 I will go ahead and call the City of Essex Junction City Council meeting for Wednesday, February 8th to order. Thank you all for being here. I have a couple of agenda additions or changes, but does anybody else have anything? Yes. Raj, you want to go first? Yeah, I just want to pull the mats. I'm sad to make them 6D. Okay. Did anybody else have any other agenda additions or changes? I wanted to add two emails, one from Elaine Haney and one from Harlem Smith to the reading file. So with no other changes, I would entertain the motion to amend the agenda as present. All right. Do amend the agenda. Still moved. Second. Any further discussion? Can I make a comment, please? There's been some discussion around how we order our agenda items, and I think I've heard from some people about that equating our, that order equating to how we value that topic. And I just want to say that more often than not, the way we order these things has to do with staff that might have to participate in the meeting and getting them in and out of the meeting as quickly as possible so they can go on with their evening. That is often the primary concern. Or if we expect public comment to have that public comment, like an issue like the public hearing tonight, to be first so people can come and participate and then leave if they choose to. So I really hope that folks don't look at our agendas and see them as a value statement or equate them as to how important we think those topics are. And I'm specifically discussing the discussion last meeting about stipends and the discussion about moving the meeting because it interfered with pass-over. So I just wanted to make that statement. There's nothing to how we do this except for practical, logistical considerations. So thanks for that. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I don't think, in general, you talked about those kinds of things as to how that happens. So I appreciate that, Roch. Thank you. The motion's on the table. It's been seconded. All in favor, please signify by saying aye. Aye. As opposed to nay. Great. So that passed unanimously. And that will move into public to be heard. So this is a portion of tonight's meeting where if there are any members of the public who wish to bring something to the Board's attention that is not on the agenda, then now is the time to do so. So if you have any questions, comments, concerns related to the budget or anything else on our agenda, please wait until that time. Otherwise, does anybody have anything else? Just Amber. Go ahead, Arlen. Hi, thank you. I think I talked to you guys once about this before last year. And I'm not really sure how much you can do about it, but I'm going to continue to bring it up. Lori Holton, thankfully, reached out to me and has given me the opportunity to testify in front of the government office committee about our military being able to vote for OCCIS. So I'm going to get that opportunity to go out there next week or join into that meeting and be able to testify on behalf of our military overseas. I think a lot of people may know my son. One of them, I have two in the military, one's deployed the majority of the time. Doesn't live here and doesn't vote here anymore, but the other one does. He was pretty upset that when he was deployed that his, the coups that he has to jump through in order to try to get his ballot back here to get his vote founded. It's impossible. It never going to happen. It both didn't happen. I'm looking forward to see what the state is putting together. Lori believes that in state elections that they're going to be able to change something. I guess there's a bill out there where they believe overseas militaries will have enough time or I'm not sure what it is, but I'm going to pay attention and I'm going to be back here to talk to you guys about it because local is definitely different. I just recently took out a loan and get everything online. Never sign anybody on the bank, signed a bunch of papers, unlegally bound by that. The fact that our military who could be sitting on a forward operating base could should be able to vote on a cell phone. And the fact that we insist on paper and snail in today's day and age tries to mean same. And I'm not going to be quiet about it. And as you can tell, I'm probably a little emotional about it. It, our vote's sacred and for those that are in the military a lot of them are our first responders. They should be able to vote and we shouldn't put barriers in their way to get their vote back here. So thank you. Thank you, Harlan. Great. I do apologize to those on Zoom worlds. When I looked up at our big screen, I only see a town meeting TV and Amber on the screen. Now that I'm logged in, I see that there are other people who are attending and I see that RSM, you do have your hand up. So please go ahead and the floor of yours. Hi, thank you. This is Rhys Samarin on Countryside Drive. I have a procedural question. Items that are under the reading file and not an actual agenda item. Did they get public to be heard also or should we ask any questions or comments now? Those would not be discussed again at this meeting. So if you do have a question or comment on those, then that would be a great time. Thank you for asking that question. Thank you. This will be fast. In terms of something like stipend increase for city council, that is not through an amendment. That is simply something that the council agrees to or doesn't and then adds to the budget. So the question is about the process of the stipends that are in the budget? I read through all the reading file and memos and in Raj's memo, he says that he requests that the council add the stipend and the yearly inflation increase to the budget. My question is, as taxpayers, the only say we have in that is yes or no on budget and that's not something that is as an amendment. The council can choose their stipend payment without any input from us. It's a good question. It's a crossover topic, if you will, that will apply to a few different parts of today's meeting. I'll just address it now since you've asked it now. So for the stipend for city councillors, with it being a part of the budget, the best time to express a comment concern of either the amount and or the process would be during the public hearing that we are about to have, as well as when we talk about it afterwards as a city council, I will ask for public comment again at that point in time and that can be another opportunity to influence what that decision would be. Once the city council approves of the budget, it then goes out to the voters and at that point in time the only opportunity that the voters have to agree or disagree with anything in the budget is to either vote for or against the budget. Okay, thank you. So it's not something that is done through amendment? Uh, no. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Any other questions, comments, concerns about things are not on the agenda. Not seeing other hands up on Zoom. I'm not seeing any hands up in the room. So we will go ahead and close that portion of the meeting and jump into the public hearing on the fiscal year 2024 budget, proposed budget and capital program. And as we transition into this topic, I just want to go over a couple of things. First off, the public hearing is the time for the council to hear from the community on questions, comments, concerns relating to the fiscal year 2024 budget, which is what funds the city and activities beginning July 1 2023 through June 30 2024. Only questions or comments that pertain to the budget and the activities that would happen during that time period are what should happen at that time. Questions that do not pertain to either the budget or the activities for this upcoming fiscal year would not, or I would call, I would ask that that not happen at this point in time. And if I hear those, I will ask that you please end that topic and go to the next one. If you are unsure whether your question is appropriate for the time, please ask me and I'll be happy to answer that. In a few moments, staff will present the budget as it currently stands. I would ask that everybody hold your questions until the end of the presentation. I will ask for public comment once the presentation is done and we'll ask people to raise their hand so that I know how many people would like to speak. Comments that are made in the chat on Zoom are not a part of the public record and are not considered public input and are not considered part of the public hearing. So please don't use the chat feature. I do not want to set time limits, but I will if somebody appears to be taking time away from others who do wish to speak. So please be mindful of everybody else who will want to speak and that each person will get one turn. And as I sort of just mentioned, the fiscal year 2024 budget is not finalized and so we may make changes at this or future city council meetings, but now is that point in time where if the community wants to influence what is in the budget, now is how you do that. So with that, Regina. All right. Let me share my screen. Get this going. All right. So I'm going to move us through here. These are some of the highlights, but these are actually mentioned again on the next slide. So I'm just going to get us right here to the next slide. So essentially, as we have talked about a few times through the process of developing the f by 24 budget for the city, we don't have a great budget to compare to. There is the village budget and you can see that summarized in the budget documents that are in the packet. And what we are actually showing a comparison to here on this slide is to the f y 22 mock city budget that was prepared. So that was prepared contemplating that there would what a city the city would look like on its own. And since that was done two years ago, we applied an 8% inflation to that f y 22 mock budget. There's been points in time when the village budget went up closer to 6% from one year to the next. And we're in a pretty high inflationary period right now. So that 8% over a two year timeframe is pretty conservative. The budget that you've got in front of you right now for f y 24 is 11 million 428 28 241. And that is a 7% change over that inflationary mock budget. If you were to look at just the village budget itself in f y 23, that's a $6 million budget. So there is quite a bit of change from that. But part of the reason is under today's budget, a lot of things happen over town. We've got to get those incorporated over here into this budget. Then what you also see on this slide are a number of things that are they're contributing factors, but really their new items brought to the table over what was contemplated in that f y 22 mock budget. So there are new positions identified in as an admin assistant in the administration department to community development department staff and adult programming staff at EJRP to accommodate the adult programming once the relationship with the town on the senior services ends at the end of December. And we've got some shifts to try to accommodate some it's not a new position, but shifting duties to cover buildings services. The stormwater amount for the most part that work was covered in the town budget. So we are accommodating that now to meet our permit requirements on the city side. Essex rescue, this is not new, but the cost have gone up. So that's the dollar amount of the increase. Essex Junction Cemetery Association, that's the increased cost for maintenance of the cemeteries. There's a shift in the programming of the Memorial Day in July 4th to the general fund considering the importance of those as community celebrations. And then there's the planned annual increase to the capital transfer because we've got a we do an excellent job here in the city preparing for capital projects going forward. And so that helps helps maintain that. Okay, so the other comparison here on this slide is showing what folks actually pay for taxes in fiscal year 23 combined between what you're paying town taxes and village taxes. The proposed tax rate is moving up 1.4%. So essentially the amount that you would pay in property taxes for an average $280,000 home under this proposed budget would go up $37.51. And I do want to point out that that this is a slight change from what's in the packet. We had included an older dollar amount. So that $37.51 is slightly lower than what was in the packet. Let me just check here. So what I think is important to point out here, when that FY 22 mock city budget was prepared, there was a contemplation that it was possible that when the city separates there would be a six to 8% tax rate decrease. So that is not what we're showing here. It's not what's proposed. It's a 1.4% tax rate increase. And much of that is because of those new contributing factors on the previous slide. If you add those up, that's about $660,000, $100,000 roughly equates to 1% tax rate increase. So you can see that difference there as well as just acknowledging that we're two years further down the road here. Other thing to point out, we also identified through the budgeting process that there's a couple of things that really are necessary now that the city is the city. And these are one-time expenditures. We wouldn't anticipate that these, we would do these consistently from year to year through the preparation of the budget. We started with these in the general fund and we moved them over to the local option tax fund to try to keep the general fund down. A couple things to point out about this. We don't yet know what the local option tax revenue is yet. This tax was started in October. We have gone through a full quarter of that collection and we won't know from the state exactly what that number is. I believe we have, they have 75 days to tell us that. So hopefully we'll find out in March. Other thing I just want to point out for folks that we are talking about a number of different components of the city budget tonight. What you actually vote on is the general fund budget. These other pieces are in here for information. So the local option tax, the economic development fund, the capital budgets, the enterprise budgets, those don't have an impact on the property tax. And so they aren't a part of that budget that you're voting on come April. So over the next couple of slides, I'm just going to talk through some of the highlights and changes from each department. Again, in comparison back to that FY22 mock budget. And again, all of this detail is in the, is up on the website and it's in the council packet following this presentation if you want to look at it for more detail. Okay. So administration department. So there is in the FY24 budget, there is a new position for an administrative assistant. And the, just going to point out that there's a couple of different new positions. And so essentially, when we get to those in these departments, I'm going to point them out. There are positions that will also happen in July. As an example, in the clerk's office, there is a new clerk assistant that will start that has been contemplated for quite some time. It's in the FY22 mock budget. They are all pieces that were assumed and understood when the city became a city. These were additional positions that would need to be added. So that isn't necessarily called out here because it's not new in comparison to that mock budget. Just to try to clarify that, I know it's muddy and apologize for that. But so legislative, it's just a new expense category. A lot of those expenses used to be in the administrative budget. We're calling that out distinctively for the city council. In the finance department, there are three staff in the admin in the FY24 budget. Again, these, when it was contemplated about the separation from the town, it was expected that there would need to be three finance staff on both sides. These positions are already in place. They're not new for FY24, but they're showing up in the budget at that point. Also, information technology. This is a new expense category for the city. So it didn't exist in the village