so i guess cold chester had a lot of damage friday night and they ended it with a sent us a couple pictures asking you know if you guys any damage would like to know there's more and million dollars for  welcome everyone we don't usually have a full house it's nice to see everybody here tonight i'd like to remind you that if you have a cell phone if you could please put it to silent or turn it off that would be great and we have a sign up sign in sheet at the table if you could all make sure that you get your name on that we need that for the minutes please so thank you and just a quick update too there's so water line work going on densmore and that means they need to shut the water supply off somewhere around eight thirty so if anyone is still here about that time you might want to think about using the bathroom before then if needed so just a heads up on that ok so we're going to go into yes so it'll be off to law about five o'clock this morning so the crews are go w complying with the condition when the liquor license was approved for free up w there is a condition that the board receive a lot of the town receive a letter from mr vin stober taking himself off the application that has been received so that can go i'd suggest the consent file approved conditionally the condition was satisfied so it would get moved to consent and then approved when we get there but if there's anyone that wanted to speak to it  or if you're just here to to see if they got approved or not again it's been approved it was conditional so i believe it's the select boards pleasure to put it to consented jan i thought there's no objections with anybody who was hoping to talk yes staff in the press that has some additional comments and that's we'd like to move that to your reading file as opposed to taking any action tonight we will see that at some future test that's the idea yes and lastly there are some potential minutes changes i would like to request that we it's of april sixteenth which were problematic address those while we still have a full room of folks because i think when we do the minutes late at night we're prone to perhaps handling it a different way than we would if we felt that the so what would you like to just move up the minutes of the sixty as soon as possible maybe i mean i would not propose doing that because we have many guest speakers here tonight and i and would like to speak to them or would like to at least hear the minutes of april sixteenth possibly correct it or not ok so then why don't we move it to after after mr nice interview and after green lantern and mr dodge ok so do it it after de very ok with that would be my suggestion ok and we're doing which minutes then all of them ok so we're going to move on to public to be heard and that's a time for the public to speak to the sludge board on items that are not on the agenda tonight is there anyone here tonight wishing to speak during public to be h vermont mountain bike association varity put a map that there's a new park in place but people are still parking at sex and hell all the bikers don't know where to go where is it legal grid not legal and a lot of bikers say assume that it is a park and that this is a park right and i said yes it is so i feel like i'm their spokes person the only other thing that is a mess in the town's been great they came in pick up picked up  garbage today all of us in the area want more police we want to be recognized and by the recreation department as a park because it's cut off allen martin parkway all of us that pay taxes here that use this area we demand the service and we want to be on the back it's the park and recreation map on if you go online it stops at saks and hall of park that isn't fair we pay taxes this has nothing to do with the ordinance this has to do with our rights the public the people that use this area that bought these homes these expensive homes and pay taxes we we demand our services and safety s concerned a way i'm concerned about the way that the minutes were handled at our last meeting so as a general statement about meeting minutes and i know elaine you're new to this board so maybe this is different than the way the trustees handle it  minutes is clearly on the agenda ok i just read ok thank you ok we're going to move on then to our business items and  five eight which is an interview tonight we have al and i would like to invite him up he's the chip in solid waste district rep for both essex talmud and the village of essex junction he's been know you're always there so that's wonderful so thank you for doing that and your appointment is for three years and we always have two years and we have people back to where they want to re up so we can hear from them and eighteen months ago i guess it was only made sense with a lot of the joint things that are going on in my mind you know trying to represent the whole organization says there are a couple of things that are coming up that i wanted to make sure everybody was aware of the first is that we're having to pay heed to get rid of mix paper  mirth the recycling facility things that have occurred in china have caused some great issues worldwide and so instead of getting seventy to eighty dollars a tonne for for mixed paper we are paying thirty to forty to fifty dollars a tonne to get rid of it so the rate for dumping at the murph is going to be going up and that responsibility has been delegated to the executive director or the director general manager i guess we call it and  so there may be rate increases in your pick up at your house based on guess i would say that it isn't the money making opportunity that we thought it might be six or seven years ago and we're going to start been talking about backing off on some of the lot more discussion on that and where we go with that but i know that there was some concern a few months ago when people started to have to pay to drop their compost off at the drop off t that the last stadium is that we have a fund that we set up and provide money into every year which is for the communities and but you know if there are boy scouts or something that come up with a project to you know clean up a portion of indian broke or those kinds of things the the disposal the pick up  you know containers all of that kind of stuff can be paid for by this fund in so just need to know that it's there it caps out at and i think five years i think the down gets maybe twelve hundred dollars a year and the village may get it because we got three in the village now we get two hundred dollars here now but after five years if money hasn't been spent it just stays at that amount we don't keep increasing it because it didn't look like a good place to you know hold on so that is available so if folks come in here looking for projects or have some ideas i know when i was on the board or scouts and coming in for eagle projects and those they had to go to you know well we know it's saturday and we have a meeting coming up i we usually get a rundown at the meeting with respect to how many  tons and usually you know a cell is taken that for free and we pay for the tires and and those kinds of things although i was around the county a little bit on saturday  it didn't seem to me that green up day was as rambunctious as i've seen it in previous years as pieces a road today noticed didn't get hit this year that normally get it home and you know those kinds of things i don't know if there was the same number of people volunteering this year that might have volunteered in years past he said we get six votes total because we're combined what would we have gotten if it was just the junction and the town the junction would have three votes in the town would have three votes now because the junction went over  i yeah i don't know that i can speak to all of the issues but what i gleaned is that china was taking a lot of dirty trash and  they passed some laws where they were going to do that anymore and so that minimizes the amount of mixed things and those kinds of things that they take but for a number of years i mean they were taking everything no matter if it was a boil a senator or anything else you know and they've they've just cleaned up their their program a lot more than now what it was previously but it's like a paper it wouldn't be one of the soiled you know i don't know that but it it you know has a lot of other mixed things in it because we we don't separate out you know the white paper in the glossy paper and everything but but hopefully some other country comes up you know maybe vietnam or somebody decides that they want to be a big recycler year you know the legislature was doing all kinds of things with it for a while there this year and it might have even disappeared for a little bit but it's back and so it looks like it will be  twenty nineteen twenty twenty organics will not be allowed in your trash and that's one option haulers new do provide pickup options you can take it to the drop off center something that you know the village treatment guy doesn't want to hear but there's garbage disposals on the you can do and you can compost in your backyard and if you compost your back yard then the meat products can go in your trash with that stuff and so there's well i think but i think we will be providing a lot more waiting for this legislative session to finish up and then i think you're going to see a lot more publicity on where we're going with it and all of the haulers are going to have to provide that option even though there's a hauler that has  a drop off behind the lutheran church and in jericho on saturdays and those kinds of operations are going to have to provide all of the services so he's going to  read on you and i have had this conversation over email but i just wanted to bring it up to the public knows that they've been hard on several of the front porch forums lately people have commented about illegal dumping that they've seen and their frustration with that and one of that you know getting into a yes we were coordinating trade or whatever that stuff is so yeah free market rate right the one thing that would be really good in the whole when we were on sex and all that drive we did it with a bunch of our neighbors and got a reduced rate and i know on the condo development that i live in a course we have one dollar come in and pick it all up but if a neighborhood decided that they could get together and and go and ask one or two hollers if they but their prices would be if they did their own neighborhood i think they would see significantly reduced rates developments to get together and say you know we really want this circle or someplace because we only have thirty five units there in the little development i'm in our rates are the lowest that i've ever it's just you know they're in and out of there in about seven minutes it would cut down on wear and tear on the streets it would cut down on fuel use and pollution and all kinds of good stuff but you don't want the smaller to go go to item five b and this discussion about submitted petition regarding represented representation issues so i presume i mean you're going to one po order is there i brought this up during our discussion about a conflict of interest policy and i know this is it this seems to be a case where this might apply and i just want clarification on that i'm not objecting at all to the discussion i just want to understand whether this article five prove it conduct of our conflict of interest policy section b says a public officer shall not  represent a peer or appear i'm behalf of any person or organization in a cause proceeding application or other matter pending before the public body in which the officer holds office some curious whether the board considers that to apply in this case and that someone else other than a select board member should be the spokesperson for this issue it's the select board's policy and you are the arbiter of whether it applies or doesn't apply oh i'm fairly certain if it does or not it sounds like it does apply here but both have a duty to the public officer chill not represent or appear on behalf of any person or organization in a cause proceeding application or other matter pending before the public party in which the officer holds office so as i said i'm not objecting to the topic we're going to talk about which is a question of whether we should have to you i appreciate andy's calling our attention to that and i agree that i think that it should not be a sitting select board member who presents a cause to the board i think i do think that's a conflict so however the board chooses to handle it is fine with me by appreciate being reminded of the conflict of interest policy so you are proposed and not having if you if the board