 Second comment, it's a song by the band, great band called The Band. I will do an original and then maybe another cover after that. And this one will be on the album, which will be out on the 12th, which I told a couple people just a few minutes ago. Available digitally, Spotify, SoundCloud, Bandcamp, Apple Music, iTunes, all that good stuff. There are a couple links in the chat there. But this is the last, the closing song on the record. More short one would be great. We don't have to be muted for the applause. Wow. That was fabulous. Evening everybody and welcome to War 2, 3, 2 and 3 neighborhood planning assembly. I'm Barbara McGrew. I'm going to be moderating tonight. I live in War 3. And I want to begin by thanking Pat Buono again for the wonderful introductory music, getting us in the mood to do a great civic duty here and have our meeting. It sounds like you have a CD coming out, is that right? It's coming out on the 12th, so Saturday. Keep an eye out on Spotify and all your favorite platforms digitally. Congratulations and thank you again. Thanks. Okay, again, welcome. As I said, I'm on the steering committee from War 3. And at this time, I would like the other steering committee members to introduce themselves. I'll start. Hi. I'm sorry. Okay. And Jess, I see you next. Hi, I'm Jess Hyman, live on North Champlain Street. Great. And I see Tony. And I live on St. Paul Street next to the great city, Paul Park. And then Molly. Hi, everybody. I live in Ward 3. I'm Molly. Great. Charlie. Hello, I'm Charlie G. And I live on Rose Street in Burlington. Thank you. Thank you all. Is there anybody that I missed any, any steers who are here that I missed? Going once, going twice. Thank you all. Thank you. The next announcement is our next meeting notification. I believe that's the second Thursday will be January 14. Six 30 with hopefully some music a little before that. Am I correct Tony that it's January 14. I don't have a count. I don't have a camera. I can't tell you. But there's no reason it can't be on that night, right? It would be the second Thursday of January. January 14 recordings of this meeting can be found on YouTube. Or CTV's website. That's my last announcement. Does anybody else have any. Good. The next item on the agenda is public forum. Any items for the public forum. I can sometimes see your physical raised hand, but I only have 16 people on my screen. I see Tony and I see Jess. So why don't we start with Jess and then Tony. Okay. Thank you, Barbara. I'm making an announcement on behalf of hands, which is a local nonprofit helping and nurturing diverse seniors. And hands is offering a hot meal delivery on Christmas day for anyone, 50 years or older. In Chittenden County. And it's a great meal. It's either a ham dinner or lasagna. It's a great meal. So if you have any, if you're 50 and over on Christmas day, call age well. At eight. Six, five, zero, three. Six, zero by December 18th to reserve your meal. And if you'd like to learn more about this initiative or get involved, a volunteer or make a donation for the gift bags that go along with the meals. You can find the link in the description below. You can find the link in the description below. And I'll put all this information in the chat too. Thank you. Thank you, Jess. Tony. Sorry, Barbara. I just, sorry, Tony. I just wanted to say one thing in addition to. That Jess was sort of keeping secret, but we also do gift bags. They go with all of the. With the meals that go out and the gift bags have, they're very basic things. It's not full of chachgos. It's just, you know, it's not full of chachgos. It's not full of basic food and toiletries. So that's added, but we wrapped some of the things. So it seems a little more festive. And it also includes if, you know, they're often, especially these days, they're grandparents raising grandchildren. So they're, they would be included whoever's in the household would get a meal. So. And we're planning on delivering at least 850. And Jess has been a huge part of it. Well, Megan, thank you. Tony. Okay. I want to talk a little bit about the King Maple neighborhood, which is actually a portion of it is part of word three. And the older and our NPA. I think most of you know that there was an environmental justice outreach on the, on the Champlain Parkway regarding the impacts of the Parkway on the King Maple neighborhood. And this was caused by new rules that were adopted federally after the barn was door was closed. Back in 2009. And I just want to just speak for basically what has happened as a whole process in which we begun to learn about environmental justice, low income minorities and low income. In regard to a King Maple, which is a, about 25% of people of black and brown color. It was a surprise number one, that that was perhaps the highest concentration of, of minority folks in the state of Vermont and in our city. And secondly, that they are particularly vulnerable, which we should have figured out ourselves. We know that about one out of three people who live in our old North end and King Maple do not have access to a car. So walking and biking is a necessity and accessing public transit, which is a, we all know is a problem. Well, what sort of happened in, in this. Effort that, that the state started over a year ago. And then we had the comments end in August. 24th. And the reason for that is that there's now a five or six month delay because they have to look at hundreds of basically a thousand pages of comments. By the way, not very friendly. And, and so they've delayed any further action until April. But that has not kept your eager folks like myself and Pine Street coalition. And other groups from beginning to make a new. Initiative. And we're actually forming a coalition of coalitions. And it will include those who are involved in racial justice. It will include a private entity of innovation center, which a lot of you folks know is the big major, a modern facility there on lakeside avenue that's been opposed to the dumping of huge amounts of traffic at their front door from the parkway. They've been fighting this since, since the century began. And that's what we've found. And this is, I think, the important message. What we found is that when you have anything, but always stops. When you go to signals. That, that is a signal is not pedestrian friendly. So, and I sort of take this back to the discussions we had, Megan and, and which with Sean. Regarding at the, at the. The, the, the, the arts and business group in, in the old North end. North street itself has four or five very dangerous intersections. And we never had any idea what to do about it. King Maple is teaching us that what we need to do is to go to always stops at those, those signalized intersections and or small roundabouts. And this, we're going to talk about this more, but I want to, what I'm trying to say is that what we have found is that the King Maple neighborhood is very much translatable to we'll call it the, the center of the old North end on North street. So keep tuned. Okay, thank you, Tony. I will make a motion someday that the first roundabout we get will be named the Reddington roundabout. You mark my words. You worked so hard for this. And the sound has a good ring to it, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So Perry, keep that in mind. Anyway. Other. Public forum. Statements. I see. Is it, I, it says CEDO NPA. So tell me your name. Hey, this is Liam. I'm the new NPA liaison from CEDO. I just wanted to introduce myself. Great. My name in the chat since I'll be here every month with you. So I just wanted to say hi and you can see my face. Do you have the job that Pat used to have? I don't have her full position. I just took over part of it. So I'm, I took over the part where she was coordinating with the NPAs. So I'm the person that you would talk to if you have any questions about, you know, meeting minutes or things like that or tech things and sort of facilitating that end or just at the beginning of it. And then I give it to y'all. Super. Thanks for introducing yourself. Yeah, I'll turn off my camera, but I'm here if you need me. Okay. Great. I can only see 16 people at a time. So are there other people raising their hands for public forum? Do you see anybody, Jessica? I don't see anyone. I did want to ask the group a question. But I wanted to make sure that there