which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all like to welcome everyone to tonight's select board meeting and just remind you if you have a cell phone if you could turn it to buzz at least offer bring or we would greatly appreciate it ok so first next thing up is gender additions and changes and i see we have a couple of things that are place t  for the public to speak to the select board on any item that's not on the agenda today is there anyone here wishing to speak during public to be heard is there if you could to state your name and your address for the record please when i reside at one forty six north will soon road at various times in my adult life a couple times i've resided in essex my father steve i would have been a long time resident here and has served the town and i'm here tonight to speak about affordable housing i'd like to get i guess update or the town of essex select for its opinion on affordable housing and then i'd like to share a with dislike toward the lack of affordable housing that is being built over at the state's growth center at your good friends from will stamp and remind the town of essex that that is sewer coming from your town and village and the community this community shit in the county and the state of vermont is not getting served like two specific individuals over there scott riley the head of the d r b from the town who will astin and snyder companies those gentleman have buil over five hundred units in that girl center and there are zero perpetually affordable homes for ownership it's an absolute disgrace and it's shameful and i say that because that group over there came out with an affordable housing task force that they were on state legislators and mr riley this affordable pass force percentage publication took a slight cord they took it into advice meant allocations in the state of vermont spurs growth center where twenty to thirty percent of those homes are required to be affordable and they were required and asked to build zero and a year later they were given another one hundred seventy seven allocations and they've been asked to build a small percentage of perpetually affordable rental homes if anyone in this board thinks that that is going to solve our demographic problem or serve it children in our school yards in this county or to people that serve us they are sadly mistaken in i a system of vermont in a believer in affordable housing put have sold three of my our schools be seven units to the housing trust beginning in july of one thousand to seven perpetually affordable homes for ownership to the younger generation that is so needed those individuals that are currently living there are renting off me they get first option some of those people work here in essex they desperately need affordable housing and to think that five hundred units were used to enrich to injure wriggles tens of millions of dollars and nothing was made and built for those children in this county and in particular their own community is a disgrace and it's a shame when town officials and state legislatures form a task force they study it and they turn around and they give sewer allocation that starts from here what i'm trying to relate to the town of essex tonight is the days if it was of that being current launch of coming to an agreement and then letting the town of willesden just use it that way it's a disgrace it's shameful and i don't believe it serves any of us in this county and i certainly don't believe it serves the town of essex and that's really all i wanted to say tonight i hope you will consider that and i hope you will talk to the trustees but again when that time comes up where they have to come here and get sewer again my goodness folks that's not right that's simply not right we're better than at is vermonters and we have to be right now is the number one thing we are facing in my lifetime right now the demographics problem we have and the lack of affordable housing for the younger generation and the people that are serving us and everything they've built over there are for a you and for me thank you folks i appreciate it you have a good holiday resolution in appreciation of sarah michelle stilts whereas sarah michelle stilts began working as the recording secretary for the town of essex lek board oh i'm sorry i found a spelling mistake sarah's last name is spelled one way in the title and a different way in the first whereas i'm sorry i'll keep reading it though whereas sarah michelle stoltz began working as the recording secretary for the town of essex select board in two thousand and five and where as sarah michelle stepped down from her regular recording secretary duties in october two thousand and eighteen and where as sarah michelle reliably attended hundreds of select board meetings and produced clear and accurate minutes to document the proceedings of the select board and where as sarah michelle took dozens of sets of minutes for the merger task force beginning in september two thousand and five and whereas sarah michelle has been a tremendous asset to the town of essex now therefore it resolved that the select board on behalf of the staff and citizens of the town of essex here by extend our most sincere appreciation to sarah michelle for her thirteen years of commitment and dedication as recording secretary adopted this third day of together for goals that were then brought to both boards and a joint board meeting and i was just giving you an update on where we are with those i also thr some some stuff that you didn't ask for what i do about personnel and the voluminous changes we've had this year and i've gotten through that in there because just to get in get all my goals did but the point is we've had a fair amount of turnover some from retirement some from people leaving for love and other reasons officer donning if you can hear me i moved to pennsylvania because that's where his fiance wind so i just had people change and so we've had a lot of change over in some part timers and things of that also on the list of the people we've  promoted which also creates usually some type of opening or otherwise and then just the things that we've been working on in terms of the organization and  one of the things i have started a monthly coffee meeting with the c e o all of the school district where we've started talking about