TranscriptSelect Board Meeting ~ May 13, 2025

here to order. We do have a quorum. Um Heather has been excused for the meeting and we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance. States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

to the agenda? All right. We have, uh, public comment. Do we have anyone here for public comment? Oh boy. Come on up. Name and address. Next to you. You probably You can probably hear me without being here, but we want the people at home to hear you. Oh yeah. I'm Mark Blake from the notoriously famous Stack Pole

Road. Um we had a big event this weekend, trash pickup day, which we have most every years. And uh un unlike some of our big townwide events, you know, Memorial Day or Durham home days, this one here was probably not as glamorous. But nevertheless, Bush the important, maybe even more important in some ways. Um kind of what bothered me about it is we didn't have anybody from the board of Suckman or our new town manager show up. In years past, we've always had somebody show up. I think Jerry did a couple years ago. He showed up at when he first came on and unfortunately for Josh he showed up to get rid of his stuff and unfortunately for him it was my station. So I got the Nor on his ear a little bit but he seems to have them both. So I don't think it beat him up too bad but it would be I think it would be good for somebody on this board to show up at those things. You won't believe the stuff you might learn. It's uh

especially since we're looking at other things right now. So, it's kind of disappointing to see that nobody showed up and it it was a bad day. So, nobody wanted to show up. But unfortunately, that's the way it works. Um, so I just like to put that out there. So, maybe in the future since I've been involved on that side or this side of the table, there's always been somebody show up. Sometimes two people. You don't have to stay all day. You don't have to work. Sometimes we don't need you to help, but it would be nice just to have that exposure. Um, the other thing that I noticed, and this is kind of not so much for our guys as it would be maybe for the Cassella people, but I know that when we have our roadside trash picked up, we're supposed to have a certain weight limit. And if we got recyclables are supposed to be cut down and do whatever to to fit. We don't seem to do that with our trash pickup days. And we

have full-size couches come in and lazy boys. And I think we actually had a rabbit cage that was 8 ft long. It's especially after all that rain, all that stuff soaked up with water pretty good. And these guys never complained. Nobody ever seems to. But they were struggling sometimes to get that stuff out of the truck or up off the trailer and get it into the back of that smasher. Granted, once it's in there, that thing will chew them up like Cheerios and milk. But they shouldn't have to do that, especially since we require less of that with our roadside pickup. And we don't want them guys getting hurt anymore. We want our guys getting hurt cuz they get hurt, their cost goes up, eventually that trickles back to us and we know cost usually goes up anyways. So, just a couple things I like to throw out to thought about when we have our our big pieces like our stoves or our washers and dryers. It's

not the same because we don't really have to lift them so much by hand because roll them off the back of the truck or roll them off the trailer and the guys there's two or three guys there. They roll it into the bucket of the of the loader and that does all the heavy lifting. So, it's not as strenuous in that respect. So, it's just something that and like I said, that's on the Cassella side. Maybe they don't care. That's up to them. But I would think that we would require maybe those couches, maybe you cut them down to the size of a skid, two or three pieces. I think that only makes sense. It would also speed up the process because you wouldn't be wrestling trying to get them in the back of that smasher. So, just a couple things to think about. Like I said, you don't have to be there every time. Don't have to be there all day. Don't even have to work. But since you guys are the leaders, the top six

leaders of this town, you would think somebody would be there and show that and show that they've been there. And you might learn something talking to the guys, too, because they don't all work in town. So, it would be a good thing. The other thing I like to thank Kelvin because he did buy his his uh guys food. I thought Cassellas were supposed to, but apparently they went out to breakfast and came back in time for lunch and decided not to buy pizza. So, I don't know what happened there, but at least we didn't go away hungry. So, anyways, that's that's my spiel from the Stat Pole road. Yeah. Well, thank you for your feedback. Sorry about that, Josh. I hope I didn't steal it all. I was going to tease you, but you're okay. I'm going to stay just for a minute or two. Yeah, no worries. Do we have any other public comment for the evening?

motion to approve our previous meeting minutes. So moved. Do I have a second? Second. Do I have any discussion? All right. Seeing none, all in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none, passes. Uh, we have no old business, so we're going to go into new business and we're going to give our fire chief the floor here. Thank you. I'm guessing that's what everyone's here for and they're not just here to hang out with us. That's how important and wellreceived the select board meetings are. Um, tonight I need to recognize it's the fire chief's job, excuse me, to recognize uh when members of the department do something extraordinary above and and beyond. Uh, and that's tonight. Uh, first before we get to the double recognition, I I need Martin Crusade to come up and his wife Renee. Um, Martin's been with us a year now. Um, as you can see, he hasn't even gotten his badge yet. Um, and after ENT school, which we'll we'll get to, Martin

decided to at least take his family on vacation after 6 months of that. And what he didn't know at the banquet was his brothers, his members voted him rookie of the year. So on behalf of the fire department, on behalf of the brothers, I present this to you. Martin Cruset is rookie of the year 2024.

to the general public. Uh when your brothers know, you you can't fool your brothers, right? So when they vote you rookie of the year for showing up, enthusiasm, um funny enough, him and Kevin were out 2 a.m. this morning. uh you you can't you can't train that, you can't teach that. So, it's appreciative. It really is. Um so, because he's been here a year, uh he does get a

anniversary badge. And if I can have I I'll trade you. If I can have Renee put that on you. We'll practice. We won't stab him. one in the team that's ready to go. Some direct pressure. It's already [Music] smiling. I thought Martin had the Boston accent. Apparently, it's Hamburg, Germany is where his accent's from. Um, came over. They bought Matty Lane off of Bowie Hill. Nice. Look at that. Huh. Also, this goes with your 75th P. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Don't go anywhere. Uh Kevin, front and center. You probably know Kevin Merrill because he's been recognized before um for his response for the uh pick a side um for the Lewon

shooting. He he was recognized. So, I'm just going to throw out some numbers for these two. I I needed volunteers to go to EMT school. Lisbon EMS, who we partnered with, said, "Hey, Chief, if you know of anyone that wants for free, go to EMT school in the fall. Uh, we'll pay for everything." Uh, and and I suckered literally these two into it. Uh, and what they signed on for was 6 months, no pay, every Monday night starting October, all through the holidays. every Monday night for four hours, every Saturday for six or seven hours, hands-on, through holidays, through Christmas, Thanksgiving, New Year's. They had a 50% dropout rate in in the school. They had a 25% failure rate for the taking the national exam and both of them passed uh for Durham, the last man standing for for their EMTs. I I almost need to recognize Kevin Merrill again because a buddy of his recently called him up uh who was in

Florida and said, "Hey, I got some medical questions for you." And he and he says, "Don't ask me. I I just right 40 minutes on the phone trying to convince his buddy like, "Hey, these are signs and symptoms. I need you to go to the hospital. Like, I know you're getting ready to get on a cruise. I need you to go to the hospital." He convinced his buddy to go and saved his life. if he'd gotten on the boat, they don't and he's in the audience, they they um they don't have those procedures on on the boat. He saved his buddy's life just by paying attention. Um I'd be remiss not to tell you a family affair really for for study time, um computer time. If you see the guys in the back, they all know they might have even uh um did they take the test for you or no? No. That's why you pass. Um and and another thing with numbers 80% you couldn't get below an 80%. So if y'all think back to school there was some days but uh 80% or

above what was passing and they both became EMTs. So on behalf of the fire department on behalf of the town certainly the select board we appreciate you. Again they were both on a medical at 2:00 this morning. I I wasn't there but these guys are picking up the slack. Uh there's no higher calling than being an EMT and and emergency management in the back of an ambulance and they both need to be recognized tonight. So these EMT pins slightly gold uh will be attached to your uniform and it is my pleasure to to do so. That will go there. Thank you, sir. Congratulations.

it so that we're going to go across the street if you want to the Eureka Center for some light fair drinks. Uh there we go. Yeah, I'm busy. Nope. But uh thank you, Mr. Chair, for taking the time. Oh, no. Thank you guys. Service you provide to our community is immeasurable and I think it's really great that we can do this at least a little bit of recognition, but there's a lot of people who live here who can recognize the Durham EMS and fire as life saving or structure saving and and uh just keep up the good work. We're we're lucky to have you both and have all of you in the audience as well. So, and and we're lucky to have Chief. There it is. Thank you. So, we will get out of the way. Please join us and uh Kevin and Martin's family across the street. I know I've seen Mr. Chair. You need anything else? No, we're good. Thanks, Chief. Take your whole Perfect. Thank you guys. Thank you. Something you said.

that they heard drinks, too. But I took care of that before I come over. I heard you. This looks like uh agenda here is going to be our town center facilities presentation. Um Jerry, you want to get this in introduced here? Yeah. Um I'd like to introduce uh Christina Egan and Christian Rodman of GP Cog. Um

thank you Mark. They did a facility studies. We got a grant through GP COG and uh they facilitated a uh study with a standard committee and uh with George Tibage about the the town what we're calling the town center and uh they're going to come up and present um how that went and some of the findings and uh and

what next steps might be after after they give their presentation. Okay, great. Perfect. All right, chair. Should I We We just got to get you close enough for the microphone to pick you up. Does this come off? No, it's not attached to the table. There we go. That seems a little strange, but that's all right. It's easier for me to be over here if that's all right with you. Whatever works for you. All right. So, I'm Christine Egan. I'm the executive director of the Greater Portland Council of Government. I'm here with our senior planner, Christian RHDman, who's the brains behind all of this, and he's here for whatever questions that you have. I'm really delighted, Phyllis, that you're here because you're part of the advisory committee. I thought more people would be here tonight. Um, I'm glad it's going to be recorded because what we tried to do is get for you the input that we received from many, many people. Um, and

we actually had an extraordinary amount of residents that weighed in on this process. So, what we're going to do tonight is I'm going to run you through a presentation that tells you what your residents said about the town center. We're calling it town center even though you don't actually have a commonly held name for this area. So it's just a standin. You might call it something else later. But you had a lot of residents that have a lot of ideas about it. And we're going to tell you about what those ideas are. And then at the end of this I'm going to try to lead you workshop style to see whether the select board actually has some priorities. And if you can settle on some priorities then it'll be easy for us to define what the next steps are for you. But there are a lot of options. So I'm just going to warn you on that. All right. So our

scope of work started with looking at the intersection of Routes 9 and 136 of ways to try to improve the safety. And from there it kind of expanded to looking at your other facilities because of course the Eureka Center is right there and it may have an impact on the intersection. And we wanted to look at the whole parcel here to understand how the transportation works but also how the facilities work with one another. So the bulk of our work has been to understand what the community thinks about this. How well is the fire station working? Eureka station working, town hall, little league field, this whole area. How well is it working for your residents? And then start to develop a vision. Now a vision can be very modest. it. Your vision could be actually the problems aren't too bad. We're not going to do anything, right? You've got a status quo option. It can be, hey, we're going to do these small lowcost things

or we're going to do this one big thing that needs to be done. And I'm going to tell you, you got a lot of opinions out there on that. So, first we'll just start with what I think is probably the simplest and most straightforward. There are some safy safety concerns around this intersection. And we heard from people that they were worried when they're taking that right-hand turn, if they can't see, if somebody else is taking a left. Um, we did look at whether this was a place where a lot of crashes were happening because that could justify some real investment in infrastructure. It did not come back as a high crash location. So, Main Dot has told us it's not a strong candidate for a major realignment, right? Like you could like cut off the corner and make it a T. That's pretty expensive. and Main DOT saying that they're not going to really pay for that. If the town wanted to do it, you could negotiate that with Main

DOT, but we think that um and Main Dot thinks that you could accomplish some safety improvements with paint. So, this is a diagram that actually Main Dot worked up for this project and for Jerry and um are willing to kind of consider and go forward with. And Jerry, I'm just going to stop here and see is there anything you wanted to add about your conversations with Main Dot? That exact picture went to the regional traffic engineer or the regional engineer Calvin right today to look at Calvin's been in touch. They will look at that to see if that is something that they can do. Yep. So, um, just fast forwarding to the end of my presentation, one of my first questions for you is, do you want to see this improvement? And you can answer yes or no, and then we can move forward from there. All right. Now, I'm going to get into the more complicated pieces. So, um, I'm going to tell you first about the community engagement.

