 I make a motion to approve the agenda as written items minutes for January 3rd meeting and the certificate of highway mileage year in the February 10th, 2022. I'll move to approve the consent agenda. Is there a second? Second. All those in favor can say aye. Aye. Can you pass this around for signature? Thank you. Moving on to public. This is an opportunity for anyone from the public to speak on any item that's not currently on the agenda. I don't know, but we will present an opportunity to speak on any item that's not currently on the public that's not currently on the agenda. All right. We will move on. Starting with our larger library. That's to be signed. Yeah, if you would mind, there's this little owl thing for everyone who's online, so if you just speak loudly and let it rotate the camera. We're going to see everybody. Did everyone get a copy of the document I passed out? Does anyone want a hard to copy version of it? Oh, you got it all. I just want to make sure. Anyone got that one? Sure. Yes. So 2022 has arrived and Revitalizing Waterbury is doing well. We came out of the pandemic with some strength considering what the world is doing. But part of that was the support. This town continues to give Revitalizing Waterbury. We greatly appreciate everything you've done for us. And we're really excited about the new year and what we have going on. So I presented this. This request is different than it has been in the past. I gave you a little more data. One of the things we've really been working hard on over the last couple of years and are really proud of is how we've really diversified where our funding comes from. One of the reasons we made it through the pandemic was that when one funding stream, particularly business memberships, just dropped off the face of the earth, there was other ways to receive funding and ways to support the organization. At no point did we let any employees go because it was really important to be here to support our businesses in the community. So the first page shows you sort of our revenue streams for the first 11 months of the year. December just finished. I don't have the end of the year numbers yet. But you can see that the town of Waterbury is about 20, a little over 20 percent of our funding in 2021. And this coming year we're asking for some increases. We're asking for some additional help. Our role in the community has been changing and we are a volunteer led organization. There's three staff, a board of directors and everything else is by volunteers. And we can't do it all the way we used to do it, I would say. I specifically have identified three areas, economic development. This has been an area you supported us since the year was it. I don't even remember if I've written it in here. It must have been shortly after the flood. Right after the flood, yes. Zoe Gordon was the first economic development director. Alyssa Johnson was the second one. Mark Pamilio we hired back in March 2021. He's doing a phenomenal job. We have worked hard to not ask for too much money for that position, but we're asking for a 3% increase in our funding from last year to this year for economic development services. But more particularly the where we've actually decided to ask for a little more help is in what would be Couch's general operations, but it's not. There's beautification and marketing promotion. The two of the other pillars of the work that we do for the town of Waterbury. Beautification has been something we've done for a long time. We used to do little Christmas trees, flowers and planters and all of these projects. And then we do holiday decor and it has become unsafe for volunteers to do a lot of this work anymore. We can put plants in the ground, but getting people up on ladders and hanging things off of lampposts and buildings has just Steve Lodge Beach hanging off of a ladder makes me anxious every single time I see it. We've been in our volunteers, by the way you probably haven't noticed, but a lot of volunteers are sort of in the older generation and I don't want them on ladders either. And they're not as nimble as they could be. So Steve Lodge Beach and I talked about this and the design committee has talked about this and we have talked to Michael Oceavo and got some quotes from him to hire him to do some of this more climbing up and down ladders, hiring people to do the work that our volunteers have done in the past. By the way, Montpelier Hires, Stowe Hires, Middlebury Hires, most towns of similar size hire companies or people in buildings to do this work for us. So I'm asking for $9600 that will help you hire this person to help do the work. The design committee will organize it, will plan it, will manage it, we will plant the flowers, but someone else is going to climb those ladders. It's a liability crisis waiting to happen. And I've really said recommend that our W design committee manages all the major beautification efforts for the town of Waterbury that we really do a lot of this work. We partner with Artie River runs through it and come over so I'm really looking at sort of formalizing and making this happen. In the past there have been bits and pieces of funding for beautification but it was always like sponsor a barrel. We don't have barrels anymore. Sponsor a tree, but we don't have trees anymore. And just the little bits and pieces of taking in $20 to pay for a tree and come up with the funding, this seems to me is the most reasonable solution for beautification. The other request is around marketing and promotion. We receive $1,000 a month from you for general operations and then $5,000 for the branding and marketing support. That is the amount that we began receiving in two, I've got these numbers here, eight, nine years ago for the first time. We've never asked for a request in these funds. What's changed is after through Main Street we have really taken on a complete plan for marketing this town as a destination to support our businesses. And we've developed programs, we've developed strategies, we've developed partnerships including the one with Route 100, best of Route 100 Stowe Area Association in the Med River Valley. We have worked really hard. This is becoming, I don't call it organic, but it's become a brand. Waterbury is a place to come to and to be. And by bringing and pulling these people together to come here in marketing and promoting our town, we are supporting our businesses which created lively, engaging and fun community for all the residents and makes it a economically sound place to live and do business. So we have asked for an increase of $6,000. So basically it's going from $1,000 a month to $1,500 a month for a general operating dollars on top of the other bits and pieces. This year we're undergoing some major projects. Stowe Street Alley is moving forward. Pleased to report we've raised $40,000 for this project already. We have written some grants. We're going to be kicking off this project soon. We got our zoning permits. Almost completely. We have to go back with a few design things. Very excited. I plan on working with Bill and Steve to submit a new downtown transportation grant for the town of Waterbury. State of Vermont has changed its funding formula, doubled, tripled the amount of money available to downtowns to $200,000 grants for a 25% match. That's only $50,000. We have paid off all of our downtown transportation grants. We've completed them through Main Street. We can be really strategic to create a good project for the town. It would be really unfortunate if we didn't submit some funding for some funding with the downtown transportation grant. And we're also partnering with some of the other arts organizations to create a public arts master plan. We'll bring to the select board to consider adopting in some fashion as we find that public art has really been something this community loves to do. So I'm just sort of popping things out here. Do you have questions for me? I have one. So the downtown transportation grants that you were just talking about. So I just heard later in the year that that increase was coming. You talked to me when I visited your office several weeks ago. And it's just kind of through the end of the year and through this process, it's hard to find the time to figure out what we're going to do. So I guess what I've been asking and you don't have to have an answer for tonight before the budget process ends, I think we don't necessarily have to identify what we're going to do for the downtown grant. But if there's any kind of match involved from the municipality, I need you to help me figure out how much money we need to include in some way. And it doesn't have to be as specific like that, but we can work together. I don't have time. Well, the timing is really hard. I so respect that bill. And the thing is, this is sort of a one shot deal. This is the state using the ARCA money and getting it out there. If we don't take advantage of it, we may not get another chance for this kind of money at this kind of match. And the grants are due in March. So the queen of the downtown transportation grant program was Barbara. So she's gone, but I can call her if I have to. I just wanted to put a plug in for this is Karen's not going to be surprised to hear me say this, but we really need to update the lighting at Rusty Parker Park. The, you know, I don't think anybody who's visited the park hasn't noticed the polls starting to they've gone past a useful light. Let's just put it that way. And they're pretty pricey to replace from what we understand to replace them with what's comparable or similar to what is on the streetscape. So that that would be something that I would strongly advocate for. Yeah, so I will be a good project. That'd be a good ARPA project. This is a perfect type of project. And the other I'm in the back of my mind. I'm even wondering could we use parts of the Stowe Street alley project and get some money through the downtown transportation grant like the lighting for the alley. So here's the deal. I'm going to reach out to you, Bill and maybe Steve together. We can sit down and have a quick brainstorm or I'll just do it with Steve and then we'll come up with some numbers and give you a match. But I think the minimum matches. I mean the maximum matches 25%, which is going to be $50,000. But if we don't submit for a full $200,000 project or $250,000 if it's a match, we can come up with numbers. I got this one. All right. That sounds close to volunteering to write the grant to me. It'll be a team effort. It'll be a team effort. It'll be a grant for those $250,000. Yeah, it would be $200,000 from them $50,000 for the match. So the project would have to be about $250,000. This additional $6,000 as part of the economic development services that helps create that match? No, no. The $6,000 I'm asking for, which is part of general operations, this is just supporting revitalizing Waterbury and all the work we do. For example, partnering with the town and writing a downtown transportation grant that takes time and effort and a lot of work. So that's what that is for. That is to go towards supporting revitalizing Waterbury. And honestly, that $6,000 will help us market this town. Our goal with the additional funding for general operations is to use that for promoting this community in this town. We do that through our website, social media, advertising, partnerships, and a variety of other ways. So maybe I'm misunderstanding the conversation. So where would that match come from? Is that an additional ask that would happen later? Yeah. Yes. Yes. That would mean the CIP, okay. Can I mention something about the ask? Not about the $50,000. This is back to the RW budget. That was separate from the RW budget, that whole grant thing. As people might be aware, the library tourism council was assumed under revitalizing Waterbury. The activities of that and the tourism council went away because we wanted to reduce duplication in the community. And we were very fortunate when we started the Main Street project to be able to hire a outstanding marketing associate, Arielle Montelac. And as a board, we made the decision because of the success that we have seen with attracting visitors to Waterbury and supporting businesses through that marketing. We made the decision to keep that position on a permanent basis. So we, the board of RW, really felt like marketing this community is something that is critical to the ongoing success of our businesses and our community at large. And we took the risk, if you will, of doing that and now have a 35-hour week position doing that on an ongoing basis. And we essentially, right now, are in the position of having to raise funds in order to maintain that position. And part of what that is about is, well, all of what it's about is marketing the community of Waterbury. And so just wanted to mention sort of the history of where we got to and where we are at at this place. And so the general support of RW has remained at $12,000 since the town, we've been an organization for 28 years. And so it's been about 25 years of the same. Well known. So we're only like about 10 years, 10, 11 years. Oh, since the... I'm not talking about the $5,000 for brand. No, but they made it downtown has only been about 10 or 11 years. That's when you started funding us when we became a designated downtown. So it's been the same amount for all that time except for the branding when we decided to ensure that we've had the branding. So we really are hopeful that you see the value of our marketing efforts of marketing the community as a long-term strategic way to increase tourism in the community and to support the downtown. Talk to you that in the... Second all of that, obviously. But I'd also like to... You know, Theresa spoke a lot about marketing outwardly, but RAL in that position and the need to also market inwardly and support the projects that we do. She does a lot for the arts fest to wrap it up in the way in which we're all the great benefits to residents here in town. All along with everything else. So I just want to get that. Because RWA is about promoting for residents, businesses, and visitors all three together. And RAL's on in case you have a question. Do you want to ask her any questions she's on? So I continue on with a couple of questions here. I see last year you had $48,000 in the PPP loans. Obviously that's gone. Correct. So a lot of times what happens is people will adjust their programs to meet the funding that they have. And now that that funding is gone, did you have to chop up that number and put it into the rest of these money items for 2022 somehow and take a loss as well? Or is it completely gone from the... It's completely gone. We... The PPP loans back stopped us when we had almost no business memberships or individual membership money coming in. So what you don't see is sort of 2020 was the difficult year. The PPP loans all sort of were forgiven in 2021, but they arrived and helped pay and support us through 2020 into 2021. So the... It's a good question. We had many board meetings where we talked about spending a year on subsidies. And that's what those were. Those were subsidies. And we were very, very cognizant of that. And again, that's why the diversity of our revenue streams are so important. And if you look at one of the budget items this coming year is corporate payments are significantly higher than they were in the past. It's because we have a couple of projects that are going to bring in funding for us. And so that's one of the resources. Can you explain how does that work and what is like an example of a project? Discover Waterbury Guide. We are reprinting the Discover Waterbury Guide. This is marketing. This is how we promote our town. I don't have a copy of the guide here, though I swear there's probably one in this building somewhere. Nine by three and a half. Ariel's showing you a picture of it on the screen. So we last printed it in 2019. These are print... We print 25,000 copies. And they're opportunity for small businesses in town to advertise. Plus we have a lot of storytelling in there for ideas of where to go. They are put in the info centers up and down the interstate. They are distributed at other locations. People in businesses have them. You know, when you go visit a town, you know, visit a new community or some place on vacation. Everyone says print is dead, but people pick these up. This is the one thing they pick up and we go through them printing those. We've got advertising and we've done all the pricing and we will make money on the Discover Waterbury Guide. That is one of the things we do. And it's every other year, but this is the year we will be printing it. So that will be the funding sources. So honestly, you see that in 2021 it was 34,000, 22,000, 71,000. The corporate... It's about 30 to $35,000 that we will bring in. Now there's expenses that go against that. But that's the difference. That's the funding that comes in for that project. Have you made such a huge leap on your foundation? That is Stow Street Alley. I am planning on bringing in at least $50,000. And whether it's foundation money or corporate, it's going to come in. I'm not sure where, but I put it in foundations because we are applied for some significant grants. We will start knowing about those grants in February. And if they do, they will come in as foundation money. Can you say here are you raising $40,000? $40,000. We have $39,050, so it's pretty close. Unless someone wants to give me $1,000 and I'll get 30,000. I have a few questions. One, I guess in terms of where you have both revenue streams for the train station and both ends, wouldn't you have been down because you lost the coffee shop? No? There's a wonderful little thing called a lease. So they're still paying? They are paying me on a monthly basis. They couldn't break it or anything like that. We wouldn't let them. I know corporations have a way of doing that. There is no app clause. The people who negotiated that lease, the 20-year lease, I mean, it's not often you have a 20-year lease for a space like that. That explains that. There literally was no app. It was one of the first things we looked at when they notified us that they were not coming back. No app clause. What is the expiration of that lease? August 2026. So if you get another tenant, say, this year or the year after, does that then do double up? No. What we do is we negotiate with KVP, a buyout that will make us whole based on the current rent and the old rent. So I'm pleased to inform you that on Friday we signed a letter of intent with a potential tenant. I know I've been hearing rumors. Well, you can hear all the rumors you want. I'm not going to say anything more. That's all I need to know. I signed a letter of intent. But I will tell you that Theresa and I were pretty much dancing for Joey on Friday to know that this was about a year ago when we were informed that they were going to not come back. So it's not been easy. But we're excited about it. The question is, you know, the money for the design committee. I know it's difficult to get volunteers. I know people like me with broken bodies are still climbing up ladders and we still will do that. But is this contract with Lociavo? Is it total service? Like the people who, some people like to volunteer. Oh, no, we're not losing our volunteers because my volunteers are really important to us. They will, all I will have is volunteers who will be doing organization and know exactly what's going on and bringing things out. But they're not going to climb up the ladders. They won't be climbing up the ladders. And then when something is broken or has to be fixed, Mike will go and take care of it instead of Steve during lunch hour rushing down the street with a ladder and climbing up and trying to put something on. We will have someone who takes care of it for us. Okay. So yes, we will. I assume he's going to do, like, watering too, right? Yes. When it comes to the contract, flowers, hanging the flower baskets, he's got a team. So when it came to hanging the garlands, he volunteered for a big chunk of time to come out and experience what it means to hang garlands and saw the process and understood it. And then with that information, he went back and