[0:00] Good evening, the special town council meeting for 10 to 15, that is called to order. Next, 7 p.m. Shannon, would you like to do the roll call? Councilperson Fox. Here. Councilperson Serencioni. Present. Councilperson Ruby. Present. Councilperson Briggs. Here. Mayor Phil Stett. Present. Deputy Tam clerk Shannon Cunio present. And Charlie Jenkins. Wait. No.

[0:29] Public Works Manager.

[0:34] Okay.

[0:35] Gang's out here.

[0:37] We have a courtroom.

[0:38] So, like, and we will...

[0:46] I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which

[0:54] it stands, one in nation, under God, individual, with liberty and justice for all.

[1:01] Thank you.

[1:03] So, first on the agenda, as usual, is public comments for items which are not on the agenda

[1:10] council.

[1:11] Did you?

[1:12] Oh, right off.

[1:13] We have shared the books.

[1:15] Yes.

[1:15] For him.

[1:16] We had some exciting news tonight at our bare Apple Festival meeting.

[1:22] We are now a non-profit. We got our I-1-1-3-C today. Progress is being made. Yay, thank

[1:32] you, Chair. You're welcome. Council, any other?

[1:40] Any comments? Not a full item,

[1:43] not on the agenda?

[1:49] Required task three times. So last call for public comment for

[1:54] items not on the agenda.

[1:57] And so, hearing none, we move on.

[2:00] We do not have any old business this evening,

[2:03] but what we're discussing first on new business

[2:06] is a new higher approval for Town Clerk Treasure,

[2:11] and I have included not the resume from Adams,

[2:16] but an executive summary that he has prepared for us.

[2:20] And so, I will give council a moment to review that I highlighted experience in municipal

[2:30] government, organizational administration, record-keeping, public communications.

[2:37] He served as a city of alderman where he lived previously and also as the city of council

[2:43] president.

[2:47] He's a proven leadership in municipal operations and community engagement.

[2:51] So, just kind of hitting some of the highlights in the experience areas, drafted meeting minutes

[3:02] and overseeing of organizational correspondence, rigorous document and record maintenance,

[3:12] which is certainly something that we do a lot of.

[3:16] and the grant and budget administration

[3:19] was pretty exciting for me to see.

[3:25] Extensive experience presenting complex information clearly,

[3:31] as well as website experience

[3:35] when it was past business owner.

[3:38] And with the civic engagement,

[3:40] how do I do the management of public grounds

[3:43] because we have public grounds that are managed?

[4:02] Questions from the council regarding

[4:06] being hired.

[4:12] Yeah, well, and this is just summary.

[4:15] So, if you'd like to see the actual resume,

[4:17] and there's also a Crickian vita that has been offered to us,

[4:24] if you want the full story,

[4:27] this individual is imminently qualified

[4:29] and that we are extremely fortunate that he has shown interest

[4:34] in applying and is very interested in the position.

[4:39] Has no problem with the office hours or what has been offered for the salary and it's the

[4:46] same terms as before in that once the notary is received that would be then the automatic

[4:53] increase when that occurs but decided to take a different track this time around and rather

[5:02] than the pound pane for it up front.

[5:05] Gonna see how it fits into Aaron's schedule

[5:08] and let him get that.

[5:10] And then after either 90 days or so depending on

[5:16] what council feels to then reimburse.

[5:19] And so we'll look for that to be in claims.

[5:25] There are no questions, I would entertain a motion.

[5:28] All those in first.

[5:30] They're fired.

[5:32] Okay, motion has been made to hire

[5:35] the town clerk that I have chosen to hire.

[5:39] We have a second.

[5:40] I'll start my motion.

[5:41] Seconded by Tim.

[5:44] Shannon, would you like to call the question?

[5:47] Councilperson Fox.

[5:48] Yes.

[5:50] Councilperson Briggs.

[5:52] Yes.

[5:53] Councilperson Serenciani.

[5:54] Yes.

[5:55] Councilperson Rebe.

