page three one thing and eleven town managers report the fourth bullet which reads staff recommends waiting for the north willesden road study to be complete before taking action second second pitch one just three one thing and then number twelve the comprehensive energy plan petition the last sentence read there was general support of the comprehensive energy plan concept and to hear from the public but concerned about consumers an extensive amount of time at the inner meeting now that i don't disagree with but i also wonder if there was concern about the concept of petitions in general there was one of which you just make that exact a brief background of yourself and why you'd like to be on the planning commission sure so my wife and i moved here about a year and a half ago from baltimore maryland i was doing a job there for the local city government so big city about six hundred thousand people and my role was decent deputy mayor for health human services education and youth my first four way into baltimore city government was through the planning department there so i did get an opportunity to see sort of the staff side of working with commission a pretty powerful commission and a pretty large one as well and while i was at the planning department in baltimore we worked on a a full overhaul of our zoning code and that was really fascinating to see how that plays out in city councils and how that played out with a strong mayor all sort of dominant structure of politics there my interest here in wilson is because i'm new and i see this community is such a vibrant one it's really exciting just going through your your own and your reports and things and your own plans through twenty twenty four it's really exciting to be in a community that is is growing and does have a lot of people moving in and a lot of activity and i think that's one really unusual to vermont you know when you have the state house talking about how people are leaving and we don't have enough people in vermont i think wilson is an exciting place to live and would be an exciting place to be on the planning commission thank you if you had a chance to talk to  with ken yes yeah i did and he gave me an incredible i would be nice thinking he's probably very busy maybe homely give me about twenty minutes i get to sit with him for over an hour kind of pick his brain asked a ton of questions and really just listen and learn to kind of the ins and outs of what the comm does and what it doesn't do how it's different then the board that oversees sort of the contracts and and also just get a sense of sort of what the process is from week in and week out and month in so i guess the question is the simple question is what did you learn i mean we need to dissertation really what i'm focusing on is to get a sense of yours what i'd like to do is get a  sense of your feelings about what are we doing right or maybe what are we doing wrong and the place maybe one document to really focus in on is the town plan and just your thoughts about about that document yeah i think what i found really encouraging when i was reading through is the way it was expressed the language the choice of language is a very intentional choice i think of of ideas and concepts that i think from on is way ahead of the curve and so the idea that they are trying to be very sustainable they are trying to have different ways of having energy look and be in this community that they're looking at equity issues around affordable housing and how that needs to accommodate sort of all ends of the economic spectrum in our state so i think in that way it was really exciting to see that wilson is are thinking about that and they're really putting that in there i think as we always know right that someone who has a policy background at the devil's in the details right how does that get implemented how do you get people with nimby issues or with issues around  concerns that get really complicated when you start talking about some of those things because they are connected to shoes of poverty or racial equity or things like that so i think what i found was particularly coming from a city like baltimore that does have so many challenges that i feel like i could could sit in on like a commission like this and both learn but also contribute and do so in a way that really felt like we were making progress and looking to the future as opposed to sort of doing some tree damage and i was dealing with the fire right in front of you that makes sense  question and it certainly already if the answer to this is no did you have a chance to attend a planning commission did ken did offer that as something i could do and i said i was interested i did want to tell the commission and he recommended that  select board i do have because i am in in classes right now for a dissertation so i'm working on that i have a conflict for tuesdays so he only goes this class only goes through april but it is something i've already discussed my professor about you know this would be policy in action it's something that's completely aligned with what i'm doing in graduate school anyway so she seems like school and i and he said to bring it up here so that you have you know sort of full disclosure that it is very temporary it's just now through april but  eleven miles of it would be class three roadway it's off the bittersweet development off to a i consulted with public charter burst or the road past the final inspection last summer to meet all the public work well was in the paper the motion saying i say there's no opponents so let's move on to item number eleven the town meeting warning revised and rick perhaps just talk a little bit about what we need to do for the after the warning was signed and approved by the board at its last meeting we found out that one key elected position have been left off and this is a school board or school director position and actually there are two openings the reason it was left office because we've never included them  they've always been included in the separate school warning but this is the first year under the new structure which is a regional structure now and under that regional structure the town is required  problems including the candidates they when they got petitions they solicited signatures for two year terms so both positions are three year case this requires action to affirm what we've already done because we didn't have time to and i had talked with each of you individually online i guess about this problem so that you were we could move for on the ballots printed and we've already received about some and we also had a deadline of getting the