he quoted us a price of what it would take for his team to hang the garlands. And then, you know, and then the flower baskets he helped put, I think he helped take the flower baskets down. This contract will start in February when we will actually bring the garlands down before springtime. This is a new project, a new way of doing things for us. So we're really pleased. He knows this town. He knows the projects. So I'm very, very pleased. And that $9,600 also represents costs of buying flowers and costs of buying supplies and things like that. So it's not purely a Michael Oceado contract price. Now, the last question is, I know on the money for the support of marketing and promotion, that's up quite a bit. Is there any other large ticket item other than you put in the second paragraph or just small, you know, marketing tax? So the marketing is really going from $5,000 to about $11,000 plus the $12,000 that supports the general operations of us. Major projects. Revitalizing Waterbury is undertaking a massive strategic plan and process that doesn't cost money, but it takes time. We are in Stoastry Alley, which is a huge, huge project. The master plan for public arts for the town is a very big project. It doesn't cost a lot of money, but it's time consuming. Waterbury Arts Fest has some significant changes that will happen this year. So that is going to require a fair amount of marketing and promotion to make that happen. But we plan on taking it up a notch, and that will be a pretty major project. Everything takes place in the next six months, and then I don't know what's going to hit. So these things you think are going to be ongoing projects, so there's going to be an ongoing revenue stream and income stream necessary for that? Yes. Okay, thanks. I don't want to forget everybody up on the screen. Oh, Danny. I'm just curious if there is an accessible annual report for either 2020 or 2021. I was only able to find 2019 online. Oh. I'd love to be able to find that. Well, you should. So 2022, 2021 is being approved by the board of directors tomorrow at our board meeting, and then I will send it out to you. And then the 2021 should be online. Ariel, you're right there. Can you find the link and put it in the chat? She's got it. Thank you. It's in the town reports in last year's. Yeah, it's always in the town report. Yeah. So, but I also put it, go ahead, Ariel. All right. I don't see a chat available to me. If you go to revitalizingquantigrary.org slash about dash us. It does have the 2020 annual report linked from there. Thank you. Good. Thanks, Ariel. Any, any other questions? No, thank you. How has business and individual membership or totals for 2022 budget compared to like 2019 prior to pandemic? Is this a return to those numbers? Or is this an increase? We will say that Main Street in the pandemic has risen our W's profile in the town of Waterbury. And particularly with individuals. And we did, if you are a homeowner in this town, you received a mailing from us in December. It's the first time we've ever done a mailing to every home. It's basically the grand list. Sort of a shot in the dark, but we feel that it was time to make sure everybody knew who we were instead of just constantly asking money from the people we know. And that has been highly successful. And gosh, I could do this analysis for the board meeting tomorrow night, but I think we've already brought in $15,000 from individual donations, including a number of significant donations from people we've just never met before. So that was... Are those considered memberships or did that fall on our foundation? It says individual membership. That's their individual memberships. Foundations, money, fidelity charity, trust donations, but I consider them their personal annual campaign donations. And business memberships, we've done a couple of strategies. Last year, because of the pandemic, we gave a 50% discount on memberships and that was actually supported by the PPP loan money. Sort of that stopped it in some ways. And we increased our number of business members from about 80 to 110 with that. And this year, we are giving a 25% discount on memberships up until January 31st. And it's an effective tool of people actually who make more money when we cut the price a little bit, because people are willing to come on. But I think the work we're doing is becoming, is really being recognized. Anecdotally, one of the board members works in a store in Stowe and spent Saturday helping people. And whenever she talked to someone from Waterbury, she mentioned revitalizing Waterbury. She said every single person in the store that she spoke to had heard of RW and knew what we were doing. We haven't had that kind of community recognition in a long time. And I will say it has a lot to do with your support of our organization. We're here doing the work, and as I say, you don't want to do. Well, also, thank you for everything that you did with regard to the Street New York Main Street Transportation Project. I know that you had grandmoney that we were able to pay the bills that you sent us every month. We're happy to have great support for it. But even if the grant hadn't covered it all, it was, and we would have paid, it was worth everything and what you did for us. So, thank you, that's personally for me, because Bob worked very closely with you and your staff to make sure that that all was handled seriously. So, thank you very much. Well, and the other thing, thank you very much for that. I appreciate it. Well, the other thing is that we've also put into place systems that if we ever haven't made a project like that, again, we've got websites and, you know, we've just got systems in place for all of that. I will also share, just thinking about this, this past year we took advantage of a retail market study and a housing study for the town of Waterbury through the economic development. And those studies are coming in. Housing study draft is here. The marketing, retail marketing study should be here by the end of the week. We plan on sharing this all with you. The housing study is eye-opening, really actionable things that we can get to work on and we want, we'll make sure you see all of that. I think the most amazing number I read from that was the average price of a home in Waterbury between 2019 and 2021 raised, went up by $98,000. I think we all knew it, but it's there. Well, I was talking to Dan Sweet today. We have to read a praise by state law. If we hit the 5% kind of level of appraisal, we're a little bit higher than 86%. We have been, our CLA have been dropping about 2% a year every year, but the last year it drops 4% to 5%. So we went from 91 in the CLA, we really go up to 86. So that is what we're going to start. Yeah. But we will share those studies as soon as we have them, I promise. I would expect by the end of January we'll have those comments for you. So this conversation kind of segues into the last couple of comments. First, I want to thank you for coming forward with this information. I know it's always difficult to come to ask for more money. You guys have been incredibly responsible over the years. It's even harder as a board member to think about having to ask the taxpayers to reach a little deeper to make these things happen. My concern is, and that always is, you know, devil's advocate, whatever you want to call me. There's some other things that, you know, the board members here are aware of. I don't know if they're thinking about them, but, you know, they're going to end up increasing, I think, perhaps our budget again. Of course, we're not tonalized by this, so we don't know the end result. Some additional costs that we've come about could impact the factory as well. And we have some solutions, perhaps, at least to help mitigate it. You know, back after the flood, economic development, development, economic development's position was created. And there was plenty of time we discussed that. Maybe someday that position would go away, but it almost seemed like it's inevitable that it stayed here. I kind of wondered if you would ever take the training that was off the bike and allow the town to run on its own. But I'm not sure that that could ever happen. So I'm starting to question, and I thought I would never say this, whether or not, and I'm not sure that it takes a charter to create that, but local options tax, I was always lucky to consider that because I'm a huge part of self-employed business people, but I stopped into the local place here today, picked something up, and was talking to the other guy behind the counter. And during this conversation, he said to me, we're talking about wages and employment and whatnot. He said, I'm struggling to pay my rent on 17 bucks an hour. So I can guarantee you that his rent is first and foremost in his life. And at 17 bucks an hour, how much is that leaving him for the rest of the necessities of life? It's those kinds of things that make me, you know, when I'm sitting here at this table, I tend to push back on new asks for money because it's impacting all those people that are having such a tough time. And so I think, you know, I try to talk openly about other ways to mitigate it, other ways to come up with revenue sources. And I'm just wondering, you know, moving forward, the housing, the whole time, I'm very interested in the housing issue costs are just skyrocketing. And I just, I can't even imagine what people would have to work out of their pockets even if they could. This gentleman here at 17 bucks an hour, no way. I would love to say a couple things. One, local options tax, there's a variety of different tools, TIF districts, downtown investment districts that are of different communities like ours used to help support the kind of work we do. I always have to remind myself that Montpelier receives $100,000 a year from their downtown investment district in order to market and promote and do their work. So it's like, I had that, I wouldn't be standing here. So that's just, there's a lot of... How does that money mechanism work, except for property tax? I honestly don't know. I don't know the details, but I do know that's what Montpelier has. Again, that is a downtown investment district, so it has to spend on the downtown. We have, we've moved beyond that of being specifically downtown to the entire town of Waterway. It's very much a focus of ours. Yeah, that's how TIF districts work too. Yeah. You know, for improvements, it's supposed to happen within the district. It's challenging, we talked about the TIF district here, we're back when Sue Ninja was still in the legislature. So that was what before 2010. And we always had an issue then, well, we've got a town in the village who gets the money. Right. And the Main Street project would have been an ideal candidate for a district in terms of a $21 billion investment and using revenues from additional grant lists that was built in the downtown to pay for it. But we only had to pay $200,000 worth of that $21 million. So I don't think a TIF district is anything that we should be considering right now. The local auction tax, there's pros and cons to that. You know, I kind of mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I think that you ought to seriously consider, you know, merging completely with EFUT now. They got rid of their village. That was a, for my point of view, a transition. And, you know, take the opportunity to write a chart for the community and then you can talk about all those issues. There's a lot of things going on in the State House now. There are advocates for local auction taxes there. There are other legislators who are saying we shouldn't have local auction taxes at all. They're talking about creating some kind of general revenue sharing for towns now. There's a lot of moving parts at the moment. And I think all that stuff is not something for tonight. The other thing I'd say, Chris, is that we have been very responsible with the town's money. We are very, very careful. We pay a lot of attention and we don't often ask for increases. And so we're asking. You can make whatever decision you make based on that, but we feel that the amount of funding you give us is used exponentially to benefit this town. So just the idea of having staff who are here to answer questions of businesses and talk to the residents and all that kind of stuff. So that's where I'm coming from. You know what my job is. My job is to ask. Your job is to figure it out from there. To Chris's point, all of these tasks are incremental. They all add up. The Economic Development Director, you know, it's $54,000. So it's about $5,000 of a annual tax rate for that. I don't know all the ins and outs of it, but I'm pretty sure that I think this is out there. Now, it's likely that it'll get me later, but two veggie grants, right? Yes, the two veggie grants. This is, what's this? Ivy Computers and MTS. MTS. So we had talked about the MTS fund a couple of months ago based on that information that we had. I heard from Mark about Ivy Computers and what they were hoping to do. So I basically wrote another letter of support and in my name saying, hey, this line board supported this MTS thing a few months ago. Please support this. So those two veggie grants. Somebody's going to be coming in to where Carousel was. Yeah. Up to what, $250? Yeah, something like that. $100 plus to start into the ultimate. And then Ivy Computers is going to be coming, but they're already there. They're going to be able to grow much more exponentially and quickly as opposed to just organically old-time. So having that Economic Development Director, I think, what those two things right there pace for the Economic Development Director, I think for probably five years anyway. And two of them happened in the town of Waterbury in one year. And Ivy was just named the third most fastest growing company in the state of Vermont. And something like 68% increased over a year. And George Ivy is becoming a good friend of revitalizing Waterbury and made a simple donation to supporters. George Pierce. George Pierce. Good friend of revitalizing Waterbury and supported our Waterbury Acts of Kindness program in November that was, you know, small but impactful, saying thank you to people in the community. Thank you. Yeah, and I just want to say that I think the investment in part of you goes a long way. Yeah, I've been sitting on that revitalizing Waterbury at the moment for a sense of care and for support. Yeah. And I'm glad that there's a focus on housing. And I think we're going to be talking about it more and more, but with these growths, growth of additional jobs and just demand through whether it's tourism or whatever else that I think housing has to be talked about. And to your point, Chris, when we talked about this before, grand less growth is a way to stabilize and continue to make Waterbury affordable. So it's figuring out how to, I'm assuming the report's going to tell you to increase the number of multifamily density housing in the downtown. I'm assuming that's going to be one of them, because that to me is the lowest paying proof from a housing perspective. So the fact that you as an organization are doing that work I think is huge and is going to pay off dividends long term for the affordability of this town and making supply and demand balance itself we're going to be doing right now. There is no supply. I know the number of conversations I have with people about not being able to find housing is unbelievable. So yeah, I think that's a very important part. I think it's hard for me to know that it's a 36% increase, I think is what I quickly calculated to about 23,000. So we haven't really gotten all the budgets to fully understand the ability to do that. Right now in my head supported, we haven't seen everything laid out to know that we can afford it. So we assume we don't have to vote on anything tonight. Right. There's also some offset, Mark. In the planning budget, which Steve Lott's speech will be presenting a week from now, there's already a $5,000 beautification line and I'm not sure we need all of that $5,000. $9,600. So there's a little bit of an offset, too. And I'm with you, Mark. I believe in what R.W. does, but I'm concerned about, as Chris is concerned, the totality and everything is kind of additive and then we have to see what's all, because I think very few people are going to be not asking for some increases in some and we just have to sort through what some of those increases are and to see if we have a budget that's sustainable that people could afford and run our town in an efficient way. If Bill does budgets like I do budgets and my board knows what I do, I do the first thing, I put everything what everybody wants in and I run it and I go, well, that ain't going to work and then we start playing. That's about how he does it. And yeah, but I can only, my simple statement is the answer is no if I don't ask, so. And I think we just want to say thank you for the support you have provided to the revitalizing library. It's really support for the community because we wouldn't be here unless there was a need for that and maybe one of our downfalls has not been to sort of incrementally ask for increases over the years and so we've held the line for a number of years and so we hope that you give it some positive position. Thank you. And I hope you people all know that we extremely appreciate everything you've done. Absolutely. You said you're almost like an extension of government but not, you know, so if you take care of very important things in this town and this valley itself and it would have something to do with other economies. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry to take so much of your time. Sorry, folks. It's good discussion. It's nice to be first on the agenda. Thank you. All right. So I'm going to play one very, very soon. Trust me. Hello. You're really interesting. I've completely forgotten what I've got to say. That's not plugged in, mate. Oh, it's not plugged in? No. That's okay. I should have enough juice. Alrighty. So I'm joined online. I have Maureen White, my Treasurer, online to help with any numbers-orientated things. Hi, Maureen. So first of all, thank you for the opportunity to come in to speak to you. It was almost exactly one year ago when I last was speaking to you, and that was by Zoom. And at that time, I was very, very new to the position and really appreciated some of the words from your board here. And at that time, a lot has happened. We are now up to a board of eight people strong. We just have one open space at the moment. I'm very pleased about that. And I'm pleased that that is a very active board. I promise that as my-in my chairperson role, I would make sure that the bylaws were online, the public is welcome to all of our meetings. And we get our minutes published. And I'm very pleased that in the last year that has happened. We've had very, very good attendance at our board meetings. So from that board oversight, I'm very happy in the direction we're going. We have in the last year had a couple of changes with our staff back in February. Our cook, Kim Huff, resigned. And we were able to, since then, hire Donna Barr as our cook. And Donna came with lots of experience from the Norwich campus in Norfield. And things are going really well there. We're getting great reviews on the actual food coming out of the kitchen, as well as some really good management practices we're seeing food donations being dealt with in a very responsible way. And all of our own produce and busts we're seeing, again, very responsibly being dealt with. We also lost our kitchen slash program assistant in August. And we have since then hired Ali Yandal. And Ali is actually a part-time schedule with us while she is also working on her master's degree in epidemiology. I always have to get that right. Epidemiology in public health at UBM. And Ali is great. She'll turn her hands to anything needed. And most importantly, the seniors absolutely adore her. So very pleased with that. I'll mention a couple of changes with staffing. Well, since originally putting together my notes I need to expand that a tiny bit to probably say a few changes. Our director, Vicky Brooker, resigned last Friday for personal reasons. So I currently have a job opening for a director. Our board has very quickly put together a job searching committee. And on a day-to-day basis, our board members are stepping in. So we have mooring almost daily, checking in to make sure the money side of things are being looked after. I'm looking after checking email accounts and that sort of thing. And we will make sure that we have that position filled soon, we're the great candidate. So moving on from there, lots of great work has happened in the last year from our treasurer, Maureen. For instance, generally tidying up the bookkeeping process is now in a really, really nice, nice place. I don't know if anyone remembers last year I had reported that there was a payroll tax arrears that we were working on at that time. And pleased to let you know that all of that backdated tax is now up to date. And we're currently just working on the last abatement request with the IRS at the regional level just to see if we can get a few of those penalties reduced. So again, great strides in that side of things. So also last year, talking with you guys, was the suggestion that it would be good if we had an audit. And that was a very scary thing at the time. The cost, possibly $5,000, $6,000, $7,000 for a full audit to take place for a small nonprofit is a fairly scary thought when every penny is quite hard fought for. But I'm pleased to announce that with a little bit of one-time money that has come in this year, let's call it COVID money, we've been able to make that happen. And we have that for later on this month. That audit will be starting. So again, great strides. Thank you for you guys pushing us last year in the right direction. That is happening. And as I mentioned towards our budgeting process, we run October to September, so we already have a budget in place and starting operational for this current year. One of the parts we do there, we put out our annual appeal to the town. So I think just before Christmas, you should have all received your own notice through the door as our own little asking letter to the community. It's too early to say for sure how that is doing, but we think we are on track to meet our budget on that side of things. So again, we're happy that we are in the right direction with some of our budgetary side of things. So moving on to a mention about pandemic. Well, the governor's lockdown did mean that the center had to completely close its doors to the public. So we did have to stop congregate gatherings at that time. That also meant that our Dominos and Bingo foot clinic, flu clinic, and any other community programs that were using the space had to stop as well. So that's a pretty tough thing for the senior center to deal with. But having said that, to say we closed our doors was not strictly true because in the background our meals on wheels continued. We never missed a day of delivering to our seniors for their meals on wheels. So that's five deliveries each week that doesn't only include the calories in the food being delivered, but also includes a wellness check and a few minutes conversation with that person to make sure they're okay. A very underestimated part of what that delivery is, in fact, is that wellness check. So having to close the dining area did actually in the background give us a bit of extra time to help freshen things up. We have a fresh coat of paint, we have fresh signage, so things like that we were able to spruce things up, you know, use that downtime very well, ourselves to tidy things up. That meant that once the relaxation of the official state rules came into place we were able to get going back again Monday, Wednesday and Friday for our congregate meals. And my best day of the year, in fact, was that first day back for our congregate meals, some of the faces of the people who hadn't seen each other for months. And that conversation, the bright smiling faces of the seniors, definitely my best day of the year, definitely. So with the space now open again it has also allowed us to do other things. It has allowed us in October we hosted a craft fair along with the Eastern Star and that cooperation with the Eastern Star ladies helped to raise about $2,000. So that process, again, I think tells a lot towards the value of that space on Stowe Street being used in that way. And the public being able to see that space used in a good way so fantastic to see it open. And the space being open also allowed the Wall Street ambulance three weeks ago. They had a COVID vaccination and unbelievably got 64 people in just the three hour slot that they had the special door which even they were amazed. Expecting no more than 15 or 20 and amazed when I turned up to lock up after them, they were like, wow, we should have had a bit of extra time. 64 people, really pleased. But again, just some of the added value of having that space there used and open. So again, a quick mention of some of the other small programs we have running. We run a movie night once a month on the first Sunday. Myself as the projectionist very often some kind of a musical. I'll project that on the wall and we have our seniors enjoying popcorn, candy, or the old fashioned candy in the boxes just as if you're going to the movies. So a fun event there. Dominoes takes place twice a week after our congregate meals. We also host a foot clinic. The senior center manages that traffic and acts as a waiting room for that process to take place. We have also hosted flu clinic. Again, we look after some of the management of the lists of who's going to be and when. Again, all things that show the value of having that space there to have these co-events with other organizations. And along with co-events the Waterbury Historical Society puts on one event each month with us. It might for instance be they did a foliage tour. They used the town recreation van and took a group. I think it was 10 that went off on a foliage tour with the folks from the Historical Society helping put that on. They also at the center put on presentations. I think the last one was Don Fields and the Pony Boys. Some, a little bit of music in there, a little bit of history. Again, very fun input. And the most recent was a Christmas single that, I don't know, everyone should go to one of those. It's really quite a thing. And sometimes forgotten is our medical equipment liner program. So the basement at the senior center is quite a large space. We have a huge collection of wheelchairs, knee walkers, crutches, all sorts of devices. So if anyone, whoever you are, it doesn't matter if you have full insurance. Come see us. We probably have the medical equipment you need. You can, if you just need it for a week after a short procedure, come and see as you can borrow it. We equally don't mind if you're going to need something very long term and probably never to bring that equipment back. We have lots of equipment we need to use it. So having mentioned how good it is to have a space open and our programs all active, you are no doubt aware of the high number of COVID cases right now. And with all of that extra concern about keeping our seniors safe and also trying to try to make sure that we don't have any problems with our own kitchen so that we can't provide meals on wheels. We have had to, this was actually fresh news last night with a meeting. We are pausing congregate meals at the centre for a two week time frame. Starting this Friday will be the first not open for two weeks. The hope is then we can reassess that we can then be back open again. We hope. And again, this is probably the toughest decision that our board has had to make. When the governor forced us to shut that wasn't us making a decision to shut. Okay, we had to. Whereas this is a very hard fought decision how we were to do the best overall. So we're going to see how it goes. We're calling up calls for two weeks and see how we go. So some of our other programs go with that. That means staying to play dominoes after the congregate meals. Not a good idea. So that has to stop as well. But we are still open for instance. If the ambulance service wants to use the space for another vaccination clinic we can accommodate them. No problem at all. So let's see, let's go a little bit more upbeat and throw a few numbers around the table. In the last year the number of meals served were 18,157. And yes, we do count them. I was going to ask you that. Yeah, everything. Delivered meals? Delivered information of delivered and the congregate together. So yes, every single day spreadsheets are filled out and we also have to fill in reports to the CBCOA where our little bits of our funding comes from and I'll mention that number in a second. So that meant that with our deliveries meals on wheels that was a little bit more of a rougher number a 12,000 number 12,000 deliveries made individual deliveries to someone's doorstep. Even though I say doorstep we will never leave a meal on a doorstep. That would just not be the right thing to do. So that is always making sure someone's okay making sure they get their meal inside. They need help with something opening the milk or whatever it may be. But that added wellness check 12,000 times in the last year. So we get a little bit of federal help. $3.76 per each one of those meals on wheels meals we have. That money also comes with a whole load of strings attached to it. An awful lot of reporting strings. Things we have to report. I'm looking at Maureen for that so yeah. Lots of things we have to we have to do to come along with that $3.76. And I'm sure you can all appreciate $3.76 does definitely not cover everything we have to put into a meal. So every single meal has to have the right amount of protein the right amount of carbohydrates everything. Everything is the exact amount. Our menu a month in advance has to be pre-approved by the CDC OA, the Central Vermont Council on Aging. So they every month have to approve our menu make sure it has the right mix of sugar, salt all these things. So yeah, that magical number $3.76. So that based on individual needs? Do you have to match the meal with their dietary needs? There's not too much of that. If somebody has a particular allergy we take that into account but if somebody just doesn't like green beans that's tough. Okay. So we get funding from six of our local towns of those six and the number we serve that's fine. I think I'm missing one number here but so so currently Waterbury residents make up 68% of the deliveries we make. Okay. And if we look at the contributions town by town Waterbury's contribution makes up 63% of the contributions we get in from our six towns. So just as an overall statement it has been a hard year for all non-profit organizations. It's been tough for our town to like. It's not a great year definitely trying to fundraise in a non-profit environment. We have prepared our budget based on last year's numbers to try and level fund in what we get in from our towns. That is our hope. So based on that we would like to be considered for funding $32,500 and that was last year's so $32,500 with the thought that 68% would so to meet the match percentage of the number of meals would be an increase to $35,000 and a little bit so $3,508 would mean back to 68% With that I'll ask any questions and if they are particularly numbers orientated Maureen is there to assist Questions for the board? A few questions I assume by what you presented to us that your fiscal year is October 1st to September 30th just making sure that we're just not getting old numbers That is wrong. I know last year it was very tough on non-profits volunteering for non-profits and fundraising I noticed it looks like under your totals for last year your actuals was below under $2,000 and you're projecting $33,200 How do you plan on getting to that level? That's the contributions or the fundraising? It's under fundraising line item, it says fundraising events $32,000 is most of it and big sales is $1,200 so it's primarily events I don't think it's like soliciting money from local people The particular low number from last year was because we were not able to use the center to host any events for instance we couldn't have a spaghetti dinner and have the public come in we couldn't do things like that we have some ideas we are working on some ideas that don't use the physical space but at the moment all of those ideas require people to be in close-ish proximity and it's just not a good thing to happen at the moment so yes some of our projections rely at this age but we don't know when we will be back to normal and in the same way as last year there were we were very low on those income numbers magically that does in other ways get topped up there were a couple of one-off pots of money available to us in various grants and things like that available to senior centers our hope is that if there are particular pandemic problems that some of those will be available to us in the same way to try and to try and leave them things up because in the budget some of those COVID related things that we received last year might not be available again this year although you might be able to get some ARPA money from places correct some may not but some different as well in different ways so we have to stay optimistic at some point that the COVID won't stay forever and and until then we will do what we can okay thanks what are the two numbers they have a different over the last years 325 the increase in what the request is 325 but he said that we could go to 35 to match that 68-68 so the request 325 to 35 Danny any questions yeah and so is it the five towns that are involved there are six six towns both haven't included yet and the building itself does want to carry that you know that that's fantastic yeah a lot of work a lot of effort commending for doing such a great job if I'm understanding your budget proposal here the way I number it in this ballot is such a few numbers minuses mean plus in this particular case it looks like you may end up 2022 with a negative 10,000 is that what this is showing yeah that's what I'm saying that is correct I budgeted the 10,000 because that's what the audit would cost probably so I was okay with not being a net zero budget just being off the 10,000 which we would pay for with last year's surplus that we have so that's kind of where I got the 10,000 so for basically a net zero budget okay good job okay I want to say thank you a lot obviously you've done a couple a lot of work for not a large budget so thank you for everything who knows each one of us need to receive you to some other service at some point in time I had a great meal there once we are back open again please come and join us one of these lunch times and come and see the food that gets thrown out of the kitchen is great quality food and some of the conversation with the seniors just astounds me every time I turn up for lunch the seniors love seeing you know people under the age of 65 I love my senior friends I can tell you that I like them in the past and to confirm the general public can rent that space they can yes I feel like that's a really important thing to make sure that some revenue that obviously doesn't part of that budget and in some of the ways we have the facilities there's ice maker there's projector radio people want music or movie or anything like that it's quite nice in that way it's been hard to do with COVID yeah sure well in any other terms maintenance aspects we have two sides if there's anything major electrical we go to our landlord but apart from that we look after many of the bits ourselves guessing a volunteer painting crew the Rotary Club was great there a few people to slap some paint around make it look really nice yes thank you thank you everyone thank you trustee we have a resource management alliance we wait a minute thank you very much professional bill would say it wouldn't be right if I didn't have something for everybody to recycle you should be giving this up electronically probably we didn't get anything digitally about this did we Bill no we didn't this is John you will I appreciate the opportunity to once again come before this August group on a less than August evening the member of a resource management alliance continues to do the work of dealing with the garbage of the world at least in the community that we serve our major project as always has been is the hazardous waste collections and this year as with last year COVID has struck and created some problems for us we were only able to hold one event both in 2020 and 2021 2021 we couldn't get a contractor that could support with resources to provide us with the necessary equipment to hold their second event but that being said we did hold the spring event and we had 122 households in Waterbury that participated and they represented 34% of the total of 359 households plus there were some businesses that participated from our community here we collected 10.19 tons of household hazardous waste during the collection activities and I'm pleased to say that we do have a contractor for 2022 unfortunately because of circumstances we couldn't get the dates that we normally would have had for the events so our spring event is going to be April 2nd instead of our normal second Saturday in May and our fall event is going to be the 20th of August I don't know if I'm pushing global warming or doing something else but we're able to hold two events we will have a lot of publicity because there are going to be some changes with the new contractor we're going to have to have all of the businesses that are participating front loaded so that they're all taking care of at the very beginning of the event due to paperwork issues that the contractors dealing with so they need to get all the small business generators of household hazardous waste to take their stuff and we have in the past been pretty flexible about when people can come and we just finish first them but this is a group that has certain requirements and we've had a deal with them we collected approximately 384 tons of food scraps through both road compost and their follow up application called and they're doing much of the transportation of food scraps around the state now there are some smaller companies also doing that and I should report that they have put in an application at the grow compost facility to be able to take they'll have totes there like what had been happening when grow compost was operating at this moment they are not able to take food scraps from the general public but once they do successfully get their permit that is part of what they want to accomplish which would be something that would be welcomed by the residents they have a good base of folks that didn't want to get a compost bin didn't want to bring it to another site but like the concept of free can't argue with our green up day event was pretty successful we collected over 9 tons of tires on green up day 206 239 of those were truly green up tires that were brought in by volunteers that found them not in their garage found them along the riversides and roadsides and places in between that needed to be cleaned up and 163 of those were from water barrier so I like to think that that's because there's a strong volunteer core in Waterbury that went out and got all these tires because 68% of the tires that were collected were collected in the Waterbury area by the green up folks in Waterbury so that was good we also had I think one of the most exciting additions this year to the alliance and that is that we once again are able to take text titles both in Waterbury, Rodney's and down at the earthwise transfer station in Watesfield a company called Helpsie is the broker they're taking these materials at no charge the materials are going back to their processing facilities down in New York and they are separating out the stuff that is still good to sell and they're putting it on the market through different stores, this kind of stores and the like and then stuff that is not usable is being used for insulation or they have three criteria criteria is it's got to be clean it's got to be dry and it's got to be odor free but beyond that they'll take shoes, they'll take all manner of clothing, they'll take all manner of linens they'll take your pets sweater they'll take all