in sutherland springs texas to kill twenty six innocent people our sympathies go out to the many victims their families and friends and we commend the heroic actions and courage of the first response won i noticed that in the consent agenda we had to memo those that were sort of gathered under the howard community outreach program but they were numbered individually and i just wondered if we could set one of those aside which was the community collaborative summary of conversations on mental health and what that particular agenda item right before the existing i because that preceded it logically but it did it was sort of tied together with it but the howard  ok next up is public to be heard this is the time for the public to speak his dislike for it on any topic that's not on the agenda is there anyone here tonight wishing to speak you're in public to night which is going to invite will run of the energy committee it's a request to join the vermont climate pledge coalition welcome oh thank you very much so i'm i'm wondering if very much and thank you again for you know pointing me and all of my sue purba and hugely motivated and the g committee members say you have to full we're not up to full but we are we are we certainly are in terms of energy battery is totally recharged but we can always had to take a little more capacity when it comes to getting more members on what's nice is that we have a good balance now between six junction and essex town and we're trying to just of livy eight that distinction altogether when it comes to a lot of our planning and so in that vein we're starting we're here before you as the town tonight to talk about the vermont climate pledge coalition just to read to you sort of where that comes from on june twent of burlington joined by governor phil scott members of the vermont mayors coalition other community leaders launched a statewide coalition for not climate pledge coalition to help achieve the december twenty fift paris climate agreement pledged by the united states and to mitigate the impact of the federal government's recent withdrawal from the agreement the coalition leaders invite all vermont municipalities nonprofits colleges and universities and businesses to join the coalition and do all they can to help vermont meet the u s commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emission levels from before two thousand and five by twenty six to twenty eight percent by two thousand and twenty five now why join according to  the the materials that are put out by the by those who are organizing the coalition are miners are proud of their environmental stewardship as well as their yankee frugal as they take care of what they have so they can pass it along to their children joining the coalition is a way for businesses farms municipalities nonprofits and institutions across the state to take part in each of these traditions by adding your pledges and registering your actions through the coalition your organization will make a commitment to reduce your  greenhouse gas emissions and save money on energy and equipment maintenance costs and inspire other organizations across the state to make similar commitments so what is all that really mean on the one hand why i think in recent weeks we've talked a little bit about the fact that vermont has a law act one seventy four the talks about sed to talks about the whole state meeting a goal of being ninety percent renewable energy by two thousand and fifty so this is basically not all different from what in other words that goal lines up pretty closely with the the paris climate accord in the first place so what we're acting what we're being asked to do by joining the pledge is not all that different from what we're doing already or what we're supposed to be doing already in the state the reason to join the coalition is because rather than it just being a top down exercise this is a way that one by one community after community institution after a institution makes an affirmative pledge to try to actually achieve these goals and instead of having it kind of foisted upon us i think the idea is really to try to engage in the planning at the local level or in sometimes the regional level  order to basically achieve that goal much more organically than would be the case if you know you're a state or a federal or an international government for that matter try to try to get us to that ninety percent another way so let me try to answer a couple of questions that have come out of this that actually greg greg was the one to raise them before and they're all good questions and i had to definitely do some research to answer them one thing asked is what other towns have committed to the pledge besides burlington so as of right now the the the other municipalities are limited to city of south burlington and let me check on this kind of interesting and the vermont league of cities and towns as well as the vermont mayors coalition so the number of communities that have actually made the pledge so far is relatively small but the other coalition members include the the burlington electric department green mountain power the lake champlain regional chamber of commerce local motion seventh the vermont power public power supply authority and the vermont ski areas association as well as the vermont state college system so when you put all that together that's actually quite a lot of of organization something or both in and out of e making that pledge the reason to get municipalities involved in particular is because that's where so much of the work is done whether it be by volunteers or by municipal staff to work with those businesses in those institutions to try to understanding of this understand you know with with the caveat that there may be there may be circumstances in which some of the you know i mean the actually said no but my overall sense is that what's been happening this year is not unlike e starting by