 Okay, I guess we start 628 call the meeting to order and do we have addictions to the agenda? I see that we do. Yes, I will brief you all on an increase in the attempt to access town funds by unscrupulous individuals. Okay, so we'll put that in somewhere. Yep. All right. Review of minutes March 20th. Does anyone read them? One thing in the select board organization on page one is I think thank you for noting that Mr it and I are recused himself from the vote for the vice chair. I think it's worth noting that Mr Gardner recused himself from the vote for the chair. Absolutely. I've got your back, Seth. I feel you're very close to being the throne. I just have on page two conversations conversations with the state police. Just a little thing is, Mr Jewett asked if there would be any issues with if the town just just yes. I think a motion that we accept the, the minutes from March 20th 2023 select board meeting with the noted changes. Anyone got to make a second. Yeah, Carl did. Oh, Carl made the second. All those in favor, please say aye. Hi. Hi. The eyes appear to have they do have it. So the next public comment. Do we have any public. I do not see any. I do not hear any. Okay. Go. The next item on the agenda is a conversation with Washington County Sheriff Mark Poulin. Please step up, Mr Poulin. So there's actually two of us here this evening. We have a mic close to Carl and a mic here. So I don't know, Brett, if you want to come here. How's that? Are you all set? They both sit here. And we put that here then. So good evening everyone. I'm Mark Poulin. I'm the Washington County Sheriff. I don't know if I've met any of you. I'm sure that we don't know if that's happening, but I guess that's what I think. I don't know if that's ever happened or not. So nice to meet you all. With me is Captain Bret Meyer. He is the patrol division supervisor for the department. So he will be doing much of the speaking this evening as it is his department to speak for. So when it comes to the patrol activities, May I suggest since you point out we don't have a prior relationship that we just go around and introduce ourselves. Please because we don't even have. I'm on the select board and I live here in East Montpelier. I'm Carl Etnair, I'm on the select board and live here in East Montpelier. Scott Hess, select board member, I have to live here or I wouldn't be here. I'm Deirdre Connolly, I take the meeting minutes. I'm Gina Jenkins, I'm the town administrator. I do also live in East Montpelier even though I don't have to. You don't have to. I don't have to. So you're the town administrator of the East Montpelier select board. So I've only been given a cursory information about this evening that you're interested in contracting with the Sheriff's Department for some patrol activity. So Brett can give you the summarization of our services the best. So at this point, Captain, would you go for it, please? Okay, I know many, many, many years ago we did have a contract. I want to say at this point it's probably about 20 years ago because I was only here a short time. I started here with the Sheriff's Department in 92 part time when I was working water very full time and switched over here in 96. We did probably, I want to say, six, eight years before whatever reasons at that point in time we parted. So it was quite a period of time and I remember we came back in and did a presentation where we were going to be working along with the state police and that ended up not happening either. But anyways, generally our patrol programs are mostly motor vehicle enforcement, but we are in fact first responders. So if in fact there's a major situation going on while we're on patrol in the town and or one of the neighboring towns, we're going to be a first responder to that call. So we in fact do those enforcements. We generally do, I know in the past here it was like three hour blocks. I'm not really sure what you're looking for at this point in time. That's something for definitely for discussion. I generally do three hour blocks in the either morning hours or late afternoon hours when the community traffic time is. I can tell you, depending on what your thoughts are, we're not seeing all the way around or even finding middle of the day is a big problem with speed now. Woodbury for instance is one of those that they did the tapes, which I love the tapes, the speed tapes, if you guys have access to the regional planning commission to get those put out on different roads, they tell me exactly what's going on. You're going to have your residents who can see things going on. And a lot of times their information is true. Other it's at the big truck and that big truck sounds loud. So it's got to be speeding and it's not, but you know, they're these tapes do wonders. Cause I generally what I do is I ask you to send me a copy of what you get for statistics. And I go through those statistics and actually look at the speeds the times are happening and organize patrols around the times those are happening. And you know, if there's one at midnight that's going through it, whatever speed, am I going to schedule somebody at midnight? Probably not, I'll just say that. And unless we have issues, I will say that if we're doing highway safety details, which we do as well, and I know that's going on, it might be a good chance we might be out here for that. But that's generally how we organize our scheduling. Right now, we presently have what six full timers on. Six, yes. Yeah, six full timers on. And generally there's four to five of us that are doing enforcement. We are trying to hire one more full-time patrolman. We have one full-time patrolman now. We're looking to do one more. That will kind of settle us in pretty well to be able to cover the different towns that we have. At the present time, if we were to take you guys on, they would make 11 towns out of, I think it's 14. Out of the 14. Yeah. It would be a very long time. We have been in Woodbury for quite some time, yes. Yeah. Think of the longest contracts that I know over the Waitfield Warrant Contracts, which actually were in place before I started in 92. So I used to hear about here, I'm doing enforcement now, I was working in Watterbury, and I started there in 89. So. Yeah. So how does the contract work? I mean, say we contracted for 20 hours a month, would that be a guarantee to 20 hours a month? Or how does that work? You want to answer that? Why don't you answer? At the present time, I don't want to make any promises. I'll be open with you. It would have to be dealing with staffing. Like we said, we want to get one more full-time patrolman on. We can kind of guarantee a day a week, maybe possibly two days a week, and be able to build up from there once we get another full-time person on. So a day is how many hours? Well, that's again, up to you. I know in the past, we generally did three hours out here. Different days of the week, but again, that would be up to discussion tonight. A lot of it is you need to tell us what you want, and we will work around that to come up what the two of us can both arrange between our prior commitments and what you're looking for. Okay. It might take a little while to get into a schedule or into a process. One of the things, and I'm sure Mark's going to get into is, we've kind of did a rate structure change on effective July 1st, and a lot of the different towns, some are still contracting for the same amount, others are reshifting what they're doing for their scheduling. That's going to open up a lot of things for us. Per example, the Valley who increased their budget based off of what the rates are, are also organizing their time a little differently. So that's going to give us that person to be able to generate out to different areas. So again, like I said, we can definitely grab one more full-time or we're going to be really set on that end of things. So that's kind of where we're at at this point in time. I don't want to promise you anything only because depending on what goes on depends on what I have available at the time. Yeah. Could you explain the system that you use for deputies coming and fulfilling the contract on your end? We understood from Vermont State Police that they fulfilled the contract that they have had with us with non-mandatory overtime. So they don't have anybody there who can say to a trooper, okay, this week you're going out to East Montpelier. It's strictly voluntary on the basis of each individual trooper. I generally set the schedule at the beginning of the month. Like I can tell you, my Sunday morning was doing the schedule for the month because I wasn't able to get caught up. We had a busy week last week. And Sunday morning I was doing the schedule for the month for the guys. So some of the stuff is done by part-time staff. They send us our availability and we plug them in whenever they're available. On the majority of our patrol work is done by the full-time staff. So it is just part of their daily schedule. So you might even, it is not, it is their daily job. So the contract means that you actually will try to fulfill those hours by telling people to go do the work. Barring, someone gets sick or gets injured or something like that. You know, things that are out of our control occasionally upset the other part. But for the most part, we schedule people as just part of their work week, so they will be here. Yeah, according to the needs of the town, according to the contract. Correct. Hours, yeah, okay. We try to be as flexible as we can. We're a small department. We're challenged with employees like anyone. So every now and then we have something that comes up last minute and we need to pull someone. But we avoid that whenever possible. So having, if we get that one more person, it'll stop a lot of that from happening. Right, and then you would take direction from the select board or the town administrator on various spots in town that might need some patrolling or enforcement, like speeding and stuff like that. We try to set up a point of contact. Somebody from in the town, whoever that person is gonna be to be in direct contact with the patrol supervisor, which is Captain Meyer. And that way you have that close relationship when a complaint comes in, it goes straight to him, he pushes it out to the staff and then we deal with it from there. Okay. That tends to work fairly well. We've had situations where we had multiple phone calls. It just doesn't work out because we end up with a dozen different complaints and tends to be they're all for the same situation where I hate to say it's better you guys can deal with the situation. We're looking obviously, if we're getting complaints, is it a particular person that we're dealing with, particularly vehicle, I should say, date and time that's happening or specific day that's happening, I should say, and the time it's happening. So again, I can schedule things accordingly. And again, we can work on our scheduling based off of what the complaints are as well. So if you got complaints at three o'clock in the afternoon, I don't wanna schedule somebody at seven o'clock in the morning. Yeah, right. As long as we have communication about the spots in town that needs something and that you have the ability to not always guarantee someone to be there, but at least make an effort to get personnel in the spots that we need them. Because that's been kind of lacking in our relationship with the state police. There's been months they've done zero hours for us