This was overseen by an advisory committee which um thank goodness we have a couple members here and we also had different community meetings, facility meetings that some of you as select board members participated in after we formed the advisory committee which was really to oversee the public engagement process to make sure we were reaching out to all aspects of the community and to kind of guide us along the way. We did a public survey and the survey was um advised again by this group. They came up with a lot of the questions and then we did it, you know, put our survey expertise to it to figure out how to ask the questions. Then we had and I'm going to tell you the results of that. Then we had a um stakeholder meeting that included folks that were really tied to the different facilities so that we made sure that the users of the facilities were telling us how they used it, what the problems were

when they were using it, what they hoped for that facility. And you can see the stakeholders listed here. And then we had a public visioning session which was really like let your artists loose and we gave people a piece of paper and they could draw what their visions were and I'm going to share some of those with you. This was the this these are the members of the advisory committee and Phyllis is here. Um, we had really wide expertise here and we also had a lot of long-term residents who um have watched how changes have happened in Durham and really gave voice to people who are on lower incomes, may not have as much money or are getting forced out of town. So, we had a really good mix of kind of newcomers to Durham and people who have been here for a long time. A lot of different perspectives were represented on the advisory committee. This was appointed by the select board, I believe last year. Is that right, Joe?

Yeah, here's the results of the public survey. First of all, we had 350 results. So, 350 people, which we have, I have to tell you, for a size of Durham, we have never gotten that percentage rate before on one of our surveys. So, you guys really knocked it out of the park and it was a lot due to the advisory committee because they put the paper surveys at the stores and you had them at the election, one of the churches, one of the churches. We also had it online. And so you got a lot of responses. We asked a few different big questions. First off was how often do you use these main facilities? You can see a lot of people, the major vast majority of people use the town office several times a year. For the Eureka Center, you don't have quite as many people. You have a lot of people saying never. I've never even used the Eureka Center. And the same thing for the fire station. So I've been in this fire

station. I can't even how I can't count how many times during this project, but that's because you use it as a meeting space for your close-ins stakeholders, your select board meetings, your committees, etc. But most of your residents don't use it that way. So, how important are town facilities for these different purposes, whether it's public service, meeting, or recreation? And what you can see is that people are ranking these different purposes as of some importance. So everybody recognizes that your town facilities are playing an important part in the community even if they're not using them. Then we asked the question, all right, we know we would love to improve everything, but it costs money. So how much would you support spending money on making these making improvements and we didn't define exactly what their improvements were? So this is a general question to just take the appetite of the town. What we found

is there's, you know, quite a bit of opposition. The red is the opposition, right? Those are folks that are saying, "I don't really want to pay any money, right? This is like strongly opposed or somewhat opposed." And then you've got support, somewhat support, and strongly support. And it's close to opposed, but if you took a vote without the green column, you wouldn't be moving forward with anything. The green column, we believe this is people saying, "I need more information before I can decide," which is legit, right? We didn't tell you how much it was going to cost. We didn't tell you what the improvements were. We just wanted to take the general sense of people. Christian, anything to add to that? Yeah, just agree is unsure. I need more information. Unsure. Yeah, I definitely got that feedback from people too and said they taken the survey that they said how much and and what. I'd have to know that first. So, just

anecdotally, exactly. So, like you could see if you put something forward that people really wanted and it didn't cost a lot of money, you might get over that opposition line and you could move forward with something. On the other hand, if you put forward something that most people didn't really care that much about and it cost a lot of money, you probably would not be able to move forward with it if you had a town vote. So, that's how we're interpreting these results. You have quite a mix of opinion about whether to invest in improvements.

So I'm going to give you the highle summary and then I'm going to go facility by facility and tell you what we heard. So the first is residents really do value and see the importance of the town's assets, but they are concerned about the cost of the upgrades. That's a very reasonable place for most of the people in the public to be. We heard over and over that this place does not work as a meeting space and we'll go into some of the reasons why that was shared. We also heard specifically from town staff and from some users of the town office that it's cramped and there's not enough space for town staff to work efficiently with each other. We heard that the Eureka Center is really valued for its historic like role that it's played in the community. It's a beautiful building has a lot of potential to be better for the town, but it also has a lot of challenges and it may be expensive to fix. Um as is the

town office. And then when we kind of opened up, what else would you like to see here that would bring people together in Durham where they could feel like they're part of a larger community? There were many ideas about how to make this space more usable for your residents and we'll highlight some of those. All right, so here we are in the fire station. We actually were sharing exact quotes from some things that we pulled out because these were stakeholder meetings. We heard from some people very strongly these meetings should not be happening in the in the fire um station. Um there were a couple big concerns. One is the select board has its executive sessions here. So they can be overheard by the people that are here. It's very hard to stop that from happening. Um there's also a security risk because there's no way to really lock people out of where all the equipment is and you also have

pharmaceuticals that are kept here. uh the parking is not adequate for big meetings where you have a lot of people coming in and then also after the meetings the breakdown and cleaning really falls on the firefighters. So there's an additional burden there. So these were some of the reasons why people thought it didn't work all that well. Um you guys are in here all the time so you can tell me later when we start workshopping about how big a issue you think it is. When we heard about the Eureka Center, we got a lot of people who were like, "We got married there." You know, we were we had dances. We we used to be on the second floor. Yeah. We did a tour. The second floor is not usable, as you probably know right now. Um it is pretty cold in the winter. I did do one of my workshops in a winter coat there. Uh there's no AV or internet. You've got the pillars that make it hard to see if you've got

somebody up front. So, there's some real limitations to the space. If you're trying to use it like this as a meeting space, some of it can be probably addressed. Um, some people f thought that if you renovated the second floor, you could actually get a lot more use out of that building and what that use would be would be determined. Um, the parking area is allowing unlimited access. We've heard from the DOT, they really don't like that, right? There's no actual curb cut. It's just like a big dirt place that you go into. So, some people wanted to um try to streamline that access, make it a little bit more defined, maybe even pave the parking, and the parking area isn't lit. So, people were imagining they dropped their keys and would be stuck. When we heard about the town office, um there's no place for a staff person to like put a big document down flat because there's just not enough space. Many of the uh a couple of the

offices, and I'll show you a floor plan, um have several different people working in them. So it's difficult if they're on the phone. It's not very efficient. Uh sometimes people have to go into the server room or the storage space and has been used for voting and that has some security issues also. And there's also some concerns about you know active shooter or other types of things. There's not there's not another egress. There's only one entrance. And then what we heard about the fields and open space, um people were concerned that if people weren't if kids weren't enrolled in formal sports, they didn't really have much to do in this area. Uh folks that have younger kids, but older kids working playing in sports, they really love the idea of a playground or some area that was a little contained where younger kids could be while the games are going on. The parking area is kind of a mess. I

noticed tonight people are on the dirt and they're just kind of coming in on it's not a defined access really over on the other side. Um dog walkers use the space a lot. You can't really get easily between the different town facilities. And one person said, "Well, is there a way that we could better share this space with um the RSU?" And that's something we had an RSU person um Michelle at one of our meetings to kind of start exploring that. it there would need to be a much more detailed discussion to think about whether you could share some of the buildings or you could build or you could share the fields. There was I said at the beginning a diversity of viewpoints. I love these two in particular because the first one says I use the town office for these things. I think the building is very nice. It serves well. No new building. Great as is. The next one is like I use Eureka Center but it's not

practical for town needs. Please replace it with a new town hall. So you get like complete opposite perspectives that we got when we were giving people these little what do we call them the word um mad lips mad libs. Yeah we give people mad libs. Um I'm going to stop here and before I go into the potential improvements and the sketches that everybody started doing and just see if there are any questions just on the basic public input we've gotten so far from the survey and the stakeholders. How many sessions did you have with the with the committee? The committee met three or four times I believe. Is that right, Phyllis? You helped design the survey, helped analyze the survey results, helped design the two workshops. Cool. Any other questions? All right, I'm going to move on to the drawing portion of our program, which was fun. So, um, the first issue that really rose to the top was there isn't

really great meeting space for large public meetings. And I can't remember where do you do your town meeting? School. School. You do it at the school. Yeah. So um you know you've got Eureka and you've got this room. Those are the two places where these meetings can occur. So when people were asked to um think this through and this is the question that you're going to be asking if this if this is unacceptable which is a question for you then you need a different space and the space would need climate control internet and AV you'd want to be able to allow for privacy and private conversations like executive sessions. It has to be um accessible for people that have disabilities and there are different options here um for where that could be and there could be some options we didn't think of of places where you could meet. So that's your first if then and then make a decision. This is the um rough floor

plan. This is not to scale but George helped us figure out exactly where everything was. You can see here that you've got the town manager in one office and then you've got the server room and kitchen etc. The kitchen is not big enough for anyone more than one person to have a breakin. Um so people can't eat together. Then you've got the vault storage. Then you've got two people in each of those offices on the right. You've got your front desk area that also has the front counters, the service counters. So you've got two people there. So that's what you've got right now. You've got seven employees, five of them full-time sharing this space. Back in 2006, people were talking about expanding because there was a problem. And these are some um rough sketches that came out of that. And I'm putting this up here just to illustrate that this has been a discussion that's been going on in town for a long

time. So if staff don't have enough space, and that's the question for you. If it's not adequate, then a different space or an expanded space would space would be necessary. And again, there are a couple things you need to have here. You need to be able to have private conversations whether they're human resources or somebody's working with a resident on a real estate transaction or something like that that requires privacy. You'd want it to have climate control. You want it to be handicap accessible. So, couple different options here. One is you could have town hall be renovated to reallocate the existing space or you could add on. You could rework Eureka. You could renovate it. You could even move it back from the the um intersection, put it on a new foundation because there's some issues with the foundation or some other solution that we haven't thought of. Um I'm going to walk you through a

couple of these concepts which we just thought were really well drawn. You can tell we've got some excellent artists in Durham. Here's one where I'm going to walk up here just to point out a few things that I thought were interesting. This concept which was by Julia who was on the advisory committee. I had the idea of having some kind of a stone up here that said like town of Durham or something that was like a slogan about Durham and then the parking lots would be connected to to serve and you could have in and out access to serve Eureka the ball fields and the town hall. Um she envisioned that the Eureka center became the town hall and that these other buildings became is it mixed and stuff? Coffee shop. Coffee shop. Coffee shop. Yeah. uh she had the idea of a coffee shop. Um you put a basketball court in near the baseball field. You'd have a couple picnic pavilions here. You'd have a playground. So this is just

one person's idea. Another idea, this is from Neil Barry. He was also he's on the budget committee and also um part of the advisory committee. His idea here was that you would provide kind of paved parking here for the ball fields and you would move Eureka center back so to be away from the intersection onto a new foundation. Um, and Christian, remind me of this. I think there's some soccer fields. There's playgrounds. Soccer field. Playground. Yep. Um, and then this one over here, this is by Patrick Bole, and he was also on the advisory committee. He's a beautiful drawer here. He's an engineer. He's an engineer, so you can tell. And I think Julia is an architect, so we benefited from them. Um, so up here, he there's a modular. There's a there's a modular back here that's um we we we tooured that. It's got a lot of animal stuff in it and old files. It's not really it's not usable at the moment. So, his idea was how do

we restore that or use it for another I getting it right? I can't really read it very well. Yep. Expand the town hall. His idea of shared parking was kind of similar to Julia's. Hers created this arc, but here there's one parking lot that would serve these three different facilities here. Um, anything I missed on that, Christian? Opportunity for signage uh along along 136. Um, yep.