information out for the annual report and for the flyer so at this point we're looking for affirmation whoever we only have two other originals approved people who approve the warning so terry suggested that maybe a better motion at this point would be just to a separate motion to just moving just a tad i have no issues with and it was a type thing where you needed three people to vote affirmatively i would never put the town warning in jeopardy i think that this way with this mission now i'm going to protect you y yeah annual basis we need to update our priority list all the loan fund and public works staff has put together this list of projects that was actually on the previous year's list and we'd like to keep them on this year's list they are each and every one of them are storm water projects that are also part of our flush ration plan so with that said the last step to letting them remain on the list is to get approval by our governing body and if anyone has any questions about these projects or while we might want to list happy to  for james of course you for james a question for the board a conflict of interest i work for the state of vermont department of environmental conservation facilities engineering division which is the entity that with the right words carries out which administers the clean water or a fund for the state of vermont the priority list is a  i don't get involved in the priority list that's actually something that there's a very perspired mechanism but you could see where somebody would be concerned about me voting for something here and then being in fact actually sometimes my best thinking happens when i talk and the more i think about it the more i think it is inappropriate for me to vote on this because i will then involved with it  know as i think about it i'm going to actually change my and the reason is i will be involved in the review of applications there's a technical component of that that the and the group that i supervise is directly involved in the review of applications so the more i speak more i wish there were at least one other shmuck board member here tonight but i do not feel comfortable participating in the discussion or moving on it ye deadline there is i don't have in this memo it's out of the twelfth of the sixteenth of february i'd have to double check fifteenth of the birth either the twelfth of the sixteenth siah should have that with me now see here it goes to show how i do it there is some separation from what i do because i don't know what that ted i did all i know is that it's too soon is that require does it require so court action actually i have a submit this isn't a grant application it's not a grant it's a loan and i did reach out to the state and they said it usually is that the governing body i could reach out again and see if manager approval is sufficient for this particular action i would also mention that currently public works has no active plans to submit for loan funding for these projects which you may ask why are we putting them on the list anyways i understand totally right it's just better to have in there you know one of these and it is under consideration for a grant through the r p c's and you know we do have some funds in the stormwater program to assist if any of these come in and look for assistance but with that said we don't have any active plans to submit for a loan application we'll have to check to see if they'll accept it if they not we can either call a special meeting or i apologize yeah we're really we have more members here and so it's in a sense and most feel like  in order to authorize the manager to to sign with the approval of the chair of the war  in the process of hiring three of the four social workers that will be involved i think there's a fourth one they're also looking and i can't tell you exactly when they'll be on board but it'll be you know within a month or so i would expect there's been a fair amount of press on this recently as well i don't know of anyone quite some of that on that we're not unique in this approach there's many jurisdictions across the country that are looking at this and number of already in their way so we're looking forward to giving it a try in our region and i'll be staying in touch as a member of the state committee  drain the existing tower it's at the end of tower lane and then they will take down that water tower probably in the spring i think that we can tell better  weather i suppose we could consider renaming the street but probably not necessary there i think there are planning to put up a small much smaller communications tower so there still be a tower there  and that's pretty much it for that project went overall very smoothly and happy to have that tank it's been on our list of things to do for many many years and it's finally done  its all have seating ok well it is close to seven thirty and so it's time for the public airing of the community development grant closed out and the wording that was  views of citizens of the community development different information concerning the ranger truly development activities that have been undertaken under this program and to give affected citizens the opportunity to examine a statement of the use renovated it and added demolished and dish and that was on the back of the building and added a new construction piece of it that's now houses a day station and it's just for carts and fourteen minutes and so apartments and it's an two thousand and twelve and danced around the temporary homes and the the greatest thing i think is walking into the day station now it's well built it's well lit and showers it has laundry it has bunk rooms for our g who work at night but are homeless and need a place to sleep during the day and the overall mood in in the room is wonderful it's a place where people can restore their dignity and get to know each other and work their way  back into into housing and into jobs so it's fantastic and we had a think initially you had figured we would have one hundred beneficiaries to that day station and jonathan's data shows we have four hundred eighty folks for folks who are experiencing homeless homelessness so all fourteen units are filled they are all affordable housing seven of those are folks who have moved out of our shelter programs into housing of their own and  it's what we term aspirational housing we further subsidize their rent to help them achieve dreams of going back to school of job training and they serve as mentors they come downstairs to that they station and help you know other not how about the board questions or comments just one and i almost apologize this