##VIDEO ID:bQ4tpLW0DqM## Zoom recording all right you guys get all that little thing telling me you're okay with being recorded and all that happy stuff y okay so calling it calling together the uh August 19th meeting of the Green Green Team uh green Community Committee um here at 6:33 um uh those who uh this meeting's been recorded for folks who want to listen later on on on Zoom or YouTube and uh I appreciate your time and appreciate you joining so first thing I'm going to do on the agenda is let's talk about the uh meeting minutes um you guys have seen Kim's Kim's amazing literature lit literary skills um any any issues or comments no by move we approve as presented unless somebody else has something second if I can do that to my own meeting okay um all in favor go roll call vote Kim Dave okay Kim hi and Chris hi and an i for me so there we go all right all right so I'm gonna go with public comment and Tyler this is when you get a chance to be on so we have a special guest today this is is a big occasion for us that we get a special guest and uh Tyler was asked to present to the committee on um something that he's passionate about so um Tyler let the stage be yours all right uh do you mind if I share my screen at all or no go ahead as long as you're allowed to so go ahead uh hosts disabled it so all right so let me figure this out share screen uh no uh advaned sharing options hold on come on who can share all participants who can say when somebody else is all right all right there you go try it now all right perfect so I'm sorry first of all give us a who you are where you where you're from you know where you live and we'll go from there yeah so I'm Tyler Proto and I'm a resident of lunenberg and um basically what I'm here to talk about to you guys today is like start from Recycling and the system that I think would be working in our community and help make our um Town more green real quick before you GOI you on could you just give me your address please yep um 84 robs road we just have to include it in the minute so which Friday be official after being yelled at for three years so bear with us strict rules down here I guess yeah real strict all right so see here so yeah so what I'm going to cover today is the current recycling issues that our town has with styrofoam um then obviously my proposed solution um the funding and grants and how that can work to sort of I guess help us along in the journey um community community involvement um expected impact and then a little bit about um like so war and stuff like that but I'll get to that later um so yeah so some of the current recycling issues that we have is so I contacted Harvey and they said that they do separate but the person I spoke to um said that they don't know where the expanded polystyrene actually goes after that so this can mean that it's obviously missed or there's some sort of functionality that canot be there to sort of have the 100% effectualness of the recycling system that Harvey has so obviously it's nonbiodegradable it sticks around and the shape doesn't change at all through the environment and I was in Nantucket last week actually and I noticed styrofoam washing up on shore and obviously n tuck it's like a pretty like sustainable place and off the shore it's just sort of amazing seeing it all come on to the island and it's sort of surprising actually when it happens okay so yeah so what I found is that 35% of all landfills is um styrofoam and obviously when you come back from let's say Chili's or The 99 we've we've all been to these restaurants where they give out like Styrofoam takeout bins and boxes and obviously that comes from outside of lunberg and that brings the pollution in and then we put it back out um yeah so we don't really know where it goes from there so the recycling process would be to so I've been looking at a a couple of recycling places that do this sort of process so we have collection points in the town and then from those collection points we transport them to these recycling centers and this could and this transport could be either covered by the Cycling Center or covered by like a state Grant which I've also researched and we actually can qualify for them up to $100,000 um but I I'll have to do more research into that if we plan to move forward with something like this um but basically what happens is they take the styrofoam and they basically crunch it up into the little cubes and they melt it down or not really melt yeah they melt it down um and they get these little like pieces of grains like probably about the size of like rice um and then they can be used to make um picture frames and like things around the house that you wouldn't even really think were St from at the time like cups bins rulers things like that um and obviously we would need a lot of community involvement for this because um having these collection points you need people to actually want to um go to these points and I think that if we have like posters or we have sessions where information's G out or basically Educational Systems where people actually want to help and like want to go into these places and get their styrofoam or put their styrofoam into the collection bins and then they can sort of help out in the way that we need help I guess um like I said um fundings and grants we can we can get them from local government businesses State funds government funds um there's lots of options that I've seen and we can research but I can dig more into that and email some people to see if we can qualify for those um like I said I think one of them that we can qualify for is up to $100,000 and I think that's a pretty good chunk of money depending on what we can get for it um obviously the expected impact would be for us to have a less percentage of Styrofoam in landfills and less carbon emissions and less all these things that are harmful to our environment um yeah and then so that's sort of it for styrofoam I have a whole um document of notes that I've taken and research of like facts and stuff like that and if you guys want that I have a link page that I can share with you guys and then yeah so I I will ask if you can if you can just share the presentation you know course after after you're done this way we can put it towards uh the website or some or make it available for others of course um and then just sort of the last thing is so I was touring Dartmouth a couple of weeks ago or not a couple weeks ago maybe like month and a half ago I don't know time flies but but um I was touring Dartmouth and they had this restaurant or Cafe near um the campus and I got like cups and utensils and straws like things you wouldn't really think to be like compostable but these things are actually pretty simple and cost effective to get in in change of like the plastic overwar which usually sometimes can't be recycled in or maybe