Full Transcript

Thank you. Good morning everybody. Today is June 25th. Happy birthday dad. And before we do anything else, I'd like to say Pledge of Allegiance. so miss maryfield ms councilman maryfield if you lead us in that please yes thank you i pledge 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 thank you so very much and to start off today we're going to move directly into executive session it's the second one the first and second to do that uh to do litigation matters surrounding litigation between the town of riverhead and united riverhead terminal with howard tenenberg lapinski and brown and then personnel matters marana uh matter surrounding hiring of an employee with stripling and then matters surrounding possible change and status leave of absence with an employee with uh council councillor prudenti may i have a first and second to move into executive all in favor all right we'll be back in the street

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welcome back to our June 25th 2026 work session I would direct to request a first and a second to go back into our open session all in favor so open session is open we will begin with matters surrounding proposed pay down of the 2018 refunding bond series B with myself financial minister the Apollo and emery prudent team ladies thank you so much for joining us so in the series of we had okayed refunding this and in the series Janetta had done some homework came back and said I think we have the opportunity to actually pay off debt so ask her to come forward and share that information with us so we can do it okay so we had talked a while ago about refunding the series this was one of two series we talked about refunding but looking at the fund balance in the community preservation fund there is a lot of money in there right now so if you follow along the spreadsheet as of 12 31 25 we have 30.1 million sitting in the CPF fund balance our debt service this year is 2.8 million roughly the proposed pay down of this debt series for CPF would be an additional seven point two million principal only so you'd be saving six hundred and sixty thousand of future interest if you pay it down now your adjusted fund balance would bring that down to twenty point one although it will probably be higher than that because last year we made seven million on the transfer tax and the debt is already in the budget so really you've probably already recouped that anyway from January through May or April transfer tax but at any rate if we say we normally try to maintain at least a 15% fund balance of the adopted budget right that would put us only at like four hundred and forty seven thousand although obviously keep more than that you would still have roughly 19 to 20 million to spend on purchasing properties and of course that would grow every year by the transfer tax and especially since you're not paying the debt going forward more in the pocket of the fund balance going forward so six six oh good i strongly support to pay off the indebtedness so this is something back in the 90s so that the public understands that um you know in the high development taking place back then i know um that we had taken out state grants county grants then in 2016 senator laval and fred thiel kind of put out legislation at that point to refinance those grants so that we can continue to preserve farmland but even after taking this step right now to pay down then does we'll still have about 19 million dollars in community preservation funds which is really impressive so I think we've we've achieved that goal and so it does not make any logical sense to continue you know to pay finances on it when we have the money readily available to do that so I always will praise Senator Ken LaValle who's always been a personal friend for for what he's done for preserving and protecting the farmland we're an agricultural community but I think that we've proven ourselves financially stable and I think it's time to do that yeah we say this is the success of 60 you want to cover yeah I want to talk about the general fund because in this bond series a very small portion is the general fund and you can't do one fund without the other is the whole debt series so the general fund is we'd have to use 92,000 of fund balance in order to pay that off not a lot of money you're not getting a lot of savings and interest on that but because is not much left this payment would be due next year anyway for 2027 so but we'd have to pay off the general fund for an additional 92,000 of fund balance that that day is the savings yeah yeah I mean it's a this is a win-win yeah I'm not a fan of debt so anytime we have an opportunity to pay our debt down I will obviously bring that forward so yeah that's not a friend oh so it's about 1% you know it equates to me in taxes right even minus the 92,000 it's good but 92,000 yeah you're gonna remove this from the budget next year exactly so another good thing for the budget remember you did a great job so time is of the essence I do need to give the financial advisor notice so that he has enough time to do and they said they would really try to rush this through for us because the payment has to go out by on August 1st so in order to pay this down so I just think that it's important to know how we got to this point that we do have this money available to be able to pay this off because you know there was a conversation in the past that you know we did have to pierce the cap for last year. And it's like all of a sudden there's this found money. How did we get to that? Are you talking about the general fund or are you talking about CPF is different? No, I know that the CPF is different, but we are using money from the general fund as well. Just for the $92,000. The other money comes from the CPS fund, so for that fund balance. But, yes, the general fund, the extra $5 million that we got in 2025, is primarily due to its combination of a conservative budget and a very focused effort on all the departments not to spend money. So we basically budget conservatively for our revenues, so some of it was interest earned. So we had about $1.5 million in excess of our budget for interest earned. So that's a significant amount of it, but it's also just a lot of operating expenditures that we were under budget in 2025. five so everybody did a great job of really being mindful of spending I will say that for sure so and we didn't have that many fund balance transfers coming out there in the year we were very mindful of that as well so it's like the town board was doing a good job but also it took you know you know for a period of time we were continuously trying to repair automobiles fix broken projects just maintain and then we finally took the the actions to repair replace you And I think that the department heads have done a phenomenal job of keeping the spending down and understanding what each little department, each savings adds up in the end of the overall budget. But I think we've expanded some of our departments, certainly the police department, and it directly affects the budget, but we now have a safer, better community. And it did take us to invest in it. But I think now when you look at our bond ratings, our levels are down, you know, our percentage rates. So that's great that we keep our bond rating down because of our expenditures. I think we've been doing it right, and I think we're finally starting to break out into the sun and see the benefits or the rewards of what we've done over the past few years. You know, Dylan, you ask, and since being in office, one thing I can say is our state and federal partners have been really good about making sure that Riverhead is on their radar. Our LELOTA, you know, they've done a great job in making sure, you know, with police vehicles and helping to do what you said. So I think those community partners and those state and federal partners are doing a good job by us. And sometimes we have to budget for items like police vehicles with the expectation that we won't receive them through a grant. And then when our congressman comes through and delivers them, then it's savings in the overall budget. The county executives as well, they've done a great job in helping with, I know we're doing, you know, the sewer department and they've just done some great things all right okay so yes for me absolutely yes right if we need to do anything I just my own opinion like before to make sure if we need to have any type of pressure for me or anything to get this through to make sure we're saving the taxpayers money well you'll see a resolution go through first yes we don't want to miss that deadline based on town board's good no I'm gonna let let him know today that we absolutely want to move forward so and he said he would work on it first thing like resolution that we can ever is all of this money needs to be allocated by August 1st or just this particular bond you know we're talking about the digitizing

the other one is community preservation is not the same deadline applied for the rest of the five million

Yeah, it's not the general fund. So the next one would be right here with these two lovely individuals. We're going to continue with the matters surrounding the proposal of the town square band budget pay down. More pay downs of debt. All good things. Do you want to come up here, Dawn?

