our right the purpose of this evening's public hearing history view and accept comments on the proposed ordinance that amends the two thousand and fourteen budget the home rule charter permits council to amend the budget during the fiscal year two as long as sufficient funds are replaced to accommodate the amendments so the c v s hearing was advertised to observe route order on october twenty seventh and on november third airing those was placed on township then general government legal services higher than one was budgeted because of activity as well as a change in solicitor ship and then under other works one of the big changes that occurred share was the snow removal costs so that was a big part of increasing the budget there accommodate the cost for overtime hours and as well as supplies we did have a couple banners up at the crossroads i think it makes a statement in there that mr lewis asked about the placement of those five of those banners because he was concerned about site distance that was actually me next item of special reports there is not on the agenda is that it is time mr sylvester you know right next to this is the audience comment portion of the agenda this is an opportunity for anyone in the audience that would like to come forward and speak on a non agenda item that would be an item that is not on the agenda you're limited to five minutes valley i have here a petition signed by one hundred twenty peters residents regarding peters lake park trail that goes around the lake mr cure you might be familiar with this topic you and i touched upon this last year let me read the undersigned request peters township council slash parks and rec department to please address the severe root problem at peter's lake park trail half a dozen areas exhibit excessive route exposure which poses a safety issue for tripping and subsequent serious injury these areas need remediated with fill dirt or some other lasting treatment to reduce this danger thank you so there's one hundred twenty signatures name printed signature address in as many emails as people willing to give what people don't want to i have the original petition here along with three additional copies for to this one hundred percent but i'm fairly sure i sent an email to parks and rec within the past year and have a pretty much i cause i remember you copied me on ok so i did and it was pretty much we don't want day to day i can't in maybe a dozen trips down there and you would be surprised that you would be shocked actually at the number of people that have admitted tripping and falling and hurt themselves one lady as soon as i read it to her she'd she gave me the petition back she said look at this who gets it but recently the parking rack comprehensive planning committee was convened was it one of the topics of conversation when we talked a little bit not in depth but the fact that there needs to be some strong attention to that and it lasted a year tops the world would last maybe a year longer you know the roots are coming up when they're living in the subsoil already which is half clay how about just fill dirt seems like it might have more staying power didn't go door to door and i didn't plot myself at the entrance to the trail and talk to people for two or three hours what i did do is i went down to the lake on the three days a week i usually try to make it i started one and and i you know make it my thirty minute trip around and i speak to whomever i kept coming in the opposite direction so statistically speaking i only get fifty percent the people that i could possibly talk to and yet i have one hundred twenty signatures i think if you just look at it from that standpoint that i only got half the people that that i possibly could have at any given time and only for that half an hour that could probably be two hundred forty signatures fairly easily if i would have done it in a more efficient way additionally i can tell you this and i thought this is very interesting in my estimation probably seventy percent of the people that i came across were nonresidents is the biggie candice bergen is the baby bethel park they might they must bring him in by the bus load we got him from st clair we got him from from whitehall we even had a couple from new kensington yeah new kensington actually said whenever they're in the area they make it a point to come over and walk around our gym of the place because it's so beautiful so if you look at it from asked him point even that many more people could assign to because of that seventy percent that were nonresidents a ton of them were willing to do it a bunch of people said oh my parents live there can i sign it can confirming some practices exist such as that direct deposit requirement adding in the section referencing performance evaluations which was not in the manner before a lot of code of conduct issue such as section in the manual dealing with the internet and use of computers we did have a computer or an internet usage policy that people sign but it hadn't been updated for quite a while and this cos i'm dealing with internet social media postings as with the rationale that i asked about and some of what i was doing was simply asking as a devil's advocate to some degree was whether or no i we could eliminate that holiday as a paid holiday and an overtime potential holiday and instead substitute a different sort of self requested holiday for the employee the objective for me was to eliminate a paid holiday time and  who had if the building was closed the office was closed and people had time that they've accumulated they could use why would we necessarily pay them a pay day on top of that was the question wrong i could see why the people working in employment a full time employee can get coverage for both themselves and their family so my question was asking about what the timing on that was my experience again is simply that that's required in the act isn't necessarily the coverage that we have but because we're buying in a group it isn't like you can differentiate between the coverages between what one individual was receiving you or the other the penalties are purely substantial  thousand five hundred dollars a month so there's a real disincentive not to be compliance if an employee a new employee has coverage already through another means whether they're already on the will care after whatever means far as the there is of a policy that states if you choose not to take coverage that you can opt out and you would receive fifty percent payment of the value of what it would have cost the township so the employee receives that back quite well and that was simply as fifty percent reasonable could it be last i understand the objective is to have give people coverage but on the other hand if people have that exposure goes somewhere else and doesn't affect the premium on everybody else who's here in the township so where there's that savings that michael clarke about there's others say means that you can't necessarily want to cry easily but it's a real were made in the a lot of these were changes that were made prior to having sat with mrs merrill some of them were made after that in my case a lot of them were clarifications and sharpening up the language was which was art do we have a motion to there's a few more points mr quest if you would give me a few more minutes ard mr so vestry and i talked about the cost of health care and they did in fact increase the percentage of payment an employer would make one of my questions was whether or not we wanted to increase the cost for new employees who are being brought online in two thousand and fifteen and that was one issue that i we changed the fifteen to twenty percent it went from ten to fifteen i was asking whether we wanted to move it higher than that for new employees and this was kind of a two pronged question because there's twelve days of sick leave per year that income employees currently get right now they basically earn a day a month if they worked a month and my question was should that level be continued should it be continued for new employees or should there be some change where we reduce that and