Parks and Rec Commission - Regular Meeting

Brian, can you hear us?

Yes, I can.

Great, thank you. We're not ready to start quite yet. We are waiting on a quorum. Sure, no worries. Thank you. George, can you hear us?

I can perfectly, thanks.

Great, thank you. I'm just going to mute us until we have a quorum here. Sorry for the delay. We're waiting for one more member in order to make a quorum, so she should be here hopefully in the next five minutes, and then we can start. Sounds good.

No worries.

Thank you. No problem on my end. I don't have the agenda for me. Are they first?

Yes, after expenditures and stuff.

Okay.

I was going to say that it might cancel.

Is there another round of rain coming?

Me and the farmers would get them.

What time does it go to?

Starts at six. It goes to, yeah.

Yeah. Between eight and nine, it could get a little sketchy if everybody's gone.

Let's see.

I mean, there's a couple of little blobs. You never know.

It'll be great.

Did anybody see the Green Bay on Broadway, the farmer's market up there?

Thank you. Oh cameo. Yeah. That was me yesterday for planning.

Yeah, I just did this yesterday. It's fine. No.

Everyone. Right.

I'd like to call the meeting to order for the Parks and Recreation Commission on July 1st. May I please have the roll call?

Reeves?

Here.

Bending? Here. Ladbroke? Here. Jorgensen?

Here.

For President Graziano?

Moving on to item number three, approval of the minutes for June 3rd and June 17th. Does anyone have any comments or questions or discussion? Hearing none, I will entertain a motion to approve the minutes for both dates. Can I get a second? All in favor?

Aye.

Minutes are approved. I did skip item number two for general public comment by accident. I'm so sorry. It looks like we have one. Sir, if you could approach the microphone. Yep. Yep.

You can come up to the mic.

If you can please state your name and address for the record.

My name is Jerry Downs, and I'm here to talk about the way you handle registration on your campsites, and particularly the first-come, first-served.

I tried to do that this last weekend, and there was a lot of confusion on how it was handled.

And I noticed that when He put up all the signs for first-hand people that were out there that all the rest of them would be available for first-come, first-served. So Monday, I showed up. I showed up trying to reserve one of those remaining sites. And I found at the senior center, they said that okay, if you see that there's one that's open, it's to put something there to just identify yourself until you get it straightened out with, well, whether or not you got it or not. And I was down there on Monday and they told me that I was unable to, because I wanted to register or reserve it for the 2nd, July 2nd through the 5th. which normally all the first scan is out there. And the way you handle that one is different than the way you do the first come, first serve. Because when you go ahead and reserve them dates, either, let's say, the seconds for the PET, and you don't have to do anything about it until you get there on the second time, right? is that you're understanding, well, when I showed up on Monday, I wanted to reserve it for the second through the draft, which is Thursday through Sunday. And they told me I could not reserve those dates. I had to pay for those sites Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in order to reserve it for the Thursday. And that doesn't seem right. It's not the way you handled the first 10 that you have to pay ahead of the date that you actually won. So that's my question right now is why can I not like the first 10 reserve at those sites ahead of time? And why do I have to show up on that particular day, like the second, and be a first come, first served person?

If I have to wait or if I do not get a confirmation, I've been camping for 40 years and

I've never seen it handled that way, where you have to be there, show up on that particular day in order to be at that site, and you can't fall ahead and make reservations ahead of time. Because I'm not going to travel 40 or 50 miles with a camper and show up at a campground on a first-come, first-served basis, because it might not just be luck.

And that's ridiculous. No one does it that way anymore.

So right now, I do not have a reservation for tomorrow through Sunday. And it is, that's why I'm here, is because I know you're going to do something different next year, which you're going to have some problems too with that, because the state has already went through that process.

is making reservations ahead of time without payment.

As the state got into that problem where people were perpunching all the sites and they never showed up.

And you're gonna have the same thing unless you get a payment upfront or at least a couple of weeks before they actually attend.

So that's a problem that I've got right now, and I decided right now I'm going to leave the camp this weekend because of some of the problems that we're going through. But I just am not happy right now being able to not tell my son and not travel until you get here, not have a space. Right now, the spots that we're available, I bought through the lines for Saturday. And to see what spots were available, I looked at all the town that had paperwork on it. And that's what I want to find out. What is the earliest possible time, date that you can reserve a site? I know we had all the slips on Friday or Saturday. I walked around and saw all the slips. And so I put a little tag, a blue tag, on the electric box that had my name, a site number, and what dates I wanted.

