 We're going to jump right in. We got a lot to talk about. We're going to start with a discussion of the capital plan that the administration is bringing forward to the city council and the board of finance tonight. And then after that, we also have a briefing about what we're calling the South End Construction Coordination Plan, which represents a significant breakthrough in how we're trying to go about the building of a vast amount of infrastructure in the South End, including the Champlain Parkway and the Realyard Enterprise projects. So we're going to start with the capital plan. And we have a slide deck here. We'll step forward with I am joined in this discussion by our Chief Administrative Officer, Katherine Shad. Shad, excuse me, our director of the Department of Public Works, Chapin Spencer, who has been a leader with this plan for many years, as has Martha Keenan, who is our capital and special projects director. And we're going to hear from each of them at different points in this presentation. In a lot of ways, this effort that we're talking about today is the continuation, it's really the next big stage in something that began back in March of 2014. I made a commitment in the state of the city that year that we were really, for the first time in modern memory, going to come forward with a comprehensive capital plan that would address all of the different assets the city is responsible for and that we were going to attempt to really elevate our investment and stewardship of a number of assets that had been under-invested in for a long period of time. We then went and over the next couple of years, we did that. We came forward with the first draft of a plan a year later in April and in September of 2016, or really the fall of 2016, the first of the council, and then the voters approved what we called the Sustainable Infrastructure Plan. In total, it was about a $50 million plan, including $27 million of general obligation bonding, which was the largest general obligation bonding in many years for infrastructure. And we are now basically five years into that effort, and a lot has happened. And why don't we go to the next slide and we can get into some of the details of what has happened. So over 14 miles of sidewalks have been rebuilt since 2016, which is about a tripling of how much sidewalk reinvestment we had been doing previously. We have made significant advancements with a variety of areas of bike infrastructure. Our annual investment in our streets, the amount of mileage of new roads that we build every year has basically doubled during the five-year period up until this year when we had encountered some challenges in this year, but we want to get back to that doubling going forward. We have rehabilitated almost the entire bike path. Seven miles of it were done earlier this year. We are now working on the final mile through Oakledge Park, and when that is complete, we will essentially be done with that effort, but for some very targeted special structures that still need to be replaced. Basically, the bridge going into the North Beach Campground is the main thing that will be unfit. I've made a number of investments in our parks, many investments in our parks, including a maintenance facility that really helps us take care of the city's assets in the northern part of the city in particular. We have made many investments in city buildings that were long overdue. We've made long overdue IT investments, including important security features that has kept the city data secured. If we want to move to the next slide, Samantha, we have improved our security systems. We have created a really critical system that we've made major investment in, is in our asset management system. We've also kind of resourced and staffed that effort in a different way, so we have improved software as well as a team, a capital committee team reference there that meets on a regular basis to make sure we are renewing our fleet and making investments in our buildings in a sustainable way and in a way where the highest needs are targeted first. And increasingly, that team has been tasked with making sure that we are electrifying and moving towards, away from fossil fuel, burning technologies as much as possible. And in this five-year period, after an extended period in which we really, our large fleet of vehicles was aging and was in trouble, we have replaced 28% of our vehicles over the last five years. So with that as the context leading up till now, we are proposing that the council take action tonight to send to the voters the next phase, essentially, of our infrastructure effort. And as part of that, to send to the voters a $40 million general obligation bond. This would be a $40 million bond, would be one piece of about a $150 million plan of investment that would be implemented over the next three. And the other sources of the presentation we kind of lay that out. But before doing that, why? I think certainly a question that will be on a lot of voters minds, especially after we've just come through a challenging reappraisal period is, why is now the right time for another general obligation bond? And here are the main reasons as I see them. One, over the last five years, we have started to catch up on really many years of under investment and of deferred maintenance. We knew that we were not going to be done at the end of this five year period. When we passed the initial bond, we projected for folks that there would be a need for more investment in