Yeah. So, a little bit of weighting or sort of identity similar to the concept on the left. So again, these are just sketches, ideas of three individual people, but I wanted to put them up because it gets towards the idea of a vision. And I thought it might spark your imaginations too about what not only what's possible, but also like what's most important, right? What are the things that are going to be most important to you? Um, so here we we we

we took all the different pictures and concepts that came together and I think George did this good tabulation. Thank you, George. Of how many people said what, right? So, expanding the town office was the top thing that came out of our community drawing uh workshop. And then having more shared parking rather than the parking being kind of atomized throughout this area was another important idea that came out, top idea. Um, folks were excited about moving or reorienting the Eureka Center, which would be accompanied by a full renovation and that you would have a driveway that would be like much more defined access off of the road, off of Route 9. Um, you would square off the intersection and that you would add a a crosswalk. Now, if you decided that the fire station was no longer needed, this is where we have to get into if then what, right? you probably wouldn't need this to be renovated for say AV and you

need it over at Eureka, right? So some of these things like they would accompany the particular project that you decided to do. You may not need a crosswalk if this is just going to be for fire. Might be a nice thing, but you may not need it. Um but if you are having meeting space, you could improve the pedestrian safety here. And it goes on here. You expand the parking. Again, you may not need to expand the parking here if you're moving your meetings over to Eureka or to the town the town hall. Um, you could create some pathways. You could build a sidewalk. Some of these things are really expensive and some of them are not expensive at all. So, here's the fire station. Um, and this is another way of looking at the information. I'm just getting your minds all oriented towards the questions I'm going to ask you pretty shortly. But first of all, you would say people said I should say no meetings here. Okay. But

if you were going to have meetings, you probably need a crosswalk and you would need to improve the AV and you need more parking. Um, and then is there a way to reuse the storage space? Now, I really wasn't we didn't dive into that too much. We do know that there are files that are over in town hall and there are files there. They all need to be digitized. Takes time. Um, but we didn't solve your file storage problem in this project. It's just wanted to to to pull it up for you so you knew that that was in the mix. All right, the town office. There kind of two options here. One is to renovate it and kind of reallocate the space if you can to be able to better fit your staff or you could expand it, which is a probably more straightforward way to go to just create more space there. You could expand it just for staff offices. You could also expand it to include a meeting space. You wouldn't want to do that and do Eureka, right?

So, these are probably mutually exclusive. For Eureka, you could renovate it. You can move it back in onto a new foundation. You would corral the car office. You'd pave the lot and you'd improve the lighting. So, that's if you decided that the Eureka Center was really your best idea for how you were going to serve the the community. Some people said you could move the town offices into Eureka. We didn't dive deep into that because we really need to get general direction from you first before going to the next step. For open space, these are some of the really lowcost things you could do if you wanted. You could add some paths. Um the parking could be gravel or better defined or you could pave it. That would be the more expensive option. You could fundra for a playground or put in a simple playground. that those playgrounds can be surprisingly expensive, but you can do them at all different levels. Um, you could create

more of a defined gathering space for people, maybe around some picnic tables. Picnic tables are really cheap. Um, you can even have a community garden was one of the ideas that came out. So these things did not rank as high in importance as your town hall issues and your meeting space issues, but there may be some lowcost things that you can do out of this. All right, so this is today just to orient you. Now we're going to go to some of what these things would look like on this on this schedule on this um schematic. So, uh, if you were to improve the fire station, you could put that crosswalk in. You could put in some paved parking across from Eureka, and you could add some picnic tables. And we just pulled little pieces of sketches that people gave us during the chet here to show you what people were thinking. You could expand the town office um, and add some walking paths and put a little playground in next to

the ball fields. If you moved Eureka back, you could create um some space there for the defined parking. You could also add a new building. You can see that gazebo styled thing that could be where you have some businesses or housing or that was some people's ideas. Um and you would have more defined access for parking. So those are all your ideas and now I wanted to talk through what some of the next steps are and then see if you are all able to get to some alignment on what you think are priorities. So one potential next step is to work with DOT to put that paint in. Another one is for you to decide whether you want to improve space for meetings andor for staff. And if you decide yes, you'd want to think through which options are worth exploring and start to obtain some cost estimates. And then if you wanted to go even further and make this more of a town center where people can really connect with each other, you'd want to

create a plan for this area. So those would be the rough next steps and you could phase them over time in whatever order you want. So, now we're going to workshop and we're going to see where you guys are on this. I can take any questions first, but then I'd like to Christian's going to take down notes here about where you guys are on this. Um, because you really have to set the direction on where this project will go from here. Does anyone have any questions before we get into the workshop stage? Actually, I do. Yeah. Um did you so with the people you spoke with uh did you have others coming to your meetings with pricing and pricing out certain aspects of it? We did not. Yeah. The pricing piece it's a it's a piece of work to get cost estimates for buildings and things like that. So we really wanted to check in with you before we went any further in thinking through that because as you can see there are a lot of different

options out here. Sorry, Rebecca. discussion about anything with the school grounds or the playground. Is there a playground at the school? There is. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and duplicating the playground here versus the school or is any of that an option? Or is it too far out of the way? Did the team discuss that at all? We didn't discuss it in depth. I mean, I think everybody recognized that like the parcel below this, right? So, if you look at Julia's little sketch here, the parcel below is your school area, and you could put paths in that connect. You need to have a discussion between the town and the RSU about what they would be willing to do and what you would be willing to do to share space. Um, I know that we had some question like, could the meeting space that Durham uses actually be in the school so you didn't have to rebuild Eureka or things like that? And that's something that we

didn't facilitate that discussion as part of this project. You could do that. There were some immediate um barriers that some people mentioned and I don't have an understanding of whether they're overcomeable or not like you know school staff have to be there during the meeting and lock up afterwards or things like that. Those would need to be negotiated with the school if you wanted to go in that direction. But that is another it is another option for you to to think through. You said Michelle was on the planning list with you guys. She participate in our stakeholder meeting, right? And also in the sharet. Yes. In the public meeting. Yeah. And she's, you know, she's very helpful about thinking that through. So I I met with her and currently right now, if we was to use the school, you'd have to fill out a piece of paper every time you wanted to have a meeting and you'd have to pay for it. Interesting. Because they have

staff. But was your question more about like access to the playground? Oh, you mean Dev? Sorry. Devs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Just just a connection of the whole concept with the school and you know, you know, I mean, this is my opinion, but I think that this area you can do some kind of lowcost improvements to create the pedestrian connectivity. When you start paving for cars and stuff, it it costs more, but creating some, you know, basic paths, you could connect into the RSU property. You'd still have to negotiate it with them, but you could do that. So, did Michelle Sorry, Jerry. Did I cut you off? No, I I was going to make one point. I don't believe the DOT will put in a crosswalk on a road that's 35 miles an hour or more. So, it have to be under that, right, Calvin? They'll do 35. I think it is 35 right here. I'm not sure 35. Is it okay? No, no one believes no one follows the sign that says 35. I think that's why if you

did put something in here, we'd have to check it out with DOT. Um if if you did go with something like that, you're going to need something flashing, right? Because the cars are very fast right there for the pedestrians to actually be safe on that um on that crosswalk. So with the possibility of pathways leading

between the design and the school area, Michelle had no. So that's something that we just have to discuss with them directly. I think it' be a town RSU negotiation. And then my second follow-up question to that sort of a piggyback is are with the use of because

I know a lot of kids who use that playground and the basketball and everything else. Is that a some sort of um liability for us or is that a question for RSV5 because everybody uses it. So, are they not allowed to use it? I I don't have any idea about that. That probably has to do with insuranceances and things like that. So, I would say that if you wanted to pursue that, you'd probably want to set up a meeting with the RSU. Yeah, I think I think you would be covered under tour claims because you wouldn't I mean if you provided a basketball court, it's there for a reason. So you wouldn't really be negligent if someone turned an ankle or something because it was you know someone tried to Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to I'm going to walk you through these big questions. So um because we there's a lot of detail that we could discuss and maybe not have all the answers tonight. So, so my objective for

you tonight is to see where you are in terms of priorities on these big questions and then from there we can determine what the next steps are whether it's cost estimates a conversation with the RSU etc. So the first question is do you want to change the intersection um using the paint scheme that DOT has drawn? Does anyone want to start with that? I don't know if it's necessary. Mhm. That's my I mean just from what the majority of people have been saying because if we are not using the space is it necessary is that a you mean the pain space meaning like the crosswalk and so this is the intersection the intersection 9 and 136. Sorry nobody's going to follow that. I mean, my question about that, like I understand I like the idea of because what happens now if you're trying to take a right and someone pulls up behind you, they block off your entire viewpoint. Yeah. Sorry. There we are. And so my question when I see that

is paint's great, but the people who, myself included, who are using this intersection might not recognize that that paint's down there or see it even if it's got the speckles or whatever in it. I have seen other towns where they have like and it's a pain in the butt during the plow season, but they have little islands and stuff, islands or something like that. To me, that seems like something that's actually going to do it. But like my truck can sit on that paint no problem trying to turn left. And so I want to see something done there because even you know my thought process is even if it isn't rising to that highest level like we I do hear feedback on it and like I hate to do nothing and you know my point one fatality is too many you know. Yep. Um,

yeah. I mean, this is kind of like a little improvement over an intersection that's somewhat problematic, but it's not problematic enough that DOT will pay for the installation of any kind of hardcape changes there, right? So, that's so that's really the question before you. Do you want to do you want to and I think we could talk to them about whether they're willing to do any more, but we've already had the preliminary conversations and this is what they're offering. I I don't mean building a curb. I mean like I've like in some other communities you have the paint and then at the little corners you just have the post that's the the plastic post that stand up with the reflector at the top like the orange cones. Yeah. No, it's kind of like it's like a straight straight white flexible. Yep. And again, I'm not sure whether they'd be willing to do it. I think the idea of this is to try to get folks to

approach the intersection in a T form so you're not straining your neck better sight sight distance. And some people will follow it, some won't. I think the idea is to get prevent two people from both being pointing at the intersection. One trying to go left, one trying to go right. So the person who's turning left would need to wait. Yeah. Until the person turning right is done, right? And that would improve the visibility of somebody coming down. So that's the point of the paint. The whether people will follow it. We all know that we've got crazy drivers out there. But this would be, you know, the proposed improvement. So the question is, do you want Jerry to pursue a paint option with

DOT? I'd like to hear the details on it. You know, if it's a nominal fee and one person pays attention to it attention to it, that seems But if it's a expensive prospect for people to park on top of it, I wouldn't mind hearing the cost estimate. All right, Rebecca, Josh, Deb, do you have any thoughts? I mean, it doesn't hurt. Yeah.

feelings here about this. It's just not very It's like to your point with the snow, nobody's going to see it. It's going to How quickly will that wear out with salt on the road? I mean, it's just just like anything. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't it doesn't change fundamentally change the intersection. Yeah. So, if it's okay, I would like Is it okay to ask Calvin if he has any? Of course. As our road commissioner what your thoughts are, Calvin? I think that would work. I don't know. I mean, we keep the intersection pretty well bare and snow and the snow. I can tell you every day when I go home, I pull up to where that says stop and I try to square off so I can see both ways and someone goes right around the inside me where that slash mark is. So, now I'm going left, but now they're going left as well. Now the two of us going left and I've had the same problem. It's I I really think and I I talked to DOT and

I'm I I'm going to say but they may very well pay for this. So yeah. Well, that's my what I was getting at too. If it's if it's a a couple hours labor and $200 worth of paint, investment is low even if return is low and low there. All right. So, what I'm hearing, and you can tell me if I'm like overstepping here, but this is how I facilitate to try to get us to decisions, is that um Jerry will reach out to DOT and ask two questions. One, which is, are you willing to do any more hardscaping? And by that, it can be ballards, it could be something else that would do a better job coring drivers than paint. And two, will DOT pay for it? Does that seem like a good way to proceed on that? Yes. Okay. So, I'm going to go back to and now we're going to go to the more complicated questions, right? So, the next question for you, too far. Um, does the community need a different meeting space? Yes. Yes. Absolutely.

