TranscriptSelect Board Meeting ~ March 10, 2026

Okay. She's she's got the host pre preime. we got like 30 seconds, but Yeah. All right, folks. We're going to get started here 23 27 seconds early if people don't mind. I'm going to call the meeting to order here at 6:30. Uh we have a quorum.

Uh vice chair Josh Klein Golden is going to be a little bit late due to unforeseen circumstance that arose today. We expect him here before 7. Other than that, we have a quorum. So we'll begin with the pledge of allegiance.

United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. I'm going to move that we bring the RSU5 school superintendent conversation to um the first amendment, the first order of business after we approve our meeting minutes. Does anyone uh want to make that motion?

I'll make the motion. Rebecca, second from John. Any questions or discussion? Seeing none, all in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none, it passes unanimously. Um just a quick note before we open public comment. My intent for tonight is public comment will be open as normal right now, but we're going to have a presentation from the superintendent and then pro provide opportunity for public comment and questions for anything that he has to say. So, if you're here to ask questions about the superintendent's presentation or discussion, um that's a great time to do it. And then when we get to the pay as you uh go bag system, pay as you throw bag system, we're going to open up public comment before that, 3 minutes per person. Um we're going to have a discussion and then we can facilitate questions from folks as well. So, there'll be a separate public comment period for that. So, you're welcome to

do public comment now, but if you're here for either the scoop superintendent or for the pay as you throw, there'll be a separate public comment for that tonight. So, with that being said, public comment is open generally. If anyone wants to come up and say we're doing a great job or that they think the fire station looks awesome, now's a good time to do that.

Okay. No takers. Okay. No takers. All right. Take that. I tried. I tried. All right. Um, do I have a motion to approve the last meeting minutes as presented? I motion. Deb, do I have a second? Second. John, any discussion? Any No, seeing none. All in favor? Any opposition? Passes unanimously. All right. So, now we're going to give the floor to RSU 5 school superintendent Tom Gray.

Anywhere. Right here. Hello. I should always combine my visits with trash. Yeah, exactly. Well, we figured we put the big ticket items all together. Um, if you want, you can you can I think that this it would be great if you were to look towards the crowd to to address them.

Um, whatever your good side is, aim over there cuz that's where the camera is. Do this. Okay, that's great. Okay. Hey, Dr. Gray, you have to speak. That's all we've got for microphone. Okay, I'll try to speak up. So, I don't have a presentation tonight and I'm here with two members of the RSU5 board who live in Durham. Um,

Steph, Steph, Worth, I'm sorry, and Lois Kilby Chesley, who are right in the front row. And the reason that I asked if the Durham Select Board would like to have me come is really to answer questions about what's going on with the school budget process and also with some discussions that I have initiated with the board about possible reconfigurations of the school district in an effort to maybe save some money over the long term and also and I think actually more importantly have better outcomes for students. So I don't know maybe it would be helpful if I just ask for a show of hands if anybody has followed any of those discussions. Okay so a good number of you. So in a nutshell why don't I start with next year's budget and if you've been following this this will be somewhat repetitive but I will try to condense it so that it is understandable. Um, so when I came as superintendent last summer, one of the first things I looked

into was status of the budget. And what I found was that if I were to take a status quo budget next year, which simply means just take everything we currently have and are doing and roll it forward, it would be an increase of over 10%. So that did not feel like something I could do. Um, but then I looked historically at what have the budget increases been over the past couple of years in this district. So last year it was about 6.5ish and the year before that it was about 6.5ish. Also kind of high but not over 10. So, I

called for a special meeting of the RSU5 board in November and I basically told them this and I said, "I can't be the brand new superintendent who doesn't even live here who either brings forward a budget that's over 10% increase or to

just to get it down to where the increases have been for the past few years, it would require cutting almost $2 million, which is about 17 teaching positions." So I asked for guidance from the board about where they wanted me to aim and what they asked at the time was for tiers at 6, seven and 8%. So that's what I have developed and that's what we've been discussing at the RSU5 board meeting since the end of January. And because

about 85% of the school district's budget is wages and benefits, we can't get that amount of reduction without I mean, we can do some with things like technology and deferring some maintenance and not buying as many pencils or whatever, but really you can't get that far without positions. So, um, the board is right now considering its options, and I've laid out what a 6% would look like, a 7%, and an 8%. My recommendation has been the 7% or the middle tier, which um, this the 6% tier would bite deeply into some of our programs in a way that I don't think is appropriate or would be good for kids. Um, the 8% tier brings it down, but probably not enough. Um we all have also looked at projections over the longer term. What happens if we um cut at each tier now and what that does over the next two or three years and my recommendation is still that we reduce to that 7% of that middle tier. Um but I want folks to know that that's

the discussion that's happening with the RSU5 board right now and that the board will adopt a budget on March 25th. So maybe I should stop with that. That's one of the major irons in the fire that we have at the moment. And um how would you like to handle questions? Take them or

I think what would be great is if folks have questions um I can you just raise your hand. I can call on you and as long as you give me your name and the uh street that you live on that would be great and then we'll give you the opportunity to answer. but I can kind of serve as a independent facilitator here because I'm not going to be asking any questions and really just want to create the space for the community. So,

we'll start with you. Jeannie Potskin Rangail Road. Uh, quick question. You mentioned 17 positions. Out of those 17 positions, how many are currently filled or how many are just placeholders? That's a great question. So, uh, they're all filled except for we have five and a half

special ed E ed edte positions that are open that um, at that middle level, we have some edtech reductions of general ed ed techs and those people would be able to slide into some of the open positions. But you still have to keep the budget line open for open positions

for those particular ones especially because they're special ed. Yeah. And some of them are connected directly to kids IEPs and we have to at least have make a good fa faith effort to find people. Can you clarify what IP?

An IEP is when a student is um in special education they have to by law have an individualized education plan. And so that's what an IEP is. That's a that's federal law. Yes, sir. Um yeah. Um my name is Brad Owen. I live on Ada Drive. Um my question is what in your opinion is the cause for the this increase in the budget? Is it inflation increase of benefits or what do you think is is causing?

The macro causes inflation. Underneath that is next year the wages and benefits are slated to go up due to contractual obligations that have been negotiated already in the past. Uh Jeff Jay Rangal Road. when you say reconfiguration of the what are you what are you thinking there?

So that's kind of my next topic. Um right now I'm just talking about next year's school budget but in addition to that we're having conversations about beyond next year we could move students around to different buildings within the district to create more efficiency potentially.

Yeah. Um, Phil Spran and Brookside Drive. Um, you mentioned teacher positions. Are there any administrative positions being considered? No. I see people scratching. I don't know if that's like a half a hand raise or we're tipping our tipping our toes in the water here.

Um, one more question. Yeah. Sorry. Do I have to? No, you're good. Okay. All right. So if you're talk Oh, wait a minute. Are you are we taking questions for the next piece about the reconfiguration? I was going to let you start uh if there's anything you wanted to present speak on about the reconfiguration first before we open for the

Sure. Um any more questions about next year's budget first? It pertains to the budget but it's also the reconfiguration. Yeah, I was going to let him give a little bit of context in case folks hadn't been following the reconfiguration conversation.

So why don't I talk about that piece now? So in November when the board asked me to give them tears at six, seven and 8%. They also asked me to come up with some ideas for beyond just next year how can we become more efficient or have greater sustainability. So I took that topic to the administrative team. We in the process of talking it through with them. What I found is that there have been some ideas already out there being discussed among them and also in the community that need to come to light. So

I brought those ideas to the board just before February break. So I think it was February 11th when I first presented. And if you go to our website, you can find the presentation I gave and you can find a recording of the way I gave it and the board's discussion afterwards. And so I presented three scenarios for longer term. The first is well really is just to maintain the status quo. Have the school buildings just as they are. Um there are good things and bad things with any of these scenarios. The easy thing about that scenario is that it requires the least amount of change and people are accustomed to it and often people feel strongly about the school that they're already in and um

that is worthy of consideration. Um the difficult thing is that we have some problems with the current configuration that we definitely need to solve. First is cost. The second is on top of all this, the state passed a law that requires school districts to take up the

responsibility of providing special education to three and four year olds. And currently that's being done by CDS, child development services, but the responsibility for that is going to shift from CDS to school districts everywhere in the state by July of 2028.

And there's been some financial incentive for school districts who take that on earlier. So in order to get some of that financial incentive, this district made the choice to take that on um starting next year. So but it would be phased in. So next year we would just take on responsibility for four year olds, which is prek, and the year after that we would take on responsibility for three-year-olds, knowing that we're going to have to do this anyway. for four-y olds. We're pretty well set up to do that because we already have prek and most of the kids who are in prek in this district, I should back up. Most of the four-year-olds who live in our district who who have a need for special education are already being given that through our prek. Um 75% of

them are. So for next year in terms of space and capacity to meet that need, we're pretty well set with what we have. What we're not set with is the year after that for three-year-olds. We don't have any more space. We we really do not. So we have to come up with a solution to that within the next year. So that's a need that we have to address and keeping things the way they are right now doesn't give us good solutions for that. And then a third thing that has come up is that the middle school kids across the district have very different experiences because Freeport and Powell's grades six, seven, and eight go to Freeport Middle School and Durham's stay right here and they don't get the same experience. Um, I'm not saying that one is better than another. They're both really, really good in their own way. But if when we take a look at in Freeport Middle School, those kids get STEM, science, technology, engineering, and

math as a core class. Here at Durham, they only get it as a special. At Freeport Middle School, there's more opportunity for world language than there is here in Durham. Because Durham is a preK to8 school, it operates on an elementary school schedule, which starts later than the middle school and the high school, which means if a Durham kid wants to be on a sports team, they have to get out to be dismissed earlier and miss more school to do that. So there are some inequities and the way we could fix that is to have a district middle school to have all the middle school kids come together and the current configuration does not support that. So that was scenario one that I presented. Scenario two is to take the powell school and turn it into a district-wide early childhood center. And that would have both three-year-olds and four year olds from across the district all being served in Powell. Right now we have prek

here in Durham. We have it at Powell and we have it at Mor Street School in Freeport. when we have to take on the three and four year olds. Some problems for meeting that need is that if I just put this in really practical terms, we're going to have to probably hire, let's say, an additional speech language pathologist. Most of the IEPs for three-year-olds are for speech delays. That's a big portion of them. So, we're going to need to hire another person for that. It is very inefficient to have them running all over Robin Hood's barn to serve kids in three locations. But if we put them in one location and the Powell school is very well sized, it's perfect size for that. What we could then do is see if you can follow this here because it's like a merrygoround. Um Pound's K through six kids would come

here. Durham's seven and eight kids would go to Freeport Middle School. So all the seven and eights would be together. And then Freeport's sixth graders who are currently at Freeport Middle School would go back to Mass Landing School. Mass Landing is currently grades 3 to 5, so it would become four to six. and Mor Street School, which is right now preK to two. Well, they would be losing the preK because it would be going out to Powell. So, they could become K through three. And by not having to add any buildings, if I come back to we don't have space for the three-year-olds, this is a way to accomplish that and not have the expense of adding more buildings. Um there would be some expense in probably we'd have to make alterations to the owl school. Um but we wouldn't have to say build a wing onto the middle school or build an entire new building or rent a new building for early childhood. Um, of course the

downside to all this is it's a lot of change, especially if you live in Powell, um, and if you live in Durham, but I think perhaps perhaps some of you know, folks in Powell are having a pretty strong reaction to that ideal at the moment, and I don't blame them. Um the third scenario that we discussed and I presented was to actually keep early childhood split up but then to bring all the sixth graders in the district together at Powell. So it once again the Powell school would be repurposed not to serve just the town of Powell but to serve the whole district but instead of early it would be grade six. Um, we've run in our minds through

some of the costs and benefits of that scenario. It's kind of a cool idea, but it's harder to pull off when you think about it's not just the kids that would have to go there. It's art teacher, music teacher, special ed, it's all the things. So, that is just a little bit more difficult. So, and those were just the first three ideas that we came up with that we thought here are some ideas that we could look at. And I asked the board really to find out if any of these ideas are viable. It actually costs significant money and time and effort to actually, you know, you have to hire consultants and do a facility study and make sure it's done right before you make a big change like that. So I asked the board, do you want to go further with this at all? And they they basically said yes, they did. They didn't vote to do that but they had a rich discussion and they said that we should go forward with exploring other

options than the current uh configuration. So, what we've done since then is we're putting together um with the board's permission, uh an RFQ for a facility study from a professional architectural firm. And that process is going to take at least I mean, we're estimating that won't be done till December of next year because you have to put it out to bid and then you've got it. It like just takes a long time. Um so, in a nutshell, that's the conversation about possible reconfiguration. I don't know where it lands. Uh the ideas that I presented were intended as conversation starters. There might be other ideas and other recommendations that come up while we think about just the entire idea of change. But the idea of change is what I put on the table.

I'm going to now facilitate some questions and we can start back there. Thanks for that explanation. So first thing about they're both actually budgetary. Um as far as Oh, it's the same as earlier. I don't know. She didn't say it before.

Yeah. Yeah. The first time she uh if you could cost to get from 68 Rangill Road. Yeah. Again. Anyway, two-part question. Number one, the transportation costs. I would imagine that it would be cheaper to move an art teacher between the facilities than it is to arrange bus and all that kind of stuff for pick up and drop off of all the pound versus Durham versus and so forth.

Y so has that we haven't fully fleshed it out yet. That's one of the things we would have to like spend time and effort to really and then another concern is going to be um I don't know how much of the history and so forth but as far as budgeting concern and getting that school vote through it has always been at least here in Durham been a sore point for taxpayers that Freeport has a primary

um gets the the primary vote and Panel and Durham have a lesser amount just due to numbers. If you're moving kids around, does that change? No. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Brian, uh, just your your street as well. Uh, 25 Passport Road.

Um, do you have a rough estimate on how many kids the third and fourth grade uh, three and four year olds would be? I know it's hard to estimate, Bill. You must have some sort of Yeah, it's roughly that we we have gosh I just ran these numbers. We anticipate 128 prek kids

next year. So that's just four year olds. Of those 25 will have IEPs. Okay. And then with the three-year-olds, we just don't know yet because it's murky. Um a lot of three-year-olds who have some kind of developmental need

are just still at home with with their parents and they haven't been screened yet. So it like but what other districts have found as they take this on because we're we're like sort of right in the middle of districts in the state who are doing this once you build the program all of a sudden they start coming out because the the school district can can do it better than CDS. And

um a good thing I should say is that although it is um you know this is an added burden for us, this is adding a whole new grades span to the school system. Um the the data that school districts are finding is that this is actually helping kids get out of special ed earlier because they're getting services earlier. So it is a benefit. Um, I also

forgot to mention, but I should, the money for the three and four-year-olds, just the ones with IEPs, mind you. So, the state is taking the money that it currently sends to CDS, who's now serving them, and is going to be sending that money to us. So, if I were working for the DO right now, the Department of Education, I would tell you that 100% of the costs for those kids with IEPs were going to be covered by the money that CDS is getting, which will now come to us.

But I don't work for them. I work for you. And the way it is looking to me is that we all know the state gives subsidy for public school anyway. We all know that at least in this district and every other one that I've worked in, the amount of money the state gives you for your schools is not nearly enough to provide the education that you think your kids deserve. So I would predict that there will be some cost associated for this that will hit the local taxpayers if we want to do it the way you would want to have it done. And so the the financial incentive for us to do that early like what is it a percentage? Is it a a monetary amount? Like what

it it's a monetary amount but it's really based on um they have yet another pot of money that is for startup costs. So it's for things like curriculum units, playgrounds, all the stuff you would need to actually fit out prek and preschool classrooms. Another consideration about doing it a year early, it's not money from the state. It's that um it is actually

extremely difficult to hire a speech language pathologist or an OT or a physical therapist or any of those specialized professions that we would need to have work for us. And if we wait, those people will be employed by other school districts first.

question or cler base rather temple deerville road you said um December next year next school year or next year next next year December of 26 is when we estimate right now we could get the facility study done and have it to reach

this year. Okay. Oh next year. Next year. Yeah. Joe Joe Gaston Gates Cole Road does the viability study you said it looks at the architecture of the buildings but does it also look at the bus routes the bus lengths and the impact on these kids having to I mean my son to go to Freeport had to get on a bus at 6:20 in the morning.