people throw them out by accient or carelessly but if like there's a possibility to switch to these things then maybe I don't know like it would be better off okay okay so can I ask a couple questions yeah of course all right so um you talked about like having a location um is this like a large bin like a like a or something you know BEC the reason why I'm asking is like say if I bought uh well I bought a new microwave right and I have that styrofoam that comes in it which now I barely I can you know I can basically fill up an entire yellow bag with just styrofoam for that one thing so I'm trying to look at a way that I'm telling people is the offset right you know if there is some cost to this what the offset is is of that they had to throw it in a bag is are are these large bins or how how would they be doing it so I guess it could be large bins but I was sort of thinking on like a smaller scale even so like there could be like a place on the school campus where you could have like a little drop off station or the fire department or police stations or even Hanford I know that Hanford has these like plastic bag um I guess collection points where you stuff the plastic bags like like recycling bin or something yes maybe they could maybe they would be on board for something like that too okay so you're thinking more of like the uh like a takeout containers uh more on that side um you know would they anything really anything okay I'm just looking at it right because to me personally as a homeowner that's my biggest hassle is I just bought something and what do you do with the stuff yeah right now and and what is I forget how much a bag is these days but you know even if I'm going to say it's it's three bucks to throw out the styrofoam of something I just bought um yeah is it cheaper to burn it in the backyard oh I'm sorry I didn't say that out loud um but yeah yeah okay would we be using the town trash bags to dispose of this or would it be removed in another way um so what I was sort of thinking is having these drop off stations having like just regular trash bags or just bringing in sort of the material itself and then bringing the I guess the collection bins or whatever we use to collect the items to the um recycling centers so so there it's something that we would have to bring it to them or will they come and pick them up um it can be either um I can contact UM the recycling centers to see which um option would work better for them but then again we can get if it does get to the point where we have to bring it to them um I think that a grant would be a good option for paying for like transportation and stuff like that well it would obviously have to be a grant to pay for transp is I don't think we're gonna get any through thing through a town budget to yeah ex add something and to try to have people say okay I'm G to bring it somewhere to now pay to throw it yeah doesn't I don't think will work either yeah all right right uh to the group I'll open up any any questions for folks I I want to agree that probably as a homeowner the biggest um kind of pain with the the styrofoam are like those big purchases like when I bought my house I was constantly throwing like cutting up cardboard throwing away styrofoam um and you know people are moving in all the time moving all the time getting replacement things so a larger scale for something like that I think would be really useful because that's what people are going to probably think of more of on a like if they're looking to recycle stuff because they're going to be like I have this big mound of recycling and not necessarily like the takeout container here and there um like me personally like when I go to a restaurant I have a collapsible tog go container because I'm one of those crazy people that I won't use a too container I would rather bring bring my Tupperware with me um but most people aren't going to like do that and they're not going to like think about oh this small one little thing here I'm just going to throw in the trash because it's convenient for them but if it's something that is big like Dave was saying you know where they could just bring it all in their car like instead of going to um you know people bring their big cardboard boxes over to devans you could someone would make definitely make the trip over to the public safety building to bring over their you know car amount size of Styrofoam um I think something like that like a bin or like a specific not like a maybe like a dumpster or something that people could throw their recycling in um would be like probably more of an appropriate scale that I would be thinking and if people do the smaller things I think that would be great too um it's probably just not a habit that a lot of people would get into um at first but I would fully support if this was possible I think it's a great idea um I would be um wondering because you know like when you bring the bags back to the recycling or like to the grocery store like your plastic bags um they say it's like oh it's a recycling area I've heard that sometimes they just throw them away so I would be like really curious how if we brought them somewhere if they were actually being recycled because people are going through all the effort you know if we were to get funding for this we would want to make sure on the back end that it's actually worthwhile and it's not just getting thrown away or burned or something um but actually recycled as intended so that would be probably my concern I would just want to make all the effort truly to be be worth it um so that people would do it and it would be like actually environmentally um you know an improvement because if we were to put them the styrofoam into plastic bags then we have another plastic bag to throw away um it's kind of creating a new type of waste um you know I would I would love to see that the big use recycling thing kind of make its way and then for like the Tog go containers and like the utensils and stuff I think if we were to find a way to reduce people's usage of too containers or at least like make them that compostable for at home like instead of the styrofoam containers if those were compostable because a lot of people do compost um but I would be worried that any of the compostable stuff isn't home compostable you have to bring it to a different facility for to actually be able to be composted um so that would be another like kind of checkbox of like yeah we have these compostable utensils or too containers but like you again have to bring them somewhere else so people are just going to throw them away you know so those are just my my thoughts appreciate that Tyler where is the uh closest uh processing area that you're aware of recovery facility um so I know that there's one in Worster I haven't been able to get in contact with them I've emailed them a couple