was no. No, no hands up. So there are plans afoot to have an all award. NPA mayoral forum. And I'm, I would love to hear from all folks here, whether that's something that you would like to see that traditionally, each NPA hosts its own mayoral forum and debate. And if there is an all ward mayoral forum, we would, the ward two, three NPA would also do something on its own as well. Probably with some neighborhood specific questions. But maybe if folks could either put in, could put in the chat. Or raise a thumbs up. Thumbs down. If you, if you would also like to have a, a broader all ward mayoral forum. Great. I see, I see a thumb or two. A couple of thumbs. Great. Thank you. And there'll be more information coming and more opportunities to submit questions as well. Okay. Thank you. Any more public forum comments. You see any, I see the first 16 and see nobody any, I don't see any mechanical hands raised. Participants. Nope. Okay. Going. Going gone. Okay. First. Item on our, on our agenda is that. Uh, We'll have Adam Haji who are I saw and Carol Livingston are going to give us an update on how the new American voting initiative when, since we gave them some money to do that. So we're, we're kind of curious about. What happened. Thank you, Barbara. Carol or hadn't. briefly because we only have a few minutes and don't want to monopolize your busy agenda. We set up two evenings in October where we had three different breakout sessions with three different language groups and a translator in each of those sessions. Along with the translator was an election expert, someone who was either an inspector of elections or was on the board of registration for voters. And for example, Ariana covered both nights for us, which was great. So we had a translator, an election person, and then a tech person who sort of managed the coming and going of folks. The six language groups were My My, Arabic, Swahili, Nepali, Vietnamese, and French. And what we found is we had probably about 25 people totaled between the two evenings who attended the sessions. No Vietnamese folks, no French speaking. Primarily the other four, My My, Arabic, Swahili, and Nepali is where most people who came to the sessions, that's what they attended. We had also coordinated this with Sarah Sinot of the family room, as well as CEDO. CEDO was instrumental, Morgan Dowdy as well as Pet, as well as the inspection, the electors, inspection electors, etc. And we're really key in helping us do this. The family room ran some tech workshops and trainings for folks so that they could become more familiar with Zoom. So some folks had some familiarity. They also had young people in their household, which as we all know is pretty key to navigating technology when we're not we're Luddites. So that was really important as well. So Adna is going to fill you in on sort of what we found and what we learned from that experience. Yep. Thank you, Kara. And thank you again for bringing us into this space. My name is Adna Hajji. I represent award eight on the school board. And so a lot of it, Carol just explained, I'm just going to talk more on what we learned and then some steps moving forward. So as we discussed, we have six languages. And those who showed up for those breakout rooms, they had many important questions to ask. And I feel like, you know, elections is a complicated process to navigate. And that language access was so critical in providing those conversations and questions that they had. And one thing that we know is that more people have questions about elections and primarily on the candidates. So that's one of the things that we're hoping to focus on moving forward, how we can help new Americans engage with candidates and help them to like engage in conversation to find out more about what the candidates stand for and the reasons why they're voting for them, you know, as well as other measurements on the ballot that's coming up for March 3rd is going to be like new information. Even I don't myself need to research more. So we're hoping to, in terms of next steps, we're going to be connecting with CEDAW again and the family room and discuss if they have any other programs or events in mind that that is aimed to making the voting process more accessible for new American communities. So that's where we are right now. And the translators that we used are from AALB. They have been really critical in this process and overall language accessibility, as well as getting young folks involved, husband to core aspects of this work. So again, thank you for your contribution and we look forward to where the conversation goes. Thank you. Well, thank you all so much. Right. Any questions quickly that people have? I have a quick one. Did anybody show up whose language wasn't covered? No, but they knew ahead with the with the sixth word. Though Sarah did bring up that she knew there are many non-new Americans who also could have, you know, wanted more information about the election process and the candidates. So, you know, we have a broad group of people who really could use more of this information. So we need to figure out ways to help all of our neighbors with this information. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Wadden. Thank you, Carol. Thank you all very, very much. Thank you. Great project. How's the question? Oh, okay. You have a quick question. I might have missed it, but what was the rough turnout numbers? Like how many people showed up for this? About 25 over the two nights in the six different groups. Cool. Right on. Yeah. Great. Thank you. The next item on the agenda is the Old North End Mobility Audit for 10 minutes by Kelly Duggan from the Old Spokes Home. I didn't see if Kelly was on the call. Oh, good. Hi. Thanks. Hi, everyone. My name is Kelly. I'm a marketing and program manager at Old Spokes Home. And Laura, our executive director is on the call as well. So we wanted to talk a little bit about some work we'll be doing in the Old North End. We have funding for this Transportation Equity Coalition. We're trying to do to make transportation a little more equitable in Burlington. Like Tony was saying, a lot of our neighbors in the Old North End don't have access to cars. So we're running a mobility audit to see how people are really getting around. And I think Laura, if you want to talk a little bit about the Equity Coalition, and then after I'll talk about the survey. Yeah. Thanks, Kelly. Yeah. And thanks for giving us your time. So Old Spokes Home, we received grant funding earlier this year to put together a Transportation Equity Coalition with this. And we've started that process by recruiting some advisors who represent multiple communities who are struggling with our existing transportation system. So our community reps, we call them, and they represent multiple ethnic groups, and ages, and sexual orientation, and physical abilities, and various lengths of time that people have lived in Burlington and in the U.S. So those representatives, community representatives, are helping us identify kind of the priorities for such a coalition and who should be engaged in such a coalition. And really, they have identified as a goal, one of the primary goals for Transportation Equity Coalition is really just giving people a voice, right? There are a lot of people who are not at the table when decisions are being made about a lot of different things in the city, but transportation being one of them. And so we're trying to give people a mechanism for communicating their their challenges with transportation, but also their priorities. And then the other kind of major emphasis of the of the coalition is kind of, you know, our community reps are feeling that are saying that transportation equity, an equitable transportation system would be, would really be a system that has a diversity of transportation options. They feel that a transportation system that would be most equitable would be one with, you know, where there are a lot of different options for people to get from A to B, and that would best serve the most people and the most diverse people. So part of the work of this group, these community reps and of, you know, kind of working, giving with the aim of giving people a voice is one of our first projects we're doing with them. And with Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission is this mobility audit. And