It doesn't mean that you could rent out on a Tuesday and Wednesday. That's not a problem. Everybody else does it that way.

But I wanted to make sure that I had .

Well, we do have a time limit for public comment, and I appreciate your comments. We can't address it right here, right now. I know, Sue, you're probably more than happy to provide a copy of the . renovation policy for future reference. And that's really all we can provide right this moment.

Okay. Another thing, you don't have a cancellation policy call.

Okay. That I know of. That's what you've got to think about.

And otherwise, people are going to go at the end of their campaign thing, they're going to be gone. You're not going to be able to catch up to them. If you don't believe someone, I'll promise.

Sure. I understand. Thank you so much for bringing this in front of us. I appreciate your concern.

I don't want to interject or be out of order with the meeting, but I didn't want the gentleman who just made some comment there to walk out without a camping spot. Could I fill him in on what's available? Close. I'm showing availability at Big Franks in Fremont and Sleepy Hollow in Oshkosh. Just wanted to let him know.

Okay. Thank you. Moving on to item number four, the revenues and expenditures report. Does anyone have any comment or opinion about this? Hearing none, I will entertain a motion to approve the Revenue and Expenditure Report as presented. I'll make a motion to approve it as a Revenue and Expenditure Report as read and reviewed. There's a first. Make it a second.

Make the second.

All in favor. Revenue and Expenditure Report is approved. Item number five, presentations for the online medical programs at park facilities by CamSpot and MySites. It looks like we have Brian and who's the other one? George. George on Zoom for presentations.

Can I just pick one? Yep. Brian, can we have you start first?

Sure, absolutely. Thank you all. My name is Brian McGuinn. I'm with MySites Reservation System and we have a very robust system. I know I sent you a brief video on that. Is it okay if I share my screen or?

Yep.

Okay, so let me go ahead and send a request. I just sent a request to share.

You should be good.

Okay, there we go. Excellent. So with my site's reservation system, we can do the online. And I'm not sure if you guys were interested in doing it. I can't recall if we were doing online reservations or we were going to just do internal for the time and then move to online later.

I think online is the way they were going to go.

Sure, absolutely. Well, I'm going to take you over to one of our partners out in Ventura, California. This is Lake Piru. Basically, this is a county park system in Ventura, California. And there's two different types of ways that you can book utilizing our system. You can either book by a site type or you can book by an interactive map. Now, the unique part of my sites is that we can embed our interactive map into your website without having to, you know, have you people directed off of the website. The map creative that you see here is created by our sister company, Southeast Publications, which creates over 1500 articles. campground maps for RV resorts and campgrounds and state parks, etc. So they're going to make the creative here at no cost to you. And when somebody comes to the website, they can choose a date range and they can go in and they can select a certain site number, individual site number that they want. Basically, each site has an... availability calendar it's got they can choose different dates if they want to they can actually go in and view up to five images or a video panning the property when they're ready to book they can just click on the book button and It will ask them if you have a cancellation policy, like the gentleman was explaining earlier. We can put that front and center where they'll have to click I understand to proceed forward with the booking. When they do that, it captures their IP address and timestamp. And if you do allow multi-site bookings online, this will appear, but typically, Some of our customers don't allow that for certain reasons, but if you don't, it won't appear. You can actually create settings within the system where if you have minimum stays, if you have dates where they can book at certain three months out, two months out, all those settings can take place. And essentially, this that came up here was a custom pop-up that can be created inside your own portal in case there are certain events that you want people to be aware of. And you can even have those pop-ups appear at certain timeframes. Very easy to set up. And then, are you ready to complete your booking? Now, it sounds to me like you have a lot of the community that come to to the uh to the to the property so look i got this thing in my way hold on a second sorry uh that you have a lot of people that that come into the community that do the booking process and look how do i get this thing out of my way hold on one second i'm sorry folks

Oh, and we'll see if he comes, give him a second to come back. Otherwise, we can move on to George. All right, well, while he's working on coming back, George, do you Want to start with yours?

Yeah, I can. And I fear I haven't been on Zoom in a while. So I hope I don't experience the same thing that Brian did there with things being in the way and windows and whatnot. But yeah, if he slides back in, I'll certainly hop back in the backseat here. But yeah, if I'm able to share here and it might take me a second to.

Yep.

get tucked in here so that I can get out of my own way, much like I think Brian was experiencing. Are you seeing CampSpot.com here?

