 to order. Thank you all for being here today. Do we have any agenda additions or changes tonight? No, not anything official for the agenda. Amber? I'm going to ask to remove the check warrants which is item 6C and make it item 5E and then that would move the executive session topic to F. Second. How about a motion first? Yeah, that's that's that's what I was saying. Yeah. All right. And then Roger second that. All right. All right. Any further discussion on that motion? Hearing none. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody pose? All right. Thank you all. And that will bring us into public to be heard. So this is a portion of tonight's meeting where if there is anybody who wishes to bring something up to the board's attention that is not currently on the agenda. This is a time to do so. For those of you using Microsoft teams, please go ahead and raise your hand for members of the audience physically at to Lincoln Street. If you could also please raise your hand if you wish to speak to the boards and George or Evan, is there anybody raising their hand? Yes, there is. Okay. You could have them come to a microphone introduce themselves. Good evening. I'm Paula Sargent and I'm a member of the senior center here in Essex. I know last night I was at the meeting, the joint meeting and there were important conversations taking place about the senior center. And I thought it would be important to update you on what I as a citizen of Essex see happening at the senior center now. I go to the senior center about three times a week. It's just one of those things that I sort of promised my mom I would do. And it's opened up. It's a very busy place. We are doing well. It has the membership is increasing every week. We've got over close to half probably of what we had before the pandemic. And it's meals are going well. Age well is there. And the seniors are very appreciative of the senior center opening up full time. And it's just been a great opportunity for them to get out during this still going ongoing pandemic. We haven't had any cases of COVID at the senior center. They're wearing masks most of the time and people will remind each other you need to wear your mask. It's very well run. And I'm Nicole is doing a great job with Ali. They have really stepped up. The I saw you had the programs here. Nicole had the December program out after two meetings this last month. She had the December program out today. And it's full of wonderful activities for the seniors. We're just doing all kinds of interesting things trying to get people from 50 up to come back to the senior center. It's a slow process. But I will say if you saw on the cover, we're having a big pie sale to support the senior center and it was going well. They had I think 50 pies out that they've made and they were all sold today. So there were people coming in picking them up. People were playing bingo today. It was just a really positive environment. I know you're making important decisions. So I wanted to give you a few insights I have into what can help the senior center as we go forward. I think the idea of joint management and cooperation of the senior center is excellent. The senior center needs that now. They really separately would have difficulty. But together we are going to be a great program. And everyone I talked to says let's just try to make sure that we can collaborate and keep the senior center together between the town and the in the city. I did speak recently to the select boards. I wanted to come and just tell you a few ideas that have been passing around the senior center as you make those decisions about what happens next. We have a great coordinator. She's there between lots of jobs. She's very busy. We would like to see her there at least 25 hours a week dedicated to the senior center because the senior center is growing and it needs a coordinator there on site. I don't think I have to go into all the details, but we need more committees. We need more programming. She's doing a great job. And I think if she could be there 25 hours a week and we knew that schedule that would be very, very helpful. Let's see. Are you talking about Blake? No, I'm talking about Nicole. Also the space I heard you talking last night about the space of the senior center. And I heard George and George when he came to visit us a few weeks ago. We had a sort of impromptu meeting with the seniors. Said that the senior center will continue to be dedicated that space to the seniors, which was really amazing for them to hear. They're very worried about that, losing their space. I feel like in the memorandum of understanding that I'm sure you all have, it said that any other activities that went on at the senior center would be the rentals and the use of that would go to the senior center. And I know that there are other activities going on at the senior center. And you said last night, George, I'm not sure you know about them, but there are parties for young children going on at the senior center. There are other activities and that may be the future. But I heard you saying last night, I think we need clarification on that. And I do think that the profits from that should go to help support the senior center. So I just wanted to bring that to your attention that seniors would like to be able to meet there off the hours that are designated. We've asked for that, but we were denied that at the time because the team said that the COVID virus was escalating and they didn't want to take any chances. But I think now that they're having other parties there at night and on weekends and stuff that we would like to make sure that the seniors have priority for those times. We have dedicated hosts that have that are being trained and we're there without management there because that's what we need to do now. And so those hosts have in the past been able to be in the evening at the senior center because it's the membership of the senior center is 50 and above. A lot of people are still working and their members there. So if we can have a reception or activity at night there and we have paid for that before such as a tournament or a card parties and stuff like that. But we were denied having that this fall. They said no, we could not do that. So I would like to see that opened up and given a priority to the seniors. Field trips have moved over to the 55 plus area and the seniors do not have access to that at the senior center. And they would like to continue simple trips where they were going to Walmart. They had the vans. I'm not sure if it's a matter of money and it makes more sense to have it in the 55. But if that's the issue about money, then we need, I think, to understand more about that and why they can't continue to have field trips from the senior center. They had enjoyed, I think, short term field trips, say going to the Flynn, things like that, other cultural activities that go on in the area. I'm not foreseeing trips to New York City or anything like that. But just to be able to get out together as a group from the senior center, that has changed and we don't have that anymore. So I just wanted to bring that awareness to you. Also the finances, I didn't realize I finally got a chance to look at the finances of the senior center and they are doing, we're doing well. Nicole has done a great job managing the finances of the senior center, what we have. But with COVID and the increasing costs of running the senior center during the virus, I'm hoping that between the town and the city you'll consider putting some sort of line item designated for the senior center so that we can continue to grow in our programs. We have a lot of people coming from out of state that I'm meeting that are coming to the senior center. They're moving in with their relatives here in town. I probably met five this week. So I think these are all things that will bring people to the senior center. It will make it a really, it will reflect our community and make it a great program. We would like to have an advisory board and that in the memory of understanding it says it's possible to have one. So we would like to in the new year after we get through the pie sale and everything we've been doing, we'd like to have an advisory board. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Paul. I appreciate your comments tonight. And are there other members of the public in the audience who wish to bring something to the board's attention tonight? Going back to Microsoft teams, I'm not seeing any hands up. So last call for public comments before we turn it over for the next item on the agenda. Being no hands, then we will go ahead and move on to business item 5a, presentation from our Village Our Voices. Hello, everyone. Nice to see you. Hi, Elaine. Thank you for being here tonight. Thanks for putting us on the agenda. I'm wondering whether I need to share my screen or someone there will be sharing the slides. I can do with Elaine if you like. Certainly. Okay. I do have one additional thing to share at the end of the slides too that will require me to share my screen, but it's just a brief webpage. If you would rather, Elaine, you can. I can give you permission. Either way. I'm happy to let you drive for now. And then I'll just ask for permission at the end. Perfect. I'll get it up here in just a minute. Thank you. So as you know, our Village Our Voices was created to amplify the work of the trustees in their creation of the new charter for the City of Essex Junction and to help get out the vote and increase the turnout in a way that magnified the message of the voters to the legislature. So we accomplished those things and we want to just report back to you what we did because it was funding from the Village and we wanted to make sure we gave you a full accounting. And I'm going to be flipping back and forth between my slides. Actually, I can move them over here. Sorry. Getting organized here. Okay. So we started in April, as you know, pretty soon after the second vote on merger. And the Four Member Steering Committee of myself, Gabrielle Smith, Bridget Meyer, and Elise Serda. But we rapidly expanded to a group of over 30 volunteers who were incredibly active and dedicated to helping us get the work done. Next slide, please. We had three goals. The first was to educate and inform Essex Junction residents and we intended to have 75% of registered voters aware of the materials that the trustees were putting out. So next slide, please. We actually managed to canvas over 71% of Essex Junction households, meaning that over 71% of households in the Village received information delivered by hand and in most instances also spoke to somebody at the door learning about the separation vote and the FAQs at the Village Trustees and we had worked on together. So we reached well over 75% of the voters by going to over 70% of the households. Next slide, please. We wanted to listen to the residents and find out what they were thinking, what their concerns were, and relay that information back to the trustees. And so we held 10 events over the course of the summer. Next slide, please. We attended one event that was being held by EJRP at Maple Street, Green Mountain Swing Night, and then we hosted our own events. We had a swim night for families at Maple Street Pool. We hosted a Let's Talk separation gathering at Firebird with Free Nachos. And we had eight coffee chats with trustees over the course of the late summer and early fall. And there were trustees at almost every single one of them, which we were very grateful for. Thank you for helping us with that. Next slide, please. And then we wanted to get out the vote. And our goal was to have 50% of registered voters. So last slide, please. We had a huge turnout, as you know, and we're very proud of that. Just over 50% of all active registered voters in Essex Junction went to the polls, 3,481 people. And that was 45% of all voters on the checklist. And so that exceeds the number of votes that were cast on the second vote in April. And so we are able now to, we're able now to go to the legislature and say that we had an extremely healthy turnout for this question, especially considering that it was an off-year election with only one item on the ballot. So we really are proud of that work. And if I might have permission to share my screen, I just want to show you one additional slide. Let me try. I'm not sure if I've pressed the share button, but it's not doing anything. Email it to me and I could share it. Okay, I'll tell you what, I'm going to put a link in the chat because what it is is a map. One of our volunteers, Carmel Turborg, is an expert in GIS programming. And I'm not getting that right because I know that it's probably called something else. But she, Raj, you're laughing at me. I see that. Oh, the link to, hold on, let me just get the link in there. She literally developed an app that our volunteers could put on their phones and take door to door with them and then record each house that they've been to. And then she took that map and it geolocate, she took that information and geolocated it on a map so that we could visually see the results of our work. And so I'm hoping that the link that is going to let you see this dashboard of data and you'll see a map with lots and lots of red and yellow dots on it. And it pretty much covers the entire village. And there it is. So you can see 30 plus volunteers spread out all across the village of Essex Junction and knocked on pretty much every door we could. We were not able to get to apartments because those have, you know, private entrances, but we worked hard to get to them in other ways. And we're just really proud of this get-out-the-vote effort. So I wanted to just call special attention to the work of our volunteers and the app that was created by Carmel Turborg. This is the first time we've used something like this. It was enormously effective. And just wanted to share that with you to raise up what great work our volunteers did. And also to thank you all for your trust in us and for your enabling us to help in this significant way. There were a lot of people in the village who really wanted to help. And this was a great way to do it. So thank you very much. And also congratulations on the success of the vote. And we're really looking forward and standing by to assist with whatever you need going forward. Thank you so much, Elaine. For sure the work of our village, our voices was simply, simply amazing. As evidenced, not just by what you've shared here, but the results themselves. A voter turnout at that level with no other issue going on is a wonderful turnout. And personally just deeply appreciated for you, for the steering committee, as well as all the volunteers who helped to get the word out, helped to do the canvassing and the messaging. Really do appreciate all of your assistance. Thank you. Thank you. If I may just add, there's one thing I forgot to say, which was you had allocated to us $10,000 to accomplish this work. And I don't have the ability to share this at the moment, but we ended up spending $6,777 and two cents. And we are returning to the village or not using $3,224.98. So we just wanted to make sure you knew that and we have a full accounting of all of those expenses, which we've shared with Brad. And I would be remiss also not to thank Brad and the and EJRP for helping us along the way with event coordination, with managing the funds for us, taking care of our receipts, and just in generally being a hugely supported help to us. So thanks. Thank you again, Elay. Trustees, any, any other comments, questions? All right, just just profound thanks. And, you know, the $3,000, I'm thinking maybe we can do something with that, right? I mean, restaurants are opening back up a big banquet or something. We would love to have the opportunity to work together on some sort of celebration should the legislature approve our charter. Well, I'd say hold it in reserve because maybe we need to rent a bus to go to Montpelier, you know. Funnily enough, we've actually had that conversation and with COVID it's probably not going to be a good idea that rent buses to go to the state house as much as we'd like to. Maybe we can, maybe we can wrap the super sucker in some kind of, you know, we'll do a wrap. We'll get, we'll call up, call up the boons. We'll get, you know, we'll get the sign company in to wrap super sucker for a nice parking. We'll park it right outside the state house. Now, that's an excellent idea. I suspect the Memorial Day parade might be an excellent opportunity to parade the super sucker around the village. Maybe we can wrap it in lights like the SDR and cement mixer. There we go. Thanks, Elaine. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. And so then next on our agenda, we have a presentation from town meeting TV. I believe I saw Megan on earlier. Hi folks. Can you hear me? Hello, Megan. Yes, we can hear you just fine. Great. So glad, so glad to go after Elaine who was our, who is the trustee for town meeting television for many years and good to see her. I trust that you've all gotten our memo and maybe had a chance to read through it. I know it's a little long. I just want to make some highlights about that. First of all, thank you all for having me here. We're here to request the municipal contribution for your FY, for your FY23 budget that would be applied to our FY22 budget. And this is our report on sort of what we've done over the FY21 year. So if you've kept up with all those FYs, and I imagine you have, and you have some experience with that, that's great. One thing that I think we might all agree on is that a lot more people are involved in politics, especially local politics these days, those numbers around how many people came out to vote are pretty astounding on the separation issue. And it makes our mission both easier and more complex going forward the mission of opening the doors to local government, which is town meeting TV's mission under the umbrella of CCTV Center for Media and Democracy. And we really appreciate working with you all as local partners and the community members also as partners in the mission, which I like to think of as serving local democracy. And the landscape for this work has changed both because of the obvious COVID changes that have closed the loop on something that has been a goal of ours to allow people to participate in government in a different way from home or from various locations. And you all have seen that and the hybrid meeting setup is something that is both really neat and a little bit tricky technically. I think it's been working pretty well in Essex. For the most part, Teams is sometimes a little tricky for our system, but I think we work through that pretty well. I guess I'm going to open it up to questions that