i thank you for much for all your patience sorry about that we this is a meeting of the thursday the march twenty second meeting of the rich and select board to consider the  i'm told that i need to use this microphone so understand over here thank you very much i'm eric sam bloom and with me as steve and as chris indicated we were hired by the town to conduct an analysis of the  at there were some reaction to the new maps that you know just seemed a little odd that from that richmond had appeared to have a higher impact than a lot of the neighboring communities as a result of the new study so what we did is we put together scope work and the town hired us to look at the existing study much more closely and what i'll will do is  i'll have steve come up and talk about the actual technical components and the results of that study their report available that we've provided to the town what steve going to do is really just highlight the  salient points of that report and then we'll go and basically them in the bottom line is that we've identified several areas within the model and how it was evaluated  indicate that it should be done a different way and with the results being that it would lower the base flood elevation as mapped on the flood insurance rate maps which are what determine whether or not a lender for instance would require that you have flood insurance and it also affects the rates significantly if you are in the in the flood zone and then so what our study does is it says ok here's what it looks like you know some some there and then we've provided just today another scope of work for the town to complete an actual appeal and we'll talk about the kind of the nitty gritty of what that entails and the timing and that sort of things so  with that i'm going to turn it right over to steve and let him kind of go through the technical aspects of the study for y grass is an acronym it's a river analyst system it's a computer program essentially developed by the hydraulic engineering center which is a division of the army corps and it's a free program anybody can get it and essentially what it does is it  simulates river systems what goes into it is there's a flow data component which essentially you're hydrology and geometric data which is you know what the picks the actual physical river system it's important to note that this is a tool it's a simulation it's not exact so it provides a baseline of risk that through females parameters of who's at risk of being flooded during the hundred year event which is a statistical analysis of you know the flow that's contributing from the watershed for the hundred year storm so the flow data like i said it this is just sort of a physical depiction i'm not sure how many people are familiar with what a watershed is but it's essentially the area of land that drains down hill to a river stream lake and there's a lot of components that go into how much flow actually contributes from a watershed based on based on a certain event we we're not disputing this portion of the model it's very similar to what was used in the one thousand nine hundred two study and just for reference of what these what the flow data shows that it's forty seven thousand cubic or forty six thousand cubic feet per second from the jonesville bridge to the huntington river and then from that point downstream it goes up to forty fifty four thousand eight hundred cubic feet per second so it's hard to wrap your head around how how much water that is although you've probably seen it very recently it's a lot of water but  farmland roads they all have different roughnesses and it affects the velocity of the water and the velocity of water affects how high the water will go so the actual ovation there is junctions when streams come together and determine whether the survey act survey data itself appeared accurate and basically for all the bridges that did and we also reviewed the what was entered into the model so there's the survey that was corrected that could be accurate but they could could have been errors entering it into the model so we looked at the bridge geometry and the upstream and downstream cross sections for each bridge and we also looked at how the bridge was modeled so there is the pending on the kind of flow scenario looking at with its low flow high flow there's a few different modeling approaches that can be used and they are essentially different equations so the first bridge and this is the most downstream bridges would be the railroad bridge it's actually located in wilson and jericho i believe it i believe one side's wilson the other side jericho so the survey data looked good but we did find errors and the biggest one was that the bridge skew angle that was entered into the model is wrong askew angle is basically how the angle in which the the bridge is crossing the river so if it comes in a zero but but as it goes from side to side it would go up in the highest and angle the model out and there is forty five and that was was entered into the model what that does is it actually reduces your cross section al area by co sign of that angle so essentially you have less area where water can flow under the bridge so when we looked at that we did our own determination we got we got a value of approximately twenty seven degrees so when you enter that into that's a conservative assumption that it could be less conservatively and that's probably what i would have done and it increased the opening from from four hundred eight feet which was that was the opening length at forty five degrees to the five hundred fourteen feet when you when you lowered it to thirty or twenty seven degrees so in addition there is a small farm road that crosses underneath the railroad crossing a south of the main river bridge and that was not in the model so i mean it's small but everything matters and when we corrected the skew angle added that opening it showed a drastic drop down just upstream of the bridge it was about two to two point three feet so the next bridge was the checkered house bridge that bridge was determined have no impact at all to the water service elevations so we didn't go in any further detail with the review of that bridge it didn't do anything so the next that is obstructing flow so i looked at the survey data and looked at the data entered into the model at all it all looked good so then we dug into