chooses to discuss it that's fine if the board chooses to select word took knowledge and remedy the fact that eleven thousand residents who live outside the village rest french and like others and taken in municipal matters compared to their village neighbors in other words there's no one speaking for just the interests of those outside the village or residents as the consolidations of the town of village apartments move ahead for example this unequal representation should be as much of a concern everyone here as the issue of unequal taxation on behalf of the village  if you played paid close attention you know that our consolidations have begun to address the disparity in taxes by shifting expenses over the past five years on the other hand the disparity in representation has not at all been addressed the boards continue to put forth plans for merger and plans for consolidation without acknowledging or attempting to remedy this representation deficit and like is to find a way to remedy this foundational problem once and for all so that every voter can feel confident that they have representation in meetings like this fair outcomes will only result from a balance negotiation we know they can be done because we've seen the school board designate outside the village as a district for very long time how could we create this balance well first of all we could encourage the town outside the village to form its own overlay district comparable to what the village did many years ago hundred twenty five years ago with its own board of trustees another way would be to increase the size of the select board to accommodate the five villas trustees as well as five outside the village trustees and that way this board would act as a ten member at large board so we would all represent our districts as well as be  depending on the tip type of issue that we are considering those five members from each just right could accept really whenever a hyper local policy or a committee or budget item arose i'd like us to see equal teams when discussing matters that affect equity as well as consolidation i can't think of an issue that's more pressing for all of our board members than making sure that all voters see that someone has their back at this table unanimous decision on the part of all boards that this was to be an item a work product item if i'm not mistaken and that the direction that both boards were going to take relative to consolidation and governance were going to be brought up because we all agreed that it was an important issue to be  to be resolved so i appreciate the comments i to be honest with you would prefer to see a ten member select board with five members from each district  i believe that's a decision that has to be made by both boards i am not in favor of an overlay district i think that that that we can do better by having a good spandex select board that our boards have been actively discussing this topic for quite some time we've been made very clearly aware of the situation we're working on it it's something that takes an enormous amount of time and effort and wires a lot of legal assistance statutory assistance it's not this limitation that the slug board or the trustees have set upon themselves we have we're our charters are in statute our governance is in statute there isn't a quick way to fix this so we're already working on it and it's taking time and while i understand we're going forth and we are all working hard on this topic and so this just kind of feels like repetition we we're really really well aware of the concern and we're working on it you are working you know there's there's there's many places where representation isn't necessarily equal i live in a part of essex where i have one state rep just as every many know i don't know i don't know if that's somewhat relevant but you know it it's a fact of the way governance is set up we're not we're not a necessarily a democracy or representative republic the laws that we have defined how we are represented and i and i would i would ask that if there's anybody in the townhouse side the village  thinks i have not represented them adequately please let me know i'm i have concerns about the setting i mean we don't think we want to or we can or we may be like maybe we we can sorry to say we can't  it's my thought that if if we within the town set aside there or add representation for folks outside of the village that we then also have to add equal representation back into the village because then people outside the village will be able to float on town wind things and district things is that how this works and then you have to add the other half of the town has to be added into another district so they did it with three votes and i'm not sure how this mechanically would work other than you know if you if you we had a town with two villages which so i think what has been proposed if you segregate that that the whole all the representation on the boundary then becomes a town with two villages or they're separate right so this is either this sounds more like a separation than a unification so my good is in the villages would be paying taxes to the other village who has it has no representation so i have before me sorry so i'm i'm kind of at that i and i understand the fact that folks that live in the village get the vote on village issues they also get to vote on town issues people outside the village get to vote on town issues because that's the municipality they are a member of if you have a tennis club and a bowling league and all of the tennis players are also in the bowling league but none of the bowlers around the tennis league tennis in the in the tennis club the people that are in the bowling league that aren't in the tennis club don't get to vote on what happens in the tennis club they only get it when the deciding where to have the bowling banquet right they don't get two votes i'm just i'm trying to understand why we have to  rambling air stream of consciousness so i understand that the whole the thing of that there's there's the two entities overlap some and some residents or are members of both but i don't understand how we're failing to provide adequate representation for folks outside the village during our joint discussions we have a list of things we want to include and one of those is representation you know this this thing so let's you without this petition we're doing that anyway we plan on and study it and to do if you want to do districts you need charter changes and no way you're going to put representatives appointed by any anybody outside the village and assume that they're going to represent outside the village only when the people in the village are paying taxes for the whole town that would be representation or tax haitian with that representation of we know what that means so and we also agree as we go through these things that there's a lot of moving pieces representation the voting the way we devoting all kinds of things that require charges and what we greed to up front was we're going to put all the pieces together have one one change out to a piece meal so it's an important discussion that's already happening about representation so home a part of that what i had a problem with on the petition was the the bit about the school the pieces you know were selected we do the municipal government we don't touch anything to do with schools we admire them and the work they do but we don't control those like ford should not be meddling in school business but it was allowed to warn a vote for the april school board election so i would not want to promise anyone that this life were gone never be involved in any school board activity again i hope great that we're not but one never knows and so applauding the school district for at least recognizing that the town outside the village is distinctive and has its own characteristics and it's i think it's really important that we understand that a lot of what goes on here at town hall is done for just outside the village residence we have had a town highway tax that has been misnamed for decades it has been charged only to outside the village residents to pay for only outside the village rather so we've been very careless by using the word town to mean a whole lot of things but for example the town cemetery commission only manages  cemeteries outside the village we have a firearms to charge ordinance that only talks about the areas outside the village and i think if we took the time to study our own structure here and redefine the words that we used to refer to the things i go on here we'd be surprised at how many departments here committees ordinances and others things are soley for the town outside the village and for the select board which is currently not made up of outside a village residence but it really doesn't matter because we are beholden to everyone here for a group that is not beholden just to outside the village voters and has been elected by just them to manage these exclusively outside the village concerns is something that would never happen on the village side and that's where to me the aha moment occurred when you've got one district in this town that has its own board has own policies and has control over those things but you have another district that for all intents and purposes was at one point a water district and then a school district and now happens to have no boundaries on it because we lost our school board in the merger largest sting to pout side the village school board in that merger it is appropriate now to be looking with all due haste to find a way to represent those eleven thousand people and their interests and their committees and their policies somewhere in our governance structure and until we do that i don't know how we can go forward with consolidation conversations because you're pitting people at this table who are representing the village and people who represent everyone in a situation where we're supposed to be deciding things for eleven thousand people who have no one speaking for them and that's not acceptable to me and if you go to go look at people's origins which happens at times will say well how many people are from the town as a villager inside the village i'm not sure that's appropriate because of what our charge is to do as lycoming but even if you look at it it's still lopsided in the average joint meeting now with the village trustees we have six village residents and three outside the village residence so even if a select where members we were allowed to represent outside the village interests we are outnumbered two to one therefore i think that this is a huge first step before we do anything else on consolidation to rightsize the people and the representation that's at this table because if we don't eleven thousand people are being shortchanged there i saw a lot of more than a dozen communities in vermont to have villages incorporated into their towns and they are all in various degrees dealing with this exact same situation in different ways and i think it's important to allow this board and the board of trustees to work this situation out in the way that works out best for all of us what i'm here the language i'm hearing when you're talking is that it sounds like we are in a vacuum and we are the only community suffering with this great injustice and i just want to make sure that you know that we aren't special in that respect the ever language i'm hearing you say is that we are pitting each other against ourselves i'm hearing that the village in the town or in competition with each other i am hearing that the town has an enormous amount of responsibility that has nothing to do with more than half its residents and i'm hearing that the partnership that we have been working all these years to solidify does not matter to you and that's very upsetting because that flies in the face of all the work we're doing it's a slap in the face to half of the bit the town residents and it's disruptive to the process we're trying to achieve we are already working on all of the stuff that you want to fix and i think we would all like to ask you to have some patience and to come on board the boat with the rest of us and do the work that we need to do it's going to take a long time it's going to be a lot of compromise that will leave everybody at the table unhappy in some degree and it's going to be something that it will be hard to understand and complicated and we will need to have act outside experts help us with it your proposals are all quick fixes that first of all won't work and second of all are not legal so i'm really wishing that we could move on with the conversation both boards have already started last week greg sent an e mail to all of us and said