Yep.

Perfecto. Okay. So, yeah. So, National Sales Executive at CampSpot, my name is George Murphy, and I'm sorry to step on the meeting there early. I've been the frustrated camper. I've also been the admin that is dealing with frustrated staff. I was in public education here in Michigan. For about 30 years, teacher, coach, athletic director, overseeing about 250 coaches at one point. So you guys were giving me a bit of a backflash talking about weather earlier. When you're responsible for a bunch of outdoor activities, that's a bit unnerving when Mother Nature isn't being kind. Yeah. At any rate, you're going to hear some passion from me because I've been with Camp Spot for about five years. Took an early retirement because I could after 30 years of education. And I've been with Camp Spot, it'll be five years this September. Happy to say that I brought on nearly 900 parks and resorts with Camp Spot during that time. And dozens and dozens of those have been, you know, county and city parks, provincial parks in Canada, you know, government owned and operated. And we've got, you know, some niche pricing and some things that we do specifically for for folks in your situation. And I know that the price point is fantastic. I think that's been shared with you by Sue, as well as a bit of a presentation, primarily the back office property management side of Camp Spot. But there are really three things that we're doing. We are best in class online booking agent. The booking process, that frustrated gentleman like the one in the room and everybody else who wants to online book, we know the data for that. We know that over 70% of people who book camping want to book online. We also know that over 75% of those who want to book online, they're not using a computer or tablet to do it. They're using their mobile device. so what i would encourage everyone on the commission to do if you haven't already is to go to the park that's being shared by brian go to a camp spot partner park and do it with your phone because that is absolutely a difference maker our coding the way the booking flow was built is completely predicated on doing one thing um and that's that's deliver the guests to your park So one of the other things that we're going to do, which nobody in the industry does, we are going to post you here on CampSpot.com for free. I have done this. I put in Berlin, Wisconsin. I did a search. And to help that gentleman, I actually put in dates. I put in today through Saturday, and that's how I found Frank's in Fremont and Sleepy Hollow in Oshkosh with availability. But I'm going to leave these dates open, and I want to show you this. And I hope that this is a bit of a genuine vetting. Admittedly, I'm tooting the horn here. I put in Berlin, Wisconsin before I met with Sue last week or a couple weeks back. These, all of these parks, and this is a geographic-based search engine. We will list you for free. We will get you free bookings from here. Berlin is a spot on the map. eight miles out, 17 miles out, 17 miles out. All of these parks are not listed with Camp Spot. Every one of these parks and resorts are in partnership with us. They are actual Camp Spot platform users. You got small mom and pops here, city parks, county parks, mega resorts. You've got a little bit of everything here. And the fact that all of these folks are using us, I hope shines a light on that we know what the heck we're doing and we're exactly where you're at. So you've got a little bit of everything here. All told, I stopped counting at 100. And what this does, the parameters are within 150 mile radius of your location. So we've got over 100 partnerships within 150 mile radius of Berlin, Wisconsin. And I hope that that means something. This is... And again, the closest one to you is Hattie Sherwood. This is something that we would do for you for free. We're going to want some imaging of your park. We'll list out your park features. We'll do a write up. The interactive map is here. This is, you know, this by putting some dates, it would show real live availability here. This is up to the second booking. So if that gentleman who is in the room right now wanted to book this spot right here, he would be able to do it. I did a demo earlier today and it would be the equivalent of I'm showing her this site and this site literally turned gray right in front of us. And she caught it. She said, hey, what happened with that site? Why did that change color? I said, somebody just grabbed that thing. So you're talking real live availability. And in addition to that, what he is requesting, which is online booking, upfront payment, fewer phone calls for your staff. The other piece that we're good at is the back office property management side of Camp Spot. Bear with me a second. I'll have to log in. And this is just a demo site here. But again, this is an extremely modern platform for the guest and for the staff. Yes, it's intuitive. Yes, it's intelligent. But it's extremely easy to use. I hope that you were able to enjoy a little bit of the tour that I gave. It's tough to be brief. When you've got a system that does so many things again, a horn to, we are taking care of the largest, most successful resorts in North America. Some of these are fortune 500 companies. We're taking care of their needs. We've been open for business since 2015. We've swollen to almost 4000 parks and resorts in North America that are using our software. But one of the biggest things that I'm most passionate about as a sales executive for Camp Spot is our retention rate. Our retention rate is nearly 96% since we opened for business in 2015. And I hope that that means as much to you as it does to us. So this back office property management side is extremely easy to use, for example. And I know that there's still going to be a small cross section of humanity there that's going to want to give your staff members a call. Super easy to do a booking over the phone. Once you come on with Camp Spot, if anybody has paid state or reserve before, I'm going to be able to do an existing guest, which I'm assuming you've got a ton of returning campers. I'd be able to do that booking over the phone in about 60 seconds. Or... If I'm a new staff member that you literally hired last week or yesterday, you could coach me up on how to do a booking over the phone, an offline booking, if you will, with Camp Spot. You could coach me up in about 10 to 15 minutes. I also have an interactive map on the back office side. So you could have hired me 15 minutes ago. I'm