McFarland School Board Meeting 8/1/2022

001called the meeting to order at 6 30 p.m on monday august 1st the year 2022 and i would look for a motion to go into closed session i'll make that thank you bruce do i have a second second megan we need a roll call i believe okay um let's see how are you yes green yes fisher yes mooney yes and vessler yes we will move to our closed session quarters there we go okay we are back in open session at 707. and we are to the consent agenda item portion of our agenda and our consent agenda contains minutes from the july 18 2022 school board meeting it also contains some professional staffing recommendations and some personnel items that are not necessary for vote so i would uh ask for a motion to approve the consent

002agenda item as presented excluding section 3d i will second that i will make the motion sorry okay kate no the second i'll second that megan any other discussion hearing none all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye opposed motion carries 5-0 that brings us to our public comments and i have a little read here before we get started in accordance with school board policy 167.3 the mcfarland school board welcomes public comment during regular meetings the board will accept public comments via individuals who are physically present at the board meeting who are participating in the board meeting virtually or who have sent an email to the board president or superintendent in advance of the meeting please note the following register participants are required to register their intention to participate in the noticed public comment

003portion of the meeting upon their arrival at the meeting and shall begin their comments by stating their name address and group affiliation if and when appropriate secondly topics participate participants shall address only topics within the legitimate jurisdiction of the board the board members will not directly respond to comments and may only take action on topics that are on the published agenda third time participants are asked to limit their comments to five minutes in duration written comments will have a word limit of 250 words the portion of the meaning for public comments is limited to 60 minutes unless extended by a vote of the board and lastly decorum participants shall direct all comments to the board and observe reasonable decorum so having said all that angie do we have any uh public comment this evening i

004have not received any public comment for this meets evening and i would like to at this time uh to invite any members of the public who are participating via zoom that if you would like to make a public appearance by speaking to the board please utilize the q a portion found at the bottom of your zoom window in the q a we would ask that you type your name address subject of interest and whether you have discussed this item prior to the meeting with either a district administrator or president howery after submitting the information i would then transfer you over to speak to the board thank you angie give them a minute to register give it a minute anyone would like i have not had anyone register at this time okay then we will move

005along to the informational part of our agenda and we're going to start out with a hera sustainability landfill project presentation by john welch director of the dane county department of waste and renewables mr welch thank you very much for coming this evening thank you and the floor is yours all right thank you mr chairman and members of the committee for uh school board excuse me for um allowing us to come tonight and present first want to say thank you to jeff for reaching out to me early on um and then also to aaron to talking with me over the last uh several weeks um and i come initially just saying apologies for not engaging with the school district prior to this um this is in our opinion a very long drawn-out process but quite frankly

006we missed the ball and not engaging with the school district earlier in this process so i apologize for that our goal and our hope here is open those lines of communication and continue to have those discussions with the school board as this project moves along through the next several years so we are talking about what we have termed the sustainability campus there's kind of two main pieces to that there's a sustainable business park piece and then the landfill itself and we understand there's a lot of concerns within the neighbor neighborhoods within the community and potentially within the school district as well so we would like to try to kind of touch upon what this project is what we do as a department and and hopefully we can address some of those concerns and then talk

007about how we can continue to engage with each other moving forward next slide please so just start out these are some of the key members of our team that will be working on this project so you can always feel free to reach out to me with that email there my cell phone is also available on our website uh roxanne weakness is my deputy director she's here as well so feel free to reach out to either of us but you'll also probably see the other folks on that on this page at some point throughout the project so this is just our existing site on the left-hand side there this is kind of covering all the great things that we do at our site we are a government agency and we provide a lot of services to

008the community related to waste and recycling and renewable energy so a lot of people know that we run a landfill but we have a lot of other features at this site we do recycling for tires shingles metal bicycle recycling program that gets bikes back into the hands of kids that would otherwise have access to bicycles wood yard which has been really really active with emerald ash borer and the recent storms as well we do construction demolition recycling so anything that would go in a construction dumpster we have a clean sweep program that's open year round and we convert landfill gas to renewable vehicle fuel as well and you see on the bottom there education and tours that's a huge part of what we do and i think there's a lot of tie-ins on how we

009can collaborate with the school district in that aspect as well just some of the overview things in the last year or so of our department we have taken landfill gas and produced a renewable vehicle fuel that's displaced over two and a half million gallons of gasoline again that's produced off of landfill gas and garbage we've recycled over 82 000 tons of construction and demolition materials over the last several years we've actually planted over 100 acres of prairie grass on top of the landfill and at one of our clay borough sites that's just our department that's not county wide that's our department only and then we've had over 10 000 visitors at our trash lab which is i'll talk a little bit later it's a mobile exhibit that helps us educate our community about waste and

010recycling so this is our mission to provide environmentally sound and sustainable waste management and renewable energy solutions for both current dane county residents and future generations and that's a picture actually from the top of our landfill you can see the prairie grass plantings in the foreground and the background is our renewable natural gas facility at our site construction and demolition i'll just touch on this briefly but it's a great example keep this in mind when i'm talking later about our vision for the new site because this is really a great example of what could happen there with other materials so this facility we take in construction and demolition materials anything that goes into a dumpster at a construction site used to go to the landfill that now goes into this facility and it's a part

011of the reason it's a great example is it's a really good public-private partnership so the county built the facility we own all the equipment inside but we actually work with a private entity to operate this market and sell the recyclable materials on the back end next slide please so we've created about 15 jobs just locally on the site there's other jobs related to trucking marketing and other things for this facility but starting in the top left there you can see it comes in as a completely co-mingled pile of waste it goes to the top right then through a series of mechanical equipment that separates it out primarily by size into four different waste streams and in the bottom left it goes across conveyor belts where we have workers pulling materials out and so one worker

012may be dropping wood into bin number five there and the next working may be dropping metal into bin number six it goes through those bins down underneath the floor in the bottom right you can see it goes into bunkers or big garages and you end up with clean sorted wood metal aggregate etc so that pile the top left turns into those sorted recyclable materials that are kept out of the landfill in the bottom right we also have our clean sweep program which is where paints chemicals fertilizers and electronics recycling happen that we are open more than any other clean sweep program in the state so again it's a service that we provide to the community it costs us several hundred thousand dollars a year but it's something that we are very passionate about this picture

013here is our our free store our product exchange room anything that comes into our facility into the clean suite facility it's non-toxic non-hazardous and at least half full we put it on these shelves and members of the community can come in and grab them for free totally free and take those you don't have to be a landfill customer you don't have to be paying a fee you can just come in and grab whatever you might need from that the landfill gas piece i talked about a little bit but as garbage breaks down it does produce gas gas it's a methane gas is about 50 percent of the makeup the gas that heats the quote unquote natural gas that heats your home is about 96 methane so it's the same gas it's an energy source and

014how can we use it as an energy source not all landfills do this but we we do we really look at it as an energy source and how can we reuse that so for over 25 years we had taken that energy and produced renewable electricity with it we've used it as a fuel in engines that spun generators for a lot of reasons on that market has changed and in the last few years we've switched over the county and our department has invested 29 million dollars into the facility you see in the bottom right corner there that picture so it's a large gas processing plant that takes the landfill gas and cleans up all those other elements in the gas and gets us to that 96 pure methane that we can now put into the pipeline

015it can be compressed in its compressed natural gas or cng vehicle fuel so the county's plow trucks our vehicles we have over 100 county vehicles in 12 different departments that run off of compressed landfill gas and then the remainder that we don't use we actually sell the quik trip and they sell it to their fleet customers that run off of cng vehicle fuel again as i mentioned education and tours are a huge part of what we do this is a great picture of a diorama that we have inside our trash lab it's a new exhibit that we just rolled out in the last two years is a collaboration between us in the madison children's museum i'm an engineer i'm not an artist and i'm not very artistic or imaginative so what they produced is really

016incredible it's really interactive it's colorful kids come in and just just are drawn to it and we've had over ten thousand visitors in the last two two years of that that exhibit itself it's a in a trailer so we can move it around it's mobile we take it to festivals community events we've been at the mcfar we're at the mcfarlane public works day this year it's been to one of the schools here in the district this year as well already next please these are some more pictures of that exhibit you can just kind of see what i was saying how colorful an imaginative is bottom left there are is a magnet puzzle that kids solve to figure out what uh the recyclables they put in their recycling bin get turned into afterwards the stuff on

