 All right, I like to call the Monday, October 18th, 2021 select board meeting to order for those who might have who have been online that it appears that we're having a discussion. We do have an individual in the room who's not masked and we're having a discussion about whether to address that or how to how to address the question. So that was why if you're watching online and you saw us having a discussion that's that was the discussion we decided open the meeting to make sure that that there was no appearance that we were hiding anything. So, so I'm not sure what to do here I understand that the you're asking us to defer the agenda item until we can somehow have a discussion with a person that has a mask on, or you can participate remotely. So what's the board's thoughts on this, which we do and this is in my opinion, not really even our issue. This is Evans as a municipal manager, the building and the rules that he has set in all of the municipal buildings, including the police station libraries, etc. I mean, I just it's a public safety issue though. We do have multiple other options that continue to participate for members of the public, including dialing in, including over the internet. But remaining in the building again unless Evan is willing to give some special dispensation. I really don't say we have an option here. I have to tell you that I did not give anybody any while they were paying their back. People came in the building without masks. I'll put them a mask. They put it on. Then have it. So, we're going to have to ask you to leave the room and we'll have a discussion about whether or not to have the agenda item. Your presence in the. Ask is very to our. That is not a request and the select board will take that into consideration. And so can you can you sir please state your name for the record so we know. Holder in that area. Yes. But you're saying I have to do it by computer. Or put a mask on there. Or put a mask on. No phone. All right. All right. So, sir, please. The computer. No. I tried to get. So, sir, you've you've you've said that you've said that previously and we're asking you to leave so that we can move the meeting forward. And just to be clear, since those online joined late, Evan, we do have spare masks here. So there that is an. I'm stating that I do not wear them. Okay. Okay, so now. I guess we'll go back to the agenda and then we'll come back to this item at the appropriate time. Are there any agenda additions or changes? Greg, I think you've got one. Yeah, I have a couple of two proposed from staff. The 1st 1. One of the consent or excuse me, 1 of the reading file items. The petition is a bee about the petition to lower speed on Vermont route 128. For a section of it. The person who. Created the petition, Patricia. Gell now is present and able to be at the meeting. So she was hoping to speak to that. So. I wonder if the select one will move that to a business item. I'd suggest a new 6 B. After the 3rd road survey. I had an opportunity to combine some of the agreements which you have in the packet for the agreements between the independent city of Essex Junction in town of Essex contain the latest comments from the trustees, but they did not include the comments from the select board. Bradluck has since put together agreements for the delinquent tax agreement, the finance agreement, reappraisal and IT that contains both comments from both boards. I don't know if that's something that you'd like to consider tonight or take a look at, but those four are available. Okay, so Patricia, are you in the room here? Yeah, okay, thank you. I just wanted to make sure you're here before we went ahead and change the agenda. Okay, so the request is that individual who put in the petition for lowering the speed on 128 is here, so she'd like to have an opportunity to speak and not wait until the end of the meeting to do so. So Greg's suggested we move to 6 B Hammond. I would agree with that one that I have a concern about documents that have just come moments ago trying to include those. I also, I mean, we had nine documents in the packet. We got six more yesterday afternoon and then apparently we've gotten another set today. The folks think about it adding yet more to the unseen documentation that we, in the past we've said no. So I think. Well, if we're gonna be working with the trustees tomorrow night, I'd rather wait. Sue, I can't hear you. I think we need to have an opportunity to listen. Yeah, yeah. I honestly don't even know about not the committee but they just came in now to put them over the court now. Yeah, I know, that's a challenge also for, yeah, for additionally, yeah, challenging. So what's the board wanna do here? We had the 128th discussion about the other. So we make that motion. Well, we do already have 6 E board and it is agreement. So can we just discuss that as a regular? Yeah, but we won't make it officially the documents that just came officially part of the documentation to be reviewed in this meeting. So we still will potentially have a discussion about the agreements, but they won't include those that we haven't seen yet. My preference would be to have a back and forth with the trustees at our joint meeting tomorrow. I think more is gained from that rather than us just talking about it and wondering what different rationales are. I think it's more productive as a back and forth. Okay. What does it make sense that we've had some meeting with the trustees and we've got a big discussion. We have another meeting next week with them. We've already had, sorry, we've already had a hard enough time scheduling meetings. There's too many of them. And we do have other items on the agenda other than that housing commission, that application. Yes, there should be, well, maybe I'll make the motion. And I make the motion that we move reading file item 8B to business items 6B to allow the discussion of route 28 speed limit. Second. Any further discussion? Those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. So we'll add that as 6B and then renumber the rest of them. Thank you. Any other changes from board members? I guess I made the motion before asking that. I should have asked if anybody wanted to make minute updates. Okay. All right. Jumped in there too soon. Okay. Next thing on the agenda is public to be heard. Public to be heard is a time where folks attending the meeting can address the board on issues that are not on the agenda. If you'd like to speak to the board, if you're in the room, you can raise your hand when we get to that point. If you're online, you can either use the raise your hand function in the teams meeting or put a comment in the chat. If you're on the phone and I don't currently see anybody attending on the phone, you don't need to go there. If you'd like to address the board, please be brief. Please be civil. Please refrain from using inappropriate language. All remarks should be addressed to me as a select board chair. Please do not attack other members of the public or town staff. If you are attending remotely, please keep your microphone muted. And it's also helpful if you keep your camera off, if you're not speaking so that you don't add distraction to the meeting. I think that's it for public to be heard. Is there anybody in the room who'd like to speak during public to be heard? Yes, please come up to the microphone and identify yourself. My name is Fernando A. Cook and I live at 22 Towers Road. And I'm here for the free survey but the lady with the speed limit brought something to my mind. I live right in front of the entrance of Meadows Edge. And that 40 mile an hour speed limit is right there. When they take off from my or come down there, they're doing 50, 60 in front of that. And I've mentioned to other people before and if that 40 mile an hour speed limit could be moved up the roadways, I think it'll alleviate something like happened in Underhill Center because anybody knows that area. It's a lot of people, a lot of dogs, a lot of kids. And I'd like to see that speed limit move. That's all I have for some disking. All right, thank you. Thank you for that. Anything else from members in the room? Okay, if you are online and would like to speak, please raise your hand. Looks like there is somebody Bob Burroughs having a difficulty joining. I don't see any hands online. All right, so we'll move on to the first business item, which is the public hearing. And this is the question where we need it. And I guess first have a discussion whether to have the public hearing because one individual who'd like to participate isn't currently able to. So what's the... Well, the general just is it's public hearing. You are welcome to attend. We have given people their options. You can hold the public hearing. We have our attorney here. You can take comments. He can either... You can continue the public hearing afterward at any time to another date. And I would ask staff, do we have a timeline restriction on this? Or is this something that can be held though we can have discussion and then hold off? There's a current development review that's in through community development. That's in process. There's some time constraints on it. This will definitely be a condition of any approval of this development. Therefore, I don't know what the time sensitivity is for that project per se, but if we do have to re-warn another public hearing, it's going to be another 30 days. Right, 30 days ago. I mean, my preference would be to continue going, understanding that we did hear from one individual who made his request. Multiple options were presented. And I'm sure he could probably submit something afterwards in writing. I mean, I've realized, well, I've already moved past this point, but at least that can be spoken. Maybe we put in a future packet if there's information that he wants to give us. But at least as far as... For the purposes of this public hearing, I mean, it was a religious objection of that individuals that he did not want to remain here. It's understandable. That's the case, but I think that the rules on the building have been clear for quite some time and multiple options were given for any individual to continue to participate in this public hearing. They choose not to avail themselves of them. That's not something we can necessarily control. So I would rather get this done tonight. Are there implications to the fact that we asked someone to leave the room? I'm... I, well, let's have the... I would like to bring up Mick Letty. He's our legal counsel. Yeah. He may have something to say on that. Good evening. Good evening. Good evening. Hello. Thanks for coming. You're welcome. In terms of the implications of him leaving, I don't think there are any other than he made his objection. Sounds like he asked an attorney to appear on his behalf and couldn't. He did get notice of this hearing. And this hearing is for the select board to consider whether to accept the survey and have it recorded. There's also a period of time after the survey is recorded where abutting landowners can make an objection and file an action in superior court if they have an issue with the survey itself. So as Evan said, I mean, the select board has a couple of options that can do a discussion tonight. Suspend that for another day or take action tonight and direct it to the survey be recorded. And as I understand it, you don't have to re-warn a meeting. You just need to resuscitate to another date certain. That's right. And, you know, he's, the gentleman was here. So he had, he does have notice. And so he would have notice of that next, next time the agenda item comes up. So with regard to the fact that he has other options, he has other recourse options to provide his input after the fact, after this public hearing is there. Can I ask you these questions? I guess. You're working, you're employed by the town, right? Is that the- Yes, yes. All right. So I can ask these questions, I think. I just wanna make sure I'm not overstepping. It's just not our normal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm pinching for Bill Ellison. But no, that is a good question. So, I mean, the item to consider tonight is whether to accept the survey and record it. This isn't a hearing with testimony or anything like that. It's giving notice to abutting property owners of this meeting to make this decision. And so the appeal rights that abutting property owners have are per statute. And it's this 120 day period where they can bring an action in superior court if they have an objection to the survey itself. You know, that would not be a scenario that anyone would wanna see happen, of course. So I would suggest taking that into consideration, but that's just one piece of it. That's it. It's a prior fine, so the public hearing is on the service more than two years on the service? Exactly, the landowners were given notice of this hearing tonight to voice their opinions and concerns. And the board may or may not take those into consideration when deciding to accept the survey and have it recorded. So can we ask you for our recommendation? Is it more appropriate to, what is the phrase you used? Continue the public hearing on another date rather than... I would say being cautious would be, that would make sense to continue it if there are no precedent time constraints. But I understand that there are some. You said earlier, 30 days, but if we continue the same, we continue the same public hearing and do it our next meeting, which is November 1st. Would that be appropriate? That need to go to... No, that would be fine because everyone already has notice. Yep. There just needs to be at least 30 days notice to the landowners, which has happened. It sounds like this gentleman had an issue with counsel and had some other issues. So nothing would prevent him from appearing at the next meeting to voice his concerns. So as a suggestion, we hold the hearing. We let the people who are here participate, anybody from the virtual world participate, and then you can recess or whatever the actual Vermont term is to a date certain and a time certain. And either he has counsel and they show up or they can submit something in writing and then you close the public hearing at that time. Right, and at that time, the board would make the motion to accept the survey. So then you're updating the agenda like as we're moving items to say. Now we would have to go forward with the public hearing and then continue it. We're doing five days, but six days. We don't, having it on the agenda doesn't require us to take action. So I think we leave it on there and then it becomes another agenda later. All right, so I see, do I need to do anything formal to open the meeting? Open the, I open the public hearing for the, just to discuss the survey of the existing class three town highway number 708 Fleury Road. All right, let's go. Yes. Sorry, is everybody else okay with that? I wasn't just jumping in. Okay, sorry. Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. So this public hearing is here for to a public survey of Fleury Road, a direct staff who require any necessary deeds or documentation to establish the right of way for Fleury Road. Fleury Road is a 0.16 mile long road with a U shaped configuration. It's located off the towers road across from Clover Drive intersection. It is currently listed on the latest state highway map as a town highway 708. Fleury Road has historically had boundaries that have not been very easy to establish. Although the road is on the state register and the state maps, it is not on the town tax map. But it has existed as a class D road in the town of Essex at least since 1943. The problem currently is that there's no survey available in the land records to document the width, location of both the road and the right of way along Fleury Road. As per state statute, public works begin the process of surveying the existing class three town road. This public hearing is part two of a two part process for this. Back in April of this year, we had a site meeting with all of the adjoining butters to Fleury Road. County attorney was present. Joe Flynn, who's in the audience tonight, he was the land surveyor for Oliver Burke was present. We reviewed this map here. After that discussion, there was a few alterations to that map and this survey map actually reflects all of those alterations we made at that meeting. I do have to point out that this map does have one correction to make. If you look at that green strip on the lower end on 16 towers road lot, it does say that it's going to deed back property to Linda Fleury. That is a typo and it should say Tim Fleury. I did have a discussion with Ms. Kim Fleury today regarding that. She can't be here tonight, but she did raise the question and it has been addressed. So it has been. Moving forward, after the survey is approved by the select board, it kind of starts a few dominoes in motion here. The first would be that the survey would be filed in the land records. Our survey was about established monuments and bounds on the road on the right away. A notice of completion will be sent to all of the abutting property owners along Fleury Road at which time we would provide the language as per Title 19, Section 34, which is the notice of appeal language, which would offer them the opportunity to appeal the survey decision, the acceptance of the survey. There's 120 days after disapproval, that's the appeal period. If we do get no appeals, it will be accepted as a survey and I would direct the town attorney to draft the claim deeds for all of the abutting property owners that would be impacted as part of the survey. And those would be filed in a land record decision. That's about it. I have, we've met Nick Letty here. He's our legal counsel. Any legal questions? I also have Joe Flynn from Maliri Burke. He's the licensed land surveyor. That did the survey for us. Okay, thanks, Erin. Any questions from the board? Go ahead, Sue. To the part of the process, is there any like improvements that we're doing to make the road? No, it's just formalizing the survey for the road. Because absent of the survey, I believe it's three rods we can claim on the road. And if you look at the map, we're only trying to set a survey for two rods. We're trying to lessen the impact to surrounding property owners. Most people do. Any other questions? No, I didn't have any. The, oh, sorry. Go ahead, Evan. So, Erin, can you explain for the people at home what the history is of this right-of-way, why we are now the owner of it and what its future is? It is a class three road. Prior to that, the building that is, you could put the map up for me, Greg, the survey map. The building that's located in the middle of that loop road used to be the train station. One of those reaches was the drive and the other to the train station. And then the other was the actual railroad bed for the Cambridge one. In history, stuff got lost in between it being a railroad station, a railroad, and 1943 when it found its way onto our state maps as a classroom. What this survey does is kind of formalizes, I guess, the right-of-way out there. It makes it legit. For any future. And as such, any abutting land owner can have, through proper permitting, have access to that road, to their property. Correct. And it will not be going through the former depot. Right, I mean, as you can see some of those lines on there, that structure is right away, it's right through their middle of their home. No, so just, we're formalizing it and it will eventually have consequences for abutting land owners to be able to gain access to the right-of-way for our permitting process. Yes, which one, there's a couple of property owners there, there's one property in particular that's in current development at this time. So Aaron, the description of this road is that as you shaped, we're only talking about the north leg of that U, right? The other. Well, if you take a look at the survey, it kind of shows a two-rod centered on the existing road, Andy, and that two-rod right-of-way has kind of gone all the way around. So, yes and no. It's still in the same location, if I'm right, Joe, that southern border of our claimed right-of-way, because by statute, we can claim a three-rod right-of-way over all of our classroom roads, that's the law. What we're trying to do is minimize these impacts to all the property owners out there by putting it on paper that we're declaring and we want a two-rod right-of-way over that cover. So it's going to be both the north and south, but most of the development as you see is on that north leg. And if you look, there's an orange kind of rectangle and then a blue piece at the end. That's to establish a turnaround for our vehicles for planning purposes and maintenance. So the dark green is that loops around, is this where the right-of-way is? If we declared a three-rod right-of-way, yes. Oh, okay, I see. But we only want a two-rod. So the lower leg, the south leg of that, which is now grass. It is, I mean, you can see wheel track, it's essentially grass, it doesn't really get used and it hasn't been really used since I've worked here. But you can see, I mean, you can see in this picture, it looks like there's that, and in reality, there is a track, but it doesn't coincide with your dark green area. No, that dark green part would be the portion of that three-rod right-of-way. So we're only claiming a two over that. So yeah, that's... Okay, okay, sorry, the dashed dark line shows the full width of that three-rod right-of-way. Okay, gotcha, now I understand. All right, okay, sorry to be clear though, I thought it said in the memo that we're only approving the north leg. I could have phrased that a little better. Yeah, it's not so much approving, but we're formalizing everything and I was trying to base the reasoning behind this as all the development that's taking place on the northern leg and not the south. So it could have been phrased. Okay, okay, all right, thank you. Evan, did you... And it is not inconceivable that the roadway will eventually be a loop from Towers Road, come around the former station and come back to Towers. In the future, that may happen, yes. As development progresses out there, there's a pretty good track of land to the lower left corner corner, which would be like the southwest that has potential to have some dense development. And as a town road, it would be plowed by the town. Just making sure everybody understands what this process is not gonna be tomorrow, but it'll be our right-of-way. It already has a piece of road on it and ultimately it may eventually get fully paved or something like that and be an access road to all those properties. Yeah. Improvements, the improvements are not permanent, but they're temporary. They're potentially in the future. When all the development in town that is usually associated, those improvements are usually associated with it. Yeah, I would probably see that take place during some sort of improvement. Any other board questions? Board member questions? Okay, so now, given this is a public hearing, I'll open it up to the public. Start first with folks in the room. Is anybody in the room who'd like to speak about this topic? See any hands? Anybody online? Who wishes to speak? You don't see any hands up and there's no one on the phone. So then, given there's no public comment, I'll accept the motion to end the public hearing. I'm sorry, are you gonna end it or reset? Oh, sorry. Thank you, thank you. We do, we did have a request to allow additional comments. So right, we will, I guess the word was the right phrasing to use. Yeah, you may table the discussion until the next meeting. Okay, go ahead Sue. Okay, thank you, Sue, to have a second. I think it has to be specified time, don't we? Mm-hmm, all right. When is it? The end of time. 635, is our usual. November 1st. Can I make a friendly, can you ask that staff contact the gentleman who came tonight and have a meeting with him in advance so that if he, for whatever reason, cannot be here in public, we have his comments. I will reach out to Mr. Delky. Okay, so, I think the change to the motion was to add 635 PM. I think that's, I think we'll be fine there. Do I have a second? Second, Kathy does have to stand up. We indicate we have to get to the next meeting. Hi there. Yeah, hi Kathy, go ahead. I'm sorry, it's really hard to hear Sue and I could not capture her, the language she used for that motion. I'm sorry. It's the mask is very muffling. So the motion was made to table our discussion on the public hearing to discuss the survey of existing staff 3, Sound Highway number 708, Surrey Road until our next flexor meeting November 1st, at 635 PM. Thank you so much for restating. Thank you for asking, Kathy. Have a second. Thank you, Tracy. Any further discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, so we've, we've tabled the discussion until the next meeting. Thank you for coming. Thank you for your preparation and hopefully we'll be able to close this our next meeting. Thank you. And given that we've tabled the discussion, we'll move on to the new item 6B, which is the discussion about the lower speed limit 128 between a Weed Road and Irene Ave. There is a memo in the reading file and a copy of the petition that was submitted to us. Evan or Greg, is there, there was more discussion around that, right? What the process would be? I believe Greg is handling this one. Yeah, I can speak to that. And Aaron is available as well. But yeah, the town received the petition from his Gallardo and some residents on route 128 Browns River, looking to have the speed reduced. They've had some accidents with pets concerns for safety of their family members in the area. Public works confirmed with V-TRANS that V-TRANS will really only consider a requested speed limit change from the municipal body, this case the select board rather than residents. So staff proposed that the police can set out a speed monitoring system for about a week. Aaron is working with V-TRANS to get permission to do that. If public works and the police feel like a further speed limit study is needed after getting some of those speeds tracked, they would do so and bring that back to the select board with the recommendation of whether or not to go ahead and request a change from V-TRANS. So that's the high level overview. Aaron can jump in if there's anything I missed and Ms. Kellan was here, of course. Okay, thanks Greg. Aaron, I know you were having a side discussion there. Yeah, anything else to add to this question about the speed limit? So I have talked with my contact at district five V-TRANS. I kind of was, I know Greg was gonna put a memo into you folks for the speed study. I wanted to wait so it was in a holding pattern. I can process an 1111 permit which allows us to work on the right-of-way. Turn around on that as a couple days and we can put either the traffic sentries that PD has or we have a couple of radar detectors as well that can go up in various locations to take a look at the speed and we can perform another speed study as needed. The big thing that I did take away from the district is the state has a committee that meets three to four times a year on looking at changing the speed and that may add some time to us actually changing the speed or the state actually changing the speed up. That needs to, you guys need to be aware of that as well. Okay, thanks Aaron. Any select bird questions or comments? You can go ahead and pass. Yeah, Aaron, before you go, just so the public is clear, I could give the explanation but we had a really good about four weeks ago explanation of how the speeds are set and through the speed study, that's really gonna limit us on whether or not we can change the speed or make a request change the speed limit. The explanation we were given then was that once the speed study is done, we basically have the proof of what a speed limit should be on a road. Yes, you do, but you also, it also has to pass muster if you will, the state. It is a state road, state highway, it's their jurisdiction. I believe it's the group of engineers that do review the documentation and studies. So if it warrants and it meets the warrants to lower the speed limit in that section, they would recommend lowering that speed limit. If the study comes out and it doesn't meet the warrants to lower it, then they're not. Part of it, Aaron, is there a certain distance you have to have? This isn't really a short section between Irene and Weed Road. It's only the four duplexes that are in there, maybe a howl. Oh no, there's so many others. I didn't know if it was long enough to warrant a study or if we need to extend the area to be studied. What I'm going to recommend is the study, the leg going at the cutting north from Irene towards Weed Road and then the other side of that corner. That corner seems to be at the top of a lot of people's minds, what it refers to safety. It's a launching area. Once you get around the corner, they either take off on 128 or they take off headed toward Delmeters. My concern is maybe we should look at the hole. A little bit larger area there if they are using that corner as an acceleration area. And we would likely do those sides of that corner. It's 30. It's 30 gone by the elementary school. We get transitions from 40 to 30. As you stay ghosting 40 up and as you start towards the elementary school, with a blink of light, it gains the 30. So between Weed Road and Irene with 50 and between Irene going toward the elementary school for some subjects, it's 40. And then it stops at 30. All right, any other select board questions? Any other staff comments? Patricia, please come up and introduce yourself. And my name is Patricia Delano. And thank you for letting me come and being part of this. And I do speak for not only myself but all the neighbors in my community. I did go around and take very carefully conversations with each individual. Neighbors were pulling out of their yard. They got hit. Soon as they come around that corner, they don't do 25. They're doing more than 25. And soon as they hit where that speed limit sign right after the corner, they do 60. They're like racing down this. And then they go through, you know, go over the bridge where Browns River is and they go through this cornfield and they don't stop there. They actually go through the 40 zone also at a 60 and they don't slow down until they get to the corner which is 35 before it gets to be 30 at the school. You know, we've, there's a school bus zone there. There's children that live there. Now I take my grandchildren. My grandbaby gets scared to get out of the car when the cars are racing by. You know, our animals, our pets have been hit in