before i ask about i feel it's necessary first of all you know it sounds like a wonderful project this has nothing to do with that but i want to go back to when we were holding the public hearing for when the grant was being applied for and some folks showed up in opposition to the project i think they were concerned about the impact on the neighborhood so it's the impact on the neighborhood that mike is are those concerns still being felt or valid or whatever may be the best way to express that i just very very  rarely once in a while we do we try to remain open and be good neighbors help that happen so we do you know if there is any issue if if somebody expresses concern we were to address that right away but there haven't been ones along with thier very own debt being room and we had today james came to committee i serve on the natural resource and energy committee in the senate which in some ways i was going  first on the water quality bill this year so eager to have the opportunity to fill you in on at least some of our thinking it's not clear exactly how it's all going to shake out but james was down today helping us understand some is mature in the sense that you've been tackling your own store money till it and thinking these issues through for a long time but i think everybody knows we are in a sort of settlement area with the federal government and the e p a really holding our feet to the fire we're in year two or three to how you count that we heard from folks at the boston office of the e p a that they are  being graded on out of twenty seventeen and there are a number of them where we have fallen short one of which is a funding source for long term funding and the other one is the three air her permanent structure sort of sort of the regulatory side it's not clear to any of us exactly how the e p a sort of do they wait some things more than others those are two pretty significant pieces although it's obvious from our discussions with e p a that they are basically impressed with the work that vermont is doing so that is just kind of the overview people we don't have a choice right we are in a prayer in a place where the e p a will hold our feet to the fire and we've been able to wrestle with them to let vermont create  some sense our own version of a solution to this because the e p a s regulatory authority is very limited to a point source run off point source is not really the problem for months so should we fall down on our obligations they would come in and insist that we look at point source regulation which would be not really adequate to solve the problem and extremely expensive as a potential solutions just offer that as an overview for what's going on the legislature as written from a keg knows well is that a something of an and disadvantage in these kinds of discussions because we are so dependent on the administration the scott administrator and the experts that come before the legislative committee as you can appreciate they are really the boots on the ground they are routinely telling us things are going very well and maybe that's great news and in some cases very clearly we have made investments in the last few years that are just getting started so for instance in the field of agriculture we now have nine inspectors who are going to all the farms around the state and really certain hold their feet to the fire that's new we never had that personnel to do that so obviously my expectations are trying to be realistic that a lot of this is just in development phase on the other hand you know it's sort of realistic i think or most for miners probably wouldn't agree that things are doing just ticking right along and we're doing a really good job with water quality i'm getting e mails every day from folks who's watching their property values plummet in lake car my as an example in franklin county i have little kids i remember this summer literally going to the beach with them and saying having to say to the four year old the six year old we're not going today turns  out we're having a water quality incident so we have very very real challenges one of the part of the work that we're doing is trying to figure out th very open to us the legislature coming up with a long term funding solution there's a projected gap in the next few years of between twelve and eighteen million dollars roughly and they were supposed to come back to us in december with a plan of how to do that they didn't really do that and so we'll say well where's the plan and they'll say well the legislature is in charge of coming up with the money and i say ok but the governor has said that there can be no new revenue so where would you recommend we cut this twelve to eighteen million dollars out of her budget that's really a legislative problem so we're in this dance with them that can be frustrating i've been trying to ask pointed questions around agriculture this is a delicate conversation to have in my ear as it is for our state the t m d l around lake champlain and it says sector you know so that's that's the big part of the prize and it's often thought to be potentially the most cost effective but this is a real cultural chief for us in this state and i'm the only person on the committee who's from chipping county there is a member from house county we're a lot of farms are we have a guy from franklin from orleans county in from orange county so they have very real more than them we feel in our community although of course there's farms and wilson really trying to understand what are we talking about here how are we going to approach ag does it make sense for us to put state dollars into farm to help create a a cleaner manure storage system for instance if the reality is that the economic viability of that farm is in question over the next three to five years does make sense you know the chair of ag flippantly said for nine hundred thousand dollars mean we should just buy the farm these these are these are really tough questions and farmers and don't take this the wrong way i mean farmers have been trapped in a commodity market that is not paying them fair price i mean but that's pressured farms to get bigger and one of the on checked pieces of that has been our water quality you know we are subsidizing them in it if you look at it from that sense and i really i want to be careful i want farmers in vermont they're the backbone of our communities and our economy and they need to make a living and we need to have clean water and those things are difficult conversations to have and when the secretary of agriculture comes in and says everything's going great ned that raises concerns for