017top of the ceiling and that bigger picture there that's all waste materials that were pulled out of the waste stream and cleaned up to get people to think about their waste and have a connection to it next slide please again it does it isn't just the trash lab we have a long history of engagement in education prior to covid we would do over 150 tours a year at our site primarily school age groups we have a school bus program so if a school district or a classroom can't afford to bring their kids because of the bus fee we'll actually pay for that bus fee to make sure that those kids can come to our site still and tour our site we have done uh in the last and it was this spring some members of

018our staff came into the district here and did stem presentations we brought the trash lab on site as i mentioned as well we did do tours we were able to start back up the tours um with i believe it's the third graders at our site this year i was it was missed for a couple of years because of covid but other than that they've actually been coming to our site every year for 25 years so it's a long relationship that we've had with the district and we're really excited we really roll out there the red carpet for that group to come it's we our whole staff is on site for about three days just doing tours for for that group of kids it's really exciting um we've had some initial discussions and engaging with the

019eco club and with jeff and i think we're looking at other opportunities that we can to continue that engagement but why why am i here and why are we talking about this new site so this is the timeline right now at our current site we do a lot of great things but quite frankly we're running out of space uh if we do nothing uh we will be full in about five years if we we are working right now on an expansion at that site if that is successful it only gets us to 2030. so we need to start looking at alternative our additional sites for a new landfill next slide please typically that permitting process takes anywhere from five to seven years so that's why we really need to beginning the beginning that process now

020so as i talk about that when you look at landfill sighting design process there's a lot of challenges and limitations which start to narrow down where could it physically be located so there's state statutes and there's codes that have setbacks two waterways two private wells two municipal wells um two parks roadways etc there's other things i i know um you guys have heard some just i think commentary recently about wetlands and and other impacts hydrogeologic concerns we have to look at so there's a lot that goes into dnr environmental review and permitting and so as you look at the county as a whole you start to run out of places that you can physically locate a landfill another big one is the airport you have to be five miles away from any major airport so

021right there that takes out a good chunk of the county as well why is that that five mile limit from an airport they're concerned about birds from the landfill causing impacts at the airport so back in the 90s we were actually permitting a site in westport just to the east of wanakee and had gone through about half of the process and the faa changed the rules i think it was three or three and a half miles they changed it to five miles while we were in the middle of that permitting process and that's 4.8 miles away from the airport so i had to abandon that site next slide please but as we look at the landfill i want to make sure that you understand this isn't like your grandparents town dump it's an engineered sanitary

022landfill they're very different today than than what you hear so um it's easy to google you know landfill pollution or landfill concerns and you know i always kind of like to say it's like if i googled uh my health symptoms i pretty quickly think that i'm dying of three different things right so if you google landfill concerns you're probably going to pull up a lot of cases of hazardous waste landfills from the 70s that are unlined or these environmental impacts and concerns that happen at landfills that were actually dump sites in the 70s and 80s the way that they're built today is a much higher standard there's a ton of environmental review steps that go into evaluating whether the site is actually even a good candidate but then once that happens there's a lot that

023goes into the engineering and design to make sure that we're protecting the environment and really you look at kind of two main areas of protecting the human health in the environment the first is to make sure that no liquids are getting out the bottom and impacting groundwater or surface waters and then the second is to make sure that we're not allowing gas and air emissions to escape from the top so this picture here is kind of a cut through of the liner at the bottom to show all the different pieces and steps that go into protecting groundwater at the bottom of a landfill so the very bottom is four feet of compacted clay that's put in eight different lifts every one of those is tested for to make sure that we get good compaction and

024it's the right type of materials above that there's a 60 mil hdpe membrane so that's just fancy engineering speak for about an eighth inch thick really high density plastic liner that gets rolled out across and actually if we could skip to the next picture this is kind of a good point to show you what some of that looks like so this is a picture where the clay liner is down and the black plastic is starting to be rolled out over the top above this black plastic there'll be a fabric sheet to protect it and then a one foot thick layer of stone will be pushed out across all of that the whole thing is sloped down to the middle and then down to one end kind of like a bathtub so any liquids that hit

025that stone will drain quickly to the middle they'll get collected in a pipe and it'll quickly drain to one end where we can pump those out so liquid garbage leachate that's leaching out of the garbage will hit this it'll get collected quickly and pumped out so it's not sitting on that liner if for some reason that fails we still have that black plastic liner if for some reason that fails we have four feet of compacted clay if for some reason all of that fails we actually have environmental monitoring around excuse me around the entire site so we actually have to monitor dozens and dozens of monitoring points every single month and in the 35 years that we've been at this site we've seen no evidence in our monitoring of any type of environmental impact leaving

026our landfill what do you do with lake jake so leachate gets pumped out in our case it actually gets pumped directly into the sewer system and then to madison metropolitan sewage some sites that are more remote may have to treat it on site or truck it to a wastewater treatment plant but not in our case one other thing i forgot to mention here with this black plastic you can see the gentleman on the left hand side he's welding two sheets of plastic together so as you roll out a new roll you actually have a six inch overlap on the seam and you weld that on both sides with a heat fusion welder and then you have an air pocket in the middle every one of those air pockets is actually pressure tested to make sure

027that's a good weld and a number of those welds are cut out and tested in the field or tested in the lab and when it's all said and done and the stone is on here we do an electro resistivity test so they wet all that stone in this case it was about a 12 acre site we wet all the stone they put an electrical charge in the stone and they go outside of the construction site and we put another electrical charge in the soil on the edge of our site and that black plastic acts like an insulator to stop that electrical circuit from being completed and if there's even a tiny hole like the size of a pencil let a little bit of current gets through there and we have devices that can detect that

028so before we ever put any garbage in here we know for a fact there are no holes in this black plastic liner at the bottom of our landfill so sorry i got a little technical there but i want to make sure that you understand it again it's not the the dumps of the 70s and 80s there's a lot that goes into environmental protection i won't get as technical here but this is the cap so after we're all done uh placing waste we built a cap over the top to prevent gas emissions it's not exactly the same but it's about 90 percent the same as the line you're flipped upside down so just think of all those clay geo membrane plastic liners flipped upside down and put on top of the landfill as well next slide

029please so this is just a picture of that cap construction happening about five years ago and everything that you see here that's dirt or plastic is about 32 acres and we actually did prairie gas plantings instead of normal plantings so the first landfill in wisconsin to do a large prairie planting on top of a landfill and the dnr's definitely watching this they're very interested and they're hoping other sites will follow our lead on this next slide i've already talked about this but protection of groundwater the liner this is just an example of some of the monitoring that happens around our site we have dozens of monitoring points again that have to be monitored on a monthly basis per our our permit with the dnr those results are reported into the dnr and they're all available

030online if anybody would like to look you know spend hours and hours looking through analytical data but the the summary is that we've seen no impacts or evidence of any type of environmental impacts from our site since we've been there since 1985. so i've talked a lot about the landfill and we do want to build a landfill at the new site but that's just a piece of it we see this site serving the community for decades to come and so as we think about that in 10 20 30 years from now we don't want to be managing our waste in the same way that we are today we want to be recycling more we want to be diverting more things from the landfill and that's really a goal of ours and so we're going from

031this old paradigm of waste is a liability to looking at as a resource these are resources that are being wasted and being thrown away how can we divert them to a higher better use than a second life so we want this new site to be a place where we have a recycling business park and we're encouraging businesses to come in perhaps we can recycle mattresses additional electronics food waste have a reuse center kind of like habitat restore but they have a drop off right at our front gate so we see that all the time every single day people come in with totally usable great materials and we say hey there's a restore four miles away and they're like no too much work i want a one-stop truck shop right so la crosse county actually has

032that at their landfill they have a restored drop up at the front gate of the landfill so having things like that built into the design of this site so we can intentionally divert more materials and encourage recycling businesses locally here in the community what kind of uh under the third bullet oops yeah sorry talk about the vision what type of recreation are you referring to before after enduring yeah absolutely so we're in the beginning stages of planning for that and that's a great opportunity to engage with the school district and the community in general and what would you like to see so the site itself is about 200 acres probably 30 acres will be business park and maybe another 30 or so acres will be used at any one time for landfills so you can

033imagine you have over 100 acres left over still that for 20 30 years aren't aren't going to be used for waste activities so how can we phase development of the landfill so maybe that 100 acres has dog parks walking trails cross-country skiing disc golf mountain biking i'm just throwing ideas out there but we want to engage with the community and what would you like to see as a resource for the community there and that would be level space yep until you have music and then and then as the landfill fills and closes and you move into those areas you can use the closed area for recreation again so our existing landfill that we call rotofeld landfill we're already starting that planting process again we have a lot of it planted in prairie grass so can