Make sure you get in the club. Sorry about that.

Okay, so basically the first sheet that I gave you, because there's been a lot of questions from the residents about the Petrocelli property and, you know, did we make money, did we not make money? So a long time ago, Anne-Marie and I sat down when we had to value the properties out. So we bought all the town square properties for $4.85 million, and we had to give a value to the Petrocelli property for the hotel. So in order to do that, Anne-Marie and I sat down, and we kind of segregated out the square footage of all the properties. And by doing so, the property at 127 East Main is valued at $2.65 million from that original purchase price. we are selling the property to Petrocelli per the contract for 2.625 million. Petrocelli has also been sending rental income in for leasing the property from December 25 through June 26, which is $122,500, which means the net proceeds from Petrocelli are going to amount to $2.747,500. So we didn't lose any money on it. We really made a little bit with the rental income. and in his contract we have specifically set aside that $660,000 worth of his funding will go towards matches for the future Town Square projects as matches for the grants. So either way we would have had to pay that $660,000 out of our general fund balance, but we decided we'll use Petrocelli's and incorporate it in that contract. So either way the town would be paying for that $660,000. So that's part of the contract. So that's an overview of where the three properties, how it all situated, and how we came up with the purchase price for the hotel. This second schedule is the proposed pay down of the town square ban. So these bans, the original price was roughly $5 million, roughly. And right now the principal that's due is the $2.725 million. And then we have interest due this year as well. So this year's budget for 2026, we've incorporated $385,000 into the budget. But we also have interest budgeted for $200,000 Howell that we have not yet bonded. And obviously we're not going to be probably doing that anytime soon. And if we did, it wouldn't be payable until next year anyway. So we already have $300,000 in the general fund budget that we can apply towards the pay down of these bans. Just so people know what you're talking about, this is the courthouse renovation and the police station. Yeah, basically Justice Court, because we didn't even talk about PD. We're just naming it as 200. Not that those projects are not moving forward. It just takes time to go to a unified court system and to get approvals. So we allocated money should we get those approvals any time sooner, knowing that it could be either reapplied or carried over to the following year. Correct. I would like to say that we did get approval from the OCA on the design of the court. So what and I thought we were going to start to move on this in early 27 We need to build that court. So where are we with that? I mean, I don't know we could talk about that at some point soon My point is we haven't done it yet So even if we did it early 27, then we talk about putting the budget in again for next year Are you in bombing at the end of this year do for a year? Yeah, exactly. We did it today It's still not a year out. We've already passed that correct it's not like we have the opportunity where I need to save this for 26 so I just don't I want that on everybody's right are we doing all this other stuff that's a this bike an absolute necessity it doesn't change the course of and I told you that if you guys are uncomfortable with that it would just bump the bottom number up 300 that we'd have to transfer from fund balance but interest on that anyway even if we move forward tomorrow right you wouldn't pay the interest until the following year. So the net pay down would then be 2.149. And we're on schedule to close with Joe Petrucelli by the end of July. So the contract sale would be the 2.625. And then we're removing the 660 and applying that towards the capital projects. So the net proceeds would be the 1,000,965, which means we need an additional 184,000 out of fund balance to transfer just to pay down the overall debt on those original three properties for the interest earned and fund balance to utilize that's the way this should be appropriate a pride yeah yes so yes it's not so bad because we have that extra also in there so I think it's this is a no-brainer we want to pay down the debt on this and not leave this hanging out or convert to long-term bonds because if If we didn't pay this down, we'd have to convert to long-term bonds come August 14. That's not a good idea. Okay. Okay, so we'll do a resolution for this as well. Thank you. Perfect.

Again, stellar work, conversation. Thank you so much. Our next is matters surrounding electronic permitting for building department, which is going to slide, for those of you watching at home, it's going to slide right into the fourth matter, which will be matters surrounding scanning and digitization of building department, planning department, archives, and I believe Chip is also going to be joining us, and we're excited about this. Across the board. So you're doing his first, and then we're doing this? How do you want to do that? We're going to hit the electronic permitting. Is that correct? Yeah, that's the first topic on this, so we would bring up building two, I think, if you want. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sorry, Bob and Heather, if you'd like to come forward. So we're going to be addressing initially just the electronic permitting. Correct. Thank you. Yes, I think Justin's got the PowerPoint ready to go. Yes.