we chose the Old North End as kind of the pilot location to do such an audit. This is a new concept for CCRPC. And actually, we didn't find a ton of examples of such audits around the country. But so we're just piloting it in the Old North End. And I'll let Kelly talk more about the audit. Yeah, thanks, Laura. So we've been working with the CCRCP and also the Center for Rural Studies at UVM to construct this survey. We're going to run in the Old North End. And we also got our community representatives to inform a lot of it to make it a little more accessible. So right now, we're working with AALV to have six different language interpreters reach out to their communities to run the audit by phone. And we're also having our reps do some outreach in their communities. And once we feel like we've kind of covered those areas, we're going to really, really sit more publicly. So stay tuned. I think in January, we'll plan to launch it on like FunPort Forum and on social media. And then I think we're supposed to have the whole report done in June, right? Yeah, yeah. And so the audit is two parts. This survey where we're really like Kelly said, making an effort to make sure that we hear from, again, people that we don't always hear from typically. And then also it's also the second part of it is a mapping of the Old North End. So the transportation infrastructure and services in the Old North End and CCRPC is doing that piece. Okay, thank you. What are your questions? Are there any? Jessica, can you see any? My 16 boxes are quiet. Okay. No, I'm not seeing any hands up. Thank you. Then thank you very much for the presentation. Next, we have a presentation on Just Cause Evictions, the charter change regarding Just Cause Evictions. And I have Tom Proctor for my democracy down. There'll be a presentation time for your questions. And then he's going to make a request. I have been remiss in not asking one of the steers to volunteer to take notes because there might be some action attached to this particular item. So will somebody? Oh, okay, I didn't know that. Thank you, Molly. Is Tom Proctor here? Or some reasonable substitution? Yes, no. Barbara, I'm not seeing Tom. Is anybody here from rights and democracy to talk to this? Well, then I'm going to move on and we will come back to this item. Hopefully he or somebody from rights and democracy will come later. Oh, thanks, Perry. Perry says she's calling Tom. Then, Kurt, I know you're here. I saw you virtually walk in. So Kurt McCormick is our state representative when our state reps and he's doing a presentation on the transportation climate modern, reducing carbon emissions, the 2021 transportation climate modernization bill. Tony, you're going to coordinate with him the presentation? Great. Kurt, you're on. Okay, thank you. You're running early. Well, we skipped a big fat item, so we'll see. We might not always, but you do have some time for this. Yeah, I can take 45 minutes if you'd like. Don't do that. I'm serious. Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for having me on. I tried to do this last month and I wasn't able to get on the site, but today I am. Okay, so as people may remember, I'm the chair of the Transportation Committee in the House and we've been doing some good things, but not enough of them. And frankly, what we've been doing in terms of climate, I would say are just a little better than token measures. In other words, we're spending some money, but not enough. And we're not moving enough money from other things to it, to climate. So a group of us on the committee got together and we've worked up this 13 point plan. It's probably going to be more like 20 points by the time we get to January, but right now it's 13. And I'm going to briefly tell you about them and they're going to be introduced as a separate piece of legislation and that will probably be rolled into the transportation program bill, what we call the T-bill. So I'll just quickly go over them and look forward to your questions. The first is EV incentives. Again, we have an EV incentive, electric vehicle incentive program now, but there's just not enough money in it. And at this rate, it will take about 300 years to have electric vehicles take over the market in Vermont. And we want to see that happen much sooner. I have this dream that Vermont will be a state that will be known for having that at least half of the cars are EVs. And we want that as soon as possible, not in the future. Another dream I have, I'll mention the dreams first and I'll get into the list. The second dream is that we're a state that is known around the country and around the world for being bicycle friendly on every road and street. So you don't have to wonder if you're coming here and you're bringing your bicycle. You don't have to wonder will I be safe? You won't be safe if you bring your bike now, but you will be. And that's the image, that's the reputation we would like to be known for that and EVs and EV buses. Okay, so the actual proposals are to have the EV program shift more to lower income people, which probably means we have to put a larger subsidy per vehicle in the larger incentive per vehicle, but it's worth it. And that's the way to do this. Low income people actually benefit more than higher income people if they have a car and they have and they and they get an EV. They will actually save more money. So that's one. Two is we need more chargers. We have a good program which we're almost finished with level free charges. Those are the very fast charges. They charge a car in 30 or 40 or 50 minutes. The actually, I think the preferable charges are the level two. That's that charges a car in about six or seven hours. That's the kind that people have at their homes. Level one is just a regular plug in and and that takes many, many hours longer than overnight to get to get a charge. And the level two actually are the most energy efficient, it turns out. A little less wasted heat with those. So we want to get those into downtowns and we want to require all employers that employ 50 or more people to have EV chargers, level two chargers at their place of employment. And then we will take care of downtowns and park and rides and other places where they where they make sense. We don't have enough of those now. Transit buses and school buses, we want to require or mandate that they stop purchasing diesel buses. A diesel bus lasts about 12 years, typically. And that's a long time to be investing in something today that's going to last 12 years. We need to be out of diesel in 12 years. So we want to require that the bus agencies and school districts stop purchasing diesel or any other fossil fuel vehicles. They should be purchasing EVs. Or utilities say they can handle this extra load and the EVs as well, EV cars. Okay, TDM, Transportation Demand Management. This is what's going on right now at UVM and UVM Medical Center. And the requirement is of the employers, not employees, but we want employers to incentivize people to take transit to work, carpool to work, take an EV to work, anything but the solo car, the gas car. And this can be accomplished to a fairly high degree with good incentives. And incentives can include disincentives, like stop giving out free parking. That particular thing would not be required of an employer. But that's a good thing to do. And UVM does that the Medical Center doesn't say. So they have a lot of choices about how to do it, but they need to incentivize non solo car commutes. And again, the same threshold, 50 or more employers. For 50 or more employees, those employers have to do this. Fair Free Transit, as we know, Fair Free Transit increases ridership substantially, especially in urban areas, especially true here in Burlington. And we are fair free statewide now. We are using the COVID money, some of the COVID money to do that. We want to make it permanent. We should never have fares again, except possibly on the commuter buses. But all buses should be fair free. Micro Transit, that's an interesting new way to do transit. It's not fixed routes and they're not terribly large vehicles. The city of Montpelier has a pilot project that we have given the money for where they're going to be trying it out. It's really on demand transit. And again, it's not a fixed route. It's where a bus goes out and the computer puts rides together and it picks