I can't imagine him doing that when he was below high school age. He barely did it for high school. Exactly. It does look at those things. In fact, it'll look at whatever we ask it to look at. Um we have a draft of um the request for proposals that we're going to bring to the facilities committee tomorrow evening. Um if anybody wanted to, if that's a public meeting, anybody could come. Right now, our thinking is that we want to keep it somewhat broad. Like we we could write into it to explore the uses of Powell Elementary School as an early childhood center. We're not going to write that because we want to we don't want to like predetermine any outcome. We really want to find out what option keep it broad as many options as possible. So we will write transportation into it, a demographic study, um the capac what what kind of renovations within the next 5 to 10 years each of these buildings needs, um

how long the boilers will last, all of that stuff. Um just do you guys have an idea or a thought process of what this um study would cost and what line item out of the school budget this comes out of? Yep. Uh so the board at its last meeting authorized us to spend up to $100,000 for the study. Um in a previous district where I worked a few years ago, I think they paid 70 something for such a study. Um it was incredibly useful and we have

so in try to make school finance as quick as as short and understandable as possible. We we paid for it out of capital reserve. And capital reserve is where you wouldn't want to pay for salaries out of that. You'd want to pay for when you need a new roof or when you need to do something like that's a one-term one-time expense,

right? To fund. Yes. Mhm. Any other questions? Yeah. Eric's Timber Oak Drive. Once this uh feasibility study is done, does any of this information or does the town have any opportunity to vote or is it all the school board that makes a decision from?

Um, that's a great question. So, first it'll definitely all be public. Um, the board will it ultimately the board decides if it wants to put it out to referendum. So, the board would make that decision. It wouldn't it wouldn't bypass the voters in

No. And in fact depending what what option is chosen um the second option that I had mentioned the repurposing power that actually legally amounts to a school closure because of the number of grade levels impacted. So there's a whole process that would have to be gone through um that does involve the town that town in particular voting.

Road. Um it's a facility study, not a feasibility study. That's an important distinction. Just make it I just had a followup. You mentioned earlier about um you know, equity uh and you brought up the example of a um Durham resident wanting to play on a school sports team. Just want to put it out there. You're talking about 50% less opportunity when it comes to athletics, right? I mean, seventh and eighth grade at Freeport, you know, I coach basketball, right? There's not going to be more roster spots,

you know? So, it did it seems interesting that we're saying, hey, this is to ride opportunity, but is there a path to make more opportunity when it comes to I'm not I'm not sure I I follow. There's only 12 spots on the basketball team.

Oh, I mean, we're combining Durham and Freeport. Less kids play. Less kids get to play. Do you have an AMD team? Well, there's a seventh and eighth grade, but there's already a So, it's 50% less. I mean, that may be true for kids playing time in games, but if they get to practice, there could be different levels of of sports.

Yeah. I mean, it's still it's still less. Yeah, I should also point out and I hope you I it is really no skin off my nose what the board and community decides. Um I'm personally really okay with whatever decision fits the best in the community, but they have I think what we're at is the moment where they have to get talked about all all of the different options that are out there. We've got to explore options and have an honest conversation about what's the district that you, not me, you want to be.

I'm so Oh, no. I have a hand up here. I am Jeanie's husband. Um, and where do you live? Y'all are on opposite ends of the room. So, so in the in the new configuration, how many Durham students would be going to DCS? The seventh and eighth grade, which is about 100.

And how many? What you mean to Freeport Middle School? No. How many go? Oh, okay. So, it would be the current amount. It how many Durham students would would go to school? So, right now there's 450ish including the 100. So, it' be about 350 would be right here.

The Durham students would seventh and eighth grade here. Is that what you were proposing? So, the Durham school, the Durham school would be a K to6 school. And so all of Durham's K to6 students would go there. Okay. And Durham's prek kids would go over to Powell. Gota

and Durham 7th and eighth would go into Freeport. Yeah. Over here. My name is Gayton. I live on Hollow Road. Um what in the greater impact on most of these it feels like Dur Powell will stand to see the most change as far as where their students go.

Yeah. Um what is what would be the you know the look when you look at Freeport and any of the changes they would be having where would they be coming over to our schools or would they stay all in their town? All of their early childhood would come out to Hamilton,

but as far as everybody else goes, it would be us going to Freeport on their their trip. At least in that scenario. At least in that scenario. Yeah. Okay. All right. Thank you. Comment, not a question. Just an FYI, bear in mind when you're doing these budgets, uh I was at a friend's house today. She paid $479 a gallon for oil.

So, that's not going to help anybody. It's it's certainly not going to help the arguments. You know, people can't afford anything else at this point. Well, I feel I should say the conversation about these longerterm scenarios is about how to be more efficient.

It's about how to save money with a 6.8% increase, right? I mean, I understand teacher contracts. I was one. Yeah. But, you know, we need a Polish speaker teacher. No. Mhm. You know, like it has been presented to us in the past. We need three French teachers. We don't have one here, you know.

No. And in fact, I recommended cutting the one at Freeport Middle School in part because there isn't one at Durham, right? And so this is where the disparity between the the between the Durham Palort residents come up. Just a comment.

No. And I think that gives me an opportunity to respond about next year's budget that I've proposed. So if you um have a chance to go and look at what that proposal is, what I noticed when I looked at we looked at this strongly through a lens of equity

and the places that if we're going to reduce primarily where it needs to be is Freeport Middle School and Freeport High School and that's if I look at where the class sizes are smallest and where the kids with the fewest needs are and What we've tried to preserve is at the lower grades especially and in special ed having ample staff there. What makes that conversation, you know, I'm going to go to Powell select board in a few weeks.

Good luck. I mean, I have to say I was at the school the other day. I had we had public comments from folks at Powell last board meeting and then I've had a few of those folks come and meet with me the past couple of weeks. people are shocked and they don't love the idea, but they've been respectful

and they they also get this um I mean I'm I'm not eager to disrupt anybody's dearly beloved school, but when I'm with my administrative team as I was the past few months and we're looking at where can we make cuts that's the most equitable and that hurts kids the least and we can't even really get to pow until the deepest tears Because a cut at pound with one class per grade level, that one cut has a much bigger impact.

That's what's not equitable. And that's the conversation that we need to have is that the configuration of that little school, like every other little rural school in Maine and across the country, is just inherently inflexible and inefficient. And it's nobody's fault. It just it is what it is. And maybe we decide to keep it that way. And if we do, that's fine. But if we decide to keep it, it should be after we really think about what that means and what other things we could do.

Yeah. Gary Owen, a drive. Um, this is a basically just a comment about um our kids are grown up now, but back in the day when Durham Elementary didn't look like that, our kids were in the little modulars. Yeah, I know that's not ideal and we didn't love it,

but is that like an option instead of building a brand new I know it's kind of like a band-aid. We we've talked about it. Um the it's not an attractive option because actually after I think it's like 5 years it costs more money. Um so it's probably better if we're going to make a change to just make the change we need to make.

Mhm. That's just my thinking. That may not be the board's thinking and they really get to decide but we did look sort of look at that. Yeah, Brian I may have missed this at the beginning but is each school is there assistant principal and a principal at each school right now

at every place except Powell? Powell just has a principal. Okay. And does do you feel like the class like the student enrollment in each school warrants having both at those schools or a floating principal to cover three schools? We have looked at that and to answer the question that came up before about administration, we did we we looked at whether or not there should be cuts in administration and that's just not really where we have excesses at the moment. Our ratios for that are pretty typical.

Basing the coverage based on the ratio per students, not not just that. Okay. Um, I can tell you at the central office, like at the the district level, we're actually very skeletal compared to most other districts, we have me, an assistant superintendent, a director of finance, and a special ed director. Um, we don't have an assistant special ed director. Although with early childhood, one of the things that that state money will pay for is an an early childhood director that will function as an assistant special ed director. Um, we have very few compared to other districts secretarial positions at the central office. We have a director of transportation. Um, we have a food services, school nutrition director. Um, we have a facilities director.

Yeah. And I think just from like an outside of not knowing how many kids are in each of those schools, I mean it seems a little excessive to have assistant principal and principal for whatever is K through three or whatever. You know what I mean?

Yeah. I just I mean if they're being utilized I think that makes sense but you know Durham we have prek through eight and we have two positions we don't have the ratios definitely are not the same. Yeah. Um and one of the ways that you've been particularly lucky in Durham is just with frankly who you've had.

Um which is with Mr. Pittton retiring that's going to be a huge change. Um but one of the things we noticed with um when we tried to assess like the impact of the assistant principles since we hired them the attendance has dramatically improved and that's where a lot of their attention is

and when did they get hired two years ago so well it depends on the school I mean the co attendance is I think it's hard to compare those numbers because we have well but I've worked in other districts where that has not been the case just recently

um and of course the high schools an assistant principal for longer. Um Durham's had an assistant principal for longer. The middle school, it's really at mass landing in more street where those were added. Um, and we're we're seeing a lot of benefit from those positions

where where we really looked at where sort of like I hate to call any of our staff members extra because everybody brings something, but where we definitely could make reductions without arming kids is primarily at Freeport Middle School and then some at Freeport High School.

Okay. in for the past few years, um the elementary schools in Freeport and Durham had been taking cuts already. And what areas are those in? Like the the STEM stuff that you talked about or is that what areas were what what areas do you feel are um you could make cuts in the high school and the middle school?

We can reduce a math teacher at the high school um because of the class sizes. We looked that we know we can do that. We have two Latin teachers and we don't need two Latin teachers. We can reduce a Latin teacher. Um there is a position at the high school. There's an office position called the printing clerk. We can reduce that position. Um there is a position for community outreach and that the person who's in it does a fantastic job. But when I weigh that against keeping kindergarten classes at manageable sizes, for example, that position can be reduced to half and the school counseling department can assist with the other half.

Are these are these cuts being proposed for this budget? Yes. Okay. Yeah, they're in the budget. on um on the school's website, there's a link that you can click on that has a PowerPoint presentation that lays out each of the tiers the school board's considering and which position be produced.

Thank you. Yes, credit cards on Brianna Drive. I just wanted to compliment you for being so proactive about this, especially with the the upcoming changes. When I think about Portland school district is actually considering closing Portland High School and only going to daring. So when you think about that's a huge step that's equally as impactful. So it's important that you're bringing this now versus a year from now on the study. So I just want to compliment you on that.

I appreciate that. It's not the perspective like for you know my father would roll over his grave if he thought he had to go there. You know what I'm saying? So, so that kind of thing that is more than putting that out there so far that

I I appreciate that. And again, it's not just stuck on it just in time. It's going across the state and we're lucky. We're we're fairly geographically lucky, but you of those kids are driving all over. Well, that's a So, one of the districts that I just worked in not too long ago is RSU3, and that is um interior Waldo County. So, if you've ever been to the Common Ground Fair,

that's where it is. And in that district, it's 11 towns. The district geographically is one-third the size of Rhode Island. And so, it's the second largest district in the state. And in that district, they have this one big beautiful building called the Mount View Complex, which is right there on the same road as the Common Ground Fair. Has a big white Mustang. And I was the high school principal. Um, but also in that building is Mount View High School, Mount View Middle School, Mount View Elementary School, all in one building. And,00

people there. And then in addition to that, they had four little town schools in Monroe, Brooks, Troy, and Liberty. But while I was there, they had to make a decision about closing two of those little schools because, you know, in Liberty, Walker School was 100 years old. The Boiler was, I think, 99 years old. Almost at the roof needed to be done. There was a asbestous and the

enrollment in Liberty had just gone down and down and down and it was only going to have like 68 kids in it and they had to decide, you know, are we going to throw good money at bad good money after bad to keep this school open when it's just not viable and the same was true of the school of the in Brooks Morse Memorial. They did end up closing two of those schools. And when they live out, you know, in a rural area, those kids are on the bus up to the Mel View complex in Thornike. And some of those bus rides are really long.

I graduated from there and went so did middle school and high school and the bus rides were terrible. Yeah. What town did you live in? Well, Freedom for a while and Fortnite and my wife grew up in Montville. real quick. Any other questions?

I I apologize for being late. My daughter was hurt yesterday, so we can't leave her alone right now. Um, I really do appreciate uh you coming. Uh, and uh and and I think you reached out and and Joe and Jerry for setting this up and I hope it's something we can do more often when big issue especially when big issues come up. Well, I felt that it was the least I could do. And I think that I I really meant it when I said I don't the win for me is that we get something that people feel good about. I mean, not everybody's going to feel good about whatever it is, but that most people feel is the right choice. And I think people need to I'd love for people to be engaged and follow along and watch our board meetings. Come to our board meetings. I there are big questions that we're addressing now. So I think that that would be really important.

our conversation with Tom here? Well, Tom, thank you for coming in. Really appreciate asking me making the space for questions. So um did of course did you need me for anything else? No, we you're you're relinquished. So Class dismissed, right? There.

Thank you so much. cycle through. discussion um is our old business which is the pay as you throw trash discussion. Um, so the way I want this to work tonight because I know this is a really important thing. And first off, I want to start by saying I've re we've received a lot of great comments and a lot of great feedback, um, which is going to help us make our decision tonight. And I have received tons of emails. I'm doing my best to respond to all of them and provide people with information. They're coming in faster than I can respond. And so I want to make sure we take the appropriate amount of time. So if you sent an email and you haven't heard back from me, we have received it. We're just working on it. Hopefully tonight can answer some questions as well. Uh just to give a little bit of background of why we are here. So our last meeting we talked about our new trash contract with Cassella. Um and

we have entered into a new contract because our previous contract expired. We follow the normal process of putting out a request for proposals to get people to apply to service our town for trash pickup. The only person who responded was Cassella. That was the only bid we had and we entered into the contract with Cassella. Now, part of their bid in uh contract included the fact that they were going to switch over to an automated trash pickup service partway through the contract, which is kind of the standard operating procedure now. Um, these companies are having a really hard time staffing people um on the back of the truck. really high liability issues, very high uh workman's comp, lots of injury rates, and so they're moving over to an automated trash pickup, which is essentially robot arm grabs the trash, puts it in. And in doing so, you're required to switch over to a special bin that can accommodate

that robotic arm that picks it up. And in doing so, there's now no one hopping off the back of the truck and removing a trash tag to uh certify that you have uh put the adequate uh documentation on your trash to pick up. And so we understand that that's a really big change and we went over it and talked about it at at length in our last meeting. Tonight's discussion is about the pay as you throw trash system that we're considering. So, since we're no longer selling trash tags, the thought process that we had was we would move to a pay as you throw bag system to offset the loss revenue from trash tags. Trash tags generally generate around $30,000 or more dollars of a year in revenue. At the same time, the trash contract price is increasing. We're seeing it's going to be over an $80,000 increase to have this new trash contract. And that contract increases every year, usually by 5% or whatever the consumer price

index for trash is, whichever is higher, which is standard contract language. So rather than rolling that entire new expense into the taxes, this board thought that what we could do is utilize a pay as you throw bag system to offset some of that expense. So, at a $1.80 bag, it estimates about $120,000 worth of revenue, which would offset almost all of the new trash expense plus the loss revenue from the tax. And now, that's one option that we were considering. Um, a lot of comments we've received are that people would like to just see that cost rolled into their tra their tax bill and so they could just pay that and not have to worry about bags. Totally a viable option. It will you will see once as we go through the budget we'd have to add we'd have to remove $120,000 worth of revenue which would drive the budget up $120,000 which means we have to raise and appropriate 120,000 more which represents about a 1%

increase in the total budget. Totally an option that's available for people to to give feedback on tonight. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to just give that background and then we can open the floor here to have people give public comment on their their thoughts on this process before the board is then going to go into a discussion to make our decision on how we want to move forward. The other option too is if we were to decide to go with the pay as you throw bag system, we could have a period of time say from now until August 1st or something like that where we say no no more worrying about trash tags. we credit everyone trash pickup for the next five months without having to worry about tags to give you all credit for tags that you may have already acquired. That's another option on the table. But what we really need to do is we need to hear from everyone here, take into consideration all the feedback we

received and then make a decision tonight. So that being said, I'm going to open the floor to comment. Generally speaking, for public comment, we use about 3 minutes per person. understanding this is a a really important topic and that there's a lot of questions that people have, we're going to uh exercise our authority just using best judgment on giving people time to provide comments and get get answers and stuff like that. So, it's a little bit more interactive than some of our other public comment. So, with that being said, I'd like to open the floor for public comment um if anyone else has anything that they want to provide.

Yes, sir. And just same as always, name and road. Nice to see you again. Yeah. Uh trash bags, who's going to supply them? Yeah. So, we have looked at an option with a company called Waste Zero, and they work with I think about 300 municipalities throughout the Eastern Seaboard, and they can supply trash bags for us at all the different local um shopping centers. Um and then that's where they can be picked up if if we were to go this route. Make sure and please get samples. I worked for the city of Porn for 41 years.

They're still in the paper bags and those bags, they're terrible. They're junk. You can't even open them. Mhm. You're going to get a lot of complaints if you don't get a good looking bag. How big are these bags going? That's the next question.

Two bag types. So, one tall kitchen bag, 13 gallons, which is supposed to be about what fits in your standard kitchen receptacle. Um, and then a larger 33gallon bag. When the representative came in, he said that the bags were 3M bags if I remember correctly. So, a thicker bag compared to your standard trash bag because this company said that they found once you move to a pay as you go bag system. People want to put as much as they can in each bag. So, they went with a thicker bag for that reason. So, it's closer to a contractor bag thickness than it is a standard trash bag thickness. tie bag.

I don't know if it's a pull tight or a tie off. Sorry, it's a it's a tie bag. Yeah. Yes, sir. Um Daryl Bastigan, uh Rango Road. Is it normal in in Durham to have a single bidder for your contracts? So, we put out a request for proposals generally for how many weeks?