kinds of things like canvas and other odds and ends that would be found in a dresser drawer and the like we're continuing to collect electronic waste both over at the state surplus property facility right outside of town and down earthwise at no charge this year we collected yeah I used to weave like I'm collecting 27.56 tons of electronic waste it's quite a substantial amount of stuff we also continue to sell compost bins and green cones past year we sold about 28 bins and three green cones plus I do a couple of workshops on composting in your backyard and if you didn't want to watch the workshop you can go on YouTube it was eight one year and I find that it's a very good sleep inducer if you're looking for alternative to be able to get a good night's sleep our assessment for 2022 is going to remain at $7 the census from 2010 to 2020 raised the number in the population a little bit but it's not a substantial amount of additional money it's about $5,000 more for the alliance so basically water varies assessments going to go up $1,869 but it will be the same $7 but I got a question everybody that we're okay right now financially but part of the reason we're okay right now is because we only held the one event this year and the one event last year and based on the numbers the new contractor is throwing at us it looks like our rates going to be going up like 40% so I just I'm going to see what else we can do but the pricing on this is just not sustainable there is legislation that's been proposed in the house natural resources committee on private stewardship dealing with hazardous materials hazardous waste specifically and it would give more of the responsibility for the cost of disposal to the industry much like what we have for pain architectural latex and oil based pain much like what we have for the waste that we have that's collected and similar things to fluorescent bulbs and the like so that's the general just to what we're at as always I have two requirements to ask of you before I'll ask for any questions and one is to continue to support or re-appoint our representative from Waterbury who has very very effectively represented us and that's Alec Feskeny and the other is to approve the budget so those are the asks but let me ask you to ask me just one quick question is more just something of interest I know people are more and more concerned about electronics and personal information when you do through surplus is that all electronically scrubbed? No everything they recommend that anybody that's got anything sensitive should make sure that whatever hard drives is destroyed beforehand I know that the folks that collect this stuff from American Retro Works does make an effort to deal with that but there's no guarantee and I always say you want to be sure of something as best you can be sure of something like that do it yourself that would be the point there Thanks Any other questions? Obviously this is important that we continue to fund this organization and the work that you do so I'm very appreciative of everything you do and the amount of waste as a company and yeah obviously the contractor increased cost and the cost you want to that's unfortunate your organization has to see that kind of increase so we'll definitely take that into account Any other questions Danny? Do we again do we need to actually make a motion this evening? Thank you So to make a motion on how it's tested I know but that's that would be a motion but the motion that's not necessarily to happen this evening We do the appointments Dr. Tommy Okay So the only aspect I have a view that now it gets reappointed is to continue to listen to him with regard to how you deal with people from Dr. Perry that your hazardous waste collections and I have so much fear Yeah Yeah Right That's the one Yeah I've been doing this now 25 years Wow and 10 years ago I became a similar citizen That's scary Anyway Anything else? No thank you Thank you Moving on to manager's item, fire department's budget Good evening Good evening Gary I have never come here and expected to be on time We never expect to get out of here Right I think Bill provided all the information to you the only comments that I'll make and then I'll leave it for you to ask questions is that you may notice Bill, did you provide them with my list of stuff? Well anyways if you happen to see it you'll see there's some redundancy from last year to this year and that's because after the tower truck had an extremely high maintenance cost talking to Bill we cut back on a lot of things that we could just put off until next year but that means that there's an additional cost to that so I think overall the budget came in pretty well Yeah I mean if you look right in the middle of the page you'll hear my name is Scott and I've spent three times as much as we budgeted most of that is for the tower truck which had a good amount of benefit and as you can see if you look at the bottom I'm just spending even though we're three times up on that we were still about $12,000 down near the date when we go into the projected column there's some expenses that we haven't got paid bills for so we're going to be a little lower I think than what we budgeted for the year even though we went all over there some of that is just again I guess you're kind of continuing the pace of calls not anywhere near like we used to have on 15 years ago not even close and that's saving us money even though I did bump those two line lines up the regular pay in the practical intent bump them up a little bit just to reflect the fact that we need to give some additional pay for our to the firefighters but I didn't ask for it this year and I don't know if you provided it for me but your calls to the interstate must be way down compared to what they used to do in terms of overall their way down I just did my town report tonight I'll be emailing it off to the nice lady on the other side but the calls on the interstate were up over last year but a lot of that was not due to snow or it was just different things so when we have a call on the interstate for a car that slid off or a lot of times it's a vehicle hit a deer as an example and now the car is smoking it's not smoking it's steam so we will contact the state police before we leave the station to make sure that they're headed there and verify that it is or is not smoke and we don't go you could ask just about every firefighter has been on the department for a lengthy period of time and gone on the interstate for years and they would take a any other call over going on the interstate it's a dangerous place we get new people that think they're godlike and they'll just walk down and not pay any attention it's just a dangerous place so we will do everything that we could possibly do to not go up there and I've even tried to give it to Stowe they came down and covered for us one time when we were at a call they took a call on the interstate they could not wait to get off the interstate so kind of where we're at we cut back on training because again there's some COVID related trainings that there's one of them that I was thinking about attending but it was two days, eight hours a day on Zoom I'm not doing that I just cannot sit in front of a computer that long so there are some things opening up this year we don't know what the virus is going to provide for us but I think if we stop making a political issue we'd have less problems understanding that back to the beginning of what you said if you look at the new equipment line from up from the bottom budget was 75,000 last year it's 81,250 this year but that's one of the line I just think we're going to pull back on to compensate for the equipment even though it's 62,50 a year ago trying to make up for a little lost time delaying the purchase of something we did it I remember doing it when the economy went down and drained after Irene we did it but that all has an impact down the rope we're going to cut budgets and I certainly understand I'm not complaining there's a ying and a yang to that you have to make up for that at some point but I think right now with this budget we'll be doing pretty good for what we need to do we are going to do some more preventative maintenance on our pumps there's a vendor out there that will come to our station and do those in-house pull them out into the apron do the preventative maintenance and that will help us not have broke hoses because one trip from him down here is 100 bucks just to get on a rope so as I reported before inflation is running pretty hard right now this is a 3% increase in total climate budget which is below the rate of inflation right now I think it's a very sustainable budget the contract with Dexbury is up slightly about a year ago 3.4 80% one thing just to let you know this may change because the Supreme Court heard a case last week and the report that I had was the conservative justices on the court were asked a lot of questions and seemed disinclined to continue to allow the Biden administration to require testing for employers over 100 people and while you don't really know it when you look at us from standard lens but when you look at the kind of property through the lens of how that Department of Labor rule is written if that is all held by the court comes May or June at the latest we will be over 100 employees and the rule says that if you're over 100 employees you have to all your employees have to be vaccinated or submit to once per week testing which is it doesn't say that the employer has to pay for the testing but just having that as something that we would have to do could be difficult one of the reasons why we're over 100 is the fire department and I don't want the fire department to go away or reduce their numbers but reduce their roles a little bit I think you're in the 45 for engines in the meantime but the Department of Labor rule says that anybody that gets paid including volunteer fire departments including summer or seasonal recreation are considered employed so when we have and it's on a I forgot what they call it but it's a good point in time so if this is upheld we wouldn't have to subject our employees to this now but as soon as we hit the magic number which would happen in June when Nick Hire's REC staff would be over 100 so just so you know if that's upheld I'd be surprised if it's upheld based on what I heard last week but if it is you're going to have to deal with it and is SWAT Court member that we're paid but there's only five of you so even if you all say no to your money it's not going to change anything that all of our members are vaccinated some chose not to get the booster not my business but they are all fully vaccinated according to the standards do you have any I'm just curious you said the numbers are down a little bit you know as you see all around the countryside you see hiring, hiring, hiring are you worried about numbers? No I'm not worried about it we're in a unique position that I worry about it because we have in the 40s as opposed to into the 50s but every 10 years or so we do this kind of thing people get done control the requirements and stuff that's really not even that during our training we hit all the requirements that they need to have new members have to go to what's called Firefighter 1 and we've got one guy that we gave him a pass this year if he wanted to because he could not get into the closest one which is Williston but there was one in Orleans so that's where he goes two days a week and every other Saturday so he can get his Firefighter 1 so that's not, that really isn't the issue it's just a matter of a year ago we had three people that had over 20 years they're ready? Yeah and there are still members that have 30, 35 40 this coming year is my 41st year on the department so those life long members are very few and far between but if we can get 10 years out of somebody I'm happy and this is one of the things that I talk about a lot about telemanagers associations and we have a lot of dedicated people we're in a unique place in Waterbury I don't know how it is now but years ago the fact that we had the state complex in Waterbury there were a lot of Firefighters who were employees of the state who allowed them to be able to go to calls and things like that so partly it's kind of the luck of where we are and we are our employers that are some of our bigger employers Ben and Jerry's always willing to allow people to be on the ambulance or the fire department I think coffee most just was but the other thing and I don't want to minimize this at all is I think that we have people that are willing to do it because it kind of supports the fire department we provide equipment, we provide training and I don't think just trucks when I say look the personal protected gear that they have to have you know we invest wisely in this department and it helps us have 45 or 15 people that are willing to do it as opposed to there's a lot of times around us that are being people 15 some of those departments would be extremely happy to have we are very fortunate you know we don't have as many members that work for the state any longer we have two one works in middle sex unless she happens to be at something she responds during the day and we have one that works for an AOT and he's an engineer and he's in his home office four days a week so he can respond we have one that works for a neighboring highway department he can respond unless it's in the middle of a snowstorm as an example or they're replacing culverts so we're fortunate there are departments around us that don't have the financial support that we have you know I know that sometimes when you look at the equipment list that I put out and you look and you see a flashlight for $75 and it's like well you can go buy a flashlight for five bucks but it's not going to last it doesn't have the intensity and it's not intrinsically safe just like our radios we've been using the same radios for probably more than 25 years and we can't get them anymore and so we bought one other option and it's very expensive it can do a lot but all we really need is to be able to push about the top and listen but technology's catching up on us and some stuff that we have to do a firecoat now is a little over $1,600 it's pricey and we appreciate it we appreciate what you guys do so based on your budget and the fact that you kind of scaled back on some things that will make up for the expense on the ladder throw you have an idea of what additional revenue you'd be asking for for next year and what I'm thinking is depending on how what the season works out here there was something that we could do this year for the offset next year I can check I have people I have one person that takes care of all the gear he has a spreadsheet and he knows when it's got to be replaced and that would be an item that we would take a look at I have an officer that is in charge of pagers and radios I have other officers that are in charge of all the training I have no idea other than I heard one of them talking a couple of days ago what we typically do on a training night it's not my thing that's what I have people for I'm not suggesting that that would happen no no no it would happen I can think of a couple things that I will throw out and just let Bill know well the other thing too I think I wrote about it in my brief memo but if you look at the two capital fund which is down at the bottom you know I we transferred $192,000 last year I added $14,000 to that that goes into the capital equipment fund for the fire trucks basically in the station part of that is for what we talked about last week we put some money aside for building maintenance or future building repairs so what I had told Gary and I think I put it in your memo but if at the end of the month we're in a position and we find that we have to cut you know that's a $14,000 increase to that line we could cut that by $6,000 and still have it be an $8,000 increase to that line but Gary can look at the equipment and see if there's anything there and we'll see where we are in general but I thought that given that there was a little capacity to get to the 3% increase that I put that money in that line so so speaking of that maintenance we had taken a look at some of the society issues there on the Waterloo Center Station yep, done does that have to do with you? yeah it's it looks nice and it's effective but it's there's a periodic maintenance issue unlike with the brick facade down here but I think if you were to put a brick fire station out there it just would not look right and the community members around when we took the trowelings to them they liked that schematic if you will yeah, no, it's in my position right along all these new buildings that we have now including the Waterquakes in the middle we're probably going to check out some additional work at some point I think the funding set aside for that makes things easier and staying on top of this yeah, there's a couple doors at the Main Street Station that because they're outside doors have a little corrosion that we're hoping to address this year and it's minor cost but if we don't address it it's going to become a major cost so yeah yeah I'll send Bill in the Town Clerk my report and also Bill can share with you the list of stuff I meant to do that Can I ask you a question you have mentioned that Paul is down do you foresee that continuing to be a trend? Is that building safety standards is causing that and then my loaded question is going to be does it ever make sense for us to either through an outside consultant or something do we need to I know there's a response time by having two facilities yeah my question is, is some of that do-do that we had a village in the Town how many other towns or sites have two facilities obviously we have we have now I think maybe I asked this question previously but just understanding especially the problem that's one of the reasons that it sparked my question but should we ever consider or could the single facility handle what the town needs so I've been around long enough that there's been three evaluations from outside people about our needs and they always come back and have said I'm just trying to remember yes you can get rid of equipment but then you're giving up response times and a response time at a house fire will make all the difference between a saving house and no so the only redundant trucks that we have are the two tank trucks that we certainly need and the engines we bought two you know a couple years ago and then there's one that's 10 years old but the other trucks are a tower truck a utility truck that carries all the residual stuff we have a a mini-pumper that gets down narrow roads and long driveways and we have a brush truck so there really isn't a lot of redundancy if we were to eliminate an engine that could have an impact sitting here but you don't know I think it's a reasonable question Mark Chris was very involved when these stations were built and we looked at trying to build a centralized location for one station the difficulty now is that if we were to get rid of a station we would have to get rid of the equipment because we're going to build a new station centralized again so I think in the immediate term it's really not feasible to think about going to one station and we looked at in the vicinity of Guelphal Road and being hungry for the kind of decentralized location to it wasn't reasonable at the time the community thought and there's contingency planning you know what happens if so a number of years ago we were on the interstate and we had probably our most conscientious best driver and we hit Black Ice where the Bolton Falls are and historic is the area there and we were going probably 10 or 15 miles an hour and lost control and so when those big trucks start sliding they pick up momentum and we hit the Jersey barrier and that was $24,000 in damage and that truck was out of service a couple weeks later we're on the interstate for another crash with one of the other engines because now we're down to 22 and we had a truck trailer going too fast came around the corner stepped on its brakes and the box slipped and slammed into the other truck and caused $26,000 in damage so we had one service for months those are