you might have about the highlights of our coverage. I would say the highlights in FY21 were of course installing and getting up and running the hybrid systems with your partnerships. A little bit of increased coverage. We went over our allotment, which is we did 42 programs out of the 40, out of the, oh, thanks, there it is right there on the screen, 42 programs out of the, and I'm trying to do my math here quickly, but it's over, it's 117% of the 100 of the allotment that you're allowed, 36, I think it is. I think that in large part is because once we start covering meetings and then you have joint meetings or you have special hearings on separation, we can't, we don't feel like it's a, it doesn't serve the public to just turn off the channel and not cover those meetings, but we have to weigh the resources that we have to provide the best service that we can to the public. I think that we have the option for you all to think about if there are more meetings that you want to have covered and expanding coverage, what that would look like and what a budget allotment would be for that. One thing, you know, one of the reasons to stir our mind, any of you that weren't here for the last couple of years when we've done this presentation around this municipal contribution is that, you know, cable revenue continues to decrease and that has been, of course, the majority of our funding, you know, it used to be 100%, it's about 86% now of the funding of this organization. And one thing that you'll see at the very bottom of our list of sort of highlights is the advocacy work and we will be going to the legislature with VAN, the Vermont Access Network, that's 25 access centers around the state who all serve their communities in various ways, similarly to the way that we serve this community and surrounding communities. And we are asking the legislature to look at ways to help fund the work that has become and been seen as an essential service. You know, an example of that is Orca Media has been at the Governor's Press Conferences since day one, recording, live streaming, you'll hear their audio is used on VPR. And that's all done with cable funding, with this money that we, that we shepherd as a resource for the community. And that has to be, you know, we are coming to the place where we're going to see the scales balanced and the community needs to make up the difference for those, you know, what is formerly, you know, heard of as franchise fees. So I will, I will pause there since I'm about halfway through my allotted 10 minutes and ask for questions from you all or comments. Thank you, Megan. For me, I don't have any particular questions. For one, one thing I really just wanted to highlight is, and I don't remember where it is, and you're in the memo, but you talked about how the legislature deemed Town Meeting Television an instrumental service. And I really just want to echo that how Town Meeting TV really has become the instrumental service to our local democracy here by having this exact hybrid meeting format, allowing for people like myself to be at home, to ensure the safety of our, of our community and those that we love and care about. So I greatly appreciate the work that you all have done. In terms of our allotments, what I would say is hopefully we don't need to have so many meetings coming up in this upcoming fiscal year with separation. Hopefully that will be resolved. If that does not end up becoming the case, I do think then we do want to look at ensuring that you're fairly compensated for the look that you're doing. That's, that's only the, in my opinion, the right thing for us to do. So just nothing but great appreciation for your work. And also for anybody listening, we are down a seat on the Town Meeting Television Board, or down representation. So if anybody listening has an interest in ensuring that our local democracy is able to continue to flourish and thrive, and you're interested serving on the board for Town Meeting Television, please feel free to shoot us an email, shoot us a letter letting us know you're interested. Happy to, happy to have the conversation. Yeah, we have a, we have a fantastic with, we have a fun board. Great. And Evan, I think your hand's up. Yes. I'm gonna take my mask up for a quick second. One question and one comment. I'm gonna go with the question. First, Megan, do you have any of the data on our viewership increase? Because once we went to hybrid, our viewership, instead of like having three people in the audience, we're up in the, in the two, three dozen people, four dozen per meeting. Do you have any of that? Yep. The only, so the viewership numbers that we can extrapolate from are the, are the YouTube view numbers. So, you know, like I looked at the last meeting, there were 95 people, 95 views. I can't say those are individual people, but I was thinking 95 people in that town meeting room with you would be kind of cramped. And it does, I, I, I'm intrigued, you know, the, so we could go back and look at YouTube view counts over time. It's hard to extrapolate how, yeah. I'm not asking you to do that. I'm just saying that through the work of your staff and, and you and others making our meetings accessible, hybrid with YouTube, with teams, with the new equipment, I think our public engagement has skyrocketed from just a handful of people per meeting to literally in, in the dozens. So, kudos to you guys and your staff. And then second, as I mentioned as a comment, the work of your staff working with our staff for the hybrid meetings. I'm now staring at your weird camera that follows people's movements, which is really creepy, but so effective for what's going on. We're in this relatively small room. It's, it's narrow, but long. And our sound is so much better in here. The production is better. And that's a credit to your staff, working with ours to just make this an easier experience. So on this cold night in late November, people get to stay home and still enjoy being part of their local government. And that's because of our partnership. So that's a credit. Yeah. Well, that's a credit to our staff. That's pretty technically resilient. And you have Travis, I think you have Travis Washington there and Jordan Mitchell, who are, who's, who's learning the system and the fact that they've and, you know, kudos to you all to give, to believe in us to do this. Because I think, you know, a lot of folks just wanted to hop on board with an owl system because it, you know, they could plug it in out of the box. And this is obviously a little more complicated and takes and, and the fact that you trusted us to set it up and do it. We really appreciate that. Cool. Thanks. Yeah. Yes. Thank you very much. Any other questions? And just to your, to your point, Andrew, that I think the municipal contribution as a, as a, as is, is very important. And then one thing that you could discuss is an allotment to the town to add case by case meeting coverage. So, you know, we have the municipal rate there and that can be done. Either some communities add on a certain amount that adds a certain number, you know, like six more meetings per month or a certain allotment. And then we would bill on an hourly basis for coverage, for additional coverage. Thank you, Megan. That's helpful. So if there are no other questions, trustees, Megan, I appreciate your time tonight and hope you enjoy the rest of your evening. Great. You too. Thank you all. Thank you all for your service. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. And next up, we have a discussion on the fiscal year 21 fund balance with Sarah Macy. We can, yes. Can you hear me? We can hear you. It is karate night in St. Albans. So I, Marguerite, if you could pull up my memo so I can quickly on what my recommendation is, I would appreciate that. A great deal. Although I had a meeting until 11 last night, I find my recalls not what it used to be. Okay. Thank you so much. All right, everybody. So we are substantially complete with the FY of the FY 21 audit. It was an incredibly successful audit season. Kudos goes to Courtney Bushy, the assistant finance director. She did an amazing job pulling together audit data for both entities while I focused on budgets. We really had, I would have to say it was the best audit year I've experienced in my 13 years so far in municipal government. We had no entries. We have very few follow-up items. And so we are substantially complete, like I said, and we have some fund balance numbers to talk to you about tonight. The village, just a quick refresher, the village has a voter approved limit on unassigned fund balance to not exceed 10% of the upcoming year's operating budget. And at the end of FY 21, the unassigned fund balance, after taking into consideration items like prepaid insurances and inventory, which are non-spendable items and other restricted things, existing commitments, existing assignments, we have 10.77%, which leaves us about $43,461 over the voter approved limit. And I would recommend that the trustees consider assigning this to offset some of the new costs in the FY 23 budget that we discussed a couple of weeks ago. We will continue to discuss that budget. And as a reminder, the trustees are able to assign or reassign these funds in different ways. If we get back into the budget and we find some other tweaks we want to make, but I think that this would, I would like you to consider my recommendation. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Sarah. Two questions that I can think of. One being for tonight, do you need us to make this motion now, given what you had just mentioned about our ability to redirect these funds later on, if necessary? I do need you to make the motion tonight, please, so that we can finish the audit and get financial statements prepared before the end of the calendar year, which is our goal this year. Got you. And then from a fiduciary standpoint, if you will, what are the concerns of if we use this money now to offset the tax levy next year? Well, the primary concern with that practice is that if you don't continue to do it the year after, you automatically have a hole that you need to fill. So let's imagine that a budget saved level from FY23 to FY24 and in FY23 we had $43,000 to offset the tax levy, but we didn't have that again in FY24 because for some reason we came in exactly on target for the year, which you never know it could happen. What would happen is we would have the tax levy would then have to increase by that approximately $43,000 in the subsequent year to make up for it. So there's a little bit of like a leapfrogging action that happens inadvertently. So that would be the primary downfall. This is normally not, you know, I think that it's definitely worth considering. I think that we have a lot of new costs in the FY23 budget and unless we are able to do something to pull them back down, that tax rate spike is going to be quite large. So that's what I was thinking when I pulled these figures together. We could also discuss setting them aside for something else. I know that renovations of to Lincoln is something we haven't really talked about in the budget process. So I hope I, I'm sure I think I answered your question and then some. Yes, absolutely, Sarah. Thank you. Other questions? I don't have questions. I just think this is the next I confess there. I I am so pleased that you found this little bit. I get, I totally get that we are inevitably going to have a tax rate increase. And I think this is an excellent suggestion. And I appreciate you being so on the ball, crunching these numbers and coming forward. Thank you. Hold on, my child is on the wrong way. Sorry, guys, a little bit of chaos, but I found him. I moved my car in the parking lot. I didn't go tell him. You better watch it. He knows karate. He does. So trustee, if there are no other questions, I would entertain the motion that we have on the screen that we no longer have on the screen. I will, I will recommend that the trustees assign $43,461 of unassigned fund balance to offset the tax levy in the FY 23 budget. Second. Thank you, George. Thank you, Dan. Any further discussion on that motion? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody oppose? Great. I think we're all set, Sarah. Good luck getting home before you get karate chopped. Thank you very much. Have a great day. He's like that more often. Where are we? We are now on to discuss and edit agreements and MLUs with the town of Essex in relation to independence. But we talked about a couple things last night. I originally had thought when we go through this, we could use this as a time to debrief. We could use this as a time to talk about next steps. There are other thoughts. I would be happy to hear those as well. I think that sounds great. Yeah, Andrew, I think that sounds great too. I would like to maybe raise the subject that, as I understand it, and this is going to segue right into what you want to talk about, I think. But we have one more joint meeting before January. I see January as the, you know, theoretically at any point in January thereafter, we could be looking at the government operations committee taking up our bill. And so it seems to me we could potentially be facing a situation with just one more joint meeting where we don't have all of the contract signed to go down here. But as you raised last night, we have the crucial ones. But I do think we need to just talk about that a little bit. Maybe not the immediate, the priority if you have something else you want to raise. But it's not a really clear situation. It seems like maybe there's some disagreement between the boards on this issue that, for example, if we think the police, which we think is the most important agreement, we think that's done. I think we finished it last night. But it seems that they're saying they're not, are they not going to sign the agreement? Are they not going to validate or acknowledge the agreement? Unless we also have agreement on all the other things that are yet unresolved. So how are we going to approach this, both in terms of our interaction with the select board and going forward? I'll stop there. George, you hit the underlying issue or you hit the biggest issue on the head there. That's my understanding as well, that nothing is to be signed until everything is ready to be signed. If that ultimately is the case, if the select board is unwilling to sign even that initial MOU until everything else is resolved, then in January the conversation is that we have come to agreements on the items, the police services agreement, an overarching memorandum of understanding, so on and so forth, and we let them know that the current state of what we're waiting on. Ideally, what I would like to see is if we are in agreement that each or that some of these agreements are final, that we then have a motion at our next meeting to finalize those as done, so that we can then just put them on the shelf and consider them done at that point. Plus then I believe we could go to the legislature and say these individual agreements have been approved of. We're just waiting upon everything being resolved before everything can be fully approved for the agreements. Rush, go ahead. Yeah, I mean I think that's accurate. I just want to take a second also to really recognize the progress we made last night and frankly, largely due to the willingness of the select board members to plow ahead and I think we really owe them a thank you for getting as far as we did last night and I think that's great and I think it bodes well for our next meeting. We don't have a lot left, I don't think. I don't think we're going to have any surprises when we get together again. I don't believe in terms of how we left last night versus how we get together again on the 13th. I see Tree Farm building use but other than that I don't see any major issues. I'd be curious to see what the rest of the group thinks and maybe we can kind of go around and see but I think as Andrew said, I think if we go to the legislature and we're able to say, you know, these things take time. We've handled the big ones. Public safety is taken care of. Finance is taken care of. We're able to run our community on day one. We're just negotiating some of the transitions which we expect to take many years and hope to work together with. That will be fine. I mean, it's a hopeful hope, right? But I mean, it's pretty amazing that we were able to do this in the amount of time, you know, and it's pretty amazing that Select Board has been working with us on that. So I'm hopeful that our next meeting goes much like last night did. Certainly do echo that appreciation to the Select Board for last night's meeting, getting through all that we did. Dan, Amber, George, if you have thoughts on where we are, those things that we have left hanging over our heads. I echo what's already been said by Raj, you and George on this. I was impressed with the cohesiveness between our two boards last night and how we were able to accomplish a lot in a short period of time. As Raj said, it's a positive thing to see and I think bodes well for the next meeting. Are there thoughts on that? I don't know, Amber, I don't want to cut you off of you at something to say. The one concern I have, and it's not a concern, but as we heard tonight, and it regards the senior center, and I'll put the headline first. I think that agreement on this, it seems like we're headed in the same direction. We had general agreement about the operation, continued operation of the senior center, and I include in that the senior bus, although it is kind of a separate issue. What I urge us to do and I'd like to see happen is that we keep it at the high level, and we agree, try to keep any agreement on the senior center in very general terms. I'm concerned that if we try to hammer on an agreement that goes down into the specifics of operation and shifting finances that we could get caught up there, and I think that would be a shame. That's one, because trying to figure out the exact way of how we're going to operate the senior center in a partnership going forward over the next five years, I don't think we can, I think there's limited amount of how much detail we get into on that right now. I think that'll be an ongoing, that'll probably be an ongoing learning experience for both boards and the people in the senior center. As we heard again, they've got ideas about an advisory board and everything, and I think we want to create something that is very general, that is positive, general, and sort of stays at a high level and has a lot of built-in flexibility. So that's my one concern coming away from last night. Thank you, George. I would agree that my sentiments from that meeting is that the majority of our boards are on board with working together for