Like 3 weeks. usually for three weeks and then we have to just we put that out through official channels like main municipal association and other places and then we have to just we wait to see what we receive for bids. Um the last time we put out the trash contract I think we only got two bids and one of the people didn't have any of the equipment to actually do do that. So last time we had two bids, one of them wasn't able to actually do the work and so we went with Cassella last time as well. So it's not much different than what we have seen. Um the service provider that provided the bid has a really strong footprint on in this marketplace.

So there's no other people that do it in our area. None that submitted a bid. No. So the the if I could the the last time before this we had the two bids. That person wanted to get into the business but didn't have any the trucks, didn't have the personnel, didn't have all the you know I think the general knowledge is is fair to say. So, it's the only bid we've really the only bid we've had from a company that is in the business already for at least the last I want to say that was that was probably 10 or 15 years ago by now.

Yeah. In the back, sir. Um, still Brad Owen, still a drive. Um, so I sometimes can be a little bit slow, but are we talking about two different things here? The bag system with a different contractor and the Cassella system with the

Yes. So, two different things. Cassella is the bins. That's all said and done. That's happening. The bags is a different conversation. That's with uh waste zero, which was what we're talking about tonight. So, we're getting both. Is that

Yeah. So, so what's what are what's going in the bins? Is that recycling or is that So, with the new system with Cassella with the automatic bins, you put bags in the bins. You have a recycling bin, you have a trash bin. What we are considering is in addition using the waste zero just to for our bags for trash only. So your recycling pickup mix pickup still the same just an automatic arm picking it up and putting it in the back of the truck. Your trash pickup would look the same except it's an automatic arm putting it in the truck and there is potentially um specific bags that would have to be used in that system.

Can I add Can I add to that real quick? Sure. I think so. We've voted to do the pay as you throw, but we haven't signed a contract. Uh we haven't finalized that. And so we heard the feedback um from the public. So I think

I think we've invited we we're holding this to sort of get the feedback and either go forward with it or reconsider and don't go forward with it. So we we have the Cassella. We've voted on the waist zero, but we haven't we're not there yet.

We haven't started that. So the Cassella contract began two years ago and so we're we're already into that contract. I I just want to reiterate. One second. I was just gonna say I think we should reiterate about the speaking bag.

Sorry. Sorry. We we want to make sure everyone can hear. So if people have have side conversations, they could keep them low or just ask the questions that you have. We can answer them. But Rebecca, so just to reiterate, so we with the contract, we are receiving two bins from Cassella. We have a recycling bin with a blue top and a black bin or another bin with a black top. And so those are being delivered to every single resident's home the week of April 6th for and it we understand and Cassella understands it is a slow roll out. There's a learning process that's going to take place. So Cassella aside that's what Joe and Josh were talking about that's already happening. But we discussed that and the Cassella rep came

last meeting February uh 27th. So, we have all of that information on the YouTube video if you want to revisit that. Just to I just also want to make a clarification. Uh my name is Deb Oliver. In order to put the trash in the trash bin, it must be in bags. So, we're either going to buy our bags like we do today or we'll buy Durham bags and the

and the community will profit, if you will, or that will go towards, you know, the budgetary thing. Yeah. But the new Cassella bags, you can't throw loose trash in them, but you could just throw your regular trash bag in them or we're considering this bag system. So, I had some other hands up first back here. Catherine,

Catherine from Cardiff from Brianna Drive, could you guys just talk a little bit about how the contract is structured because I don't think people understand 100%. We have a contract for the for them to come and take the they come and take the good. Yeah. I can explain it. Contract is tunage.

So if we go with no bags, no pay to throw bags, folks are going to put more in in theory people going to put more in that bag. So the flip side besides not getting any revenue for the bag, we're also going to be paying more for the trash itself.

Call it out for the brotherhood. There's two charges to the contractor. Yeah, I can explain that. Cather service that comes and picks up the bin part and then also how much do we get rid of part? So by doing pay as you throw, we're going to have to pay for it one way or the other. We're either going to have to pay for it with our bags or we're going to pay for it in pack.

It costs so much to get rid of the trash and dirt or we go without the system at all. Yeah. And so to your point, the contract structured in two ways. We have your standard contract just for the service, you know, um there that includes the contracted service and the fee associated with bin management and all those sorts of things. And then we have what's called a tipping fee. So as trash gets picked up and brought somewhere, there's a price incurred when it's brought to where it has to go. And that called tipping fee or tonnage. So however much trash we throw out, that fee goes up per each unit. In addition, in addition, every year that percentage goes up on what they charge. I think right now we're at like $120 a ton or something like that. And so we have to estimate based off of previous years what we anticipate tonnage for people to throw trash out. What people have found in the industry is that when you switch

over to a larger bin and you have more opportunity to put trash in there and there's no um incentive to decrease your trash, then that tonnage goes up and then we have to absorb that in the in the tax bill spread across everyone. So even if you only produce one bag of trash a week, but I have a newborn, I produce three bags of diapers alone a week, my tonnage goes up. Everybody else's tonnage might stay the same, but that has an impact on the whole community. So, this system here with the bags is no different than the tags. The tags do the same thing. This just moves it from per to per bag as opposed to per bin. Um, the tags have also been an imperfect system. I'm not saying anyone in this room does it, but there's reports that people are cutting tags in half so they can try to stretch those. The tags are really only supposed to be for 25 lbs of trash. People are putting way more than that in there. People are

making counterfeit tags and then putting them on the trash bag. So it's already not a perfect system. This is but because we don't have the ability to pull the tags off now, this is the system that would kind of replace that to create an incentive to put less tonnage. What this company has found through the 300 municipalities they've worked with is that they generally see about a 30% reduction in tonnage within the first couple years of switching over to this system. People become more efficient because they start composting. They start eating all their vegetables so we're not throwing them out in the trash. start donating clothing as opposed to throwing clothing out, start reconsidering what they've put in the trash trash bin. And so they're seeing that that decreases the tonnage. So the reason we were exploring this is because it gives you all control more so over your personal trash cost at your home

cuz if you're a high producer, you can cut that back. If you're a low producer, you get the benefit from it. But also, it could help re reduce the total tonnage, which means that in future years, we could budget for less tonnage prices as we go along. So, it could be a win-win for everyone.

All right. I had saw your hand. Okay. All right. And then I'll get you. I had a hand in the back first. Yeah. So, Jeff J Rangel, I think you told me the budget for the the solid waste was $521,000 this year. For this year, yes.

What percentage is service versus tonnage? So, the it's about $80,000 for the service of the bin management and things like that. I don't have the exact number on tonnage. I can't recall. At least 375,000 worth of tonnage.

About Yeah. About two70 tons average. 270 tons average. Yeah. So I can do some So yeah, 210 tons you said 470 tons is your average over the last five years at $110 a ton. Yes, I suppose. About 85. Yeah, here we are. Sorry.

For the tonnage. This is the disposal cost. Yeah. 82,500 cuz we do about 750 tons here. Um so that's the price for just the tonnage. Then the rest is the contract for tonage or 82,000 for service. 82,000 for tonnage. And so then the rest is the service. So, this could in theory, if it works the way it has in other municipalities, decrease that tonnage price by about 30%.

So, we're we're basically prepaying $80,000 a ton. No, we I wouldn't say we're prepaying. We're budgeting for that amount. Paid for it. I mean, it's 521. It's in the budget. It's coming out of everyone's prepaying for it.

We're budgeting for that amount based off of the previous year. If that goes above, then we have to try to find that elsewhere. We got some kick. Yeah. If it goes below that money then gets rolled into revenue. And so then the next year what we look at is we look at what wasn't used and we've been using our fund balance or our extra revenue to pay into t into the budget before we set the tax rate to to return any of those surpluses back to the taxpayer before we begin the budget process.

Just seems like we're going to we're going to be paying it's you know you you know the numbers from previous years. say it's going to be about $80,000 and you're probably pretty close. So, we're paying for tonnage that we can't use unless we buy a trash bag.

Exactly. We're paying for school budget passing and it's saying you get it's we're doing the same system now. So, we pay for an estimated tonnage and then we sell we sell tags. So, it's it's the same system. they're they're built in as loss revenue. And then we actually have a fee that we charge for for printing the tax.

So it's not double taxation. It's shifting an expense to individuals based off of their tax based off of their trash consumption rather than based off of their overall um um household. So how many bags do we get then? Zero.

We have no one second sir. So we got to make sure we facilitate this in a way so everyone can hear the questions. Uh we're having that bag discussion tonight. We haven't we we are opening this to get feedback to people. So we have received some feedback that people want to either bags or they want credit for their tags. We have decided to talk about that tonight. And one option would be rather than buying bags and then holding them up front because there's a logistic issue because of how small of our space is at the town office, we could say we're moving away from tags. So this month through August 1st, let's say no tags, no bags to credit everyone for that and then begin the system starting in August. So five months of zero, zero tags, zero bags to give everyone credit for that, then start with the bag system. It gives us more time to roll it out. Um the challenge is when you look at 26 bags.

So right now tags, just the printing of the tags cost us about $3,000. The floor price for bags is 25. So, if we did 26 bags um times uh 1,600 households, which is what we have, we'd have to purchase all those bags and then I don't have the math off the top of my head. It's a large volume that we'd have to store at the town office and then get people to come pick up. We're we're struggled for struggling for space over there. Um and so that would be a logistic challenge. So, we're we're here to hear other options. Yes,

this just for lack of any better terminology because this just inflames me as well as I'm sure a lot of people because I have lived in this town for 26 years and trash tags have been a bane of people's existence. It is double taxation no matter how you look at it. We prepaid that bill every single taxpayer in this place. That trash bill, all of it. The contract we

pay as taxpayers. The trash tags are an addition. Everybody's like, "We give you 26." No, we paid for 26. That's what everybody does, right? If you have to go to town hall and you buy them for $3 a piece, so be it. That's my Yep. I use more than that. I go buy them every single six months. I'm that gal, right? So, by saying we're we're losing the revenue from these tags or we're going to make up the revenue with the bags, basically for everything that we've prepaid for that contract in our tax bill and the 18month bill that I just got, you're telling us that I'm going to tax you again. Here's your your backs. Do you want me to? So, so that's how that feels. I I understand how it feels, but I 100% disagree. And let me explain why.

Where prepaying the taxes for the tonnage, you take out the income from the tags or the bags, whichever one you were to use, that prepayment, as you call it, Yeah. would go up. And that's a more of a tax that everybody shares. So, if I use one bag a week,

I'm paying the same as you who might use five bags a week. a lowinccome lady who has five children and doing diapers. Screw her. That's not okay. We need to remain calm and professional during this. So, it's like, you know, we're here to hear everyone's opinion and try to find a solution here. So, we just want to make sure it's a respectful back and forth.

So, we we've been looking for an equitable way to spread this out, right? Because that's what people want. And there's no perfect system. No. Right. And so, this is a system based on usage. And that is the most equitable system that I think we've been presented with. I know I've asked Jerry, I I asked you last week, I think it was, give me something out of the box. Like I I've been trying. I've been asking around. Nobody can come up with a with a out of the box. There's there's nothing. It's it's we all pay for equally, right?

And so if you use five times as much as I do, we're still paying the same. Yeah. Or I think you're missing what I'm saying to you is is that that 26 tags in the beginning we have already paid for. We are entitled as taxpayers to receive those 26 tags.

And what I'm understanding is now you have to buy the bags. So I can explain if we go let's say we go zero tags. We get rid of that and then we say zero bags because of the increase in the trash contract. We're now going to take that $521,000 line is going to go up to $630,000. So right now the system is we all contribute for a portion of it and then those who need more can buy more. If we don't do that then we all pay for the whole thing which is totally an option. If everyone in here says I don't want bags. I don't want tags. I'd rather you add $120,000 to the trash bill. That is totally an option. That's what we're here to hear tonight. And if that's where you fall, that's totally cool. We we it we just budget for what you all ask for. And we have had people ask for other options as a pay as you throw. We're getting feedback that pe people also don't want that. So totally open book here. We haven't made any decisions

on that. Right. I just like to say something too here. Go ahead. So it's like the school budget. We all pay equally for whatever that school budget is. I don't have children in the school. I'm paying. There is an opinion that we should do very similar to trash. It's just that's equally across the board. No one's burdened with buying special bags. We have to buy bags anyway.

But that same that same argument you just made, we all paid for the school for and we paid for the school and so forth. But as Jack pointed out, in this same scenario, you now have to pay $2 for your kid to ride the bus. Well, I'm trying to make the the opposite point is if we do not go to bags and just spread the fee out against

all residents equally, one would think that is not equitable for some families than others. That's an option we can take. In fact, when I when we first started talking about this, I walked in like no bags, zero. I think I don't want to burden people with buying bags. Where do you buy them? I don't have them. I can't put my trash out. That type of thing. But then we started the discussion about

the twoerson household versus the sevenperson household and is that fair to the residents. So that's a dilemma that we're in and it's great that everybody's adding to that. The the other thing we have received feedback, some folks have reached out um their words, not mine said, I'm elderly. I do a really good job of keeping my trash to less than one bag a week. So I don't want to have to pay for more than my fair share of trash. So in that example, if someone's like, I only fill a one 13 gallon bag every two weeks. I should only have to pay for that one bag, that gives them more opportunity to have control over their household expenses. And one thing we hear all the time when we're budgeting, which we take very serious, that is that there's a lot of people who are on a fixed income. And rather than them splitting this extra $120,000 cost amongst all 16 households, it gives them the opportunity to tighten

up that portion of their budget should they choose. So that's that's just some of the other feedback we're receiving. I've got real quick I've got a hand here here and then Jill I'll get you third. So sir road I guess I just want

Oh sorry I'll get you right after. I'm sorry ma'am. No no no please. No I can't. What do you want? You can. Thank you. I am the demographic you just spoke of. Um, we're retired. This we make one maybe one kitchen bag trash a week. Everything else we recycle. We compost. And and for years I said I mean I got a filing cabinet draw full of tags cuz we don't use them all. Anybody want some free tags? Give me a call. I'll give them to you. I got probably 500 tags. I don't know. Anyway, um

but it's called joke inside here. It really is. If you're a senior citizen on a fixed income and somebody's saying, "Oh, yeah, you're going to pay for your neighbor's trash." I mean, with kids, it's different. Nobody says, "Hey, school's free. Let's have three more kids." You know,

trash, if the trash is free or your neighbors are paying for it, like you said earlier, people are just going to throw everything in. I don't care. It's free. I'm paying for it. Mhm. But you're paying part of it. I'm paying for that, too.

So, I think by going with you need a bag, you pay for the bag. It's fair, it's equitable, and it's encouraging everybody to save money by being frugal. Thank you. So, um I'm going to skip you, Jerry. I skipped here by accident. I apologize.

Baker Pound Road. I have a couple questions and then comment. Um, I'm with you on the Ali thing. Um, I apologize, but I we did not go to the last trash meeting with Cassella, and I really wish we had because we live on Pound Road, and in the winter time, they don't come down our road. There are about four of us families on the road that are elderly. Yes, we're elderly and we're on fixed income and you know we have various degrees of disabilities and it's

easy for us to roll out our trash can right now. My first question is how big is this trash can that they're going to provide to us? Is it something that we can physically still roll our bags out and um what happens in the winter? Are is Cassella going to come down the road? Because right now we have we we don't have a truck. So we have to use bags instead of our barrels. We have to put the bags in our car and drive down to the end of the road and just leave our bags there because we have no way other way of doing that.

Um I can't I'm not going to be able to roll a whatever they're giving us down to the end of the road. Has there been any discussion with Cassella about what they're doing with people like us right now, which is making us go down to the end of the road with our bags? Are they going to come down our road? Are they not going to come down the road?

What about elderly people? What about people that are disabled? How are we going to manage this? Yeah. So, we had that I I'll put a pin in pants you throw real quick to answer that. Um, so we had that discussion with Cassella uh a couple times now. the bags that the the bins that they provide. The standard bin is a 65gallon wheeled bin that uh you can bring to to the end of your driveway, the end of your road. If that is too big for folks, they say, "Hey, give it a try. If you don't like it, you can reach out to us and we can provide you with a smaller bin to make it work for you." So, they've had this experience with a lot of other municipalities. They said that they find that most people who have concerns about the bins end up actually liking it, but if that they don't, there is an opportunity to swap in for a smaller bin. As for the roads, Cassella did a bunch of uh research and they drove

around. They figured out which roads they're going to drive down, which roads they're going to back down. One thing they did is they're going to now go up and down some of the main roads so people don't have to cross the road uh to get to their trash like on 125 and 136 and 9. And so if your road is

changing the way that trash is picked up, they will be reaching out to you within the next week or so via mail to talk about that. They said that in instances like folks who are like, I really don't want to have to go all the way to the end of my long road, if there's a situation where all the people who live on a private road are putting them at the end of their their road. opportunities there could be you leave the bin out there and you just bring your bags out there if you can leave it on the side of your driveway or your road. Um, a bunch of different options, but realistically we're wait individuals need to wait to hear what Cassella has suggested for their road. Figure out if that's going to work or not and then have a conversation with them. So there's like three or four different they have the back down is that they call it, the cluster pickups and then the back and forth pickups that they're

doing. And um if you send me an email, I'll send you directly the link that has that presentation and I can send you the link to the YouTube video in the time stamp where that conversation took place. And if you have any other questions after that, I can answer them, too.