and that just doesn't really fulfill some of the needs that we have. And not that we have a lot of needs, but we do have complaints about speeding in various areas of the town. It would be nice to answer those complaints with some enforcement. In the coming months, you're gonna have a lot of those complaints so every time of the year. Oh yeah. I know. One other thing we try to provide for the towns is when we have these contracts or even sometimes when we don't. Myself, the captain and our sergeant are all state employees. So occasionally when a complaint comes in, we'll come out and just do it on state time on our own time just to try to help out. We don't guarantee that at any time, but we try to get out here as much as possible. I'm gonna say, and remember, we addressed the situation at your elementary school here back last fall, was it? Which was a situation that unfortunately wasn't able to be dealt with by someone else. So we're able to come up and deal with the situation. I do remember there was some different issues and one of the things I will bring up is we definitely are big on proper signage and having the signs up that need to be put up, et cetera, on the roads, because I don't wanna be out writing a ticket that's never gonna hold up in court. I'll just want you to know that up front. Yeah, that's good. So how often over the last, I don't know, six months or a year, have you come to Eastmont-Pulier on what you call state time? Well, the state time is kind of spotty. It depends on the nature of complaints. We're out here frequently on grant time, which is highway safety money. Okay. So that can be for occupant protection, distracted driver, DOI programs. A lot of times when you see us doing car stops out here, it's been on those grant programs. How often have you done that over the last six months? Fair amount, fair amount, yes. Hours off the top of our head. In this area quite often. It's frequent for us to make our way out through this way, stopping cars through here, getting into Plainfield out through that way and segregating into different areas. One of the things that I'm also in charge of is the highway safety programs. The old program called Clicker Tickets now called Buckled Up. I basically run that program for the county. So we basically designate where we're gonna work in given days and generally what we have, usually it's five to six cruisers in areas. And one of those, I hope you open with us, is Eastmont-Pulier, that we work in general area. So it'd be like Eastmont-Pulier, Calis and Woodbury would be that day. And we would have that number of cars in the area for the day working. So that'd be more or less than once a month, so yeah. Well, that's a set thing that happens in May. So it's just something that we do. As far as the other, the DUI and the distracted driving, those things, it generally, it's about hit or miss once a month that I'll put together our highway safety detail. It all depends on what we've got going on because there's different set times that we're supposed to work by way of the contracts. So one of the things that I work off from and where I designate where people are gonna be has to do with what the crash problems are. If there's high crash ratings in a given area, we work that area heavily. So data-driven is the basis for everything we do these days. That's what the feds expect. That's what the state expects. So yeah, you go where the problems are proven to be not where you think they are. And as we said, by time of the day and the day of the week, again, it's data-driven but it gives, it works. Yeah, well, I like the data-driven approach and I realize that we don't have the data from the tapes to give to you. I like your real proactively saying that would be helpful but based on what you've observed in town over the time that you've been working here, where are the hotspots that you think your presence would be more helpful? I'm sure you still have a hotspot on Town Hill Road. That never changes. It's always been a hotspot. Route two out here is a hotspot. You guys just had a major crash recently out here. I know the state police just did it. They did one of their coordinated details out here two weekends ago and it was nonstop. Again, it was high speeds and that was on the weekend. So as far as designated areas where we would work, I can tell you one of the places I would be putting more attention to would be Vincent Flats. School means a lot to me. I haven't looked up there and it's something I actually need to look at. One of the big changes that people may not know about if you designate a school zone and sign it properly, it's double the fines. All you have to do is put an ordinance in place. It makes a big difference. It makes a big difference. It makes a big difference to people's mindset when they start dealing with those type of things. Again, one of the things we do is we use Facebook to put out information. We don't put people's names out there unless it's an arrest. But other than that, we put out information based off of what we're doing. And that gives kind of an insight that this is serious. And like I said, that school zone area up in there, that's serious. I know when we're having the problems up there, I actually spent a few days up there just myself setting up there, dealing with things. Okay. And the cost for this, I don't remember what we were paying for the state police, but I can't have to negotiate that. And we can negotiate it now, but. I can't answer that question, what you're paying state police. So we have two models set up. We are changing our billing structure due to many different reasons. The current rate between now and July 1st for all the other towns is currently at 3125. After July 1st, it's going to 60 per hour plus mileage, which is the standard federal rate for mileage. The reason for the large increase was, we sat down with our accountant and ran numbers. In long story short, we were using money generated from other contracts to supplement the patrol contracts. We were actually losing money on the patrol contracts, which we don't have the staff to keep that kind of supplementary process going. So that the cost of the program has to cover itself. We're getting different computers for the cars. We've had to update a lot of our equipment. Body cameras are a thing now as of last week. They're incredibly expensive and modern policing is expensive. And so as much as the previous sheriff like to look at it as a service provided, unfortunately we are a business and we have to, every program has to pull its own weight. And just to clarify that. So it's $60 an hour? $60 an hour plus mileage, yes. And that rate is the same regardless of who the officer is. Sorry, sorry, so that is the same across the board. Yes. And the way the state police contact works, I think some of the fine percentage of the fines went back to the town. Is that the same way? Anything that's covered by an ordinance that's in place, be it for speed, be it for stop signs, whatever the ordinance is covered. The towns when a violation is written get a certain percentage of that money back from the state. So that same process would continue. What that percentage do you know off the top of your head? It's a calculation, I'm not even gonna guess. This is like Vermont Ticket Barrel or something. Yeah, Vermont Ticket Barrel, that's correct. So I will hit on that a little bit. Back in 2016, one of the things that legislature did for us was put in place for us a couple of different things. One was gives us the ability to deal with points depending on how many violations and moving violations, et cetera. The other thing they did is wanting us to work with people on fines. So it's not uncommon for us to generally go into a traffic hearing and be asked whether or not we wanna set and talk to people and try to work out things before a hearing. That's the new way. So it's very common for us to work with people and deal with things so you're not having to pay for a traffic hearing. You know, pay for us guys having to go to traffic hearings. It is a way the world is gone, unfortunately. And basically legislature was the one that did it and they push you to do it. How do you decide when you pull somebody over whether to issue a ticket which would result in revenue or just issue a warning? First of all, we don't do enforcement for money to make you money. I'll be open up front for you. We do highway safety, that's what we are doing. So depending on what the circumstances depends on what we're doing. How egregious it is. Correct, it's the totality of the circumstances at the term we use. You have to look at the big picture. What was all involved? Yeah, we tell everybody don't go and put money into a contract based off of what you get back and find money. We tell everybody that because that's not what we're doing. We're out there for highway safety. We don't want the bad crashes out here. We are trying to do the safety part of things to make it so you don't have people dying on the roads. Thank you for saying that. When Seth and I were on the select board when we first started the current set of contracts with the Vermont State Police, and we were very clear as a select board about our intention. We expected that we get some money back. We did not expect it to cover the expense of the contract and we were just fine with that because it would improve safety. Excellent. Okay, so I think we just have to figure out what is the rest of the select board interested in pursuing us further with a Washington County Sheriff's Department or what are you all thinking? I have a bunch of other questions, but I don't have to take them in this meeting. We could handle them outside of the meetings, Seth, I know you like to keep the meetings going relatively according to the schedule. But we still have nine minutes left till we get to the next item. Okay, but he just, but he did ask if what we felt is a select board. And I would have to say I am in favor of that. Yes, unanimous here. Yeah, I am too. I'm interested in pursuing the question. Yes, yes. Yeah. Nine minutes is not terrible to... Would you like to get more questions? Yes, so, or move on. Seth, you want me to continue with my questions? Well, you can continue with some more questions depending on how long-winded they are. So, I want to ask you about first responders. You said that if I understood you correct that all your officers are first responders. Okay. What does that mean? So, if in fact there's a crime being committed at domestic somewhere or some major crime, we're going to be there as a first responder. We're going to go there and quell that situation and it'll be the state police that obviously deal with the mass part of the issue. But where they are, perfect example, something happens at U32 where if we're on scene or on here in the town, we're going to be there immediately. If we're at our office, we're going to be there immediately if it's U32, but here knows there. If we're on in town, we're going to be there immediately. I'll extend a little bit further on that. Actually, Mark's in EMT. We're looking to introduce also to make it so all the people are EMRs, all of our enforcement people. So, that's emergency medical responders and then he's opened up to the people who want to be EMTs. He'll pay for them guys to go to the EMT school. Guys, girls. So, EMTs are, how many hours are you training? Oh, the course is a lot. It was five months of two nights a week and every other weekend and