operational things and where the school district in the town and village can work better and communicate better as well and we've got some things on the burner to keep keep out so i can answer any questions any ques about what's written here are still nice work and i was really pleased to see that the there is some work beginning on updating the town and village web sites so i'm really excited here about that and i would love to receive regular updates on how it's going and is that going to be an internal staff project or is there going to be any committee work on that or anything like that that's a staff led we've already interviewed and reviewed a few different firms there is a firm called civic is heading up the per program and it is designed so that our departments can easily update their own their own content and we're tasking darby from the village to help as well because she learns these things very well a scene spearheaded the village right with and so the idea is that we will unify the look and feel and train everybody at least one person each department how to upload but then also provide them with technical assistance with darby and others to be able to kind of keep an eye on it keep it fresh and she has a good eye for things that like hey you should put this photo up we can do this we can do that so we are looking to do that and maybe standardize where you find things and page to page department of department that type of thing so you don't go looking all over the other thing we're eventually also want to do is make sure that our citizens can interact with the website like if you want to pay for something or do something online you don't always have to come into our offices and then standardize who are using for those financial transactions yes and to keep us appraised on that process on a regular basis i would really appreciate it the comments questions it and the there's comments in there about the facebook page it says i asked the question about it says the village was taking over the facebook page but then when i asked about it the response said that it was a general public outreach informational thing and the select board is never discussed that facebook page is not just wondering whether we should or whether there's we could at least see what the policy is so we feel comfortable with it i'm really happy to bring you what we develop for that it's basically the village took it over because it was offered to the village voice in three minutes a good to use darby's name derby worked with bridget and there were some so it was the strings but we'll call it strings they wanted to keep it alive they've got about two thousand followers and we saw it as an opportunity  able to get municipal message out to at least two thousand people of the village in town because there are town people who are signed up for it and so i will bring that policy back to you and if the town wants to post to it we wanted to be able to get information out to as many people as part of our communications i don't want to say strategy because we don't have one yet  one but trying to get our message out to as many people about our meetings about open houses about things that are going on in both communities are one concern is we don't necessarily want it to be us being in a conversation with dialogue but that's what facebook also allows and the one thing that we did discuss was it being a public website you have to maintain a record that somebody said something you did something we will certainly do that but part of our policy procedure is if there's vulgar language or bad tone we reserve the right to remove a posting and we want to keep it civil we want to keep it up beat and it's really i would say ninety percent if not more informational ask real quick is the facebook page still called downtown essex junction i believe it is i think so i think as that would probably explain why it was just a village dealing with it and what we keep pumping out so that's what it's called but we keep pumping out information so when we send something out about a meeting or a special event santo was at the fire station this saturday it went out on our media outlets including twitter and so i guess the clarify wasn't concerned but i mean when you when you first had it in that you said it was a village entity and i just wanted to make sure no one understand that but the response so that it was a general one intended for the entire town and that's where i'd want to understand what the situation was in and the other the other thing is that we had at one point greg given us a model social media policy that we never there was just included in a reading for we never touched it again  and you mention that you don't i think you mentioned you don't want to be a discussion platform necessarily and so the thing that concerns me is whether or not it's appropriate for select board members to ever post on there because it can quickly become a discussion and that you know even other select board members seeing comments made by select word members can be construed possibly be construed as an open meeting violation if you're right so it's a big one was going to be one atomic talk through those things ok for we will put ourselves in a position of having a we'll bring you back in a couple weeks and one of the things is and i will tell you this i recommend that you do not respond to most when we do respond we should respond from the town to this is free not individually and i would tend to refrain from getting into a back and forth dialogue we state the policy of what we do or don't do and try to stay away do things or why we don't do things and we tell them but we don't go back and forth and back and forth the secretary of state's office has guidance on social media policies for me to supply lease yields and we've had that conversation with legal was approached about taking it over that was offered up to us at this point we're not looking to take over any others i suppose if somebody had the offer we would consider it but we're not looking to go out and take it over as far as i was told it was we'd like someone to take it over or it's going to go away and we didn't want to lose something that had built two thousand plus followers so if somebody from essex talked to us and it fits in what we're trying to do is give it due consideration and i guess