Okay, we'll call to order the village board work session meeting for July 21st at 5 p.m.
Kelly, would you please note the rule announcements? I have none. Anybody else have any discussion
items? Presentation of the initial 2027 department budget updates regarding the forest area public
library. Jan Berg, you're up first.
You need green to go, right? Okay. So, for some of you, you've seen the presentation many
years and it's been pretty much the same one. So this year, I thought I'd change it up a
little bit. There's new faces and just try to make this a little bit more of a narrative
about what libraries do in the community and for the community before getting into the
budget because it's why we have a library, okay? So, okay, all right. Well, I'm not going
to just talk about dollars and cents. Every budget reflects values and every budget is
a story. So, and since libraries are about stories and we have books, so I'm going to tell
a little story here and do more of a narrative than I usually do. So, let's see. Just click
anywhere. Just roll. Okay, go the other way. Okay. So, this is your library. We certainly
have a lot of books in there, but our library today is one of the forest's gathering places
where neighbors meet, families connect, and community happens. Oh, I'm going the wrong way.
Okay, let me make it. So, this is a really big number. This is a, this is how many people
visit our library or visited our library last year. It's not just a number. Every one of those
visits represents a person, a child at story time, a student studying, a senior attending a program,
or family making memories together. Behind every number is a story. And in case, you know, you
think I'm not just going to talk about stories. This, this is more data from our annual report to
the Department of Public Instruction, but you can see how many items we own. We have a number of
databases and how many of the physical items get checked out annually, but also how many electronic
items get checked out. As you can see the, well, maybe you can't see that, but over the years,
the number of electronic checkouts has gone up while the number of physical checkouts is stay
relatively stable. Let's see, let me keep going the right way. So, joy matters. This is a celebration
from last year's end of summer reading program. Libraries aren't only places where people find
information. They're places where children laugh, families make memories, and curiosity comes alive.
Joy isn't separate from learning. It's often where learning begins.
Okay, the right. Learning doesn't end when school lets out. Every day our library helps
someone discover a new skill, explore a new interest, or build confidence. Whether someone is three
or 93, there's always another chapter waiting to be written.
You can borrow more than books from the library. We have games and cake pans and many other pieces
of equipment, hotspots, which help connect people, and we have a makerspace too. So, we're more than
books. Families borrow games for game night. Residents borrow hotspots to stay connected.
Bakers celebrate birthdays with cake pans. Makers use equipment that they may never be able to afford
or have at home. And we lend tools that help our community learn, create, and thrive.
This is the picture of the teeny area before and after. We listen to our community
through a community survey and staff survey. And one of the things that became obvious was that
we needed to do something with the teeny area. So, as our community changed, the needs of our
teens changed as well. We created this space where young people feel welcome, respected, and that
they belong. We use mostly donations to create this space. So, there's a few taxpayer dollars in
the lights, but other than that, it was paid for by donations. And so, libraries don't change lives.
People do. Buildings, collections, and technology all matter, but the heart of our library has
always been our staff. Every day, they help people discover, connect, and succeed. The greatest
investment we make is in the people who make those moments happen.
Every age, every interest, every day, there isn't one typical library user. One day, you'll find
children, teens, adults, and seniors learning, creating, and connecting. Library is one of
few places where everyone belongs. This is a return on investment that was done by independent
researchers, found that every public dollar invested in libraries returns about $7 in community
value. This was done by every library institute. On the return is reflected in education,
workforce development, digital access, literacy, and strong community connection.
Some of the library's greatest returns simply can't be measured in dollars.
So, every moment counts, or every moment matters. Tonight, I've seen some statistics.
Here are some pictures of programs that happen at our library.
Behind every checkout of those $197,000, there's somebody discovering the joy of reading,
a young child for steps in illiteracy, a family spending time together, a teen finding a place
to belong, a senior citizen making new friends, and someone learning something they never
imagined they could. In our workshop, people find that they didn't know they could make
resin casts or that they could use some of the equipment that's down there. These moments are
why we're here, and they're the reason that libraries matter. And there's just some more
pictures of some of the programs that we do at the library and see the workshop and the
concerts outside, and some of the programs we have inside.
Now, our priorities haven't changed, but how we serve the community has changed.
Every budget reflects priorities, and ours are simple. We invest in people, both the patrons
who use us and the library staff. We have our collections, and we have programs, and then
there's our facility. You may notice that the symbol of the facility is a dragon on the ground,
because that dragon's 25 years old, and has been up in the weather for 25 years,
and now he's no longer up in the weather, he's being replaced, because nothing lasts forever,
even our dragons don't. So, I know we're working on it.
So, I think we were asked to talk about challenges. So, some of the challenges facing the library
this year, we have a new integrated library system, which is how we check books in and out,
and it's been a learning curve for not only staff, but for the patrons as well.
We have an increasing number of library users, and with the same number of staff.
Getting books, those of you who were here last year, may remember that we have problems,
that the major book vendor went out of business, and then we had to start using a different vendor,
and they were backlogged, and they're still backlogged, but it finally seems to be getting
better so that we can buy books, but it's been a challenge. We're dealing with an aging building,
and we're running out of space.
Our goals are to our simple, we want to continue to serve, provide good customer service.
We want to use what space we have to provide service to the largest number of people possible.
We want to make sure staff continues to be compensated comparably, and we want to meet
the standards with our collection size and additions that are somewhat required by Dean
County Library Service to get the reimbursement for serving their patrons.
Sorry, I'm going to address the four big buckets, as it were, so for people the last three years,
the village board has been very supportive of moving us, the library staff close to comparable
salary and wages with other area libraries, with local businesses, and village employees,
and really a big thank you for that. That was a huge lift that was done over the past three
years, and we're right there, but we're almost right there, but we're very close, so that this
budget then includes a 4% increase for all staff, so we don't lose ground, and so that we don't
backslide with any of the gains that have been made over those past three years. It also includes
adding a part-time night clerk to deal with a number of people using the library in the evening.
Currently, we have two people at the circulation desk, and with the number of people coming in,
and we have three floors, trying to keep control of the building is sometimes difficult, especially
with children of a certain age, and coming in, running around. So that's the people part of it.
Programs over the past four years are programs that have a number, and attendance has increased
dramatically. You can see over the last from 2022 to 2025, there's been an increase in total
attendance of almost 90%, and total number of programs has gone up almost 30%, and number of
visits, which is people coming through our doors, has gone up about 20%, so it's a lot of
people to deal with. I think part of that is due to the population increase in the area.
We've gone from, I forget what it was, like 7,300 people, when this building was built,
and now we're at over 13,000 people, just a municipal population, so the building was built
for a certain size population, and we've certainly outgrown that.
Collections, I don't know if you can read all of this, but the cost of books has stayed relatively
stable. Audio books also are expected to remain stable. DVDs and Blu-rays, apparently people are
now getting tired of streaming and are starting to come back to physical things, so they want to
check out DVDs or Blu-rays, so because of low production, because everybody thought that those
discs were going away, that the price has gone up on those, so they consider there's going to be a
price surge, and then we buy other things, we circulate other things, we do board games,
we do puzzles, we do equipment, and all of those things continue to increase in price.
The budget that the library board has put forward as a draft has modest increases in each of these
line items just to deal with some of those increases, let's say go to this one facility, and
most of the line items in the library's budget is the operating budget, so we
utilities and janitorial supplies and all that come out of our operational budget,
but the janitorial service, building insurance and building improvements and all that sort of
are under the villages, so it's not showing up in our budget per se, request per se,
and I think as I mentioned, the library opened in 2002, maybe didn't mention it, but it'll be 25
years old next year, and stuff is starting to show wear and tear, we did a community survey
in September or October last year, and one of the recurring themes was that the building was a
little dirty, the building was a little shoddy, that we needed to do something about some of those
things that happened to any building over time, so as I said before, the village population was
built with 7800 and is now about 13,000, and the way we show, what we show put on our shelves is
different because we have equipment, and that doesn't fit very nicely, books go very nicely on
certain kinds of shelving, metal detector or telescope doesn't fit so well, and it requires
more shelf space, all the toys that we have, or not toys, but games, I guess they're toys, also
do not take the nice regular space that a book does, we've been able to remain using the shelving
we have for a couple of reasons, one is all remember VHS, those were about yay thick, and now we get
thin blue rays, and their containers are so much, you can probably get three or four
of what our VHS used to live, so we've been able to use that same space because the media has gotten
smaller, or how its package has gotten smaller, but even so we're starting to run out of space.
So we are doing a needs, a space needs assessment, this fall I was able to, our library system has
a consultant on staff that is willing to do, willing and able to do this has done it for other
libraries, and the cost is very good, it's free, so we hope to have that study by the end of the year,
and the fact that we need space is fairly obvious if you look at our shelves, and you look at the
attendance at some of our programs, how cramped we are, and how cramped we are, but it doesn't
tell you how much space you actually need, or looking into the future what that space should
possibly look like, how many linear feet of shelving you might need, and that's what a space
needs study would tell it, so we're hoping to get more information, which we will share with you
as soon as we get back. So here is a pie chart of a draft, a very preliminary draft budget,
and you know as you can see most of it's staff, because that's what we're a public facing
institution, and our staff does all the heavy lifting, and then you can see our collections are
the next largest, our programs have been very, it's been a very small part of the budget,
we've used a lot of donations to pay for performers and presenters, and even some
some items that we use for programs, but we've run out of money almost this year already,
especially with the workshop, it's been so wildly popular that we run through a lot of materials,
and we run through a lot of acrylic paint, we run through a lot of these little squares that kids
use to make Minecraft dioramas and things like that, and it just, the amount of people going
through our building using our programs has just made a drain on that, so that that line item is
increased in our budget as the supplies, because you have more people in your building, and
you use more supplies, you use more garbage bags, you use more toilet paper, you use more cleaning
supplies because people are in your building using it, so are the budget, the draft budgeting
food, some of that, it also includes best guesses at insurances because we don't know what those
are going to be, and that would, I don't think you guys know what it is either yet, so that'll
make some change on what the final numbers are, let's see, and this is where we get our revenues,
we don't, all our revenues, most of our revenues come from the village, and this is like, I've just
threw out some numbers here, but the Dane County reimbursement is the blue, the blue, and that's
what we get for providing library service to people who live in Dane County who do not have a library,
so people in Windsor who use our library, we get reimbursed for people in,
well, Burke, Bristol, all those surrounding parts of Dane County, and anywhere, actually,
in Dane County, if they decide to come over here and use the library, and they don't have a library,
we get reimbursed every year for that, the little orange yellow slice is what we get for
serving other counties that do not have a library, so people up the road in Columbia County who come
down and use the library, we get reimbursed for that too, so those, and then the other little numbers
are like rentals and fines and copies, which we don't make a lot of money on, but it still adds
to the revenue, if you look at the total from other sources of revenue, that's about just under
40 percent of the budget, and that's about what the use by other libraries or by other
citizens without libraries is, so it sort of matches our circulation numbers,
so the next chapter starts here, it starts with you guys, and I hope you would invest in the
library and help us move forward, and happy to answer any questions you may have. Questions,
anyone? Brad? Not a question, I'm just sitting on the board, I'm able to see some of the numbers
and really happy to see that we have a huge increase in people using the maker shop and
in doing different activities and supplies, supplies runs out very quickly, and I think we
were at 100 percent or 99 percent of the budget already halfway through the year, so as we increase
people and bring them in, that's great for our community, but unfortunately it has increased
costs along with it, so I just want to put a little context around why one of the areas you touched on
is going to be increasing this year. Thanks, Brad. Jim.
Say, Jan, one thing that I noticed in your presentation, that is a bit different than we've
talked about for other staff, is that you're proposing a four percent? Well, first two things,
first I was told four percent a long time ago and I didn't have that corrected. Second of all,
we're not 100 percent having to close the gap totally with other local libraries and other
municipal workers and other businesses, so we think four percent would be
keep us moving towards equitable. Yeah, I just wanted that for explanation, so thank you.
Yeah, like I said, we started behind, we've almost caught up, but we don't, if we, we may fall
behind if we don't add just a little bit more.
I was just curious, this is just pure curiosity, but how does the reimbursement for services for
the surrounding areas in the county and the other counties work? Like, is that based, like,
are you tracking that somehow? Yeah, the ILS, which I was the integrated library system,
right, is, you know, we check books out with a, on a computer and everybody's card is tied to a
part of the county where they live. It could be a ward, it could, in Madison, it might be wards,
in here it's, it's surrounding counties or townships, so everybody's card is coded when they come in
and check out an item that gets counted and at the, at the year end, we have that number,
so we, we can say, I don't know, pick a number, say 30, 35,000 items were checked out by Columbia
County patrons, and then, um, then a claim is made actually on our behalf by the South Central
Library System to get reimbursed for that. Got it. Thank you.
And anyone else? Alicia? A couple things you talked about during the expansion of the
teen, uh, teen area, instead, uh, that it was mostly through donations. I probably just missed
it on, like, committee update. Can you talk to a little bit more than aesthetics? What else was
I, that's, it's pretty much what, what we did. Um, we, it was, um, one made the furniture
and more teen friendly as it were, it's more, um, up to date, we did get rid of some of the old,
um, carols that were there that were more like study carols. We had, um, old electrical boxes that
sort of, um, stuck out from the wall, the little wall there, and we had those, um, put,
put flush, and we also got, um, the USB chargers on there. Um, we did keep the, uh, the booths because
people like those adults like those too. They like to go over there and sit because they can
be away from other people until school let's out. And, um, they liked being able to charge
using a USB horn, but it was mostly, a lot of it was just color and, um, painting the walls
and replacing the, um, carpeting, which was pretty neat, indeed. And then moving furniture around
and getting a few pieces of more modern furniture, because what we used there was stuff we had
accumulated over the years, actually from one demo, um, well, they're still here, but they used
to give away a lot to the community libraries. Um, if there was a community connection, so we were
there home library. So we sometimes get furniture or other items that donated, you know, it didn't
match very well and it didn't hold up necessarily very well. So, um, it's just made things look a
little bit more designed. Sure, cohesive. Thank you. Yeah. Um, and then secondary question,
in regards to staff, you asked for, you're looking for like a part-time night person, which as a
mom of the teenager who's often at the library, uh, I can tell from his life 360, uh, at late hours,
I think that's needed. Um, but can you speak to retention, uh, this last year? Um, we've been,
that looks like overall. Actually, retention has always been, it's been really good. Um,
we, we don't have a lot of turnover. Um, and so I think that was one of the, um, one of my
pleadings to you in previous years is that we have very loyal and caring, um, staff who were willing
to work for a pittance, as it were, and, and, um, because they're so loyal to the institution and
the idea of public libraries, but now that they're getting paid a much better wage, they're happier
to stay, I guess I'd say. Okay. Bye. Okay. Uh, so you're speaking to the challenges going forward
for the library and all of them was running out of space. Right. Right. Um, so last time I was in
there, is the basement utilized very much? Yeah. That's where the workshop is. We have a community
meeting room in there that is, is used a lot. Um, and then we have a couple of smaller meeting
rooms in there, but they'd be full all the time. If, if we, um, didn't have some
one stringent requirements for, for use, but, um, yeah, there's, there's meeting rooms down there
and store, there is some storage down there too. And the HVAC and all that's in a big part of it too.