joining into the button up program and then have been putting this on the agenda as kind of the next thing to do part of the reason why i think it makes sense to jump in now as opposing to w frankly because we will get a splash from there is a all day conference of champlin college on wednesday where they're going where a number of different organizations are going to be presenting pitches for what types of things can we do to try to move the agenda along and there's a number of different utilities and other stakeholders who are going to be talking about what is the best way to track this and how do we measure the milestones and so forth since there are so few other municipalities in this right now my thinking is it's best to get in sooner rather than later where it's just a wash and we get kind of no real splash from it necessarily the other question that that greg asked which i think it makes sense is what actions can or must we take after actually joining the coalition so and how does all of this get tracked so right now the vermont energy action network is a volunteer organization that basically has every community in the state tracked for how do they actually achieve their renewable energy goal and they divide everything into how they reduce their energy needs how they increase their level of energy and how do they make goals on transportation interestingly enough that has six is already going the opposite direction from where where we're supposed to be going and we're still trying to get to the bottom of why that took place but we think it's you know it's both in some ways it's a good thing what we think is it's new businesses coming in that are using more power during the day and that's obviously a great thing is a testament to the work that the select board the planning commission and everybody else who promotes economic development the community is doing but we don't want to be here if all of our competing neighbors in south burlington and williston of burlington so forth are headed the opposite direction and are using that to pitch getting more businesses in the future so part of why we think that this whole enterprise makes sense is because we have this tool to track our progress the other great thing about it is  that you know it's one thing to make a pledge like saying let's just get to ninety percent renewable or reduce our greenhouse gases and not have any idea how you go about doing that one of the things that the the energy action network gives us is a checklist of all kinds of different actions that you can take most of which are actually in the action plan sections of our town plan already so things like adopting a residential code or a stricter residential  entirely consistent with the town plan and actually i looked at it again today because i wanted to be certain about that and the the part that that stuck out for me was i think it's section two s nineteen says and this is talking about specific energy policies of the town the town shall support regulatory and non regulatory initiatives that result in decreased greenhouse gas emissions reduced energy consumption and increased were new of all energy generation as the you know as the primary source of regulation and enforcement in essex as well as a source of guidance for the community the town government can champion energy reform and efficiency i think this is entirely consistent with that the difference is that it's both showing that the if you will the pledge is coming from the the grassroots as i said before but also that we have the tools to actually figure out how to get there and gauge our progress against some of the other communit and get the splash from it that you know quite honestly we should get if we're going to be early adopters of it's a sort of related question that greg asked that made a lot of sense as well what happens if what happens if we you know we don't get there or what if we're you know just are do we have to specifically reduce by twenty six to twenty eight percent on our g h t and or is it just ok to move toward the goals i would say that it's really about moving toward the goals there's unlike the button up campaign that we were here about a couple weeks ago there's no ammo you there's no agreement that needs to be signed or reviewed by legal counsel it's purely just kind of putting our chips in and saying we're into this and we'll help out and we're going to follow the guidance that you've provided and and chart our own way as opposed to an obligation that would come back and result in some kind of consequence legal consequence or monetary consequence now gregg also asked what type of what any idea of the staff time that would be required on a municipal level if we're to move towards this it's very difficult to tell but i would say certainly e mail lot more than we did before her earlier part of the year but i don't think that it's any real difference in how much municipal time is spent i think it's more a question of hopefully getting david and others that are on the energy committee to devote their time to working with town staff to achieve goals that are both in the acts in the the town plan already as well as new ones that we adopt as part of you know things like convincing some of our restaurants to to install energy star equipment in their dishwashers or their of their cooking equipment or to  you know work with different businesses to do whether ization i did my first weather ization project at my house this weekend with a lot of trepidation at first and now i'm like i'm ready to go and i'm already feeling like my house is some much more comfortable just because of putting you know twenty dollars worth of plastic on the bottom of my door so there's a lot that can be done and this is really about a focus as opposed to sort of an extra commitment that's over and above what you know the of the data on there who puts the data in and you know if it's going in the wrong direction