034we put walking trails through there viewing areas at the top we have a lot of wetlands that we restored to the north of our site so can we put boardwalks through the wetlands how do we bring the community in and make that a resource um that people can use long-term i know o'connor walk but that's a pretty that's an old site they use it for ski yep they use skiing marathon county has a really extensive mountain bike trail system on their old landfill so there's a lot of opportunities there i'm excited so again just looking at this you know circular economy how do we take things instead of extracting them from the ground using them throwing them using them once throwing them away and filling landfills up to how do we bring those materials back

035into the circular economy put them back in the economy as feed stocks for businesses and how do we do that locally because for the longest time we were so dependent on china recycling all of our stuff that when they said no everything was disrupted in all over america so how do we here locally in dane county create that kind of economy so we're not so so impacted by those market disruptions that can happen you know internationally so this is a very early conceptual idea of what the sustainability campus could look like this would be on the north side kind of fronting 12 and 18 and a b that intersection there a lot of opportunities for education built into this so we want to have viewing areas where people can come in and actually see materials

036being recycled come and come in and see how these things are done but this is very early so we are right now we have an rfp out to hire a consultant to help us to figure this out to figure out what materials could be recycled what do the business plans look like for that what types of businesses could come in here and so as part of their work which will be happening over the next year to year and a half they will have public listening sessions we will actually reach out to the district and ask for your input directly on what could this look like both in terms of the businesses but especially in terms of the education how can we interact with the school district and students and include education into this plan i

037kind of talked about this already but you can see there there's tons of opportunities again we used to get a 150 tours pre-covered so how do we continue to engage with uh the newest me or the the the next members of our community the next leaders in our community it's really important we also see a lot of opportunities with school districts near this site of course and with the ho-chunk nation so they have plans for a cultural education center on their site and we have a lot we see a lot of opportunities to talk about what we do with conservation with recycling with the prairie plantings and what they would like to teach at their site as well so hopefully a lot of potentials for collaboration and again just you know having this be a

038resource for the community i you know maybe kind of forgot to mention this but we don't generate garbage right we all generate garbage so dane county waste renewals manages the waste that our community produces and so you know that's a service that we take very seriously to the community it's important if we don't take it it has to go somewhere and so as a community we don't think it's the proper thing to say we're just going to ship it all to some other uh county we're going to ship it an hour and a half away and fill up a landfill there so we want to handle our materials here in the most environmentally responsible manner possible we feel that it should happen somewhere here in dane county um yes it it could you know some

039people said well can't you do it like at a farm field 10 miles down the road potentially we could but we would not do all these other things you know the community or the the sustainability campus with the businesses there's certain infrastructure you need to do that you need access to hauling roads internet water sewer to build a business park and so that's really how we came to to hone in on this site recreation i think we talked about this already but there's a lot of potential opportunities for some light recreational use out here we need to really engage in that plan or engage with the community in that planning process but we do fully intend for there to be recreation on this site at all phases of the site life so over the next

04050 to 100 years continue to develop this into a real community asset over a couple hundred acres of recreation for the community i know also there is some concern brought up about the golf program so we actually as part of our agreements with the city of madison there will always be for the next 25 plus years there will always be at least 18 holes of golf at their site still but it will actually start out with a full 36 for the first couple of years and it drops down to 27 holes for a while and then to 18 holes so that is built in to continue to provide golf facilities at this site over the next 25 years next slide please this is probably it seems a little boring but this is probably actually fairly

041interesting or important for the the school board here this is about the timeline and everything in yellow are opportunities for engagement with us and with the school board so the top blue is the plan or the permitting process through the city of madison zoning etc the yellow excuse me the the purple area is the consultant i mentioned that we're working to hire in the next month or so that will be working over the next couple of years on the campus planning and you see a long yellow bar there kind of starting next year several months of engagement with the community on what what that's going to include and then the the orange areas on the bottom are the dnr permitting the state permitting process you see a couple of yellow dots in there where the

042dnr will actually put out public comment or they'll put out their recommendations and then take public comment on their reports or their recommendations and so those are things where the school district as state statute states will get a notice saying here this is out you have 30 days to respond and we'll make sure to engage with you at those points as well to make sure you know when that's coming and then there's another yellow bar in that section that's called a local negotiated agreement process and that's really another really strong opportunity to engage with us and with the community about this project so that is a separate process that's spelled out in state statute if you are building or expanding a landfill you must engage in a negotiation with any community so any any municipality

043i should say so any village town city or county that's within 1500 feet of the boundaries of that waste facility and in this case most likely that would be the city of madison town to cottage grove probably just those two initially it could grow to the village of mcfarland as well the state statute does allow let's say for example it was just the town and the city the state statute does allow other municipalities like the village to be brought into those negotiations if the city and town agree and i know the village president has already sent letters to those other two communities asking to be included in that process and we at the county have absolutely no problem with that even in a worst case scenario if that were not to happen we fully intend

044to engage with the village and the school board about what your concerns are and build that into the design we're not intending to come in here and say oh sorry you're not part of that formal process so we can ignore everything that you would like to discuss about this site that's that's not how we do business we want to be here for decades to come and it's important that we have a strong relationship with the community and with the school district also in addition to that i will say that those local negotiated agreement meetings are public so they're publicly noticed people can come to them just like this you can provide comments can let the the elected officials who may be sitting on there or who may have appointed that board let them know what

045their concerns are what their positions are what they'd like to see included in that the negotiated agreement process typically includes things such as hours of operation traffic hauling routes how we're going to handle complaints about odors or windblown litter any potential compensation to neighbors or the community for impacts because of the landfill things things of that nature since you brought the issue of odors yes smell the odor now periodically will this increase the likelihood that there will be some smells more frequently i think um there's the potential because it is closer absolutely but i think realistically or we are getting a better handle on it so i readily admit that the summer of 2017 was terrible you know it's terrible for your community um it was something that caught us by surprise so we had

046been at this site since 1985 and we had never experienced anything like that there was a new type of waste that was coming in and it created more hydrogen sulfide in our gas than what we typically see hydrogen sulfide is that rotten egg smell which is why it's so much more noticeable so i would argue that you know things have gotten much better since then we've understood how to control that much better how we place that waste how we oversee and control the gas collection system we're much more in tune to that so we have mobile misters that we can deploy we put a spray-on product on on bad days if we're detecting odors we have weather stations at our site to help us see where the wind patterns are going if we need to

047increase additional efforts for that day we have a vapor-based odor control system that goes around the perimeter of our site that was around the north and east side and just in the last month we've now extended around the south side so that should add a lot of additional protection for the village as well um all that to say is we're working on it we're spending a tremendous amount of resources and time to make sure that we we don't have impacts for motor but i will never sit and say that you're never going to smell a landfill on any day of the year guaranteed our goal is to have the least impact possible you know realistically i think i think it's reasonable to say you may have a handful of days a year where you may

048notice the landfill odor but if that happens we need to know about it right away we have an online reporting system now which actually just started because of a recommendation from a community member and so when we get those older reports we have staff that get on that jump on it right away it doesn't matter if it's saturday at 8 a.m or whatever it may be we actually send a staff person out to that address to the community to see what they're noticing and we also put other staff on our own site on okay what's happening at our site do we need to adjust our gasoline field do we need to increase our vapor misting system what what's causing this and then how do we fix it as quickly as possible i just to jump

049on that i mean living in this town it's it's an issue it's more of an issue now than it was 15 years ago for sure there's more than a handful of days when it's warm that you smell at least some of the methane gas or the rotten egg odor that being said we're in this town right now there's a lot of expansion happening out towards that landfill and with the village expansion and then you know the school owning 10 acres very very close to that i mean it's it's definitely a concern given that standing on firewall street sometimes you can smell it we're going to be a heck of a lot closer to that landfill sooner rather than later yeah no i what i would say again is um i absolutely hear what you're saying

050your concerns uh if you do smell odors even it's a faint one please report it to us because it lets us know that we're not doing a good enough job to stop it and it stops it from getting worse within the community as well at the new site we do have some additional plans as i mentioned a lot of this is coming from a specific waste type so we're looking at plants at the new site to segregate that waste and its own cell within the landfill so it doesn't interact and then we can cover it a lot better we can pull on the gas collection system a lot harder in that area and we think those things will help as well to prevent you know the gases that you're really smelling from getting out um

