting $250 and one was getting $600. There was no rhyme or reason. They were just numbers that were just generated. Exactly. So I just went through and made everybody the same. And then added the other two. So that was my thinking there. Lister budget you already got last time that came directly from the Listers. The $10,000 assessor services, certainly Mo and Judy wanted me to remind you, they're not going to be Listers forever. They're both new. One of the things that they're looking for right now, again, I mentioned this last time is to find someone who appraises commercial properties. So they have reached out to someone and that person does not do like they were talking about, maybe Rock of Ages or the Hydro Dam. And you know, gotta have as special skills if you're doing that. And one person that they reached out to said, yeah, no can do, we don't do that. So they're looking, still looking. So that could be something that comes out of there. I think the only thing that concerns me with the Lister piece is we added that $10,000 assessor services two years ago because there was uncertainty about having enough staff that we might have to outsource some of the staff. And now that we are, well, pretty comfortable with our staff situation, I know there's gonna be times where we might have to do something out of the box, but we've added that $10,000 that was supposed to be there to help if we had to outsource it. We're not outsourcing, but we're keeping the 10,000. The budget's just going up. Do we have Reed on Moe? Is he gonna rerun for that position? I think so. I mean, he likes to remind me of his age and says, you know, we're not gonna be here forever. And I'm like, I know, but you're gonna be here. As you're here now. So yeah, that's one of the things is. This is curious along Chris's point. Yeah, I mean, Louise is, our mom was gonna retire already, but she hasn't. So you'd be looking for someone else. She hasn't. Because we increased the wages by. Round number 10,000, I know we got 10,000 assessments. They work on a regular schedule and a Loan Judyer there, which is actually really handy for the office. You have people in Lister's office to ask. So you know when you can answer questions and help people. So this was their recommendation. And all I'm saying is from three years ago, the budget has doubled. Our Lister budget has doubled in three years. Yeah. So I guess that was. Went from 2020 to, yeah, I. It is a good point that if the salaries and the wages are going up as much as they are, do we need to keep housing the $10,000 that we have seem to spend in. Well, you know, if they decided, if they hired, we could look and see. I can ask them about the real. Let me talk to Mo and Judy because the reappraisal fund budget, if they're saying there's enough money in there, then I can double check the balance. Maybe that's something that they could say, look, if we hired someone to come in and assess these commercial properties, maybe they don't need the 10,000 dollars. If they have enough funding in the budget to do the reappraisal, maybe there's money in there to pay for those assessments. But right now, we don't know. And like I said, this was their budget they put forward. So let me ask Mo and Judy what they think about that. And then just while we're on that topic, so to go to the reappraisal fund, like we talked about earlier, if they said that we have what we need, do we even need to put 5,000 in there? I would say yes, because you want to keep funding that fund and I can take a look at the numbers to what the state, because we do get a percentage from the state per parcel. But let me take a harder look at that, because the only reason I'm saying yes is that you should have done a reappraisal about at least five to seven years ago. So we'd be doing one again in a few more years, even when we get this one done. So even though we're projecting doing a two-year rolling reappraisal from like 2023 to 2025, we still need to save for the one that we're going to do in 2032 or 2030. And so how much money do we need to get there? So let me do the math out on that. Yeah, I still don't have a firm price on what this one is going to cost. Well, I thought we were... They did have a, they did speak to Nimrick and to talk to someone about... Well, when we were talking... Dude, ma'am. I don't know, six months ago about this, I was under the perception that we were off by about 100,000 dollars from doing this. And now all of a sudden it's like, we're good. And I'm like, are we good? Well, last week we bumped it up to 20,000 because we felt like we were so far behind. So now all of a sudden we're doing it. Well, we looked at it because we looked at, they looked at some other towns and said, what did they pay for a reappraisal? And I knew, and we knew some numbers. So what they did was they started talking to a couple of people and said, hey, how much is it going to cost us? Where are you at? So one of the horrible things about reappraisals is it's tough. There are very few people that do it now, but they got a price from someone and they said, yeah, this is how much it would cost for parcel this is where we're at. And Mo and Judy were like, well, we're in. We thought it was going to be way, way more. So what I was talking to Mo about though is that did not include a lot of things. They didn't like to put a burden, not a burden, but our listeners would have to be involved, actively involved in setting up appointments, doing a lot of the data entry, a lot of stuff as opposed to having somebody just take the whole thing and run it. Well, they drafted an RFP. I looked at their last draft and added it. She put another one on my desk today. So they're getting preparing to put out the RFP to get, which is basically you need to get on the books for someone to do you in a couple of years. So that's where we stand right now, but let me project out the math for what the state for parcel is, what we're thinking for costs now as to where is it going to get you when you need to do your next one? Well, I guess to figure out how much money we need to have it in for next time is what, you know, how often do we need, should we do it? I know they say 10 or so years, or if your CLA runs out of balance, but I mean, and then what is our portion of it? Like if the state chips in, I'll make it up, 100,000, do we have to chip in 100,000? If that's the case, should we be putting in $10,000 a year? Yeah, that's what I'm saying. What is that number? I'll project out the math because I can go back and look historically what you've got for parcel from the state because we put it in the reappraisal fund. So I can just do the math, project it out via spreadsheet. Yeah, and then we could better budget that evenly over 10 years or 12 years or whatever. Exactly, yeah, because we thought for sure, yeah. But there's gonna be a big flip in the CLA with all this real estate building and everything. Once that comes crashing back down again. Well usually the parameters on that are something like between what, 95% and 100? It is, and yeah, and I think we're at like 102 or something like that. The problem is too is we haven't been into some of these houses. Yeah, because you're looking at your CLA, which is your common level appraisal. So they're looking at your last three years of sales history to get there, but it's tough because you haven't been in people's houses in 12, 13 years. Somebody's got a brand new kitchen or all this. So basically what that reappraisal is gonna do is kind of bring you, well they are the people that maybe need more depreciation and the other people that you go out and see you out. So I level funded the rest of the, all of the, well the appropriations, I will receive an email about the Bethel Library and then if I receive a letter with a form request then I will receive letters. What did we decide on the assessor services? I'm gonna talk to them again to see if they have any idea, if we could take the, anyone to do the commercial out of the capital, the appraisal fund. So I'm gonna ask them for their thoughts on that. We basically didn't decide, she's just looking into it. Okay, hopefully the potential of. I'd rather have it in there and not have to spend it as guests as part of my, yeah. So I'm gonna see what they say about that. If something should happen and we had to. Yeah, no, I know, that's always hard. And then, no, knock the library. But we had the library come to us last year because they wanted to do, well, just the timing was bad and all the computers needed to be changed out at the same time. So we doubled the funded for the library last year to relieve that situation. And now this year they're asking to keep that, basically that forever, you know, that we've doubled it. I mean, I guess I don't have enough history with some of those identities of, you know, how much the town contributes versus how much is done through donations and volunteer and stuff like that. I mean, I don't even know. I mean, is $5,000 enough for a library? Is it too much? Like, does anybody know what the real number should be for that? You know, like I thought $2,500 was kind of cheap. But I guess it's one of those, like I don't have enough information to understand, like all I know is we doubled it, which, you know, seems like a lot of money. But is $5,000 the right number? Is it 10? Is it two? Is it, you know, like, where do we go with that? Well, I wrote to Lisa Campbell and said, hey, you know, so you sent this letter for five grand and I said the same thing. Well, they agreed to put money on last year for your computers. Did you have a problem with that? And she's like, no, we're moving forward to the computers, but as a local library, we always have a lot of need. And so they felt that the money could be spent. And then she CC'd the president, which is Lisa Hill, and of the library board trustees. And she said the same thing. They didn't give me a specific. There was no, we're going to buy this or we're going to do that. But what I can do is ask, email them back and ask them for their recent, let's see your books. I mean, if I had the balance sheet or something. You know, if I had to guess, we probably underfunded the library for many years. And now we're trying to play catch up, right? We did a lot of things. But I guess it's just, what is that real number that we should be, you know, what is that the real, real number that we should be appropriating money for? I have a comment about the library. I was surprised that they were not able to participate in an interlibrary lending service. So that if they didn't have a book on their shelves, you might