the people that jeff mentioned ok that sort of puts us in a bit of a difficult position because we had it sort of started talking about looking at zoning is a broader issue in town but she has very generously generously agreed to help you know provide her input to that process as we go forward and she will be coming back next week when i think we're going to try and put on the agenda an open discussion about revising zoning administration in in the town and that mean klute also looking at at the regulations themselves but also the process for handling them to see whether we can come up with something that's a little bit more i don't know fluid maybe meets better meets the town's needs so just to let everybody know need to toning officer but that was certainly i mean i think everything's on the table but we want to ensure that that businesses that want to make changes to their properties to move into town are able to do that in a clear consistent and and transparent way and also prosecutors so it's is is there anything in our current regulations that can be improved and she's also offered to stay but actually left left it up to jeff to sort of work out the details so that we can be a seems possible i think it's going to be a challenge to find a replacement for the you know we're we're going to start a recruitment and it will take at least ninety days to be able to find someone in that time we hope to have a better definition of what exactly it is that we're looking for from the discussion of the fiscal year two thousand loving audit norah wanted or are present as well as our treasurer and finance director i'd like to ask them to come up at this time and then after the discussion of the on it in your package the authors provided a contract proposal for the fiscal year twelve audit which i would say that i would recommend that we move forward  on that if you had a chance to read it and formulate questions or comments and that's why we're here tonight it's not necessarily to pronounce but to have a good open round table discussion that anybody would like to bring anything forward that's great i will point out that we did bring one extra yours there's a couple of things that we generally provide to you one of course is the perfect package which is all of the financial statements and audit reports and then there's a secondary then one that we call our letter or communication with those charge of governance and this is about three or four page letter that kind of summarizes some of the high points of the audit and what's your different other things of that sort but basically what we're trying to do tonight is to just give you a chance to talk about any of the things and the financial statements like we begin what would you like to hear about back of this report and just talk very briefly about what had to happen before we formally started the audit the well the which  i'm going to right now page fifty five which is in this back of the big package the schedule findings responses and i'm looking first of all i think at eleven dash five bank reconciliations and during our questioning of cash balances we noted that accurate bank reconciliations had not been performing for several months we summarize that by saying this result of our testing we proposed fifty seven adjustments to correct cash balances what that really says is man we looked at that and said this doesn't really a lot of work biden did a lot of work she worked with jeff she worked with him and and most of that work was prior to what we think of as the beginning of an audit path the what that  that's and what we also said was that because of having to do that additional work and record adjustments that either bonnie or jeff would come up with we wound up actually kind of starting the audit process with a trial balance or a set of numbers that was inaccurate then during the the the fixing process a second and then ultimately of third trial balance were produced and prepared before the auditors had kind of the not the normal way to proceed with a not it not the most efficient way to close the year this is your first year during the now this is our third or fourth  two thousand and eleven audit and have read through the the recommendations in here i think you'll have a pretty good sense of what we think management needs to do to be here this year and we've talked about year it was it was an order of magnitude larger so yeah i think the and i think there are a few i guess i do think that there's an understanding of the problem areas and the recommendations that we've made for getting you back on track i do know that it's it's it's up to management as a group and up to this war to to to to see that the recommendations are carried out and to get back on a  what else would you like to  without it was not there for her as a resource and again it's a severe disadvantage and you combine that with everything else it's very much a challenge and i think he has got a long  wrote talked about talked about to and i'll quote here when i say the town hired a person for the position referring to the to the financial director i or the person for the position while a complete understanding of governmental accounting and financial reporting does not need to be a requirement of the position of the town needs to provide such training and support as is needed to fully understand the operation of the accounting system and to have a basic understanding of governmental providers and we made that recommendation realizing that it was it was it was simply an uncomfortable one to say to the town and to say that to him that boy you know  your search for a financial director you you you work you hired somebody with potential but without the skills and training to win and and and take over now i i realize that it's often difficult to find people that have all of the skills and training you might like to find but so if you can't do that you really need to supplement the you feel that the town is bringing their resources to bear in order to supply the training for caymans and supply the supplementary support in order to interest its deficiencies at this situation you you know what you need to do and as a group i think i really should throw that back at ya and say what do you think are you are you getting comfortable the first six months were very wrong but we made a lot of we knew that kim had little experience in the financial world and she did have a lot of potential we have made training available to her she has talked with record she's gone in numerous