What did you say? Yes. Yes, Rebecca. Yes. Okay. Wow. I thought this was the more complicated one. All right. So, let's go back to the decision tree on this one. If the community needs a Where is it, Christian? You're You've So, if the if the fire station is unacceptable, so you're saying you need a new I think that's a uniform. It seems like four people right now said yes. So, a different space is needed. So, let's go to that small line there about what you would need in the space. are is this the right list? So, I think in in looking at that list, that that's everything we need. We need to be able to have the recording that we have here. We need to be able to present things on a screen, present things on a wall. We need to have good internet, um good line of sight for people to participate, and good access for people in um access accessible. Yeah, it has to be handicapped and that's that's

required. Um, any other thoughts from the three of you if those if that's the right list? We don't have the word security up there anywhere. That's good. Yeah. So security. Can you just say a little bit more about security? From what from your perspective, when you think of a secure place that you what would you want to make sure there was like a locked front door, a second egress? What is when you think about it? Yeah. Yeah. I think both of those things. Yeah. For me, part of that is determined a little bit on the location, but like if it's a multi-use facility where there's town office and that being able to have there be like an accessibility point where that shared space can be utilized without access to the rest of the building. So like when we use the school, um you can rent out the cafeteria for a public event, you only have access to the cafeteria and the restrooms, you can't roam the rest

of the building. And if we were to have something like this at a town office, there'd have to be that like public use space separated from town office space. That's if it were. So the security could look a little different in my opinion. But also set modes of egress to get in and out, especially for the unfortunate reality we live in with mass casualty events and then something that prevents people from intentionally or unintentionally driving into it because Jerry had someone almost drive into the town building to your office um by accident. Yeah. Okay, I think we've got that. Anything else on security from any of you? Cameras probably. What? Cameras. Okay, great. All right, so before we go to where that space, you know, what are the best options for exploring that space? I want to ask you the next question, which is, do your staff need more office space? Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. So to me, this drives town office as the town office needs space for the staff and we need so I promise. All right. So we've got a couple different options here that I want to talk through. So you've got the town hall, right? You could do a couple things with the town hall. You could expand it. Um you could renovate it. You

could also expand it so that I'm sorry. You could expand it to include offices and you could expand it to also include community space, right? Um, I think those are the two options there. For Eureka, you could renovate it. The foundation's not in great shape. There's, um, sand and water that's kind of flowing under it. So, Calvin had advised us that it would be good to probably move it on to you could either fix the foundation, keep it where it is, or you could move it back to kind of where the not where the parking area is, kind of into the field. Um, and you could add things in like climate control and AV. You've got your line of sight issue because those pillars, and I did ask, are um, structural. So, you can't really get rid of those pillars unless you put steel beams in. I'm looking at Calvin just to make sure I'm getting this right. And steel beams are expensive. Okay. So, um, you could you you'd still have your line

of sight issue there for an open meeting room. There is an idea also of renovating the top floor and you could put some offices in there. You would need to install an elevator. So that's all I'm going to say about Eureka because that's about the depth of my knowledge on what needs to happen there and we can dive in more if you decide that you want to really look at Eureka. I think those are your two kind of most natural options. I'm going to take number three off because we just decided that fire station is not a good place. The only other option would be to work with the RSU, maybe to go into public works. We didn't explore that a lot in this meeting in this process because fairly early on we were told there be the same kind of conflicts that you have at the fire station with trucks going in and out, not having enough parking. It's it's far away from the existing town hall. So, it didn't seem like it was a

great idea, but I put it up there because it's something one of our members talked about, Donna Church, and also it wasn't really investigated. Um, you could also just build a brand new building, which is always another option. So, uh, I'm going to stop there and say if you wanted to do town space and sorry, you can split it too. You could renovate Eureka for your meeting space and you could add on to town hall for more staff space. So, you've got the option of going full-blown on the town hall, going to Eureka full-blown or having them separate for different purposes. And you've got, of course, other options we may not have thought of. Um, I'm in favor of leaving Eureka as a fellowship space versus taking it over with town business. Um, it all depends on the cost and where we end up with the plans and all that, too. And I think um uh an addition to the town hall, a big addition that includes

meeting space and office expansion knowing cost and evaluating that, but I would lean more towards that. I think it's important if we're going to eventually end up investing in this area to make it a community uh you know drive community um presence. I guess I think a a place of fellowship is important outside of using the town hall for you know teen dances or something like that. I I think the fellowship piece is important. I'm gonna go to Josh next. I agree. Uh, I mean, granted, if we weren't here, you know, the fire department could be having their thing here instead of over at the center. Um, but they have stuff going on. There have been many conflicts actually like when both rooms are booked, right? And and so I don't think that makes sense. I also think, you know, renovating the Eureka Center is going to be super expensive. Um, but I think that

that the addition to the town hall can address everything. It's I mean it's going to be expensive either way, but um I think that's the best way to do it. Okay. Thanks, Josh. How about you, Rebecca? I totally agree. Um I think that renovating an older building is going to be a lot more expensive. I think especially if we have to move it. um and the upstairs and elevator. It's just doesn't make sense. I think the

addition for the office is much better financially and a community space for the and a community space too. I I think that's a way for meetings. Yeah. Like where you'd have Yeah. Okay. And then Joe, where are you at? Yeah. I'm following with everybody else here. I think that put a really good way about having that when I hear the stories of the Eureka Center. It's not that I hear people say, "Oh, I had a really good time filing my taxes there." It's, "I got married there. I got a had a dance there. I met somebody there." And I think that that's what that space is kind of good for when we already in my mind, we need to address office space. And so just like, you know, economy is scale. It's going to be cheaper to increase your expansion if you're having to do that anyways than it is to work o over there. And to Josh your point and to Rebecca's point, I think the expense of Eureka center would get really

prohibitive really quickly for ADA compliance and uh uh moving a building isn't cheap. And then you know from what I've learned from Calvin's like sand and water is coming through the walls of the foundation into the bottom of the foundation. So there will have to be some repairs that are done. And so that's where I think that some repairs at the Eureka Center would be nice for a community space, but it doesn't need to be the AV system and the security camera, the cameras we have here, like you know, some sort of heat and I can't remember who is financially responsible for Eureka right now. Who owns it? The town. The town. Yeah. Okay. And so that's so you're still so there still is going to have to be some to do something on the foundation, right? Yeah. Okay. But I think that trying to do something over there to create a space that community members can use like the scouts are using or people are having a a birthday party or

something is good and then town fellowship. Yeah. Town business happens someplace separate. Yeah. Okay. All right. That's not here. This is actually I mean you guys are in remarkable alignment. I mean the the question is going to be that tension that you saw in the results saying that people want improvements but they also don't want to pay a lot of money for them. Right? So I think you're as a next step I'm going to propose to you that there be a um highlevel look at what the needs are for staff space and how big a meeting room would need to be and then a cost estimate that would be associated with that. that would give you an understanding of whether you feel like the town can afford it and would want to put that out to the residents. I think that looking at the 2006 drawing that we already have that was done that expanded the space. I've looked at it once before and it has like a meeting space for town meetings, but

it also creates better office space and it seems like it's already well thought out. Like I think that that's a good starting point to start from. Yeah, that doesn't get into the whole awesome ideas about other community spaces, but just in terms of that, that's where I think it's Do you have general do Deb, you want did you want to say something? Yeah, I just, you know, I keep thinking how fortunate we are about how the town office sits right now and the fact that it is very doable to add a huge or whatever size, you know, in addition, you know, you're not having this because you got the land and there's land around. It's flat. It's Yeah, there's really it's We're really fortunate with that. I mean, yeah. Yeah. This doesn't have to Do you have any guidance right um on how do I put this? How ambitious you want to be with this? So, for me, I would say it would be nice to make it see people to have an

individual office um as full-time staff to have an individual office. Um, and then enough space for people to be able to have a break room where they can actually sit down and eat food like you would see at most standard offices and then kind of like a council chambers that can be used as a meet meeting space. Now, I know in some places there's a separate council chamber from meeting space. I think that we can put those two together as one. Um, and you can design a space like that so that it's more flexible. Yeah. And yeah, a space that has at least the space we have here for people to come and participate. But so something around this large or bigger or smaller. To me,

a little bit bigger. Yeah. Because even tonight, you know, we don't get this sort of turnout often, but when we do Yeah. Uh and for hearings with the planning board and stuff like that, we get that kind of turnout. And yeah, it's just it's harder to build a sense of community when you've worked all day and now you're standing in the back of a room waiting for your speak time to speak and it's like I'm standing out back here. I want people to be comfortable in it and be inviting. So what I'm So what I'm hearing from Joe is full-time staff should be able to have their individual office. There should be a break room where more than one person can sit together and that you need a flexible space that would um host your select board meetings but also could be used for other town business. Yeah. What else? Or any thoughts on that? Go ahead. I don't think it should be I don't know what the right term is.

Architecturally challenging meaning it doesn't have to be real costly. I mean basic so more like a more basic artic building that you know meets the needs of the community. We don't need extra columns, right? No frills, no columns, no Greek columns, no marble, no. Can you put the 2006 plan on? Yeah, that's I'm gonna give Christian

No, you're and I'm I'm really in favor of Thank you, George. Really making the town offices where our employees work. wait for adjectives. comfortable comfortable you do you want to you want to enjoy coming to work I you know now they've it's challenging and especially because we're largely inerson work most of the time too so we want space but George yeah another point is like today I came out of the office and there were like eight people in the in line to get

to the to the uh counter and it's like there's no place for them to sit all crowded so it's just the employees. It's also the res large waiting area where they can have a seat if they wait and see the code officer if they're waiting to get something done. A little bit of privacy, too, cuz maybe you don't want the seven people in line hearing the conversation you're having. If you're paying a late tax bill or something like you're filing something sensitive for paperwork, you know, maybe just a little bit more space in that lobby area for the front desk. a little privacy like a little like partition. Okay. Is somebody able to describe what's like how this is the original right here? Right. See on this on this left one here, Rebecca. See the little hatch at the top there? That is the added area. Thank you. And you can see it over here. It's it's a little bit longer on this one than it is on that.

But that's the that was the first idea. I mean, I'm not an architect, so I don't really know how best to do this. I think you'd want to maybe share this with somebody who's doing a but but not depend on this as the plan because this was done 20 years 2006 2006 and here we are in 26. So I think any kind of design that you want to do, you want to you want to kind of project some growth even so we want to design this from like 2050. One thing that I think is important to me about that security thing is you can even see here this is the council chamber and meeting space and bathroom. It's delineated separately from the workspace. So, you know, the staff leaves and they lock the door here. If someone's coming in and they got to go out take a phone call or use the restroom or something like that, they don't have they're not weaving through in through and you know, so I've heard two other things. One is to make

sure that there's a security barrier between where the public space is and where the workspace is. And another one is to think about a waiting area for people who are using the front desk services. And another one is to make sure that we've got the long term in mind that we're not just designing for today. So I think that's why I wanted to get some principles from you so that when we go and start talking to folks that we can have a little bit of an understanding of what we're asking for and not just depend on this drawing. Yeah. I think also just in with what Jerry was saying, we need a building that's very efficient because definitely with prices going up. Energy efficient. Yes. Yep. Okay. Yeah. And there's some ways that you know you can do that. We again beyond what we were able to do in this project, but we could think a little bit about how that the heating works, the cooling, things like that.

Okay. I only have one last question for you. So, George, can you flip to the very end where we've got the qu the workshop questions and that is about this larger idea about oops uh one before that one more yep there. So, you've answered these three the three top questions which is yes if it's low cost and DOT will pay for it. Second one is yes and we want it to be the same as where we do the staff space. So yes to the third. So the last question is are there any other priorities that you heard from the public that you want to put on the table to explore? And one thing I'll say is that you don't have to do everything at once. Right. Sure. Right. So this would be real more directional. If you decided that you do want to make this more of a town center that has, you know, places where people collide and have community spaces and things like that, you probably want to do kind of a plan now that we know that Eureka stays where it

is, the town office is going to get expanded. Then you kind of draw a plan around that about anything else that you want to put in as amenities. And I would say that would probably be a next step if you wanted to go in that direction. But before we go there, um, what are the things that kind of stood out to you, if anything, that you think are worth pursuing? I'll let someone else go first because I have a lot of thoughts on One of the things that I heard was like a community center with a gym. Uh, this

was from basketball parents who were complaining that there's not enough gym time for the younger kids. Um, is there a basketball court over at the RSU? Yes, but there's just not enough. It's not very great work. Yeah, the outdoor there's one outdoor outdoor and we can use the inside but it's very limited. The gym has um you have to like to your point you have to get the permission and RSU communities. We've arranged for programs for like football and some basketball, but it's not we I mean the we did the a basketball program this fall or winter. It was all Durham kids, but we had to go to Pound. Yeah. Use our gym. Yeah. That's a big thing I've heard a lot of is people to just jump on this point with you is that having a space to do things extracurricularly, especially with people with kids that's not tied to the RSU because like people said like my kids on a team, we're all from Durham and we play every game in Freeport. Yep.