be able to get it from somewhere else. I don't know the reason for that or the rationale for that. I've gotten books from them through a lot of Randolph. Randolph has the capacity to do that. Yeah, but they were in Bethel. Well, but they told me they couldn't. You have to be in the in-crowd. No, maybe. That's because we raised their budget by $2,500. Which is really good. That's it. You're gonna buy the membership anyway. The question I have, and maybe this isn't a place to ask it, but the question I have is, if that is a subscription thing or if there's a fee for having that access or maybe they haven't, none of us understood. That's something I think that should be basic to a library. It'd be nice to have a little more. Dear trees, the trustees of the Bethel Library Association request a continuance of the annual town of Bethel contribution of $5,000 for our library in the town budget. We do appreciate support of the town of Bethel and rely on a continued interest in maintaining a vital community resource. So, and then when I emailed them, that was it. Which I would expect would be the proper response. We don't want you to go back down to $2,500. But I just wonder if maybe it's better to, I don't know, do some research or bring them in to see. Well, I'll ask her if she's got some. What is a realistic number that we should be budgeting or helping with? Are there services they would like to supply that they cannot afford? Yeah, I'll ask her. What is the real number? Their services, the population would like that they're choosing. I mean, this is not just the interlibrary, but there's a whole, you can prove it to your mind, you can be on the audiobook consortium through the library. So you can get audiobooks, but our library doesn't do it. And so, you know, there are services that exist. I was looking for an audio, but that's... Right, but there's services that exist that our library doesn't participate in, probably because of capacity and funds. And so, yeah, are there things that, even not just what the library's thinking about, but what people work on. The other one too, Worva, I just got their spreadsheet today, so I'm gonna double check their number. I just got their spreadsheet, so I haven't done that. The debt financing is the debt financing except for the line of credit for the transfer station. Chris asked me about this. I didn't really know what to do. I didn't wanna get caught with our hands down here. Whereas if we, we're gonna sign, you're gonna sign papers in a minute here for the $100,000 loan that we... Maybe. Maybe. That we have, that they said we do. And Royalton has done theirs, but I wasn't sure what to do. Obviously in the perfect situation, they borrow the money, they pay it back. But if they don't, we're on the hook for it. So I thought, all right, should I just budget for interest only on the full amount? So I could go either way. I just really didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know what to do. I don't think they should be paying everything back. Well, I'd like to think so, but if they can't, I just didn't wanna be, yeah, I'm like, you, it's your loan in the end. It's the good full faith credit of the town of Bethel. You're the ones holding the bag at the end. But I, so I'm happy to do whatever you want here. I wasn't really sure. And I just didn't want us to miss it. So I put something in. Well, I think that... If you want me to take it out. I think that opens up a whole another discussion that we need to put on for the next meeting is what is our intentions with the facility? I know we talked about in our agreement, in order to opt out, we have to do it by January 1st or whatever of each year. So we really don't have a lot of time now if that's the route that we want to go because I'm sure the paperwork's gotta go to a lawyer. That's gonna take a little bit of time to get there. We're almost to December 1st, right? So we're a month away from having to do action or be in it for another year, right? We had also hoped we would have had a second meeting with the joint meeting by now. That hasn't happened and there have been reasons for not having it, I'm just... And it seems like right now that financially at the moment, things are kosher. But behind the scenes, things are unraveling. It's from what I'm understanding. So there could be more problems coming down. Just a mixture of people trying to hire people, a mix of what we're trying to do there financially right now. Like last year at this time, we're like, we can't keep bankrollin' you know? That right now seems to be, at least right now, good. Yeah, we're paying, they're paying the spot every month. But now it seems like some of the procedures and policies that are being placed, may not be hit in the right direction. So it's definitely something that we wanna put on the next meeting and probably talk about seriously, like do we wanna move towards not or do we wanna roll the dice and take another year with it? So I can take that. Here's our chance to get out. I can take it out of the budget if you want, but like I said, I just figured we, why don't you just make the edits that we had there and then present us the new cover sheet. But didn't you have someone? I thought that. I got a whole bunch, but we're... I know, huh? Well again, we have to kinda get to a point, I think we don't need this tonight, but at the next meeting we need to get to the point of, based on where our edits are now. We probably have a few other ones that we may want to do or not do. But how do we feel with the overall budget number and the increase that folks would see in that? Do we feel that it's a modest increase that everybody can absorb? Do we think we need to take a little bit out? Or do we think that we can put a little more away? I think next time we'll just have to be prepared to make that what we think that number is and then we can back into it. What's the bottom line percentage? Right now? I think, oh it's the bottom line percentage. I think we're at... Well things have changed because just that one, the constable piece is like a $70,000 difference there. Well, down 700? Well I've had it over here. I had, we stuck with the part time constable and the signage, you're at 2.81. And then I did the number underneath it saying minus eRAF, just to show you, but we don't have any control over the eRAF. So eRAF brings you to a 0.10% increase over last year. Because, so I just wanted you to see, so constable signage, which is at 2.81 and we already are making some changes for this, but... But that was the old one, right? No, that's the one I gave you tonight that I redid before I came here. Okay. That dropped it from the 4,000, the $40,000 to $4,000 error that I made a little bit. Well, that's like anything under three is good. And... Both are. Yeah, so that's where it started. And I just separated out the eRAF just because it's something we don't have control over. So I just kind of... Is that? No, that number doesn't seem to add up. Well, I took the... Because I chopped, like in my, what I did behind the scenes, I chopped more than what we talked about tonight. But you probably adjusted your revenues. And my numbers only, no, well, I'm just saying just the... Right now you have the proposed cost, two, five, three, two, right? Yeah. I have the full... Yeah, that's minus the... And that hasn't even taken account of any of that. That's minus the eRAFs, but if I'm saying up here was part time, this was the constable and signage, but... Oh, oh, oh, the eRAF, I'm sorry. Yeah, so what I was saying here is... Right, two, five, eight, nine, minus the pieces that we had talked about. Yeah, I was right here, yeah, 2.81. So, but I'll go back and make sure my numbers are right. And, but thank you for that. Four to 40, thank you for that. I was happy when you called and said that I'm like, oh, sweet. And then usually, Jean, during budget time, depending on the grand list, usually it's around 20, now it's about $20,000 per penny. So every $20,000 swing in our budgets, about one penny on the tax rate. Round numbers, you know. Because our grand list is just over 2 million, it's 2, 202 or something. Yeah. It used to be like 195 or something. It took a pretty good jump last year. Because it used to be like $19,400 per penny and now it's about 20. So when you're looking through that you think, because usually you're kind of thinking yourself the penny rate, right? Like we go up three pennies, how much does that affect each person and so three pennies would be 60 grand that that budget would have to change between revenue and cost, you know. At which I think right now we were sitting at, after all the, after those edits, we were sitting at like 60, I think. So we're like three cents I think right now about where we're at. So we're kind of right close to usual to goal. So yeah. And so I'll make the changes and look at the other revenue slide too for the tax, so that'll help you. That'll help you see what that was for last year. Any further questions on the budget for this evening or we'll have a few more revisions on it. And then what are we thinking for a- I've got to fragment a look at the calendar. I have to above my desk. A night for doing, I'm just trying to think, how soon did we do it before, we have to have it in by what, second week in January? We signed it, we signed the warning kind of one, but we got it pretty quick. I'd love to wrap it up at the next meeting. We signed the warning on January 11th, but I'd love to finish the budget next meeting. So we're gonna have to have an informational meeting. Yeah, we always have to have an informational meeting. We have it on the Monday before, we have two. Yeah, we have one, the first select board meeting of the month of February, and then we have another one, or no, excuse me, sorry. We have done a special meeting in the past and did a budget informational in the middle. And then we always do one, the meeting before town meeting. Right. But we did one, because we were Australian ballot last year, there was different rules. Right, so I'm thinking the- So the budget discussion meetings happened in February, but we have to send, go to print for the town report. So, I mean, I'll bring- Well, we've always had a meeting right before the report got printed. Like, this is the final budget. Oh, I'm sure, yeah, I mean, they're all- So that would be, so you're saying- I'm saying- Well, the next meeting is the 13th, right? Yeah, it'd be nice- So are you saying doing that on the 13th or the 27th? Because that would be the- Well, you signed January 11th. Honestly, I'd love to wrap up the budget on the 13th. If we