There's not much expandable room down there. Um, because we'd have to find place to store all
the stuff that's in there, you know, you could, you could clear it out, but it's got very high
ceilings and when it's basement, nobody likes basements, if they can avoid it, would fake windows
up or something, but yeah, but there's not really expandable space downstairs. Thank you.
Can I have your question? Um, hi, Jam. Hi, Jim. Um, going back to your
pie chart on the revenues. Okay. So when we were talking, when you were talking about
and explaining the usage and reimburse for that, depending on the counties, is that like the yellow
sliver there, the 44,000? Yeah, I think it's the orange. And it's for the various counties,
because we get reimbursed not only from Columbia County, but from SOC, because some people use
us from SOC, some from Jefferson from Iowa. Any, any, any county that touches Dane County,
we get reimbursed by if their people come and use our library, as long as they don't have
their own library in the word they live. Okay. And then the 810,000 is just a
space holder for the, for the village. Okay. And then it's strictly deforest though. Yeah,
that would be. Yes. Okay. Is, and maybe this isn't a question for you, but maybe this is a question
for AL or someone. Why is it that like, for example, at the community center, you know,
all of the surrounding communities, we hit, we have like a usage and like Windsor donates
percentage based on their population and Vienna then donates part based on their population.
Why isn't it like that with the library?
Want to explain chapter 43?
Because they don't.
The senior center was put together, it was organized as a joint enterprise. The library was created
by the village. You have to let everybody use them. The municipalities that are not,
they don't have their own library pay a tax to the county, which then some of that money
comes back to fund the library, but it's not quite the same as it would be with a senior center type
arrangement. I figured there was probably a, that Dane County reimbursement is based on the library
tax to other municipalities or towns around us. They get taxed because they don't have a library.
Right. So, yeah. So, Tana Windsor does pay a tax because they don't buy.
So, this, I just want to quickly mention that this is on the operation side. So, when we're talking
about the physical library and the expansion, that's all capital improvement and that issuance,
and that doesn't get prorated as the operation, which I does. The village,
such as the municipal library, the village is responsible for the, the envelope of the building
for the library itself. But we do get reimbursed. Part of that reimbursement is for facility as
well. They realize that not only are operations impacted by us checking out materials, but that
we have to have a facility of a certain size because we have more people coming in. Right. So,
our service population includes some of those surrounding towns. So, that we do get reimbursed
by Dane County for the facility to some extent. So, yeah. It's really complex.
Yeah. I know that. And I do want to just say that I think the library does a wonderful job.
And you guys have got so much going on there. And I think you have done a wonderful job. All
these years being ahead of it. Thank you.
Well, I believe that's it. Hey, well, thank you, Jan. I have a token of my
presentation.
Thank you.
Thanks.
But if you can point it, Brandon.
So if you don't mind, I just want a quick explanation
about library funding for the village board,
especially for new trustees and stuff,
just as a reminder and a learning,
just because we only talk about it once here as well too.
So municipal libraries, state statutorially,
need to be funded through your municipality.
So when we talk about that $800,000,
that is levy dollars that we appropriate within there.
So libraries pitch their proposals, pitch their budgets
and essentially request a levy amount
from the village itself.
So depending on what you want to do,
fund how much or as little within there.
Now there are some rules that you can't just slash
a library indefinitely or anything,
but there are rules and restrictions as to how much
you can and cannot fund an entire library itself.
It does come from levy dollars too.
So the levy, as we know too, supports your general fund,
your capital fund, your debt issuances as well too
within there.
So just something to kind of think of or a mind of
within here as we just go through every other department
presentation as well too.
And we just think and consider within here
that when we talk about the villages operations,
it's coming from the levy itself.
Jim.
Brandon, I wonder if you can explain, say,
for myself and other people.
I know, say the first year I was here,
I remember looking at the library budget
and bringing up a few items that I thought you could discuss,
but I found out pretty quickly that a library budget
is a bit different to say than a different department
because we only really are like and do a total lump sum
or not supposed to be looking at like individual items as far as.
Yeah, so when it comes to the Village Boards obligation
and your responsibility for the library,
you are approving essentially a lump sum
to go to the library.
You're not really looking at, I mean,
you can kind of question a little bit about overall
operations and plans and stuff within there,
but it's not your responsibility to nitpick
within there exactly what they do.
The library has their own library board and commission
that they do float everything to.
They approve all the expenditures payroll within there,
but statutorily, villages, municipalities have to process
their payroll, their expenses, their AP within here
for that level of internal control and responsibility
since we do put a significant amount
of the revenues towards villages.
So to answer your question again, Jim, yes,
it's more of a, we're looking at more of a lump sum total
for them versus like a itemization of
this is exactly what we're funding instead.
Okay, let's move on for our next department budget update
from the Cornerstone Community Center and Natalie Ramesh.
Hi everyone, good to see you all.
I'm Natalie in case we haven't met yet.
So, who is Bill, am I doing it?
Oh, yes, thank you.
Okay, so first I'm gonna tell a little story.
This is a typical story or interaction
that we encounter at the Community Center.
So this is a fictitious person, of course.
This is Barbara, she's an 80-something-year-old woman
living in her own home.
And recently her husband has passed away
and her adult children live out of state.
So the adult children are opposed with what do we do?
We're busy and we don't know how to help Barbara.
So Barbara is grieving her spouse.
She's struggling with memory loss perhaps.
She's forgetting to eat.
Maybe she gets in a car accident.
You know, she's just struggling in general.
And she is hospitalized and very weak.
So now these adult children are wondering
what shall we do with mom?
So they may have a couple options.
One option would be to call us at the Community Center.
And another option is they say,
Mom, it's time you go into a nursing home.
So I'm going to explain what we would do
if the family would call us.
And this is not an exhaustive list,
but this is just some ideas off the top of my head.
Meal delivery, for example.
So if Barbara doesn't remember to eat,
we have volunteers that deliver food
and they also check to make sure that someone
hadn't fallen and no one knows.
We have medical equipment that people check out.
We have a support system.
So we have case managers.
We have support groups.
We have, you know, I console people all the time
on what to do if something happens in their loved one situation.
A support group for Barbara to cope with her grief
and how to handle her new life as a single adult.
And then the alternative, maybe the children
don't know what to do.
They, again, don't live in our state.
They, you know, Barbara doesn't want to be a bother
to the adult children, which is something we hear all the time.
And, you know, she's struggling, you know,
and her life is just not what it was
when her husband was alive.
And she was kind of managing
and getting along day to day.
You know, being at risk for falls,
being at risk for infections,
and potentially she does not make it through this tragedy.
So kind of like what I mentioned before
about meals and visits,
transportation to medical appointments,
supporting people in their isolation,
their mental health.
You know, ultimately we meet people
and try to help them have a better trajectory
because aging, as we've all seen in our personal lives,
is not easy.
And we all have to figure out how to navigate it.
There's a lot of red tape,
a lot of challenges when it comes to aging
and benefits.
So we try to make it a sense
of aging and benefits.
So we try to make it as simple as possible.
Any questions about Barbara?
Or what we would do?
Okay.
Unfortunately, that's a very common situation,
especially with adult children living out of state these days.
I get calls all the time.
Natalie, what would you do or how should we proceed?
And sometimes it's an easy answer
and they can proceed on their own,
and sometimes we help them over time.
It just depends.
So if you've driven past the center lately,
I hope you've seen our new area,
new parking lot, new landscaping.
We have a new highway, driveway entrance
off of the highway V.
So that is phase one.
It used to be, for those of you who are newer,
it used to be three different parcels,
and so we're working on making it one,
making it wheelchair accessible, making it user-friendly.
The second phase will be looking at a walking path
connecting to the village's path and kind of like an exercise,
outdoor entertainment type area.
Right there, I just put some percentages.
If I had about a $300,000 bill for that,
I had 69% of it was donations last year,
12% was fundraising, and about 19% was interest.
So it was, you know, not out of my operating budget.
So it was kind of reserves and fundraising efforts.
When I look at the staffing plans,
I'm always working at relationships
and supporting the staff because that's who we have
to counsel these family members and work with the family.
With the board, we've talked about a 3% increase
as kind of an average lately for staff.
You know, we look at around Dane County
and other senior centers to see what they are paying.
We continue to just work on, like I said,
just development and working at our relationships.
As far as the building goes,
right now we're really focused on the outdoor area.
But I have a laundry list that every year I try to chip away at something,
you know, depending on how many donations come in,
depending on maybe how much staff time we have
to try and just kind of help with the general maintenance
of the building.
So legal structure.
So this has been a project I've been working on for a few years.
So again, for those newer trustees,
right now the employees are employees of the village of winter.
And we're working on trying to kind of update our legal structure
so that we are able to have our own employees or, you know,
hold our own employment.
So it's taken some time.
As you can see, I listed a few of kind of the major hurdles.
And I'm working with Social Security and Wisconsin retirement
to get approved essentially.
It would be the same operations.
It would be, it's essentially the same agreement.
It's just asking for their permission to continue as we are.
So I'm kind of in legal limbo and I just continue to wait.
So just kind of a history for all of you.
Up until the last couple of years, the ask for the three municipalities
has been the same.
The last few years we've asked for an increase.
In August, every year we get the population numbers from the state
and we look at the population of Windsor and DeForest.
And we split Vienna with Wanna Key.
And we allocate the percentage based on who has more people.
So you can see I just kept track of the population trends and the percentages.
And right there it says, so I calculated for revenue.
Municipal funding was about 70% of our revenue last year.
Dane County, 18%.
So that's our nutrition and case management primarily.
And then everything else is other.
So donations, pretty unpredictable.
So interest, cost share for using the building and the weekends.
I have the good fortune of hearing all the good things that people say
and how we've changed their lives.
And I just kind of wanted you to see some of the notes and some of the things
that I've heard.
We tend to only meet people when they're in a really rough time in their life,
unfortunately.
And we go through a lot together and it's very rewarding.
I mean, I think that's why I love it there and why my staff love it there
because I know we make a difference and we just continue to do so.
They're getting their microphones ready.
Yeah, thanks for presentation.
For the people who come eat meals or you deliver,
is there any reimbursement from them?
Do they pay any part of that or is it all cost free?
Good question.
So Dane County pays for it up front.
And then any donations we receive, we ask for a general donation.
Any donations we receive, then we got to check back to Dane County.
Okay, great.
And then going back to the municipal funding, I was just curious, very flat.
I was surprised to see that for several years.
What changed the last two years?
Great question.
So we just, I mean, I've been the director for a few years, but prior to me,
I don't know, we just haven't changed anything.
I think that we look at the facility.
It's a 40 some year old building, just trying to plan for the future.
Yeah, I'm not really sure why, because I wasn't director, but that's the only thing I could think of.
Anyone else?
Quick question.
Could you just talk a little bit more about the case management services you offer and how many people you're servicing there?
And I think I saw recently you brought on another case manager or just talk a little bit about staffing.
And maybe in your example, kind of is all inclusive in the beginning.
Yeah.
So we have, we have a social worker and a case manager.
So two full time staff, I myself am a social worker.
So that is where my roots are as well.
And I, we serve about, well, at any given time, we're case managing about 120 people.
But that ebbs and flows with sometimes people are a daily contact, sometimes weekly, you know, it could vary.
But our case managers can go into the home.
We can work with them forever.
So there's not a lot of, you know, statutes or challenges that say you can and can't do this.
There's a lot of agencies in Dane County that are very limited on how they can help people.
And I, I really like our model because we can just figure out what we need to do and try to do it.
You know, if they need help to go to the doctor, if they need transportation, if we need to call someone to set up their med box.
We can just be very flexible, I guess.
Alex.
Oh, hi.
Jan.
Well, first I want to say that the cornerstone community center is one of my most favorite places to go and be at a divorce now.
And being on the board there, I've just learned so much and I've added and I go to the extracurriculars now and I'm in their exercise class and whatever.
Anyways, knowing that I've met a lot of the staff and I know they work really hard over there. You work really hard over there.
And one thing that I wanted to kind of piggyback off of is what Brad was asking about the why it was kind of a flat.
Ask in the past years and one of the things I learned about when I got on the board there is the other board members who are long term board members.
There was a lot of discussion about the director that was prior to Natalie and she was not doing her job and she was actually absent quite a bit and not involved.
So I'm wondering if that had something to do with it with those years of the.
I'm not exactly sure when she was there, 2022, 23, 21, maybe somewhere in there, maybe Natalie, you know more about that, but that might have been the reason.
I did want to say, Natalie, in your presentation, you say that you, the number of your full time employees has stayed the same and is actually decreased a little bit in some areas.
So I wanted to know how long that you think that's been and then with the community usage going up, we know that's been happening.
Do you know what percentage that has been?
Yeah, good question.
So we utilize volunteers to run our center.
We really do.
We have about 120 active volunteers every year and most of them run the nutrition program.
So they're the ones delivering the meals.
They're the ones portioning the meals.
They're the ones, you know, running all the programming and they're invaluable.
So that's how when I say it's staff time has gone down a little bit at the, at the front desk at the welcome desk.
When we had a staff personally, we replaced it with what I would say is one of our best volunteers and that's, you know, I didn't want to change.
Quality for, for saving money.
And I, with this person, I definitely didn't have to do that.
So just trying to be creative and trying to just work within my means and.
But as far as usage, I'd say it's gone up about 11% over the last couple of years as far as daily people coming into the center.
Meals has gone up about 3%.
And rides has gone up 34%.
Rides is by far our biggest challenge.
Because I mean, as you know, if you can't get to the doctor, there's a lot when you're older that you're just limited.
So trying to figure out how to get someone in a wheelchair affordable to the doctor is something that.
I think about a lot and I don't have the answer, but it's something I'm going to work on.
I guess that reinforces and proves, you know, that you're able to, that everybody over there is working so hard that you're able to do this with the same amount of staff with the, with the usage that's went up.
So I guess I would say that I feel your ask what you're asking from the village is very, very fair.
Yeah.
Anyone else.
Thank you, Natalie. You are welcome.
Okay. Next up is department updates administration, Bill.
Just a quick one here.
We have the budget listening session, the first one.
One day, the 29th, five o'clock to seven o'clock or fireman park in the community room there.
Brandon and I will write a short presentation is highlighting kind of the current status of the budget.
And timeframe, and then you plan to just open it up and see if we can.
Engage folks in the conversation about how they feel about the village finances.
Be there to answer any questions that they may have understanding that are very early on in the process and that there will be another opportunity for a listening session later on, including meetings here at the village board.
And then also eventually a public hearing to come. So we're trying our best to get out there. We do have our website on the engaged of force open and as these presentations.
We'll go ahead and post them up on that website also.
That's all.
Thanks, Bill.
Finance update, Brandon.
That's what I had written down as well too.
But besides that, I was able to be a part of our president's community connections last week.
We had members of the public come and ask overall questions to all of us.
There's a few budget finance related questions within there.
So it was a good time as well to just answer a couple of those questions for the public as well too.
Thank you. Thank you for being there, by the way.
Please department is chief also gone.
Okay, I guess we'll skip the police department update.
Public services, Judd.
Just that we were able to have a large number of candidates apply for our open parks position due to a retirement.
And we're happy to announce required Jackson Heilman to join us.
He'll start on August 3rd.
He was a great candidate.
He works currently for a municipality down in Illinois.
But they're relocating up this way.
