TranscriptSelect Board Meeting ~ January 14, 2025

o [Music] all hello is this different than what we changes today okay make sure your have to look at myself on the screen you set that off so I can turn need to well you're under right what's 30 that's fire Perfect all righty uh let's get this meeting started uh it's 6:31 here on the

14th of January 2025 we have a quorum uh Joe Tom is excused this evening we'll begin with the Pledge of United States of America America and to the for it stands one nation indivisible amendments to the agenda uh the only thing I wanted to note is that uh we're we're getting a presentation from town legal council tonight and so uh when she arrives we may pause budget discussions to get hear from her and then jump back into budget discussions to to be respectful of her time and so we'll just have to wait till she gets here she has another conflicting meeting and we kind of hopped on her schedule last minute uh okay seeing no other amendments do we have any public comment tonight yeah just state your name if we just steal maybe uh here go go Chief's

Road um so I understand we're going to be talking about contract zoning tonight and I would like to offer a couple comments as a citizen not as a planning board member even though I am a planning board member um in relation to solar I

just want folks to you know remember that we just passed the solar ordinance in this town um and there was a reason for that there was no we talked about sighting um but the ordinance still passed without any sort of citing conditions and so now we're proposing to put solar into contract zoning which I'm not opposed to but I don't we voted to approve solar in our town so I want to make sure everyone remembers that and I would like to propose um that perhaps a minimum threshold for solar being kicked into contract zoning is 10 acres no less than

10 acres um is my recommendation a 10 acre solar project and that's your project size is not a very large project um that would show us show you know the town and others that we are not prohibitive of solar but we do care about where these projects are going larger than 10 acres yes let's go to contract zoning um and also one other thing is just to recall that in the Solar ordinance we do have I would say quite stringent setbacks and um buffers I think it's like 50 ft of

veg which is a very big buffer so regardless of whether these go to contract zoning or not these have buffers so if there is a view issue it's already in our ordinance so again I would like to propose 10 acres no less going to contract zoning thank you Juliet do we have any other public comment before we get started this

right here into uh discussion on uh public he will we have to open a public hearing on general assistance maximums so do I have a motion to open the public hearing so Move Motion from Josh do I have a second I'll second from Deb all in favor of moving into the public hearing I'll post seeing none all right where's my document here Jarry for uh general assistance yeah so

um could you give us a little explanation here yeah so the town of durh follows the Department of Health Department of Health and Human Services on their general assistance so when they update their maximums we have to update our maximums it's kind of a formality because we follow their policy so these are the maximums that you have before you and their maximums as far as like if someone needed help um with a bar or cremation or uh food maximums or

something like that uh we follow their guidelines and then we get reimbursed a certain percentage depending on what they're actually asking for so they've up their maximums um in 2025 and we need to or the Board needs to uh adopt these maximums to put it into our policy so we're updated and compliant with Department of Health and Human Services yeah thank you and so because it's a change in this we open it up to a public hearing if anyone wants to provide comments or feedback on what they think of adopting the maximums or or changing the maximums that we're proposing which is to follow the uh Department of Health and Human Services uh recommendation so is there any comments from the public on adopting these general assistance

uh I would entertain a motion to approve the general assistance maximum update as uh presented in our packet so so we have a motion from Josh do I have a second second from Heather all right so do we have any additional discussion here on the general assistance maximum update I um Jerry is this like then an attachment to an existing policy that we have that will yeah this goes yeah this will go in the um Maxim actually did you put it in the consent agenda that what they have to sign so yeah good question though and in general how do we feel about the residents knowledge of this it's more than just asking for support in funerals or cremations right it's yeah it's all of what you see food maximums heating fuel um I'm just wondering if maybe it's time that we include something in the news blast that just says this exist it would come at a good time as we're the rates were changed because there's probably

people that need help that don't even know about this will I will yeah I will say that most people that apply for general assistance don't qualify because the max because they typically make too much money for you got to be really struggling you got to be really struggling to even qualify the folks that have tried to to get some general assistance don't they don't meet the bottom threshold whether it comes from the board or us I think knowing that the criteria has been modified would be a good time to just reiterate that the program exist for the residents y we can definitely bring we can definitely do some information that the in maybe in a news blast just that the select board has increased the general assistant maximums and that if you have an inquiry see this policy to reach out so maybe we could also say that the select board has increased maximums to align with so that residents don't think that

we just like pulled numbers out of the air yeah great perfect any other questions on the motion so all in favor of approving the motion in favor thank you any opposition seeing none sign that and you want to close the public hearing yep and uh do I have a motion to close the public hearing second second uh any discussion on the motion all right all in favor any opposition seeing none we'll move along okay um next on our agenda is the Department of Transportation letter of support so this is to send a vote to send a letter of support to the Department of Transportation for the Allway stop on Route 136 on Rabbit Road and Quaker Meeting House Road just a reminder this is not an approval from the select board the select board does not get the chance to approve or deny this intersection it will happen with it without our approval but based off of the data that we were provided by the uh do we are supportive

of it um whether we were supportive of it or not it's going in and we just uh they kind of meet with us as a um courtesy and so this will incur no additional cost from Durham taxpayers because it's a state road and uh we just want to send that we support their their action here to uh help increase the safety at that intersection this intersection this intersection is rated one of the top uh intersections for a fatality estimate in the state of Maine and so it has has risen to the level for the town there or for the state there and a perfect example is since the uh intersection at Quaker Meeting House Road in 125 went in there's only been one accident in all the years that we've had that go in there so we uh don't want to argue with facts and just and pull our opinions into it so we're just following the recommendation from do with a with a support letter so do we have any other questions about this letter the only

thing that I just noticed and and maybe it's fine it it the way that the bottom reads is that you're the town manager and not sentence how it says if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me or and then it says Town manager at dur I didn't know if you well yeah I think it says contact yeah contact me at this number or the town manager or town manager. goov but then it's chair sign the chair I just didn't know if you wanted to put that as your email address or if you wanted if you want to leave it the way it is it's fine just when I first read that I thought maybe that that was a typo I'm not wor about it he he's more than likely going to contact the chair through me so that's why I put my email in there and and the in the town office phone number I didn't want to hand out his phone number and okay so that's why I did it that way okay works for me if it works for as long as they know how to

get a hold of us so do you have another so I I the only thing I disagree with is one word in this and that's the word strong support MH because I I I was totally against it he made a good compelling argument and I support it I don't know I would say strong support um I don't mind leaving it in uh but uh the argument he made I think convinced

me that because of who we are as a society now this is necessary as much as I think it's absolutely ridiculous for that there to be that many access on that road that line of sight there are and it has become necessary so that's all well I'm fine with moving the Let It Word strong I'm just saying express our support yeah and while we do that we may add a period to the end of that sentence all right so I make a motion that we amend the letter of support to strike the word strong out of the first paragraph and add a period to the the end of the first paragraph and then accept the uh letter that's my motion does anyone second it I'll second Josh seconds it do we have any additional discussion I just like to I think we should note that we did have a couple emails come in on this topic from residents and both were responded to by um Dennis yeah I think the emails went to Dennis but he cced Us in his response

yeah but on the topic some residents voiced some concern and they were responded to and I think that was good yeah I appreciate Dennis's concern and providing the data as well do we have any other discussion on the motion Mr chair yeah uh fire department has no opinion but we responded to a motor vehicle accident at that intersection today Y and we actually we actually know that um based off of the data the incident rate has been pretty high every year and I think that that response puts us into like a I believe you said again without an opinion from us 11th or 12th in the entire state for intersections it was that intersection 11th or 12th highest the entire State um so again do but yeah I see that

intersection a lot on the motion thank you Chief all right seeing none uh I all in favor of the approving the letter as amended any opposition agenda this is going to be a quick new business um we have a discussion here with the escrow agreement and uh this is from George well George I can I can kind of lead into it so right now currently we don't have an escro agreement between the contractor in the town for performance guarantees and George drafted up a a um an agreement and then we talked to the town attorney and in the ordinance we don't there's there's no authority to give the town manager the authority to sign agreements with the contractor and we would do this du efficiency and I think Kristen sent an email to you and I think it's included in your packet explaining um her opinion or her

recommendation so um I don't we we drafted up the order yeah and you have the order in front of you and that order upon your signatures would be would go into the land and then and George is here to answer he's more familiar with these agreements than I am um so if you have um questions

go ahead any my only question they can be added to the L use ordinance without going to town meeting no would not be added to the L use it's just an administ okay but it wouldn't get inserted there I thought that's what trist said she she recommends it be inserted at the end of the master right but just that would the delegation of author to right just it's not added to it it's just in the master copy that you keep somewhere yeah you keep it so you know what it's there and it can be referred to

an authority that we have to Jerry to give him the opportunity to do that rather than making him go through us to do that right I'm in full support of that I just wasn't sure if it but it's a good clarification question I didn't know me

want we can just take a quick minute if someone wants to review any of uh the the recommendation from Kristen or if people are ready we can entertain a motion to approve I KN I knew you I'm I'm fine yeah I'm ready to go I'd make a motion we're halfway through the meeting so i' I'd make a motion that we

uh approve approve the uh esro AG all right Josh has made a motion do we have a second I second second any additional discussion can we get a Target date of when we'll update the land use ordinance to include this as an appendix again it would not be Amendment to the L ordinance it will just be attached to the ordinances it won't even be an official appendic so I think the intent is to have a public record that this has been delegated and you know okay well it does say here did we just have this discussion and I kind of missed it sh shall be maintained as an official appendix to the master copy of the land use ordinance to me when I read it I think that means I'm going to see appendix blah blah blah in the ordinance yeah we can clarify if Kristen thinks that it needs to be approved at the town meeting then certainly that but I think if if it had required a town meeting vote she wouldn't have put that before

he was an order well Kristen just got here we can give her more than three seconds to get in and ready we were talking about you no okay um did you want to ask that well so if it's just filed with wherever you keep the master there we're good I think that's the intent okay yeah the way I Envision it is if it's in the filing cabinet this goes right behind it and you pull it out with it um I do understand the conf confusion there about the wording where it says maintain as an official appendix I think the risk is slow any kind of future but this is I think this is just documenting that we have delegated that authority to Jerry as opposed to just saying sure go for it and then there's no documentation other than the video recording and we got to file it somewhere I see this the same way the select board delegated their Authority for Jerry assign licenses

that's that's the way that I see this and it's just all in the name of efficiency to move it because we were just saying yes when those came through and just slowed the process down and took up time because they have to get before meeting and like they're getting held up doing things because they have to get to get on agenda get the meeting Jerry can handle so yeah I'm fine with it as well do we have any other discussion okay seeing none all in favor of the motion any opposition perfect we're approved

second to get the computer yeah no worries cool well first we're going to um briefly have a discussion about Freedom of Information Act um you know we all have gone through FAA training with the town legal council and I know that you know we had brought up that uh when we looked at it all elected officials are required to go through a level of FAA training and right now I don't think we're facilitating any sort of FAA training for the uh budget committee who is elected and technically needs to go through foa training so we need to have a discussion on how we provide that opportunity because it's a legal requirement to the budget committee so I'd like to hear what people's thoughts are on that so I should clarify foa is Freedom of Information Act is there just a thing you read on the secretary take website and you print the form and you sign it um are we talking about that it's not as in so and that's what I

want to have the discussion is what sort of training we want to make sure it's provided there so I have comments about this well sure I'll let Josh finish up first yeah because the reason I bring this up because that's the bare minimum right you read that and then you sign it then we also you know had we had a presentation from legal council on foa so we understood it um and then there's also like online trainings you can take for elected officials and then go through and get that process so just wanted to make sure we have a discussion about making sure that's known to the uh budget committee and to make sure we provide them with that so sounds like you're in favor just having them go through the or the basic process if if we have Christen or somebody else come do a presentation we record it and we can send it out an email play it at a meeting I mean I can't imagine it's going to be very

long we had our presentation earlier well late last year but that was recorded too so we could share that but I'm open to other people's thoughts as well Heather you had some um my thoughts were to do a workshop that included all

of our boards committees and Commission in one shot and then if they weren't able to attend that Workshop you have it and then have them watch it or do the MMA training and the reason why I say that is because all of our boards and committees and commissions are subject to followup and I think that

when they're all emailing back and forth I don't think that people understand the rules necessarily around it in the terms of record keeping and well I think one to inject real thing one people don't think people don't realize is that if you're discussing Town business on your personal devices that's subject to a Freedom of Information Act request so someone can say we need all emails and texts about this thing that the select board was talking about or the budget committee or the Conservation Commission and that can be I don't think people realize that right so and so I think that without without intentionally doing so you know like it's okay to do administrative acts outside of a public meeting but when there's like any discussion about anything that's like happening in an upcoming meeting or or in a previous meeting and all the board members are part of that that that's constitut legal meeting and I don't

think anyone's doing that intentionally but I do think that that could potentially be happening like on accident and so I'm in favor of a workshop format for all boards commissions and committees to attend and if they can't attend then to either do the online training or have it report don't watch it I think I think it's something that really needs to be addressed I think it's I think that's a good idea but I think that's for a next later this year type thing I think that we don't have time to do that between now and like the time meeting um but I think that we should at least in the inter term issue the link to what you were talking about Josh reading the information and then signing off that you did it to all of the boards and committees with the plan of in I would say next year but I mean after April of this year getting everyone together for one person poet training all the boards and committees but there's some