the modeling approach so this is a low flow model model modeling approach would be used for this bridge there's four different equations one is the momentum equation that produces results that were significantly higher than the other three i am model mall individually the other three were found to be in very close agreement so led me to believe that the wasn't a good equation to use for this i when i went to the farmer crossing the river crossing what's the road  crossing and there's actually a spray painted high watermark there so as part of our proposal we're proposing that chris obtained that elop chris button obtain that elevation or chris from button chris haggerty from button obtain that elevation so we can help confirm that our suspicion that the momentum accretion is wrong and we feel we already have pretty solid justification but but we're going to be responsible for the results of the model and it be a good piece of information to collect  of the three that produced similar results we're recommending that you go with the most conservative of those three and it has a significant lowering of water surface elevations as well so and then and then the next upstream bridge is the bridge street bridge which is right here the survey data for the bridge itself was found to be accurate it was the bridge itself was entered correctly into the model but the upstream and downstream cross sections were found to be in conflict with the survey data and essentially what the bridge street bridge is is a perch bridge meaning that water can flow under it but the approach is the road approaches to the bridge are at flood plain level so water can actually flow around the bridge as well  probably all know and the cross sections entered in the model were filled in so it was only really allowing water to go under the bridge so if you go to the next slide so these were the incorrect cross section of that and if you go to the next one so you can see the drops going in and this section right here and this section right here i have incomplete data so the survey data that was provided to me from c t m i filled it in as much as i could but once i got outside the extents i just went back to what they had but it looks like the approach is lower in here as well so there's some some of what our scope for it entails is getting the survey data for this it's all existing in just a matter of obtaining these are the upstream and downstream cross sections directly upstream downstream of bridge so these are cross sections so yeah you were looking at if you were to cut a line through the bridge through the river and take the l of shore to shore and take the elevations along that line that's what you're looking at so these are assumption is that those floodplains were filled in because they process the data and i can only guess so i'm going to verify that that data is accurate and just use the existing data so i'm really trying to not obtain additional data as it should all be there should be accurate chris bridge street so we have actual survey data and with that chris obtained north of beslan out and then we're going to use a lighter south of of the bridge now we're not taking only survey data or painting is a mark on the route eighty nine underpass where just so we have another point of data to be like to compare our results to the next like oh this is a this is actually the bridge street crossing this is this is obtained from a newsletter from the d e c actually eric emailed me one morning and i was and i was like this is great this proves it's a person bridge he was working on this and i'm like perfect this is great so this is the bridge to bridge and you can see obviously that water can flow around and under and that's that's what that's what was lacking and had a major effect on the results upstream a bridge theory and i'll get into more detail later selection of an appropriate manning said is very important for the accuracy of a model so so what we did is kind of hard to see but we we looked at all the cross sections and put them over overlay them  your farmland were high they were modeled at point zero six one and your typical modeling is point zero four five point zero five and i mean this means nothing to you but it is significant i have had a pretty big impact on the had a significant impact on the model because there's so much cultivated land within the richmond flood plains so correcting that in ninety even touching the bridges just doing that independently we had almost a half a foot drop alo for you know middle of august when the corn crop is eight feet tall and then the middle of december when in theory they have to they told it under so you just take an average of it what i would do it was i would take the higher values because they're the more conservative so they represent your full crop and essentially what happens is when if a caught crop sees a significant depth of flow most of them are going to fold over but but but the the conservative way the and you can also take kind of an average because they rotate crops so yeah and so there's a difference between feel crops and crops and no crops so you just kind of take an average i mean you're not going to go in to the model well what i did is i took an average between no crop row crop and field crop so the average of those is what i use for all for all the farm because they rotate they change here's the bridge here's i'm just going to talk about this area for now so just upstream of the bridge street bridge if you make the corrections were suggesting flood elevations will drop a foot and a to two feet so in a progressively goes down as you get away from the bridge street bridge so by the time you get to the jonesville bridge you're looking at about a quarter foot of a drop but  two but it's a drop from what is currently being proposed for richmond study we had to commission these before they got finished with their studies we said show us a one foot interval or a two foot interval and they got complicated for them so they tried to do that but their representation is the shaded brown area is the extent of the proposed right yes so i think that the bridge street bridge has a major when you correct the when you turn it into a perch bridge like a currently is has a major impact is essentially is acting like a dam before so watered pool behind it so be more behind it than in front of it