And his boss is actually kind of upset that he's leaving and would wish he'd stick around.
So we've got a great employee and looking forward to being on board.
Thanks, Alex community development.
No updates.
Okay.
So we're going to have a couple of legislative services.
Kelly.
A couple of things in person F and T voting begins next Tuesday.
We will during this election offer in person F and T voting during all business hours Monday through Friday.
Except the Friday prior to the election, we will remain open until five p.m.
The other thing is we are going to be starting having a.
I voted sticker contest for the kids in doing it in combination with the village of Windsor.
So it will be directed towards all kids within the divorce school district.
We're going to have four different categories split up by the different schools within the district.
So we'll have elementary intermediate middle and high school.
The kids will have until August 14th to turn in the.
Their drawing of I voted sticker.
We do have rules in place on what has to happen, what cannot be on the sticker.
And there is going to be a engaged to force page that we'll be launching tomorrow by the end of the day that will have all of the information.
So once the John who is the clerk over in Windsor, once John and I are able to review the.
The sticker submissions, we will pick the top three for each category and then put it out to a community vote for the community to vote on the top one for each category.
And then those will be printed and available to voters for the November election.
So it's a cool little project.
Thank you for coming to community chats last time to.
You get to answer some questions.
Creation and community enrichment race.
I believe for our last meeting, the mural had not officially been installed, but it has been installed on the public service building. So looks great.
Thanks to Greg and Nate and all of them to be able to get that up.
We do have a new market manager for the farmers market that is starting tonight.
She's overlapping with our other market manager, who's tonight is her last night.
So we're excited. She also runs the Verona's farmers market. So she has some experience and is also a vendor for us as well. So she'll be kind of doing some dual tasks there.
We have submitted all the information for our fall winter program guides. So we're kind of just waiting on the paper right now to start doing design and then we'll get into the process of editing.
But right now, during this period of time, what's posting ahead of trying to get all those programs entered into our civic rec software so that it's up and ready and doing editing for that and the program guide when that all comes together.
Summer activities are wrapping up and then in the next like three weeks or so, and then we'll be starting to get into all of the fall winter programming.
And then we have our last movie for summer series is this Friday, Zootopia 2 will be in the park. And then, unfortunately, last Thursday, we had to cancel our night market. We were super excited.
We had over 50 vendors, I believe, and those day in Canadian wildfires got us. So we're in the process of actually refunding all of the vendors for that and looking forward to the August night market.
All right, that's it. Thank you. Communications update. Stacey Harmon is not here tonight. Is somebody speaking for her?
She did email out enough. She did email. Yes. So you've all been in your packets.
It's hard to work as always.
Any other business that lawfully comes before the committee.
Just a little.
Okay.
I would take a motion for German, please.
Motion by Jim, Mr. Second.
Second.
Second by Jan.
All those in favor say aye.
Aye.
All those votes, no.
We'll encourage unanimously. We will be adjourned at 601 PM and let's take a little.
10 minute.
Okay, let's call to order the village board meeting for July 21st at 610 p.m. Callin, would you please note the role.
Alicia, would you please lead us in the pledge.
Thank you.
Announcements, I will make just a little bit of an announcement tonight.
I'm going to talk to Stacey about putting on engaged to force the level of interest that might be out there.
In terms of food waste composting.
That's something that's come up a couple of times in the last few months.
We'll see what the interest is that that generates.
And if we look like we might have a bit of interest, we're.
Going to look at maybe making an ad hoc committee to take a look at that and what the expense is involved.
Just so you all know what's going on.
Next up is the case me calling necessary. I'm sorry interrupt on the consent agenda.
I did notice an error that I made on the memo for the appointment for the public safety commission.
The end date of the term for the public safety commission of Jeff Amundsen would be until March or April of 27.
Not the end of his trusty term. He's not a trustee.
That's a good point.
Thanks Kelly.
Okay, I'm a consent agenda. Does anyone want anything separated out?
I want to separate out 5.1 and 5.2 since I was gone.
Oh, okay.
Anybody else? All right, we're good.
Let's.
I'm having a blank.
Motion to approve.
I three and five four.
Thank you, Brad, for being on me out. Is there a second? Second.
Second by Alicia. Any discussion?
All those in favor and the capis saying aye.
Aye.
Opposed? No.
Motion carries unanimously.
A village board work session minutes from July 7th.
Is there a motion to approve those? Make a motion to approve.
Motion by Alicia. Is there a second? Second.
Second by Brad. Any discussion? All those in favor and the capis saying aye.
Aye. All those opposed? No.
Epstein.
Motion carries with one abstention.
Did I do that? I just do the board.
I have to.
Okay, let's do the board minutes from July 7th. Is there a motion?
I'll make a motion to approve. Motion by Alicia. Is there a second?
Second.
Seconded by Melanie. Any discussion? All those in favor and the capis saying aye.
Aye. All opposed? No.
Epstein.
And one abstention.
Motion carries.
General public appearances. Do we have anyone wishing to make a public appearance on something that on the agenda for tonight?
Nope. Okay.
I have it.
Yeah, this is just this is comments for anything that isn't on the agenda.
Then our next up is presentations. The initial 2027 department budget update regarding public services.
Work natural resources in capital improvement plan.
Judd and Greg.
Good evening, everyone.
Tonight we're going to present or public services budget as well as a capital improvement plan that we have prepared for the 2027 year.
So the first item is a new street crew member.
So basically a new member. It's a long list of things. I'm not going to go through these one by one.
But in general, we have 54 miles of roadway.
We had in 2017, we have now 68 miles, right? So that's a 25% increase in 10 years.
So that's a lot of additional roads that we have to maintain.
There's almost double the amount of street sweepings that we've doing in 10 years timeframe.
So again, we want to maintain those streets making clean and prevent what runs off the streets to go into the river.
So we want to make sure we're taking care of that.
Our leaf pickup is a.
Wildly successful and we have a 314% increase in just pickup alone.
Not to mention that the yard waste site has an increase in use and amenities, right? So we have.
People residents who don't use the street sweeping or the leaf pickup they bring in themselves.
Or if you like me who bags your grass when you mow it, I'm taking that out there.
So we have to haul all that yard waste and brush away weekly as well as then we've got scrap metal that we collect out there that we also take to new buyers when the bucket gets filled right.
That does bring back a little bit of revenue to the village every time we take one, take the metal out there, but it's still, you know, it's another task for us to do.
We have a vacation policy where we only allow two people off in the winter time at any given time.
So we have the manpower, people power, sorry to make sure that we are appropriately there to follow the streets, maintain them during that.
And there's paving trails, road patches, concrete removal.
That's one thing that we've started to do that saved us some money and we can get more sidewalks repaired by removing the concrete ourselves.
We have all those miles of trails and sidewalk that we have to maintain in the winter time as well, right? So we have to keep those clear so people can use them.
Stormwater basin clean out last year. We did the one just off of Lexington.
That was kind of an all hands on deck. It was a major undertaking to do it. And if you've gone to see it, it looks great.
It's starting to come back with the vegetation around, but the water quality is doesn't have the same level of cat tail.
So we're going to have to start to build a rotation for the amount of stormwater ponds that we continue to have in the village and continue to add as developments occur.
There's all the work. There's occasional mowing. We have to do. We do have part timers that do a bulk of the mowing.
But there are times we have to have our guys out mowing bigger areas or in the fall time.
So and then we have more special events was set up some takedowns and those kinds of things.
So I think it warrants. I think all this stuff should show that we're warranted to have a new street crew member.
The wage. I put an average in there. We have a range that we could hire somebody at depending upon their level of experience.
Right. So I put the average number as the wages is 58,000 benefits. Thanks to Brandon.
He was able to give you that number is 34,000 for an average. So that total payroll increase would be about $92,559.
Assuming we find somebody of average, if we find a newer person, a younger person, that would be with a little less experience than we'll that number would go down.
From there. So.
So public works, natural resources in parks, budget spreadsheet here. We're looking at public services going up about 1.5% due to fuel increases and I'm going up a little bit with the road maintenance.
Parks was flat. Natural resources is up 32% do restoration projects such as our diamond drive.
Land that we purchased a couple years ago and we've been removing the invasive species there.
Sunfish pond weed control. So looking at instead of spraying weed with chemicals, we're looking at mechanical removal of weeds in the pond.
So people can use the pond a little bit more and not lose their bombers every time they throw their lines out.
And then looking to add two inch caliper trees in the natural areas where we've removed all the invasive species and unwanted trees.
We do put in sapling trees every spring. But as you know with our population, we don't see any of those growing because they love eating deer love eating most.
So adding bigger trees in these spaces will will see better outcomes.
Let's see. We're looking to go out for our P for the five year or for the new five year garbage contract. So hopefully we will we don't have the numbers yet.
But hopefully here in August, we'll be going off for for our P on that get some numbers in.
Any questions on that sheet? So we just we have a ton more line items that are not shown.
We just pull out the parks and the natural resources where we have some slight increases just to kind of highlight those areas. Most things are flat, mailings, most of those kinds of things.
But there are some areas that have gone up a little bit. So when you go off for your garbage disposal bid, would you please or can you? Are you going to look at what the price of every week?
So I've just finalized the RFP today. So we'll be posting that in a week or two. We're going to give it one more look, make sure we have it right.
But we're anticipating that I think I had it for the end of the month to get those responses back.
And then we do have an option in there for exact same services as we have today, as well as then every week recycling pickup. So we'll have that cost.
If if it comes back, I don't I have no idea where to come back, right? But I've estimated it's probably about $200,000 additional. So that would be something the board would have to decide we would have to increase our budget for that to maintain that.
I'm sure it will be higher cost than what we have today.
Thanks.
We have yearly trade ins that we do one tool cat, one skid steer and one skag more.
We never have issues. They don't rust out in one year's timeframe. It's a really nice.
Benefit that we have worked out with the these for these products that way we get them. We can use them. We're not being well, we're getting a good trade in value.
We can have new ones there. They're maintained. So it's something happened in that year's two years time that we have them.
It's all maintained and take care of by the vendor that we work with. So we have minimal costs on those things.
We're looking at adding to our message board arsenal.
This will help us communicate better with our residents as far as road projects. We can use them for the special events.
I know the PD will use them every once in a while as well. So looking to purchase one more message board.
Any questions?
So we are known. We've probably had seven straight weeks of brush pickup with the storms we've had this year and we have that trend seems to be fairly steady.
So we're looking to get an additional grapple. So we do have two front end loaders that we use, but we only have one grapple.
So the grapple is this claw mechanism that helps us pick and dump it so we don't have to go into chipping on the curbside every time there's brush pickup.
Because that's a long arduous task, right? It's a lot of physical labor.
This is we can pick scoop, put it into a dump truck and take it out to the clean fill site where they then handle composting it or chipping it down.
So a brand new one is about $32,000. Greg's priced them out. There's one with a little lower cost of $26,000.
This one on the screen is actually the village of cottage grow has one. They've not been able. They don't use it very often. So they're looking to sell it.
So we can get it for $12,000. Thankfully they have it for sale with a company found basically a consignment type of thing.
If the board says this looks good and you're kind of can give us a thumbs up tonight, we can convey that back to that dealer to say, yeah, we're in.
And once the new year comes around, we'll we can secure it for $12,000, which is about a $20,000 savings. So I'm kind of asking tonight if you give a thumbs up so we can tell them that they then they can we can go back to him and say, we'll take it January one.
Looking good operation. That's I just gave us money and a $20,000 savings. That's impressive.
Thank you. So next we've got a trailer. This is it would be an additional trailer specifically used for our mini excavator.
Let's see this trailer would house the mini excavator and all its attachments. So we got a concrete breaker. We got several different buckets that we would also put on this trailer and it'd be housed.
It'd be only used for that piece of machinery. And the reason why is because we're constantly using trailers to move the lifts to move the skid steer.
The mini excavator.
Having the tools on this trailer at all times. We don't have to go look for it at the yard waste site or if it's at Shanku or down here.
Our public service is building here. It's all in one location. If we have an emergency, we just hook on and we go. We don't have to put it on the trailer and go find all the extra buckets or jackhammers.
So it's ready to go if we need it. We use it on just like I said last night at public service committee.
We say we had a project out at Conservancy Commons Park where.
The contractor on the charges $23,000 to put in a water lateral.
Well, I'm like, let me do some calculations to see how much this is going to really cost us.
Well, we could do it for the parts or three grand. So I'm like, we're going to dig at ourselves and we're going to install it.
So we had our crew take it out and do that ourselves. So I have a piece of equipment to where.
The equipment's on the trailer ready to go. We can just go and we don't have to worry about say the park departmenters or the water department season.
The other trailer we got a finagle at around.
It's just ready to go. So that's what we're looking at.
We may have any questions on that.
Questions anyone?
I guess not.
The next thing is another trailer. This will be an enclosed trailer for our sewer camera.
So we do have a sewer camera that we can use to.
Review our current sanitary sewer. We can also use it in storm sewers right to mean to see what the condition of those sanitary sewers.
Storm sewers are in. However, they currently do it off the back of the truck.
It's a smaller unit. It sits in the bed of the truck. So you've got two guys that are there standing behind a truck looking at a monitor in the bright sun.
So it's hard to see to get it just the right angle to see the the camera image that they're viewing as well as then they're just kind of exposed.
We are wearing hype is they are being as safe as possible.
But it's hot. It's a long day because when we do this, we have to we camera a third of our sewer every year.
We go out and review those. So the guys are kind of exposed in the sun and just kind of out there having this trailer for $4,200 puts them in a little bit safer spot.
Again, makes it easier for them to make sure they can see the screen and handle all that stuff. And then we've got it already loaded.
So last week we had a sinkhole at the corner of Mohawk and highway V is in Mohawk. The sanitary sewer there had it collapsed on a little bit. The sanitary the storm sewer had collapsed a bit.
We got the camera out there. It took us a minute to go back to the shop, voted up into the truck and bring it out and then deploy it.
So if we had this, we could have had one just hooked up the trailer and pulled it out and done it. So again, it would save us a little bit of time and then makes it safer for the guys doing the job.
Jim's got a question. Go ahead.
A question that I had last night. So I think I'll just state the answer that trailer also has a door for say easier access for loading and stuff too.
Yeah, I'm off the side and off the back.
So we're looking at, so we've got two unloaders like we've stated.
They both plow snow and winter time for us. We've got two plows, just like this similar to this. This is our newest one, which is still probably 2012ish.
Our other one is a lot older than that.
They'll work, but having a new blade, we could put the oldest one as backup.
This new one has a newer design for the blades, where the blades follow those contour of the roads, which will get us down closer to the asphalt, which clears the snow off, where you don't have to put as much salt.
Down.
It also does eight. It'll expand all to 18 feet, which the old flowers are 12 feet.
And you can also, there's hydraulic rams on the sides here that you can like that picture. You can have a box and you can push the snow as well.
So we use the unloaders, mainly on cul-de-sacs, downtown roadways, and the parking lots.
So it would be beneficial to get through our cul-de-sacs quicker with six extra feet.
And with the new design, we lost salt.
This is actually a picture of cottage girls.
They're a lot older and they love it, but they're amazed with how well it removes snow.
So I touched earlier when I talked about the new streets worker.
One of the things we have is an increased number of roads and what we have to maintain.
So we do have street sweeper that goes out and does street sweeping as often as we can get it out quite a bit throughout the summer.