Logistics we'd have to work out there like space thatd have to probably be at the school and then we'd have to set up a time where people could see it and then because we had the presentation from Kristen but we were kind of broad ranging in our discussion during that so it's not really compartmentalized where we can say go watch from minute you know 17 to minute 27 we kind of as our conversations get sometimes all over the place so I think that the workshop is a great idea for after April um when we have our new iteration of the board and uh I think it would be a good time to do an onboarding process at the same time we do this goal setting you know well I we but like in that same general time frame so um so I think that what I would like to do right now is just we'll send out an email to all people who serve the boards and commissions and elected appointed and all that with a link to what you said Josh just to say that this

needs to be conduct this needs to be completed within the next 30 days does that seem reasonable yeah and I think it should include like a a formed roster or something that each there's a form you have to print ins sign yeah and so we can say that after you've complete the form that you print and sign you got to bring it to the town office and then we can I can go through and double check based off who's received the email or the chairs could just collect them at their next meeting delegation I like that you know yeah I mean that's a good chairs we can do that I don't think we need a motion for this but we could we could it's a motion for sure I move that we send the town chairs

a uh link to the appropriate documents to conduct FAA training and instruct them to have membership complete it within 30 days and return it to the town office do we have a second a second second any discussion on the motion all right all in favor any opposition perfect can you put that on the check sheet perfect thanks you should see what you said last yeah I asked Deb if she could put it on our check sheet of of too Tas sheets task sheet okay all right well now we want to move in are you prepared for the contract awesome and chief already escaped his mic I don't know when he snuck away but he made room Calvin's brave enough to stay up oh no too Jerry you going out of there

discussion here uh the planning board already received a presentation uh similar to this to talk about the concept of contract zoning and the ordinance and and we're going to have that conversation here tonight with our town legal council so okay and that was going to be my first question back was do we want a general overview of contract Zoning for the public as much as this group for yeah I think that a general overview uh maybe a trunk a version to what the planning board got is great to explain the concept and then we can go through in more detail and we can ask questions if that but can we ask questions as we go please do interrupt As You Wish um contract zoning is a statutory uh process that allows a town by ordinance to um provide for contract zoning and contract zoning is the ability to modify standards that apply under the ordinance or the types of uses that might be allowed in a district um

if a contract zoning agreement is proposed and accepted by the legislative body so here in Durham legislative body is the town meeting and any contract zoning agreement is not valid until it is presented to an approved by town meeting so if you think of it um as sort of a mini Amendment to the land use ordinance that only applies to a particular project on a particular parcel um that's probably the best way to think about it goes through the same legislative process it's actually it works as an amendment to the zoning ordinance it's attached to the zoning ordinance um and sort of again modifies the standards just for that parcel for that project and the idea is to be able to Target the standards of

review um to that particular project because perhaps it's a unique piece of plan or perhaps it's a type of project that it's just really hard to write standards for that are going to get us the best project in the best place every time so it allows a developer to come to town and say I want to do this particular project however maybe you don't provide for that use and your table of uses as something allowed in this District or any District or maybe I need to modify the lot size in order to accomplish what I need to do maybe I need to modify frontages in order to accomplish what I need to do and in exchange for that there's typically some modifications that are made to the development to suit the town so perhaps perhaps the town wants to ensure that there's public access to the shore through a residential development on a lake um perhaps there's going to be a project that has a big draw for

utilities and so you require them to establish a new utility Corridor that only benefits them but benefits you know properties along the way so there's this concept of it is a contract it is an agreement and both parties get some consideration out of it so the consideration the developer gets is some terms of the ordinance get modified in their favor the consideration the town gets is you can sort of mold the development in the way that you want in a way that the planning board really doesn't have authority to do because they only have authority to apply the performance standards that are already in the ordinance yeah they can put conditions on but the the limits on what they can do are much more um confined in

that case than what contract zoning can accomplish so um you know example would be like Rock Row and Westbrook was all done through contract zoning I represent the city of Belfast they did their Harbor walk through contract zoning by selling by requiring those Parcels when they sold to use that process to develop and when they were developed through contract zoning they you know had to keep a path to the shore um so that's the overview Qui do most municipalities have contract zoning as an option I would say most do um it's certainly a a developing and developed Community sort of concept um I will say that I really like the idea for Durham because of the fact that it's a rural community that there's not a lot of commercial Industrial Development here yet and not a lot of residential scale development here yet um and perhaps you're not ready to take the full leap into like we're going to do um large scale residential and Zone

appropriately with tiny lot sizes and cluster development we're not ready to do that we want to see a project as it comes and determine whether in this neck of the woods it makes sense with the way it's proposed and that the roads are good enough to serve it and the utilities which we don't have public utilities you know are they serving them um so I think it's a way that Durham can sort of um control its Destiny here for a little while without going P hog into develop like like commercial zoning heavy commercial okay right because because this is a town that doesn't have a defined commercial area and a defined residential area so it's really more about does that project work on that parcel and do we like it in general MH so so when the contract is being developed and proposed what sort of things could the municipality ask for as part of the agreement because my understanding is that contract zoning is you're

essentially entering into a contract with the community to do something outside of the traditional confines of that zone so contract zoning and so my thought process if someone wants to this un let's maybe this is a little absurd but if someone wants to put a rocket launching facility in town that's something that we don't have anything written down for what are the sorts of like scale of things that you can ask for in the contract zoning agreement so the the statute limits us only to the physical development of the property physical development and use of the property but I can extrapolate that pretty far um so anything certainly that we can look at in a review of an application so is it public safety is it utilities is it sighting on a property um is it roads so if someone isn't proposing a project and that that developer is going to require a lot of water is there possibility to say well

if you're establishing the supply you need for heavy water use along the route we want you to install hydrants exactly that's the kind of thing we can ask for y um or you know I'll use the Waterfront development again you know we have very few means of Waterfront access in this town we're going to require you to preserve a public easement to the shore MH um and and that makes sense because we already think about these things when we approve applications would the planning board be able to mandate somebody to put in a public easement no but under contract zoning yes and who negotiates the contract UPF front with applicants so the the way this draft ordinance um would work is someone submits a developer would submit a contract zoning application to the town through the town manager the town manager would Engage The Town planner and the town attorney and we would do a preliminary review of the package sort of an analysis of the

the cost benefit um I would look at the contract zoning agreement itself and see what areas we could push or restrict or whether we think it complies with the comprehensive plan um it's very important in contract zoning as with all zoning that we don't do things that are directly in conflict with the comprehensive plan so you know if the district is described as agricultural we're not going to allow a rocket launching facility in it but if there's under the language if it's more it's more vague if it's generalistic there's usually a path M um so we will look at that stuff preliminarily then we schedule a public hearing that goes through uh that's held by the planning board and the select board directly so at this point it's the town attorney and the town manager who have received the information and then from the town manager and the town attorney it comes to a public hearing or is it handed to

the select board before that uh we would probably I think in a workshop or something let you all know about it a lot of times a developer wants to come and introduce the project and the concept before they even submit the the plan um so you know I I think for a larger development with somebody wanting to use this process they're probably going to want to come in have a workshop talk about the select board's priorities their priorities and kind of get some ideas on how they're going to draft that agreement M and then they would officially submit the application after that that's what I'm used to seeing but the process would allow somebody to come in sort of cold turkey and drop an application on our desk and we we deal with it in that way okay so the idea is that staff sort of does some preliminary massaging of the agreement into what we think would be more palatable or interesting to the select board um then

it goes to this joint hearing of the planning board and the select board and there's no obligation under this process that it's one meeting and done it can be this iterative process where where the planning board might you know have some ideas the select board might have some ideas and you send the developer off to make some changes and and that joint hearing meting sorry that joint hearing is open for the public input as well and so what I'm seeing here is that if they're essentially asking for a contract Zone from the legislative body which is the the voters they're saying we're applying and presenting to the voters at this time of what we want to do and then that's being facilitated by the select board and the budget committee right so say you're the conduit planning board sorry so does that mean like the budget the select board and the planning board can't say UPF front we don't even want to hear

this application if they've indicated that we're applying for contract zoning if you hate it yeah um they can make an application but if you hate it and the planning board hates it you could absolutely send them away in the very first meeting you know you go through at that public hearing yeah the public but they so what I'm getting is the Public's always going to have a chance to input on it public always would have a chance whether yay or nay to continue okay yep um because the first step in the in the official process is a public hearing which mandates that the public be heard um you know in real life probably there's going to be a public hearing um some discussion between the boards and applicant they go back they make some changes they present it to you again maybe you've already heard enough public comment on it and now they're just responding to that public comment so maybe you don't take public comment at

meeting number two um or meeting number three and it's just sort of the nuts and bolts of the agreement we're talking about at that point but there's there will always be the opportunity for public hearing and then you take it to town meeting of course with which is its own public hearing itself and nothing is stopping the board from having you know another public hearing before town meeting too so just to clarify the bullet points here someone indicates that they want to apply for contract zoning they look at our town ordinance and they say oh what I want to do in this town says that I need to go through contract zoning they develop an application and submit it to the town manager and it gets reviewed by the town manager in legal council and then at that point they can do an application it's likely that they'll come forward and say we want to meet with the select board at a at a meeting to present what we're

talking about from there the next step is a public hearing and then discussing the merits of that contract the give and take and there can be additional public hearings and feedback so if we hear we like this project but only if we get XYZ from the community um then we can say that's what we're going to need to see in an application and then they come back to our our our governing body and then ultimately once a contract is framed out in one that's mutually agreed upon and then goes to the actual town meeting and everyone at Town gets the vote on whether it's approved correct okay so ultimately the permit and the contract zone is awarded by the town the town but then no rights at all up until that point okay and then does the uh applicant still have to meet the requirements for other permits like site review and stuff like that to the planning board okay so the um the contract zoning agreement just a couple

of things on the process you just outlined in theory um the select board could feel warm about account contract zoning proposal but say town meeting decides this is a democratic process we're going to give them all the information they need to make the decision here maybe we'll make a recommendation against it or for it um but we're going to pass it on just because we want the Democratic process to play out um the planning board's role in this is advisory only so they take a vote first and their vote is to either recommend or not recommend or recommend with changes and the select board is not bound by the recommendation is just sort of advisory to you and their job principally is to look at this issue of does it comport with the comprehensive plan so um there is there is a scenario where the planning board votes they don't like it the select board votes you do and you want to put it forward or

vice versa okay um definitely puts a lot of that power into the legislative body of the Town absolutely and a lot of towns where contract zoning is used quite frankly it's not a town meeting town it's a Town Council Town MH and so this is more of a a fast-paced process but um here it will be a very slow process so we were talking about this the planning board and I think it's going to be the rare developer or development that wants to take advantage a lot of risk for the developer ton of risk you know they've got to they've got to put their plan together because we need to see the plan um at least in a sketch format as part of the application um they're going to need to work on some preliminary engineering and be able to answer all their questions and then potenti eventually like you know we're probably only going to put this on for an annual town meeting so it could be a 10-month process before it even goes to

the vote um so it would it would be again the rare development where somebody's choice is better in using contract zoning than just modifying some things and conforming with what we already have or going elsewhere um and then in terms of land e approvals the way this is written we can modify basically any um sort of like a dimensional standard that might apply to a project um that anything else that we don't specifically modify in that agreement is going to come under the regular Town ordinances so they're still no matter what they still have to get their site plan approval or their subdivision approval or anything that applies if they are if it's for particular use where we have specific standards like mineral extraction or solar whatever it is um all those standards are still going to apply unless we've modified them so example right now we have a solar ordinance we have requirements for what

buffering and things like that so the town were to agree for contract if if solar were to be required for contract zoning let's say and the town were agreed to a contract zone for solar that says sure we want to put we allow the applicant to put solar here they still have to meet all the standards outlined in the town solar ordinance unless the contract zoning agreement explicitly said you don't need this buffer or you that that is already lined up corre and that so that then gives the opportunity for the community itself to have that vote as well okay y so unless it's explicitly modified it's goes to the standards already in the land use ordinance correct okay uh contract zoning process by the way is not appealable because at the end of the day it's a legislative act mhm so nobody could use a appeal process to try to challenge it if if they wanted to say okay you didn't follow the ordinance or

you um you know it doesn't comply with the comprehensive plan then in theory they could bring a lawsuit on that point to challenge the zoning but I've not ever seen that happen at least not successfully um I have a question about

marijuana because in I think it was in 2018 the town voted to opt out of that and so if we if contract zoning were pass and the town voted to opt out it doesn't exist in our land use ordinance is there is there a pathway for that because we opted out for Contra no CU that and cannabis really is like the one area that I can think of where you wouldn't be able to use this process because of the opt out okay you know the statute requires you to have opted in before anybody can make that application that's totally separate from the contracts thing and to that point question outside of the Cannabis question so when we

we'll get into the details of this in a second here but you know my understanding is we're going to have a proposal to say two types of projects require contract zoning does that mean that it is only limited in scope to those two or could someone who wants to do let's say a subdivision or normal cluster development come through and say I want to go through the I I don't foresee someone wanting to do this but they say I want to go through the contract zoning process for this 12 unit subdivision rather than the normal process yeah so the way this is written now anybody could make an application to use contract zoning on any lot R use anywhere in town it's going to go through the whole process we just St but for a couple of designated uses

no matter where it is you would have to use contract zoning if you want to have that type of development in this town MH um so you know right now the proposal on the table is for battery energy storage this is a prime example of the type of project that it's really hard to say yeah can go in District X because it might be okay on one parcel and horrible on another within a certain District so we're going to say we want to be able to look at the whole package of a proposal to decide whether that makes sense as proposed um and because it comes with it you know a bunch of different risks than we're used to dealing with or prepared to deal with we want to look at as a toll package so we're mandating contracts zing being used for that type of project I see it is really helpful for a community like Durham where we might have standards for some activities but we don't have we haven't gone through the process of saying where

those activities would be preferred to take place in town so I think of things like Prime agricultural soils like maybe that's not a good place for a project whereas an old Gravel Pit could be a good place or something like that and that seems like it gives us that the community that opportunity through this right it does okay y do we have any more questions on the concept of contract zoning before we get into the uh draft

to start at the top or wherever you want okay you want to just work our way through yep okay it is not long thankfully so keep you awake um we'll start with Section a um so that refers to the statute that I referenced section 4352 which says contract zoning is authorized it says that it's um it may include conditions or restrictions that relate to the fiscal development of land and that it has to be consistent with the comprehensive plan so that comes straight from the statute and contract zoning is to promote the general General Welfare of the residents of the Town Selectmen May approve a contract zoning request for placement on the town warrant only if it determines in its discretion that the contract zoning is in the public interest um very general term there and subjective you know typ or un purpose and that it will have beneficial effects on the town as a whole can I stop you for one second Y is

that okay I do not this is not bother me at all that it says Selectmen um but MMA like put out guidance to say that things should change to select board I again I do not care I just I think we're going to update our stuff we should update yeah we we have we have changed our all of our literature in town and all of our documents to say select board and so we weren't we had this discussion of like if something refers to select men but we call it our select board does that still count because it says well that's for the select men not the select board so I don't this was before you were here so we had to just speculate at these things yeah the statutes still generally say Board of selectman I pulled this from the land use ordinance currently using Board of Select for consistency sake I know you guys are doing a codification one idea would be that for consistency since this is just an amendment to the zoning ordinance to use