[5:57] Yes.

[5:58] I'd love to have a question, you know.

[6:00] I'd like to ask.

[6:02] What happened with that?

[6:04] She had never let me in with her and that became evident pretty much immediately and I was

[6:12] scrambling to find another applicant and tried to figure out what to do.

[6:16] And Aaron's surface, Aaron lives in town, he has four, seven years, longer.

[6:25] A little bit longer.

[6:27] A little bit longer?

[6:28] A little bit longer.

[6:31] We'll do it in our six, came back in 2014 or 2015.

[6:38] Can't skip the four sets.

[6:39] That's right.

[6:41] Sorry.

[6:41] It happened to be here.

[6:43] Oh, welcome, Erin.

[6:45] I'm very happy that you will be our new clerk.

[6:48] Thank you.

[6:49] I'll do my best to help everybody.

[6:53] And at this point, first day for Erin will be my day

[6:56] In the 20,000-minute special, okay, good, perfect.

[7:02] And introducing Ann Oms, our new clerk, Ki-Hee.

[7:06] How forward are you to meet all of you

[7:09] in person?

[7:09] If any of the council members would like some additional

[7:15] veteran information, please come.

[7:18] This will be at the office.

[7:19] I'm happy to share, especially with you,

[7:22] any information that would be considered HR and not necessarily

[7:27] showable to the public for your consideration if you wish.

[7:32] Well, thank you.

[7:34] That's wonderful.

[7:35] So the next item on our agenda is to discuss moving the town bank account

[7:42] from our current bank, Travis West.

[7:45] And for this, I'm going to hand it over to Shannon to have a discussion.

[7:50] We're probably not going to make, we're not going to be making any decisions tonight

[7:56] about this, but we wanted to open the subject and a discussion.

[8:03] So I guess this came to light for the most part, we'll move on down to visit Stevensville

[8:10] and in talking with their finance department and listening to their town council meeting

[8:16] that night. One of the things that was just glaringly obvious to me is they went from a few hundred

[8:22] dollars a year in interest to over a hundred thousand dollars in interest for the accounts that

[8:29] they have. Now granted, they are bigger than we are, they have more money than we do, so we're not

[8:35] looking at that kind of a change. But my thing was, is trails west really doesn't do anything for us,

[8:42] And as a matter of fact, I've come to find out they're not even, we'll say collateralizing

[8:48] our money.

[8:49] We are over the limit for FDIC, for FDIC insured.

[8:54] So there's a number of different ways that they can collateralize our money.

[8:58] One is pledge certificates and everybody that I've talked to at Trail's West doesn't seem

[9:03] to know what I'm talking about, which I find pretty frustrating because they have to deal

[9:09] with a number.

[9:09] I'm sure they deal with a number of towns or cities.

[9:13] So it came to light that Steven'sville actually has gone

[9:18] to first security bank of Missoula, I think it's called.

[9:24] So what we have done is we have asked for, I should have brought one tonight,

[9:30] but I'll make sure that we do this when we make the final decision.

[9:33] I put together a deal that says, what do we specifically want to know

[9:37] about what can you provide us? Some of it is, you know, what is your ACH and your online profile?

[9:44] What can you do for us because we're a municipal, what's ACH?

[9:49] Automat clearing house is what it stands for, but it's basically direct deposit.

[9:54] So our paychecks are direct deposit, but technically it goes through ACH through the bank.

[10:00] And so, you know, all these things that we have, we don't necessarily need a merchant

[10:05] account for credit cards, we do that already through somebody else, but our

[10:09] deposits are kind of ahead of it because the bank's quite a ways away. So what

[10:13] kind of promoted deposit do they have for us with everything but cash obviously?

[10:19] Anyway, we've asked all those questions and we've asked to have the information

[10:23] come back, but two of the four that we have asked from came back to us and said,

[10:28] hey, we need more time with this. So we're going to give them that time to come

[10:33] through. We have asked Trail West to be a part of it, you know, find out what they can do for us.

