 Looks like there's four of us here, the five, so we can begin. Call a meeting to order for July 30th, just a step away from August. Scary. First thing we need to do is approve the agenda. Make a motion that we approve the agenda as presented. Second that. Is there any further discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Consent agenda items, just a minute from the July 16th meeting. Somebody wants to make a motion. Make a motion to approve the consent agenda items. All second that. Further discussion on that as well? Seeing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. Public, there is none, unless Ian wants to speak. So the ball's in your court, Bill. Okay, I sent a memo to you all on Friday. I trust that you all got it. Talking about the sidewalk plow, I feel badly that it's come up. It's a situation that we really, we had hoped to get through this winter with this machine, even though, as I said in the memo, we had it approved in our capital improvement plan in 2016. And to reiterate the memo, we had a net cost of $110,000 in 2016. We had a pretty good lead that the town of Milton was going to buy the old machine for about $20,000, the machine that we still have now. And then, you know, we thought the new machine was going to be about $130,000, and it would be 110 net. Milton backed out, decided they didn't want the machine. It was really not much of a surprise in the end, because I'm sure they decided for the same reason that we decided to get rid of that Belos machine. They're just not sold by any dealers around here any longer. It comes from Sweden. There were a couple of local dealers that sold it. One was in Maine, and another one was here in Vermont years ago when we bought it. Neither one handled it anymore, and getting parts was very difficult. So in 2016, we decided to keep it. We worked with the company in Minnesota. We actually, I can't remember if we sent the computer out to Minnesota, but there were a fair amount of dollars were spent in 2016 to keep it, and we got all of 16 and all of 17 out of it. And we had hope to get through this year and then buy it next year. As I told you when we bought it in 2008, there were two versions of the CIP that I still kept an improvement plan that I keep to work on all of these equipment replacements. And we had one version that had the thing being traded in 2017, and it was $154,520, and then there was another one that had an estimate for it to go in 2018, and the price to replace was $162,646. Now part of the reason why the price is lower than that is because the Belos machine that we have that we purchased in 2008, we were planning on replacing that same machine with a light machine. And the machine, the track list that we're buying is not quite as sophisticated as the Belos, but it does the job. We have had track list machines in the past. They work well. There are dealers around that sell them and service them. So the reason why the machine that we have here now is not in the $160,000 range. It's close, but it's not quite that high is because it's a track list and not a Belos. So anyway, we need a sidewalk plow, a sidewalk machine to get into the winter and through the winter. The machine that we have now isn't going to do it. So while I feel badly that we have to consider this now, I really don't think there's any choice. The safest way to do this is to authorize a lease. A lease is not a purchase. We don't have this purchase authorized by the voters. You are allowed to lease. The lease arrangement that I've talked about right now is a one-year lease where a year after the lease is signed, which would be tomorrow, in fact, it might be one-year upon delivery. Yeah, it's one-year upon delivery. So this machine probably won't get to us until November. And we would have to pay $157,964,93 a year from when it's delivered. And as I told you in the memo, the price to buy it outright is $151,467. And in a sense, there's not really a lot of difference between buying it outright and promising a year from now to pay a lease payment a one-time deal because in both instances, the voters really don't have much of a choice. Now, I have not explored it and just, you know, this came to my attention a little bit late. Unfortunately, with Celia being on disability and then my own issues dealing with my daughter in Georgia, I wish that we had had this on the agenda for the last meeting as opposed to, you know, I didn't really find out about it until two or three days after the last meeting and I could have asked a few more questions. My guess is that with the lease company that if I wanted to, if I asked, they would be willing to lease it for five years and one-fifth of the lease payment would be due in a year and then every year after that. That's not too much different, though, because if the voters would have to approve the first lease payment and then if they didn't approve the rest of it, you'd have to send the machine back and then you'd have to figure out how you're going to plow the sidewalks going forward. So for me, I think we can explain this to the voters. I think they will understand that sometimes your best intentions are to wait until next year to buy something and it just doesn't work out. If we had crashed the truck and we've done this in the past and the truck was totaled, we'd replace the truck without calling a special town meeting and just deal with it. There's no insurance payment on this one. I mean, if you crash a truck, you get, you know, the depreciated value of the truck anyway. But I think the voters will understand it's not going to put us in any kind of deficit situation right now. This year we have a report in this particular vehicle, this highway vehicle