Thank you. So, um uh I'm okay with um buying a bag for I mean, we don't generate a lot of trash. We're pretty good about composting everything and recycling as much as possible. I am more than him, but that I'm okay with um

you know purchasing smaller bags or whatever, but I we have major concerns about our trash pickup in the middle of the winter and how difficult that is. It's it's difficult. It's you know and we don't want a bunch of trash barrels down sitting down the end of the road looking horrible either. I mean

Yeah. Yeah. And and one benefit with this system is if you are friendly with your neighbors and you say, "I'm only putting in one bag a week. You're only putting in one bag a week." Since you would now potentially be paying just for the bag, you could just leave the one down there and then you both put it in the same bin because it's you're not now needing to say who's putting the tag on it this week. So just just an option. Um Jared and then I'll go to Jill and then I'll go to you Jar.

Um Jared Maddox, Davis Road. Um, I guess I have a few comments and u brainstorm idea, but um if we must go to bags, maybe it'd be a good idea to get both sizes for for folks that only need the little ones and others that need the big ones, especially to accommodate for uh with the 25 lb uh currently I can put

like three or four bags in my pin with one tag. Now I'm, you know, doing the math, four or five bags in the thing. That's gonna add up and really piss me off to speak. Um um I do I'm I'm in favor again if we must go to the bags. I'm in favor of uh uh going to August or further to kind of use up the tags to reimburse. Sorry for the guy that's got 500, but um I think that would be good for for everybody to uh we already paid for those tags.

Have we had any discussion with like uh the Freeport dump um collaborating with them? I know nobody wants to put bags of trash in their car, but like just thinking outside the box. The dump, the dump, and Brunswick dump.

Yeah. So, we haven't talked to them about household trash. Currently, you can bring bulky items to Freeport. You have to pay punish there. Any place you have to bring trash, even if we were to come up with an agreement, you would then be paying to throw it out once you get there. And so, um, then we have to ask them if they have capacity to take on, you know, a bunch of extra tonnage. At the same time, the issue arises there is that there's for a lot of folks, the the curbside pickup is really popular. So if we're asking everyone to pay for curbside pickup and then if you don't want curbside pickup, you also have to we also going to enter a contract with another municipality, pay them money and then bring trash there too. It becomes an even bigger line. It's something that we can discuss. And so we are in the middle of our Cassella contract right now. We have a really great um solid waste committee that's been working uh

full of community members to look at options. This is all great stuff to discuss over the next two years while we finish out this Cassella contract to see if we want to change that in in the future. But for right now, we're kind of in in the middle of this contract. Um to the bag thing. So if if we go with the pay as you throw bags, um the the pro service provider will stock both 13gallon and 33 gallon bags at all the locations that we um will have them put the bags at. So, it's likely going to be like Hannerford, Market Basket, places like that. Um, those vendors don't charge a fee for storing the bags. They consider them a foot traffic item that they get the benefit of people coming in to buy their bags. The reason we're including that 33gallon bag is for examples like you said. If you have two, three small kitchen bags that you are using from your kitchen, they can fit inside that 33 gallon bag. So, that's a

that's a one $3 bag instead of three $180 bags. So, we're trying to give that that flexibility, but the it would it would have both bags available from the onset. So, um I think I then said Jill, you were next. I've heard it said a couple of times um

that if we if we were to provide x number of bags to the residents that we would then need to offset that in the budget and I disagree because you already provide x number of tags to the residents which is offset in the budget. So, if you're going to replace the tax with bags, you still could provide x number of bags because it's already budgeted for in the budget.

And it's not a guessing game. You already know the tag was being used for a 25gallon It might have started out as pounds, but it's not anymore. It's a 25gallon container. So providing residents with an equivalent 25* 26 Mhm.

gallon bags. It's it's an even trade. It's not because the contract price has gone up so much. So we're not comparing one contract to last contract. Contract contract. We're in the middle of the contract, but there's a new element of the contract coming into play this year because of the bin system, because of everything. So there's a new budget line for $80,000 for all of this new part new part of it. So the contract itself has increased this year from last year.

But it's not because of going from tags to bags. It's from it's because of the automated trash system. Because of the automated trash system and the proposal is to use the bags to offset that. But if you trade tags for bags,

then those that want to dispose more can offset help you offset that tonnage increase. It's not equal though because the the tags cover the whole bin whereas the bags are just the individual bags and then at the same What's that Josh?

Okay. What What is the cost to the town for the bags for the 2 I mean to the tag? 26 tags. It's $3,000 printing cost. the the the bags at 26 bags for 1,600 households is over $10,000 a year. Plus plus, don't forget the most important part.

There's not a lot of space at the town office. And it's a lot harder to count out 26 bags than it is to count out 26 tags. So that means that's more work for the staff, which takes them away. Let me let me let me let me finish. Right. It's takes them away from doing the other things. And in my opinion, we're they're already I don't want to say short staff because they're getting everything done, but they could use help. And and Frank Stretch, thank you. Frankly,

I I have been a long opponent of the only being open four days a week. Uh I don't I I think we should be open five days a week. Uh we can't. That's a whole bunch of money and more people. Um, and you need you need that extra person that help count the bags to store them to get them.

No, you don't. They come in a package of 10 is what the gentleman said. So, keep it simple, people. Go with the kiss system. It's 10 over 33 bags. 10 bags is 16,500 bags. bags. You don't need to pay somebody to count the bags. You just need somebody to grab a ball.

So, if we provide 26 bags to everyone, 10 bags per household is a total of 16,500 bags. If we provide 26 to everyone, it's almost 40. It's almost 30 thou 30,000 bags that we have to store at the town office for people to pick up.

You could logically say you're providing the equivalent monetary amount. I'm just saying you guys, which would just be adding it to the taxes, which but if people are asking for physical bags, if we say we're going to increase the taxes, $30,000 to credit everyone for those bags, they don't get the physical bag. They still have to go someplace and get the bags. We don't have the space to store 30,000 bags in the town office until people come pick them up. We just we I mean, we don't have the space.

Two more questions. One is I'll get you right after, sir. Um, panel started with pay as you and they did away with it. And it's been asked of you guys several times. Why? And how much did their tonnage go up? Have you gotten that answer yet?

No, we haven't had had that answer. Um, but to your point, to them, there's there's another 300 towns that haven't gotten rid of it. So, do you want us to reach out to those and ask them as well? Because if we're just saying one town didn't like it, but 300 towns do like it, it it's not necessarily an applesto apples comparison.

May I try to answer that? Yeah. I I talked to somebody who's very active on their solid waste committee. There two reasons he said they they didn't want to use the pay as you throw. One was they talked about using a camera and for whatever reason PMO doesn't like their garbage film. And then the other one was they're not current we're not currently had a limit. So you could throw whatever in your trash you wanted to. And the consensus was we don't want to go to a constraint of having uh

whatever you know trying to limit our garbage. We just want to throw stuff away. So they were willing to pay the extra extra fee. So whereas we've started we've already been limiting that. So, and and that's a perfectly fine answer here is we'd rather pay the extra tonnage and rather pay the extra expense. That's totally a fine answer here, too.

Sir, you in the back? Yeah. Mike Ber out of Per Lane. Um, do we have to buy all like a year's worth of bags? No. So, what's the problem with the storage at the town office? Why can't you buy it by the week or by the month? You buy a thousand bags. The storage is if people wanted to be given 26 bags at the start of the year, we would have to order 26 bags for each household and then store them at the town office to hand out. We don't have

You got a Eureka, you got the police, the fire department, you got the school. Yeah. I mean, chief would rip my head off if I tried to store 30,000 bags in this in this room for this building. We can probably trash out send out some trash bags. The challenge is the

You can put a UL rental out here and put it in. Give it to them. Yeah. The challenge is the logistics of that checking system that handing those out. The Eureka Hall gets rented out multiple times a week. If we have to ask the Girl Scouts to move around that there's just some challenges there that we don't feel like it's we can accommodate

challenge of just figuring it out. Yeah, we've thought we've thought about all these options and we just don't feel like it's the right approach. But I appreciate the feedback and we can we can consider at the town office and let everybody come in and say, "Oh, we got to, you know, have our dedicated room just for bags."

No, the approach right now would be to just sell them have them sold at the local vendors that are willing to carry them, which is most of them. Yeah. And so that's the approach. Now, if that approach happens, then those vendors working with Waste Zero make sure that the bags are flowing through at a rate that is adequate for people to come and pick them up. the the added challenge is when you want a a bulk supply up front. What they find is most people come in, buy a roll or two or 10 bags at a time and then go. So even at the store, they don't stock 30,000 bags. They're stocking what they see as a generally a week's worth of of flow of bags for each municipality. And so that's why we are moving away from the idea of providing all the bags up front. Um you know, totally understand that feedback though. But some people have asked for 26 bags up front. And so if we were to say that, we would then have to

buy all those and hand them out over at the beginning of the the year like we do our tags and stuff like that. And I hear you. I hear you. But just to just to go back to your question about where the bags would be because also people are not frequenting the town office as much, but they do go to camper, they do go to Shaw, they do go to get to go or wherever it might be. We thought it was easier or it could be easier for residents to pick up as they're getting their groceries because right now Brunswick and other towns pick up just before they're going to check out. They pick up the bags on their way out for checkout. So it's Yeah, we just thought it seems easier that way.

No problem. I was under the assumption that it was going to be Oh, no. No. Yeah. And you guys were trying to figure out a space. No. If we Yeah. No. I'm sorry about that. I could have clarified a little bit more. Todd. Yeah. Todd Bull stack a couple things. Um it probably be a good incentive to give out trash bags at town meeting.

Mhm. That's where we give out our tags. Except how do you carry them to the only place you can go? You you mean if you attend if you attend you get a free box of bags. You have to come to town meeting. Put them next to the girls cookies. Also, another thing I understood that Cassello was buying the trash cans and they were they were going to own the trash cans.

Why are we paying for them? The bin management. So, the logistics around bin management, the replacement way to say you're paying for it. I don't you just tell us we're paying for them. It's built into So, we don't own the bat the the bins,

but we're paying for Right. We also pay for the trash pickup. We pay for the service, too. It's part of their business model. I I don't I don't manage Cassella's business model, so I don't know how much those bags cost them versus for the management versus the purchase. Um 26.

So 3,500 bins probably does add up to quite a bit of money. And then that cost is then carried yeartoear. So if they build in their contract that every year through the rest of our contract, it helps offset the cost of that initial investment. pretty common for when you get a service from a business, they charge you for the product they're they're providing. So

sir, I know the reason ditched it was they it was hard to enforce without spending extra money. So the trash guy, what bag you use, the town gets the video. The town that doesn't go through the video. No, no. The the the the video system has artificial intelligence built into it. So it tracks who's not following the bag rules and who is. We don't have the video system built into our contract. That would be an extra expense. That

So how are we going to enforcement? We already said the town employees are pretty thin. Are you going to send Jessica over on a lunch hour to look at people's bins? No. So, so there's multiple different companies that cover the bags. The company we work with provides spot enforcement where it part of their contract. They follow the truck, the trash truck, and they determine the compliance rate and then it they can help us figure out if there is an issue and we need to look into a future way to mitigate that.

Contract with them. It's part of the bag contract. the bag and and the contract is 25 cents a bag. That's the that's the cost that they carry over to us. 25 cents a bag. The contract cost. Um well, the when we buy the bags, that's what pays for it. Yeah.

Can I Good question, though. I I made a mistake when I said it was $10,000 for the 26 bags for 1,500 homes at 26 bags. Uh at a $180 bag, it's actually $70,000. Maybe give the people the option buying the cost. Mhm. Yeah. We we talked about that. And so when when we had the um guy come in here, we he said, "You set the price."

And I said, "Well, there's got to be a floor." Like, "You can't give us the bags for nothing." And he said, "Their their floor is 25. At 25 cents, it generates zero revenue for the town, but it covers the expense of the bags." So when we looked at based off of Durham's tonnage and some analysis of what they and and this is on our website, so if you email me, I'll follow up with you. When we looked at the tonnage and all of that, we said, "Well, at a $180 a bag for small bags, that's going to generate enough revenue to offset the new increase in in the the the system." So about $80,000, and offset the loss of the tags for the um for the uh uh the

tag revenue, which is about $30,000. And so we felt that rather than trying to make a profit that the best price point would just be to offset the new contract and offset the lost revenue from the tags and then break even. If we wanted to increase revenue, we could say let's charge $2, $3 a bag. That's not what we wanted to do. We wanted to keep it as lean as possible. And so that's where we came to that $180 price point.

Price for a 33 gallon bag $3. It's like $320. Oh, no. The town price. Um, I didn't ask him to break out the bag price is 25 cents versus uh the small or the big. When I asked him what the bag price was, 38 cents. Sorry. 38 cents. We do have it. Sorry.

Um, and the the way we price the bags is it's not supposed to be like, oh, if you go with the big bag, you get a volume discount. It's it's trying to be apples to apples just for preference because we don't want this to seem like, hey, we're trying to generate a half a million of revenue by punishing everyone for for selling for getting trash. This is just to try to break even on the new contract.

And what's the enforcement if you get bagged for not using the right bag? So, the drivers get out, they put a sticker on the top of the bin, and then they know that that's a bin that they need to skip next time they come around. Also, the drivers do have a a camera that they see tracks the trash going in. So, Durm will have a unique bag. If our bags blaze orange and they see a bunch of black bags going in, they note that that house is not in compliance and they start skipping houses. Um, if people aren't in compliance, if compliance becomes a major issue, then towns have added the AI component, which costs $20,000 a year, which we want to avoid. He said that their spot checks where they follow people the trucks around. He said that they find that generally most citizens are compliant with the uh uh the system. the people cutting their tags in half, they might not be compliant because they aren't already,

but they said that generally most people follow the the system. So, I'm gonna get you right in the back. Sorry. Sorry, drive. I just I realized the bins are not up for debate, right? It's a done deal. But like how many bins do you suppose will be on 136 in the road when people are,

you know, even not in the winter, but the winter in the plow trucks? Like I don't know honestly how many people actually use cans now. Maybe it's already an issue. I don't know. I live on 125. The vast majority is bins already at the end of the roads. Um and so that's we we anticipate it's going to be a similar amount. There are a handful of people who just throw bags out. I remind people that if you're throwing just bags out, you're actually supposed to put a tag on each bag. And so that's actually $3 a bag at that point. And that's not we're having some compliance issues there because of misunderstanding. Um, but generally speaking, it's going to be the same bin issue or bin uh numbers I would imagine that we have now. Not everyone puts trash out every week, those sorts of things. But um I had not put a ton of

thought into how people like to throw their trash out. Then we started the system and I started cruising around and it's the standard way most people throw out trash. They have to be lined in a way because the mechanics of the thing and that's the nice thing about this tricky the nice thing about this new system is because it's an automatic arm, they're now allowing for bins to be on either side of 136, 125, and route 9. Um, so you can put them at the end of your driveway and have them in your driveway as opposed to the side of the road. So like on 125, I have to put mine in the bank on the other side of the road because it's only one pickup route. And so I have to cross every day. A lot of times I, you know, shovel out the bank if I want a little bit more space. Whereas now on that road, people be able to just put on whichever side they have more space on. So if they're already having their driveway plowed, already

having their driveway shoveled, they can go right in the driveway um as they're after they leave for the morning. So, it opens up some options to try because that was another concern as we were worrying about safety. Um, and we feel that this creates a safer system for for bins than than before. All right, I'm trying to track the hands. Donna, I think you were next.

We're halfway through a D. I know your name, but everyone else needs to hear your name. Donna Church. There you go. Sorry. Um, if we're halfway through a contract, what good's a contract? So, this was built into the contract and we knew about it when we signed it and we talked about that at the town meeting. I think it was 2023 or 2024. It was the only option. It was 2024. It was built in the contract that they said we are entering this contract and we're ordering a truck. So, partway through the contract, the expense will increase to accommodate automatic pickup. This was expected. Um, they got the truck a few months earlier than we expected. We thought it might happen later. Um, but it was it was built into the contract. There was actually a conversation with them about how can we not do this

and they said if you don't want automated pickup we're not interested in in providing the service and then we'd be without curbside pickup. So yes, so I'm sorry to oversimplify it but this is the best way for me to former kindergarten teacher

former kindergartener. So perfect. So prepaying like we get our tax bill, I've paid my tax bills and so I am basically paying for fiscal 2026 2027 trash. Okay. And just for simplification purposes, let's just say the contract is $50,000,

right? So then you're selling trash tags throughout the year and so forth and you're saying that you're recouping revenue, right? So what are you doing with that revenue? Is it going towards next year's fiscal 2027 trash line or is it going off to some general fund?