Transmitting to the TV. Great to see all of you this morning. Just as a preface, we started looking at different, and I'll just back up a little bit. Later part of 25, Bob became the head of the building division, and Heather took a step up to administrator. We have not currently backfilled the existing position that was eliminated, But one of the things that Bob and Heather have done to really kind of drill down into the details of what the building department is doing, how they're doing it, how efficient it's being done, and how we can make things better. And that dovetails into some other things. But some of the things that we noted that were important, and I'll go to this slide. The first slide here just talks about what the building department actually handles on the day-to-day basis. It's a tremendous amount of work that they do. it's not just accepting and processing building permits they give zoning advice they help people understand what the process is they issue they do inspections on all work that's to be done they review plans they give people site history they look at applications they meet with a million people every single day I think they have 3,800 counter visits every year and then one of the big functions that the building department is responsible for is responding to FOIL requests and so there's between nine hundred and a thousand FOIL requests every year that we've done the work and detailed and they average about an hour apiece a little over an hour apiece to address so it's about 1,200 hours a year of staff time that's addressing mostly just to FOILs yeah so I just go to the next slide building statistics again 1,200 permits annually give or take about a thousand foil requests thousands of calls the phone never stops ringing multiple formal complaints they dovetail their work with code enforcement and also the town attorney's office and the prosecution's there are at least 1,500 inspections which are going up I think Bob could you know we actually looked at our numbers from five months from last year to this year, our total field inspections have gone up 66 percent this year from last year. MS. Again, close to 4,000 counter visits, and the building department draws in about $1.5 million annually in all of the fees collectively, including permit fees and inspection fees. And so, you know, the goal of the department is to really kind of advance customer service and to make things better. And so you probably are familiar with other communities that are doing electronic permitting, which means that when you submit an application, you don't need to physically deliver the paper. You can actually do it online through a portal. And that gives the customer, the taxpayer or developer, the ability to really kind of maximize their efficiency and to help us really kind of compress a lot of the work that's done. Because right now when you file a paper permit application, it gets translated by the staff into an electronic file, and then the paper files come in, and then we go back and forth on the paper files, and then everybody's dropping off, picking up, dropping off, picking up, and then there's inspections that need to be scheduled. All of those are currently done by telephone or by email sometimes. And that sort of brought us to the idea that we need to make sure that our documents are not misplaced, not misfiled, put in the correct order, and easily accessible to us. And so that kind of got us to the point of, well, we really need to get those documents digitized. And so the documents being digitized as they're coming in, when we do electronic permitting, they're currently not doing that. we're actually scanning things into the folders, which is a time-consuming thing. And those documents, when they're introduced by an applicant through an online portal, are automatically digitized. And that is an important thing because those are records that we use all the time. Those are records that are the public. They belong to the public. And in the past, those of you who have been here a while may recall, we've had fires and floods and documents have been destroyed. and missing and not available and we needed to one time get them all demolded by some company because we had a flood in the basement so the the move going forward has got to be electronic documents and so that was part of this discussion i think in the highway department don't they have some of them there there's some barn somewhere i didn't think it was mike zaleski showed me where I think that's possibly true, and the basement is full and continues to get fuller, and the world continues to not need as much storage space as we are currently on track to needing. So right now, we as a town are antiquated in this. Like if you look at any other industry, when you go to the bank and you submit documentation, it's scanned, it's put in. All large-scale companies have gotten away from storage, meaning like physical boxes and piles of storage, trying to keep them in climate-controlled areas and arenas to prevent mold and so forth. I think that the electronic thing still gives you the security and the protection. So I work on a regular basis with the health commerce system, where we each have our own individual license number and so forth. So when we are, in fact, uploading documentations, it's proof that it's coming specifically from me. So it eliminates the idea of having to come to the town clerk and get something notarized to present it off to you, that it has the identity theft protection built into it. And I can do, as an applicant in the building department, I can do a lot of work that you normally have to do. I'll upload it. I'll scan it. And then I don't mind paying a electronic permitting or digitization fee in addition because I'm saving time now. I'm not going back and forth. I'm not paying my contractors or my workers to leave the job site, to go to Town Hall, to request that next inspection, to tell them that we're ready to have it. You can actually take photos from the site, right? So if we want to look at certain things, we can take photos, upload it, and you can view them right from your desk and be like, it's a faster method. it keeps construction going on it's more cost efficient for contractors but we keep looking at okay but what's the cost of the town and that's why I think we add the the electronic fees digitization digitization fees and what we will save in the amount of foil times once things are fully digitally uploaded in the hours that you need to spend to go down to that basement and go from box to box the box the employee hours are astronomical you're just one department but I think that this becomes a cost savings we invest into this and then we will have a return on our money and we were working with all the numbers and we're looking at between a five and six year of return and then then from there we will be making money so it's an it's a one-time investment with with a return for many years to come absolutely I think antiquated was kind I think that was really good and I you know exactly I resonate with what you're saying I think I think this is, I'm so excited. I think this board is. So if we can just flip to the next slide, I think some of the things that you were. One thing, and this is because we explored this several years ago. And one of the good things about this is when people do submit online, they can't, they're not going to be able to make mistakes. If they don't upload a file, they're going to be notified you didn't upload a file. And that's going to save you a tremendous amount of time. In addition, once we have the information scanned in, people will then follow the Southampton model where you will register to either do a yearly subscription for foils, daily, monthly, and that will allow you guys to be more productive. and and this is for me this is about time because we've been getting rubberhead out of the dark ages and I'm glad people around here starting to realize where it needs to be looking at companies that provide digital permitting services back in August and September of last year we actually interviewed and did demonstrations with five different companies I work IPS who's our current provider we did SDL which is now called govpilot open government civic plus those five when we actually did multiples with some of those groups just to see which one offered the best and the one one of the things we talked about what I think some of the council people were talking about is you know when you submit digital plans the way the company that we liked the best is called GovPilot, used to be called SDL. They have a bunch of features that the other ones don't have. One of them is this, there's a program called Bluebeam that people use to review plans. This has an integrated thing, so the plans will come up on the screen. The plans review, site plan, building permit plans review person will, who's currently Andy, will be able to note those things. and the notes are kind of canned on certain things, so they can just clip them in. And that, when he's completed his review, automatically emails or texts the applicant to tell them they can look at the result in the portal. And then those plans can be corrected. So we're not