051one other question i have so you brought up the birds when you were talking about the aviation but obviously birds can do a lot of damage to like existing buildings and parks when they're too close to an area where it's an overpopulation of birds what do you you know considering that some of our developments are are going to be relatively close to the landfill do you do anything to negate the bird population yeah so we have we have some homes and businesses that are about 320 feet from the edge of our garbage right now across the bay very close so we work very closely with those homes and neighbors already as an example there's uh one business across the road that has called us a couple times where the flock of birds came down and

052then when they left they left a bunch of feathers and other stuff and so we worked with that gentleman and how can we clean up your site but more importantly how do we prevent it we looked at some decoys on the roof and some other things like that um there's different things we've used over the years on our own site um there's a grape seed extract that actually acts as mace for for the birds and keeps them away to some extent um so there's a lot of things you can look at we haven't had to go to kind of too far of extremes so far because to this point it hasn't impacted our neighbors too badly i think there's only been two or three times where i've actually been called from a neighbor because the

053birds were just actually causing a nuisance at their property but if if we do get to that stage there's really one solution that actually truly works which is using other birds of prey like hawks um or falcons out on the site to scare the birds away and so we actually have started to explore that because we were concerned about that same problem we've gotten quotes from three different falconers and we're thinking about we were thinking about doing a pilot this summer but we'll probably do a pilot next summer to see how well how effective it is and talking to my other colleagues around the nation that's really the true fix for this it's having someone fly a bird at your site every single day of every single year and if it gets to that point

054if this were a nuisance for the community or for those new developments absolutely that's what that is what we would have to do okay you had mentioned that third grade is sort of the target area that you have come up with the tours do you have any plans of catching up to the two great levels that did not go up during the pandemic because i think it's a great educational opportunity for kids yeah we would love to have them come out if you guys are able to have your fourth fifth sixth graders that missed it come out with us we would love to do that um again we have the school bus program so we can pay for the buses to come it's totally free tour on our end so if you can build that

055into your curriculum we'd love to i know with the the grade that it traditionally has come out it fits in really well as they're doing a unit on energy and engineering so it's a great time but if there's other units in fourth fifth and sixth graders where we can have a tie-in and they can fit into their curriculum we'd love to have them come out on this on the screen here too you can see on the right-hand side we're actually having an open house on august 20th so please make sure to share that with the community and with your folks and it's about three hours i think it's 11 30 to 4 30 or 3 30 um have folks out and we're going to have a live music with a dj food trucks out there

056big equipment for the kids to climb up and explore a little bit of interactive with our parks department again getting feedback on what people would like to see in their recreation space at this site and then actually having tours of our landfill as well so please make sure you if you're able to stop out and let others know about it as well i won't go into everything on the left-hand side but you can see there's a lot of upcoming opportunities for engagement as well and involvement and the permitting the zoning and the the public engagement development plans that we have coming up over the next year or so next slide i think that is it any any additional questions i can help with i did have a couple um we've had feedback from the community

057that you've probably also heard about the potential health impacts of even just air quality and things like that you address a lot of it and i this was very informative i like to call myself tree hugger and i really like to see a lot of what you guys are doing so thank you for doing that um but kind of the more like low-key health impacts there's a lot of concern in our community about that and so can you address that yeah absolutely so and i didn't go into a lot of this but um really the the dnr oversees the entire design permitting construction and operation of our landfill and so that's built into the design and permitting in the front end but then operation and compliance with all of our permits on the back end

058and there is included in that an air permit so that covers things like our gas plant or before we were running engines for electric generation the emissions off of that it includes the emissions fugitive emissions from the landfill we have to calculate those estimate those and report to them but it also includes things like dust so how much dust is leaving the site and so we have a watering plan we have to water head multiple times a day every single day so there's a lot that goes into that piece of it but also you know concerns i've heard about ground water surface waters there's a lot that goes in again the design and the permitting from their end to make sure that we don't have impacts environmental impacts from the landfill i've talked a lot

059about protection of groundwater with the liner system the monitoring that goes on i heard some comments recently about oh what if there's runoff and it gets into the waterways well just the way these systems are designed that they're designed to prevent that right any water that falls within that footprint stays inside that waste footprint beyond that we have surface water ponds or you know storm water ponds on the site so if there was some sort of a catastrophic failure that allowed wastewater or even rain water that hit waste to go out into those ponds there's controls built in that we can detect that we can stop that and then there's a whole series of testing with the dnr on how do we mitigate this now how do we pump the water out of there how

060do you dig that out how do you make sure that there is no release to the environment so there's a lot that goes into protecting not just the environment but human health as well and it's really built into the codes and the standards that the dnr will hold us to when we're designing this and when we're operating this and it's the same that every landfill in wisconsin is has to meet for those same standards i think i thought i recall that the county bought a piece of property corner of maybe femwright and ab i think there's a tavern out there now wasn't there something you were going to build in that general vicinity there yeah what was that so we've built we've gotten a few different pieces of property bought the tavern there yeah and

061originally we were looking to build our offices there because right now most of our administration staff is actually at the alliant energy center which isn't very ideal so we actually hired a consultant we designed and we were about to build the office there and that's when really discussions with the city got serious about the golf course because they came out with their golf course task force the year before that they recommended closing half of yahara and that's when we said hey this is an opportunity to talk with them so literally in the at the tail end of that design or the i should say the tail end of the the economic feasibility of that office building we realized it doesn't make sense to do that because we're probably going to be building new offices across

062the road so we still own that property we're looking at using it potentially right now we use it as a training center so we do a lot of our training larger department trainings there that's where the open house will be as well that uh long term my goal my hope is that it could potentially be a trail head for the recreational use on the site so if we have trails going into the boardwalks and up under the prairie you have a parking lot right there a trail head potentially it could be a warming house for a cross-country skiing club or something of that nature so we do all that across the road across davey we bought a couple different farms and farm fields in that area and most of that is getting turned into a

063solar field actually the the pile driving for that has just started in the last month or so so with that project the county will meet its goal of being 100 renewable electricity and all of our county functions county buildings so if the yahara golf course had not become available what was your next plan of action to find another space for the future landfill yeah absolutely we would have had to continue we we have been looking for sites for some time we would have had to continue to do that and continue to narrow it down realistically um there's very limit again as i mentioned very limited sites that meet all your setbacks what you need to wetlands roads private drinking wells have the right geology on the site etc most likely it would have been a

064site further out in the country and it would have been just a landfill it wouldn't have the sustainable business park they wouldn't have the circular economy we wouldn't be talking about how we move our county forward and with waste management and most likely would be just a landfill and then we're going backwards and the last question i have is do you have an alternate electrical backup if we lose electricity yeah for our key pieces we do for our key systems so like our leachate pumps our gas system flare so if the gas system isn't working we have a flare as a backup but what if the flare doesn't have electricity then we can't we can't destruct the gas so the key elements the key infrastructure we have mobile backup generators that we can supply power

065thanks yeah i just was going to make a comment just that you know dane county is is truly almost one of a national leader in what it's doing and you hope you can continue with that and keep improving and making it even more i guess circular as you want to say um it's going to be easy for the people who want to fight this in some ways because many of them don't know much and i think some of the information they have is somewhat misleading and it seems that it almost behooves you guys to really try to sell why it would be good for this area and i don't know how exactly i'm you're hiring a firm you know do that because there are recreational but there's other things as well hopefully some economic because

066if you can do that then i think you're there so as much as it's a technical and engineering kind of thing it's also very political in that sense or economic whatever yeah no it's very insightful and um you thank you for your comments and what we do we we often lose sight of that that you know there's not many landfills that do all these different things we do but to your point about the community absolutely um it can be challenging as an engineer to to sometimes hear people make comments or you just know that's not how these systems work right or you know like that's just that's a hazardous waste landfill from the 70s that leaked because it isn't built to the same standards ours is um so that that can be challenging to fight

067that or to to argue against that but you're right we need to make sure that we're engaging more with the community and making sure that they can understand some of the positives of this we did prior to the the main votes at the city and county board we had three different uh sessions with the community where we you know i think it was over nine and a half total hours where we presented and then just took all their questions until they were done asking questions for the night i think that helped with a good number of the the community but not all you know i think some people um either didn't hear about some of those early sessions or weren't there i think there's also some people that are going to you know be upset

068about this no matter what and that's going to be a hard piece but you're right there's a lot of people that i think we can explain the benefits to and they can understand that hopefully we can we can move forward you know with something that works for the community and for us yeah we're lucky that we have the university here as well and i mean 20 years ago the idea of using natural gas to be powering county trucks and whatnot would have been far-fetched so i mean we've come a long ways you just want to keep going with that anybody have anything else any other questions or comments i'm better informed so i appreciate all the information that you provide i think we all are yeah i think we all are yeah sorry for taking

