Town Board - Regular Meeting

Allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Um we have um two board members um out today. So um we're going we have um cut back on today's schedule. So it'll be a short meeting, but we also have um an executive session with a couple of interviews. So, um, we'll start off with public comments if there's anyone in the public who has anything that they'd like to say which isn't on today's agenda or subject to a public hearing. Pam,

good morning everyone. I I just have a simple question about the uh facilities master plan. Was that contract signed and do we have a date on when that might be completed? I know what they said it was like 14 weeks to have it done. Correct. Um I know that Joe was uh working with the consultant to just button down a couple things. I think you had a copy with some comments that might have gone back, Thomas. Right. My latest status as far as I know is I sent Joe some comments back on the contract to set to the NBS and I haven't received anything back from BBS yet.

Okay. Okay. That's that's my understanding is where we stand too. So, as soon as we can get that moving, um, I keep checking in with him just to make sure we we don't delay it because I would like to get that moving as fast as possible. All right. Thank you very much. Yep. Thank you, Pam. Bert, uh, you're muted if you're speaking. How am I am I speaking now? Yes, we can hear you now.

Yeah. Hi. Okay. Um, so the, uh, the master plan that you're, uh, you're working on, um, I was wondering if you're going to have a section, uh, devoted to the waterways management advisory council, uh, and their things that they review. Um and one of them being that you have a gap in your um contractor's um uh license that you don't include moing contractors in that um and you know I think you uh it probably should be considering the um level of protection that it would provide to residents. um on the island. Um so that is what I'm seeing. I don't see any uh movement in the WAC to um take up any other items except that come to come to them in a permit. I was wondering if there's any direction that you're sending them. Thanks.

Thank you. the facilities master plan is um solely focused on infrastructure and how the staff and public interact with our existing infrastructure. So that um would not be included. Um but if you want to call Judy and set up an appointment um come on in and we can talk about um your concerns in more detail and figure out a path on that. All right. Thank you. I'll do that. Thank you. Yeah. Have a good day.

Anyone else? Okay. Um, we will move on to the Shelter Island History Museum has put in a request for banners and we have some history museum people here. So, if you'd like to go over the request with us. Nette Bronson, director of the Child History Museum. We're having our red, white, and blue event in celebration of the 250th anniversary this July 18th. And we're requesting uh permission to put up two banners. One across Bridge Street and one across 114 in front of the New Museum. Banners are approximately 36 by 96 in land request. Um can you tell me um I did a reconnaissance mission um so I drove past to see like where exactly it could be hung on at Bridge Street and um near you. And how were you proposing to erect it? Well, I know that our co-chair here, um, Kathy Dingle, had talked to, uh, the highway department and they offered, correct me if I'm wrong, or could offer to help with that. In the past, when we had one day in history, we used to put a banner across 114 from our um pole on on our property across the street, which I think at this point would be either Jamante or Clark property. Um, and then Bridge Street. I'm not exactly sure. I think we would wait for your permission and guidance on that.

Okay. I don't see we don't have Ken Lewis on, but he did, um, give us a response. And so, um, the concern was that, um, trying to figure out how to hang them at a height that's sufficient to avoid interfering with the traffic. And I know Chief can speak to that as well. Um, so I didn't see like anything that was established that would be easily Kathy if you want to come up and speak to that because I did if you could also um just state your name for the record.

Katherine Jingle. I'm with the U museum's uh benefit this summer. I did go and speak to um all those particular people, highway department, the building department, so on. and um he said he could probably do it for us, but he also recommended other people that I could contact like Dan Clark, uh Chris Johnson, and I know I know some of them pretty well. And so I was going to ask if they'd be kind enough to help us do it. Brought us of course. So I guess the question is how and where they would attach the cables that would hold the sign. Is that what we're

Yes. Yeah. Like what the height would be, exactly the location of any posts. Um, alternatively, we every year the 10K um hangs something from the Presbyterian Church to the pole across the street there. And we know from past history and use that it's um doesn't interfere with traffic or anything. Um like could that be an alternative if you got permission? Oh, as far as I'm concerned, that's a great location. Supervisor, can I just possibly can do it on the um Bridge Street? I think we get much more visible contact with it, but I think uh it would be good probably to go out with someone from the highway department just to look and see where it could be attached if possible.