the senior bus, senior services, recreation, Indian Brook, that those were, those really seemed to be non-issues, at least at the high level. And I would agree with you that it seems, as long as we can keep these conversations at the high level to use that phrase that Tracy brought up, that we can stay at the forest, I think we'll be able to get through this pretty quickly. Okay. You know, they did ask for, they did ask for a, we all agreed to ask staff for a model of how these things could potentially offset each other. But I thought I heard that that was okay to appear after the new year, not necessarily be an impediment to moving forward, as you all both mentioned at that high level to agree on a concept to a framework and get this document moved forward. That's, that's what I recall. And that's what I hope. I don't know if everybody had that, was on the same page with that. I do believe that that is very similar to what I have said, as my understanding is that those issues of Indian Brook Access, the senior center, EJRP program access for those outside of the village or city at that point, those really aren't legislative issues that are core to the functioning of government. Those are absolutely important services to our community. And I want to make sure that's clear. But it is not, it is not the police protection services. It is not stormwater, wastewater. It is not public works. It is not those types of things where if there's an emergency in one of those other departments, then our municipality would be seriously harmed. So there's a slightly different issue there, similar to finance, if our community couldn't, couldn't have a finance staff, then I would have the, I would see the legislature having a hard time approving that. You know, it might benefit us to have a conversation before we get back together as to what we are comfortable doing with tree farm. You know, where, where do, where do we see, where's the, the village board on that topic? Because I, I see that as a place where this like board is going to want to talk about that. And so we, we should have some options available just to, just to be ready to have a conversation and move it along. You know, what are, what are some things that we could, various options, you know, scenarios that we could see us see, see moving forward with. And I don't know if right now is an appropriate time to do that, if because it's a negotiation, we want to do that in the executive session or I can't remember our calendar if we have another opportunity to do it. But anyway, just, just one of those things that it might be a good idea to talk about before we're all together, just so we're ready to, to respond to whatever we need to respond to. Meeting before the joint meeting. So we can discuss. We do. First, yeah, we have one meeting the first, the, whatever, first, the second Tuesday in December is before our joint meeting. If I could just make a comment to follow up with you, Raj. So I, I'll tell you what I came away with was we are tentatively agreeing to, and I think you're talking about the, the, the management contract. We're not talking about the building. So that's a separate, okay. I came up with, with one understand, with an understanding that the contract extension that we're signing is, is a transition. It defined, it should define a transition period at the end of the two recreation departments will take over management of the tree farm. I think that I don't think George, I think what Roger was talking about is actually the building maintenance. Yeah, just the buildings. I'm talking about the building. Sorry. Oh, you're talking about the building? I say, okay. Building capital was, was something that the select board chair was, was concerned about. And as far as meetings, I'm looking at our schedule. I don't see that we have one before we meet jointly. Our meeting is the day after on the 14th. So I don't, I don't know how that impacts everybody. So our next meeting as a, as a board by ourselves is the 14th. This is the day after we meet jointly. At least according to the calendar that's on the packet. Sorry, I wasn't on meeting myself. Go ahead, Evan. Okay. So just for education sake, there, the buildings on the tree farm that are still standing. There is a house that is vacant. There's a garage slash barn behind the house, which is generally vacant. There is a storage building, which is not vacant, which the town is using for storage, including the clerk's office, the finance department, and several shared departments that have files and other equipment, including some recreation equipment stored there. And then there was the seed lead building that fell down. And then we tore the rest of it down. We are under the town, including the village as co-owners is under a quasi mandate to maintain those buildings until such time as a plan is devised and approved by the state for what you may want to do with the buildings. Right now, nothing is going on with the house and the garage slash barn. The other building, which is the storage building is being maintained. There's no problems with it. Oh, yeah. And there's this little outbuilding that used to have bathrooms in it that is so wildlife infested. And the roof is gone. There's nothing to do with the building other than the fact that part of it's a concrete bunker. So there's really not much to do on the site until, say, the village and the town get together to agree of what to do with the buildings in a plan and submit it to the state's historical representatives. So just to say, it shouldn't be such a huge issue, especially if you guys come to an agreement with the state that the best thing for most of those buildings is to calm down. I can't even imagine there's anything of historical value in those buildings. They just need to make a determination. We have to apply. That's all. Go ahead, Amber, your hands up. I feel like I'm half prepared to have this conversation tonight and half unprepared to have this conversation because I don't think I have all of my documents in front of me. But I have continuously struggled with why this is even an issue when the town agreed and all of the documents that I can recall says that the town is responsible for these buildings. So I guess that's where I just keep going back to. Why would we agree to change things now? Why is today different than when this originally happened years back? And so again, I don't have all of the documents in front of me, but I believe that is an accurate statement, especially looking at what we looked at last night with Tree Farm and how they were specifically split out in the management agreement. Go ahead, Rush. That's my recollection from rereading the original documents from the Tree Farm transaction, whether the intent was back then to not double sign those structures or not. They are both on town property in terms of how that parcel was brought together, and they're listed in the original documents as being the responsibility of the town. The town has chosen not to maintain them since the inception. I guess that includes village voters as town voters, but the village had no say in how those capital funds were used for the buildings are not used and how they were maintained regardless of our joint ownership of the property. So the town's capital plan has them listed as a $200,000 liability, and under this scenario, we'd be looking at somewhere around $100,000 of that liability. That is a significant chunk of change. Once we have the, I'll just leave it there, that's kind of where I'm coming from with, like, if that's what the board wants to do, then I'm okay with it. If we're going to say that we're also responsible for them, but my feeling is this like board's going to want, want to not kick it down the road to see what we do when years from now when something has to be done, they're going to want to know now. Go ahead, George. Yeah, Raj, to follow up, I think their logic, if I recall, is that, yes, they agreed to that because there was an understanding that any money the town puts towards capital costs for those buildings, you know, roughly half is coming from the village. Now, if with separation, they 100%, they would be getting nothing from S6 Junction. They would be getting all the funds only from the town outside the village. I think they were seeking, they were kind of saying, that's a little problematic for them. You know, and, yeah, so, and I think that's the, I think that's the, maybe I'm wrong, but I believe that's the core issue. I guess it for argument's sake, I would, I would return to that conversation and say, you know what, use the leftover fund balance and capital money that we're leaving behind for you, which totals easily over, what are we talking about, a million dollars? You know, you can use that, how you see fit. I'm just making an argument, you know, an argument that I've heard from other residents when this comes up is, aren't we leaving a tremendous amount of money, tremendous amount of money on the table as we walk out and, excuse me, and assets? So, I'm not saying that I want to make that argument, I'm just, I want to make sure that- I got you, I understand. I was going to say, I do see that we have the villages tree farm representative who has their hand up in the meeting. So, Harlan, I'm assuming that you may have some information or input on this topic that those of us who are not into the, at