Um, but there's kids on Freeport's team coming to the Durham, you know, and a little bit since it's a shared, the RSU is shared, having a little bit of Durham space for Durham activities is something I heard, which was uh surprising to me, which glad to get that feedback. Okay, so we'll put community center in there. High price tag. Yeah. And and what I heard, which surprised me from some of the people that said it, uh was that the price tag would be worth it. Um so yeah.

Okay. Interesting. I don't know how much I agree, but yeah, but that was that was a comment that I got. All right. Well, why don't we put all the ideas on the table first and then we'll figure out how to prioritize them. Can I go to you next, Rebecca? Or wait, Josh, do you have anything else besides the basketball in the community center? like some of these I'm I I'm actually and I'll just be transparent fishing for some lowcost things uh that might help improve people's quality of life. I think the the walkie path idea doing some of those those sorts of things in the area to me uh would be a great idea. Um and then the parking I used the parking over there looking for somebody at the field uh and I didn't even realize there was that little dirt exit on the 136 over there. It's informal. Yes. Yes. Uh it

was it didn't seem very safe when it gets crowded. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So So can I capture that is like improve the parking situation? Parking. Yeah. Create a parking create official parking situation. Yeah. Rebecca, I'm going to go to you next. Um I'm actually very surprised nobody said anything about a a fenced dog park area. Yeah. It's um I

mean I feel like that's something that would bring people I know that a lot of us just let our dogs out, but the only dog parks are in Brunswick, Auburn, and Bath really. Those are the closest ones. And they're, you know, if there's something simple, just a fence Yeah. for the dogs to run around, that would be good and low cost. Yep. Um throw some kids in there, too. Yeah. You know, honestly, just we just need the mats. Let them go. Um I, you know, I

would love to see what Josh is saying as a gym, but I don't think our town's going to spring for that. Um that's high on the list. Yeah. Right. Um, we could I what I really thought I didn't see either were um like Nordic trails for crosscountry skiing or just walkway paths that can weave in and out of the woods. Um, this probably is not allowed, but a lot of the kids at DCS do play manhunt um where they it's tag in the dark. So utilizing the you know like

creating paths within the tree line areas for skiing or walking that's a really nice option that is very low cost. Great. Thank you Rebecca. I say I kind of like the idea of this parking. I mean, it's not not a low cost like you were asking about, but the more I look at it, the more I kind of you're limiting the different areas, but providing space for all of them at the same time. Yeah. And you know, the the the there was another sketch that was intriguing to me too where you had one parking area, but you had three accesses to it, right? And so like the less pavement you have, the less expensive it would be. So to the extent that the different facilities have people using them at different times, you can get away with shared parking and fewer spaces. Um that would be its own kind of like thing that we'd have to look at. It'd be a little bit of an analysis of the uses and where you do it, but sharing parking and connecting

it formally to the roads is probably safer. Interesting. Yeah. Um, okay, Deb, you're up. I like the idea of very small changes just showing that there's some progress there. Like I really like the idea of I think you said that was a brick wall maybe with a stone thing like welcome to Durham, something like that. Yeah. Yeah, that's probably not that expensive. Not that expensive. And just a sign that there's more to come, you know, if if something like that was there. It like demarcates the space as a community space, right? And I I really love this design, too, like Josh said, of this rounded I don't know if you were there, but just the parking, you know, doing something with the parking so it's safer. I really think this is unsafe where we are right now. We're lucky that nothing has happened. I don't I don't know if I don't think Well, you're pointing to what? Over over Eureka. The entrance

point being the entrance wide. Yeah. And it's dark over there. It is dark. Um, and I think, you know, a lowc cost putting picnic tables or some pavilions up right off just to draw people to the space. Okay. But I'm excited that, you know, we can make a long-term plan for all of this. But I think that would be things. Yeah. That would be then your next step would be for the for the larger parcel here would be to have a plan that also included phases and some

cost estimates like a master plan like a master plan and a funding and a funding plan. Yeah. I mean and and I am going to share just you know and um there are not that many funding opportunities at the moment right they've been really drying up at the federal level. There's never been a lot of funding that's been available for community facilities. There may be some changes where TIF money might be able to be used for community facilities, but you don't have a TIFF yet, a TIFF district. Um, so, you know, this would be self-funded by Durham. So, that's just something for you to keep in mind as you're thinking about these improvements because your voters will have to approve it. Sure. So, what about um with other places and towns, you know, people can buy in to buy a bench to put a plaque on or whatever it might be. You could certainly do that. I mean, yeah, because I'm sure there are a lot

of people in the town who would love that. Um, just to have that option. Is that something that can also be priced? I mean, you could do a Well, you could do a fundraising campaign, right? We could come up with what the costs are for different things and then if you decided, say you want picnic tables to be sponsored, right? Or if you decide you want a path to be sponsored, right, you could always do that and do some private fundraising, which I think would make a lot of sense in for these community things. I don't think it makes sense for your town hall, right? That's not going to be a fundraising like great thing. That's something that you're just going to have to bond for and go to the voters for in my opinion. Maybe there's some options I haven't thought of, but just giving you my best advice. Well, I have a ton of ideas that I like about this. So, one thing that I think about is that we don't really have the

space in the community where people can come and like participate in activities. Um, and I think generally the thought process has always been like we're a rural town. You've already got your back 40. You can, you know, kick the can around the woods behind your house. You don't have to do it at a town space. But I think that as we've seen developments take place and and uh subdivisions, people want a space where they can be like, you know, rather than letting my dog out the door and then putting on all things Durham, lost my dog, you know, we have a place that we can go and and and bring our dogs or something. And so I think of idea of this downtown is really great. And with some of the things being bigger ticket versus smaller ticket, I think that the big thing that we can look at is this access place. And then you have the open space that you know could in future be something. So maybe you want a a a building with a

basketball court in there. Well, in the short term, could it be the open grassy cheap inexpensive fencing around a dog area? And then that could be the future site of something bigger. Um, like just cutting trails through the woods there. Uh, something as simple as like putting uh they're not super expensive, but and it might sound goofy, but like putting a couple of the Frisbee golf post up in the woods and then, you know, we have a little place that people can come play. I just think like if you look over any given night when there's something going on at the baseball, the kids whose parents are attending, they might have other children and they're just running around in the grassy parking area, you know, there's nothing really there for them to do. Um, and so I see things like, you know, you put out a picnic table with the hopes of someday fundraising to put in a small concrete pad and cover it, but the

picnic table is the placeholder for now, the future covered area. That's something I see we could do like a community garden. It's like you run a roat tiller through the ground, you put some top soil down, you can have a community garden. So if your kids playing baseball, you can come over and work on your garden plot. Those are things I I like the idea of. Um when you said like a gymnasium, I was thinking like Venice Muscle Beach out there equipment or something. And I know that might just be me, but like there's some really cool exercise equipment that's made to be like playground style equipment. Like Lewon has a gym facility where they have like everything. So like yeah, you drop the kid off, you can exercise or you come over. And I think that those sorts of things just things to do so you're not just like sitting over there. Um, but whomever came up, and I think Calvin had pointed this idea out as

well, the idea of having this access that you can kind of like pass through it rather than just like pull in, run up some grass, and like, yeah, hope your car doesn't get hit by a home run. I like this idea. And then you can plug in those future sites for for different things. So great. And this is to me like vocalize like I understand everything I just vocalized costs a lot of money but this is just like putting it out on the table and you could do this. This is the want section of the conversation you know. I mean this is really thinking about the future for Durham and you are going to have to be sensitive to the cost and figure out what you wanted to do first. So Calvin, oh sorry Calvin, could if we put a master plan together that everybody's happy with to put out to the public, could we do impact fees like the new construction to favor that families that are moving here? I know a lot of towns do impact fees for schools

or would that not be considered an impact perhaps? I don't know the answer to that. Do you? So, so I first of all should acknowledge that there's like a lot of interest in the legislature right now in terms of like possibly clarifying impact fees and what they can be used for. Um, so the answer might be a little different in the near future. I would just generally um acknowledge that I think there's a lot of need for impact to be very specifically quantified and appropriately allocated. And so, um, there are certainly ways to do recreation impact fees, um, or school or public infrastructure impact fees, but,

um, I think it would need to be a pretty dedicated plan and you'd need a, you know, a lawyer to and a specialist to really make sure that that was a I I I can't say right off the bat that that's something you could absolutely do. I think you'd really have to shoehorn that into a really specific vision. I'm gonna I'm gonna mention another approach though to get it what I think your objective is, which is to get some money that could go into this, right? Which would be a a a tiff district, a tax increment financing district, and it would need to be coordinated with other priorities for the town. But Jerry and I were just chatting before about is there economic development that could happen in the town that would take some burden off the property tax payer. Um, and could you if you if you structured it right, you got to stop me here if I'm going beyond my get Paul here. I know we have an expert on our staff on how to

put together tiffs, but you know, you could structure it in a way where if the economic development were near to this, then you could have it help funnel some money into the infrastructure costs. So, um, you know, that's that's something also to explore in the future when you get further down the line on where where you're going. I mean, Christina, if I can just add in, I mean, I I think where where this gets complicated and it's always worth acknowledging is that like there is almost never going to be a magic wand solution. And so even if there are impact fees, even if there is a tiff, the things that are going to fund a drastic level of investment through one of those mechanisms are going to be pretty dramatic changes and growths in the town. And so really, yeah, so you sort of need to be aware, yeah, that's what you're interested in and hoping for. Um, and we don't want to give you anything pie in

the sky, right? Like, this is going to come back to your voters, right? And it's what they're going to be willing to pay. So, you're going to want to design what you do in, you know, in conjunction with what you think the town residents want, which is why we did so much public input. You you you can see people want things, but they are very nervous about the cost. So, you just got to keep that in mind as you start to think about what goes forward. So, I want to get us I know. Do you have more? I was just gonna ask. Yeah. So could what we could get out of this is like you know ask let's say let's make a move towards getting some sort of highlevel design like in my mind if we

say the road complex going through is a good idea maybe we start with that and say how could this be laid out to keep as much open space available for adding or moving things in the future like we don't know if that's going to be a basketball court but there's space for up to something that's 50 by 100 here up to something that's 100 by 100 here rather than like you know designing a because that road in that trail could be the first step maybe. Yeah. I mean, I think what I would recommend is that you you focus on what seems to be the highest priority, which is the town building and at the same time start thinking about investing in developing a master plan for this region, for this area that takes into account what we already know about the town building and starts mapping out how the parking and the trails would go and where different future facilities could go. and the plan would phase it, right? And it'll take a

little while for you to come up with the plan for the like the building plan, the architectural plan and the cost estimates, but it doesn't mean you can't do kind of a lowerc cost investment in a master plan at the same time with making some assumptions about that. So, I think I think that's the way that I would advise you to go. I mean, we are as GP COG, we're at the end of our grant for you. So, you're going to need to probably put some skin in the game to go to the next step. I can work with Jerry to put together kind of a final memo about these are the things that we think you can do. Here are some next steps that you can take. Um there might be a little bit more that we can do on a few pieces doing some connections and things like that. But then you'll probably want to take a select board action at some upcoming meeting about what you what you want to do first, second, third, and based on what it might cost for you to

pursue those, you know, architectural plans and cost estimates and things like that. Jerry, does that make sense? Yes. Yeah. So, I'm going to try to summarize. Does that seem okay? And then you can all nod or shake your heads and Christian and I will go back and and get you a two-pager that we hope summarizes what you said. You're not going to take any action here tonight because it's a workshop. You don't have anything on the agenda. Am I right, Joe? Yeah, we weren't going to take no no action. So it'll also give an opportunity to others who can't be here to listen to this workshop and like weigh in when you actually make a decision. Right. So my takeaways are

that we're going to talk to DOT, see what kind of improvements are they can make to the road and then what kind of um money they're willing to put in to fund it. We are going to say that the select board's guidance is that the highest priority is to expand the town

hall to include a meeting space appropriate for the select board and other town business and offices for the staff. And we have some guidance around what that would look like that you already articulated and we'll write up. And that you would like to pursue a master plan for this area that takes into account some maybe long-term goals around a community center, but also some short-term improvements that um prioritize fixing the parking and finding some shared areas where the community can come together. A dog park, community garden, playground, picnic area. Pats. Get it. Did I get it? Y. Yep. Okay. I think my work is done here tonight. Well, we really appreciate you convening such a good community. When you said you get over 300 responses, it's like that's really good for what we get for responses. I mean, that's almost twice as many people that attended the the town meeting, you know, like that's a

big response, you know. Yeah. I think you had 350 which like you're a population of almost 4,000. So it's almost 10% of your people responded to the survey which is really due to the advisory committee because they really Yeah. It was really awesome to get that support from them. Yeah. And if you get a chance to recognize them at meeting or something give them all a round of applause. They did a great job. Yes. All right. Thank you very much. It was very informative. We'll be talking. All right. We will. Okay. Super. We'll be in touch.