not just send them to Majestic and have them fix them there were frame issues they had to fix straight into frame so there is that contingency only two we would have had none you know the old theory one is nine, two is one yeah yeah so when we're done and see how size helps obviously and we can also respond to mutual aid in any other town and we still have what we call class A pumpers that can be here to protect our community I was just wondering if it ever from your perspective I didn't really understand the whole call line going down and if that's something that you foresee it's gone up this year by three four or six calls so it went up a little bit we used to have a whole bunch more calls on the interstate we used to have a whole bunch more we have maybe two maybe three chimney fires a year well I think we do a fall campaign of going out and cleaning chimneys for people and we go out we do it and that has reduced our chimney fires we know that even though we do some of the chimneys we're still going to go back there so we go to the same places each year we know we're going to go no harm we don't want people to think oh they don't want to come here we do we don't want you to wait because then that turns into more of a building fire so we make a lot of progress we have made huge progress we used to have 20 plus chimney fires every year I think some of this has to do with economics too I think quite honestly the economic the financial economic level of people in this town has risen over time which is in turn enabled them to make the repairs on a lot of homes that wouldn't be so far with the new chimneys and different types of heat systems as time goes on with heat problems and all that stuff which is not as cheap as it used to be unless you do a lot of it yourself I don't know what to eat though I think that may have some play in this production calls as well my other question now that we talk about that is how does that play into it may not at all but dispatching costs but not slightly so it really it's the how we pay is based on I just lost the word it's ran less of the towns and there's an element in there of the number of calls even though our call volume has dropped over the last few years we had a number of years ago 443 calls and now we're down to 181 so where you're really saving is fuel and pay because you still have to do everything else with the trucks the battery has to be there 447 and this battery system has to work I figured it was probably a six call it goes up goes up slightly every year and I threw a few more dollars into it than Gary had asked for because there's always some upgrade some esoteric thing that they send the bill for once or twice a year and you know it's gone up it used to be 35,000 it's gone up but when it was 35,000 it was 35,000 in both budgets it was 70,000 back then it's all in one life now but it's frankly it's a I never complain about it there's one guy I don't know where he lives but he sends me an email about 15 times a year talking about Capital West and all of the issues and the governance and how they operate and it's not fair and it's not this and that and right back and you tell me it's got legal status and they have a contract with Montpelier and you know what if we had to do it ourselves it would be 250,000 dollars yeah so this individual just is he doesn't have a regular job so his job is going to all these meetings and complaining about every little thing that he might have slipped on and he comes to Harps and I was going to say I stepped on it but it didn't he will try and dominate a meeting and I made them comment to our president that there's a public portion at the beginning of the meeting he just have his say then and then that is it and so that shut him down he doesn't like me I don't care but he is a pain he is a pain and he likes to he wants all the information that he wants and he wants you to buy the equipment that he wants us to buy and he doesn't have anything to do with any emergency response so that's any other questions Danny? I have one more thing that I will be very brief I know that the board has chosen over time to I don't know if it's an approach or what you might want to call it but something has to be done about the party thank you and you know after you even held the board we did discuss it I can't remember exactly where that conversation led but go ahead and then we have been talking about another idea okay so starting before 2 o'clock for release time at 245 cars are at the school and then there is literally two lanes going from main street once you hit go over the dry bridge a lot of times it's all the way back down they block people's driveways they block the turn go up high street and there are literally two lanes to go up into the school to get their kids so if you're trying to go all the way down to school street or up school street you have to go into the opposite lane and then you have to worry about other cars that are coming and periodically other cars parking in the other lane will they move for fire trucks I don't yeah probably but I don't know where they would move to it is that congested, that clog and then you turn up high street and they park up on top of the sidewalk so if you had somebody that was visually impaired they're going to walk into vehicles so and they're not supposed to park there so I don't know what the answer is other than finding maybe we need to have a parking enforcement person as an option and just walk up through and start issuing tickets we reached out to the principal there too correct? I did yeah and so Gary that's what I was going to follow up with is they um I reached out to them and was right around the holidays so it was a little bit wild but basically they kind of just put it back on me and said they're doing they're doing things a lot better and I said and I used to live on high street so I was often in a dangerous situation sure I believe but I'm not there anymore so I hadn't seen it for myself I asked them to be a person to talk and they declined and I wanted to go back to them and see it firsthand lately so um the first thing I thought was maybe chatting with you and seeing if you and I would meet with them because you you know have more you know visual experience and know what it means so and I had thought of some ideas like a park you know someone to direct parking or direct traffic during those times like a crossing bar for the vehicles um but that said uh you know we just raised them to talk with Bill about you know the idea of having someone have that responsibility you know to have an employee in the future so that's a bigger picture maybe a longer term solution but um but I could reach out to you separately and talk about that meeting with the principals I'd be happy we met um four or five years ago and the principal of the time said you know this really isn't my problem it's a postman issue and we can't tell parents they can't come pick up their kids maybe they need to have a drop off place at a parking lot some place maybe the the ice uh outdoor ice rink all your kids get on the bus and you know they're gonna wheel them down there and you can pick your kids up down there I don't know what the answer is then there'd be people complaining about traffic on Butler and Wallace but it is a problem and I don't want to deal with it I get frustrated sometimes I get just down right angry when I'm sitting there for ten minutes and but on Mondays I pick up my granddaughter at preschool in Baltimore and I have to go by I'm not gonna just take my time and drive all over town just to avoid it for a half an hour and nobody should have to wait to get to their homes well the unfortunate part about it is uh I don't think it was always that way where parents dropped their kids off school bus was a major part of education and transportation system and how it evolved over years and become what it is today that is not the only spot either, I mean no there are times when we have to jockey coming off stochery with the new markings because people will park in that marked off area even during the summer when you can see it because they don't want to have to go parks in place to go into one of the local restaurants so they they'll park right there and that is designed so larger or longer vehicles can get around there but they park there and they park in front of the fire station because they can't see the big sign that says what a fire department or big doors that's a problem and it is definitely enforcement they don't care it's just no enforcement the people that do it are local people back when our kids were in school not only did our kids take the bus but if your kid lived on out of the street they walked nobody walked correct so there was a car parked in front of our fire station blocking our tower truck because it has like very little good turning radius I mean it has to come all the way out all the way to the sidewalk and beyond before you can turn and it was this lady and I went around to different businesses trying to find the owner and she finally came out of the sporting this door and I said is that your car? She goes yeah I said well see that fire station and their response is typically the same you have a call? well call a call collector and have a pay for the telephone to be on our apartment because you clearly know when the calls are going to happen so that or there was a couple months ago there was a truck with a big trailer that pulled up and we would have been able to get one truck out so it's a problem and people and most of them are local people and they know that it's a fire station and I'm only going to be gone for a few minutes and I'm going to be gone for a few moments on the truck well in you can you can YouTube New York City and some other cities that's what they do they push them right out of the way and I don't want to hear you complaining that I do that any other questions? thank you thank you no worries you need to tell me you don't drive trucks I rarely go in drive trucks it's not my job I'm sorry Bill nothing good on TV tonight national championship I'm sorry I'm being myself and I decided to stop it I'm always home one person for a very long time I guess I'm around hey guys good thank you thank you I've given a bunch of updates throughout the special meetings so I'll try to go pretty quickly just to recap for this last year the pool was very successful I don't have the historical data on it I'm assuming it's the tightest we've ever run it it certainly is in my time but the burden that was passed off taxpayers on that part of that was because there was a chronic funding issue or a staffing issue we didn't have to close any days due to lack of staffing that thankfully wasn't an issue we have enough summer camp staff cross-trained enough of my staff old shavers where we could keep a staff for the hours we were advertised the overall budget for pay was down because of that we also closed on weekends and shifted to special events and expanding arts and lessons on Saturdays and that's also why we had some more revenue I got kind of creative with renting the pool I think that's part of the pay issue too is that you're not open to the public at all on weekends anymore for non-structured events right because for years we were always open having to have full staff there and you might have full of people that decision was primarily driven analytically I looked at actual data we were spending a lot more on weekends to keep the pool open than what we'd ever make I never heard any complaints no I got the first week we were open I had one person who we already knew would probably have an issue with it have a minor issue with it at the end of the summer she bought my staff gift card for Zachary's Pizza and was super thankful so we were doing something right to make her happy in the summer I got creative with renting it rented it to a military robotics company in Richmond they have these little prototypes that are supposed to clean submarines for the military so they're trying out our pool which was very complimentary of the new passion-paint job that we had it was pretty delicate on it summer swim lessons were the highest enrollment we had we had over 200 kids enrolled in the swim lessons we ran off-season lessons this past fall and we're currently running winter lessons and we shifted those from Berlin to Stowe we ran Golden Eagle Resorts a little bit more money but we got much nicer facility we still kept a large clientele programmed I guess I'll go back to early 2021 we ran Rep Academy to supplement the days that the kids were out of school due to COVID we ran our vacation camp so during school break we ran out of kind of a mini version of summer camp for the kids and then during the summer we ran summer camp as you know we ran it for 8 weeks but that last week was very few kids because of our outbreak which in hindsight now is not as shocking as it is what's going on today the meals came from a grant that we secured the Rep Department does not we do not internally provide food it's the senior center gets reimbursed from the Department of Agriculture for meals for kids they haven't been operating in their capacity and doesn't seem like it's going to be for the summer as well so I'll work with Feeding Hunger Vermont to try to get a backup plan in place but ultimately we do not pay for food it's always been either bring your lunch or we have this other option and we always try to do our due diligence to make sure we have that option so this summer we had the grant then we had a hiking fishing camp and that was incredibly popular because of COVID we took the kids separate locations throughout like two bands we did different locations so they weren't all together in case one band got exposed it was right after our outbreak so they were just being extra cautious it was successful and then we opened up after school rep and I mean yeah rep is busy every day it's busy I was with the kids earlier today it's an everyday thing now so we'll still have lessons on Sunday and then we have events usually scheduled for Saturdays typically works seven days a week I did this last week so moving on last week, last year for parks we paid to Anderson's parking lot we had a youth basketball court in front of the right building we're getting a lot of use of the basketball court at Anderson so that was kind of to alleviate some of the pressure on my court we did a bunch of field work down here at Dak Road to the fields that had some dangerous slips on them and scouting so to reclaim the infield bought some bands as you guys know I spent a whole week patching painting the pool an experience hoping that we'll have minor patches this year because of it and then we kind of restructured Anderson, Celia and I we added some big rocks so cars can't drive in the field and two access gates that Waterbury Ambulance and Gary have the code to in case for some reason there's a medical issue at the tennis court but that's to prevent cars from going out in the fields and doing donuts that have typically happened at least once or twice during my time here it was open for the Christmas tree burn and got a report the next day that some kid was doing donuts on the ice so now it's closed because Christmas tree burn is done but it just shows you it's open for two weeks and someone's found their way in that pretty much sums up 2021 for REF so any questions before I move on thank you great in the pool there isn't anything really notable for change I'm asking less for pay than I did in 2021 you'll see we spent way less which I explained before I'm hoping that we'll be back up to you know you can't always count on the staff to always work the extra hours that you need them to so I'm hoping that we can get a few more life credits again this year we'll pay the starting pay for that position as what's been happening across small businesses and just this overall economy the wage rate is going up it's more competitive you can go flip burgers in McDonald's for more than you can pay for a life guard so we're trying to be more competitive in that sense yeah wage went up almost a whole dollar this year so outside of that anything notable for increases Bill added a line for programs it's $3600 that's our fee we have to pay for recessions of off season swim lessons we'll recuperate that if you micromanage it with our swim lesson fees that we charge for those lessons so to be clear for the board there's a decrease in that cost of taxpayer for pay yeah you'll see probably departments that I feel like I'm asking lots of taxpayers not asking for an increase for an operating budget for our programs the most notable additions first off is a full time program coordinator I know Bill's mentioned it I mentioned it but in order to sustain this this growth that we've kind of established we're going to be another full time person thankfully we've been able to budget it where this person is basically funded by the revenue they will handle the programs that I've already established they're going to take over more of the in-person offerings so I don't have to work from 7am to 2.30 here and then go cover records till 6.30pm every night and then after they're on their feet the goal is that they'll have even more programs that will generate revenue so it's a win-win and just to be clear that 33455 starts June 1st so that's not a 40 years support the 24,000 will start June 1st 33455 that's the difference I'm sorry yeah but drop down two lines yeah 24,000 starts June 1st sorry about that the program payback number he just said it's more staff we need to run mini camps anything that's not summer camp so after school hiking and fishing the vacation camps basically any of the other programs that we need to run that's covered by fees do you think you're reasonably can expect to hire someone for that 24,000 well again that's for just 7 months I understand that it's a full time position it's just fun to see them it's fun to see them so it's all the next year so it's a full time year-round position it's budgeted around 40,000 45,000 it's in the range for a program coordinator this is for someone who's getting out of college or maybe has more time it's a really good position and then there's growth so if they generate more revenue and whatnot they can pay what we would want to pay them but to start this is what the going rate is for exactly that's what I mean that's how I got mine how I got Bill to give me increases there really isn't anything else notable besides the mini camps line which is the correlating line to the program pay it used to be called mini camp pay but in order to run after school in those mini camps there's supplies we need arts crafts fuel I put everything for the after school field trips hiking and fishing etc so that's the projected cost to run non summer camp programs for the year in the old days for those of you who might remember the program pay line at the top 121 program that used to say mini camp pay that was for people that were our employees that we paid to do mini camp stuff and then to run further down it's still there that says mini camps that used to be what we paid contractors but that situation is not that way this 10,350 that is budgeted is really to provide supplies of materials is anything else that we need to run those programs for an example I put together a curriculum that like Monday's are short stories and something days Tuesday's are science days Wednesday's are are game days so each day like I have to have some sort of activity lined up and the science one for instance we need materials to make a volcano so it's a really good curriculum it's a really well-budgeted one this is again covered by the fees I've structured might really structure this program to generate revenue that covers the cost there's nothing else notable that I want to mention in programs or that sticks out that is stuff that's just correlating to the increase and you'll see that I've asked for programs that's 1965 19,655 and 2024 I'm asking less $5,000 and that's it this new program coordinator runs programs as is as I've designed hopefully they'll have more capacity to focus on programs and be able to generate even more I will list the ideas I just don't have the time to implement everything I'm going to