times um so they might be closed down now but I know of other um compost or other recycling centers I think there's one in like starts at the L but it's not lunberg it's like lyx Littleton it's like it's like one weird it's like one weird name I I don't really know no no leester yeah leester ler yeah ler yep sorry ler I'm saying it like I'm saying it like for 30 years yeah the only reason I ask that you know if you get this program uh off the ground and there is funding out there for just about all types of recycling the town actually used to get credits for uh some of the things that we did like education to the public so on and so forth and I'll try to find out what agency that was through um but what I the reason I was asking about the location is ultimately if you could get this thing going to the point where a dumpster is filled up every two weeks or something like that possibly you could contract with the recovery center to come swap out the dumpster every two weeks and they transport it ass assuming there'll be an expense to that but again like you said if the grant money is out there uh you can take advantage of that for the Transportation uh little early to jump that far into it but you know this is you're what you're proposing sounds like an interesting uh project and um you never know until you try whether it's going to be successful yeah yeah the other thing that's going to be important is that it's a container that uh secures the material once it's put in there because it's a lot of this stuff is so light you get a strong wind if it blows through an open dumpster it'll take half the material blow it all over the area thoughts at this yeah in fact it was interesting because I remember when that town did have the cardboard dumpster that it it was a sealed dumpster which which was a pain to the neck because you had to sit there breaking up your cardboard box to fit into the stupid little slot however however once it was in there it wasn't going anywhere type of thing as well as it you know the fact that you broke it up made it so that it doesn't take up as much room and in the dumpster type of thing um your comment earlier da no go ahead Dave yeah I was just going to say Tyler you comment earlier about uh this stuff doesn't go away I was reading an article about deep sea exploration uh last evening I think it was and I forget the name of the trench but it's the deepest trench in the ocean very well known but I just can't think of the name of it right now Mar French yep there we go that's it and uh the the guy that went down in that trench holds the one of the records to the deepest dive in the ocean and it was into that trench and he discovered two or three new species of animals but he also stated in the uh article that it was Laden with pieces of plastic also so you're right they never go away they just go down when they get dumped in the ocean they go everywhere nice so I we like the idea I mean I I think as a group we like the idea and would love to be able you know help help you with the proposal for the town I think the biggest things that we feel is is is well at least personally I feel like I'd like to be able to do the bigger you know be able to do the larger styrofoam because I think that's the quickest impact from people and if I'm bringing large styrofoam I would think about the rest of my styrofoam type of thing especially if you know the other issue I have is um if I have to accumulate it so in other words how many times do I have to eat out and bring something until I get a bin full of Styrofoam that I'm going to want to bring there but if I'm having you know I think the biggest quickest impact is going to be the big stuff so I recommend if you um uh you know I I do recommend that if we can find out more about you know the size of the the the container that would hold it and whether it you know what the difference is between them picking it up or us delivering it we'd be I'd be you know very interested okay I think the other thing to look for if you can is uh a program like this that's already been instituted somewhere if you can find one and see you know what their successes were and what tweaks they had to go through to get it to work so on and so forth right I mean to me it's unfortunate that we don't have a town dump anymore because it would have just been one more dumpster at the time of dump well not you know I mean obviously our town dump was not the same as the new town dumps that you seeing say a Bolton or Harvard or something like that where they everybody comes and just separates it into different dumpsters but I would look at is this would be perfect it would just be one more dumpster that that we fill type of thing but unfortunately I don't think we're going back to town dump I'll tell you all the uh towns up in uh North Central New Hampshire they all use trans transer stations that's that's what you do you go into the transfer station like towns and you separate into the individual dumpsters and then the final one is trash that's trash right right so and I would love that to be in lunberg because like I say too many folks there you get an item and you're like what do I do with it now type of thing right so you know and I missed the camaraderie of the Town coming coming there and being able to trade with my fellow towns people you know if I if I had a set of speakers and I need a a receiver you know or something like that or coming home with a new set of dishes you know we miss that all right excellent excellent Jennifer thanks for joining us you don't mind all right did you miss the beginning of it or you have an idea that's okay I have an idea okay okay any do you have any questions or anything that you would like to ask no thank you okay I figured I had to asked okay got both duffies crash in the meeting yeah now you're the one that has the talent Bank form in also what do you have a talent Bank form in that you're thinking about joining one of the one get on this committee yes yes yeah okay okay well we welcome you know there are openings um as alternate right now which means you know when somebody's not here like today we don't have somebody here you you know you basically can be a a voting member if it's you know if it's if it's something where we have to have the deciding Vote or anything like that but um you're welcome welcome to join us we try to meet once a month they give me they give us an hour and a half after an hour and a half anybody's willing to say meeting adjourned and we call it we call it an evening so we ask for an hour and a half of your time uh once a month type of thing or other times as well so I appreciate this I don't know what you know is there a certain direction you would like from us at this point or have we kind of given you some good ideas of what we're thinking um I think I got some good ideas I mean I