the second five years of that effort. And that is now where we are. We have completed the first five years. We still have a lot of maintenance to catch up on. The I believe from my conversations with people while there are certainly concerns about property taxes, there's also a strong belief that another part of responsible management of the city is to take care of our infrastructure, to take care of these historic assets that have been built over generations and which need investment if they are going to stay strong. And we saw that in our budget work this year when we had surveys about this year's budget, one of the item that got the strongest support was investments in infrastructure. We've also seen that whenever we've gone to the voters in recent years for investment in one element or another of our infrastructure, not only the general obligation funding, but the water bonds that we've gone out for all have gotten very strong support. And we think that support is still there. If we have a significant amount of local funds that we can invest in our infrastructure, that is going to position us well to seek out these other opportunities for federal infrastructure funding, for using ARPA dollars potentially, and for using state climate and infrastructure funding. And in a moment when we go through these other sources of funds that we're going to pursue, you can see we are hopeful that those will be quite significant. Having flexible local dollars will put us in much better position to leverage those other sources of funds. Further, we know that right now interest rates remain very low. They've been very low for years. There is no guarantee that that will continue, especially given all of the uncertainty and the fluidity in the economy right now. We are in unprecedented economic recovery. And there have been signs of inflation in many sectors. It would not be shocking to see that start to happen in the long-term borrowing markets as well. By bonding now, by going to voters in November, we can go out and secure those low interest rates now before they shift. Another important thing that's weighing on us as we make this tough decision about coming forward at this point is that we are already behind in our plans by about a year. We had long talked about with the council and various committees that are very engaged in this that we had planned to go for the next round of infrastructure investment in 2020. The pandemic made it impossible to do that. And as a result, we have really had to patch together our investments for this current year. Fortunately, we have these additional federal dollars that's made it possible to do that. But that was a one-year strategy. If we do not go and bond now this November, there will be an impact on the calendar year 2022 construction season. And we'll lose some of that momentum that we think has been so important over the last five years towards changing the trajectory in our infrastructure investment. And finally, we have major federal infrastructure projects already underway. People know that we are in construction on the Shelburne Road Rotary, a long-awaited project. We are pursuing and spending significant dollars already, and these will dramatically expand when we get these projects into construction, the Champlain Parkway and the Raleigh Art Enterprise Project. If we need the local share of these projects is very small, it ranges from about 2% to 10% of any given federal and state project. But when you're talking projects of this scale, there's still millions of dollars involved. And this bond, a yes vote on this bond will include approximately $3.5 million of investment that will help us leverage more than $60 million in other federal and state funding on these major transportation projects. So with that, I am now gonna hand over the presentation, hand over the Zoom to Chip and Spencer, our Director of Public Works, who has been a real leader in these infrastructure efforts since the beginning, gone all the way back to those announcements and decisions back in 2014, 2015, 2016. I am grateful to have Chip and sustain partnership as we get to this next critical step in this effort. And I'm gonna hand over the Zoom to him to walk through some detail on how we are proposing to invest the $40 million of bond proceeds if the voters do support it in November. So Chip, hand it over to you. Great, thank you very much, Mayor, appreciate it. It is an honor to get to do this work and we've made tremendous progress over the last five years, but there is much more to do. And the general fund is responsible for a broad array of asset types. And you're seeing that here on this slide. This summarizes here the breakout by asset type of the proposed $40 million general obligation bond. As you'll see at the top, the proposed additional money for sidewalks so we continue to triple the sidewalk production as the Mayor talked about. Additional funding for streets and bridges. Bridges were not a major component of the last round, but this year we are proposing to bring forward funds to address existing structures, the Queen City Park Road Bridge, the Rock Point Bridge, the Winooski Burlington Bridge that need attention in addition to enhanced paving. Information and technology, as the Mayor said, we must continue to keep our communications safe and accessible. Bike infrastructure and intersection improvements. There are a number of spot improvements in the city for intersections, such as the misaligned, pearl and prospect street