is that whether we're participating or not is that a what vermont right which is our efficiency utility that we all pay for and that is collecting data in turn from utilities you know right down to the car dealers who are selling electric vehicles so a lot of it is coming from there we actually we've had the the folks who put a lot of this data in come and visit with the energy committee twice now and we poked and prodded on a number of different things like has the hydro facility in essex junction been included in the does this represent all of essex or just asics junction or both there are a whole number of things we looked at maps where we were trying to gauge certain evidence and they came back right away and gave us answers on pretty much every they are you know it's a it is a superb group of people who are monitoring this and doing this basically you know they're getting paid a little bit but not very much but they are entirely committed to  using all the best available data to keep putting this on and fine tuning i think the the main way that we could you know make sure that the information is right is to keep doing not just keep testing just keep asking questions and making sure that they don't but also populating this red page with data so what they ask us to do is for instance if you take an action at an individual level right if i weatherized my door put up that story and they start tracking how many people are are taking similar actions if somebody buys an electric car you put that on there but that onto the data is going to get better as we move forward but it's only going to work if people really start to use this thing  and and what's great about it is because they are not just tracking data but also you know working on the campaigns like the vermont climate pledge coalition and button up they they have an interest in working with the other organizations in having this serve as a clearing house for everybody so even when you go on to fight now it kicks you right back over to here to actually track data same with the the energy pledge for another a that i'll give you as two weekends ago i was over in new hampshire earning energy conference very similar to some of the ones here i don't know anything like this and they are hurting because if they don't know how to track their data they don't know how to start getting true option in their communities and they were all kind of salivating at having an organization that puts this together and it makes it so much easier for folks like david and i who really we had no exposure to this before volunteer to actually use it and be able to track and send out information and post it on facebook and all of those things i hope that if there's a question getting go in is this something that they can choose as well it's a it's a great question although like i said i think this is basically just a way of promoting and getting more splash out of what we're doing already so and of course the other great thing about it is in joining up with that pledge we get more information we get more exposure to what other communities are doing and you know throughout the state the communities are all over  right there south burlington that feels like they're on the edge of getting google to come in now and and and city of burlington who says that they're one hundred percent renewable already and then you have other communities like i noticed on this that west is having a you know they're having an energy committee meeting where they're going to try to push the button up stuff and there's not very many people there but there just goes dark as well or just you know trying to sustain those interest so but this is a of that i think the more the merrier and the more it starts to look like an imperative for more communities and more institutions the more likely that this is to get funded better the more you know overall with my sense is that it's a lot based on soft reporting so i can see that i'm not picking up a lot of staff time that the individuals who are doing things are actually putting them up but when it comes to what the town has done yes we spent many hours as soon as on the street lighting projects and yet logging those would take mere minutes and yet the proxy itself took months and again and when to get a staff time to log it but it sure took a lot of everybody's time to do the project right the other thing that i guess i would mention would be i think ten initiatives like this when we join something like this coalition show that we're going the extra mile and we've talked about going the extra mile and i think that potential residents potential businesses potential employers are looking to see who are the forward thinking towns in vermont and so if we can have this out on our web page or somewhere else that it shows we're out there folks and we're working really hard to make the state and should haves real in our how it can i would say that you know one of the first things i think we should put on the website is the fact that you all got these surfaces and you're you mentioned being being a seamless committee of village and town residents i believe it says that the population of essex in there is too low and i think they've the data that they have in there is town outside the village so i think that's something to look at that i think it should be if you want to be a seamless committee that maybe ask them to try to combine them  h the other the other thing yes it's population eleven thousand four hundred and i think that's we know or it's many many years old and the and the other the other thing i wanted to bring up is this  you mentioned in your very early in your comments that this is a reaction to an action of the federal government is there any downside to doing this with regard  notwithstanding what the what that emotional materials as and what maybe you know mayor weinberger is that i think it's pretty interesting i just i think the