and if you read states that it's really the top towns to deal with issues of common interest to our town our member towns with but we have a primary focus on transportation but two thirds of our funding comes from transportation but then we also get very active inventory in traffic count program each summer and we retain about in turn has it come in and assist our staff in getting the counts made for all the communities that have requests for special active you can find information about the cancer available to your  community in the links that are given in this document and as you'll hear about later we're going to have the opportunity for you and identify any counter inventories that you may want for the coming field season through our in a work  process in our transportation improvement program which is essentially the for your capital program that gets the planning program document that gets incorporated right into the state's program of course got a few projects going near us to paving project which is wrapping up now bridge thirty two overs my filing broke and then the richmond park and ride expansion which was recently completed so we continue to keep active projects that have been identified for i believe have already been presented to the switchboard so they have that wrapped up and potentially ready for action through other grant funded sources coming up and so those are the principal activities we also transportation and management services to try to encourage people to use to apply for projects to be included in the work program are our fiscal year starts july first twenty fifteen running through june thirtieth two thousand and sixteen and the application should be coming to you within two weeks and it will be a january twenty third for responding we have a variety of funding sources charlie mentioned principally transportation dollars available but there's a lot of ways to integrate transportation into projects we have communities to inform base code and other sort of integrated transportation and land use for transportation water follow the projects so if you have ideas in mind for projects our staff are happy to work with the staff of your community to shape those ideas and get them into an application that can be competitive for potentially  being funded for planning through our organization so we're happy to help with that the other activity that we recently concluded was the update of our public participation plan and we are required by the federal government through our federal highway administration program to adopt a public participation plan updated every five years and this time around we strove to create a document that was much more in depth in terms of including populations that would not traditionally participate in our planning process and also looking at how to be more strategic about the types of participation that we engage with for each project so we've developed a worksheet process that helps us understand planning on the complexit planning project how much engaged in what types of engagement tools we might utilize how we might better include under represented come communities in our process and then also a process to evaluate the effectiveness of our at risk of a road and you know you don't want to put it in structures or if you could help it and then how to deal with that but that's just something to look at they're hoping the town's going to look at those maps get  right fit for the town and adopt protections as you have the flood plains so that's just a heads up another heads up we're going to try something we haven't done before which is hosting a legislative breakfast for agencies have come together around the issue of transportation provision for elderly and disabled folks that are not able to access all the resources they need to get the rides to medical appointments to it's trying to expand the base of providing more rides and i'm not going to spend a lot of time on this there's a lot of information here and welcome you to take a look at it it gives you a lot of demographic data related to the growing populations in particular of seniors that are going to be needing these resources in the coming years and you will i'm sure you're going to hear more about this issue in this topic as time goes on allison  select board essentially we are trying to get communities to encourage folks within their community to become volunteers to assist in the ride program and more as more resources become available where we can bring or whatever review process you want to have the in your town but there will be a little bit of a glass i think as opposed to a flood plain up to the one thing i want to size and this is coming out a conversation just recently that the reporter manager as project has been program going to be trans incarnation of the community that the reclaiming projects do not include those areas outside of the right of way so that have to be a concurrent project to the village to as and i don't know if you have funding for the project or not otherwise it would have to come in later on a separate project and if you haven't yet done planning analysis for that type of project to address the facilities that the lady from the audience mentioned that could be something we could think about in doing sort of a comprehensive village area transportation assessment the conservation commission thank you already so the issue at hand is the girl scouts have filed an application for a permit to remove the d m and we've heard presumably associated with its structural integrity and safety risk like so secondary team it's a complicated issue it's a complicated resource who's also complicated issue all this transpiring from governors to the various parties involved the state the engineers the girl scouts different land owners  relationship between parcels as they're laid out the dam itself and who owns what  consideration of the different values of from a strictly ecological viewpoint it's a little bit complicated you know but you know true environmentalist would say all are bad you know dam should be removed because they impede the flow