long yes well you granted them a waiver to like they could make as much noise as they wanted and once again it was an even bigger drunken party there were fireworks there were cars rather i did and he said he was surprised because he had her name which is another kind of issue i have i called the police errol times somehow when you board the fairgrounds really register is a noise file a complaint like it would be any place else in the town they just call them the somebody in the fairgrounds and it's forgot to mark i really i don't know i can't don't have a good answer for you i'm i'm surprised that they were there it was back it was the same as it was last year i was surprised that that was allowed i thought it was understood that they got out of control and so it was going to be put under first off that one of the reasons i accepted the position was because of how astounded i was we have the support from the community for this program the fact that there is this space have worked in many non profits over the years and i've never and i've always felt that i wanted to see young people represented on boards of directors and it was always very difficult to convince boards that was a good idea and so this agency really stands out in this community stands out in support of this agency darby was mentioning to me that about once a year chip's comes and meets with trustees so i think this is our annual state of chips presentation and from my perspective chip's is doing very well and i'm hoping you'll be very pleased  with how the progress it's making its plans for doing more and having a creator impact in the year ahead i wanted to tell you briefly about myself because i i noticed on the website tonight my picture there but it says for my bio to come later so i guess i better present it now since i'm native new englander from connecticut the embury connecticut most of my professional career had been in massachusetts central and western mass my position most relevant to chips was as executive director of dial self you think community services inc green field mouse for twelve years i had a meeting today with val smith the first executive director for chips and i was kind of many to her that she was impressed with my twelve years without something i said wait till you see my twelve years here is that i mean excited about the job in the community and the work that we can accomplish together my most recent role i just to fill in my my background i have and then the director of the first call for help in amherst massachusetts which was before the two one one systems came into place around the country it was first call for help that was run by united ways across the nation i was the director of a first call for help for five years in amherst i then became the first executive director of mass to one promoting the needs of young people and using two hundred one as a vehicle to do that i spent twelve years at dial self youth services and then the last four and a half years were in new york state i was managing early care it was the early care learning council for the state in new york i'm working with a much younger population and my wife and i had wanted for years to be in vermont and i had applied for years to work in vermont and and whatever reason i came in number two a number of times and i couldn't figure it out and so last year when i had applied for a position in burlington and they came in number two i asked the person heading the search committee if she had any advice for me and she said yeah you better move to vermont has as we don't like to hire people from out of state and so my wife and i moved to vermont almost a year ago and then three had three and a half months ago everybody went through the process of becoming the executive director of chip so it was good advice  achieved through a variety of programs and services in our case it's the tween center and the teen center it's the friendships mentoring program it's the adventure orientation program it's our eight above the influence program with high school students and we are in the process of the statewide contract to provide coaching services to school districts one thousand school districts across the state who on tobacco issues related to tobacco prevention so we are managing a team of coaches who are located in different parts of the state who are offering advice in consultation to these high risk one thousand school districts across the state chips has potential has played a role as a state e agency for this program the it's funded through the department of education the agency and education we also have other initiatives that we are working on in i'm  just not ready to present them yet but when we are ready to present them i think you're going to be excited about them new a new program in particular that will help increase further the visibility of chips and w strengthen the services to young people in six trench and the town of us six so that's coming up down the road and we believe it's going to be very successful and within a couple months i hope to be able to share that information with you our tween center opened yesterday and we had nearly forty young people from the fleming school who participate in the tween center and today we opened the teen center that's the middle school students and we had close to twenty minute school students today which are right on target in terms of opening day numbers  did receive a grant this past year to expand the above the influence program which previously we had been running the program on a shoestring did not have dedicated funding support for we got a grant from  i group of high school students was last week we had eleven high school students show up we're expecting to reach twenty to thirty high school students participating in the program this year and  influence is a peer prevention program that's young people who are committed to being free of substances who have and who are providing support to their peers related to all the pressures that come upon teens whether peace stress whether bowling wide variety of issues are her right there in front of middle and high school students that can cause a lot of  negative outcomes if there isn't support and teens from the a g i program are part of our team in providing support to students in the community the adventure orientation program does two four day hikes in the green mountains they did one late in july and one in early august we had twenty units participating in the august trip and about ten in the july one and this is wonderful and again unique program of providing orientation for students leaving middle school and entering