approach is very different right the paris climate of cord was supposedly something that the federal government entered into then didn't really know how it was going to necessarily implement ultimately that it was just going to do it what i like about this so much is that this is basically community by community institution by institution affirmatively stating that they're going to move forward with it in their community it's not organizing a protest it's not you know a new type of tea party it's really basically trying to  proceed with a goal that other countries other parts of the world are trying to achieve but doing it from the ground up so i think if it's if it's if it's broadcast that way and that's how i think we talk about it in our energy committee and that's how we propose to at least look at ourselves i think that insulates us quite a bit from saying that this is you know attack on the federal government i really think that's a lot of this and all of the literature that the that the climate pledges put out there conference that they have on wednesday not of it suggests that it is trying to go with kind of a real ideological angle or send really i mean after all just saving money whether i was in your house i mean that shouldn't be ideological at the hall that's literally talking about money in the pocket and you know doing something that's really cool and actually makes a lot of financial sense  i mean it's not to say that there's not going to be some disagreements about things right re not in power is dedicated to this but on the other hand they're trying to get a rate increase for four to six percent because a you have a lot of jeep itself i i was thinking about that as well in terms of our largest employer who is facing a fairly that's its junction you know globalfoundries is facing a fairly hefty rate increase but i've got to believe that at the end of the day they too if we if we pushed it would like to is remember my other question over the it's is my understanding that our current president has signified an intent to withdraw from the paris with chords that it doesn't actually it can't actually happen into the beginning of the next presidential term so i guess there are certainly folks who would view that that that the signal is there that things would not move in favor energy of the entire community its only all that it's doing is pledging to yes to alternately make sure that the energy or two to do its best to try to change you know get us to that greenhouse gas reduction ensure that we knew what energy goal by twenty fifty so it doesn't literally mean that if if you know if us if a certain customer like a large industrial large commercial customer doesn't want to play ball that somehow we've failed it's simply that we've done our best to try to convince them one way or the other and as i see it as i see it i'm sure chair the whole our chart the charter of the essex energy committee is basically that we're the we function as the vehicle to try to make that happen and that's the same as you know as with other energy committees so obviously we'll be working with the town manager will be working with d p w will be working with everybody but i sort of see it as in a sense you need a vibrant energy committee to try to make that happen because if i thought the energy commission committee mission was kind of focused on the municipalities use of energy and we can that and then why are you looking at that if the you showed you know the trench yard where as the energy consumption is going i would hope those data get normalize somehow because if we're bringing say more businesses online energy consumption is going to go up and we certainly don't want to to say this is don't come to to reduce that energy but for the right so how to how do we you know how does that chart take that into account when we have to somehow right i think so i think that's one of our challenges is to say are there assumptions correct about what is going to happen to energy consumption in assets over time like for instance if we experienced some kind of big boom is that what looks like a sort of plateau is that actually going to go up we can still make a lot of progress toward this goal even just by changing the mix or getting you know more electric transportation racers say is the best bike they've ever tried and since so many of our vehicles in essex are motorcycles this could be you know with whom to see if we could change that in the mix but yeah as i see it you've got to use a chart like this to try to looking just sort of for the feeling of the board d v resupport this there's no image of you that you're going to sign are you on the right track is kind of what you're asking us here absolutely ok absolutely and at least support that if i were to go forward you know things like was there any reason given why they wouldn't do this again did they feel like they got the information they needed and it was one and done kind of deal that it's going to take a little bit tentative i'm i'm i'm not concerned about the financial risk to the town as much as i am that if we contract with these folks i'm done just i think i would want to take i would hope staff would take a very very good look at the the pay back and what they're charging for what they're getting  brackets and strict it because the way they restrict it is they used twice there in the in the u s as well as the fact that as of that sentence continues to read it acts as if we would consider spending them which you cannot spend a non spend anything over fifteen percent into reserves and that's the frustration there is that we're once again assigning a high fine balance as a word if we allow ourselves because if we do have access to technology i think maybe the way we work can change to help us in the audience see when any proposed read in real time and understand rather than you reading to us what you're going to change which is really hard for