Board of Selectmen consistently and then in the codification update every single urance with select board okay that makes sense to you yeah perfect application process already been over this but um you know not withstanding any time that the applicant may have come in for something less formal in front of the board eventually they submit an application for contract owning to the town manager has to include at minimum um a map showing where it's going to be located um the address the property

owners information evidence of their ownership or interest in the property a site analysis that describes the major features of the property um and then a conceptual development plan showing the layout of all of the you know the buildings the parking areas the driveways um utilities buffers things like that so you really get a sense of what's going to go where on the development it's not going to have every topographical detail and um Street design plan and everything that it would have when it later goes to the planning board but it can be you know at at the end of the day they're at your mercy so so the board can always request more detail on certain elements when an example here might be it's not going to show you an exact two scale everything but it might say here's our proposed development with this foot buffer and all that sort of stuff but it might not show you exactly how that all looks it's

more of a con that like you said a conceptual yeah if if you've ever seen a sketch plan in front of the planning board more at that level um and then they give you the the proposed contract zoning agreement this is usually you know let's say it's a three or four page agreement about a third of it going to be boiler plate that deals with you know their are timelines to complete the development what happens if they don't comply various things like that and the meat of it will usually be reduced to like a page or two so that it's pretty you know palatable for people to read in town and understand what it's going for and that sorry to jump in but at this juncture here when they say here's your here's our contract agreement is that where they're first saying this is what we want to do to that's different within your zoning and here's what we're offering in a in it for that correct okay so that's where they kind of make

the first offer of like here's what we're going to do and so this is prepared entirely by them and not at the cost of our correct town okay yep now let's assume they've probably had a meeting with planning um and the town manager just you know developers want to know stuff about the community they want to know what the board is like yeah so I don't I don't expect it to ever really come in in a total vacuum M they'll have had some input so they submit that application but um at that process that's where now we're going to work on the agreement itself and if they don't have Provisions in there that should be I'd add them in if we know that there are certain issues that are going to be important to the select board we can say you know we know Public Access is really important in this town or the sighting of this is going to be problematic because you could have put it here in the residential areas you

know closer to where You' chose to put in and it's up to them they can modify it and represent it they can go with what they initially presented mhm and also if in this first initial Town manager review process the town manager the code enforcement officer flag something of note that says they can then that's where that this I is here y yep um and an application fee which we don't yet have but it'll go in your regular fee scheduled do do you can you give us a ballpark of what those application fees usually look like I mean I this is contract zoning is a significant process that involves a lot of Staff time so I think it should be a hefty so you're in thousands not hundreds defin I I would think around 2,000 at the minimum that's just to the application on the desk yep

reasonably final form MH we work as part of the agenda to call the public hearing and that's got to work for the planning board too because they will also be in just saying this has to meet um the the town manager or the designate just reviews it all Y and at this point says yep all the things in section one have been checked here this is complete not not commenting on the the value of it but saying this they're they're bringing everything to the table that we asked exactly okay and um I shouldn't have skipped over there is a robust public notice process so it's um at least days plus notice directly to anybody who's within 500 ft of the boundaries of the affected Parcels mhm and you could make that larger if you wanted this is nitpicky but is it within 500 F feet of the project footprint or within 500 ft of the boundary of the parcel that the project is on parcel so if they had a 40 acre parcel they can't just put it in

the middle you run that 500 ft from the parcel boundary better now than later how he pointed right at me I didn't I didn't I didn't that was a Freudian there I didn't mean to I did actually go we love nitpicky stuff that was my bad I'm sorry I I went like this though both of us that's that's you know you should wear that proud I do yes that's not a complaint um so then uh section four goes into some pretty specific detail about how that meeting is run there's presentation by the applicant Town staff makes comments um the planning board and board of Selectmen discuss or the select board discuss and can ask questions um you hear from the public the applicant provides any response and then you know the planning board is going to consider the land use implications and the comprehensive U plan implications and the select board is going to discuss whatever it wants to discuss at that point you can do one of two

things if it's ready for a vote um in favor or oppos to the planning board takes a vote to recommend or not recommend and then the select board takes a vote to put it on town meeting or or not so those are live votes at that meeting or or we don't have enough we we think we need more given from the applicant based off of public comment in board concerns correct you could say we're going to need to have come back with a better offer yeah I mean and think of the planning board process too there's a little flavor of that here um you know we're just not sure on what the noise impacts of this project are going to be so we're either going to require you applicant to come back with a really granular noise impact analysis provided by somebody you hire or you know we want to hire somebody to advise us on this does it make sense at this meeting to have legal counsel there in case we have questions right then so for the hearing

absolutely yeah y besides I think anytime it's going to be so infrequent that one of these projects comes up um you know boards often have to relearn the process every time so it's help have Legal C might be several iterations of the board before it's experienced again and there there are some legal lines that are drawn of course and you might need some guidance on well the Public's requesting this and this you know are we allowed to ask for that um for instance you know Housing Development I was working on um through contract zoning the public um particularly the residents of the development were concerned about their rents and they wanted to make sure that rents didn't go up MH and the council was prepared very much to say yeah we want to put some rent controls in here but you can't actually do that as part of contracts Zing because it doesn't relate to the physical development of the property so it was good they had

their lawyer there say oh w w can't do that quick side question and so I know that we are determining the contract here and what the as a community could that say for example I think of like if we were to have a proposed like very large development that adds to the a lot of valuation to the town I know that some of our Valu our our resources from the state you know Pro like this called profit sharing right when the state helps Revenue sharing that's the word I'm looking for Revenue sharing school funding stuff like that might change once the town valuation increases can you request that they fund economic analysis of that to figure out the total impact that the project might have it might sound great you're bringing a lot of valuation in but does that mean we're getting less of the assistance we normally get yes okay yep that's a really good question Joe someone else must have said it and I just heard it

because I don't usually come up with good questions like that it it is very smart thinking because a lot of times an applicant like this will come in and say we're going to add $20 million in valuation to your town but they're not looking at the net and the net I mean the net is still usually positive don't get me wrong but it's usually not a $20 million net so um and then you know we're going

to add $20 million worth of valuation to your town but we're also going to add 140 more students to your school district that now we're going to have taxation related to so uh yeah and there is specific in um paragraph five the board determines that professional professional assistance is necessary you can request the applicant to make a deposit in escrow to permit such review and that's where we request funds that we the amount we request there could be determined on on what we think we need for information so it's not limited to well you need a small escrow account it might be we need you to deposit 10 10,000 $15,000 into and the applicant's choice at that point is I think that's unreasonable I don't want to pay it we're out of here yeah or it's you know so it sounds like the whole process here if they don't like what the town's asking for the solution is buy exactly um not oh well let's negotiate that you

know yeah and that that's a refreshing change from the usual planning board process where they have to make specific findings they have to find something under the ordinance to deny based on and then they still risk that the applicant might appeal because the reasons they gave weren't good enough under contract zoning you can just basically be like no we don't like it you know bye interesting sorry for all the

six which is just again the there's no end date to the number of meetings that one would have on this potentially there could be any number of iterations back and forth of the agreement and conversations about it um you might let's say the planning board has heard enough at meeting one but the select board hasn't uh planning board could make a recommendation on meeting one but the select board could could continue through meetings two three and four for instance can that work vice versa probably not because under the way this is written the planning board goes first in terms of making its recommend and then it proceeds more to deliberations of theel okay can I ask a question y when we get to the town meeting part of it is

it like they so the planning board makes their recommendation when they're ready to make their recommendation and then we get all the way through it we go to town meeting are those is that is it just the select board at that point that's making the recommendation or is it like how on our budget the budget committee and the select board recommendation are on the warrant yeah I would I would say it's not mandated under the um ordinance Amendment here but I would say to put both on there MH so the community knows when they're voting yeah both boards agree both boards disagree or the boards are split correct yeah y I imagine the applicant usually wants to make their offer so to say one that aligns with both boards though for the best chance okay absolutely and real quick on the process you might get to this but say the process begins and there's a town meeting in 2 months there's no requirement and I

there's no requirement for us to say you get a chance at the Town floor the next town meeting it's the town meeting after we're all ready so we can say it could be a 14-month process before you're you're getting a vote from the community okay okay yep the the select board is 100% the gatekeeper of we and when it goes to town meeting so while we don't just act in bad faith and drag somebody around just because um it is certainly within your discussion to say ah this is all moving too fast we're not going to have it ready okay so the plan board takes its um advisory vote then the select board um takes its vote at some point within 30 days of the close of the full hearing process and again you either vote that it's going to go on the warrant or that it's not and they're done and that's really the end of the game for the developer at that point they can't go to afford appeals or anything like I

said um so the developer doesn't show up to the town meeting to plead their case they can okay absolutely you know they have to go through the process of being recognized as you know out of town and yeah um and it's usually good to I mean I would imagine if something were to go through I would imagine we would want them to present at the town meeting to make sure people have an ample understanding in case they hadn't participated in the previous public hearings but yeah I mean or possibly the better way to do it that you know is less partial to the developer is to have planner give the presentation and then the developer is there to answer goes

way but yeah people people don't generally love to have you know the snake oil salesman from out of town com pitch to them they want to hear it from the people who work for so let's say that it has gone to town meeting um and it has been approved the applicant well up until that point the applicant can always change their mind and bail and withdraw their agreement until it appears on that warrant um the let's say it does get approved it's not going to mandate that the developer do that development at the end of the day um we don't ever want to force anybody to complete a development because then you end up with companies that are bankrupt or where it's not a good business decision going through with something and then ultimately it doesn't go well so we allow them to not develop the property in accordance with the contract zoning agreement but if they are going to do this development it has to be done to

the letter of that contract's own agreement so they get the they get the green light but it's not a forced start correct can you put a time limit on that green light to say you know if construction doesn't start within 12 months then additional approval would be required um in paragraph

numbers on this document but um the contract zoning agreement itself will have Provisions for termination of the contract if proposed development is not commenced or completed by certain State deadlines uh they have to start sometime within two years from approval by town meeting and they have to complete no more than three years following the day they start okay so five next cuz one of the things I think about like not that I would imagine this to happen but if a type of development were to be proposed and they received the contract zoning the next if someone else comes in and wants to do the exact same thing in another site the town may say we only want one of these in town not two of these so we need to make sure that we know whether the first one's going to actually happen or not after we've given them that and so that gives a little bit of wiggle room there in terms of if they don't actually start it

you can say okay we're now ready to entertain another another offer so to say and there's some wiggle room downward from the states and if you think you know this works in our community today with the pattern of development we have and what's on the adjacent properties things change fast right and so we don't want to have to make a decision today when things might change drastically and our analysis of what's a public benefit versus a risk might be completely different in a year or two so for development X we might say you have one year to start and two years to finish mhm or whatever it may be whatever is reasonable but the idea is that you know we are really looking at this holistically based on the full set of facts today we're not going to let them come in five or 10 years later with this project that now doesn't fit for whatever reason or that people would have never approved five or 10 years

yeah I think in an example is if something's approved and then for some stroke of a miracle the adjacent landowner decides to give the town a town park all of a sudden it's like it's been 2 years you haven't done anything it's not the same town anymore now you need to come back and we need to talk again yep when you you brought something that was going to raise the red flag for me about the fact that like all of this leg work could happen but then they could not follow through and for me I'm

wondering what kind of assurance along the way like I can just imagine hours like the planner is going to put into this right and that's like Town resources that are getting used so how do we cover ourselves financially for the light work that the town's going to put into it if they can just walk away from it I would in that situation yeah one way is by setting that application fee high enough that it helps def Fray that you know accounting for let's be realistic you know probably

25 staff hours and five attorney hours in that process so we think about you know how much of that is reasonable to expect the applicant to defay and how much do we eat because you know it's just part of our process but part of it is that um part of it is making sure as we go through the process that the developer is serious and that they're doing things according to schedule they're not dragging things out unrealistically um because again we can put a Hal to it at any time by just you know we're bring using and we're going to say no is there an opportunity when setting up like the escrow account to say the this the scope and scale of this is putting a lot of effort a lot of lot of taxing on our Our Town staff so we need you to set up an escrow account to provide for contract staff to handle some of this Administration or does that escrow only have to be for like double-checking their work with a consultant or

something it's written as professional assistance very broad term so that could be you're going to use um the Cog to get some contract plan help or you're going to go to you know some company for contract planner help or you need my help yeah I think that it's perfectly realistic to put legal fees under there um anything you'd need up to and including fancy Engineers perfect so yeah you can control for a lot of that um it is a risk but you know you know what I mean the average planning board project of a certain scale is a risk too because you've got a lot of George's time into it a lot of planning board time into it um so there's always that risk generally speaking though people who developers who pursue this process are really into it you know they're they're not kind of playing around and I'm gathering they're usually the scale that they have the financial backing that correct these sorts of fees aren't scaring them away

correct yeah y they've made a cost benefit analysis that um and a lot of these you know companies that come in in a process like this they're working on a a nationwide scale they're used to bureaucracy they're used to time frames taking forever um so you know they are if anything they're put off by small town government but they're not put off by a long process they're not that mean and high fees you know yeah so they don't like us it's not the fee that bothers them no I mean I I expect a developer to be like town meeting what's town meeting you know why do I have to go to a a Saturday uh you know meeting and explain this project to a bunch of people but so we give someone the opportunity to experience their first town meeting and I think that's a gift to them you know

um moving into C then under header contract zoning agreement agement the agreement has to include an enforcement provision the way these are enforced is really just like any other violation of any other ordinances enforced through the code enforcement officer we would go to court we commanded they do whatever they promised they were going to do as part of this agreement or we can impose penalties we could also you know if a predicate to their development was installing some special utility line and they haven't done that but they're building the development anyway we could get an injunction against the development proceeding because they haven't done step one of the contract um and then there's a list in number two there of the types of things that we might require of the development so might be limitations on the way the facility is used maybe it's hours of operation or days of the week um maybe

it's the way traffic Flows In and Out maybe it's um where buildings go where buffers are open space is preserved um contributions toward the provision of Municipal Services impacted by the development so I want to touch on that one for a second because a lot of people are like okay contracts zoning what do we get out of it we want some balloon payment from the developer um sort of to make us feel better about letting you do the project that's not what this is talking about it's really it's usually contributions in kind so let's use battery energy storage has a higher fire risk and might need special kinds of firefighting foam or equipment I don't really know um but if our fire department doesn't have those resources perhaps they are providing equipment and training um at the developer cost of start of the agreement I think an example of that is like I grew up in a municipality that had a paper mill and when the mill went