of aquatic organisms and change the nature of this are called natural landscape but the pond itself is about people wildlife resource as it is  the area doesn't have a whole lot of ponds particularly undeveloped ponds and lakes and since the pond does exist in its current state it has become an important wildlife resource resource  spiritual value there for people who like to experience wilder places that are under stir undeveloped i think on balance people in general see all those values appreciate those values and would like to see the pond continue its current state  i think it's complex you know a lot of people might say that it's sort of a wild rustic place to dam and and the entire parcel there are surrounding woodlands and the lake itself know it would be a lot of people might like to see it just maintain the way it's currently maintained you keep the structure as is and put some rocks on it but there are a lot of requirements i think from an engineering standpoint a safety it i think the state would like to see it and improved if it's not in the moved it seems the sort of bottom line thinking amongst engineers and public officials that the state or that it you know poses some level of of safety hazard you know that might be that assessment is somewhat debatable perhaps that's that's their concern and that's their responsibility to people who have responsibility or liability in that area obviously very concerned that we do something to shore up the dam for the place pontus to try to work with the girl scouts to help relieve them of some of the responsibilities that are compelling them to want to remove the dam you may have a liability they have safety concerns they have financial concerns and i think there are a lot of parties would like to step up and assume some of those responsibilities some of those liabilities but you know i don't know how best to proceed with that what particular avenues might be most  conservation commission of this town stands as we were sui sort of anticipate that other parties who are working on solutions to the problem may eventually approach us for use of some conservation reserve funds to help  effort so you know aside from individual members on the commission who have a specific interest in working with friends and to left on leave not as a group take a lot of action proactively know i don't know that i can speak for the entire commission but you know one point i would like to make is that if there is a request for funds from the town of richmond to engage in dam reconstruction or something like that it seems to me it would be best if it was a broad based project that had a lot of matching i would look personally i would look less favorably on the application that was looking to put a lot of the financial load on richmond because i think the interests go much beyond our town and one could almost argue that it's more funding to on than ours because the access is so much closer to some of their village of the patients there may be yes there is time i think the girl scouts continue to spend money on engineering which could be perhaps better spent or saved again good evening everyone while i'm here to talk about our communicators camp which is a private nonprofit organization with the town of richmond and i don't see anybody on the board that was here in two thousand and nine right when we first incorporated this is a camp i'll just give you a very brief update i want to take as little time as possible our community cares camp is basically at its core it's a summer food service program to meet the nutritional needs of children in the summertime it was actually started by the richmond congregational church in the late ninety's when they felt that there was a need to address this issue and it had many different configurations over time and then in two thousand and nine it sort of changed and we became a private nonprofit where before even running sort of through the town the town had been running some of the finances and that kind of associations and things but anyways we were there and since two thousand and nine two we've run for six seasons now we've grown to be a fairly large program the summer we served over fifty five hundred meals to over two hundred thirty children within the chin in the school district primarily richmond huntington and bolton were located at campbell's hot middle school although in the past we've been at our yes and we've been up at brow river which because there was construction at the schools we have a very strong partnership with the school department we feed all of the children who go to summer school we feed them two meals a day for the month of july and we have an enrichment program and enrichment camp our partnership with the school district the children are able to write buses to come to camp at the same time as the summer school is happening so that allows us to be an extremely successful program we've  been complemented by the state and by hunger free vermont and for other people for having sort of an example program we've been able to get a number of grants so that we can buy food from local farms it's a wonderful little biased but it's a wonderful program we have a really high quality camp program in richmond camp and this summer we were able to increase it by having a good music program or a teaching ukuleles we have some drumming  we had an artist in residence we're doing our juicing the kids to our and just letting them really express their creative selves we also have a cooking program where everybody learns how to cook which is a good life skill but most importantly if we have some really good fresh food a lot of it from local farms and children get to learn how to make good choices in nutrition as well as in behavior so we address a lot of different issues in the town may just give you a few a few statistics about our program this year  this summer we had thirty two employees which is pretty good out of that they were eighteen from richmond a lot of them are just students or teens so providing a lot of good quality jobs for kids we also have an internship program with junior