And then even last year we were decent enough in the winter, we could get it out a few times there.
We are looking to add a new regenerative air vacuum street sweeper.
So this is different than our current street sweeper.
Our current one is just rooms and it just sweeps and puts in a hopper in the front, right?
So it's got a little bit, doesn't hold quite as much debris as you might want with that front hopper.
This one is actually more of a vacuum system so it can pick up finer materials.
When it does the street sweeping, we've looked at six, seven different ones and we're able to look and drive them around.
Our guys have been driving them, seeing how they operate, trying to find the one that makes the most sense for us.
The one that we want is that that hopper that we can offload holds more debris.
It can also be used off the back, there would be a back on to it.
So it could be used to jet back the, it's not in this image, but there's an attachment to it that so it can jet back out.
Storm inlets, which we have a fair number of sums that we put into our storm sewers throughout the community, right?
It helps settle the sediment to the bottom and more than likely have cleaner water going out through the storm that gets right to the river.
So we can clean those sums easier.
This can also then pick up leaves while not ideal.
It's not designed, it's not like our leaf fact truck.
It does have the capabilities to do that.
It just doesn't do it as efficiently as our leaf fact truck does, right?
This truck does go faster though.
So the one area that we don't get to sweep a whole lot is our down south further.
The current sweeper goes maybe 15 miles an hour if you're going all out.
So it takes a long time just to get down there.
So by the time you get to sweep that area and then come back, it can be a couple of days process.
This one can go 55, 65 miles an hour so it can go down there, get to the job, do the work and then come back.
In a more efficient manner.
Questions.
Just switch it back and forth from, you know, street sweeper to clean it out of catch basin.
Is that a pretty big deal or?
No, it's just a lover.
You just pull the lover and the clothes as a hatch and then you're, you're able to suck up.
Whatever you need to.
Now the back is just a hose that's operated by an operator.
They can get down in there.
It's got an attachment kind of like our jet back truck.
It's got some attachments to get down to the bottom of that some.
Just out of curiosity.
You don't know what kind of blower this has on it.
Do you?
Motor.
Blower.
Number.
Yeah, it's not important.
It's easy to clean as well.
Right.
So there's a water containment so you can hose it out inside at the end of it every day.
You don't have to do it deep clean onto it.
We'll clearly be doing that on fairly regular basis.
But when we use it, we can just hold it out and it rinses out pretty quick and easy.
So.
So we're looking to install cameras at conserve our veterans park and then replace the cameras at conservancy part.
There are no cameras of veterans part currently.
We've noticed some graffiti and vandalism at that park and want to be able to keep a close eye on a PD is down there quite often just looking.
There's been graffiti that we've been cleaning.
So it'd be nice to keep a closer eye on that place.
Conservancy park.
The cameras are outdated.
I was over there yesterday and actually the cameras aren't even working anymore.
So it's time to for replacements.
And I'm still working.
Contractors still working on the prices.
So I'm hoping I was hoping to have him today, but he said he didn't hear back from his vendors.
So we're working on those yet.
So this is the list of the costs for the equipment all kind of itemized out minus the camera system on there.
So a sub total of five hundred and thirty six thousand five hundred dollars as part of our equipment replacement program that we have for the year.
This is not what we're going to build.
I did this out of a little bit of a funny to well.
We don't really want to advertise what our wells look like necessarily to the general public.
People in town probably know where they are, but if there's people that want to look at this outside, we didn't.
So I just thought it lightened it up with a wishing well picture.
So go ahead, Greg.
So while seven, we're looking to, if we get good test well information on innovation and automobiles.
This year we're doing the test well.
And if it comes back good, we will build the well building itself in infrastructure next year.
Estimated at two point five million.
We are looking next year to begin planning for our new building and community parks.
So if you recall, we recently acquired the land at the corner of gray road and north down road.
So we have an initial planning estimate at six hundred thousand dollars.
This includes a preliminary site assessment.
There's an archaeological review environmental review will have to do soil borings to make sure what the what's underneath there.
That was good quality material to be building on.
Begin a concept planning space needs assessment as well as what we might do for programming from a park perspective out there.
So this is going to be all hands on deck with Reese Sam and Tricia her team kind of getting involved to begin to program and look to see how we might do this kind of stuff.
And then there'll be environmental clearance and then a preliminary site design.
So that will be in twenty seven and twenty eight would be much more in depth.
Architectural design drawings plans for the public services building.
So we do plan to bring everything down to this location.
So this building here, all the equipment we have there equipment, we keep it.
As well as the yard waste site as well.
And the salt shed would all be down at this at the site here at corner of gray road and river road or north down road.
So this does make it much more central for our community, right?
So we're able to get to the north and the south as well as in a cross gray road road to the west side of the village and expedite manner.
So puts all of our equipment in one building is the plan.
Ideally, you want to keep your stuff inside and maintains it keeps it operational longer.
If you keep your big trucks outside in the winter time, it takes a lot longer to get them started and get them ready to run and roll.
So if they're inside, they're warm, they're ready to go.
Again, all of our equipment is in one space. We don't have to drive like currently.
If you'll notice in the morning, we have to jenga things out of this building.
We park things around the campus.
And then somebody has to take a car from here and drive up or a truck and park a chon to get other pieces of equipment.
So then we've got a vehicle waiting there that is just waiting to come back, right?
We can't use it or if we needed, we got to go send another vehicle to go get that truck and bring it back and use.
So having everything in one space would be great.
Having a nice, a bigger shop because Tim does amazing work for us.
But having all the amenities in one space for him to do those repairs from our vehicles, we do maintain the police department vehicles.
So there'll be a lot of planning and well thought out reasons that we proceed through this.
So next year will be the initial planning stage of that.
Questions.
Yeah, I'll just take us back to well seven. If I could, just because there's been so much well talk in the community and there's a lot of numbers floating around of different wells. Could you.
For residents just explain well seven and the need for the new well and where that's coming from with that.
5 million price tag. I want people to understand that.
Sure. So we had to do a water supply service area plan last year as required by state statutes, which we.
Completed and we presented that last year when we met at the high school when we had our.
Special meeting there. So the needs are.
We're laid out in that plan. It is available on our website and we can go read it. If you go to go to the forest web page.
It's there basically our wells are for wells currently produced enough water to provide for all of our needs within the community.
However, should our one of our primary wells go down and then we have a major incident, we would be lacking. We would not be able to provide the adequate amount of water. So.
With the growth that we've had, it's prescribed that we do need another well.
It was planned. We've had that land at the corner of autumn blaze and innovation since the beginning of conservancy place was was first plotted out as a well site.
We did have a well number five, which ultimately was unsuccessful. We had kept getting.
High levels of rating rate on from there and we could not remediate that well.
So we had a cap that well. So with that, this well, we're doing that test well this year.
And if it works out, then we will again build that next year.
So again, it's just to make sure we have the water supplies that's needed to feed our community for.
As it should need it.
I have to ask, how do you do a test? Well.
You drink.
We're big. We're boring a well and then we run water through it through a set prescribed amount of time to test the water to make sure it's good, clean, safe drinking water will meet the needs of the community.
And once it passes those tests, then we say, all right, we're good.
They feel that well, then we build a new well.
And we will nearby and then build a building around.
We're looking to.
Install and engineer the boardwalk for the mall bike park next year.
Down near sonfish pond that 16 acres that we've been talking about for the last couple years.
Roughly 700,000 for the engineering and permitting for wetlands to get that boardwalk in.
Go ahead.
Jim's got a question.
I just wanted to clarify if you could clarify when you say the 700,000.
You're talking.
So we talked quite a bit of length for about the mountain biking potential.
But right here, you're talking just the boardwalk, not necessarily the mounting biking trail of.
If for when we move forward with it, because that was all more or less volunteer driven, right?
Yeah.
So this is specifically for the mountain bike or the boardwalk.
Corp presented last night at our public service committee and talked about how they could build the trails for us through volunteer time.
So the trails that would be built would be through volunteers.
But this would be important for the say EMS access or other larger.
Yeah, so to safely get back to there's three knob.
There's two knobs that are away from any roadways.
So if someone were to get hurt in the back third knob.
EMS fire has to get back there to retrieve them.
So having an eight to 10 foot wide boardwalk to get our TV back there to safely get them out without getting stuck in the middle of March would be ideal.
So that's why we would like to see the boardwalk installed before anybody would open that pirate park up to residents for biking.
If you remember the image there's there's Greg touch. There's three knobs right in between those are wetlands, right? So it's hard to navigate to walk through there.
Then to try to go through on a bike.
It would be destructive to the ecosystem as well. Right. So part of this is we want to make sure that we're good stewards of our environment.
And so that boardwalk would get also the bicyclists motor.
Bike bikers to that park as well as again this park could be used for.
I mean, it's primary purpose is mountain biking, right? But people could walk in the opposite direction at the mountain bikers are on there.
And again, they could use those boardwalks again to get from hill to hill to get through that park as well.
And just to clarify, there will be some costs to build the mountain bike park.
Most of it can be accomplished through volunteer efforts, but there will be some.
Equipment that might need to be brought in to do some of the skills based things and other things that.
We don't really want to leave to volunteer efforts that we were on a contract with. So we're in the, again, the preliminary planning stages for the mountain bike park itself.
So that will there will be more to come on those costs as we have them.
Iver Munson Park is another park that we have.
This is Cradle Hill Park, the Windsor's Park, which is down to the south here where they have a splash pad and play amenities.
So we have took into account what is literally right next door in a park setting.
They've got some basketball courts as well there and some indoor restroom facilities.
We would build an additional softball field. I think it's 235 or 215 feet.
215 is the outfield fence, right? So we'll have that.
There'll be a parking lot as well as a couple pickleball courts.
And then an open air shelter very similar to like what we have across here in the park, right?
That we'll be doing. We'll have those, that similar concept throughout most of our parks, as well as then a port-a-potty enclosure.
So we'll have port-a-pottys there, but we don't want them just exposed.
We do get feedback from residents who live near that they don't want to see an unsightly port-a-potty.
So if we build a little enclosure, kind of like a garbage corral enclosure, if you picture that, only slightly taller, just kind of shields those port-a-pottys on a side.
So we do have that planned and then there'll be a big flexible open space as well that they could use for youth soccer or other amenities that the park programming that Reese might put on there.
We have shared that design with the developer down there.
They are wanting to have the park in and a plan in as they're building out the remainder of that development.
So that's what we have planned for next year.
Questions?
Facilities maintenance projects for next year.
We're looking at replacing windows at the PD fire department training room, which is directly to your right at the public safety building.
There's six windows left of the entire building that need to be replaced and looking at doing that.
Not on the screen.
This year we've had a lot of condensation issues with the ductwork running through the fire department and into the offices.
I just got a quote to insulate that duct works because it's condensating and dripping through the ceiling tiles and onto furniture and desks and stuff.
That is like $11,000 to insulate that.
Then looking to replace the carpet on the basement level of the library.
Looking at doing that like a three year plan with the library carpet replacement.
So this year would next year would be the basement level.
2028 would be the main level, mezzanine level and 29.
Finishing up the library lighting project and the mezzanine next year.
There won't be a whole lot left next year to finish for the lighting.
Some of this year's cost will go up another mezzanine as well.
So that's been a three year project as well finishing up.
Just to highlight when Greg added that in that's new, right?
So for the, the condensation, the ductwork, there's constant things that come up like this from a facility's maintenance perspective as well that we have to quickly decide is this.
It's evident that we need to take care of immediately or do we have a little time.
So this one will have a little time to make that adjustment and add it into next year's budget.
Jim has a question.
Yeah.
The question as far as like with the library carpet.
That's to me seems like a rather large bill for carpeting and I'm wondering how it gets there.
And I guess the little bit of a continuing question is, what are we replacing it with?
I know a lot of locations.
I guess even here it looks like there's maybe some sort of carpet squares.
So there is a way to replace individual things is that what we're going to and maybe.
Just seeing the thinking there in my view with a basement.
It's a rather large site community room.
Do we maybe just do the community room next year and not the hallways or vice versa or something.
So I think it was like three years ago.
We met with Jan and Krista and their library staff from Dane County.
And they came in and we got an estimate for carpet replacement.
I think it was like between four or 500,000 for the entire building.
So that's most likely we would be going with the carpet tiles.
For when we replace similar to what they did in their children's room.
The new scene area that they did those were carpet tiles.
So just moving all the.
The deaths and the books.
They'll have to do all that so that gets expensive as well.
So.
Carpet expensive.
Unfortunately.
Thank you.
Thanks.
So the we are continuing out of the stream bank stabilization project.
So we did phase one into this year. This is an image.
That is.
Where's this at?
This is a loose down.
So it is, you see the gray area.
That's all matting that has been matted all the way around here.
This is just an image that Greg took a head taken with the drone to show that.
So phase one and phase two are in the final phases of being wrapped up.
If you have a chance to go and look at it, we've done areas by Sunnybrook Park.
Also then a little further down by Woods Glen court.
This area then paradise court and then innovation driver.
The five areas we did this year.
So next year we plan to do further south of innovation drive and continuing on down that way.
We have all the way to Windsor road.
We won't get all of that in phase three.
So we'll get as much as that we can do.
We have about $800,000 budgeted for that.
We do have grants that we have received from the DNR.
A trim grant, which is the targeted runoff management grant is in the neighborhood of $600,000.
I think it was that we had that right or right.
No, there is to two.
Our first one first combined phase one and two was like 600,000 combined.
There are a third phase here.
I think we've got one grant so far secured.
It was like 200.
It's a trim grant.
It's 200,000.
We are meeting with Madison community foundation.
They did fund our first phase with $50,000.
So we'll we have a application into them.
They've given us the approval to proceed forward with the next step of that grant application.
So we'll be meeting them this week and then finalizing that grant application as well as then.
A service water grant application with the DNR is also being worked on.
So we are trying to get as many outside funds to help continue to fund this effort.
So it's not so much all in the storm water.
Road projects for next year.
Vinburn road reconstruction project from main street to North town road.
So that'll get all carbon gutter new road base storm sewer.
Some sidewalk additions.
Traffic signals that Vinburn road and North town road.
We've received over $2 million in grants for both the reconstruction and the signals.
And working hard at that.
York town road resurfacing project and then burn the Cleveland.
North view circle and court would be a resurfacing project up here off the North street.
Glenn road is a resurfacing project.
It's from our village limits to the dead end.
We'd be working with the village ones or the resurface there half of the road.
And then green acres reconstruction over here by cake parkway.
That's all dependent upon development.
If the developers decide to continue building out there.
We'll have to build that road.
And go ahead.
Hickory lane will be kind of a.
It's a this year project, but will be it'll probably be a two year project.
Continuing into next year.
These are all PASER ratings of four. So if you're newer to the board,
we have to go and rate every road and and PASER is what we use in the state of Wisconsin.
So a brand new road when it gets finished, it's a 10.
The very next year it becomes a nine just automatic.
But then we go and look at the road condition, how it what it's made of what it's count,
how it's was standing. It's a cracking.
That kind of stuff. So all of these are fours or four or five.
With the exception of green acres, that's a gravel road. So it's a one.
So that's we do we review them. Like I said, every year we drive every road in the village.
Give it a rating.
And then build our plans off of how those ratings are coming out. So.
Jan has a question.