in the mill bought a special ladder truck because there wasn't a truck that could accommodate the height of the structure already existing in that town and in that example they kept it on site so the fire department could just get it there is that something that I don't know if that was done through contract zoning but is that something that is something you could do y i remember working on a you know a big tank in South Portland and they needed I think it was called a screamer or something was a mobile piece of firefighting equipment that would be left on site but belonged to the fire department similar kind of things um you know another example might be as

you know developers um love private roads residential developers love private roads they'll build a big huge development um and have it served by private roads that have homeowners associations that inevitably don't take great care of their roads there's no Road connectivity from this development to that road um so it would be pretty common in something like this to say okay we want you to build a road of good quality that's going to connect from point A to point be and serve your development and it's going to be a Town Road and you know it's going to be built to spec and maybe you're going to Escrow money to take care of it in its first 10 years or something like that again not usually cash not usually you know one of these payments in Li of taxes um but there's a lot of opportunity to work with them within the confines of what this provides and that's a good point too everything you've mentioned so far

is in addition to the property tax expense that they would incur after the project is correct in place so okay we talked about termination which is number three um number four effects of the agreement so if you have a contract zoning agreement related to a particular piece of property which it always does that contract zoning agreement runs with the land meaning they can sell the development to party a party B whether it's pre-development or post-development and yeah that's that thir party that has acquired the parcel um gets the benefit of the contract zoning agreement but they also have to you know comply with all of its terms and so I might if I'm writing a contract zoning agreement I might have some provision for assignment that says if you sell this and assign it to somebody else we get to vet that somebody else to make sure that they have the capacity follow through with what whatever else

needs to be done um number six or number five sorry the contract zoning agreement may allow for changes um and it can specify the procedure for approval so you can say something like minor changes can be approved by the town manager um or it could be approved by the select board alone after a public hearing whatever we want to put in there so maybe we have minor changes our process a major changes we go through the whole contract zoning process again what defines the scope of minor versus major we Define it in the agreement but generally I would say ER would be um in line with what already is in the land use ordinance like um you know things that are not known at the time of application but crop up on the site like maybe there's a ledge here so they have to move the building over by 100 feet or something but don't don't change the nature of they don't change the the substantive like anything that the the

board would have taken as a pro or con against the development okay so we try to put the right language around that and then number five or number six is just um they don't get any rights to the project so even if they've endured a a grueling year or years long process uh

they still don't get any rights in that process unless town meeting has voted up sounds like this process really just puts the ball in the court of the Town Absolut it's just like really robust and a very much a direct democracy there because ultimately it's the court of public opinion they can't appeal it they're not guaranteed the project and they've got to appease the voter base exactly I mean one of the fundamental flaws of Landes ordinances is that we're and comprehensive plans for that matter is we're trying to prognosticate what's going to happen with the town we're trying to generalize what's good in this area versus that area um and so many times right this why we're always modifying our landies ordinances every single year because things come up that we didn't anticipate or um things change and just new new scope and scale of projects that you know you can't make an exhaustive list of every possible thing

some exactly if you look at your table of uses for instance you know certainly it doesn't have everything under the no rocket launching facility listed you know and sometimes it's wicked hard to figure out where something falls under that chart because maybe it's a little bit of this and a little bit of that it's just you know these ordinances are not built for a lot of flexibility and when the planning board acting alone you know tries to employ that flexibility often it's running into trouble with appeals and stuff like that one of the big values I see here is that often times in public policy you see the proceedings on how a policy was developed and understand its intent and then when it gets applied someone figures out a loophole or someone figures out something and says that's really not and the person who wrote the policy or was an advocate for it goes that's not really what the intent was

but it is technically allowed so it has to go through it this seems like since it's a a sight by sight application by application you're craft in that policy agreement for not any project but this specific project and I think that's a huge strength and so many times um in

smaller towns in particular where we're always kind of behind aall because town meeting is slow um and you know it's it's hard to get something in front of the voters it we end up playing catchup so much so somebody comes in and makes a proposal and then there's an oh no moment where we realize oh we don't have the standards for this or we don't have the the category of use for this and where does it fall and typically what we do is we throw a moratorium on something um under a special town meeting and then we spend some monthlong process trying to evaluate this type of use when really it's like one application that drives it and we may never get that application again for 10 years and now we've created a whole category of use and standards to try to just get at this one development so if we have contracts zing in place as a process then what we do and we have that oh no moment now is instead of a

moratorium we could have a special town meeting that says sure you can do this if it's by contract zoning so now we have that process where yeah the planning board is going to look at it but also town meeting is going to look at it and at the end of the day we decide whether we like this project rather than try to General projects of that type I really like that idea because then it it's like you said rather than we need to put put a six Monon block on this develop a whole process just just like yeah sure contract zoning and then the applicant can present and then you immediately start that process that involves the entire Community I think there's a lot of strength there for town like Durham you know because we do need to add more to our tax base to to help manage expenses but it needs to be the right kind of project it can't just be anything so and you just don't have that granular level of detail in the ordinance where

you know 20 different zones you're not there yet yeah um I don't have any other questions does anyone else I I know I always talk a lot so I think I get it out of the way I just wanted to ask George if he had anything he wanted to add or that you wanted us to know from your perspective about this if it's no it's fine just didn't want you to sit here all night and then not have the opportunity to

important tool where Durham is at as Kristen said in terms of your comprehensive planning process and this town under the comprehensive plan basically has a townwide zoning as opposed to District zonings uh where you would have those traditional places where larger projects and com large scale commercial industrial would have an opportunity to go into increase your tax Bas so um you know you've been talking about doing an update to the comence a plan to look at that but as Kristen said I think you're from a development standpoint you're years away from really being able to do it and use it effectively so I think this is kind of an alternative to that and you were thinking about you know budgeting somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 to to do a a real comprehensive plan for growth in rural areas and the whole nine yards um basically what this does and it just seems to potentially make a lot of

sense that here rather than trying to plan out the entire Community under very complicated analysis you can basically uh look at individual properties on that same approach to comprehensive planning and limit scope limit the cost and not have it as Kristen said try to write an ordinance that covers everything under the Sun so I think it's a really important tool I think also Durham is an position uh with some of the people that are available your new town attorney uh support the my experience I've negotiated uh for Falmouth and gray um special zoning districts that involved very large projects with infrastructure and tax increment financing so we really it's amazing you have an opportunity uh with some of the resources that are available to do this because most small towns just can't even do it even if they they had the contracts Zone because they don't have the resources and the and the experience

to deal with something like this but Durham is in a position right now to be able to take advantage of it so I think it's a very important tool good point Thank You George it sounds like you're saying we're just a wicked smack town we can figure it out he yeah yeah perfect any

other and I like ordinances that are only a few pages CU it's easier too easier done is there is there anything that has popped out with anybody as a wording change you'd like to see or anything you'd like added or change I don't see anything based off my review before tonight when we had it in our packet or based off our discussion today um so does anyone else see anything I didn't see anything but I also I never check for periods commas that is Heather who checks for that do your worst yeah I it's cuz I worked for a lawyer yeah so I can't read anything without proof reading um so I think that I'm comfortable with sending this uh to the planning board to get to review they got a presentation last week on the concept of contract zoning to just kind of be a primer like what we had earlier tonight I think sending this over as uh something that we're comfortable with for them to put it in their pipeline to

start the public hearing process uh to put it on the as a warrant article on the time meeting me so does anyone the only thing that I would add to that is that I want to make sure they know that if they're that they if they need input from us about the direction or that we just don't end up in that situation that we were in before where um we were thinking we had communicated one thing they were thinking we had communicated something else and it kind of is not going in the same direction yeah so my understanding of the process you know all warrant Lang article language needs to have be presented in a public format by the town by the planning board and then it comes to the select board and we say yep we like this warrant language plus your public comment we did it a little bit differently here because this is so major just to say the select board's good with the basis document so we're up to speed now so now I think we

can hand this to the planning board and say go through your process and bring it to town public hearing and then bring us the warrant language but we know the nuts and bolts of it rather than seeing it at the very end and saying whoa whoa this is pretty major so does that work if we just communicate to them that we just want them to take this and go with it on their normal process for uh review for Warrant

that I think you at least need to touch on tonight you don't necessarily need to resolve it and that is what will the trigger be for the scale of projects that have to go through this on solar as well as uh batter energy storage so yeah again you don't have to resolve that tonight but I think it' be be important to communicate to the planning board are you looking for them to come up with those thresholds uh of the size of a battery energy storage system project or a solar farm that uh triggers this mechanism uh

because the mechanism itself I think probably is going to be less of an issue for the planning board than but when when to apply it when to apply it yeah so do we want to have a conversation on that CU I think that it should be for any battery energy storage system I I don't to me I don't want to interrupt but it's almost 8:00 mhm we still have the budget to go through yeah I understand it's something but I don't think it's something that we need to decide right now we can have them review and have further discussions if we want to decide that pered I agree yeah and that was what I was just going to say but at minimum include battery battery energy storage system in the contract zoning and then have them go through the public process to get feedb are you comfortable if they look at that issue and vet it look at the issue of what to include what the threshold for size of projects sure okay good yeah

makes sense but the thing I would add to that is now that you understand the process and the ordinance it would make some some sense to go back to the land use ordinance or the um the table of uses in it and if there's anything in your individual Minds that's this type of project or perhaps this type of project at a certain scale something where I would really prefer to see it go through contract zoning we could certainly have that discussion of an existing use of an existing use so I grael P yeah me and my gravel pits um so I think what would be good is just if we do homework as a board and just put on the agenda for next week to any board member who wants to bring forward a topic to include as a contract zoning and send that from the board discuss that with the board and send that to the planning board we'll do that at our next meeting but it's going to require people to do homework and

come prepared so so we'll start with just the two yeah and then maybe after next meeting the planning board might hear from the select board and say we want you to con bring the following up as well perfect thank you r a little bit sometimes um so the next thing is the budget presentation do you need a minute uh if the mic is off if we can take one minute I have to use the restroom before we get started and I think this will be a few minutes of discussion

I guess don't to be to these things how many do you need two [Music] just well maybe just for a minute hard time like he getes to me he they were out plowing I don't know why I'm so bad for me to clean the snow off my driveway

hours last night that's the wor as soon as I can get in this tomorrow morning at 9:00 so I tried I went in a week ago told him it was hurting and he said well it's not infected so come back and it's just robbing just touch it s oh well I got Mark I'm sorry

that's getting what's he going to be doing another one well wouldve been playing poker with some friends that's that's social but that's all no wor I wasn't reading a humorous story somebody shoplifted at the Haner on stre just wer I think people were cold ran out of the store ran across Springs and got run we have to and he was pinned under the car I guess he wasn't hurt but he was pinned under the car

see all righty everyone back cool all right uh yeah we're going to move now into our 2020 fiscal year 2026 budget presentation and start off here with the uh manager budget to pres present it to the board based off of the feedback we gave them uh him a couple weeks ago so all right well well thank you um so first let me just uh talk about the process of this budget that gets developed um so somewhere around the mid October I I asked Chief trip and Ro commissioner momia to look at their equipment schedules and their replacement schedules in year to see if there's been any changes in those and get those to me and and then we get those to to Mark um

and then there's as we move forward we I Mark gives us the uh budget workbook that gets handed off to the fire chief and Road commissioner and they begin to put their budgets as I do for administration and we have meetings together to discuss what these budget items look like as far as where are we with fuel what's that cost and things like that so we meet several times leading up to today um to put this budget together and then once we have this budget together we we we hand it off to Mark and Mark Roy our I consider him as a finance director he kind of puts it all together and sends it back to me and we look at it and uh uh we this thing changes things

change today in this budget believe it or not so it's it's it's always moving it changed from Thursday when I sent it to you so we've spent several well two and a half three months on putting this budget together so it's not just a a a one meeting and one and done and here we go we put a lot of effort in this in this budget this particular budget is unique in the sense that it's 18mon long so some services and invoices will be paid in one year some get paid for the full 18 months and some get uh is a

two-year so for example like Calvin salt he's going to go through two Winters so there's two years worth of expenditures in that the county budget only gets paid once in this budget so there was a lot of work a lot of phone calls to to you know look at okay when is this getting paid when does that get paid and we put the budget together and we see what the numbers look like so I'm going to go over the summary page with you and we'll dive in because this is all the pages underneath that is what drives the summary page so I just kind of want to give you a overview first of where we're at okay so if you look at the first

page if you look up in the left hand corner where it says funding requirements that really is the municipal budget we also have a County taxes and we have school budgets so but this is just the the municipal portion of the budget it does include County tax and school estimates in the townwide oh in the townwide okay so yeah it's all there right okay so when you look at it you'll see that total spending in this budget is down half a percent even though you see increases in in general govern Public Safety and um spending is down a

half a percent and we'll look at those numbers that drives it okay and we've an annualized all of this too to help you understand that because it's an 18th month budget we have a factor in there that takes into account on Apple to Apple's compar comparison in the percent variance mhm all the budget numbers that you see in the 26 column is the cost of an 18th month budget okay so once we

once we fill in all this is we see what we we get and then what I do is it's like okay what do we want for a Target tax levy so what I use for a data point is the Consumer Price Index for the Northeast and that's at three and a half so I say okay I'm going to I'm going to deliver a 3.5% increase and what do we have to do to get there you'll see the additions to fund balance that's what drives that so to get to the three and even though we're a half a percent less in spending to get there I get we I use 590,000 in fund balance annualized is 393 last year we used 668 so it's gone down significantly um but to get to that three and A2 that's what we got to use in fund balance and just to clarify when you say your target there being the 3 and a half% because that's the Consumer Price Index that's because we indicated to you we wanted a budget that provides flat funding same level of services and

with the Consumer Price Index being up by that percentage that's a good way to Target it and it's a data point that is pulled from a good resource you know and it's just not like my what I feel you know it's like the Consumer Price Index is really the price of goods and Services over last year so it just sort of keeps up with the inflation if you will so Jerry pause for absolutely do you want us to ask questions as you go or that you get sure no you can no go ahead and go ahead and ask as you go so where we budgeted 668,000 for 2024 out

of the fund balance but then it says the actual is 394 that's a huge difference just explain why yeah that's because of the unexpended money that we didn't spend and revenues combined go back in so it reduces that amount thank and we'll see that on the last page of the budget okay what what really where that

