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What is this?

I’m Oscar Heller, the chair of the Brattleboro Selectboard. This is my personal, informal recap of the 10/20 Selectboard meeting. Trying to keep it readable and brief, because the actual meetings can be dense. If you have questions, feedback, whatever, please get in touch with me at [email protected] - happy to chat anytime!

Our next meeting is the all-day budget workday on 11/10, then a regular meeting on 11/17.

Here’s the packet for this meeting, and a supplement about the Putney Road project.

New trash contract

We approved the new 5 year contract with Casella for trash and recycling. Thoughts:

• It’s about $200k/year CHEAPER than our current 1 year contract.
• This shows the importance of a competitive market. We had multiple applications where last year we only had Casella. We need to keep working with the state to keep the markets for all services competitive.
• I feel good about our decision to only do a 1 year contract last year. We hoped that the environment might be better this year, and it was, and we saved money.

The big change: bins and automated pickup. The town has been holding back this change for years with a whip and a chair, and the sector has finally moved on. We had no bids for a manual pickup option. I know this will make things better for some people, worse for others, and we’ll all do our best to ease the transition.

The good news is that the town isn’t buying or maintaining the bins. That’s a big savings too.

The budget

Lots lots lots to talk about the budget, and it’ll be our main focus for the next few months. This was the first public unveiling of the staff’s draft budget. The board kept the discussion high level, so I’ll do the same here. (We’ll go deep for the first time on Tuesday, at our all-day budget workday with department heads. I’ll recap that too.)

I’m glad the board gave staff a target to hit. The draft budget is a 4% tax increase on the nose. Unfortunately, I have some concerns about how staff got there, and how realistic the numbers are, which is a little disappointing. We’ll be working on that.

To give a quick gut-check on where I’m at with the budget and potential changes:

• It adds an economic development position and brings back a police captain position that we held out last year. I think both may need to go. There’s a table of the staffing changes in the packet for Tuesday’s workday.
• There’s a new “bicycle registration” revenue plan. I’ll hear the pitch on Tuesday, but I doubt this is the right direction.
• A $500k fire truck expense was left out of the main budget as a possible “special article” for Town Meeting to decide. If this is a necessary expense, then we should put it in our SB budget.
• This budget moves some fractional expenses into the parking fund. I’m not sure that’s supportable, given the state of the parking budget.
• I’ll say it - I’m a little weirded out that staff reduced the board’s stipends as part of their recommended budget. I’d do this job for free because I love it, but it’s a ton of work. I’m confused as to why staff thought this was a departmental question.
• Human services funding is at $200k in the budget with $150k left as another “special article”. The board needs to have a conversation about what number we want to put in, but I also want us to use a realistic number based on what Town Meeting will actually do.
• We (the board, the community) need to have a big-picture conversation about what the future is for the pool and the DPW facility (multi-million dollar capital projects).

Anyway, this is step one in a long process, so there will be plenty more budget stuff in these recaps. Feel free to contact me with your thoughts!

Putney Road Reconstruction Plan

The board seemed in general agreement that the new, scaled-back version of the Putney Road Reconstruction Plan doesn’t meet the needs of the town (notably, walk/bike safety, and economic revitalization of the corridor) in the way that the original plan did.

I think we’re all excited about what this project could do for our town, but we want to make sure that we get the best version of this project, and that the state gets best value for its money.

I was also worried about how the first version of the plan unfolded over many years, with input from all different groups, and the new version came to us very quickly without the same public buy-in or feedback. In particular, I want to hear officially from the Traffic Safety Committee and the Windham Regional Commission’s Transportation Committee. Staff will be drafting a letter to VTrans for the board to look at at a future meeting.

Fire department elevator, charter commission public meeting

The fire department elevator has been unusable for quite awhile and we approved $25k to finally fix it. This is much cheaper than we thought (originally $100k+), so this is a nice surprise. It will bring the second floor community room at the FD back into ADA compliance, which means we can use it as an emergency operations center in case the municipal building becomes unavailable, as well as for regular community meetings.

We also warned the Selectboard’s official public meeting to discuss the changes to the Town Charter for 12/16 at 6:15pm at the library. We’ll publicize this more thoroughly as we get closer. The Charter Review Commission is also holding its own info session on 12/2 at 6pm, also at the library.