it's a lot. How many hours, I couldn't tell you. And EMR is more training than? EMR is the next level down. Next level down. So, by statute, we have to do first aid training every year, but it's really not much. So, this would be more so than we do now but not quite to the level of EMT because that is quite a commitment. EMT also have continuing training requirements every year which are a lot. You have to have. Yes, correct. So, it can be a lot. So, EMR is going to be you shall EMT for a handful of if you're interested. So, it's one more service we can provide. That's a work in progress and obviously it's gonna take a year or two to get that rolling, but it's coming. One thing I expect that we, this is already happening obviously with state police work staff, we're taking a fair amount of their calls depending on what they are. It's very common, a minor crash type situation. Somebody's gonna involve injuries at that type of stuff. We let them handle that aspect of it. We'll obviously be the first responder but other crashes, we're very capable of doing it. We're capable of even doing one with injuries but we don't wanna be charging you guys the extra money and all that's involved in the extra investigation. So, the minor crashes, it's gonna take us clearly no time to do. There's no sense for them having to run all the way here to get here if we're already unseen and dealing with it. So, we already started that in a lot of the towns. And I understood from the state police presentation that there are different levels of law enforcement training for their troopers. I believe it was a three-point scale. Does that sound familiar? There's different certifications in this data from on one, two and three. All our officers are level two or level three. The only real difference when you get down, somewhat depends on the individual agency. Level two, you have kind of a, there's a range of what you can do and what you can't do depending on what training you're sent to. We train our people to a very high level as a level two officer. They are fully capable of handling everything except what statute says they can't which is a handful of stuff usually involving death and sexual assault and things of that nature. So, it's stuff that we tend not to deal with within our contracts anyways. So, it's kind of a moot point. And at this point, one of the things that was hiring one more full-timer on is hopefully, one, that person will be a level three certified. But we have two people that we're hoping to be able to send to the full-time academy here within the next couple of years, being able to get them up to level three. So, our intent is obviously to have a lot more level three certified people out here than what we normally have. And then I reached out to our Washington County Senator Ann Watson because she's been on the House committee sorry, the Senate committee that has been looking at the bill reforming the sheriff's departments and told her, hey, we're having a discussion just based on what you've seen, what questions would you suggest that we ask? And so, these are not directed with any thought towards what's happened at Washington County Sheriff in particular, but just from her perspective in the state as a whole. And one question is, do you expect the sheriff to reside in Vermont for the duration of the contract? And I'll ask, do you expect to reside in Washington County for the duration of the contract? So, I- The sheriffs have moved out of state while still being paid. I was born at CVH, I've lived in Berrytown my whole life other than college in the Army and I chose to come back here. I have a 10-year-old at home, so I'm going nowhere for at least eight years, so. Thank you. Wow. So, what sort of work schedule or log would you maintain? I think you've given a pretty good answer to that already. Is this for the patrol contract? Yes, yes. We're no different than the state police. We're all around what we call Velcourt. That's our criteria system now. So, as far as if you're looking for what can I give you for data, I'll be able to give you the same reports that state police do. If you have one particular that they're using that you want me to basically copy and use, I am more than pleased to do that. But, all you gotta do is whoever's gonna be the person in charge, let me know what you want and I can present stuff to you. Accordingly, you could get a rundown of all the stops and everything, the type of stops and when they happen, where they happen. Pretty easy. Yeah, pretty easy. And the hours work, so. The hours work that's done through our bookkeeping part. That'll be done through the invoicing. It'll give you day, the hours work, the mileage driven, blah, blah, blah. Okay, so. But as far as the other data, that's easy. You just, you tell me what you want and I'll put it together. Okay. And then the next question is, what sort of conflict of interest policy you have at the department? And she mentioned one sheriff created a non-profit that was basically named the same thing as a sheriff's office and the sheriff was raising money through it. So it had at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. So there isn't any conflict of interest policy. That sure is. It's actually it's a state policy. It's the state policy, correct. Yes. That's built into the statewide thing. But there isn't anything that specifically prevents that, but those of us who were aware of that, we're just like, oh God, it's nothing that's ever gonna happen to the Washington County Sheriff's Department. So you don't have any other entity other than the department that you raise money for? We do not. There's some mailings for the Vermont Sheriffs Association, which is a statewide organization of all the sheriff's departments as a whole. But that has been around for, I don't know how long. As long as I know. As long as I know. That's a state approved entity. I am at a couple of board of directors for a piano technician group, believe it or not. I'm a piano tuner. I'm the president of the Piano Technicians Guild. And I'm also on the board of directors of the Green Mountain Council, the Boy Scouts here in Vermont. So that's my involvement with other organizations. It doesn't sound like people would be likely to mistake those for the sheriff's office. Not really, no. Okay, and then finally, she wasn't sure whether this is applicable to the contract, but I'll just throw it out there. When someone receives a relief from abuse order and they need to go back to the house where they used to live to get their stuff, usually a sheriff accompanies the person leaving the relationship to get the stuff. Unfortunately, the sheriff's department usually charges the person who needs to retrieve their stuff for that time. What's your policy there? So, the TROs can be the restraining order. I used to work for Montpelier PD, for example. We would go and we'd serve them and one person would have to leave and they would be given the opportunity to receive, to go back to the house and get their belongings one time in the presence of law enforcement. And any police officer, any constable, any sheriff's deputy, any state police officer, any law enforcement officer can do that. But it all came down to, most agencies are like, we don't have time for that, call the sheriff's. It really comes down to, they all have their main roles versus us, we do all kinds of different things. Outside of these contracts, the sheriff's departments don't have a budget. We don't receive any money from the state other than my salary and two employees' salary. But the vehicles, the equipment, the training, the uniforms, all of that are paid for by these contracts. So, when we go out and do something, somebody has to be paying for that. So, we've always go see the sheriffs and we've done it as a service because nobody else is, but they've needed to pay for our time because somebody has to pay for it. Okay. So. Okay, and then finally, the town is a member of the Vermont League of Cities in town, so we have a couple of advocates there working for us. I'm curious if you have any reflections that you'd like us to hear on this legislation relating to the sheriff's office. This is just, my personal take is this is more of a human problem than a sheriff's problem. A few people were doing things that they shouldn't have and they are no longer here other than the gentleman in Franklin which is working its way through the criminal justice system. So, the people that were a problem are gone when it comes to oversight of the sheriffs. The sheriffs are a constitutional officer, the same as the governor. And who oversees the governor, the voters? Who is supposed to oversee the sheriff? The voters. So to set up to have these sheriffs done some things that they shouldn't have, you betcha. Am I upset as everybody else? You betcha. But this is not the way to solve the problem. This is a human problem, so. So just to move forward, I think we're interested in, everyone on the select board seems interested in pursuing this to maybe finding out how many hours a month we're thinking of. We were at 20 hours a month with the state police. I don't know if we need much more than that. If you're at the three hour a day or six hour a week, is that the increments that we're talking about? We do it by the threes. I'm gonna look to do three to six hours a week. Now, we twice a week you get enforced if we're staying on a three hour schedule. Yeah, I mean, I just trying to make it fit with your schedule and our needs. So, I know it's not gonna come out exactly 20 hours if you're doing three or six hours a week. If it's six hours a week, that's 25, 26 hours or something a month. If you tell us what you would like, Brett can sit down with the schedule and figure it out. It doesn't have to be decided this second. It won't break the treasury if we haven't worked 24 hours actually. Let's see what the budget is. Yeah, we can look at the. Yeah, so we'll look at our budget and figure that out, right? I can leave a copy of the draft contract behind for your reference. That'd be great. Hey, Seth, I just want to say something to it. I drove for eight years to Hargwick. I was a town manager up there. And I'll tell you that having, anyway, having the sheriffs periodically there at Woodbury Pond and around that whole area through the camping area where you're supposed to be driving forward and everybody drives faster, that actually slowed people down a lot. And I really appreciated having you folks there. So, and if you do the same thing here, I think it's going to be a really good improvement for us. I think so too. And especially on the areas we've had problems with up by the old meeting house and areas like that, we've had a lot of troubles speeding up there. And I think this is my work. So I'm, I think we should pursue this contract myself and see what it's going to cost us and how it matches up with our budget. That sound good? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. We don't need a motion rating. No, because we won't do the motion yet till we figure out what the costs are and how that's going to fit in. We have to look over the contract. So just one other question. We're in here talking with Vermont State Police. It sounds like they don't have a lot of capacity for us at this point. But should that change in the future? What's your experience working with a town that has a contract with both Vermont State Police and the Sheriff's office? Historically, I don't know if it's ever happened. I know that we were supposed to many years ago and I was to basically cover center road area, cover many years back and never attrition, but that's the only one that I know of. We have a good working relationship, so I don't see there being any issues. We don't have any problem with the State Police. It's just that the contract that we have with them has not, they haven't been able to fulfill it. And there's, when they say we've worked zero hours, January, February, March, well, why do we have a contract? It just didn't make any sense to me. It's like, we do have some issues, not a lot of law enforcement issues, but if we have a contract, it'd be nice if it was fulfilled at least to some extent as far as the hours work goes. And it sounds like you folks are more on that same page where you put it on your schedule and the contract gets more or less fulfilled. So I think that's the intent and I like that. I like the intent and I like the fact that you're gonna put it on your schedule. And I think that we'll get more, I think we'll get some enforcement where we need it. That's the feeling I'm getting. So thank you for coming in and leave a sample contract and we'll see how it works out with our budget. We appreciate your time. If you have any questions, let us know. I'll meet you soon. Well, thank you very much. You were very, very informative and thank you for answering the question so well. I appreciate it. So we're on camera, do you have body cams? We do. There's a little boxes here or four. Yeah, okay. Call me here. Call me here. Yeah, I'm already on several cameras. Yeah, I'm already on a lot of cameras. And that reflection is off cause head has killed me. I mean, I'm sorry, I just really love yours. Okay. Okay, so now what is going on here? Do you folks have a screen or maybe I do? Oh, well, can you see me or not? What's that? Kinda. Kinda, yeah. I gotta see if I can get rid of this but I'm not having much luck. Anyway, what's that? There's a blue button. Yeah, I'm trying to get it taken care of, but. I'm trying to do what Sean just did. I'll make that dialogue box go away. I can't, I'm trying to make it go away. I'm not having much luck. You're a technical consultant nearby? I know my consultant's gone. But let's go to the next item and I can flew around with it while we're talking. So the next thing is discussion on ARPA funds and it's review VLCT ARPA information. And that's, so here we go. I could possibly, I had some really good conversations with the VLCT experts on ARPA in addition to probably even more importantly the town's external auditor, Sullivan Empowers. Because I was kinda going round and round with this on how, what the best way is to approach it. And speaking with the auditor was great. What many towns are doing, as you see what I wrote in the memo is essentially the overarching guidance is to cover, use ARPA funds to cover your employee salary and benefit expenditures. It's very clean to do that. The idea behind this is when you allocate or use ARPA funds to cover salaries and benefits expenses, you're just essentially telling the federal government that this is what you're using ARPA funds for. You record a nice credit in your general fund for allocating the funds to ARPA and that frees up your general fund to then reallocate the general fund as needed to your capital reserve, whatever the case may be. It's a shell game. It is a shell game. I'm trying to speak very politically correctly, but yes, it is a shell game. So when I spoke with the external auditor, that is the guidance. So I've put together a list of the general funds that I think I forgot to print out and put in there. Well, it's in the memo actually. I forgot, I copied it in the memo. So what I'm proposing we do is I will call out the broadband enhancement as $100,000 allocation. So we have to do reporting April 30th. I'm gonna call out the broadband enhancement because we did commit funds to CD fiber. That's a pretty clean thing for us to identify as a use of ARPA funds. I am in the process and we'll present to you at the next select board meeting a proposal for a chunk of salary and benefit expense that would then be attributed to ARPA or would be using ARPA funds to fund in this April 30th reporting. The one piece of advice and a lot of literature that I've read is to you have until December 31st, 2024 to obligate your expenditures you have until December 31st, 2026 to spend the guidance is if you're using salary and benefit expense show that it's all been spent by December 31st, 2024 because in doing this, you are identifying the employees you are identifying the costs. If employees leave, you've lost that employee theoretically that bucket of money would that you've considered obligated would disappear. So it could be lost. So they're suggesting that if you're going this route which again is the overall advice that they recommend that you do there's lots of articles on this by the way but that you just show that you've essentially spent the funds by December 31st, 2024. So that is what I'm working on. So I'm currently going back the reporting period for ARPA runs from April to March which is inconsistent with our year end. However, we had something very interesting happen in April last year and I was hired and we had some transition of staffing that occurred in this office. It's actually a pretty ideal time to start looking at staffing costs and allocating costs or identifying costs that could be ARPA eligible. So that's what I'm working on. One thing I am looking at is the guidance on the auditor told me just get a spreadsheet together show the costs and this is what you're saying is ARPA but I just wanna do some reading. I'll probably take it a little bit more detailed. Odds of us ever encountering audit from the federal government is pretty slim. They're gonna probably go after the 10 million and up people. But so that's kind of where we are. The next step to this though is we obviously wanna keep our eye on the ball as to what the ARPA funds were. So we'd still need to, I'm proposing this just goes into and Michelle and I have talked about this. It just kind of goes into the general bucket but I still think it's good. We all know we have these funds. These are additional funds that are above and beyond that we have identified in our capital or have available in our capital reserve. So we still wanna maintain a project list of how we are using this extra money that the town is going to have to use for future projects. So that's, this is a start of the list. So it is a start of the list for us to, I was getting in more detail trying to find you see the employee laptops. This is when I was trying to get into incredible detail for the April 30th reporting. I can back off on this a little bit though I don't think it's bad to have your eyes on some of these potential expenditures as well. So, so that's the next agenda item. But yes, we need a phone system. So, you know, there are certainly things that we know that we need to do. So this was me, these are the things we know that are on our radar. Obviously we have a significant amount of money that would still be allocated beyond this. And I was guessing at some of these amounts. So, you know, have no idea what the design of the town garage is gonna be. But we just, we know there are things we need to do. So this is my attempt to get this going. But, it's actually in the memo, right at the beginning. Yeah. Okay. Okay, thank you. There's a little box on your second page, page three to five. Yes. There's a little box at the top. Okay, thank you. Have we been approached by anyone from the community asking us what we're gonna do with the money? Oh, well, I mean, it's a question. I mean, I think actually Kim Watson brought it up in the town forum, I think. And then Twin Valley, this was a long time ago. I'd have to go pull back when did submit a request for some funds. So I mean, I think the second piece of this is gonna become the question of how we get this out to the community to get obviously four corners recently came to us with the mold issue in the four corner schoolhouse, which is gonna be discussed in detail at the next meeting. So, I mean, this becomes, I think I've requested if we probably create a committee to field these types of requests because someone's gonna have, I mean, we're gonna have to The select board is gonna have to determine how they're going to hear these requests and how you're going to prioritize and how you all want to move forward with that. Because we have been asked these questions already. Yeah, town meeting or otherwise, what are we doing with the ARPA money? Yeah. It's their money. So, just so I mean, just for the sake of the record, we're talking about the ARPA money, the American Rescue Plan Act money. The town has an allocation of about $763,000, of which we've already committed 100,000 to, or given 100,000 to CV fiber for broadband expansion. And we have earlier on for us to establish guidelines that we are not gonna use this money for ongoing expenses, but for one-time expenses. We also have talked about cuts a little bit against that, possibly using that to reduce the tax rate when we set the tax rate for this upcoming year. So, if we do this shell game and use the ARPA money to pay for what are really ongoing expenses, employee expenses, then we know that we have for actual ARPA allocations, we have these deadlines that you've mentioned at the end of 2024 and end of 2026 to commit the money and then spend the money. What does that shell game do to our deadlines? Is there any deadline for using that money? They're using the funds in perpetuity, that's the point. They're obligated at that point. Because you have now eliminated the risk that you obligated funds, potentially hired a contractor, whatever you're going to do that now can't complete the work by December 31st, 2026, you are now on the hook for that money, your ARPA money would no longer be eligible to be used for that funds. Right, and so we could. That's the point in this. So we could keep it on the books for as long as we wanted to pay for some future one-time thing or something that's in the pipeline that we're planning or that does not mean that we would need to take all the ARPA funds and use it to reduce the tax rate immediately. Okay. Now, we would end the year with a surplus and we can decide how we account for that surplus. Yeah, okay, very good. So yeah, that's the whole idea. That's why, I mean, the words I used were not mine, but it frees up the non-grant revenues that would have been used to cover salaries and benefits to be expended on new projects and programs to increase fund balance or to replace other revenue sources. So the freed up non-grant revenues are not subject to award terms, time limits, or other federal grant regulations. That's the point. And ideally the ARPA money should be used for one-time expenses. Something that's not gonna leave us short of money the next year or the year after the year after. And that's really what we're gonna do with it. Yeah, that's what we're gonna do. We're just getting it into a bucket that gives us free access to be able to use that and not be restrained by these time limits. So good chance we'll probably spend the money before 26 anyway, but it eliminates that requirement. So the only question really at this point is, you've talked about reaching out to the taxpayers about various projects that people might have ideas for. Is that something that, that's something