going back and forth with multiple sets of paper plans. It's another storage issue. We save on postage. We save on notary. Because currently, when you have an online portal, you register yourself in the portal, and you put all of your information in there. So we know who you are when you submit through the portal versus having to get a paper and make sure that it's notarized by the person who says who they are, says they are who they say they are. That will save the clerk's office time because Jim's office has been inundated with people looking for notaries. And so it alerts people to the statuses of their application. If something new changes on their application, it automatically alerts them. The remote inspections was the thing that we really loved about this because of the fact that River has like 68 square miles, I think, or something. So if we have a little small thing that failed inspection in Wading River and another one in Jamesport, you're talking about four hours of travel time versus this has an app that the contractor will have. they can not only schedule their application through the app, but if it's a small thing that needs to be just verified, the app will allow that person to basically FaceTime with the inspector. It will geolocate them at the spot so we know that they are where they say they are, and it will automatically upload photos of the inspection into the folder. So it's the amount of time savings there, and I think you could just flip to the next slide, Justin. We talk about just in the paper permits, we've figured out based on the hourly rate, a blended average of the hourly rate of the staff that are doing mostly the FOIL work. It's about $72,000 a year just in that time saving. So no longer, you know, we changed. You can go to the next slide, Justin. And then the savings on. It's Chip. Oh, sorry, Chip. Sorry. I don't know who's flipping the slides here. Sorry, Chip. We've got the big boss here. But we tried to be very conservative when we prepared this. We worked on it all together just to show the numbers what they would be. Fifteen percent of the inspections annually, and we have more inspections now than we used to, are compliant, are using a remote. We could save $26,000. And that's just in labor time. That doesn't include fuel, and that doesn't include risk. Awareness. You wear and tear on the vehicles or risk when we send someone out on the road to do something So that's sometimes only because of the short staff You're out doing inspections and someone else is falling down the basement and then the customer comes in and there's nobody at the window We understand that's not you know, you're trying to do everything you can but it's too much of a workload on that So we have to do something to try to decrease that work for it to help you along Yes If we can take 1,200 hours a year and put that back into actually processing permits, we've done a really important thing because we're attending to the customer and making sure that the process is as enjoyable as it can be. And it generates fees. Correct. And that also, we did a little research, and it looks like in other communities, people are actually more likely to apply for permits when they know the process is easy. So we anticipate a general three small three percent increase in the total number of permits which would be another $45,000 in revenue to the department annually So exciting We've been excited We did a tremendous amount of work preparing for this and a lot of stats and review what we do and kind of like Diving deep into it how it all works This goes right down to each individual resident for the simple things when we talk about the building of palm We also, we, most parts of general contributes you to large scale development that's taking place. But this is the average homeowner that simply wants a SHED permit. Doesn't need to leave their place of employment, their work, to come down to Town Hall to fill out an application, and then to come back and to pick up their permit. When it's all done electronically, they can do it from home, they can do it in the evening. They can fill it out, they can make the payment, and then they get everything. it's about making the everyday life what we all kind of with these iPhones now everybody wants instant gratification of just like I'm able to do this right now I want to get my permit right I want to begin right now and I think that we've got to get into just wage what we do in building is impacted by what happens in code and what happens in the clerk's office because the clerk improved the software for the FOIL requests. So that's great, wonderful for the public, but now the FOILs are stacking up and we don't have a new process to process them. And same with code. The more work they do and the more officers they hire, the more work gets put on building. And so it again gives them, it relieves them of the things that really shouldn't be taking their time and puts them on the duty that they're actually hired to do. So that's an important thing. So we anticipate, and this is, again, we think pretty conservative, about 143,000 annual savings just from the electronic permitting system addition. And then we go to the next slide and we show the cost. We were kind of pleasantly surprised, I think, at the cost. The first year is a little higher, but the annual cost of maintaining the system, and that includes our training, that includes them creating all of our forms which will then be online the forms on this particular system will look exactly like they look there be designed by the building department and have what they have in them we have a current software IPS which is not able to do what we needed it to do we interviewed them and so we're looking at you know a hundred and six thousand 190 to initiate it and 72,000 a year after that but clearly the revenue saved will cover the cost of this and then some so we think it's a really smart idea I think it would be really helpful to staff and I think it's a win-win and I don't know if you guys want to add to any of that but that was on just electronic permitting and then we'll kick to the digitizing the documents the existing building documents right because the supervisor wanted to separate the two out because there are two different payments but yeah this is so exciting it's great stuff and like a segue right into the next one but yeah you want to talk about like just the frustration you have some of your staff members have had and we've had some turnover yeah well so one of the ben was so last year in in august when i stepped into the seat that i'm in now um from august to the end of the year was a lot of trying to get an understanding of what the building department does what it needs where we can go so at the end of the year and Heather and I've talked about a lot of a lot of these things my I had two goals that I wanted for for this year one was to stabilize the employees and last year we have seven slots last year four of those people left for better paying less stressful jobs and you can't function like that because we're always training it's not efficient it's very stressful so stabilize the employees and then And then number two, hopefully complete, this depends on you guys, of course, but one of my goals was to complete a transition to electronic permitting to get away from all the problems we have with lost documents and the pressures at the counter constantly on people. I have to tell people sometimes to slow down because people come, they're bringing us paperwork and you try to take the, you know, somebody takes it from the counter and goes to look for the file and then they get distracted by something else and then you can have things get lost that way this gets rid of all of that it gets rid of the pressure at the counter it gets rid of the pieces of paper that can be physically lost so um the boxes upon boxes in your office the piles of files on my desk as well for instance so um those are those were my two goals what i considered the most important thing we considered you know heather's been here longer than me and she's obviously as you all know an integral part of everything that goes on in building so that for For the two of us, that was the two things we thought we needed to do. So this is a big part. We're excited. It's going to be a transition. It's going to be tough, but the only way out is through. So we're going to put our heads down. And now to the dinosaur age. We can throw out the abacus. The next quick save that you're speaking about, all the paper, the boxes and boxes of paper. I know that sounds small, but the amount of money that will be saved because you're not using as much paper, paper is a significant cost to the town, to everybody. So I'm happy with that. We're currently mailing things through snail mail, and people will be able to see when the CO is issued, it will be as a file in your portal. and everyone will be organized it'll be a lot easier for everyone to keep track of what we wanted that additional money in the fund balance to go towards these modernizing process I just say we're a quarter of a century through the 21st century so when we talked about the digitizing of the documents moving forward through