and and that's been mitigated to a certain extent by putting the correct geometric data in so just upstream of bridge street you're seeing a foot a half to two foot drop and then a progressively goes down so i mean you're talking a few miles right between between these two but but i mean it it's a significant change so so from the checkered house bridge to  the bridge street bridge with our corrections they bury some but it's basically about a half a foot to a foot just upstream of route eighty nine and then a progressively goes goes to one to two  feet at bridge street and where we're going to we need a little more data and that's what some of the proposal is but we're advocating for more of the scenario where you have the larger drops because it seems to make the most sense so that would be about a foot to two foot drop from route eighty nine to the checker to to the bridge street bridge currently on the end of brooklyn over atlanta and that is that ten three ten point three was the water elevation that was serving so our hope various scenarios have it very close that we have three ten point seven three ten point five and three three ten point three so they were there within a few inches of what was surveyed so give or take three or four inches which in a model like this is this is good and we want to try to get the same type of feel for the route eighty nine process so that's what we're that's what to looking for there so right now it it's looking like a smashing a pretty pretty well to irene which is it was somewhere between a fifty nine your storm they don't know yet but they they kind of say one to two percent which would be fifty one two hundred one hundred two fifty  it because they're at critical locations ones at the bridge street bridge most of these models are and you have one or two points of data over hundreds of miles so i mean it's that that's why you have to understand this is a tool used to simulate an event that may happen very differently in reality what could happen is that the bridge street bridge gets clogged with a bunch of trees and then this whole thing goes differently so this is really just to establish a baseline risk that affects how much you pay in flood insurance essentially or what you can develop yeah so exactly there's nothing about ice jams there's you know there's sediment loading you consider there's a lot of things that that happen in reality that you just can't accurately there's just no way to gather all that information so these models  surprisingly accurate considering but they're just tools that two reasons one it wasn't necessarily one hundred year event and and you have to understand that when i read happened the ground is very wet already so there's a lot of  runoff there was a whole bunch of different scenarios this one hundred year event is a statistical thing based on for this river basically the flowed out of they've collected over you know eighty years or so of i think is from the twenty's twenty six twenty seven is when it starts on so you can only correlate the two so much you know but but it is good information so where we do have it we will look at it and if it's a little bit lower than what we're showing that's a good sign so if we're so at like at the end of brooklyn if we're showing say three three ten point five and it's showing three ten point three we know we're real close to a significant flooding event and you know you know the nothing be there will never be something exactly like that again but for the insurance companies they want to see on average you know given what we know about what's happened in the past what do we think the next from will kind of be like nothing will ever be exactly that way but when they decide where they're signing riskin who needs to have insurance to cover that risk that's the tool that they use this is the thing that i said last time is getting your head around it none of this tells you whether it's a good idea to have insurance or not if you are near the flood zone whether you're in or not you're at risk there are storms that are bigger than irene so i mean it's just a matter of what comfort level of risk you're comfortable with it may it depends i mean if there was a drought before irene then the ground may soak in a lot more the reservoirs could be able to maybe take more and it's again that's why you can't look at it as where simulating this exactly i mean we are doing our best based on the information we have to establish risk and it's just baseline risk and the decline that female has drawn is that hundred year storm of it so that's what we're we we're trying to accurately depict again this is all statistics statistically it looks like irene was somewhere between fifteen a hundred years to school about matches based on the peak flow gauge data they have downstream so when they compare that to this currently in the proposed flood area and are mapping an appeal shows you're not and if you are still at risk of flooding just statistically you're out this risk  answer your first question i had a conference call with thema on friday right near him this monday this past monday and it went very well they they are they they agree with our analysis and they feel that richmond has grounds for a successful appeal your second answer is it looks like my scenario eight may have one point that is lower than irene it's at ten point two and the the survey measurement that chris came up with it was at ten point three but i but that is something that i take with a grain of salt because i have to fix the survey data on bridge street so that could change that elevation as it could let more water through and it could raise a little bit to that point i mean these are clues my results are close to what the final is going to be but it's not exact yet so i'm going to take those bits of information to finalize and i'll go over it with the town but  sense so anyway this is from main street down to one north wilson road and and then this this gap right here would be a railroad bridge so from the railroad bridge to the checkered house bridge we're showing drops of elevation from two point three feet to two point five feet to one foot  s possibly but so what does it all boil down to we're look at an average drop of somewhere between point eight to one point two feet within town limits so it's going to vary up and down more some areas are going to drop