Chief, you wanted to chime in. Yeah, that was my recommendation. I think we could save everybody a lot of time. Let's just go out and we'll get back to you on on a location. Um, I believe Sergeant Rando and uh the highway superintendent went out and looked at locations and didn't feel there were many good besides the Presbyterian Church in 114, but I I think some reps from um how Sergeant Rando and and Ken Mis get with the reps from the um historic society and we'll get back to you. I was I was thinking that's the best path like so you when you come back then you can have exact locations, exact heights if it's not just the usual 10k place. Should we organize that or wait to hear from you all or

um Yeah, if you want to take lead and um reach out to um PD and Highway. Yeah, you only need three people. Someone from you, Highway, and Sergeant Randa. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. Cool. All right, that was fast. We're going to just fly through this agenda. Keep going. All right. So, next on the agenda, last night we created the public safety task force and so I just thought that um we could discuss um the logistics of getting that set up. Yeah.

So, the my first question was um will they be internal meetings um working group meetings or public meetings? What was the board's thought on that? Um I know that like when South set theirs up they were public. Um so yeah the only thing is like I know that the um you know the schools had so much going on with like working on they're real playful but they had um wanted to kind of maybe sit in but not be on it. So I don't know how that would work. I mean I think I'm

I mean I guess here's the thing is is like is there Is there logistics that we need to think about if they're public versus Yes. And that's where I was leading. Yeah. Yeah. So, let's start with public or not because then if it's public, then we definitely need a clerk involved because we need to set up the room and the um the Zoom um so we can have public participation and getting things posted on websites and things like the meeting. Um, yeah,

I don't necessarily have a problem with them being public meetings. Um, because I think it's an opportunity. I mean, it is, you know, you know, Albert expressed, you know, his concern like what exactly would the um the focus of the the working group be. Um, so I think it would be good for the public to understand and be able to see, you know, and have an opportunity to participate in, you know, it's educational for everybody. Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm sensitive to the budget concerns, but my hope is is that it would just be one or two meetings.

Um, and I think that maybe having it uh those discussions in public so that when the task force comes back to us that people will understand how we got there so we don't have to like reexlain, right, what the record is whatever like whatever we come up with. Yes. Um, so

I took two of the clerks that would be potentially tapped for um, running the meeting and um, obviously it would be overtime because they have full schedule. So I was thinking that we'd probably need I was figuring about 9 hours um, between you know the setup um, holding two or three meetings and um, and I just said three meetings just because that's what it's taken self-hold. Okay. They've had three meetings to get them, I think, to a point where they're recommending to their town board. So, we probably would need about $500,000 to $500,000. So, $500.

Exactly. This is Amber. I can provide a clerk. No, no cost. I I think it should be fully public and I provide the clerk. Okay. Yeah. I didn't want to put anything on you because you've got some staff changes going on as well. So, we can add one. Okay. Thank you, Chief. All right. Um Okay. So, we don't need to do a budget transfer if we can incorporate it into somebody's day. And then I was also going to suggest um that, you know, they do, you know, help with setting up the agenda and with um you know, taking minutes to just talk about awesome. and to you know work on the crafting of the doc, you know, the document the changes. Sounds good.

Okay. And then I think we'll just maybe we could just like coordinate via email offline just to start picking out a couple days. Yeah. Yeah. Or we could test if um or test a clerk. My preference is to always test clerk. All right. Perfect.

Okay. That was all that on that topic. Wow. the public has any uh any questions on that. Okay. Um investment policy. I didn't get as far as I wanted to. Um start to talk to Liz and I'm thinking that like I keep putting this on and then having to pull it off. Um I think what I want to do Liz is maybe this week, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday if you can carve out an hour you and I sit down and we go through the investment policy changes. Um, that sounds great.

Red line it and then bring it back to the temporary. That sounds wonderful. Um, because I'm still working with um I wanted to find out from New York class if they've got any limits and how exact Well, I think their protections come out of state law and what they invest in. Um, so yeah, there's that and then the um Chase has collateralization I think were the the questions, but I just didn't have the context to be able to Yeah. Yeah. to ask the questions. Yeah. But yeah, and then we can review the Like I said, I just put something together for a policy. Yes, if you push that back to me because I couldn't find it when I was looking for it yesterday. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. And Ashley and I actually have it. Um, it's not the investment policy. It was the um

Nope. I have that the investment policy. What I was missing was the you for the internal controls. Internal controls. Yeah. Yeah. It's very basic. Mhm. Just because I was like, I actually don't know what our internal controls are. I was like, this is what I think they might be. And um reached out to the auditors to see if what they had in the files and they didn't have anything um specifically for the investment policy. Um Ashley and I like started to go over like what the internal procedures are. And I do actually want to talk to like Chase if we're moving money. um the accounting clerk initiates it and then the supervisor's clerk um you know seconds it right

um but we don't have that in place for moving money out of the New York class account. We can move it back into our Chase accounts. So I want to talk to them to see if we can get a second control put on there. Yeah, that would be great. Yeah. So so we have a little bit of work before we can finalize this. So I figured you do uh Thursday morning maybe. Mhm. Okay. I'll follow up with you. Yeah, I think Yeah, I would love to just get this. I mean, why not? Yep. Yeah. Okay, so that's it for the investment policy today. Oh, my town board leazison reports. Oh, wow. Okay. Um, let me just pull up my little Oh my goodness. Kick out where it jumps out more really quickly.