this electronic building permit process the the question then arises well we have a tremendous cache of building department documents that that are in the basement and I know Bob in the past had worked on trying to figure out how to digitize those at CHIP and when we started talking about it, we went to CHIP and said, you know, let's figure out what it's going to cost. Like how does this work and can we do it because every day we wait, there's more documents to digitize and the cost goes up and every year the cost goes up and then we have less and less space which is always, you know, an interesting thing. So we did bring in someone today that helped kind of give us some insight on towards, you know how digitization works you know that because the idea is that we have an existing staff but Bob if you assign somebody to spend all day downstairs it would be months and months and potentially maybe years you know to go through that and now you have an absentee person up front but again if we made the the investment towards going folders they hired a private company to come in, scan all the documents, the hours we'll save in FOIL request alone is astronomical. The space that we can, we already have, we're now currently battling, our code enforcement's doing a great job, but now we're like, we need more desks, more placements, and then in the meantime, we're filling our basements up with documents. Maybe there's a potential down the road to move things around to allocate more space in here without having to have all these documents in one building. So we do have a gentleman here that maybe could, if you want to come forward and join us, if you don't mind, you can introduce yourself and the company. But just we wanted to make sure that what we were putting forth, that we were being factual and accurate in terms of what real costs are, what it is. And then Dawn has done a great job at allocating what we believe the long-term savings would be. So we appreciate you coming forward. And I think, Chip, also you have utilized this company as well previously. I have one in my office already. Okay good, I'll take it then. Thank you. I don't know if you need to do any more introduction or you want to... Let me just, we're just going to cut through, we'll show what we think, what we're getting toward and then... Can I just bring up one practical example? This happened to me today, not ten minutes before I came down here. the phone rang Heather picked it up it's a woman who needed a copy of her survey because she's going to closing and she needs it tomorrow that normally goes to the foil system when she told her that so how long is that gonna be we're probably two months this woman freaked out and I said transfer to me so I ended up going in the basement pulling her file making a physical copy of this so that her broker can pick it up tomorrow and she can sell her house if this is all online and available by clicking on a map boom boom boom I never she doesn't get that phone call she doesn't get it and somebody being nasty with her I don't have to spend time explaining it and then just going downstairs and try to help her out so this is what we're looking at a boy it's this is an everyday thing and this just happened the other thing I want to mention we keep talking foils foils foils we can't charge anything for you all that it's not like we can pass this on to customers but it's the the idea on the system too is like when I was trying to learn about it in digitization you know how do you find this stuff how do you categorize it but it's basically a tax map of the whole town so if you have foil in any particular parcel you click on it and everything is about that from start to finish to your initial building permit fees you know it's all right there so it's very click easy to locate I think and they join deals with this all the time and I think yeah and you're such a good person for being kind of you are but I think Bob said he's been We're excited about this, so let's hear it. This is exciting. Let's go. I just have a slide just kind of identifying the things that will help us. One of the things that Chip and I have been talking about is having it attached to GIS, and Chip can address kind of how that happens. I don't know if you want to just talk about that quick. The scanning project that we're talking about now is simply scanning all the documents in the basement for the building department and digitizing those and ultimately hosting them online, something we will get to is connecting our GIS system to that new repository. We must put it in the repository first before we can even build a GIS platform. If we build a GIS platform and we have a subscription model, it'll be perfect for it. That's what I alluded to earlier. Denise, to your point, you can't charge your foils. Well, Pete, I would urge you to look at Southampton. you actually can do that and this will cut down because you get a lot of realtors you get that do it a lot of attorneys that's an access fee it's an access fee they pay subscription because their life is easier I can't charge spoke to Southampton and how much do they get annually for their 5170 first subscription so that's yeah that's that will help support that system in an ongoing way revenue for their subscription plans their annual is $360 and they have a six month one month or one week in a one day the one day is ten dollars so a lot of people would pay the one day ten dollars just to not drive downtown so that that would be a way to alleviate foils as well so you You can get your document one way or the other. And I don't know if, can you flip to the next slide? So we did just some numbers on what we think we would save. You know, that foil, that thousand foils a year, 1,200, you know, an hour and a quarter each average, 1,219 staff hours could be a savings of 73,140. And then, I mean, that cost of 73,000, that's what it costs now. And then the annual savings looks like it would be around $58,005 a year, just in that time. We'll go to the next one. And as you were mentioning, Bob, these are the types of people that are subscribing at Southampton, contractors, expeditors, architects, engineers. All those people are looking for documents every day, as we know, based on our FOIL flow. And we think that they would pay an average of $300 a year. You know, that's what the total subscription would generate based on Southampton. That's a little bit less than they were doing. We're a little bit smaller, but probably not too much smaller. And then we just did a last slide on cost benefit. So it's, you know. We're quickly going to the revenue of $180,000. Yes. Go back. We're doing really good here. I wanted to say that too. I know. It is good, but it does. It's a driver. The $180,000 a year. The digitizing of the documents based on your prior estimate, and I think you were here and measured those files for Chip, was around 1.326, and that's currently the number we have. And then, Chip, do you want to just talk about how that indexing part works? The indexing of the documents, after we receive the digital documents back from Mr. Seery and his company, we have the task of indexing and creating this repository that's searchable. and we intend to host it on LaserFiche. So the company that I've talked to a couple of companies, but one who works often with Richard Seary's company has given me an estimate to take all the documents and build our LaserFiche portal. Having never done that, I'm not sure that I want to take that task on, and they are the experts, and they've done it numerous times. So it's a one-time fee of 194.2. That's estimated right now, but that's about what it is. And then the leisure fees going forward will have an annual cost of the $34,000, but that would be covered by the revenue from the subscriptions too. So total project cost is a big number, 1.554. But if we take those savings into account, which are on the right column, at the end we would cover the cost of the entire program in five years. So I think that's a little bit of a, feels like a little bit of a long time, but we really feel like the improvements in efficiency and customer service will be so worth it that, and, you know, again, it will ultimately pay for itself. So that's our presentation. I don't know if you want to take it from there, but tell us. So a little bit about how the whole digital station works. So they came in about a year ago or so that we started working on this project. So if you want to just kind of lead us into a little bit about what your company does. Sure. So Ceres Systems has been in business for 25 years. I've been in the industry over 40 years. And our core business is scanning documents, digitizing records. In the last 15 years, we primarily focused on government because that's where the paper is. Someone made a comment before about corporations saying, corporations being, they're fully digital. Morgan Stanley, I did tons of work for in the 2000s. There's no more need. They're all digital. They won't survive if they're not digital. But government is still paper intensive. So we've done about 25 to 30 building departments, for example, of towns and villages in Nassau and Suffolk County and Westchester over the last 10 or 