definitely I was thinking more small scale and big scale because I wasn't really sure like which one would work better but I feel like yeah larger scale now that you guys said like obviously I think you guys lived more years than me I'm I'm only 17 so okay okay well think you know I was going to say the only thing I would suggest is reach out to Hanford have a conversation and see what you get for a reaction from them um the only reason I say that is if you could start a small scale recycling project with them as your backer that could happen a lot faster than municipal government can do anything so just just be aware municipal government almost runs in Reverse before it go goes forward correct uh but but I won't I don't want to dissuade you from doing it through the town but if you get a positive reaction from Haniford uh I'm not sure about Walmart but I think Hanford would be the one to approach see what you get for a response okay and and by the way even if it is it might be Walmart when you're thinking about somebody bought a TV from Walmart is there a place they can bring the starter F back and if that's the case it might be a reason for them to go back into Walmart and shop for something else type of thing yeah the only thing I will say is that dumpsters and those parking lots up there have been an issue so just keep that in mind it would have to be where at a spot where it can be monitored because you'll end up with baby furniture and you name it there'll be everything on the ground couches um from that perspective the DPW garage is probably a better location or something like that uh where there's surveillance at all times so uh I don't think there's been any problems over there with cardboard dumpsters so no not yeah not just passing that out as information right because also Ty as Dave mentioned the fact is is that you know if we feel this as a go I now still got to convince the DPW to put a dumpster there or something like that right and they're going to push back everybody's you know they it's as he said says it's everybody wants to be not in my backyard is is the famous saying in every town as long as it's not in my backyard solo farms so long as it's not in my backyard right and everything else so excellent excellent well I appreciate you bringing this forward to us and it's definitely and the research you've done it's definitely a good idea I think it's something we need um it's just a matter of uh being able to present the program in to the town to the selectman and then into town meeting and you know if we could put if you can with your help if we can put something together more than more than happy to stand in front of our wonderful Selectmen and the and the rest of the town and get this move helping you get this moving with yeah that' be great um again I'm willing to do I guess whatever it takes I mean I guess like I'd appreciate some help from you guys and that would be much appreciated well as it gets further along we'll give you more than just our our Sage old advice we'll give you we you know we'll be able to help with other things and and getting getting you the right meetings and stuff like that okay excellent excellent well thank you get an answer back from the administrative assistant yet from the town I have not no okay you should be she distributed your talent Bank form so you should be hearing from her for uh an appointment with the select board sometime in the next few weeks I would assume I'll touch I'll try to touch base with her tomorrow see what they think as to a date okay curiosity do you need to be a certain age to be appointed to a committee I do not believe so how old how old do you say where to 17 when's your 18 um November 29th perfect so we can do you as probably do you as an alternate maybe you might not be able to vote till your voting age you might not be able to vote that type of thing I'm not sure about that Dave but we'll see yeah and by the way by the time by the time this town moves right now the way the board of selectman is working you could be 21 by the time they figure things out you put it put it this way we'll treat you as a member until they say you can be a member so don't worry about exactly this group is real we like to think of ourselves we're just a rag tag tab group anybody's willing to join anybody's willing to put their two cents in we we we'll accept any we'll accept everything type of thing excellent well I thank you I thank you again and you know if you to stay on stay on and you can listen to the rest of our our wonderful speeches here tonight yeah I'd love to thank you for having me thanks okay all right Jennifer um I just got to ask if you got anything before I move on to the uh wonderful rest of this uh meeting um agenda I'll see if you had anything in particular you wanted to talk to us about uh no nothing in particular I usually have Adcom at the same time so we had Ed early so I figured joining for a few minutes and do some cross commit uh networking I guess that's all okay so what committee I'm sorry what committee are you uh Adcom I'm the chair of Adcom for okay okay all right all right cool all right well I appreciate that excellent well welcome all right so let me go I'll jump onto the can I steal the screen back there Tyler oh yeah sorry it's all right oh was even still on there that's all right okay so I am going to where is my uh oh I just lost I don't have enough screens here Zoom okay so I'm going to jump to the part of our wonderful thing where we're talking about the Grant I mean the next competitive Grant guys okay and I will tell you now that the feedback from the town has been mediocre at best and I'm going to be really nice when I'm calling it mediocre okay it's to me my opinion it's abysmal right now um so there was one email going around and this was actually done by Unitil um that kind of showed uh a bunch of projects for possibilities and how much grant money they would be looking for and you know out of the money that's that's available and the utility incentives the you can see here I think you can hopefully everybody see my screen but um Dave can you P that up a little bit can I what can you zoom in on that a little bit hold on let me get let me get let me get rid of some of these uh let me get rid of some of these things here okay I'm gonna hide I'm gonna hide a bunch of Let Me Hide a bunch of um screens here hide hide come on hide oh it's not letting me hide come on all right I'm gonna skip that then okay so let me make this a little bit bigger um that's great for me okay I can zoom in on it and see it all right so here's here's here's the deal this is the this is the easy part I'm going to just go in this thing there's they this was done by as I mentioned this was done by a gentleman in Unitil uh o'keef um it was it you know it's not official or anything like that but these are