Colchester Selectboard Position Letter

Please Note: This letter was received by many residents during the last week of August (2022). We believe the Town's opinion is an important part of any conversation. Their questions and statements have generated a great deal of discussion within the neighborhood. Below is their letter without resident's discussion notes. We ask that you consider the questions, facts and opinions that were brought up by residents.

If you know someone that did not receive a copy of this letter and is interested in the Village Project discussion, please direct them here.

If you live within the Westbury neighborhood and want more information on the discussion over the past year, please join the Face Book page.

August 22, 2022

Gayle Pezzo, President

Westbury Homeowners Association, Inc.

289 Coventry Rd.

Colchester, VT 05446

Re: Municipal village creation and contracted services

Dear Gayle,

I am writing to address the requests of the Westbury Homeowners Association Inc. for the Town to provide municipal services under contract to the Westbury Homeowners Association Inc. (WHOA) and /or support the creation of a Vermont municipal village at Westbury and provide contracted services to the village.

The Selectboard has been engaged in a dialogue with WHOA since 2018 that has included: public meetings with the entire Selectboard; meetings with Selectboard members, Town staff and WHOA paid consultants; and, responses to written correspondence. We have also read information posted on your website, viewed your videos and promotional materials, provided input on how to contract for plowing, engaged in your request for an exception for WHOA under the Town’s policy not to plow private roads, and answered all inquiries regarding municipal services, issues and infrastructure in Vermont.

WHOA’s initial interest in contracted services and later a municipal village began with the Selectboard’s decision to no longer plow 15 of 40 miles of the privately owned roads within the Town of Colchester in the spring of 2018, the reasons for which are explained in the linked policy. The Selectboard provided an 18 month notice to all affected entities: individual private property owners, homeowners associations, non- and for-profit organizations.

We are perplexed by the legal and business management advice leading WHOA to the conclusion that a municipal village is an appropriate tool to address your concerns. There must be reasons that other homeowners associations and mobile home communities, for profit or not, do not seek to become municipal villages.

In our opinion, it is not in the best interest of the Town as a whole, or the residents of WHOA, who are also residents of the Town to create a new municipal entity at Westbury. Attached are some reasons for this decision.

Sincerely,

Pam Loranger, Selectboard Chair and on behalf of the Colchester Selectboard

cc:

Colchester Representatives and Senator Mazza

Champlain Water District General Manager Joe Duncan

Attached:

Selectboard Reasons for Decision

Westbury Homeowners Association, Inc. -- Application for Membership 12/30/2021

Westbury Homeowners Association, Inc. – Maybe it Takes a Village Web Pages 1-7

Prior communications between the Town and Westbury on this topic

Selectboard Reasons for Decision

From the perspective of the Selectboard, a municipal village does not make sense for Westbury or for the Town of Colchester. Reasons include:

1. Westbury Home Owners Association, Incorporated is a single private organization that already controls the entire area of the proposed village in terms of land ownership, which WHOA wishes to overlay with a municipal village.

a. WHOA, a resident owned private not-for-profit corporation has significant control over the property as outlined in your 52-page application to live in the area including a: Letter to Applicants, Association Living, Application Process

(Buying or Selling), Application for Membership, Consumer Authorization and

Release Form, Bylaws/Community Rules/Occupancy Agreement

Acknowledgement Form, Fair Credit Reporting Act, Bylaws, Community Rules, and Occupancy Agreement.

This level of control appears to be far beyond what is granted to a municipality. If

Westbury was a municipal village in addition to a private association, would Westbury be able to continue to enforce rules under its Occupancy Agreement excluding dogs, requiring that only homes of a certain age be placed on the lots, and the authority to expel people as members of the Association and exclude them from being able to occupy lots within Westbury, as noted in section 3.6 of the Westbury Homeowners Association, Inc. Bylaws dated 12/30/2021? If Westbury becomes a municipal village, will it be legal to prohibit renting or leasing homes as noted in section 4.1 of the above-mentioned bylaws? If Westbury becomes a municipal village, will it be able to control sales of homes as noted in section 3.2 of the above-mentioned bylaws?

As an incorporated association that levies ongoing fees to its owners through lot rents, the same tool used by the prior for-profit owners, WHOA already has an efficient mechanism to collect funds for jointly funded services and infrastructure.