would you please define this long list of words and so we're setting our common terms together right now it's our homework that's due on may tenth so that we can talk about it next week jennifer now or asked us to start thinking about defining common terms when we were meeting with her on march twenty fourth we are working on building the common language that you're insisting we don't have that's a just one small step in the work we're doing and finally i'd like to get the conversation back to the petition that's on our agenda and i have a question regarding the school aspect of it because as max said select board does not have jurisdiction over what the school board does and so my concern is for all the people who signed this petition how are they going to be notified that the redress they were seeking by signing this petition is not going to happen because it's not the select board's responsibility to do it how are they going to be notified that the petition was not accurate in saying that the select board would be fixing the school problem when really it's an ak forty six issue that the legislature is taking care of right now you know there's a big statement with a lot of stuff in it but in the end i just want that last question answered so that was six or the fact that there was a remedy among the petition signers and there also was no knowledge among the school board member that there was even a problem with the ballot that was worn here so we're all learning as we go along and as i said because the slick court is looking at this governance picture and because the select were does not have assurance yet from the legislature that a bill has passed correcting a hick up that caused us to warn the vote in march or april the select word sh be keeping its eye out i think as it looks in town and village governance for anything it recognizes as a red flag and then i would hope we would raise that with our school board friends and let them know that hey not only do we see that ak forty six had a little issue here that might be corrected through legislation but have you ever thought of x y or z it's purely to get us brainstorming since we are the ones who are sitting around thinking about governance issues last year the school board had already merged so they're dealing with sort of the aftermath of a merger whereas we're still putting some of the pieces together as far as i'm concerned and that's why you included the word school because i don't want to be exclusive of anyone i want to keep our thinking caps on on just that one quick thing two seconds i make a suggestion that in order that we address the concerns that this board and perhaps the essex school to the s d d send a letter to representative jim batiste who sits on the education committee to say we would like to receive yours sure and says that ak forty six remedies will be addressed at the opening of the new bayani i'm in january as soon as practicable so that we can be saying that we are paying attention to this issue so that our i think we see enough of that in montpellier where you have to go back and double track or you get half of what you want and then you wind up having to pick it up again i would i am much more in favor of  research of the issue before we go and propose a charter change to that and one of our assignments is to comment on the work schedule and the work progress and the ten of us are going to have an opinion on what needs to get done in what order i i agree with the earlier statement i think that before we can have a board that equally represents both the town and the village i think that the tax inequity issue has to be resolved i do not see that as a quick fix but i think in order to have a board that would be free from those from that yoke i think that's one of the that's one of the things that i'm going to suggest that the joint meeting be one of the first things that we deal with i think the second thing and not in any particular order but for me the two biggest things are does consolidation do we take a breather do we table it here do we go perhaps as the lane suggested last week and we fine tune public works maybe we do because that's where one of the tax inequities slice is on the street on the highway tax maybe that's maybe we take a breather i don't know my opinion is not the only one that matters but i think the point that i'm trying to make is this is not something that you can just do by flying by the city or pants and i am not going to support a temporary quick fix i think the boards need to be able to do their work prioritize the things that are going to allow us to have an equal board and then move forward from  there unfortunately to repeat myself to take an oath to to serve the entire town of essex and which includes the eleven thousand people have been mentioned outside the village and  i you know again i invite folks to tell me of how i have failed may have failed or any of us may have failed to adequately represent those folks at this table  yeah we were going to be working on these these items to do this representation thing that's already some we're talking about i went to a t l listen to the children in the seventh grade presentation on  options for going forward and that's one of the recommendations they had is when we come up with a new consolidated government perhaps consider two districts so  something that that we said we're going to we're going to be discussing and i grew then he also lekman when you're elected by the entire town you're obligated to represent the entire the entire town and the people vote you in regardless so you have the authority to represent everybody and regardless of where you live mike you're in the village when you're i don't see that you have any conflict making sure that you represent the entire town i live out just outside there and i consider the village as well in my consideration so  so i think we can get there if we work together and to do that we get back to this petition it really wasn't even that's i mean the selectmen can can bring these things up by themselves to the board and you don't need signatures behind it i mean that's what you can bring these things up and ask for them to be discussed so i think we're on the right path we're getting there what i said before in a joint meeting is that we want to make sure that we're we're allowing the and encouraging the public to be heard in this process from the entire community so that we can validate where we are and where we're going with them and  move forward together no i think it's one thing to listen to the public and it's another thing to have decision makers at the table i've spoken to at least two members of this select were in the last  there are no only outside the village issues so it is a ongoing learning process and i hope that in two more months people will tell me things that tonight they are denying are true or false or whatever but i think we all have to be gentle with each other and we all have to keep brainstorming and thinking through these issues as much as possible because yes there are issues and committees and other things that the select board is not the most appropriate board to legislate or regulate or monitor those activities there needs to be some group of people from outside the village only with that as their sole purpose you are either elected separately as an overlay district or that are folded into the select board with all due haste we can put off anything we want for as long as we want but if we don't fix the representation then every decision that we make sitting at this table as joint town wide select board and village district board is not being done with the interests of the eleven thousand people who need exclusive representation comparable to what the village trustees bring to the table and that would require a charter change which we already said we're going to do one charter change so i don't see that happening  legislature language two there's a letter i know that his staff is going to send to encourage them to make sure they correct that but you know things happen maybe it won't happen but we'll need to make sure that we have  our staff in our tourney working with the school board in their attorney to find some facts that the legislators will come up with that that can work i know what that would be or how that would be but that's it's more folks that  can put effort into to make sure that that we do agree i just don't want you happy to work with the school district on either a letter from the town or a joint letter from both of our entities and trying to get the legislature to do that but also should the legislature fail which we hope does not occur good that we are prepared to be able to have a conversation well in advance of candidates and others that were on the same page to get what is in their charter and what is in the interests of the town residents have been the representation that is proposed in the school charter as well as westward and village of essex junction very remember correctly and i did get an e mail from their board and responded that i would also be happy to meet with them at any time to start working on that process so thank you and the other comments from the board before we open up to the public like just a suggestion i don't have a comment but just a suggestion mr chairman given the hour in what we still have left on our agenda might we suggest that comments that are the same is a very quick i agree with so and so and down the gulf and just leave the comments t  something that you agree with please don't repeat it just say i agree with it you know what that person said just as mike said to keep it going so i'll just go from left to right i guess par milledge we don't seem to get any police services we get our roads or our own can't there is still i feel like i live in the wild west out there like the town is just simply forgotten about us that live out and beyond route fifteen i agree with what you have to say are very much and i think maybe consolidation should be tabled i will tell you that i'm a very busy person raising a child and i also have a very full time  business which probably most of you in this room have no idea about and i just want to say that i don't get a chance to come to select board meetings i do the best i can i train get to the town meeting i'm sorry the meetings we have in march i'm sometimes that's very difficult to get to but i feel very under represented when i see this petition i didn't hear about it but i'm glad that the people are being heard obviously these two hundred eighty need we need to feel what is happening in the in respect to the possible merger is going to be done fairly so that we all feel that we are properly represented it's not that we have to it's true that i'm sure you all have very fair minds but you know we all have our you know why is that we don't necessarily record of recognize when we're entering into a negotiation like this so i think that that is i think that you know you need to listen to what ms rather is saying because she's a she's got a some very good points and sometimes a suspect that she's you know not being heard to do create a sustainable community in the future and doing it piece by piece and having the public prove the budget which enables it is good permission that we get from the public to do it community together but we get our permission by the public who approved the the budget and we've been on this path for five or five years so ok so we have the six people who who spoke and with the people who say that we need to do something before you start making the decisions that you're going to make because you do not have the for everything changed in but i wanted to also express an opinion about just the process that i watched among people here tonight and i heard a lot of from this end of the table i heard a lot of the you word you say did you do that and you won then in that very accusatory and and it was really seems that you're saying that our petition was we've had it it was not needed because you're doing it anyhow but then at the same time you say we want to hear from the people here don't think you're a little bit schizophrenia you want to hear from us only if we tell you a late hour it's a very important thing thank you all for us for your comments we hear you we do so thank you for for so as i said beginning of the meeting we're going to have the water shut off here at about eight thirty so if anybody needs the restroom now be a good time here to go through what is the forty five day notice package is what you receive this power point will go through all the top points of the project as it's designed over the chemo in property on the sandpit if we can go to the first slide on or to skirt