intersections, as well as bike improvements, such as building out the Winooski Avenue corridor that was called for in plan BTV walk bike. We've made good progress in implementing that plan, but there's more work to be done. The Mayor also touched on needing funding for matching the significant amount of state and federal dollars that we've secured, and that is listed here as local match for grants. That in large part can be Champlain Parkway, Rail Yard Enterprise Project, but we also have grants for smaller projects like the Interville Road side path and the Lake Street side path extension. We've talked about bridges as well. The bridges are itemized here as I discussed previously. Project management. This is the resource to really help staff and our consultant team drive and complete successfully this significant enhanced workload. And that funding really helps us resource the efforts and the project management sufficiently. Civic buildings. The city has over 40 buildings across the city that it needs to maintain. We have done some significant work over the first period of sustainable infrastructure plan, but this is a robust effort to do a lot of the deferred maintenance on structures across the city. In addition, parks and parks facilities is represented here with a proposed $3 million reinvestment from the boat house to structures and to ball fields across the city. Fleet is another key area. We replaced several key fire apparatus in the first round of sustainable infrastructure funding. This would help address remaining end-of-life fire apparatus and snow plows and sidewalk tracks. This is part of a sustainable fleet package that I've been really pleased to work on. Each year we've brought forward dozens of replacement vehicles who are at end-of-life and looking at alternative fueled vehicles as part of that as we implement the net zero energy plan. Public safety infrastructure relates to a communication tool that we need for both fire and police to ensure responsive and timely communications. This is a complete overhaul of an outdated communication system. And last but not least, Memorial Auditorium $10 million proposal to really a placeholder to allow us, the city collectively to figure out the best path forward. And I think the mayor is gonna touch on a range of what those options could be. Yeah, great, Jaypen. I think, sure, let's talk for a moment about the situation with Memorial Auditorium. We're in a moment where we know that action is gonna be needed with Memorial in the coming relatively short period of time. For decades, we have seen deferred maintenance build up within Memorial Auditorium. This goes back well before the start of this administration. We felt we had to take action in this administration to actually close the building because we were concerned about safety within it. There was a active redevelopment effort that was working towards a bond vote when the pandemic hit and the pandemic really has set back those efforts. And right now, from my perspective, one of three things can happen with Memorial Auditorium. One, we either need to make significant investments in the building just to stabilize and reopen and keep it from being a vacant building. That probably would cost something approaching maybe even a full $10 million just to essentially stabilize and reopen the building based on past estimates. Alternatively, the council, working with the public could decide that there was not a viable route there and this would give us the funds that would give us the ability if the council and the public did not want to save the building to transition the site. And then finally, there is an active discussion going on right now. And in fact, we're expecting the school district to make a decision on this tonight as to whether the Memorial Gateway Block should be considered as one of the possible sites for a new high school. And we are, if the school district were to move forward with a plan to move, to permanently put the high school in the downtown, at this site, this would give the city the ability to participate in a dual use plan if that goes forward. So essentially this gives us flexibility to act and act relatively quickly as is needed in the coming months and years. Let's keep going with the presentation. This spreadsheet is a summary of the $150 million of total capital projects that the city will be pursuing over the next three years. And basically what you have is along the rows here are the different uses of those funds and the columns each represent a different source. And you can see we will be pursuing and federal, we are expecting to be able to pursue federal infrastructure funding if the bill in Congress goes forward. We are already using federal and state transportation grants for something approaching approximately $60 million in funds on the projects we talked about before. And then there are a number of other columns, sources called out here that will also be part of this total plan. The bond proceeds column, the one basically in the middle where you'll see some investment on each row. This is a piece of each of these rows that would be going to the voters for funding for this sheet. Let's go to the next slide. And I think here I'd like to introduce Catherine Shad and ask Catherine, our CAO, to walk you through why this is a responsible plan in terms of our overall fiscal management, how this fits into the various efforts and policies we have in place to ensure that we do not do too much borrowing and what