 introduce you to sculptor, artist, jeweler, teacher, Jim Sardones, who is a local artist here from Randolph, and is a designer and creator of Whale Dance, which is just a mile down the road. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. And everybody here, okay. Okay, well, I do have a short film on the making of the Whale Dance sculpture. This is the sculpture that I made 30 years ago, which used to be in the same location, and is now in South Burlington that was sold and moved there 20 years ago, after spending its first 10 years on the same site as the new ones. But I thought I would just show a little more about some of the other work that I do. I don't just do Whale's Tales, but I'll show you the last 20 years or so. I've kind of focused on public art so that it is placed often in universities, aquariums, libraries, places like that, where the public can have access to the work, which I enjoy more people being able to enjoy the work, hopefully. But I started out just as a high school student, taking a sculpture class, which was offered. I went to Phillips Exeter Academy, which happened to offer sculpture. I would have never thought to do it otherwise, but I took the class and fell in love with the whole process of making traditional type sculpture, which meant using clay, plaster, wood, and stone. This was in the late 60s when lots of newer materials were being used like plastics and other things. And when I went to college, I went to Oberlin College in Ohio, and I majored in studio art and art history. But my studio art teachers couldn't understand why I wanted to work with something like stone that in their eyes had been done as well as it could be done 500 years before when we had all this new material to work with. But I was always drawn to these natural materials and the natural forms of human, animal, and plant subject matter. So that's pretty much what I've focused on and started out just doing my own work, mostly on a small scale, until I had the opportunity to do a large piece, which I'll show you at the end here. That was in 1981. So this was the piece that is titled, Reverence, and the one that used to be in Randolph. It ended up inside and on the cover of this art history textbook. Some of my work comes from competitions that I enter around the country. This one is in Raleigh, North Carolina at the North Carolina State Veterinary College. And I proposed this called Swimming Retriever along the lines of the whales' tails where one has to imagine the earth, the grass, or whatever material as a water surface. And I wasn't sure they would go for it, but I decided to, and they ended up loving the idea. The head of the retriever is a gold-colored granite and the stick in its mouth is bronze. So it was a matter of attaching that and the stick is used as a bench. People sit on in front of the veterinary hospital there. How big is it? It's, the stick is seven feet wide and the head is about 10 feet long. So it's made for children to climb on as well as people to sit on the stick. And it was, these competitions, usually, there's a budget either because they're a part of the percent for art law that a lot of states have where a new building is required to spend one percent of the budget on art, or as in this case, fellow donated a lot of money to this veterinary college and his entire family consisted of five golden retrievers. And he used to like bringing them to this hospital and when he died, he left something like $24 million to the hospital, which is partly how they built this state of the art hospital, but they wanted to honor him. So they put this competition out there that I entered. And when people enter these competitions, you show them what you've done and from those, they pick four or five finalists from whom they ask for a specific proposal. And I was one of four finalists and this was my proposal and thankfully they ended up liking it. So that's how that happened. This is up in Burlington at Champlain College. It's kind of my interpretation of the explorer, Samuel de Champlain, and this piece is in bronze on a granite pedestal. I made three or four different models in different positions and in this case, the donor of the money that they had for this as well as the president of the college chose from the models that I presented. Small ones kind of along these lines and that's the one they liked. This is a group of polar bears carved out of Bethel white granite that comes right down the road. It's in Andover, Massachusetts. There was a library that wanted something as a focal point for readings on the environment and also for children to climb on. So I proposed this idea of the time the polar bears were in the news with the whole climate change and the ice polar, ice caps receding and melting. So that was something that they ended up liking as well. Sorry, I put the wrong thing here. This was another competition up in Maine at the University of Maine at Presque Isle and I didn't realize that manors are very much into fiddlehead ferns just like a lot of Vermonters are. Apparently they keep their patches secret from everybody but I proposed this bench that uses giant sized fiddlehead ferns partly to look a little bit to me like a family and this is in the lobby of a new fitness building that they were building for the university but it was also open to the public so felt like it might be a nice idea for kind of community support. This is a group of dolphins family. Families are often a theme of mine and on the other side that you can't see is the ocean. I would have placed it a little differently if I had been involved in the pouring of the concrete foundations which they did before I got down there in Fair Hope, Alabama but I always