I don't necessarily have a question. I just want to say always lots of road work.
And I just want to say it's very commendable that you've received these large grants.
And I imagine it took a lot of work to get those and I appreciate it. Thank you.
One way we can extend the life of a sewer and not have to do a full reconstruction,
meaning they go all the way down, pull the sewer out and put new one in is to do a lining.
So we, it's basically a fiberglass that's a sock that's put in.
They both steam and expands it out. Well, it's a cure and then it hardens around and makes it a brand new pipe.
You get a little less volume in that pipe by doing it. I mean,
very minimal, but it does extend the life of that pipe. So we've done it successfully.
And a number of pipes throughout the, the community. So we're looking to do that next year and South Hill street and metal lane.
That's about $192,000.
So this is the overview of our capital improvement plan for 2027.
Just kind of pretty much everything that we talked about.
I guess we didn't talk about the athletic complex sprinkler additions.
So that's just in the common areas. So as you walk in from the parking lot in between the ball fields,
there's green common areas that have not been sprinkled.
It would look much better if we can water that like we do the fields.
Just aesthetics would look good.
So last night at the public services committee, there was a question asked about how does this compare the total dollar on.
So again, I don't have enough room to put all this on here. This is a long document.
But in 2026, our budgeted amount for the CIP for a based upon the taxpayer borrowing contribution of that was 5,595,875 dollars.
For 2027, we have the taxpayer borrowing to be $4,212,158.
So it's down a little million.
So I'm going to stay within that and then really what Brandon says we can do.
He holds a first string so we don't really get to say.
And that those numbers are really streets projects and park projects, I believe.
Our total CIP was $15,000 or $15 million.
And that's not sure it will be $17 million.
Again, that, you know, a good tax for your borrowing is what I'm sharing with you.
Water, sewer, stormwater, those are all separate utility funds that have their own things.
And that doesn't account for all the grants that we've received.
I think that's it.
Right has a question.
Just a couple of questions. The 15,000 for the trailer seemed like.
Quite expensive to me.
Just wondering is that normal and like how does that compare to, let's say a replacement skid steer.
Replacement skid steer.
Yeah.
So a replacement skid steer.
They're about $80,000.
The trailers.
Actually, I was surprised on how cheap that trailer was for, I think it's a 16,000 pound trailer.
To heavy duty trailer tips.
I'm going to compare it to the one that's enclosed right at so much lighter.
Doesn't need to carry, it's not going to carry near as much weight as this other one.
So when you start to have something that can carry that much more weight, the cost goes up.
The steel is thicker to handle the towing and tonnage.
Yeah.
And then have you guys ever done like a cost comparison?
I was surprised to see that we exchange equipment every year.
If we waited two to five years, like what's a cost comparison on that matrix?
We could look into that.
It'd be significantly more.
We would be, we won't have warranty then either on the equipment.
So right now we've got two years, two, two year warranties on every, everything that we purchase.
If we wait, if we get out of that two year warranty, if there's something that goes wrong with that piece of equipment, we're paying for it right now.
If something goes wrong, we call it mid state and they come get it or we take it to them and say, hey, we need this fixed with no charge to us.
If we don't and it's out of warranty, then we're paying for it.
That's kind of the where we've seen the benefits.
Whereas we don't have the issues that we have to pay for.
We just call them.
And especially with our tool cats, we're driving those around.
All winter long, plough and snull through the salt, they get really rusty, especially after three to five years.
They just get really rusty and lose their money and have problems.
Yes, I wanted to bring up a question again that I brought up last night with the, I'll say the leaf truck.
Really, it sounds like to me like we, we've sort of outgrown one truck if we're just using the say the regular 15 mile per hour vehicle.
I questioned you Greg last night. I don't know if you had time to look into it in more detail.
Like what is the price comparison between say buying a standard sweeper with the spinning wheels versus this one.
And all if you could elaborate again, just how much more efficient this one is to.
Yes, so I didn't have time, but I believe the mechanical street sweepers are, you know, 350 ish 350,000 roughly.
Where that's just the mechanical. So that's when you're driving down the road, say during leaf season, it's going to leave a trail of leaves.
They're kind of grown up, which is not the, that's not what we want. We want it all picked up.
So a lot of times you're going in circles to pick everything up.
But this, the air vacuum sweeper is blown air down into the ground onto the asphalt surface and bringing pushing things back up into the hopper and sucks everything off off the ground.
We used it down Jefferson and doll drive.
It sucked asphalt chunks up off the ground.
It's clean when you're done.
You did not have paradise circle to right. I've done one of my long walks once and the part of my path is going through paradise circle.
I said, then that was the night before I came and I said, we should go down a paradise circle with this because there's a lot of debris and then it was perfectly clean when we got done.
I mean, it's got everything up and out of the curved line and as well off the road.
So I guess I wanted to bring that up because to me, that was a huge selling point last night where this is a big price tag.
But when you just look at the difference between the two, this is going to keep so much phosphorus out of the water and say even the random debris that's when we get flushed into our storm so we're now you won't have that asphalt chunk or whatever
but the air river. So I am very much for this, say a little bit extra for a nicer truck.
Well, you can also think of it as a multi-use tool where, yeah, we're sweeping. Great. Okay. Well, we can go hydro excavate a sign post instead of getting out the big jet back truck that's twice as big as this machine.
And you can also hydro excavate the storm and let's out and use both machines, the hot jet back truck and this machine to get the job done quicker too.
So it is a multi-use tool really, if you think about it.
Whereas a mechanical street sweepers, one time, one use machine.
Right.
To the tool cats and skid steers.
And we ever looked into leasing.
It's basically a lease.
Yeah, it's actually, I think, cheaper to do it this way than leasing.
But it's kind of like a lease similar. We own them.
Anything else anyone will switch departments.
Thank you gentlemen.
Thank you.
Next up for their initial budget presentation is recreation and community enrichment with Reese and.
Oh, you had already opened it.
All right. So.
So if you have been here the past, we have a very similar presentation. We did add something.
So Tricia is here to kind of give some more in depth of really what goes into special events, but our team really looks the same.
So it's me, Tricia and Sam. We have three full time employees.
We have 89 part time or seasonal employees that we work with throughout the year and then 18 contracted instructors that we also work with for our department.
Services that we operate. So we do all the recreation programming athletic. We do all of the.
Day to day operations of the athletic complex. All the maintenance and everything is done by the public service crew.
We do all the field rentals for all of the parks, manage the park rentals, the farmers market, community garden, special events and sponsorship.
And I kind of went through and started making some things that kind of go in between what myself, Sam and Tricia do.
And I'll note that I started making this list at 330 today. So it is as encompassed as I could make it in the short period of time.
So I know there's plenty of other things, but for the recreation programs for for myself.
I managed most of the adult programming and then any of the enrichment programs, which would be all of our one day wonder programs and preschool and school age in 2025.
That was roughly 283 programs for those programs. That means we're dealing with instructors, participants, rosters, equipment supplies, ordering, picking up, delivering, and sometimes even surprise instructing.
And then for programs, both Sam and I enter all of the reservations into the school district or whatever facility that we're using.
So as we have talked about before with facility needs, we operate the community room is our only facility for indoor programming outdoor programming. Obviously, we operate the fields.
But for any indoor programming, we have to go through a reservation process, which would be for cornerstone.
If we do use the library, which is rare.
And then mostly the school district. So kind of going through all of that. And then if there are changes, we have to modify all of those changes, final alternative locations and coordinate all those different different things.
We also work on the program guide, as I was mentioning before. So that's getting all the information together, double checking it all, then getting it put it over into our system, getting it to editing.
So all of that takes quite a bit of time and checking and I can tell you after staring at it for weeks on end, sometimes they all the words jumbled together and we still miss things during the editing process.
But, you know, we were pretty hard on it.
I'm on the lead for all of our registration software stuff for civic rec. So I've kind of, I guess I'm the OG for civic rec.
If there's a question in the office, I'm the person that's helping answer that question. I'm doing a lot of the setup for the programs or point of sales or any of the utilizations.
I make a lot of custom reports based off of what staff needs are for those things.
And then if someone has a, there's a help button on our registration software, which you think would be going to the software. Nope, it's to us.
So if someone can't figure out how to get into their account or they're looking to remove their child from a program or believe they're being charged a wrong rate.
They contact and that goes to Sam and myself and then we respond to all of those questions.
Also go through and handle all of the financial aid requests that go to Simone and myself and then we have to put that into the civic rec account as well.
And then we do that on an annual basis. So it goes August 15th, August 15th so that we can kind of coincide with the school district here.
And those requests have been increasing in the last few years. So those come in more and more.
Oversee the community, Gardeling had all the plot assignments, rule enforcement, communications, any general park rental questions.
So if someone we get actually a decent amount of requests to say, Hey, can I see the community room or I want to see what the concession stand looks like at Tierney park.
We schedule appointments with those people meet them at the location, show them the facility and then answer all of their questions.
Both Sam and I handle all of the field rental requests. Those can sometimes during the summer change on an hourly basis.
And then when those happen, we're getting those all corrected in the system and then coordinating with Keith and the parks crew to make sure that they know all of those changes so that everything's being done appropriately.
Sometimes we might get a call after hours if something wasn't done right and we might have to go in and actually adjust some of those fields to make sure that they're appropriate for for teams.
We, I review and try to find out efficiencies that we can have. So a couple of things we look to implement credit card refunds this year, which allowed us to say some staff time and money.
Instead of doing check refunds for every single one, which I mean, to create a vendor for every single refund. We had the mailing and the check print.
So now we're able to do some of those. And then we also were able to implement a method to have a more efficient volunteer background checks to be completed where it's actually done directly through the company that we use.
Making it so that it's a safer process where people aren't giving us their private information. We're implementing it into the system. It goes directly there. And then we just see the results from from those.
I work with Judd and Greg on park planning for future parks and then notify them if there's any needs for any repairs that people might notify us in the parks.
Approve all the department bills, handle all of the agreements and contracts that come before our department, the divorce, quick trip, athletic complex lease agreements, sponsorship agreements, event contracts, software contracts, executing facility use agreements for the user groups for the
athletic complex of village facility use agreements with the divorce yard. I generally oversee all of our pointer sale machines and software making sure to maximize our usage and not to incur an unneeded cost because you have to pay per machine that you have activated.
So we activate some machines during our higher use times and then deactivate them when it slows down a little bit, i.e. 4th of July, all of our machines are activated.
Then work on the budget, work on the on call phone for the athletic complex, which we have a rotating on call schedule between Judd, Greg, Sam and myself, which sometimes outside of our on call schedules, we make a call depending on what the need is for the facility.
If there's a maintenance thing, we might still be calling Greg or Judd for assistance. And if there's a staffing issue, they're going to be calling us.
And there's been a couple times this year where Sam and myself have had to be leads out of the athletic complex, just because we were having some staffing issues.
Reviewing all the sanction organization applications and then all of us handle all the weather cancellations, whether it's for events, programs or anything like that.
We often have a lot of conversations about kind of the decision and making sure that we're following best practices and policies.
And then we also all do invoicing for programs, park rentals, events, things like that.
And then I managed to make sure that we're not maintaining credits on any account because from a budgetary standpoint with the finance department, we don't want to be holding credits on people's account.
And then in a couple years, we're going to say, well, we want that money back and we got that money, you know, in 2024.
Sam oversees all the youth sports camps and adult programs are adult open gyms. There are a couple of youth enrichment programs that he was approached by and he wanted to maintain them.
So the example would be like the horse experience class. We, we run in 2025. That was 172 programs.
And that of that 172 programs, that's 148 youth sports teams. So that means that's coaches, meetings, equipment, bags, background checks, coaches, conduct equipment ordering, jersey, shirt ordering, game practice, scheduling,
inputting information into Mojo. It's now called Team Snap, which is a tool that we implemented for our leagues that gives coaches practice plan ideas video.
It shows them videos and drills. They can communicate with all of the teams and parents right there. All of their practices are inputted in their end games.
So when we do make a change, it automatically notifies the parents and they can see the location for that.
He does all the communication for tournament groups. Getting their schedules creates communication sheets, both for our staff and the tournament groups of who our staff is working, who their contact is going to be.
And then for our staff to know what the field setups need to be.
Creates the staff schedule for concessions dance, hiring, onboarding, training, retention.
And then, like I said, when we're short, sometimes we're out there.
Does all the concessions stand ordering, which includes taking weekly inventory, handles the field rental requests and other parks, light scheduling, the on call.
And then overseas travel leagues, which includes multiple communities where it's multiple teams and age groups where we're developing all of the schedules for that whole league scheduling referees and umpires.
Does the staff and committee and village board apparel order? So if anyone has done one of those Sam orchestrates, all of that he works with trending now to pick all the different pieces, make sure that we're getting feedback from everyone and what they're looking for.
He's also on the culture club, which does activities for staff across all departments.
And we all work with contracted instructors, making sure that they're getting paid and everything's being approved the program guide.
Trisha, like I said, she'll be talking a lot more about kind of everything that goes into special events.
And, you know, I truly believe that that's going to be pretty eye opening of what it takes, but kind of just to briefly go over some things outside of that would be the farmers market.
So it's updating the vendor application on an annual basis, reviewing applications and accepting or denying.
So we were kind of having a chat about this prior to coming in here of, you know, maybe we'll have 25 vendors every week for the farmers market.
But by the end of the year, we might have had 40 vendors because it's not like it's always the exact same vendors that are coming each week.
So it's kind of always a puzzle that you're moving pieces in and out and communicating with different people and making sure that we have a good selection and not over saturating one type of vendor develops special events for the farmers market marketing for the farmers market.
She does work with Stacy's team on banners and other marketing materials.
And then as a requirement for the farmers market, we do have to do an S to 40 form that we get all the vendors.
Yeah, number. And we have to record that to Wisconsin Department of revenue.
And then sponsorship making personal connections and growing relationships with sponsors.
So I think if we look at where our sponsorship has come in the last couple of years, you can see just that personal connection and how that has impacted.
One of the great things about having sponsors more sponsorships is, you know, it helps fund all the awesome things that we're doing.
But it's also more work to by having more sponsors because that's making sure that we're fulfilling all of those sponsorship agreements to, you know, what they said that they're going to get.
So it's a lot of coordinating with them, making sure that we have the appropriate artwork.
Everything's getting approved, developing and reviewing the sponsorship guide, working on renewals of sponsorships, submitting foundation requests for sponsorships and then working with Greg and Stacy on sponsorship signage and installation.
So there's just a couple things, not a lot, but that's what I could come up with in the hour that I was trying to think of this.
And, like I said, Tricia, we'll share some more, share more.
But here are some trends. We'll get into the boring numbers now.
So kind of looking at this is something that, again, as we've said, since we're about only halfway through the year, a lot of our numbers aren't finalized.
We haven't released our fall winter guides. So this is only programming through the spring summer.
But we're seeing, we were seeing an uptick. We were a little bit down last year.
I think we're going to be pretty close to last year by the end of this year.
There is a little bit of an anomaly we're seeing with some programming that we've canceled some programs that historically have been very good.
We've kind of felt that maybe it's some people feeling uncertain with the market.
And so we're kind of watching that. It's not a deforesting. It's definitely an industry thing that we've been talking about.
I'm still just kind of looking to see how the non-resident fee has impacted our program registration.
I wouldn't say that we've seen a big impact from it.