we need to be cognizant of now? Is it not? We need to be establishing a committee and doing the reach out. Yeah, it's an interesting quandary because if you have a forum or you put stuff out on Front Forge Forum, solicit your ideas and then how do you call them, censor them, rate them, and who's gonna be, would there be a committee that sends it to the select board? Should it be a committee of non-select board members? As me, you know, yeah. We've handled things like this in the past by having a committee of non-select board members with one or two select board members on it as liaisons. If you have fewer than three, then it doesn't trigger quorums of the select board when you meet. Yeah, I guess it's a leap of faith. You gotta be common sense. We have to do something. The public has to be engaged, it's not that, and it should be. Yeah. But do you just do with solicit emails or do you have a forum? Probably put something in writing. What have other towns done as far as community reaching out to the community? Does anybody know? It's all over the place, sending out a survey to having a forum, to having a community day. People bring their ideas, so I think it's, and I mean, some towns had needs already identified and they needed the funds for, you know, building issues that needed to be exactly, they got a saving grace of the funds that, so some towns, I don't know, they have gone, I don't know that they did go in solicit because they just simply, there was nothing left by the time they dealt with what they needed to do. There's no small towns in the information you sent. I looked at it all spreadsheet. Yeah. Just the big hitters for the most part. Yeah. Yeah. If we do this shell game, the money that's freed up, are there any restrictions on using that for matching grants? Very good. That's also the point. Yeah, okay. Good question. Yeah. Yeah, right down in there. You can match. You've eliminated all of those restrictions by doing this. Because it's clean money now. Yeah, exactly. It's your money, it's the town's money, just like if you raised it exactly, it's your regular tax dollars. Yeah, that's right. You laundered it so speed. Oh boy. I didn't use it. I was gonna say that on a video, but, but you've laundered it in a nice, clean way. That term is used. So. Is that what you're saying? Be careful because it's something called the recall. Reaching out to the community, how do you present that to the community and then what do you do with the information that comes back? Yeah. So, I mean, you could actually do just a special meeting say, hey, let's go to this meet up and we're having an open hearing or whatever, open meeting. People can tune in or advertise that somewhere or post it or put it on front porch form. And we could have a select board meeting and an hour or two was devoted to that. You could do that. I really think you have to also let, you know, it's like an Australian ballot. You have to give the opportunity for people to send in an email, not just a forum, people, childcare, whatever. The reason why we only get 150 people to attend to a, you know, March meeting. So I wouldn't just have a forum. I would have, I think the email is better. Anyone have a forum, but I wouldn't exclude that. I'd be getting. Well, I'm open to ideas. You can mail out surveys to everybody if you want to. That's really like the Australian ballot is you mail a mail ballot to everybody and they have the choice to respond or not. You can have right in. You can send a candidate right in project. That's an idea too. Or at least a postcard with a link. Well, like we're interested in doing something with the town of Grouch eventually and with the town offices eventually. And those could be in there as potential projects, but we can also have right in projects. That would work out pretty well, I think. And we could, we could work with the planning, planning commission that they're responsible for long-term planning of the town. Say, okay, what comes up to the top of your lists that cost money. Stick them with it. And there's also the rainy day fund. Yeah, yeah, I guess you can. And once you've made it through the process and you've used your money for the project. Yeah, you can. You spent that money on salaries. Right, that's right. But you just can't take that money and put it into a rainy day. That's it. I understand. You already spent the money on salaries. You already spent the money. We already have a rainy day fund. I understand. Is it sufficient? Yes, it is. Oh, what if it's... More than sufficient. We have lots of money around. You never have enough, Seth. Well, that's not the agreedy here. So why don't we... You never have enough cows or money. Okay. It's a joke along this whole way, by the way. Are we going to do a mailing? Is that what the consensus is? A postcard of some kind? Trying to remember what sort of comments we said at town meeting and town forum that we're going to do. So it'd be consistent with that. Did we talk about having a committee formed or just that we were going to have a public process? We're going to explore it, but I don't think I remember any detail. I don't know that we said we had a committee. I think it would potentially be helpful to have the committee formed and then get some committee ideas, because who knows what they're going to come up with. Because someone seeking interest in joining a committee would be helpful. But I think Gina's right, Seth, to have a forum and committee. Okay. What are the ideas for the committee then? Five members, one select board liaison, seven members, two select board liaisons. We'll just worry about the members. One of us will definitely show up, even if we can't go to every meeting. We'll have representation. Five people on the committee, if we can get it, sounds logical to me. I think we will have interest on this committee. I do, too. Yeah. Should we want to put a number? Maybe if we get so many qualified people, it'd be seven. Maybe it should be ambiguous. Yeah, we could say five to seven for now, yeah. Okay. And we want to advertise for those members? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. It'll go on the website, the conference forum. Okay. We'll do it in a forum by. Okay, so let's do that. So that'd be a first step and we'll advertise for five to seven members. And then we'll see what we get and then we can figure out what we have to fill in with select board members. Well, I think it was May 1st, at our May 1st meeting. If we can get the members by, yeah, that's a full month. Yeah. Is that reasonable in terms of your timeline, Gina? I'll get this posted this week. Yeah, okay. Cool. Okay. Let's do that. At least we get something started. So we are right on schedule. No, we're not. We're 10 minutes behind. So we better get rolling here. Is everyone willing to move to the next item? Yeah. Yes, sir. Okay. We made a plan for ARPA. We will advertise for committee members and we'll finalize the committee on May 1st. So 715 consideration of local emergency management plan. Len. I think you're sent something out. You skipped one. No, you skipped one. He may have, I gave him some papers. Oh, do the phone, do the phone. Consideration of quote for new town office phone system. Seth, we have a. Oh, I've got a different agenda. Yeah, you have the preview agenda from last week. So there's a new, I got an official quote from RB Tech to replace the town office phone system, which is 16 years old and was installed or and was refurbished when it was installed. So it wasn't actually new even 16 years ago. So I got a quote from RB Tech for $11,265 to replace our phone system. And there will be a monthly charge of 750 per month for the new phone system, but we will catch up to modern times. This is a very similar system that exists at the emergency at the ESF building. Yeah, the fire station building. Yeah, okay. Do we currently have a fax line that's just a POTS line, as they say, plain old telephone system line? And will that continue to be in place? So in case the power goes out, we'll still have one functioning phone here. Yeah, okay. Did we just go out to bid? Does it have to go out to bid? So technically the policy would be over $10,000. We would go out to bid. We're pretty close to that. RB Tech is gonna be the preferred supplier. So I would like to just move forward with RB Tech if we could. They're local, they currently manage all the technology in the office. They're incredibly wonderful to work with. So we're close enough to that that I felt like we could probably hopefully make it work with RB Tech. Yes, that's my preference also. We know this is a fair price, I assume. I mean, I trust me. I thought it was gonna be 15 to 20, so from my Googling and researching. Oh, okay, so you did some preliminary, okay. So it's in the ballpark. Yeah. Okay, as long as there was some investigation. What? I'll make a motion. Do you need a motion? You got to, I make a motion to accept the bid for RB Technologies for the new phone system. Okay, seconded. John, John, you're seconding it? Yes, sir. Okay. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. You guys have it. So now we will move to the next item with consideration of local emergency plan, LEMP. It's an annual requirement for town to adopt a LEMP. The format of the document is consistent with prior years. Yep. The document set that would require yours and my signature, which we can do when you return. Yeah, I'll be back in a couple days. I can sign on Thursday. People can also review it if they haven't, you know, with theoretically. It doesn't look like there's too many changes. Now it's select board members, Bruce to me. I did tweak a little bit of the document based on my meeting with the state, just to clean up the way it was laid out a little bit in certain areas based on the experts. Recommendation, but overall consistent with prior years. Okay. Sounds good to me. So we do need a motion to adopt it, I believe. Yeah, one thing that just strikes me this time, and I don't know why I haven't noticed it so much before, is at the top of page two, under resources, emergency spending limits, this gives the select board chair, the authority to spend an unlimited amount of town money, in the case of emergency, I believe. Is that standard? So previously it said no limit, which was unclear when I met with the state of what that meant. The person with this today told me they would read that as everyone on that list had absolutely unlimited spending capability. So I wrote this in an attempt to create some type of spending limit. So that was all that was there before, it literally just said no limit. Okay, and do you know how other towns handle it? No, he said it's all different. I mean, how different towns decide to handle it. So his only recommendation was, he said what you have in here is unclear to what it means. Do we want? So do you want to set a limit? We can set it to anything you want it to be. Right, I mean, our current select board chair, I have great faith in to use the authority judiciously, but he won't forever be the select board chair. And I hate to see this just automatically go forward without a future select board member or select board catching it and revising it. But you do adopt this every year. We do adopt it each year. There's a chance to flag it, but I don't know. The reason is no limit is because you don't know what the emergency is gonna be. And we really, in some situations, wouldn't be able to sit down here and warn a meeting, or warn a special