the advisory committee. That was very good. Um, next on the agenda here is Calvin, uh, road commissioner truck review on bits. So, come on up, Calvin. you. So, we've put the uh the pickup out to bid and got bids back from uh these

the the biders on the attack. Do you guys have the sheet, the Excel sheet? and Jerry and I thought we could get another year out of it. So, we've done that, but it's So, this is one of the Sorry. So, this is one of these um deals where um we fund the reserves and the

town used to um when it was up for replacement on the schedule, the town meeting, they would vote for it just because it was up. Well, we could have another year out of the truck when it was up. And that's exactly what we did. Um but as you can see in the pictures, it's pretty much run its life. Um, what do you

46,600 on it. It's really rusting out bad. Calvin's had some electrical problems with it. Um, and if you look at the tradein value to get all that fixed would cost more than what they give him for a trade in. So, it's it. So, I'm supporting his um wanting to get a new truck. I think it's time. So, he went out to bid and we got those three bids. And uh you'll see where Okconor um is the preferred bid. It's not the exact

low bid. There's only $800 difference. One of the reasons we're going with Okconor is the low bid truck is up in Bangor. So, we prefer to get the one right out of Augusta. It's $800 more. So, truck is a tool. I mean the cab corners you can see in some of the pictures it's it's it's rusted out. So worse in color in color. So this is one of these ideas where we did get more life out of the truck versus um Yeah. My my first question is so why not the high bid

here? Like I know that you're saying that the the middle bid doesn't have the dual battery. Is that something that you're going you would prefer? Well, they're telling me that they've increased the size of the alternator and I can live with one battery now. And the first company was going to try to retrofit one after the fact. I wasn't crazy about that. Anytime we've had things like that done, it comes back to haunt you later. So, I'd be happy to have the high bit one, but uh well, I mean, the the reason I ask is, you know, I think that we want to make sure you're getting the right piece of equipment for the job. The you know, tradein's a little bit better, but it's still a little bit more expensive, but we're talking less than, you know, $4,000. And if there's that value associated with that higher bid, this is your chance to let us know if you think it's there or if we really think that that middle bid's what you

need and and the best value. That's that's fine, too. But I just wanted to make sure. Well, one of the we hear you out. One of the issues here is I had to let the winning bidder know a week ago that they were the winning bidder because these trucks are on the market. Yeah. So, I have no idea if that high bid truck is even still available. So, okay. So at this point I let them know that we had a meeting today and likely they would have a check and they they've taken it aside and put it in a sold lot. They quite reluctant to do that but Yeah. Are you saying on the Okconor one they do that? Yeah. So, I just have a question that might sound do we ever consider or have we looked at any that are one or two years old where you could save significant or do we always go to a brand new uh vehicle when you're making these purchases? We've always done new. You typically buying somebody else's headache at that point.

You don't know what you're getting into. And these trucks have to be retrofitted. And it's going to be a lot harder to retrofit something that uh is already out there. finding one that's got the right specs and that you would have to add all the equipment to. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. And you're happy with that one? I I think that that'll work for us. It's it's it's what we got now. So, and that's worked. So, and what year is the one we have now? 15. Wow. It's 10 years old. The primary function of this truck is through the winter is to follow the big trucks around and make sure they're putting out the right amount of material in the right place. And what these rubs look like so that the crew knows what to do next. And and uh so I'm following right behind the calcium and the salt and I'm getting more of it than most. So that gets into the wiring harnesses. It gets into places you just can't get. So is

this a truck you normally drive? Yeah. Mhm. and uh you can stick your fist right through the front fender and one of the one of the former selectman saw me about a month ago and he says that's embarrassing. Yeah. Well, we're working on it. I think we're getting we're getting a good deal on that trade in. Yeah. Yeah. It's time to go. And so, just let me clarify here. This is the total that that bit at the end with the total outfitting which you have broken out here at the end for the extra uh four-wheel drive studded snow tires, the graphics, the radio, strobe light blade, and all that sort of stuff. Is that $7,495 added to our our um that's included in that $66,370 price? That's correct. It's the

5875 plus the 74.95. Perfect. Mhm. Uh well, do I have a motion to approve uh the preferred bid submitted by Calvin for 2025 pickup truck? So moved. Do I have a second? I'll second. All right. Any other discussion on the motion? Does this line up with, you know, the plan? We've been putting money in this bucket and it's a reasonable expenditure based on what we've been putting in each year. This is what the budget is for. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it was supposed to be replaced last year, but they were able to get an extra year out of it. And so I think getting 10 years out of a municipal truck that serves this function, if I get 10 years out of my personal truck, I'll be happy. So I think you're doing a good job with that. Counter, does the truck have any kind of signage on the side? And the new one is going to Oh, the new one will have come. Even though it's not in the outfitting list. No, it is. It's on the um

graphics. Oh, graphics. Got you. It's going to have red red stripes on it. Just like we did on the say call Calvin right on the side of it. Right. It might say call chief. You know, I don't know. Send send the complaints that one. All right. Do we have any other discussion on the motion? All in favor? Any opposition? I do want to say I'm just really happy that this system's working well and that you were able to get an extra year out of the truck. I know it was definitely something you would have probably tried to replace last year, but appreciate the flexibility and and keeping up the good work. So, another comment. So, we heard um I mean this will be in the meeting minutes, but do we want to put anything other communication out to the community that we're doing this? just as a a matter of transparency. I think what would be really great is after it's graphic if we take a picture of of it

then you know yeah I know we did discuss at town meeting and people asked what we were doing and we told them this that I think after it's graphic would be great and then we could say you know Calvin managed to you know use the work truck over 10 years and we were able to put this per purchase off till 2025 instead of 2024. We can do a little outreach on that. Let's get a picture of you with the current truck and then a picture of you with the new truck with your hand inside of the hole with a hand on the hole. I could do that. Okay. Yeah, we should be proud of the process and the fact that we're supplying you with a truck that is safe and thank you. Just

real quick, Jess, did you get the motion and the second on that? Okay, perfect. Awesome. Thank you for that. Okay. Did you need me to talk about the uh internet stuff here or No, I got all that. Okay. All righty. Uh, next thing on our agenda here is the town attorney retainer uh agreement. Yep. So, so here's the retainer agreement that Thanks, Calvin. Thank you. That she that the attorney gave us. I've read it. I've talked with her. So, this is a retainer where she charges the same amount every month. Um, and I don't know what's recommended. I I I'm I'm waffling to keep it just

hourly or sign the retainer only because we don't have a really good history of how much we're going to use the attorney. Um, and my fear is if we don't use her that much in a month, we're still going to get a bill for $1250. And I don't know what's coming down the road, right? We don't know if battery energy storage is going to come to town. We don't know. I We only budgeted the 1250 for 18

months. So you can see what it covers. So I I guess what I would recommend is that you take that home and maybe we table this and you all think about what you want to do. I'm kind of leaning towards just staying on the hourly rate and trying to manage it that way.

Um how much have you been using the services? Well, it varies. Some months it's 3,000, another month it's 800. Do you know do you have a number from when we switched over to Freddy total amount we've used from them? Like how much we've spent spent totally using them so far to date? To date I don't have that number with me right off hand now. I probably should have not paid, but we've got we still got like 15 months to go and I I don't I

don't like the idea I don't think of the retainer right now because we don't have a we don't have a good history of we're using the attorney more than we have in the past. What in my understanding here the normal rate says per hour for municipal law and finance group partners is $265, right? And so 12 12,250* 12 is $15,000 15,000 which for is 12 months of retainer $15,000 but divided by you follow what I'm saying? Well, I'm G. We've got an 18 month. I know, but I'm just using the the one year as an example. So, 12 months at 1,250 per month is a total of $15,000. If we were to be paying hourly at 265, you take that $15,000. Divide it by 265 and it works out to 50 less than 57 hours, right? And so our question is do we think we need the lawyer for

more than 4.7 hours a month on the aggregate if we think about it at that rate because the other thing in my mind too and we don't we can maybe take table this but the other thing in my mind too is when you're on a pay as you go you start asking is it worth calling about this because we're going to have to pay whereas if we're on a retainer it's Well, we've already paid for this month. We might as well ask make the call or do the engagement. So, I know anytime that I'm, you know, I think back when I had on when I had to pay for text messages, I was really cautious as to whether I sent a text. Now, that's unlimited. I do what I want, right? And I'm kind of thinking of it same deal. You follow what I'm saying? Like, I don't want us to be holding back on when we reach out to use our lawyer because we're trying to save the money. And I think that we have the opportunity as well to use our lawyer

more than we have in the past. So that's just my food for thought. We don't have to make the decision right now. We still will use MMA can for the routine stuff because that, you know, they provide that service. And if we got an if I got an answer from MMA that wasn't really defined, it really didn't tell me, then I would have her review that because she's more she's more apt to tell you, no, this is what you need to do. Is there a benefit though too if we have the lawyer and retainer just using our lawyer rather than going through MMA to build that relationship and have her up to speed on all conversations and concerns? I worry about the I worry about the budget managing the actual budget. That's my concern. It's not so much, you know, we'll get help one way or the other from MMA or her. It's it's how much we want to use her. Mhm. So I guess because one of the things that we have to do is set our goals for the

select board for the year. So when is this due back? It's not, you know, it's this is just we need to just decide if I mean because we have her as an attorney. Yeah. So we just keep going the way we're going until we decide if this is the way we want to go. If I if I had in the budget figured the 1250 times 18 and then added say another 5,000 or 6,000 then I would be more I'd be more comfortable with that, right? Because there'd be a little cushion built in above that 12250 that she's going to bill every month. Um, has she been charging us for or has the company been charging us for the times that Oh, yeah. Yeah. They they charge us extra over the 1250. We we haven't we're not into the 12250 payment yet. Anytime she's here, she's getting paid 265 an hour right now. Right. This will kick in the 1250 an hour. Okay. So, let's remember we talked about this in the budgeting process and we made some cases that it was the way

to go and that created the budget line for the attorney of this. Well, we always had a budget line for the attorney. We budgeted. budgeted the amount on the line was this 1250 idea for 18 months and I remember there was discussion about whether that made sense. I think someone from the budget committee was questioning it. Yeah. But I'm not concerned so much with what the budget committee thinks or says because they're not really in involved into the the management of the budget and how much we use. Yeah. I think my point was that when that discussion was happening, we the select board, you know, we had some arguments on why it was the right way to go with a retainer fee versus the per hour. And that all can change. You know, circumstances change. So, I'm just bringing that up. I'm with I understand what you're saying, D, because my impression was that we budgeted for I thought we voted to budget for retainer

for 18 months, right? And so I'm confused as to where the concern would be about needing more than that if we said, "All right, the retainer is going to be$1250 a month times 18. We're good there." So the research, right? Well, and not only that, you can see what the retainer is going to cover, right? Mhm. We didn't have that before. This is just routine stuff, right? If we get into anything larger and more complicated, it's going to be above and beyond that retainer feed. Let me take Yeah. So, I think where you where you're just getting I've had time to digest this and you folks haven't Yeah. Maybe you take it home and think about how you want to go. I'm just saying which way that I think I would lean and you you you all can go however you'd like, right? Um

3F. Uh the retainer fees only covers remote attendance which we don't do at these meetings. Um and uh you know if it were like you know one meeting a quarter that might make me feel more comfortable. But uh you know we've we've

been with them for 11 months. Is that right? It says June 18th of last year. So about 11 months and she's been to six meetings or so. Yeah. I mean it says right here inerson attendance was out of scope. Yeah. Right. Uh and so uh