could, if you could tell me what the numbers are, we could still have to follow the meeting, but at least it just, it helps to get through it because it's all, because the budget is a huge part of the town report. So I'd have to look back at our schedule from last year, but obviously you signed the warning on January 11th, and you would have had to have the final budget numbers. So we'll need to finish on the 13th at the 27th. Yeah, the 11th was the first meeting of the- I'll put something in the chat. So that would then, okay. So we'll aim for the 13th then. Okay, oh, so Leonard said, leave the meeting, visual was great and there was a bit of an echo, but I could clearly hear the select board members in attendance. So- Could you hear the, I'm sorry. He's not there. Was he able to hear the audience members? Yeah, he said he could. He said there was a little bit of an echo. Because that was our- He could clearly hear the audience. I think we're always gonna have an echo in this room. I think that's true. So anyways, yeah, Chris, so we'll, so yes, and the perfect, it'd be nice- Well, just that way, so we'll advertise it that the next meeting will be- Just like we did this time, budget discussion, it's gonna be on here, just like we always do. Well, I know, but we're gonna act on it next meeting. Is what you're saying? Well, maybe, I'd like to. Just so that people know that that would be their last chance to voice any opinions that they may have. Yeah, we can flush it out if not what's gonna happen. Before town meeting day, you know? If not, we'll make any final edits, the final edits should be next time on the 13th, and then when you get it on the 27th, that would be done and done. Yeah, okay, sounds good. That's my hope, it's just nice to get it done. Sounds good. The last thing we gotta worry about. All right, mask on my bank note. So the mask on my bank loan for the transfer station for $100,000 at 2.5%. You obviously right here is the documents. There's the emotion to adopt the resolution and certification and to approve the promissory note, disbursement requests and errors and omissions. You're gonna see in here, there's some changes that the bank already initialed. So you all have to go through here when you see B-A-V, that's one of the bank and you guys have to initial these changes, these are changes that your lawyer made. And that- We all have to initial everyone on this? Yeah, that's what they requested. Yes, we haven't done that in the past, but I'm like, okay, no big deal. And but these are changes that the lawyer made and maskoma agreed to them and so we're all good. But that's the loan if you wanna. The legal rank is gone behind this thing. If we ended up offing out of this thing, or given our notice in January, which wouldn't take effect until what, June or something? Right, yeah. How would that affect this note? Well, basically it would be part of your- It would just close up? It'd be your part of your finance. Yeah, because if you haven't borrowed anything, it's no big deal. We're not taking out any money unless we have to. And so obviously it's, or it's not obviously, honestly as part of your financial closeout with royals and would be to pay off the debt that you were owed. Yeah, and then right now the goal is any money that is borrowed to me payroll that interest would get paid back to us through the transfer station. Yeah, if we get a bill from Mascoma, the transfer station, it's gonna get coded from their budget. They're gonna pay for it. Obviously, I mean that's their hope, is that they've raised revenue enough and right now they're doing okay. I mean, they still have high numbers, so pretty good numbers. They've been really busy. So currently it looks good and they haven't even borrowed off Royalton's $100,000 line of credit. So currently there is no borrowing. But it works out nice because they're paying the bills. It's not like it's an uncommon thing. I mean, there's many businesses that have that take out loans to me payroll. So that's kind of a normal practice. Yeah, and it may be anything. It may not be be more than payroll. But in this case, if they take out something, I don't know, make it up. It's $500 in interest and they'll pay us the $500 in interest back. Well, they're just gonna write the check directly to Mascoma. Oh, okay. We're right now. And the interest, okay. Yeah, so they're cutting the check directly right now. But because of the way that the interlocal was set up, they can't borrow on their own. You guys have to borrow. Why Mascoma and not Bar Harbor? Where did that shift happen? Because Bar Harbor would not make the edits that the lawyer wanted. And so I went back to Bar Harbor and said, we're gonna have to pull our request. If you can't, the select board is not gonna sign something that the lawyer is saying, do not let them sign this. Because, and so they couldn't, I'm not sure if one is more of an out-of-state bank and one Mascoma does more banking in state or what. But so we ended up not. I think they're both in the same kind of market, aren't they? Yeah, I think, yeah. But we've got really good luck. I was just curious. That was my assumption was that Bar Harbor wouldn't make the changes. They wouldn't and every time, you know, and so obviously we pay for legal advice or the transfer station. They've paid for all the bills for negotiating this stuff. And being that we have a piece of this loan, we'll obviously get statements of what's being. Yeah, they can't. Bar out in what's being paid. The only one who's gonna come off from here is Pam. They can't borrow the money because it's our tax ID number. But we'll know when there's. So technically, Royalton's 100,000 is with Bar Harbor and ours is with Mascoma. Exactly. Fascinating. Because they had agreed, Jerry had said in the beginning, they would do what we did. And I said, perfect. So we'll pay, the lawyer's gonna transfer station will pay for the attorney, we didn't do it. And then they signed. And I said, why did you sign? You went against legal advice. You said we would do the same things. And I said, the lawyer's saying no, but the Royalton board apparently didn't need a legal opinion. They didn't have a legal opinion. They signed it. And I said, our lawyer is saying not to sign it, but they took it upon themselves. And I'm like, okay, whatever. But I said, Bethel's not doing that. And then they had said, why are you dragging your feet? And I said, because the lawyer said not to sign it. So hence we ended up here. So that's your long motion. So just need a motion to adopt the resolution and the certification and to approve the promissory note, disbursement, request and errors and emissions. So both. Okay, all in favor? All right, we just have to make sure we initial every piece of this, right? Yeah, so I didn't tag it, so there's several. Okay. So yeah, it's been a thing, but attorney Fletcher was there. Just initial it? Yep, he was a good, it's always been a good test. But yeah, Lili, I don't know why they, so I ended up talking to Jerry, and I'm like, where did I get our feet? And they're making them pay for all the legal bills. Yeah? Oh, that's good. So, it's like signing your life away, isn't it? It's like, I'm. Yeah, don't even come away with it. I just feel it's wrong. Yeah, I mean, I'm not even coming out of here with like a new vehicle or something. Like, what's going on? Sorry. While we're signing and what we just move on, catch up some time here. Sure. Pinella Bridge Engineering and Design. Yep, that's pretty easy. We got proposals from three contractors, obviously. It's really hard not to build a low bidder when you're dealing with FEMA. Probably gonna want blood samples and stuff, if you don't. But we went through the BHB, it was good design and they're a good proposal and they've done work like this before, and so, made sense. So it was the bidders were right here. So they were the high bidder. Otter Creek was the second, and then the BHB was a little better. And this is based on a lump sum bid or? This is an RFP that, no. This is an RFP that we put together with help of VTrans to get through the project. There was a detailed scope of services. I think I put it in a previous packet a month or so ago. So this is the outcome of the argument. And their pricing here, you can see obviously is their response to the proposal. So, obviously, I hoped you covered it, but it's hard because they're picking up from the prior engineer. So it would just be a motion and once we do that, I'll call them tomorrow and get the contract going. And I just, we need to get them started. When would the design process finished? Did they say how long it'd take them? Well, we had been through that. It was all laid out in the RFP, which I didn't bring with me tonight. And now I think that I had said I needed construction documents by the end of February, so that we could put it out to bid. And then obviously there's construction management in here. They needed to do some soil borings. So they've already had, I'm not sure if these guys are dealing with Stand Born Head or somebody else, but they'd already preliminary set that aside. So it's ready to run. They gave them from the prior person, everybody got a thumb drive with all the documents we had. FEMA did allow us to keep both North Star Hydro and Contact Bridges in the game without issuing the RFP since they were already on board and they had an idea of the project. I'd ask FEMA specifically if we could keep them. So that's it. All right. Just need a motion to award the contract of VHB. Any amount? Do you need the amount or are we good? I'm all right. Okay. Second. All in favor? All right. As long as it doesn't come back to invite us. That's so many of them do. Hopefully not, babe. It seems like every time we engineer something, it's like, really? I know. Well, what are you going to do? We don't have a choice. It's Groundhog Day every time, all over again. Well, we've made out both Pinellas. Pinellas. We've been down that road a few times. Well, I'm saying before. Yeah, and no fault of anybody, but we've been down that road a few times on different projects. Yeah, so hopefully that's it. So let me get next. The town, the draft warning is in here, which is the same warning I've been giving you. So I'm not sure if I said, but in my town management report, but I recommend that you take out cannabis, frankly, because I really, it's just a feeling. I just feel like the state, they passed the legislation, which is fine. And then they kicked it to the council and they're still trying to figure stuff out. And I gave you the list of all the towns near us that I could find that