high school it's only that's who is open to our middle school students graduating thai school and it's a great way to boost self confidence help steer them down a path that's going to be very positive for them in the years ahead  and i didn't realize it until recently that it is to the best of our knowledge the only high school program of its type in vermont so that's something to be for the agency in the community to be very proud of that we are providing that type of experience for you to entering high school we also are in the process of growing and in other we have a new strategic vision that we are in the process of developing that will set our sights on the next three to five years and we believe it's going to help guide the agency and we'll be able to show the community we're serving where we're going and why we're going that direction and asking for the support of the communities we have a new fundraiser that we're going to be doing have to do fundraisers this year one is tomorrow night the bluebird barbecue in burlington all proceeds we will be getting ten percent of all proceeds for the evening we just needed to bring twenty five but in addition we also are i referred neglected to mention that we are a key player in the chain prevention network we're working on policies related to tobacco  prevention and alcohol and marijuana and over the counter drug misuse and trying to prevent that from happening through public policy through environmental awareness of how how many liquor stores does a small community really need or how many how are they displaying their tobacco wares and are they trying to attract kids with tobacco advertising so there's a lot that we work with the network and other networks across the state to try to ways raise awareness about prevention issues and to provide a community dialogue about why these issues are important and what we can do jointly to prevent you from going down that path the other fundraising event i want to mention is one that it's a replication of one that i did started it dial self you think community services and it's one of the best things i did there and it's the badminton bashed in and it will be an indoor event probably in january or february time a year when people are starting to getting a little cabin fever and wondering what they're going to do that next weekend the badminton bashes and indoor badminton tournaments for people of all ages badminton is the great american backyard sport everyone is played badminton in someone's backyard at some  life and in atl self we were able to attract one hundred two hundred fifty people each year and would raise ten thousand dollars through a one day event so we're looking to do that with chips we also have in the spring a new fundraising event that we are planning which feels unique at least in the name and that it would be to do a water based event at the reservoir probably and i don't have the details i am going to there are other more but i know it's there somewhere but it would be some sort of fun aquatic event maybe an inner tube race across the reservoir and the name of it is a stroke of genius so we're looking forward to the badminton bashing chips ahoy we have funding applications going out to enhance our services and continue just to strengthen our services to the youth in this community  budget this year is close to three hundred thousand but that takes into account the sixty thousand of being kind support that we received from the village we have going to be launching a major donor campaign this year which the agency has not done to the best of my recollection in the past we are looking forward to working with new community partners and helping to give a little new energy into the essex healthy youth coalition which has been vital to the community for some thirty years was starting point for the teen center and chips and  over the last few months has perhaps just lost a little energy because of some transitions and me including transitions of chips chips was unable to provide same stable leadership over the last few months so we are ready to jump in and offer our support and leadership to the healthy youth coalition to the extent they would like it and we  believe that they're going to be excited about what we're doing so i don't want to take too much of your time tonight i know i will talk on and on if you let me do you have any questions i can answer for  great the four members did not all last the term and and because we were able to get all four successfully through that year the number of members that were available to us went down and last year we only had one american member however i approached the american or the state america our program in july and said we have a new project as of that we want to flow by you and see if this is something you would be willing to invest another member and they said yes so we have two america remembers this year with the new staff on board justin was a program director in addition to allies and was a essentially i'm in the process of working on her meaning and getting permission to place all these they will be placed and held down the sandbags and then agreement it will take care of removing them in the winter and placing them back in the spring house to have an idea of having each one of them being individual so maybe different on each side  and as it's town because that's where i live and they basically told me that the twenty five thousand dollars that so we came up with this solution which is i think would be helpful for most of the community i've seen a open to it i think at least one will be done by my troop and then maybe like three local artist or something else for the other three yeah how are you going to build these you have your own power tools or how's it going to work risk yes ok you're willing to do that all right good just wanted to make sure your timeline so right now i'm in the process of getting permission for all these that will be fund raising  which i hope to get done by the end of this month and then it will be whatever assembly and painting all of them i hope to get them all done by mid october  it to happen by mid august but just sidewalk i mean if i can put them on the grass if you like that would be more of an option than on the sidewalk i don't really want to put it in the middle of this i'd like to be going to distribute the well when the time comes someone from the property and raises the property value meaning that we would get more taxes out of it but we don't take the tax benefit right away we let the we acquire the tax benefit slowly that's tax stabilization as i understand it is that correct