talking to Mr. Smith on the phone and I can be very conversational with him about availability. Mr. Smith's going to ask me the questions you know. Mr. Smith's going to ask, hey, George, can you get me a spot next to the playground? Can you get me next to the washroom? Can you get me out in a spot that's got a little more elbow room? All of this is built into the software. um reservation confirmation emails will be built in here uh online booking and the gentleman made a great point he says you don't and i don't know if it's true or not but if you don't have a cancellation policy cancellation policy and refunds we're going to take all of your resort or all of your park rules terms and conditions expectations from the city are going to be built in i would have to check the box at the time of booking But in the reservation confirmation email, and again, I get this as being a Parks and Rec person and athletic director myself, liability is a big deal. You've got people on your property. So not only do I have that initial, I've got to agree to the terms and conditions of the park, but once I receive my reservation confirmation email, there's an additional layer of liability here, and I'm going to show it to you. So, and again, just envision this being your logo, your branding, but what this is going to allow for is some other automations that your park might want. Online check-in, online check-out, Online reservation edits. All of those things reduce the number of phone calls and frustrations for your staff, and they absolutely reduce frustration for the camper. But if I've got this booking, I've clicked into my reservation confirmation email, I've got all of my information here that I need as a camper. When I'm staying, how many nights I'm staying, what site I'm in. what I've paid for. And then, and I know this from being in education for almost 30 years, you know it too. People don't read what they're supposed to read. And while this does not force the reading, here's all the terms and conditions. And again, these would be yours. Look at this here. This is a DocuSign. Now, we don't do this at the time of booking because that is a barrier to completing the booking. But what this does, if I'm Vincent Alvarez and I sign this DocuSign box, once I click, I accept terms and conditions. You've got this additional layer of liability on the back office side. And I'm sure that your attorneys would love this to have this built in for free into the system. So best booking experience for your campers, extremely easy, streamlined back office property management side of Camp Spot. Everything I'm showing you would be built in here for free. Your staff would also have access to this. This is Camp Spot's knowledge base. It's basically an encyclopedia of all things Camp Spot. Go in here, questions, answers, webinars, how-tos, videos, everything your staff might need if they need help. That, besides, we also have 24-7 support with Camp Spot. Our support team is North American based. That's a big deal. It's going to be a big deal to your staff if they need help. Additionally, and I know that this doesn't happen as much in public parks as it does at private parks, but turnover. If you've got turnover with staff, if heaven forbid, you've got to replace Sue in the next 12 months. Let us take that out of your hair. Camp spot certification program is right here. This is basically you just hired a new staff member. You're cutting them loose on the learn at their own pace module based learning here. So if you just hired me last week, I start this week. You're going to make me work through these modules here. And if I work through here, not only does it get me trained, But it's going to let Sue or whoever the lead admin or manager know exactly what George is good at. If I did four modules, I did flawlessly on modules one through three, but I struggled a bit on module number four, you're going to put me back to work on number four. But this takes all that training out of your hair. It's completely free. Also, Camp Spot Analytics, completely free. I know that she shared pricing with you. Our price point is not to be looked past either. You're basically going to be using Camp Spot software for free. You're simply only going to need to pay processing. And if you're like 98, 99% of our parks, they're building in a booking fee to have the customer pay for the processing along the way. But in almost every group, there's a data head. I want charts and graphs. I want data and analytics. You've got it with CampSpot. Again, Orin2, these folks have very high expectations of the performance of our platform. That includes reporting. There are over 270 reports available in CampSpot. it's awesome if you want charts and graphs if you want data and analytics that's in here as well i'll see if i can bring up the daily manager report just a demo space for you here but this is going to give you a couple of different things 10 000 foot view all the way down to extremely granular so your admin types might want to look from afar and again every single screen i'm showing you It optimizes to any screen size that you're looking at. So I could not be on site today. I'm looking at what today looks like. What's it look like? It looks like a 4th of July weekend. 37 arrivals, 7 departures. Tomorrow we got 61 coming in, 33 leaving. What'd we do for transactions yesterday? 93 transactions, a little under 9K. What type of transactions were those? Cash, credit card on site, credit card off site. If you have multiple people responsible for transactions, it's going to track all that for you as well. I've got Lisa here. She did 26 transactions, a little over $950. So we take this reporting very seriously. This reporting is literally updated, not a batch upload at midnight, literally every 60 seconds. So these are things we're good at. We've got the largest OTA in the business. That's online travel agent. You would be listed here for free. We will not charge you for bookings that come here. Typically we do, but our pricing for municipalities like yourself is fantastic. What we would do is just put some booking links in here, book now, reserve now buttons. You're going to reduce that. We're not the business of telling people how to do business, but if you want fewer phones ringing, our invitation would be to take this and put this down here and put some book now, reserve now buttons up here to get your guests the best online booking tool in the space. That's all for me. Do you have any questions, anything I can answer for you?