presented you're looking at a uh mill rate increase of annualized at 2252 but over 18 month it's 3378 but you really got to annualize it to really get the Apples to Apples can you say that number again yeah it's right at the bottom of your sheet it's 2252 do they have the notes uh they don't okay no

yeah oh yeah so it's it doesn't say on here the notes that it doesn't annualize it but um it's a 1.7% increase to the right annual mill rate as presented now this keep in mind this is estimated so when when uh the assessor does her commitment valuation is probably going to go up because we've got more housing that's going to end up going down we don't know how much until the commitment is done MH it's also contingent upon what the school bud proves for their budget as well as what the County taxes are because these are included in here in order to arrive at Rough estimates but these are rough estimates right okay okay any questions on the first page all right

you'll also see in this budget that uh we provided more data for you to kind of like just break down the budget a little bit um and you could so what we did was we categorized the expenditures into wages and benefits and then you've got fixed cost and really where you've got your discretionary cost and that's that's all listed on your um second page um but to talk about this further if you go to page three that's where

um we can look at this so when you break down your benefits and um the wages and benefit is assuming a 3 and a half% increase in wages as it's presented here so if you look at that and it's either 100% of the budget or you can look at it as every dollar that passes through that town office 13.4 cents goes to wages and benefits okay 74.8 cents goes to fixed

cost that's your education that's your debt service the stuff that you really can't touch there you you you're going to pay those regardless and then the variable and discretionary cost we broke down 11.7% or 11.7 cents of every dollar is discretionary where you've got got some wiggle room that includes the road B so which isn't really it isn't but you can touch it um and speaking of road maintenance which done before work as well and speaking of just speaking of road maintenance because I think this is important um the next two roads well next year we're going to do Au and pel Road and the year after that is um stackpole road so if there's any I mean that's a big ticket so if you want to defer maintenance to to cut the budget that would be the place to do it cuz that's where your biggest piece of the pie is MHM so I I just give that to you but if you don't want to touch it and I would recommend that you

don't if you leave all that in there plus you you transfer to reserves we'll talk about that later that's your funding the capital um that's at 3.2 cents the rest of it you're really talking about you know 3 what three cents of discretionary

money that you got of every dollar that you can that you have wiggle room to do so I just throw it in that way just to kind of give you a different perspective yeah yeah um talking about road maintenance and Au panel and stack hole will be will they be done with the work that they're doing to the corridor over there because should so if they're done yes if they're not no we'll have to we'll have to switch but Calvin can speak to Alin pel's next correct they that's the plan tell they're telling me they think they'll be out of there in March hopefully so that's and then and

then stack time mud season I'm wondering if some of those Timber mats might still be Frozen in it so I wouldn't say before may think be we'll be Paving after that anyway so okay okay thank you and when I and then again in this in this particular budget I gave you some nice graphs to look at to kind of show you um I mean what I'm seeing here is there's not a lot of wiggle room for discretionary spending no you know all but 11.7 % of the budget

is fixed pretty much yeah yep and like Josh said even 5% of it's road so if we consider road maintenance discretionary yeah and and the other part is is the the reserves which to me by putting money in the reserves we're saving all that interest it's I mean and collecting interest on what's in the reserves right right so we're making money and saving money at the end right I mean to me that's a no-brainer yeah

yeah and and again just some visual grasp to to to show you some people like those they they they can pick that stuff up a little easier all right so if you go to page six we'll just talk about revenues for a second because we do we do um estimate those uh we did last year a little bit it was I think one of the first years if not the first year I think the town started to because if you don't estimate your your revenues you're asking the residents to pick up that tab so you don't want to do that which is how that fund balance built up over the years it was yeah it certainly contributed so can we just talk about that for one quick second because that was one of my major points about this is that for a long time we didn't estimate I mean right until last year we weren't estimating revenues and that's how that fund balance grew to the point that it's at and now we are estimating revenues and

so and we're pulling out of that and so if that input isn't happening at the level that it was because we're now estimating revenues and we're pulling money out of that to use I ju I just think that that's something that we need to be mindful of and and I want to get through this more but then see which we talked about on the 668 and the three you know that were not pulling and isn't anything going back in because now we're doing a better job estimating revenues does that make sense what I'm trying to yeah correct I mean obviously it so one of the major focuses of of towns is is their fund balance and

having a good idea of where your fund balance is and what you're actually actually adding or taking away from fund balance from one year to the next helps you to make decisions about the budget about okay well how much are we going to add or take take back from it so over time as you continue to do this in a uh in a comparative manner right that's the same way every year um you're going to have much more control over where your fund balance is it's not always it's not precise right because like for example you'll come in you'll estimate revenues and you'll come in over estimates for revenues you'll budget expenditures you'll come in under budget for expenditures so that has a variance on what your ultimate fund balance will be but it's still is much better than not estimating anything rues so yeah that's one of the big considerations at the end which is why we include the fund balance um sheet in

the at the end so you can see where we're at as of December 31st thank you so just a couple thing to point out about the revenues it's really I mean you can see what we estimated and where we were but if you look at intergovernmental you're seen a lot of negative percentages there with intergovernmental revenues do you see that the reason for that is because we're only uh getting one year's worth of Revenue in an 18th month budget that's why it's negative so we have to consider that so

in interg government that's why it Revenue was down 177% is because we're only getting one one year's worth in an 18th month bu everyone follow that it do it have to do with the timing yeah it does absolutely so it's just a glitch for now and then correct yeah then when we're on like some things we're only paying once in that 18 months some things were only collecting once in that 18 month right and the expectation by going to the 18mon budget is most of I mean not necessarily the funding but the expenses and will be easier to estimate and you know what the revenue sharing will be have a better idea when we do the budget the FIS year mostly mostly Revenue sharing right and revenue sharing you can see here um for example FY 23's actual was $740,000 for that 12month period um and then for FY 24 it was 680 uh one of the reasons why it dropped so much is because we lost out on um Revenue sharing number two um which was

is based off of your your valuation and your mail rate number of people and so we exceeded the average for the state and so you disqualified for Revenue sharing too there's not really much you can do about that but uh going into this coming 18 month bit budget we simply said all right well let's let's budget a little bit conservatively this is a place where you could play with it you could increase it if you wanted to um the budget uh but I wouldn't I wouldn't go all Hog Wild because it's also determined about uh not just whether you get both Revenue sharing one and revenue sharing too but it's also dep upon uh estimating out 18 months of economic economic uh you know development we don't have the benefit even right now when we're when you're a calendar your town you don't have the benefit of the state economists forecast which come out the preliminary forecasts come out usually around February March

time frame and then their final forecasts come out usually in May June time frame right we don't even have the benefit of that L as a calendar year um town because they come out after we're done putting together the budget so yes changing to an 18-month budget helps too helps to gets us onlineed with everyone else you know fine-tune that estimate in future years can I just point something out so I'm looking at planning board fees and code enforcement fees and $3,000 is what was budgeted and the actual was 10,671 obviously that's a direct result of our fee schedule change and but so then I'm surprised by the next line where our budget for code enforcement fees was 45,000 and the actuals 43 because a lot of what how

would code enforcement feed what what's isn't that like permits so I'm surprised that that number is down because we did raise the price of all of our permitting it's just depending on volume of if you don't have people asking as much for permit you know needing as much permit that I'm just that I find that's surprises me a lot I see what you're saying you're saying that if we increased if we increased it yeah the what how did the volume of permits drop by a factor so large that even with the increase the volume itself or the the actuals didn't drop the actual from FY 23 was 41,000 the actual for FY 24 was 43,000 so you did have an increase it's just we budgeted 4 5,000 for FY 24 and we just didn't achieve that market we just doubled our permit fees in like May so I'm just surprised that numbers that yeah I I I don't know I was thinking I was getting a win there but again those any any of the

revenue estimates you can you can fiddle with right yeah but because the goal obviously is to try to have not a precise estimate of where you're going to end up at year end but at least I have closer than what you had in the past yeah realistic yeah

questions with revenues I just wanted to point out the negatives and why that I want to point out the positives here okay this uh it's really nice you to see the um you know we adjusted the ski Fe ski schedule W fee schedule on the planning board fees and that's bringing us up 244 and so I think one of the big goals we had this year was figuring out other ways to generate revenue and this is showing that we're doing that so that's nice to see

onage next page yeah yeah interest you can actually I mean with interest we don't know what the interest rates are going to be m um just like we don't know what the economy is going to be that's why Revenue sharing is cuz Revenue sharing is based off of you know sales tax right that the state collect so you as the economy goes down people stop buying have lesser projections same with interest I don't know where the interest rates are going to be so we received $112,000 in interest on our deposits in in 2024 compared to 28,000 in 2023 which

is huge it is reasonable to expect that we will actually have over the course of 18 months more than $100,000 so that's another area where if you wanted to fiddle with the budget as far as Revenue sources uh my suggestion is be a little bit conservative because who knows what's going to happen with interest rate but you know you could probably get more than 120 I would imagine with the um move that you made from One bank to the other did they give you any lock in that interest rate for any set period of time or is it variable months L yeah the cedar so we did two we did two 1.5 million and they were locked in at 5% for three months for three months yeah one well one for three months one for six okay so that'll probably go down based off of what I've seen for interest rates changing slightly well you're locked in after after that but so my my discussion Point here would be while I think we can expect more than

100 ,000 in in revenue from the interest rate I think it's good to budget conservatively there um because even though it's over an extra six months I'd rather for us to budget at 100,000 and then be looking at you know 130,000 in Revenue as opposed to the other way around so

Cella was sing us over to the automated bins and so I can tell you okay so the the target date is uh July 2026 which is the start start of the new of this no the end the end the start of the first next budget yeah got okay my question is answer thank you yep okay so that that that that does the revenue side of that not a whole lot to yeah I think I another a question um the goal to collect back taxes any that is that built in no no um

and it wouldn't have any effect on Revenue anyway um so those are all receivables right basically the revenue has been recognized if the if there's any collections on it then it'll just reduce the re the receivable there's no additional Revenue MH thank you

right your pages didn't get numbered I'm sorry so we'll just uh these pages are number oh yours is mine the ones with the not oh okay all right good then they're numbered so uh page eight then just kind of sums up the whole budget again um I think there's a a ton to see there uh you know Administration uh is

up 13 assessing I mean this just kind of goes down through the the whole list uh by Department Yeah by yeah so General government is up 133% Public Safety is up 133% um Public Works is up 2.9% um is that the annualized number yeah or normalized right normalized and we'll and we'll look at the numbers what's driving that when we get into it

pages eight and nine are really for uh uh to aggregate the data um so that you can see you're not getting into the weeds of it um the townwide um comparison on an on a normalized basis meaning Apples to Apples uh the budget is down 3.2 and that's what's really driving a lot of the ability to stay flat in total expenditures right total expenditures are minus .5% reduction um from budget to budget

most of that is because of the fact that you're only going to pay one County tax bill during during that 18-month period and Debt Service payments are really just going to be one payment during that 18-month time frame as well but the takeaway message here is our Municipal budget just our our townwide Municipal budget is down 3% correct yep right so how or 5% uh yes sorry 0.5% yeah

yeah so if we're only paying that those bills one time in an 18month budget what does that do to the next budget cycle it doesn't do anything so we only pay it once County tax gets paid in September okay so in what would normally be your a 12 month you'll pay 18 you'll pay September's County tax bill but now because the the fiscal year is going to go all the way to until June of 2026 well it's not paid until September of 2026 then once you go to a 12-month budget again for FY 27 it's it's only going to be one right I was trying to worry a little well no no no it's not like we're going to have to the 12- month period is not going to double up double us up there are things in this budget that we'll double up on but that once we get to the next budget it'll just be a normal budet just be normal just hit hitting singles after that and you know and and the Public Works Paving that's that's only getting hit once and

that's a $400,000 bill so that's only getting paid once because we can pave after July in 2026 yeah so but before we go forward I just want to acknowledge again like this is really good to see our Municipal budget because of our increase in revenues and then the way it's all laying out to be down .5% like that's that's something to be celebrated right there nice work so now we can get into

the individual departments if you'd like to kind of look at that and I'm just going to touch on the the big the increases um and and why they why they're increasing so when you look at uh the first two well the second line 20705 on in wages and then 20702 the part-time wages you know it you know if you look at the full-time wages it looks like it's a 56.2% increase but it's it's really not

um you have to take we don't have any part-time help anymore so you got to take that and that got added right Mark to to the full-time wages so when you do that it's really a 5.3% increase okay right if you were to compare the $93,000 $45,000 budget for fy4 to the 217

,950 18month budget for FY 26 the the variance the normalized variance between those two is 5.3% so there's no no added staff in this in these wages I'll I'll show you where we added some some help later in the budget um so the next the next big real increase if you go down is really health insurance so our health insurance is up 9% and and we had an employee add family

health and we had another employee add some uh their child to uh dental insurance sorry can you give me that line number yeah I can it's uh a an employee to a family plan and another employee added a child to the dental plan plan so that's that's driving

says 186% because uh a family plan is is like $27,000 30 now it's how much how much so you're saying that the the health insurance has increased in price and additionally more people are claiming right the premiums increas by 9% and then they're likely to increase we didn't budget an increase for the because health insurance premiums are done on a calendar year basis so we didn't add in an additional amount for the six months from dece uh January 1st 2026 through June uh we just simply added one and a half times so they could actually come in a little bit higher but I figured that well there's the difference is wasn't that big it was maybe another 15,000 I think total not even that right I I don't think it was that maybe 10,000 total so just left it as is with the calculation it might it might actually be higher plus we don't know what else people are going to select when open enrollment comes in 2026 anyway can you

clarify do that town employees contribute anything to yeah it's 80 Town 20% employee for health and dental for health Y and then they pay for their own vision and uh income protection yeah supplemental life does the payroll tax line reflect the new it does yep and it reflects the town paying the full 1% and yep

okay um so the next uh in in the 62% retirement that's just driven through the wages not much we can do with that um again that's because of uh the additional employees right so if you're a full-time employee you're required to join main paers for town of durum um because they don't have an agreement with Social Security Administration so all new employees have to join all new full-time employees have to join and as a result you're going to have a huge increase and just to clarify by additional employees you mean the part-time is moving into a full-time capacity so correct yeah which is why they weren't on Main purse before yeah yep main Pur um okay so um