12 years. and it grows every year. We get another five or six additional ones. The biggest one is the town of Hempstead. We started in 2007. If you know the town of Hempstead, it's the largest town by population in the country. If it was a city, it would be the 13th largest city, supposedly, with 900,000. And so we started digitizing their building records and many other departments too, but they're building records back in 2007 and every year they give us a budget. And when COVID hit, they went to a very sophisticated, just like you, permitting software solution. And the supervisor called me and said, Rich, it's during COVID. We need to get everything digital one time, finish it up so that everything's in the repository, that people outside can access these records during COVID. So they gave us a very large budget to do one final push. And now they're fully digital. We're doing the town of North Hempstead, who hadn't done anything in the past. town always to bay for cave in um east hampton we did 10 years ago um when larry cantwell was there and he said to us and i'd work with him when he was a village clerk and uh village administrator the village of east hampton but the town he said we want you we want to index all our records by all the records not just building planning arb zba bca whatever you refer to it here and we want to do a key search on the tax map ID and get all the documents back in one shot that have been scanned. So we're talking about building now, but down the road you'll say, I want ARB, I want BZA, I want planning. Town clerk, birth certificate, death certificate, marriage certificate, all those things. Well, those are not indexed by tax map ID. No, but it's a whole other way of scanning. 100%. We're doing a number of projects for Kevin now, very similar. And so I have a lot of expertise. So we were talking earlier, Bob and Heather and Chip, about how do we do this after we index it, you know, by tax map ID and maybe street name and number. And your files are indexed by those fields. But then when you go into that Redwell, they're broken out by permit number. Well, we want to take full advantage of that. We want to index down to the permit level so when you do a search in the historical latest system, you're getting back a permit number. If you have an associated type of permit, like a name in a database for that permit, we could grab that too. Like we do Nassau County Police Department, all their records, and they give us their pistol permits every month. And they give us a database of the pistol permit number, the name, and other information. Well, we key in the pistol permit number and we look at the file and says that's Richard Seery. And then it says, we look at the file and says, yeah, that's Richard Seery. The database says it. If it comes up with another name, we've miskeyed it. So then we check it again, key it, and then we accept all the data. So it saves on money on index. And that's the key is to do it the most efficient way possible. So we were talking about running tests on some of your records because some of your records might not, you might have stuff in the files. maybe fax cover sheets, things like that you don't want. There's a cost associated with us culling those files. And so we look at that. If you're looking for the needle in a haystack to find a document you've got to remove, just scan it. If you're going to scan, find a lot of documents that have been removed, it's worth spending additional funds, right? It's a one-time job. Once it's done, it's done. When you have everything digital in your permitting solution, then you're only scanning some documents that come in. We do everything through a state contract, so you really don't even contract with Sears Systems. You contract with NYSID, New York State Industry Disabled. Under the New York State Finance Law, and this is 51 years now, since 1975, New York State Office of General Services requires that certain types of services have to be provided by what they refer to as preferred source. Preferred source is, so NYSEN is New York State Industry for the Disabled. And the whole mission of NYSEN is to put individuals with disabilities to work so they're not on the state. And so we have over 30 people who are disabled who work for us, do fantastic work, and I'm very proud of them. I mean, they show up every day, you know, get the job done. That's fantastic. And make sure we're working with Teresa to make sure that that's, you know, through the proper channels. And, yeah, that's exciting stuff. It's a good contract. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so just to make it clear, like Chip has said, there's no RFP involved in this. That's great. That's true. Yeah. So, I mean, I think, yeah. Highly, highly recommended from, you know, different hounds and companies and so on. I appreciate what you're doing. just the time that you've put in to guide us, to make a determination for whether or not to implement this cost. You're really thinking this through. I'm very impressed the way you're doing this, to be quite honest with you, because you're getting your permitting software. You're looking at LaserFish, which is a great product. We work with them on many occasions. and you're going to digitize the records, you're tying it all together, you're looking, I mean, not everyone looks at that, getting that annual revenue. A lot of municipalities, they're not looking at that annual revenue where they can provide that data and get, you know, $115,000, $125,000, $150,000 a year reoccurring revenue. It'll pay for this easily over five years or whatever. That's really, or whatever it takes. That's a really good way to look at this. Thank you Mr. Seary Thank you You guys excited? You have to be You're anticipating it but you're like Don't let it fall apart This is something that we've talked for a number of years wanting to do this, wanting to get to this level I think what has held us off in prior years is simply do we put that million dollars into the budget and how does that directly affect every taxpayer and how we do it. And so we have been talking and watching FundBalance for a period of time and watching the investment funds grow and there was an expectation that at some point, so we kept promising you, at some point when we have more documented on exactly the investment that we get on that return, then this could become available. So I think I firmly believe that this is what invested funds from FundBalance should be utilized for because this is about taking those funds and ultimately it's still a reinvestment it's almost like you know buying a house for a million dollars and paying it off within five years and now you have a product that's worth that and so with this we you know after five years we're gonna get an ongoing return and so we're gonna see so it's another revenue generating you know if there's an additional investment but this will be revenue generating time consuming quality of life in the building department right that's important I mean that's because you know what people have to get up in the morning and they have to like their job and want to go to work you want to spend it there and foils and things like that can be really difficult and tears and but and if somebody just thought why you mean I could do this for my living room at home I can log on and get the information that I need um I think it has everything around and I'm just I'm glad that we're at where we're at and so maybe we could say promises kept promises made promises kept we're trying to get to that point of investing this and I think it's a great way to move forward and I encourage everybody that it's time ways to use that money where it generate money for us in the future that's what we're trying to do and help with our personnel help with community relations because I know that gets frustrating for people at the counter at times so I just there's so many different ways and there's also um a tickler process i understand so if somebody's permit is past due it's easy way to check to find out um and that's again a way to generate revenue there's so much that's automated through this that it will really help and facilitate the process and you know as you say it's important as a member of the public to be able to get the things that you need and when you can get them readily uh it's a good feeling like oh my the government serving me well so that's kind of real estate companies may choose to do a prescription to this device is simply that if they're going to choose to begin to market a house we can go online with it with a yearly subscription fee like this house that I'm about to market does it have that shed permit fee does it have that pool permit fee where am I going in this and how soon can I put it on what's going to be necessary to get this house up to date with their permit fee the buyer the buyer can look and see they don't have a permit for the shed you know etc etc i'm over my embarrassment for this town that it's taken this long and there's no question about that you know the speed the efficiency and what will happen at all you know i mean this is one last one last slide you wanted to say something i did i just i have i'm fortunate enough