that area. There's plenty of accidents. I was a part of one major accident on that corner with the garbage truck of Cassella. You know, it turned up on top of that lady's car and I sat in the car with that lady until rescue came. You know, and she thought she was going to die. She just seen that truck coming so fast around that corner. She didn't have time to get out of the way. And you know, I've lived there in the area for 30 years and I've seen so many accidents and so many careless people that come through this area. You know, in our driveways, where our house is set, there's only like four or five houses in that area but that one particular area is just 50 which nobody can understand in the community why it goes from 40 to 50 in that area and then 25 around the corner and then 50 again. I have spoken with the Essex police back a little while ago and they can't understand why that section of the road is 50 especially when, you know, the driveways are only one car length away from our front doors or, you know, mine is two cars a length from my door and the road is right there. You know, the houses are just too close to the road to have that speed limit being 50. You know, my neighbors wanted to be here tonight but they have small children. Nobody can open their windows because of the traffic speeding by there. You know, they're doing more than 50. I had a pet that recently snuck out on me, you know and it was mangled in the road. This person drove right over and didn't stop, you know and it cost me $300 to put my cat down, you know and the next people across the street they did the same thing with their dog. I just, I feel it's a very dangerous area. One of my neighbors had stated it's a duck trap. We live in a duck trap area, you know it's really scary when your kids get scared even play out in their yard because of the cars that go by so fast, it scares them. I'm not sure, you know, it just, it really has to, somebody has, we welcome anybody on this board to come and sit in our yards or our driveways to experience what we're experienced. You know, I drive only 40 in that area. I mean, it's just too dangerous to, you know somebody pull in quickly out of their driveway like the neighbor next, it crossed the street from me and the other duplex. They came out of their yard, they are their driveway thinking it was okay and this car was just speeding and they nicked their car. So now their car is sitting in the driveway, you know, waiting to be processed for the insurance or whatnot, whatever. I just know that, you know there used to be monitors in that area and they used to catch speeders all the time in that area. So I don't understand why it stopped, you know they'd sit in the cornfield or they'd sit on the corner of we rode there and they used to catch speeders all the time and it's just like, I don't understand why it stopped. It's not safe to walk, you know do evening walks or morning walks or bicyclists that come by or riding on that road. Even we have discussions out by the mailboxes that it's very scary for us to go up by our mailbox because people just don't care. You know, they don't care if they see a person inside the road getting their mail. They just keep going and it needs to really be an issue for the town to, you know considered of dropping that speed limit sign in that particular area. Okay, thank you, Patricia. And it sounds like the staff is taking this seriously. Thank you for bringing the issue to our, did you have a question? No. No, I thought you were originally having a bad one. Yeah, Sunday staff is taking it seriously. We will take a look at it. We will have to work with the state. As Aaron said, there may be some because you have to schedule if you have to work to their schedule. And so we'll... So a question I do have following, you know what I just said, how long, I mean would it take a surveying, you know and if the state highway doesn't feel that it needs to be lowered, what is our next step? As, you know, homeowners and, you know people that ran that area, what do we do now? I mean, what do we do then? Yeah, go ahead, Aaron. What I would suggest that the board do is once we submit the study because this study is submitted by the select board to the state. And as part of that package of that submittal we maybe get some of your fellow neighbors along that stretch of the road to provide ladders to go along with that study. So that the board that does review this at the state will take that into consideration as well. Okay, none of them could be here because they do have small... Yeah, yeah. So when the time comes, we'll reach out to you and ask you to provide probably written comments that we can include with the report that goes through the state. I think that's excellent recommendation, Aaron. Go ahead, see. That's part of the study, also the volume of stuff that's just, you know, do we have any, you know baseline like when the study was on the sort of extra amount of parts coming along? That's taken into consideration, the volume of the traffic, the traveling speed, what the pace speed is. And quite honestly, how dense the population is along that stretch of road. 50 miles an hour back 30 years ago may have been sufficient out there. As development increases and as, you know, more traffic and interaction with pedestrians, I know we have the path that comes down Irene Ave and cuts across the Trowbridge Crossing. As development continues along that section, that's definitely, in my opinion, would be at least for the state to at least consider changing the speeds. So Aaron, do you have a, can you outlook a timeline or is that totally dependent on the state? It's, the study will be pretty quick. We can get that done. Once I get the green light from you folks tonight, I can make sure I can implement those radar detectors out in the field after I get my permit. I'll talk with VTrans tomorrow about getting that done. We could probably have them out at the beginning of next week, collect their data for a week or two and bring it back in-house, take a look at the data, write the report similar to the one on a previous road we had here recently. And then provide that to you folks so you can submit that to the formal requests to the state so next mid-month, mid-November, seven? And then unfortunately the second part of your question is if the state doesn't approve it, what happens? Well, it is their road. We do have enforcement. So what we can do is I can talk with the chief as to whether we can do some more traffic enforcement out there. We get a lot of requests from a lot of different places. We cover about 39 square miles. And so we will, regardless of this, we won't do this during the speed study because when people see police cars, they automatically slow down and it will absolutely skew the data. One of the things we also like to do, and you'll know this, we don't have the sign flash your speed. People, it'll be black. People think it's off or it's not working. It's working. It's just not showing your speed because every time you'll see it, when people see that they're going 10 over, they hit the brakes and then when they go past it, it records a different speed than what you were actually going to do. So don't worry about that. It's collecting data. And then that's what we'll do and he's right, some testimonials. The other thing is we can reach out to the school district and see if we can get a letter of support from the school district. I do this. The thing will be up within the next couple of weeks or next week or? Within the next couple of weeks. Okay. I just want to make sure that I get back in my community what I can give them, because I did give them all a copy of the petition. Just please understand we're dealing with a state agency. They're good people that we have a local office, but we don't know what their timelines or their priorities are. And it's not a committee that meets on a regular basis. Okay. It's more on a quarterly fact. We just don't know. There may be some not. That's all I'm concerned about is we just don't, we're not gonna be forgotten. I guess that wraps up what I have to say. Okay. Thank you, Patricia. Thank you. There are a couple of hands up online. Kathy, I see your hand is up. Is that a leftover from before? Or is that, did you have another question? Sorry, no, that's a leftover. I'll take that down. All right. Thanks. I see Margaret Smith. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, we can. Okay, so I, first of all, I want to suggest that Sue's microphone is not working because everybody else comes through loud and clear and she just doesn't. It might be worth checking on. And second of all, I want to thank you for considering this issue. I live fairly near the elementary school. And while the speed limit may be 30, my guess is an awful lot of traffic going by the elementary school is doing 45. They, when the light changes at route 15 and 128, they say, oh, goodie, no stop lights between here and Milton. And they take off and they gun their engines going up that hill by the elementary school. So there doesn't seem to be any statutes on muffler sound anymore. So there's a lot of noise. And I, a number of years ago did speak with one of the policemen about the speeding on 128. And he said, yeah, I clocked somebody going 100 up there on a motorcycle and I'm trying to pin it on him. I'm not sure what that meant, but there, I'm sorry, the lady is right. There's never any surveillance there either for sound or for speed limits. So I hope that we'll be able to get the state out to do something because it's not fun and it's dangerous. So thank you. Yep, thank you, Margaret. We actually later in the agenda we'll be talking about a noise ordinance. And as the discussion, yeah, they'll be doing a speed study and also following it up with some enforcement out there. Thank you for your comments. Mary Post. Yeah, thank you. Just recently we were out on that road and we were, you know, you leave the elementary school then you go all the way to where you 128 makes a left, I guess, and then if you make a right, it's weed road. And when we came back, instead of turning right on 128 to go back towards the elementary, we had to go straight ahead for some reason to get to route 15. And that intersection is really pretty frightening because you can't really see if you're gonna go across straight ahead towards route 15. If there's a car coming on 128, like from the elementary school, and if they're going really fast, I can just, it's pretty frightening. So I just wanted to mention that intersection too that maybe that can kind of be looked at. Thank you. Thank you, Mary. Patty Davis, you had your hand up, but it's not up now. No, I wanted to say something, sure. Oh, go ahead, go ahead then. I just wanted to say, does the town have some kind of, kind of, not law, but priority to confront the engineers of the state of Vermont, that public realm is not only a necessity fight. Bicyclists shouldn't be scared out of their gourd, biking, my husband bikes all over 128 and runs all over the place. And we shouldn't be afraid. I don't care if there's five houses on that road. The engineer, you're breaking up, Patty. We can't hear you. Patty, we're not hearing you. I think we have to just, Erin, would you like to explain how the state works? So they have a process. And at times it's a lengthy process. They have multiple engineers that has to be looked at, different departments. I think what we've laid out here tonight is a start, start of something that could expand to something bigger. Moving forward. Yeah, there are, government can be slow at times. We know this, but this is something that I feel we should probably expedite. And I think the board is wanting the same thing as I, I mean, we're going to try our best to get out there, get collected data and get a submittal into the state for them to review as soon as we can. And then it's a waiting game at that point. I don't know. How do I make it muted? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Something like my computer says me and now I'm unmuted. All I wanted to say was the public realm. I wonder if there's any kind of law in Essex or can the town of Essex write a letter and give it to Erin, have Erin give it to the state to say, okay, know everything about the state road, but they don't know everything. And people should be able to bike and run and be able to not have their dogs get killed. There must be, other than just dealing with the speed limit, some kind of policy that Essex can come up with as a town. That's when I'm wondering if Erin knows anything about that because a lot of planners, they demand a pounds plan actually confront these engineers that work for the state to say, not just because the population is greater that this is the priority of the town of Essex. They walk, they bike, they have pets, you should be able to go to your mailbox, you should be able to walk your dog and not be scared out of your gourd. That is not right. And I just feel there's gotta be some kind of policy for Essex and I wonder if Evan might know something. So Patty, we spent a lot of effort trying to develop multimodal transportation options and we install them where we can and where we can get, you know, is there anything? Well, the only reason to mention it is public realm has a lot to do with what you discussed earlier about right of way. And there's gotta be some kind of, yeah. Discussion is specific to the weed row or the 128 speed limit. So if you have other comments about transportation options. That was it. It's just overall for the whole town. Okay, thank you. Yeah, go ahead. Do you know when the next committee meeting is? I just, I would hate for, you know, to do it by a day or two and then have to wait another. No, so now that I have the green light, when I discuss this with one of my counterparts over at district five tomorrow, when I'm applying for the permit, I will ask. And he'll at least get a confirmation on the timeframe of when the next meeting is scheduled. So do you need anything formal from us tonight? We need to make a motion to ask you to go do this. You okay with your start consensus? I'm okay with you saying, Aaron, go get the speed study done, yeah. And then we would present it back to you. And we would request that you sign a letter basically for our submittal process for the boys to study to the state. And then we would make a motion to do that. Yeah, okay. All right, any other board or staff comments? All right, thank you, Aaron. Thank you Patricia for bringing the issue forward and for coming to speak to it. I appreciate it. I'm very sorry to hear about your cat. I'm very sorry to hear about your cat. Okay, let's move on to the next business item. Consider passage of public nuisance and dog licensing and control ordinances and warning of public hearing to consider final passage. We're just going to speak to this one. Greg, you want me to do it or are you doing it? I was going to turn it over to Lieutenant Kissinger. The select board saw the drafts of these ordinances about a month ago. And they're back before the board tonight looking at the public nuisance and dog licensing and control ordinances. I know some of the board members have some questions since then, but I would defer to Lieutenant Kissinger if he's the expert on this item. Lieutenant, the floor is yours. Thank