meeting, or call an emergency meeting, and get down here and make decisions, you know? They're trying to take a little bit of that complication out of it. So just to be clear, we do have the ability- It's for a dollar. What was that said? It's for a dollar, we'll see what happens. Set it for a dollar, is that what you said? Sure. So just to be clear, we do have the ability to convene an emergency meeting with no public notice whatsoever. So we could get three people together. I would want to suggest maybe 100,000? Exactly. What's the downside? Or just use your fund balance, whatever the fund balance is. Because we can also get together on Zoom. Right. Well, you know, if we were going through a thing called a pandemic, we might not get together. If we were going through a power out at the same time, we might not be able to get on Zoom. Who is going to make the decision? Those things would never happen. Those things would never happen. We'd never have a pandemic. We'd never have a power out. Yeah, five and a half days. OK, I'm going to throw that out there. Do you remember what you had when you were? I was about to ask. When I left from my other job. Where was that job? The town of Hardwick, which the point, though, is that we weren't using this form. It was different than this. And there wasn't a limit. There wasn't even an amount there. You just designated who was responsible. It was kind of what we had. And it was an emergency management. Where did you say no limits? Like I said, the person I met with said that really kind of means it's unlimited. There was an emergency management coordinator, which would have been a chair that's like Ward and a chief of police and the fire chief. Just since this is my first test of this. So in theory, the head honcho of the select board, the chair can spend unlimited kink of dough to spend an emergency. I need to spend a million dollars to buy that cookie over there. Does somebody else have to sign off on it? I mean, what is the checks and balance of spending a dollar or a million? Is there if it's a declared emergency? That's what we're defining. So again, previously it said no limit. Right, but what Seth says, I want you to wire $500,000 to Nigeria. What does the treasurer then have to report it to the town administrator? Does it have is there? We don't know. That's $100,000 on this right now. Why would you send money to Nigeria, Mr. Reckley? I mean, I think at the end of the day, there would be some inherent checks and balances. If something were a request were to come in that did not make practical sense, certainly if I saw something, if Seth were requesting to do something, certainly I would reach out to someone else on the select board if I thought there was something inappropriate happening. So you can't really do much without this office. So exactly. Someone has to write a check. And our entire credit limit for all of our credit cards is $8,500. So Guthrie couldn't even really technically spend up to the $10,000 unless he put something on account. I don't know what you could buy for $1 million at East Montpelier Homesetter. But I don't know if this is the case, but let me just be the devil's advocate here. It seems to me that if we pre-authorize the select board chair to spend an unlimited amount of money, that that person can call up somebody and say, I have legal authorization to ask for this million dollar item on behalf of the town. It doesn't matter whether you guys are going to write the check out for it. He has the authority to do it. You have to. The town has taken on that debt in that case. Does that make sense? Yeah. Put a limit on it, then. He said, I'm going to put a fast dollar. I'm with Carl. I'm in the Carl camp on that. 100K. It's not with me. Yeah. Makes sense. I don't care. It's not with me. Right. And it'll all change when these plans are great, but no plan ever stands the first moment of battle anyway. Exactly. And would you make a note, Gino, to bring this up with solvent powers next time you talk with our external auditors and just because you talk about anti-corruption things with them just to see if they have any suggestions here. Yeah. I mean, I can ask them. I don't. Yeah, I don't. Usually this is more based on policies than it is audit. So we don't necessarily have a policy on this. So I'm not sure that how much. Well, this is our policy, right? Essentially, but it doesn't get into the authorizations. We have a purchasing policy way of this. This is usually not something that, in my experience, I would fall under external audit review. Maybe they don't say it's outside our purview, but that would be useful information too. And just the way I interpret this, it says right under resources. It says use municipal resources, mutual aid agreements, and local purchases first to get resources for response as needed and available. So I'm reading that anything beyond that is what we're authorizing. So even if it did say unlimited, it would not quite be unlimited because there would be that whole set of limitations. 100,000, I think. So I just like to move on. Yeah, I would, too. So you want to settle in or not? Yes, we can write the limit in. And then just when we approve the plan, we'll approve the limit. Yeah. Yeah, I'll do great. So we're not approving the same now? No, no. Unless you want to state that I make that change to $100,000 and then when Seth returns, we can go ahead and sign it and send it off. If that's the only change we're making. So is there a signature that's required on this? Yeah, previously it was Bruce and Seth. Yeah, OK. So what did you do? We need to restate the motion. Well, I mean, yes. So the motion is to adopt to accept. To have the change of the limit, the local emergency management plan as presented with the change to set the emergency spending limit for the select board chair to $100,000. Sure. Why don't you just set it for the amount that's in the contingency fund? Kind of like that'd be smarter, but the fund balance is $200,000. That would require the select board chair to look up that number in an emergency? You may not know it. Yeah. It's two. It's about $264,000, that's the thing I knew. But I'm not exactly sure of that, but it was pretty close. We agreed on $100,000, two of us anyway. I honestly don't care. You could put for $10 for all I care. I really don't. If it's sufficient emergency that we'd want to spend more than $100,000, I think this select board would converge on the town office and we'd have an emergency. I think that even if they got to $100,000, that would be a lot of money. Yes. Yeah. So anyway, if you want to put $100,000, let's do it. And then make the motion, including that. And then I'll sign it when I get back. I stated a motion. I can make it. And who made the second, Scott? I did. OK. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. All right. So the next item is consideration of the community capacity building mini-grant. And Ben McCall of the Energy Committee will be intended to discuss the request to submit an application. He said you are here. Can you discuss the request? Yeah. So I'm Ben McCall, I'm the facilitator of the Energy Committee. And we came across this municipal energy resilience program, or MERP, from the state of Vermont, which has three upcoming major features. One, which I'm here today to talk about, is a up to $4,000 community capacity building mini-grant. The second piece of this is free building energy resilience assessments for municipal structures. And that unlocks the third piece, which is up to half a million dollar implementation grants, which can be used for weatherization, thermal efficiency, renewable energy systems, and so forth. The energy resilience assessments are not yet ready. So all that's out right now are these community capacity building mini-grants, which is basically you can ask for $4,000 to support the activities of the Energy Committee, maybe if we might need to hire a consultant to get a little bit of data in support of developing enhanced energy plan, or if we want to have a community forum to discuss ideas around energy planning, or things like that. We don't actually have to specify exactly what we're going to use the money for. We just have to ask for it. And it's a first come first served grant. It's non-competitive. So even though the committee is just getting started and we don't really know what we're doing yet, it seemed like we ought to go ahead and apply for this so that we get into a queue. So it's not non-competitive. You don't have to specify what you're going to use it for. There's a series of tick boxes that are on the application. So you can tick Energy Committee and consultant and community forum or something like that. And do a short little paragraph. There's not even a narrative. You just have to say who the town authorized or representative is, what town you're in. I sent Tina the application and kind of pre-filled it out for her. It's just a point. Just because they don't want to read all that stuff. For $4,000, I think they don't want to deal with the reports. Oh, I understand. That's great. I think this is pretty controversial. I'll make a motion to do the... I'm sorry, Mr. Chairman, but I'm cutting the thing off here. I'll make a motion to give approval to go for the mini-grade. To the Energy Committee. For the Energy Committee. Thank you for serving. That's my motion. Do we need a motion? Oh. We just got a let's say I'm applying. We're not applying anything. I withdraw, Mr. Chairman, I withdraw my motion. Actually, no, it's the town that applies, not the energy committee. So Gina would have to go and fill it out. So by consensus, we authorize Gina to apply for the mini-grant on behalf of the Energy Committee. Yeah, he's given me everything to say, so I just have to go and click it. Perfect. Okay, cool. Excellent. And so while you're thinking about financial resources that are available to you, I don't know how much you've talked about further weatherization of town buildings, but I just want to inject into your conversation the fact that we have an anonymous donor who is willing to give $5,000 to weatherizing municipal buildings. Wow. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Great. Well, I think as we do this, the next step will be to do these energy resilience assessments, which are free. And then that will kind of give us a shopping list of things that need to be done on the municipal buildings. And we can apply for this up to $500,000, and then we can supplement that with the $5,000 from the donor. Cool. OK. Thank you for serving with the Energy Committee. Nice. Thank you. And sharing it. OK, so do we have a motion for Gina to do the paperwork for the mini-grant application? We don't need it. OK. So. You guys are good with it, so I'm going to do it. We've done the wave. OK, sounds good. OK, so I think that's it for Ben. Is that correct, Ben? Yep. You're all good. Thank you. Thank you for coming in. I'm not allowed to stay. It's a hangout, so you just did it some second. And I'll have to be aggressive and get rid of it. It's so entertaining. I might stick around for a while. Oh, yeah, very entertaining. Thank you. So we're going to go to the next item, which is consideration of VTRANS or payment. I guess that's it, right? VTRANS grant applications. Well, we have the annual financial plan first. So this is essentially this. It's essentially the same document you saw last time. It just includes repaving of Townhill Road. And then next, you're going to see a grant application to request funding to help support the repaving of Townhill Road. So as long as you're good with this, I can send this document off to VTRANS. Do we have to offer you to move ahead with it or do you? Actually, this one actually requires since there's three of you here, you can sign. So I can't remember if I stuck. Yeah, I think there is a copy of it. So basically what we're talking about on the highway financial plan is the same. We talked about last meeting about paving. Yeah. Yes, OK. I just didn't want to move forward with this yet because I was meeting with Michelle Redman, our VTRANS representative for our district. And I just wanted to go over it with her before we moved forward. And what I had was fine. So everybody OK with us signing this before I set my pen to paper? Yes, sure. OK. OK. Do you need a motion for any of this? No, you all are physically signing. Well, they're going to physically sign it. OK, that sounds good. So what they're signing is the annual highway financial plan? Yes. So you're done. We're done with that item. So the next one is consideration of VTRANS grant applications. Yes. So I have two applications. One is for the repaving of Townhill Road that I would like to submit. The only piece I'm waiting on is Guthrie's going to take some pictures of Townhill Road. So before I send it in, I will get pictures to send with the application. And then the second is I'm requesting an extension of the grant BC 2063, which is the Center Road Mallory-Brook culvert replacement. That is the historic, famous historic culvert on Center Road. We need to extend this because the deadline for it is December 31st of 2023. As we all know, Doug Newton was the engineer working on this project and unfortunately passed away. Bruce Johnson was also working on this project, has retired, this has sat idle, and it was essentially idle really the beginning of last year. Essentially at Doug's passing, it kind of stopped. So we need to get easements. I reached out to Chase and Chase to ask if Chase and Chase would have the capacity to assume essentially an engineer project oversight role of this project. They do have the capacity to do so. What exactly that means financially? I don't know. So one, I'm giving you an application that I'm gonna ask for an extension of the timeline of this project because clearly December 31st, 2023, we will not have that culvert replaced or the stream altered. It's a new culvert, it's not even replacing the culvert. And then secondly, I think it may be worth spending some time for Chase and Chase and some money for Chase and Chase to update the budget for this project. We have no idea where this is going to be. The last estimate was 262,400, but that was in April of 2021. We all know that the world has changed dramatically since then. So we need to get an idea of what the cost would be to do this work. And then I can also ask Chase and Chase if they can give me an estimate as best as they can of what they think overseeing this project would be as well from their perspective. And then it will come back to you at that point to decide where we go with this. The grant value on this is $175,000. And I mean, that's fine that you're filing for the extension. I'm just not sure about all the various pieces, what's been completed on the whole project because I know the Army Corps of Engineers had to sign off on it. There was a wetlands snafu on the whole thing. I don't know what happened to all that. I believe, I don't know specifically, I believe a lot of this is resolved. I mean, that's part of what I need Chase and Chase to help with, is to determine where we are. There are four easements that do need to be obtained. And that was where Doug, that was what he was actively working on. The construction easements? The easements of the property owners that are in this area. He was actually in the process of waiting for snow to melt. And he was going to start having detailed conversations with people in April or March to April of last year. Passed away in January. So we need to have- Some are relatively easy to get. So I asked if your construction easements are permanent easements, permanent easements are a little harder to get. But if you're doing construction, you usually go out at like 15 or 20 or 30 feet on either side and those easements disappear after the construction's over. I think one or two may be a permanent easement. Was it a higher once? Yeah. So I know one, the initial landowner that they were gonna be speaking with, I know there were just questions that she had. It wasn't that she was in opposition, but it was very hard with all the snow on the ground. She just couldn't really get a feel for what Doug was talking about, which is why Doug was gonna wait for the snow to melt and then meet with her. So we need to kind of have all those conversations. So I, again, I don't know. I know a little bit about this project. So I did call Mr. Johnson about it, but. Okay. So the first step though is to file for extension. Yeah. I mean, filing for this extension doesn't cost us anything. It at least punts this so we can decide where to go from there. Because I mean, we have no idea where the costs are gonna be and what your appetite may be at that point to even move forward with the project. Is there any chance that it would not postpone it? Hard to say. Michelle, when I met with Michelle Rudman, she, as soon as I said, you know, Doug had passed away, she just was like. And so it was almost like, yeah. You know, it seems like it's a reasonable request. So I feel confident that we will get this extension. For the sake of our new select board member and also for our record, you mentioned this, some of this Gina, but this is a culvert, that historical culvert, which is undersized for the current stormwater standards. And we can't simply replace it in the, we've been told we cannot replace it in the place where it is, which would make the most sense that's where the stream is. Because of its historical nature, we would destroy this beautiful stone culvert. And so we are being required to reroute the stream to a place further uphill and put in a bigger culvert there. And then as Seth mentioned, there's some wetlands questions. There were some archeology questions, but I see from this paperwork that that was checked off in 2021. But it's your tax dollars, a lot of your tax dollars at work to preserve some rocks. You could take those rocks and just give them to historical society and put up on the wall somewhere around it. Well, it does not have the rocks, it's the carving on the rocks. The initials are carved in there, the people that did the work. Yeah, is this a reset of stone? Is that it? Okay, so do you need anything else so much Gina? Not really, I don't think I need a motion or anything for these. I just, as long as keeping you guys up to date on what's going on unless you had any opposition, I will be submitting these grant applications. Thank you. Thank you. It sounds good to me. Thank you. So the next thing is the access permit, curb cut on Santa Circle. That correct? On Santa Circle, which that permit was already approved. It was 22072 and road foreman Perry has reviewed the plans, has indicated that a culvert is required for this application. So any questions or concerns that the select word may have? Who buys the first culvert? I think they do, yeah. Yeah, every town is different. But yeah, it's amazing. We get new houses in this town, it's phenomenal. It's amazing. Do you want a street? Do you need a motion? Yeah. Do you need a motion? Yes. Yes, I make the motion to accept this permit. If that's the proper language. To approve curb cut. Yes. To approve curb cut permit 23-005. Exactly. Yes, that's my motion. And I'll second that. That'd be my motion. That'd be my motion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. You have the folder there as the actual curb cut permit. If you all would like to circulate that for signature. Oh yeah, right here. The next item that I have is discussion on town management light of COVID-19. I was thinking that we could get this with that. Thank you, Gina, for putting together the statistics as you usually do. I was talking in last meeting or the one before about waiting until the federal government ends its state of emergency in May to take this off our agenda. But I'm thinking, you know, we just keep saying the same thing over and over. And that's not going to change in May. So I would suggest that we put it on the agenda for next time. I'll try to put together some language for us to approve in terms of taking it off the agenda as a permanent item. And we can always bring it up again in May or June if we need to. How does that sound to you guys? That's great. Sounds good to me. Okay. I didn't think there'd be objections. Yeah. Very good. Very good. So that being said, I'd like to put the. Other business in now. Or on the banking question. You have the regular expense. Which is. The normal regular expense for it. But you have a second warrant. That has a check for $4.3 million. That's a good amount of money. That's a good amount of money to move the vast majority of the town money out of M and T and deposit it at Northfield savings bank. We received a call this morning from Lori Tarion, who is our representative with M and T. That an attempt was made to access the phone response system on M and T to gain access to our bank account over the weekend. It was either Friday or over the weekend. So they have a real impact on that. No, they're not. The attempts to get to the town's money have increased. They should be going. I mean, no one has gotten a dime from any attempt to write the multitude of fraud. Michelle has. I don't know how many reams of paper she's gone through at this point printing out the fraudulent checks and a C H attempts that have been made on our account. But the fact that someone attempted this is very disturbing. who then reached out to us because Lori was reaching out to us to say it may be time to set up a new account. I had already told Lori that we were looking to move banks. So finalize that discussion today to let her know that yes, we haven't just in fact decided we would be moving over to Northfield. We're working on getting everything set up, which is why we hadn't reached out to her just yet. The account is set up. So we spoke with Northfield today, we decided that we really wanted to get the lion's share of the town's money out. We're leaving about $355,000 in M&T and Michelle is going to be, you know, we were already in process of working to do this. We were just trying to do this methodically. There's a lot to think about when you're changing banks and not rush. Doing what we're doing still gives us a little time, but I would feel much better knowing that $4.3 million is not in M&T and is sitting in another bank account and is no longer connected to that bank account anymore. So I have a second warrant with the largest check that probably the town has ever written to move $4.3 million. Michelle will personally take that check to Northfield Savings Bank tomorrow. You have a second, you have in the folders in front of you with the warrant. You have, I think the one on front, the note right in front of you. Yep. I think that's the warrant. The first one that's loose in front of that folder is the $4.3 million. So it's literally just a check written in Northfield Savings Bank. It's hot. You don't have the check, but... That was so big that it wouldn't fit into the regular warrant. Yeah, I haven't seen an amount like this in a long time. So... There's a lot of interest in this. Yeah, Michelle and I kind of laugh because it even prints a little weird. And I said, I don't think Nemerc was set up to actually build print numbers of this amount. So we need to just sign this. Yeah, I'm just... Yeah, it's just like a normal warrant. It just happens to be a very unique check, which is why we did it on a separate warrant as well. So we're doing warrants now. We're going to do this other one first and we'll do this one. Yeah, that's fine. I have a question on the other warrant. Yes. It's a big one. Dog biscuits, is that you? That's not. You're the animal control officer. We give dog biscuits to doggies that come into the office. Oh, okay. I should probably help myself to some of those because I use them professionally. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I give them coffee. I use them professionally. Is this something came here? Animal control officer. Oh, when you have a stray dog, dog biscuits are really, really helpful. Yeah, I think that's why I thought it was you. Yeah. Yeah, good thought. What do you have for the stray cats? I found... I got a call the other... Well, it came up incidentally in a dog call, but I got... Somebody mentioned to me the other day that her cat was... She said 50 feet up in a black chair with not a lot of branches down below. I told her I had a cat that went way up a tree and cats... I've not seen... They don't go down backwards the way you think that they might. They just turn... They try to run. Yeah, they try to run right down, and my cat was not going to run down from that tree. I just left her up there all day in the theory that I've never seen a cat skeleton in a tree. But when it got near sunset, I put a ladder up against the tree and went up and got her by the nape of the neck and held her out so here so she wouldn't claw me. But this woman said that the cat was beyond ladder range for her. So I don't know what would work in that case. All right, so we're signing set. So you're just no motions? Regular one? Okay, regular one. Yep, thank you. Okay, and I'll sign this one. Is that it on the vanishing things here? Yes, we will keep working through all the pieces in part, but I will sleep much better tonight knowing that we're going to be getting this money out. Yeah, great. Yeah, that's good. Michelle was literally shaking when she got that call today. Like she came into my office to get me and she was shaking. She was freaking out so much about it and I calmed her down. But you know, but it is, that is disturbing. Yes, right. And it's comforting that they caught it. Yes. Do you think you'll have a bank transition done by the time taxes come in? We're going to work on that. Michelle and I were talking through, she hadn't yet gotten into all those levels of details yet, but she needs to think through what all systems we need to try to change. And then my only concern there is I certainly do not want any hiccups. The only thing that would affect or that would go into M&T is anyone that paid online with their taxes, any checks that are brought in at this point will be deposited to Northfield Savings Bank. So we're going to work on that. Could you remind us, just so we have this in front of our minds, why we think that having the account at Northfield Savings Bank will greatly reduce these fraud accounts on our account? It's smaller. It's not going to reduce them today because the account with M&T is still open. Until that account is closed, attempts will still be made. Right. It could happen in the future with Northfield Savings Bank. M&T has a bigger exposure because they're in Northfield Savings Bank. I personally think they're being targeted. I mean, the town was with People's Bank for years, never had an issue, had positive pay in place. It was never used. It was never needed. And then this bank transition happened and suddenly this started within a month or two of that. Our account number is out there. That's the thing. As soon as your account number is out there, it's fair game. I mean, you know, anyone can type those numbers onto a fraudulent check and attempt to cash that fraudulent check. And do you mind if us, with the transition going on from one bank to the next, not from us in Northfield, but from M&T Bank to who's with People's? Yeah, with People's. That is a possibility in the confusion they might be able to get some money. Maybe that's why they're targeting them. Yes. Interesting. Well, and keep in mind, I mean, I've heard that other towns have had this type of thing happen. If you don't have positive pay, those checks are getting cashed. So then you're in an even bigger scramble because now you have to close your account immediately. We have positive pay with M&T and had it with People's, which carried over to M&T, which is why none of these checks were actually cashed. We have positive pay as well with Northfield Savings Bank. So yeah, I mean, you know, the difference is if it were to happen, we would have to cancel, we would close that account and start a new one with Northfield Savings, you know, but the hope is that once we close this account and stop this, then, you know, it will stop. Unfortunately, unfortunately, attempts at committing fraud are just increasing in general. Our email, Carl knows I sent an email out to anyone with an e-spot Peelier account. We're getting emails. I get them more than anyone else. Here's your receipt for your payment. Thanks for your payment. Click on it. Last week, there was one, what prompted me to send that email was I got two in a row one morning and I just wanted to make sure everyone knew not to open that. No, I'm not going to email you to ask you to buy a gift card. Many people received that one too from Gina. So I've also reached out to RB Tech about cybersecurity. I'm also attending a training at the Department of Public Safety in April on cybersecurity, but RB Tech, there are some programs. It's just, Ruben and I discussed a lot about last week, but there are some things that they can implement for us that will can put an additional layer over our email system to stop some of these things from getting in and to produce some checks that if people, if someone does click on something that it checks it first before it takes you to the website. So unfortunately, this is my wife's dealing with the same thing at her company. They're getting the same here's your receipt emails. It's the same thing. So they've just instituted a whole new thing on her email system as well. So it's just the world we're in today. They've moved on well beyond him now. So that takes care of the banking issue. The next thing on the agenda I see is the town and ministry report. Yes. Yes. So here I have the revised the town meeting minutes. So John's looking at it now. So that's here for the select board to review and approve. We had three new permits issued since last meeting. I provided a report. Not sure how much detail you may want to go in on that. The biggest thing on here is to discuss the summer schedule and what the select board would like to do with the summer schedule. I know people can travel. So I've highlighted two dates in particular, July 3rd, which is the day before the Independence Day holiday. That could be an issue depending on people's travel schedules and then Labor Day, which is September 4th. Those are the only two dates I called out that I wanted to mention. I don't know what everyone has on their schedule and we don't necessarily have to solve this tonight, but just something you all can look at. So July 3rd, really that's not the holiday, but it's the day before the holiday. So sometimes people travel. So I just wanted to comment on the May 1st meeting. Unfortunately, I cannot be here that day. I mean, I guess it's not that important. I can't zoom in either. Nor can I be here on May 1st. I don't know what we have going on at that meeting. It seems like we just talked about forming a committee for the ARPA funds. And when are we doing these select board member interviews? That's the next meeting, April 17th. That's what I thought. So I don't have to be there. I can't be there on the May 1st meeting. I just cannot do it. If you want to move the meeting day, that's fine. If we don't have that much that we have to discuss that meeting, and I miss it, that's probably okay too. It's twice a month so we can improve the warrants at a minimum. And yeah, we can just be in communication with you, Seth, and anything that really seems to need your presence we can hold off on. Yeah, we can move it to the May 15th meeting. For July, it would work well for me if it were the 10th and the 24th because I would be out of town on the 17th until after the 17th. So I won't make the first meeting in July with it at the 10th and 24th, but at least I could make one. But apparently I just eliminated the second meeting in my schedule too in July, so sorry about that. Well, maybe we may have done that in the past. We reduced our schedule a little bit during the summer. Well, I don't think I did it intentionally. Okay, thanks for that. Planning Commission does not meet in August. What are we saying for July? It looks like July 3rd is not a good idea. So July 10th and the 24th, would that be an option? I'll be six hours ahead time-wise, so I'm not going to zoom in on the 10th either. No matter how entertaining it is. Okay. So 10th and 24th for July. You know, September 4th isn't a good idea either. That should be moved. That's a good point. Yeah. I know historically sometimes you have canceled meetings during some of these time periods, so if there's one you want to cancel now, I mean, you know, the schedule can always be tweaked as we go too, so. Well, we can do the 11th and 25th in September. And avoid the Labor Day. We can cancel the July 10th when perhaps I'm concerned. Up you, I don't care. There's a lot of stuff going on right around that time period. Yeah. Yeah, I know I'm really busy. You usually do cancel a couple in the summer, so. Yeah. Why don't we just cancel the 10th now? Yeah. We usually, don't we usually have a very short meeting just to approve warrants? No, no, we've canceled. We've had one meeting a month on some summer, like July. I think that's where Seth would come in and he will. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we want change. Just have one meeting in July, you're saying? Yes. So July 20th. Yeah. Sure. Sure. Okay. So I think we've taken care of the meeting schedule. Anything else, Gina? No. Okay. So now I think we're all set except for personnel matters. Yes. Okay. So now we need to go in the executive session, I believe. To discuss personnel matters, right? Just personnel matters. Second. Thank you. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Ben. Okay. Orca's back here in the room, Seth. Oh, very good. Okay. We're in the executive session. No action taken. No action taken. And the time is 828. 828. What's the next thing on the agenda? I can't hardly read it. I think it might have something to do with adjourning. I'd like to make a motion that we adjourn tonight's meeting. I will definitely second that. Have the psych work. No, let's say we're on time. We are. There you go. All the way from Florida. Time difference in Florida. So you made the motion to adjourn? Yes. We didn't vote on it. You didn't vote on it? Yep. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All right. Safe travels. Safe travels home.