think of the photos like this I'd rather have seen the ocean in the background than those trees but that's how they placed it. This is of at St. Michael's College they a donor there wanted to honor well both kind of commemorate the St. Michael which the school was named after but also three or four of their students died in the 9-11 catastrophe in New York so this was also an honor of them. Ammonites which are the fossil forerunners to Nautilus shells were around up to 400 million years ago and this is a bench that I made out of a chunk of black marble that comes from one of the Champlain Islands where in the stone I found many fossils that look very much like this but it's at the University of Vermont in the geology building and at the time my daughter was a student at UVM and I proposed that they trade me tuition which I often try to do with my work I do a lot of bartering and have gotten things from antique cars to fine wine from people. Did they take you a class? They did, yeah, yeah I ended up not really spending the money on the tuition but that's what it was supposed to be for. This is a piece that's made out of the same Champlain black marble from Isle of Mon and it was a competition for an elementary school in Maine and I proposed this little family of bears so happens my oldest friend who grew up across the street from Maine and Nashua, New Hampshire was a first grade teacher in this school so she got to, I got to visit there in her classroom. Sorry the quality isn't that great on these photos but this is also another bear family which is at the Dartmouth Medical Center and I was contacted by a couple from Hanover who rather than have a big 50th anniversary celebration they wanted me to create something which they donated to the children's ward in the hospital at Dartmouth and this is what I came up with it's meant for the kids who are patients there to climb on and have a little fun while they're there for not so fun things. Some of you may have been on Braintree Hill where the Braintree meeting house is just a few miles from here but in 1991 I made this Panther family turns out back in the 1800s Panthers were quite a popular thing in Braintree in particular there was a lot written about them and in fact in the museum, historical museum in Randolph is a footprint that was cast in plaster from an actual print in a farm field in Braintree that was confirmed by the New York Natural History Museum as a Panther footprint which I used and looked at but that was one of the reasons the community that was in on deciding what they wanted me to make chose this idea. After I made those Whales Tales in Randolph 30 years ago, 1989, an architect friend of mine from Warren, Vermont who went to Yale and was having a 30th anniversary, I'm not anniversary but reunion, they had a classmate named Bart Giamatti who had been the president of Yale as well as commissioner of baseball at this time and they as a class gift wanted to do something in his honor so he had seen the Whales Tales which he loved and asked me if I would work with him to create this big granite bench which is on the campus there at Yale. Unfortunately, Bart Giamatti died while I was making it, he never got to see it although he knew it was happening, getting down to the last few here. This was just a photo that I took shortly after the original tales were in there which I liked before any grass grew but and just a few years before that, sorry, I'm not used to this. In front of the Gifford Medical Center I made this family, I call it Vermont family, at the time my wife and I had a little baby who died and we suggested we felt as though we were given such wonderful family care that I proposed the idea of a family sculpture to kind of symbolize the care that the hospital provided and thankfully they went along with raising the funds for me to do that which included going to Carrara, Italy to buy this marble which is a beautiful marble. Unfortunately, it's not the greatest stone for being outdoors anymore now that we have acid rain raining on it. And then the very first large piece I ever did is right by the Floating Bridge in Brookfield. It's a pair of hippos called father and son. My father had just died and my son had just been born so I named it that also because everybody always assumes it's a mother and child. And this is also the Bethel White Granite. And at the time I didn't have a studio, the fellow who commissioned this let me work in a field that he had that once I plunked it down on the ground I wasn't able to move it until I was done so I had to lay on the ground to do the lower parts. And because I was teaching at the time I thought it would be a great summer project but it ended up taking three summers for me to finish it in those conditions. Yeah, I would say it's not the hardest granite but it's very hard. All granites are hard. Compared to marble it's another much harder level. So you use electric tools? Yeah, you know people have carved granite but I look at the Egyptian sculptures which are some of my favorite and can't believe that I don't know how they did it but they carved these beautiful things. In fact one of my favorite pieces is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It's ahead of a queen and it's this yellow jasper is the stone that's broken right in half so the top is broken off and the bottom has these beautiful lips carved and the chin polished granite. And I remember reading that when they got that in the museum they didn't have anything in the museum that could drill a hole in it so they could mount it and here this thing had been carved thousands of years ago so beautifully and expertly. So maybe we'll, Bonnie if you could switch over to... Jim I want to make a