me in real time and so it's my understanding that the intent is when we're doing our budget discussions and we're talking about in that that's the in that timeframe is when we will have the audit complete so we will know the previous leave as fund balance or assigned to something else or a point of applied to revenue and i think the it's my understanding well that would be my understanding that the intent would be to if if that number was something over fifteen percent that we would choose to do something with all of the funds that would bring us down to fifteen percent at that time that was the way i would look at it so that we would not intentionally have a fund balance  assigned monies of seventeen percent that would be money if that's the direction that i would go but i know others have to have other opinions but so i was kind of kind of i guess responding to irene's comment about the fact that we could mean yes we can choose to have a seventeen percent on balance in a given year but i think if we do that we have to explain why so so one of my confusions was in one spot here and maybe maybe andy's updates over this but the ballots up to fifteen percent and then in another area if it's required fifteen percent go whether it takes the form of reducing the tax rate as we've done in the last three years or whether we decide to pump up you know the capital accounts or decide where would we decide to put more money toward stormwater or something like that i would agree that by the time we get done it should be at the fifteen percent anything above that should be to come to about the possibility having email addresses for each of us as opposed to our personal one you know that way you can keep your y year town business stuff separate from your personal one the other advantage is when you write an email to somebody say to staff in a year you know i'm coming from  just just to be clear the supreme court just affirmed that any device that you do government business on is subject to seizure relative to public records requests so it may be it you can choose to do what you will but it's my intent to only use this service for town business because of that so i can hand it to you and i don't have to worry about losing my phone or my work laptop which would be a big problem for me  so i mean certainly if that's going to be the case then there's not going to be a great now because i get it on my phone and i have my phone with me at worth if there's something wasnt it or something that somebody needs like know the other thing is the policy that we signed last week says you can't use you cannot use this device for campaigning for public office and so on the email address that i use the wa not new for you is the one that i opened for and stayman my campaign and so i cannot use that email address on this laptop because it has all my campaign stuff to campaigns as well so i in seven days last week that right where i learned about this and then search a little more about it but actually there was an article in the same the same issue about it but i don't recall what i right we have a different relationship but we also will reveal so after thirteen years of people contacting me about town business and the things i volunteer in here i'm not going to not answer somebody you know i mean like you said i'm going to copy maybe to my other account but was for records retention and i guess it depends on the type of record and so it would be helpful to have some clarity on that if i could go and delete you know a couple years worth of e mails tha picture expenses on the remodel we didn't have a lot of money we only had two hundred fifty thousand for furniture and pictures so people that really like you needed something new and better and more comfortable and the citizens  i decided to keep the austere look as long as possible however i'm a short timer now i think the new manager whomever that may be will want to be able to set up their own their own furniture with something that's more geared towards c technological approach to how you do business these days so my nine hundred seventy s desk is probably not going to be a very good thing so i don't know when they'll all find their way into the landfill they're go their way through the organization there maybe something other departments would use as is their practice and then if it gets down to the last minute you know maybe you'll have a little come in and your office equipment tag sale can four paragraph and will you on my last months with you on maintaining my current benefits and to do that to have a discussion is probably more relevant to executive session because  they change the word large to many many users and then after the word because i'd like to enter introduce the next word that won the sentence because we have the second largest population of any of our moms town period  after that therefore on the next line what i saw on the videotape was whether or not and then answer the word town residents are aware keeping as positive as when actually s mean at the end of the first sentence fragment on line four thirty four please is runner pointed out your recent example of max signing off on a census report on behalf of the town outside  so after one twenty four i would like to fit in first to cook it was the committee's recommendation that mr let's provide details to the select board of the six seven one seventy seven one seventy nine it says there will be a standing agenda item on the information compilation each board member will research their suggestions and forward information to staff or inclusion in a document and somebody explain what i should be doing that is in your packet on the eight or the eight if there's a memo that george summarized what people said they would want to talk about when we have this discussion and it was suggested that that person do some research on it so that when we do have a discussion they could share their research with