budget before. All of the current IT expenses are covered by the town currently. The spring will have to actively separate from the town and have an IT budget for the city moving forward. Those numbers are fairly rough, but we are getting closer to understanding what those costs might look like. Assessing. These expenses, they were previously in the town budget. I will point out that assessing is one of two departments that we will continue to have a relationship and shared with the town moving forward. For the assessing department, that plan is in place through, I think it's FY25, when the reappraisal is finished. At that point, we'll reconsider what that looks like. Under community development department, there is the addition of a full-time code enforcement officer and a full-time planner. Currently, we have a separate health officer position, that's a stipend position. These two positions, we would incorporate the health officer into these roles. Code enforcement is in to try to address long-term concerns about code enforcement in the city, as well as the potential of a new rental registry program, which would have a revenue source associated with it if we put that into place. The planner is intended to try to prepare for possible new committees. There are a number of committee functions that happen over on the town side. We're prepared to take on some of those duties here on the city side as well. I think everything else on this slide is fairly straightforward, nothing to call out specifically. Health and human services. Dollarwise, this is a pretty big section of the budget. This is where Essex Rescue is, and this is also where the Essex Police Department is. Essex Police Department is the second department that is intended to be shared with the town moving forward. We're in a 10-year agreement right now to maintain that relationship going forward. In the county and regional functions, you'll see the membership fees for Green Mountain Transit and for the Winooski Valley Park District to become members of those organizations as the voters approved in November 2022. Again, these fees were in the town budget. We were just paying for them through that budget. Now we will need to pay for them separately on our own on the city side. Then the Public Works Streets budget, you can start to see just the reality of the increased costs and supplies and maintenance of those services going forward. Stormwater. Previously in the village side on the stormwater budget, there was a portion of one full-time employee and there's the salary and the benefits to cover those expenses. Rest of that program and how to run that program, we needed to incorporate on the city side so we can meet our permit requirements. That's what you've gotten there. For the library budget, that is including an increase in the part-time staffing so we can get to four staff on each shift for safety needs. Then with a lot more access to digital materials and increased budget for high-demand collection of digital services. There's also increased furniture, increased expense for replacing furniture to get to more wipeable surfaces. This is again post COVID world. We're just trying to keep things clean and as hygienic as possible. EJRP recreation program. This program has the same amount of full-time employees that we've seen that they've had in the past. There are a few changes and shifts in the funding for the Memorial Day program and the July 4th program. Under parks and facilities, this is where we have shifted duties to try to pick up some definite needs and building coordination. I will say that this is an experiment and hope that we can accommodate the needs for this work in FY24 with existing staff. We may in the future have to accommodate that with a new full-time staff but that's not what we're proposing at this point in time. Then we've got the new adult programming line. Again, we have talked about this quite a bit with the council through the process so far. In December 2023, the agreement with the town to manage the senior programming and senior van will end. We are trying to accommodate some of that change with a new adult program director starting in January 1 to be able to do some more senior programming as well as other adult programming. We have also included in the budget $20,000 assuming that without the senior van, our SSTA usage might go up. That is a youth-based fee so we will get charged the actual amount and so we're just trying to prepare for what that extra amount might be. For debt, you'll see the city share of the police facility debt in buildings that generally across the board. You see we're working to get the cleaning services now under one contract and just really have identified some repair and maintenance needs that have been ongoing for quite some time and really trying to put some effort towards getting our buildings in good shape. Of course, we will be doing renovation of two Lincoln which will be quite a big effort. Also, some of the budget has increased for expenses at two Lincoln because for a number of years we've had maybe one person here working and we've got quite a few more people working here now which I think Terry's probably pretty happy about. Okay, so I have jabbered on for long enough here and Jess is going to take over from here. All right, good evening everyone. So the capital funds that you see on your screen now, two of these funds are funded with general fund dollars and the rest are enterprise funds, sorry three of these funds are funded with enterprise fund or general fund dollars, the rest are enterprise funds. So the first three capital reserve, the rolling stock fund and the EJRP capital all come from general fund dollars and these are transfers that are mentioned within the general fund budget itself. So the capital reserve fund and rolling stock are based on plans that have been in place for a number of years now. Capital also is reviewed by the capital committee. So we haven't made, although the capital committee did not meet prior to this budget process, we didn't make any changes to that plan. We'll be doing those going forward, we'll be picking that committee work back up. So the plans that you see in the packet are essentially the plans that have existed for a couple of years now and project out, I think it's summer five year plans and summer eight year plans. So the projects are listed here. Again, EJRP capital is also something that is transferred from the general fund dollars and every year EJRP provides us, they essentially get one penny on the tax rate assigned to them each year and they come up with their plan to use that funding accordingly. The water wastewater and sanitation capital are all enterprise fund budgets. So they're here, these do not affect the tax rate, but they are here just for informational purposes at this point. The enterprise fund budgets again, no tax dollars are used to support any of these enterprise funds. Again, it's just informational for residents and voters. So the EJRP program fund provides all of the programming, Maple Street School, the parks and programs, preschools, the licensed child care and after school care, vacation camps and summer day camps and the like. They are all self funded by revenue that they bring in. It's basically fees for services. The water wastewater and sanitation funds are all supported by user fees for anyone who is on those systems. So then next we'll talk about those increases on these funds. So the wastewater treatment facility is continuing to face challenges with state regulations and unfunded mandates that are getting passed through. We also are seeing a significant impact from inflation on the wastewater treatment facility for supplies and materials and we have also entered into a new contract last this fiscal year actually for technical services so that our pump station communications are communicating back to our wastewater facility and also are accessible remotely for staff. Hopefully we will see a decrease in the amount that staff needs to come on site to address issues off hours and they'll be able to address these things remotely going forward. We also have an addition to the water fund for the main street waterline bond that was approved last annual meeting and the most significant impact to all three of these enterprise funds is the administrative fee increase partly due to increased costs but also as a result of the FY23 rate increases were not fully realized in FY23 the rates were reduced to kind of soften the impact on rate payers but effectively this is making us realize two years worth of increases in one fiscal year being FY24. So the impact of all of that on the rates is projected here again these are preliminary numbers so we will have final data that comes in and these rates will be reviewed budgets will be updated in April May timeframe right now the impact we're projecting is overall an 8.47% increase or about 49 dollars and 62 cents per year on the average residential property using 120 gallons of water per day. All right thank you Jess so that that's it for our presentation so I can stop sharing. Great Jess Regina thank you so much so again this is a public hearing so this is a point in time where if there are questions or comments concerns from members of the public please raise your hand and let me know both using teams as well as in the room if there is anybody who has any questions comments concerns. Harlan why don't you take it off? I'm assuming you want me to please come on up so that way everybody can hear you. Harlan Smith Seneca just a quick question right so on the revenue end something I've never dove into and I thought about it actually on the way to the meeting tonight and I was curious if our fee so building permits we're now going to be doing dog licensing which used to be within the town so on and so forth to those rates although the consumer price index we continually increase those to compensate for I mean those fees are generally to pay for the administrative services to maintain those we know that dogs tend to pose a huge burden to our police department on a lot of issues and take up a lot of resources so I was just curious if you if you knew of those fees increase yearly like the budget does or if that's kind of an afterthought we take a look at them and we raise them only occasionally. Some of those fees so the fees such as dog licensing marriage licensing those types of things that are overseen by the clerk are set in state statue and we have zero control over or the ability to change so that one's a no. In terms of our buildings though those types of land development types of fees those are within the control of our municipality and we can change we had a request a few years ago to change to increase those rates as we are at the very low end and again I believe this year we've also made a request to increase those rates so that way we can better align with what the rest of the developed county and developed parts of the state have so we we have looked at those sure thank you for sure absolutely thank you Harlan Diane my first question is how much time is left before the police department? How many were yours? I don't recall off the top of my head um if you don't mind if I if we can't get that quickly I'll have to email you Seeing that online that the planning commission being the adding an additional planner is of interest um I wasn't aware of where we were going in that direction because we discussed the planning commission that we were adding a planner we didn't talk about code enforcement of course and health officer and that sort of thing so this is can you tell me more about adding a planner yeah just prior to community development right in part it's the community development department as you well know has basically been overseen by two fte's one really the big picture stuff and then another to help with some of the day-to-day logistics this is in some ways to help with that differential of duties between those helping to encourage development and then those enforcing the ordinances that we have as well as intentionally trying to enforce the ordinance side so that's a part of the the ordinance enforcement officer with a planner another part of that is we've had conversations about should we have a an energy committee our housing commission we're likely going to be separating into a junction commission we've talked about creating some other committees which are escaping my head at this point in time and so somebody needs to staff those otherwise we have people who are going to be very well intentioned and impassioned and we need to make sure there's a communication move back to the municipality with that so that's part of the thought okay so my last question is because I noticed there was a citywide building coordinator that was under the jrp I know that we had had someone when we were contemplating merger with the town who is doing responsible for buildings would this person be doing that for the valuation activity or what would they be doing Regina do you want to talk more to their day to day or sure yeah so the work has been pretty significant between a number of different buildings that we have so there was a good facility study done with that effort with the town on the fire department the public works building and recreation buildings the what we've seen more so than that is needing somebody to manage the route replacement at the library needing to help manage the renovation of this building and proper maintenance of this building that hasn't been done for quite some time looking at the things that need to be done over at park street school like sprinkling the windows need to be replaced there's just a number of things in our buildings that we just haven't been able to figure out or really say on top of there are different cleaning contracts in each building and that creates a lot of inefficiencies and costs so that's the that's what we've been trying to accommodate with current staff on how to how to manage that and see if we can get through that work with who we have now because some of these are construction projects and when they're done there they will be done so it's it's definitely experimental in terms of whether we can continue down this road and and accommodate what the needs that we have okay so it's it's still accommodating current needs and this person may or may not continue to help things play out yeah or we might need to find that we might need a full time position this is a start somewhere see how it goes yeah decides we go being agile okay well hey i know there's a lot of work that needs to be done in this bill yeah you do okay good thank you diane uh i see some hands up i do have an answer oh great thank you we will be paying paying for the police facility through fy 34 i would have been off by a year i'm happy to guess thank you rejina uh so we'll go into zoom land next uh john willy i see your hands up floor is yours yes hi thanks thanks very much and uh thanks to everybody for the work done so far great great job i'd like to weigh in um on some of the the senior items that were mentioned uh well i'm technically actually able to take advantage of them i'm more speaking for uh some others that are using it now and love the senior center and the the uh offerings that they have and anything to expand those i notice a full-time person for the senior center that that would be awesome uh to expand uh what's what's going on now because i really think you know we should take care of our seniors and uh and keep them independent and uh part of that is the the the services of the sx senior band now uh have been uh have been great and and maintaining their independence and uh abilities to get to appointments and all that kind of thing and and i'm just curious if they if the city doesn't have its own resource and it uses ssta would from what i understand a lot of ssta i mean it needs to be part of a medical appointment or something like that whereas the sx senior van really can be used for anything that that senior needs to go to as far as appointments or