069so much of your time and i appreciate all those questions and we're always happy to come in and talk with you more we'll let you know when opportunities are for public engagement as well we appreciate your coming out very much and also appreciate the the educational tours and such and and we would look forward to getting those kids that weren't able to do it maybe another opportunity here coming up we'd love that thanks again thank you thank you and thanks thank you thank you okay uh we need moving to an update on the village board school board planning committee meeting mr fisher mr mooney yeah and i'll try to run through it um tom i would hope you or aaron as far as that goes um would would speak up if i leave things out

070but it was uh really kind of exciting because uh the the july 19th meeting it was announced that the jeff mahoney's had a great deal to do with a lot to do with this so anyway it turns out the village has purchased eight acres of land it's off of single cow it is north of the hope rotten gun club so it's right next to it and then it's also next to the um uh what is it the power see sort of like power station yeah well it isn't a mice it's not power stations it's substations yeah the mcfarland property it sounds like right so it's it's one of no well it was privately we were looking at that right right and so in some ways because it's so near that substation you know one of

071the problems with any kind of uh you know electricity is when you you know send that the power over a distance you lose a certain amount of that so it's right there so it's perfect that way it's also next to the the gun club which is not exactly probably choice for building and whatnot so it's really exciting i have talked with jeff it turns out well what's what's happened is basically um alliant energy has uh has agreed that they're going to negotiate with the village the reason the school got involved was it turns out that seven acres they're gonna do seven acres of the eighth eight they're going to produce more electricity than the village could actually use and so the only way they could do it is if they would include this district as

072well and that's part of the problem because you can you can produce electricity and sell it to your own i guess your municipality but when you start bringing another governmental agency or whatnot at that point then you have to actually basically let the utility actually kind of sell it back to you so we would produce it we'd send to them they in turn would actually then be selling to us and we're in the process right now and and jeff has talked to me about it it's just it's the negotiations and they're not going as well as you'd like and part of it is just simply the laws that we have for our utilities regulate them are outdated and some states have actually kind of gotten ahead where they're literally allowing people to sell their own

073electricity that they produce the state of wisconsin we haven't gotten there so it's it's going to be dicey right now trying to figure out how that's going to work but they're trying to negotiate a 20-year contract and they'd be in charge of all the upkeep and whatnot they would produce or they would put down and pay for all of the the uh the solar po solar panels and whatnot um and the nice thing is it would produce enough electricity for the entire village and the entire school district minus the was the obesity intermediate school and i think that area in the village is actually run by mge so that's that's i don't understand it yeah that's kind of a confusing issue over there and we need arlen halverson in here to explain exactly how that

074works probably or job but it i mean it it offers you know such potential if we can actually just work the negotiation out and jeff is very much involved with those right now okay he's saying things are not looking as good as they should but we'll see how that works out so that was the the first thing we we talked about um we looked at diversity equity and inclusion um the dei work and really the big thing there is we mentioned about ian just getting again another contract from us the youth center um that's one of the things that the village and the uh in the school district we we both contribute to the the resources to that uh uh jamie thomas is a new member of them um we look at the community recreation

075we know a lot more now about baseball softball there was the affordable housing it's something that we're looking at as sharing again the taylor road site has just come in there's the holster road is under construction we talked about the school resource officer and joel ziesma has been a sign of that and then some of the things that we had looked at kind of brainstorming early on with the idea of local journalism communication technology and trying to work together that way between the village sharing or working with a district and then uh trying to work it out so that we can get more students on some of the committees that they're doing so that's kind of where we are with that and uh i don't know if tom you want to add anything that was

076a great summary sounds like a good meeting it was everything it was good but it was a little discouraging well that happened we're as we're going through the negotiation now we get to play the game so i don't know if was that a piece of the mcfarland property that at one point in time we were looking at possibly purchasing okay yes i think the big thing for everybody to realize when you are talking about solar and doing that which is wonderful when you talk about that it could power the school district and the villages electrical it doesn't take away necessarily the expense it's taking not free it's taking the equivalent of what we take on or use off the grid of from other non-renewable energies and then there is some potential financial gain for the

077entities that help move that forward so right and and there's going to be the need for you know the non-renewables when you have those those deep times and whatnot that's going to continue but it should i mean is there potential to bring down yeah that solar field would go into the grid right for the whole whole area the whole area there's a dozen it doesn't direct that area but what it is is it's taking a considerable i think we're talking one one megawatt which is a zillion watts so again we have to make sure that we're up front that this isn't a lot of people think it's a budget solve it's not a budget solve it's a shift in how we get energy that's more sustainable for yeah so is it essentially basically like offsetting

078a carbon footprint yes okay yep we would be eliminating the carbon footprint for like the village of mcfarland and the school district of mcfarland mars but we're looking at the options with that okay anything else moving on to cesa 2 annual convention mr mooney okay yours yes thanks um i'm the rep on the board for the season 2 convention it's held annually at whitewater i was unable to make it because i was suffering from covet but i do have information about it and this is a little background information sisa 2 covers the geographical boundaries of like from wisconsin heights to beloit to lake geneva into union grove and everything in in inside those boundaries it consists of 49 school districts in six unified high school districts and ceases divided into 11 clusters mcfarland belongs to

079cluster c which consists of mcfarland deerfield manola grove and madison each cluster can vote to have one of the four reps serve on the board of control sort of like the school board sort of like that and they meet monthly and the person from class from deerfield who is the rep for this year um the topic in june was the 2022 cyber insurance landscape um and they forwarded the slideshow to me it was a wonderful slideshow but jeff are you presenting our cyberplan in september here so we'll look forward to that see what's happening with that um and that's about it for cesa too any questions virtual schools summit originals mr moani yes summit again uh being the board rep on on the weedle board the board of board members were invited to attend their

080annual summit it was in washington dc uh this past week for a day and a half and again the four words i would use to describe my experience sitting in those meetings would be educational and eye-opening i mean i think a lot of people there's a misconception of what virtual school is we have limited knowledge of it because our kids went through some virtual learning the past year and a half or two years but it's well beyond that uh with weava and the other virtual academies the goal is to giving all students the opportunity to succeed and graduate just like we do with our kids and options lead to success they have a whole host of options and they may have greater options than we do in the brick and mortar building because it's virtual

081the outcomes of the summit was uh two things align the leadership and their partners their partners include the executive directors and sarah cutler is the executive director here in uh mcfarland i'll just add i think she's been in that position maybe for i know 11 or 13 months she is dynamite i mean i was on the board two years ago and she has taken the weva school here so much further than what was before and it was going good guns before but just her background her knowledge her enthusiasm her motivation her ability to connect with people i mean it's really outstanding and secondly highlighting successes challenges opportunities you know coming together what's working what's not working in the virtual world there were four sectionals and this is their sort of the business piece customer experience

082you know what can they do to provide the experience and opportunities for families students who first enroll and they're retaining student attention because that can be very challenging at times secondly national local marketing they showed a commercial that they just produced it was like a 20-second commercial and the first time it was with uh a script audible script and it talked about you know you want your child to be riding the school bus two hours a day you know but yeah six o'clock in the morning carrying a 20-pound backpack being bullied in school all this stuff okay then they ran the same commercial with no script only the ad at the end yeah consider virtual schools k12 virtual schools the feedback feedback from the participants was really interesting like some of the like principals also

083oversee their virtual academies it was quite critical of the brick and mortar buildings uh sure some of that goes on but that's not the typical life of a child in the public schools they were so they're going to go back and take a look at that because what we don't want to do is we don't want them to criticize us and we don't want to criticize them also everyone has a niche in the educational field and what virtual k-12 wants to do is find the best fit possible might be with them might be in the more brick-and-mortar schools um career learning adult uh learning uh they're expanding to post high school now uh they've partnering with um southern massachusetts what is it a southern new hampshire university virtually that's a community college i think it's

084a four-year college yeah but i see commercial yeah yeah and it's the bus that goes around so they can hand some people their diploma in real life you'll see that uh but again their uh accounts that their the concentration is on career and readiness programs um work based learning project based and adult learning the enrichment programs so they're really expanding beyond just the k-12 and then the professional development it's where we have an opportunity to learn from virtual folks the virtual schools have a lot to learn from us and together we feel there's a niche for both of us to do even further collaboration in their sharing resources materials professional development uh job shadowing just so that we have a better understanding of what our colleagues in a different setting uh what their world looks