the affordability impact of this effort will be if it is adopted by voters. What can voters count on? What should they be thinking? The impact on them is going to be as they, if they get a chance to vote on this. So Catherine, over to you. Thank you, Mayor. So in September of 2018, City Council established the debt management policy and that policy establishes both the philosophy and specific guidelines around the use of debt. And that is meant to be used in conjunction with the city charter to help us figure out exactly how much debt we can and should take on. And so as you can see from this slide, the first couple of rows, the first one is the city debt. And this includes the proposed $40 million bond along with everything else that we know now, including debt retiring over time. The second line is the schools projected debt. And then as you see on the second two thirds of the slide, these are important ratios that are part of our debt management policy. The first one is the limits on the city's direct or general obligation debt. And as you can see, they're tied to our Moody's credit rating. We wanna see how that will affect our credit rating because fiscal management has always been an important part of this administration. There are two ways that we and Moody's measure this. The first one that you can see here is our debt or proposed debt as a percentage of the full value of our tax base. And the second one is the debt as a percentage of our budgeted operating revenue. And that excludes transfers. So you can see in the middle column, there's a target. I have highlighted in orange in FY23, 24 and 25. Under the proposed $40 million bond, we would slightly exceed the target. Now, if you can read that tiny print down at the bottom with the asterisk, you can see that under the debt management policy, although 1.75% is the target, a maximum of 2% is allowed if it is approved by the city council. They need to approve reasons for exceeding the target. They need to understand the expectations for the length of time we would exceed the target, the three years listed here, and the plan to bring back within the target, which as you can see, we already have and it's retiring debt. The other thing just worth noting here is the second ratio is what we call overlapping debt or the amount of debt, both the city's general obligation as well as the school district debt. As you can see with this $40 million bond, we are well within all of our targets here, and we understand that they will likely be looking to a vote in March and we are allowing for that, Mr. Mayor. Thanks, Katherine, great job with this. I just wanted to make explicit that what is shown here in terms of the school district's debt is basically showing them, correct me if I have this wrong Katherine, them pulling down all of the debt between 22 and 27 that they currently have voter approval for. So essentially the $70 million bond that voters approved a couple of years ago, I think almost three years ago now, what this also shows in the lower and in the overlapping debt section below the, in the row right below the final blue row is that even at $70 million being pulled down, there's considerable additional capacity beyond that within this policy, if they're for us to talk about and for the public and the council on the school board to consider if as we all expect in that the $70 million is not sufficient if a new high school is needed. So I think it's good news that they're on both of those two ways in which we limit the amount of overlapping debt, the ratios, there's considerable room beyond both the $40 million that we're proposing as well as the existing debt borrowing authority that the school district has. I mean, take it back over here Katherine and talk about taxpayer impact. Great, thank you. As you can see here, we are very mindful of the effect of the reappraisal on property taxes. The new median priced home in Burlington is listed here at just over $379,000. And so we've done those calculations of what would the increase in annual tax payment be for homeowners at that level to pay for all of these improvements that we've been talking about. And so as you can see here, if you average it out divided out by month, it is, as you can see about $7 a month up to maybe $13 a month. And so we think that is well worth the investment for all of the reasons that the mayor talked about now is the right time. And I'll hand it back over to you, Mayor. Great, thank you, thank you, Katherine. And let's now talk a little bit more about just the process from here. And I wanted to invite Martha Keenan now to join us as well. She's really been taking the lead in a lot of the public engagement that's taken place up until now. She's been to a lot of meetings over this year talking to folks about this plan and why don't you walk us through, Martha, the plan to say a little bit about what you've done up until now in terms of public engagement and where we're going from here. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. Yes, I actually started the process of talking with the community in July and I have met with most of the city's commissions, the public works, library, police parks, fire commissions, as well as the TUC, and I had the joy of meeting with the trusted community voices. I've started meeting with each of the NPAs and it's a wonderful thing to be able to talk to the community and to help them understand how important this bonding is to the vibrancy of the city. And this will continue throughout September and October. We are hoping tonight to seek approval from both the Board of Finance and the City Council and that would allow us to put on the ballot in the special election on November 9th this bond. And back to you, Mayor. Great. And I wanna just say a little bit more about how this special election would work if the council does support this administration proposal and as Martha mentioned, this does have the endorsements being sponsored by a couple members of the transportation, the council committee, the TUC committee, the transportation utility, what is a transportation environment and utility committee, I believe, we always call it the TUC. I'm struggling exactly what that acronym stands for, but the couple members, two of the members of that council committee are sponsors on the resolution tonight. If the council supports this plan, this is a pretty quick turnaround. There will be ballots printed up right away and approximately September 25th, the ballots would be mailed out to all voters and they would have until November 9th to return them through the variety of ways we now do, this will be a full, this is basically being done the way we have done the last couple of elections, mail-in balloting as well as a day of election in-person voting as well as drop boxes and the ability to come into city halls. So a full-on election for this item as well as the other proposed special election item, which we had a whole press conference on a couple of weeks ago, revenue bond effort for the Bryant Electric Department. So that's the time table we're on. And with that, I think that is the end of the capital plan presentation. And so now let's shift gears quickly to the South End Construction Coordination Plan. And when we're done with this, we will take questions on both. The proposed South End Construction Coordination Plan is something that is in front of the council for a decision tonight in the sense that they're being asked to vote for the extension of one of the consultant contracts that is working on the Champlain Parkway. And with this approval, there've been many renewals of this contract over the years that this longstanding federally funded project. What is different about this one is that part of this extension of the contract would be to direct the consultants to begin implementing a phased plan for the Champlain Parkway. This project has always been expected to be built in one extended phase in the past, as most federal projects are. However, after months of talking with our federal and state partners, what we are now proposing is a plan, a pragmatic plan for the Champlain Parkway. A pragmatic path to build a wide variety of infrastructure in the South End over the coming years. And to do so in a way that really brings about major renewal of the infrastructure in the South End and modernization of that infrastructure while reducing community impacts. And with that, Chief, and why don't you walk through some of the detail on what people should be expecting in this phased plan if the council supports this? Great, thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. As you can see here, there is a wide range of infrastructure projects planned for the South End over the coming five to seven years. And given the community's input coming through COVID and with a number of intensive capital projects on the horizon, we have heard loud and clear that there was a request from the council and members of the public, local businesses, figure out how we could mitigate impact as we move forward. And as you can see here, we have broken out by year a general approach to the timeline of various projects. I won't go through each line in particular, but the Champlain Parkway project is in a salmon color. And the first proposed construction contract that the mayor alluded to are the middle three lines, which would basically conduct and complete the improvements between Home Avenue and Kilburn Street in the middle portion of the Champlain Parkway project. And be able to coordinate that around the Shelburne Street roundabout as both Shelburne Street and Pine Street are really the two main corridors into and out of the South End. So by making sure they don't step on each other's toes and are coordinated, that reduces impact. In addition, there's a plan that we've been working on a couple of years ago and are now gonna be bringing back is the renewal of Main Street, the Great Streets Main Street project and wanting to make sure that fits in as well with the South End efforts. The Rail Yard Enterprise project as well, which is a project connecting Pine to Battery Street down by the Rail Yard is going to be under preliminary engineering in the coming months. And we are seeking to get to construction here in 2526. The Champlain Parkway second phase, the final construction contract we're proposing basically to follow that first phase in such a way that the connection to the interstate I-189 for the Champlain Parkway would not be connected until the community is ready. And by being able to complete all these other South End infrastructure improvements, including the Rail Yard Enterprise project, we expect to be able to reduce traffic ultimately in the King and Maple neighborhood and minimize overall impact. There are several important objectives as you'll see here for implementing the South End Instruction Coordination Plan. We talked about the minimizing of overall impacts on residents and businesses. It also achieves many of the parkways