Again, looking at where we are at this point in the year, you know, I think we'll probably either be even or higher from last year.
So, you know, I think we'll be in a good spot.
We had approached the village of Windsor again at the end of last year.
Just to see if they were interested in reconsidering, giving a contribution and they were not interested still.
So we still encourage residents who reach out about it to talk to their elected officials.
Looking at our recreation program operations, you can see we work really hard to try to make sure we're bringing in more revenues than expenditures.
Anyways that we can save money for program equipment. That's what we're going to do.
And then we're trying to make sure that we're always covering all of our expenses.
This does not include full-time wages and benefits.
I feel usage rental breakdown. So in years past, I never put year by year side and by side.
So decided that would be a fun exercise to do this year.
And our usage is pretty similar. One of the things that, you know, I think was interesting.
All the board did approve a grace period for the already approved sanction user groups.
Only one returned.
And deforest or Windsor deforest baseball decided to not become a sanction organization.
So this year we've had three sanction organizations will have a fourth.
Deforest area youth football has submitted their application.
I just haven't had the time to fully go through their whole list of players yet.
So right now this has given us the opportunity where you can see we're getting some additional outside user groups that are coming in.
And then we have like the same usage for high school. I guess high school went up a little bit.
And our recreation programs went down a little bit.
And then you look at the cost of what each one of those groups are bringing in.
So the village still does subsidize $100,000. But I think an important thing to remember is that's not specifically just for field rental usage.
That's for all of fun to 30. So what's in fun to 30 is basically almost all.
It's all of our recreational programming or programming expenses.
All of our special events are in fun to 30.
And then we have the athletic complex and field rental.
So when you think about that we have over 200,000 in full time wages and benefits that are in fun to 30 and we're getting $100,000 from village taxpayers to help cover that.
I feel like we're doing a pretty good job in getting our revenues for events and rec programming to try to cover cover our costs.
So we continue to try to strive to getting fun to 30 to be fully sustaining.
And that will be our goal. But I just wanted to make that note.
But you can see. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Before you move on. Just the other category.
I just noticed it's a pretty large chunk of both the revenues and the usage breakdown can just give examples of what's included or what might be included in that.
So there's that would be all of our tournament rental groups.
So an example of why we would actually see also an increase for this year is we're hosting the Special Olympics fall games out of the divorce quick trip athletic complex.
So that's a really big deal, but any of the tournament weekends they're included in there. If they're not a sanctioned organization, they're included.
GRB rock sports group.
The Special Olympics. Those are all others.
Yeah.
Field rental revenues. So this is just a breakdown showing the difference between what we get at the divorce quick trip athletic complex compared to fireman's in you.
That really low blue line is fireman's in your horror and the upper line is what we get at the athletic complex.
So the reason you can see we did have we have gone down for fireman's in your horror is that we continue to look to put our rec programming at the local field here your horror fireman's and then we're having those user groups and others
using the athletic complex to try to generate that revenue because they're we're going to generate more revenue by that usage there than having recreation programs at that facility.
So that's why you're seeing that that big a big a difference.
We do still work with local nonprofits to do a concession profit share. This one helps us with a Gavin, you know, I forgot to tell you.
It gives us an opportunity to give back to the community for this facility while also helping us save some money on some staffing costs.
So we do not have to have as many staff out there by having those volunteers.
We still have, I believe it says eight or six. I can't I can't read it from here now.
Tournament's left so I know that that number is going to go up through through the rest of the year but it's been a great program and I think there's a lot of value.
I'm going to talk a little bit about this and I'm going to kind of turn it over to I guess I'll talk about this one next slide and then I'll turn it over to Trisha so I'm looking at our special events.
We always our goal is always been to bring in enough revenues to cover our expenditures for those events and and you can see that we have done that over the past five years so there is a little bit of a bigger gap here and I believe that that is because we received
a firework sponsorship from quick trip in the calendar year 2025 but really it was for 2026. The agreement now is that they'll pay on the calendar year for that going forward.
But I know Trisha works very hard to make sure that we're staying within our budget and giving us cost savings. However, we can.
So I kind of did this graph here on some of my bigger events that I do throughout the year there. Can I interrupt you for just a second.
I remember being on the board when we created the position and I wondered at the time if we really had enough stuff going on and clearly we do.
How long ago was that? How long have you been here?
Just about two and a half years at all.
And I do about, I think it's about 2324 events that I do throughout the year so these are just some of the real high level events that I do that take a lot of my attention throughout the year not to say that some of the smaller events don't take my attention as well.
But I wanted to kind of show throughout the year like where a lot of my time is being spent and when these events are kind of happening.
So I'm just kind of a visual person and I thought it would be nice to kind of show you two of them. I know are two really large events and I know a lot of people are always thinking like 4th of July is such a large event.
And I'm always like, no, dragon art fair is like the beast. Literally, it's a dragon and it takes a lot of my time because I am working on that event all year round.
That event is in June and I'm already, you know, I'm going to art fairs on the weekends now trying to get new vendors for next year.
So I'm working on the contract to start opening that in October. So I'll start reviewing applications here starting in the fall already, you know, trying to plan out next year's event.
So dragon art fair is very, very large. I'm sure you guys have been to it, but you know, I've grown it to over, you know, 140, I think I had 147 artists this year with 167 booths.
We added more performances. We've added a kid zone and things like that. So it's just really growing a lot.
Farmers market. Same thing. I know Reese kind of talked about it briefly, but it goes 20 weeks.
I opened that in January looking for vendors. I know a lot of people are always looking wanting more produce vendors. Well, there's not a lot of produce vendors out there.
It's hard to get vendors to come with the produce. So I'm, I'm emailing them. I'm trying to research, trying to find out where they are and trying to get new ones because if you bend to our farmers market, we don't have the same produce.
We have like one or two that are the same this year. Otherwise, I have a couple new ones. There's a lot of new vendors this year because they, they change.
But the farmers market, you know, trying to come up with new ideas for events.
And then, you know, this year we found out we weren't going to have a farmers market manager and, you know, that's an important person to have on site. I don't want to be here all day long and then out at the farmers market at night to on Tuesdays.
And it's a very important thing. I think our community really loves having our Tuesday night farmers market and it runs all summer long and just trying to attract all different types of our residents to come down of all ages and abilities and things like that.
So, you know, I hear people from other communities are like, wow, your market is really thriving compared to my community. I come to divorces farmers market versus my own in my community because it's better years. So, and that's just great to hear that way.
And then Fourth of July, I mean, that's like a great event. We've really, you know, took that over from the chamber.
It's a large event with attendance. There's a lot of moving pieces in a short period of time and there's a lot of dollars to be spent, you know, in that event.
And, you know, we have all the other little events, some of the other events that I don't have up there.
You know, I do like the shop local event. This year we're adding a skate with Santa.
You know, I do make music day. That's another one that we've done over the years.
This year I took on the America 250 mural project, which was, you know, it's a beautiful project, but it was a lot to take on.
And, you know, I work with the public work guys. They were great with helping me, getting that project completed.
And the library was supportive with helping me make the missing tiles that people didn't finish and return.
So that was like a lot. So, and then sponsorship.
I mean, I literally right after Yohara Riverfest, I sit down with Stacy and we go through and kind of review all of our marketing
for for the summer. And then we start planning out our the next year already because I'll start reaching out to sponsors starting in like November,
because a lot of businesses will be working on their budgets just like we are for 2027 in November and December.
So I'll start reaching out emailing and it sometimes takes two emails or more and I'll set up meetings.
So I'll be setting up meetings with them to have coffee or wherever they're businesses and things like that to build that relationship to get the sponsorship dollars.
So I mentioned to Reese today, like if you I have like a big Excel spreadsheet.
And when I came on board two years ago that spreadsheet that there was not a lot of businesses listed if you pull up that spreadsheet today.
There's a lot on there. So, I think this year, year to date, my goal for special events just special events was 53,900.
And my actual year to date right now, which with the holiday tree event coming up, I'm at seven without the holiday tree, which would add quite a bit.
So it's not included yet with all the sponsors. I'm at 70730. So I'm, that does include quick trip, but I'm still even above and beyond that with the quick trip included in there.
So, and I'm not even done with the year. So I, and that doesn't include farmers market and farmers market. I was able to get some grants.
I was able to succeed with all the sponsorship dollars with that as well. So, but I guess some of my bigger challenges are is there's just a lot going on volunteers.
You know, I work with the high school with some of their organized organization groups, but you know, there's just not, there's a lot going on.
And so like, you know, these are all the hats that I wear with my job. And sometimes I can't, I can't mold myself to be in all those different places throughout the day. So, or at the event or.
Yeah, so.
You have any help?
Well, I did have, I had Gavin last year, which he was an amazing intern and then I had Carly, which is another intern and then sometimes the front land staff will help a little bit.
And then we, I do have like our team, but we're all busy, all of us in our department. There's just the three of us.
And this time of year or throughout the year, we're super busy. So it's just not a whole lot of help. I was very fortunate that with the mural that I had two artists that were local and they were amazing.
Otherwise, I don't think I would have been able to do that mural by myself, unfortunately. So that was Jan Hoffman.
Uh, Jan Hoffman and. Sorry. No, not. I can't think of the other girls name, but yeah, I had two. They did the direct two of them did drag and so.
But yeah, Jan was amazing. She spent many, many, many hours helping her.
I was an amazing project. And we'll see.
Oh, I'm sorry.
I wanted to say Tricia, I was skeptical when we were developing your position.
Me too. And, and you have proven us wrong or me wrong. And I want to say that I am.
I am really happy with everything you've done and the hard work you've put in and all the success you're having and how you are growing these numbers. So thank you.
I just want to second. I mean, we don't, you know, I sit in my seat and I get requests for staff every year.
And we know for a while what the financial impact of adding a staff.
All time staff, part time staff with benefits and not the focus in front of you here.
But I also have these conversations with fire and and library and and the community center.
And so we don't take it lightly when we come up here to ask you to support a position being created, especially because we know that that the objective is to minimize impact.
To the taxpayers and get as much as we can get from the current staff that we have.
And you'll see this and you'll hear from each of the department heads about this.
But we, but these are results or challenges of a growing community, which have growing demands, right?
And not that it's just related to population.
And it's related to expectations. And so these are things that we are hearing.
These are things that, you know, we try to provide as a staff.
And I think, I think just like you, we get very great comments from the population of the services that we provide.
And so, you know, you've heard me say this before and I'll say it again that these are very good issues to have.
And so we will continue to work towards that.
And it's our intention to try to level out the financial impacts so that we're not necessarily having those peace and values.
And so we asked that, you know, as you consider the budget, remember these conversations that we have here and be mindful of that.
Thank you.
I do have a question on the presentation. Could we go back to the field rental revenues?
So, of course, we've shown the athletic complex and it's doing very well.
And then there is the line with the firemen's and yajera, what we're getting for revenue there.
Is that because those fields are sitting nappy used a good amount of time or is it because we charge?
We don't charge very much for them.
It's twofold. We don't charge as much for those fields, but it's primarily record like village recreation programming that's on there.
So we're not, I'm not counting the revenue there because I'm not taking the program registration fees and putting that towards the revenue.
That's counted towards like our overall revenue and expenses for recreation programs.
So this is just outside like sanctioned groups or other groups that are renting it that are not part of our village programming.
Okay, so they are being used a lot.
Oh, and that was just going to lead to my next question is then is it necessary that we have another ball field at the iverse months in park.
It sounds like we need it.
Yeah, so we, we often, I mean, every night, I don't know if we have an open field.
Rarely do we have an open field during the summer.
Okay, thank you.
Anybody else have questions?
I've got some more slides.
Oh, sorry. It's okay.
I'm almost there.
Yeah.
So looking at forecasting of what we see.
And as no surprise, we are asking for a part time recreation coordinator kind of hearing all the things you talk about.
Patricia have help.
This is what we're looking. We want to have someone year round.
We have been very fortunate to have had Gavin two years ago and and Carly our last year and having Carly this year.
Carly has been intermittent because she's also a tennis instructor for us.
So we haven't even been able to have her as much as we had Gavin.
And oftentimes for interns, we're not getting them in until May and like we are so deep and thick into the woods of things that may that it's very hard to be bringing someone on boarding at that point, trying to train them, getting them up to speed to be helpful.
When we have a major event happening in two weeks from that period of time.
So we're looking to have someone that's year round to be able to also help us with some office coverage.
So, you know, as I was mentioning through those lists, like, there are so many just little tasks that have to be done that are so time consuming.
It's making vendor sheets.
It's making lanyards.
It's making equipment bags.
Pretty not roster reports, like all of those things are not challenging things, but being able to have one more hand to be able to take some of those tasks off.
You know, it would be huge. You know, I ran an hours report.
Just a little bit ago in between our meetings and between March 1 through to July.
Our department had 280 additional hours that we worked.
And that was mostly over half of it was Tricia.
And you can see that's because of the events and that we are working at those events later.
And, you know, we try our best to be able to flex out our hours for our own, like, mental health and well being.
But it is just not possible when we get to be spring summer.
Because there's just so much so many things happening at that time.
So being able to get another person in to have a support and have your round get that institutional knowledge.
I think will be huge and allow us to one looking to maybe transfer the farmers market off of Tricia to give her some more time to be able to focus on all the other events.
Because all of those the farmers market starts in June, dragon art starts in June.
You know, the special events are in June. So like all of those things, all of our summer programming starts in June.
They all happen within two weeks period of time and to have three people trying to get all those things started at one time is very challenging.
And then the one way that we are looking.
So all of our basically, as I mentioned before, most of our budget is all in fun to 30, which is a special revenue fund that has just $100,000 of taxpayer money that goes towards it.
We would look to reallocate the money that we have for like summer health, that internship position.
And then we would look to use additional hotel revenue tax that we would be getting in to pay for the rest of that position, keeping it at all and fun to 30.
And the 13,300 is the additional amount would needed. It would be on the highest end of what we would look to have as a pay range. So we would look to have a pay range of 20 to $25 an hour is what I've proposed at this point.
And when I took those hours of additional, it's about 20 hours a week additional. So that would be perfect to help with this person.
Facility needs, as I was talking about before, we're continuing to just kind of monitor that. We're really working to try to get the school district into a facility use agreement, just to get us a more concrete level.
They have agreed saying that they're not going to start charging us for their facility usage for this school year still the upcoming school year.
But their budget cycle is different. There's an R. So they go July to June, and we go January to December.
So we're just continuing to try to have those conversations as I've explained to them that that's very ambiguous for us to be kind of left in the position always.
So we have shared some examples and we're working through that. And then hoping to kind of try to get through. We do have that facility use agreement with the divorce yards to.
But I believe that they don't have as part of their agreement. The gym area wouldn't be finished until 2029, I believe. So we've got some years to kind of fill in and hopefully to get us through and continue to try to work to make sure we're getting enough space for what we need.
Biggest general fund impacts that we're looking at is there is a international festival and events association conference.
So with everything that Tricia does looking to give her the opportunity to be able to go at that and see how we can have like efficiencies or improve and things that we can learn from there.
We there could be an opportunity for us if needed where we would maybe not become a member for that association for the first year, but still allow Tricia to attend that conference as a non member.
It's obviously more expensive as a non member.
But we believe that that would be invaluable opportunity for her and then both Sam and I have certifications that were required to have so many continuing education units per year.