right there is great so no one have on the front of lincoln hall to play during rush hour to get people excited and interested to let them know that there's something fun here the other thing is to  no need to wear hats so it's not like you really do have ships in mind or we know right now we were actually just talking about possibly having one or two hour shift depending on the people's interest will definitely need more people probably four to seven ish you know i don't and i do tend ship to be particularly see you never know seen with diligence i know just today i was around with julie and we looked at i don't want to share new locations because we haven't nailed anything down every lead to a couple of patients for the band and there are a few things that wow i would never have thought to have  and so now we're on to new business and so you can stay right there and tell us about the government grant application for my practice all right so before i get into this i want to mention that the village did receive this grant in two thousand to it was a little bit of a different focus back then and we used it to pretty much hand out materials we formed it was called a sustainable transportation committee and we worked there and the sad condition so by committee felt that this would be a good project as well they were interested in getting a five hundred dollars match from the matching great fun this is not a requirement for the grant but it would enable us to purchase more bike racks and speaking of bike ride we've also been working with try to get some of their programs to produce to design and produce my graphics and that's something we've been working continually with it's a bit of a long process we started back in the spring and like rocks won't be ready for for the spring or possibly even th spring afterwards but that's another thing working on and we're hoping that those bike racks are going to be very artistic and creative not just like a couple slabs of metal we want something really cool you know we were was bouncing around a couple of occasions and we wanted to see if we got the green before we really needed idea of the locations they were discussing possibly doing a map of all far the smallest community to ever receive it which is cool but one of the things some of their recommendations were things that we could never like yeah they were very interested  i you know we just wanted to update everybody and we had to watch material that the big thing with the survey which you also should have gotten a contract between us and m r i in the town and i think everything i presented top of our heads to give just a first person narrative of what we thought some of the highlights and the importance challenges and opportunities were a religion i went right home and did it because i'm verbose and i do stuff like that that this was reluctant did write a sentence so and that i said that's not in the survey you got the survey you have it asks so many questions it pretty much gets all to the same thing so i guess the point is that max and i are going to get to do the survey twice is what i'm saying but it doesn't it doesn't add extra weight to our words or anything it's just there for work so but the the place is one of the other interesting things is the places where the job is going to be and again i forgot the list is going to be advertised  it's with the each state in will and has the equivalent of the l c t and it is going to be advertising each one of those organizations on their website it is also going to be advertised with the i cna website which is the big one and then we debated on recommended putting it in the boston globe this monster dot com boston globe he thought that that hits a lot of places in new england a lot of managers would look at that it some wasn't a big expense so we said yeah he  said he's had success with that but that's the only newspaper that we're that he was going to put in there so i think all the higher process that we did was that we signed on to was pretty much what john laid out for us during his interview here if you recall i don't there were any surprises and the other issue that came up was this obviously is sort of e mail intensive between at least for now between dawn and max and i we're seizing travis on these just to sort of support the support staff in the town i can send all those e mails your way if you're just dying for a warm even greater transparency than what's already available to you i'm glad to send you those e mails but if you don't then i'll restrain myself and not send them to you and i and i will we'll just try to let you know anything eventful happens i think the big issue is because that's he's not a youth he's got on a million he'll pull all those together and try to create a profile of what you know and hopefully it will be some consistency there so that's the key piece the other thing that is a little un ain is we we all agreed we all agreed and like the idea of having focus groups and to put to bring the public in exactly don had in mind three focus groups a sort of a staff locus group into sort of citizen focus groups but we weren't sure if we just advertise you know in front work for hey come join a focus group and be involved in a man or a group and what would happen whether we would actually get enough people would it be better for us to go out and recruit people i would we prefer not to advertise it in just recruit people so we haven't figured that out yet there's time to figure that out so i thought that that's something we could discuss at the joint meeting with the select board in two weeks just what how we want to go about the we went over it and recommend some changes he had some things in there that were appropriate for a successor structure we added a few things that he didn't have so you know we we kind of try to speed things along instead of saying oh let's wait until the jo i think the beauty of ethics is that it is you all individuals who face yourself every morning in there and if others find out about something management of the department heads that puts everybody in the entire organization so the route of common goals and objectives so that when it comes time for evaluation you moment because i need to i'm anxious to estimate cost before putting this out to the public to do and that's a big building and so i need to figure out how much is going to cost to prepare the services that was before barrels comes in and you include the cost of the preparation in the in the cost of what you're going to give the muralist to do the work or do we do it first so i'm just doing the research i talk to the king bri