seminars she's a number of vermont government finance finance officers association she's got contacts there so this july one kim is really expanded service out and with conversations i've had with came i feel like she has come a long way and i'm i feel comfortable with the information that she's given to me so i think that i know that i think if we keep moving in this direction if she gets the train produces the checks so neither one of us should be reconciled those accounts because i was going to go to originally and then i was like wait a minute he doesn't sign so why is that why is what why does just not send a check yes too much control you don't want somebody with access of all that stuff to go ahead and be assigned and that's part of the problem with the assistant treasurer is you don't want somebody with access to all the blank checks and everything else and you know present he's out with some problems because you guys had a if i could also just one more comment it was difficult for me to learn how to do the bank reconciliation because you actually do them in the number of your system and with him doing myself i knew that if i sort somebody else to do these but they have to have access to the finances to we don't have a lot of other staff that can devote the time to it so it's going to be difficult i think it's working out a lot better now than  a pretty well organized group crawl control structure in the checking accounts are much more control to like it transfers or anything else are very much more controlled environment they were in the house a good somebody else to do that so it just seems like a very tedious task for our town manager to be doing a volunteer no more than i do i also want to just do one more time state that that generally would be the most serious in that is that there were there were three or four that were labeled significant deficiencies a step below and then there were other recommendations from the last ones that had a top to bottom  to new ways of doing things and i mean it's always it's unfortunately when things don't get to get on done the way that you want them to be done to the main question is are we on the right path to to improvement we certainly there's a meeting like this to to to encourage continuing communication between auditors and select or as well and by all means cal more frequent basis and here i think what we're seeing here is is a structure that you need to address and one of the reasons we'd like to get your fairly early this year is to be able to start to the right to give exactly the same kind of scrutiny that you've given and expressed the same of concern you know issues there i wanted to explain my words a little bit before misspeaking i think what june said more eloquently earlier we made a management decision to centrally grow our own financial expertise ok we knew that there were going to be transition difficulties associated with that making the calculation that you were talking about that that there was going to be upfront expense that we would the that was going to lead to a lower long term cost also given the response that we got to our to our personnel search yes i want to respond because you need to know that i'm seeing this i got the stuff right so i'm happy there has been a rescue is pumping gas and there's no trail of gas i am but now that we know this certainly we i wouldn't go that far but there have been some deficiencies and there is and there isn't a lot of places and just because somebody has an accounting degree doesn't mean that they are going to be the best person at a certain drug by the difference between a statement boy you would actually be quite surprised on how some of those statements actually look like employees and i'm not saying all of them or anything else but you also don't know materiality of this were just read in this you don't know if it was a ten dollars statement position but i went into the understanding that the position was going to be offered to the most qualified the best person for the job and that's what i wanted for my kids you didn't hear me say a lot about this back with him was hired i'm here because the our viewers are coming to you and telling you there's a problem now we can all make it great and not it's going to be good better next year but i have a daughter who's graduating from say a marxist here with an accounting degree in business to group and wires and finance and political science i know a lot of her classmates are looking for jobs and ye gets paid the financial director position was for the purpose of directing you to advise you with finances creating financial statements or you want a quarterly basis and letting you know about there's a couple of things in your capital assets tommy lovell and she will not reconcile she look for a reason you can get it out of college or still in college to do that or he should have his time spent doing something much more important that i'm ok with that i support that you should not be a training ground for a financial director in today's day and age with the level of issues going on in other towns and other businesses you should not be training ground for financial  have the power to make these decisions but you don't understand what is required of the job someone saying i understand i know how to do this ok it's ok i don't know  because irish and i was talking with someone that had received three four checks from the same bill and she called and said what's going on in your anybody don't you have a treasure i said well i thought we had a lot to tragic i don't know how come she hasn't gone over to see that these bills have been paid to three times i think lee said that was your job to do that you're into treasure and i do go through why how come you didn't recognize this stack of bills and reach you guys i know in the fields is about you a big stack of bills from school can also be about the same thing and i'm going to catch every single one no right let me finish and i also don't have access into the network i don't and i have to drive you do the job if you don't want the job then out and the same with kim if she can do it i think she should step out gracefully and it's virtually i don't think that all the people in this town feel the same way because you know you're all bonded have experience then make the jump to hundred hours a week and i don't think we have a responsibility as a town to bring someone up to the financial director position and that is that decision was made to hire you when i was on the board i can