two feet and some beer is going to drop maybe a quarter foot but on average it's point eight to one point two feet which again it's very significant i mean it's going to change possibly a decent amount of people's insurance rates so on what are the next that in the appeal process so i had the phone call we laid the groundwork for what's going to take to do the appeal first we just have to i already see d m has already mailed out the terrain that i need to do the updated mapping so i have we got that today at the this afternoon i haven't a chance to go through it but so we have to in the field data we want to get that one point of that for the flood insurance produce unfortunately is going to be our burden to produce the updated mapping if we could just shoot off our report and the model let them do it we'd pretty much be done but fema makes the applicant which is us do the mapping so that's where bogle the work's going to come in so we have to produce these maps here will will will be significantly changed well you could but that's just what's there i mean we have to be accurate with what is there right not just there should we go for this well you want accurate data for it making because it has a has has a lot of lot of things happened you know when you're in the flood zone or not i mean its effects development affect your flood rate i mean someone having to pay two to three thousand year for flood insurance versus two to three hundred that's a significant difference and that's a lot of money that could be get back into town or be put to improving the home or whatever so i mean but i would not it's going to go down for most proposed i could tell you that but from what i'm currently modeling it may go up a little bit but you're talking a couple inches it's not going to be significant important information i mean you want as accurate of the depiction of the flood zone as you can get in this i mean it's a it would be nice if it be easy to quantify you know what a one foot change or whatever would be but to do that you have to do this work anyway and then you can figure it out but beforehand it's it's it's not practical right now now that well when i just changed the mannings coefficients and did not correct the bridge geometry the the flood zones did go up slightly upstream of the bridge street bridge but but that all changes when you change the bridge street bridge geometry and then they go down quite quite substantially well it's a combination of a lot of things and i'm only making assumptions but this is a large study i mean you're talking we're new ski river from you know the essex them upstream there's a lot of things to consider there's a lot of bridge crossings there's dams there's there's there's a lot of streams that come in and they've made not have been as detail oriented as i was just focusing on richmond in addition they normally see these big companies like c t m they generally have an office somewhere that does all the modeling it is most likely nowhere near vermont so they've never seen this area so they  can't i look at it you know weekly i see things and i could easily pick out some of the air so i mean really it's comes down to attention to detail and well there's scale and attention to detail and they probably have budgetary constraints i mean there's a whole bunch of things to consider i mean or they just didn't do i mean it's again it's a speculation i don't want to get into it now compared to what is use in eighty two is substantially more accurate unfortunately there was a lot of the changes i made were part of mine but they have a significant impact because they were at critical areas bridge crossings are very critical areas that want to narrow that crossing as much as possible so you have the shortest bridge panels possible and that creates constructions when you have these giant floods so there are obvious points you know and just minor changes can have a big effect and when you change the velocity you can have a huge effect as well yes yeah i guess some accounts gone very well they seem like it's going to be a collaboration so you know things can go very smoothly if they do it'll come at the benefit of the town if they decide to proceed so we went all the way down the northwestern road because you can't just end it at the town boundary i mean you have to go down a ways because you know effects downstream have effects upstream so we want to make sure we got downstream enough to walk you know to to make corrections as much as community outreach we have to go talk to them just provide letters tell him what we're doing we're and just get their approval which dave mendelson said that is long as they're lowering he doesn't see a reason why there would be an issue it's going to benefit those towns  this review were to trigger and i know judge has accepted already but but but if in the future a similar revision were found there and the model then took assumed increased flow water from jericho into richmond would then we need to redo our maps or once your appeal is accepted you will no longer incur costs whoever changes the model would have to change those maps so and when it comes to what we're doing we're providing better data so you will not have to pay the fees that come with letters a map or vision so if you if we were to do a project like a major flood control project or so or heard or modify a bridge or something that's going to drastically change the flood the flood zone the the you would then have to pay for the service a female and their engineer to accept your mapping which would be thousands of dollars but since we're providing better data we don't have to pay we've been told we don't we're not going to pay those fees so in your with an appeal part process so it's not an issue  richmond but for jericho and wills than it is but we're providing better data and they encourage that so they don't charge you for the review of that it's it's a decent amount of work but my sister suspects that my suspicion is a considerable amount of property and homes will come out if you're looking at you know a one foot on average drop and you know two feet within portions of you know the richmond village i mean that's it's again it's just my suspicion but my something if you get five homes out or three homes out that alone is significant because that's two to three thousand a year per on that is no longer