some projects that have been talked around around town and what what he's looking at as far as utility intensives incentives and uh grant funding we've the first three have to do with the Sewer Commission um different pump stations um I have to talk to um K uh I I have to talk to Kelly and see how she feels about these but last time last time around when we looked at pump stations we didn't get the greatest response from for the ROI and the time to Market in fact here let me let me try to do this bear with me a second here I might make this smaller but um let me try to all right I gotta let me make it a little bit smaller for everybody here but I'm trying to I'm trying to get to the wonderful where it gives you the ROI time oh come on this is ridiculous oh I don't even have an Roi here oh here it is okay here we go I'm getting closer guys I'm getting closer all right let me skip that one all right now we get to the bottom line here okay can everybody see everything now the big thing I'm pointing out is this column here uh column AA and as you can see the pump stations the Grant Community the green community's payback period is a little bit longer than I would expect them to approve and that's in years not go way right exactly so I don't think they're going to be jumping at the fact that we're going to S you know they'll get their money back in 800 years so I'd say the first three are out so I'm going to go and do I'm going to get rid of these a little bit so I'm down to the elementary school of walking Refrigeration control the high school Walkin Refrigeration control and the same thing the Turkey Hill I assume that's a walk-in Refrigeration control yeah Refrigeration controls the payback time is pretty good here you know a maximum of like two and a two and a quarter years so I feel these are good but you know we're talking about a total of um what am I going to be nice and say that's seven 10 10 $1,000 in Grand funding for these and I'm look I'm really pushing folks to come up with more stuff but so far I'm not getting anything from the towns towns folks um Dave we should be getting two Cruisers correct the two cruises would be in there that would be another 10 grand right okay but just trying to add up what we've got for pennies exactly exactly so I'm looking at this and I'm going guys this is this is disgusting right now um the fact that we're still sitting here at like 22 Grand 20 well even if I put in the training for Chris and the training for for Chris Ruth and the training for Eric hee on how to work the systems and all that stuff we're still going to be at maybe 30k total 25 to 30 30k total and that's it I'm really pushing Chris just got back from vacation so he's going to send me something tomorrow I'll push it to you guys but we got I got to get something I went in front of the school board emphasized to them that you know we want to help them with the Mini Splits and that to get us the information but I still haven't seen anything and I got to go back to them and find out what they've done you know to talk to Eric about it I'm try you know my un my feeling is is that he's looking at it is he's just trying to maintain buildings and tell the town what they need but as as far as how it's paid for that I don't feel that that's what he's that that's the concern the concern is more of just outlining what needs to be done and maintaining what we have so I just wanted to be upfront and honest with you guys you know upfront with you guys about where we're at so far when it comes to this $200,000 worth of grant funding that's available yeah it didn't seem like they wanted to use it for um heating as much correct yeah that that's the huge mistake right there huge mistake and and the problem is that uh step back just a little bit uh Kim Kelly and I did a zoom meeting with Eric a few weeks ago to okay try to try to pick it apart a little bit more from Eric's perspective and you are correct you know uh he kind of understands what we're trying to do but it's really doesn't see that as part of his responsibilities as the facilities director you know different from John Wanda who was on the ground floor with green communities so he knew the process and it wasn't more work for him it was just part of his day-to-day operations um and he drove most of the submissions for quite a few years um I I think going forward whatever we do this year I think going forward for the long term somebody's got to be identified on the town side paid employee that is going to help coordinate um what we've been trying to do pulling projects from facilities and so on and working with Kelly to help identify the projects that are eligible so that we're not you know pulling our hair out trying to get projects um at the basically what came out of that meeting that we had from Kelly's perspective was that initially we were going to try to submit a proposal that included both phases and show Green communities that the town had already made an investment because phase one is actually in progress now and that would help towards them looking in a different we at phase two because we've already made an investment uh by the end of the conversation it was felt that we dropped phase one from our consideration try to pull phase two in uh but even that is going to be a stretch because they've already demonstrated that they don't plan to use it for heat which is really too bad because they are going to use it for heat to guarantee they are um number of years ago and I haven't said this in a public meeting but a number of years ago and Kelly and I talked about this a couple of times uh the Ritter building there was a proposal put to Green communities to put uh a mini split type unit in that building a number of years ago and it was submitted again the same as the school talking no it's for AC only so green communities kicked it out well while and behold she did a site visit a number of years later and what they had installed and they were using was AC and heating and green communities could have paid for every dollar of it that install and here we are again with you know a multi hundreds of thousands of dollars that's being put into Min splits and we're struggling to get it funded because you know that they brought it forward as cooling only so is there another is there another committee we could put this in front of that would realize the value and be able to require that we fund projects like this the uh I think we should have some more conversations with the capital planning committee they are already adding that to their criteria for the department heads when the projects are brought forward I I think if we collaborate with the capital planning committee and give them some guidance as to you know what types of projects that we could uh help fund and that's going to be a question on their questioner or or during their uh