groceries or going to the senior center or whatever so anyway i i'm just love love to weigh in on that and uh and encourage anything we can do to take care of our seniors we should do it um that's my input thank you john just a couple of things to your your comments slash questions uh with the seniors with the the adult services director that position um that is not one fte that's going to be dedicated 100 to senior programming but to adult programming a portion of that will absolutely be senior services uh and we have talked about how our desire is to maintain a senior center so that that way the seniors can have though that type of socialization that type of peer interaction uh one of the things that is blaringly evident from the pandemic is around social isolation in the senior population and so we want to help be a a resource and an advocate to help fix and resolve some of those issues but i just wanted to clarify that that bit of right manic and then with the senior van we are in this budget would not be supporting the senior van beyond the sx senior van beyond the end of this current calendar year which is when our agreement with the town of sx would end the usage that we have from that from sx junction residents is and please correct me if i'm wrong less than 10 individuals per month utilize the service within a given month uh the cost of tens of thousands of dollars for less than a handful of people is just something that's when we've talked about this does not seem to make fiscal sense um there are going to be some barriers with going to ssta but from trying but from thinking about that fiscal responsibility side it seemed like that made the most sense yeah and i'll just clarify that there are um the list of city residents that are um signed up to use the bus is a list that's uh over 100 people long but it's it's the usage of how many people are actually taking trips in each week that um really were helpful in our decision making factor in terms of the cost of providing that service also uh just want to add that um ssta does yeah um becoming eligible for ssta does mean that um you need a doctor approval that you can't walk to the fixed route service uh so that's the limitation but once you uh if you are eligible for that um there's no limit on um when you can use it how often you can use it um in terms of the per person usage of it and where where they will take you because the part of that is also the the hours and days of the week that ssta is available well surpasses that of the sx senior van correct okay thank you Regina thank you that's good to know great uh so then andy santa your hand is up i'm hopefully i didn't mispronounce your last name hi it was a good presentation thorough but you went way too fast for some of us non-financial people to understand um i believe that when we separated most people voted to do that based on saving money as opposed to staying with the town so i have two questions um one is this budget within the parameters of what was told to us when we discussed separation if not how much additional is it and two how much money are we actually saving compared to if we stayed with the town and paid two taxes and since you don't know the value of my house you could express that in percentage points in reverse order to your questions i don't have the slightest idea if we were to um have stayed with the town because that entity's budgets that would be proposed for this upcoming fiscal year like what we are doing does not exist anymore similarly the village of sx junction there was no budget exercise to plan out what that budget would have been so there is no known as to what that would have would have been in terms of increases for this year compared to what was in the mock budget that was developed as a part of separation i believe that what is in there that was not either known or new and there's a distinction there uh is on slide what side is this slide three of the presentation or page four of our packet which shows 353 thousand and salary and benefits uh 119 thousand storm water 71 thousand from sx rescue 20 000 from the sx junction cemetery association 17 500 from the morial day parade and 80 000 80 000 in capital transfer that would have been planned so that was a that would have been a known so whatever those numbers add up to be that would be approximately what would be different from what was proposed to now the other thing that was not known is this giant inflation that we are experiencing at this point in time uh which is approximately seven to eight percent on our operations of costs uh that also was not known at the point in time of developing the mock budget all right um do you have a gut feeling you know knowing the finances of the town and the city if we really are coming out ahead by being separated gut feeling gut feeling yes as well as in the city what we're doing by proposing things like having a code enforcement officer is for years this council and the village trustees have told our community we know that enforcing ordinances is an issue we know that you want this but we're not going to do it until we can figure out the governance issue of our two communities so things like that we're finally actually going to be able to help figure out and provide a a service to our community that we've been saying no to for years so in my side my gut reaction yes fiscally we're better off and customer service wise and services to the community yes we're better off and i see my yeah i'm just just going to add to my interest saying about this there's some things you cannot particularly quantify the value in a percentage or a number dollar number but i just want to let you know that by separating becoming the city our um obligation to capital bond issues that the town faces potentially quite a lot of expenditures for improvements in the town we're not going to be tied to right now we earlier we discussed the bond for the police facility that's going to be paid off in 2034 we're going to separate that from this point on once we start getting we'll be only paying for our improvements within our city anything that occurs outside of the city when the road washes out out there we're no longer tied to that as well as paying 100 of the capital projects within our community all by ourselves so in that sense it's it's it's hard to to to state but we're definitely better off in my opinion thank you Dan okay thank you doing a quick hands check there are no other hands up on zoom there's no hands up in the room last call for public comments questions concerns during public hearing seeing no hands no chirpings trying to delay nothing all right so then we will go ahead and i'll close the public hearing on fiscal year 24 budget thank you all for your questions comments concern thank you for participating in this process and we will now go to a continued discussion it's a business item 6a let's talk about the budget some more okay um so what you've got in your packet is a fairly short memo from uh from me i've identified um again just to sort of let you folks know we also will be having second public hearing on february 22nd um and in terms of your timeline uh you've got to set your ballot items um and your budget on march 8th so uh we will be having this on the agenda again um on the 22nd and then again on the 8th um so just wanted to point out a couple of things that we have identified since this budget was prepared um tonight the election budget uh so for the last two years um the actual expenses for the election budget has been about 24 000 and about 32 000 um this line used to sit in the administration we dropped elections down to the clerk's budget um and we uh budgeted 15 000 we're realizing because of that shift we sort of missed what those actuals have been for the last two years um so we're going to do a little bit more work on this and figure out exactly what cost we need to uh recommend to you because the what we've been able to benefit from in the mailing of the ballots for the last couple years is we're right online with the school and so we've cost shared what that cost has been um so we're just going to take a little bit of look um to see if those actuals reflect that cost share or don't uh we might be okay if um the cost share does actually get us close to 15 000 which is what we've got budgeted now but we might need to increase that um just a this doesn't change anything monetarily but just um uh technically in our budget we want to have your city council stipends as a separate line in and of itself so people can see what that is right now we've got the um community potential for community advisory board stipends on there and the best committee advisory uh best committee stipends on there too so we'll pull those out to a separate line um we have uh so we've talked about adding the staff for the potential of these other committees that might come our way um and uh i think it's still um we'll have to figure out what those committees are and i think what probably makes the most sense is through our strategic planning work you know collaborative comprehensive strategic planning work that we want to do now we're our city what is our now that we've like well we haven't 100 become a city i'll say for my day to check look you've had it well we are 100 get there um what is our uh next steps in terms of our priorities um and i think that can help us decide what are the right committees going forward but um what we don't have is additional stipend money for these additional committees so the suggestion is to put in uh enough of a stipend for maybe three more committees in the city um so that 10 500 is about $50 a meeting five people one meeting a month plus the uh fringe that goes along with that because it is um considered as income um and then just other two other things that i have um identified even since i put this memo together last week uh we just don't have a postage line at all in the clerk's budget so that will be very minor maybe like a couple hundred dollars for that um and just uh thinking through um potential needs and space and if we will at some point benefit from having uh rent or usable multi-purpose space um outside of this building uh so that again just a concept and idea um that we'll probably try to do a little bit more work on for for your next meeting thank you Regina um a couple of just a quick question you mentioned about uh having committee stipends as separate line items are you talking about all committees having the like each committee having their own line item or just committee stipends in one um the charter requires that the city council stipend is on its own line so that's all i'm saying because right now in the legislative budget we have the city council stipends plus the uh potential community advisory board and the best committee stipends all up online so we'll just need to break those out so it's only separating the city council and not the others yes okay great because i just wanted to make sure that if somebody say if we had the housing commission as a unique line item that then someone wouldn't be able to quickly just do the math and say oh it seems as if x number of people are taking it and aren't doing it to just try to help a little bit without shaming somebody into either taking or not taking the stipend that was the only impetus yep for us like yeah that is what that is yeah and you know i'd have to think about that a tiny bit just to make sure um in my mind that we don't have any other committees that it's only one committee in a budget um most of them are in the community development budget and those are all you wouldn't see that um but i'll have to think about that a little bit more in terms of where we put these other ones okay because yeah so yeah excuse me have to talk too long um we have bike walk tree advisory housing we've discussed that's it right currently operating right now capital capital excuse me sorry um so four we've talked about resurrecting some kind of economic development or downtown or both yeah um two more don't no yeah one of you um there's been discussion in the community about getting to a place for the inform of reconvisory community yep and you know a lot of these are optional right so we don't we're not paying by showing up people can request to do this as needed um so it does leave us with flexibility if we have a special community project come up you know maybe there's an ordinance discussion that we want to have that includes that we need special input from people maybe we're trying to reach certain portions of our community that budget also can be used there because it's unlikely and i think our history tells us that we're budget we're budgeting for the amounts we we maximum we would need in the maximum but that money's not not being taken out so um i think that's that's kind of a benefit of that and we do have some flexibility as we you know as we reach out for different things tonight sort of anticipate with this next year especially at 24 that we're going to have a lot of community outreach too as we as we get things as we get things going as a new city and as we we ramp up different efforts so um if i don't people need more than this i just think it's nice for another flexibility to to engage with people just to elaborate for those listening because the hard part of government budgeting is that we have to plan now and so if we're going to do something next year we need to put it in the budget now otherwise it is going to be very difficult for that to happen so in eight months if somebody or a group comes to us and say or says hey we think it'd be fantastic if the city had a party planning committee had a new resident or new community member welcoming committee great thank you and we don't have money in the budget to pay for the stipends so that can't happen this fiscal year it needs to wait until the next fiscal year so hence part of that's difficulty in this process of if it hasn't if it wasn't planned for then sorry it can't happen until the next budget year anything else bring good on that piece broadly with the budget i'm sorry what broadly with the budget um i i i just want to first of all observe that our our new manager and finance director i i can't say how pleased i am and and thankful and grateful i am i thought i thought you guys did a great job putting this together and i you know as a team just not having worked with each other and you came together very quickly and put together a great presentation um so i really appreciate that everything was really clear um the whole mock budget thing was a good idea um i i only gonna observe you just touched on it briefly i do want to point out that and i i'm i'm not picking on recreation but and but our recreation budget has increased almost 100 in three years it went from can't remember where it was with 620 and we're over a million dollars that's i understand all of the specifics of the recreation budget why one thing or another nevertheless sometimes you have to step back from the forest and so you don't see the trees and look at something because at the same time in the same time period our capital transfers which is our capital costs are repairing of critical infrastructure that budget actually declined now i know that that budget is pegged to upcoming pending capital projects we try to anticipate and put the money in a year ahead of time but that's telling us where our priorities are and it's a little concerning and so i as someone who is leaving the board i do urge you and we've heard this from some of our constituents i do urge you to put some kind of a recreation oversight or committee in place just to make sure that we understand that this is a significant commitment this community is making to recreation yeah in as opposed to some other things that we could be making commitments to and so i'd like to make sure that we get community input and guidance on that going forward absolutely georgia in terms of the new committees that within virginia's memo the recreation advisory committee is one of the ones that hat will have money budgeted to be