benefits promptly and there's a follow-up slide where I'll go into detail about what those benefits would be. We talked also about making the interstate connection once the community is ready for that by breaking the Champlain Parkway into two construction phases. The city council and the administration both have to approve each construction contract. And so that really gives the community a large sense of control over when we are ready to embark on each construction phase. Next. So many of the parkway benefits that can be achieved on the short-term with this initial construction contract are listed here, a new grid street between Home Ave and Lakeside Avenue, robust stormwater infrastructure reducing over three tons of sediment from being discharged into Lake Champlain each year. It'll be two miles of shared use path, notably a shared use path along Pine Street, raised intersections at many locations on Pine Street, including a new mid-block crosswalk. Pine Street will get an enhanced makeover with granite curves, new sidewalk on the east side, the shared use path on the west side that we discussed, and new pavement and draining. Also significant undergrounding of utilities and also replacing of water lines and sewer lines. And lastly, some upgrades to the rail crossings at home in Flynn and on the southern part of the waterfront by Maple and King. So we'll be bringing that to the city council tonight as the mayor discussed. And with any questions, feel free to reach out to team DPW. Happy to answer any questions on how we're trying to renew the south end infrastructure in a comprehensive and robust way. Thank you. Well, don't go anywhere, Chapin. There might be questions right now from the members of the media that are with us today. I see a number of you are here. And Samantha, I think we're ready for questions. Okay. First question will be from Cam Smith at WCAX. And you can go ahead, Cam. Good afternoon. First questions for Mayor Weinberger in regard to the BDS resolution. Do you see this as a positive step forward for the city council to weigh in on such a complex issue? Or are you concerned for division that this could so in the community? Thanks, Cam. No, I think the resolution that was proposed is very problematic. And I am encouraged to hear that some of the chief sponsors of this may be rethinking this. Basically this resolution would is intended to weaken and delegitimize a long-standing partner, important partner in the Middle East, the state of Israel. And I'm opposed to it. And I think if the council wants to weigh in on Middle Eastern issues, and certainly I am deeply troubled by the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian relations. And if the council wants to weigh in in some way, I think they should go back to scratch, reject this resolution, and they could think about starting afresh. But I know I'm very much opposed to the current proposal and hope the council will reject it. Thank you. And just one last question. In regard to the ACLU letter from last week, do you intend to take any sort of action as a result of a letter? And have you received any feedback from constituents? Yeah, I mean, the feedback I've heard mostly from constituents is just that the ACLU is just completely out of touch with what is going on here in Burlington and what they describe. I don't think they even accurately describe their own data in some of the narrative there and their sort of general take that we shouldn't worry about public safety right now, that everything is fine, is not consistent with the experience of lots of Burlingtonians. And the action that I do intend to take is to keep working to shore up our public safety infrastructure in a range of ways. We are continuing to work very hard to build new infrastructure. Our community service liaison program is getting some momentum. We will be going out with an RFP to add more partnerships and work on mental health issues in the weeks ahead. Chief Mirad and I are working hard on a retention and recruitment plan. And I do expect that the operational and functional assessment will be complete soon. And once that is done, I expect us to have another debate at the city council discussion. Hopefully something we can get the consensus with about what the future size that the police department should be. So we're gonna keep, I haven't seen anything in that report that would change the direction that I've been working towards and Chief Mirad has been working towards, which is to address the emerging problems that we have right now. Thank you. That was the only request that I received from members of the media. If we can do a last call and if anyone would like to be recognized, you can use the raised hand function right now. Well, we're seeing if anyone responds to that. I will just say this is sort of an advanced briefing for the media presentations that are also gonna be given on both of these topics at the Board of Finance and the city council tonight. So there will be more discussion and debate of these items. But this, we thought we would do this presentation now as well, if there were additional questions in the media this might be a good time to address them. But if there are not further questions, I'm not seeing any more, are you, Samantha? Then we will wrap things up. Thank you all for joining us. I wanna thank Chapin, Catherine and Martha for helping make today's presentation. And we will see many of you tonight at the Board of Finance and City Council. Thank you, everyone.