us so if i have suggestions sound and the budget work schedule i try to bring this up every year and i want to focus their attention again as we have very specific list here of what items we're going to talk about interaction between people under street and the police have and have been made worse or exacerbated by the fact that many health issues are there and i think far more importantly when it comes time to bring somebody into custody who's in that capacity there's no place to put them so there's a double problem so the hospital howard mental health have put together a program to push a little bit by the managers and the chiefs  county to address this this issue and to that end there's been a couple of fairly large meetings identifying the problem and then a fine potential solutions from the howard mental health professional so yes at some point it's going to come before us because we're at the stage now where howard mental health is pretty much ready to go forward with a street person who can act as a referral agent would probably run about ninety one thousand dollars for that person for the current year and budgeted money for the current year they would be willing to pick up forty one thousand dollars of that cost and then parcel out the rest of the costs the balance the forty two thousand dollars balance from the original cost of ninety thousand dollars of between among the communities who've been involved in regional dispatch based upon the same formula of the funds that we came to you many moons ago to look at the regional dispatch approach that was about sixty five hundred bucks i think initially this one is going to be twelve thousand for us to talk to brad brad went to the most recent meeting it was at that point where there was some hope that we would come to the we the police chief myself and maybe others maybe some from our mental health come here to requests from the board money from where else would fund balance for twelve thousand dollars for the first year and then that's just a year one and then entertain the absolute more for the budget here that we're working on for next fiscal year so that's that's what i think i have come to know my involvement has been with the through the manager's meeting initially and i went to the first main meeting brad has been directly involved he's gone to the two big leaves and the report that i put on the consented is that the outcome of the last main meeting at the hospital and so that's to have twenty four hour access so they wouldn't be physically in colchester or or essex they might there would be somebody on church street is the biggest the biggest area but there'd be somebody that the dispatches could reach out to and then have the service available at any time twenty four seventh's from howard mental health and they said howard said that they were ready to roll it out starting january first so if it would be more  financials i get the salary infringes and the operating cost in the supervision and that type of thing and then all of a sudden there's administration to the tune of eighty nine hundred eighteen dollars i'd love to know what's under that head four but no i think that i think the greater costs the next years in the three hundred thousand dollars range but again please don't hold me to that number just reading here  that howard has experienced a loss of funding and a decrease in their team members and their street outreach program so it sounds like this new program would make up some of the loss yes so we're all going to be sharing just these four  calculated that way it's having the ability to have people should you have an incident that needed to be investigated to see incidents you have the resources there that can get on it quickly and cases can be adjudicated here it's the same  principle we're not going to fund somebody ourselves by the service is an individual municipality so we could partner up with the hospital and our mental health and we can have that same kind of instant reaction to the need for  and i just wanted to remind us all that last year we were talking about human service funding and and doug came down and told us the exact amount that we had we had a few some small number of dollars  that outer loop and again and again another total of twenty five trees or so widowmaker that are you know twenty feet high with their root system totally uprooted trees that are completely down and so we put barricades at the trailheads with signage additional signage was made eliminated for parks crew to also put majority of any responses that came in were positive and thankful for the no deaths you know he's got a couple that are unhappy or claim that they're going to go in there with their own power tools and clear the way so we communicated that we appreciated the fact that many wanted to help at the park even though they were still cleanup their own yards but to please stay away so  have a contractor who this past weekend worked at st park and the fort and they were able to help us on weekends at this point but they were the ones that came in to be able to do it the quick so we try everybody you know parks and public works crews and fire u p d all worked really well as a team clearing roadways and parks and all that so we're still working on things but we're getting there and then the second question was i believe there was reference to thirty or forty grand to find out and is this the last to find out the three servants if that's on special districts which would be a lot more relevant to what we're doing here because the california special districts have all kinds of special legislation and special oversight committees that we don't have and from hunt plus we voted not to do a special district so i think research if you want to do it yourself i really don't have time to do i found this article i gave it to both the trustees and the selectmen and i read said there's a more complete one from the same source