me so we've been trying to tease this out we're trying to for instance we've been dependent in our short term funding strategy on capitol dollars which is borrowed dollars that's ok for a stopgap the capital money as terry knows well comes with a lot of strings attached you can only do certain kind of projects because it's because it's capital money one of the critiques we hear is that we don't have the planning in place to necessarily get all the capital dollars out the door because you can't pay for all all of the planning work with capital dollars and not capital dollars eligible so one of the eight and at the same time we have hundreds of water basin and different kind of community partners that are working on different aspects of the water quality discussion who get for instance a tiny tiny amount of baseline funding from the state to the tune of you know hundred twenty thousand dollars for i think there's fifteen water basin can groups around the state and then they collectively write one hundred forty grants competitive grants for the state to the state all of them to the state and they end up getting a budget of one point two million dollars well how does that makes sense for us to get these poor people to sing for their supper to get off you know pretty reliably over a million dollars of state funding so one of the solutions that we're looking at is could we could we add a little money right now to get the state to basically build our local infrastructure put these people on a block grant let's not make them compete against one another for for a small amount of dollars let's obviously we need to be sensible about this but this is going to be at minimum a twenty year project so let's build some local infrastructure these guys can part of i'm part of the you know it's the r p c's and other kinds of local groups they can do a lot of the planning to help get our capital dollars out the door so it's ideas like that that we're kind of pecking around and trying to come up with some answers and i'll just say probably of interest to you guys is there's been a lot of discussion about a i think most people seem to think that ultimately that is how we will fund part of this and i'm in a unique position representing me carry on the committee you know i live in burlington obviously south bronx it was the first community in the state to have a these communities deserve some acknowledgement that you've been paying to do your part i don't think we want to take you completely off the hook even though if the the working assumption is would be about a forty dollar per parcel fee and as james explained you're paying probably fifty fifty one dollars so it and we can't give you credit for all of it because there is i think of feeling a need to have everybody in in some way  but trying to find that right balance so that you are credited that's a unique challenge for a lot of our communities right here in county that you know i get to at least argue with my friends in the legislature needs to be acknowledged we'll see how it turns out so it's a bit of a scattered shot but those are several of the things that we're talking about and we have not made decisions at this point but you know as late as early as later this week we will be getting a bill in sort of shape to pass out at least in the first process and i was as you all know that to be interrupted right up till the but i don't know if there are questions and be happy to take them depends on your schedule but we have time for questions to come yes first of all i'm full disclosure i work for d c that's my question has it that kind of we have so many balls in the air and what i mean by that is is we have the environment or the team vo or the lake or water quality we have health care we have education we have infrastructure problems in vermont and in addition to that we need to keep them on somehow affordable so that my kids who go away to college and end up in this city in the midwest are finding out that it's cheaper to live there and it's you know there's more opportunities for them there so i guess my question is is how do we prioritize and i realize i yeah well huge welcome to my life prioritize water quality when we have those other needs well i understand the need but i also understand the so i guess i would ask it a couple of different ways and  you know you've rightly identified the impossible position we're in and kerry and i work four and a half months a year so you know sometimes i wonder if a citizen legislature structure is really up to these kinds of challenges and water quality is kind of in the headlines these days but there's a lot of big questions in some cases they're deferred maintenance frankly that we've been punting down the road for a long time  the flip side is well what if we ignore it what if we don't do it right that is going to cost us more money what if we you know the billions of dollars from from state revenue that comes in because of people who come to enjoy the nature in vermont is a jeopardy i think if we don't face up to this challenge so that it's i think you know this but it's sometimes helpful to articulate this there's also a very real cost of us not addressing it so the question is how do you address it sensibly part of that i think has to be holding the people that polluters responsible i mean i mean that's how we that's how we do it  on the big parking lots you know around the box stores right we have knowledge that that has an impact on us and so we we say to them you know you have to deal with this you have to mitigate the storm water runoff of your big parking lot  have to deal with it and we have to deal with ag ag imports phosphorus today think about that that's crazy we're in a crisis of phosphorous in our water and the heart of our communities their business model imports phosphorus we can't keep doing this we have to call these questions it's difficult it's not very forward but you know one of the things that we've been poking around is you know when ag goes when the agency goes to a farm and says you know you can't keep doing it this way we've got to look at other things we say to them is there an economic viability part of your calculation like maybe the solution isn't to figure out how to keep being conventional dairy and do it a little cleaner or maybe the solution is if you are you know shift to raising animals for meat and growing a diverse set of crops and then you could make money and not be contributing in the same way so we don't have a choice we can't just shrug this one off we've got to do it in a way that's affordable and we've got to we've got to call the hard questions