fund, the year-end fund balance at the end of 2017, taking into consideration the $284,000 we borrowed from ourselves, the greater. The fund balance is $361,284. We owe ourselves the $284,000. If we owed that $284,000 to the bank, we would have to reduce that off of our balance sheet, but we owe it to ourselves. In essence, we ended last year with $361,000. We've got two purchases of two dump trucks scheduled this year. They've already been ordered about $120,000 each. And with those two purchases and the $93,000 that we are putting into the fund from our operating budgets, we're supposed to end this year with a $173,000 fund balance. So there's more money in the fund than we need to spend for this sidewalk machine, and we can plug it into our budget and our capital budget going forward. In essence, we're spending it just a little bit earlier than we need to. So for me, I'm not the elected officials. I would save the $6,200 or whatever I told you was the financing charges for a year, and I would just buy the machine outright for $151,000 and be done with it. But if you are concerned about that, and I certainly understand if you are, rather than paying $151,467 this year, we would pay nothing this year, and we would put $157,964 into the budget next year to pay it off, or we could try to extend the lease and pay for it incrementally. But if we were going to pay for it over time, we can probably get a better deal from the bank or ourselves than we can get from the lease company. This is about a 4.4% interest rate for one year. It's not a terrible rate, but probably from the bank we could get 3% or so, but we can't borrow from the bank because we don't have authorization to purchase from the voters. It looks like your recommendation here based on what we have for reserve funds would be to make the purchase that 151,467 with the funding coming from the reserve funds, and then we would include that amount in the proposed 2019 CIP budget. We thought we were going to end this year, and when I wrote the memo, I said, well, if we have to, worst case scenario, we can liquidate some money from the tax stabilization fund and borrow it from ourselves if we have to. But right now, this Fund 72, the Vehicle Highway Equipment Fund, has a fund balance that's high enough to pay for the two trucks plus this. So then next year, we might decide, well, instead of putting $93,000 in, we put in $150,000 to try to mirror what we would have done had we waited a year. Now, this may be a better question for Chris, but the relative advantages between leasing and owning, I know I'm from buying personal vehicles and everything, but as far as a piece of equipment like this, are you generally in a better position to own it outright? Yeah, I mean, if we lease it, we have to insure it. We have to maintain it. You know, the way this lease is structured, we would simply pay the entire thing off in a year and own it. There are some times, and you do this, you know, I know some people do it with cars. You know, they lease a car for so many years, five years, three years, whatever it is. They get a payment of $225 a month, and that's a pretty decent payment to drive the car that they're driving, but at the end of the lease period, you either got to buy the car outright or you have to turn it back in, and it would be the same thing. From the municipal standpoint, I really don't think there's much advantage to leasing, except that you absolutely don't need voter approval to lease. I've never leased a piece of equipment in my life, but then again, I still own the first escalator I ever bought in 1994, so that's not the way the municipality operates. I mean, I don't know how long this last sidewalk plow lasted. We bought it in 2008. So it's only ten years. Ten years. It's been a, we've had it for... It doesn't owe us anything. Yeah. Right. So when you were talking earlier here just a minute ago about insurance, we would still insure the machine, even if we were to buy it outright. Oh yeah. Were you talking about insuring the machine or insuring the note? No, no, the machine. Okay. So what I was trying to say was if we lease it, we still have to do everything that we have to do if we own it. We have to maintain it. We have to pay for parts. We have to, you know, service it, and we would have to insure it as well. So there's nothing that we have to do to own the machine that we don't have to do if we just lease it. It's the point I was trying to make. So what's more astonishing to me is the fact that we can buy a fully-fit-up dump truck with plow and sander for $120,000, and you could put this sidewalk machine in the back of that truck. That's what I was thinking. Yeah. That's really the boot in the butt, you know? Yeah. It just gets a specialized machine and volume. Yeah, we got it. You need it. They don't sell two, you know, they sell us seven trucks, but only one sidewalk machine. They do that. Is 10 years typical on a machine like that? We have tried to keep these machines at least 10 years. This particular machine that we have now, as I said, because we were having problems with parts the last couple of years haven't been as reliable. The trackless is a tried-and-true thing. I won't say it took a chance on the Belos, but we went that way. There was some more versatility with the Belos, we thought. But because, I think, because nobody was buying around here, the dealers just said, forget it. So if we could go back 10 years, we probably should have bought a trackless. But this machine should last us 10 years. Okay. And as far as the voters are concerned, I mean, obviously that machine is basically used in the village for the sidewalks that we have here. There was one suggestion there from somebody earlier today when I was discussing it with one of the voters. They said, well, it could always just buy ready the village a shovel. They didn't take care of their share of the sidewalk. They were joking. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Obviously they were joking. They didn't have any reservations about the fact that we were going to have to purchase it early. So I think it's probably a good move because it sounds like these things continue to jump up in price like anything does every year. So if we don't lease it, we're saving ourselves some money. If we buy it outright, we're saving ourselves some money. And if we buy it a year in advance, we're probably also saving ourselves some money. Yeah. I mean, the guy told me, he said, well, you know, from the lease perspective, if you let me know before August 1st and you buy it at the 151 price and then you turn around and lease it, he said, you'll pay a year from now $400 what you'd have to pay if you waited until August 1st to buy the thing because the price is going to go up. But to me, given that we're making this deal and we're in a position that we have to make this deal, I would think the voters would appreciate saving $6,500 of finance charges by just outright buying the thing and being done with it. I agree. Does this spread salt while it's plowing? It can. Do we though? Is that part of the deterioration of the machine or what? Well, I mean, salt is certainly corrosive. There's no question about it. We sand when we can and then there are times that we have to salt. So yeah, it does salt the sidewalks. But there are times you can't just leave the sidewalk ice-cold. Yeah, it's just wondering. I know sometimes sand is not used because of cost but I didn't know if that was part of if we could increase the usage of sand to extend the life of the machine is basically what I was wondering. Yeah, I think just as on the roads with the sidewalks it's probably more important than on the roads to put something down. People are walking. The sidewalks are uneven anyway right now and having something there for traction is definitely helpful. I think we try to use salt sparingly. When we built the sidewalk on Stow Street four or five years ago now, because the sidewalk didn't get poured until late in the season we told them no salt on that sidewalk because if you salt the concrete sidewalk too early it tends to salt eats into it because it hasn't cured properly. Well, I'll make the motion that we authorize Bill to negotiate the purchase on before August 1st for the purchase price of 151.467 thereby saving us $6,500 in interest and that we use reserve funds for that purchase and look to the 2019 CIP budget as a replenishment to the reserve fund either fully or partially. Is there a second to that motion? I'll second that. Motion to be made and seconded. Is there any further discussion? Looks like everybody's on board. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Thank you. So considering re-reaching rights of lease plan. Yes. I think I get myself completely prepared and then I get in here when something is missing out here. So we have a request. We did this just a couple of weeks ago. This is a different request. So David Hoyt and Linda Hoyt own a property and it's encumbered by one of these old leases, at least land, the leases to the benefit of the town and it's for either school or some other municipal purpose. And about 10 years or so ago, title insurance companies started giving the lawyers who were writing the deeds difficulty and said unless you release these leases, we're not going to insure the title. So the first one, Bruce Pureland's office brought it to us and I talked to Bruce and Sheena and I just said look, if we're going to release this, you prepare the quit claim deed. I don't want to spend any municipal money on it. You prepare the board. If they approve, we'll sign it and if the title insurance companies are good with it, then fine with us and we move on. So we've done probably, I don't know, half a dozen or ten over the years and we just did one a couple of weeks ago. So we got a call from an attorney a week and a half ago. They asked for this to be released and when I talked to the attorney, I said, well, the legislature just passed a law, took effect July 1st to allow all these leases to just be automatically relinquished and he said, well, title insurance companies haven't caught up with the law yet. They still want to release. So I would ask that the board release this particular deed and it's the same form as the one you did a couple weeks ago and then after you take action on that, I want to come back to the main issue. So a motion to authorize the quit claim deed as prepared on behalf of the poids is in order if you want to do that and then Carla will take care of it to make that motion. I will make the motion that we authorize the town clerk to sign the quit claim deed as prepared on behalf of David Hoyt and Linda Hoyt regarding release of interest in lease lands as part of their property. Any further questions? All those in favor say aye. Aye. So is this one going to be blank? So I'm going to just make sure you authorize the town clerk to sign it that Carla is also the town agent for the town so you're authorizing the town agent, right? Yes. Okay. All right. So anyway, after talking with that attorney and saying, okay, we have to do this, I did a little bit more research into the new law that has been passed and I contacted Joe McLean, the attorney that we use for a lot of zoning and just general municipal functions when we need legal advice. So I sent him an email and I asked him, basically I said, is there a simple way for the municipality to