I don't think so. Thank you so much.

Happy to help. I'm trying to not share now.

Brian, you're back with us.

I'd like to thank everybody for allowing me to embarrass myself. Your time is important, and I appreciate you guys allowing me back to share as well. Hold on one second while I go ahead and show you a little bit on the insides of, and I do agree, you should definitely take a look at user experience. I got my video on now, so as you can see, I'm the president. Okay, so in terms of getting the assistance that you need, what we're looking at right now is the dashboard of MySites. And MySites actually has all of the support that you could possibly need, 24-7 support. Every page has an explainer video that your users can quickly click on, and they can go right into a video to explain exactly how the page works. We also have artificial intelligence baked into our system on every page. You'll find ember if you don't know how to do a process or anything like that. You can ask ember and we'll give step by step instructions. We have a full video library, so you don't have to go off to another platform in order to utilize the library. You can support tickets. We have a service level agreement of 1 hour. to get back to any tickets that are sent. But you also have an 800 number that's from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. East Coast time where you'll reach a live person. After hours is 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. where you can do your support tickets and you will get a response within the hour. We can create permissions for different users because some of the stuff, they don't need to see all of it, right? Maybe they just need to take reservations and they don't need to see all the reporting features that we have. And we have quite extensive reporting bunched up into categories. But as you can see here, our system, it benchmarks year over year productivity. It shows total nights books, average night stay, production reports. You can see arrivals and departures or bills that are due in the same day. There's also different benchmarks between site types year over year at this current time that you put up here. There are, if you sell items like firewood or ice or anything like that, those sales are broken down over here. You can also see where people are booking from in here. So if you click, you can see which ones were online bookings and which ones were internal bookings. You can see occupancy rate percentages, and it's good to know all of the users, where they're coming from. Are they, you know, the place where they're located from, the types of devices that they're using. So that's all baked in here as well. Our reservation, we do have the live availability map as well. And this map here will help people, you know, see in a beautiful map view. They can hover over it. They can see specifications regarding the site images. So if you have somebody new, they can say, okay, well, what size rig do you have? You have a 45 foot. Well, it says clearly that this does 35. We can go on to the next one. And when I want to book, all I have to do is click on the site. It gives me an estimated price. I can click on proceed to booking. It creates the reservation for me. And the person's been here before. I can put in their name. If you notice there's flags adjacent to the name, that basically just shows that that person's good to book. They're green flagged, but you can red flag people because maybe they caused a problem and you need to consider if you want them back. When red flag people try to book online, the system looks at unique identifying information like an email address or a phone number. And if it matches somebody that's been flagged, it won't process their credit card. And it'll ask them to call in. And if a new user is typing in a person that's been flagged, a status will appear letting the person know who they are, why they've been flagged. And then they can determine from there what they should do. Should they let them go? Should they continue? And so on. Very, very simple items here. And then, of course, you can also look at the site availability chart, which is basically the current day, and then it goes out to 60 days. And you can book from here. You can drag and drop people wherever you want to put them. The system will make sure that you want to make that change. You can search by months. You can rearrange the order that the view shows in. You can book from here just by clicking on here. It gives all the pricing structures and just hit the book now button. If you hover over the site number, it gives a full description of the site. And so and we also include another map and that's the current guest map. So here you can see. which sites are going to be checking in, how many are turning over, where people might need to check to see if they're clean. People that are checked in are in red, and it gives a full profile of that individual, including the children, adults, vehicles. You can book from here. you can see people that are leaving sites that are turning over if a site is turning over and there's an issue you can report that issue and it will go into your alert bell that will show up here this alert bell is going to let you know everything that happened while you were away You'll also get email notifications from the system. You'll be able to do all sorts of things. And the great thing about my sites is that we're not gonna force you into any payment gateway. We work with