I I mean I tend to agree with you Jerry if if this included like one meeting a quarter or something like that. Yeah. I'd be much more inclined or if we had a way to use remote attendance. Yeah, that's a good point, Josh. Uh, I would be much more inclined to say, let's jump at this because it, you know, if we if you spend less than 75% of that 1250 a month, then it it gets put back in and it lowers your bill for the next month, right? Which I really appreciate because I don't think a lot of people are going to do that for us. And I also think I mean, look, uh, when I left private practice in 2019, I was charging more than this on on certain cases an hour. So, I think the the hourly rates are fair. Yeah. Um and so, but but for me, our need is

going to be the inerson meetings and where this doesn't cover that. Uh it's a little disappointing. Um and that's where the biggest expense is going to be, right? Coming here and sitting through our almost two-hour meeting already. Um right. And you know

with the hope you know I think one of the goals we've kind of discussed maybe not as a goal but we've talked about is what are we going to do to bring in some more business some more money to take the burden off the homeowners which is essentially 99% of our taxes right now.

and that's going to take time and bringing an attorney in to these meetings. Uh and seeing some type of recognition of that or us having a way to do remote meetings. I mean, if we were able to get her on the screen um and and have her there, yeah, that might might make me feel comfortable because I think that for 75 80% of what we need and our conversations would be sufficient, but I think there are some like if there is a best situation that comes up that's going to be multiple meetings in person remote is not going to be appropriate for most of that. Um uh and so uh that's

that's my concern with this. I I just wish there were some like if if it were a meeting a quarter and we could you know get do that'd be great. As it is it's two routine trainings a year. Um you know I guess what we're paying for is it at our next meeting. Um I think there's just a lot of outside of the scope of now that you point that out. It's just this Yeah, I think that your point Jerry about after getting the retainer agreement from them, there's a lot missing. Um that does put a

different light on it for me. Right now, if we had figured the 1250 for the 18 months, like I think it's like 22,000 total and we and during the budget process, we said, "Well, let's make that 30." I would be more comfortable signing that. But when this only covers the retainer, I'm a little reluctant. I you know, it makes it really difficult for you to budget. Exactly. And I think I think going forward knowing that this is the scope of the agreement, you know, at in the next budget cycle, I think it's something we have we can budget for. Um but you know, like I said, my concern is you get one big thing, right? And I'm taking out like, you know, there's a a lawsuit or something like those things that we don't see very often, like not including those because those are always going to be extra and those are going to be surprises and, you know, we're playing with fire, not budgeting any money for that uh to begin

with. Um but with the stuff you know I think we've as a group collectively spoken about from last year what you've been sort of pushing us to do. It seems in my mind there's going to be a lot of just a lot of inerson meetings uh if everything go if if we get everything off the ground and start working on things and uh I

budget this year because we did we budgeted just the 1250 times 18 um you know it's it's going it we're just running the risk and there's not a lot of room in our budget and you need to know how to appropriately budget this line item. Uh, you know, which, you know, makes me concerned about, you know, why are we having her come in for an hourong presentation plus all the prep work for something that we can do online or we could, you know, maybe get MMA to do. Uh, so, um, I I I agree with you. I

I'm I'm not sure this is the right time for us to do something like this. Yeah. And like, you know, just to bring it up, it's like when we talked about bringing her in for FOA training. Personally, I don't think that's the best use of her time, right? Cuz look, everybody that's on these committees, they're adults. They can do their own FOA training. you know, town doesn't have to spend tax dollars training, you know, because I get I get nervous because I'm the one that has to manage the budget, you know, and I I get it. Let's do this, let's do that, and I'm like, whoa, wait a second. Right. So, you you I I'm ready to move along. I you can and maybe next budget season we can we can bring this up again and talk about it and if we want to if we want to add more on top of the retainer we can have that discussion. Now keep in mind that town meeting the budget committee wanted to cut this was one of the ones I wanted to cut. So

that's why I don't mean to be short but I I can't get into like their reasoning because they don't they're not into it like we are. I think that what you've said to us is just pointing out the scope of what's not covered. Um that clarified my concern. Um when I first looked at it, I was just like, "Oh, this seems like a lot's covered." And I realized, no, not a lot's covered of the things that we would anticipate using. So, I'm fine with saying the way we are now. Um do I have a motion to reject the attorney retainer agreement? So moved. Do I have a second? I second. Second. Any further discussion? Uh I I would just say, you know, if we could come up with a method of doing allowing remote attendance uh in our meetings like that, which would save us probably a lot of money either route we take. Yeah. Uh with this, I think that's worth exploring. We are exploring regardless. I mean, why can't she call in through a Zoom link?

just her. I think our rules say something about um remote attendance for board members and I don't know what we've done. We can look into it. We have a challenge to because we're live streamed then getting her on the screen. We'd have to figure something out there. So, look at there on that TV. And if we could do something like that so it's included in the live stream, um you know, that might change my mind. But I I just think, you know, with the

hope for things that the things that we want to do, it's like the third time I've said it, you know, the hope to lessen the burden by bringing in you know, if we can you know doing a best negotiation if that comes up or um you

know, you know or anything, right? It could be anything. I mean, you've convinced me. So, so I I I would ask that that we explore that though because that might change my mind because that to me to me that's the biggest thing missing is um is having her you know come and you know and she's come and you know we're going to have this money plus it's going to you know at 265 an hour it's going to be that it's not included in this so it's going to be extra and then we're we've already over spent right paid for our travel time Yes. And we pay for travel and and and you know the budget we were less than 1% last year uh and we're probably close and this is an 18month budget. It's uh you know I I don't like going against what we all supported but at the same time it doesn't make much sense to do it under these circumstances. I'm good to vote on it. So I think we're on the same page. So any other discussion on the motion?

All in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none, I think that's elucidated a lot of good points there, Josh. Um, for the current needs where this will be good you get the motion? Second on that. right. Little bit here for you to absorb. So, first thing is the search bar is now on our left. page. Yeah. What is that? A Google search bar. It It is indexed. So, if we look at our website, um you're looking at it right now. So, yeah, it's up in the top right. So, we got that done. Um Jessica's smiling, so it must be working well so far. It's done. That's all I do.

think. So, That's good. Just want to give you so our opera reporting, we have to report to the fuzz where all of our opera money went. So that is complete. We're in good shape. The only addition that I'll have to make is when we when we expend more money either codification or the fire the quint then I'll have to update the expenditures. uh we obligated every penny they gave us and it's all it's rough on that. Those federal reporting sites can be very um confusing and everything but uh we're in good shape there. Do we have a summary of um that we could look at? I can send the split. Yeah, I can send it to you if you want you want to see that. You don't have I think it'd be No, I think it'd just be kind of nice to understand like this is where we ended up. This is I can send that to you.

that you know people erroneously refer to ARPA money is like free money. Well, it's really our tax money just taken outside of our municipal taxes. And I think it's cool for us to be able to show that's tax money that you've already paid. We brought back to the community. Here's how we we spent it. Yeah. Um, so you guys got a letter something about the hedge and budget committee letter of interest people. So no one in town was interested. So that was due today. So there'll be

because one of because one of them had to be sorry. Can you remind me what that letter was? just to have some representation from Durham on the um Anderson County budget committee. Oh, in the county commissioners. Yeah. And it was three meetings. Three three meetings out there. Three meetings total in a year or three meetings a month? All three meetings a month. Yeah. A year. Okay.

So that's why nobody wants Is anybody willing to do it? I can't I can't do it since I I work for the county department. Yeah. Um I feel like Heather might have been interested, but she didn't say anything. She's got a lot going on, too. What about you, Deb? She's not here. I don't mind nominating her. That would be great. I think Deb's a baby right now. Yeah, I think maybe I could probably do it. When are they due?

one day late or for the residents if you guys want to attend you would still attend, right? Not not just attend but be part of the committee. Yeah. So, you would go and it's like a caucus and you would have someone nominate like you and then you be on the committee. Yeah. I think we should have someone there and I think I'm a good candidate as anyone. I don't you know. Wow. I can resend the letter to you guys. I think I had the letter in my email. Oh, you did? Yeah. I I was reading it over. Yeah. I I don't have the capacity unfortunately to do it. So,

so I would nominate that to be the select board. Nom. I'll accept the nomination. I'll second the right. Nominate, accept, and second. Yeah. All in favor of having Deote. Any opposition? Thank you. Thank you, Dad. De. No, I think that'd be really great to have you as part of that. I think I think it's important and I think I think you'll do a good job. and and uh I like meeting new people. Yeah. Well, and I also think that there's this we have other regional things that we're like I'm a part of and I think it's good to spread that out from our representation. So, that's fine. I don't mind going to support you if you tell me one. Okay.

well despite the weather. Yeah. Just let you know we had 250 household participants. Oh, wow. with with 18 repeaters. Meaning we went back and that was my husband. Was it all 18 of them? All 18. I I think next year we should probably talk about how we manage this too. Um you've got 4,200 subsidizing 250 people. So

there might be a way to get some revenue if you if you wanted to do it that way. But we can talk about that. What I would recommend. Do you have the numbers from last year? I know what we never track the data. That's that's part of like why it's not really well managed because that's why I got a little nervous when you all wanted to put signs out and uh because people from Pal frequ then they you know we don't without maybe them possibly coming to town to get a voucher to hand to somebody that they are actually from Denver. There's really no way to to monitor that check licenses, right? But

if they had and I mean Calvin might I don't know might have been the first time I went. Cal I'm pretty sure Calvin checked my license or registration. It might be worth a discussion before next year to see how we might be able. Do we also know how much money was made with um things that people had to pay to bring in? $30 for me. Wow. And I appreciate I appreciate that because I've been too lazy to bring it somewhere and after we pay our bills I think it was like it was under $100. Yeah. But that payment paid the bills for it. No, we budget $10,000 in

the town budget to cover Sorry, I should mention so we Calvin had someone come um and remove refrigerant. So before you could not bring anything, you had a free on it. Yeah. So this year you could and you had to pay $10. Yeah. And then so after Calvin paid that person their service. I mean I do think one of the merits of bulky way is it prevents bulky ways from being dropped off on the side of roads and that the boat launches and stuff like that. So I was surprised about the public comment on that. I didn't really realize that a select board member attendance was important to people and maybe it was just important to the resident who spoke, but I was thinking, "Wow, that's interesting." So, Mark said something to me. We had a a few minute conversation and I can't remember the name of the person he was with right now. Uh, but you know, he wasn't he I

mean I I think he thought it would be nice if some of us went. Um, but I don't think he necessarily cared as much as as Mark did. Yeah. Uh, and and I, you know, I would have stayed, but I had plans with my daughter. I don't think there's it's tradition in the time that I've been on the board. It's not like anyone's ever been like, I'm going to be the board member who goes and attends Bulky Way. You can say I'm from the select board and I'm checking your license. Anyway, I just thought the comment was interesting and had I known it, someone thought that was important. I would probably I want Yeah. had dished out coffee. I don't think I've ever seen I mean I've gone almost for many many years I've never seen somebody like checking or Yeah. And I I would have loved to go this year because I actually love it. Um, I love seeing them crush everything. But it's Yeah, I was working. But I I told Mark that I one

year I got yelled at for getting out of my car because they didn't want people out of their cars. Uh, so I didn't think I mean I still do it because like I had three air conditioners I was getting rid of. I'm like, why are you guys lifting all my air conditioners when I was just too lazy to bring it somewhere else? Uh uh. So, um, so that's, you know, that's why I didn't plan on going. I've never gone because I've never thrown anything out there. I didn't realize there was like a spectator component of it. So, who knew I mean to me? I It's my favorite day of the year. I do, too. My favorite day. Um, what else you had, Jerry? A little bit more. So, works

hired a new person to replace the person that left. They started yesterday. It's the mechanic. No, no, mechanic's still there. It was a truck driver. Truck driver. Okay. So, his name's Ron Bergens. And uh welcome Ron to the Welcome Ron. Welcome Ron. Public should post about on their Facebook about the new new hire cuz if not they'll be like I've never We'll get someone be like there's someone I've never seen in a DM jacket doing something in this cemetery. What's going on? Yeah. Um Heather can handle that. Yeah. So we got a quote to get the uh tension of the Sorry, what was that? Sorry. We got a quote to get ant over to the Eureka. Yeah. Just basically boosting it from here. Two boosters, one on that, one on this one. Um, it'd be safe and secure. You know, wouldn't compromise the fire. It's a