presentations is is this eligible for Green community well right it should be it should be kind of a you know check you know check with green community the green committee first right Chris the only other issue is always that they're in a big rush to get it in get the project funded so they bring It Forward when it's at a critical point where it can't wait till the next Grant round and then say Oh we can't wait for that we're just gonna spend the taxpayers money that's what it boils down to saying it blunt Dave I'm sorry did I uh oh that's my hand I have I have a hand on the screen that pops up if I accidentally put my cursor over a speaker or over any one of you and I thought it was your hand that's okay no I I by the way I I agree guys this is this is a frustrating one from day one and it it doesn't take much it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Mini Splits is Mini Splits using them for heat and heating just the classrooms not the building you know not the hallways makes a lot of freaking sense but I mean maybe I don't have have my masters in thermodynamics but you know the fact of the matter is it's just common sense and I don't understand it at all I'm sorry Dave one one other comment I wanted to make is that because of the time frame that it takes for these projects like this we could have potentially put these projects phase one into one Grant round and a year later phase two into the next Grant round and we could have committed you know two or $300,000 towards this project but now we've got nothing understand understand so um I'm going I'm going to look to try to talk to the school committee again you know to talk to at least do something with the school committee um I agree with Dave that you know need to probably have a a meeting with Capitol planning you know maybe if at one of their meetings we can you know as a group we can come to one of their meetings and just present to them and talk to them about this whole thing and and go from there I don't know if phase two for the Mini Splits is already funded by the town I know right and I got a feel is not right so I I want to make sure that it would not be funded by the town and that the school would have to you know figure out how to do this a different way right now because this is ridiculous you know to tell me you're GNA use it for 12 days a year when you need AC and you want you know that's almost like saying this thing payback period of a hundred years it's like you that's what you're basically doing to me it's stupid I don't get it at all Dave the other two important points and again this goes back to projects bring being brought before us or somebody who knows the process early on is that one of the other problems we I don't know if Kelly heard from Eric or not after since that meeting we don't know what brand of unit they chose and if it's not on the state list and green communities won't fund it anyway oh that's correct too yes yes you know so so we're still in the dark really and and if that's all it takes and you know I can't imagine that on the state list there's not a quality unit that's kind of a double negative but um you know there there's got to be a quality unit that you could pick off that list all as an alternative to what you maybe your vendor looking at and then it makes it eligible but to choose a a brand that's not on the list again they're shooting themselves in the foot and spending the taxpayers money instead of the taxpayers money through grants yeah in addition to that there was just a lot of I wrote down you know five things that they needed to do in order to for it to work and be eligible um you know the energy assessment the weatherization assessment they didn't do that um they don't have the energy savings data um and also that they would also look into the utility incentives with Unitil or you know whoever would provide that in that area of town um so you know Kelly said with there's a lot of things that they would need to provide in order for it to be eligible that U Eric didn't seem to have the information on no and and Kim to your point that he's looking he's not even looking at it if there is any no there to him there's no Energy savings because it's AC right now there is no AC so there's actually an energy user versus Energy savings right yeah their whole their whole thing was just the AC like you know not wanting it to use it for the heat I think that somebody made that decision right yeah and and the other side of that is we we have solar panels on these buildings so it's free electric it's like you know it the return on investment is could be so short it's ridiculous I I the town's struggling right now to use all the all all the solar energy we have because of the street lights and everything like that so I I don't get it but all right so um I'll take some yeah volunteer tribute yes I understand I might have $300 worth of credits I got to pass off off to somebody in a few months so I'll keep you posted okay cool thank you yes all right so um I will Chris is supposed to send me his list he he unfortunately no I think today was his first day back so he's supposed to send me his list I'll pass it on to you guys um it looks like the next meeting you know will be the meeting in early September that we'll have to just try to hammer something and get and get this get this moving if we can okay I mean I I feel terrible if this is all we're submitting yeah Dave if we have uh you know something substantive like a an improved list by then uh Kelly would like to be linked into the meet the meeting when we're ready to start reviewing these projects like uh the chart you have up there wait till Dave gets back by the way Kim thank you for taking all those notes I'm terrible about taking notes well if I don't take the notes then I won't remember so I remember but it's tomorrow I'll remember it all sorry guys I lost I lost you there for a minute there I I my my headphones dropped out of me on me um okay okay Dave I know heard my comment or not but Kelly would like to be looped in on one of our meetings here in the near future especially maybe the early September one if if we have uh you know an expanded uh spreadsheet yeah to what we have here and um then we can have that conversation you know Kelly can say yes no yes no yes no and you know assuming she can have it in advance she will have been able to collect thoughts already okay Dave agree 100% in fact I look at it as we don't have AIT a longer list by September we're shot anyhow you know yeah you know I I wanted to speak to that but it wasn't appropriate earlier but I I think I don't know we'll have to talk about this as a committee I don't want to keep putting off not applying not applying because we don't have $100,000 $10 is better than zero dos um I just want to make sure that we're not shooting ourselves in the foot