let Bill talk I just have a I wanted you to clarify you may have touched on it when you started but in rec programs in the programs lying down below we budgeted in 5 we spent almost 49 and we budgeted in 5 so we set the Albertsons grant that was for the food right? that program line isn't always spent for food 3500 of that typically is what we take our rental fee out this year I had it come out of a different line because I wanted that to accurately reflect the food that we got from the Albertsons line but yeah that would be good so that's not happening as of now that was the last minute I'm going to come here and talk about it again if I stumble upon 60 thousand that was the one that Nick used the grant money to provide food for the kids but also used to provide food from local restaurants which was a kind of a symbiotic relationship and now I have a lot of favorites in restaurants Bill do you want to speak to my admin? do I go through the rest of your budget and I'll go back I think Bill and I carried over what we did in 2020 when we cut way back so we might have accidentally without really thinking too much didn't budget enough for help there was an additional staff person that came on last minute as well that was kind of doing a bunch of other things and so that would explain the kind of drastic increase in that part time pay line and we did what we think is accurate for the and Celia and I budgeted what we think is accurate for the 2022 summer and then I just asked for a little bit more money for new equipment because Celia and I scaled back on some improvements to the parks we usually have to replace temporary fencing we can't put permanent fencing out here because it floods and I learned when I first got here logs have come and taken out the mesh fence before and that's expensive so we put in semi permanent fencing where you put an anchor in and put it up around it Celia and I pushed back from 2020 that we had planned and then again last year and got by with our other fence but it's definitely taken a beating so that's primarily why there's a little bit of an increase from there but 750 bucks I don't have anything else notable for parks so the administration budget the yellow highlighted the bottom to the capital fund right now that's a placeholder $10,000 is what we sent to the red capital fund last year we're still in the process of putting together the CIP budget for the parks one of the shortcuts if you will is that we've got the red committee who's been dealing with and working on the whole dating park situation with this golf and conflicts between the users there and other members of the public we've talked, the red committee has talked and spent a lot of time with public input to try to come up with maybe doing some type of land use planning, park planning and after planning what have you make this work with the red committee and right now there's a $35,000 ask I'm not presenting that ask tonight but I'm just letting you know why that capital fund line is a little bit nebulous right now I think doing that work I think developing the scope of what we're going to ask a consultant is going to have to be done by somebody outside we don't have the expertise more of the time in front of me to do it in-house there's issues there with regard to wetlands and other natural areas that when this golf course was first allowed to be established none of that was taken into consideration so there's likely some spending I think it should happen we'll talk more about that in detail when we review the CIP budgets there's also talk about doing some master planning down at the ISEM site which currently is not teleplan but I think in the near future either through the transfer that EFUD was talking about or better yet through a merger with the town ends up taking over all the assets we've got a lot of our recreation programming going on down there right now and you've got this group that wants to develop a state park down there and if you're going to do that you're going to have to do a master plan there so there's some things that are a little bit not finalized yet so that two capital fund line right now is really just a placeholder how much money we need to spend and then in relation to capital expenditures we'll have to massage that and see what we can do but those two things are things I think need to happen whether the board thinks they need to happen both at the same time at the same year that's something in this trust real quick there was an application for a grant for some of that yeah that was that more grant that I could go with private funding and have been successful yet and I guess they've kind of indicated they're not looking to do planning they're looking to do implementation yeah right they're not they weren't both our application was in a strong so there's a somewhat different but if we did the plan and then approached them with an actual budget for a plan and this is the implementation cost and the actual that's where they would be more sure yeah this could segue into right in a better position just to get those funds we've tried for some actual infrastructure improvements for last month, last year but two years ago was there tennis sliding or something something with water yeah I'll have to deal with that but we can continue to try but we haven't been successful yet the recreation administration budget really is what it takes to run to have the director most of the expenses in the first five line items up to the top or six line items all having to do with personnel the rest of it is telephone some insurance is a little bit of building maintenance for that building over there I'm proposing I put this in a memo that that I'd like to add some duties to Nick's portfolio I think that if we hire the program coordinator that he talked about that will free him up a little bit to do some things that I think are unnecessary to be transitioned away from me and Barb Farre Barb is gone now so somebody's got to do some of the things that she was doing grant administration for one thing is very important work that needs to happen on an annual basis but this that's coming in we've already received over $700,000 of it we're going to get another $700,000 sometime in the next couple of months there's all kinds of reporting that has to happen we're not going to spend any in New York all of it if any of it in 2022 I I've already recommended that we transfer $600,000 into E5 but the remainder of the money likely will not be spent in 2022 maybe some of it will but the vast majority of it is going to be carried forward and we have until 2024 I believe to obligate the money in 2026 before we have to spend it and I have been designated as the the term most of the term not the responsible party the primary anyway I'm the one designated by the time right now to take care of this money and I think maybe Carla was second in why but I'm going to be transitioning out this year I think with mixed experience and education frankly now that has received the master's degree and a doctorate degree in this time that he's been here and a significant portion of that portfolio is financial management the skills that I believe to be able to take care of all of the nuts and bolts reporting requirements you remember those things Mike so I've got something to explain here in the recreation director's budget we don't have the general government budget in front of us this week I'm going to ask some money to what I showed you last week there still going to be less than what I was making but I think it's important that for two things it's important that the town is in a position to transition smoothly forward and you're going to need somebody to be able to handle just this type of fund along and then giving Nick some additional compensation and some additional duties helps keep a very interesting place for the guy I don't want to be heading down to East Timbuktu to be the town manager the kind of administrator in one of those communities the other thing I think that would be helpful is we talked about that position last week the position to deal with the parking that Gary talked about to talk about maybe having the person ability to do some policing in the parks and when I say policing I don't mean as a police officer but to deal with people who are in the parks and the animal control officer and the health officer duties I think that my plan would be that person if that person is hired to have Nick supervise that person directly obviously the town manager would be right in the chamber for me but a significant portion of that portfolio has to do with parking and recreation facilities so I think that makes sense so I'm not asking you again to discuss tonight I know that we're only the second week my hope is that first I'll stop there see if you have any questions about anything you laid it out well so my hope is that next Monday we're going to talk with Celia about the highway budget and highway CIP stop Steve will be here to talk about the planning budget I have a meeting with the library commissioners at 5 this afternoon their budget was pretty much done so even though we will not have approved or even talked about the highway budget and the planning budget next week my plan is in addition to reviewing those two budgets next week that goes to the department heads that I'll have enough information and I'll put everything that we've talked about in and I think I'll have a preliminary bottom line if you will and then you know we'll see where we are at that point and then if you think that it's not doable then we'll cut back if everything was looking good next week maybe on the 24th I'll fine tune everything and we can adopt everything on the 24th and maybe not have to meet on the 31st but if what I present to you next week kind of as a whole assuming that you can go for what I present as a highway budget and as a planning budget if that's too much when we're at the end of next week's meeting then I'll bring something different back on the 24th and then have to finalize it on the 31st so I think we're making progress I think we're still in a pretty good place right now there is one thing I just realized last week and I feel badly because I didn't really read the letter I've had on my desk since October a letter from the ambulance service and I read it last week and said oh they're asking for you know they going from $39,000 to something over $50,000 for the appropriation when I read it two weeks ago when I read it two months ago when I first got it I thought that they were kind of saying well that's what was in kind because we own the building and we've provided this batch in Florida but they've had a significant cost as you can imagine given COVID the last two years so there's a significant increase in actual cash for that line and I'll plug that in next week I've sent an email to my colleague to ask a few questions he hasn't been spotted yet aren't there COVID funds to pay for some of that stuff I don't know I would assume so because that's what we're doing this whole thing is testing and vaccination he would think that wouldn't be the key thing that we would have money for what was that line is the Marble line supposed to be for no Marble is not for operations that's more infrastructure and yeah but there's COVID money that was for operational costs so I don't have the answers here to that hopefully get it because I understand they probably had this year you know we've gone for testing a whole bunch of times whenever we go someplace we get tested I understand they're probably having a lot more people they're open all the time it's an increased cost but I think that's a one time let's hope it's last year, this year and not continuing let's hope we're going to be out of this pandemic at some point anything else for Nick so good job Nick your programs are running well I would very appreciate it seeing something with a lower cost yes, well thank you I know everyone's run over it's one more important thing to say this is likely the last time I presented a budget with Bill and so I mean I think you look at the budget the operating budget expense side is $1000 shy of a half million dollars when I first started it was in the high 200-300 range so we've increased this department substantially while almost every year asking less from taxpayers and as much as you know that's me driving it and having all these ideas and getting creative I would not be able to do that without Bill not stonewall in the every five seconds you know I may get arguments may get yelling matches certainly happened over the past couple weeks but I personally and professionally would not be where I'm at today to be able to be successful in this role or if I do go somewhere else and be successful in municipal government without Bill so because it's our last meeting I also want to give him a ton of credit for how far the right department has come in such a short time thank you Bill and thank you guys thank you Bill thank you thanks Bill so at quarter 10 I had letters seen there which is you asked about it last week I don't want to talk about it over there but just to ask the town what's reaction to some of what I talked about back in December when I talked about being you know this afternoon and giving some of it to EFUD and having EFUD turn over which is involving loan plans and that first idea kind of morphed into I really think it ought to move towards an option to eat is it on this conversation or is it not necessary either way it's this late already I'll fit in your insight into representation in general and the direction that this could have so I tuned you out for the last two minutes so what topic did we go what did you swing into well I want Mark to come back but what we're talking about now is the night that I told everybody that I was going to be tired I preface that with the presentation about how I believe the town should transfer approximately $600,000 of its amount of money to EFUD to allow EFUD to deal with a private water system that they provide water to to be able to fight the trail of fire it's a substandard system that should be in complete public ownership and this is a good way to do it because we can't use our money for traditional infrastructure that the selectable is usually infrastructure which is roads and bridges and that kind of stuff there's other infrastructure we will be able to use some of that for the traditional infrastructure because you can calculate lost revenue and the amount of lost revenue that you can prove that you have you can re-appropriate that in the regular budgeting process so there may be some of that money that we can use just to get into the infrastructure CIP or the pay VCRP or the vehicle CIPs what have you but the bulk of it we're going to have to be a little bit creative so $600,000 to EFUD so that they can deal with the water system at the pet mobile home park and if that if the cost of that I don't have a firm estimate on that yet but even if the cost of that there's more improvements that need to be done up on the 100 there's a one inch line that comes down from Howard Avenue down to the what is it Sunflower Natural Foods so there's only a one inch line that comes down there kind of computers right across the street they're across the move hours and eight inch watering with hybrids there so even if the $600,000 is too much for the pet mobile home park there's other stuff up there that EFUD could deal with so that gets something for EFUD and you know the bottom line is that there should be one in the water EFUD the only portfolio right now really is operating water and sewer system they happen to have the EFUD known fund that's a vestige of the old village of Waterbury but the city is about where water is sewer so this is going to be provided in these communities where you sewer line where you're going to provide sewer anywhere other than in the existing EFUD district it shouldn't be EFUD making those decisions it should be the tap you know to report sewer line up room 100 to you know you know I had visions at one point you know it's already in the village it's already in the EFUD district country told them for what not trying to make them go out of business but if they ever decided that wasn't a good use of their land anymore if they wanted to get out of the golf business that's one area that you could pretty much have a groundy sewer flow from there in the pump station but I guess it's already it's all in conservation development perhaps never say never but anyway so where water and sewer goes really should be a decision the whole town makes not just EFUD EFUD in the town select board have already talked about EFUD transferring to the town properties EFUD owns that are not used for water and sewer like I said if you're going to do that you might as well take it off own everything and I think you'd be in a much better position than you are now but in the short term I think that you know the trade should be right off of that in exchange for the $600,000 that EFUD would give the town would give to EFUD for that water system improvement the quick flow flow should be turned over the evolving loan fund to the town and allow the town select board to be the ones deciding whether this almost a million dollar portfolio assets and cash investments that EFUD has should it be used to continue to to businesses, watch businesses right now all the businesses that get loans are in EFUD you can't get a loan if you're up in the watery center so they don't need it but if I have a computer or MPX needed a loan to help EFUD could do it now because both of them are water customers but if they were not on the water system EFUD would have no ability to give them a loan so we wanted to build something down room 2 beyond sewer plant EFUD couldn't give them a loan we talked about housing it's a huge issue for the town and wouldn't it be nice to have a involved loan fund of $700,000 that you could incentivize housing with so I think it makes sense all the way around I don't see any downside to doing this and if the biggest the bigger step was taken trying to merge the old process for 35 years almost I've dealt with two municipalities I got rid of two meetings a month when EFUD consolidated and did a win with their board of trustees I used to have two trustees meetings a month and one water sewer commissioners meeting a month now I have one water sewer commissioners meeting a month the fact that they moved there in the leading to May makes budget times so much more pleasant for me I mean it's still a lot of work but I don't have to have a town budget and a village budget a full service village budget all done in January like I did until 2018 so you know there's still however an elected library commission that I go to all the meetings I go to elected cemetery commission meetings I've got the EFUD meetings and I've got your meetings so there's four boards of five individuals and I staff all those meetings if you merge one of those boards could go away or I will think you still want to have a water sewer commission whether they need to be elected I don't know but you probably want to appoint people who have the background that state flangers and we can have you know engineers who know something about how those systems work but the select board would have some control over that you don't have any control over anything that they do just don't think that's good for the town in the water so anyway that's so maybe I have a misunderstanding here are you suggesting and I don't believe this is your suggestion but are you suggesting that over time the town is going to look at the water and sewer the EFUD district the water and sewer department this is new from in this kind of years completely off what our conversation about this was supposed to be because you were going to take the one you called the money there that were getting from the feds you were going to take that and you were going to use it as a care for the water department and sewer department to put water in the trailer part in exchange for the for their their fund almost million dollars and then you were going to suggest that we take a portion of that and I won't you know I don't mean this in a negative term but bail out to the ice center by doing some