over 14 different payment gateways in one bank. So we have a lot of our customers using government windows, ConvergePay, Authorize.net. You can change these yourself at any time. And we also have an OTAI calendar section where you can connect with Booking.com, VRBO, HipCamp, whatever you'd like to get those spaces filled. In addition to that, we have free email campaign capabilities where you can actually, if I wanted to send a message to everybody that's currently on site, I can go in and I can look at currently checked in, click on search, And then I have all the email addresses and it doesn't send it as a bulk email where everyone could see everyone's email. It sends each person their own individual message and you can actually have templates. You can create newsletters from the system and you can send to your entire database. There's no limitation on how many sends that you can have within this system. We also have a direct integration with Spot Tonight, which is also another marketplace that can help promote you. In addition to promoting you, maybe you want to know what people think before they go online and say something on Google or whatnot. We have what's called the Net Promoter Link. And what this does is allows people to review you and then their comments will come in here so that you can address concerns or you can ask them if they wanted to post that review on Google. But either way, that's a capability here. In addition to that, we have automation that includes text messaging where you can create automated text messages either action based or date based. So, for example, if you want someone to receive a text message that when they book, they can go ahead and put in your message here, maybe put in a happy emoji and it will send it. You successfully booked with the city of Berlin. Thank you for your patronage or whatever it is you want to say. But that's that's in here as well. In terms of financial reports, we have many, many options for you in terms of, you know, different types of reports. We also have operational sales and marketing reports. Like, for example, if you wanted to see a calendar of the occupancy rates, you can go ahead and take a look at, okay, well, I'm 32% occupied here. Which one's, you know, failing us? So in addition to this, we also own RVing USA, which is a website that gets about 40,000 unique visitors per month. And we also have a Android application that has about 75,000 active downloads where we promote you. on here our newsletter for the rv bunch which we also own has 350 000 opt-in subscribers where you'll receive highlights of the property and why people should book with you as well and all of that is free the only thing that we charge is a three dollar processing fee that gets added to the bill that the guest pays if it's a completed reservation and when your system is we don't have any minimums either so if you guys are offline for the winter The system remains active. We don't get any reservations. There's no fees to us. It's basically sitting dormant till season comes in. And then in terms of add-ons or additional programming measures that you would like installed for your campground, we don't charge for that. We can do custom programming and usually our lead time's anywhere between two to four days. And we'll give you that exact timeframe when you make a request for an adjustment within the system. Our system also does have time clock capabilities where you can track users. You can create schedules or edit time cards. So as my former gentleman was saying, there's a lot that these systems can do. We have not changed our pricing in the eight years that we've been around. So rest assured that we have every intention of keeping our pricing the same that it is on an ongoing basis. Are there any questions? Well, you can actually choose how far you want customers to book by going into that site type and just say, okay, well, what do we want to have them booked for, right? Allow them for 18 months. Do you want them to book out a week, three years, all time? You can set very precise and specific settings so that when you get something, it's falling within all of your parameters. So for example, if you want, and again, we don't, and one key distinction here that I want everyone to know is that We don't de-identify your data. Your data is your data. We don't give away, you know, pricing structures or, you know, we don't do anything like that or do promotions for same area options. Okay. So if we're going to promote Berlin, we're going to promote you. If we're going to promote, you know, we're not going to promote, you know, competing resources. So that's one distinction as well.

Yeah, same here. It's called booking window in the space, folks. So city of Berlin and its administrators would be a complete control of how long you want your booking window to be open. Pretty typical with public parks to have a shutdown for a certain number of months, what have you. Totally get your seasonality, if you will, over here in Michigan is where I'm at. So we're pretty much open. you know, April to October, 85, 90% of parks and resorts are closed down, you know, for the winter time, unless they've got cabins and things, but, um, city of Berlin will be in complete control of the booking window. Uh, so that's, you're in control of that.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you guys. Yeah, thanks for the opportunity, folks. Let me see if I can learn how to stop sharing myself, too.