note. Yeah. I'm talking in the water. Oh yeah. And I read came through. Yeah, well there, the read came through and the water level covered the grass so that it looked like the sculpture was in the water and it was kind of a nice sight. I'm glad it didn't stay that way. Get that full screen. Yeah, let me get the other one out of here first I think. I had a question about that one. The sculpture of the dog in the stick outside of veterinarian school. Did you know the story of the dog's being that green when you chose that? Yes, when I was chosen as a finalist, typically finalists go to the place and learn, you know, meet the committee and see where the sculpture will be placed and talk to people about whatever they may have in mind. In this case, it wasn't that they had anything like this in mind, it was just my idea and my fact that I like to use other surfaces as water, imaginary water surfaces. But I did learn that he had all these golden retrievers. He had a house with a pool for them to swim in and he left money for the woman who was taken care of the last of those dogs that were still alive who was living there when I went down there with the nine, two, two or three of his golden retrievers that came. For all set? Okay, so yeah, this is the short film and we'll have time for questions about this or the other things afterwards. Yeah, in 1980, after I had been working with the kids in school making projects related to whales, I had a dream and I woke up from the dream and the dream was that I was standing on a beach looking out at the water when these two whales' tails came up out of the water and I remember seeing the water cascading off of the tails, watching them and when I awoke, I realized that was something I was gonna need to do in some form of a sculpture and originally I thought it might make a good fountain with water coming off of them but I later decided it would be better to use the earth, whatever surface it might be on, grass or otherwise as an imaginary ocean surface so that people could get right up to the pieces and actually touch them and feel the scale of whales. I figured out that I could make each tail in two pieces and with steel pins and epoxy, attach the flukes on top of the vertical part of the tail, which is what I did and which is the piece called Reverence that ended up spending 10 years on the Exit 4 site in Randolph, which belonged to this guy whose name is David Threlkelt. After 10 years on this site, the owner found he had to sell both the land and the sculpture. A group of people in South Burlington who owned Technology Park ended up buying it from them and hired me to move them from Randolph to Burlington. You know, the Preservation Trust was formed in 1980 and the Whales Tales, the original sculpture was installed in 1989 and it was here until 1999 and as part of my job all these years I've done a lot of traveling around the state, really been to just about every community in the state, traveled interstate 89 a lot. I would often stop along the way because every time I stopped and had a chance to have a look at the sculpture, I would just sit there and smile. It was so surprising, so wonderful to just come upon this incredible sculpture, hopping out of the field in this very unlikely location was a very special experience. And then when the sculpture was sold and it moved to Chittenden County, it was a very sad day frankly. It was kind of a metaphor of what's happening in Vermont that all good things move to Chittenden County. And we've got to make every effort in the state to make sure that communities all over the state can be successful. And Paul Brun and the Preservation Trust helped to get the land conserved and at that point asked me about the possibility of doing another sculpture and at this point in time I had decided I was no longer planning to work in stone but that I would love to make something in bronze which would be along the lines of the original but a little different design. Bronze casting is a process that involves collaborating with a foundry in this case, the Polish Talix Foundry in New York was one of the only ones capable of casting something this large. So I worked with them first by experimenting on a small scale with little plaster models and I made these out of wire and screen and cardboard and applied plaster over the surface and made probably 10 different versions of these tails and different sizes until I came up with the one that I felt would be the best for the large scale. At that point I sent these models to the foundry and they were able to use them to enlarge in foam by a digital scan of my models so that the size of the pieces were exactly what I wanted which was 16 feet tall and about 12 feet wide across the flukes. Once they roughed out these foam patterns I was able to go and work on the foam, get it a little bit more to my liking and then a layer of metal screen was applied on top of the foam and about three quarters of an inch of plaster on top of that and from those patterns molds were made in sand the pieces were cast in about I would say six different pieces each one. Cast they were welded together and ground down finished what they call chasing of the bronze to get the smooth surface I was after. Patina which is the application of chemicals with a torch that oxidize on the surface to make a color that can be anything from green, brown, black as well as other colors. I was looking for mostly black with a little bit of green showing through in places. I have the opportunity to not, I didn't think of it as doing the same thing again because they are quite different but obviously they're both two whales tails but I felt like I had a lot of years to think about what I had done originally