you. I just had to get everything going on my end. I hopefully answer all the questions about dog licensing and I would ask that the board move forward with the dog license to control ordinance. If there's no questions on that. Sue, I think did you have some? Did you get satisfactory answers to the questions? Any, does any, and board members have any other comments or questions about the dog ordinance changes? Just to thank him for his work on these. Okay, and so you specifically mentioned the dog ordinance, are you then asking us not to move forward with the public nuisance one at this point? I would request to move forward with it, but amend the noise ordinance portion. There seems to be discussion that we didn't take into account when we drafted this. So to take in those concerns, we would table that section but put everything else moving that forward. So we have stuff in place, specifically on the sound it came up with people that have ranges on their property. And we did not take in consideration that this potentially be used against them if they want to shoot on their properties. So I think we need to do some more studies to enact that as far as the ranges go and how that affects them. All right, thank you. Yeah, the issue there is that it was in at one point trying to enact the noise ordinance that got, and they got, there's an existing court case that established that can't enact a noise ordinance that and the definition of a shooting range is terribly good for you. And so there's additional language, I guess that Willis added to their ordinance that addresses the question of how the shooting may or may not be affected by. And I think that's what we need to go look at. Go ahead. So I see in the recommendation that a public hearing is suggested for November 1st since we already have a public hearing we tabled the discussion on Flurry Road. What should we do for time? Since we have to have a specific time make a seven as well as thinking to make a seven or five. All right. We don't have enough work. Okay, so do we, Greg, I saw your hand up. She took it back down again. Yes, I'm going to suggest that we could do the Flurry Road at 635 and we could warn the ordinances for 645. If we don't start on time then we can postpone it a little bit but that way it's more for earlier and we don't have to jump around if the first public hearing goes quickly. All right, we, do we need to, yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. I was just going to move to warn about. So we haven't had any public comment yet. Okay. We want to have a motion before we have a public comment. All right, Sue, go ahead. Go ahead. All right. Okay, so that's in the public news and so we're not going to address that one tonight. So send in any, if you see any additional, so we can address them before we, send in any other board comments or questions. I see a couple of hands up but I can't tell whether they are old hands or new hands. Margaret Smith, did you want to comment? Margaret? Her hand's not up. Okay, keep, put your hand down then, please. Patty, Davis, did you want to comment? Or is that a residual hand from people? I couldn't hear a word that Sue said. I hear shuffling of papers. I just wanted to point that out. Andy, my hand was down. Okay, sorry. It was showing us up on my screen here. Apologies. So Patty, Sue was talking about a typo that she found about the part of the public nuisance section that she's going to submit well for future questions. Yeah, it is very, very hard to hear some sounds. Do I? Yeah, I know, I know, I know. I'm actually yelling here. Do you have a paper mask? I would turn off the camera. Oh, all right, all right, I help. Yeah, okay. Mary Post, I see your hand up. Yeah, thank you. I just like some clarification. On the dog ordinances, I just need to know if this applies or not. I noticed on the Essex page the other day, they were talking about a German shepherd that runs loose quite often, I guess on old stage or something. And someone had complained that he almost hit the dog and that the dog was actually nipping at the, I don't think the dog was being dangerous to somebody, but nipping at somebody's heels running after them. And I was wondering, do the dog leash rules apply out into the country like that? I know where I live, we have to always have our dogs on a leash. And I'm worried mostly about the dog. I don't want that poor dog to get hit, but according to neighbors that were answering this thing, they were saying, oh, Boomer is out all the time running on the road. So I just wanna know if they have the same rules out there that we do in town. Yes, they do. Okay, so hopefully anybody listening, we could get the people that live with Boomer to keep them safer. And then the people that are out on the road, the children. And then the second thing is just, it just piqued my interest is that if now you're gonna be considering shooting ranges, should there be a public hearing about that because there might be people that would like to talk about shooting ranges if they live close to one. It's just a thought, it's- Yeah, so the public nuisance ordinance that we're considering will mention, we'll have some specific factors associated with shooting ranges. So I believe, yes, people will likely want to comment on that. Okay, thanks very much. Yep. Patty Davis, your hand is up. It's down now, okay. Al Bambardi. Yes, Andy. I just had a couple of brief comments about the nuisance ordinance, the sound. And I'll try to represent a lot of the comments that I've heard in the Tanglewood, Foster Road, and Sand Hill areas as well. We are experiencing some major noise here starting as early as 5 a.m. And it's late at 7.30ish with vehicles that apparently have defective mufflers or no mufflers. And if you walked outside your house in the Foster Road area, you can hear these vehicles going down 15. It's that loud. One of the things that I noticed when I read this, I did not see any penalties. In any of the ordinance. And there really ought to be some, at least attention getting penalties and for repeat offenses. The second thing I noticed was, I like this 611.040, this general prohibition because it comes back to me as a reasonable person rule. It isn't so much as decibels and length of duration as it is, you know, if you're woken up at five o'clock in the morning out of a sound sleep, you're not getting any sleep at all. And these areas out here in the center are really high density. So that protection is really needed. You see the table A that was in this, I didn't quite understand that, but I think it mostly relates to machinery than to vehicles. At least that was my impression. So those were the, oh, by the way, the exemptions that were identified in this procedure, they really appear reasonable and appropriate. So three main takeaways from almost everyone in this area. The sound violations has gotten people's attention. There are more density, more condos. And in the Foster Road area, you've got a lot of kids, a lot of students, bicycles, good mix of people and traffic. The second point was speeding. Speeding is every day of the week. I don't think anyone drives 25 miles an hour. It's in the 30 to 50 and even beyond that at times. And I really have not seen any police presence out here for a long time. It's sporadic, but I don't see patrols and I very rarely see a police car out here. And finally, the two vehicles that we are mostly concerned about have been identified to the chief and about six officers that were with him when we talked to them. So there was a good public turnout to that meeting, but we're still waiting. So thank you for your time, Anthony. Hi, thanks, Al. Lieutenant Kissinger, any response to any of those comments referred? As far as the noise ordinance section for the sound that he was referring to, the general exemptions and the general prohibitions and the exemptions don't necessarily require a decibel reading. So we could just table section C and make the rest of the ordinance part of a warning. And then we can really further visit and study section C that would be amendable to the residences of the town. Okay, I don't have enough familiarity with the document to know what it's contained in there. I mean, I do remember that table with the guest levels. With respect, I think, Lieutenant, I would prefer to keep the numbers in there and have a solid baseline, at least. I certainly, in sympathetic towards the complaint about walking up at 5 a.m. by loud noises, but it feels to me like if we want to enforce this, that we need to have some hard numbers and that I was woken up at night, so it must be loud, probably wouldn't fly in the court of law if someone were to challenge something that we wrote. So, Lieutenant, do we have to remove those? I mean, again, my preference to keep the hard numbers and if we need to fall back on it. Well, not for all the general exemptions. This is more geared towards if someone's complaining about their neighbor being loud. We would have an objective way to measure sound. A lot of complaints previously were also objective. So, theoretically, if someone didn't get along with a neighbor, they could say they're making too much noise and then we would have to decide. This kind of gives us guidelines on how to measure that. If someone was complaining about a neighbor being too loud or their music's too loud, we would have something as objective. We would measure it from the complaining person's property line and get a decimal read and see if it falls within the time period, sample time period. So this doesn't necessarily address all of the concerns that the previous resident had. Those are addressed in the general exemptions or the general provisions and exemptions. There are fines associated with this. He didn't see that part, but it starts off at $50, then it goes up to a hundred all the way up to, I believe, 400 for continued violation. So there are fines associated with this ordinance. Thank you, Lieutenant. Honestly, it sounds to me like that's probably more of a reason to keep it in. Yeah, if we wanna do that though, then we need to defer because we need to address the impact it would have on shooting ranges and the risk of being sued immediately upon passage. So it sounds like you'd rather keep the document intact and approve it later. It's specific to that table. I thought that was what we were talking about, removing the table or not. So he said section C. He didn't say tables, yeah. I think you said, Lieutenant, you said C, right? Yeah, section C, prohibitions for non-residential uses would get rid of that. But like I said, I don't believe all the other exemptions require decimal reading. Because it's all things that are approved or snow removal specific. So Greg, can you pull up the document so we can see which section that Lieutenant Kissinger is suggesting we remove? So it's under 611.020, I think. And then it goes down to C where it says decibel. Is that what he thought that was talking about? So you're talking about this entire section that says prohibitions for... Correct. It's 611.020, is that what you're saying? Yeah, yes. No, I think you're just in the definitions, I think. It's 040, isn't it? That's just the definition there. Yeah. So it would be 6.11.040 section C. Generally is a general prohibition. So the section above this is the reasonable person section, where it would be if loud noise generated by some activity, you could issue a citation, but it would remove the explicit... These are non-residential purposes. I guess what would be an example of that? That would be your shooting ranges, yeah. Ranged. Yeah, the general prohibition addresses the previous callers about loud sound. It would be hard to get a sampling period of someone that's driving a car with no exhaust for a 15-minute period. So that's why I would ask to maybe just take out that section that could potentially cause concerns for the town of liability. Understanding what's working. No, maybe I'm just... I guess maybe I'm just confused about an apologies if I am, but I thought Al's comment requested removing that table. I'm not talking about the whole of section C. I believed it was arguing that keeping the decibel examples in there would be a positive thing. Non-residential users, I can think of a few complaints that I've had about certain businesses that make noises early, and if we have a decibel level that we can point to, it just feels to me like that's going to be, for us as a town, easier on enforcement than... I mean, I'm sure you've heard it as well, right? On the backyard early in the morning, when I'm on my porch drinking coffee, I hear all sorts of noises, and all sorts of noises is reasonable for one business, but for a homeowner nearby, it might not be. So keeping the table in, I feel, gives us a very specific number that we can use for cases that I know have at least come to me several times before. If I'm completely wrong and this is not about removing the table, then please just tell me to shut up. So my understanding, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, Lieutenant Kissinger, is that the suggestion is that we temporarily remove this so we can move forward with the rest of the document, because this is the section that causes the difficulty with shooting ranges. If you take this section out, then there's nothing explicitly impinged on somebody citing in their rifle on their property within... But this will come back to us. It will come back. That's the intent, right, that it would come back after we address the appropriate language to not get ourselves sued over somebody's, I believe, a shoot. But, you know, just charge your firearm on their property safely. Yeah, and with the examples, hopefully. So, Lieutenant Kissinger is offering us an option to go forward with the ordinance that would address the car noises and those sort of things, but not these explicit... One that require an explicit measurement of the... Yeah, as long as... Correct. Gracie. And I guess, Lieutenant, you may have been clear on this earlier, but it's not completely clear to me if someone has a private range for their own use on their own property. Is that a residential use or a non-residential use? Because to me, I wouldn't think it's a residential use. That would be residential, but it would still be subject to a noise complaint. Okay. And my confusion comes from the section we're talking about. You can see it's prohibitions for commercial uses. So I just want to make sure if we're pulling out a certain section, we're pulling out the right one. Correct. So maybe that one was not worded correctly, but I think because that has that table in there, then that's something that we would need to further look at. I guess the other way to look at this is if we're at risk of doing something incorrectly, because we're trying to find a solution to move forward more quickly, but maybe we just defer and do the whole thing as one piece so that it's coherent and that we don't inadvertently do something that we don't intend to. We have people waiting on some of these ordinances, though. I know that. I know that. Yeah. Right. So I think, I think we need to make sure that we're, we're being consistent and that we're doing actually what we want to do and that it didn't take more time to do it right rather than try to just pull out a section and hope we don't lose some intent or do something I intended. It's I think where I'm sitting. Chief is also nodding. Oh, thanks. Can I jump in here for just a second? So I don't think, I don't think that taking out that section is going to do what we want it to do. I think under the general prohibition under, under right in the first section, I think we're going to run into issues with that if we don't address the shooting range issue. So I think what we're looking for right now is we would like to get some kind of direction as to how we want to, how do we want to write that? Because what Williston has done is they came back after the lawsuit and they negotiated a settlement with the specific shooting range that's there and they've limited that, that shooting range to certain days of the week that they can shoot and then they can have different like special events and that type of thing. So I'm not saying that we need to go that direction. I'm not saying that we shouldn't go that direction. But certainly they only address that one shooting range. There are many other shooting ranges here in Essex. There are private ones and Williston doesn't currently from my reading of their ordinance does not allow any other shooting ranges other than that one specific one. And like I said, I don't know if we want to go down that road with this ordinance. That wasn't the intention of it at all. However, I'm also wanting to respect folks like Mr. Vimbardier who need a noise ordinance. Essex has grown enough where we need a noise ordinance to be able to effectively enforce those types of violations and having those decibel readings will allow us to do it. Unfortunately, I think we've got a little bit more work to do on that before and make some decisions as to how we want to handle the shooting range issue first. Oh boy. And the small cannon worms got there. I 100% agree with that. Yeah. Right. The last time we opened this subject, we had multiple hour long meetings with many, many attendees. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Cause you can't enforce one noise and not another. Do you know, do we have any idea where all the shooting ranges are that the owners could be contacted and have, let them have input? No. No. Not officially, no. No. Right. We know where they're generally some of them are located because we've, you know, we've had calls about them in the course with the hearings that we had a couple of years ago, you know, many of the owners showed up at the hearings and, you know, and the folks that live next to them showed up. So that's how we knew where some of them were, but I'm certainly there's probably some that we're, that we're not aware of, at least informal ones. So chief, my understanding of that court case was that there was the concern was that you couldn't limit an existing or a shooting range that existed before a very specific date. Correct. January 1st, 2005. And so, and so yeah, I guess I don't want to start a discussion right now about how to deal with that though. So it's not been a warm discussion. To be honest with you, that would be my, that would be my concern and my recommendation is I don't know if the select board wants to get into that at this point. And there's, and there's, there's likely no way to have a noise ordinance that does not address shooting. With that general prohibition in there, the way that it's worded, I believe that that would probably cover someone shooting next to someone's property and causing what would be considered unreasonably loud sound that that is, that's an ambiguous, ambiguous term. So it could be interpreted in a number of different ways. And certainly if somebody was shooting next door, that could be interpreted as that in my opinion. Yep. Yep. I agree. Yep. All right. So sounds like more thoughts required. Oh dear. I think so and possibly some legal opinions. And I apologize for the, for the time of the select board. We honestly did not consider, you know, shooting ranges when we were looking at this, when we were crafting this, we were using Williston as a model and that was prior to them adding this section that they've now added for shooting ranges once their lawsuit was settled. Okay. So what's the pleasure of the board? Should we go forward with the, the dog licensing and control ordinance and table the public news this one for other discussion later. I'll make a motion that we warn a public hearing for the dog control and licensing proposed ordinance for November 1st, 2021 at 45 PM. So, Greg, we need to approve the ordinance also, right? Yeah, you, you pass the ordinance is the language. And I can scroll up to the memo, which has it in there. Give me a moment. So, yeah. Pass the public or pass the dog licensing and control ordinance and authorized staff to warn a public hearing to consider final passage of the ordinance revisions on November 1st, 2021 at 45 PM. Thank you, Tracy. You seconded that. Thank you. Any further discussion? Hearing none. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay. Mission passes five zero. So we will warn that the public hearing for the dog licensing and control ordinance. Our next meeting. Thank you. All right. Now, moving on to the next item presentation of Chittendon County Regional Planning Commission annual update. And here I thought we were going to be way past, we were going to be way early and you're going to be waiting. And we were going to be waiting for you. Jeff. No, no. And can you see and hear me? Okay. Yes, we can. Okay, great. Yeah. And thank you to Jeff for being there in person. I know he's carrying all the heavy water. So, yeah, feel free to call on him at any moment. You don't have to be masked. That's true. So thank you very much for making time on your agenda. I try to visit every year and do a customer service call. And just make sure that we're providing the services to the town and in the way that you expect and looking for any feedback on how we've done that. I believe you have the report in your packet. I was just going to review it pretty quickly and feel free to stop me or ask me any questions along the way. Okay. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Okay. The first page is really kind of background on the regional planning commission and our board members and also how we leverage municipal dues to bring in state and federal funds to the town and the region. And at the bottom, what were your representatives in FY 21? I know there's been a couple updates for FY 22. But I do want to actually take a moment to thank Jeff for the announcement of time into the RPC over the years. And this year has been no exception. So thank you, Jeff, for that. I don't know if there's anything you want to say at the outset, Jeff. No, we're just the municipal service organization. And we have a slant towards transportation planning, energy use, and all the things that the state requires us to do. And I know there's an insatiable need out there for the state to do that. But I think that's one of the things that the state has to do with the state of other things that unfortunately we're not allowed to do until the state tells us that we can do it. And we can't be, we can't do everything. But I think what we do, we do very well. And we've been doing quite a bit. Yeah. So on the second page has a list of and a paragraph on each of the projects that we worked on with the town. I don't know if you can review those in any detail, but happy to take any feedback. Did those go well? Things we could improve on? Happy. Any feedback on any of those specifics or? And I don't know. It may not be a fair question to the board, but I don't know or Evan or Greg. If you have any feedback for us too, that would be great. Thanks for letting me do that. RPC has been great this year with with ARPA and Charlie convenes a meeting once twice a month with all the managers in the area. So we get the chance to chat and think what's going on regionally. And yeah, RPC is a great resource. So thank you. Yeah, thanks. For those who don't know, several years ago, CCRPC became the host of the local managers meeting, which also includes assistant managers where we talk about regional issues, not just planning per se, but we, this is probably where the genesis of the Howard Center agreement started. That's true. We started dealing with ARPA. You could start talking about, we've had discussions about drug treatment, not just for managers, but for the general public where, you know, one of the things that is difficult is UVM is the medical center. And if you take somebody into the medical center and you think they're having a mental health issue, they take a long time to either be seen or admitted or not admitted. And if they have any type of drug interaction, they tend to get released because then they claim it's not a mental health issue or they can't deal with both at the same time. So CCRPC is a really good clearing house of local issues that as many of us can attest, you know, for a community to take on a big issue, it's too daunting. But if we do it as the Chinden region and we're all working in the same direction, we get a lot more traction and we get a lot more buy-in and we have a bigger voice. So between Charlie and all those others, it's really a great resource for not only us, but our partners in the region. One of the most important things, though, that the RPC does is it's one of the, there's only one federally designated metropolitan planning organization for transportation. So all of the planning, we don't have control over all of the budget numbers, like for example, we don't control the federal roads. We don't have any say in the priorities of the airport. But for almost every other federally funded and state funded transportation project, metropolitan planning organization part of the RPC is very important to transportation planning and funding of projects. And so we spend an awful lot of time on that. And there's, so there's really an organization within the organization. And back when I was chair of the MPO back in the late 2000, we actually began the initiation of the merger between the RPC and the MPO, which was completed in 2011. It just made, they separated sometime during the 60s. And for some reason, you know, we had to endure that, you know, for quite some period of time. And we finally got them back together in 2011. And so that's very important to the town to understand what the federal and state transportation funding priorities are and how they fit into doing the projects, including things, paths. You know, if you've driven on 117, you saw the repairs that were done over the Alderbrough. You see things like we're slated to have an improvement project there. 117 and North Williston Road in the next couple of years is part of the circle turn its process, which why it was a part of. You know, when we lost AB of the CERC and then the links, the cold chester, there was a whole planning process that was done back in 2013, 2014 time period, where we identified a whole bunch of projects to help deal with the fact that we weren't going to have the transportation benefits of CERC. Which the Crescent Connector is one of those projects. It was identified as the number one project, which was supported by CCRPC and the other regional partners and is now slated for construction. Right, and there's a whole bunch of other projects that are out there with construction timing to be determined based on the availability. And that's where we in Chittenden County, even though we're a metropolitan planning organization, we still compete with other counties around the state for the state funds portion of the federal funding that goes with it that we sometimes locally match. And so it's one of those things where, you know, people that represent the community on the RPC Board are very integrally involved with the transportation planning and transportation funding of all the projects that are important to us in the community. So it really behooves the select board and the town staff to be right on top of all those transportation issues because they're crucial and they're really important. And one of the things that we're doing now at the RPC as part of the MPO planning process is we're planning the future of our federal aid highway that goes through here called the Interstate. And there's a very significant project going on right now that's going to be very important to finding the transportation future of the entire county, including our community. Yeah, thank you both, Jeff and Evan and Greg. I'll get back to the report and just to kind of follow up, well, the next section on page three is the projects that the town has in our transportation improvement program, which really mirrors what VTrans has in the capital program that the legislature proves each year. And you can see you have a good number of projects that I think, you know, credit to the staff there and as Jeff noted, some of these are follow up from the CERC alternatives process that are still moving forward. I don't know the details of every single project that is here expected to be funded, but do let me know if there's any of these projects that you'd like me to follow on to get any more information or detail on, happy to do that. So I'll pause there. Any questions on any of those projects? Questions. Are you specifically on page three or on page five? The building? Yeah, I'm sorry. I was on page three to four on the third section. I'll get there in one minute if you don't mind holding that. That's the regional issues that we've done, not the individual community. Yeah. Although ramifications for the community. Yeah. The next section is just a couple of projects that we have in this fiscal year that we're working with the town on the 15 quarter pedestrian and also the stormwater inspection work. So that's continuing. And then I'll jump into these regional activities. Obviously we do that without regard to any specific town as Jeff just mentioned. A couple of those I want to mention before getting to the building homes together. One is that we do a legislative forum every early December. If you have some issues that you think we ought to address with the legislature. We usually get a good number of our legislators, both representatives and senators there. So if there's something that you would like us to consider, including in what we talk about with them, please let Evan know or Jeff know or me know and happy to put that into the mix. The other, the next topic is just the public engagement and racial equity. And this is really just to let you know that we are trying to do some racial equity work internally as an organization, but also keeping an eye out for what can we do that might be helpful to our town, our member towns. So we did have some communication, some conversations with each of our towns to get a sense of what's going on there. And so all that's kind of getting cooked up right now. And we're holding an equity summit on Saturday, November 6th, which is not in the report, but just heads up to let you know. I'm hoping that you all got invites for that maybe. Let me know if you did not see anything about that. I haven't. Okay. That sounds like all of you saying you have not seen that. You said you have. Yeah. You may have gotten. Yeah, you would have got it from Emma Vaughan. I was right. Yeah. Yeah. And it's a possible it ended up in your spare folder because