Yeah. So, I can answer that really easily. So, all revenue is considered revenue. It goes into one revenue fund. But what happens is right now when we budget, we budget all of our expenses. We say this is what it costs to run the town. This is what it costs to pay the school bill, the county, all that sort of stuff. And then we look at our revenues. So this is how much we get from property uh from um uh permits for buildings. This is how much we get for uh car registrations. And then this goes now into a revenue line. We'll say and we anticipate $120,000 revenue from bag. We subtract all of our revenue from our expenses and then we set the mill rate based off of the difference. Um our unfortunately our revenue doesn't cover all of our expenses. So that's where the tax rate comes from. If we were to remove the bags from the revenue line and that we anticipate that would be a loss of about $120,000, that means that

when we go to set the tax rate, we have to raise an extra $120,000. Right now, the first read through the budget, $100,000 is about 1% increase. So, if we don't do bags, that's an extra 1% that we have to raise. Totally an option if people would prefer to do that, but right now, this is what we're looking at.

So, I just want to make sure that I am understanding here. So technically, we're not if we sell the bags, we're not taking that in that income, generated income off of the tax base of what we pay for next year's trash collection. We could be paying for the 19% increase on the administrative cost.

No. So that money that is generated in revenue is immediately calculated into our current expenses, which decreases the need to raise taxes. So, the number we came up with is saying if trash is going up $120,000, let's set the trash bag line at $120,000

to functionally offset that. Now, does the dollar use bought spend at the for the trash bag go into the trash the trash company's hands or does it go into the electrical company's hands? We don't track that dollar for dollar, but it's one thing that we just use to give us an idea of what we want. And that's why we came up with a$180 line because we didn't want to say we're going to use this trash tag to generate $300,000 of income even though the trash is only going up by $120,000 and then we're going to take all that surplus and use it on other things. So, we're trying to keep that as low as possible.

In your scenario, if it was $50,000 in expenses and $10,000 in revenue, right, we'd be paying the 60,000 expenses if you got rid of the bags. So, so it comes out of everybody or the people who use them. No, understood. Understood. But it just it doesn't make sense in terms of your fiscal line item for budget for this year. And we're anticipating that budget. Like I would let's even make it even smaller. I know that every year I spend about $5,000 ballpark, you know, in oil. I know that I need to raise that money for next year's oil line, right? But the problem is is that so for the $30,000 that you're saying that we're losing in revenue,

those are the people who are buying the extra tags, not the ones who are a lot of them, right? So if you're doing that, you are looking at the situation of You're trying to make up that difference and so forth. We've already paid for it.

No. No. Because that $120,000 is money that's not taxed. That $120,000 is being paid in the future. Mhm. But we're not taxing you for it now. That money is coming from the bag sales or the tax. That's what I was wondering. Where is it? Is it being applied to that?

That's it's being applied to the costs, but it's not through taxes. It's through the revenue stream from selling the bags in tax. And so it's not a double taxation. When we the way our accounting works is we don't have one account that's just for trash. one account that's just for electricity. We have our general funds and then we allocate things out of that general fund to go towards the expensing. It's just it's what we've moved to a few years ago. It's much better streamlined processing because then you limit your amount of accounts and all that sort of stuff. But just a quick note on the tags. So right now when we say free tags, those 26 tags that are given free also represent an opportunity cost. So, if we were to say we're not doing free tags and we now are selling tags, that's $128,700 worth of tags that we are building into our our budget right now. So, that's the opportunity cost. So, we already as a

community incur the cost of the free tags. This is just now helping account for that in the system. So, think of it as you're paying the fee for the general services, and now we're just trying to make it so more of the fee that covers the actual tonnage and pickup comes from the individuals based off of how much they create rather than the valuation of their home.

I understand that you keep saying free tags. They're not free. We pay for them. No, I'm saying they're not free. I'm saying that the opportunity cost on the tags is $128,700 cuz we give we give we build in 26 tags to each household. There's about 1,650 households about $78 per house. So it's about $128,700 of revenue that is given up

to give the tags uh as part of your your bill. Yeah. And so what but what I'm saying is the tags is also is an example of an opportunity cost too because by not charging for any tag for 20 the first 26 tags right now that's an lost revenue opportunity of 128,000

and that's where we're having the disconnect is that we have already paid for those 26 tags but but not now going in the future you're not going to have paid for those. You're going to be only paying for them as you use the bags. That's how the system works. So, but what you are saying is is that our trash total is increasing by 120,000 over what we currently pay.

Okay. When you do that, we are the current environment as taxpayers is we are paying for that as taxpayers which has always included not always. I take that back. When I first moved to Durham, we didn't have trash decks. We had a bunch of trash on the side of the road.

Mhm. And And uh so the problem is is that so for those tags, those 26 tags that people think are free are not free. You've already paid for them as part of your taxes. And if you take those tags away and you're now saying to those people, everybody has to buy tags,

bags, bags, bags, bags, tags, all same thing. is that I understand the whole piece of, you know, those people who were using more trash, you know, the the moms who have the babies or the elderly who are using fence. Mhm.

Um, you have the perceive perception that we're only charging those people who generate more charge. No, that's not true. We all paid the collective tax base and now now you're going to pay, and this is what I keep saying, double taxation. I understand we're not taxing it, but I'm going to tack that $120,000 onto your tax bill.

We're already taxing on the cost, opportunity cost of bags. So that's already h tags. That's already happening. This is no different. It's the exact same as tags. It's just a bag instead of a tag. So it's the same concept

because the cost has increased. And so if we want the 26, we can do that. We're just going to have to absorb the new trash cost for sure. So, if you if you don't want to incur cost at the at the bin, we have to raise the tax line. We have to raise an additional $120,000 for trash, which is totally an option. You get rid of your tags, but your taxes go up. And so, that's that's what we're talking about here. Sir, sorry about the wink.

Um, dear railroad, um, so you you kind of helped me understand that a little better, but it seems the disconnect from having helped me get here. We go from zero to 26. Understand there's more cost for bags. You said it like 12 times. So, um I think there should be something in between,

right? I mean, if we know that we know that there's a certain amount that we're currently paying, however we want to put the version, there's 26 current tags that has an inherent value. What's that value in bags? Is it 10? Is it nine? We should get those. Yeah. So, so to to your point to essentially say there should be some value received on the taxpayers to cover this, we can achieve that by setting the bag price as low as possible to offset that that expense. So, the value is we're not trying to generate any extra revenue off the bags. We're just trying to offset that. Um, as opposed to saying, hey, this is a I mean, because some of the scenarios are presented as, hey, you could generate $300,000 worth of revenue off bags if you charge three bucks a bag. and we said no, we want to make sure that this isn't adding that expense to people that were coming in as tight as we can. So, I think that's where

we're trying to give that that credit. And then the other thing we've talked about uh just tonight is as we transition, if we choose to go with bags, if we were to transition from tax to bags, we could do like a fivemon gap to say there's no fee to that helps accommodate your tags that you've already bought. You know, I imagine people are going to start throwing everything that they can in that bin at that time. But that's where we're trying to do it because like we all pay taxes, too. We all throw trash away, too. Up until 8 weeks ago, I was a one bag a month and I'm now two bags of diapers a week, let alone the my normal trash. So, I totally I totally get it. We all get it. We just think that this is the best way to to shift that to give the fixed income a little bit more control and then still credit people by setting that bag price as low as possible to cover the difference. Does that answer your

question at all? I think it does. I think it does. I'm just I'm I'm It's a lot of moving parts and it's just it's we understand that. The way I explain it to my wife is you just change the way you're paying for it. Instead of paying for those 26 tags and taxes, I'm just buying the bags myself.

Yeah, that's true. I think um yeah, but but there's no I'm sorry, Jeff. But there's no the taxpayer doesn't see the right? To put it in in round numbers or flat numbers. It doesn't go like, okay, $10,000 before and now we're going to pay for the bags. So, it's you're going to get $8,000, but you're going to pay for the bags

to totally like you said, the key statement there is seeing the shift. So right now, until the last few weeks, I don't think there was a lot of people thinking what percentage of my trash bill is part of my tax bill and stuff like that. By opening this up and saying, let's be super transparent and figure out what the process is. All of a sudden, it's like, oh yeah, I do technically because I've seen the narrative change from free bags to, well, they're not really free bags. I am paying them. I just hadn't really thought about what that cost me before or what the opportunity was, right? And so when we see all the we get the we're playing with our cards on the on the table up face up right now it's like oh there is some elements that we hadn't thought about now and so now we have to kind of comp compartmentalize right what was this before what was it now we're all probably trying to say all right

this is better for my house now hold now or not this is just us trying to be more transparent and in in that process I think what we learned is that there was a lot of just like not even thinking about it like the trash comes I get my tags it's not a big deal and and this just adds Is that more information for everyone to kind of mle over?

You know, maybe there's an option to think about instead of giving every resident free bags or, you know, similar to what we do today for tags is just delay the implementation of the of the bag requirement to the fourth month of every year or something like that. So,

and you know, you you you'd have a communication issue you'd have to deal with. And that point, Debbie, is that that if people are saying, "I don't want to see this start till January 1, we can do that, too." Now, we'll have to come up with that in the budget, we'll have to decrease our if we anything we do, we would decrease our revenue line on bags from, let's say, 120,000 down to 60,000 if we're not going to start till mid year. And so, the money is still coming out of your out of your pocket. It's coming out of the pocket in the tax bill as opposed to weekly when you pick up trash bags. Um, and so, but that's a conversation. We're here to hear that sort of input tonight.

And I think you've said in the past that 3% of everyone's taxes roughly are 3 3.5% roughly, closer to 4% of everyone's tax of the of our expenses is the trash contract. That's going to be going up to about 5% with the new the new trash contract. So, I had you as your hand next.

Thank you, Christell Road. Um, one I just want to say that if we do move to the bags, what about the people who like do you not have access to like going out, you know, people who are homebound and things like that? Um, maybe they have home health or something like that who comes in. I'm sure there are people around. Are they going to be able to call someone to get these bags delivered to their house? Are they going to be able to get it on like a Hannifford to go order or something like that? can get included with Hannerford, Shaw's Market Basket. If we do get and go, all of the normal supermarkets are already carriers of bags for other towns. And so that would just be an add-on when they order their groceries, you add on. So like

or if someone's picking groceries up for them, there are people who cannot or whatever that orders directly from those supermarkets. It's just like getting bananas. Okay. M um my next question is I recycle a lot and I don't I I think that the bags is not a bad idea as far as like encouraging people to reduce the waste. Um but can you get more than one recycle can or is it only one?

So that's a question we asked Cassella. Um and they were saying that same thing as the smaller bins. They asked that people try it the 65gallon bin and they said if you find that you're a chronic recycler which is a good thing like me

we go through a ton of options. Yeah. the Amazon online purchases. They said if you find that it's it's you always need more, you can call them and request us a second bin. It's built it's supposed to be built into our contract and whatnot. But they just asked that they said try the bins, let us know if it's an issue, you know, I mean cuz especially I think about the same thing around holidays when you got all the boxes and stuff like that.

Um but there's some flexibility there. So, one of the things also just to note with the recycling bins, just like with the trash bins, because of the automated arm, it everything has to be closed. So, you cannot leave it open.

Good to know. So, it just and all of the information is going to be attached to the bins when they are dropped off to every household. So, if there questions, we and Cassella encourage everybody to sign up for the app and reach out to them. They can answer whatever. And and part of the reason I feel that Cassella and other trash companies have moved towards this system is because we people have taken advantage of the past of I'm just going to pile a bunch of boxes and all that stuff on the side of the road and then those folks are out there breaking them down, putting them in there. And I mean that Cassella was saying that in terms of like their their employees, they usually have to use like day laborers to stand on the back of the truck because they can't retain anyone because it's not something that folks are are are wanting to do. And part of it is if the trash that's been put out, the bags are

ripped, all that sort of stuff. People just don't want to do it. And so that's part of the reason why Cassella said, you know, try the 65gallon bin, we'll ask that you break your boxes down to maximize all that sort of stuff. If that's still not enough,

reach each individual through either the app, email, or phone, or we could help facilitate it. Can reach out to Cassella and say, "It's been 3 weeks. I still need more recycled capacity." And that's fine, too. I just want to say thank you guys.

Ma'am, you right there. Yeah. Patty Smith on Rainale Road. Thanks. I have probably a funny question u that you might have covered in a previous meeting. What hap what do we do with our old bins? I I've got two big large bins. What am I going to do with them?

Yeah. Um so that's one thing that we've heard a lot of. I I already own bins. What do I got to do with them? That's going to be up to each each individual. Cassella is not going to buy the bin. Um if it's plastic, probably can break it down and put it in the Cassella bin to get it recycled if you'd like.

Um Yeah. And so for each person for each person who who already has bins, it's going to be a household decision. What What do I do in my bin? Do I sell it? Do I get rid of it? Those sorts of things. Why not some dump bag?

Yeah. All right. So, I had a hand back there. I've got three back here that you haven't noticed. That's why my hand is raised. Sorry, Jill. You know, I'm pretty short. It's hard for me to see past the first row. So, we'll do all the back row. Yes, sir.

Harry Murray, Old Brunswick Road. Um, just very quickly on the cardboard, um, my wife puts a lot of money in Jeff Bezos's pocket. Yes. So, we have a lot of boxes. We break them down. We make them flat, so on and so forth. So, going forward, um, we'll have to break those boxes down further and jam them into a bin somewhere and make sure we can get the lid down. How do you how do you get rid of them? Now,

what I do now is I take every box, I cut them up to fairly small pieces. I make sure they're flat and I stick that out with the recycle. Mhm. So, what size bin do you put them in? Currently, I don't put the Oh, so yeah, you will have to put it in a bin.

Um, and so you'll just have to break it down to a size that can fit within the 65gallon bin. And so did you two have questions as well back there? Yeah. Oh, uh I was just going to say that at we sell uh Panel and Yarmouth bags and they come in a roll of I think it's 20

and they're all color coded. Yarmouth is blue and pound I think is orange or something. So I'm sure we will get them and and could I get your name and road please ma'am? Lonnie Bowie Bowen Road. Okay, perfect. And you ma'am?

Yeah. What happens if there's a goalie on each side of your driveway? I guess I want to drive and I can't put them across the street because they're the same. Mhm. What road do you 136 to? Yeah. And so with 136 there's an option to put it going to be option to put it on either side. If your driveway has a goalie on it, you can put it on the curb of the road, which is what a lot of folks on 136 are already doing.

By the yellow line? No, no, by the white. Not on the yellow line. The Yeah, we're going to have a little bit of a frogger scenario on the yellow line. challenge that we've heard about right now. The new bins, it's going to be the same challenge with snow as the old bins. Um, you know, in and for some if it's a really bad snowstorm, that might be Cassella saying we're canceling pickup for the day. If if they are still picking up and you have the ability to have your the end of your driveway plowed or shoveled, we can you can put the bins there. If you're going to have to wait a week because the bins can't go out because it's non-stop snowstorm. The plows are running all day and for some reason Cassell is still picking up. There's going to have to be a little bit of flexibility there. So, um it's going to be a storm by storm storm basis.

A long driveway to take it all the way down. not as long as so that if they're not going to deliver that day and I bring it back. Um would you be able to put them in the mouth of your driveway at the end of your driveway?

Yeah. Unless the snow my snowman goes by in the drive. Yeah. And so do you put bins out now? Yeah. Okay. You only have to use one. Yeah. And so you would still only have to use one if you're just putting trash out. And I would say the same system you use now would still be available to you with the with the new bin. Um, and you have the added benefit of also being able to choose either side of the road.

right here. Yes. Thank um when your proposal you said you're getting charged 25 cents per bag. That's the town's cost for for that's what the cost is 25 cents a bag for a small bag and you want to charge $180 to us, right?

So the the the cost to produce the bag and use the service is 25 cents per bag. Yes. Right. Okay. And you and you're proposing $180 per bag. And then for the larger bags, you said it was 38 cents a bag. I think 38 char $3.

I think it's 320. I'm not good at math in my head. Sorry. $3. Yeah. Are you charging the same percentage markup on I I'd have to do the math, but I think it's supposed to be comparable. It's not trying to like make a better financial deal with either either bag

and I think it was taking into consideration how much weight those bags could handle. I don't think it had to do with weight. The bags are are all made of the same material no matter the size. Yeah. No, I know how much the bag.

Yeah. So the the can fit three bags into one large one or Mhm. Okay. So then the large one does make more sense. Congratulations. And that's that's going to be what preference to each individual. The large one probably does make more sense, but for for some people, they don't want to use a larger bag. And so we need to make sure that there's multiple options. Yeah. Ma'am,

I'm Carol from Royalsboro Road. When you figured out how much it was going to be per bag, you didn't use the 25 cents. You used a $180. Yes. And so what what we did was we said, so if you was to give out the free 26, you should base that on 25 cents a bag.