those board meetings would be privy to. Yeah, I guess, so the reason I put my hand up is there was, there's still one building on the property, which is on the village side that hasn't been mentioned. There's a red barn over there that the tree farm management group uses, which is also in disrepair and is going to need some maintenance going forward. And then I would just want to agree that all the paperwork, it does kind of say that all of those buildings were insured by the town, town responsibility. I don't know how much more information you would be looking for, but I do understand that at the time that that was said that we, they are going to be losing the village tax dollars that go into the town. There's an argument to be made that they've been getting that money for the last 20 years or however long we've been in this agreement and nothing's still been done with the buildings, but that's totally up to you guys. But we do not, the village, to the best of my knowledge, does not have any use of the storage building, the white one. So I guess if there was going to be a responsibility of some of the buildings that there would also be a shared use plan of those buildings moving forward. Thank you, Harlan. So my thought on that is, from what I'm hearing from Evan as well, I would be okay having there be an agreement for those buildings if it were one of two things. One being we agree to work with the state to have them being taken down if they are in such disrepair. Or two, we agree to be response to be partially responsible for their maintenance if they're going to be used by both municipalities. What my concern comes down to is to that $200,000 liability, if we're going to be responsible for half of it for things that our community won't benefit from, I have a hard time understanding going to our community and to our voters and saying, please support this budget, which is going to have funds going to another municipality to serve that other municipality that will not serve you. Go ahead. I'd agree with that. And I think maybe one path forward is to say, much like we've done with the other things last night, we agree a principle to explore the feasibility of restoring or removing the buildings. And because it might come down to the point where when it comes time to inspect them and decide what to do, which I think a building study did a couple years ago, but is it really financially feasible to rehab all of them? Or would it make more sense to have a mix of tearing one or two down and repairing the ones that are worthwhile? We just don't know. So if we go back to them and with this conversation and we say, look, we agree in principle as long as we can share in the use, but we want a really strong review that we're doing together or that we both get to see on whether it's worth it, like what's the cost benefit of working on these or rehabbing them versus tearing them down. Secondly, as an aside to what Harlan mentioned, this is a total aside from the conversation last night around tree farm management and the transition period. I just want to put out there, we're not micromanaging the transition, but I really do want to see any future dollars coming in to tree farm management include a percentage that goes to capital like this from here on out or from next year on out. I'd like to see any income for TFMG on that property to include a some amount towards capital that's not goals, irrigation, and stuff like that, you know, basically the buildings. Because if this had been run from day one as an enterprise fund, that capital money would have probably been set aside over time. And right now we're dealing with two things. We're dealing with that capital money not being set aside in that model. We're also dealing with the town not taking care of it all that time too. So just a thought. It's just my comment to I guess staff as they work through this that it would be nice to see what that would mean to the operation in the business plan. Well, okay. Just a comment. I agree with what Roger was saying. I was going to bring that up earlier. What the use Evan says one of these buildings being used for storage for files and such. We start going down the road of it requires somebody to go and look at that. I think didn't Dennis Lutz have somebody that was going out and evaluating structures and properties throughout the town to see what needs to be done, the cost, effectiveness of what we have for properties. And these would be, I guess, ripe for that type of review. And if it's, you know, cost prohibitive, you're putting good money toward bad to try and salvage something that's not worth anything, get rid of it. But obviously, it's close to the road there. I don't know what it has for utilities available to it. But maybe we could find use for something if it's good there. I don't know, you know, what they have for sewer. Yeah. Well, well, I just had another thought, which is maybe it is what you're, you know, one way of dealing with this. If the town sees the buildings that are on there, if they're using them, and they see it as an asset, see those buildings as basically an asset. And we have a storage building, there's a storage building on the village side of the border. One possible way of dealing, very simple way of saying the town, we relinquish all interest or control over the buildings that are on the town side of the boundary. And the town relinquishes all interest and responsibility for the building on the village side, we take ownership and control of the building on our side, they take, et cetera. And if they want to renovate them, they can if they want to replace them with something that's exactly pretty much the same, that's okay. Any new buildings that go up on some other part of the tree farm, that would have to be an agreement with both of us. But you know, just as an alternative to explore something like that. Because I'm concerned, again, that going down into the weeds on something like this, trying to get, nail something like this down over the next month is probably going to be really hard if we're going to need to try to stay at that high level. Can I just read you something, the line from their capital budget that discusses these buildings, straight from their latest capital plan. There is no defined plan to use the site or the buildings, to utilize the site of the buildings, and they're talking about everything but the record storage building. It is recommended that a committee be formed to determine uses for the site before more funds are expended to repair demolish existing buildings or build new ones. The residential house needs to be completely redone with extensive interior work in a new roof, new water and sewer systems at approximately $125,000. Large storage buildings need a new roof and paint. If they identify it as an FY21 and 22 project, and it's billed at about $185,000 to $200,000 of which $12,000 is theirs of I think FY21. So that's kind of what's in their capital plan. And they're not even sure it doesn't sound like what they want to keep or what they don't want to keep. And I think that to do anything more detailed and say, we commit to having a further discussion on this when the time is right, I don't know how else we're supposed to approach it. Those figures you just gave Raj are going to be very low given the state of cost of building materials have gone up exponentially over the last year. So it'd probably be double or more what those costs, those figures. So what I'm taking away from this as a general, I'm taking a census that the board is generally not in favor of maintaining these buildings. And that's the preferences. If the town wants to have a study done that the town should go and have the study done, do what's in the capital plan. So I think that, yeah, I think I, unless I'm wrong, please correct me if I am, I think that we have the basis for something on that to go back to the select board with. I mean, I don't know what else they couldn't possibly give us a dollar figure that we could count on. They just don't know one. And so aside from that, anything further than saying we're open to discussing into the future date or what you said, I don't know what we're supposed to agree to on that one. I can see doing financial analysis of EGRP and Indian Brook and all that stuff, but how do you do it for this? Yep. Yep. And what this, if you, if you all remember a couple of joint meetings ago, one of the things that was discussed is the resolution on some of these items maybe that we just agree to not work together on them. If this is one of those items, then that's just one of those items. Yeah. You know, I suppose you could conceive of a place where we're changing management of tree farm and in four years, once that, you know, in year three and that last fourth year, we completely redo an MOU for tree farm. But I don't think anybody wants to go down that road to open up that all over again. Because frankly, that's working and worked last night. We should be able to work together going forward. So to kind of bring this back, my hope for that next joint meeting is to get us to a place where we can finalize those, what I refer to earlier as a tier ones, so that police services agreement, the reappraisal assessor, financial services, IT, delinquent taxes, and that overarching MOU, get those to a point where we can at least have individual emotions on those agreements to agree