paying for english was not very good there but i think you know what i'm saying yeah it's no exactly what you say great thank you um so i know that at our last meeting we had a conversation around stipends um and around our city council stipends roge do you want to touch on this do you want me to to go first um so based on our last conversation one thing just contextually and thinking about how that conversation went and the things that we're trying to do uh around around diversity around equity and inclusion none of us in this room are experts in the subject none of us in this room have our crystal ball or magic a ball and know if we do one thing here what that is then going to do tomorrow what that's then going to do in six months nine months ten months ten years we have no idea and so we are here in this fog of either doing nothing and hoping for the best or doing something and hoping for the best personally i i do not believe in doing nothing and hoping for the best to me that's a fool's errand my words um and i would propose that we do something in terms of starting a conversation from a budgetary standpoint and to try to find some kind of a a happy medium i would propose instead of the six thousand five hundred that was originally proposed that we do five thousand per council member i mean i'll go next just to say anything um i'm fine with that um i put this together i put this together i've talked to a bunch of people i spent the past few days talking to some people that do have some knowledge around this with the state um it is a conversation that's happening every day now in the state house they're trying to address it that's happening in board similar to ours now around the state not just here um and it's centered around you know and included this in the novel um people in local leadership positions remain unaware of their biases or shortcomings perpetuate a system where marginalized voices are further excluded from community affairs not on purpose we're not doing anything here i just want to clarify because it got a little confusing last i don't believe we're doing anything in here to make that we're not knowingly coming out that i'm not intending that nothing we're doing what we're trying to do with it's certainly community and what we've all been doing is doing so this isn't a comment at all this is recognizing that when i was out recruiting for youtube for places youtube for instance i was talking to like single mothers who i thought would be great to come on here and having to identify things that weren't you need a painting it was how much time does it take all right let me look into that it's like wow so what would you need well baby sitting right now in the community there's about 20 bucks an hour for a kid so we just cover our meetings and free work it's 20 you know so you get to that point where you're trying to say to people we really want to hear you know we don't have anybody on this board for instance that we're welcoming to the community that lives and all the new development we're bringing in it is going to take some effort to meet them where they fall so you get them here because we are saying that we want their their participation we need to hear from them because we need to know what to do with community we don't we know some things right but but we don't know what we can't speak for we just simply can't we can guess you know so and and the irony there is we could you know i've heard i've heard i'm not laughing at anybody else just myself they're saying it like this but we can say to ourselves we should really get out there and talk but we've already seen in numbers how much time we are currently spending or anybody in our role not just not about us would already be spending just doing this work so to then say why don't you spend more time having a Saturday morning community conversation at bottom pot or stopping by when there's a barbecue okay well that's that's adding on in a way that's already it's it's ironic so i i think there are all kinds of ways to come to a number i i don't pretend to say that all of a sudden before the petitions for this election are due that we're going to see a flood or even one and i can't predict that we're going to see many more next election but we're we're you know these budgets their numbers and their expenditures and their revenues but their policy statements their value statements and what we're saying we're a community by doing this is it's expensive but in the grand scheme of things i think five thousand is four dollars and maybe ten cents on the average not nothing because that happens every year what we're saying is we really do want that input we're going to meet people where they are we can adjust it you know this isn't in the charter this isn't in our so it's not in our community constitution we can come back in a couple years and say i know that didn't really give us much use i don't know what the time frame would be but if we're not getting the result we want we can pick the reason this is coming up now rather rushed and i didn't say this last time i didn't know the two of you i didn't know we're gonna have two open seats so that's not necessarily important because people still have to get elected as you rightly pointed out and but it's harder to run against somebody it's already right now we have open seats so it's really they don't have to compete against current board members so that does make it easier right so we're gonna go out and try to round up some people and try to really convince them that they belong here they can do it we're going to support them this way as a community and we value them it's a good time to do it it's a little last minute here i granted it um also we have to make like Andrew pointed out we have to make this decision now for next march in April for the next petition season because you know so if we don't put this in now we're not only we're missing an opportunity for these two seats but we're missing an opportunity for the next two seats and and that's 80 of our board we've we've basically said we're gonna we're gonna wait and those seats last that'll be six years we're waiting to see that turnover and so i realized this is last minute it's sudden it was unexpected but i think part of it comes from just being opportunistic in a way and saying this is a good time to bring this up in a sense that it's a good time for people to join the board and i'll stop at other things okay can i can i can i can comment all right all right um i did want to express that i thought a lot about what you said and i still disagree i disagree with the five thousand dollars that increased the five thousanders up to five thousand um the things i've i've contemplated this issue and a couple things come to mind like i said there's no guarantee that we're going to get no you know people to to um come from that community that you're talking about whatever single mothers or bi-talk community what have you um the things i see that could not tie to cost but like you said it's hard to be an incumbent is term limits increasing the size of the board from five these are of course the chart things but increasing the size of the board from five to seven members so you know you're getting a large you know board but potentially from more things because to try and placate every group i mean you could you break down to the elderly we heard from people talking about the senior bus and all the things there are many many groups factions whatever out there that want to be heard i mean to get representation of them we'd probably have a board of who knows 30 40 people what what what you know who knows how many what is the right number and how many people have to be on board to to to make it equitable what people think is going to be equitable so i think term limits i think you know potentially increasing the size of the board another thing could be we have committees or groups or advisory boards reaching out to people we had it with the heart with the police department with these issues i don't see why we can't do do such so we can get input from the youth the elderly the handicapped everybody out there that's in a position where they'd love to be able to have input but it's difficult for them to get involved with this to do whatever you know limitations they have and think that money is going to solve it i disagree can i can i say can i jump in okay i'd like to bring a completely different dimension into this okay i'm going to start by saying i think it's and i discussed this with and previously when we were putting the charter together there were a bunch of little areas that troubled me and but we were in a rush we needed to make it in time for the legislative session so we kind of let a lot of stuff go and i think we're making some good corrections this year but compensation for the city council was one of those issues that i was a little leery about and uh and and here's why i think it's inappropriate and kind of borderline unethical for any elected board in charge of a municipal budget to give itself a raise and in effect the way the charter is set up by simply putting a raise for the city council into the general fund budget the only if and we've already seen that this is a controversial issue and we've gotten emails already and we've seen this is controversial uh this this question because you can come at it from so many different angles begs significant community input but you're not going to get that because you're going to put it into the general fund budget and people who don't agree with giving us a raise what's their choice the only choice is to vote down the police the fire department public works capital they have to vote down the entire municipal budget in order to say no i don't want you to get a raise okay and i in other words we're in effect holding the municipal budget hostage okay i'm sorry but that's how i look at it i would like to propose a a kind of a compromise here if i can uh how do we get around it look the charter language how do we get around it i would like to propose that we put a question on the bell about doing this okay not a separate line item but a separate question so shall the shall the the f y 25 budget uh include a proposal to increase city council stipends to five thousand dollars obviously it would have to take effect in the following year's budget in the f y 25 budget right because you can't we can't retroactively put it back into the budget because the budget's going to have been approved but let me point out i don't think we can disagree on a lot of things but i think we can all agree i don't think there's an emergency here i don't think that the wheels of government are going to come undone if the s extension city council doesn't get a pay raise this coming this july i think this could wait i think then you would know it's going to be in place raj by by the next election cycle you you would know it's going to be in there okay and that would give us the opportunity to really hear what the community has to say you know because there are a lot of people looking at this at our budget and looking and we have just heard from a couple are going gee i voted for separation thinking i was going to see a decrease in my well it's complicated because of inflation because we had to transfer but nevertheless it there are there are people out there who are looking at us saying what was it what is it that you guys ever say no to you say yes to everything but when do you say no to some request so but on the other hand i completely understand the the issues that you're raising raj so i hear a lot about community input let's get some real significant binding political community input put this as a question on the upcoming ballot that's going to annual meeting at annual meeting we can explain our positions you can make your case it can be debated publicly if the people say yes then the city council has its it has its answer the other reason why i think it's an ethical way to to approach this is because it really does kind of distance the current city council from the the pay increase that happens in other words two of the members won't we're certainly not going to benefit from it but two of the other members may not benefit from it it's for a board that's going to be put together a year from now so that makes it less like we're looking just to compensate ourselves as opposed to saying we think that this is a a good move a good governance move okay so i would like to make that proposal as a compromise i the the only other thing i'm going to add i i i do want to point out that there are we there are a lot of unknowns about about why people in some populations don't apply for the board or don't run for the board i want to point out that what we do know out there in s6 junction is that there are thousands of people middle and upper income people who also don't run for the board okay is that because they're bad people they don't care about their community of course not they care about their community but they don't want to get involved because they don't care they're not that interested they don't want to take on that degree of responsibility they don't want to be in the public eye they don't want to have to go and knock on doors and and get a petition signed uh and and so when i say and so they don't and so we can understand why those people and it's understandable why people who could run for the board they have the resources in the time that to to run for the board and then we don't and they don't and yet we say that's okay well why doesn't that that logic and that reasoning apply across to all everyone in every other community low income people people and marginalized community in communities i i i think that i'm just pointing out that you're right putting more money onto the city count into the city council compensation it is a real shot in the dark that it's going to do anything and in fact it could do just the opposite of what you want it could encourage more people from other parts of the community not not marginalized parts of the community to also run and they could further displace it so i i just don't know what to say i don't think that there's a clear path i'm not sure it's fiscally irresponsible responsible to for us to spend money on something that we're not really clear what the problem is and we i have absolutely no idea if it's going to have an effect i think we have to understand that it's a lot of people would question whether that's a reasonable thing for the city council to do so that's why i will go back to my suggestion that we put this as a separate question um let let the let the community weigh in on it and then that will inform um next year's budget by the city council thank you george uh amber did you want to add anything at this point um i'll i'll just add a quick comment um i'm struggling with this question honestly um i do think it's always it's always nice to add an increase um because i think that's just the general i mean the city council siphon stayed at what it was for years and then we got the increase we had the increase last year i'm just struggling with that large of an increase um and i hear the counter proposal of five thousand but i'm still i'm still not i'm not i'm not a hundred percent sold that i would go that far you know maybe two thousand twenty five hundred i appreciate all of the research that rash has done on this and i totally understand where he's coming from in regards to the to the numbers that he's proposing um i but i will just say that one of the biggest things one of the biggest impediments to me even stepping up was not the monetary piece of it was the time commitment you know it's somebody who works 40 plus hours a week it's not it's not the two hours that we sit here on a zoom call or in at two lincoln it's the four hours that we're spending reading 200 pages um on top of trying to you know trying to live our lives here and so that's that's while i see the the monetary piece of it i guess i'm also agreeing with with dan and george and saying i'm not sure that that's the reason