up people and takes them to the common places they may be going or places that are along the same route or close to the same route. That's actually a very exciting thing, which I think is going to be something to watch here in Vermont. I mentioned the walking and bicycling. This can be accomplished. It's not that costly. And it's amazing to me that we haven't done this yet. I was a bicycle pedestrian coordinator back in 1996 and 1997. My cubicle was right next to Tony Reddington's. He was the planner then. And it's amazing how we have not come very far since then. So if you just think of some of the routes coming into Burlington, how atrocious they are, how very unsafe they are, Route 15 coming down from Essex Junction, Williston Road, Shelburne Road and Shelburne Street, they're shameful. It's unbelievable that they're still in that condition. They're that unsafe to put a bicycle on. And therefore, people don't ride bicycles. I can't tell you how many people have told me they would love to ride a bicycle to work, but they're not going to because it's too unsafe. And I don't blame them. Okay. So those are the high points. Oh, and sorry, Tony, roundabouts. Do you remember anything about more roundabouts? Roundabouts save a lot of energy and a lot of lives. There's as far less, it's 25% less idle idling, waiting for a red light when no one's coming. This does not happen with roundabouts. Roundabouts in a traffic slight, you go through. When the traffic's heavy, you go through more efficiently and faster. And of course, they're so much safer because your accidents are not T bones, they are side swipes. And that inherently is so much safer. Okay. So that's it. I'm really excited about this. I hope people are also, it's going to be a lot of work, but I think we can do it. And as far as the cost of it, I'm not going to fight with people about exactly how we pay for it. But as far as I'm concerned, we either raise new revenues for these things, or we move revenues that are now going to other things. It's one for the other. Thank you. Thank you. Questions for Kurt? I have to go back to, I have to go back to Tony, if you could take this off the screen so I could see the people. Thank you. That's good. Thank you. Questions for Kurt? I see Laura and then Tony. Thanks. Thanks, Kurt. That's exciting. So all this is going to be in the T-BILL, is that what you said? Well, I'm going to introduce it separately. The T-BILL actually is proposed by the administration, by the agency of transportation, and then we amend it. We do things to it. And it's in that process that we will move this legislation into it. That's cool. And the microtransit, would that be fair for you as well? Oh, good question. I don't know. I suppose it could be, I suppose it should be. What does Perry Freeman think? She was on, yes. Okay. Well, I'm going to recognize Perry in a minute after Tony goes so she can tell you. Okay. Mine is more of a comment that I worked for the state of Vermont for 15 years in transportation policy. And during those 15 years, I never drove to work. I either walked, including up the hill to national life, used the, in the wintertime, you could use the shuttle, or walked when I worked downtown. So I'm really proud of that record. And there's no reason any state employee, or any employee for that matter, shouldn't be using non-solo driving to go to their workplace. It's a little difficult today when you're working from home and you have to travel to support clients. And that's an example of one of my daughter-in-law. She's working for the area agency on the aging in central Vermont. So she will, she's working from home, but then she needs to buy an electric car. So I see that I think not only is there tremendous opportunity in terms of demand management, but also in terms of the use of electric power vehicles. So it's more a comment in support than any question. Thank you, Tony. I think I saw your hand, Perry. Yes. Thank you. Yeah, it looks really good. I kind of missed the nine through the end there because I was getting in touch with Tom, but I don't know if this is a good time to ask the sir if this would go into a bill like this. But when I saw the increased incentives for EV, it does, of course, make me think about starting to limit or prohibit the sales of combustion vehicles. And I don't know if that would go into this bill or just, I was just curious, Kurt, what your thoughts were about that. Obviously, it's it's a bit of like the other side of it. But I don't know how you feel about that as in terms of an effective tool for sort of transitioning over all of our transit to sustainable models. But I was curious to hear your thoughts. Well, I would certainly agree with that. I know California, I think actually has it already, but it's way out there. I was disappointed in the year that it actually starts the ban on fossil fuel powered cars. I hesitate to say what it is, but I'm not remembering exactly, but I think it's I think it's at least 15 years from now. And again, remember that that will only start it. Obviously, we have started some EV penetration into the market, but precious little, including in California. So I think we're still not getting it that the timeline, the timelines are just too slow. So I do fear that that's one period of that would be very controversial, you know, the idea of a ban. And it would, I would only support it if it was going to be pretty soon, you know, phased in soon, not not starting in 15 years. Yeah, the reason why I ask is because I kind of I went to this talk by an a while ago by an Icelandic researcher and scientist who did was part of a bunch of studies that they ran on transit and the impact, you know, on emissions and all this sort of stuff. And I, I'd have to go back and look at notes. This was like over a year ago or this might have been two years ago, but I just remember that it was kind of even if they like banned the sale within like 10 years or five years or something, I can't remember exactly a deadline, but it still was it barely like kind of it wasn't really enough or it didn't really do that much. And that was very disturbing to me and made me think like we just are actually so much farther behind than we need to be. And so I just am kind of thinking about that. And I know it's, like you're saying it's more controversial, it's more, you know, people see it as much more extreme, but it is just something that I that I think about and something that's stuck in my head from that talk that I went to. Yeah, I agree with you. I haven't heard of a timeline that is not too slow. That doesn't take too long. So I'm hopeful that we can incentivize our way to EVs taking over the market. And obviously we're just Vermont, but I think most of what we do on the environment in Vermont has more to do with our leadership than it does with the environment in Vermont. And that that's what we can do. And we, we can do that as difficult as it is. It's easier here. We're just more nimble and because of our size. So, so I, so I think I agree with you. Okay. Are there other questions for Kurt? I don't see any. Jessica, do you see any? I think Laura raised her hand again. Okay, Laura, I'm sorry. No, yes. No, sorry, I was waving to someone. Okay. Where can I find that presentation? Is it, is that just on the NPA website now, or did you? I think it is. Tony, yeah, can people download it? Okay. And I met with Kurt earlier this year because he's, maybe people don't know this, but he has been the legislative representative on the university's committee to oversee their COVID response. And I think we did pretty well. So I really thank you for your vigilance on that. Thank you. Yes, that document is the base document is online at the NPA. It's attached to the the agenda tonight's agenda online. It's easy to access and it's in a PDF form. Thank you, Tony. Okay, I believe that Tom Proctor is now here. He's coming from rights and democracy to talk about the charter change for just cause evictions. And he's going to make a presentation. There will be some time for questions and answers. And I believe he's going to have a request. I just want to say, if I may, thank you to everybody. I've not a commission for a while, but I'm back in commission. And great to see everybody. Thank you, Kurt. Well, good evening, everybody. Huge apologies for being tardy. Kurt, thank you so much for