That's what it would cost for us to buy the bags, but then there's the op there's the loss revenue which we would have to offset. Well, when I thought you was making the revenue on the people that had to buy extra things,

but if we give the bags away, the amount of bags, if we give 20 the bags away, that is a lost that's seven that's lost bags per household. It works out to a large number of lost revenue and then we would have to offset that through more taxes. So, I I was talking to somebody that that's that I know and they don't use our trash system at all.

And so, they're helping to subsidize your trash and my trash, but they don't I mean, he doesn't sell his tags, but he could. Mhm. Uh, and you know, if he sold them for 250 and I say 50 cents a tag, I was just configuration of the free tags are only it should be 25 cents times what you said for

that would be what it physically costs us to buy them. But then you have the anything that is not charged for is a loss revenue and then we have to make up for that in taxes. So if we were had the logistics and all that sort of stuff and we said everyone gets free bag 10 free bags and it cost us $2.50 for those 10 free bags that represents a loss revenue of $180. Our contract price has gone up and so we have to make that money up. And if we don't have that revenue the only other way we have to make up money is raise and appropriate taxes. And so that's would be the lost revenue.

Okay. Got a couple questions. Quick points. Your revenue on recycling. You make any money on recycling? No, there's no recycling has zero uh sort. So there's no bags. My second one is the bag. You said we got one contractor bid.

You can't get other contractor bid. There's only a couple companies that do it in New England. And this is the one that we we went with. Have you gotten any samples of the bags yet? We haven't physically held the bags. No, some of us have.

Oh, sorry. I haven't. Yeah. So, I mean, because you can go and check out the bags at at Hannerford or Shaw or people who live in Brunswick have the bag. So, bag. Um, that's what we are getting. Brunswick. Yes. Yes. So, if you go to Hannerford and you want to go check out the bag, just look at Brunswick's bag. Jared,

uh, for clarification, did did you say that they're planning on so on Davis Road, everyone puts it on one side of the road? So now, did you say that they're going to go up and down? It's going to depend on the road. So Cassell went out and they drove routes. They figured it all out. And what they've told us is that if your road is changing, they will be in contact within the next couple weeks to let you know. If you don't hear anything, it your roads are remain the same. So,

I was thinking of, you know, be crazy if they just said they're going to drive up and down every single road, doubling their Yeah. No, they they can't do that because it would be even longer process. So, I thought I had another hand over here and then I can come back to you.

Nope. Yeah. Go ahead. Okay. Two things here real quick. Um, the bins and the automatic. I know that that is part of it, but it's kind of like a budgetary type of thing. I am pretty positive that they're not gently placing those down.

And um when people keep saying on the side of 136, I'm thinking more along the lines of in 136. How did those get replaced? Cuz I don't know how many people remember the green recycling bins that we had that lasted 27 days.

Yeah. So Cassella owns the bins. So Cassella has a vested interest in not breaking the bin because if your bin is broken, you either call, email, or use the app to alert Cassella and they come replace the bin at no additional cost. So because they own them, they baby them a little bit more than they probably would if we own them because at least my bin I usually gets thrown into the woods every day when I got to go pick it up anyways.

Um but now they're have incentive. Also, these bins are are very heavy duty. Um, so they're more commercial grade. They're going to crack better in the freezing cold. So, Cassella Cassella has a fully functional business that utilizes these across dozens of municipalities. I I'm sure that they have an attrition rate that they have built into their business model. Um, but I imagine that they try to provide it the best because they are the ones who own the bin. So, they are the one who is at loss if the bins break. And then I had a second part of the same question because I know that I'm sucking up a lot of time here, but um the whole thing about that I saw about the line item of the bulky waste is being removed.

No. So So real quick, the in the current budget does not have bulky waste in it. That this current budget is just a draft. We are going to be reviewing the budget. A really quick highle review tonight and then next meeting is where we're going to make suggestions on either adding or subtracting elements of the budget. Right now the draft is missing is is has bulky waste not in it, but that's going to be up for discussion at our a future meeting.

So what were those numbers on that chart that showed LA? So it showed last year's budget in line for bulky waste and it shows that this year there's not a budget for bulky waste, right? So, in other words, if there's not a budget for bulky waste, does that mean that there is no bulky waste?

The current draft of the budget shows no bulky waste expenditures for this year, but we haven't finalized the budget. We haven't even fully gone through each line item. So, we can add that in or we can choose to not have bulky waste. I

I think we went to town meeting recently without it in and it got put back in at town meeting. It's fluctuated year to year, but this current draft because we were trying to keep uh when we instructed the town manager to prepare the first draft of the budget for us, we asked for him to include just the needs, not the wants. That was pulled out of it for the draft. That's a want. If we choose to spend money on that want, we can add that back in. Currently, it's not in there, but I don't

taxpayers or just the board. The taxpayers. I mean, we're also taxpayers, so we're one of one of 5,000. Um, but no, when we as a as a um board develop our budget, we as a board can choose whether we want to add that in or take that out. Public comments always available and then there's it's going to the budget is going to be reviewed every meeting for the next three meetings. It'll go to the budget committee, then it'll come back to us, be reviewed again, and then it'll go there. So, there's about five or six meetings where this is going to be discussed just on the board's side, not even the budget committee side. Perfect. Thank you.

Um, Catherine, part of Katherine Curtis from Glad part of the solid waste committee. We met last night. So, I'm glad you came up because we wanted to encourage the board to put the boat back in partly because some of our work is going to be to increase composting, um, do some of the more clothing drives like they did weeks ago with Eureka. We're going to work to get our tonnage down. We're really going to work to get our tonnage down. And part of the uh bulky waste system is a way to get that tinage down. But somebody may hang on to that assembly block they have instead of putting it in the bin.

feedback. Um I don't want to go too far into budget lines that aren't related to pay as you throw because we'll be here all night because that's that's a four four five meeting uh endeavor to begin with. But if you have those concerns about bulky waste, whether you want to in or not, all of our budget meetings are open to the public, we're doing our best to increase communication through social media, through email, and all that sort of stuff. Please give us that feedback because we're just trying to develop the budget that you all want. It does relate to pay as you throw because the people hold on to things because they can't throw it into their garbage cans or they do throw it into their garbage cans. But because it's going to take up a 13gallon $180 bag now, they're going to hold on to it till bulky waste. But if there is no bulky waste in the budget line item, it's like what do you do with it now? Oh, you can go to

Auburn. Go to Aubber unless you're home. Mr. Mr. Chair, I think in the in the interest of time, I think you've answered the question on bulky bulky waste. Okay, perfect. Thank you for the feedback though. Um, totally hear your point. Do we have any other questions about the pay as you go system? Sorry, pay as you throw system.

Where where's it go from here now? So, we heard all the comments. How how do you guys come into a decision? Yeah. So, that's our was scheduled for us to do tonight was to take into consideration all the written comment we've heard, all the feedback we received from people um via email, social media, phone calls, angry letters, all those sorts of things, everything we've received here tonight. Now, tonight, we have to make the decision as to what we want to do. We could also table it if we feel like we can put it down the down the road. We were inclined to make a decision tonight because that has an impact on the budget. So, if we vote to table it, we now don't know what to budget for or or what to budget for revenues or anything like that. So, most likely we're going to have a discussion tonight after we've received all this feedback and make a vote.

Okay. So, so before I close, if folks want to just say this is your last chance. If you don't want it, if you want it, now's the time to let us know. There's been a lot of really great questions asked and we can budget for either or. So, does anyone have any other comments on that?

I want the pay as you throw out because when you go up to 65 gallons, there's going to be a lot more trash that people are going to put out and I think we need to try and offset that. As much as it's a TIA, I think it will offset it.

Mhm. Parody, pay as you go. I think is the most equable way to uh process this. Uh GD60 at Rangale Road. Um I have been in Durham for a number of years and I remember prior to doing all this and all the amount of crap that was on the side of the road or people were burning.

I just think it's going to cause more headaches Mhm. than it's worth. What is Are you in favor of paying you? No. you throw or you're not. Okay. I think that you're going to find people who are avoiding that cost because they can't fit it in their household budget. They've been able they've been throwing four four bags worth of garbage into their their can. So now they're going to go back to what it was. They're burning it in their backyard in a can. They're burying it on somebody's property. Okay.

Any other feedback, Donna? Donna told me to chart. I'll get there. Anyway, um I've talked to quite a few, well, I've talked to four other people who have talked to a lot of people and they're going to be they're like me. They got a dumpster. I've got all my neighbors thrown in the dumpster. They give me $10 a month. I'm happy. Pays for the bin. There you go.

Mhm. I don't I don't Yeah. I pay taxes. So, another option is swing by Donna's and throw it in our dumpster. I don't know if you give me some money. Did you say what that address was? No, seriously. I can tell you how much garbage went in the galler.

cuz I clean them. No, I haven't seen you. Thank you. Thank you. Alan, I'll get you after. But behind down road, uh I'm always looking at the bottom line and I'm looking for the revenues to come in to offset the expense. And I'm definitely in favor of the pay as you throw. I for myself right now, granted I'm retired and it's just the two of us. And I probably use one kitchen bag a week. What I do, I put that into a larger container. So I can go a couple of weeks at least before I take my trash out. I'm always recycling. But right now, if I'm going to a 65gallon, I'm going to be lucky if I go out once a month.

So, as far as I'm concerned, it will be cheaper for me. I hope you don't have captain. I do not. Thank you, sir. The comment I want to make is that um I I would be also in favor, but I think it it feels like for me and it sounds like some other people have said that there just feels like there's still a little inequality. You talked about some other options that filled that in and I think if that happened whether it was a a delayed period of time or or a reduced number of bags, I think I think

I think you feel like an equity was gained back and I think you have a better favor. But but ultimately I saying I'm in favor of I'm going to go here and then the back row. Rokinson, old Emerson Road. Um, and I'm in favor for pay as you go. I think it's if you use it, you pay for it.

I mean, how can it be any simpler? Try to overthink this sometimes. Should put this passion in the school budget question, you know. Yeah, that was my suggestion. Let's take this passion, put it in everything else, too, you know. sir only.

I've lived in this town a number of years myself and uh the only constant is change and um the trash industry is changing the automated trucks that technological marvel but it's the wave of the future and I I think there's no getting around it. I do see my trash cost going up. I I too am retired. Uh but I managed to to generate a good amount of trash as a lot of younger families do. And now instead of $3 a can, I'm paying X amount of dollars a bag per bag that I'm putting in this can that used to cost me three bucks. It's just the way of it. But I think in terms of uh you know, it's all about compromise. You got to give and take a little all the time. And I don't always like it, but I I think in this instance, the the bags you throw was the way to go.

Yes, ma'am. Uh, yeah. 13 in the room. So, what about the choice of either the 33 or the 65? Oh, sorry. 33 or the 13. 13 gallon bag or a 33 gallon bag. And bins are the bin is 65. But if you find that too unmanageable, you can request a smaller bin. I think that they go down to a 40 something gallon bin as well.

um I'm in Phil's Brandon Brooks Drive. Uh I'm in favor of the um pay as you throw. Yeah. Don't want to be messing up. Um but I I guess I want to also just mention that we are in our third year contract of this contract. So, it may work really well or it might not. And so, we have some time to kind of test this.

Um, and on the solid waste committee, we've been talking about other things that we might be able to do if it doesn't work out, but at least we're, you know, it could work and it might not work, but have to test it. Sir,

still Brad Owens, still a drive. Um um I have an 82 year old mother who generates a lot more trash than I do and I mean a lot less trash than I am. Yeah. So um she generates a lot less trash than I do. Um so I just feel like you know it's it's only fair that if I generate more trash then I should pick up the cost of that. Um, I also agree with this gentleman who said there there needs to be some sort of equity

in what people are holding right now in their hands with tags um or some sort of credit. Mhm. When this switches over I'm sorry. Can I just Is that up and above the few months where there's no bags? I guess is we can have

like what you were proposing like a grace period till you know however many months that where we don't have to buy bags to kind of offset what what I'm holding in my hand right now with with tags you know that that would be has a value like like you said.

Yeah. Thank you. Ton we get a deal where we give you tracks 10 for bags. We talked about that and we just felt like it would run into the same logistic challenge of storing bags at the town office, having a trade-in system and stuff like that. So,

I got to throw away the taxes. It's five tags for a bag. uh I'm in favor of grace period rugged bags. And if you're going to store them at the get-go, those things are gonna be off the shelf in like two seconds. I think there have got probably storage problems, too.

Everyone's going to go there first and be sold out all the time, just like But Maybe someone here can help build a shed or something. Yeah. Well, that wouldn't get popularized at all. Sure. Yeah. I guess I'll go with the bags. stand against it, but uh that's the majority, but I will agree on the grace.

good point. Um as far as buying tech, you say they're going to be at Hannah and Shaws. Is this like Handit Brunswick, Toppsum, Auburn? We're if we approve going with pay as you throw, we talked to them and they are confident that they can get them into the stores that we need because they have a relationship with the parent company for these grocery stores and it's more or less a hey, we need to put those in there. Um, so if we go through this, my thought process would be the Brunswick Hanniffords and the Topsome Hannerford Market Basket. Um, and then if

Yeah. And so we could get into those details. Um, and I would encourage folks to if we end up voting through with this to let us know where you need them to be to make it convenient for you. That might be a good question. Something you guys put out in town or whatever, but just cuz

I auto we shop in some cops. Well, sometime we can stop in in Auburn and he talked about the Shaws in Freeport, Food City in Lisbon, Auburn, Topsum, Brunswick. I think anything in a geographic area and we want yeah we don't want to make it seem like you know we're benefiting any one grocery store by saying oh they're the only ones that get to carry them or anything like that. So um it's important for us that these are accessible.

Thank you for that. Yeah I had in the back oh sorry Jill um is Amazon or Walmart available and I would also recommend adding Hannifford and Gray. Okay. I did. I looked at Walmart to see if they held any bags for any communities. I did not see them.

Okay. And Amazon. I would doubt it. I would doubt it, but uh I we can look into it. He said Oh, sorry. Real quick. He said Jessica pointed out you can order them online, I think, through direct through them. Yeah. Yeah. There you go.

So, can I just add something real quick to that point then? If you can order them online from him, why can't you give us a coupon to get one box free from him? Because we get back to the revenue discussion and the the opportunity cost and the loss revenue,

right? But you're already dealing with a loss revenue of $125,000 with the tax. And if so, at this point, we've we've litigated that conversation and we're just trying to get feedback so we can wrap it up and move on to the next thing. I understand your point. It's still a lost revenue con concern there and it would just have to be offset in taxes.

You're not gonna like my question, sir. Yeah, no problem. Okay, never mind. I'm gonna ask it. So, you your revenue of 120,000 that's at $180 a bag, right? So, does Hannerford all these other companies that we're going to go buy from? What are they charging you or us to keep to sell those bags?

They don't charge. So they they he has a relation. They have a relationship with this company because they find they find that it's what they call a foot traffic item, meaning that it people either are already in there or people are going there to get them. So they don't carry like a stock fee. Um which surprised us as well, but I guess they just like to uh be a good community participant.

So So buying from the company, is it like yep, I'm from Durham. Am I paying this much or is are we paying 28 cents or whatever? You pay the we set the bag cost. So no matter where you buy them, they charge what we have set for the bag.

Company had the darn button and that's what my assumption is. I will make sure we clarify that though. I'm in favor of it. I would rather just throw whatever I want in there. But I don't know. you you pay 120,000 in revenue for all these extra bags or maybe we spend a little bit more in extra bins are big. I've seen them. They're very durable.

Um I don't know if you're going to fill them and offset the cost of the revenue, but you know. Yeah. Thank you for the feedback though. Chill. Are they subject to sales tax? I'm not sure. I don't think so. I don't think so. Okay, guys. Thank you.

Can Can I just say I got a text message from a former board member who was in support of of the pay as you throw in the grace period. So, yeah. A question and a comment question. Tell us who you are and where you're from.

I could say it for you, but I got to give you If you remember, I live on the Stack Pole Road. Um I have a shortterm I wasn't trying to trick you. If we So for purchasing bags from Shaws, are those stores writing the Todd a check to

Yeah. So that's part of the waste zeros management. That's what their 25 cent deals with. And then they also give us reporting about how many bags are being sold and those sorts of things. So that's built into the the 25 cent margin on the bag for them.

It all goes to waste zero and waist zero sends us a check. Yeah. Waste zero collects all of that and then and returns some money to us. Okay. Yeah. Um I'm in favor of the page pro you you um you um you you generate more trash uh your cost then I think you know than pay your your fair share. And my last comment is I would like to thank the select board for having this open forum. I think this was very appropriate. Um I hope it helped you. Um you know we don't you don't get this kind of feedback with all of your decisions. It's a difficult decision to make and you're not you know you're going to please some people and not please others. And this is where this is this is the occasion where you earn your pay for sure. Uh but this I believe was an appropriate decision to have this type of meeting and I want to thank you for giving up what is your aotted time to do select board business and allow the town to speak just having

um scheduled you know a totally separate meeting. Thank you. Thank you. I I will Thank you. I'm not down. Thank you. I I will note that when we move into this, I I have a proposal that I want to put forth to the board and it was completely derived from public comment that I've received and both tonight. So, this is 100% a point where like my stance on this completely changed because of of public comment, which is easier to get now than it's ever been. So, but we appreciate you all for being here till 9:00 on a Tuesday night, too.