to have been on the other end of this with my title company it is so great to be able to access I do not think twice about getting a subscription to the towns that offer this and I've dealt with town of hempstead which you did your company did and it's great you know when when I see something oh it's in Riverhead it's like I have to wait to find out you know for the foil to come through my municipal data company. It's just to have Riverhead come have this, it's just I'm so excited about it. And we've been talking about this for a while. We were discussing how to build a bridge between the assessor's office and building department to make it easier for them to work together instead of constantly having to get out of their office to go to another office, go to the basement. And it's just where the time is now. Or, you know, antiquated for sure. If I may, I know board members have talked about the importance of encouraging homebuyers in Riverhead. And this will help them as well. As you're saying, too much of what we get is something that somebody bought a house and didn't know about problems about it. And now it ends up costing them time and money or holds up a sale. This will get rid of some of that. So it's stepping even outside just, again, the goals of the town and what we want to achieve. Well, Bob, you know that we've been discussing on the Landmark Commission how to have potential buyers know that they are purchasing a home that's in the landmark preservation. So this, it's like there would be an automatic tag on it that, you know, this is what you're purchasing. So we won't have those problems. zoning, everything will pop up. Yeah, and environmental concerns, that'll all be available and integrated in. And as part of the analysis that Bob and Heather worked on, what needs to be done in the building department, one of the things was there's quite a few expired permits that are currently in violation status. There just hasn't been enough time to pursue that. And so this could free up the time for them to get those old violations kind of scored away. And we have about 730 expired permits, and that's as of January. I think that was when they did that work. It's probably more now. If half of those came back and we gave them an amnesty, so no penalty, you come in, you apply for your permit, you get your CO, you do your inspection to get your CO, we could generate just conservatively, I think, another close to $200,000 in revenue, which is something that the town has missed that's out there. But there's just not enough personnel to achieve that goal. I know you're going to find this shocking, but Bob would like to see that 500 go up a little bit. When we did this, I know you're not. We did this very conservatively. We were very careful to not overestimate things. We worked with the building to get the personnel numbers with benefits for hourly rates. You know, we felt very strongly this was a really good thing to do, and so we want to make sure we made a good presentation to the board. Great presentation. Awesome stuff. rich how much time does it take to yesterday have everything exactly um it would probably take a year and a half it really depends on when we get into details of like if we if if we when we were talking about this you know if the permit if the the red well folder by tax map id has a manila folder with each permit number and all the documents associated with and we're just going to scan them, that's going to go a lot quicker than if we have to actually look at documents and make a business decision to say, do we need to keep this? Do we need to open a plan, see if there's duplicate copies? There's certain things like that that happen. We're doing a project for a village in Nassau where they give us one big Redwell, and we're sorting through all the documents. This is permit one, this is permit 100, this is permit 1,000, and it takes us a day and a half to go through a box. That's a lot of labor. We don't want to do that here. I mean, you either pay for it up front or on the back end. So if you pay for it on the back end, that means that if you've got it by permit, the back end is someone clicking through 10, 20, 30 pages to find a piece of paper. You know, I mean, some of the things we'll do is we could put the files in a certain order that when you're looking at them, you'll always see, you know, the survey will be up front, the application, you know, we can sort those. And that's not really a big cost because there's not that many documents in each file. The plans will always be separate from the documents. The documents will be photos, so you might have three different doc types that you'd look at, okay? In the town of Hempstead, we did it by 18 different document types because they didn't want their staff, 100 people, looking through files. They wanted to go right to the application, right to the CFO. I'm a fan of documenting all of it because I know that you might say I don't need a fax cover page or something like that. But I think from my own experience and researching properties that I've bought and rented, when you go back sometimes some of these plans for like sheds and decks, they're sketched on a piece of paper. There's no architect seal. There's no, you know, and it's that actual fax cover that kind of gives you the time frame. okay so this was before this and then this is how it was it was removed and rebuilt and it kind of I like I like well because I think it gives them an opportunity to build like a time sequence of everything like someone did it you know yeah because the you know on the property that we just purchased the deck was quite different than what the initial plan was but then you go through the file and then you can find that the different sequence of how you got to that so one of the questions that came up you know to me at a legal department was this so between scanning right and then and then laser fish if there is things that have to be redacted phone numbers you know there might be social security numbers on a document when it when does the redaction take place because and I'll give you an example in in I'll say it as in South Hall they had an intern do their scanning and they scanned everything and they put everything online. Everybody's information. And they thought they were saving money, and they created a nightmare. So do you know when that redaction takes place? It can happen by a couple of methods at scanning point, or it could happen within laser fish through AI, potentially picking up on phone numbers and social security numbers. Different methods and I've yet to hear the advice of our attorneys on this. To understand our requirements, which as we realize some of our neighbors have done none, we need to understand what we must do. Which because it's a massive undertaking to maybe program this redaction and then go verify some of it. And using AI, it brings the question of, because we discussed PDF files versus TIFF files. So then, you know, that would figure out which one is going to be. Yeah, Lacefish likes TIFF. Likes TIFF. But one of the things you can, and this particular point is that if we're going through the files, I don't know a lot of documents that have, you know, Social Security numbers. Well, I use that, but this phone, this name, phone number is formal. and some people's address like that might be one of the things that came up is they have a house in florida you know whatever with a phone number i'll let legal look at that but if if if there were documents like that and we could identify them we can also create a miscellaneous section and within laserfish you can actually put security around it saying okay this particular set of documents the public can't see okay it's all down to the document level when you set up the security okay so these are i'm not i've sold systems for 40 years i'm not interested in selling you a system i don't sell these fish so um so but that those tools are to your you can use and so i'd give you some guidance at least to tell ladies fish these set of documents we want to only the town people can we do like personnel records we do a lot of comptroller's office records a lot of confidential information and payroll records and so only certain people in like the county can see them it's locked down in the system again I know you guys are like you're like anxious you're patiently excited I think we're both on me we'll see it just feels like I don't mean that to defend I just you know I think that's fair yeah you believe it when you see it promises so I think this is great good news is so many towns are doing it and it's so much easier thank you thank you for coming to thank you thank you we're gonna we're gonna cut down on the pen distribution oh yeah you pen budgets I still color code. I color code everything. That's okay. We steal them off at the bank anyway. It's fine. These are mine. He doesn't even look at them. Our legal intern is learning so much. He's learning so much here, right? Thank you. Speaking of our legal department, our next matter is matters surrounding change of Chapter 289 regarding parking and commercial vehicles on residential roadways with Councilman Woski and our fine councillor, Ms. Pilow. welcome to the