say perhaps we made a financial statements and the disclosures and this case those financial statements are the problem the financial statements are and go to war but the problem is the process that got ok any comments or questions from slick or from that i would like to say that a lot of what we've talked about his being cured in the past six or seven months mistakes do happen from time to time we all make mistakes somebody could come up and call each one of us on a mistake that we made in the past six months i think this is a little piling on we've made a number of changes to reduce the number of errors that we make we've changed the deadlines for submission of bills because we had a tendency to pile on kim she was doing the bills on one day before the monday of ok you did and if your business went through this audit and you hired an employee that that was a result of this ok responsible for it ok what would you do would you say would you say well you know everything's kind of better now we're just going to put a band aid on it and hope it heals ok what would you do best because the money that of your business is going to be directly come out of your roses sunshine and lollipops you don't want to take the hard line but if it was if it's your if it was your home that was on the one or your business that was on the l you would have a different attitude is it because even though you live here ok you can leave you can leave from this town you can leave from a select board there's a difference to learn how to do that on my on my that's for sure i just want to let you know when we look at financial statements and i look at them every single tank you're not going to necessarily notice what your defenses are you think we need to move on for tonight but i will ask that we put this on the agenda repeating basis going forward for the next few weeks and we can keep you apprised of progress and  we'll be talking with with staff in the meantime to the before but before it was there anything that you would like to add to this question that we've had here tonight no i think i think i would agree with that it's been a useful discussion i know that the draft statements are been actually available for a couple of months and so i'm i'm i'm surprised i think to hear that you haven't had very long to look at them that said you my best professional advice it would be don't change in the middle of the problem try to get another year at least here maybe two and then and then figure everything out there because they're not going to hit you with fifty comments all over and here it takes time that they need to get familiar with things they need to see if how well you're doing on your own and it does take a certain period of time to uttered or was was afraid of giving us bad news i don't think we need to have that concern so can do our write ups and understand how systems work to control testing and have a number of urine tests prepared and ready to go at the end of the year the actual year and feel we're which this year started in august if that's not an uncommon time to start it because generally you need somewhere between a few weeks or maybe a couple of months for your books to be closed and ready for  we love to have that be sometime in august but we'd also like to make sure that you guys are comfortable with where you're at before you send us some numbers this year we started to put those into in there about doing interim i don't know what that we put the dates on it and i know we said and i recommendations that we thought we should be here early to have kind of an update of where things are did you only the only that the reason you received a bill for extra services this year had very little to do with the timing or the start of the audit have to do with the i can think of what i want to do tomorrow afternoon kind of resolution that can satisfy or at least not be an acceptable to both sides here is one safer for public that the because the noise at the fishing club has never been an issue on the board in my experience it's simply the amount of noise and that's what appears to be moving moving along on the show we do the round church yes and thank you for your patience please we can look at ordinances and figure out how to work better together and make it so that businesses understand the process and look at the ordinances and look at some problem solving and trying to make the whole kind of working in combination with gravel they would mostly drive it but do you think they'll be doing a survey of businesses to kind of be able to pinpoint what some of the issues are that businesses are seeing so that they can kind of figure out who could bring to the table for this broader discussion and from that we also talked about reinvigorating the economic development committee that would be a committee and the town  resources that we have because you know short of during what i said at the last meeting in jury duty type of selection i don't know and i'm mostly kidding about that i don't know how to get people on committees committee and the scope of work that they're tasked with in such a way that they can get things done and that people will be inspired to be part of it because they'll see the opportunity to do that tomorrow yeah that's what it's all about last fall which is the change order for school street that we agreed to that we're holding off on because we were trying to see if we could negotiate a right of way transfer from the school in there there were some delays and getting things set up and the town's going to hire a surveyor to survey the right of way for school street and we're going to do an ordinance later on to accept it but there's nothing stopping us from completing the project which was the paving and the sidewalk for school street in the school was going to pay for the paving we were the favorite sidewalk in the pipes which is most of that's a largely done except for the final part of it in order to get the sidewalk installed we need sure the contractor that we've committed to there actually agreed to do it and so this change order number nineteen includes the are some of the or some of the figures that are listed in the in the change order going to be paid for by the school and some are paid for by the town royalist ok those are the paving in the road surface remove all artifice which is six hundred two for the removal and the twelve thousand for thirty two of the paving is going to be paid for by the schools ok we agreed to pay for the here so we were paying the first three