and what I might like to do again and not really thinking I'd ever have the chance so it was incredible to have this opportunity to try again. This sculpture, the original sculpture and we hope this sculpture will be one of those things that will contribute help contribute to the efforts that are going on in this community to build a stronger downtown and village center up on the hill. Sculpturb, Sculpturb in Gen Least and I think others, it makes you stop for just a moment from our crazy days. We're the things that we have to deal with in our lives and then all of a sudden you see this sculpture and you stop for a moment and smile, calm down a little bit, respite in a busy day. The director of preservation trust unfortunately passed away just two months after that sculpture was done so I was so happy he got to see it in place. I'd probably stop there more than anybody else and it's thrilling for me to have them back there again but I'm also checking on them unfortunately discovered the first graffiti on them. It's marker, which shouldn't be too hard to get on. Fears I've had, but you have to take that chance. Was that a decision about the lighting at night? I wonder how they're not lit at night and I wondered if some of that's to protect them or would? I don't know either. At one point I know I was told I wasn't at the meeting but there was a community meeting in Randolph before the sculpture was done and they knew there was gonna be it up there and someone thought I had told them, which I didn't, you know, that it was gonna be lit and apparently there was quite an uproar from the people there about having it lit up here. I don't see why, no they didn't like the idea at all. I don't know why, because McDonald's certainly is. Well, but maybe it's, you know, at this point there's not money there to do more with it, whether it's lighting or otherwise and the plan originally by the preservation trust was to offer the sculpture and the land that's on to the town of Randolph, which they did and the town turned it down. Not exactly sure why, but they didn't want the maintenance which was very little needed. But there's a little- Like scrubbing off of graffiti? Right, yeah, yeah. I wonder if a camera on there could help with the rest of the handle? Yeah, maybe, but we'll have to see. Do you and Maryboulds know each other? You look familiar. But you wrote the most beautiful home prayer. I tried to find it, I want to send you a copy. I'd love to. You did, because I've just retired, so I'm between about previous computer, my home computer, they're not at all communicated. I couldn't find it, but I dedicated it to you. And you wrote about the sculpture or? Yes, I happened to be praying in church that Sunday after the event at Chandler and I did it about before. Thank you, that's nice, I'd love to see it. Thank you so much. Did you create the table list in the foyer at the hospital? Yes, I did. Good guess, not too many other whale-tailed guys around, but yeah, I made two of them. One of them belongs to a friend and Maryboulds. You haven't seen it in the lobby of the hospital, or two browns tails that form a table with a piece of glass on top. It's in the waiting room there, in the lobby of the hospital. I'm curious, how do you think of the whales? Are they, since you knew the father and the son? Yeah. And the family, are they friends? Are they siblings? Are they, what happened? Do you have a thought about this one? Yeah, I think of them as a couple or a pair. And the reason they're placed the way they are is because I think of the rest of the bodies underneath and how they relate to each other. And in this case, I think of it as a hug, that they're parts that you can't see if you could imagine them extending and curving the way that the tails do. Below the surface, they would be touching. The whales do that? I think they do, I certainly don't know that they do it exactly like this, but in other orientations, certainly with young ones, you see lots of caressing and touching each other. So I don't think it's too big of a stretch to think that they might not do something like that. Jim, when you go to a foundry where it's created, do the workers feel like they've created this creation? Yeah. I mean, are they more than just workers? Are they craftsmen? Oh, yeah, most of them are sculptors, you know. Oh, okay, I'm curious about that. Yeah, lots of sculptor background and people who are artists in their own right, but it's one of the few jobs artists can do and get a regular paycheck for. So a lot of them do work in that arena, but they were very, very appreciative and really liked the sculpture, which made me feel good. This foundry in New York does work for most of the big name artists in the country and around the world. So I felt lucky to be able to have work done there, the top notch place. Did they ever see them? Well, I sent them photos, yeah. They have a team that does the installation, which I've hired them to do, but I've sent lots of photos to them. And do they commission you the sculpture or does the sculpture commission a foundry? How does that? Yeah, the sculpture commissions the foundry. They'll get a quotation of what it's gonna cost to do all the stuff that's needed, the making of the mold, the casting, the patina, and in this case, the delivery and installation. So that's usually quite a large figure and that doesn't include anything for me. So that's how things are, at least how I price things, knowing what it's gonna cost me out of my pocket to get this thing done. I have to get reimbursed for that as well as my time that I'm putting in. Yes. What's the average time of takes when you do a piece? Most of the large pieces I've done have been between six and nine