Great. Thank you so much, guys. Have a great weekend.

All right. You, too. Thank you. Happy Independence Day to all of you. Take care now.

Take care. All right. Does anyone have any discussion?

So I just want to draw your attention to the breakdown that's in your packet and just kind of highlight some points. The $3 with my sites, the 6% with Camp Spot, which our campsites are $30 a night. So with Camp Spot, you're going to pay 6%. with campsite, you're going to pay $3. And then our shelter houses are average $100. So again, 60% are just $3. So you have to weigh that out as well. Because that's going to be paid for by the consumer. right yep yep no contract for either one i'm going to terminate any time for either one and we don't need to make decisions today of course correct or so do you you don't have to make a decision the sooner we make a decision the sooner i can get started sure do you have a recommendation on it when you prefer um i went through the process with both of them um so i guess i don't have a preference either way but When I look at the cost that's going to fall onto the consumer, I think about the fact that if somebody's renting a shelter house on $100, they're going to pay 6%. Or they're going to pay $3. But on a campsite, I mean, you know, there's a difference. Yeah, absolutely. So 6% of $30 is, I believe, a doggy, or they'll pay $3. So...

That $3 is for however long their booking is. Yes. Correct. So if they camp for four days, it's still $3. If they camp for four days, it's 6% of $120. So it depends. It depends what your scenario is.

Yes.

But it's straight up $3 no matter what, or it's 6%.

6% of the total amount. So if you're booking for two weeks, you're going to pay 6% on that cost. or you're going to pay $3 on that two weeks. So did anybody get a chance to watch the demos that I sent with the agenda packet by chance?

It started.

Well, I mean, it's pretty hard to write down what we just watched, Sharon.

Would it be fair to give the commission the next month to kind of review the documents that were sent and the downloads that were sent, and we can make a decision at ACMO's meeting?

I guess what I would recommend, if you would, is actually go out to one of their sites. Go to Heinz or Wood. Go through the process. See what you think. And I don't remember if I sent you a link to one of the MySites. If I hadn't, I certainly could do that. But go through the process. That's what I did. I went through the entire process. And then I went back in and I canceled it. But it just gives you a sense of how, you know, what the flow feels like, what you're going to see, what you're going to experience, what the future is going to look like.

Yes. Right. And then for the stuff that would be on your end of it, like the back side, was there one that was more comfortable than the other to you? I mean, I felt like when he was going through the campsite one, it seemed like it was very easy to use. A lot of like big buttons and stuff. So I felt like that one looked a little more comfortable. Steadily facing, but yeah, I don't know if you have a preference either. I don't have really.

They both do the same thing, to be quite honest. And I felt comfortable with either one.

Okay. Okay. That's good to know. Great. Well, I mean, we'll table this.

No, not table. Not table. I bet. We'll bring it back next month.

We will bring it back next month for a shared meeting.

Yeah. Great.

Yeah.

Another decision next month.

All right, item number six, Parks Facilities Office by Medjab, 142 Far Street.

As we know, it's not just the senior center anymore. It is also the Parks Facilities Office. And so there are a lot of people that walk through the door and they kind of tiptoe around and they say, is this where I can book a shelter house? So I guess I would like to make it a little more visible for them. And as you see, I did attack the picture. On one side of the building, there is, it does say Berlin Senior Citizens Center. And then this is more to the other side of the building, which is the one that I would like, we could, what we could do is put the Berlin Parks Facilities Office sign there. So people understand that they actually are at the correct address and they can assist them there at that location. So what you have here is, The first, which is a little bit darker here, that is going to be for the front door. It will say Berlin Senior Center and Parks Facilities Office. So when people walk to the front door, they actually know that they're in the right place. And that would be $41.58. And then the Berlin Parks Facilities Office on the Woodley sign, they quoted me at $202.08. For both of them to be installed, they quoted me at $50 for both installation.

So the front side will be a wooden sign that's similar to the one that's already out there, or is it replacing?

It'll be right next to the senior center sign, right? It's the same size and everything?

It's going to go right over the top of the one that's currently there. It's just going to say the Berlin Parks Facilities Office at Berlin Senior Center.

But now they know it's a senior center.

There's a senior center when you're walking up to the building. There's a Vermont Senior Center sign right here. That's right. So it's going to say Vermont Senior Center on this sign. And then on this other side, it would say Parks Facilities Office. So it will identify both roles.