going to goal was fifty six hundred and there was a previous consultant i'm not exactly sure how much it was it was about seven well over six thousand a little over six thousand off we have to go quickly the appeal period ends april twelfth is that correct and so if we were given approval to proceed with the scope of work an impact there are there could be a fact on the ground list as someone mentioned earlier you know being in the floodplain versus being out of the flood plain affects the property values and then it impact development it would impact you know what you can do it in those flood plain areas i don't know if you're familiar with the regulations for what you can do in a flood zone but you may or may not be able to put an addition on your house if you're in the flood zone so there's impacts like that that would benefit from not being in insurance is different than the type of flood insurance and other homes businesses would have because we're part of a i mean just pull insurance pool that has a ten million dollar policy and that ten million dollar balls he covers all their towns and who subscribes so individually it doesn't really matter anyway but i could tell you that it be cheaper to keep continue with the pool than it would be try to get individual private insurance for i don't know if the building's going to be taking place changes from the nine hundred eighty two map shows the back of town center really is the line and if it goes up one foot with the new mapping then the building will be in the flood plain everything volunteers green is already in and the libraries out and even with the new map it still them stay out so the town centers are three a half million dollar building so very difficult i only got this list today we don't know really what kind of reduction in property value or grandest value to expect i don't think you could apply a broad percentage to every single insurance so it's really difficult to tell just based on this list i'm thinking between five and ten thousand dollars in taxes tax revenue annually but that's just a wild guess based on what might be a twenty thousand to twenty percent reduction for all the property types which is just again a broad generalization i've got really no basis to make them the i'm a resident of richmond as many of you know and you know i'm nowhere near the flood but i would certainly you know be in favor of this but i'm biased as a person saying that right now as well  know i mean just on that point and i'm only going to interject here because i've been reading about nothing but climate change within the last couple days i want to stress again that this is all about insurance it's nothing about whether or not it's a good idea to take action personally in terms of getting it and what i would certainly hope that we can do is get an accurate look like just a nation that will allow as many thoughts i mean as a as a resident of the hilltop sections of this town i don't directly benefit from it however from a planning perspective and from an affordability perspective of people who are or who may be marginal and i'm supportive of going forward with with this nation i mean especially since we do know that there is a problem and a significant problem it's not like you said a couple of inches or even a half but it's it's a significant amount statistical analysis and we know this isn't a perfect science because if this happens the middle of winter and there's two feet of of ice on the the river you know that it's worthless but but the reality is that this is this is the best we can this is the best we've got right now and and maybe in ten years if climate continues to be affected freeman will say you know what we've got to redraw we've got to go back to the drawing board and then we go back to the drawing board i mean that's what happens i mean it's been twenty years since it was last done or gauche almost thirty really done right and then so when we anticipate we would do it again in another twenty thirty depends on  here just a sort of a practical i think and i think your point about equity and to should pay for what is a good one and certainly one that's that's been brought up and my understanding of what you presented is that the word we actually do the mapping is probably going to be more because of where the elevations are affected being in the more heavily populated part of town so you just do the math we can't really do anything about mine that's been spent already that decision was not you can't go back to people and ask them you know to contribute to the mine has already been spent so we're talking about eighty five hundred bucks to thirty one people it's a lot of small amounts of money to collect and probably not worth the administrative cost to the town alone to do that so so i just want to make that point you know the the equity issue aside so i guess the question that i have and i know this may not be possible to answer right now either is this and i know this is an estimate but are there is there anything that's not in here that that is a potential item might come up to get us from where we are now through thousand five hundred forty five from contract ministration two thousand dollars from landscaping five hundred dollars from the wards five hundred dollars from technology two thousand dollars from notes interest which we don't have a expenditure for and two thousand dollars from chittenden unit on special investigations which we've already paid that bill and it was lower than it was last year so we had some and spent money the but we're going to the next order of business so mr chair today right preston the health officer issued an emergency public health order  the health officer has declared that the dog is an imminent and substantial significant public health risk and pursuant to that emergency health order we've requested for the health officers requested that a warrant be signed for the seizure of the dog the dog has to be impounded we're not proposing we euthanize the dog this is just a seizure in an isolation of the dog and there is a right to appeal this public health order if an appeal is made it would be how it has to be held within five business days of that would be next thursday if no appeal was made this emergency order would have to be made all right we're going to go into executive session for five minutes to discuss a personnel issue