items i guess which is fifteen hundred twelve thousand eight thousand one hundred seventy so that's almost twenty three thousand and then ownership is we're going to own right currently for the benefit of a national you may not realize it we don't own all the schools st we own roughly about thirty percent of schools free the rest of it's own by richmond elementary this was sort of something that both ministrations were really aware of i'm sure that some people realize that but most people never seen it in when we entered into agreement last fall for schools to make some improvements they were replacing their parking lot and their water lines and we extended our ownership of the waterline down to where there was was going to meet up and said rather than go through this again we should really just have drop an ordinance to do the trains for the paperwork will be taking care of but they're ready to move the sidewalk now we have to approve this so we'll see more of the change we're doing total amount thirty five thousand seven hundred five dollars of that six hundred two dollars two hundred one dollars and twelve thousand four hundred thirty two dollars we have a prior agreement with richmond elementary that they pay for those costs  one ok man so after proving this home what other change orders are expecting coming down the pike i'm just you know cognizant of the need to retain leverage breath we have identified the need for an additional catch basin at the on the downhill side of the herald irish is driveway right now the plan calls for two pipes one that are not going to work it really needs to be connected in a catch basin and regraded the whole thing has to be really great so there drains water properly and that's going to be twenty three hundred dollars  other change orders and you know it's hard to tell there's nothing that we've looked out for enough and said that this is absolutely going to happen most of that work is done it's a lot of it is cleanup work ditch on some areas on the irish properties we have to rough it and but those were already i think tyler explain those i am not sure we approve that change order but he i think he gave us some numbers with footworks being done this spring right what do you mean new contingency well isn't there another money i need to put in this contingency as contingency funds because  of what's being done in the spring that's what was stated in december when we said yes you can have some of the contingency money right we still have half of the original contingency amount held right but that's all it was not really contingency i don't know that it's all hope again i think it's it's still we're paying we're holding back ten percent of what we're what the wrong track it around is but we'll buy ninety percent  swash metropolitan planning organization last year they did huntington road words essentially signage and striping upgrade where they replace all the signs with the new federal standard signs were there are high visibility in larger letters and that sort of thing this is proposing to do a portion of west whitehill in the vicinity of stone fence road i don't really have a project length but it's again it's signage and striping it might be on guard rails also but the regional planning commission is asking us to endorse this project so  they there has been significant danger is that the case with this project i'm not sure why it was identified as a location i'm not aware of very many it's a history of high history of crashes and fatalities like it so but i mean i kind of feel like if they want to try to apply it's not going to do anything it's not to take anything out of our time except our discussion is now i think three years ago the town applied for those it was awarded for work on into and then the state took it over and said the state because the state had a number of these  throughout the state decided they were going to do the project they were essentially going to consolidate them all and bid them out so that one contractor would do all so this was completed even though we received the grant from the state took it over and we didn't have to do anything and the states contractor completed th situation or this year or what but it we didn't definitely said there that it wasn't applicable in two hundred fifty feet of telecommunications cable in that area and they need to go under the road so they've asked us for permission and said to serve new construction no i think they're just burying fire are there any underground until it is that we are over there that you don't it says they're going to bore under does all right let's go through the minutes of the regular people second meeting which i will stay on from because i was there any y i would be the appropriate person to speak to have that conversation because i have no idea you know if i don't know what his plan was on the road here and what the schedule is so i can have it but aren't really know what i'm talking about this i don't know what the plan is ok well the plans that we were talking about were that they were in the town portrays a seven year gra crew starting next week the highway department is going to go to their ten hour day four days a week and they've emailed me a work schedule  we're still working on to see if it's going to things and but they trust their work plain for the year mostly set there is a little bit of sidewalk work that we're trying to get them to be part of and also try to work  will have some have a nice fall and they'll be able to work well on to the fall to do that another thing that we're trying to examine is the feasibility of redoing brown's court i had originally wanted to do that this year the preliminary engine hearing estimates to replace the water along with very high and we didn't have that kind of money and we applied for the revolving loan fund which we will hear for for a while the residents up there have called kendall and pete and they really want somebody to get that road done so we're examining whether or not we have the engineering manpower in the supervisor supervision manpower to be able to get that done this year mike why is it was going on vacation over the summer but he's got callie it's going to be working with us over the summer and they came in talked to us last week and said they thought that they could get plans designed and a big package done and be able to supervise it over the summer and because one can do road is that we hire a contractor to do the waterline and we think it's go cost one hundred fifty thousand or