had passed it. So Randolph and other, and I just, I don't like to let somebody else figure this out who has more money, a bigger town with more money. And then they worked the bugs out. You could always adopt it next year. I always hate being the first because it eventually causes somebody money and heartache. So that's my opinion, you can do with that, what you want. So I had, I don't think I've gotten a 100% consensus from anybody that I've talked to, or I did have a few individuals that reached out to me. I'll say it was last week or tail end after our other one. Thank you. That voiced their opinion, they were, but I haven't found an overwhelming one way or another. So I guess what I was talking with Therese today when we were up on Dart Hill and said, I wonder if we treat this at this point more like the Doyle poll thing. Like, does the select board put out their own questionnaire that we can not just give at town meeting day but have an opportunity to either put it in, like we could put a copy of the questionnaire in the back of the town report. We could mail some, we could mail them out to people for their water bills and sewer bills. We could do things like survey monkey online, to get some information. And I wonder if we put like a couple of different questions on the survey together. One would be to go to the vote in regards to the cannabis. Two would be not to specifically label the Australian ballot, but to put on a question that would say in support of Australian ballot voting in the future. And then the other one would be like the policing or constable piece just to gather some information. And I think if we get overwhelming information on one way or another on a topic, then that gets directed back to the board of this is your to-do list to work out and get done for next town meeting. If that's overwhelming for policing in one way or another that we build that into our next budget. And if we have an overwhelming support that says we do want Australian ballot, then we need to move on that. Either put the question on the ballot, right? Because I just wonder if right now we just haven't gotten enough information to solve all these. One of the things we talked about today was putting that survey also in town report. Town report is the only document besides the tax bill that goes to every registered voter in Bethel as well as the household. So we talked about maybe making the last page so someone could tear it out. So it either has a survey monkey or they can answer the questions and drop it off and mail it to the town office, make sure on the back that it has something in it. So do make it a survey monkey link on there. So if someone wants to just go online and answer or they can actually tear it out and mail it back or drop it off. So that was my thought to Chris when he brought up his idea. I said, well, town report is the only thing that goes to every registered voter. And I wonder if it being the same color page in the back of a book, people wouldn't notice it versus like when you do stuff with like the water sewer or the link with taxes, you make it a colorful page, you put it in front of a loose page. Like I know that it's in its time of putting one in every report, but would you get more results? And it'd be hard to mail it that way because once it gets mailed like this. So these things aren't sealed. I couldn't, it has to be attached. I could ask her, I don't. Can you make one page a different color in the report? No. No. Oh, gosh. Well, Penny might also kill every single one. Yes. Well, that might be a good exercise if it is. You can do it, but you have to put a tape over. Paul's a printer. Well, send Therese down. I'm sure it would be. Well, send Therese to break it to her in the morning. It's dual, technically it's dual. You could technically, you could staple in, you could stitch in a paint piece of paper, but it'd have to be two pages. It would have to run, because I think they do them in four-page units or eight-page units. But I think the piggyback on what I think Jean had said at the beginning is it wouldn't be just sampling people that show up for town meeting. We could also put it in the water bill or sewer bill and ask that those be dropped off. And we could also do for online, because more people are online now, we could do the survey monkey that we could advertise. The hard part is multiple people could fill it out. Somebody could fill it out 100 times. But ultimately, the Australian validation question and the cannabis question must be decided at town meeting. Exactly. Yes. So if you were to put a survey in this year, we would not be able to act on it until the year of subsequent year. And I'm not sure what that gets us. Gets you more inclusivity of people participating in there, giving their opinion about how they feel about those topics without locking in to your immediate solution. No, it doesn't. But putting it on the ballot doesn't lock into a solution. It simply puts the option of voting for it or against it. Right. And I think the counter to that being that then the vote for or against is only the people who have shown up for town meeting as opposed to a survey could get a wider subset of information that then informs how things move forward as opposed to only who's at town meeting. Well, I guess you could say you could put it on the warning for town meeting, right? And then the individuals that come to town meeting all want town meeting, right? And they vote it down. But then the individuals that the whole Australian ballot system is there to potentially help aren't there to vote. You know what I mean? So I just wonder if we get more information now and let's say we do a couple of different methods of collecting data. And then we get the data back that says, make it up, 75% of people want to see then that kind of then I think we can better shape that question and put it on to the warning. And I think at that time, you can get more information out of that. We will be voting on Australian ballot at town meeting. I mean, I think right now a lot of people like we've had a couple of different times. Like I remember one meeting we had overwhelming support for it's well, of course, it's only a sample population of three or four of you. Nothing against you three or four, but I remember we had one meeting that it would seem like the overwhelming support was for some sort of Australian ballot, right? And then it seemed like the meeting that we had here last time seemed like there was more support for not sticking the way we had it. So it's kind of like, but again, that's only a sample population of like eight people. So it's like, you know? And the people, I've been, everybody I see or the few people have reached out to me. You know, it's not like they're all saying town meeting. It's not like they're all saying, you know, Australian ballot. Mike, Mike, I ask the same question. So suppose we put a survey in and it says the majority of the people who are not attending town meeting think it should go this way, but the next year you put a question, but the next year it winds up, we put it on the ballot. The people who show up at town meeting are going to be the same people who showed up at the town meeting this year, whether they represent, now whether they're influenced by all the people who don't attend town meeting or not. I'm not sure the survey does any. If it were an action that the select board needed to take, then I would say yes. Do the survey, get as much information as you can. And I think that's appropriate for the constable position. I question whether having a survey about something that the town meeting ultimately has to vote on is really doing anything. If it's warm, there is opportunity for people to say, I'm to write a letter to the editor or whatever, I'm going to vote for this or I'm going to vote for that. It is an opportunity for public discussion as much as for any issue that goes before the meeting. Do you think that a survey, just like you asked me, because I get what you're saying, do you think that a survey would, a survey this year would get more people to come to town meeting next year if they knew it was on the ballot? Because I understand what you're saying. You're right. There's always the same sample people are going to be there. I'm totally, you're right about that. But I'm just curious if you think that if we did a survey this year and kind of pushed it more, I don't mean I guess it's a year out, I guess it would be hard to say. I'm just curious if we'd get more, drum up more business for more people to come and vote on it. But yeah, I don't know. Either way, you're right. You could add to that question. You could say, are you in favor, or would you like to see Australian ballot? And then if they say yes, if so. Because it doesn't have to be a town meeting. You could do a special meeting in November. And you could vote on it townwide to go to Australian ballot if that was what people want to do to then present it at the, I mean, there's, it doesn't have to be a town meeting. You could hold a special session any time you want it. But I'm just, I mean, I think right now, if we put it on the warning or not, you're still going to have the same 180 people that are going to show up at the town meeting, right? This year or next year? Give or take. Now, if it's out there for a longer period of time, maybe you get more people, maybe you don't. It's kind of like that Tuesday thing versus a Saturday thing, you get more people and it didn't show like you did. But I mean, I do think just purely to play out your question, right? Because I actually don't have a strong opinion on this personally. But I think what it does is it gives the select board more of the voice of a broader population. So then at that meeting, if you get somebody standing up on the floor and saying their viewpoint about keeping town meeting exactly as it is, a member of the select board who or anybody who's seen the results of that survey could end up and say, well, counter to that, we have X number of people who put out this survey. So I think your point is valid, but also there is merit to it. So it's, I mean, he's right. Inevitably, it goes in front of the board. So he's right. And it goes in front of the floor boat. You're right. And I feel more or less about my argument in terms of Australian belt than I do with the cannabis. Regardless of what feedback we would get from the town's to not ultimately have to vote that up or down. Yep. I think it's giving people more warning. I mean, yes, we can all sit here and say, well, it's in the warning. You should know. You need to be informed as