like we held off hoping that the mini split project could be brought around for this round to you know get the numbers up and to help offet the uh return on investment on some of these that are marginal um so that's what we were hedging there but if we just don't get that then we need to have a serious conversation about going forward with 40 or 50,000 for this round and wait till next year for a new round um I'll I'll in fact I'll entertain the committee's opinion on that but and then I'll give mine um any thoughts Kim Chris um go ahead Chris no go ahead I'm sorry I say if we you know we can apply for one Grant per year we're gonna have to wait until next year anyways we might as well use it it's better than nothing okay uh my side of that is I probably agree with what David said he broke up in the middle he broke up halfway through and I didn't hear the whole middle of it so basically it's the idea is even if no matter what we have this for this round we need to apply oh I would agree with that yes absolutely and you know at this point I and I I agree with you I agree Dave I agree I don't feel like kicking the can down to Spring will have any other result you know would have any different result right now I felt like we've given everybody fair warning we've told them we've tried to steer you know bring the horse to water but you know what can I do type of thing and I guess really would look at it as let's go for what we can get and then put a full out Blitz to other committees in town like Capital planning like select like school committee and basically say you know you need to change your change your ways um and make the town's people better more aware of what they're missing out on type of thing I mean I I'll gladly stand up in town meeting and rant and Rave until they uh you know next time the Mini Splits come up for me to pay fund for them again hey Kim those notes that you have of the things that the Hoops that um the school would need to jump through to to bring that project forward that that sounds like a good start for an in informational sheet that could be passed out to department heads or or whatever um and as I say that I think that's just the beginning of it but if we start throwing something together that informs them the steps they're going to the Hoops they're going to need to jump through then at least they know in advance you know what's needed and not us trying to pull it out of them at the last minute um and if we put a draft of that document together and then review it with Kelly I'm sure she'll have more uh thoughts on other things that could be added to the list or worded differently Etc yeah kind of similar to how she was saying the application really outlines all of these but I think people might be you know a little intimidated by the application it's a little convoluted because it's not straightforward probably checklist it's just probably pages and pages of requirements so you know I you know I agree with you I think it would be better to have kind of an offline you know tool that we can use to bring to the Committees that would be a little bit easier for them to understand so I can definitely do that I have those you know five um you know commitment like five checkbox items from that meeting that can start to put together and going forward it might be you know again in the early stages um once you've identified a project that you're fairly certain is eligible one of the first steps might be to have the conversation with Kelly whatever the department head is and at least one of the members of this committee and put a list together like those five items you got there but specific to the project that's being brought forward then everybody knows what needs to get done before the application goes in right right yeah I I look my feeling is is most of this stuff that they're asking for the the contractor who's doing the work should be able to put together you know right they already know this stuff they just it's easier to say no than to have to actually do it type of thing you know I mean how many homeowners say to the contractor why why are you giveing me this furnace versus another furnace right you know that we we just say okay you know what you're talking about and they don't you know but it's because they get a better deal and they get a win Hawaii yeah the other thing that Kelly mentioned in regard to that is that um depending on the project if you run up against uh the contractor that doesn't want to do this or doesn't think he can do it properly it's not that expensive to have to pay to have that done separately it it depends again you have to do an analysis on what your savings going to be are you willing to spend ,000 or $2,000 to have uh the energy audit and whatever else needs to be done done by a separate contractor and pay him a few dollars to get that work done so that you can move forward and get 150,000 okay so let me um as I I agree daveid and so let's let's look at this can if you can put together you know like just the bullets we'll pass it by Kell well we can pass it through Kelly get her approval that says okay this is good and then start publishing this within town and you know it could even be on how wonderful Facebook page of what they need to do type of thing so um I think we're okay I will also as soon as I get something from Chris pass it to you guys and then I will look to schedu uh make see if Kelly make sure Kelly's available for our meeting in September okay because I really feel like we can't wait till October to have projects in September we got to be looking at the nitty-gritty details through September to get them off off you know over the over the goal line yeah those last three weeks of September they're going to have to be dotting the eyes and crossing the tees on the application not pulling projects in and and try to fill out the paperwork on October 10th right right and and to Dave do you point that even if they're telling us the project we can help them with this Energy savings if they can give us enough details type of thing it's not it's yeah the other thing we should remember and uh this came up in that meeting too um is that if we if they bring a project forward and it turns out it's not going to work out for green communities we need to remind them that they need to talk to Unitil uh to vet the incentives that are available through Unitil because even though they're not eligible for green communities there are incentives for power electrical savings and so on there's a number of them that well Unitil will do the analysis and they get free money we did that with the street lights we got a pretty good chunk of money on top of the green guys Dave to your point look at here you know the refrigeration stuff three there it is right two two thirds of the money is from you you know incentives onethird is from GR