Um, do we have any other comments? All right. So, we're going to move now into actually voting on this issue, but generally we only do our meetings until 9:00. So, I'm going to make a motion that we extend our meeting until uh 9:45 because we have a lot to do. You all don't have to stay here, but that's my that's my motion. Hoping we use less.

Do we need to do that? 9:45. I'm just doing So, do I have a second on the motion? All right, Josh. All in favor? Any opposition? Passes. You all are leaving before the big vote of what we're doing with the bags. Yeah. So, we're going to do that right now.

Um, we've extended We usually end our meetings at 9 and we have a vote to extend it past 9:45. We're going to do the vote on the bags right now. Um, hey folks, if you don't mind having your conversations outside, we can continue on with the meeting. So,

real quick. So, what I'd like to propose here after we got all this public feedback is that we go with the $180 a bag and the $3 for the 33 gallon bag. But we say no tags, no bags until August 1. So that gives us all of March, all of April, all of May, all of June. So almost five months of no tags, no bags as that is to be credit for tag tags that people have already bought. and then we won't have the bags come out until then. So that's my I'm making that motion. Do I have a second?

I second that motion. Second. And any additional discussion? I I go ahead. I I just want to say like what Mill said uh you know I've been going back and forth on this. Uh and I know we had a discussion today and I can't remember some time ago and Jerry and I I've been calling Jerry. Uh this was extremely helpful and I do agree with Mill. You know, it was a a good long discussion. Um, and I was for the pay as you throw and I was kind of leaning back against it. Keep going back and forth. So, I appreciate everybody coming in and the good discussion. Um, and thank you for doing bulk of the talking.

Yes. Um, ask my wife. She'll tell you I talked a lot. So, appreciate that. Um, so we have the motion. Do we have any other discussion? Discussion. I I agree with everything except the the one August thing. I think we kind of have forgotten that we've paid for it. Our fiscal year ends at the end of June

and so everything's been paid be you know in taxes or however but the first of July the new fiscal year. So you haven't paid anything you know going for 2027. So I would my initial thought was to just start with the new fiscal year but it's not worth any more time. You know one month is one month but it is 1012,000 in loss revenue. So I just throw that out there in a year when we need every freaking dime we can get so in taxes. So it's going to be a a big deal. So that's my comment.

I hear you. Any other comment or discussion? I do. There was a mention with the way zero people about you know potentially selling advertisement and I don't know how to do that. Was it? Yeah. I think I mean I don't know if that's something someone in the public could you know reach out and find someone have someone reach out but I think that's

just a point of clarification there. So when you get the bag you can have your logo or whatever you want printed on it. I had just kind of flippantly suggested maybe we sell the advertising rights to that logo on the bag to generate revenue to offset trash expenses. the the guy had never really heard of that idea, but it's something we could look into more. Should we go with the trash bag thing and if we can talk to him about that, we can figure out the the benefit there.

But I mean, that addresses some some of that concern and that, you know, I I think it's something worth looking into. I don't know who would do that. Sponsorship. It's interesting. We're trying to think outside the box here.

Yeah. I can tell you as a guy who runs an energy company, we're always a good partner for stuff like that. All right. Sold. 50 cents a bag, it's all yours. All right. Well, seeing no additional discussion, uh, the motion is to adopt the pay throw bag system with a $180. Sorry, Jess, I know you got to write this whole thing down. With a$180 tall kitchen bag and a $33 bag to begin

August 1st. and to discontinue the use of trash tags effective March 10th which is today. keep the tags we're not using the trash any opposition seeing none. So we'll communicate this out but starting today we'll say no trash tags. We'll let Cassella know. And so you will be able to throw out from now until August 1 without tags to give you credit for what you have already acquired for tags to try to have that equity standpoint. And then we'll start August one with the um with the but pay as you throw bags. So all righty.

Thank you everybody for Thank you so much for the feedback. Thanks Steve. I'll tell the neighbors. You did a good job representing. So they start picking up tomorrow morning tomorrow meetings are on the website. So I need to use the restroom real quick. So we can just take 30 60 seconds and it has a link for

my Oh, you're garbage. And my husband is just like I didn't all my kids went off to college or did whatever they got to do. I'll never forget one night. I would sit there. It's so I'd love to be a draft. I really mean damn, you know, they couldn't get jobs. They couldn't, you know, there were a whole bunch of reasons why

and and then to top it off, we had a my wife's friends, their daughter, she was student teaching in our town. So I ended up with having three kids. I ended up having, you know, four. It was not It was I was happy. I love my kids, but I was more than happy to see them all go. So,

yeah. And you know, 11 9 years old, 11 years old, and 20 years old. Yeah. And my daughter and your daughter, but you're a good person. You're a good grandmother and mother. It's good. I I love it so far. Yeah, but it is, you know, going from an empty neester and just kind of, you know, being able

walking around here. Yeah, exactly. That kitty that I ate what I wanted to eat all that the budget, so 2026, we've got we've got it's the 2027. That's the starting July 1. It's not in the budget right now. Uh, well, actually, I did actually think of something.

He mentioned that that you guys are going to sell out. If it's all at the zoo, you guys should really think about start selling bags before you actually get them. Yeah, that's a good point. They're available. people can pick them up

cuz there'll be a run on them at first. you know, from the time. my grandma's not going to be able to get a a bag. How do you feel? You know, she's in a nursing home. I know. I just have those huge problems already. painting goes past 9.

just we're just going to give De a minute to get back here. Yeah. All right. I I do want to move the first breed of the budget uh ahead of the appointing the discussion around appointing elected members to committees just because we have outside staff here um

that that we pay to be here. So um that's my motion. Do I have a second? Second. Uh any discussion? All in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none, we pass that. All right. First read of the budget. One thing I want to clarify here is um

especially because it's already 9:05. I don't want us to get into the weeds on the budget here tonight. This is really the uh first step of submitting the budget to the public to see what our working draft is. So, if we have questions, let's keep them super high level in the sense of what is this, what is that, rather than what why. If we're when we get we're going to have a discussion on policy and adjusting figures that will begin at our next meeting. This is really just to get the first rough draft of the budget into a public space and for us to just do a real quick read through. Does that work for everybody?

Yes. Okay. Perfect. All right, Mr. Douglas. All yours. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So, let's let's look at capital. So, they sheets and a little graph on them. Have you guys looked at the CIP? Yeah, the CIP. Yeah. Yep. Yes.

Okay. So, how this is set up is that we've asked the uh department heads to put together their equipment list or any kind of infrastructure projects and it gets put on the list here. So, if we want to look at public works first, we can look at that. So, what you'll see different on this list that you've seen in the past is that we added some infrastructure projects to this to be done in 20 uh seven and 28 and 29. Okay. So, and we've also added a few uh tandem axles that weren't on the plow trucks.

Yeah. Public works. Yeah. So, once we Thank you both for coming. Once we put this uh list together, right, we kind of looked at it and say, "Okay, you know, when is the replacement here of this equipment or when do we plan on doing those infrastructure projects?"

Okay. So, once we do that and you can see you can see, sorry, I got lost. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. Sorry, Jerry. Yep. All right. So you'll see like what the current year and what the cost of a replacement is and we've added a 3% interest rate on that.

Right. What's different about this than you've seen in the past is we've taken the most expensive tandem axle plow trucks and we've spread that amount purchased them over three years. In the past a couple of them have come up you know back to back but the town just can't afford that right. So we're trying to spread those out. So, the last truck that we just bought was in 2024. You'll see that at the very bottom um being purchased again. By the time we get there in 2042, that truck will be 18 years old.

So, we may have to shift this, you know, as we get later in the year. So, that's kind of how this planning document capital works. You know, you put together, you know, I mean, this goes all the way to 2042. So, uh, things could happen between now and then. All right. So, you just sort of look at So, if you flip it on to the other side, that orange line represents where you are with your funding. And you really always want to sort of be above that black line. All right? That's where you sort of even. So, if you look at over to the left hand side in 2027 for the capital reserve for public works, we want about 250 in a manner. 28 it's 260, you know, 2029 it jumps up to 270 to be able to buy these pieces of equipment or do this infrastructure and have the money to do it without having to borrow

or bond or lease. Mhm. Cuz that costs money and interest. So you always want to try to put it in your reserves so you can you can fund that. And this So that's the that's the capital plan this year for public works. All right. Who can tell how that works? Later on

how that works. Yeah. Okay. So, public works, we're gonna you'll see when we get to the budget, there's 250,000 that that's out of that transfer outline and we'll go do that. So, the buildings, we do the same thing. We look at our buildings and it's like, okay, you know, uh what's coming up? What do we need to fix? And you can see like the the public works garage furnace is like on its way out. So in 2029 we want to budget like

20,000 to fix that. The self shed door in 2029 25,000 and so on and so forth as you look at the description of these building improvements. All right. So you flip it over just like and you can see what years the funding amounts that we want to fund for each year. So this year for buildings we're looking to put in 5,000 in the reserve. Okay. 2028 at 6,000, 2029 at 7. But

every year we'll take a another look at that and see what adjustments we need to make. And the reason being if you go back to the public works, he's got the infrastructure project in there. Well, um, if he does that infrastructure project, then that money is going to come out of this plan. not adjust your numbers.

Okay. Yep. All right. So, more or less the change here is that we've added infrastructure projects into the public works. Yeah. And he he did add some trucks cuz I think originally when he put this um when we put this together, the trucks came off a 10-year plan,

but there were trucks that weren't on it because they weren't scheduled to be replaced in that 10-year plan. So, we had to make up for that this year. Um, can can we ask questions of you? Yeah, sure. On the public works side, we do have mobile traffic control lights. Is that

the topic we've been talking about? No. So, those are those are lights to help with flagging because we we paid flaggers. Gotcha. So, Calvin has asked to put to buy some light so he doesn't have to have his crew flagging so it'll stop the traffic.

Oh, okay. That's good. That's actually good. Yeah. Thank you. It's worth good to go 20 year life on there. The fire capital hasn't really changed that much from from the past few years. So that's relatively the same as it has been.

Okay. So you flip it over and so this year we're looking to uh put 140,000. So in total transfers out for your for your um reserves is going to equal 395,000 see that in the budget. But that's basically how you're how the capital is going to learn. So you're funding it so you can so you can pay for it without having to borrow the money or have spikes in taxes.

Yeah. I because you're not saving for it and it comes up to the scope. I I will note like when I look at the fire department capital, we we have like a vote on there. So we in the past have been able to get grants to help with that stuff, but it's just best practice to budget for them and then hope for the grants rather than to budget guarant like um budget and think that the grant is. So that's why that's on here. Correct. that one.

So, like for I noticed like for example, Chief, you've got the um rescue boat in 2045. Um we the last boat we got was through a grant, but you're including it in here because it's not a good practice to just say, "Oh, we'll get another grant because if we don't, then we don't have the opportunity to replace that. That's why it's here."

Correct. So, I put it out years ago. Uh and it's also one of the seven or eight pieces of equipment that you own. So, it has to be accounted for for replacement. Totally fine. I just want to make sure we clarify some of these things could possibly be grant acquired, but we need to budget for them in case those ar opportunities aren't available.

Because you allowed us to purchase that UTV last year at 30,000, I pushed the ambulance purchase out a year, which actually saved 40,000 a year for capital. So that offset that cost um and continued down the line. Perfect. Thank you. And on all of these, they're replacements, not

No. No, sir. No, they're only speaking for the fire department. They didn't rehab. So, if you don't see something that cost a million dollars, but you're not adding a fire truck. We're not adding them. Well, the ambulance would be added. If you purchased an ambulance in 2030, that would be a in addition to that would be a second one. We would not trade in what we have. That's always been the plan of sitting there for the project is

uh and again you can change that but otherwise it takes until 19 more years before before you buy a new pumper. Everything is rehab and sunk into it just like the ladder truck. Again my plan somebody else could come by and talk it but currently low mileage good investment pennies on the dollar is what this is about. Okay. Thank you, Chief.

anything to add? Okay. All right. And I'm sorry. This doesn't include expanding the town hall or a major addition or whatever to Eureka. This this capital these capital improvement plans consider the kind of midway types of capital improvements, right? So you have have capital improvements or that are technically capital improvements, but they're small in

you just pay for them in the year that you they're usually minor maintenance or even small pieces of equipment. Uh and then there's capital items that you're most likely going to have to bond for because they're just so large in here.

5 million $10 million building. You're not going to start saving for that. That that's so this is the mid-range type of capital. Okay. Thank you. Good question, John. Thank you. Okay. Ready to jump into the So, have you all looked at this, read the summary, all that?

Do you want to go over the summary or do you want to get right into the budget? How do you For sake of time, let's get right into the budget because we're going to talk about this ad nauseium for the next three meetings anyways. But I'm going to use the starting point because I think that summarizes the

the increases. So, so just like the just like the school, there's there there are some increases in the in the budget cuz basically everything goes up and in this year the wages and benefits have gone up, fixed cost has gone up and the

discretionary funding has gone up and we'll talk about those and the rate of those expenditures. Okay. So wages and benefits, there's a there's an increase. Um uh we we use the budget the wage table and if the town if the if

the legislative body votes to add colas to the employees retirement plan, um the wages and health insurance went up 9%. So the wages and benefits went up 295,59. That's what it says on the on the summary page. Just to clarify, that is actual wages through the wage table. That's a 9% increase in the benefit cost and health insurance

in health insurance cost. And that includes an assumption that the town votes to approve the COLA adjustment for pension. Correct. Okay. So, there's three elements there, right? um and what makes up some of those um increases that the fire department had in a full-time position.

Okay. But restructuring the planning and uh code enforcement, we uh um as part of my manage report, but we had our code enforcement officer resigned. So, what we're going to do is we have a code a certified code officer in the room right now and his name is Calvin Bulmier. So, he's now going to be the code off code enforcement officer and we're going to hire an administrative assistant to help him both with public works, the code officer job and they can also help in the town office cuz we could use it.

Mhm. Right. And it so that that position is funded with full health insurance. So, the current the the the previous code officer took cash and Lou. So, it's funded, the health insurance is funded at 33,000 because that's what it is for family and we're going to have to assume that's what they're going to take. But if they don't say they take cash and we'll save 32,000 and if they take family, it'll be closer to 15. So, but we're funding it at that level.

Okay. Um the public works wages and benefits are also up quite a bit 35% and that's because um in that wage table we had a hard time keeping public works employed from um June to February. We didn't have a full public works going. Mhm.

It was actually February 2nd when we actually had the full public works employee and you know we lost some folks to because of wages they lacked because they nine months of the year money. So that's that's increased quite a bit. Um and like I said the retirement plans jumped up. So those are the reasons why those are up for the most part. And we can get into more detail when we sit down and really look at this budget. the county tax. Um, that's the correct number in the budget. So, that's up 12.6%. So, there's an increase there. And we just got on talking about solid waste. Um, so that's up too, but with the payload, it might help offset that.

Okay. And you got education in there as well. Oh, yeah. So, education. So, um, so there's a seven. We I put a 7%. You heard Tom talk about he was putting together a six, seven, and eight. Um, so what I did was we just added 7% to the assessment what we were assessed. So that's still up in the air. So that might change

and that was his recommendation. So I imagine it'll be but I think he's he's talking about the 7% of the whole school budget not an assessment. So that could that could that's a little different, right? But that's all we have to go on right now. So that number

and that and they said March 23rd 24th 24th 25th they're going to have that number. Yeah. So anything you want to add about that? That's where that's where you're education. No about the whole. Okay. All right. So then let's move to the budget and see what some of these are. Uh, I would, you know, for the sake of time, I would probably bring you two page. Uh, here it says 13. Also, roads. Well, look at that. Roads is a decrease and we're we're doing almost three miles less of paving.

Mhm. Yeah, we can get we'll get to that. Okay. Yeah. I'd like to So, for the sake of time, I want us to go through this quickly, but we are going to go through every section like that next meeting and the meeting after. So, we're not going to skim over it, but you bring up a good point, John.

So, I want to I want to talk to you about these increases and how you kind of look at it. So, you know, on page 13 where it says your percent of total expenditures, I saw. So, when you look at your wages and benefits, if you look at the budget for 2026, it was at a 13%. You see that?

So, then if you go to the 27, it's 14%. So it's up 1% from last year as a proportion of the budget, right? That's the rate at which it increased. Okay, which is important, you know, to and we'll look at the other categories because the wages and benefits and your fixed cost and your discretionary are your expenditure categories.

Mhm. Okay. Just a real point of comparison like we just heard from the school superintendent though, he was saying how their budget's like 70% wages and benefits. Our budget's 14%. And I think you can broke down the county budget too. Their biggest is going to be wages and benefits.