All right. So, I've got a couple community notes. Okay. Um, we are, as a town, we are co-sponsoring a 250th parade for America's birthday on July 4th. It's going to be at 10:00 a.m. in the morning. It is not going to be like the Memorial Day parade. It's its own little beast. Um, we uh the parade registration is now open. So, we uh you can there's a link online and also you can sign up on the chamber website. Um, so you could do uh floats, you can do marching, you know, there's all sorts of groups that you could um, everybody's encouraged to attend. We're really excited about it. Um, the other thing I just wanted to say was the school musical closed on Sunday and if you had a chance to see it, it was amazing. So, just a big congratulations to the cast and a big and special thank you to all the town residents including especially the Cassix um who work so hard to put it together. It was a real treasure. Um a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And then my only like update for board meeting or uh committee meetings that we had is we did have a ZBA meeting a hearing last week. Um, and so we, uh, there was two ADA hearings. Um, and there's a lot of community involvement and feedback. So, it would I think a lot of people would be very interested to see how some of those go, myself included. Um, and that's what I got. Want to go next?

I can go next.

Okay. Um, on Thursday there was a luncheon for the seniors where we had speakers talk about opioids and pain and different ways that seniors can take care of themselves. Um, there was a wonderful speaker who talked about her struggles with opioids, especially after a surgery. And then we had Reggie come in who's one of working with our social worker. And um he talked for a little bit about different services that are available and people you can contact. And then um Calie from our health and wellness committee spoke about uh natural ways to kind of manage pain and different stretches and exercises and breathing techniques that people can use. Um so it was a very informative session. It was very helpful. Um, one of the things we talked about was safely disposing of medications. So, if you have extra medications left over from after a surgery or an illness or there's someone else's medications that you were taking care of and now you don't know where they go, um, we have disposal bags at town hall and you can come to the clerk's office, request one. They're no charge. You put all the medications in there, you add a little bit of water, you seal it up, you shake it up, and you can throw it out. Um so that was a lovely lunch. It was um lunch was provided by slice and uh the recck department and senior center worked together on it. It was a wonderful event.

Um health and wellness welcomed its new members on Friday for just a little intro meeting. So now that committee is going to be like 11 and um their next official meeting is May I believe May 8th to really kick things off and um so they're looking forward to getting started. Uh the Lions Club had their street cleanup on Saturday which was a lot of fun and always makes everything look shiny when we're done. And donuts. And donuts. There is donuts for hamburgers and hot dogs. It was wonderful.

Um, this Thursday, April 30th, is Purple Up Day. Um, Purple Up Day is to celebrate and recognize the children of military families. And there's going to be a bake sale at 2:30 outside of the school. Everything's a dollar to um raise funds to go to different charities for military children. and it's organized by the honor society and um some of the other student organizations. So, it's kind of students helping students. So, everyone's encouraged to come by the school at 2:30 on Thursday the 30th wearing purple and bringing a dollar to buy a snack. So, that's all I got.

Okay, cool.

Um I'll go for the serious stuff first. the um capital planning and grants committee met um last week and we um are moving along with the ferry flood hazard mitigation. Um we're almost done with that and should be getting a final report soon. Um we um talked about increasing the community development block grant um so that we could um increase the funding. We're going to in order for that um playground to get resurfaced, which is just mindboggling to have like the proper surface and the you know equipment and making sure everything's safe. Um, that project could cost close to $500,000, which when we first did it, let's see, Ivy's 30 almost 32, I guess, 28 years ago, it cost $45,000. And we were able to install it with community members. Um, but in this much more legal oriented world, that's where we are. So, we're um we had put in $105,000 for the playground. um we're going to up our um ask to $194,000 and then we're going to look for state funding um to see if we can get the rest and then there's community members who want to do some fundraising as well. So to be continued, but that was um one big topic. Um, we also want to work on setting up um, we have a good equipment reserve um, schedule that we look at and that's how you know we put money into the equipment reserve and then kind of, you know, time out when we're going to do um, equipment replacement. We're going to start setting up for the waterway schedule. So that incorporates ramps and um town docks and landings so that we just better monitor like when we might have big big expenditures coming up and kind of plan for it. And then we also want to do the same with building and infrastructure. So, we'll continue