you know I mean that's 70% of it is being paid by incentives yeah and to my knowledge the minisplit project that's in progress now was never vetted for incentives I think I think maybe it has now because of that conversation we had yeah a few weeks ago because Kelly actually talked to Matthew she had a meeting schedule for something else and I think Kelly kind of put a flag up and said hey give Eric a call and let him know this is available okay okay all right so we we'll get that so guys stay tuned on this but I think we're in agreement that whatever we have together is going to is going to uh grant funding request this fall at this point okay excellent um are we okay here can I move on to the next topic I'm good I'm good all right excellent excellent which goes for how's our how's our Facebook page doing have we gone viral yet um not viral yet but you know we continue to make posts people continue to interact with it so it's better um you know like for July I posted about rain barrels which is a personal interest of mine about collecting rain water um there was a post that was created from the water department that you know I kind of like piggybacked on um you know and and provided some calculations on uh you know how much rain you'll need for how much Garden you have so not entirely related to energy savings but um you know still part of you know Green um you know sustainability uh you know look outlooks um that reached like over a 100 people um you know I'm posting it to the P to the groups but I'm gonna have um I'm G to do a post about you know just following the page and stuff like that because I think Dave had that idea a few months ago um just to invite people to to follow the page uh so that it can show up on more people's feed uh for upcoming posts I was going to do that um the data that you provided for the LED lights um so whatever we had there is fine I know you said you couldn't get all of the um all the information you were looking for but I'll figure something out to make it interesting um so I I think on that is and and sorry Chris uh but the basically the idea was is that when we went from the original plan that we were doing when we decided to buy him and dump the you the maintenance fee that kind of cut us in half and then now that we've G LED it's it was a further like 60 to 70% savings I don't know if you you know the difference between 6,000 well say the $5,000 $4,000 number we used to be paying in 2020 and the $700 number we paying now that's what I would love to be able to somehow emphasize to everybody make like a a visual ual like kind of a a graph situation so that can see it without even reading you know for those visual Learners yeah um to say even if you looked at as like uh um you know average it as a year and said okay in 2020 our yearly our monthly bill on average was that that that we could probably get away with I would think okay yeah yeah I'll definitely um yeah I'll take a look at what's there and and create something um and then I also got got that meter from the library so I'm going to post that that's there if anyone's interested okay how' it do for you um I thought it was interesting some of the things that I thought would pull Phantom energy didn't and others that did um for example my coffee maker pulled energy which I thought was interesting but it doesn't have the clock on it so I don't know um but like my air conditioners they didn't do anything or like my um air fryer I kind of thought would I don't know based off of nothing besides my own thoughts but it was it was interesting to see what did and what didn't because I was not unplugging the right things so okay it was useful for me uh and and you know they were concerned because it was quite old but I did put it next to um a friend's energy meter that I happened to grab and they had pretty comparable results so was able to confirm for them it still worked okay okay excellent excellent yeah I'd love to be able to bring that back you know into the fold for folks and and it's funny because I I I mean your microwave and your coffee maker use probably more energy than half the stuff in your you know that's sitting there anything that has a clock or a timer waiting to go on is is bad but people don't want to be like unplugging their microwave because they use the clock so it's a understand yeah but yeah it was interesting glad to have learned about it I understand okay by the way Tyler I don't know if you knew that if you ever want to take a look around the house there for there is a meter at the library that you can borrow for free and you can look plug PL you know plug stuff into it and figure out how much Fantom power it's using or you could turn it on and it tells you how much power it's using too which I thought was neat because um you know I could compare like the two air conditioners to see like yeah they're both set at the same temperature as one pulling more power so yep yeah okay so have to see see instead of doing that fancy thousands of dollars for a system for the house just free okay excellent excellent all right um let's see I think that was everything we got right now you guys anything I missed today think so all right if there's anything that anyone wants me to post about or like if there's an event that you would like me to put on the page let me know just send me an email and I can I can post it on there okay all right excellent excellent I'm gonna step away for just a second I'll back no actually Dave Dave we're gonna make it easier for you um well we got the next meeting is the first one in first Monday of March I mean sorry September September which is September which is which is not Labor Day it's the following Monday right so it's the 6th I think it is n9th September what's the first Monday in September it's nine it's nine n yep oh the second is the second why does it say that it's the Labor Day that's Labor Day so so you want to skip that well we can't we we can't have a town a town a meeting on a on a state Hall no I get it I get okay so we're gonna look at the ninth for the next one and I'll come up with the location type of thing okay sounds good so at this at this point I will entertain a motion hey Dave I would suggest before we adjourn just a suggestion but I would post the agenda at least a basic one tomorrow okay yes because we're coming up on the end of the month real fast okay I will I'll I'll look to get something out tomorrow then yes yeah greate okay all right now I'll second the motion okay uh in favor I hi Dave hi sorry Dave Tyler you're okay with the journey no I'm okaying with you all right guys I I appreciate the time today we'll be talking again but I you know I'm sure we'll be chatting but um if anything looking forward to seeing everybody on the ninth sounds good thank you all right enjoy the evening all right take care everybody thanks bye