then and if that looks at ad which i think it has to can you build a answer but i don't know if that helps thank you and you know i mean i get your point about the citizen legislature it must be tough i don't i don't disagree with that a special kind of challenge i you know we are a rural state and we're facing many of those dynamics that are everywhere in rural america i mean no question about that and and i'm very sensitive to the idea that people feel maxed out and people are many cases maxed out and i think we also have to acknowledge that you know just about a third of the state is living in poverty i mean you know that's not nothing though those so the idea that we can cut programs that are wasteful and inefficient we've basically been since the douglas administration not adding new programs we've been trimming we've been in austerity budgets it is very hard and people that work at this every day of the year are not coming to the legislature and saying here's where we've identified the waste there's precious little of that and you know i have over that my time in the legislature i was in the house for a long time gone to appropriations and suggested you know millions of dollars in programs that i would cut and alternatives where either give the money back or or sensible investments that i would like to see us make and the problem is you know other people say well that's a priority for me you can't cut that and then people might say well you know but food stamps are getting more and more expensive and i would say that these people are living on the bone you know so this is the challenge and it's a very real challenge you know wage stagnation is a very real problem that impacts that impacts state revenue we got to deal with that so your message is well represented in the state house i would say everybody you know time and time again and i would assume that it's true in terry's committee people say well having a really good idea if we could do that you the two years in the biennium we put in about fifty million dollars a bonded money that needs to be which is allocated towards cleaning up the the waters of the detention which is in desperate need of if not repair certainly rebuilding and we have forensic units for the mental health individuals who have mental health problems that comes out bonded money as well so you know if there were a money machine in the basement of the state house would be in good shape there isn't you know i've just give you a tiny example and you know i don't think that this is why i wake up in the mornings to work on  quality i mean i happen to care a lot about it i happen to be one of five people in the senate sitting on the committee right now has been chewing through this for many weeks but for instance a bill that i have that i think senate economic development is is going to advance as in talking to small business owners they'll tell you a few things one is that i hear is like you know my administrative assistant hangs up with the department of labor and has to call a department taxes and tries sort through this and we just want to in person that said it most articulate was i just want to fix cars i don't really want to have all this interface so so there's like a lack of efficiency there and then talk to new business developers and they'll tell you yeah you can register your new corporation on the web site it works pretty well but you can't go anywhere in the state of vermont on a single website and figure out with a permanent processes that's absurd right and so for one hundred thousand dollars we'd like to my bill directs the secretary of state that has the business portal to do that relatively straightforward thing that people in twenty six eighteen think should somewhere in a straight forward way right hundred thousand dollars to to hire the developer come up with a plan and start down that road and we're struggling to get that kind of investment and you know i think most people go it's that seems like out of a war for now have billion dollar budget we should be able to find that on a grant and you know these are the things that were out there that would be a good way to let the business community know that we you know we're anyway we are all doing a lot of things we get a committee assignment and dig in there but we have broad interests and are trying to balance all these competing need to know about the well the all that is you can have a simple tax or you can have a fair tax write so some people say well it should be forty dollars a parcel and that's it and we should just get out of town and then i go well what about the good people will soon they're already paying fifty one dollars parcel and the people burned himself from that and then all right maybe we can look at that you know figure out how that works and then someone says well what about the guy that owns eighty acres  and i live on a three course or any of her lot you know ok we got to deal with that so but those are some of where we're at in the in the in the discussion right now i don't think you're going to see a new revenue source of significance come online right now but very clearly from the government and we and the p a he's very interested in us honoring that commitment in the next few years i've i've been advocating for a weight in the next few years we have to the e p a is going to be all over us if we do not have a dependable ongoing source of revenue to pay for water quality and they've acknowledged that the capital dollars that was been the bulk of it lately is a short term stopgap but that cannot be the way we pay for this for one thing not a lot of projects would not be eligible for bonded dollars i've been advocating as a way to maybe get some short term money on the table for some of this planning work and also to maybe buy down the per person what's called an occupancy fee and anybody that goes to a hotel room anywhere just about in the country at the bottom of your bill right is like eight lines of a dollar twenty five here in a bowl and it's just mystifying you know you could raise for every dollar of an occupancy race three point six million dollars this is ninety percent paid by our visitors i don't think it's realistic to think that a tourist who's wondering where they're going to vacation or or come visit or go skiing is going to be persuaded by a dollar or two dollar fee tacked on to the bottom of the hotel bill so i think that's that's a pretty good source of revenue again ninety percent paid by out of state by non vermonters and never real nexus to our clean water which is the basis of our tourist economy so you know that is a little bit in the