entirely why we don't have the diversification um on the board so i guess i'm still in an i don't know where i'm at kind of position but just wanted to share my thought process great thank you amber um in terms of moving this forward so i think overall i i completely understand where you're both coming from term limits have been discussed before we're going to discuss yesterday at the same time you know there's pros and cons to that um as you said before people still need to get elected and i think george that's where when you refer to those people who might make more than the average of some of those people that might make less everybody here still has to get elected i don't think the community is gonna all of a sudden go uh that guy that's the one you know if they don't believe it so i think some of those concerns while i hear exactly what you're saying i think the community is a little more sad in terms of who we're gonna put on the board so i don't actually share that concern but overall i think the theme i'm hearing and my my thought to all of this is you're you're asking a system that's in place to change itself to reduce its power you know if you think about this as a system and you're looking at it and saying well it should just agree that at some point and you know it's a way to kind of perpetuate that system when people say well we can't quantify it we're going on faith we're gonna you know see how it goes we'll ask the community very few of the of these moves of this type in our country's history have been by popular vote and how they've been left the popular vote would not have been we'd still be dealing with other things i'm not equating this to that necessarily i'm saying there are no i'll come back to it single members on this board there are no there's nobody under 30 right um you know you think the great what are you talking about 20 years ago there you know we could go on and on and on it's it's not simply a but but i've been out talking to a lot of people who care just as deeply about our community as everybody in this room right now and and i i know all of you amazing people every time one of these meetings and i look out and there's more than two people it's all of us it's just us and i know there's a there's a dozen people probably watching on youtube some will watch there's a probably eight people on zoom right now that our employees are still it's always us we always joke about it's how it's always us i'm not mad and you'll be always joking i think it's funny we go to elections same bowl workers we go to committees same people volunteering you know we had a great turnout for the hiring committee that was cool only got people we were interested in we can't talk and then come on the board it's you know i put in the memo how much this would cost but can't not tribute i don't pretend any any expenditure on our budget is true but i think the community and i will we're not making decisions tonight i'll think about what you said about the advisory you know we've done it with other things my concern about that like i said is you're asking a system that sort of benefits from from leaving it alone to change itself i i don't have a history of that happen i don't see where that's happened before especially when people can say well you're just trying to just trying to get to a percentage i mean dan i i think i know what you mean but you were i think when you when you talk about this you you try to i think you're you're trying to kind of is the is the answer you're looking for what are the numbers we want to see we're not looking for a target we're looking for voices we're looking for a life experience lived experience we're looking for lived experience we i don't have there's no target there's no right number it will change election to election um so i i don't want us to to get caught up with what's the right ratio you know are we are we on percentage for the number of people who speaking english is the second language that are in our community the simple fact is that the majority of the group by far in the state of vermont where people of color not english speakers as first languages and others in this past census so i'm not saying that's the target it's a wide net so i'm just trying to answer and again george i'll give that some thought about you know should we do that and we'll get some feedback from people can i can i respond to your thing about the percentage and stuff i don't disagree with you it doesn't have to be a percentage but you're talking about single mothers you're talking about different people from different backgrounds different life experiences on war as i said earlier to where how how many different voices do we we all have different voices i have a different background than you do we all have different backgrounds and it depends on how you look at it rosh okay so my background is law enforcement my my whole life okay i am a single father i think the rest of you guys are all married okay and okay well i still was for all the term my you know full time whether i've won the planning commission all the way through wreck advisory council this board and work the job that will shift work night's weekend's calls for search and rescue everything i made it work it was difficult and not easy but that's something i chose to do and it's not no one forces you to do it and i try to represent all the people and don't i i felt kind of almost like an affront to me that because i i can't we don't i the initial message was we don't represent our community and i think we do and to think that i'd like to know because i'm not of a unique situation whatever you're describing it i can't represent those people our state our federal representatives up for the longest time bernie sanders patrick lehy and peter welch three old white guys they represent the state of vermont okay we have a super majority in mom player of democrats okay did they get the house they've got the senate we have moderate governor but we talk about inequities but we don't look beyond we talk country what so there's a lot of ways you can look at the picture i'm just saying i disagree with trying to solve this by putting money to it i want to hear voices from everybody we try and do that we're doing a lot more of it like i said before now that we we Skype in meetings like i said before patty used to patty benoit used to come around with that three-room binder to teach our houses and drop that off our meetings now we get people calling in we have much more attendance than we ever had in the 12 years i've been on this board okay so i'm happy with that is it perfect no but you know you it's a it's a process we move forward we move forward quite a bit and that's all i'll say right now you know i just want to say yes to everything you're saying i'll add that when you were talking about we have other committees they can report to us and we can do something about that's to your that's what our filters we filtered them we bring our way of thinking our life experience and interpret what they tell us in our own way and then make our decision they're not making that decision is what i'm saying so when we say it's good enough to have that representation there my reaction to that is yes you're right it is amazing to have that representation that's that's enough and when we take and when we say we don't need to make that impact on this we're saying it's good enough to have it there and then we're just going to let that filter through the same group of people that always so we're keeping that lack of representation in the decision-making table you know it's kind of like i heard from i heard from somebody about the budget my interest are being represented this is an increase valid valid valid i asked some questions about that they're not here in this group we can think like them we can hear them and we can say i think they'll like this but it's even the people you're talking about you know like we're filtering we're always filtering it's like newspaper right editors will always filter the writer that's what ends up in the paper let's just do that so you can look at it right but it's the same thing it's our filter and i we don't have to go on this all night because we've got a long meaning can we not put the sides in that i just want this continued thinking about it and i appreciate the input i really do and the and the so i'll stop i i want to clarify let me let me quickly as a former editor i want to say uh considering the state of social media today i think things are a lot better off when they did go through but we'll put that we'll put that issue aside i i'm trying to say i really rush i i i i i try to say you know this is this is a lively debate and so i'm posing the question to the city council why not amplify this debate and let the community have this debate and let them let them vote on it i understand what you're saying that sometimes an institutional structure doesn't want to change itself but i i think we're i think we're pretty a pretty flexible progressive group here in s extension and i would trust voters on this and i would just really urge urge us to try to let's let's get community input on it put it on a ballot as a separate question again i have to point out i've been on here 15 years um you know but i didn't even know they gave compensation when i joined uh and so we've done a pretty good job for the last 15 years i think holding off one more year is not going to be critical and then if if the answer is yes then you guys will know what to do and then in the next election cycle in in a you know a year from now you the the people who run for for those seats they will know that starting in a couple of months they're going to get a little more compensation see if you bring your way because it's two elections it's effectively two election cycles they well no it would kick in it would kick in in the in the in that in that in that budget it it would kick in in that that fiscal year in the in the in July of that fiscal year so you would have it you would it would only be a few months away you would miss this one you'd miss this one all you'd miss is this one and and so it would kick in the following year and so all i'm saying and i don't think that's a i think that's a reasonable um compromise to make in order to really let the community weigh in on this and inform the board and and i i'll let me add i would recommend that uh that you we either you guys either consider maybe altering this in the charter to how how the uh to to to give the community the community a little more input into this um down the road and i think that that would give you an opportunity to do that as well so i i would just urge you to do it i think it would be a good thing i think it would be good to have the community debate this and and give us uh and give you guys their input on it so the only thing um i'd like to just to wrap this up the only things that i i kind of want to add into this in terms of somebody not liking a line item within our budget whether that be our stipends whether that be the amount for the police department uh health officer whatever recreation anything else in our budget the only recourse anyone has is to vote it to vote the budget in its totality up or down regardless of what it is and so at some point in time the people who have been elected by the community to make some of these tough decisions have to make a decision and it's of course up to us whether we choose to utilize that power that has been given to us or whether we advocate that power um with public input i got two emails i don't know about the rest of you that's all i got uh on facebook there was some lively conversation about this broadly it was in support a few against but much more so in support of increasing the stipends the question of should it be 6500 5000 4000 different numbers were thrown around a broad increase was was favorable um i didn't see anything on foreign porch forum if there's other conversations on other forms of social media i don't do those so i have no idea term limits i would say governance in general one of the things we put in our charter is to have a study on governance and our governance options uh by years or within three years of the passage of our charter so these are some conversations that i i hope our community does have around our governance structure around the number of people who sit at this table um should we have wards term limits all those types of things um so again we could look at at that point in time other aspects of the system to change to then see what types of impact that may have but again as rajah saying this is a system with various attributes to the system and so we can either change something hope for the best or do nothing and hope the best and we can continue that well i i i think you you brought up a good point uh andrew i think that it's reasonable to say that this a board giving a board getting it increasing its stipend it's always going to be a controversial issue i think okay um and just as staff wants to if they they want salary increases uh uh operational increases we're the boss in terms of that they have to come to us and ask our permission and who's our boss yeah um so i think it's time for us to go to the boss and ask the boss's opinion uh number one and i think you raised a good question because when we transitioned from having live meetings to uh australian ballot i think that there was a a a tacit um uh necessity in there for us to not put controversial things uh into the australian ballot budget because as we know i'm sorry it does not get the scrutiny that it does when you when you had two or three hundred people gathered at the auditorium and stuff like this would get pulled out and debated and that meant people could change it from the floor that that doesn't happen and it doesn't get that level of scrutiny before people vote on it so again i go back to saying um that's why i think this is controversial i think it's it's a fascinating debate for the community to have i would urge us to just put it on hold you know i think we can safely the wheels of government the government won't explode if we put it on hold per year let the community have it say and then that will inform the city council when you guys are putting the budget together next year that would be my my suggestion um anything new so many things um i think controversial really is i guess defined by whoever's looking at so i could suspect that we have many controversial things i think this is you know if we're looking to the state this is how the legislature does it and they're struggling right now with this question because they don't dare do this because it's politically difficult they're also struggling and probably being impacted more by not being able to get the bodies they need to to run and serve um and and so i we don't keep going on this i just i think it's an interesting idea to have the community weigh in i always want to know the community thanks um i'm not going to say i don't trust them at all but there's not a lot of history you know i'll say i'll think part of that because i'm talking to people back the thing about controversial things in our budget roge the controversial things in our budget for projects or anything we want to you know start new add to the budget this could be construed or looked upon as being self-serving it's it's as opposed to the projects we do in the community benefits the community as a whole indirectly you can make your argument and say this benefits the community as a whole but i think if you were to pull a lot of people they could say well this you know you're giving yourselves a raise as it were and that is very self-serving whereas the other stuff i don't look upon it as being self-serving just as much as any member of you know we we can't have a a person involved in public works you know like ricky jones on this board because it's he's conflict of interest but we you know his budget he's he's dealing with his budget i mean but i'm saying we're able to vote and say our our personal stipend is going