months. This was basically a year's project, although I wasn't working on it constantly. Somebody there was mostly working on it throughout the year. But the original tales, the reverence piece that I carved out of granite, I spent nine months working every day on it. Do you have any future projects? I'm hoping, I never know if the one that I last do is gonna be the last one to get to do. I have a design for one and I have some interest that I have not got a firm commitment yet, but if I get to do it, it is a very different design for a whale's tail that doesn't have the vertical part. It's just the flukes at a diagonal, but it would be 25 feet across, which would be the size of a blue whale, the largest whale, so that's what I'm hoping I get to do, but I don't know that I won't. Are you gonna tell us about the frog? Oh, yeah, and I have another little short, well, I was gonna say, if you could get back to my little thing there, I've got another short little thing we could show to anybody who needs or wants to leave, I don't feel free to, but I have this frog, which is up at the new Vermont Agriculture and Environmental Laboratory, was another competition, the most recent one that I entered and won, and so I've put on here my presentation to the committee to kind of show how I go about trying to get work. In this case, it worked out, you know, you have to try a lot of times and it doesn't work out very so often, it does, and in this case, my little model, which was this size that was made out of plaster originally, I photographed it and my son, who's great with computers and digital art, you know, helps me in these situations, like that dog with the stick in his mouth. I had a photo of the model and a photo of where I was gonna go and my son made it look like it was already there and people sitting on it, you know, he could do that part, but he helped, I originally proposed that they put this in the lobby of the laboratory, but they decided they really would prefer to have it outside, so the photo that I had him help me with showed my model with it inside of the lab. But one of the main things that the laboratory does is water testing around the state and this was partly what made me propose this idea because frogs being the fact that they absorb everything through their skin can be the ones that work cast a problem with contaminants in the water. I think we need to take this out and add it again in order for it to, it won't. It's not showing. You've added it, come on. So I kind of referred to it as the canary and the coal mine in that when frogs start to have problems which they already are in many cases becoming deformed and it's typically from chemicals that have gotten into the water. So that's that V-A-E-L, yeah. So once I was chosen as a finalist and I decided this is what I wanted to propose, I put this together to show the committee on the night that the finalists were proposing their ideas. And was yours the only frog that was proposed? Yes, yeah. Yeah, there were some great ideas. Again, because some of these things require people to use their imagination that that's not really water that the frog is sitting in. You have to imagine that it is. I'm never quite sure whether people are gonna go with it or not, but it's been so far so good. Same with the dog. I almost didn't propose that. Several of the finalists with that North Carolina state piece was proposed, the guy who left the money with his dogs around him. And the committee told me that he was someone who very much would have preferred my idea and not wanting to be in the foreground. He was very much someone who liked to be in the background. And on the back of that dog, I made what looked like a dog tag on a scholar that had the fellow's portrait and his name and dates. So he could find who it was. Yeah, this is just a series of slides, some of which may be redundant, but I'll read them so you don't have to. My work is inspired by natural forms, human plant and animal. This is the Champlain piece that I showed you earlier. Same with the fiddleheads showing human and plant and animal. I didn't show at the time all examples of my work, so I put a few of these in. And then one of the themes in my work has been to use other surfaces such as grass, brick, et cetera, as imaginary water. This forces viewers to imagine unseen parts below the surface. This being an example of that. This was a piece that was commissioned by a fellow who saw the Whales Tales in Burlington and he happened to have gone on a sailing trip with his wife from, started on the East Coast and ended up West in the Marshall Islands and they came upon a typhoon, which they knew was gonna happen and they sailed into a harbor and decided to spend the night there. And they were invited to join the local people in the town hall, but they wanted to make sure the boat was okay, so they stayed on the boat. And in the middle of the night it changed direction and came right through this harbor and the boat was destroyed and his wife was lost. He was washed up and he wanted a memorial to her having seen the two of mine. So I made one similar that has a engraving on the side of a little poem that he had written, but he wrote a book about the whole experience called Dark Wind, which I have. You can find it, I'm sure you're interested in this being the original one. This is now where they are in Burlington. This is my favorite view, which is if you're traveling south on 89, you get to see the hills in the background more like you did when they were here. So this, my proposal for this site was inspired by the next photo taken by Vermont author and photographer, Mary Holland. The head of a male green frog emerges from the water and the rest of the