discussion right now maybe use that to buy down the per person feet so i don't know that there's not a lot as very concrete right now  we've also been looking at the idea of citizen suits so one of the very real challenges is who's kind of accountable here and the secretary of ag accountable for nonpoint specific pollution the sectar for point a point sources and you know there's a lot of like oh no that's over there own that's over there it can further the legislature when we're in town for four months it can be pretty difficult there and there are a dozen states that allow it would allow a citizen who who found a violation to let's say for it was storm water runoff to to sue and on and say you're not living up to the regulatory authority that you have  this parking lot is is polluting that's that model of for the federal statute the goal is not to have a bunch of court cases the goal is you would have a remedy period so the agency would come out and they'd have sixty days to be engaged in fixing that problem that might be sort of you know basically of six hundred thousand and four serves in a way that you know we're maybe as positive some people are afraid of it  it does happen and around water quality in a dozen or more states so we're digging in to understand if that's a realistic approach or not you know so these are some of the things that are on the on the table and right now i be i wouldn't guess exactly what will sugar out in the next few weeks or over the next few months but and again this is going to be very many many years in development and execution so i expect we'll chip away at it but a lot of us are feeling like you know les carmike completely in crisis these people of watching their investment income their their retirement income or retirement nest egg in many cases completely devalued they go to it was in august right so when people vacationing in august they had to leave you know it's a real problem is real health problem it's a real problem for property values round sysco bay st on space southern part of the lake you know this is we can't avoid this this particular one i don't think for much longer there chris  appreciate your coming forward with the problems that we face in the year and here well thank you and we do reach out and again you guys have a star in james and i'll be i'll be checking in with him and of course you know to reach a great education system and it's why we came i have two kids five and seven preschool and first grade and i wanted to get on the school board to be more involved than just knowing what was going on and that's one thing to do i think i and in addition to being a parent of small kids as well i have a preschooler and a second grader i'm a teacher in culture esther been teaching high school for twelve years of work to education policy prior to my teaching career so i've enjoyed the opportunity to be more immersed in the policy right here in our community ok and we'll just we'll try to take you through this quickly if you have any questions just stop us on a slide because it's particularly like enrollment class sizes then we'll show you the budget at the end we have the tax articles and implications or tax implications in article sorry and i'm not going to get into detail on those kind of were you kind of read them if you have any questions been interesting to put together after doing it at the town hall this is our second year doing so so we're still learning but making a lot of progress and in the process of putting together our budget we had informational budget form and hearing from the community in november and then we had four budget meetings two in december two in january and these are some of the participants that we had our budget bodies they work with us kind of double check our numbers ask questions kind of us the energy check for the board and ministration and then we also got input from parents community members teachers staff so on and so forth so here are some of the points of pride that i was talking about before you can read through these i won't go on to detail we only have wilson central school represented here so i'll give a shout out t o we recently hired a new principal and it's a big position big deal and i was on the hiring committee and really impressed by the quality of applicants and said something about our school district in the states i was very happy we have a good i vermont so i don't have to get into the details on here you can look at this but on the whole through all of our grades we are performing well on our standardized test scores and this is another way of looking at it for science but we're still performing above standards which is get so the takeaway of this lie there's a lot of data and information here we were kind of on a downward trend for enrollment and we sort of plateaued we had a little bit like i think an  uptake maybe from finney crossing particularly last year's kindergarten class with an unusually large but we're sort of the tilling now and wilson in particular the different towns in t v s he had different fluctuations are a lot probably fluctuates the most  also pretty steady and then heinsberg is declining so we're kind of hold the study for now which is you know a little bit easier to weather in some ways and this tells you about our class sizes which are there bubble classes so you'll have some that are larger than others but on the whole our state average are the state standards core choir that from k through third grade you have an average of less than twenty for all of the greats combined so you'll see that  grade two has twenty one but it's an average across the four grades and then the same thing from four through eight an average of twenty five or less and no notice that wilson is on the higher side one of the reasons for that is where a larger scale like the two schools are much larger so sixteen it's we're able to handle that better since we this year have six kindergarten classes so we can kind of and handle little fluctuations like that a little bit better so we're able to stay a little bit on her side while still having a quality education and one of the benefits of the merger is just to be a little bit more flexible in those situations so that if there are big fluctuations in student populations and the ability for teachers to move which in the districts and to move resources within the district much much not yet it's happened it's been happening for years and special ed because special education merged across the district many years ago so they were the model for a lot of this and we haven't had we haven't had a big case like that in terms of ica full classroom