085like and to actually observe students to see how they engage them and we would invite them to come into our brick and mortar schools also it's certainly two different disciplines teaching virtually and teaching brick and mortar yep two different animals for sure and i think we found that out in spades yes over the last year and one of the opportunities is for brick mortar's staff to see how they're doing it because what they're doing is far different than what we did because our curriculums are vastly different um and again everything that they do is centered around their state's standards so yeah they're working under some of the same restraints that we are but one of the fascinating things is they call it gamification have you heard of that i never heard of it uh it's

086where they use video games uh for the the learning um they have competitions like with fortnight league of leg league of legends chess rocket rocket league smash ball guys now some of you guys kids might know what those are i have no idea but what they've done is that they use those games and it's called gamification to draw the kids interest and again they're tied to standards so they're actually learning about realizing it sometimes but they have esports at the varsity and junior varsity level they have competitions they have the spelling bee they have art competition photography contests a national cook-off an innovation contest to name a few so they provide a whole host of different types of extracurricular and they consider that addressing some of the mental health issues that might be out there

087with socialization it's just a different way to look at it and then they have work-based learning approach to careers which sort of parallels to what we do i think maybe it's a little more specific at the k-5 level it's career awareness which we're all aware of at the 6-8 level it's career exploration at the 9 11 level it's career preparation and then at grade 12 it's career training where they really get right into it future careers that they're focusing in on are career skills certification for students employment readiness certification and employment ready advanced certification and certainly one of the goals of the virtual academy and we've in particular is what they call the cra the credit recovery equivalent and it's done via the project-based learning and some of the research out there is very positive

088yeah try to catch these kids up so they can graduate and the closing tidbit that i have of all the counties in wisconsin there's only one that does not have at least one student i knew they were all over the state yes they are yeah yeah they bring kids in from all over so that concludes this report thank you very much mr mooney any questions comments moving on we have uh superintendent tarnitzer with an update on the strategic planning process yes so the the invites to participate in the listening sessions and the committee went out my first time creating a flyer tell me it's pretty it's beautiful thank you um it was exciting angie got to hear some of that excitement from me um working on my graphic design abilities so far we've had 19

089people express interest exciting um to share that we of that group we've had four students express interests which it's a summer right so that's pretty good that means they're checking their school email or or some of the social media outlets yeah they're paying attention so the um just so you know kind of the behind the scenes of it a little bit um is that in addition to sending out these this information what i'll do is then see who responds then who hasn't responded so one of the questions on that form is who else do you think we should reach out to and so i want to see who naturally volunteers who happens to see it and steps forward and acknowledge those people so i don't want to start recruiting too early but then there's there's

090weeks built in specific for recruitment and adding to the committee um to see that so so far had a had a nice response i'm sure that we'll have more staff responding as well it did so happen not accidentally that the planning committee meetings um one is on they're both on days off of school one is a professional development day one is a conference release day um so it works out i think it'll make it a little easier for staff to be able to participate without us having to have guests that'd be great teacher coverage or or where they have to plan their absence right so so hopefully that will have that we want to have a balanced group obviously we don't want to overwhelm them with the committee with staff but we want to make

091sure staff are represented and continue to have our underserved and often underrepresented population as well it was nice that you mentioned that at that the joint school district village board meeting that was at the very end and i think that was a great way to kind of almost kick it off so thanks yeah okay school board retreat agenda items yes so thank you for uh sharing um your wisdom i sent this to you today but i don't you know expect you to get on your school email um during the day but i have this to share with you so what i did was okay i took all the topics and um made sure to register your votes um again now this you know it's uh votes i use you know as a joke um you

092didn't vote but you expressed your interest in what your priorities are but it's up for us to discuss i mean it's not something we vote on and we're just going to kind of help guide ultimately the agenda that we'll set for the 17th in terms of priority areas one of the things we need to be mindful and some of you actually added comments about that is just let's you know make sure that we can adequately address the topics that we do discuss and not set ourselves up with too many topics one of the things i did and you know again take it for what it's worth was i put some some an asterisk by some of those that i felt like these are topics we could probably dress through you know a regular school board

093meeting possibly or through the mcfarland minutes they're just kind of some were just like really good questions as much as anything um but you know it's important for us to think about we've got this time together on the 17th you know what do we want to focus on and prioritize and two hours will go by like 20 minutes so things have to be kind of concise in order to get everything done and it rarely gets done in a couple of hours but it doesn't i don't think it's taken three so but thanks for explaining about the the uh the asterisk that's really neat yeah and again we could talk about one of those topics at the retreat it's not to say that we couldn't and then on the back i just i you know just

094to show you my results i'm not you know citing my sources there so you can see well for the visual learners it's great yes it makes it easy around the interval so whatever you know it's up for your discussion now about any of the topics that you see that you want to make sure we really focus on on the 17th i think it would be helpful if yeah those four that you've you have involved if we have an idea of what type of outcome we're looking for either an action outcome or a plan so we don't spend you know two hours on just one just certainly yeah cycling in and out of it i agree with that and it seems like some of those topics are about information gathering you know kind of sharing less

095necessarily that they'll be you know something that the board will do but maybe something more so for for me to follow up on well for example that number one aaron employee morale yeah i think we all have heard from staff you know periodically and it does impact their morale or they might share things i would find it useful if we just spent a few minutes what have we heard right you know from school staff yeah you know we don't even have to mention names maybe building levels i don't know but just to serve a baseline yep um we do have information from the staff survey that was ministered two years ago this past spring i don't know if anyone else has what you probably have information there was a lot of information and one of

096the criticism that the board receives is yeah we sent that information but nothing was ever done with that in fact i think sometimes things do get done with it but they just don't hear about it they don't get marketed you know um but i know before that shame on us though sure if that's the case then it's our fault so we need to fix it so on a couple of the topics are just they relate very well together so in a way you can almost cluster missing together so that's gonna i agree so like employing morale and even time task force kind of go hand in hand right because we're talking about workload workflows [Music] but also the actual interview is going to give you information about morale so it means they're all connected but

097i agree i mean i don't i don't want to talk about too many things and we don't have time to focus on the big things i'm just excited to have the time well and if after we get through with this one we feel like there's enough left over to have another one we can have another one there's nothing it's us we can't you know i think we all want to address the issues that need to be addressed and we'll take whatever time we need i think to make sure that happens so are you saying that the four that are bolded are the ones that are being placed on the agenda that we're notifying to the public to the public or can some of these other topics be discussed yes i'm not saying that we need

098to talk about those four i just bold put them in bold because they did have the highest response right so yeah it's just to guide the discussion but it's not a decision okay could it make one suggestion when it comes to uh yeah please employ morale if we could spend a few minutes just conversing with each other what have we heard the good bad and the ugly yeah what do we know we have data that we can refer back to by you know take a look at the exit surveys and the former staff survey we can't do it that night we don't have to do it during the board retreat but maybe some of us would be willing to go back into that data take a look because i think the data that we're going

099to share in the conversation we have is about present comments from staff in the past year probably uh but not historical issues well and i think um the board listening session information that was gathered um in the past year see i don't know anything about that yeah we had board listening sessions and i think that it's really important to go back to some of the comments and i think a lot of these topics even the ones that aren't bolded so the employee morale kind of focuses on that and the comments we got from those listening sessions can help to add some discussion or maybe that would be for the retreat um someone could summarize the listing sessions is this from last year so yes and and we do have summaries maybe and andrew do you

100have the summaries of the board listening session sessions because i know i haven't you have them okay because i know dr anderson had typed up some summaries we do for the first one but did we have any others not for the second okay and this is this is the issue that i have is that we all have different levels of understanding and knowledge but we're all functioning as one team so it behooves us to have the same amount of information so as new board members come on it'd be helpful if like meg and i had received some of those survey results agreed i agree anything else on that otherwise we'll move to the district administrator's report but what about these other things correct oh what do we have communication exit interviews time task force oh

101talking about the the priorities for priority areas right so i think that exit interview analysis is important i i know that it hasn't been well this year we were doing it right but pre with covet and everything exit interviews weren't being completed were they or were they being completed they still were okay but the question is were they shared at the board level because when i was on the board the first time i don't remember getting any results we did get we we did get the months from 20 20 and 21. yeah and then i did ask if the if the most current ones were available yet available but i haven't checked i suspect they probably aren't available okay but that's another thing we should be talking about because the return rate is so poor

102with teacher exit surveys you know what can we do to bolster that you know maybe there's a better way of doing it you know sitting down with the staff before they leave i don't know but and i do think like that standard-based grading vision versus reality falls into employee morale time communication so i think that can be a part of all of this but um definitely from some of the listening sessions we heard a lot about that as well interesting yes yeah i'm the one that put the time task force on if it it's okay with the board why don't i come prepared just to share a little history on that sure no action has to be taken at that point you know but but i agree i think virtually everything here ties back into