less you know we will have to go get approval from the water commissioners on may seventh to move forward with that but it looks like we have the confidence to be able to permanent it will have to be if it's more than four hundred ninety nine feet or has a hundred it it must be permitted one yes you can do up to four up to five hundred feet in a year without getting a permit from water supply so i think we're looking at a august september timeframe for construction and is the cost so much because of their road can i mean it's clearly not just out of the water supply you are you upgrading engineering summers were a little high but then again you can accuse us of being optimistic that if we bit on a smaller scale that might come in that half of the numbers but they're seeing numbers in our in our office so i thought i would for water supply that permitting agency that we were just discussing and we're seeing numbers anywhere from sixty five dollars a linear foot to eighty to linear foot that includes surface redo as well so you know some contractors are hungrier than others and it really it really depends and you know we are finding engineering's estimates otal cost of the project was two hundred thousand dollars but that included fifty thousand dollars of road work which he sounds not going to do under his already authorized budget so we're thinking four just for the waterline replacement the the the biz will have to come in within budget this may be a discussion that will have to happen at the water and sewer commission but i know given the age of the line and given the age of the houses i'm wondering what what the service lines look like and i know towns typically don't own the service lines or control them but there is a significant source of leaks in water systems and i don't know if it was going to be the option because i know towns have done this to have the homeowners sort of piggy back on to the contractor for but they pay for it to replace their service line as well going into the house and so i know that it's going to be made available to in this situation i believe my weisel is going to have a yes you can we have a prior town meeting authorization that allows us what poor to require capital assets not to exceed one hundred fifty thousand dollars for one hundred twelve thousand one hundred eighty seven dollars one hundred twelve thousand one hundred eighty seven dollars for highly quitman no one one six zero zero nine two zero two seven laundry is very close to what they're like most of the homes affected are here in the village and in the mobile home park there's very little of anything sort of pushing back against that i was wondering if i could get permission to try to pursue something with twenty years and then i'm control officer see what kind of services they might be able to provide  wasn't there is a issue out of the relationship with the current animal control officer for richmond does that have to happen first or well it's a new appointment  the dog of the humane society in that doesn't happen very often mean we're fairly successful with finding the owners because a lot of people say the calls are made their missing dog but highly said that for  most of the day when they come in the morning they leave in the afternoon it becomes their job to take care of the dog on that really wasn't part of the bargain you know there have been a couple of issues with unlicensed dogs think we have a job description what he does he goes out and he does a lot of soup to nuts things hill he'll trap wild animals to relocate them hill take stray dogs that are typically on the road side that somebody reports and killed capture them and bring them in to be held or we'll take complaints about incidents involving dogs and  don't get a lot of stray dogs so it's an expensive proposition to try to find somebody somewhere that will take ok so we decided we could if we're all going to hold the dog for three days we would find its owner we could do that here and the animal control officer would  take taken we have a great set up and i would raji take care of them ok so it is assuming that the air control officer does take responsibility for impounded or stray animals ok and that's not what's happening right that if the current animal control officer is not exercising their duties to the fullest and whether they may or may not be interested in doing that remains to be seen but if there is somebody who is interested in who has the the control officer and come back to us with a financial report involving of all the financial implications and also as actually just said you know what the qualifications of the new provider would be if that was behind on his work schedule it was probably would have been done in the fall except we got caught dork behind we didn't work because we got caught on to this concrete public session on for the hearing on that notice of violation was that the ten on the fish and game club in the interested parties the residents in the area overall reparatory why attorneys agreed upon success being made in the immediate negotiations between the parties success has to be determined by the slight board that may days and that takes the ninety days mistakes being made and and we don't if we don't know about it then there's nothing we can do to how to change that so i think that's one thing that will we need to work on i think that it would be very tough right now to go through our next item without having you there with the history so i think that and i understand completely where you are coming from i mean you have to understand that this audience is such a small percentage of the town and i know that that that it's hard to hear that stuff but i think that no one now us knowing what needs to be worked out we can we can get there where we need to be direction i would want to support that and appreciate your the knowledge that you bring to it so we haven't even had a chance to tell you who just got it and haven't even you know the first we've even talked know you know you mentioned i i have i'm taking it all right now i this is this is meeting number three if you don't count just special meaning and so i'm i the mood and the types of comments that you that you then referenced are very unfortunate aspect of the politics of the town and it's one of the reasons i ran for fiscally correct way we have the we also have the responsibility to make sure that the people who serve the town are treated with respect and i don't think that happened tonight and i apologize for that i think