teacher yet although so as we're taking all this information like how we're performing class sizes that's one thing we put together some goals and so the biggest goal is we want to be fiscally responsible and the governor said you know try not to go above two point five percent in your increase the border is like schools that still coordinated so that when they get to high school it's not like clearly if you came from where they're all kind of together in the same place and then one of the other things you have to make sure you're listening to your community and make sure that you're putting a budget they're going to approve of and that people that they can support that sort of thing and to make sure that it doesn't only meet the community financially but in this case like for instance parents they want to make sure that there's certain programming for their kids they want to make sure their kids have certain opportunities to perhaps learn a language or try a new instrument that sort of thing and then also another thing that's been really important is that we came together as one school district but each town has kind of their own culture and how they like to do things and that autonomy is very important or trying to be equitable on one hand to make sure students have you know reasonable classroom sizes access to certain things but still maintain that level of autonomy that that's actually one of my biggest question is how is that working i realize it's still too early to talk to you very early but that's still very early how is that working t come the concept of willesden which used to be its own school district has its own goals and priorities in that those types of things but now it's part of a larger district we're going to use computing maybe that's not the best word but you're competing against other towns and their priorities and their goals and how's that working there's an element of competition but i think one of the biggest things that we're experiencing right now the sharing like a lot of sharing of like well since we are kind of constrained on these resources now how are we going to make the most of what we have here and know how are you doing it bear and some of the a lot of what we had was merged before but some of it wasn't like food services wasn't so i feel like we're getting some news there perhaps i'm learning there one of the biggest pieces between equity and autonomy we're we're kind of making sure things are equitable right now because just like erin said really early on so we're making sure class sizes are equal that you have the counsellor ratios in your different schools right nursing ratios that sort of thing and then shuffling if it's not quite right and some of that has been happening like we needed to make a few changes so there hasn't been enough change i think yet to really offset or like you know tip or move things around for autonomy i think people who are still feeling the autonomy that they have might not be craig as you know destructive for the autonomy part yet but the equity you are mostly focusing on now just to get things sort of balance starting point and then moving forward and there's been some things like instructional coaching has now been implemented across the district so that some of the instructional coaches work between different buildings so they can help build some of those bridges and sort of provide some consistent educational ideas and goals but then also there in the buildings are able to tailor it a bit to the buildings there and and i think and again it's just our would probably be a good question for this traders to better perception is that the towns all have such strong school cultures and support of school communities that we came from a good place for which all of the towns were had that to start with and so so thus far it seems like that has  been been maintained and there's a lot of predation between administrators across the district the superintendent has a very robust system for district leadership and really having those administrators working together in developing shared leadership of the district that i think is a good model for a unified districts i think that also plays to our  favor kind of set our goals as to what's going to guide us in creating budget we put the budget to go it and i kind of gave you an idea of the meetings that we had prepared to those meetings we had a whole bunch of means we have a budget committee that sat down and looked at all the information that we had to roll together and it's rolled together in a way now that it's actually not broken out by town like you couldn't do it or the way that it is it's it wouldn't make sense so some of the  process was started well before we actually started meeting with the public obviously and as we were going through in creating this budget there were a lot of factors that we had to consider for instance you know the budget deficit there were already starting in from last year and the health insurance recapture costs so they set some limitations as to what they were going to allow health care to increase by last year and what the premium what they thought it should be eighty twenty and we came in eighty four or sixteen so there is something  we have to figure that out this year that we're in the second year of it though so it's not as much and then health care costs are just increasing ten percent a year that's just that's a lot to keep up with when you're not having other increases and revenue and there are an increase of special needs students an increasing number of them although this year unusually our special a budget is almost like flat from last year to share it just happens to be the way it worked out this year and then the internal pressures that we have  negotiate a contract of three percent with the teachers for it'll wrap up this coming year and we'll start negotiations again in the fall and we have two projects to renovation projects for the schools there's much auburn and there's the one and was and  that you know take care of necessary infrastructure changes but those come with costs and debt payments that services those are some of the pressures that we had to deal with there and then you know high community expectations they want you know cutting or not edge but like some of the more trendy but things that kind of push the learning balance like to help you not just be great now but be great in the future too so personalize learning well think your distance of supports a variety of things like that both from educators and parents and many of us are state mandates yes that's true so we had a our goals now are developing