103employee morale and time oh well for sure and we know full well that we've had an extraordinary last couple of years and you know the way that you evaluate performance can't be the same you know as it would have been pre-coped or pre-pandemic probably and and there are a lot of i think issues that pop up when you're in the middle of something you had no way of anticipating and different people react differently to those sorts of situations um the covet the pandemic period i think is a tough time to to put too much stock into judging someone's performance maybe or at least you have to understand keeping in mind you know the different circumstance that these people face that no one had ever faced before so we just kind of have to temper temper

104things i think now and again if i could well and this is kind of my vision for this if we're discussing these topics like when we talk about the issues we kind of formulate some action plans on how to move forward i feel like as a board we need i mean we need to talk about these things but we also need some accountability how is this information being reported back to us what changes need to be made and so to me some of these topics i foresee us actually discussing it and having some action plans of next steps versus just discussing it to discuss it so that would be kind of i mean i would i would not advocate just for discussion purposes yeah yeah there has to be an action there has to be

105some kind of action plan some accountability yeah because i think a lot of these things we discuss a lot and then it kind of we don't hear much else about it and i want to make sure that that we're moving forward and that's the frustrating part 2k yeah we do talk about things we think things are emotion but we never get that feedback loop you know things are probably going on behind the scenes but we aren't aware we do have a new superintendent yes who is yeah that's me who's you know who uh is very committed to once we say we're going to do something and follow up and that's part of my my commitment is to communicate back to you about you know what is being done we talked about this what is being

106done so that's that'll be an important thing i think through the discussion at the retreat one of the things we'll talk about is what we know but we'll also talk about what we don't know and how could we find out what we don't know because i think sometimes you know somebody stopping us at pick and save or coming to a listening session they are speaking for themselves you know are there people we're not hearing from you know and how do we engage all of our staff and because there may be some people that you know have wonderful things to share or not wonderful things to share that would be helpful to know but they're not somebody that feels comfortable you know approaching one of one of us right you know there are plenty of those

107folks out there yeah so they need to have we we need to figure out a way to mine their issues as well yeah because there was a lot of discomfort in a couple of those listening sessions was this last year yeah did a couple of them yeah and it didn't it didn't i don't think it it turned out as well as anybody had hoped it's just a difficult thing to it's a difficult thing to pull off see but i would disagree you know i think it can be pulled off i think you have to have the players in the room that are active listeners that are open to different ideas and if everyone does that then some of that other stuff goes away but some ground rules were put in place that made it very

108difficult oh okay to to make it a fruitful okay discussion sometimes it's helpful just ventilating yep exactly and that's the approach that that's exactly i said we'll be have representatives there and you come in and you talk to us about anything you want to talk about but i do think it's important we look at the things and we try to find as much information as we can and if there is something that we need to be concerned about then let's start working towards i think if you gather information it's your responsibility to do something exactly you know even if even if it's table and move out that's at least you're paying attention yeah but based on that craig we can pull the results from the spring 2019 sure teacher survey sure and just go down

109and say okay these have been accomplished these weren't addressed or whatever i think so anything else on the retreat if not we'll move on mr tarnitzer yes district administrators report yes thank you um don't know if you caught a little bit of recognition about the forward unified i did not realize about this thanks about social media so we have five high school students that volunteered with the special olympics did you hear about this yes the soccer i did i did so this summer yeah so playing um on the soccer team so they signed i like how we quoted that uh forward madison to play um and yeah so they played at bree stevens um after nebraska um played they played them i say that to to my wife who's uh who is an alum and

110a husker through and through and then they're traveling to um nebraska on august 31st to play so so just wanted to give some recognition to stella blau cole larson jacob sturtz rowan wagner and avery weaver um for engaging in that with the special olympics a unique unique thing um some upcoming things did you know uh for whatever reason i don't know the history but august is national truancy prevention month and you know where i isn't that odd i don't know it's a fun fact um and i thought it was kind of interesting because i think of my days as a school administrator that is one of the things that we would do in august is reach out to the kids and the families that struggled with attendance in the previous year and let them know

111how excited we are to have them come excited and can't wait to have them come back because sometimes that is a hard transition coming back but for whatever reason it's true and secret benjamin i guess you should prevent it before it happens true and gotta be thinking about it first yeah that's right that's right i have a plan but really proud of the work that we do and especially a shout out to uh to my uh colleagues who are school social workers as they often lead that work with the associate principles this one makes sense get ready for kindergarten month august is that and i really uh camp kindergarten is is a wonderful tradition important here and you know it was important i wanted to be there on that first day just to see that

112you know and to have that school year where i get the get to see the bookends that's one of the great things about my new role is being able to see the kids nervously as they come and they were a little nervous not too bad though not what i expected not the tears i expected at least not from the students i've heard of all about it from a couple kids that came wow like i get middle school i am so excited to learn um from our our ec through two colleagues what what a great service well organized you know thanks to to greg and brooke and jess for organizing that and that they do a great job with those teachers my goodness fantastic and i think you know the 4k teachers really prime the kids

113yes for camp kindergarten and it really has resulted in the level of comfort i think the level of success as these kids experience their 5k yeah we're so glad you brought that up because i that is something i think we can celebrate a little bit more as our partnership with our foreigners sure that's a that's something that we don't often talk about since day one yeah that has been incredible since the very first day that we did that yeah really great people great partnerships um august 9th is national book lovers day so make sure that you uh celebrate reading oh that was funny tomorrow is a big day for us administrative wise we have our beginning of the year kickoff for our administrative council we used to call it a retreat but unless they're we're

114going somewhere and there's you know a spa involved i'm not calling her food and beverage yeah that's right that's right we are going to have lunch we are going to have lunch um you know about the upcoming um school board meetings we'll we'll talk about niola a little bit on the 15th and the 17th is our retreat one of the things that you'll see in the minutes the mcfarland minutes this week but just want to key you in is august 23rd is our new staff orientation and board members are are invited to come typically the president um speaks at the welcome which is from 7 45 to 8 30. it's a really neat thing to do if you can get over there and you don't need to make a speech you're welcome to you can

115just wait um it will be noticed so yeah so we can have a quorum there um angie will do a great job noticing that and then after um at the end of the day from three to four thirty they gather at angelo's um for just a little more informal casual um gathering there and you're welcome to stop by and say hi but please don't feel obligated but just wanted to extend that to you um craig does feel obligated because the board president will speak it's obligated you are obligated i'm good with that i'm good with that so that's my update all right uh smart business manager's report i think is next on the agenda thank you for staying around mr mahoney we appreciate it very much i'm gonna hand out just a couple documents that's

116what i'm doing um now the last several times we've talked we've been talking really about like big vision five years out [Music] this piece of paper is really going to be something that we're going to kind of mindfully move through okay these are the type of columns again that you'll see as we develop our annual meeting and are noticing that in september we'll actually have the board take action on a posting for our annual meeting which occurred in october and you know the great thing in here is i can tell you and it sounds weird for me to just leave it this way but the great thing is that i've been looking back at uh you know july and june and may and those other reports um i'm still stuck on this about 1.5 million

117that's the gap that i'm going to stay again our legislation legislators have really left us with because that is the amount of money we'll need from one-time funds that are federal funds that the next time you see this document it'll have a balanced budget because i will now insert in about 1.5 million dollars worth of federal funds for the 22-23 year out of about four and a half million dollars worth of federal funds that we can use this year and next fiscal year now that's a band-aid because as you know at some point we can't use those federal funds and therefore we either continue to use as i stated all of them and build some of our own reserves so that later on we're easing into potentially a referendum but i did say i wasn't

118going to get past 22 23 because ultimately and lately with my reports for annual meetings i've really focused on the big picture of what's occurring with from students right down to taxes and i'd like to shift to that um oh one more comment about this page the two um highlighted yellow the piece i wanted to point out and this is a you know we should be proud of the fact that we do have a lot of opportunities in special education to provide a lot of services for a lot of students um but you know one of the significant increases of a about 6.8 million dollar budget is the fact that that was last year 21-22 moving forward we're looking at 7.4 million for that fund it's mostly due to the fact that we continue to

119have more one-on-one aids we do have more significant situations that we have to provide that and gathering talent to come and work in our school district is a competition so the cost for our eas in special education has risen our costs for people services in special education has risen it's not just us it's the school districts around us our staff um you know we have a situation just even today where we have a candidate that also verona's interviewing and you get into you know i hate to say it refer back to that oakland hayes movie moneyball but that's what you know was created back in with act 11. so we continue to do well but those are the pressures that i believe our legislation legislators are not seeing is the fact that they're not providing