release its interest in its lease lands that won't cost us a lot? I said, if you can write a simple motion and do it for 15 minutes times whatever rate he gets, I'm willing to do it. If this is a complex process, we'll just do it the way that we've always been doing it. So he sent me an email and I have copied the motion that he says that you could pass if you want to do this and relinquish all the lands, all the leases that the town holds. But I want to read the email to you because it's not just simple as that. He said, I'm forwarding for review and consideration some comments that were previously prepared for taking to the effect of Act 152 and this is the information and you don't have to have that. And then he said, if the select board decides to vote to relinquish all of its leased land at this time, the motion need not be complex. It may be paraphrased as follows and you have it in front of you now. However, he says, if the select board wishes to relinquish only some of its leased lands, for example, all ministerial lots or all school lots. Now ministerial lots is just what it sounds like, a lot being set aside for churches. The government, I'm not supposed to have anything to do with churches anymore, houses of worship. He said, if you want to relinquish only some of them, then we need to discuss this further and we have to go into the land records and identify all these lands. Now I asked Carla, do we have a list of all of this leased land that we have? We don't, as far as anyone here knows. They are only found when a lawyer goes in and does a title search. And from my perspective, I can't think of any leased land that we would want to exercise the lease for. So I don't think there's a problem with making that motion and simply filing this and relinquishing everything. But if you don't want to, then we just continue to do what we just did. I have one question regarding the language in here. The way I would read it and it dovetails with what you were just explaining, it looks as if we had any municipal incomparances or easements, those would still remain. However, all these unknown hidden toys in the cracker box kind of leases from back years ago and nobody remembers what they are. Right, we don't have any active, we would not have retained any say over those, but if there are existing incomparances or easements that we currently possess, those would remain. Right, so the incomparances and easements that are specified in this motion speak specifically to other incomparances and easements that are on these leased lands. So we have easements on land where there's no leased land. You know, Joe Smith has, you know, we need to go through his property to get somewhere. We've got that easement that doesn't get affected by this. If the lease that the Hoyts had, if it was leased land and we had some other specified right-of-way or easement across that land, we would be giving up the lease but not giving up the right-of-way or easement. So it's a little bit of a really small step into the unknown if you release all these things with this motion because, you know, is it possible out there that it says, you know, here's a leased land and you can build, you know, 14 municipal garages on it or something. But I think... Most of those were school set-asides and church set-asides. Yeah, they were almost all school and church set-asides. What the law says is that if you do nothing all your lease lands will go away on January 1st, 2020. You have to take specific action to retain your lease lands. So this is July, almost August of 2018. If you take that action, you're basically taking action a year and a half that's going to happen anyway unless you take action to retain everything. And I think what the savings is, it's a little bit of savings at a select board meeting so we don't have to explain what this is and why we're doing it. And then the other savings is really to the people that own the land. It's not costing us anything but they had to have a lawyer. They found this in the title search. They had to drop an easement and even though it's a boilerplate you know they didn't bill for it. So when the attorney, how will the attorney know that this... Will he speak to Carla? We'll post it with the land records. Carla will make sure that this is something that they know about. Well, we have a motion in front of us. If somebody... We have a motion. Just on favor here. We've got the language in front of us. The board members are dead against it. Speak now otherwise. I'll go for it. I'll make a motion. I move that the town of Waterbury relinquish its interest in all of the perpetual lease lands within the town held in accordance with 24VSA 2401 such that fee simple title to those perpetual lease lands vest in the current less see a record subject to any other encumbrances of record including municipal encumbrances and easements. I'll second that. Okay. Any further discussion? The only thing would be to note what Bill shared with us already is that this would go into effect January of 2020 absent aren't taking any steps to prolong that. So what we're really doing here is just accelerating that time clock or something that's already passed muster as state statute. Yeah, right. With that, all those in favor? Aye. Okay. The next one, I just want to you already passed the minutes of the last meeting and I just wanted to inform you that we did do our diligence talk with the person about the selling the alcohol at the field here and I just am reporting to you that we're all set with it and Carla has actually issued the license. There's no action necessary. It's just an update. Okay. I just had another question about another alcohol license that we'd given permit for up