a citizen. But we also know the realities that people don't read the warnings and aren't informed. And so then is it on us as a town to do a better job of getting more information out to the public more regularly, which I think we do, but we still are catering to the same audience on a weekly basis. So it is a survey, a way to potentially get a handful of people who maybe weren't aware, a little more aware, or giving us their feedback, or hitting the people that don't know one of us personally if we're doing these anecdotal individual surveys. I mean, you can leave the horse in the water, but you can't make the drink. But we've got to leave the horse. I think we've got to put it out there and give, as we talked about, giving as many people opportunity to input. And how do we do that Zoom or in-person? Or how do we accomplish that? And that's a good way to accomplish that. Whether or not they fill it out and send it in, we've done what we can do. But at least it would give more input from a wider base. And then you can utilize the results of that survey as part of the discussion. Because we're just guessing. I'm sorry. It's not when you're distributing it in an equity way. Well, it goes out to everybody. It goes out to every registered voter. Every registered voter and property owner get a copy of Town of Port. So it goes out there. Plus, we would do the usual, you know, Facebook. But my point is we've got to possibly be part of what we're thinking about. You're just sending it to folks who have property. That's not actual. Right. No, it goes to. Goes to all the registered voters. Yeah, it goes to both. Yeah, we call this list every year. We pull the property owners registered voters. Because you may be a registered voter or not a property owner. So we try to nail down every. And with the town, we can obviously would mask me on the town of Port. So that was only a suggestion of putting it in as a, like the last page of the town of Port. So someone could, the back could be flanked. And someone could. Well, and I do think then having an online version maybe hits a population that, I don't know, for whatever reason, chucks it in the bin right as they get it out of their mailbox and they don't even open it to know that it's a survey. You could put the link on here too. So if you did, if you chose to do that, you could do the survey plus have the link to the survey monkey. But have the survey monkey only open for whatever, a month, or whatever, or month and a half, whatever you want. I don't care. But set it open so that at least it's on there too. So if someone didn't want to desecrate their town of Port, they could go online and instead of tearing it up. I'm afraid of mine. See, I like to think that people do it because so much work goes into it. Yeah, I have a whole specialized frame that I can add into the survey. I don't know, it's just a. But it is tricky to collect data because it's unless you've got every single person in one room, right? And raise your hand or didn't raise your hand. You have no way of knowing, right? You're always going to collect different sample population. Survey is only going to be important anyway. Right. But I do like it does give the. I guess the way I've always, you know, on the select board anyways, the way I've always seen my duty is even if it's something I necessarily don't want to see, if you know, we'll use the. We use the bull belts as an example, right? Chris's bull. Yes, anytime you can use the bull belts, right? So the bull belts were something that, you know, I didn't 100% think that it's a very crowded downtown and think really it's probably. But an overwhelming majority of people wanted to take advantage of the grant and see these changes. So I voted for it. So I always try to take my personal opinion out of it. But I like to have enough data to say, you know, like usually you come out of town meeting and there's some things that people have barked at you and said, we want to see this and that and this, right? And then you know, just start working on those things, right? And in this case, it's like, you know, like what? Like for me to get up at town meeting day to say, you know, the reason why we put this on here is because it's been overwhelming support for it. It makes it easy for me, you know, or justifies the stance in it. And right now it's like, well, I don't know, we're just gonna throw this stuff on here because these are options that we have in the world and I don't know. You know, I mean, I don't have to support it. Other than that, at that point, I'll have to support it individually, right? I understand and I appreciate it. But again, we're not talking about putting the substance of the issue. We're not, we're talking about putting, we're talking about putting the, giving the community the opportunity to vote on something. We're not giving them, this is what we have decided or ought to happen. We're not, hey, putting it on the agenda is not deciding how the town should vote on the issue. That is the ultimate survey. Yeah, it's true. And so I just, I'm not, I'm not gonna, so I don't wanna beat it, beat it to death. I just think that there is a time for gathering public opinion and a time to say, look, we're going, you're gonna have to make a decision, especially like the cannabis thing. At some point they're gonna have to make a decision, regardless of what any survey is going to say. And I'm not sure that submitting a survey in advance serves much purpose, but I've had my say and I don't need to hear any more about it. I just think we need to. Well, and don't forget, people competition. So even if you choose, you know, not to put it on there, then there's obviously a petition process where, you know, there's a process laid out to the Vice Secretary's date and statute, in which case there's only certain circumstances in which somebody can force you to put something on the warning. But if it's something that has to be voted on, has to be voted on by the voters, then a properly filed and followed petition is something that would force you to put it on the warning. So, but anyway, so you can decide. So on here, obviously the one thing we had put on here, as I've said before, 12 is the elected officers by Australian ballot, 13 was the budget articles. The other one that we had kicked around was, the other one is you can vote public questions that way. So I'm not sure what you want to do here. If you want to leave 12, take out 13, put on 14, or what is it, what's the mix you want to see here? Did you guys have agreed to make a decision that way if somebody doesn't have time to do it? It would be my preference to put the officers on, but not the budget. Okay. That will be my preference, but if the board wants to go with the survey, we shouldn't do that. And what did you think about 14, about cannabis? You want to leave it on or take it off? I just simply want to get it over with, but on the other hand, I'm not going to sleep over one pair or another. I just see that one being the great, the great, I don't know what I'm really voting on. It's kind of a true, you know what I mean? And it's hard right now to flush out the laws ourselves. Yeah, I mean, this one is just, it's not like you're allowing the use of it. We're allowing the retail sale of it, right? I mean, that's everything. You're allowing the community to decide that. You're not deciding that issue. We're putting it on the ballot, simply says it's on the ballot. You're not taking sides. Putting it on the ballot doesn't say that you favor approving it for retail sale or that you're opposed to it. Simply gives the community the choice. Well, I mean, if we want to give the community choice, I mean, we could probably, I could find 50 things we could put on this ballot to give choices of what stocks we're gonna wear and everything else, but I think that's my point. This is a question of putting it before the voters. It isn't about choosing sides or making a recommendation one way or another, simply says. But in this case, we're putting something on the warning that there is no interest in. So there's nobody that has submitted anything saying that they want to put a retail store in Beppel, right? Now, this does come with consequences. So if the town voted this in, let's say, there's no retailer, right? There's nobody that wants to go in right now, but let's say the town votes it in, right? And then somebody comes in and then they say, wait a minute, this was terrible. We should never have done this. And we're gonna vote it out. Well, that's good. It's all voted out except for that one retailer that's in here that you can't get rid of them. It's in stone forever. You know what I mean? They're grandpa. They're grandfather clause forever. So it's like Randolph. They did theirs and there's nothing over there. They voted for it and there's no retailer, no anybody. And I know why the state did this. I mean, if the state really wanted their input, they would ask us, should we legalize marijuana, right? They never asked us that. They just went and did it, right? They never asked us voters. But the only reason why they have us doing this is because of the cities in Vermont. It has nothing to do with Bepple. It has to do with the Willis-Tins and the Burlington and those that collect money, not Bepple. So if you're in Willis-Tin, you could vote this in and you can collect your 1% on whatever you make and get to local revenue. Bepple, it means nothing at this point other than keeping it out of the community if you don't want it, you know? So, all right. So Lily, what do you want to do? You've got 12, 13 of them. I don't know. We're gonna have to go person by person. I'm not putting any of them on. Okay, so, and Dave... I don't have enough information to do it. To put anything on? Nope. Okay, and then... Dave's a no on everything. Dave was a no on anything. All right, so, okay. So, that's policy three. So, what do you, Lily, what would you like to do? Go to bed. That's not allowed, I know. So, Gene is saying leave on 12, take off 13 and 14. He can go either way. Yeah, I mean, I'm leaning towards leaving. Well, not 13. I don't know, I'm torn on the cannabis because I see both sides of it of, you know, we just, we don't know enough from the state to, I don't even think the voters are making an informed vote. If we as a board can't even say we'd be making an informed vote putting this on here or not, how can voters be informed when the state hasn't set the rules? So, voters are voting a personal preference with no actual knowledge of ramifications behind it. And I think that, I don't know, I'm just, I'm torn on it. Yeah, I'm