shields who's the lead on this project just as some background green lanterns partnered with green mountain power and essex solar storage is the entity that is permit ing this project you know it will go through this real quick because i know you guys are jammed on times on time so we'll blow through it quick but one of the things i thought would be helpful is that we get a lot of questions like why did you why are you doing this and why are you doing it here that kind of thing so having some high level contacts usually helps but we're seeing a lot of solar now in vermont and we have a lot we're getting more and more solar in our power portfolio for serving customers one of the big things that we're seeing though is that regional transmission costs are rising over time as one of those things that it's one of those costs that we have little control over so as we're thinking about our rate structure and trying to find ways to mitigate upward rate pressure driving transmission costs down is one of those things that we try to do so one tool that we have is  to try to reduce the amount of peak load later on in the day that it gets used by customers and gets allocated we we get our costs from the region allocated based on the most energy we use in the single hour during a month or in a year so as much as we can shave that peak load down in that one hour costs the g m p get reduced from the region and of course  those lower rates to our customers so that's one of our strategic ignition initiatives is try to target peak loads try to get peak loads down as much as possible so that we can optimize the  the transmission cost and lower those for customers want to go to the next one so one of the tools we have is to use battery storage to be able to take a solar energy into the battery when solar energy is abundant and then fired at the the peak loads in the later in the evening our peak load used to be like one two o'clock in the afternoon but now it's moved with as much so as we have it's move later in the evenings like six seven o'clock that everybody gets home turns on air conditioners and so these are able to absorb a lot of energy during the daytime hours and then when we have a forecast that peak we're able to use  battery in target peak lows and shoot at the people's try and get those doubt as low as possible so with a project like this we have a couple of projects going on around the state we have we've done solar projects in the past but this is a way to supercharge solar by pairing a battery with it so it projects so we've partnered with tesla we're using a two megawatt power pack batteries that we're going to be using with the saw with large utility scale solar arrays and selected sites around the state and we'll be doing those to target the peak loads so that's kind of it in a in a nutshell at a high level and then yeah that there's a larger initiative going on from his perspective which is pretty exciting and i think they're one of the first utilities to distribute this solution on the distribution level so we're really excited to be doing business with them now i'll just go over the actual project how we're designing it and  what you'll be seeing so we're partnered with green mountain power as project partners the solar project will be a four point four nine six megawatt solar facility ground mount solar integrated by chemo and on the solar side they'll be approximately nineteen thousand four hundred panels those will be installed in rows running east to west south facing with no shading issues no in a row shading issues to be able to collect as much solar power as possible store that at the proper times and then the battery will discharge when j m p tells it to just charge  of the benefits from projects like this this is a new local source for about eleven hundred homes is the actual electric equivalent of what will be installed the battery is going to store solar output until it's instructed to discharge and at the optimal times it will drive down costs for all g m p rate payers that state wide which is also important because this is part of a larger statewide initiative this micro grid slash island ng feature and it's something we're really excited about because nobody nobody else is really doing it every choir's a really sophisticated set of protection systems that once we develop the skill in this muscle we'll be able to deploy it in other areas and it's it's it's happening now so that battery will be going in in june when this project goes forward this time next year will have will be able exercise that muscle with this project as well so it's pretty cool feature build island and provide micro good services and it has a scale like this another benefit that's an important one to everyone that's here as well  additional taxes that the project's going to pay the property will pay and that's done through on state solar tax which is a distribution of the install the quittance value which is then prorated rate in for a comparison believe the town of milton on a similar project with the battery plus solar that g n p is doing is seeing about twenty two thousand dollars a year in their  tax revenue go up on that single project so that's also an important part important to all of the projects that we design is low impact this is a perfect solar site on a played out sand pit that's well located and out of view or limiting impervious surfaces new surfaces will be limited to transformer pads equipment pads and battery pads and any needed upgrades to the already existing access road into the site the native soils are going to remain in place and the areas around the array will remain vegetated and the land inside and around the perimeter of the fence will be periodically mowed as ongoing maintenance and as part of the reclamation aspect of a sand pit is the planting of vegetative there's minimum vegetation clearing all of the negative aspects that have happened to this property of already happened through the years of its operation as sand gravel extraction business and there's very limited vegetation clearing on construction in operation we expect proxy process to be about sixteen weeks from beginning a one in set of about three phases phase one will be the construction of any of the upgrades the access drives in the equipment pads on site within the project phase two will be the actual construction of the re whereby the racking is delivered posts are a ground mount post system which is a pounded post that goes into the ground with the machine there are no footings or extra concrete for the post it's a very minimal impact allowing us to remove the project at the end of its useful life without process the first eight weeks have the most activity with trucks coming in and out following completion of the system being mechanically complete it will go through  s for site access an equipment delivery project is at the end of the access road on the high plain we're accessing off of river road in the solar panels the components will be shipped on pallets and everything is typically delivered by tractor trailers smaller sharks will be utilized as well for small materials and we expect sixty plus or minus truckloads to be delivered over the course of an eight week period like i said in the beginning that's when all the heaviest construction phase will will will commence and take place outside of that like i pickups on the support side of the project we've been doing a lot of work in our permanent phase right now we're in the forty five day notice phase we presented this project to the e energy committee we received a general level letter of support from them which we're very happy to have we're excited to be working with them towards their renewable energy goals it's an important project also for the the state well there are one or two goals they've scope and here from the energy committee who's been instrumental in working with the committee and ourselves so we and if they've has anything to say there we thank him very much and the committee for that letter of support the regional planning commission which gitting county regional planning has also issued a general  letter of support they also had some general comments for us which was to address slopes and stabilisation within the project site which will absolutely be addressed and we're working with our civil engineers to make sure that all those comments are perfectly addressed before the application is complete on top of that we're working with a budding landowners who've sent in comments as late as of two or three days ago and same comment on slope and stabilisation we're working with them and other voters i'm actually taking meetings with when they come back from their vacation next week and everything is been generally very positive in coordination with us working through the project on the forty five day notice aspect so that is a pretty concise report of where we're at  the permanent process we will be planning on filing a complete petition right around june first which is a few days after the forty fifth day of the notice period so with that i thank the board for taking the time to listen to us and we are here to answer any questions you might have about the project and that good summary open it to the board questions about the project agenda that we could get on so i received an email from the administrator there looking forward to hearing the full presentation they said they were generally supportive in the e mail but wanted to get through general comments and they're aware of both the letter support from the energy committee and regional planning letter because you have to in order to to do this project you have to get their approval and you know this goes through an act two forty eight process so we take these meetings to engage with the community the boards you have to be good neighbors and you guys are party to the  process the planning commission is a party to the process and they can put in comments at any time during the process and that's why we like to engage as quickly as possible with each board and a committee are you mention that this this type of activity would help to lure the electrical rate of transmission is that all it is is it the overall rate or the transmission rate which affects the rate lots of things go into the overall rate so some are cost drivers that increase that put increased pressure on rates and some were able to put decrease pressure on rates that's a b in the so if we have if if the project cost may be like fourteen cents a kilowatt hour to build the the benefits the customers are about sixteen cents per kilowatt hour the flow back to customers so  at what scale because obviously this isn't large enough to provide that to the state right so we need a few of these in there make a big dent so we have all the seven hundred megawatt peak load and  megawatt battery and it can me you know you can reduce by about two michael watts so if you have a few of these though you can make a bigger difference and this isn't the only thing that we're doing we also and the people in the audience of the several meetings that have taken and been a part of it other meetings of the regional in the region one of the largest concerns of the of the business community is the cost of power in this region versus other parts of the country that they are in competition with and they would like to see you know the cost of power to be addressed  one of which is the trim transmission portion which is really not even in green mountain's control as i'm understanding you have to buy the power it comes in over the transmission lines and if one of the ways does to reduce the peak load then i applaud your efforts i assume this is also happening and it sounds like you're going to need about three hundred over time you need several hundred locations to be able to store kilowatt hours to be able to post back into the system at peak demand at some point having a flat load is best because when you have when you have a bell shaped peak curve which we usually do little a lot of the time when you're paying for that just that peak part only of a little bit of the time but there's a point at which you can repair tell your load anywhere because it's store the power from the solar that allows you to do use it when you need to use it versus the demand on any given moment right the battery allows you to very precisely dispatch it at th time that you're forecasting the peak and for the duration that you think you need it for because the peak load could be if you think it's going to be out of three hour peak you have to make sure it's there for three hours because if it's only there for t that third hour you may that may be the people that you have moved in anywhere it's stay at that third hour