[10:39] We're already there. One of the second ones is for security. We went to those guys. We have

[10:45] got, we have asked Clearwater Credit Union, largest credit union around. We have also asked Mountain

[10:52] America and the last one I would actually like to target, it could be either, or is Stockman

[11:00] or Montana. Montana bank? Montana. I'm not sure. I forget exactly what it's called. I'd like to

[11:07] pull one of those two because there are a larger bank that isn't quite the community bank. They're

[11:13] slightly bigger but still in that genre. I'd like to pull one of those into and probably get five

[11:19] and then just take a look at them. What can they do for us? You know we generally have somewhere

[11:25] between six and eight hundred thousand dollars of the bank at any time. We can use our

[11:30] STIP account, which is our short-term investment program account, to get higher interest, but we need

[11:37] to get this all put together so that it's all working and the banks can talk to each other and we

[11:43] can transfer money and hopefully make a little bit more money for the town. That's ultimately what our

[11:50] want is to have better flow with the bank number one and to have better not

[11:58] rewards but returns. That's a better protection of our funds. Protection

[12:04] period, yeah. Because it was really just concerning that trails west didn't

[12:09] really know what we were talking about. Right. They also have not been able to offer

[12:13] a business credit card which is not a super big problem. We had debit cards

[12:20] before, but I know that when you have a fraud charge on a debit card it's a

[12:25] completely different issue than if it's on a credit card and I do know you can

[12:31] put limits on debit cards and that's what we had before but that's why we

[12:36] initially made the switch that we have credit cards different now that are not

[12:41] through the bank and that's with Costco so it benefits us in the longer and

[12:46] because you get money back and more toilet paper or whatever.

[12:51] Offers things we maybe.

[12:53] So the big kicker for the Costco credit card was the fuel.

[13:02] So we used the rent code down here.

[13:07] They gave us just these mag strip cards that they're very generic

[13:13] or whatever.

[13:14] Well those mac strips of wear out and they're like we're not going to issue those to you anymore

[13:19] It's it's game over whatever. So it was like really looking at it

[13:23] And it's like well, what is the best situation that that Costco visa it gives you that 4% on any

[13:32] Yeah, I personally have it as well and just for the fuel fact alone

[13:37] That's really why I very much advocated for that Costco

[13:43] because fuel is, you know, one of our number one situations is that it is

[13:48] need to have a fuel card. So, thank you for adding that, Charlie. Yeah. It's good.

[13:54] Good information. All right. All right. Well, this all sounds, you know,

[14:00] incredibly kind of official. So as far as what you're gonna need from us, I don't

[14:05] think you necessarily understand. Do we need to approve anything, or is this just a

[14:10] getting a temperature check on, you know, if we are okay making this, starting to make this change?

[14:15] Well, because we weren't able to get the information all together from everybody this quickly.

[14:20] Um, I say we table it, yeah, and put it on as old as this.

[14:25] Right, I mean, there's no need for us to approve it.

[14:26] No, not this.

[14:28] Yeah, but...

[14:30] Well, I mean, you know...

[14:31] We've got Charlotte once, like, something to just say.

[14:33] Charlotte?

[14:34] Did you have...

[14:35] The only other thing that I would kind of question is whether or not we would actually roll

[14:42] into like having a couple accounts.

[14:46] So it's still...

[14:47] Uh, something I'm going to talk with Jody about.

[14:49] So it's...

[14:51] There's one of the crazy things.

[14:52] As I understand it, government, it puts all of its money into one account, but it's ear

[14:57] marked for different things.

[15:00] And so, you know, a lot of, especially coming from a business background, you know, there's always the operating account but there's always the savings account. And it seems like government runs a little bit different. It's one of the things I wanted to talk to Jody, and I need to talk to her about transferring back and forth to Stip because that's going to be our highest interest theoretically. So anyway, one of the things I want to touch face with her on is,

[15:28] is, can we just keep a usable amount of money in the operating account and keep a whole

[15:35] bunch of it in savings somewhere?