To be able to maintain those certifications. So we did, I did bump up the travel just a little bit as hotels are getting to be more expensive and everything just to make sure that we're covering our actual expenses.
And there we go. Any other questions?
Anyone?
I guess not.
Perfect.
Ladies.
Thank you.
Does anybody need a five minute break?
All right, we're going to take a five minute break.
Okay.
After our little five minute break, we will resume with old business.
We have none new business 9.1 discussion regarding virtual meeting format and public commenting policy bill and Cali are nothing.
All right. So I will start this off.
The reason that I wanted to put this on the meeting or on the agenda was just to start the conversation.
If there was any changes to the virtual formatting that the board wished.
To happen on the main reason for this was on May 5th, our village board meeting was hacked.
That's not the first time that it has been hacked. We've had.
At least for incidents within the village board meeting and the planning and zoning has also.
Been hacked or hijacked or however we want to talk about it.
Also, there was an incident at the CDA meeting, but the staff were able to shut the meeting down before anything happened.
So with that in mind.
It has been brought to the attention that possibly moving to a zoom webinar format.
Maybe more secure for these purposes.
There's a couple of differences between the web the zoom meeting and the zoom webinar.
We currently use the meeting according to my Google search.
The meetings are more ideal for smaller meetings office between departments and things of that sort where the webinar is utilized for more of a town hall format.
Community events, things of that sort with a web with a zoom meeting.
There's a coast and co host that we have and then participants who would be anybody in the public.
They can come in as you see here. We can see that who's in the meeting on the side there.
With a webinar, there would be a host co host and then panelist and then attendees.
So the public would be brought in as an attendee.
As an attendee, they're there just in a view only state.
If we did have people that were wanting to attend to give presentations.
Any of our contractors or developers or things of that sort.
We have the ability to send them a separate link that they would be able to access the meeting to present their information.
That is really the main differences with the two formats.
I also have spoken with some other municipalities in the area to see how everybody else is handling this because we are not the only people that have had our meetings hijacked via zoom in some of my conversations that I've had with other
municipalities.
Some of them have gone to web to the webinar because of the same reasons of their meetings have been taken over very inappropriately.
A couple of them do not allow virtual public comment because of that reason.
Other ones do allow it.
I have found some one community.
The virtual comment is reserved only for the city residents or landowners or businesses that lease properties throughout the community.
One option that we would have with.
Public commenting, which I know is a large portion of our meeting is.
We would need people to fill out the public speaking form and have that emailed to me ideally having some form of a deadline attached to that so that I can ensure we're able to allow them.
And then we need to see how the counter-center access during the meeting and we can match up names and make sure one problem or downfall with that is we really never know who anybody is.
Anybody can access our form.
Anybody can make up a name, use that same name.
be inappropriate during the meeting.
It's a risk that happens no matter what format we would be using,
because in this day and age, a lot of people want to remain anonymous
or use nicknames and we don't know who they are
or what's going to happen when that microphone is turned on on their end.
So, the other thing with Zoom Webinar is there is those built-in security measures
with people not being able to turn things on.
With Zoom meetings, it is staff that are changing those settings for every meeting.
We can't, through the platform, we cannot go in and set those to be permanent.
So, there is always the risk that some button might not get toggled,
because we're just humans trying to do our best job.
So, yeah, that is about all for my...
Can you provide some information or provide us with the process,
which, you know, how does a entity get into the system?
What happens during a meeting time if our system is hijacked?
And then what potential implications are there to the folks that may already be in the room?
And then how do we deal with that?
Sure. So, I'll just go by what happened May 5th when we were in our meeting here.
We have to shut the meeting down immediately.
And then after that, we now have to create a new link within the Zoom platform.
We publish that onto our agenda that is posted on our website.
If we have presenters that are in that meeting or board members or staff,
we have to now make sure that they are able to get that link so that they can get back into the meeting.
And same with the public. The public will need to re-navigate through that process to get back to the link.
We won't... Our meeting at this point, you know, has been hijacked.
We cannot say, oh, just hang on, we're going to end this meeting and you'll find our new link here.
We wouldn't... We can't do that and we wouldn't want to do that because we also have a hacker in our system.
So, there's a lot of staff time that goes into it in doing that and it ends our meeting for 10, 15 minutes while we get all reorganized.
It makes things run much more inefficiently.
And we are recording our meetings.
So, we now have a public record that consists of whatever somebody wants to put through.
So...
And I had a comment. The other thing, when that happened, I made that we had to physically shut the computer down, right?
He had taken control of that computer. He was still on there even after I powered it down and I thought I powered it down.
I didn't... I had to physically unplug it to turn it all the way off.
Had that actor wanted to implant something, he's now into our system, which makes us vulnerable to cybersecurity risks and other things, right?
Because he's into our system, right? It's just like somebody hands you a hard drive, you know, a thumb drive.
You should never put that in your computer because you don't know what they put on there.
That can infect your machine, which can infect our entire network.
That gentleman could have done that exact same thing to us and caused ransomware.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars of expenditure just to get them to release our information back to us.
So, that is another risk that we have by having it open with Zoom and human error or he was super smart.
As soon as they accept him in the meeting, I mean, he was doing three things behind the scenes super quick and then he had control of everything.
There was nothing to do but to shut it down.
It's not... It's highly intelligent or knowing how to do these things, the type of people.
It's not that you and me that are going to more than likely do this.
Except Reese might. She's very, very smart techie.
Again, I just want to reiterate, it's not that we're trying to scare you.
It's more reducing risk and liability in addition to running efficient meetings.
And this is, again, the start of the conversation, right?
You as a board will need to make the decision of how do we balance, you know, public commenting with risk.
And how do we go about that?
Is it, you know, what are the choices here? Is it the webinar?
Is it a panelist?
Is it asking for more information and implementing a stronger policy for providing information for whoever wants to provide public comment?
Do we go out there and look for a program that is a little bit more secure and is more open to public meetings or may cost more?
Those are all, I think, options on the table here, including what was suggested to have public commenting in person.
So, again, start of the conversation. We need some direction here.
If it's going to impact the budget, it's something that we need to get into the budget as we plan for next year.
It's a bit of a question, I think, around staff presentation yet, and I don't want to forget about the public appearance.
But I do want to add this, say, to the staff because the planning and zoning meeting that got taken over my memory of it, it was very close to the end.
So we pretty much ended the meeting rather than restarting it, say, for the three minutes that was left.
Why bring that up, too? It was lucky it was at the end.
I think we had public hearings earlier in that meeting.
If that would have happened before, that potentially could have shut down public hearings that need two weeks to be posted,
so it could potentially delay developers or whatever we had a public hearing for.
And I'm assuming this would not limit, like, let's say I was sick, had to stay home for a board meeting.
I could be entered in as a panelist, it sounds like, and not because otherwise we wouldn't be able to ask questions or speak or attend a meeting.
You're correct.
Yes, so I would need to know prior to if you if we went with this format and you weren't able to attend.
Personally, I can send you the link that would allow you to access the zoom meeting as a panelist.
So you would be able to unmute yourself, turn your camera on.
Comment is needed.
Okay, gang, I have a public appearance and she's been waiting.
So, well, sorry.
So, come on up and then we'll get to this question after that.
Just give us your name and municipality for the record, please.
Yes, my name is Lindsay Fry.
I'm a divorce resident.
Thank you so much for the.
Are you serious?
Did it all go away?
There it is.
Thank you so much for all of your time today and thank you for some of that clear clarifying information that we were recently hacked.
I mentioned that I've been waiting to two hours to speak and I understand that you have other things that you need to get done.
I normally on a day when I'm working cannot sit here for two hours.
If people have kids, if they're sick, this zoom option or some sort of.
Way to speak online.
In my opinion, it just needs to happen.
So, and I'm also glad to hear because another question I had is have we reached out to other villages because I know want to key has a similar.
Webinar and I think they allow people in with raising hands and another.
Big issue that I have is I feel like when I email, it's not conveying the same message to you.
I can all I can email all of you and if a big issue arises with a data center.
I think you guys were so swamped that I never got messages back rarely did I get a message back.
So, I really think this public comment needs to stay.
Available to people.
And because people just can't wait for two hours. We just can't.
I understand I don't want people attacking us. I get that.
But there's got to be an in between because I'm really afraid that if you shut down this public online comment, people are going to think that you're doing it purposefully to try to be just and pull back.
And the trust is not going to be there.
So, I think since I saw some things honestly for the cost, which makes me know that I need to start paying better attention.
If we can get a leaf blower or a leaf sucker up that sucks up cement, we can add more money in our budget so that I can be at home or other people who have health problems can be at home and address you.
And address you and speak to you.
That's just is not for me an issue.
I think you I know you guys work really hard paid on paid.
I really think you but I really think this needs to stay open.
The trust.
I think you're going to lose a lot, a lot of trust if it goes to know online speaking.
Thank you.
Thank you, Lindsey.
Um,
I guess I'm sure it was registered.
She was here, but I don't see her anymore.
I believe she left.
Yes.
All right.
Then we'll move on to, um, that's the end of our public parents.
This correct.
We'll move on to discussion by trustees.
I saw her first Melanie.
Yeah.
I appreciate Lindsey. Thank you for the public comment.
I share the concern about restricting the public comment feature on the virtual format.
Zoom webinar is something.
It's like the bane of my existence.
I have to use it a lot for my job.
So I'm very familiar with that platform and I use it regularly and I'm the admin setting up meetings.
And so I know that there, you know, we use it for union bargaining where we want members to be able to observe and.
Watch the proceedings and then we also want control over when they're speaking because we have time that we're like on the record and we don't want disruption. So.
Attendees do have like the host will have the ability to mute and unmute attendees.
So we don't have to restrict comments through that option.
And I think with some of the security issues that we've had in particular, it's not so much an issue of like.
Someone's being unmuted and saying stuff. It's like they're literally hacking the system. And so it's an entry issue and like a security issue of who's actually getting into the meeting, which as we all know is very challenging with meetings that have to be public.
Just by their nature, as you pointed out, we can't be restrictive of who we're letting in necessarily.
Or did I write down my notes.
So just some ideas. I mean, I know we're just discussing today. So just some things that are bouncing around in my head.
Having the registration form ahead of time through the zoom registration, you can also require pre registration. I'm not super in favor of like making residents jump through more hoops to participate in virtual meetings, but that's a feature that is something we could potentially explore.
And then also, I know that there is a screening feature where you're able to chat with individual attendees. And so it's a function that I use as an admin because I need to know often who's in the meetings that I'm hosting.
And so you can chat individually with people if they're not clearly identified to be able to say, you know, hey, your full name needs to be showing or whatever you can change their name once they communicate with you.
And then it gives you the ability just to match, you know, say who registered on the form with who's in the meeting.
Again, we can never fully control people's actions. But anyway, just some things that I'm thinking about completely recognize the liabilities and the risks of people hacking into meetings and how destructive and potentially costly that could be.
But I agree, we have to find a solution that preserves the public comment because to me, that's the whole point of a public meeting.
And if we're going to have it accessible online, it should be just as accessible and easy for people to participate as it is in person. So that's where I'm going to stand on any sort of solution.
Thank you, Alicia.
I think I'm more of the opinion that I'd like staff to look at other options for platforms that are outside of zoom to integrate with public meetings.
I had the opportunity to sit in a meeting with someone about a public platform that does, you know, hold meetings that integrates with our system.
And so, you know, had the meeting got to just see everything except the cost.
So, which, of course, I think that's going to be the big elephant, right? Like, as we look towards the future, knowing that probably people's availability to come in person is going to be more limited.
What can we do more so to expand public input and, you know, and see if the juice is worth the squeeze, like if it's worth the costs to see what those programs are, I would like to see us actually move that route to be more innovative and look at the cost of some of those platforms, which I did email over.
So, thank you.
Wayne, you had your hand up before these two started.
Yeah, so I kind of echo that. I think we need to keep public comment open.
I happenstance.
Talk to somebody that works with the account.
They use the webinar format.
It sounds like they're able to control it pretty well.
There are more. There are a few more hoops to jump through, but if, I guess, in my opinion, if that's what we had to do to keep things a little more secure than so be it, you're still allowed to make your comments.
You just have to give a little more information.
Jump through a couple more hoops.
And the other scenario is if there are any other formats that we can use that aren't, you know, $10 million.
That kind of thing. So, yeah, I guess that's kind of my stance on it.
Right.
So one of the things before I started, I was always, I would look at our surveys that we sent out and we get 137 responses of, you know, 13,000 people living here and annoyed me because I'm like, why can't we get people involved?
So I think we struggle as any community does, you know, the increase or even in participation already that I think this turns the wrong direction.
If we were to limit public comment, we don't want to go backwards.
You know, we have a goal of transparency, encouraging people to get involved in, like, we've heard trust and local leadership and the community is at the all time goal right now.
So I don't think limiting anything that we do is going to be beneficial to any of us.
So I would like to see, you know, ways that we can increase security.
I think one example is we can say if you're doing a presentation, you have to be here.
We're not going to release control.
We're not going to give you access to control anything from outside.
We're going to unmute and mute people as necessary, but you don't get control, you know, because I think that was one of the issues that we had.
So I think there's a lot of things you can potentially do.
I don't know what those all are, but I think doing that research would be beneficial and, and obviously security posture.
It's, it's a lot of, it's everything for us right now.
But I think COVID has taught us that it taught us a lot of things, but we can be nimble.
We can do things remotely better than we've ever been able to do before.
There's a lot of options out there.
We need to encourage participation and not try to limit it at all.
So I think also having people register online to speak or email and get a link.
I think it's going to be a lot of work for Kelly or whoever's in that position doing that work to get that out.
And then you have, you know, four days to do it.
One, the agenda comes out.
People know it's there having to review it, having to get the time to be able to say, Hey, I want to speak on this and get a separate link.
I think that's going to be too cumbersome for, for anybody to do.
And then making sure that we have everybody and who do we let in.
Do they have their name actually on there?
I know some people or the older generation that I work with struggle to put their name up in a work setting, let alone, you know, public comments if they want to be in there.
And they don't use a computer very much.
So having them have their first last name can sometimes even be a challenge, just a normal day to day business.
So I just struggle with how do we make that work by not limiting their ability to speak.
Thank you. Anybody else, Jim?
I just going to state that in my opinion, it is not an option to not have a virtual participation.
I think that's very important.
A lot of things that's already been said tonight.
I work in the public.
I don't know if our meetings are quite posted like.
Say as often as they are here, but I mean, all of our meetings are public to at the DOT.
And how you I brought this up at a managers meeting and we were everybody else in the room is sort of stunned that this happened.
So I don't know why shouldn't say this, but why doesn't happen at the DOT?
Oh, we use MS team. So I don't know if that's just a more secure format.
So like other people said, I think we maybe need to look at different formats.
I personally wouldn't be opposed if we need to send out links ahead of time.
If that's the only way we can get around it, but yes, it would be very cumbersome.
So I'd rather hope that there's other ways that we can do it.
It sounds like we've got experience with that.
Yeah, I was just I'm sorry. I was just going to clarify.
Were you done, Jim? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off.
I have more, but you can go ahead.
I did want to speak to as far as like sending emails.
I know say, but the data center and many other topics that we have.
We do get it and deleted with emails, but I can tell you I read them.