Makes sense to me.

Does anyone have any other questions? And then I would, I guess, I think we need to talk about how it would be paid or, I mean, this is going to be, yeah.

It's on your budget.

Okay. It's on the budget.

Okay. So really today we're just looking for an approval for Sue to do this. Okay.

Do you want to make a motion to that?

Yep. I'll make a motion that Sue can move forward with the signage for the parks facility office signs that go on the Burlington sign. All in favor? Aye. All right, that's approved. Go spend your money. All right, item number seven, rental procedures, discussion regarding deposits for shelter houses for some first serve policy for Cameron Brown and Kent. Cancellation refund policy for all. Okay, this sort of sounds like I remember you were just talking. Yes.

So on the next page, you'll see that our current deposit return policy for the campground, there is no deposit required on the campsites, on the shelter house, in the case of damage to the facilities, or if the facilities are left in an unacceptable condition, the $100 deposit would not get returned. At this point, it's been very, very rare. that the $100 has not been returned. Everybody's been very respectful at that point. So with moving forward, when we talked with both MySite and CanSpot, with MySite, it was very easy that if we wanted to continue to do the $100 deposit, it was easy for that return to happen. With the CanSpot, it was a little bit different because they're going to be paying 6% on that $100. Now, there's also something else to think about, and that is to do away with the $100 deposit. For instance, when you go to a hotel, you don't pay a deposit. They hold your credit card. And what we could do in the future is they could sign a document or it could be on the new program that they would check a box. And it says, if you are renting this, you also agree to the fact that you are responsible for any damages so on and so forth, your credit card will be charged for property. They already want to award that, but there needs to be a decision at some point whether we're going to continue with the $100 deposit. Sure.

Now, if we were to make a decision, are you looking at this for next season, or are you looking at this for the current, already started season?

I would recommend for next season. We start January 1st.

Okay.

Mm-hmm. That's why I'm hoping that we'll get the online program started.

Sure. So really, this decision can be made when we decide what system to go with. Right. They would just need to get access to that ID.

And so they can actually do real cars. Yeah, I think both sites said that they could very easily accommodate putting some kind of waiver, checkbox waiver, if we wanted to do something But right now we don't accept credit cards. So we don't have anything on file, obviously, except the $100 for shelter and hospice. But moving forward with the online program, this is something that would be paid more by debit or credit card. So something to think about. And then we want to move on to the first come, first serve policy for the campground. In the last months, I'm going to back up a little bit because in last month's, I gave you a couple of examples of first come first serve for different areas and also cancellation of policies. So I don't know if you want to go back and review that, but it gives you kind of a breakdown as to what's being done with other sites. But the first come first serve has been proven in my short time here, but it has proven to be an issue time and time again. And I... I think, you know, I asked the question, if you live two hours away, do you want to take a chance of driving, pulling your camper, and, you know, there's possible loss of revenue. So that's something to be decided. But I also think that once everything is online, it's going to be very difficult to work with first come, first serve. If we had everything, if we had all 22 cyclists in and anybody could pick any one of them, Instead of saying like we're doing now, okay, we have to tell the program, only 10 reservations can be made and the next 12 are all first come first serve. It just gives a little more money at that point. Keeping all 22 sites reservable, if you will, is probably a much cleaner way to do it. And then cancellation policy. As I have noted, that current cancellation policy on campgrounds is none. And on shelter houses, the cancellation for a full return of a rental deposit must be made no later than six weeks before the requested reservation date. And again, I'm going to refer to last month's inclusion and the cancellation policies that other places do. So something to think about as far as if you want to go you know, two weeks prior to the reservation. Did they cancel? They get the full refund or, you know, however that is. So something to think about with that as well.

And again, this is something for the commission to think about over the next month as we make a decision or come to a decision on what program to use. Again, this cancellation policy, does it plan on being implemented this Season or next season.

Yeah. As far as, as far as I'm any of these changes, it'll be at this January 1st. Correct. That's what I believe in last year was dropped. Otherwise.

Okay. I don't agree with that. Just, just it cost me through a rest.

Okay.

But I agree with it. Would you like to bring that? Should I bring that for next month also? Yes.

Okay. Anything else on item number seven? All right, moving on to item number eight, new business. Any new business that needs to be brought forward? Any old? If not, I will entertain a motion to adjourn.

I make a motion to bring adjourn.

All in favor? Aye.