to work on that and keep the town board um apprised of how that's going and we'll bring th that information um prior to budget season so that we know what we're what the ask is on those types of infrastructure and equipment um large purchases um so that we can incorporate that into budget season. And then we also have capital request forms that are due back in a couple of weeks from department heads so that um there's something a bigger ask this year that doesn't quite fit into you know a building roof and things like that or you know highway equipment um we'll have those and be discussing those at our next either May meeting or a June meeting I can't remember which. Um so that was capital planning. Um Westneck Water met and the purpose for the West Neck Water was to discuss the rates um for the water district. So when um so the West Neck Water District has always set the rates, but then when Suffach County Water Authority came in to be the operator, they have their own rates that they use for islands. And so that's what they charge us for operating the district, but we have a higher rate that they then incorporate into the bills that go out to the customers that covers um or helps to cover the search charge that we incurred to do all of the capital improvements that were necessary in order for Suffach County Water Authority to take on operating our system. So it started out as a $1.7 million um investment. Fred Field's office had gotten us a grant um from the New York State uh dormatory dormatory authority um for 500,000 which lowered the um the search charge and we the district had also accumulated some reserves to when um prior to being um having the county water authority take over the operating agreement to pay for some of these expenditures. So, we use a

little bit of that money each year to help um offset paying off that sir charge. So, the rates haven't gone up in four years or 3 years since we started with um Suffach County Water Authority. So, the Westnick Water Board discussed whether or not it made sense rather than having a large increase hit us and just working with some, you know, larger assumption, you know, like assump, you know, static assumptions. the original like if they didn't do any increases in 2040 I think it was um there would be a large jump and what would be needed. Do I have the right year? I'm just double checking my notes here. Yeah, it was in 2040 there'd be like a 18%.

Yeah, I'm just am I not reading this correctly? Yeah, actually I must I was making edits on the fly, but it was an 18% increase. Well, no, we we fall off the roof. Oh, I see. Yeah, now I now I see what I'm looking at. Yeah, it would be an 18% increase. So rather than having an 18% increase roughly in 2040, the thought was what would it be if we did a more flat rate and so what they are recommending to the town board is to have a steady west water increase for the next 10 years of half a percent a year and then jumping up 1.8% 8% until the search charge is paid off over the next I think it's 11 years and then after the search charge is paid off then Westwater District can then go back down to the Suffach County Water Authority their island rate which would be a decrease of 43% in rates county water authority first took over the operations um the rates doubled for the customers so that's kind of like it was a 50% % increase has been flat for a few years. Now they're suggesting a half a percent increase for 10 years and 1.8% increase over the next few years. Um I have um spreadsheets on this that I will hand out and when the um we have a full board we can go through and

kind of go through the presentation that I did to the WestNet board um last week. Um and then Shelby and I are just looking into um how those rates get approved at the town board level and then how it gets communicated to Southk County Water Authority. So we'll have those answers in the next couple of weeks and they would like that to take effect um I think the year closes May 31st. It's either May 1st and No, it's it's May 31st. um so that we can communicate that to sub county water authority so that they can start the new fiscal year with the new rates and it'll we'll give the public an opportunity to come in especially the west neck water residents to weigh in on how they feel about that. Um, so that's it for I had for committees as far as open positions as well as open volunteer opportunities. We have um until application deadline of May 7th for part-time senior office assistant in the police department. Um it's 24 hours per week, 3 days a week. um salary of $34 an hour. That is posted on the town website and on the bulletin board when if you walk into town hall. We also are looking for lifeguards for this summer. Um starting pay is $25 an hour. There's full-time and part-time positions available. You must be 16 years or older. You have to have um waterfront still water lifeguard certified and CPR and AED certification. Um the certification or reertification courses are offered February through June and the town will cover the cost of um those classes for c for candidates who commit to working for the summer. We are looking for community preservation fund advisory board members. Um we are starting interviews

on that today. So um if someone's interested um let us know soon like today. Um, green options. We're looking at water quality improvement advisory board. Missing anything. I think I got them all. Yeah, I'm looking out at the board to see if I've got everything. So, those are those are what we have. And that's all that I have.

I have one more thing. I almost forgot. Um, the healthcare survey is still live. So, if you haven't had a chance to take the Shelter Island future healthcare survey, it's on the town website. And um I will repost it on social media and there are also hard copies available at the library town hall, the senior center and the fit center. Um I've received almost 300 responses so far. A little shy of that. So it's wonderful. I appreciate all the feedback. Um so I look forward to hearing from everybody.

We are going to adjourn the work session. Um we will reopen it at 11:00, but we'll go immediately into an executive session for um a contract as well as employment history of um couple of employees and interviews. So all right, thank you everybody. I think this is a world record. Yeah, this is crazy. All right, that's it. Thank you.