to go up this this much you know basically like george saying and then they got to vote the whole but it's tied to the budget and then if they're opposed to it they really doesn't get you know it's just to make sure we're not equating want to participate and good with volunteer and automatically losing that good and service to community with increases that because we'll already pan ourselves right i'm just saying i'm just saying there's always been oh it is but just i'm saying the extent i'm saying the extent i'm saying the extent it's not no across the board communities everyone you know generally there's a stipend for community service but i'm just saying the extent of it the amount of it just adding adding it to you know so at the beginning of the public hearing i said that we would then talk about the budget and at that point in time i would ask if there are public comments on things that they've heard so far so with that in mind if anybody either in the room or out in zoomland wants to make a comment have a question things you've heard thus far about the budget because after this i'm assuming or i'm thinking we're going to go off of this topic and onto the next agenda item please go ahead and raise your hand marlon just listen to the type of document maybe because of things i wanted to maybe just talk about just if my sense is i didn't part of it online so um and i'm going to talk a little bit about it um but we thought about it on our own board too um from my perspective thinking from an equity lens um i don't look at it as checking boxes off i don't look at it as i need to like pick one person from here pick another person from there pick another person there to make sure that i fill all these boxes that's my negative negative is giving everybody a chance to actually have you see the table and i think and again i don't even know what to get out of it i'm going to be involved with that as i should i can't check it on whatever the fact i apologize for that but i was having an open question for you guys um one because the law was passed year you know vacancy i appreciate that it was i'll probably say a lot of word people a lot hours into that so you know that including you know the years prior to that for you for for being on the board hold on it well yeah going on 12 years 11 years and rock all over this is my board George 15 dad well never falling down the board i think it's four almost four four years so you're usually you're the newbie type in the morning yeah roge and i are almost the same time frame okay so so i have the question you guys especially for the three of them got over that they experience on the board so in your time on the board i'm certain there's time with all this meetings i've missed being in the school board i'm certain you guys missed time me sure because of commitments i have never been in time or you guys have missed a board meeting not because you have prior because you but because you couldn't afford to go to a meeting like let's say you got you know you're at home and the kids are there there's no way to wash them you can't pay for a poor to pay a day you said or to wash them or you are you're having to work up to a certain point and if you can't you can't afford to miss work because you can't pay your bills it's either come to the board meeting or it's i don't i don't put my foot in my feet or i don't i'm not able to provide for my family is that ever happen to the three of you specifically the team members of the board do you recall a time of time that you've been on the board that they've made it happen to you that made it that hard decision of like i can't come to the board because if i don't my right um you know my children don't get washed and i'm unable to do it so just i think that we um i think we can just broadly completely understand what you're saying not trying to stop the the comments just want to make sure we don't get into a have you have and i don't mean and i thought into it but like the point the question the point of that question is this i think that bringing up the idea of a stipend and yes it's something we'll do is a large enough but i think for some folks i think in arguing we had in our board is the point is this is i think that the talk of the of choice like a lot of people should not want to do this work it's a hassle the pain it is trust me i i i'm a newbie to this and it's i needed the pain to do this work but when i look at it and that i have the ability that i don't have to worry about um making that financial choice um you know if i come to a meeting in my family because they're going to recover my house and i think that's what i'm talking about at this point there if i could afford babies if i could afford to maybe miss a couple hours of a shift that's not going to impact me to be able to have a c of these tables to help my voice be heard and to make an impact in the in the work again you guys have done great work and i appreciate what you guys have done it's not that easy we've asked all the heavy lift all of them and you guys come through this community and i appreciate that i really really do but i think that sometimes we talk about equity we focus on patterns we focus on you know the person next to me fit a certain category look a certain way that's not equity equity is allowing everybody an equal opportunity at these seats at these tables that you guys have right now that i have on Tuesday it's already Tuesday i can tell you for a fact that everybody in this community has an opportunity it's not a choice because a choice is i can do a or b at the end of the day yeah i'm gonna miss this thing but it's not gonna have a major impact on my life equity is if i choose b i can be very negative impact on myself my family's life so when we talk about equity i just kind of want to put that on the screen with something to think about for food to thought that i understand there's a lot of talk to me you can talk to me but i urge you guys from an equity lens to think about not so much of a choice not so much as you know um people trying to fill boxes or fill spots here it's about an opportunity for folks that we don't get you to hear very off you know i i won't man i'll be on the school board i got lauded repeatedly for being the first my father was on the school and this school district has been here hundreds and thousands plus years that's we shouldn't be that shouldn't be a barrier but i know there are others in the community with a barrier board i heard that i talked to them and they appreciated me being having to see that table so i didn't ask you guys when you think about this further but yes i i understand what's coming you want the community is to speak and i agree i i i can understand and i agree with them but i just say for for you guys in the here in this conversation please think about that that when you're looking at this year it's not about it's about making sure if i have this has a has a an opportunity that i see at this table and i know for a fact that not everybody's community has a choice right now because we see in our board people have not wanted in the world because they can't because they choose to but because they flat out can't that's a financial issue right now for most of those things so i'll just leave it at that so thank you guys very much thank you thank you marlon anybody else in the room verge it just a couple quick things um if you are going if you are planning or thinking about putting this that commission um and the separate question on the ballot that's george is going to say it's going to require a lot of education because people are just you know i'm sorry and and once they understand the issues understand the time you're spending those kinds of things so i would like to to know that you will commit to doing that education however however you have to do it because i don't think putting it on the ballot is really going to have the effect in terms of community education that you that you're looking for you want an informed decision made by by the citizenry and and just putting it on there is not going to be i think you all know that but it is a commitment to do that education the second thing um going back to a comment that george made about uh about re-establishing um of a recreation advisory council um i just want to be really clear excerpt on that board as the dan roge i've worked for 12 years um is not an oversight board you would have to rewrite the charter job whenever you want to call it if you want that kind of a board we were an advisory board we served as the conduit between community and recreation and it was we didn't have budget oversight and things like that that what you're looking for um it's going to require a total rewrite of of our of what what we used as a as a as a mission statement um you know we changed charter a couple times but um never did we have that kind of of oversight or supervisory capacity so that's it just to expand on that for one quick moment since you brought it up uh the other thing that it would likely require is a charter change since we're very clear in the charter that the manager has the ultimate responsibility on uh the departments within our community and that it is not given to the the city council in terms of operational uh oversight but rather our manager and so if that's referred to me a lot in terms of this conference in relation to this conversation i've been away having served on that board for long as i did um council for example um uh using the rationale that recreation needs more oversight if you will you are the you're the oversight board you you and and and the manager oversee that aren't you at the same i mean thinking about this does that mean a public works same kind of oversight right i i see your logic yeah can i enter just just i i was what i was thinking bridget is more like the brown l oversight board now that is in the charter and it's in their foundation charter that they have to have a board like that but i've been on that board and certainly the director wendy has control and and the and she proposes a budget but then they have a lot of input to that budget before the budget comes to us and that's really what i was sort of recommending for something of like recreation just so you know you're talking about you're not talking about advisory council you're talking about some kind of an oversight board and if that again would require a lot of research and education it turns to a staff because across the board recreation advisory councils do not have that kind of power oversight they just don't so that they're they're they're they're established to communicate with the community to volunteer events to do those kinds of things so you're talking about a fully different kind of work and i don't approve or disapprove i'm just saying it's going to require some to work just one quick word it's a it's a four million dollar uh cost center right now with their with their with their all their program funds uh that i believe is our largest cost center in in the city third i think it's it's a third i think they're probably not sure what you call streets which i call public work uh no that's a that's about that's under two million it depends on what we're what you're calling in terms of what or what you're including in terms of general fund or i i'm not trying to have a general conversation but i'm just saying it's a very very significant it's no longer when you go from half a million a year to that much money it's a significant amount of money is which requires a significant response like right i'm not saying they're doing anything bad right but it's a that's a big budget i'm not defending or or because i haven't been involved in that closely with that group for a while but i do think we've asked rep to do a lot that we normally did in other you know like okay they'll take it on they'll take it on the more elaborate they'll take this off they'll take that off and you can't do that and then say uh wait a minute your your budget is increasing and that's not going to work i mean it's all this is a part of the whole right i mean it's a part of the whole examination of how how the municipality runs how it works and how it works for the community how it works for the staff how it works for everybody and this should be something we spend time on you know and um and and to examine in terms of how we want this to work it's kind of same conversation you're having about the getting people to serve you know and seeing the same people over and over again um i just think it's another thing we can do here there's something else and they not struggle with it for 20 years either you know but um there's something else there's a way that we can we can connect the community to the municipality you know and just want to say i i agree with you i we're going to have a strategic planning process at some point right in the near future one of the things i wanted to talk about because there's a lot of all of a sudden there's a lot of talk about recreation guys we can write down and then you know it's fine we had one for a while i don't think that's that thing i've been thinking a lot about how we interact with our community and the number of committees we have and the number of required people number of people that requires and can we can we think about a different way can we be more nimble can we have a can we have people we just know we can go to on a topic and say look got this project problem do you have a few weeks to or six weeks to engage on it and give us advice and and really have groups of people that are out there to help us when we need it or with it bring us or rec or public or whoever things that need to be worked and then we can you know to be more nimble to be more creative to get more voices in to not have these separate little silos that then require whole whole you know times that we need to meet with them you know they're all then under different meeting requirements different minds you know like i think we we we have this opportunity as a new city i said we have this opportunity as a new city to really kind of look at how we're doing this and i think i just asked for folks to give us a chance to get the city going and now that sounds a little lame no but we've really just needed a chance to get the city going we're going to talk about this we're going to engage the community on it we need a couple years or a year sorry if i just need to talk i've always been a proponent of involving the community and i think we saw with the manager search committee that you can ask the community to do that very serious very in some ways for pretty difficult work and they step up they step up i think they're they're in a way we need to do more of that give the community some important jobs some really important jobs and i think they'll step up and i think the kind of would work to do it absolutely that needs facilitation which is why you're seeing some of these positions in the budget recommended because we need people to interact with the with the community in that way yeah so i mean when you when you when we talk about that i just want to make sure as we're talking about the budget and everything that people understand this takes it's not the entire reason we're not you know we need more people but we have a lot of things we want to do here as a community and and i think that requires a conversation and that requires some staff and it's different than what we thought two years ago and it's unfortunate but i will say that i'm a proponent of disabilities rip off the band aid very difficult so i want we want to hear from more people if it's not the right way to go more evidence well you know you're having really important conversations right here right now and um that's the beginning i certainly hear more opinions and ideas and i think that's that's certainly where you start but but you know and i'm just strong proponent of getting the community involved and and i'm in really important work so thank you bridge it can i just add one one thing um sorry just mostly since we are talking about