it's questions and so you're what you're looking for tonight is a letter of support from the select board for this project right and dave has any comments you want to make a new you we read your letter of supporters any thing you'd like to just highlight in your letter even know where let's say this project goes forward where does that put a six in essex junction in the solar power world of vermont or anywhere else based on e i don't know off the top of my ad as far as largest a race there are many towns that have arrays the size is only we have five other sites that i have utility scale projects the size there is a  project that's in essex down the road which i think is the largest one that's close to two megawatts outside of that this would be the largest project and essex for the time being  you say were in the top five in the state leading in and of solar power generation hard to say we think we can figure it out thanks when you figure it out so my only concern is that the penny commission has been refuted in made comments yet on things that perhaps we might overlook that they know what to look for and what to ask the what we hear is like really exciting i mean it sounds really wonderful i'm just i'd like for me anyway if i you know do the letter of support it would be subject to the planning commission review and support of the project as well in case there's some things that they they find that we didn't see in the energy committee didn't see that we might want to ask you to possibly address before we go forward i think that's a really good idea explaining commissions and place to plan projects and i just i make a motion that the select board prepare a letter of support for this project conditioned on the approval of the planning commission as well thank you to send that letter went to the planning commission has given its short support just timing wise your next meeting is going to happen before the planning commission meeting and locations going in before for june first you want have a time to review that letter passes by zero thank you good luck a very like a very very very exciting work and david thank you and they and the energy committee for the work you're doing as well ok we're going to move on to the next side of  business which speaking of energy is a funny request from the energy committee and we have the chair of that committee with us will dodge welcome well thank you mr tara thinkers like board members looking for about six hundred i see what's really interesting about this is that i have to tie together the past two agenda items as odd as that may seem but the reason that we're making the request and i think this is implicit in your it's stated in my letter is because right now one of the best tools that we have out there to track how we're doing basically going right to evidence question about where are we in comparison to everyone else which after all is what we're excited about to watch we think motivates people as much as anything to try to improve on our energy usage and and mean are we knew a blender gigo goals is can we beat south burlington they're probably way ahead of us right now but we could make a very serious dent both with the green lantern project and of a lot of other efforts that we are that we're making now but the truth is i can't give you the exact number in part because of the complexity of mixing the data of the junction and the town essex junction has the and i really shouldn't say the town i should say the o t v or whatever the outside the village to come by and that data is tricky in part because the state's largest power producer consumer is globalfoundries which is an essex junction where the when you look at the town as a whole where the largest municipal we have a lot of commercial  residential in essex junction quite a bit of commercial industrial residential in the outside the village and the good folks at the energy action network which is a volunteer right now is a volunteer agency that's trying to basically collect data from efficiency vermont from the utilities from the planning agencies and put it all together in a way that actually makes sense and that gives us a ability to track how what progress we're making over time they are having a real tough time merging that data so we first thought of trying to find funding sources beyond the town we went to  they said we'd love to help but we just it doesn't fit within our criteria we went to that shouldn't a county regional planning commission again doesn't fit our criteria although that one it's a little bit of a head scratcher but i'm going to take them at their word and i'm going to hit them up for something later when we need it and then later put them on notice if exactly then we had they actually made some recommendations there's a i think it's called the new angle new england grassroots energy  and again that's that's another funding source that you know the good thing about this is the education that we do and finding out that we can't quite find the rock where the six hundred dollars is located yet but there's those other good things that we'll be able to use  some of those funds for and then the other the other step that we took was to talk with the village and the issue came up with speaking with the village trustees the trustees have been doing a great job as you folks have is concentrating on energy of making it more of a priority for instance the village just put in as had great success with their e v charging they're putting more e v charging in they're thinking about these issues both at the trustee level and at the  at the planning department level robin we've been speaking with robin pierce about various different ideas but i don't but on the six hundred dollars the idea was well if we were to split it three hundred three hundred between  the town and the village it doesn't make sense because it's almost like the village residents are then paying twice so that's why we're that's why we're coming to you with this we also wanted to give you a brief snapshot that  addition to the wonderful project that you heard about through green lantern and g n p you'll notice that there is solar going up on the the outlet mall that's something that we had a role in playing we are still working on the net metering agreement i think we're very close to having that finalized we're working on an r f p for an energy audit memorial hall and there's a whole lot of other we're working on electric vehicles show  concert with some of our other energy committees in different municipalities so there's a whole lot of good things going on but this is just a tool for planning purposes the dashboard that we really need so that we don't look down the road five years from now and say where have we made any progress at all we want metrics i notice i have a wonderful video of when andy watts was on the energy committee he he put out a great piece of propaganda if you will together to try to encourage energy usage but i bet you if i asked him he would not know how much solar since that time have we managed to get in assets just because we don't have any any tracker and i'd love ten years from now to know that we pinpointed what we needed at a particular point in time and have been able to track it since then six hundred would cover that you said yes i've i pressed on that as well and the folks that energy as an action network say that's that's what they need so this is not in the budget but so but we could probably staff to find some place where it might make sense i know you pointed out some capital line about energy efficiency or something but with the disclaimer that i don't know what i'm talking about when i was standing municipal budget so that i saw that line items that well maybe that's something but maybe it is maybe it is i could find six hundred dollars in our budget somewhere that's appropriate for the activity or at least have one of the staff do it for me ok so any questions for for well on his request for the six hundred data in the community energy dashboard checking in so any further discussion about directing staff to find six hundred dollars in the budget somewhere to apply to this energy committee request which we agreed in the beginning to modify by bringing the minutes of april sixteenth two thousand and eighteen up just that one set of minutes yet the other two are remain where they are so wait to have the motion until after comments our practice is what emotion is on the table we don't accept so i guess we could go through the minutes propose our updates and then have a motion to approve those that we at we we make that acceptable to the board so ok that way we can not violate our our practice of these policies and their practice to not allow public input when there's a motion on the table so that being said we'll just start requesting  if there are any changes to page one rate instead of wage ok and we also want to page three and four on line one fifty five at the end hilary jones really big change here was handed out separately because there's a lot of w adjusting on one one thirty two that we strike the first one two three four five six words and we insert news runner pointed out that the firearms discharged ordinance is for the talent side the village only as the village has its own right elations could just question on that if we confirm that the town ordinance does not cover the village yes the test in the town ordinance does cover the village in its entirety without a very specific the village has an identical ordinance that says in the and it refers to other types of weaponry like arrows and such the only information in the ordinance regarding actual firearms is that it says there shall be no firearms discharge in the village redundant because the boundaries that are established in the town ordinance enclose the village right in the town or an excuse me the village ordinance addresses other kinds of things that you're allowed to fire and there's just one particular sentence that says there's no firearms discharge in the village and you're saying that the town one of the timeline right it draws lines or says right this point to this point a very specific point and it draws the boundaries the village is fully contained within the boundaries of our of our of the towns or accordance farm to show your guns but there's a second ordinance in the village that also includes other types of weaponry ok and does that make you well i'm i'm just you know we get it we get bent out of shape when we make comments that may or may not be fact just i just wanted to be clear i mean this is what she said is true so the minutes should reflect what were said i guess but i'm concerned that it's not necessarily accurate technically it could be said that the village has its own regulation however it's identical to the towns so it's not like it's different would you like to modify what's being proposed then to make that clear but if we're putting in this is in quotes right we have to go forbade him well  yeah i want to change your words i mean because it's right because this is in quotes well remember minutes aren't transcripts and they're not supposed to be verbatim is america back you know up to put any of this stuff in there except i guess i would say that was not had this is it's  not true it was said in the meeting it's true ok but it's it's i believe it's an incorrect statement because the town ordinance does ok so you're saying you don't want and you would rather not see the speak ok mike ok all right then that's three so we're going to say to sam we're not going to add the addition so what about striking that it was confirmed mean this is where the question arises as to what was really said only for a second if you're flying to the size of the margin of victory not a lady of the outcome of the election it would make no sense for me to discuss validity because what we were talking about was did max's campaigning for elena make a difference it could have increased the vote totals and in fact put a lane over the top because the voting the victory margin was so small max's campaign feeling has no impact on validity so elaine suggestion that i said something about validity which i protested when she tried to make that correction  it doesn't make sense i was referring to the margin of victory and i pushed back when that question was first introduced so i'm confused about what change you're proposing that i'm proposing that we take out from line three sixty nine where it says three c three sixty nine and it says line forty six ad and i would just soon see all that come out but i would settle for having just the first sentence come out of the subject wants to mention that she talked about the recount that's why she did talk about the