[Music] 27222 Business Services legal did oh oh yeah I got to touch legal sorry I was there so yes uh 20 7220 legal so we were um in the years past we would we budget 10,000 and wouldn't use our legal services that much um but we're now using them more and so to get them on a monthly retainer it's 12250 a month mhm for 18 months and that's the 225 that you see which I would really recommend because I think we're going to need the attorney yes much more than we were and so to clarify the retainer is at that price we have access to our attorney for as much or as little time in the month and we're not yep invoiced per exactly conversation per visit yeah okay and this helps everybody codes if they have question just call up and I this is a really good yeah that seem to go so if we think about how much more we've seen this attorney versus the previous attorney I think that there's makes sense to there's a lot to we going to

need her okay so we got that um line um so that's typically what Mark does for us um you can see that it's 65 now so in a one in an 18th month budget that would be 45 but I added another 20,000 for an HR consultant to get us up to compliance CU right now our HR is not in compliance so um she's a she's a

professional and so when you when we think about the four employees that we had before this line makes up for that fourth employee because it's Mark in the Human Resources person so we're still that so that addresses the the administrative concerns we had when we initiated I yeah that a lot of towns you know that have these smaller budgets it's a much more cost um productive to hire these professionals to do it because they just they're so much quicker and faster at it um plus you don't have any payroll cost youa well especially if it's a discret and measurable task that just needs to be completed and then R they get it down wrapped up and you know what's accurate and yeah I mean I mean having mark on the team is we also like your Mar huge

huge so I want to say around this I think Mark is a perfect example of why this works and works phenomenally well um I also think that it's important to point out that when we gave you Direction um it at least to me the perception was that we were saying we're supporting you hiring another full-time person and instead of doing that which could have costed you know like if it's just the family plan and whatever the salary would be and that kind of thing you've come back to us um for

$20,000 yeah to cover what you need to be able to bring the HR up to compliance and the administrative issues that we agreed exist yeah and instead of that potentially 80,000 a year bill so I appreciate this coming at us this way I definitely appreciate that initiative cuz when we give you the green light to hire somebody new and you come back and say I found a better deal that's awesome cost savings right there yeah I appreciate that also the professionalism is something that you really do need to consider right I mean towns try to do their own HR they try to do their own accounting um those things may seem like they're easy or easy enough to do but trying to finding somebody who is qualified to do that that's willing to do it at you know a price that you know a wage that that small towns are willing to pay you know no says oh well why don't we hire our own you know small town attorney and pay

him $30,000 a year to do do legal stuff we're small town we don't need much legal Nobody Does that right starting to think about for towns to start think about look accounting is a profession HR as a profession these are these are things where you really need skill if you really want to do it well um and it's cheaper I think obviously as we've talked about much much more cost effective and you know hiring is like a box of chocolates right you really don't know what you're going to get you know the other the other part of it too is that if you hire and the person leaves the institutional knowledge leaves with them and so this way it stays and the other part that I appreciate is like the long game right like this is accomplishing this goal for $2,000 and not adding an employee to the town staff right for year over year going forward so I I think this was a great J yeah and both professionals do training I mean

Mark has trained me he's helped Jessica this HR person is going to do the same thing for all staff so it's it's definitely a better Better Way Forward okay is this a position you see going long term or is this something to get on because I know you've talked about wanting that little better HR Services is it longterm shortterm

don't know yet so it it would be longterm but not that costly there's going to be a lot of heavy lifting for her at first to get us to compliance because you get in trouble in HR stuff really in a hurry yeah so if you're not in compliance that's that's the main thing so part of a manager's job and part of the department head's job all of it is to protect the town from Li ability so that's why I it's really important to get this person on board so she'll probably spend this down um half of it in probably the three or four months get us compliance and then she's just on an on call basis if if there's something heavy that I need to get her involved with maybe there's a we don't have a union here about for an example if there was a grievance I would call her to handle it if there's something like that I would call them we will still do um inhouse like the onboarding package and the payroll and all that

stuff they'll just be there to if we get in some sort of trouble or something they'll be to walk us through that and that's what we need that professionalism there and I think in this especially with HR stuff like a penny in prevention saves you a dollar in expenses in the future absolutely and you don't necessarily if you never have to cash out on that investment you're in good position you know like so you've got that in place that protects us and I think we need to always think about limiting liability here so yeah so like in the um in the first few months she'll she'll go through all the employees files to make sure they're they're up because you're supposed to separate medical from other stuff and I don't think that's done she's GNA go through the employee handbook and update that she's going to look at job descriptions is going to really help out to get us to a good point where wage table going to

be wage table is going to help with that and this is all those time suck things that take a lot of time right but when you get distracted huge opportunity do it right so and like I said after that it's just an on call thing she does this for a lot of she does this for a lot of time I know she does it for you balls and she told me the other day she say it's been one toown I haven't heard from for 6 months because nothing's really come up and I suspect that's going to be sort of our case we don't really have a lot of issues the issue is we're just not in compliance now and we can get ding for it but we got nobody to get us out of compliance so that's so it's kind of an open-ended contract and she's on call when you need her it's perfect it's just sort of like Mark it's a exactly like Mar just in the Human Resources isome good I appreciate that yeah um let's see as we go down there really isn't a whole lot more increases other

than Postage and Freight yeah Postage and Freight that's a big one isn't it so um postage is up you can see where we're we budgeted for, 1500 um but we're leaning more uh that's part of it it's 250 a month just for normal postage to send our B&B reports we're sending more notice out to Butters um so that's that's the reason for that yeah and the two tax bills and the two tax bills thank you yeah the two tax bills is included in that so we're doing that now so that's up so postage is up in terms of its unit cost but also in the amount that we do it's volume yeah um do and subscriptions that you know that's 1.1% but that's because some of those are due at different times and I think we're going to be okay I think I looked at that I didn't really write a note in there for what who was getting paid when but I think we're

um miscellaneous Benes that's the big one um the percent the reason is is we had an employee that was paying into Social Security and we don't pay into Social Security so now we owe main peers money $4,300 so 4,300 is coming right off the top of that and then we're right back to where we was before so I just put that in this yeah it's a big percentage increase but it's not a huge amount and and that goes to my sort of that point of HR that's that's why that would have been prevented if we had HR consult to help and kind of guide exactly um so with all that you know the total Administration you know so it wages and benefits I think is driving a lot that but it's 13 up

you say wages and benefits but there's also increased volume on other things there is it's a it's a combination yeah in and that well I think of that 20,000 investment in HR is a something that's going to return dividends to multiple magnitudes it could save you a lot of money in the long run actually yeah okay any questions with the general govern that year no and just for a process thing I was thinking we would go through and have all these questions and then after we've got all our questions out of the way we can then as a board just go through and vote on approval of what we see section by section um and anyone wants to make any changes then we can discuss that

4.4% um not there's really not a lot of change you can see that we just didn't increase anything like in uh General supplies they didn't really spend much in last year so it's small money it's $250 we just kept it the same so it's a pretty small yeah budget and it's down if you have questions about it I'm I just have questions about the mapping I thought I thought we had to pay an annual fee for mapping for because we went to GI yeah and we just haven't got that bill yet okay so that's why they're still there okay

Jerry I got to give him a call I I George and we know that amount oh do I no I don't know I don't know exactly what that amount is okay no worries right moving on to Information Technology you let me know if you if you're ready yep okay this is a this is a um this is a big one here that that went up a little bit and um we can explain why so uh IT services so you

were all involved with that we've got Managed IT services and um our current provider dropped us we had to go out to bed we picked one and that's uh that's the cost of the new service so that's up which is a good thing because we were pretty wide open with our again mitigating liability exactly I mean it was it was a little scary I mean when when the it consultant says someone has been in your system they've just decided they didn't want to do anything with it that's oh yeah yeah I mean he said based off of I mean he said based off of our security levels he was he had no that if someone wanted to be in there they could be you know yeah um another one is the that that's gone up is uh the website but that's because we uh have text mik go with doing text notifications so that's kind of that kind of drove that and that's one where we're paying twice in this budget and that's $88,000 it's 4,000 a

year yeah so and we pay it at the in January so we just paid it this J right but when you say when you say gone up it's like we're budgeting $10,000 and one of that 8,000 of that is just the techic of being buil twice and the website's only 2100 this year and next year we don't pay anything for the website that's a that's a pay two years and you get the third one free do we have a percent U participation rate in the text um I can ask cam she might know um

the last I knew we were up 950 950 people people that were getting notifications it's good but there's a whole lot yeah and I mean part of that could be one person in a household you know using it yeah like I have it Chris is definitely not getting it I have it my wife I don't think has it I just tell oh yeah just mean per Family household whatever yeah we have like 2,000 we have about 2,000 households so I me 2,200 yeah but it be nice to see

those numbers get up so we could do some more Outreach there we have a contract for two years and if we decide it wasn't worth it is not working we can revisit it then but I would like to say I like that I like it I like the service I like the messages we've seen so far oh good I text back but no one responds I say hey chief and nothing

think I think a conversation that we have to have around information technology is our Telecom Reserve because there's there's all kinds of money in there and I'm not really I think Mark explained it to me what the town was doing was we were they were taking their franchise fees and putting them in a reserve and then they were using those fees to pay for Telecom or well that what used to be the IT department right but that doesn't really make much sense to do that right so we should talk about that yeah at um okay um planning and code enforcement I have a question about the software license yeah so I know that we s yeah okay that's good and I I thought that it was a and I could be remember this wrong I thought it was $5,000 a year yep so they're not ready okay so so

this that 25231 you um well you don't see it so 25231 is the trio um maintenance cost okay so what I've done there is I I'm working with them to do six months of pay payments all right so we're going to pay 6 months of that and hopefully by the time July gets around our new software will be ready to go and Donna doesn't want to be in transition when she does this 18th month budget either so we're going to have to run in tandem a little bit while we transition okay so in other words this line reflects six months of our old software cost and then moving into the new software that's actually a year years is worth okay and then you got 10 for Town Cloud mhm so if we pay six month Town cloud is up half of that 25 we won't pay because it's a year so I'm kind of kind of managing so we budgeted for a year of Trio right with the hopes at Town Cloud will be ready within six months and then we don't have

to pay for that Tri it's better to budget for it not need it okay right and when we pay that town Cloud Bill does that represent a full year at 10,000 yes okay in most towns that are jumping on with them are July 1st town so I think they have that in their mind that they definitely want to be ready by then okay cuz they they've taken on other towns so being a calendar year a little bit of an oddity but we're we're changing that so that's good so with the with the new IT services and the text my go we're up um uh 50% in that category

okay all right planning and code enforcement there's not a lot to see there they're up 3.8% I just want to go back to that for a second and say out loud for all the residents to hear that we entered into a contract I just want to make sure that's really clear that's not a negotiable number we entered into a contract for IT services as a fixed cost I just want to make sure that's really clear that that is really driving that 50% number exactly yeah much better Services everybody's protected too and that 50% number is also driven by if we need to pay for the more expensive one for a year so if we only need that for in Treo is 25,000 a year so we if that drops off at 6 months we save $12,100 because we don't have to pay that full 25,000 so when we look at that that 51% starts going down

okay moving on to planning and codes maybe while Jerry takes a drink we should make a bu of extend the meeting because it's 8:3 yeah all right you can make that motion I'd like to move well I don't know because I don't know how long we should do on page 12 and we have 19 we have 20 eight more pages you

want to extend till 9:30 I think we definitely have to extend to 9:30 all right I make a motion to extend our meeting till 9:30 any questions on the motion any all in favor any opposition seeing none extended I think you did that in the wrong but it's okay I said all in favor any opposition oh said any questions okay go go okay so planning code enforcement uh they're up 3.8% there's really not a lot there to see most most of their lines are down

um I don't if you have any questions uh regarding that I'm happy to second I don't know about I don't get the wages but okay they just are there not as many planning board members that didn't have as many meetings I thought they Oh you mean for the 1100 yeah uh it's because uh there was a $5,000 grant that uh the town had received for um I can't remember the doing some codes but we allocated allocated I think about 2,500 to it so that's why the actuals is is down for this for this year so we got a grant to save some money yeah yeah but that that's only a one time thing yeah yeah I like saving money yeah I think it's important though like I pointed this out last time that I don't think that Jerry does a great job of highlighting where your wins are right and so when we receive a grant like I asked for I'm not asking you for that tonight but I think it's important to say these are the the grants that we applied for these are

what we want and this is how much money we saved on the budget because of the grant work that you did and that's one of those places like if I hadn't asked that question we would have known that y right so share your WIS Jerry yeah well and make a note of it because when you do your stuff at the end of the year you write your letter like I think that's something to include I think it's something the town should know right you are doing that work on our behalf to get those Grant dollars which is helping and the way I think about grants is Grants from other state federal agencies those are taxes people have already paid in town and you're just helping us bring more of our tax money back to our local municipality which I like yeah I appreciate that all right so that so

that um wraps up wraps up total General government part-time wages you're seeing an increase in that because that includes 3 months of night coverage that wasn't included in last year's bill because it didn't start until April M okay and there's 10% call volume too and chief speak up at any time if I misspeak or not um saying things correctly [Music] um you you all set on that and you said it's a 10% increase in call volume um currently after running the numbers again because it changes daily yeah uh we were up 12% for the year totality so that was 50 extra um and again that drives roughly I average four per call you know so that's a couple hundred hours but that's payroll and of course Fuel and wear and tear and that really still does wages payroll taxes workers comp you know the more you pay out everything goes up um the other thing with an 18month budget and I have what we've been up we've been

up 28% in call volume since I started three three and a half years so I'm trying to figure out you know last year was 7.4 this is 12.1 what's next year going to be we just continue to go and then 18 month right so what's the next six months on top of that you have to build build in some type of protection for wages so not only is there a percentage of the rate that the percentage increases from the previous years up building off of that previous year too this start in January 1st minimum wage went up0 50 cents so half the fire department got a 50 cent raise for the next year but that number is not fixed for the next six of the budget so I don't know what that'll be that could be a dollar could be 50 cents more or less um half the department is based on minimum wage if you don't have an EMS license we're running about 42 on the roster if you don't have an EMS license you're based on minimum wage which

currently is 1465 um but so I do a totality of of how many of those how many hours they've done and average that out and that adds up to thousands is next year's minimum wage adjustment just a cost of living percentage or is there another fixed increment to incre so main main stopped at the 25 year they had like a three-year plan so they just went up 50 cents January 1st but there's nothing documented for 26 so for our budget that that next six months there's nothing documented of the increase yeah if it were be a dollar that would be hundreds of hours actually per employee times roughly 14 15 employees so that adds up to thousands very quickly uh the increased call volume again the payroll tax work is C all go