then give the current employees instead of it and sick time give it to the next additional vacation or personal one of the reasons i asked is that the other thing about sick time is that it accumulates anyone who doesn't use their sick time can accumulate up to sixty days and mr sylvester has said that this isn't a problem that people don't call off in the administrators departments and i believe that's true they're very conscientious but then that means that at the end they're having sixty days of accumulated sick time which is then paid out when they well it's a lot more than two miles one mr lauer has said when we talked about this that that is funded we have that covered as far as the liability right now based on what they know they were what the township knows we would pay right now one of the things that we do as part of the preparation of our of our financial reports is that we have an actual work study done every other year to determine any post retirement benefit  so the township actually funds those the payment of those days upon retirement on an ongoing basis on a current basis and one of the things that i would agree is there are people who are in place right now sort of relying on that and i'm not necessarily suggesting that we change it for everybody who's here right now i mean there are people here that cumulated that they've been sitting on it you know now you have to change it and people weren't sixty they're going to use those fifteen days before they lose  cumulated sick time could be taken after you gave notice so if i told you that fridays my last day and then i had sixty days that i would technically be on the payroll for sixty more days and i question no not through return for retirement i question the amount of emergency time off that is being allocated there's a policy that says that they'll be granted four days off for days serious illness maternity in looking at the going back over the f m l a policy fo days is apparently the standard and i can understand why we would keep that the same in home i i did suggest that we change bereavement pool at the death benefit as a reader benefit separately that's just something i've been used to  did a lemonade the unpaid leave of absence policy that was completely hard to understand that people so those with a rate those are the questions that i thought staff benefits and the cost of those was one of the goals that was set forth in the objectives for the township manager to sell and glasser just like to make a comment mr sylvester  has said a couple times that these are policies that affect the administration ministry of staff and i'd like to just reaffirm that i certainly appreciate what they do and i in no way want to imply that they don't deserve a good benefit package that's not at all what i mean  i feel that when there are discussions about union contracts they look to this and anything that may or may not be that may be of another benefit will be looked at as a potential for  but second of all you know it as a devil's advocate i thought we needed to look at some of these and i needed to ask the questions because it's financial obligations that affect the township and the other people we represent or the township residents who are going to make me pay for whatever go trough for the deal you mean i think that everybody has stated what their opinions are i think that was all that i was really trying to achieve that people had and i could really verify what the next day what makes it fly if they're used as a floating holiday could still take advantage of going well if if mr sylvester is comfortable with what the decisions were then i would make a motion that we approve the handbook resolution eleven zero one fourteen with the changes that have been discussed this evening varies based on the opus index rate and that that's the same for all the better so glassware has the lowest fixed margin price and in its second year in a row that prices going down so we're yes they're going through all these and we have a lot of appeal right and those we can do that can we do that by consent agenda you have to eat to each one individually it's up to you i mean everyone's a different case and not agree  no nay seven to zero next request by taylor third for modification to the subdivision of land development ordinance to install the road base in the field stone plan of anything i have mixed emotions about the issue not to belabor the point but i mean i'm certainly sympathetic to the fact that we were short construction season and in western pennsylvania you know sometimes to spring rains you know you get a wait start you can't get the work that you planned to get done in time and i did check with other municipalities in the area and they have deadlines similar to what we have and they make concessions similar to what but what we but i guess on the other hand it seems that we have a lot of problems with this issues due to just poor planning sometimes developments get started late and there's an expectation that well i'm going to get paid this year and i think some of these expectations are probably off base sometimes but you know to be consistent i concur with what mike stratton in the managers report you know i think that we should consider doing as long as we you know inspect it like we normally would first thing under miscellaneous i'd like to suggest that you're based on the progress we've made at the budget workshop that i'm not sure that we need another budget workshop prior to the hearing  actually will result in it will be a larger test of the larger surplus than we anticipated in our workshops so i think that there there would be time after the hearing if we need to make adjustments based on any got and there's there's you know and if there's no secret there's a lot of leasing activity going out going on out there and we need to be trying to get our ducks together to about how we're going to proceed in anything we do of the overlay district of residential areas would not be constitutional and so that we would have to change our scheme and we have a number of options that we'd like to review and try to come up with some kind of a consensus on how t with the discussion going on in a number of presidents who are getting information and being told information that may or may not be accurate i do think we need to move forward right but i have a difficult time trying to understand how  comment about the traffic calming i've driven through a couple of the newer plans that are currently being developed and i asked mr westray about the size of the islands the traffic calming islands the size and shape the weight because it seems small to me and he he assured me that they're within minimum to me they don't seem like they're going to be much of a deterrent if you go through the new are and what plan is really not going to slow you down very much and i guess my concern going forward as we look at some of the different changes we're going to make is that we should try to maybe raise the bar a little bit rather than meeting minimum for traffic coming in this size of the roads and width of the roads and all that i mean you know we always say peters is better than that so i just ask that we do that going forward because i think meeting minimum is maybe not good enough maintenance people did a great job of doing that also the issue of illumination came up and i know i had a conversation with mike i offered to run extension cord lights from from from my house  all that says is properly illuminated to doesn't have a definition for what properly illuminated is other than that the flag must be there must be sufficient lighting that it can make the flag visible at night and i'd gen i would like to find out some information it's occurred to me with all the different developments that are going on some of these were places that had green space on clean and green allocation and i wonder if it's some point mr lauer to talk about how that changes once a development goes you know once it's taken for a different purpose because i understood there were some benefit taxwise to the so next time we're potentially one of the future meetings