at the just a question as to what happened up at the peak screens. Yeah, the little hut disappeared. I don't know if it had anything to do with the construction or if they had a business related issue, but a little hut disappeared. I didn't know about this. What was it? It was a hard cider operation. I don't know if you had noticed, but at peak on the property that right there, they had a little lean to kind of three-sided and I don't know if it had anything to do with the construction or if they had a business to kind of three-sided shelter that was out by the roadside, but it faced in toward the building itself. And they had a roped area around it or something. Yeah. They wanted to sell this hard cider out there and have a little vending area. So we approved that license request and then within a couple of weeks, the thing was gone. So I don't know what happened. I don't know if you've changed your mind or something. It probably didn't make sense to put the labor dollar out there and offsetting what they were getting into the income. Well, it may well have been because it was right around the time the construction was going through their full bore and they may have thought that it was just going to be disrupted for the whole season than it could be. We're already required requests to place fund-raising thermometer on the inner pole. Again, I wouldn't have bothered. I would have just said okay to this if we weren't having this meeting, but since we had to have the meeting for the sidewalk plow and this just came in on Friday or Thursday, I thought I'd just bring it to your attention and make sure nobody had a problem with it. So Tammy Bass is the incoming Rotary President, which means she was probably elected like as the third Vice President four years ago or something like that. She moved up and next year at this time, I think around June 1st, she'll become the President. And the incoming President has to, the President always gets to do a project and they basically have a year to raise money for their project. So Tammy doesn't know exactly what a project is going to be yet, but she wants to start raising money right away. And I'm sure they have a goal. She didn't tell me what the goal was, but she's going to be basically having a 50-50 raffle as a fundraiser and wants to place a fundraising thermometer out here on the banner poles. I talked with Nina since it's on those banner poles and we've already kind of agreed to allow the banner poles to exist with banners on them. Nina said, well, if the Board approves it, then she's not going to worry about a zoning permit or anything else. So does anybody have a problem with a banner pole going out there? I won't even make you make a motion. You just shake your head if everybody's okay with it. And then when you get stopped on the street, you can say, oh yeah, the manager brought us to attention and we didn't tell him no. All right? Fine with me. Okay. Thank you. The last item. Yeah. No, I didn't mean to kind of... So we got a letter again from the organization Turn the Town Teal for Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month, which is September. This is the third time anyway that they've asked us this and they put teal ribbons on utility poles. They put some out here on, you know, our protocols. I think some businesses allow them to put teal ribbons on their businesses. And they're raising awareness for ovarian cancer and they're going to do it again this September. I'm pretty sure they told us the first year that they were going to kind of rotate this around and do other talents. But they continue to trumpet how excited people in Waterbury are about it and so they're asking to put it up again. I have no problem with it. I've seen it every year. They take them down pretty quickly. It might work. Nope. So again, I'll just say by consensus, the board approved this. Yeah. Okay. Amen. Yeah. All right. Make a motion to adjourn. I'll second that. Okay. Everybody in favor? Aye. Thank you, Jim. Thank you all. Sorry to make you come out, but... That's good. Oh, oh, oh. You didn't really adjourn yet. Take it back. So your next meeting is scheduled for the first one in August, which is next week. Yeah. Steve Watts Beach and the Woodruff have been working with the person about the speed on Guptle Road and the like. Yes. So there was some suggestion today. Well, since their meeting tonight, maybe they can skip that. I'd already arranged for those two guys to present something. So meet on the 6th of August, and then your second meeting is scheduled for the 20th of August. And I certainly have no problem at all if you meet without me, but I'm going to be on vacation from August 18th through Labor Day. And I'll be back the day after Labor Day. So Carla wanted to know are you going to meet without Bill or not? And you don't have to decide tonight. I'm going to say, I mean, is there not an agenda yet, right? At this point in time, there's nothing that I can tell you. There's stuff on the August 6th agenda that you have to meet for next week. There's nothing yet on the August 20th agenda. If you want to wait until next week to decide, that's okay, but start thinking about it. And then the other thing is to think about what you're going to do in September. Monday, the 30th of Labor Day, most often you meet the next day. September only has four Mondays in it, so moving it to the 2nd and 4th kind of gets you off schedule. So more than likely you'll meet on the 4th, which is Tuesday night. Okay? All right. Now you're adjourned. You don't have to say it. The only other item I'd like to suggest for the agenda on the 6th is just a discussion among the board regarding the concept of changing the fiscal year. Okay.