recount but you talk about the recount in response to ok so on three sixty eight we're removing what section are being proposed to  nonsensical not have that they're ok so what's the or hear from the board about removing that line from one forty six where it says add an misread or question the legitimacy of the subject selection e i need some clarification on the reliance on verbatim actually what was said versus intent because i've always understood that there is intent behind every statement and i will second it was the beginning of the meeting and it was the items to public to be heard section if it was not a thing that was on the agenda in any way and irene brought the election and discussed the margin of my winning the election and discussed jury and her feelings about efforts that were made on my behalf by members of this board which were completely within reason and i'm trying to understand why that was even brought up and so my understanding of the intent of that issue being brought up was to question the legitimacy of my presence on the board and i know that's intense and it's my interpretation of it but it's very important to me that folks understand that in addition to the actual words that are used there's intent behind it and i felt at the time and i still feel today this is my fourth meeting with the select board where we've been having a conversation about whether i deserve to be on this board and so i would really like this issue to be settled because regardless of plurality overage already or whatever use words were used at whatever time and a point in time in the agenda i'm here and i'm ready to work with everybody and i want to election legitimately and i want to recount which is in italy we totally need to keep talking about it and i stand by my assessment in line forty six when i say news runner question legitimacy of the subject selection to the sled board because i truly believe that was the intent of those comments the minutes or the video was very helpful i did watch both the the original discussion and the discussion about the minutes of the april second and april sixteenth meaning and it was it was my impression that the intent was more to direct a skewered in max's direction rather than so i felt very reasonable to remove that sentence to take it out there were some and i also as long as i'm still have the floor and speaking i think that we need to have a discussion next time we have our  review our policy on early conduct of business to allow some means of potentially tabling approval of minutes if there's a question about what was said by the like w member we could yes we could do that we don't have a policy to do that i mean typically i've seen before where when a question is made about something that someone said the individual who whose words are asked to be changed in the minutes are given an opportunity to rebut that and i think in this case we may have rushed past that and  having reviewed the tape i i am fully supportive taking this line out  yeah i know yeah  because it's a response to the for the one before that was also added language from the original minutes and i get also i think we should have a discussion we talk about really conduct of business how we want to deal with questions of who said what in a previous meeting so that we don't run into this so as much as i want to how we can proce i i will say that election was legitimate the recount was verified and i would say let's get this language settled and then let's move on elaine is here she deserves to be here she won the election fair and square let's just get this done so it sounds like you're saying then delete that line as well yes i believe that that's that's three then we'll go with the leading i minute to it there's no judgment there there's no intent it's just a fact as i could just amend it a little to make it make more sense in light of the fact that the sentence prior to that is being removed i would say that instead sam perhaps we could say miss object reminded the board  ok moving on anything else any ok page nine and page ten ok are there any comments from the public before we make a motion put a lot of work into this document he really did most of it and the vermont urban community forestry program or by the logs estimates she's moved to western mass which is why she had to leave the committee  was very passionate about this subject and has asked me to keep her informed of progress so i'll start by saying you know why are we talking about managing street trees it's maybe something obvious but i want to sort of go over why it's even an issue one is that we can't live without trees we wouldn't be on this earth without them trees can live without us but they seem to have a hard time living with us in an urban environment it's difficult for a tree to survive on a street in an area with lots of pavement lots of people walking around knowing lawns so it's important if we want to keep trees around to consider how are managing them and how are making their  environment better or worse so with that why do we want to keep trees around in an urban environment one is that you prove your quality i'm actually not going to run through all of these but because they're all in the plan but i just want to sort of put them up there how to talk about any of these some of them are a little more straightforward than others but generally there's better quality stormwater mitigation shading better and most importantly from a financial perspective higher property values and from a municipal perspective traffic calming better communities people who are happier in their communities if we are not managing trees properly in the urban environment there's some consequences some of them are sort of the opposite of what i just showed you which is stormwater consequences increase sediment and phosphorous erosion which is a big issue here in vermont we the town has an investment in the trees that are owned by the town we've put them in or we've taken ownership of them if we're not protecting that investment we're losing money on that essentially dead trees or disease trees that are dropping limbs can cause power outages so we want to make sure that we're not contributing to costs that are passed on to ratepayers and also you know it's just nice to have trees around we don't want to lose that and you'll see some examples of what losing trees can look like so with that  is a invasive beetle that thank you very much sort of pass around some touchy feely things so you can get your hands on whatever allows for it looks like and what it does to trees pretty much all over the east and the midwest it was only discovered in vermont in february so we've known it's coming for a while but we're now starting to think about exactly how it's going to impact us this is an image of  a street in toledo ohio before emerald ashmore came in and after it killed all the ash trees on the street that was climbed entirely with ash it was often the sole landscaping tree of to replace chestnut after get all the chestnut trees so we're continuing to have this problem of and pass weaving through and take out all of our trees and we're trying to fix that so as you can see it kill all these trees and then when all the trees are dad you have to take them down and this is what it looks like this is an example and boulder colorado where i rolled out working through that to cut down the trees and now there's nothing lot so we want to make sure this doesn't happen in essex how are we going to do that the resources to make that happen there's no point in planning if it's not going to get funded we want to continue to monitor the health of public trees we've already started doing that but we want to keep tabs on them who want to improve and maintain the whole of the urban forest we have some educate the community about urban forestry and how to care for trees and the impacts of and pasts so the conservation trails committee and the conservation committee before it consolidated under took a public tree inventory looking at all the trees within the public right of way along the streets not necessarily all the street trees some are on private land and we also captured the four neighborhood parks in the town outside the village the village  own tree survey in two thousand and fourteen that they incorporated into their street tree management plan so this will be a separate document but essentially the same similar to firearms ordinance a lot of volunteers helped with the suffered  management plans not the streets the mansion planned but we had a lot of really good citizen participation in this in terms of the results we saw that overall there is a relatively good of species in the towns st trees are publicly owned trees however there are a few dominant species and sorry this isn't showing up very well but the dark blue there is green ash the red is red oak and the greek like green there is norway maple which is actually an invasive trees so we want to not plant any more of those and ideally replace them this in as possible and there are a few others but we want to try and encourage no more than ten percent of one species no more than twenty percent of one genus and thirty percent of one family trees that's sort of a good rule of thumb to go by it depends on the site it depends on you know the species that are available but basically that will give you the best resilience of an urban forest in that are on their way out we want to try and replace those one of the deer on the way out not lose them entirely and we want to try and fix and help the ones that are in fair condition in terms of the size which is sort of a proxy for age  this is simply diameter most of them are in the six to twelve inch diameter category so probably the size of a person and their chest which means that most of them were planted about thirty give or take years ago right around when a lot of you subdivisions were designed and built so there's going to be a bit of a baby boomer effect with trees as well as people in essex we want to try and start replacing those middle aged trees with younger trees and make sure that the older trees stay as healthy and long lived as possible a lot of us all of the state is actually available online if you want to look at it and the public can look at it too on the  resources out less you can see the town as well as the village has their data up here at the white trees in the village or new planning sites i won't go into detail about all this but just wanted to point out the tough there and it contains a lot of really useful information which i realise now we can see on the projector but there is information on the diameter of the species any issues that it's facing as well as sometimes a photo so you can see your neighborhood trees so with all that information we looked at and said ok we know that these investors are coming we know that we're going to manage even trees that are susceptible to pasts what is that going to cost so just looking at let's say through what would it cost for us to remove those trees that are affected or and or replace them and or treat them and try to keep them alive if there's several options when it comes time rolled out for so we actually did them out and said replanting reactive removal after an ash has been killed by a rope ashmore is more expensive up to two and a half times more because you have to deal with rotting limbs and safety issues as well as what do you do with the wood that is now infested and can't be transported or dispose of the way a regular clean would could be so if we are going to try and remove any trees that could be such we would advocate for proactive travel maybe a mile not a thing small amount per year a small distance per year the problem is people are driving on roads and sometimes carrying firewood or even just carrying the past on a truck or whatever  there's lots of other factors but that's how it ended up in vermont so quickly within ten years of its discovery in the u s so there are other options than just taking out ash trees and we do hope that some of them will actually develop resilience to emerald off or the other thing i'll mention is that trees that are healthy generally do better against fighting pests the ones that are killed are usually already having some sort of health issue whether it's not enough water or not enough certain nutrients so the problem with urban trees is they're generally susceptible to a lot of those issues so there are options for keeping trees in place even if they are infested by emerald ashmore it's basically medicine  pesticides insecticides there's no one really likes to use but if there are particular trees say and even our current grounds or a park part that we want to preserve while we