restructuring or refining and I thought that's what this conversation was about well that was a part of it because from last time we talked I don't recall any discussion about and I'm elated to hear that because you know back a while ago I had one of our joint meetings when Skip and I got into it there and go ahead and exchange about my suggested merger would never really merger you were going to take the villagers going to take the gravy and leave us with a bag of crap and I said merger to me means all in and now you're suggesting that that's a possibility I mean I love to see exactly what the same that's what that lasts it's exactly the same but I thought it was just great but it's not here's the memo this is the memo that I read that night and I said right here working one hundred thirty four years we've taken big strides to consolidate governments I still work for two governmental entities four elected boards that's a story from another time but through the use of the ARPA funds coming our way to recently passed infrastructure I believe it is time for the fund to begin to take steps to merge so that's what I thought it was the investment investment portfolio one we were going to go over and they might still keep the sewer no I mean my mistake so in the short term I mean the merger the merger is going to take the merger can't happen until the earliest the merger could happen would be January of 2023 and frankly realistically not until July of 2023 because first of all you're going to have to go through have a merger vote you still need to do that in both communities and then the merger well you have to write the merger document first vote on that in both communities it's got to pass in both communities it's got to survive it's got to be a petition challenge there shouldn't be any because there's no tax implications anymore it was all those years in the past that I don't always say no because taxes were going to go up there's no taxes anymore but the big thing is that once it passes then you've got to send it into Montpelier to the legislature and that will introduce it next January and the earliest that they'll be able to pass maybe in 2023 and the governor signs it and maybe as of July 1st 2023 you could be more so maybe you decide to wait have the merger take effect January 1st 2024 if you are going to stay on a calendar of your budget but and then correct me if I'm wrong but the other interesting part of this balance sheet scenario is we would be taking $600,000 of money buying something that I would say arguably has assets well in access of $600,000 and then that $600,000 is now there would be a plan for the use of those funds but it really is it's not like that $600,000 left the greater merge entity that now uses that to invest in the trailer part project or whatever else it's really like it's an interesting scenario I would recommend that I would like to think that in our 2022 budget we can have in there a $600,000 appropriation to EPUT give them the money so that they have it and they can begin dealing with the technical homework right after that if that appropriation happens and you pay that EPUT will transfer the in May at their annual meeting so your town meeting is going to be in March you approve the $600,000 of EPUT it goes through and survives the petition challenge and then at the EPUT meeting in May they will put on their budget that I mean on their point that they're going to transfer the loan fund to you so that's the first transaction if this board and the EPUT board is up for it I would you can put an article on the warning for March meeting to say to ask the voters to give you the authority to establish a committee to work on merger and start that potentially to have that document so it could be elected at the November elections and then it passes you've got to wait for 30 days and then January 1st rolls around you can have your new charter to the legislature and you know so it's ambitious but it's all doable we've written merger documents in the past when it was a much more complicated merger to deal with how we're going to deal with the police department how we're going to deal with the fire department how we're going to deal with all that has been taken care of now it's really governance now that you're talking about the town of Guadre shall have the authority to have all the things allowed by the general government to take over EPUT's water and sewer system take over all these EPUT's assets all that goes EPUT just goes away and you're lucky with the town of Guadre that has a full service municipality a total tax burden that it has now a water and sewer system both of which have significant assets not only in the ground but in the bank and and then you have lots of resources to do things that I think the community needs to address over time and the housing stuff is right there talk about what the auction tax is earlier Chris today you could put right in your merger document which would be the charter for the new for the town government you could put right in there the authority to have a local auction tax with a caveat that we don't get to implement it until the voters authorize you to you know to impose the tax but at least you'll have the ability to have it because we don't have the ability to have it right now so can we put the connection or that kind of off the table at this time with the ISAC what is my bigger concern about this conversation well the ISAC that's why I initially have so the ISAC I did say in this memo that I would ask you to appropriate $100,000 and give it to the ISAC this year and whether that's our money or our money you know you can move things around under a 21 I believe that they are an entity that could you could appropriate our money to them as long as they need it for an eligible purpose when I wrote the memo my idea was we've got a significant cash balance right now that we talked about last week from all of the excess revenue we have on anticipated last year and lower spending let's just make it simple let's just appropriate $100,000 of our money not tied to ARCO that way they don't have any strings they don't have to worry about you know justifying how they use it the reason I recommend this Chris is that to me it strengthens the ISAC and it gives them much more ability to continue on operating as they do and not be taken over by the panel if we fail to help the ISAC I think what's eventually going to happen you've got a handful of people down there that have been doing that work for 20 years 17 years since they've opened and 3 years before they opened to try to fundraise for that and COVID has done a number on their cash reserves and for not the profit organization to pay all their bills to operate that center pay all their mortgage and have the ability to have built up a reserve of $150,000 before COVID struck I think they're doing things pretty good they're getting no assistance except for the road that was built down there and the water and sewer lines that were put down there by the community there hasn't been any payment there's been given a break on taxes I'll correct you that but there's never been an appropriation of $32,000 like we're the senior citizen center or to $75,000 plus to revitalizing waterway or any of those other special articles they've never come and asked us for anything so I think if you do that if you give them the $100,000 that they can put back in their reserve fund and then use it they don't always need to be replaced you know their buildings getting old they need to be building maintenance if you give them that money I think they have a reasonable chance to continue operating as they do including a lot of business including paying their debt in the model they're currently carrying out yeah so now I did also recommend that restructure their debt they owe $500,000 $530,000 to EFUD and I would recommend that EFUD I was going to recommend that they forgive that debt but then I had second thoughts and I said no we should convert that to a 20 year term with a balloon payment at the end that could be negotiated at the end and the reason I suggested that is just like we did that EFUD did with the Stinson Graves Building you know they had a $500,000 loan to the Stinson Graves Building and they forgave it and principle all was forgiven and they also that was a CBG grant that was granted to the British and then they lent it into that program and it had to be lent in those days because of federal rules tax rules about people who get tax credits that those rules aren't the same anymore so at the time we got that CBG grant and it had to be lent it couldn't have been granted but in effect that's what they did they said we're going to do a 30 year term and at the end of the term we're going to forgive it basically they lent $202,000 to the Stinson Graves Building and they did ask that to be paid back but they forgave the interest about $63,000 worth of interest and the town did the same thing for the Stinson Graves Building with the CBG grant that came in $336,000 still on our books but there's no expectation that's ever going to be paid and when 30 years comes they'll come into town and say that wasn't our money in the first place it was a grant we lent it into the project because we got to and it just goes away the reason why I decided that I shouldn't just have people forgive the loan and keep it on the books as a loan with a little payment after 20 years is in the event that they do go bankrupt if you forgive the loan it's gone if they do go bankrupt and somebody comes in and buys the property they've got to at least negotiate with E-Five for that $500,000 loan so that loan I do believe should go away but the loan that the high center had when they started this was a half a million dollars from UDAC UDAC from the village and $800,000 from the community national bank so they were at $1.3 million now they're down to $800,000 $536,000 $530,000 to E-Five and $300,000 more or less to the community national bank so in the 17 years they've paid their debt to E-Five or to the community national bank when COVID struck for all UDAC borrowers the E-Five commissioners have waived penalty and interest just until the pandemic ends so these businesses can use their money to try to pay help or buy supplies or whatever so they haven't had to pay anything for two years now but before the pandemic and they have paid their UDAC loan down from the original $500,000 down into the $300,000 range and the reason why it's back up to $530,000 now is because all the E-Five commissioners if you want to protect your loan what you want to do is loan more money so they can buy down their community national loan community nationals for a 6.5% interest rate so we left them a couple hundred thousand dollars more they were able to work out with the community national bank they wouldn't loan the interest rate but they said well if you pay $200,000 down on your loan you will re-amortize it over the number of years that you have left by giving them the immediate credit because if you make an extra $2,000 payment on your mortgage you still have to pay your $800 mortgage payment every month so that's why they got $500,000 still in the E-Five so that they could pay that community national loan and pay a lesser interest rate so my goal with giving the ICANN of this money is to try to allow them to continue to operate on their current business model because if the worst case scenario happens and they can't pay their bills they can't pay their mortgage community national bank is not going to want to loan that interest rate they're going to turn to the village and they're going to say well they owe us $300,000 they owe you $500,000 maybe the village says to the community national bank we'll cancel the debt we'll take over or we'll buy maybe a $0.50 on the dollar for it they've got to guarantee from role development so if they've failed on that debt community national will actually get 90% of the $330,000 that they oh so if it all happens if the worst case scenario happens who's going to be operating that ICANN they should walk away right now because they're going to sell it to get their money back they're going to have an ICANN in the community national and I think they've proven in the 7-3 years that they've operated that they can do it and that the community wants it don't you just want to have an ICANN in your portfolio I and Katie were probably worried for a bit I mean definitely the town could run it more efficiently but it would be kind of a scenario like the pool not as drastic as far as losing money in that sense would be creative but it would be a headache I don't think it would have to be a losing proposition for 17 years they paid every bill that they had and they put they built up a reserve fund of over $150,000 so if they can do that and our expenses would be less I guarantee you well they probably don't pay anybody health insurance down there I don't know if they if they do or not but the liability insurance would be certainly a lot lower if we got it because we would be able to ensure that it has some problem but I'm not angling to have the town take that over I'd like to have them continue to operate just as they are and I think if you give them a little bit of help that can happen so are you currently saying that they they right now they have a hundred reserve $150,000 reserve I don't think they have quite that now because they've had to so it's going like that so the reason I asked you to stay because you know I appreciate the ICENER for what it is it's always been a rub for me because I remember back years ago when they came in for others people at town meeting to propose the ICENER and swore they'd never be a burden to the town and I guess I have a different perspective or a different wide sight with this thing that in my opinion and apparently you're proving me wrong here tonight whenever you have to subsidize any business in any form it's running it's running in the block interact so what's the subset well I mean you just suggested that some of the things that the town did for for them to with the road and other utilities plus the tax breaks that we've given them over the years in my eyes they've always seemed like they came to the finish inside of the building because they haven't had sufficient funds to do it apparently for whatever reason they haven't finished it and you know as valuable as some people may think that the ICENER is for the community others perhaps think the opposite way what happens is when people come and create these ideas with this vision of grandeur and then they run in the red for years and then by default you know ends up being the municipalities baby the reason I wanted you to sit here is to get some idea of whether or not you thought if the town ended up with that for any reason that it could be structured in such a way that it could run the way it should and be cost effective so before he answers I'm going to argue with your premise a little bit that I don't think that they're running in the red now if you want to the town paid over a cart path that went down to the old town built that was down so that's what the town put $90,000 into that so if you divide $90,000 into 17 I can't do it in my head but you know it's $5,000 a year that's all on the town that's put in now yes we had a deal with them that if they ever became tax exempt that they would continue to pay paying little taxes to the town they did that through 2017 and then in that year the swipe once said well the village has gone away in 2018 and the education tax went away we don't have to pay their share of the education tax like we have to for the 100 month childcare so since we don't have to do that we said forget you don't have to bother your $4,000 or whatever it was so we gave that away but besides that little bit of a tax appropriation in the road how it hasn't done anything for it and as I said in my this memo that I wrote the so between 2003 and 2021 so we paid a banking brand for the and we gave a little bit of a tax break so let's double that let's say $200,000 that we've given in 20 years $10,000 a year I don't think it comes close to that but from 2003 to 2021 we've appropriated $1.24 million to every other $65,000 a year that we've given to the senior center to the Center for Independent Living for what have you on that special articles list retired senior citizens volunteers, family center project independent did they ever approach the board in years past asking for a special article because they were able to run into the block they just didn't know they started the fundraising project they told me we're not going to ask the town for any money so they accept for the road and the water and sewer now they paid allocation fees they paid $56,000 of allocation fees to get the water and sewer down there and I skim thought that they gave the village back for $200,000 worth of water and sewer lines that we built down there but I don't think they ever paid that back so even if you add all that together $90,000 it's $300,000 from the community $200,000 which comes from the water and sewer people which are a lot of the full town so all I'm saying is that with a little bit of help I think that they can maintain under the current business model that they have assuming COVID goes away they can start selling ice like they were before so I don't see that it's a subsidy I see that it's a one-time appropriation, give them a lift and hopefully that's an investment so you don't have to take it away that's my feeling I would agree to all of that and I am on board with it I mean Katie been on this committee here for a while I mean if I guess what I would need to know and it sounds like very reluctant to give that information is if for some reason they're bleeding at the seams in certain areas and unless things get restructured and and set up so that they're feasibly running strong and efficient and effective which I'm sure they're probably trying to do the best that they can but if there's areas that they're not where they're bleeding then it was do we need to have those corrections made before we dump more money into what I'm going to say because you haven't built it you don't understand what I'm saying but throwing money into something that's eventually going to be back to the same position that it's in right now if corrections if you give them 100 grand and a couple years later they're in a similar situation if you give them 100 grand and then a couple years later they fail you're going to have whether it's an asset or a liability you're going to own it and I'm trying to prevent that by saying should there be internal restructuring that would make them more operate more securely but you haven't convinced me yet that they've been doing anything wrong I'm not saying that they are, I'm just saying do we have the ability to look into that I mean you can certainly talk to them about what their challenges are and what their issues are but as I said, from the outside I don't inspect their books I'm not I don't go to their meetings I talk to them several times a year but when I look at the fact that without any kind of appropriation from the community that for the first 17 years they've operated they've been able to pay all their bills and put some money in the bank that's a whole lot better than most of these organizations that we do know with all this federal money coming into the state coffers I even asked the governor one day on the radio and said before you go dishing this money out to all these departments don't you think that they should be the ones that are bleeding at the seams should be restructured so that you return on the investment that you were expecting to get but aren't for some reason and making these programs run efficiently before you start going back to it well otherwise they're just going to be back in the same place when they burn through it what I will tell you I don't know this nobody's said this to me but talking with Jonathan Seigel and Tomson we've been doing this since you know 2000 if the town said we'll take over the ice center we can do it better than you can they would say here you go they would be happy as plans to get rid of it and I think that we still have the ice center and Harry's