that those are final. And then with any time left, we continue those conversations on those tier twos. I think that's a great plan, Andrew. I would urge you, if we can, urge us to try to set us up, you know, have to communicate that. So we're set up to have something like that happen at the next joint meeting. So we set ourselves up for success. I think that's a good idea. Yes, I was waiting intentionally before I communicated to the chair. Okay. We'll do. Oh, thank you. Sorry. What screams, Brad? Go ahead. That's okay. Just quick. I haven't seen anything. So maybe it exists, but there aren't any joint meetings scheduled from January and beyond. So if that process hasn't started, I just wanted to alert you all to that. Yes, thank you, Brad. That was something I had intended to bring up. So thank you for reminding me. I think it would be important for us to continue these conversations beyond just this calendar year. I think we need to go into 2022 as odd as it is to think of that we're almost at the next year of a relatively similar format. But I think that that will, the frequency of the meetings, I think are going to depend on how this next meeting goes. But I think at a minimum at this point, we are still looking at continuing to have one joint meeting in months to finish these agreements as well as any other joint issues we have coming up. And I'd again be happy to communicate that to select board chair Watts. Is there anything else on this agenda item? I'm sure we could figure out a way to keep this going until 1030, if you'd like. Well, at the risk of, I don't want to get into a deep one on this, but are we all aware or where we're at with finance? Like what the situation is with the finance, what we're going to do with that. The agreement itself? Yeah, with the recent changes with Sarah leaving, new ideas on how that will all look and work. I don't think right now if we don't want to, but I'm just. I would encourage us each individually to relook at the agreement as it was last presented. I did that earlier this morning and I admit I'm having terrible recall right now, but I believe that the position that we are in is documented within that agreement of the cause of the current finance director leads, then so on and so forth. I believe that's in there. And I'm sure Brad who helps to write many of these is about to correct me. Not to correct you, Andrew, but I had a great conversation with Sarah the other day about what this new finance agreement should look like. And it's much like you all have been talking about in terms of keeping it real high level. I think it can pretty much be a one-pager and basically say that the two municipalities agree to employ their own finance departments, that those finance departments will both operate out of 81 Main Street, that they will both work together and cross functionally to provide services for both the city and town and will and will begin the process of trying to separate and unwind or the pieces that are together and become two separate departments within four years. I think those are the basic tenants of it. I don't think there needs to be any discussion of money. I don't think there needs to be any discussion of personnel and management. That's kind of where she and I landed. So how does that all sound to you? That sounds great to me. So it sounds good to me. Is there a way that we can get that one-pager like a bulleted and off to Claudine maybe for for a review and fleshing out and then maybe over drafts to whoever needs to get them for the select board's next meeting? Yeah, that's exactly the next steps, Raj. If you guys are good with kind of that loose outline, we would put those things in the four or five bullets that I said and and let them draft it into an agreement. I would also my only request would be if we can keep that phrase tentative agreement in mind. The phrase that's sticking with me as well from last night is the more words that are on the piece of paper means the more wordsmithing we're going to do. So realizing these are nothing more than tentative agreements, if we could keep it at that level, I think we'll be able to get through this better. I think the board members are done. So with that, I can turn this over to the public. Harlan Smith, go ahead. You can unmute yourself. Floor is yours. Yeah, I just I wanted to comment a little bit more on the tree farm and the buildings and I'm not sure in your negotiations if the buildings would become a sticking point, but it does sound like there'll be a transitioning period over the next four years. Unfortunately, I missed last night's meeting, so I didn't get all of the details. But it sounds like the property would be overseen by the two recreation departments four years from now. And if it's the entire property, right, the agreement with the tree farm management group, those buildings were singled out and kept out of that agreement. I don't know if that would still want to be the course with recreation overseeing it, if they would keep that out or but where I'm headed with this is I haven't been in any other buildings. I've been in the storage building and I've seen the barn when I've worked with the high school on behalf of the tree farm management group for them to be able to do their logging and some of the stuff up there. But I haven't I don't have detailed information on it. But if it got to that point, maybe the recreation departments could get together and review the whole property. I would assume at some point we're going to build a 10 year plan for this property moving it forward. So if that gets to a sticking point, I would like to be part of a team if at all possible to review it on behalf of recreation and in the future of the tree farm management tree farm property and see if we could come up with some ideas that might be beneficiary mutual to to both parties. Thank you Harlan. I would hope that all of our staff absolutely feel empowered and Evan please apologize. I apologize now. I hope this isn't overstepping my role here. But I do hope our staff in general feel empowered to to bring ideas to to Evan to the board innovative ideas things that are out of the box. You guys have the the day to day ground level details that we don't have here. And so we in some ways have some of those blinders. And if you can help to open our our eyes to other possibilities, I'm all for it. Yeah. And so thank you. Thanks. As I mentioned last night, I think opening up possibilities to more to more uses and more people on the property. We have a great asset in E W S D the school district and, you know, their tech center. I think we can really start partnering with others, maybe about the trails or some maintenance of the buildings, they build beautiful homes on their property. May and I don't know if they have one in production right now. I think they sold the last one for buku dollars. I think that's a term that I'm allowed to use. And maybe there's an ability to have them come take a look at the barn. So there's a lot of opportunities. It's just day one from last night. Yeah. And those relationships have started to be built. I work with Brian Jeff and Robin Siddons with E W S D and they've been doing some work and we've been doing some planning for the future of them continuing to utilize that property to engage their students and teach their students a craft. And at the same time, the property benefiting from that. So yeah, those were those were the ideas that I was headed with. But again, I have not had the opportunity to completely review all of the property and I'm not sure Ali has as well. And that's just where I was headed with that where if this was going to be under recreation control, I'm not sure. And I may be overstepping my bounds here, unfortunately. But if somebody wanted us to take a look at it, I would definitely raise my hand and like to be part of that. Thank you, Arlen. So I believe we are at the point where we can now go to agenda item originally on our agenda as six C that we moved to five E from our consent agenda and the check warrants. Amber, you asked us to be pulled out. Yes, I did. So inadvertently, I think we ended up with some of the town check warrants. If you look at the and I have confirmed this with Sarah is that if you look at the accounts, if they begin with a one, those are town accounts. If you if you look at them and they begin with two, those are ours. So I think the cleanest way to do this is to approve two of those check warrants because those did not have any town checks in them, but and then have the other one come back at a later time with just village. If that is if that works. Can I make a suggestion? Instead of that, if you would approve the check warrants subject to anything that is a O2 account, be reviewed by finance and removed. I guess what I'd say, Evan, is that was going to be my my alternative was be to approve all three check warrants except as those that except those that relate to accounts beginning with two or beginning with a one, which are identified as town accounts. I would appreciate that. Okay. A whole lot simpler for finance. Yep. That's fine. So then I I can move to approve the check warrants. Except that those that identify with identify begin with a cheese. It was a long night last night. Begin with a number one, which are town accounts. Great. Thank you, Raj. Amber, thank you for doing that. Is there any further discussion on that motion? Hearing none. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Anybody oppose? Great. Pass unanimously. Thank you. And so that was going to bring us now into the business item five now f of discussion potential action regarding personnel. My intention for this conversation is to talk about things that might believe our best in the executive session. Due to the people we'd be discussing. And so having that conversation in the executive session, I do not anticipate coming out of that meeting with a formal action of any kind. It is just going to be a discussion. Then I will move to accept the consent agenda. Second. Second. Thank you, Raj and Amber. All those in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. If anybody opposed? Pass unanimously. Into the reading file and board member comments. Evan, Jim Jutris's recognition is certainly you know one of I want to say four or five or so since I've been on the board as he has continued to just be an amazing public servant frankly. He's an amazing advocate, an amazing individual to have in his role. Can I mention something that was emailed to us all? Absolutely. And I have something of my own. So why don't you go first? So our board learned the other day that Jim Jutris after 31 years of employment with the village of Essex Junction and the wastewater treatment facility is going to be retiring. He is an absolutely amazing individual for that role. I can't think of another individual who I would have wanted to have there. His ability to take these in my personal opinion very complex and scientific processes and bring them to a level that I can almost understand. I greatly appreciate his ability to influence not just within our community here in the village but also of course the town and will listen with Tritown. Beyond that with his work that he's done with the states and even further the entire industry as the work that's happening there is being recognized because of how fantastic it is and its leadership. So my my heartfelt appreciation to Jim and his decades of service to our community. He will be sorely missed. I can't imagine what it's going to be like to find the next person in that role and I'm sorry to see him leave but happy for him. So if I get to so I'll echo that people probably have no concept of the complexity of a wastewater treatment plan. Yes it is what you think it is except all the state and federal rules that are upon us because we return basically and I don't want to because I'm going to be but our affluent goes directly into the Winooski River which goes directly downstream into Lake Champlain which becomes the drinking water for the entirety of our village and the town and several other communities that has EPA standards like you would not believe. We are just going through a permitting process with the state where they wrote in interesting language about a requirement that's not actually a requirement and Jim found it and we're now in discussions about its removal from our permit which would have cost our constituents a lot of money if we were under that requirement. Jim is up to date on so many topics including how people are using wastewater to determine the presence of COVID in your community not specifically what resident or what property just its general presence his use of technology and always dealing with the cost of chemicals and if one chemical goes sky high in terms of cost he tries to find other ways to use different chemicals to be in our state permit and the last one that I'm going to mention is not really about Jim but about the process of trying to find a replacement. With the board's comments etc Jim is a village employee but he runs the tri-town plant which has partners of the town of Essex and the town of Williston. In that process we would like to include the town and the village and Williston in the interview process so that it's such an important position to the three communities we would like to extend that offer of having someone or representative from each of those communities as part of the recruitment process including maybe even board members because of its nature. Evan I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah absolutely yeah yes. Thanks and we're we're we're stunned by the news we knew it was going to happen someday and then we are working internally on options for his departure and a well-deserved retirement and we'll keep you guys updated. Thank you Evan. Trustees other. Drew can I make just one comment? Please. Yes and I'm looking at Jim's and this just has to do with Jim and not his replacement but he was specifically the the organization is the New England Water Environment Association and they are giving him his award would like to present him his award in Boston at their annual conference at the Marriott-Copley Hotel and on January 26th and if Jim is inclined to go there I'd like to make sure I'd like to see if the village can't make that happen for Jim and Pauline his wife and make sure he gets down there and gets that award. I'm not going to get into the specifics but I'd like to make sure that we make that happen for him at the very least. Absolutely I would I would hope that any time one of our employees receives such an award that that our community makes that happen. Not not a great time for a fun weekend in Boston in the middle of January but yeah he'll find something to do. It's always funny to do. Okay yeah. I'm sure the water conference is in June. Yeah. In Greenland. Thank you George. Trustees other comments? Yeah I mean I don't want to bring the party down but Evan knows because he searched for me about five or six times on this but we all know there's construction happening at the former 197 location on Pearl Street. It's I think a new handy building gave handy building. For more days than not that after they cleared the building out for more days than not after the fence came up the fence and vehicles have been blocking the sidewalk. To one extent or another today it was fully anybody for instance walking with a stroller or anybody wheelchair bound and that sidewalk would have had to enter traffic to get around it for quite some time. Anybody coming into the village would have had to enter opposing traffic on one of our most dangerous and high speed roads. I understand staff have been struggling to reach the owner. At this point I would encourage staff to maybe see if PD wants to go over and have some conversations as early as tomorrow morning since we're on week two. The fence needs to be pulled back to allow full width of the sidewalk. There are telephone poles there, the fence encroaches, people have to go around them. This isn't just me I've heard from neighbors. Anybody on a stroller? Anybody trying to walk side by side? I think we just need I stopped this morning and had a quick chat with the concrete folks. They're expecting a cement truck and I said well why isn't the lane closed if you need to look at where people have to walk. They're literally in the road and they realized that and they were fine with it. They didn't know what to do because they had a truck coming. This is a major concrete company in our region that they know better. If they need to close the lane, close the lane, pay the fee, do whatever you need to do, get their officer there, do whatever it has to be, but this needs to be addressed. I think long term, like once we settle down as a city, as we get more building, especially as more infill happens in the downtown, we need to figure out how this can work without undue impact on just general life in the village. How can we we decided not to fund anybody on ordinances for this year, which is fine, but I think this speaks to having staff that have the time to go down and actually deal with it in person or figure out a way forward. I have nothing against the building going up at all. This isn't at all about that. It's just about doing it in a way that doesn't cause a public safety issue for people who shouldn't have a problem using the sidewalks. So I don't want it to become about the building. It's not that. So that's all I had to say. I know Evan's heard from me a few times. And we have contacted the owner. He is aware of our concerns. I will follow up tomorrow. Thanks. So the police have the police have been notified, and they did go by there today, and they will continue to go by. But I will talk to the owner. Thanks. There's a couple people in the area that have some mobility challenges, and I want to make sure that, you know, we don't have, you know, that they're able to get around as needed. It is absolutely not appropriate that people should go into the lane of traffic ever on Pearl Street. That is not, that's, I believe the speed limit there is 35, even so it's not, it's not a safe action. So, thanks for bringing it to our attention. And yeah, I appreciate the effort. Anything else? Okay. So I believe that now brings us to the executive session. There's the motion. I'll go ahead and I'll make the motion. The trustees enter into executive session to discuss employment of a public employee in accordance with one BSA section 31383 to include the unified manager and assistant manager. Second. Thank you, Dan. Any further discussion on the motion? Hearing none of those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Anybody oppose? Great. Why don't we take five minutes and then we'll see you on the executive session.