body is unseen below the surface, substituting approximately 64 blue tiles for the gray tiles that they had planned for the lobby. A bronze frog's head between three and four feet tall and four to five feet wide will sit in the middle of the blue tiles as if in water. This is the photo that I went to a presentation that this woman, Mary Holland, she's written several great books on nature. One of them is called Naturally Curious, but she's a fantastic photographer as well as a writer. I highly recommend finding her books. One of them goes through every day of the year and tells you what's happening in nature in Vermont, relating to different animals, plants, birds, beautiful photos and very interesting work. Anyway, I saw this photo at her presentation and I said, I'm gonna make a sculpture like that. So this came along and my design highlights one of the most important functions of the VAEL, which is to test waterways for dangerous pollutants. Guy Roberts, the director had this to say when I asked whether the lab tests lakes, ponds, rivers and streams, yes, we test all the surface waters you mentioned for nutrient runoff from farms and acid deposition that drifts from out of state. Of the 30,000 samples we test per year, this type of testing accounts for about two thirds of the work, so it's a very important focus of the lab. A huge percentage of our work ultimately helps protect our surface waters since they're connected to so many Vermont activities and seem to get it to change here. Well, that's okay. I was talking about why I felt like it was a good idea. And here's the little model that my son made up for me with a child there to kind of show the scale. But if you take a, you could probably almost walk from here up there. You can see it out in front of the entrance to the building there. I think that's all that I have. I think that's the end anyway. So anyone else who has questions, you're welcome to ask. Was the fog passed here in Randolph Center? No, Bob Wright has cast things for me. I've worked for many years with a friend of mine who has a foundry in West Rutland, and I had already kind of committed to having him do this at the time, but Bob's doing a great job. It's great to have this foundry here. He casts some of these small ones for me. Right now he's doing some. That is the grunt on the wheel stand. And are there indeed reinforcing rods inside? The bottom of each of the bottom sections has a framework of stainless steel which is welded inside of the bottom and then eight inch legs extend down to the foundation. So they're bolted in, they were bolted in first and then we filled in eight inches of dirt up to the base of the sculpture. So before the sculpture came, the first thing was to had to demolish the top layer of the old foundation that had been there originally just because it had been there for 30 years and these were a little larger. So the shape of the foundation needed to be different. So we broke up the concrete, then poured a new pad and I tried to keep track of where the rebar was in the cement knowing that we'd be drilling holes to attach these not wanting to hit the rebar. So you might have seen one of the shots of my daughter helping draw red lines on the concrete which corresponded to where the rebar was so that when the fellow came to install he came a few days early with the bolts which he drilled according to our patterns that we had left there to avoid the rebar. And then a couple of days later after the bolts had been epoxied into the cement they were able to just lower it down and luckily they lined up the way they were supposed to and just put nuts and washers on and tighten it up. So it's bronze is very strong by itself and they have engineers who had to approve the design and decide whether it needed extra reinforcement inside which it might have, but they decided it didn't. So how big is this stick? So the bronze it's always about a half an inch thick something this small is a little less than that but something that size typically is about three-eighths to a half an inch thick. Well thank you all for coming. Thank you. Thank you. It's possible for that now. Who owns the brand off? They still are owned by the preservation trust whether they will gift them to another entity I hope they'll maybe try again with Randolph and having seen that it is somewhat of a draw for the town that maybe they'll be more receptive to the idea, but the other thing is possibly the state of them what they may give it to. They have the responsibility because this frog came through the art and public buildings program that means that this among many other public art pieces are the responsibility of the state to maintain. So they will be coming here to do the maintenance on the frog and I was suggesting that perhaps they'd wanna take these as well. So we'll see. It's not really up to me at this point, but I hope that there'll be someone in charge of maintaining them which simply means applying a coat of wax twice a year to keep the patina the same as it is now. When you do nothing it ends up turning that green color that you see on a lot of old bronzes or copper roofs which doesn't look so bad, it starts eating into the metal. So it really needs to have that little bit of maintenance which is really about a day's work for one or two people. Did Randolph give a reason why they were rejecting it? I wasn't there at the meeting, but I think part of it was the maintenance. Part of it I think was they felt like they're getting some benefit without having to do anything, but I don't know, I think it happened to be the particular makeup of the select board and the town manager that felt they didn't want to do it. Anyway, thanks again for coming. Thank you.