$2578. So, if you want to discuss that, whether you want to do that, let me know. Can we put it on discussion topic for next agenda? It's one flat fee and no monthly fee, right? It's just the booster. It's just the booster. Yeah. Hop, skip, and jump in the signal over. Is the rest of the board want to mention? That's fine. Yeah. I just don't want to vote on something on a fiscal note that hasn't been on the Right. Right. Just bring it to your attention. Yeah. No, no, I think it's a good topic to put on to next meeting. Okay. Was that was it only one? Did you just reach

out to somebody? Yeah, our provider. Okay. It's probably the right person to go. But we have heard a lot of people wanting better connectivity over there. So, it's up to you. We can take it out of the um building reserves if you decide to do that. We certainly don't have it on the operating budget. Yeah. No, no. All right. So, so just going to let you know that uh Oh, as far as the IT folks, so we got a new server,

right? So, to migrate everything over, they're working on that. Well, to migrate Trio over, it's going to cost us 1,250 bucks. Mhm. So, which wasn't budgeted for either. So, I just kind of because I had no idea they're migrating our own data. So, typically I never would have guessed that that was the case. So, I just want to bring that to your attention,

GA request. We're getting a lot more coming in. I mean, we've had more this year since January than we've had the two years that I've been here. We only budget a thousand for that. So, we may that may So, what happens if there's more requests than there is budgeted? Like at some point, do we say we don't have any more money for GA? No. Okay. No, we us we we get 70% of it back, but we've already sent out almost 800 already of the files we have budgeted. Hopefully, we'll get 70% of that back. as they I'm not sure what's going on, but just want you to be it's general assistance. Oh, okay. If folks need help with food or and there's some pretty strict like this is mandated the requirements of like income level per household and number of people is is dictated by the state. Okay. And Justin and I work together on that. Just does a good job and we we go through it. We actually had some GA training this

morning. How frequently can someone make a GA request? It's every 30 days. Oh, the same person. Yeah. Yeah. We have one that's in a recovery. So, Mhm. I'm not going to get any more. Sure. It's But I'm just letting you know, we only budget a thousand. So, I am thankful with like what I'm seeing that we have that contingency now because 18 month budget. Yeah. But there has not been like you said in the first two years we weren't spending anything out of there. It's just been a carryover and we and we're mandated by state law to carry this out. So to give you we don't have a choice to give you a point of perspective in some of our larger municipalities like Portland their GA line is more than our entire town budget you know. So do you get uh do we get prompt reimbursement from the state or is it a delay every quarter? Oh every reimbursement you can do quarterly. Yeah. So, we're getting ready to do one

right now, right? Yeah. We'll want to stay on top of that cash flow perspective. Yeah. Do our best. Could you give keep us updated regularly on the status of that? Absolutely. If it's going to be an issue like us to know sooner than later so we can start talking about a contingency option. Yeah. you that wouldn't come into play until the end of the year because we're going to fund it regardless and we're going to Yeah, but I'd still like that running update so we know if if we're over that line through the through the year. Yeah.

Social Security office and basically what happened was the W uh W3s the 2022 payroll didn't get submitted. So, they said they had been reaching out to the town, but it's been crickets. But, um, the staff hadn't seen any letter. And I asked urges to go through all the emails to see if we got anything from with an IRS or Social Security extension. They said they didn't find anything. But when you miss a reporting thing like that, you can get penalized. So, right now, the potential penalty amount for not turning that in is

Um, I've written an abatement apology on behalf of the town saying, you know, we had staff turnover. Um, people thought they may have done it, but it didn't get it didn't get done. Um, explaining that, you know, this is the first time it's happened to the town. Can you what what is it that has happened? Can you when you So when you when you you know how they get your W2s at the end of the year that automatically generates a W3 that gets turned into the social security office that didn't happen. It's just a report or is it money? It's a report. It's just a report and there it's an $83,000 potential penalty. So what happens is um the fed the federal government and the social security talked to them and say okay this is what we got for numbers what did you get the numbers they're saying we didn't get anything so they they reach they said they were reaching out to the town to get those over the

last couple of years but we haven't seen anything you said Burgess looked who's Burgess the IT company looked through and didn't find emails and didn't find any emails so once we got the letter once I got the lad that way. I mean, we took prompt action. You can read the letter right here. Um, that got sent. Hopefully, they're

going to be like, "Don't worry about it. It's your first time. We're going to let you go." Other towns have made the same mistake when they hire folks that don't really know and they don't get them trained and they don't know they do it. Sometimes they get assessed a $25,000 penalty. So, I don't know what they're going to do. They got that letter. They got their file. I'm gonna wait to hear from them and see where it lands. How quickly did you get in the file after you got this letter? Three days. Okay. Four days. And then have you made some process changes? So guaranteed we'll

meet the commitment. That knows what we have. So this so this was a 2022 issue. It has not happened in 23 and did not happen in No. cuz once you can read the letter explains it exactly how it went. So once we once I figured out all that we didn't really have the capacity in house to do it. We got a payroll system to do it. So they take care of it now. Gotcha. You know so we should be good. Um but we'll see what they we'll see what they say. I don't I don't know. We sent it certified. So, we haven't got our card back, but they've actually received that letter in the in that W3.

So, this So, this took place right before you started. Yeah. Yeah. scary. Can you send us all a copy of this and mail this so we have it? Absolutely. You don't have there's nothing for you to vote on. I No, I know. But just for us to have It's a lot of GA funding. Yeah, it sure is. Yeah. So, I'm just keeping you pressed to that. Good. Thank you. So, the next one is there is no way we're going to get through the year without getting a tax anticipation note. We just don't have the funds because we've got that gap between August and October because typically our taxes will be due like in the middle of August. Well, now they're due in the middle of October. Even though do the commitment at the same time and some people will pay their taxes, they won't be due until October 15th. So, we need to get a TAN to carry us through the TAM loan. And I'm working with Pretty Flare and they have what they call a bond

council. So working with them, gave them all the information. Mark and I are working on that. We've already worked on we've given it to Freddy Flity. I have a meeting with Andrew Scott Bank on the 20th, which is next Tuesday, I think. Um to go over that, but 2,630,000 is what we're going to put in for. And we only pay the interest on what we use. Okay. The concern is we also didn't budget for the interest in the budget. Okay. So, I don't know what that interest amount's going to be until we get through it. Do they give us a a rate? Yeah, it's going to be somewhere between five and six. I'm meeting with them on the 20th to to find out between five and six%. We

haven't sent out the notices. taxes due in October? I We're only doing half of them, right? So when you when you change fiscal years, we change the collection date to twice. October 15th and April 15th. There's nothing in the law that says it has to be those two dates. No, but that's typical though. They're six months apart. Mhm. But so my response is so it it doesn't

really matter because if we're only getting if we only get half collection, it doesn't matter if we get half collection in October or if we get half collection in August. If we only get half collection, we still have to manage cash flow until the next half collection. Unless when we submit the bill, everyone decides to pay their full tax bill on in October. Yeah. But you still get you still have less that you're might have to go potentially grab. I think it just moves it to a different time that we'd have to grab it though because it's still going to be the same cash flow analysis because you have two major collections rather than one. We we've only got enough money to invest to the end of July. Mhm. So this has to be in place by July 1. Yeah. It's a cash flow thing, is it? You know, it's just because this year we're having that 18month. Well, I think Dor's gotten tans before even Yeah. Yeah. Not

not since you've been here, though. Right. And uh just keeping you just informed on that. You will all will have to sign the paper, but we should have it in place by July 1st. I don't want to take any chances. We don't want to go. Yeah. We need the pay. Yeah. No, it's better to have it. It's unfortunate because I mean like in September we have two we pay the county and we have two bond payments that come out. So that really that really hurts. We didn't have those two. We might not have to borrow so much. But that's that's where we're at. I mean that's to Josh's point. Well, if we collected before September, we'd have more cash on hand to make those payments, though.

cash management problem in July, it doesn't matter. Just remember, we made that brochure and the last of those days. Well, that's I'm saying I'm not saying we change it. We we made that contract with the town, that agreement with the people. Um I'm just thinking out loud really. Daughter has to do her work to be able to Yeah. She's nervous about even in August or

late June. She's June 28th. Yeah. and she's, you know, she has to get her work done to be able to just do that. Thank you. Right. They'll go out, but the due date is still on. I don't know. I think people would be happier to pay the taxes earlier than expected to save however much interest. And that might be true. Like I said, we're only going to pay interest on what we use. And you know, that's hard to know at this point. Mhm. Well, the earlier the bill goes out the better, even if there's the same due date.

on assuming you want to stick with the same Mhm. bank and not go up to typically stay with people that have your accounts all set up. I defer your judgment. Unless someone else has a strong opinion's not so mad at you for moving all that leather money. Yeah, that's a good letter. Yeah, right. So, this kind of summed it up pretty good. Yeah, it's very good. So, I don't know if that's I don't think the skies fall. Hopefully, they'll they'll they'll be play nice, but I I I don't know, you know. I I don't know.

concludes my manager. Mhm. That was action-packed. Yes. quick through these next nine minutes. Uh chair report. I'm gonna have like I I get a a letter in my inbox today that I just peaked as I came into here that was um a formal complaint about the use of this space for meetings um from a a prior fire uh fire chief um not not our

current chief. And I just was going to have someone could someone from the office please scan that and deliver it to via email to all of us so we can talk about it next meeting. Um I just got it on the way in today and so there's didn't want to address it tonight. He did whisper in my ear that he wanted it on the agenda. I'll check with the chair. Yeah, I got it at 6:00. So yeah.

Um and if you know we feel the need to invite anyone in after we address that, we'll put on the agenda for review next week though. But um it's functionally the same as like any other complaint. They just didn't fill out a complaint form. So um but that's all I have. for a board member report there. Just letting you all know that you'll see that in your inbox next this sometime this week or next. Josh, uh I have some but with the time I'll wait. You don't want to do at least one of them? No. All right. No, Heather Deb. Um

just this solid waste committee is right now down to three members. So, we're anxiously awaiting the review of the candidates, applicants, um, to move that group up to, excuse me, we're at four members to add a member and then an alternate member. So, I know that's on an upcoming agenda. Um, and the team had Cassella come and talk about the pay as you throw program. It was a good discussion and um appreciate the website being updated to provide information to the residents about options for disposing of different waste and that's been updated. I think it's in the bulletin memo newsletter that goes out. So anyway, making progress there with Juliet is the chair on the cell waste.

Josh, since I was so fast, do you want to No, because it's one and only. All right. Uh, in that regard, do we have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So, move. Second. Second. Uh, any discussion? All in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none. All right. Upcoming meetings RSU5 board of directors meeting May 14th 5:45. It's 6 I thought 6:30. So they're doing sorry they're doing the RSC 5 board directors meeting right before the tri town. Oh. So that's the their radio meeting at 5:45 and then the tri town's going to start at 6:30. Voters can come at 6:00 to start checking in. Do you want cuz I'm going or should one of us be there early for their meeting or that's not allowed? We don't usually attend that meeting, do we? the the select board, the the RSU5 board of directors. No, we don't. But it's open. It's open, but we don't usually No, I know. I'm going just to Oh, yeah. No, no, there's not. This

your job here has doesn't impact your ability to do any of that stuff. No, you're fine. No, but I just meant like for when they're meeting at 5:45, should one of us be represented to be there since I'm already going later? No, we don't send in someone as an official board representative to that. No.

Um, conservation commission's May 21st at 6:30. Town office is going to be closed Memorial Day the 26th. And the next select board meeting is going to be May 27th, 2025 at the fire station at 6:30. Do we need an executive session? All right. Seeing none, do I have a motion to adjurnn? Motion to motion to do motion. Josh second. Any discussion? All in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none. Meeting adjourned. 8:55.

tomorrow. I'll see you tomorrow night at the next meeting. I know. At the end of the meeting. Yeah.