stepping up your presentation and filling in while Perry got hold of me. I really do apologize for being late here. Thank you all for being here tonight. I'm really looking forward to talking a little bit about just cause eviction. I know it's been a hot topic in Burlington these past few weeks. A few people have been keeping their eyes very close on it, closely on it. And really what I'm here is just to try and answer a few questions that anyone has. But I have got short presentation first. I'm going to try room for it pretty quickly. There's probably a few too many slides, if I'm honest, I need to do some editing down. So I'm going to try to go quickly. But please, if you have any questions, just write them down, think about them, or put them in the chat and I will address them all at the end. So I'm going to share my screen. And there we go. And can we all see the screen? Yep. Okay. So first things first, the where we're at at the moment with just cause eviction is it was originally proposed and sent to Charter Change I believe in April. Sorry, CDNR in April. It got discussed at CDNR and passed out at CDNR by Brian here, as well as Lariah and Sarah Carpenter using this language that you see on the screen. It then went through to Charter Change where Perry, Jane and Joan Shannon discussed it further and it passed out of Charter Change on a two to one vote with no amendments and then went back to the city council. So this is the Charter Change as it's written at the moment as it's gone to council, which should also be voted on on Monday night. Now this isn't going to be the totality of it. Since then we've kind of gone back and forth from language and there will be an amendments added to this language. But this is a language as written at the moment and I'll get through to the amendments probably towards the end. But broad brush at the moment, what is a just cause eviction? So just cause eviction is law designed to protect tenants from being evicted for no cause. So Vermont is currently in no cause state, which means you can get evicted for, for no reason whatsoever. I believe the landlords can give you 90 days notice with a written eviction. I think it's 120 days notice for the, sorry, the written lease 120 days notice with a non written lease might need to get Brian to fact check me on that one just in case. And so no, a no cause eviction also counts as a tenant not being allowed to renew a lease. So being told at the end of their lease agreement that they are not allowed to renew and have to renew a house. So a just cause eviction or just cause eviction law would ensure landlords can only evict for a justification. So at the moment what we're looking at is just cause eviction would include a non payment of rent. So you can't, can't afford your rent over a few months. That would be a cause for eviction breach of lease. So if you've done something that's contrary to what you agreed on when first moving in or breaking state law or city ordinances like disturbing the peace. There is also language right now on the amendments that may also include a tenant refusing a new lease that has reasonable changes. But that's not that part is not set in stone at this point. So what is a no cause eviction? So our site, so as I said before this can just be for no cause whatsoever. You can get a free door and the landlord can be like please get out the house and it's going to be, you get 90 days to then do that. Or it's a non-renewal of the lease. Exact figures on how many people per year are affected by this run clear. We do know the no cause eviction counts for about 10% of evictions that do reach the courts. But this isn't really painting an accurate picture. The vast majority of the time when presented with an end of lease eviction, end of lease eviction tenants will not contest it in order to have avoid having eviction on the records or leaving a plummage on there. And that will stop them from getting more from being able to rent again especially in such a tight market such as Burlington. Often tenants aren't even aware of this law. And if a landlord says, you know, please leave at the end of the lease, I'll just do so. Tenants often don't have the resources or the knowledge to fight an eviction case. And this puts a lot of the power in the hands of the landlords. So let's go over a few arguments for just cause. So as I said at the moment the vacancy rate hovers around 1.5% is very low. If you can compare some of the rest of them on compared to the rest of the nation. The market is also driven by university accommodation costs every time there is go up the rents for everyone in town follow suit. And this is combined with a lack of housing and affordable housing stock. And to compound all this, unlike most cities, Vermont or sorry, Burlington has one day of the year where a vast majority of people end up moving house. And that's usually July 1. So that also contributes to the available housing stock. So no cause also allows landlords to discriminate on race, gender, sexuality, political affiliation, economic status and disability. So it has been known and we've gathered stories where landlords have evicted after finding out the sexual preference of tenants once or if a tenant has come home with a partner from a different race or has friends from a different race, they've been known to evict tenants who have got pregnant, have become unemployed and eligible for such an eight vouchers. And some landlords have even evicted after tenants have become fallen ill, become disabled, did hear of one tenant at one landlord who was threatening eviction at one point to someone who got a not seeing eye dog, but you know, like an emotional support dog. So it does happen. So another thing that landlords use no cause for is it could be able to prevent tenants from reporting back housing practices or landlord harassment. So if we have a problem with code enforcement in Burlington, often landlords, if they get too many complaints from their tenants will just refuse to re-sign a lease. The tenant will leave and the problems will continue year after year with code enforcement never getting involved. So another way landlords will will overtly threaten eviction and people won't go to code enforcement as well. This can also then also lead to the harassment because as I said, landlords hold a substantial power over their tenants and especially threatening eviction means that some do use that as a powerful tool to basically harass their own tenants. Really difficult to prove that in a court of law as well. And these things often don't ever even make it that far. So on a practical side, no court, just cause eviction would slow down, rapidly increases through slower tenant turnover if you got the option to be able to renew each year. It means that the landlords would find it more difficult to have people move on and then raise up the rent prices and that will slow down gentrification and allow people to really put down roots in their communities. So with people being able to stay where they would like to stay, this helped population growth in Burlington as renters will have time to put down roots. A lot of people from EVM for instance would like to stay in Burlington after they graduate, but just can't seem to afford it because of the housing market we've got. With that, it will also increase community and civic engagement, which I know you know a lot about in wards two and three. Fantastic war for that for civic engagement. And it also helps young people to get on the property ladder. If we're really talking brass taxes also means more tax money. And another argument is that it does help good landlords because a lot of small landlords and a lot of good housing groups like Champlain Housing Trust already use kind of a version of just cause of itching. And so this would create a level playing field for everyone. There is arguments against no cause of itching. I don't want to paint this as just a one sided thing. No cause does allow landlords to get rid of problematic tenants whose behavior doesn't quite reach the level of a breach of lease. So if maybe they're playing loud music and the landlord can't prove it, maybe they've smoked to cigarette or rejoin or something like that inside. And again, the landlord can't quite prove it. It doesn't quite breach lease. And often landlords use no cause to be able to get rid