replace them and let another tree grow to maturity that is  a chemical that we're injecting into the tree and that comes with some potential consequences that we can discuss again this isn't these cost estimates don't include labor for actually putting an insecticide or a planting or anything we also looked terms of the number of trees that could be affected same cost for proactive versus reactive removal insecticide treatment of a lot easier for and cheaper for l b s and it's been proven successful so that is an option but  costs out there so that we know going into this what we might be looking at and that we're not facing a four hundred thousand dollar tree care bill in one year or three years so in terms of next steps we want to address the we want to consider a preemptive replacement of some trees with an area of low diversity so that they are not completely wiped out you know like those trees and really that's treating toledo and i don't have i a site for new plantings increase the urban canopy put as much out there as possible that could be resilient to any past and consider starting a comeback consider climate change in that as well because some of those areas are planning today that are alive today may not survive in a climate change world and update landscaping standards for development through the planning commission we've can already i already have some ideas for how to do that but that may require some changes to the zoning regulations to make sure that new development needs these same standards that we're applying to our town trees and then continue our reach to landowners about this issue invasive pass proper tree care etc so i have talked for a little bit i'd like to answer your questions   might want to ask for before we adopted say show was what how we would handle this in our budget and what what the potential cost would be so we might want to make sure we see that before we get to the adoption phase but today it's really here's  budget choices as to how much money is available and where it should be allocated and doesn't meet this plan or not so this is really more of a planning document saying we'd like to adopt this as policy so that we can go forward moving along with how do we budget for this and the confirmation trails committee would be involved with that hopefully in terms of coming up with numbers and working with the select board on how to make that happen  but i guess the question i'm going to ask is that a conflict of interest for me if trees get replaced on my one and put that out there that i'm on one of those streets that's likely going to need some attention we all benefit to protect in the tree and well thank you for bringing that up we all live on a street somewhere and by having a plan it's sort of no pun intended inoculates you from you know what happens necessarily on your street when we don't people well so they removed two trees from trusty wazza street well that's interesting except we remove three trees from this street that street and that's true because it's a matter of our plan and you're actually not involved with which trees we remove and which trees we keep those are actually done by professionals and our whole goal as daring to mention and is what we're stewards of the ecology we also want to make sure that we don't devastate a block all the once which is you know coming from chicago in the ravenswood neighborhood which was devastated by the dutch elm disease only to be replanted by ash trees and now they're learning even in the city of chicago that species diversification is really the way to go and then through our development plan we want to make sure that we don't have developers just plain cheap the cheap history that's available in the market at the time we want them actually of diversity and daring and i were even talking about it as part of this plan you know you could have a beautiful stretch a street and you're going to pick one of those trees is just going to have to be removed and start planting a sapling now so five six seven years from now that tree is starting to get to a place where it's not a twig and it's prominent and its neighbor which was a lot kept a lot you know life for seven years maybe got treated a few more times it's now got to go and you have not the forested that block in that tree and so it's not really about where you live i know that i appreciate it it's about making sure the town is protected by june thirtieth or it goes into the general if accounts are set up in the capital account then you can put those funds away a little bit at a time and incrementally save up for that situation where all of a sudden you do have to spend the thirty or forty thousand dollars and you've got if you don't have it all you at least have a piece of it and so there's a certain benefit i've always thought of putting these kinds of funds into some form of capital program th dedicated for that use knowing that that use is coming it's kind of like putting the money away to reprise replace the roof a memorial hall twenty five thousand dollars a year after four years you've got two hundred thousand you do the work again you don't know when this is coming but you know it is coming so it's prudent to maybe put those funds into that type of a fund as opposed to an operating fund that every year you'd have to say well we didn't spend it so let's take action to put it into the fund it's it's just a way to meet a better pla for the future if you can do that when you know that you can have to spend that large amount that's correct along the way and we'll add that there's a lot of actually grant funding available for planting new trees there's not a lot of able for treating trees with we'll call it a staff friendly timeframe i mean when you do things a couple of trees e year or something manageable we're able to do that in our schedules if you put it off and put it off and put it off then staff is not able to take down one hundred trees in a season and then we end up having to go all the contractors and doing other things we'd probably be going out for contractors when everybody else is going out  and therefore pay a higher price so we want to also consider how we can get this done in a logical manner and in a timely manner on a proactive because you know it's common right but i also like dennis is idea the the fund the money that we don't spend in certain areas sure of course some should go back to the general fund for other allocations year over year but when you do have these expenses similar to a rough or excellent work thank you very much alike and you want to add one quick thing about this location and representation issue one of the suggestions as to do a rural area survey so that's next on the to do list sort of look at those of rural roads not just the urban areas and try to get a sense of what the composition of those areas is even though it may be privately and private trees and i apologize i stepped up for part of your discussion this having a tree management plan is also one of the that but there is a requirement to do i think two dollars per capita of money toward st tree management treatment and in order to get that tree city usa recognition the village has it they'd be a great resource to check in with about how there ok moving right along we're going to go to five g that's adoption of water and sewer rates for fiscal year ending two thousand and nineteen so we've we've had our discussion with the water one increase the water rate from five dollars and twenty six cents per thousand gallons to five dollars and forty two cents per thousand gallons to maintain the water initiation fee one thousand dollars base fee per connection plus five dollars and seventy three cents per gallon per day as it would right capacity three increased the water minimum charge per year from one hundred sixty five dollars two hundred seventy dollars for bill water users four times per year as soon as the system of billing can be effectively put into operation sewer rates in fees are one increase the sewer operating fee from eight dollars and ninety eight cents per thousand gallons to nine dollars and twenty seven cents per thousand gallons to maintain the sewer initiation fee of one thousand dollar base fee per connection plus ten dollars and thirty cents per gallon per day of capacity three bill sewer users four times per year as soon as the system of billing can be effectively put into operation the rechange is effective upon passage with all water sewer usage billing applied with the billing period starting after the spring twenty eight hundred billings ok dennis now that you're here we're going to go into item business out of five eights and that's approval of contract for traffic signal maintenance it's the it's late so i don't want to go into a whole lot of detail but  for a period of time we had a company that did a lot of our signal maintenance for us basically through auction and county that company went out of business person retired and the business went with him we scrambled for a while for a number of years we the state agreed to pitch in and help us on any maintenance that had to be done emergency stuff they wouldn't touch anything that was new where we had to actually change over a signal installation what happened was their principle the state does not have any have many people to do this what they had is their principal person who has worked a lot with our signals in the town and is really familiar with i'm retired and went to work for east coast signal east coast signal is one of the premier signal companies in  england that are up here doing all the signals along with fifteen all that transfer over and getting those in shape what we have recommended doing in the listed in the memo are signals  ve recommended certainly for the village and i'm going to be going to a meeting tonight to recommend that they do a similar ticket up of action but that we contract with them for i believe i put in here a three year  period which the town attorney has looked at we went back and forth with the sco signal over insurance their format is a little different than ours we finally got that settled and with some minor issues but we did not settle on a specific price for the for it we've got their price sheet for showing up and doing work with a lift if they work in the cabinet a lot of the stuff we can do ourselves and we do do ourselves i think the signals on our two suzy wilson road once short of a fifteen have kicked out due to rain storms over the last couple of months probably three or four times it's a simple switch over and our guys couldn't open the box to the switch over there in a lot side cost the problem is when you start to get into load centers or you start to get into problems with the actual signal heads if the wind takes one and blows it off we don't have the equipment to get up there and little traffic to do it steve and the business has had quite a lot of water barriers walls and hampshire he has the trucks he has the equipment and so what we're trying to do is do two things sign an agreement with them that will provide if we have an incident or a need they will show up to fulfill that need to repair or maintain the system as we need it we also want them because of steve's knowledge and before he does a real full time long term retirement to go through all our signals and good look at our candidates look at our signals the stuff that they're replacing on fifteen for the state is better than the stuff that's in our signals right now in terms of controllers cabinets signal heads you name it would very much like to approach and i know aaron i've talked about working with state  little difficult to have them hand over that stuff but if they decide that they're going to market that it might be worthwhile to redo some of our signal installations with that equipment since it's a newer version and it would be a lot less expensive than doing it new but we want we want east coast signals and steve to go through our entire system identify what's needed there's one particular installation we've had some complaints on that i've got a i want him to look at some solutions for and then if we do design or make changes we would have a design engineer design the changes that's a totally separate arrangement we would then bid that out as we would normally do any project and if he's close wants to bid on it that's fine but they're more of a resource for emergencies and for us to identify what are our future needs for our signals we've got seven locations at some places there's multiple heads the village has eight and rather than combine them into one contract which gets a little funky now since we've got one financial department but still running two sets of books it's easier to run