sitting here and I know that there was promises made that tax payers any money when they transform the Jackson arena from what it was into what it is now I think they are putting tax money into it so I'm not here making the promise to say if we took it over it would never cost a cent because there are things that would happen all the employees would be municipal employees and we provide health insurance benefits we have higher employee overhead than they have if we can help in hand and keep them doing what they're doing I think the thing is a benefit to the community in terms of you just look at the number of just high school hockey games forget their leagues but you must have how many games for the girls now in a normal year is that the whole season so 10 8 to 10 the boys are now the same amount there's 20 games those people they're coming here their parents are coming I'm guaranteed that there's a multiply from the people that come into this ice center that spill over into the businesses in this community but I guarantee it's there I mean obviously prior to COVID they were able to make that service payment from what was originally 1.3 million to what came to be how they were able to change so they understand they have some kind of capital budget that they built to over 6 billion so that would imply that they under regular circumstances can function in that space and not be running in the right so we had that meeting we've had subsequent meetings discussing this did they approach you and ask for any money but what they have done is restructured debt to try to figure out how to make things work with their current cash flows by doing what they did with community bank and along into that right and the reason why so the answer is no nobody from the ice center came to me and asked me to say when you're pissed they didn't even know about it until I presented it I didn't invite them to the meeting I told them afterwards to watch it what I will say is that the biggest assistance that they've had is through COPE now they did get some PPP loans so that they could pay their staff and stuff like that and I think those would be forgiven but there's no question that what the recommended to the E-Flight commissioners and what they ultimately did saved their vacant so since March of 2020 they haven't had to make $2,300 paying on the UDAC loan to the village now the community, National Bank said oh we'll suspend your principal and interest payments you don't have to make them but we're going to keep the on button on the interest so if they owe $300,000 and they don't make any payments at 6.5% you know they can call up the rollercoaster in the community they're unable to go to a new lender to become a primary lender on that they've talked and working with them so they're looking around but the interest payment might go down 100% which would be helpful but they're not going to get 2% more like they get from the problem with ice arenas all over the state and all over New England economically they're difficult to do in any kind of conventional loan that's why they like the only reason why Community National Bank did the whole thing is because they had a loan guarantee they basically had a 90% guarantee against loss so they had 10% exposure the problem is that what we see with all the ice arenas is that they don't want to charge hockey is expensive enough and they don't want to charge enough to you know hockey kids have to pay a lot as is but the true cost of it is a lot more and that's why all these arenas statewide and New England wide are having problems this one has it I mean it hasn't been it's annual budget was not being paid by the municipality at all and more I understand they've been doing pretty well right so since March of 2020 almost 2 years they haven't had to pay if they had to do that they'd be bankrupt they'd be gone they'd be negotiating do you want to operate a hockey game or do we sell it to people in our house is it yours do we have a Amazon Prime distribution center one of the things that I struggle with right now through this conversation is you have to bring the ice center into the conversation mostly because you have a revolving loan revolving loans on Disney money right so it's represented as a million dollars but 530 of it no no it's 1.7 okay there's 1.7 you take the 500 you're still going to have you're going to have a million dollars but the conversation here is that I personally struggle with even being able to talk through the idea of us having any opinion on forgiveness of a loan that we don't currently hold in our books and I appreciate that now we've changed that conversation from let's not talk about forgiveness let's just talk about making sure they survive so they can continue to make that payment that is still good work not bad but I think if if this deal with the $600,000 of powerful to deal with the home practice water system happens I do think E-Fund should restructure the loan for the I7 so it is a boom payment in 20 years so it's no principal in interest nothing is expected E-Fund's got the loan fund now they should make that decision and when the loan fund is turned over to the town that that's why we're going to $30,000 but there's no anticipation of any payment until 20 years down the road total loan comes to why not why not a hybrid balloon where you still have some kind of payment so be it 30-year or 60-year or whatever you want to do but there's still some kind of payment to represent that I don't know why is it different than what was done with the Stimson Grants why is it different from what the town did for the 70-year bill $336,000 loan to Down Street from the town of Waterway it was federal money just like the UDN money that came to the village back in 1984 for the beneficiaries it was federal money that came to the village it's not village tax money it's been wiped out they've done it for the Stimson Grants building the town has done it for the Stimson Grants building so why not that was specific to housing and affordable housing compared to hockey and that's all about that's all about tax credits too that's all about housing tax credits I do know that the ICE Center does before to serve them on community support and it's important to the community I do believe that but I can't necessarily say it's a one-for-one in conversation with affordable housing and low-income housing I just can't put those two on the same level I do think that it's important to be this is something where I agree I know that Stowe pays $350,000 a year to carry the debt service on a facility they built and they pay for it to do a lot of tax so that's part of the reason why it's a little bit of a luxury versus a necessity to me from the conversations that I've heard since the start of the concerns around the COVID which I do believe that I completely understand how that business can be absolutely affected by this I think we should definitely talk about ways we can help them my question is can we recall meeting with them outside of this I know we have to do it if we're going to try to put it as a line item on the annual budget for this year but I want to hear from them do they need this $100,000 because if they say they think they can make it work I just don't see how we can just balance it I do want to protect that debt because there's a very good chance we're going to absorb that debt but that would be on the balance sheet and nobody is suggesting that nobody is suggesting that a decision is made today that it never has to be paid back you don't want that into the loan when the Stimson Graves owner came back to the village after the 30 years they came back the village trustees could have said well let's you have 30 years of no principal of interest into 10 years we want $100,000 after 10 years that's for the board at that time to make the decision on so I don't think you make the decision on the debt now you made it so if the ice center doesn't have to pay that debt and they help them with this $100,000 for their capital equipment fund you know the debt alone is $2,300 a month that they save that will make it much easier for them to stay in business as they currently act I still think it's important that we meet with them and for everybody's purpose to meet with them and see if there's ways that that's in with his mind and the way he works with with recreation has been able to bring funding into the picture that we never saw before and that's why his budget is so spectacular and he's getting more on board with the whole recreation concept as time goes on which I never was but to you'll be adding in the expansion to the ice center just to suggest or help the ice center if they if there's any places that they can restructure their management and the way they operate to yet further create a more financially stable entity than before we throw them you know if we do that just secures our investment even longer and better I don't know that I don't know that we're overreaching if we're going to be offered to put that kind of money so the big thing for them is to continue to be able to move forward without having to pay a $2,300 a month debt they haven't had to pay it for two years now if eFlight on Wednesday says we're throwing the switch and the organization schedule is back on they've got to come up with $2,300 a month they haven't had to come up with for three years and they're still in the middle of a pandemic so that is the brass ring is restructured that debt so they don't have to pay that and that puts them on a much better footing for operating purposes the hundred grand is to simply get some money back in their reserve fund so that if things happen they can pay for it there's other opportunities that they may have I mean there's our money I don't know maybe there's all kinds of things that might happen is it critical that even 100,000 absolutely not if you want to say come to us if you have a need come to us and ask us for an appropriation at that point maybe the town will only volume the loan fund you can lend them money from the new debt fund 1% for 10 years to pay for the thing the 100,000 isn't critical but I think it goes a long way to making them stable but what is critical for them right now is not having to pay that $2,300 a month if they have to pay that maybe time soon they're going to end up they're going to pay that putting the keys on the table saying we're done so don't they already have issues with a water storage tank how am I not being able to save money operations since the fall they've already been scheduling until late next month they have money coming in so they should be able to have those saved up I was going to have to say too like where are revenues compared to 2019 right now and are they quickly ramping up their reserves based on the return of revenues and still not having that debt service there there's got to be some scenario that starts to happen so I guess that's part of my not wanting to have an in-depth conversation with you on this I'm not against having a conversation it's their I guess the balls in their toy I understand you've been working with them no I haven't I know not recently but for a while you were attending board meetings and stuff I know you didn't get all the information I know we've spoken and you felt you've been getting all the information that you should have been getting but what do you think right now is from your knowledge you're involved with youth sports and stuff like that what do you think is in their mindset where they want to go with this or the board speaking about that if you aren't then don't you don't have to but if you have an opinion I would love to hear I'm just curious if you have some sense from that board of where they want to go I think they want to be able to turn a profit again everyone does but honestly that ring has been on the downcast side for a very long time yeah also program ones they have lost all their fingers in the program so they're not even able to schedule figures even next year for any time if there's coffee programming numbers are down there's not enough people coming in the building that's on them because if you talk to their board they don't want to hear the words from or anything and the way that they treat their employees is terrible they haven't been able to be consistent in their employment or guaranteeing their employees hours since the pandemic started and before they have got their employees hours three different times so the people that are employed don't know what worked better Bill, can I say I was also a liaison for a little bit I was Bill's left-hand man for that but then the pandemic kept asking me too busy to continue but I attended probably a handful of meetings in the beginning and got the sense that things weren't panning out the way it wasn't as successful I'm surprised to hear that they have been I believe you, I believe what you're saying I'm just surprised to hear it because I was getting the sense too from their board meetings that were sitting in on that there were some issues with generating revenue this was right before COVID sorry, you're surprised to hear what? I'm just surprised to hear and I believe Bill so I don't want to think I'm challenging on this but I'm surprised to hear they're doing so well, they've been able to the numbers make sense I'm surprised that they have money in the family I think they're making sure all of the people it might be some infusion of private money there as well I was in a handful of meetings I identified right off the bat six different ways that we could save money while taking it over because Bill said we're not doing that but I want you to listen in and see just in case we do is this something feasible the town could do anything as big as our insurance policy we would take over and save a ton of money to the smallest they were trying to buy like $800 in jackets when I go to my lifeguards and I get an order of $50 so there was whether it's a management thing or what not there was areas I found that we could save money now what Bill is doing and he's made a great case for it is we're trying to give him this restructuring the debt a couple of the $100,000 this gives it the most strong strongest opportunity to then avoid having that headache in the future of the town taking it over that's in a nutshell what you're that's my statement Bill the community and what I said the community I mean the select board that I've worked with there hasn't seem to be any static on the board to want to operate and I said so we have it in the community I think it's an important asset for the community and I'm just trying to do what I can to keep it viable in its current state and kind of right now and I hear you and I don't want I don't want to telegraph a message that I'm saying $100,000 is in a lot of money it's a lot of money but in the grand scheme of things in terms of when you have an opportunity when are we going to have an opportunity when we have we're going to have $1.5 million of federal money that has come in that we can use when are we going to have an opportunity when we have the fund balance that we have this year and you know what I think if the ice center wanted to they stuck with their commitment that they they're not asking the town for anything but I bet if they went out and got a petition and asked for $20,000 a year like the senior citizen center is asking for $32,000 they'd probably be able to get that petition they'd get $20,000 a year forever from now on so I think this is an easier way to do it I'm not against talking to them I'm not saying that we shouldn't talk to them just do this without even a conversation but I think this is the time that you have the resources you can provide the help that they need this it's a time when I think the stars have lined up that it can be done without pain anyway it's awful late and Harry's raising his hand I have a comment this is the topic that intrigued me to first I read it wrong about minutes from the meeting I know there's details with ice center there's a lightning on some of the things you're thinking about with that I think the bigger picture that I want you to consider is really other things that Bill is trying to accomplish with the merger of the water sewer districts into the town I think long term the two government instructors with EFUD and the town is always going to come with them and I commend Bill for thinking of bringing this forward at this time I think I think most of us are on board with the merger because it would have happened when we voted on merger years ago so like that would have happened there's now an opportunity the ice center is part of this component partially because of the debt that lives over in EFUD but also just a conversation surrounding you know how we try to figure out where we've never historically put money into this and I understand there's reasons why part of it was when they originally and they felt strong that they won't ask the town for money maybe that's why they haven't so I respect that but I also to me we have to completely separate the two conversations and make sure that that merger conversation is absolutely at the forefront of what happened at the same time start working with the ice center as much as we can to help understand their needs and how we can help and wait for them to ask for specific amounts of money and then have that conversation I think there's a risk there of getting too ahead of it where it gives them an opportunity they have 17 years or 15 years of showing that they can run in the block sounds like maybe they need some fresh young ideas or whatever to try to get back to either programming on the past or trying to figure out ways to grow their revenues back where they were historically but that has made a completely separate conversation and I think that it's even part of the conversation surrounding the two enemies I mean I thought that that was part of the original plan and forgive me if I was misunderstood but I didn't think that the sewer of water being merged into this whole part that was even considered absolutely best and the ice center is a separate part of the conversation but it sounds like they're actively working and restructuring that and there are things in motion I think very quickly we should have a conversation with them whether it's a couple of us to just to follow up to our other meeting that we have with them and just talk about what we talked about tonight and really get a sense for where they are at so the other part is the volunteerism down there is it a staple volunteerism is it on the cusp of just a house of cards collapsing there's a lot of things to consider in this whole picture of the ice center why should Waterbury be the only town that's throw $100,000 in if so many members from other communities are using that facility in that that's the other thing that comes to mind thinking about this I think it's so we don't have to in the future take it over and potentially have that cost to run for a long time they've got 30 seconds and then we should all go home it's like we talked a lot about the financial risks and stuff like that the real risk frankly you can say all you want maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy but the people that run the ice center they're all my age or older Jonathan's in his 70s and they've been doing this for a long time nobody's stepping up saying we want to be manage the ice center we want to run the board so that's the other side of the equation who's going to step up are you going to step up and do what those four people do when they're either dead or in a nursing home I don't know who's going to be doing it that's the other that's another risk and you know if I had to tell you about is the ice center and it's current business model good for another 20 years probably not unless some younger people start stepping up saying we'll put in our time like you guys have in the last 17 years you know that aspect is disappearing everywhere whole non-profits they're all having problems recruiting people it's just terrible anyway thank you all thank you Danny had a go earlier she texted me she apologized and she's not feeling great thanks for coming by Harry yeah there's a lot in it haha so being with that person people you can go