it comes through constant contact. So, but I'll send that we send that to the whole stock board. And I'm sorry. Okay, I will do that. And then I wanted to, yeah, talk about the building homes together campaign. We set out a goal five years ago. Along with champagne housing trust and housing Vermont, which is now ever north to try to build 3,500 homes in Cheney County, hoping that that would help our housing market. We did build over 3,600 homes. And we also built over 500. I say we as a broad community built over 500 affordable units, permanently affordable units. However, the task is nowhere near done. COVID did not help. There's still a lot more to do in terms of getting to a healthy housing market. The vacancy rate for rentals is still very low. Housing prices have gone up, which is great if you're a buyer, but not great if you're a buyer. You know, I think it's, we're really seeing it as a, it's really an economic development issue. It's constraining our ability to grow the economy at Cheney County. As we hear every week from employers that are trying to bring new employees into town and they can't find any place to live. And so it is a real issue that's impacting us in a variety of ways. And, you know, also homeless issues and other things and mental health is certainly a factor at that end of the market. But I'm sorry, there was a question about the building homes together. No, I just was hoping you could go into a little more detail what you did. Yeah. And if you have some thoughts about what would be helpful in terms of addressing our housing market, you know, at some level at a simplistic level, we just need more supply. But there's more nuance to it than that. Our towns, including Essex, I think have all been doing good work to try to address that. You're looking at your zoning and doing things like that. And so if you have other thoughts about, you know, state policy, municipal policy, funding, there's a lot more funding thanks to the federal government for affordable housing and to address the homeless issue. And so I don't think that will be the focus of this next campaign, but there's certainly, we all need to do more to try to address our housing market. And happy to take any feedback. So what we do at the municipal level, and sorry, I'm dipping back into the report here where I can't see you, is we've been holding what we've been calling regional housing convenings. And we get the housing committees together. And really partly to share best practices across the towns and learn from each other and kind of say, oh, how did that go for you? What did you learn? You know, so that hopefully we're incrementally, all the towns are learning from each other and getting better about this issue. And I'm sorry, I can't remember if somebody from Essex, I'm sure somebody from Essex has been engaged there. Probably they're Darren Seibler or Oesama Kuku. Yeah, definitely Darren has been plugged into it. Thanks. Yeah, any other feedback for me on, there's a lot more in there. I did not read, but any other feedback or reactions or comments for us? I have a question. It does dip into the housing thing a bit. Have you heard anything statewide or anything that locally smaller communities may have done that might impact the short-term housing like the Airbnb rentals? Because what colloquially or anecdotally, excuse me, I should say, I've seen is that a lot of the housing markets are being driven up by either individuals or larger companies that will buy them and then effectively just do short-term rentals because, you know, the profit is there. It's happened to a house on my street in the last year. It's just kind of a rotating cast of people and out there. Obviously we can't tell people you can't buy a house, but I have seen some articles about putting in some sort of, whether it's like a vacancy tax or something along those lines. Have you guys been tracking that at all around the state? Just get an idea for it. Yeah, a little bit, you know, and you kind of, I know you hear this the other side, you know, if it's not a corporate buyer that you're right, that's a whole different thing, but sometimes there's also the homeowner who's, yeah, being able to do Airbnb is helping them stay in their home, you know, as a retiree or something so. But there are definitely, there's other conversations going on in some different municipalities and in the state house about what kind of, how to regulate that issue. So I do think that is going to get some more discussion, certainly in this legislative session. And it is part of this equation. Yeah, we had, you know, people from out of state buying second homes here, which took up, you know, some segment of the housing market. And there, and the, I think the Airbnb issue is really, it is part of the issue too. And I don't know, Jeff, I don't know from your perspective, if you've seen more on that topic or not. I've seen a lot, it's turned the supply on its ear, because a lot of them, you know, whether it's Airbnb, Home Away, or any of the other folks that have been involved, the activities exploded statewide. A lot of it's happened around resort areas in particular, but also in neighborhoods where the residential is certainly is competing for supply. A lot of, you know, a lot of times when we do affordable housing, we forget about something that's very important, which is if we make the middle of the price range work well, it allows people that are living in houses that are well within their affordability range on the empty nest couple when we live in a four-bedroom house. And we could afford more house than what we're in when we choose to stay in a house that is well within our affordability range. But if you gave people choices in the middle, there are a lot of times that can free up units for people that are moving into first-time home buyer things and people can move up if they have something that they would like to move in to. And I think in the housing report that originally launched this, it was called the Forgotten Middle. We spend so much time on the low end, and then we spend other parts of our thing lamenting the upper end that we forget about the middle. And it's about not just providing supply, it's also about making markets work correctly. And so, you know, a lot of times when we do things on the supply side, we're making 100-year, 100-year decision about where they're going to be located and those kinds of things, and we don't properly sometimes take account of the demand side of the equation, which is a lot of times why you'll hear economists say, like me, that if you just give people the capability with vouchers and everything to make their own decisions about where they live and just make it more affordable because you're increasing the purchasing power to either rent or own. A lot of times you help the market correct itself. We're also going through a very difficult period now where COVID is impacting things. And the question is, it is probably altering market preferences among people. We just don't know how it's going to end up. In the end, after things settle down, like when the economy starts operating on its economic fundamentals, rather than deficits spending dollars from the federal government falling out of the supply, out of the sky into people's bank accounts. So, we're going to have a real interesting time with housing markets over the next five years, particularly as we get past this unprecedented period of the federal fiscal stimulus and the federal monetary stimulus that's kept interest rates really low, which has done a lot to increase the asset prices of the housing units, which has exacerbated the affordability issues on the demand side. So, I don't envy the RPC's work, but I will tell you one thing that the RPC has consciously tried to avoid establishing municipal targets for affordable housing. You will recall we did that back in the 80s, and that went over with our member communities like a lead balloon. I think that was 2004, actually, but it was a little bit before I got here because four or five years later, I was still getting feedback about it. It was one of those first things I heard when I got here. It's been 40 years that just blends in, Charlie. And I do, yeah, and that's a good point. Thank you, Jeff. Yeah, so any more feedback for me, for us? Any more questions? Yeah, Charlie. One of the things that we hear from our residents about is access to childcare. And that's kind of a regional issue also. I don't know if there's any, I know it's not one of your specific things today, but is there any discussion about, you know, I know the hospital is doing their three year community needs assessments effort right now. Health needs assessment. Your scorecard, your, the eco scorecard doesn't mention anything about, I guess there's two things. There's the childcare access and the other is mental health access. Yeah. We're on your radar. Jeff kind of covered and Evan did too on the mental health. I think a big part of that push was really the community outreach program. And we kind of facilitated the beginning of that. That is now, you know, it's a new service. It seems to be going great in the suburban town. So thank you for participating in that. On the daycare side, you know, it's not more of a state issue in terms of their regulations. And I understand that I think I saw recently, they're putting 29 $30 million into supporting daycare providers. So it's much more of a state issue, you know, we try to kind of support where, where that's going to, it is an issue out there for sure. And we've also, if there have been specific efforts, sometimes a town or a group has gotten together to try to form a daycare or build a daycare. I'm actually talking to the group at Hula. I don't know if you're familiar with them in the old project site. They're looking to do a daycare. We're probably going to help support some grant applications to try to help them do that. So, you know, if that kind of thing is coming along, we're happy to support those, you know, and we do try to pay attention to that issue because that's also definitely impacting our community. And thankfully, you know, I think the state did a good job supporting the daycare centers through the pandemic. I mean, we didn't have as nearly as negative an impact here as other states to provider. I'm saying that facetiously. If I'd have my mask off, you would have seen I had my tongue in my teeth. You know, thank goodness for COVID pun. Yeah. And Andy, I think you might have another question or two, or was that it? Well, my other question is you, I didn't realize you were, you were asking us to go page by page here, but back on page three at the bottom of the, one of the earlier sections, there was a question about, or there was a comment about meeting with Essex staff to discuss our senior van program. And is the, is the intent there an expansion of our program or is it a separate entity or what's the discussion there? I would say the discussion is very early. I think the more rural towns were trying to understand how you were providing that service and, and wondering if they could replicate it or expand it, you know, into their towns, but nothing too serious, I think has happened there yet. So I think we're just kind of letting you, letting you know that that's, that was a discussion out there, but nothing firm has come out of that yet. Okay. We've no good idea on store. Right. That's right. Or what did somebody that I heard it, that phrase at a R and D is, uh, Rip it off and duplicate it. So, um, so anyway, but in which media, just trying to steal good ideas from other people. So I think they're, I think impressed a little bit with what Essex has done with regard to your service there. If you got any ideas on how to find bus drivers. Yeah. And honestly, we are, there's a bigger issue there too. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, just in terms of local, uh, pop property taxes. And I'm sure you're more familiar with this than I am having to support, you know, GMT and SSTA. And whatever else you do on top of that, uh, for transportation needs in the community. Um, we are partnering right now with, um, GMT and V trans to look at, uh, transit financing options that could take the burden off of the public. Um, and so I'm hoping that goes somewhere. It's not the first time that issue has been looked at, but, um, I don't know, maybe this is the right time for that issue to get addressed. Um, and that would really help the town and frankly help the public. Um, we don't have the most functional system, certainly with regard to the elderly disabled system. Right. And my, my other question is where the, uh, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know if you have a question whether to separate. Is there any implications with regard to our relationship to you or, or. Uh, not really that I can think of. Um, I do think a number of years ago, um, we used to have, and certainly before I'm larger. So this goes back maybe 10 years. Um, the dues payment was separated out a little bit more. I think it's gotten combined over the last number of years. Um, that, but that's, you know, it's a very different time list. And so, um, that's only the only implication. I mean, I think we've been working with both the village and the town. Um, yeah, as. Yeah, whether we're talking about your zoning, bylaws, your time plans, those have been separate activities, um, public works. Yeah, I don't know. I do not see any issue. I guess I answer that question directly. All right. Metropolitan planning organization votes. The town has to vote, right? Because it has one in the village, from the village rep and one for the town outside the village, which is me. So we will, the town of Essex will no longer have two weighted votes for MPO. Yeah. For South Burlington has to. That's right. And Colchester. Yeah. And Colchester has to, and we have to, but we will. And I will say, Jeff, you have more history on this than I do, but I think there was only one vote in the whole history of the MPO that even came down to a weighted vote. And that was around the CERC probably 20 years ago or something. Right. That's why I'm the second alternate for the village as well as long, even though I live in the town outside. Yeah. There's probably three or four meetings a year where I represent both the town and outside the village and the. And vote. So that's all I have, Mr. Chair, and thank you very much for your time and, you know, anything to follow up, please do. I appreciate it. Any other, any other questions from board members? Yeah, make sure we're okay. All right, Mr. Chair. I have one. Don't mind. I have to tell you that I'm not going to be in town of Essex resident for much longer. And my wife and I started building a house in the town of Shelburne with a late February, early March type of supply chain, not withstanding. Yeah. So when it comes to the point of time, when I'm moving out of the town, I feel like I have to step down from my position as the CCRPC rep. And also I'm a tri-town commissioner as well. And try down. Right. So I serve at the pleasure of the board. If you want me to step down now, I will be glad to do that. I had conversations with Tracy and I think she would like to continue to integrate herself into it. And I'm happy to continue to represent the town until I actually move. But I