of tenants like this. It allows landlords to terminate at least at the end of the rental period in order to renovate their units. There will be a cause probably in the amendments that will allow landlords to evict if they need to do substantial repairs. But if they want to do small repairs, often landlords use that termination of lease to be able to kind of update the properties. Would I give the other argument against them doing this though? It does increase gentrification in the area and rights rent prices. No cause allows landlords to evict tenants at will without needing evidence of reason. And there is an argument here that landlords own property and it's kind of up to them to do what they want with their property. And therefore they should be allowed to evict their tenants at will because it is their house or their unit and they've got that right to do what they like with it. No cause advocates argue that just cause is rent control. And I really want to clear the air on this one now. So one loophole you could use as a landlord to evict a tenant is to raise a rent to an unreasonable amount. Say your rent this month is $1,000. Next month your landlord raises it to $3,000. Of course, you can't afford that. You have to move out. And so there is a cause in the just cause of itch and ordinance charge exchange language that says that landlords can only raise their rents a reasonable market-based amount. But there is the argument there that that is there for rent control. I would like to push back and say it's not rent control, it does allow landlords to raise their rents. But obviously it means they can't raise an unreasonable amount. So I see why that is argued. That is a typo, but it's meant to say possible exemptions. So these are the sort of things that we've been kind of finding that middle ground on in order to make sure that we got a robust just cause of itch and charge of change language, but at the same time it alleviates some of the fears of the smaller landlords in Burlington. And I do hear those worries and I would like to get those people on our side to bonus because they are part of our community as well. So there is an exemptions for owner-occupied buildings. So that single unit that your landlord lives in the unit with you, duplexes and triplexes as well. So you would be allowed to evict at the end of the lease if you were a landlord that owned a duplex or a triplex known and lived in one of those units. Evictions for substantial repairs or renovations. Substantial is an actual legal term when it comes to home ownership. Substantial is equates to 50% of the unit price. So if your house is worth $300,000, a substantial renovation or repair would be $150,000 worth of repairs. There is an amendment for properties being withdrawn from the market. This would require the property to be taken out of the rental pool, which means if a landlord sold to one of the landlords, they wouldn't be able to evict to the attendant to a current living there. But if the landlord was selling to a private owner who wasn't planning to rent out the unit, then they would be allowed to evict. Properties in which a family member is moving in. So if your mother or sister or son or grandparent gets sick or something like that, they can't look after themselves and need to closer, they could then move in. We have got a clause with all of these. If just cause does happen under these exemptions, we have got a clause that says the compensation and advance notice for evictions would be required. This is because the vacancy rates are so low that if you are given only 90 days to try and find a new apartment, a new unit is shockingly hard. Because it's just not many things to choose from, you can end up in a really, really bad place. So you can end up somewhere prohibitively expensive that you can't afford. And so we would require an extended notice for any of these evictions under these exemptions. Moving is also really expensive. Up until last year, I have moved every single year since I was 18. It costs money. Every single year, I'm having to get a U-Haul. Every single year, I'm having to get my friends to come help me out or take a day off work or maybe even multiple days off work. And I'm a single guy. If I was a family, it would be even harder than that. So we would also require compensation for those who are evicted. These are exemptions that have not been solidified yet. They have not fully been agreed on by both Democrats and progressives. But this is the sort of thing that we've been looking at in order to make sure everyone's happy and make sure that we've got reasonable, a reasonable charter change that we'll be going on to the ballot. That is pretty much just cause in a nutshell. I realize I've just done a ton of information on everyone, but I would love to hear any questions that anyone may have. I could stop sharing screen please so I can see the people. Yes, thank you. What are your questions, Tony? A quick question, a great presentation. What about a landlord that wants to shift his unit to Airbnb? Is that a change in use? Is that going to allow an eviction? That's a really great question, Tony. So as far as I know, there's still kind of Airbnb's and regulation around Airbnb's is still a bit of state flux in Burlington. I would say that there is nothing in this charter change language that would prohibit an ordinance that would surround Airbnb's and I would expect an ordinance to be created about Airbnb's once this is passed as a charter change by the city, passed by the state, and then come back to Burlington. The four exemptions that are currently in there are baited in there, kind of already baited in there. We have to create ordinances around those four specific exemptions. However, that doesn't limit us from other exemptions that might be made for things like Airbnb's or to regulate things like Airbnb's more. Does that make sense? I guess the answer is yes, maybe. Yes, maybe. It's not in the current language, but it's not to say that we couldn't create ordinances around it. Okay. Thanks. I have a question. What about condo conversions? In other words, things that buildings, let's say that are rental now and the owner wants to convert to condos. Will there be something like the right of first refusal for the tenants or schemes where they could rent to own or anything like that? And it looks like Brian maybe has an answer to this. I'll let Brian answer this one. He's far better than I in this kind of stuff. Yeah, that's a policy that's on the books, Barbara, from the 1980s to discourage the conversion of apartments to condominiums. So it's allowable, but it's a very long notice period. If you're elderly or qualified as disabled, you get a four-year notice before you have to take your unit. So it was part of our initiative to save rental housing from being converted to condominiums, and we succeeded in that. So thank you. That's great. Patrick has a question, and then there's also a question in the chat from Julia. Okay, thanks. Patrick, and then I'll read the other question. Much of this is really interesting. There's a few misleading statements you made, though. Code enforcement, as a landlord, code enforcement shows up to my buildings. If I'm a good landlord once every three years, regardless, so deadbeat landlords who don't fix their places get caught all the time. It's mandatory that code enforcement shows up, and it behooves me to keep my property in good shape because then they don't show up every year. So that's a very misleading statement. And much of this I support, and it doesn't go far enough for me. It's still a little antiquated. It doesn't really support home ownership beyond what Burlington Community Land Trust or Champlain Land Trust provides. We just talked about divesting in oil and fossil fuels, yet we're not reinvesting that same money in our communities, sort of a thing. How come there isn't a ban the box type of provision where, okay, great, you got evicted. There was a reasonable reason. What about being evicted in, you know, this is going to be a huge fight, and I'm really afraid that there's a lot of money that's going to be put in to this. So I'm already thinking of ways to soften and accommodate, to make me as a landlord. I'm really in sport of it, but I know a lot of landlords that aren't. I would like to say, hey, ban the box. You know, evicted for