Tonight, executive director of finance and operations, Mr. Paul Rajois, is going to talk through the what this trust fund is, a little bit of history about it, our current status, and some projections for the purpose of informing the board and the public about this fund and and how some things have changed over the last 6 months or 12 months based on some changes in employee behavior, former employee behavior, and other statutory change.

If we had not been able to transfer $10.8 million or $10.9 million from the OPED fund to the general fund to pay for retirey benefits over that time period, our our current fund balance instead of being the projected actual uh we we're not closed officially yet, but then the estimated closing amount of 17.4 4 million would actually only be about 6.5 million.

We basically were able to put into 100 million or 100 million a 100red-year asset.

I'm just I'm just trying to think around like how prudent we need to be with this fund because looking at it through the the Vantage momentum lens, you know, we withdrew $7 million and then there were cost overruns that necessitated another dispersement of 2.85 and we've got an $85 million bond measure we're putting in front of the community for a bunch of construction this fall.

So you may not be able to predict all the future, but it looks like this was a pretty good prediction that this was a good investment to make back in 2008.

I shared an update to the Minnesota statute 13D.02, specifically related to remote participation for for government bodies or specifically in our case, school boards to board meetings... the legislation passed our legislature passed this change and I'll read through the uh pertinent members or uh pertinent items for members of the public.

So both of these I would summarize as having an openness to this policy, making sure our technology is uh fully accessible and making sure we're fully transparent with members of the community that this is an option should it need to be used.

But we've had um lots of interesting meetings or that that have come up out of necessity where we have emergency meetings or doing other things or we really need to make a decision or do different things. And there's probably going to be things like that. Um, and if we need to get to a quorum or other things, I I think uh we need we should have the flexibility and have a policy like this.

I think a couple a couple factors I have to consider are, you know, um is it, you know, like you said, important ones where it would be for the public's benefit to bring people in remotely. We should absolutely consider it if there's someone that can't be there.

what one thing I think you I heard you say is an unintended consequence might be the community's view of this and what the board thinks about it. And so addressing that in a um in a policy or a statement or something um you know would help. We're always striving to be transparent and uh public trust and has been a goal for the last couple years.