think after that, it hoos me to step down. I don't think you want your representative living in another town. But I'm always available. I have some institutional memory. Since I've been doing this for over 20 years. I've lived in the town for almost 30 years. You are in the economic development commission. You know, when I first came to town, so I love the town, but it's just I'm over 65 and it's a time in my life where I need to take on a new stage and things. And I love what I've done with the RPC and my 10 years on the select board, although when I sit here tonight, you're talking about the same issues we've talked about 15 to 20 years ago. I looked at the agenda, except for noise ordinance. I don't think we ever did noise ordinances of what we did doggies. One of the worst parts of my job was when we had dog bite complaints. People used to say to me, why do you have to euthanize dogs? I used to say because we can't euthanize the owner. So it's just it's been a pleasure. And I regret I won't be able to serve out the remainder of my 21-22 term. But like I said, I'm always available for anybody. Before COVID, I used to tell people I've seen it all. But even as I've been at this for 40 years, I realized that there's still new twists and there's still new turns and everything. And I very much appreciate the board keeping me on so I could keep my hand in things that are important. I tell my wife, democracy is not a spectator sport. And it allowed me, even after I left elected office back in 2010, to continue to serve the community. And I always, I always appreciated the opportunity to do it. That's embarrassing. It's a good thing I got my mask on. I have to share my favorite memory of Jeff, though. On the BCA, we didn't have a quorum one night. And so we were on the phone trying to call people to come to the BCA meeting and Jeff was painting. And Jeff came covered in paint, carrying paintbrush, just so he could vote that night at the BCA. That's the kind of awesome person that he is. So does anybody want to boot him out now? I wish we let him finish. No, I would prefer he stays until he, you know, he's all the longer. Who knows? I could be there for the whole year. I understand. We'll make sure. We'll see if we can. And I'll miss Charlie and the staff. You just need to understand the quality of the staff at the RTC and their knowledge of transportation issues and energy planning issues and. And all the things that are out there, we would not be as good as we are. We would not be the economic engine of the state that we are in Chittenden County without organizations like that. Supporting. Appreciate that. Thanks. And with that, I bid you adieu. It's my last annual update for you. Thank you, Jeff. Thank you, Charlie. You never know. Good night. Thank you. Have a good night. Thanks. Okay. So, right. The next, next business item is discussion on potential action on open meeting law training from Vermont League of cities and towns. As you likely recall, we had a request a while back to have the secretary of state come and. And give us some training and I think Evan, you know the. Most of the details about that, the interaction with the secretary of state. We finally did get a hold of the secretary of state and they said they don't nest. They don't do individual towns. They will do presentations for multiple things. So we turned our attention to the VLCT. Vermont League of cities and towns. Staff did and we can get some data. We can get some dates. Where they're able to do it, but. Greg was the one who took the last part of it. There is one thing that they stated. Is they will certainly do the training. But they're not going to take questions from the public. It's just going to be a presentation. If there are questions, they will. From the select board, they'll take them and get back to you, but they're not going to be able to take questions from the public. It's training. It's not an open public. We certainly appreciate that they will do it. Those who are in the audience. The Vermont League of cities and towns. Is just like the CCRPC before them. They are of a wealth of resources. They have several attorneys on staff. When towns have a legal question. Maybe it's something in a state statute. We are. Or, or. Many other things. About COVID or employment law. If it's something that they have touched before. They will usually give you an opinion. Of what you should do or where you can look. So. This is as good. As anything of the state. Secretary of state's office. And they do this training all the time. You had a question. Yeah. Go by the. From. The. Public. State. And. I don't. They. Meet with the public. They'll answer individual questions. They just don't want to have a group meeting where that Jim comes to talk to the group. But his staff will answer individual questions. We know. Periodically the secretary of state's office will do a. A. The tour. Very well. Transparency tour. Yes. And they will they will set up regional meetings where. They'll go through and they'll do this kind of discussion. I think. Early recently there was because there have been some places that have that have had. Doesn't meant done in their towns. They've gone around and they've talked about. You know, controls around that. As a. But it's a regional thing again. They don't go to specific. Pounds to do it. And do we know. Was there a comment in that about that in the memo. I think it just said we would watch out for the next one. I don't know if it said that there was any. It's just said we don't we don't know. I don't know. I don't know if there's a. I don't see anything about that. What was the original request for the public. Yeah. That's why we need to have this discussion is do we do we want to have this training because we could we could go. I mean, I've I've if you've gone to the. The Vermont League of Cities Towns Town Fair. They often will have this topic. I've attended it a couple of times. In fact, I repeated it. In fact, they know they offer it. They offer it every after every town meeting. For new board members. And so I when I became chair. I repeated it just this this this year just to have it fresher in my mind. And I think Tracy, you took it this year as well. So it is it is offered annually to, you know, any. Any board member can take it. And I don't know if it's. I don't know if it's open to the public or not. Just anybody can sign up for it. I don't know. Probably not. Because the response pretty much said that we serve our members and our members are the municipalities, meaning the people that are either employed by our, or elected to. And so they're not a resource for the general public and they don't want to give legal advice to the general public about. About. You know, open meeting. You know, or any other questions. I think, I think that's the difference. The VLCT is a member driven organization. Of municipalities. The Secretary of State. You know, anything that gets that. The Secretary for the state. So if you have questions. About a state statute. You can ask the Secretary of State. As a resident. Or a business. So, so the question before us, there's a couple of ways to. That's a couple of things we could consider. We could have a. A public meeting where the training video is shown. And then we ask questions of their lawyer and only we get to If we have any, or we can each individually watch the video and then have a public discussion about it afterwards, or we can just decide it's not really what was asked for and refer to those who requested the discussion to go to the Secretary of State's office. Or we, or we, or we, you know, and or continue to watch for the next transparency tour if it's offered and then publicize that locally. So I don't know what folks think about that. As I said, Tracy and I have taken the open meeting while training this year. It would, we would have to pay for the training for what for us to even just five of us to watch the video. It's not a free service. Or, you know, or, you know, in March, or April, actually April after, or yeah, in March, March, April, every after town meeting has happened they they offered every year for new or existing members. I don't know what I mean question I guess does it satisfy the need that drove us to get to this question asking this question. I don't know but Greg is up. Greg you want to say something sorry. Yeah, most of what I was going to say has been covered, but I just had the LCT told us that there's nothing to prevent residents from sending questions to board members ahead of time with this meeting is scheduled for members to ask that. But yeah, like Evan said, the reason that they want to respond on board questions is because they serve the board, not all the public. Yeah, true. So we could write we could we could relay the questions and hopefully, and hopefully, we catch the correct nuance and, and then there's not really a mechanism for follow up questions, because I don't think we want to be having online chat going with people during the folks. How we got in this mess in the first place. Exactly. I mean, I, I was, I didn't think this was a good idea to start with. I mean now the Secretary of State isn't coming. And if the only option would be for the five of us to watch a video, and then ask some VLCT questions. Maybe members of the public could send them in but seems like they could just talk to the Secretary of State at that point, which is always recommended. The questions relayed to us to get the VLCT who I mean just go to the Secretary of State. I still do not believe that this is an efficient use of our time and anyway whatsoever was suggested by a member of the public who brought it to the board, and then the board voted to reach out to the Secretary of State. So we've done our due diligence on that. And if the VLCT option seemed like it would satisfy the public with some sort of like open forum which I really feel is more what people were looking for, then, you know, I could be swayed. But in this case it doesn't sound anything like what the members of the public brought to us. I don't really think that it's a high priority for us. We all know how the open meeting law works and when there's been an instance where it was unclear, we'd reach out for advice. In the instance where this came up where Elaine and I were talking online was a situation where we were doing online meetings with COVID and, you know, just it was one instance that got clear up and public request was submitted and all documentation was turned over. So it seems to me that we have followed open meeting law almost every step of the way. I don't really see that the five of us need to watch a video to understand that. Thanks, Beth. Any other thoughts? I guess my thought is the request was specifically for the Secretary of State to come and have more of an open forum. As you mentioned earlier, the LCT offers this training every single year. It's going to be available in six months' time. So I'm not convinced that this meets the need of what we're asking for. But I do think that we should be paying attention to when the next transparency tool happens and take advantage of that. Sue, what do you think? And I don't remember if you're saying that before the update, but I think it's probably just any of us that's interested to take the training and refresh the data. I don't think it would be an instance of the fact that it wasn't for a public. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I kind of agree with that. I kind of, I do agree with that. It's not just kind of, I do agree with what's been said. It doesn't seem to meet what we were asked for. But I see at least one hand up in the public. So it's trying to get me back to the meeting. Okay, we've gone to the public for Betsy Dunn. Did you want to comment Betsy? My hand signed up, Andy. I'm sorry. Okay, must be my, I got some lagging here. Can anybody see any hand up Bruce? Bruce. Bruce. Now I'm saying Bruce. Hi, Bruce post one Cindy Lane for the record. I agree that this really doesn't meet the spirit. I think Betsy and I brought the issue based on that March 26 meeting where we alleged that there was an illegal side meeting going on involving three members of the select board. We felt it was important to have a conversation about these issues because there are people the public didn't think it was fair to even submit a request for public information about what went on. Vermont has a relatively weak open meeting law and the primary enforcers of the law are citizens who have to incur expenditures to go to court to bring a case against potential offending municipality. So, I think it was public education. Perhaps most of the public's not interested in it. I thought at the time it was a good idea. Frankly, I don't think you ought to waste money getting select board training on this. And I understand fully the VLCT serves its members and the VLCT is not particularly a friend of open meeting laws and transparency. The secretary of state is the secretary of state said they would meet with an individual town. So I guess it falls to us citizens to try to make sure that there is some transparency in our local government and we tell you when we think you're not being transparent so I don't think you should spend the money either. Thanks. Thanks for your comments. Any other comments. Go ahead. I don't. I don't understand necessarily the comment that VLCT is not a. I don't know what the VLCT stance that open meetings as they do training, they know the law. I don't think I have no idea if they're against it or for it. But I don't know if that comment is appropriate. I just don't know. So I just, it just struck me. Every time we've asked them about the law, they interpret the law as they know it and they see it and they, they do it throughout the state. So that's all Mr. Chair. Thanks. Any comments in the room. Only one person in the room. Okay. I don't see any other online other other hands. Sorry about that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bruce Bruce does. So I guess he's probably asking to rebut what. Evan just said, so. Hello. I'm here. The VLCT has put things, they lobby the legislature. And we saw that happen here in Essex when an agenda went out on a very important issue did not an agenda went out and a very important issue was not listed on the agenda. The board met on it. And then later on at a subsequent meeting, shared it by adding it to the previous agenda. But the public who might have been interested in that issue was not able to participate because they didn't know ahead of time. So that's the kind of stuff that weakens an already weak law. So I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I'm not sure you heard it by adding it to the previous agenda. But the public who might have been interested in that issue. Was not able to participate because they didn't know ahead of time. So that's the kind of stuff that weakens an already weak law. And as a select board member and as someone who's been in. So that's certainly an appropriate comment. So there you go. Thank you. All right. Hey, I don't see any other online hands. Anybody else see any? In case my, I'm out of sync here. I don't know. Okay. All right, so it sounds like the consensus is, well, again, we all agreed that it's inappropriate to go forward with that. So we can take that off the table and we'll, we'll again, watch