torn on it. I mean, I mean, I'm saying don't do it because I can't even explain it to you. Well, I don't think it's hard to try to follow because it's just trying to... For me, knowing that the time limit, like before when you first presented this, we were, it was... You have to go within a year. You're voting this year, period. And now actually we have time to see what the state says, what the cannabis control board comes out with, how it actually does, and your point of like, what does it do in other communities? Yeah, I don't know. They have a very small downtown and it could be completely changed by one retailer, good or bad. It doesn't, I'm not giving that weight to which direction because recognize that one retailer can change the landscape. Yeah, and it's hard too because they're still trying to, and then it's the cannabis control board and they're still, they're gathering surveys and I do have another packet that they put out and still someone has the right. They could still request a town meeting or a vote so we could still vote this at some point. Yeah, I just... Well, we're gonna vote it at some point. I mean, I think that's the reality is it's this year, it's next year, but is next year more informed as a whole versus this year? I think next year would be totally more informed because you would add a year that the cannabis control board has gone through that out of town has tried stuff if there's legislation that had been passed to correct anything. I mean, for me it's just tough because I mean, I can't explain it to someone. Just trying to tell you all the ins and outs, I can't help you. I mean, I'm not... We have a hard enough time getting, it's just what I would say, your normal businesses that every community has, right? We have a tough time having a bakery and those types of businesses. Anyway, it's not alone, some retailer from marijuana. And I think for me it would be, again, it's a data thing. It's very easy if some individual stood before us and said, geez, I would really like to put a cannabis retail store in the blossom block. I don't know, make it up, right? And then it's very easy to say, okay, well, we need to put it on the warning, right? I mean, that's so easy for me to say that. But we have had no interest. Randolph went and did it anyways and they have had zero interest, you know? So it's like, at this point, what's it matter if we have to do it or not do it? Like, maybe we never voted in. Maybe somebody comes in in February and says, I'm gonna petition to have it on. The devil's advocate of business developers says, yeah. Randolph says, I can do it. You say I can't, I'm going to Randolph. Yep. Oh, no. I mean, that's the whole thing. But how does that affect us? They probably had to go to Randolph in the substance, right? That's a way to report about that. What's that? Paul had a good point. It's a higher population center out there, so they probably want to go and Randolph anyway. Yeah. Well, then we'll see how that figures out. But it doesn't affect negatively anything here. No, no. I mean, we're not gonna collect any local revenue off of it. No, no. I guess. You know, it's readily available for all. All right, so we've got the, so Gene Lindley and Chris remove, say remove the budget one. So that, and then it sounds like you've got possibly three of those things. Well, they're saying cannabis retails. What do you think, Paul? You've got 12. I want to take them all off. You want them all off? Yep. Okay, so Paul says no. Yep. And Chris says no. There you go. So you've got to tie on taking them off on 12, because we know Dave said no. He was clear in his last time, said no way. I don't want any of this on. And then three of you agree that we don't do the budget by Australian balance. So we take that off. And then seemingly, if I'm interpreting this correctly, the majority of you are saying, and let's wait on cannabis. So we'll take it off. There's so many unknowns. I mean, there's just so much stuff there. And every, it seems like a change. And every time they get together, they change. Well, it's the current before the horse thing. I mean, they're still trying to work all the details out from what they already put in place. It's hard. I'm still trying to follow it up. But so then 12, so we'll even do about 12. So 12, there's four of you present, two of you say yes, two of you say no. Or we can wait until Dave's here at the next meeting. No, the only reason you have been saying you'll get through it is because so if somebody wanted to petition they have time, they still have time. So we can, we'll put it on for next meeting. At least it would get a little closer. But Jean, climate change coordinated. Real, real quick, the town of Randolph is considering the select board meeting. They had a special meeting last week in which they had given us, of course, to the idea of a shared resource person to manage climate change planning and or implementation of responses. And I am suggesting that we, with collaboration of whatever the effect of committee town committees, that we put something on the town agenda that would empower us to move forward with a joint position to deal with climate matters. Apparently Randolph has expressed support and interest. Brookfield has expressed strong interest and support. Braintree has been invited to participate in I think their conversation with Rochester. So that would be five communities sharing a position. Lots of details we need to be worked out. There is currently a six-town regional coordinator that's been hired by T-Work to work with and is that position being funded by those six communities to deal with those kinds of issues. And T-Work is developing in its energy subcommittee or whatever, they are working hard at developing planning tools, et cetera, for local communities. So what I'm asking is involving energy, conservation, planning in the select board, I think those are the ones that, oh, like EIC, that we develop something so that the town can consider something very specific around climate change action, not just pie-in-the-sky ideals. So I'm looking at the paperwork that they had for motions and they're talking about putting on the articles. The one that I think the key one that Jean is speaking of is shall the town of Randolph establish a staff position according to the town manager to develop the plan, processes and procedures across all town departments to meet town climate action goals. So that would be the one question that you could put to the voters, but then we need to fall back and we need to add something to the budget because we can't, if you wanna put this on the town. So we're having a, they're having a position that's just gonna be a full-time. That's dealing with all these towns. Mike, we've talked about doing other things, but so basically it'd be a full-time position that everybody funds. It would be a full-time position shared by, six towns, five or six towns. But what does that person, what does that person do? What is their job description? You know, what does it look like? I mean, I guess the way I, I'm not saying that, that this tool wouldn't be helpful. I'm just, the way I see it sometimes is when these things are on the forefront, there are people that take advantage of this situation and they're probably doing the same thing that two rivers is doing, you know, but we're just paying someone to do something that somebody else started doing, you know what I mean? So I guess I'm, I- So, in my mind, some of the things that that person would do would be to move ideas that we already have in the town plan from the, we ought to consider doing this, into specific plans and actions for this we should do in 2022 and this we should do in 2023. But isn't that our, our responsibilities here and the town manager? I mean, no, I know, I know, but I'm just saying like that. The town plan is, is managed by the town manager and the select board. So I mean, that's, and that's where I'm saying is we're gonna pay somebody to do something that we should be doing ourselves already, you know? And to write the grant proposal, grant proposals. Got that legendary. For all of the funds that will be, that are becoming available and are already available for developing the plan, for implementing, for coordinating, for managing those particular funds. It's, it's a, it's a, it's a position to supplement the work that our current staff are already doing to enable climate change action to actually take place rather than to just be in a, someday we ought to maybe consider having a, a charging station. It, it's already in the town plan, but who's been doing anything about that? And not just the energy committee. That's the, the point is to have some staffing support for our capacity as a town to deal with the issues that are going to be coming down the pike at us. And to think proactively ahead of schedule before we have our backs against the wall and are now looking for dollars to do X, Y, and Z. Those things are all gonna be available, but do we have the resources to do it? For example, two years ago in Randolph, there was an opportunity to apply for a grant to put a charging station in the town of Randolph. Nobody in the town office applied for that grant. They didn't get it because nobody applied. Right, yep. It's, it's, it's, that's the kind of thing that a climate, that a co-ordinated for any program could do. Could the position, it's not a position, but the 10,000 that you put in there for grant assistance, could that potentially be part of this, right? So to sort of answer your budget question of instead of going back to the drawing board and the budget, could it be? I mean, we don't know, we don't know what, what a budget amount would be like. If they're gonna pay, if you get six towns and they're paying $60,000 a year, the 10 grand we just put in isn't even gonna cover it if they're gonna do us equally and that doesn't do me any good. So then you get any benefits and all that stuff. Yeah, because we need to figure out, we really need some idea, right, of how, what the position is funny, but I mean, I'm reading the information that you brought, which was good, which is, and is helpful. I just don't know, so my answer would be no. I don't think that's gonna be the money that 10,000 because then if we had other grants, we wouldn't have anyone to write them because obviously if someone's gonna do this for multiple towns, you're not paying them 30 grand, so even if you divvied it up. And so that's my thing is I'm, if you choose to put on a warning, I don't care, but I have to fund it, because if it passes, I can't stand to tell me, that's