counselor program this year we only had nine we usually have twenty was it was a short program we hear it's a low numbers but we have a job training program for fourteen sixteen year olds and now most of my employees some of who were been with me for five years some for six some for five some for for most of our counselors started off as interns and then they've grown into the job is a great deal of of loyalty there we have  last year we started a program for upper middle school students our primary program for our community cares care friends from kindergarten through sixth grade we started a program for seventh and eighth graders because that's a group that's grossly under served by any other recreational program you know little league stops at twelve everything stops at twelve so we have a program that goes for seventh and eighth graders and that's a great time because it's a very difficult time in kids lives because they're they're finding out about themselves and they awkward or what what not had a very very successful program and this summer i was really thrilled because they did a public service project where they created launch it and invited senior citizens up and serve the lunch to them and to see them  fridays and we've been doing that in huntington for a number of years also so that so we served at it in richmond we serviced a total of five thousand meals at the library here we serve one hundred five meals in huntington we serve two hundred thirty five and at m m u we serve two hundred seventeen because we service that program also we buy all of our stuff in town to the grocery store with the richmond home supply so i think we've become a real economic our budget now i up in the sixty thousand dollars range my payroll alone was over forty seven thousand dollars for the summer so we're providing a lot of good jobs and what not the town i want to come here mostly to think the town for your support even though you may not know it you're supporting the program because you provide directly underneath us is the winter home of our community cares camp and everything is stored in the base but and you provide this space free of charge which we are very very grateful for i also now have a very small office space within the teen center downstairs the teen center and o c c are kind of slowly working their way towards each other in the town where the camp has a lot of partnerships with a lot of different groups in town we do a lot of facilitating  and things it's just it's just kind of cool to see it all sort of come together we have never asked the town to include us in your budget mostly because i felt that you know as a nonprofit we get most of our funding by asking people for money and we also fill out a lot of grants applications i think this year i did very well i got almost twenty five thousand dollars in grants but we also get a lot of money from you know private citizens and from businesses and from fundraisers and i always feel that the richmond provides a lot of support by providing this office space for this storage space for us but if you would be so inclined to include us under your charitable contributions even with something token of like fifty dollars or one hundred dollars we would not refuse it just to show number one show your support for the program and maybe help to help encourage other people to put us as part of their budget we do have a number of people who have become annual donors and we hope that they're happy we have a website at w w w dot our community cares camp dot org that was donated by breezy help marketing they loved what we were doing so that they bought our domain name and they are posting the website and they designed it and they help us maintain it we have a facebook page so we are really getting out there there's lots of photographs we had a great little video done this summer that's on our website four and a half minutes that just shows the impact to these children some of them have been with us now for six years and they just talk about what would i do in the summertime if i didn't have our community cares camp to come to and i look forward to going to the seventh and eighth grade campus you call the leadership adventure camp and then they are looking forward to becoming junior counselors then they want to become counsellors so you're seeing this really very very cool one kid talked about one kid from  huntington talked about meeting his best friend before he even got to camel's hump he met his best friend who's from richmond and he became friends at camp so it's really kind of a very cool phenomenon and i believe that this we're sort of on the vanguard of what's happening in the future is that we're addressing local issues on a local level and having a really big impact on the state keeps asking me why can't we expand the program because we do so well that go county wide or state wide and i said well then we wouldn't have the same impact on this community you know we have eighty kids a day can we double the number of kids that are getting a quality summer program some of those kids were helping prevent the summer just very very cold and i want to make sure that you guys knew and everybody knew what we were doing and to thank you for your continued support and if you'd like to include us as a budget item like i said something minimal even ten dollars just to decide where in the budget as something that is good for people even if it could get somebody to ask the question is what is this town meeting so we could answer that  question we'd appreciate it but if not we still appreciate you for everything that you do and you know you don't know it but you're you're doing a lot by just providing this storage space we have some really good values we try to be very green our request on the front porch form whenever we need supplies people donate supplies to us art supplies games toys and things of a budget item most of my budget goes to payroll and food i think our payroll ok were i said was like forty seven thousand this year our food was almost ten thousand dollars but if you figure serving fifty five hundred meals we