more like a talking point so the chief doesn't take health insurance but he gets that 1 12200 and then there's Affleck that's what that 3750 adds up to right Chief yeah yeah so which if he decides to take it and we don't budget for it we're gonna that that could be an issue but I think there's a way we can work with that you know in case another employee that might that doesn't have because we have a few that don't take it MH I think there's like three three or four that don't take health insurance and if they decide to take it we don't budget for it we we're going to have to have a conversation um okay and generally we would know that during the open enrollment period unless they had a life event that changed their right ability to enroll yeah so speaking of that if you look at 30 7100 M um I'm proposing to um give

the uh Chief a stien of 5200 a year because when I I sign a time sheet and he's constantly working 48 Hours 50 hours 46 hours and when he can't get um coverage at night he goes on the call and when call volumes up and he continues to work I would really like to retain him and kind of offer him something and he wears like three hats he does the fire chief is the Ms and he's the emergency director so when we have emergency so I'm proposing that we do that for him um

and again he doesn't take health insurance so if he was to get paid his even just straight time with the hours he puts in we'd be paying him $3 and $400 if he was to be eligible for overtime which he's not because he's salaried it'd even be more so 100 a week is minimum when you

when you add that up um so so that establish is a stien for being the EMS director and emergency director and the Emergency Management director yes and so in in theory if someone were to ever we were to ever add that position and break up Ems and fire that would go right to whomever has that role so it's a stien that is for a duty but if someone else were to be in that Duty it would shift right okay and you know we have to we really want to try to retain our employees because our good employees sometimes get sought after and they'll they'll come after them so we need to like think about that sort of stuff so I I just want to say one thing I don't think that it's necessary to um have the cave be that he doesn't take health insurance I think it's fine to say that you want to do this because it's in the best interest of the town to offer that statement like the second part of your sentence I think that the

work that she does is worth regardless of what his health insurance is I don't think I I get what you're doing there and I you know appreciate that but I also think that it's okay to not have to feel like you need to offset it like by saying he doesn't take health insurance I think he's worth the typ in right he is but he's not much of I guess the reason why I said he's he's he's not uh Tak As Much from the town that he he could be I mean cuz he could easily just just come and say fine I'll take health insurance and now we're into it for much more than that

30 7210 the telephone and internet so he has computer AED dispatch so that's the increase in the Wi-Fi to run those what what why is that an increase is it you need more bandwidth or um just the WiFi for for those tablets that we bought for each truck so there's roughly four going now each one of those needs wi-fi from our Verizon account oh so you mean it's Cellular Connection yes okay yeah CU I was just just to just to receive the notes from dispatch okay so when those are active they're not using the stations Wi-Fi they're using their own cellular correct when they leave the bar so it's their own yeah okay that's what I just wanted to clarify

yeah and I did just you know every truck every uh pumper truck had a cell phone for the same so we actually really got rid of the cell phones we're not using it or or you know with the foyer and and everything else if you take pictures of accidents I mean all those could be bed in a legal suit so we really got rid of the the cell phones and the pumper trucks uh we use mine or you can use these tablets you know as photo evidence so really does still protect the town it's nice that it keeps it in a place that's easy for staff to find in the event that there is a yes yep and each one's assigned a truck almost like an IP address

services because call volume goes up he uses more uh material that's in his ambulance and he has to restock that and just the inflation in stocking the cost the hurricane that came through like North Carolina that's where the backer uh production for IV fluid is right so that doubles and and it's just you there's nothing you can do and you can't plan for you can't think of these things it it doubles uh but I do point out um revenues that that Heather's a fan of um hey we're all a fan of re you're um the ambulance revenues were up to like 117,000 again just a reminder doesn't come back to the fire department that goes right back into General uh for you to use so it's just a reinvestment in the business if you will but that's your determination do you recall what percent increase that is from previous years it it was on there um I couldn't remember if we already skimmed it no I I'll tell you well we might have skimmed it but I

want to highlight increased revenues whenever we have the chance so I don't have the page but under um ambulance revenues because we went up being volume on page seven seven um you know we went from 92,000 to 117 mhm so you know almost 25 and we're

projected to go up from there also because it increased call call say a 27% increase awesome does that include the remember did the thing about the billing yes is that in that yes it is that is why we initiated that in the previous partway through the previous budget right yep so this is the first full year with that being in play yes and don't forget they're still collecting from 6 months ago yeah so it's just an ongoing our billing company

13.4% as a as a result of the way the numbers fall um I think Chief got a grant too right for sure we just we uh we didn't receive it yet but uh and you'll receive this by uh end of year U update to you all next week with all the call volumes Mutual Aid down to the how many times we went to Freeport how many times they came here but yes so we just applied to FEMA for 180,000 for radios uh whether we get it or not we did um Gary sise for and

you'll get the whole report for a Lucas machine for a CPR machine it's about 23,000 uh just the other day they submitted for a new boat from Firehouse Subs um that's over 30,000 like the the sandwich place where you buy it's a round up is what you're saying I love those sandwiches there's also the main EMS um funding for uh

keeping of employees and again all that some s of those revenues go back to General but the main EMS sustainability fund we're we're looking at possibly 15,000 coming back to the town and we also applied and again as I've told you it's a cycle right just every time um we put in a bill for the 2023 uh shooting in Lewiston so there's a a grant funding for overtime cost so again myself four members went 10 covered the town so that was submitted also so that's over $1,000 you get the breakdown you receed some safety equipment yes every year we we go through the state MMA all the safety equipment um and we do the volunteer forest fire funny enough so that's a matching so we receive roughly 5 to 10,000 a year in equipment uh and some of that's matching which you have work for the town manager to increase from the shooting response you received some safety equipment as well um which was would have a pretty price tag

bulletproof vest if you will ballistic vests uh I think that was upwards of 12,000 MH um from the shooting y yeah I just think it' be great if we have a tally of all the grants that were pulled in by everybody so we can show where we're getting some other stuff and just if you all think that's a good idea so okay awesome on keep we're switching Rel we're switching Jerry's played out for a platter I prefer platters for dinner so and you will get that in the fire department any year next week for you all before your next meeting that's really good stuff thanks Chief any other questions for the fire department before we move on yeah this cost to repair equipment and maintenance is that just because there's some scheduled maintenance items that are coming up that are going to drive that I think about like with my vehicle know this is not a year I need to change the transmission fluid but that's a big

expense when it comes along right you know I I just did the average cost of the six vehicles that are out the bay not the utility they're averaging 16.5 years old MH um between the six uh luckily the the ladder truck is out getting rehabbed right now so that's positive with the Opera funds that was um appropriated but the other thing is yes one of the trucks just turned 21 years so the Spring's in the back but that's an $8,000 you know preparation for and then again you're talking 18 months out so that those trucks will be 18 years old so so this is estimating some specific expenses that you anticipate not just a general estimate getting with our mechanic of what he wants to fix like the fuel tank on the tanker this year was done tires come up that type of stuff and you know those are large trucks that they add up those tires aren't cheap either so there's no built-in planning for you know the

potential when you have to buy a new vehicle that's capital reserves yeah uh yes Capital um but for us the plan the next plan would be an ambulance in 29 now next year you'll see that we we'll start talking about signing a contract ambulances are three years out but we've decided throughout the years of talking with Jerry Consulting with mechanics that we're just going to keep what we have for the fire department did remember how we were going to reer with the ARA yep that is being rehabbed right now the ladder truck is out of quarters it's in Auburn and it's being rehabbed with the arpa funds yeah which will add 10 years to that truck thank you

Control this just got updated today as a matter of fact I just got the uh um estimate from uh Chief McGee over in Lisbon what it was going to be and I got the um number from Coastal Humane and it's 29 it's 3.7% because we budgeted what like what I assume we're budgeting the way we're budgeting for 26 we did because I thought it was I thought that was like a fixed cost for us to be able to have the animal control officer it was 18,650 but then we only spent 12 I thought it was like a kind of like Donna like we just pay a fixed amount of money no no he does it based on call volume okay yeah so he just he kind of just does his call volume and sees what we got for 24 and he he makes that as 25 okay and I'm sorry why was why is it going up to 29 cuz that's 18 months just to the 18 month plus the 3.7% Y

have to call okay I'm honestly surprised it's not more than that based on how many he's probably not responding to people aren't calling for a lot of the dogs that are missing I think Facebook does a lot of that for we had two dogs dropped off here last week that were running in the road somebody coralled them up had to go to work stopped here so I contacted Animal Control he took them uh we had an injured hour I know you guys don't you know these are just daily occurrences a rabid Fox had rabid Fox I mean it really daily girl Gary took care of the Rabid Fox yes but SL Animal control officer Town manager not being funny but when you don't have police or or sheriff in a timely fashion the fire department's always open so we get a lot of calls that we just handle really all right we move on to public works so on the summary page I just want to point this out um it shows that Public Works is up

2.9% but that's just the category if you really look at Public Works budget um he's actually down 3.6 so that's really good job cin right making us all look bad ACH gold star for Calvin yeah right he did a great job um so we go down

through this I'll I'll uh again I'll just pick out you know what's increased um in in in his budget um even though it's decreased um so he's up a little bit in his training and development because he just wants to provide more training opportunities to his crew okay um other contracted services so last year he hired out uh a contractor to grade the gravel roads and and people loved it they really thought they did a good job so he's going to try to do that again um we may have want to have a conversation about that cuz we're probably one of the one of the towns in the area uh where a public works department doesn't have a grader most public works and they have a grader it's a tool they use and if you look at you know the cost of doing that Kevin what was the price to to do that to do this coming in what we looking at well it was $8,000 a pop we did it uh uh

twice so you looking at for this coming year you'd be you'd have three of those at 24,000 to grade gravel roads so we might want to talk about that so when you say a pop is that per Road that's per to do all the six miles of gravel roads each time they do it it's eight grand and they do it three times year spring and fall May and October and so the in this 18 month cycle you would have you'd have two and 25 and one and 26 mhm and not that I'm suggesting adding a greater but quick question on that would there be use for that in the town for outside of just the gravel roads oh yeah ditching you can you can your shoulders get high on the edges and then water gets stuck you can't get in the ditch so then it travels under your pavement gets and do you have staff currently that are capable of operating that oh yeah with experience okay just just again not adding that now just asking some questions and if he doesn't

get those gravel roads graded he gets an air oh yeah so what time getting an ear you know maybe just something we can we can talk about so one good thing here with this budget again you know his his Paving work you know he's only doing it one time in this budget so that's why you're seeing a a 33% decrease which which helps decreases budget for this quick question when you say Paving work yeah it's 33% decrease 407257 so but I thought we said that there was going to be two roads paved in this budget section one in 25 one no not one and 25 one and 26 but not until after okay sorry that was my misunderstanding y

um so when you go down to like uh salt with go down cuz pretty much everything else is negative 40 7450 you know he's doing two four1 to Seasons in this budget so that's why you see a 33% increase in that those two lines all right so why not 50% if we're doing two winters like why wouldn't it like it's I just want to make sure we're budgeting enough because no just because of the math the math is the math did it and it's right so basically you're doubling your budget 147 to 294 um but when you normalize it the 294

is for 18 month so as opposed to 12 months so need to do the math just comes 33% I don't know how to explain it that's why we have you because I don't understand anything you just said total dollars it's twice okay for 18 months as opposed to 12 question here Calvin so when when we have liquid deicer is that applied as a liquid or is that mixed in with something else or how is that used differently than salt versus sand I know it's doesn't necessarily pertain to the budget but just for my edification so when the salt comes in we uh have a big 5,000 gallon tank in the salt shed and we uh treat the salt before we push it up so it's already treated we used to have the equipment on the trucks and we save uh you know probably $50,000 a truck by getting rid of that stuff not ordering it so but they were always we used to have tanks that would treat the salt as it came out but so now you treat the

salt when you load it up with the liquid deicer okay every time the trucks went on cuz I was just asking I've never seen anyone driving around spraying liquid off the back anything good for liquid off the there was little nozzles and every time the trucks went out it was just their pluged all the time because you're putting molasses and beet juice and those other chemicals and magnesium chloride in there and of course they just plug up the yeah so it was a maintenance inre efficiency it was a lot easier to just spray it and put it in a pile see more cost savings there right that's you save quite a bit on the trucks that way um I just want to say that the last two times that the roads were awful I had to be out on the roads and I can tell a marked difference when I cross our um boundary line the roads have been really great this year Calvin thank

agreed okay if we flip over to the next page the sorry one thing the cver is down 33% is that because it's only one year of Culver Improvement yeah okay what did you say oh Culver I thought you said Cobra I was like a cobra I thought you said got a cobra pit over at the public the next biggest percentage increase even though it's not a whole lot of money is uh added allowance um so his Calvin's employees get like a clothing allowance he wants to add it to his part-time employees and um Calvin

wants uh to be included too so I'd like to be included hey steel til boots ain't cheap sweatshirt so and then then the other one that's up is the gas and Diesel I mean they're running that more in the winter time so we just budgeted more for that so so the result of that is a minus