great, we're even putting money to fund it. So, I guess you could, but. Two responses. One is, we understand that it cannot be funded until it's been part of the budget. So that doesn't mean that this person would be engaged on April 1st of 2022. It means that, no, we will move ahead with that when we can fund it in maybe a year, and it would be a year from now when we could put it into the budget. But we would be in a position to move forward when, you know, because the town has asked us to do that. Oh, I see. Instead of putting it on the same warning that you're gonna fund it out. Not to establish, not to hire this person right now, but to say, look, let's. Is there interest in hiring? Let's move in this direction and then have it in our head pocket when we're putting the budget together for 2023. That's one response. Okay. And that's a response that I've raised with other town, that this is not something that we can easily put on warn this year when the budget's already been set. So you're basically saying, let's put the question out now and see if anybody's interested and then fund it in the future. So basically, so you could even shell the town of Randolph established stop position in the future or something, or you could just explain it. So I see what you're saying. But I think it can be a confusing question because one would say, well, that's a no brainer. We should have somebody doing that, right? But I also look as a businessman that we have infrastructure already put in place that should be doing that, right? I mean, the energy committee was, when we put the energy committee together, that was solely their job, which not every town has an energy committee, but the energy committee was to take the energy and climate concerns and directions from the state and apply those in our local setting, right? With the help of the select board. And we include these things in the town plan and the town plan is our guide to managing the town, Teresa's and ours. And I guess the way I just see this is an extra layer in the cake that do we need to pay for this person when we should be doing our jobs ourselves. I mean, Randolph, the reason why they missed the charging stations is because somebody didn't do the job, right? I mean, our energy committee put together a grant for a charging station. And then we found out the charging station was gonna cost like, what was it? Seven times what we were told it was gonna cost. So then we bagged it. And then the funding, and then the grant funding or something fell through. We also found out that that was for a short-term contract and then the maintenance was gonna fall to us, which was gonna be pricey. So it was a whole thing, but this was helpful, so thank you. It did explain once I was questioning it first, but then I got it, so. I just wonder if it's just overlap of, I mean, and in every town is made up differently, right? I mean, if you're in a town that has a town administrator, because administrators and managers do different things, right? Then it's easy for a select board to say, we need that position because if not, select board's gonna do it, right? And I do think it comes back to capacity and Theresa's expressed within the office a lack of capacity for grants in general. We're actively looking at options of a shared economic development person between multiple towns. I think in a lot of ways it's no different. If we're looking at one, why are we not looking at another? It's not that there's no entity within our town thinking about or focused on economic development. It adds more force behind it and it's a dedicated person who their entire focus is about one thing as opposed to, you're right, it is part of all of our things, but as are 100 other things and then we'll play that by 100 for Theresa, right? Like none of us are going to spend all of our focus on one element of these things. It's in a lot of ways, it's why we create the committees, right? It's that they can kind of spearhead it and bring the information back and I think it's just sort of, it is adding a little more force to you. So do you want me to just add it to the warning so you guys can deal with it when Dave comes next week? I mean, since you guys are split on the Austrian-Balden we're talking about waiting for Dave, do you want me to, because I know it's getting late and you still have more to talk about on the, do you want to, what do you want to do with this? Do you want to add it to the draft warning and this draft warning and have Dave or do you just want to say no? Let's still leave a lot more information about how this position would function. I mean, just the logistics of one person dealing with the individual needs of six towns because I need maybe totally different than brain trees or hurt fields. You know, I think it's a good concept to do that kind of a centralized position that would not deal with all these things because I don't think one person could deal with the six towns worth of needs would be a very much overhead view of all the towns. What they would have in common perhaps, you know, what can all the towns do that can be readily done next year? But I just, there's just too much missing. So it seems like you're smart about this. It seems like two of you can go one way and two the next. Well again, on my end, just to state my position clearly is it has nothing to do with climate change. It has to do with the management of the climate change. And I feel that there is infrastructure in our town to hand, it's not gonna be light switch and we have to do X, Y, Z all in this year, you know, or two years or three years. It's gonna be over a long time. And, you know, we're gonna be doing little pieces here and there and we should be able to coordinate that stuff ourselves. I mean, there's other things in this town that we would love to have too that we don't because we can't afford it, right? Like, we don't have a water commissioner. We don't have a public works director. We don't have, you know, a lot of these functions because we can't afford to build in all these positions. Instead, we have a person that has multiple hats, you know, so, you know, but I mean, I guess that's the way I look at it is, I think it's a no brainer that you should have somebody or something or some mechanism to move this, right? Efficiently. But do we have to pay some way to do it, you know, like, you know, I mean, it's, there's other, I mean, you know, zoning enforcement, I mean, it's all about need, right? Yeah, we talked about that social services position. I mean, there's, like, do we- It's like a need, we could have, we could, you know, if we had hired a couple of full-time people more, you could do, manage all these things, better than we do now or add more want. So it's tough, I get what you're saying, and nobody's wrong here. Is Randolph the only one with that on their warning? Is there- Part of, well, in terms of cost, hard for hire a full-time person to do this, that person paid for their job twice over, just by the savings. By the savings, yeah. No, that's one, one way, one response. The second is, we have some good stuff in the town plan. I'm not sure the community, the town knows what's there or appreciates what's there in the town plan, especially as it relates to climate change. I think having something on the agenda of the town meeting gives us an opportunity to say to the community, look what we are doing, look what we have already said is important, and give us talent, the backing, the emotional, whatever backing to proceed with what we have already said in the town plan. We've said that as a select one, we haven't said it as a 10. And the third thing is that I happen to be one of those crazy people who thinks that climate change is going to be more expensive if we put it off than if we begin to address it sooner rather than later. And I would, so for those three reasons, I would respectfully suggest that, again, putting it before the people is a good thing to do. We are, so I'm just, he's done, you want to move on? I agree with you 100% on everything. I think the mechanisms are there to drive the ship, and in this case, what would happen is we would put something on the warning. Let's say if people voted it in, right? They're voting in to have a coordinator, so we're now going to be tied to this coordinator that we have no idea how much we're going to pay them, any of the details on what they're going to do for us, but we've made the commitment to six towns now that we're on board. And I agree with you, probably in the town of Hartford, having a full-time person probably does pay dividends because they have three large boroughs in that town, and they have a huge budget, you know? Well, we're just town of Bethel. We got to watch out for our budget. I'm simply saying this is what another town has done. I just, not to say it would even happen here. I'm just saying, well, we also have the option of not doing anything in the town of Bethel, and saying it's a select board. Yeah, we want to go ahead and pursue this and see what we can make out of it. I mean, we could also, yeah, we could act separate and say over the next 12, yeah, we're interested in exploring this further with neighboring communities, and we will continue to explore that, and if necessary, we'll put it in the next year's budget. We don't have to have the town permission to do that. That's an option too. Anyway, next meeting can we? All right, well, eventually we have to get the warning put together, so. Yeah, I mean, you guys have been trying to get, I mean, obviously, you didn't sign until January last year, but you were trying to get it done in case somebody wanted to, and I can look again, also look again at the, I'm gonna put that for the draft warning. I gotta look at the calendar. We have a municipal calendar that kind of lays out the deadlines for everything. So deadline for signing, warning. All right, so won't we go through the vorac? Okay, so the letter of support is just really a discussion, why I just barely saw the draft of it that was came to us and it looked good and it was going to the school because vorac can only have three letters of support and I mean, we were really, they were trying to find the fine bounds of who that could be. So one of them is gonna be signed by the school and the school board, select board, and then they were thinking about getting one from AARP and someone else. So I saw it looks good, but like I said in your report, you're not gonna see it until the grant has to go in on the 29th. So they were still kind of editing that out. But one of the things that they do need is this project resolution