what? You know, reasonable, unreasonable. And then what about a citywide lease? I use a state of Vermont required lease because it gives, it's really simple. It gives provisions for both the tenants and me easily understand. And it saves us all a lot of legal wrangling. I can get a lawyer and come up with a lease to get around most of this stuff. And I'm not wealthy and have a million properties. And if I had lawyer on staff, this would be really easy to work around. And it would cost a lot of people a lot of money legally. The other problem I find is I'm not finding after reading the original data provided, I didn't see any actual comparable markets to Burlington and how the effect on those comparable markets, New Jersey and Quebec and places in Europe, none of those were really comparable markets. I want to see like to like just so I have ammunition to take what, again, like I said, this seems antiquated. I would like to bring it to a more progressive, more futuristic stance, if you will. I have a lot of questions, but I don't want to capitalize. And I'm sure Brian, who's been doing this and working hard on it has a lot of useful information, but I'll stop there. Thanks. Okay, thanks, Patrick. There is also a question in the chat box that you might want to try to address, which is under the exemption for owner-occupied duplexes, what constitutes advanced notice? Sorry, let's see. I'll take the quick question, Julie, and then I'll try and answer a few of yours, Patrick and Brian. I might lean on you for a couple of those answers as well, if you'll mind. In terms of what would be considered advance notice, it's not written out specifically in the chart change. It says that we're going to create an ordinance or actually says at the moment, we may or shall, we're not actually solidified on the words there, to basically provide compensation and give advance notice. There's no actual dollar amount or percentage amount. There's no actual time limit right there in the charter at the moment. There is ideas floating that we would follow Champlain Housing Trust model, and they give a year's notice, but as I said, there's nothing in there at the moment. And that gets onto my next point, where there's a very big difference between a charter change and an ordinance, and I very much learned this while on this campaign. With a charter change, what we're doing is we're effectively asking the state whether or not we can regulate as a city evictions in the city. The kind of things that we've got baked in saying we will make this ordinance, or we might make this ordinance, that's really so people can get a bit more of a structure of what it might look like when it comes back, but in all honesty, the kind of what we're looking for here is just a bare bones ask to the state, can we regulate our own evictions in the state of Burlington? The kind of details that we've been talking about tonight, most of which will be, or all of which really will be talked about and discussed and poured over and voted on as ordinances, and that wouldn't happen until we get this on the ballot. It gets voted through by the city of Burlington, it goes to the state, and then it comes back. And in all honesty, the state has a lot of power to be able to rewrite a lot of this language themselves. So what we get back from the state might be entirely different from what we actually send to them in March. Trying to answer a few of your questions, Patrick, and I should have had my pen and written a few of them down. I get you, there is definitely room to make this more robust, make this more progressive. What we were trying to do with this language was really try and make a good framework that we could then build around afterwards. With things like ban the box, that would actually require a separate charter change, and that it's actually something we have also identified. It's something that are personally part of the Just Cause Coalition we want to push through and rad as well. But we can only really take one thing at a time. And so we decided Just Cause was more important or more pressing that issue. And that was just the decision we made. But that's certainly something that we would also like to see getting pushed through. But it can't go in as one charter change. It has to be two separate things. Because again, we're just really asking to regulate evictions. Ban the box would be kind of a different thing that would be regulating lease agreements, I guess. Brian, was there anything you'd like to add to this? Because I'm sure I just forgot a ton of the questions that Patrick asked. No, Tom, I think you did great. And I think Patrick raises the bigger issue of what are we doing to address the entire sort of housing puzzle, if you will. And this is really just one discreet piece that was deemed to be a priority when we met and discussed the various list of issues. And Ban the Box was one of them. And there were others on there. And there is sort of a, I think, a different philosophy of put a whole bunch of really far reaching stuff together and do it all as one and hope that you get it or just go for incremental pieces. And we did choose the incremental approach, hoping that the voters would see it, digest it, understand it, support it, and that the legislature would do the same, rather than putting together an omnibus package that may get really weighted down by its own complexity. So that was our strategy. Okay, there's a big comment in the chat by Julia. I hope people will read it. I want to know, Tom, do you want to put emotion on the floor for us to endorse this or are you just satisfied with the presentation? Well, if Wards 2 and 3 would like to endorse this, that would be fantastic news to my ears. I would love to be able to put on our campaign material that Wards 2 and 3. It just happens to be on the agenda. We only have a very few more minutes for this. I don't know if anybody is interested in making a motion. I would move that the, well, on behalf of Ward 3, I would move that the Ward 3 endorses the proposal to enact a charter change, a just-causation charter change. Thank you, just on your seconding it, Tony. Okay, you have Molly. And what about Ward 2? Is there somebody from Ward 2 here who would like to make a similar motion? Yes, Patrick. And a Ward 2 seconder? I'm Ward 2, so I'll second it. Who's saying that? Yeah, same. Great, great. Okay, then the motion is now open for discussion. Have we had enough discussion or people ready to vote? Jessica, do you see anything on any of the things? Because seeing nobody offering anything else, I'm going to put it to a vote. I think I'm going to take the votes together and if there are people who are voting no, then I'll have to separate them. Okay, all those in favor of endorsing the charter change for just-caus evictions, please say aye. Aye. Aye. I'm sorry, can you unmute people whoever does the unmuting? Oh yeah, I can do that. Okay, so all those in favor of this, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All those opposed, nay. Hearing none, the motion passes and Ward 2 and 3 will go down on the record as endorsing the charter change for just-caus evictions. Okay, thank you very much, Tom. That was a great presentation. Well, thank you everyone for having me. I really appreciate it. Just quickly before I go, if anyone does want to get involved, just causebtv.org. You can sign up there. Again, that's just causebtv.org. We meet once a week and we're really going to get this campaign up and running in a big way in January. Love to have anyone there. And then I'm also going to put my email in the chat as well. And if anyone has any further questions, I would love to speak to them on it. Julie, I'd love to talk to you more a little bit about this awareness issue that kind of is written in, but I'd love to talk to you more on it, given a little bit more time. Okay. I note that Tiki Arshambo has put in the chat box that they had a concern and didn't have enough time to speak to it. I don't know exactly what to do about that. Somebody give me some- I can move to reconsider the motion if people felt like there that there wasn't enough time. And the majority can move to reconsider and we can vote on it and then open the floor again. Okay. I need a second and a vote. If that's what we want to do, I don't want to stay. Yeah, because I just do want to point out that the fact