I mean, it's what inflation does. I only point that out. It's just a little point of comparison for us to take into consideration. So if you and then you go down to the fixed cost. Those are the costs that we really can't touch. That's the education. That's the debt services, the county tax, these are your contracts, that sort of stuff. Um, in 2026 that was

75.6%. 6%. So in 2027 that's 77.4. That's a 1.8% increase over last year. The rate of going down. Okay. Again, so the rate of the fixed cost is almost another percent higher than the rate of the wages and benefits. Okay. But then when you get down and you look at the varial variable and discretionary cost, that's kind of like what you all have control of.

Um, if you look in 2026, that was 11.4%. Yep. Percent. And, uh, in 2027, that's down 8.6%. Yeah. That's where we sharpen the pencil. So, you can really look at this as pennies on the dollar. Mhm. So every dollar that passes through that town office, 14 cents goes to wages and benefits, 77.4 cents goes to the fixed cost education county, and 8.6 cents is your

discretionary. Mhm. That's where you have your most wiggle room, if you got any wiggle room at all. Yeah. All right. So that's where your your increases are. Um in that sort of uh so now let's look at funding sources. That's going to be page 16 and 17.

Can I just ask about that? Sure. And maybe this is better for next meeting, but did that the fuel budget take into account the current situation? Well, I it was kind of it was kind of interesting because I added 5,000 just I'm gonna call you up just the other day

because we got an email that GP calls sent out and they said that they because of what's going on they wasn't going to be doing any competitive bidding because it just it's so volatile right now. So, I actually um called up the vendor we used and got prices. So the

one fuel that they don't quote like uh like I think we're paying a buck 59 for propane. They will quote that. But the one that they don't is gasoline. So the gasoline is what how they quoted is wreck wreck price plus 20.

Yeah. Mhm. So when I got the price from them, it was $2.25. So I kind of based it on that. Well, after what I what I was saying on TV and everything going up, I added I made that three bucks just to be safe. But it's a good point you bring up because when things like this are going on in the world, you all bets are off. You don't know what's going to shake out here. So,

yeah, I think this is a good point because someone earlier talked about, you know, the price they paid for heating oil and unfortunately those expenses we have to pay for as a town, too. So if there's volatility at home, we're experiencing the same volatility.

I can tell you that back in 2008 when I was at the DOT when the when the barrel went up over $100, DOT pays paves a million ton a year. And when it went above when the barrel went up above $100 a barrel, they could only do 800,000 tons. So they reduced it because they didn't have it in the budget. So, we could be looking at something like that, too, if this thing continues to go on. I It's We put an escalator clause in the in the in the contract in our paving contract. So, if it goes up, it goes up. It goes down, it also goes down. But, uh, we're going to have to keep an eye on the liquid asphalt. So, the asphalt is made, it's a derivative from making fuel.

It's a byproduct from that. So, it comes from the same barrel. So, it's just it's really volatile right now. Just throwing that all out there. So, I did add a little bit. I I can't tell you if it's We can get into this a little bit more. I just

But that's a good point to bring up and that's something we should all think about ahead of our meeting where we we get in there. So, you know, the funding sources in total here is we're we're we're thinking we're going to get like 15% more in funding. So, you can see this in excise tax where um motor vehicle tax and other stuff is 12.1. I mean, you could go down through here. We tried to do the best we could with

estimating and projecting what we think the revenues will be, but again, it's not a it's not an exact science. So, uh, before we leave funding, I have concerns and maybe it's just I'm not reading this right. Before we get into 27, it looks to me like we've got significant shortfalls in 26 on our income.

The FY26 budget is 18 months. I understand that. But even even so, uh, you know, we're town clerk fees, okay, but there's some like state revenue sharing. We've got we've gotten that isn't that's incurred quarterly. So, some of that is going to show up as

absolutely. I get that's my question is which of those are we still getting money from? I I did some research into that. I'm sure Mark can speak to it, but last time that was a question you had asked. Some of those are incurred quarterly. Things like vehicle excise taxes. Not as many people are registering vehicles in January as they do in the summer months. So, those aren't a continuous cash flow for some of those things. So, they have troughs and peaks. It's my understanding.

Revenue homestead. Exactly. There's, you know, I I guess what I'm hearing and which makes me happy is that none of these are final input numbers. Or am I wrong? Uh, well, with the homestead exemption, that's the final amount that you got.

How about uh and and I we don't even we go into them later, but it does bother me that in some of these we are uh and if it's some of them are minor. I mean, my homestead exemption is uh well, it's it's 20ome thou, you know, that's 21

that's almost that's over $100,000 short. So, that's $100,000 in revenue we're not going to get because it's already Yeah. So, those are my concerns. Yeah. You only get the you only get the um payment uh the onetime payment. So, I guess, you know, as we're talking about 27, I'd like to start with where are we going to end up in 26 given that we still got some quarterly payments coming in, people are still going to register cars and some of that other stuff. Are we going to be way short, little short,

but one thing to note too, John, is when we look at like code enforcement fees, that's up 150. And so, it's looking there's there's a give and take there. If there's less homestead exemption, that means there's less people taking a homestead exemption, which means there's a larger tax base available, a larger valuation available,

which we're not going to just not going to pay the homestead. That's my concern. We can get into these details at the next meeting. I I don't want you to think I want to skip over them, but just for sake of time. Yeah. No, because I flagged them myself, too.

But I do want us to just move forward. I'm I'm good with that. It's probably best that you look at the bottom number and not the line by line because just like you said, we may be down in one but we're way over in another. But the bottom revenue line that we projected, we're going to be pretty close.

Yeah. Yeah. So, I did a projection for all of those revenues uh through the rest of the year and we're going to be we're going to come in around 3.8 million in all of those revenues. So, total funding sources that you see at the bottom

I just wanted to raise that concern. Yeah. No, no, it's a fair concern. Um, but I I've done a projection. We're not Yeah, we can't make it up in Eureka rental fees. No. Right. Right. Unless you start throwing some parties over there.

Good. Thank you, though. And just a note with the trash tags now with the change that we voted on tonight. That is obviously going to change. Well, I don't know. So that's one thing what I want we can talk about again but when I look our initial estimate from that uh the company was 150,000

and so this is budgeted at 125,000 right and so it would be starting a couple months later and so I we can talk about that number um based we can do some back in the napkin math about the loss revenue during March through

yep that so really what you're looking at here is a bunch of data Some of the data we have we know pretty well. Some of it we don't. And that's one where we're just talking about the program. We haven't started the program. But by next year at this time we'll have better data point to go with because we'll see what that revenue was.

So right now we're just it's an it's an estimate. It's an estimate. It's and it's we can adjust that number. And then the budget committee will take a look at that number as well and we'll they'll have a lot of eyes on it.

Okay. Sorry. So, let's just keep right on going. We'll we'll just hit the high points here. Um, Yeah. I'm just trying to like All right. Yep. So, This is still funny. Let me get my bearings. What What are you looking for?

Well, I don't I've kind of gone over the revenue as we so I don't know if I just want to get into the into the the actual budgets. Yeah, we've got So, revenue here, funding up 15%. Let's just go real high level again because we're going to dive right in on this next meeting. real high level on um sections, not individual.

Well, I do, but there is some things that I wanted to we'll get into the summary page. We'll look at that. All right. But there are some things that I want to point out in the budget just so we can get out of here. Right. So, you'll see in the like in the uh planning and codes, you'll see I just want to point out the yellow stuff that

What page are we on? 22. 22. So that code enforcement, that full-time wages, you're seeing that as zero because we're we're we're hiring someone for 32 hours, but we're going to split that between public works and the in the uh

planning and codes. Okay. So that's why you're seeing 7, you know, a different number. You went we went from 65 to 73,000 basically in that one. But that that's a lower hourly wage job. But we are budgeting for full family insurance which is $33,000.

If that person were to fill the role and take cash and loo that employee cost drops by $31,000, but we have to budget for the full because we don't know what that person we go full time. Yeah. No, they get benefits for the if they go full family coverage for that position.

No, but I mean if it's a part-time position, we don't pay medical. Yeah, but this is budgeted for a No, I got the budget. Yeah. Yeah, No, he's understand. Okay. And then you'll see in the travel and mileage that's gone because uh Calvin has a truck through that payful. So that's

um see that that's that's really the only yellow part of the budget, too. What page? Uh that's going to be on page 27. So I'm just going to give you my rationale for for why I cut it. Okay. So as a manager, I'm going to manage and

Thank you, Alan. And budget for the entire community. All right. M so in bulky waste you had 270 participants last year. So but you're funding it and everybody's paying for it but only 270. Personally I don't think that's fair to the people that don't use it.

But that's a decision that you have to make and Mark and I are we're happy to put it back in there if that's what you decide to do. But I want you to understand my rationale for it. Okay. It's it's it's and that's really what it is. You got

you got a very minority of people using it, but everybody's paying for it. Okay. So, that's why Can you give us that number or is it just based off of So, it would be 18,000 if you put it back in. Yeah. Okay. I I just cut it because, you know, we'll look at the summary and you'll see why I cut it. Um, so let's just go right to the front page of the summary then.

Page number 11. 11. um is up 11.5%. And you can see the percentages of each department. General government's up 7.7, public safety is up 9.7, public works is 1.6. Um community services is uh up 14.2. Yeah. Yeah. 50%. Right.

Yeah. But it's a very small I missed it. Yeah. Yeah. Townwide is 14.2. Sorry, I misread the line. Yeah. Or a total of 11.5. Yeah. That 50% increase is on a $1,000 budget line. So very small. But total funding requirements is up 11.5%. That's what you're saying.

Yeah. The funding requirements what we need to expand. Yeah. 11.5 um funding sources is at 15.3%. Okay, that's what we're that's what we're estimating an increase in Yeah, that includes ambulance increase that we approved last week or last night.

Yeah, that doesn't come out of this but out of the general fund. That comes out of the capital projects fund. I'm not buying the ambulance. No, no, this is for the service fee that we charge. Yeah, we increase the service.

Does that that get updated in this those new fees? Uh we're increasing the budget for revenues for ambulance duties. Yes, that's already included in So if you stroke out, you better bring more money with you. Um so it went up uh 7%

the budget that we're planning for for ambulance. Thank you. inherited now is 500,000. That's a 1.4% increase over last year. Okay. And by using that, um, total tax levy is 10.9. So, you could, you know, you're going to need to look at this and decide, you know, are you are you okay with that? And you're going to need to try to find if you want to bring it down where you do that. Do you do you do it in your reserves? You know, that's an option.

When you take away from reserves, you know, you're going to find a way have to find a way. Just kicking the can just just kicking that. And if you use more fun balance, this is where it gets a little tricky. So you're getting at that point where your fund balance is right in that sweet spot where you want to try to keep it. So even though that this this tax levy doesn't look good, it's really it's really good like financial policy because of that fund balance.

If you take if you use more fund balance to get that tax levy down, yeah, it looks good on the taxes, but it's not good on your financials. You know what I mean? because you're you're really flirting with if you get that down too low then you won't be able to use anything at all and that's going to raise your

tax run into cash flow issues and exactly need temporary what is it tans or tax anticipation right so you know it's it's it's a it's a tough one to swallow um and I'll and I'll and I'll share with you too I've got Uh, I got a wage and benefit study. I think I actually have shared that with you

the analysis analysis. So, I've kind of broken it down by position what the study average is, what we currently are and what the wage table does and you guys can kind of that and see where you're at. Let's um All righty.

I mean, this is Yeah, this is this is a good first presentation. I don't want us to that 940 to get into figures. This is getting this into the public record. I would encourage everyone, I know everyone's already looked at this, look at it some more, especially some of the areas that Jerry's flagged, any areas you have of concern. Um, and come prepared next meeting to, you know, sharpen our pencil, pull out our erasers, talk about things. Mark is going to be here. We're going to be able to have the budget up on screen. Um, and if we want to make adjustments and see what that impact is downstream, we can do that. Um, but let's just make sure we do our homework. If you have questions about items, please feel free to reach out to myself or Jerry. Um, obviously just facts and figures type stuff, but uh, we will have the whole crew back here in two weeks to go through

questions like what you brought up, John, about funding sources and stuff like that or questions about um, you know, the bag fees, permits, those sorts of things. And I would encourage you too to read to read the analysis and highlights the budget. Okay, you know, some work went into this and it really does sort of explain it and

you know and understand too that that tax levy amount that 10.9 you got to find $100,000 to move that up or down, right? So if you want to go down a percent, you got to find $100,000 somewhere to do it. Okay. And also understand too that $4,000 either way is one penny on the on

the bill rate the weight list currently is. Mhm. So, you know, just gives us a good unit. It kind of Yeah, it just kind of gives you like where you're at. So, thank you for Thank you, Jerry. This is all on the website. Yep.

So, everyone has access to it. Um, if you're good with the capital the way it is, we'll we'll start to put the the town meeting, bunch of stuff together. We'll put this on everybody's safe. Of course, we'll wait and do you know of course it's on the agenda so so people can see it but till you kind of adopt the budget that you want also on the website but

works for me. So any questions either for Jerry Mark or about the process? So, just a reminder, we're going to talk about this, get in the weeds with it next meeting. The meeting after that, uh Jill and Milt are going to be at that meeting to go over uh review it with us as well. Ask any sort of pro uh facts and figures questions that they have and that's when we'll lock in our recommendation and send it to them. So, that's in a couple meetings. But, um we encourage everyone who's interested in the budget to come to all of these to to hear what we're seeing and or see what we're seeing and hear what we're saying and those sorts of things. Just feel free to shoot me some questions if you have them.

Cool. By email or by calling me. Awesome. Appreciate that. All righty. Um just want to judge people's interest level here. So this is good work. Yes. Thanks. All right. Thank you, Jerry. Thank you, Mark. And thanks for being here tonight. That's a lot for everyone. Um just want to address we have one item left in just a discussion around appointing elected members to committees. Is that something that we want to extend the meeting and and do tonight or do we want to table that? That's up to you all. I know it is getting late.

How long the discussion is going to leave? Can we table it? I motion to table it. Okay. So, there's a motion to table it from Rebecca. Is there any second on the MOA? Second for Josh. Yeah. I don't want to rush it. I have thoughts on the process. Um and I want to make sure we're giving it adequate amount of time. Um and so at 9:45 I don't think it's going to get our full brain powers and I don't want to rush this process.

All right. Um so you need a vote if we have a vote to uh table to till next meeting. Could I just ask if maybe we discuss this in at least a limited fashion before we discuss the budget? Yes, 100%. It'll be it'll be we'll put it in old business the first item.

Thank you. Thanks. All right. All in favor of the tableing till next meeting. Any opposition? John. All right, we'll table it. Thank you all. Thank you. Um I do need a motion to extend the meeting five minutes so we can do our wrap-up. So move

second. All right. Any discussion? All in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none. All righty. That brings us to town manager report. I got I got nothing. I was going to tell you about the um law enforcement resigning, but I just I just thought and we're going to fill up with

Yeah. Did you already post the admin job? I have and I'm waiting for a job description from Betsy. Maybe outside. I'm retiring on Tuesday. Oh, you should retire on Tuesday. Congratulations. Tuesday. This Tuesday is the last meeting. Congratulations.

Fantastic. Coming over to the dark side. Um, all right. Well, I don't have a board member report. Josh, do you have one? Just thank you for all the work that you guys have put into this. I know it's been a long I should ratchet back just a minute. I do.

Uh, Rebecca and I attended the GP COG meeting a couple weeks ago and uh that's what has spurred some more of our out my my outreach attempts. And so if folks just give me feedback on those offline, that'd be great. Um I'm I'm planning on on our off weeks just trying to do a quick video of here's what we were talking about at the next meeting or here's what we talked about based off what we're getting for for comments. Um other than that, I don't have a report. Uh Deb,

John and I attended the meeting that same from the conservation committee. Uh the uh the open space committee open space. really well done, well facilitated. I took a video of it. I couldn't send it because it's too big, but uh of the woman who gave the overview, but it was

very well done. And they just today sent out the summary to all the attendees. So, I didn't read it yet. Yeah. All right, Rebecca. Uh I have nothing. Thank you for managing this conversation today. No problem. It's really good.

That went really well, John. I'll second Rebecca's thank you. And that's it. I don't sleep anyway, so I can stay up there and do stuff. Great. Awesome. All right. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So move.

Motion from Josh. Do I have a second from John? Any discussion? Seeing none, all in favor? Any opposition? That passes unanimously. That was in favor of the consent. Yep. Um and real quick, upcoming meetings, board of directors meeting for RSU 5 is on March 11th, which is tomorrow at the library, Freeport High School Library. Public hearing of proposed land use ordinance changes March 18th here at the fire station at 6:30. Select board meetings March 24th, 2026 at the fire station. Budget committee meeting March 30th at the Eureka Center and then 6:30 p.m. at 6:30 p.m. Um I don't see an executive

session needed. In that case, a motion to adjurnn. So move Josh. Second. Second from John. All in favor? Any opposition? Seeing none, that ends our record long meeting in my tenure here. Is it record long? I don't Oh, yeah. We never

So, we haven't We've never We have signatures. We got training coming up. Yeah. I'm going to frame these. We got training coming up. I'm gonna frame these and hang them in my No, no signatures. John just gave this to me tonight.