of commitment from the municipality for projects involving class four town highways. So this just talks about, so this, the Bethel has to sign a resolution that, and it says the Bethel select board is in full support of the project that I referred to here in, agrees to continually allow the reference recreational activity to occur on this town highway under the direction of the town for the useful life of the investment, which is determined by forest parks and recreation to be a minimum of five or 10 years, I think they're gonna say 10, from the end date of the grant agreement and the town commits to maintaining the funded recreational improvements in useful repair for their useful life as defined above. So this is something that this goal record grant is requiring, we can't get past point one. If you look in the budget, I put in a little bit of money for trail maintenance. Obviously a lot of it's done by volunteers, but I did put something in the budget that way it shows that you're... So are they saying the infrastructure that we would put into play, then obviously we would maintain that for a period of time? Right, pretty epic. That's basically what they're saying. They're gonna give us $5 million, they wanna make sure. Yeah, yeah, I mean it makes sense, right? Maybe $5 million, $500,000, they're not gonna squander it. So I have not filled in yet, just so you know exactly which town highway this is because I need to talk to Chris Fours. I know I think one of them is gonna be maybe the top portion of Ringe, but so I don't know exactly, so I know part of it's gonna be Ringe, maybe the top part of Woodland because that's near Quimby, so it's Ringe. So I haven't heard back from Chris Fours yet, so when you look at it, obviously, I haven't written in the town highway number yet because I don't know, and it's gonna be multiple. We know it's, I'm pretty sure it's gonna be the top of Woodland and the top of Ringe because they're Fours. So I don't know that as he flushes out the details of the map, sure of course. So that's in addition to the support letter? Yup, so this is a whole, yeah, they're gonna do the letter of support, then this project resolution and then they gave us another letter which says the town of Bethel owns and manages a diverse set of properties in Bethel village that are currently used or designated for outgrow recreation. The town fully supports the uses and improvements to town facilities and properties described in this application. The town of Bethel will allow the public to access the properties with trail construction projects listed below for a minimum of 10 years and will maintain the investments. This is development of the multi-use outer loop trail, connected trails in the Bethel Woods trail system where it lies on Bethel Rec Center property. Construction of phase two of the skate park, the universally acceptable, acceptable accessible, excuse me, pathways, an accessible pool lift and map kiosk at the rec center. Construction of a walking trail and installation of a small map of kiosk at Carles Meadow, a rebuilding of inaccessible stairs at the River Street Bridge access point adjacent to 16 Miller Drive. The town of Bethel will allow access and maintain public access and investments for a minimum of five years for kiosk installations at Yvonne Park, River Street Bridge, Bethel Town Hall, Bethel Common, Branglair Town Forest, Pumby Town Forest, Bethel Recreation Center, Carles Meadow, I don't know where we're putting the kiosk here, but so anyway, so this has to go on town letterhead and then either all sign it or Christopher's sign it either way, but so this is, it's just what's coming together, they're flushing it out, so it just needs more and more support. So the way I read this class four commitment, maybe I'm wrong, but so if we, if part of this we build the trail system that just make it up comes out on the far end of a class four road, right? Then we have to, we're responsible for making sure that people have access to that trailhead, right? So driving once, let's say, let's say somebody wants to drive out to park to go on the trail system or something, then that means that that class four road that we may not typically maintain, we are swearing to that we are gonna maintain that road to that so that there's access in and out. I think we would still have authority to close roads. Much like they do with Lincoln Gap. Is that what I'm reading? They close a road in the winter. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't get into any more details like is it seasonal? Like can you just close it in the winter or whatnot? But it sounds like we, because there's often as Doug knows, there's a lot of class four roads in town that we don't touch, right? Unless it has, I drove up one there a few weeks ago with three. So let me tell you, my truck had a rough time getting through there. Well, it says that it just, we would have to make sure that we're, we would have to maintain. It's saying that is in full support of the project referred to here and we agree to continually allow the reference recreational activity to occur on this town highway under the direction of the town for the useful lice of the investment. So part of the resolution is that you're allowing them to use the road, which is determined. And then it says to the town commits to maintain the funded recreational improvements. So we're not agreeing to fund the road. We're saying that if we put, they put $500,000 in trails, we agree to maintain the trails. And it says if the town should allow additional improvements to the effective length of highway to accommodate uses other than the reference for recreational activity, which we know is trails, those uses shall not preclude the intended wreck activity for the stated useful lice. I think they're saying, you all of a sudden upgrade this road to a class, something else, you're still gonna allow these guys to use it as trails. But you know how it is. I mean, if we're gonna, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I mean, just if we're gonna allow access, we know that there are some class four roads that you can't get a lot of vehicles through. I think the same thing that they're saying is your, we're not, we are going to allow this activity to occur on this town highway. I think that's what we're saying. It's not actually about vehicle access. It's about outdoor recreation. No, but we know how that ties in. Sure, but I don't think this is in any way saying you have to maintain a class four road in the middle of winter so that somebody can get their bike to the trailhead. It's that you're allowing them to use the trail that's off of that road. They have to get themselves there. It's not about the maintenance of. Yeah, it sounds, basically what they're trying to do is they're protecting their investment. And if they give you money, then that's what you're doing. And so basically they're saying we've proposed a recreational trail project described generally as work to be done along this certain trail. And you have to list what the work is. You can snowshoe, you can snowshoe, and you can snowshoe on one trail. Well, you'll have to on a lot of these. You can snowshoe on one trail. You can snowshoe on one trail. That's what it said. That we're ready to continue to permit people to do that. Anyway, so you'll need a motion, a motion to adopt the project resolution of commitment from municipalities. So you'll need a motion to adopt the resolution. So moved. Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Aye. That's going around. And we're all set. You're going on record that you'll have to make sure that you'll have to maintain those roads too. I know. That'll be the next thing. When somebody can't get up that road for whatever reason. It's true. And then I'll sign this letter on the letterhead saying that you support this. So we allow access and maintain public investments for a minute. Yeah, I'll just get a reminder. Someone needs the zoning permit, so. But it is something we'll have to think about down the road. You know, we may have to put some extra money in the budget, wherever you put it, to have someone go in and get some maintenance. Well, we did, we talked about that. Most of it, the maintenance is done now, is done by volunteers for free. So, but. But the trail system is also smaller right now, where this is going to be vastly improved, you know. Yeah. And if you want to do it right, you know, might be better. I don't know if there's somebody else who's pay one fee. So I'll remind Rebecca, before we sign this, that you know, I'm not, I want to know where she's going to be out of the town hall, that kind of questioning. And just a reminder, they need zoning. Yeah, it's so easy. There's not much, not much real estate out there. That is just, it's my bad. Not much real estate out there. No, I'm not. So that's it, that's it for the VOREC. They're all good there? Yes. Yeah. Anything left on the town managers report that we didn't cover? Yeah. Now, select board meeting minutes from the eight. What a great day that was. Yeah, this is for you. This is funny. Yeah. I've been, I would have rather been here. Yeah, we all got infinity comp time after that one. Move there, sir. Just a little minor thing. Present, spelled my name wrong. Got it right in all the rest of the article. Yeah. Okay, it's wrong in the beginning. But yeah, it's a EY instead of an E, I know. Sorry, okay, it tends to break your pulse. No, sorry, I thought I should have caught it. Second. So Jean made a motion. Do you guys like it? Second. All in favor? All right, all right. Very good one there. So that's right, she can't. I didn't forget you were going to hear about it, but I forgot that. Just trying to move a little. Do whatever she wants. And you're going to have to find out. Then we had, Why don't you run that shoot? Yeah, who's it next week? Same week, dinner, breakfast. Yeah, just going to get up and go to school. Hey, I remember when I first got on the board, we had some like 10 o'clockers. It used to be like, especially budget season, like one year we were fighting the budget. We also had the town plan. Oh yeah. River corridor thing going on at the same time. We were here to like midnight every night. Like it was, I didn't see Doug that year. He was, he was at home in bed. Anything else come before the board? Now we haven't beaten to death, right? So I think we just have to make sure that the next one that we're prepared to put the bed, the town warning and the budget itself. All right. All right, just need a meeting to adjourn. So moved. Second. Okay, have a good night everybody.