still have a pretty good ratio there we're very very few other other cost our voice mail donated by green mail waitstill telecom so that nine dollars a month charges daunce who are really it's one hundred dollars we don't have to pay every year so that's about it do you have any questions for  reach more than fifty percent of the kids that are being fed qualify for free and reduced lunch then we get reimbursed for all the meals from the u s d a and our target audience is kids who aren't going to get to camp any other way so we are aimed at the lower income brackets but also if you look at the way i say i describe it as if you look at free reduced lunches sort of the bottom twenty five percent if you're making between that twenty five percent or fifty percent you still can't afford to send your kid so we don't discriminate against people because of their incomes but sometimes you have families in transition oh you'll have kids that have social issues or or or needs to have that socialization and that kind of support in the summer time so we don't ask people for their financial information but you know eventually i have to get that i get have the school department gives me that exposed person for a lot of different resources like this to see those kids and when they see me like in the grocery store or something or even a how to lean i was doing trick or treating over at the college for church on friday the girl comes so i know who you're from are just the way to combat it is there and and they just they're you know and one of their all the summer said i used to hate summer because i didn't have anything to do and you know i have friends and i can do all these things and the kids are really passionate about it too so i think if you watch that little four minute video that was produced by griffin russell a local student i think you'll see that those kids feel very passionate about it too and i think it's making the community a better place because those kids are they feel like they are loved by their family unity and that there is somebody cares for them outside of the school outside of their family and they bond to their counselors and it's changed the life of all of our counselors too like i believe  shallow who's went to dartmouth was one of my counselors and he wrote his college essay about his experiences lisbeth's morris has changed her her career path based on her experiences with the you know other you know it has a profound impact on everybody who's been a so it's just it's just a really cool thing that happens and i substitute at the high school now and i see kids come running over to me and they're like i was at your k f and they get they get very excited were catching up on  it you maybe it would be useful to have you here next in our conversation the water sewer commission because we were talking about what is the value of water for fire protection and we'll have more  so overall with those changes it does represent a slight overall decrease in the budget for fire we're going to be staggering the debt payments for the new fire trucks that  be placing so rather than buy thirty units at the end of the fifteen year cycle through placing five year now six years so that we can not pop to have a thirty year  does not now doesn't bode we could talk about that i did have a memo where i prepared for the requests were some of the forms hadn't come in that sense received three of those back the conservation reserve fund it's been requested that the selectors were to prove that were valid it's automatically australian ballot if it were put on the ballot or the wording of what was  rather revisions that's going to be presented to the select board at our next meeting we would have a public hearing advertised for december fifteenth and then we would have an australian ballot meaning helen junior fourteenth to put that as australian values for a town meeting that is a time schedule with no room for error any major changes that would require a second public hearing  i think that's going to be during the week of thanksgiving i'm not going to be here but you can hold a special meeting to say that the warning is it i think that generally that was is the the floodplains are getting is not anywhere as controversial as it used to be and not as controversial as the gate which is right right so you would have public hearings on well you know you've got there not public here not so there so you would have would have to put the questions on the ballot for richmond rescue and and the tax stabilization move them to be on the ballot and say you're going to have a meeting of the voters on january fourteenth to decide whether they're australian valid or not for the zoning you would have public and then you would decide whether you're going to adopt them so i'm a little embarrassed to say that the data logger for the speaker was not connected issue which has to do the blind hill and i spoke to pete cars one about what he felt about that and he said there's actually rockledge very shallow buried by the road here  so you can't build the road up very high either because in order to maintain your slope you have to have a wider base we'll have the right of way for them he says that you could try to relocate the route to the east of the bar which is on the downhill with the auditor or the financial stamp last week they're preparing to wrap things up they should have a draft to us in a couple of weeks which you know of all share that the select word we can review pay what if the benefit you the gateways a failed septic there are talks about who's really to blame for the failed septic and people are starting to get attorneys so the town may or may not be you mean by small well so there's two sort of outstanding basic problems one is that there's an open septic in my backyard that's a health situation that needs to be resolved it doesn't look that way to me it looks like it was actually underground is a different and so he said he just died test and so it's taken us a while to figure out who's authorized the one who died just how to do this so that this kind of result now so you know it