day thank you for coming in today and thank you for all of your work on this in my ongoing effort and promise to try to tackle bringing back our neighborhoods to happy environment looking nice and getting rid of some of the blight throughout the town I had come to Victoria and asked her to work with me on the commercial vehicles the the vans that are coming home after work and are parked out on the streets and this has been to code revision and I worked with that's woman Merrifield on this as well through code revision and I think that we came up with something great so yes take it away all right um so there are neighboring towns that only allow for one commercial vehicle to be parked in a driveway in a residential area we came up with a few different ideas whether we wanted to match those neighboring towns but in further discussion at code revision we realized that there are some people that have you know their own businesses and they have two vehicles and we don't want to infringe on any of that but as we were discussing it it became apparent that if you have more than two it's no longer bringing your vehicles home it's kind of you know getting to the point where it's almost you have a fleet of vehicles so what we don't want to see especially in residential areas are these roads becoming de facto parking lots for either people that that own all of these vehicles or for possibly employees that are being sent home with the vehicles from neighboring town businesses to kind of circumvent the laws over there to put their extra vehicles over here I did since I sent this in the the only thing that I that I'm still workshopping a little bit I spoke to Chief Frost this morning about how we would go about enforcement of this because this is a great idea but enforcement is a little bit tricky because if you say all residential roads you know it's difficult for an officer at 2 a.m. that notices a vehicle parked on the side of the road, he may not know or she may not know what district they're in. Also certain roads as you're driving down them, they're agricultural, then they turn into mixed use, then they turn into industrial. So it would be really tough on the police officers to be able to know exactly where they are at any given time. Code enforcement can issue these tickets as well and they're a lot more well-versed in these areas. So upon speaking to Chief Frost this morning we came up with an alternative idea the um the definitions you see those would stay for some reason we never had a commercial vehicle or commercial trailer defined so we're going to have that now if you all approve those definitions um so the only thing that we may play around with a little bit would be the listing either just saying residential roads or if we want to take a peek into 289 12 which is not part of your packets today but 289 12 we should be pretty familiar with we touched on it for the Young's Avenue parking it's no parking certain hours so it would be incredibly difficult to list that each road and its terminus which one is you know considered residential in which is not so what myself and PD kind of came to a conclusion about is maybe we list the the roads these sections of the roads that are getting the most um calls about or the most complaints about we'll start with those and then kind of month by month start to add them into 28912 but really you know focus on the ones that are the dangerous the life safety because in addition to to parking these vehicles on these side roads it's it's visibility it's it's blight it's it's a whole plethora of things that are an issue but I wanted to I didn't want to pull this back because I'm not sure about where we're gonna put it in the code but I wanted to present the general idea and then we can work together on you know with PD on enforcement and signage and and all that seeing some people are turning half their front yard into a parking their parking yes and saying well I'm not on the lawn but you know right and the thirds of your entire front yard are now paved yes does this address the yards and the driveways are just the right you're parking addressed and we're right sir we're getting a ton of those tickets now that we have the part-time officers I'm seeing a lot of those so those are getting dealt with so it we're kind of trying to tackle it on all fronts where you know if these vehicles can no longer park on the road then they're gonna try to park on the front lawn but they'll get a ticket either way so it's kind of you know seeing where the issues are and kind of addressing them as they come in. Good morning, Strati. I'm very glad that you came in and didn't take this off for today with me because I just want the public to know that we see what's going on and we're trying to make a difference. It's not all talk, it's getting done. So thank you, Victoria. I do have to ask one question because when you say commercial vehicles, I know exactly what we're going for and I commend you completely for working on it you know the big plumbing trucks electrical trucks and everything big box vehicles my only thing of just questioning to get a better understanding is that a lot of families have campers some people have jet skis other things a A Dodge Ram 1500 is a regular passenger vehicle. I myself drive a Dodge Ram 2500. It is the same size truck. It's the same aesthetic-looking truck, but it has a Hemi engine in it to pull. So I pull my 36-foot Jayco camper around. I pull my horse trails around, but that's my own private use. But I cannot register that vehicle with passenger plates. Because it's a 2500, the Department of Motor Vehicle classifies it as a commercial vehicle. I'm not alone in that setting, so I don't know how to address what there was. I mean, Riverhead's definitely a large camping community, and a lot of people have larger scale size pickup trucks simply to pull their campers to go around. So I don't know if there is a method to separate it, meaning that if it's a vehicle that does not have commercial lettering on it, commercial storage containers, you know, if it's a standard pickup truck, I'm just asking, and I'm applying to, you know, directly this is something that would directly affect, like somebody like myself that uses this to hold. We had to pick up, we had a Tahoe, and the engine kept blowing on it, pulling a camper on trips, and so we went to a 2500. But unfortunately, it had to be listed as a commercial vehicle. maybe it could be like an advertised commercial vehicle definition a little bit more as you can see you know we can with like lettering often like all of a sudden I put a logo on the truck now it's a commercial truck there you go and so I just you know I'm just asking if we there's I just think that may affect there's a lot of residents that are not involved in commercial businesses but have commercial vehicles because they're towing campers so we can work with the definition we could we could strike out the first part up into that semicolon and get rid of the or and then just have it for in connection with the business trade profession we can get rid of occupation and then it would really just nail down those those fans and those trucks we also you know we landed on 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. because as far as I know I know nobody is hiring contractors or having anyone stay past 8 p.m. to work on their houses. And it would be, it's more cut and dry for court. If someone says, you know, I had a guy working on my kitchen and the ticket's at 2 a.m., you know, it's a little easier there. So what we could do is I could definitely firm up the definition. I'm going to be working on what area of the code we'd like to see it in, whether it be the specific roads or a certain amount of distance on each road. We even tried, like on my vehicle, we want to be able to go on Northern State Parkway, Southern State Parkway. No, you can't. I had commercial plates on my first car, on my first truck. Some of the ones they say, well, some pickup trucks, if you get a rear cab put on the top of it and you enclose it in, becomes then they give you but immediately what eliminates it is the 2500 engine cuts it out and that's strategy like the code go where are you getting the compliances more this you know following the breadcrumbs good work like it yeah thank you so much I'm sorry to put something else on your plate that's what I'm here for I know don't ever apologize that is it should not feel like it's a burden at all I got a few repeat though that make sure that people heard you. Did you say there's a lot more tickets of violation coming in due to our newly hired code enforcement officers that we are cleaning up the town? Yes. At first I didn't, I almost didn't recognize the names and then I said, oh, it's the, it's, it's the new, it's the new people. Yes. They're, they're writing and they're, they're very well written tickets too. So whoever's training them is doing a great job. Yes. Thank you very much. right thank you I'll rework it and I'll send a new version as we so with that we're actually finished with our open session so I'll just ask for a first and second to close our meeting today so much to adjourn all in favor to adjourn aye have a great week

Thank you.