the budget just want to be clear that i i get the point about the ejrp budget but just so most folks know that a very strong majority of that is not at general fund expense at the property tax it is a program based enterprise fund essentially yeah right the overwhelming majority something like two-thirds or three-quarters of ejrp's uh revenue and expenditures goes through uh the the enterprise funds which are user fees by the people who use those things whether that be our child care licensed child care uh the recreation programs in general the pool all those those things um which are not in the general fund and so are not paid for by taxes anybody else in the room being no hands in the room so i've got my email in and i have more to choose yep you email that may not be the last one your email is in the reading file i it is in the email i would i would love if there's anybody online or in the room that would maybe go up and speak and i wouldn't have to but if not i wouldn't there's one person online who'd like to speak could we hear from them maybe they're kind of speaking for them maybe alice oh good lord i'm supposedly maybe speaking for someone i apologize i am not putting my camera on because as my grandma said i don't have my face on so i wanted to just chime in and said one i'm voting yes on this budget so thank you so much for all the hard work i really appreciate it um i wanted to also voice my support for marlin's position on the stipends um i do have a bit of a conflict of interest in this uh but i thought it was important enough to step forward and say that i know i think number one it is an equity issue i hope it doesn't end there as a conversation about increasing a stipend but potentially how do we also remove other barriers from people's way um to level the playing field and give them the opportunity to serve so i really encourage the council to think of not only raising a stipend and i'd like to see debate over the amount but also about other things like maybe supporting childcare things like that giving more options for virtual options which i think we're moving towards but i think this is critical piece of work for the city to show a commitment to the second thing that i would say in support of the stipend is there's a value to people's time and they're volunteering and serving and i also support this in the legislature paying the people in the legislature for all their time because it certainly is a barrier um and i really would like to just acknowledge everyone who does put in their time whether it be on a committee on a council an elective position that that's time away from their families that's time away from their education uh that's time away from their own sort of uh self-care so i think that value should be acknowledged and i think one way we do that is financially so thank you for that i also want to uh voice my support for an advisory committee for ejrp but i do believe that that makes it takes a little thought and we do want the we i want to understand fully what that advisory committee is responsible for having worked um and a lot of nonprofits that have boards and committees that staff uh reports to it's very difficult to have so many people trying to drive the ship um as a staff member and we need to trust our staff to do the right thing with the proper oversight but i'm sorry i feel like the push to to target ejrp at this time is is more personal than it is about ejrp and i think that i am totally open to an advisory committee conversation but i'm willing to wait for that conversation to happen in a thoughtful well documented in process uh thanks so much thank you alise uh next up on zoom we have annie cooper hi um my push uh alise uh is not personal um andrew speaking to you uh i would like to um say that a four point six million dollar recreation budget while two thirds to three quarters of it comes in through program is residential income it's income for the city and so i i think it's i've been a long time that we talk about how great it is which it is great of course absolutely it is fantastic that programming brings in income we are so fortunate to have a thriving recreation department it's great the recreation department manages many budgets our um our village our voices had that 10k budget for that committee that alise was on and bridget was on and um aline haney was on that was a great um moment in time where that committee was formed um there's been there's a committee for the memorial day parade that budget is managed by the rec department um i think it's so important that our rec department be supported and that things like the cash preferred during halloween that we really threw me friends that really threw me i i it really surprised me and it threw me so that was the the main impetus for my feelings about a rec advisory committee that aside george makes an excellent point that we've lost the ability to have discussions on the floor and point out particulars and vote on things that should be changed in the budget and while i 100 agree with australian ballot and i 100 agree with how we're doing it we need to change with that like george said we need to find ways to bring more community input as we go and uh in regards to the stipend i would like to see if there's a question on the ballot or discussion throughout the year um just take myself back one more time to the rec advisory committee component i don't mind what that committee gets determined to be i don't i trust that those of you sitting at that table and regina and the rec department can determine what that committee does i'm just frustrated that we've not had it for seven years and this is an eighth year so those are all my frustrations uh those are my thoughts about this stipend as well and thank you all so much for your time thank you annie arlyn are you good or so gone all right you can have the final word um a lot to take in no you're not and if i send my email top conversations i appreciate you guys doing that um great conversations uh george i agree with you that there should be discussion um problem is it's really difficult and then um it's it's kind of interesting we're talking about like some marginalized roots um and trying to give everybody a voice and i don't think putting the question on the ballot answers anything if anything we've discovered and actually you wouldn't be it's not actually on the ballot right it's separate question very similar to what we did before the problem is you can't get enough information education as british folks do it um it just gives you a kind of yes or no um and honestly because we're talking about taxes i don't think there's a person around here that will claim that they have never at some point in their life said no no more taxes no more new taxes just you know that's that's our our goal to you is always don't raise our taxes um i think this is i think if you did get into public discussion if you found a unique way social media it's not going to cut it um some of these marginalized communities can't get on social media um from port form um you know anything within the internet don't get me wrong we're reaching way more people than we are used to um i don't know if we're still reaching them some of these marginalized communities um and i and again to go back to public discussion i think you're gonna get i think you're gonna get 50 50 i don't think you're gonna get an answer i don't think they're gonna point you in a direction um i think this board is faced with one of the top reasons that you guys all signed up for which is you're gonna you're gonna make a decision and you're gonna get yelled at some people are not gonna be happy with other people are gonna support you at all um and the other thing that i found interesting is i was thinking you let that out okay so we go to let's let's say we get 6500 only because i'm a little competitive and i'd like to be first and if we go to 6500 we're the first community to ever do it but i'll i'll go back to five but that's where we need to go um just i felt like you what i i feel like you let that out of the bag right we do 6500 we're never gonna hit it but then i got thinking about it it is a line of them i mean technically we could just reduce the budget and pull it out of there so i guess we could have it and then we have to figure out how many years do we give it an opportunity to see if it changes the board right how many how many voting cycles do we go through before we pivot so it's a big conversation i could go either way um piece of me that said pull the trigger let's do it let's see what happens let's give you all that for a little while and see what happens thank you harlan you're gonna join us in the yelling okay never mind i'll talk to you offline understanding behind harlan thank you harlan all right uh risa got your hand in at just the last moment thank you sorry i didn't mean to do that i couldn't get to the hand um i completely support increasing the stipend not to this amount and not to this way i was a very strong supporter of merger and then when that when it was clear that that was never going to happen i was an extremely strong supporter of separation um i said at that time and i meant it if i'm paying the same amount of taxes however it's all staying in the city i'm okay with that i am having a real hard time with my money going to the town however looking at this budget i'm not seeing that there was any attempt to start it from where we were only as a city and adding from there so referring to the budget increase as 1.6 percent it may be 1.5 i may have that wrong that's not quite the case and it makes me it makes me uncomfortable it makes me uncomfortable that a city council is saying we're going to add this as a line item to our budget and include in there an annual inflation increase you know i i i know how much you got work you guys do i can talk about my conversation with raj which took up way too much of his time and i appreciated his time you all do so much that's not the question the question is 25 plus an hour which most people don't make in our community because that's what's considered the livable wage that seems like an overreach when i saw the 6500 i viewed it as this is smart you ask for 6500 because you're going to get 3000 and be really thrilled with it but apparently that isn't the case the case is you want 6500 now you're not willing to wait a year from now as george has suggested and you want there to be in addition to that in an additional inflation increase each year i also i've listened clearly to everything everyone has said and i keep coming back to what raj said about you know it's always us and he's right and all i keep thinking is this is a real push for me to consider the outliers to consider voting for the people who aren't part of quote unquote us because i think that right now we need a shake up it is very sad that george with all of his institutional history is leaving that dan with all of his institutional history and frankly a view that is different than mine is leaving i understand them leaving i completely do there comes a point you want to get on with your life but when i asked at the beginning is this something that would be as an amendment or as part of a line item this was why i agree that there needs to be discussion i agree that it's um it's not something that people will automatically understand but considering how high our budget is over what we paid only to the city adding this as a line item feels to me like you're trying to hide it i know you're not doing that it's been very clear it's been all over facebook it's been in the in the packets but you know i i really believe this is something that should go to the community and if the council doesn't believe that the community will have the council's best interest at heart i think that says something about the relationship between the community and the council thank you thank you risa the only uh couple clear pieces of clarification i just wanted to put out there um you talk about an annual increase that isn't guaranteed unless we put that into the charter which would then be voted upon by the community it would have to be discussed every single year by the board approved of by the board to then be approved by the voters through the budget process so we here can't guarantee that in five years it would increase at the rate of inflation without that charter change and then just with it being the city council stipends within our charter it's supposed to be its own unique line item within our budget so that that way it would clearly show what that that stipend is so it wouldn't be hidden among any other purpose so it wouldn't be within say the public works paving budget so that nobody could find it um so it does have to be its own unique line item just like thank you for that my comment about the annual inflation rate is because that is stated in raj's memo so that's where i got that and i realize that it's a separate line item it not being an amendment it's just like the council voted on this and passed it's a little questionable thank you yeah thank you risa so do i want to talk about the combined city budget okay there's no other hands up so we will go on to business item six be a discussion and consideration of moving the annual meeting date and discussion on the annual meeting election and preparation of schedule okay let me uh while you're you're finding that um i do want to offer a two apologies one i want to apologize that the community has not had an apology from the council or anybody on the council for where we are even needing to have this conversation so for that first portion i apologize and the second apology here is the fact that when we put this schedule together when we put out the the annual meeting happening we did not look at a calendar that was include that was more inclusive than a calendar that personally i would have grown up with throughout my entire life and so i did not know at that point in time that this was the first day of Passover moving forward what we will be doing is we will be using a more inclusive calendar that will have more holidays that would be recognized more days of importance that would be recognized and so just on behalf of myself i think i can speak for the city council here broadly of offering my apology to the community for this oversight so i am sorry for that as well okay so um thank you andrew so uh the memo points out some of that information and essentially um so because the charter now has um all of your voting done by australian ballot which we've talked about quite a bit tonight um the annual meeting itself really can be the voting day so this memo is recommending that you change the annual meeting to april 11th which is uh the date that everybody will be voting and then with that you've got to have your informational meeting 10 days prior to that so the recommendation here is that um the annual meeting uh moved to april 11th and the informational meeting happened the night before on the 10th um the um we're thinking that the best way to do the informational meeting is a completely online meeting uh because the school will be hosting their informational meeting at the high school that prior night before um uh sorry what else do we have here um we also uh just want to let folks know uh we are aware that there used to be a much more fun community dinner event with the committees outside trying to explain what they did and and try to get some more folks to come into the room um and we have looked into that logistically to figure out if we can make that happen um and we certainly can't do it on the 10th and we have investigated whether we can do it for some other kind of event in between now and then and it just logistically isn't isn't possible so that's why we're suggesting an online meeting for the informational meeting because if folks really want to come this room is not big enough we can't be in the high school and so online might be the best way to get the most people to participate um also I will point out that um for a lot of people um in your consent