out for the deals, the Secretary of State offerings if they come in the future. Okay. Moving on to the next business item, discussion and potential action on tentative agreements about shared services between town of Essex and independent city of Essex Junction. It appears now we've got three different versions of those documents potentially to look at. What do we want to do? Do we, does it, does it make sense to look at versions that are, we have not yet seen or that potentially our back level would be one? Yes, that was my question is, can we be sent the absolute latest version that we're all on the same page because reading through nice agenda tomorrow's agenda, there's a working copy out there. I got very confused as far as what we should actually be talking about. So I guess I would like to suggest that we could be sent that tomorrow, first thing in the morning or Greg, if you have it tonight so that we can have a discussion on the actual good working copy tomorrow night at the joint meeting. One thing I'd like to consider too is there were nine documents in the packet. Could we work on two or three of them at a time instead of trying to have every packet full of every agreement and then, you know, I- But some of them we already worked on and I thought- Right, I think some of them right, we should mark as either complete or mostly complete and not keep including them. And maybe we need to, for those, we need to actually state that we're done with it, at least for now. Those are the ones that shouldn't go to the trustees if we're done, is that, is that what I thought? See, I thought that's what we were gonna discuss tomorrow night are the ones that we were ready to. Yeah, I don't know. The problem that I'm having right now is I don't know where we are with any of them because it's confusing. The fact that we've now got three sets and I think, you know, I don't view that we really have any urgency to do these very, you know, I mean, the vote's gonna happen regardless of whether, you know, where we are with these agreements. Yes, we'd like to get them behind us, but not at the expense of missing something or, you know. So then what is it? So then we'll, other than interviewing tomorrow night, we are also on the agenda with the discuss this with the trustees, but what are you proposing we're gonna be discussing? I don't know, that's really hard because we just got, just before this meeting supposedly got new updates or they were, right, Greg, new documents came late this afternoon. Yeah, so what happened is the, excuse me, the documents in your packet and in the packet for tomorrow night are the trustees' latest comments. It does not include the edits in the comments that the select board made through Bill Ellis. Those have come in from Bill over the weekend. Not his fault on the delay. So Brad Luck has taken those and as of tonight has combined the trustee comments and the select board comments into one document. So to Tracy's question, yes, I'm happy to send that out. Tonight, I think tomorrow the discussion between the two boards is to go through as many of the documents as you're willing to and talk about some of those outstanding issues. As far as I can remember and tell, I have not been any documents that have been finalized at this point. You're getting close on some of them but nothing has been totally wrapped up. So tomorrow's another chance to talk about what's out there and different sides and opinions and perspectives that both boards have on the documents. Yes, you may. Greg, when these changes are coming from different sources, is that correct? Are those changes correct? I know I saw things crossed out and different words put in, but is there any factors like when that change was made? Yes and no. There's been so many changes over the past few months that we don't have everything in one document but it's just kind of worked out where when the boards get pretty close to something, they get a clean copy and then it goes back out. So it's kind of track changes, kind of water two meetings at a time, but we have to go through the whole history and find everything that's been discussed to really see exactly what changes are made when, by who. Does that answer the question? Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah, of course, I think. I agree with what you said, Anne. Yeah. I think that we're creative using the situation and none of us really have any clarity into what are the current documents. We're getting updates used to work in advance to be able to discuss them. So in order for us to have a reasonable discussion, I think there needs to be some time given for us to discuss and make our own comments. Go, Tracy. Well, and it would, going forward, it would also be extremely helpful because of the trap change issue and losing that to have a separate, not necessarily a separate document, but not just to get a track change version back, but an actual listing of the rationale behind those requested changes. Because right now it's, I mean, it's great that we get a track change version back, but we have no idea why that's being requested, what the, you know, why? Why was one word changed? Why was one sentence changed? It would just help us to all understand and be on the same page. I think a lot of that comes from our discussion though. And yeah, unfortunately, right, then you end up though with understanding of the progress of the document being institutional knowledge and not documented anywhere, you're right. But that's a lot of work, but... Well, and it's also, I mean, if you have a track change document in the packet and we read those track changes, we have no idea what the onus is behind those. So we're at the mercy of waiting in order to have a conversation. We can't think through that rationale in advance of the meeting. So it becomes a preparation issue, at least for me. Right, so if the trustees request a change, right, we don't know why they requested that change until we sit in a room with them and have a conversation about it, right? That's true, that is true. Versus it being part of a comment box or something that is attached to this version. Why did you make, you know, usually you would say, or you could say, this is why I've made the change or this was the issue. And it would either be in a comment box in the document or a cover memo to what you're getting. I did the same thing today. Sorry, Sue, in a review of an RFP, you see it, you make a comment, you tell them why you're making the comment and they then answer, you know, a staff member answers the comment. Oh, this is how it, you know, I put in a comment something like per state requirements, the comment came back, the state doesn't require any of that. It's just what you want done. And so at least I understood that my comment wasn't gonna get changed, but understood. This is part of the problem because you're not doing this together, mostly in the same room. Sorry, so I don't understand Brad left the role, and he's not assessing, and so this is coming from the... So they're using Brad to, as their clearinghouse for all this stuff. It's their decision, it's not the week we have not chosen to challenge that. Maybe we haven't discussed that either, but early on in, he was named as their point person for all things separation. I don't know if that's the right term to use, and I don't want to give him any abilities that he hasn't been officially granted by the trustees, but that's... But then we're discussing with the trustees. Yeah, and we have our legal counsel helping us do that, and our legal counsel is doing our edits for us for us, I think in their case, in some of their case, some of the, I don't know specific details of who's doing what. Right, well, Greg's hand was up, I didn't know if he had something to add. Go ahead, Greg. Just gonna say that Brad has been coordinating the efforts for the trustees, so he's sending out the changes that they've discussed that they wanna have this, like, review. So they're coming from the trustees. I don't know, does that answer your question? They've also engaged their village attorney as the town has engaged its town attorney, and where they have asked, either side has asked for staff input, whether it's Brad or myself, or anybody else they ask, they get input. So, but he is doing the coordinating for them because they have decided they'd put me in a bad position to have to do both. Sometimes they ask me, for my opinion, I give it to them and give them direction and try to get to the emphasis of what the agreement could be and what to try to focus on versus not dwell on. Hope that helps. All right, so it sounds like we don't wanna talk about any of these agreements now because we're not sure which documents, we don't have the final documents to work with. The other question then is, do we have, Bill Ellis lined up to talk to us to be available for executive session tonight? I didn't think so. So there's probably no reason to have it. Do we, we probably don't need to have any executive session about this topic either. Are you next in us as discussion personnel? Was there anything for that one? Well, we can have our own discussion without Bill. Okay, but I'm as far as executive session. So you still wanna go that way? So we don't need to have an executive session to talk about the agreements because we aren't gonna talk about those agreements tonight. Because we need to get to the correct documents. We have, none of us have seen them. Well, correct. The most recent documents, we haven't seen them. We'll get them tonight. And I understand that some of us are working tomorrow. I am, others are. So we may have some challenge tomorrow too, to get to do a complete review. Unfortunately, or unfortunately, we have another joint meeting next Monday. So, it may be unfortunate. We was hoping we could cancel that second one, but maybe we can't. And it's, you know, the work to be done. We should do the work. Sorry. Okay, so any other discussion on this topic? Any reason they think we should go to the public comments on this? I see a couple of hands. Go ahead. Irene, you wanna come to the microphone? Thank you. I held my tongue on other things tonight. Given Brad's role for the village, I think it would be highly appropriate for the select board to have their own consultant. Like someone from the town outside the village, who is knowledgeable, and invite them to peruse these agreements just the way Brad has helped out his side of the town. Thank you. Thank you. Bruce, I see your hand up. Where's that left holdover from before? Bruce's hand isn't up. I made a note that I've been in some Microsoft meetings lately, and this has been a problem in those meetings where some hands show up to the rest of us. There is no hand. And then to you, it looks like there is. And I do see, though, from where I'm sitting that Betsy done has her hand up, but Bruce doesn't. I see, yes, Betsy's the next one on my list. I was gonna go there next. Thank you for that clarification. My apologies for the way Microsoft Teams is working this evening. Not your problem. But thank you. Go ahead, Betsy. Thank you, Andy. So that you haven't been able to talk about these MOUs or the tentative agreement on each of these particular ones that you have to work with with the trustees. Maybe you should take the time and get the actual document from them as a negotiator for the nurses contracts. When we would get a article from them, they would explain it, and then we would separate totally so that we could sit and talk about what this actually means amongst ourselves beside instead of you, each of you picking it apart in front of them. So don't meet tomorrow, get the actual thing, and then the next Monday, meet with them. So there is only one actual next meeting that you have with them. It would be a way of you all coming together with your response to what they're putting out there. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Betsy, to, I guess, to clarify some of the changes that will be discussed tomorrow are changes that we requested and we're looking for their reaction. So this is, yeah, we are, this does have, this does go on a two-way street. And so we're, and there are oftentimes when we see something new from the trustees and we say, well, we need to have our own private discussion about that before we respond. And so that's part of, yeah, why this is taking time to get through. But thank you, thank you for your comments. Got it, thank you. Yep, any other hands? Sorry, I still see Bruce's hand, but I won't call him. All right, okay, so that is that then. We'll hopefully have a fruitful discussion tomorrow about that. The next item on the agenda is discussion of personnel. We'll go into executive session later to have that discussion and we'll tell you that. Okay, then we move on to the consent agenda. Mr. Chairman, I make the motion that we accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you, Don. Do I have a second? Second. Thank you, Pat. Any further discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes five, zero. Moving on to reading file. Any board member comments? You have one minor addition for you. You mentioned bus drivers. This last week and a half, two weeks, we hired two new senior van drivers and they are starting, I believe this week or next at the worst. So we have gotten lucky and found two drivers. Good. So thank you for mentioning that. It was a good, that's it. All right, thanks. One thing I want to mention is there's the list of committees and commission vacancies. Tomorrow we're interviewing four people for one seat on the housing commission. One of the candidates is a close personal friend of mine, so I'm going to recuse myself from the interviews and the decision. And so Pat's gonna be the point person from our side. I'll be out of the room. Let you be aware of that ahead of time. I will at the time, tomorrow also state concern about the appearance of a potential conflict of interest and recuse myself. Anything else? All right, if not, then we need to go into any of the motions to go into executive session for discussion of personnel. I move that the select board enter into executive session to discuss the employment of a public employee in accordance with one GSA section 313A3 to include the town attorney, unified manager and deputy manager. Okay, thank you, Don. Thank you, Tracy. Any discussion? I guess we did include those three additional folks. We... You can keep the motion and if you don't need us... Leave him in the motion. I can change. I just... No, no, no, leave him in the motion and then we can either tell them not just ask them not to... Step in, step out. There's a likely, I'm not aware that we would come back and take any action afterwards, so we would, when we end the executive session, adjourn the meeting from there and not return to the... Intentionally, we don't want to be taking any action. We will just adjourn here. So, thank you for everyone for attending and... Oh, did we vote? No, not yet. We didn't vote. It's all right, I was waiting, and he wasn't supposed to go anywhere. Yeah, yeah, I'm glad I caught up on that. All right, so... Any further discussion? Who was set up? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, motion passes 5-0. We'll go upstairs for executive session. We won't come back. Thank you for everyone for attending.