across the budget and so this is kind of where we landed it's a two point three percent increase you'll see that at the very bottom and there are two numbers to kind of look at the debt service referred to last time that's been for the shelbourne building in the bond for the west and central school building those were one point one percent so that's just kind of you came into this budget and you had to pay this amount so then we were like how can we given the other constraints increase our budget to still keep our quality of education that sort of thing and we came up with a one point two percent increase just district operating costs which we were hoping would impress people this is the hour and here this gives you an idea  of some of the areas that are increasing by how much specialized service is that's a really small increase for them and i did want to point out we did have consolidation savings this year so we can actually pinpoint this is specifically where we saved some money which was great to be able to show people any questions on some of the numbers these are really high level numbers i'll keep going so then you have the increase that the school board  together and then how does it get put into a number that you'll see in your tax bill and that's the very complicated part and so this gets kind of a break out of how and what that happened so we have at the top line that's kind of what the school board is able to control i guess is the best word of explaining it and then you have these other calculations they go into your total increase in your taxes so the school board has put together two point three percent increase us look really high in terms of our impact on the tax rate keep going and here is that's right so we're at the bottom we have a plus eleven point nine percent but four and a half percent of that was our current common level assessment it's approximately like seventy eight percent across the board this does take into consideration the consolidation savings there was ten cents the first year eight cents a second we're in the second year so we still get that eight and savings but this is  estimate of what it will look like it's totally dependent on a whole bunch of other things but that two point three percent factored into what we think will be the numbers gives us a point nine percent increase and there is a breakout there's a slide later on tax implications that kind of shows you what that means dollar wise depending on your housing value and i can show you that if you would like to see it's right here just to give you an idea so if you have a house that's a two hundred  that's actually one more slide so the takeaway from this slide is the one point two percent for the most part that services will be baked in the future so we've increased one point two percent this year and another thing we did you share which i really like we have a five year plan so we said ok this year we're going to spend a penny plan to spend about two point three percent next year we're going to play in the sand i think it's like one point three one point five x or something so we have a plan in place for about five years where we can just you know and we've skip back up i think yes ok this is a this is a more detailed explanation of the calculation i can leave this up here i will walk people through it necessarily and then the next four slides are the actual articles written out people would another metric that the governor has mentioned there might try to be a cap on under on that one to two point three is under two point i would try to be under the same whenever we can and people spending a already a little bit larger we have six can arrive class classes instead of charlotte which has two but they have forty students and they have twenty each class if they get five extra kids what are they going to do you know hire a whole nother teacher so we're able to absorb changes like that a little better it's kind of an economy it's a scale thing and now that we've merged the larger districts we can do that even more by you know possibly sharing staff that sort of thing so that explains part of it  i'll go through the articles real quick so you'll have an idea of what you'll see so this is the article to approve the budget the two point three percent increase that's the part that the school board can vote on this is want to look like  also we need to  our lots busing which used to be contracted out and we've taken that under our control and every year on average c s s you would purchase about three buses we have about sixty five in our fleet prior to acquiring share a lot so you know just normal you got to retire buses are getting old the average age i think is about sixteen years so we're not talking about like having all brand new buses and by acquiring sure a lot we need to add a few new buses two three this year and three next year and then just keep some of our buses on this year make them go hopefully when extra year or so but this is an article to vote on the bussing purchases i just wanted to explain why it was a little higher than usual because we  passing under the just moved under with everything else and c v s to manage transportation in one way this is for this is a recapture because the bill the construction in childbirth is done and they actually had a surplus but because it was done over with before we were merged district by law that money can only be used for shelbourne unless we all vote on it now in c v s d so essential to release those funds to be yours for capital needs across the district which is again a nice consolidation benefit keep world language and are they going to be a half time teacher of all time teachers so it was it was a much more detailed conversation a lot of those details the administration still has at the local level and even i guess the superintendent what as well but the we couldn't just take one of our extra bus drivers and have them go drive a bus because we didn't have the bus so part of it i'm saving thing also is just having the convenience of making sure it's managed correctly because i think for like the first and i was almost a month of school charlotte has five or six bus routes and they were doing it with five buses so they go pick up the bus pick up five of the bus routes and then one would go back out and pick up the other voucher and then come back and so those kids were in the school half an hour later and that was just an ok so we had to think of  i can't pronounce it you know the other day or two isn't too much of a problem should've seventeen were present in the budget this coming friday night funk forty five scheduled to be