agenda you have the concept of mailing ballots if we mail ballots a lot of people will be voting way earlier than April 10th and so the whole process is a little bit different um and changed at this point um and really perhaps at some point we'll get some state changes state statute changes that kind of identified this new future that we're in for prepping for um local elections I think that's it thank you Regina anybody have any questions comments concerns my only comment is if you know if we just talk with the board of civil authority if we're going to move the operation over to cbe probably it's too obviously can't do it this year but once you settle in over there you might be able to have your your kind of fun dinner over there certainly cba I'm sure would be amenable to that um but it's too too soon but I think that's a good plan the other portion as well um one of the nice things about doing it at the high school was also just that dinner side yeah being frankly very inexpensive yeah whereas we don't have it in this budget that we know of at least to be able to recreate that and have some kind of private catering entity as the school right now doesn't have the capacity to do those kinds of events anymore but yes absolutely would love to be able to get back to that point in time well you can do it we'll get you can do it we'll get no I'm not gonna be I won't be part of this but you can do it anything else from the council uh Marcus I see your hands up quick question based on how I read this memo because the way that it's worded here an informational meeting is required 10 days prior to the annual meeting if you have it the night before that's within 10 days where read this it sounds like in sweet April 1st within 10 days yeah you can't yeah you have to have it within the 10 days of the vote okay just wanted to make sure I was reading that yeah sorry that's that's confusing in here yeah I appreciate that clarification um and yeah as a part of what Regina was talking about was the lack of alignment with current practice and capabilities to do mail-in ballots and yeah unfortunately I'll entertain a motion okay I will move that the city council moved the 2023 annual meeting from Wednesday April 5th 2023 to Tuesday April 11th 2023 to vote for the village officers and transact any business involving voting by Australian ballot second George thank you Dan any further discussion hearing none all in favorably signify by saying aye aye does opposed say nay so that passed unanimously and next up is something else this is just a minor uh present connector this is the all right come on this is a good thing rick's here I'd be very happy to talk to you and throw that you're here for this yeah um I could I can start us off if you'd like um so essentially we are ready to award the bid for phase two of the actual construction of the of the roadway itself um you've got a lot of attachments here uh in the memo um but essentially uh we have identified a low bid and are recommending that you move forward on that um on that bid award I we are also identifying here in the amendment that there are a number of non-participating items um that the city will have to cover and some of that we don't 100 know what that cost is going to be at particularly with the contaminated soils that have to be addressed um but um there are some other things which George excellent memory knew that there were some of these bike racks and other kinds of in-street amenities um associated with that so um I'll leave it at that so where we find ourselves is um at the end of a trip that's lasted well years today a little bit longer than that but from the preliminary study scoping studies the alternative analysis uh environmental assessment uh a predictive action plan uh designed the right-of-way acquisition um all of those process steps over the last 12 years have brought us to this point where we're ready to to actually complete the work and actually do the construction um and before I go on any other details let me just say that as you can imagine a project like this it's extremely complicated um it's like a giant flywheel and it starts moving very slowly and as we get closer again it's moving very quickly and Regina has joined us at a point where we're in this carousel this flywheel is moving very quickly and could easily have been thrown to the ground um confronted with it or definitely stepped on and joined it when she has evolved very impressively fast just being able to catch up with where we are after 12 years of focus on this project so it's been really the uh awesome to watch why we hired her exactly good choice um so um so we're at the point as I say we've got a a bidder a low bidder um and in our current bidding environment over the last year and a half almost two years now um to get a low bid that was lower than the engineer's estimate has been very rare the over the last year and a half two years the bids have been significantly higher than the engineer's estimate but in this case it was actually 1.6 percent lower than the engineer's estimate uh that DuBois and King that design engineers uh prepared which is great news for us uh this project is a hundred percent funded except for the things that we've talked about by state and federal funds so it's a part of the certain French alternative projects although we don't use that term anymore um so the the main work of this project is a hundred percent funded by state and federal funds uh to build the to build the project um uh the bid has been completely analyzed based on VTRAN standards and so and you'll see your package if you want to delve into it deeply but um there are multiple tests that a bid must go through um and filters to make sure that there's no disadvantage in this case to the city to awarding that low bid and a bid analysis which is multiple pages of specifically looking at the line out of my line out of the bid has determined um both the design engineers review and VTRAN's incurs that uh there is no and the term of art here is no disadvantage to the city in issuing uh and accepting this bid and issuing a contract this contractor which is the finding we hope to find uh with a low bid so that's where we're at um as Regina says the the one piece that's still um unknown it's because unfortunately this work is along historic railroad right of way and the railroad over time used both coal and wood um that emissions from the low vengeance created some contamination in the soil mainly metals arsenic for one um and so uh right now the good folks at VTRAN are examining what the city had done up to this point in terms of due diligence related to those contaminating soils our initial read is that the city through all this process over the last 12 years has done every single thing possible to mitigate that and so we're hoping that the findings from the good folks at VTRAN are that they will pay all for a large percentage of the cost of the disposal um our initial read throughout the project leading up to this point even before that finding was a hope for a 50-50 split um I'm hoping that we get a little bit more if they came back and said there's no participation for the soils that plus the life of the gracks the bike boxes uh ED charging stations some other thing that the the city wanted that aren't really considered under VTRAN as a part of a necessary part of the project for this type of funding um the percentage would be about three percent just a hair over three percent of this little project cost so again very small percentage against what the city will get from this project and so that's that's where we're at at this point and ready to go as you may know phase one of the project has already been completed um and that was all the railroad work that happened this summer so the reconstruction of every single crossing within the city limits that hadn't been upgraded recently so short of north the north street crossing which had been rebuilt so central street was rebuilt maple street main street park street north park street south and south summer street crossing uh were rebuilt uh the wet street extension extension had been rebuilt a few years before so um that was phase one of the project all the signals all the crossing panels um and a lot of railroad infrastructure was work on the summer uh so phase two is is the road comes along behind uh as you know the road will start on park uh it will cross traverse uh the lands of McEwing uh Calanges uh Mr. Knotts all provided easements uh to to the city along with the railroad um at maple street there'll be a new signalized intersection the railroad street will be completely reconstructed from maple to main and there'll be a new signalized intersection at the intersection of the crossing connector and park park street so um bike lanes will be on both sides of the road so we'll have a bike lane connection all the way from park to main sidewalks public parking will be a part of the project uh the apartment infrastructure and the entire street route will be uh lit so uh quite an input uh for that stretch to get you from park to main so that's where we're at and we're hoping you agree that it's do the final do the final step i remember um it was about nine or so years ago we were having the conversation about the bonds for briar and some other construction projects at the same time and a staff member at that point in time had said this is going to be one real busy construction season especially with the crossing connector coming in that this upcoming construction season and here we are nine years later well well you were still a good predictor uh and future events because yeah right now we're teed up to do all the water line replaced it on main street yeah the culvert replaced it on brickyard yeah and that's a connector project so it'll still be a it will so i'll make sure to repulse that post from nine years ago to the facebook community to say it's going to be a very busy construction season again this year yeah um this is absolutely fantastic thrill that it's it's happening can't wait for the for the crossing connector to come through um george dan i can i know how many times you've spoken about this uh i i this started for me this started with a meeting in the governor's office in 2011 and then probably i would say will you will you with the cirq alternative we with the rpc with the cirq alternative task force it just started in 2011 and i think they were kind of wrapped up i i i think i spent a hundred hours seeing this beast through the cirq alternative task force because we had to go to every possible person in the state who could say no to us and convince them to say i but it was wonderful every single moment but yeah it'd be great i'm going to reserve the right to make this motion so you can ask oh yeah questions but it helped put this puppy to bed here i was going to show somebody else if anybody tried no i i i'm very happy to see this project moving forward now um when i came on the board john log was the primary rep to the regional planning commission it was two actually it was regional planning commission and the ccrpc was you know uh mpo and regional planning mpo and planning so much much and we combined but anyhow so i saw this from the get go starting up and the other projects all the way through down in williston and we had our group of uh it's a small group because it was the communities that were actually in would have been impacted had the cirq been built so us the town willis then calls past their cirq community that's it you know it's it was uh quite interesting but we're finally here i will point out that that that colchester their cirq alternative project was this complicated diamond intersection if you know you if you've been keeping up on that and that thing works our project is way better than it started there so i don't know it started there it's pretty cool it's called the diverging double diamond intersection diverging double diamond yeah and uh great name it is it's it does it's several years but if you drive up by exit 16 on route seven to its combo you'll see they've got concrete blocks and they're digging away on the south side to the bridge above toward the bridge above that's that's that's not the time of a memorial crossing connection sure well the things take time i mean up in up in grand isle they've got a new new drawbridge yep it's taken many many years but it takes a lot um covid didn't help and it's it's taken a lot of tenacity hard work by certainly some of you here in this room yeah those who are not in this room as well yeah so it wouldn't be where it is without everybody who's been a part of it particularly appreciative and thankful yep for all of you yep i'm not seeing any other questions george there's anything else you wanted to add okay i will recommend that the city council award the crescent connector phase two project to the lowest bidder engineers construction incorporated and authorize hamlin engineering to manage the construction phase phase of the project and authorize the city manager to execute the contracts second any further discussion hearing none all favorably signified by saying aye aye those opposed say nay great that passed unanimously or he would have been voted off the board wow thank you rick thank you thank you tonight getting punchy we'll see you this summer sorry thank you rick appreciate it and raj you wanted to bring up the minutes yeah a couple quick things in the minutes um and i just found this one um page 115 or sorry line 115 um i don't know i just saw it so i'm going to bring it up rigid um this spelled with an it it's bridge of meyer and i know it's not it's just close to name but more importantly what i was bringing up the first time was part of line 104 in our conversation about stipends um just the word vision on line 104 i think it changes the meaning of what the discussion was um i think the original word was aesthetic and then change to appearance i think vision in this context would refer to how the board sees the future of the community as opposed to what i think the conversation was actually about would you propose an amendment so 104 change i think dan changed it to appearance so we go with that that's even the final comment so change the word vision to appearance in the end of line 104 as well as on 115 bridge it bridge it b-r-i-d-g-e-t yeah not it should probably like that all right anybody have anything else i'll identify them boy yeah so you'd like to make that motion to amend yes i moved to amend the minutes as described i'll second any further discussion hearing none all in favor please signify by saying aye those opposed say nay pass unanimously and that will bring us into the consent agenda there'll be a preview consent agenda second any further discussion hearing none all in favor signify by saying aye those opposed say nay great and so now we will go into the reading file and board member comments the only thing i wanted to mention uh the board of civil authority met right before this meeting for those of you who weren't present for that and made the decision that voting will no longer happen for this voting in april and for this upcoming year of 2024 voting will happen at cv e so shampling valley expo it will not be happening at the high school this should allow for more parking in terms of accessibility the parking will be on a flat surface you won't have to go up a ramp it will be heated and or air conditioned depending on the temperature it won't be in a school so that way in terms of a school safety standpoint you won't have guests going into the school and so that crowd control will be able to be managed significantly better especially as in case you did not hear about the the school shooting hoax that happened today that dynamic would not be played out during voting so be on the lookout it will be different but it will be a an exciting change and hope that it it goes well it's any member have anything else we'll be adjourned for a second which all in favor of what else you have all in favor say aye bye bye all both say night have a good night everybody