i would suggest that if we have a policy that tells us how to use the downtown  essex junction one or whatever it's called that if there are are rules that we as a select were to adopt a policy that we had on the need to apply to essex v t also i don't think you can be you know we should have a right i mean i'm not saying we're going to take it over but i think if we take i i you know if there's a social media platform out there that's focusing on our town and town business is being discussed on  or it has the same ramifications of one that we own it's a you know if it's a public record who's going to keep it and it's that i get very worried about you know that's not true it's only if if we control it we have to maintain it as a record if they're talking about town business they can do it anybody can talk about dumb business anything they want that doesn't make it a record that you know it but it but if you i'm sorry if you were talking about whether you go maintain that if i'm on facebook and i post some stuff about the town i own that record right i need to keep a copy of it need to make it available don't i and how do i prevent another two other select board members from reading it and having become a discussion that's a good question that's why you hear the owner of the record you're not you're not administering that site you have what you have put right there right you don't you don't physically control that record right was the one thing i think i heard it early on in correct me if i'm going to if i'm saying this wrong but i think there has to be one person in charge of who is updating that website not one person from each department but one person in charge of that website i happen to live with a website administrator interviews ok so that's five c in five d which will be in executive session and we'll see about having motions to do that later in the meeting ok then believe it or not  to the minutes then approval of the minutes of november nineteenth two thousand and eighteen do have a motion  too many too many records floating around but one that at the track changes as opposed to the accepted version since then kathy and i been talking to timmy and darby we think there's a more streamlined process it's going to have one person kind of word for word we didn't really do that here what's the board's pleasured you want to have the word for word in there so we can always point to it in case there's a violation and say  usually but i for one am not comfortable putting something in there if i didn't say it and if we didn't do it so ok put it in the future i think it would be good to have it kind of or bait him at least that piece do you to make it really transparent i'm lines one thirty six and one thirty seven and on the november thirty one senate there's a charge it's check number twenty one twenty nine for electric vehicle charge twenty nine hundred seventy four dollars as part of the installation of the they're moving it over here and are the police so i did this contract or something and get rid of the moving over here in a three year agreement with the company for billing  so we maybe am and maybe i'm going too far as do we anticipate revenue from from it or is it a feel good thing i'm going to try to be optimistic i try to never say never but it's going to be a long time before we break even on that deal but people do use it it is environmentally friendly it does support our mission with our invite energy  committee and we are seeing a lot more people use it here than they did at the police department and i think as the app and i'm told there are apps available that tell people where they're available and so but it is certainly elaine so the memo regarding the highly tax in the village rolling stock transfer the trustees didn't get to talk about it at our last meeting even though it said in our right we didn't cover it we table it so we haven't talked about it yet and i'm just curious if it's going to become a subject for a joint meeting or is it going to be handled at separate boards that's a really good question because the village board has not asked to do it therefore the town may or may not have anything to act upon if you were asked but the the hope is that they will both will see it in your reading viles and ask any questions and then present any questions either singularly a jur meetings or together at a joint meeting slash and if one is held a joint budget type meeting to understand what's being proposed so it could be discussed they really would depend on whether the village is going to ask but from a staff person active we think the idea has merit and maybe i'm missing something but i think it would be more transparent if these i can just imagine trying to explain one of these things to a reson and saying but they're happening at the same time and i think the reason excuse me i think the reason they're couple is because in the end they result in smaller net increase because we're combining them i understand why we're doing that so you know and you're asking us to maybe separate it out so it's a little clearer of the two separate actions equal something ok and then we show how they impact when combined with very should they both be things that we want to do we may have something we don't want to hear in the outside the village tax or we may decide we want to move the rolling stock but a couple of new gather prevents us from all the other i think it's just again easier for the public to parse and it's easier for us to talk about things if we consider them separately rather than just as a package deal which is sort of back up a little bit before we get there ok ok  anything else in the reading for and yeah i've learned that i may be out of town on january twenty third which is a budget meeting i think that's the date that we intend to set the budget right and so when i don't you know i am going to be in california still be three o'clock for me i'm going to see if i can arrange my schedule to participate on this state to discuss the employment of public officers pursuant to one vs a three thirteen a three to include the unified manager and deputy town manager if we could also have sarah and t include the unified manager and deputy town manager and i didn't think so if you have second on the second you think any further discussion about going into executive session for that