120any new revenues but we have incredibly increasing expenses that you know that's where at some point similar other school districts in dane county and across the state are going out for referendums we're going to be no different unless for some reason in the next biennial budget that gets fixed but i think we're in a great opportunity as i can show from this next document which is a lot of people at the annual media would just wish i'd put up the property tax bill and the board could vote and we could be done in about 30 seconds or the community could vote in 30 seconds but i'd like to kind of get to that snapshot of what that looks like for as we develop the final chapters of that information in september with voting in october

121jeff do you have a date for the annual meeting yes we do it's 24th 24th thanks thank you so this document again don't want to scare it's got a lot of information um but it is part of a picture of what we'll probably be having to tell our story with regards to in the future um an annual meeting and then after that and i'm getting used to these readers um so what i wanted to start with is student count now this is the revenue cap student count when we work from left to right that's the number of fte resident fte students in our district i'd like to point that out that you know 12 13 we're 2011 students fte we're looking at 2287 which is 13.72 percent growth it's an average of 1.3 percent enrollment

122growth for revenue cap purposes the rest of our enrollment comes from open enrollment which we've capped over the years so similarly when you and i'm going to bounce back to the student count of 13.72 over that 10-year snapshot when i talk about equalized value because there's an important correlation there but our revenue cap which controls over 90 percent of our revenues starts with how many kids you have you get a certain dollar amount per kid and it's a cap unless the legislature gives us inflationary adjustments which they didn't do last year or this fiscal year so if you look from left to right and you go all the way to the orange you'll see that our revenue cap is 27 million dollars now that is point one percent growth okay everybody's getting used to the

123glasses on jeff but i'm the one struggling with this um at the moment um so revenue cap minus state aid which is that next piece there 13.3 million dollars that's we're estimating that has risen 45 since 2012-13 or on average about 3.88 now when you take the revenue cap 27 million minus 13 million we're well funded in the school district formulas in dayton county when we compare to our neighbors we are 50 basically funded by the state and then the property taxpayers but if you'll notice we're looking at just for our general fund purposes a levy of 13.3 million seven hundred and thirteen million three hundred seventy five thousand it's about a one percent decrease from last year so property taxes for general fund that's general that's the general education that supports that first piece

124of paper i gave you that's what supports general education and special education now obviously there's some other taxes but those are planned out through either referendums for the debt service fund which this coming year is 4.3 million our capital fund is actually comes out of a revenue cap that's 249 000 and our community service fund is 432 000 so our total property tax levy for projected at this point is 18.3 and about 18.4 million which is a 0.2 increase over last year now when you look at where it was in 1213 it's only a 29 change but 2.9 change over 10 years on average each year now the big piece is how does that get to the homeowner well equalization value all the value of the whole school district combined is how it's divvied out

125so if i have 500 000 home i take that percent or that amount divided by the 1.9 1.8 billion and i get a percentage of this budget or this property taxes well that leads to a mill rate then so we're looking at ten dollars and four cents per thousand dollars for educational purposes remember on a tax bill there's municipal county and technical schools and sometimes special districts so but this is a 22 percent decrease from 10 years ago we are certainly at a point where education with when you look at how much state equalization has been put in the formulas i mean we can at least say that the state has been putting money more money into offsetting property taxes the report i heard most recently wisconsin's at like the 27th or 28th state in

126spending two years ago per student we're likely to hit the mid 30s we're the only state in the united states that's made a double and almost a 10 if not 20 place move down in spending per student in the united states we're not in that top five anymore we haven't been for 10 years but we're well past the top five i mean we've tumbled so there's always options for state legislators but more importantly our local economy in mcfarland has really thrived on the fact that when you look at the equalized value of our school district 65 growth in 10 years of equalized value and when people talk about what are you going to do with all those students that are filling your buildings we have to remember we've only had 13 14 growth in enrollment

127so we do have a tax base out there that has grown that could likely support um a positive referendum in a few years to keep our operational moving uh simply by the numbers now there's a lot more work than just me just saying well you can afford it that's it who's going out this year uh yes uh wanna key uh is gonna have a vote on it uh the second meeting in august middleton is going out already uh oregon um they'll be basically half the county will be going out these are all operational representatives operational yeah um you know we we would be further along with this if we didn't have the virtual school which we're using this year to the tune of a million we also have federal funds that we did not have

128given to us in the first two years so we didn't expand a lot of areas well that's that's a benefit yeah but fiscal cliffs are not going away some yeah because some districts use those funds to create things that the programming that they now have to sustain so some great news for our property taxpayers for for sure this year potentially the following year that you know property taxes kind of continue to go down for taxpayers for school purposes yeah and that's the unfortunate piece is that when i hear about it i just hear about the school property tax until we inform them better that it includes all these other things so what um and you can blame this on my newness but so obviously the long-term fix is lobbying the legislators right so what are

129what is there anything we can do to help support that or how do we do that from a board level it's a great question certainly things that we can do in particular maybe as we get into october or november or december we can discuss how we can help send resolutions to our state legislators to advocate for better funding or increased funding or the ability for a board to make decisions about funding um you know even if that coincides with referendums of some sort so i think that's the level that we can migrate through um you know as a if i'm continue to be allowed to uh you know i'm on the school administrators alliance which is a lobbying group for our administrative teams across the state i'm a board member on that i also serve

130on the board of directors for osbo which is business directors of the state i have one more year on that so a lot of times my energies are spent on those boards with the collective group advocating we are taking new directions with some of those um for instance osbo our statewide business manager organization just hired a fiscal analyst that's going to prepare more data so we can get more statewide data out to our legislators uh something i've been advocating for is that our realtors boards our associations hospital associations road builders associations those groups really need to know what's impacting because when we talk about enrollment here think about the fact that we have all of this development and we're barely filling our own buildings right well dane county is a hot market for people to

131move to we go north of highway 8 and the out migration and the death migration is those towns are starting to dry up which means services aren't there fire stations ems can't support because they don't have people that are young enough to go do that stuff so um so anyways as long as i'm continuing to be allowed to you know attend these organizations be on board as a representative from mcfarland i'll be continuing to advocate at that level there was a wonderful editorial in yesterday's wisconsin state journal where the uh the mayor of milwaukee and the mayor of tomahawk talked about how we got to change how we're funding you know you were over lying in some ways on that problem couldn't be more different yeah in terms of needs and i i think we're

132going to have to start doing perhaps a better job or at least being more open about things that we can provide to the public that that two-thirds the three-quarters that don't have children in schools we there's a lot we can do and are doing and i that's why i really like being on that committee and you're right it's not a fix with the the solar but it's an opportunity and uh you know we we just need to to kind of show the public that it's money worth spending so that's going to be the challenge we've also had local uh representatives come to the board meetings so that might be something that we take a look at fortunately and unfortunately fortunately for us all of our local legislators have been pounding the pavement to try to

133get better funding and we don't necessarily have access to those that are outside of the others our districts but that's why it's so important that you get involved with that statewide and start saying look this is not just thank god this is affecting everybody any other questions for just one budget update very sobering okay thank you very much mr mahoney as always superb work keep it up thank you very much keep us open don't let him close us okay just between now and the next meeting let's get some work on keep it the distance keep the lights on all right so we'll move on here we've got an action item action on the 2021-2022 budget changes administration recommends approval of the attached budget changes for the 2021-2022 school year do i have a motion so

134move thank you tana do i have a second well second okay any other discussion i think i hit since i don't have access to my computer um i don't know that i fully remember my question here but it looked like for the most part um there was a like the second part of it was mostly a reallocation of funds and so is that something we do typically every year at this time or was there special circumstances that so you'll see that or the the revenues that we uh indicated had the majority changes which usually then has corresponding expenditure up top it's items uh 6 30 or sources 6 30 7 30 and 7 80 those are all special grants so our allocations have to match in the budget and then we have to shift around

135so that we're within a certain percentage level on the expenditure side so this is very typical for each july august to have this done before we hit our auditor season which is two weeks wow so okay thank you yeah absolutely it's a great question auditor season is fun anything else okay hearing none all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye aye opposed motion carries five zero and i would look for a motion for adjournment i'll move to adjourn thank you anybody oh second kate all those in favor please signify by saying aye aye aye opposed motion carries 5-0 we are adjourned at cool perfect timing good it's hoping to beat nine o'clock