[15:37] She has never specifically said anything about, hey, move it to savings.

[15:42] It's always been specific.

[15:43] Move it to STIT.

[15:45] The short-term investment.

[15:47] Yeah.

[15:48] Cool.

[15:48] That's a piece of the question.

[15:50] Yeah.

[15:51] But it's something that I want to be crystal clear on with Jody before we make our final

[15:56] decision or open new accounts.

[15:58] And there are some nuances that we learned, like, what the Credit Union, the Mountain

[16:03] America Credit Union would offer in terms of a step, is a little different than what we

[16:08] can get in the state of Montana because that bank is, or that Credit Union is based out

[16:13] of Utah.

[16:14] So we would even get a higher yield on the step because it's based on Utah rates, not Montana

[16:21] rates.

[16:21] So there's a lot of details that we're looking at, but we wanted you to be aware so that

[16:27] then it's not going to be something we spring line yet when we present this.

[16:33] Probably in October, does it seem like that is possible?

[16:36] Yeah.

[16:36] Okay.

[16:37] So it'll be an old business and our regular council meeting in October.

[16:42] Sounds great.

[16:43] Well, that in mind then, unless we are meeting for the...

[16:47] Yeah.

[16:47] I don't know what I have. I would just make a motion to table this until we have a decision to remain.

[16:53] Excellent. So there's a motion on the table to table the moving of the main account.

[16:59] Do we have a second?

[17:00] We'll start it.

[17:01] Again, second.

[17:01] And, Shannon, if you could do the roll call.

[17:04] Councilperson Fox.

[17:05] Yes.

[17:07] Councilperson Briggs.

[17:08] Yes.

[17:09] Councilperson Servizioni.

[17:10] Yes.

[17:11] Councilperson Rady.

[17:13] Yes.

[17:13] unanimously passed.

[17:16] Humanist table, so thank you very much.

[17:18] And now that we have a new clerk and things should get

[17:26] nice and clockwork here and also that we have changed our

[17:30] meeting to Wednesday, it's going to make things easier in

[17:35] terms of getting you information the week ahead so that

[17:39] you've got a packet, you've got information to review

[17:44] and it's not trying to be awkward, not working on Friday to try to get that

[17:49] all coordinated as well as the notice of the meeting happening. So moving forward,

[17:55] I think life will be much smoother working with all of you. I hope that that

[18:03] works better for you too. With that, is there any additional public comment?

[18:12] And to

[18:13] to be sure, no public comment at this time.

[18:18] Mr. Cunio.

[18:19] Oh, make one comment.

[18:20] Thank you.

[18:21] I think it's really neat that not only are you focused

[18:26] on how the money that count as is being managed

[18:31] on a daily basis or a monthly basis,

[18:34] you're also focused on the amount of money

[18:37] that's in the bank that could make money

[18:39] for it's just sitting there.

[18:40] and I think that is brilliant and I think it's, you know, that's thank you.

[18:47] You're welcome and thank you for saying that.

[18:49] There's a lot of ways you can keep your money, expand your money, grow your money,

[18:56] make your money work for you better, but I'm going to even know that those exist

[19:02] and she does.

[19:04] Exactly.

[19:05] And it was a super eye opener when we were at that

[19:09] Steven's Bill Town Council meeting, it really...

[19:12] It's just simple things that you would do if he knew it.

[19:17] Exactly.

[19:17] But you just didn't know that that was...

[19:20] We ran into that with the grant writing.

[19:22] It's just certain things you do.

[19:24] If you just do them a little differently, all of a sudden the whole world opens up for you.

[19:29] Well, we're looking forward to wonderful things.

[19:36] Any additional?

[19:36] So then I would entertain a motion to adjourn the motion to adjourn.

[19:45] I'll second the motion.

[19:47] The ladies are rather quiet tonight.

[19:51] All right.

[19:53] adjourned.

[19:54] Okay, I'm going to get a seven-twenty out of this experience.

Untitled meeting

Transcript