I don't necessarily respond to them.
I should qualify that because I do work say Tuesday.
So if you send me something Tuesday at three, I'm not necessarily going to read it before we get to the meeting,
but I do read them. I don't always reply because often the emails are sent to the whole board.
So I figure when that happens, I guess this is for anybody listening to.
I tend to think that that's something for bill or staff to respond to rather than myself.
But if you ever want a response directly from me, just make sure that put my name like in the title.
So I think that's all I can.
I can leave it at that right now.
All I was going to add was just that the registration piece I was talking about with webinar,
the platform will send out the emails. It wouldn't be a manual process for staff.
You just register and then after you register, Zoom will automatically send the registrant the link to their email address
so that you have to pre-register.
Also in favor of exploring other options, but that's a potential workaround to assume.
Thank you.
Dan, did you want to say something?
Yeah.
So first of all, I want to say to Lindsay, I'm sorry if I didn't reply to you on the QTS stuff.
We did get nailed on those.
Nailed.
Hundreds and hundreds.
So anyways, I'm sorry, I tried to reply.
And anyways, I just want to say that I am pretty much in agreement with what everybody else is saying.
Here's our trustees.
I am not a very technical person in this area.
All I know is I do have to do a fair amount of webinars and I am not in the admin part.
I'm just there.
And I know that they all do seem to have a little bit different format.
And there are different ones out there.
Like I forgot about the teams one, but there's that out there and so forth.
So maybe it's looking at a different format.
And I know that with many of them, it's just you.
They just unmute you.
I mean, they have control that when I go in, I'm muted automatically.
And I can't say anything.
So I don't know.
I guess we maybe just need to look at that a little bit more.
I don't understand the hacking part and how that plays into this because I'm not it.
But I'll let you guys figure that out.
Kelly wants to say something.
As for the links.
The only links that would be sent out would be to a staff member that needed to attend virtually to a board member.
We do have on our website a public commenting form that we currently require people commenting in person.
To fill out to be part of the public record.
So my suggestion would be to have that form also filled out by somebody that wishes to comment virtually.
However, if possible to put a timeline or a deadline on that form being sent out because it is emailed to me.
And so I have time to print it process, you know, make sure I have it here so that we can.
If we to say use will zoom webinar match up the names.
And if, you know, there's somebody we think we can.
From my understanding on zoom webinar is the person in charge of the meeting would be able to.
There's a question and answer area Q&A that is just between the moderator of the meeting and the participants.
To verify that's the same person or is.
Whoever they say and my two senses I too am not in favor of limiting.
Public comment, but I think we need to look at some alternatives.
Look at if.
I guess I want to speak as far as like our IT system and I guess I'm looking at job because I don't know exactly how this all works.
But if it's more secure if we create like a second system.
So when we're like in this room, if it gets hacked, it's a single computer rather than having it anywhere connected.
To our same main hub and just maybe we have to thumb drive in our presentations is to make sure that we're secure and not getting to our data.
Certainly something we can explore.
This is I have not put out the RFP for the new equipment in this room yet.
So this could be one that is could be a part of that RFP that might have.
Other suggestions from vendors that say, Hey, these are things that other.
Disabilities have used for public comment.
We may be able to get additional information back for that.
They may then suggest we have this as its own.
Separate. It's not connected to our network. It's just a.
Computer here that just connected to the Internet and that's all it has.
That would be work for staff differently just to make sure we can get to the.
Our materials that we need.
But it's certainly something that's doable.
Okay, I think we've had a discussion bill. Go ahead.
Yes, I just want to clarify. Well, maybe propose something here is that in the short term,
we take a look at some of the parameters needed to create a public commenting process through the webinar zoom webinar and be able to.
To propose that to the board, what those steps and procedures are.
And then long term look at potentially what it may cost for a software.
Update platform update for the long term.
And it could be that if the webinar and the new process works,
we don't have to necessarily continue on at least open those options up for us as we make decisions on the budget.
Okay, let's move on.
Well, I was just going to say that I like that, but I would hope that would include what judge said that maybe it's a more secure system here.
Yeah, well, consider, I mean, the security item, I think we'll consider separately as part of the budget.
Something that we're going to have to consider anyway with the equipment that we're looking to update in this room.
Okay, nine point two is resolution 2026 094 resolution authorizing the village administrator to execute a request for release of funds and certification.
Staff presentation by Alex, who's going to keep it short.
Yeah, so this is a process that unfortunately we've gone through twice already.
This will be the third time that we've.
Same set of activities. The main change here is to the exhibit. So whoever's got the mouse, if you could just scroll to the exhibit real fast.
Essentially in box number three, there's a required identification number or request identification number.
We previously had a number in there.
I had access to remove it and go through the public comment period again. So we did.
Motion will approve second.
I did click.
That makes a motion.
Discussion.
All right, no discussion.
All those in favor indicate by saying aye.
Aye.
All those opposed no.
Motion carries unanimously.
Resolution 2026 095 a resolution authorizing the village presidency sign the relocation order.
The Vinburn Road project.
Yes, I will try to make this as brief as I can.
So with the Vinburn Road project and because we have Department of Transportation funds that are also tied federally, we have to follow all of their parameters.
So there are 10 affected properties that have temporary limited easements or TLEs that will impact their property, meaning we are temporarily on their property.
In the end, ultimately, just probably re grading the property. So it ties into the improvements that we're making with the Vinburn Road project.
But because of that, we have to go through a relocation order process.
If it's a full relocation order process, that means you're buying a house and moving somebody.
We're not doing that with this one.
This is simply for TLEs, but we still have to follow the same thing.
So the first step in this process is once we get a signed DSR from the DOT,
Colleen can then sign the relocation order.
So you're giving authorization for her to sign that.
Then that gives me the authority after a sales study is completed to go and work with every affected homeowner and offer them a nominal payment
for the temporary impairment on their property.
If that doesn't work, they have the right to get a full appraisal done.
We have to pay for that appraisal. They can get a second one that they pay for and then come up with their value for those costs and all that.
Long and short of this relocation order authorizes me to start that process.
Again, once DOT gives us a DSR to get officially to 60% plans, and then I can begin that real estate process.
Anybody have any questions?
I suppose I should ask versus there's a motion to approve 20-26-095.
We have no public appearances.
Thank you, Brad.
Is there a second?
We'll mix it up a second.
Thank you, Melanie.
Second.
Discussion?
Go ahead, Jim.
As it's going to add a bit to a judge, as far as a relocation order, that's a term that's been around a long time, and that does not mean necessarily relocation.
That just means the availability to be able to condemn property if there's not a willing seller, so this is a necessary step.
I do want to say, though, that there was a public informational meeting approximately a year ago.
I am not going to be voting for this, and the reason why is that I felt like that public informational meeting that was presented was more or less.
Blinds were, I'm used to seeing more of a street plan design, and I think it's important that we share that information with the individuals as part of the public information.
So, again, I personally don't feel we're quite ready to move forward with acquisitions, but that's just my opinion.
Thank you.
Jan, can I ask a question? Did any of the property owners show up and object to this?
No, so I can't.
We can't begin conversations with those landowners until we get a DSR sign from the DOT.
So, when we did the public information meeting, we were probably at 30% plans.
So, we're following the DOT guidelines, whether we're not doing anything out of order or in a different scenario.
It's very rigid in how you have to proceed with this.
So, while having $2 million to do this project is great, it adds a mountain of more complexity to this project.
I mean, this project would be done. We'd be put to bed, and I mean, our plans are usually 40 to 50 pages.
Right now, we're at 131 pages, plansets.
So, it costs a lot more money with our engineering firm to do this work, and I'll have a lot more work to do for real estate acquisition.
So, I'm not like it's great.
It's saving us $2 million, but it's just a lot more work.
So, we're following every process.
DOT has been great to work with. I'm not knocking DOT in any way, shape, or form.
They're following their process, and they're very helpful to us and making sure we're moving through this in the right way.
What we're talking about here is not very much property for each person, is it?
It's just we need a little bit further this way, and we're only there to do what we need to do underground, and then we're fixing it and we're out of there.
Correct, and so we're really tying the grades back in.
If you've driven down Van Buren Road, there's a lot of ditches there.
This will actually probably improve their property.
Most of these homeowners, because we'll be putting stormwater in, and so it'll level off, so it'll make it slightly easier to maintain and mow in the future.
But nonetheless, we still have to go through and get their approval, because it's their private land that we'll be on, and then remediating it,
and turning it, making it ideally better for them.
And they're getting some money for that.
Yes.
Letting us do this.
Letting us do, there's a nominal payment that we have to provide.
Al can add more.
Yeah, I just wanted to add that temporary limited easements are things that people would give to us all the time.
We simply ask them for a temporary limited easement so that we can grade the site of a highway and they say,
sure, where do I sign?
This is a process that the DOT process is based on the assumption that everybody's going to object to these things.
So there's a rigid process that you have to go through in terms of when you put together your relocation order,
which is technically a highway relocation order.
It's not a people relocation order.
You may get a people relocation issue on some types of kind of nation, but on this project, you won't ever get to that.
Because nobody's going to be kicked off their property even temporarily.
This is just a matter of the temporary use.
So among the rules that apply is that you can't even talk to people about acquiring the easement until you've given them some
required pamphlets that tell them their rights in the event of condemnation.
You can't give them those pamphlets until the DOT has approved what they're doing.
So it's a rigid process that's designed for us projects that are not this type of a project,
but we still have to go through those steps.
Thank you for the clarification, Jim.
I just want to add one of those documents that is required is this relocation order to.
For you can give that information.
Okay, we have a motion and a second if there's no further discussion, all those in favor indicate by saying I.
I suppose no.
Motion carries one, two, three.
Thanks to one.
Good tonight.
Ordinance 2026 dash 013 and ordinance repealing section 3.06 parent to parody of the deforest municipal code.
Restricting parking on we're not at court.
Chief Olson's not here.
We have no public appearances.
A number of years ago, the village.
There was a problem that residents brought up that their kids parking up and down their street and they couldn't get.
They couldn't park in front of their own house.
So the village did adopt an ordinance that limited parking on school days on certain areas right near the entrance to the school.
Since then the school has been remodeled.
The entrance has been moved well away from run out of court.
Nobody parks there anymore because they have to walk too far to the entrance.
And now the residents are saying it's just an inconvenience to us.
It's not solving problem.
So the chief looked at the issue and determined that there was really no reason to limit parking on that street anymore and suggesting that that section of the ordinance be repealed.
Yeah, we take a motion to often to approve.
Motion by Jann as our second.
Second.
Seconded by Alicia.
All those in favor.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Discussion.
Jim.
I just kind of question. There was other streets that were limited. Did the.
Did the chief talk to those because like to me there was an evergreen court that to me seems a very similar situation is for Hannah.
I only know that he mentioned or not a court to me. You didn't ask about any of the other ones. So I don't know the answer to that.
I think Jefferson Street was part of that right in front of my house.
So it's part of what I saw in here.
Is it still an issue? Sorry.
I don't care if anybody parks are meant or me.
I guess I'm good with what we're doing tonight. But to me, it was a larger question. Do we just get rid of all the other three streets that are listed to.
That's probably a good question to direct to this.
I say let the police office.
Please department figure that out. Yeah. Okay. Let's take a vote on 2026 0 9. I'm sorry. 2026 0 1 3.
Almost in favor to keep it saying aye. Aye.
No.
Okay.
Motion passes unanimously.
Ordinance 2026 0 1 4 and ordinance amending section 3.05 of the divorce municipal code design meeting one way streets now.
This is just a situation where since the last time we designated one way streets in the ordinances.
Several new subdivisions have come in and there are several streets that were designed to be one way streets have been marked as one way streets,
but they really don't have any ordinance authority behind them. This ordinance will fix that.
Thank you.
We have no public appearances. Is there a motion to approve 2026 0 1 4.
I'll make the motion motion by Melanie. Is there a second?
I'll second.
Seconded by Jan. Thank you.
Discussion.
I think on the ordinance, it says July 7th at the end that is approved.
Want to have that date updated reflect that.
Yeah, that would be appropriate. I wrote this before the last meeting and the chief wanted to wait till this meeting and ever updated.
And then I'll question for you, maybe.
We just put in the ordinance that those that are signed as one way are in effect instead of listing every street that is becomes a one way.
Well, technically the village board has to determine what streets are going to be one way streets.
If you.
The signs are put up by the public works department, so you can't have the public works department deciding for you, which streets are going to be one way.
So we really do have to have to list them.
Okay.
I don't remember. We have a motion a second.
We do have a motion by Melanie and second by Jane.
I should have written it down. All those in favor indicate by saying aye.
Aye.
I suppose no.
Creation, animously.
That register was in your packet committee commission board reports the fourth area public library.
So we elected a new board members for the year and then of course is the new president and others are listed in the packet.
As we heard the library believes that there's an potential need to expand for circulation and other programs.
So looking at those options, we're working on strategic plan updates right now.
Looking five years out and then working up on working on catching up from book orders because last year, one of the large vendors went out of business near the end of the year.
So they're still trying to catch up from that with book orders.
Thank you.
The forest public safety commission.
We did our usual operators license approval and that was about it.
Cornerstone community center.
When Natalie was here, she mentioned the new parking lot is open. It's finished open and it's fabulous.
And then last week, we had a regular monthly cornerstone meeting.
And then we also had a special half century club meeting.
Half century club is the one that owns the all the property.
The land, the building, the business personal property.
And we had, we normally just have that quarterly that we had the special meeting because now we're getting into planning the park space that's going to be right there on the corner of that, where the four way stop is.
And so we actually had beer Becker there and we're going over plans. So let's move it along.
Community development authority.
I'm always, I need to take better notes because I'm just remembering what we talked about in close session. So.
Thank you. Alex will build you all.
Yeah, help me out. Alex, sir.
You had our annual audit presentation, which went very well.
We entered into a consulting agreement for third party energy certification for the building that the CDAs developing.
As we should have mentioned, we had some close session discussion about disposition of some properties that we own. And then we did also approve an amendment to a loan agreement for the very soon, hopefully to be open pizza and Italian restaurant on me.
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
Planning and zoning commission.
I don't think I have anything to report out. I only have the meeting for June 8th. And I think the meeting after that was really short if there was anything.
I don't know if you remember, Alex is quite some time ago.
I don't have the agenda. So I think the way I remember it's a short meeting. So.
Public services committee.
We had the budget presentations that we saw here tonight.
And then as Greg had mentioned earlier, we had a board member there from Corp.
And we were starting to talk about plans, the first preliminary stuff for the bike trail that we're going to be making.
Grace.
I just wanted to add, we didn't talk about it earlier. We are doing two public.
Input meetings for the mountain bike at.
We're doing it at the next night market on August 13th. And then we're also going to do it at the PD family fun night on September 10th.
And we might look to do one at a farmer's market as well in conjunction with the mountain bike team.
Okay.
Of course, Windsor fire and EMS board.
We're doing great with the budget so far this year, right on the money.
Speak.
And the foundation for station two has been put in.
And I think those are the highlights.
Community development. Oh, the minutes committee commission board minutes are in your packet.
Any other business that lawfully comes before the board.
Seeing nothing is their motion to adjourn.
Motion to adjourn.
Janice or second.
Seconded by Jim. All those in favor indicate the saying aye.
I suppose no.
We are adjourned at.
Aye.