WHOA had the opportunity for the land to be owned by a government-controlled entity, the Vermont State Housing Authority, that would have provided government backed management, infrastructure planning and development, and other services as it does to Windemere Mobile Home Park in Colchester and many other manufactured housing entities in the state. Your March 21st email explains the difficult responsibilities of being resident-owned. However, WHOA chose to purchase the park from the prior owners. We presume there were positives in that choice such as independence, resident ownership, stewardship and sense of community. But that choice came with responsibilities for the

residents who are now WHOA vs. a State entity. The responsibility of a government is even greater, so it is difficult to understand how creating a municipal government helps.

WHOA appears to perceive benefits of being a municipal entity. But there are also significant costs or responsibilities of being a municipality. WHOA, in the noted documents, seems to have the viewpoint that a municipal village or fire district is a structural tool, much like different for- and non-profit corporate structures. Some of your information seems to indicate that costs and responsibilities of WHOA can just be pushed back and forth to and from a village as best benefits WHOA from a fiscal perspective. This is not how government works. A village would have to have very defined responsibilities that often take years to change.

Even the simplest municipal village would include at the minimum: a clerk, a treasurer, a lister, and boards that handle abatement requests, assessment and tax appeals, a tax collector; qualified government accountant; government auditor; grant administrator; and a government general manager.

Governments are not tools known primarily for financial effectiveness and efficiency. Governments are tools for participation. The Town of Colchester has 85 elected and appointed board and commission members, almost one for every full-time employee. We have a lot of input on what we should do and how we should do it. We try hard to be efficient and effective within that framework.

Governments often contract with private or non-profit entities to deliver specific services. It isn’t often that governments are created to deliver a small suite of services directly such as is being contemplated by WHOA. This may be one of the reasons that there has not been a creation of a Vermont municipal village in the last 70 years. In fact, many villages have concluded operations.

If WHOA roads became public, you would have to hire engineers to study and evaluate speed limits to make the limits enforceable under law and in traffic court, and speed limits below 25 miles per hour are difficult to approve and enforce as a municipality.

Grant funding for ongoing operations by municipalities are almost non-existent and those that exist are expensive to administer especially on a small scale. The grant from the State

Agency of Transportation is about $1,600 per mile, or about $4,800 per year for WHOA’s 3 miles of road and comes with complex paperwork, reporting and financial auditing requirements that could cost more than $4,8 00 to comply with. We understand from some of your web-based information that WHOA believes the Town would contract with the village to plow for around $4,800, the value of the possible state grant. This is seemingly based on a misunderstanding related to the Town’s budget reduction following our discontinuance of plowing some of the private roads. We reduced the budget by $19,300

after that discontinuance, but that did not represent the cost of plowing 15 of the 44 miles of plowing private roads, merely the external and overtime costs of doing so. We applied the fixed capital and non-overtime labor costs to better maintain the public roads. It is not representative of the total cost to plow and maintain public roads by mile.

The Town of Colchester is not interested in providing services under contract to a village at Westbury or any other village in the Town of Colchester. While Westbury is a special place, there are many associations and special neighborhoods in the Town of Colchester. Under the approach proposed by WHOA, any of these associations could become municipal villages and then ask to contract with the Town and for municipal privileges, such as wholesale water rates from the regional water entity.

Just as it was with private roads, it would be unfair to provide municipal services to a

Westbury village but not villages created by the many other homeowners associations. Given that municipal service delivery often costs more for the above-mentioned reasons, we are not seeking to expand our portfolio of responsibilities under contract. Beyond the issue of efficiency, by taking on contract work, the Town would be taking on liability for its operations, both physical and paperwork operations. It is not in the best interest of the Town to take on liability for a village that would be spread to the taxpayers across the Town in terms of a claim exceeding our coverage or through increased premiums should an incident occur.

If Westbury were to become a village, the Town would oppose Westbury obtaining wholesale water rates from Champlain Water District (CWD). This approach would serve to unwind CWD’s approach of providing wholesale water to vast areas through a distribution system to a town-wide local retail system. If CWD granted Westbury wholesale water rates, it would cause a shift (increase) in distribution costs and water rates to other residents in Colchester and/or other communities. Additionally, if Westbury did become a village and managed to obtain wholesale water rates, what would prevent other associations from becoming villages, obtaining wholesale water rates and further shifting costs to those who were not villages? In the end, we could wind up with a more complicated and costly water system vs. one operated and owned by three entities (CWD, CFD#2 and the Town of Essex).