3.6 in his budget jobin if you figure inflation figure inflation that's actually a 6 yeah say 7% reduction you hear that Chief yeah what the heck I've been hearing it mons been he that's how you do your wins [Laughter] right all right I have a question question that's in general across all of the budgets and I might just be recalling this incorrectly I thought I I know there's an answer and I just can't remember what it is so I'm asking the question again I thought we took building and Maintenance Building Maintenance Building Maintenance out of the individual budgets and made a building and maintenance category but I see it in the individual budgets and I can't remember I feel like I'm recalling that wrong because it's in the individual budgets right so like the town office has its own little maintenance thing Reserve soda's Calvin soda's Chief

this is for more the buildings in grounds is more like for the Eureka the riverfront park and and what used to be the union church it was those buildings under maybe I'm recalling it in the opposite direction did it used to have its own category and then you broke it up and put it into the individual budgets okay never mind move on no okay so but what we did do this year though is municipal buildings and grounds was in the general government M but where he's kind of the director if you will of municipal buildings and grounds we moved it to to over to him it's just a category within his Public Works budget and in in most towns the Public Works director often times is the buildings and grounds uh superintendent or whatever you want to call them too or the director of buildings and grounds for that matter so the real only increase here um really to that's worth

talking about is we lost our um part-time cleaner who was getting paid like minimal $4 an hour and to hire a new one um we got two people well we got one person in a service the service was just crazy money and uh the individual that we hired um gets paid a little bit more than minimum wage and that's an 18th month budget does this take into account the extra cost for the cemetery that is proposed yeah it does okay somewhat I'm

confused about where we are oh right on the municipal Municipal grounds right under Public Works you page 15 right municipal buildings not not number TR yes okay sorry it looks like you got it so the 31.4% increase is what okay talking thank you thank you

related to that Cemetery you mean uh proposed yeah there going to be it's going to be Stone repairs and the gate's going to need some repairs and that's something that we'll have to wait till 2026 budget this no this isn't

this is one of the things we had asked I thought was for the expense on the on the cemetery that they're asking us to assume responsibility for so uh we're just going to absorb the labor and and uh the current crew that we have and there's some money will some of this uh uh buildings and grounds money would go to uh fixing some of the stones I'm sure there's going to be some adjusting to do to get it if it's anything like the other cemeteries we've seen that the Stone's going to be dug out of the ground and fixed there's quite a few broken ones I see over there yeah that's with that 15,000 that's that number that that's reflecting yeah okay I just I I just think if if if it's something we're going to do we should do it right m uh

and so and I don't want to add to the you know to the budget but right I think I think as a town with the state it's in it's you know they they don't they're not doing it they want to get rid of it we have that responsibility and you know that's you know I don't not necessarily for this year but I think in the future that's something that I would be interested in seeing is what's it going to be for us take care of it right we in an appropriate way and and we did talk about that but it's hard right now to like throw a I didn't want to throw a dart at it so when we talked was like you know you're going to have to mow it and take care of it and let's just sort of evaluate how that goes and then we might be better prepared to put a budget number to it that's we have a decision to make though and we were waiting for that information to make because we we have to vot at the we got to bring it to a

yeah the town has to vote on it the town has to vote to transfer it to us correct and then we we take on the management cost but we probably kind of have to get it before we can evaluate the total cost to to repairs and whatnot so does this but this seems like this 15,000 covers the maintenance of it and then from there maybe next budget you're telling us there's this significant Stone workor there this whatever that we need to budget for yeah we have to just look at our some material if we're taking them on we just got to look at them and just just throwing a number out yeah I I still not real comfortable with that so nothing answered my own question I have a question real quick this part-time staff wages for municipal building cleaning the only building that they're cleaning right now is the town office town office Public Works and Eureka so they're not cleaning here no Che that's so one thing you know real

quick that came out of last night's meeting was that people point out that this building this space is getting being used a ton now for meetings M and so maybe this isn't the exact time to talk about this but I would like to see that number increased to get cleaning services in here um or maybe at least in this P this space here because I look at like we got salt all over this here and all that sort of stuff and there's you know a half dozen meetings a month in here now that weren't here until we moved over here and if we're going to be here for a little while but you know we were paying someone to clean our conference room over there we're not paying to get this is cleaned here and that just falls on whoever is kicking around so I appreciate the sediments but

fire stations the Personnel clean their own is that I just want to throw having Pride ownership we we'll clean our own fire station our own trucks uh and the boys it's on the list so now that we've gone to 24 hours um we can handle that okay I just want to make sure that we're adding you know something we heard last night so it is true but I guess the chief Will Mock more yeah okay you're just saying since Calvin came in with a all I got get a little bit that's all I got yeah all right well never mind we all good with municipal buildings y all right this just this next one just got up sorry real quick we're going to need to extend oh because it's 928 so I make a motion that we extend till 9:45

discussion do the attendees get the vote all in favor any opposition thank you all right so this just got updated today this is very different than what uh you've got on Thursday um so Solid Waste is up 22.7% um and those are the num is that based off tonnage yep so what so is it an increase in the cost of the ton or an increase in the actual tons I would say it's the volume right it's the volume budget 375 and you actually came in for this year you budgeted 375 at that at those rates and I remember last year when you were calculating it were based off of okay these are the contracted rates plus times the tonnage but you guys still came in 429 so that has to be toned cuz it didn't didn't change the r we got to do the wet get the wet trash out of our garbage this was I think last year this was one that went up and down I I think it originally was like 385 but then it got went back then they went down with

it and now it's now it's up and this is a tough one to to to kind of hone in on and find cuz it's all based on volume of trash you know yeah um so I I think I think it reflects the criticality of that Solid Waste committee and that is not really going well right yeah I will say though that closes bin Chief had reported that that thing is getting filled up regularly so that's good you mean you see people stop there all the time not only see but when they empty it uhuh um you can see the bags they open it right up um I don't know about the the weight uh but those bags are are heavy yeah umh so in this full you have to imagine 15 to 20 bags a whack yeah and they've been doing a great job cleaning it there's no problems it's been a great program good let's talk about that too yeah PR that right up um I don't necessarily think though that impacted the tonnage of waste people were just taking it to Goodwill instead

but yeah we'll need to this is a number we might want to look at increasing cuz I remember last year we voted to increase it the budget committee voted to decrease it and it looks like it was increased so it was under budgeted yeah but does this 690 reflect the fact that we're we were over and so you're did you extrapolate it at the overage we took we took the 430 of actuals and because there's a contracted 5% increase we essentially are just inreasing the what we had for volume times their rates 5%

if your volume still goes up again next year this will still be cont will still be under budget cont this contracted the same volume just at 5% more per ton each do we have a easy deliverable from them from previous years where we can just see the annual tonnage over the last five years and then we can just well I mean just to even have a better educated guess if we can figure out the factor that it's been increasing and build that into the tonnage I know it's not perfect but we had this conversation last year said well we can't guess it and then we went with way underestimat so I was saying maybe we should have this conversation again and try to come up with a closer number because it seems like trash is not the rate is not going down and if we see a rate of tonnage increase every single year and we just estimate based off of the previous year it just doesn't make sense like we're not budgeting for the same call volume

because we know that call volume is going up all the time and so I just think that this is a place where so we can get a little bit at least more educated estimate than what we have here yeah we have those numbers and tonnages and it's if if you look at it it was it was pretty consistent and then Co hit mhm and people stayed home I don't know they were generating more trash and something so then it went they went up it went up and then the then when it went back then it went back down and now it's up it's well could you just send me those numbers and I'll just come up with a I'll have to napkin get a whole Cassel to have them update the tonage for December so you have the whole year and then it you the report I was I'll just let everyone know I'm going to be a stickler on this line this year because I was trying to be a stickler last year and everyone said I was crazy so I don't want to just pass over Debb's comment

though I think really important that we add to the task list or something that we Circle back to the fact that the solid waste committee we that put that on next week's agenda okay because we're what a year into the five years plan of

you know what I mean I I I mean I think it got a slow start and then let's just put that onto the agenda for next meeting that works put that on just we'll talk about solid and we'll let them know just one other thing I have a placeholder in here it's a composting program there's no money tied to it I didn't put any money we you saw that grant that came through thing I sent it to so that that helps get waste out if you if you want to get into a program like that at 6,500 but just let me tell it's not a cost-saving measure it's more of an environmental thing so it's a shifting of it's a shifting right so you're not really saving anything it's just that you know it's something the solid waste committee can talk about but Calvin and I did our just did some quick homework to see what would it cost 6,500 bucks so just keep that composting is cheaper if people are comp posting on their own exactly but I just threw that

in there that maybe helped the but it's not part of the budget yeah it's just a little note in bulky waste you can see where we had a budget of 12,000 but it was actually 15 and we just uh called it 32 there's going to be two of those cuz they're done in May mhm so that's up um well anytime we don't do bulky waste our tonnage is up and our stuff getting thrown on the side of the road is up okay so so when you when you take the Public Works CN and you add you know Solid Waste to it and uh it makes it up

2.9% for total Public Works where Public Works is actually down all assistance because the maximums went up I we went from 600 to a th000 you can change that it's it's $4,000 uh $400 difference um not not a lot of money outside organizations those are those donations that the town does I didn't put anything in there it's not really something that I can do on my own so that's the and we can if you look at this sheet here um that you got you can see what you did last year for outside donations did anybody come to you asking yeah well Mike Clark did for baseball um

and snowmobile um but you got a recreation reserve and I would recommend you pull it out of that right just putting it in your budget and raing more tax didn't come asking for and I believe they came around this time La they came in December or January right last year but if I recall they were trying to build up an endowment and then they were planning to just draw off of that so maybe they built it up but if they didn't come asking so that's why you're seeing it's down it's because there's there's no there's no outside organization and the um so something to think about um moving

what it is County tax uh that's pretty much what it is they did their tax did go up 10% but where we're only paying it once in this budget an 18th month budget that's the percentage increase education is a complete estimate it's just based on what they did last year I know last year we did this we did 3% and we were we off they so I just kept the percentage the same for the school so I see that it's looks like one and a half times on that 20126 budget based

yeah because we pay it every month okay just want to check once a year I think okay so it's cash yeah and the tax payment we don't really put anything in there at this point you'll you'll determine that when Donna does the commitment and the transfer is out that is also on your this sheet right here that is your basically your Capital reserves um and what I did here for you

is there was really no significant increase to replace the equipment so we left the the the the um amounts the same as we did last year we just did it 1.5 times that's the 307 the 270 the 15 but 6,000 if you do 6,000 it'll keep our grant up to a $30,000 so if we get matching grants we'll have money to pull it from and that all totals up to that 598 500 which is line 99 uh 8500 transfer is out um and that's what makes up that number that's can I ask a question about the uh three departments and the you just did one and a half times yeah do you think that when we do that we should at least do the cost of living each year with those numbers for the transfers up for like how Public Works we did 205 fire department 180 Town buildings 10 should we multiply those by the cost of living and then do it no no the the longterm plan for the Capital Improvements is well we're planning out different purchases over the course of 10 20 years

uh and then taking all of that and saying okay how how much do we need on an annual basis uh in order to make sure that we'll have enough money and never go negative in order to make those purchases because if you recall that was the exercise they went through and figured out those 10year costs or those 10year costs and they built in the department heads were building in expected inflation during that time frame so this annual contribution is to achieve a set figure that already has I didn't know the inflation was built in okay yeah so when they say oh we get we got to buy a truck 20 years from now it's not today's prices they you know they do a rough estimate of what it might be 20 years from now thank you for explaining yeah okay and that um we can go to the

the very last page just want to Point some things out here to you so real quick it just say the the total townwide here what page on the on the our it says negative 3.2% annualized is that I must have just so know and that's because that's because you only doing one Debt Service you're only doing one County tax um and your your um transfers out doesn't include last year we had a what 160,000 for assessing that we're not doing so um those are those are the reasons why it's down yeah okay even with some other things being up correct okay I like negative numbers I just like know yeah there's there's a few of them in this one um so the very last page uh this is just a basic this is your fund your fund balances um 01 the the general fund you

can see where we started the last year at 3.6 million but then we ended the year at 3.2 so of that 668 that we used we really didn't use we only used about $400 we budgeted 668,000 of General funds but of a expenditure out of the fund balance but we only used 400 and change we have one more a AP to go through so there going to be probably another 30 40,000 I would imagine yeah but other than that so you used about 420 roughly or will will end up using about 420 so we still have a pretty good healthy fund balance and reasons for that Heather because I know you're wondering why is that is because you came in under budget for um a lot of your expenditures for the year and you also came in over estimates for revenue and so the variance between those two resulted in the variance in the use of fund balance and I should just retrain my brain that we're not trying to make that that's correct okay we're trying to

spend down I mean I mean you want to be you want to be close to what you're budgeting for your use of fund balance but you're never going to get there because no Town goes over budget on their expenditures right you're not allowed to so you're always coming in under budget for expenditures no matter what and inherently we know we're going to pick up a little valuation every year and then if we are continuing to adjust our fee schedule the and depending on the number of applications the revenues could increase so it's like if you're planning to spend out of your savings account you spend less out of your savings account that's a good thing yeah and the goal through though with the fund balance is we are deliberately trying to spend it down because it's not great to hold on to tax payer dollars and not apply it to a use right so yeah I just also like the fact that we get all the way through the year without

having to take a loan and pay interest on that right and with our fund balance where it is that allows us to do that mhm MH right right and that's some of the things we want to talk about when we start talking about the warrant and what we're going to Warrant articles that we need to consider putting into this budget yeah it's an 18th month budget and I also just just real briefly I know we're going to go is that we also want to talk about writing a warrant article to clean up some of these uh Reserve just kind of organize out a little bit better um yeah but other than that that's that's you know pretty much the the budget that uh I'm confident

with and I just thank Calvin and chief trip and Mark working with me and helping me with this and cheap not so much just a lot of work went into this so we're leaving it like this we're going to have a discussion and then we'll go through and vote we're not do I was going to say because of time I'd like us to just absorb absorb this information and come with recommendations for next week for Jerry the only challenge there is we're going to need to have those airtight because he needs to just adopt them and we're not going to have a chance to look at them in a public setting again before the budget goes to the um budget committee because that's supposed to be to them 1 of February right and by next week you meet sorry next meeting next meeting the 28th and so if I was concerned that I thought we were going to have major changes I'd be the pain in the butt who extends this further vote I think we're

pretty good especially also coming we also have um comment yeah so we want to go over that but I don't think we need Mark for next week next month meeting because I think we're just going to talk to you a little bit about adjustments so um I do think he

and I would like to have him come to the first budget absolutely yeah so that's on the 27th I'll have to I'll I'll have to keep you posted because their first meeting on the 27th is just a process meeting oh okay and then meeting

agenda to do that sort of thing y so wrap this up let's see here I mean our agenda here um I'm GNA you don't have anything else for manager report I don't I I I will say that the generator at the town office is scheduled to be placed on the 24th of January okay I hope it's good weather hope we have power yeah um is everyone okay if we just skip over board member reports for the sake of time tonight okay and then I just need a motion to approve the meeting minutes and the consent agenda so second all right any questions all in favor any opposition seeing none um upcoming meetings are planning board January 15th and then budget committee January 27th which just just a policy meeting they're not looking at the budget yet and then our select board meeting January 28th where will uh finalize our budget we don't facilities meeting oh and the facilities meeting the the public hearing for the and uh we don't need an executive

session tonight so I take a motion to adjourn so move second all in FA any conversation all in favor any opposition seeing none right let's see signatures here thank are we