two separate contracts one for the village one for the town so that what we're requesting from the board is permission to enter into a signal main is agreement with them for a fixed period of time we'll see how it goes and see if it's it provides that backup that we don't have now in terms of equipment and you know  go out of suzy wilson or in the middle of the winter and it's a major issue and we're not equipped to handle we need somebody who's technically competent to come in and do the repairs and that's what this provides for us it's each france doing this work and covering the informal agreement that they had agreed to but when they lost their principal signal guy and that's a point where we got notified from the district office basically saying we just can't do it anymore we don't have the people we don't have the experience so is it go into their highway budget there is a there is a long line item in the highway budget for signal maintenance i don't have it in front of me right now i did i did look up r's i was curious i just got the last month's financials our traffic control devices are about thirty four thousand dollars a year in the budget so far this year we spent eighteen thousand for repairs on the other kind of stuff that goes with it so we've got about fourteen thousand so this year given two months left on this we get a northeaster that comes through that takes all or are several heads down we're probably going to be able to afford that one time survey out of the funds that we already have so we're not going after have extra funds to do that but getting back to the village if it goes into the  highway budget then that's covered then because it gets rolled into the town that's correct general or the operating budget that's correct i'd like because it seems like that's where it belongs then in the highway budget so that it can be a town wide you know paid by the town but it is it's what's complicating it now is the two financial systems and who pays for what so technically it ultimately  should probably come out of one account to cover everything but with the current two sets of books and two bill it makes it easier to have two contracts in two bills but in the end towns paying for both the town in the village if the second to last paragraph just above the recommendation of the thick paragraph stars the contract is to a degree open ended at this point and you said a few minutes ago that you would have a term to it is that you have to go back and it's been a little off of the look at the contract but the contract let me just see what we put in there if we did if we change that or not we didn't we left it open ended on cost but we did not we changed it so it was the other term of this agreement should be three years from the effective date renewable upon agreement of the owner and contractor and for a length of time agreeable to both the owner and the contractor so it's not open and it's open ended with regard to there's no dollars in the contract that says they're going to do it for twenty five dollars or one hundred dollars we have attached the contract their fee schedule so every time they come out we know what that fee is going to time scale it's fixed for three years but it's open ended with regard to costs and then we have to manage those costs within the budget that we have that's the name of the game other questions ok what's the voice pleasure in this page two and three lane they'll come to you i would like to ask a question about it's paragraph starting line one thirty  there's some factual information that is incorrect and so perhaps the conversation we had earlier regarding wording versus accuracy  one thirty one the village charter was put together in one thousand nine hundred three when the village withdrew from the town the village has never withdrawn from the town of the village created and separate district within the town to tax itself for services the town residents didn't need at the time withdrew from the town correct he said that makes much more sense and line one thirty three that the village has different ordinances such as the gun ordinance we just discussed this earlier in th right and he also in seventy eight three one three thirty eight please read says i was hearing from the audience i was i was hearing from my peers and at the end of the line i'd like to add a comma top down so they're working on a total top down and then in three thirty nine insert in the middle of that line between our and not aiming we are not even when i was at stor so i get it going to question the statement that if anyone had been interested in running from the village had been interested in running for the seat they could have who handled the petitions for that vote do we know ninety three ninety three so the question the question is that there's an assertion that because the vote for the seat on the says school board that was intended to represent a town outside the village was worn to the entire town there's an assertion that someone from the village could have run for that seat and i just have a question about how the petition to get on the ballot was handled who handled that petition and what how was it how was that warrant or was there some other mechanism that would have prevented a village question about how to handle the petition occur before the petitions were made available and i swear i'm just trying to understand if there's some more to this than just it's just clerk began working with the schools and lawyers in january but it could be rather that to figure out the process for this i recognize you might have the not may not have the answer on the top your head but i just want to i just want to try to make it clear clear up that question as to whether indeed someone i realize they could have relaxed there could have been a right in a massive raid in canada you know campaign and somebody could have potentially got the name right in theory but i'm i'm wondering how the petition to get opinion but we do need to sit down with the school district as part of this as to go over the process that's going to have to occur so the things like this are understood in advance it was my first meeting in february or the first thing in march and there was confusion going on we weren't even clear why the town was warning this election in the first place and we were told well there's a mix up in the law we need you to do it staff kept asking questions including going to the secretary of state as my first meeting secretary of state calling their attorney having these discussions it is what it was but those those purse the person that was on the ballot had to have been done before right because it allows that as the right that's the piece safeguards might might imply that somebody thought about it but but you know could could have some of the reaction be gotten on the ballot from the from the village that's the question i'm trying to i want to get an answer to because it is stated here is a fact that they could have and i don't talk about the ballot i just said running for the i'm new here but i think for another night when it's not ten o'clock you're you may want to consider having a discussion about what your minutes are and what the should be and i would be hard be they said throughout a copy of the state statutes of the minimum i think you may want to be slightly more than the minimum but verbatim with intent and other things are leaving  fox here on one of four and one of those six until one of seven and i believe it's ms stein from what i saw on the tape so i just want to bring it up mr there was mr fox but he was not he was speaking  brown starts mr brown states that it's great to hear the best way versus village way or town way and that gets repeated here so i just want to take it out here i don't think that's appropriate to have that i mean we have so few minutes we don't repeat the stuff mr brown to fifty nine it says mr brown state is your second or the same and we will talk about them as are just a summary and to repeat some one statement basically verbatim twice to me seems like we're spending a lot of ink on at the same time we're expecting to say in every opportunity that there's town outside the village town should expand with us like we're becoming a ten member town wide board comprised of five village and five towns and villages residents who could also meet separately and legislate by districts for as long as needed she suggested taking care to use words other than town which has in ash for more details so that's what i am right now we have that i mean who we need to move this discussion about minutes up kind of assume you have like next meeting i would say in this particular case because as a board member o said our friends on the school board we want to work with them to make sure that we can get all the votes in one day i think the sentence as written is that you have to work with the school to move the school thank you all right and comments continuous improvement like that's great ok so all those in favor of consent well any further discussion of consent that's another great idea from the village trustees right they have a really found section that we did yes we do so thank you trust may come onto a future agenda you are certainly welcome to ask questions that would help staff to have them in advance of any future meeting you can also e mail us montpelier department liquor control or can we get some sort of discussion are information about jurisdiction you know why are there you know we were going to have our own hering  having her in there terry is looking into the jurisdiction of the townhouse and for that we might want to wait till we hear it till after the state has their hearing and their results so because it may just be move for us to do so i would propose it and yes we are we are waiting to see what the state does we got conflicting information as to what our authority was and we were actually quite wise to wait because the information we got might have gotten us into a lot of water so we actually so we're checking in but it's very likely that we only have the powers that are in the town's ordinance which is quite limited to what you can do so it is appropriate to wait to see what the state does and we will be bac would like to have as many applicants as possible so that the money that is being provided by the town taxpayers is put to good use  be the cop to to direct traffic to who he needs to go to so that there's no confusion on the staff's part is to what they're supposed to be don't have any control ok thank you you confess i've been copying greg is that that's why and that's why i'm say others the agenda which if you're sending it on a sunday or monday we're not paying them like the work weekends to you know so we're going to have to work that out if it's for the agenda a simple hey could you do i send you an e mail please jack because of time i'll get that and i just try not to do e mails on sundays so i want to be rock make sure it's clear one regarding the reading file i believe in the a few meetings ago i had asked if trustee minutes could be included in the reading packet and so i'd appreciate it if that could happen and if you're looking for examples of minutes that would be a suitable happy medium between detail and summary and write in is the secretary for the board of trustees and her minutes are satisfactory i think they need a medium that you might be interested in seeing just maybe use that as an example when we have an example exactly the other thing i just wanted to suggest was the reading file idea is awesome and i'm really glad we have it now another opportunity that we could use is for example on the trustees we do the reading file after the consent of gender and it's an opportunity we also have trustee concerns and questions it's an opportunity at that time for board members to have a conversation rather than possibly having board members take part in the public to be heard portion which really belongs to the public and that's their you know we're not the public when we're sitting at this table so perhaps it might not be a bad idea to have a separate place where the public gets to speak first because they're here and they're watching and they're talking about stuff that's not on the agenda and then later on after all the other business is done that's when the select board members can chat about you know i went to this meeting or i had a constituent call me or i have a question about something just something they consider changing the way we bring up off the cuff topics one of  ok anything else i'm reading far and i mean i'm not in favor of adding other organised other entities minutes to our agenda used to have the plane commissions on there we never did anything