that an endorsement was going to be requested was in the agenda, which was warned. So we can get that part out of the way. Assuming that Perry is in Ward 3, I second the motion. I'll make the motion for Ward 3 then. Okay. All those in favor, do I have to take a vote on the motion to be considered? Yes. All those in favor of reconsideration, please say aye. All those against? No. Hearing none, we are now reconsidering the motion to endorse a charter change for just cause of evictions. Tiki, I'm going to recognize you. Hi, can you hear me? Okay. Yes. Yes. I'm sorry. Yeah, thank you. I downloaded the app and it's not being very friendly with me here. So thank you. And apologies for all of the energy that just went into going with the back and forth there. Yeah, so lots of concerns with the just cause presentation as is. I think I share some of the concerns by others on this call as a small time landlord that I believe that as written this will put small time landlords into a difficult predicament, especially concerning certain situations, namely when it comes to I'll cite drug houses, right? Just as one particular example, although there are so many more examples to cite that all of us know what it's like to live in a house on the street that has all that activity going on day and night. And there's very little that a landlord can do to move to evict. There's rarely a cause to move on that because traffic at three in the morning is not a cause to remove people because they're just having visitors or someone stumbling out of the house and casing out the street is not illegal. It's nothing to move on and it takes so long in order to affect change with such a situation. Having been there myself, not only is it a long process and you feel helpless as a landlord, but it is crazy expensive once you can get an attorney to get that. And effectively, you have to have an attorney in order to remove someone for an eviction here. And if small time landlords are just working people, just trying to get by and pay the bills. So with putting an attorney on retainer and having to pursue those efforts, I have myself a better situation of being near the breaking point thanks to situations like that. So I just pose one, I don't mean to dominate, but I just pose one particular situation that to me is a real concern about this legislation as is. And I fear that it doesn't take into account those small time landlords, especially in the communities that surround these homes that where people are raising children and want to do so safely and also want protection on the impacts of those neighborhoods, namely drug activity. So I'll stop there and then apologize for going on so long. Thank you for the opportunity. Okay, thank you for your point of view. Very briefly, Tom, would you like to respond? Yeah, I appreciate you making that point. And I think you've kind of summed up really well there that if it's not illegal, you can't evict someone. And that's it at the end of the day. That's the crux of the argument because in just cause and just cause has just causes you can evict someone. And one of them is is the illegal things that happen in state and illegal things that or things that go against city ordinances. Now, breaching of the piece is often in the city ordinances, I think it's a state rule as well. If someone is, if someone is loudly breaching the piece at three o'clock in the morning, that is grounds to evict because you would be calling the police and you'd be, they would be getting in trouble. And if they're getting in trouble, then that gives you grounds to evict. If you can't, if they're not doing anything illegal, they shouldn't be getting evicted full stop. And and you also cite drugs. Well, in this day and this age, drugs are still illegal. And if you can prove that they're taking drugs, then you can evict them. But again, I would like to stress if they are not doing anything illegal, you can't evict and you shouldn't be able to. Okay, Brian, anything to add? Okay. Okay, hearing all this, I guess I can put the motion back on the floor to, to, to endorse just cause eviction charter change. Or does this, does this, there is a step that has to come before that? Okay, good. We've reconsidered. And then I'm going to ask for a vote again. All those in favor of this charter change, please signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All those opposed, nay. Aye. Aye. Thank you very much. The motion still passes. Thanks for that discussion. And the next thing on the agenda, we're running about 10 minutes behind now. City COVID response update and housing supports. Luke McGowan from CEDAW. Hi. Coming through. Hi. Oh, you are Luke McGowan. Hi. That's what they tell me. Yeah. Sometimes hard to tell these days. You're wrong. Thank you. All right. Well, thank you, Barb. And thank you to the Wards two and three MPA for having me tonight. I'm Luke McGowan. I'm the community and economic development office CEDAW director. I'm also managing the resource and recovery center, the RRC, which is kind of the platform for a lot of the city's COVID response really since the spring. So it's good to see some familiar faces, Megan. I see you over there. But I thought it might be helpful just to quickly benchmark where we are as a community. And I know lots of people are following every bit of news. Some people have maybe totally started tuning things out. But in a relative sense and with some really important caveats, Burlington is in just about as good a position as we could be relative to this virus as we could hope for. So when you look around the country, Burlington, if you rated sort of similar sized metro areas of 580 communities, I think we're sort of 578 or at least we were a couple weeks ago. So that's a good kind of big picture story. So especially as you look around the country and see the news about what's going on in certain communities and certain states and certain hospitals, it's important to remember that we are in a different situation here in Burlington and Vermont. And that's largely because of the community response. So all of you taking regulations and guidance seriously and your neighbors doing the same. That's a start. And then Dr. Lefler of UVMC, he joined the city's briefing yesterday and all these briefings are on the website now. So you're welcome to go and check it out. But I'll give you kind of a high level summary. We had been really worried about a Thanksgiving related surge in cases. And that was a very real concern here in the community. We actually had our wastewater surveillance show kind of higher indicators right before Thanksgiving of COVID in our community. And we were ready for to see sort of continued exponential growth two weeks after Thanksgiving. And we are in a good place because we haven't seen that growth. We are seeing the highest levels of case transmission that we have seen throughout the pandemic. So it is very much here. It is very much spreading. But it is not at the level that you see in other communities. Another really important aspect of this is the ICUs in the hospital. So throughout how we thought about the response to the crisis has been, how do we maintain the capacity in our hospital to treat patients? Because not only are you not able, if you aren't able to, if you don't have ICU bed space for all of your super critical COVID cases, mortality rates go way up. But it also causes lots of problems for all health issues. Vermont and Burlington specifically is not in that position. We actually have no COVID positive cases in the ICU or at least we didn't as of last night. And that's been fairly consistent over the last few weeks. So our capacity remains strong. So that's another thing that should give everybody confidence. Lastly, on the big picture, the vaccine news. And again, I don't want to talk about everything that's going on. But I hope you've been seeing the news recently about the first doses of the vaccine in the UK. I was actually moved by seeing the pictures of the first woman and man who got their doses and the nurses were around them applauding. And it just reminded me we are at the beginning of the end of this, though we've got a little bit of a ways to go here. So talking specifically where we are in Burlington and what we're worried about, what I'm focused on especially is what is happening in our long-term care facilities. So throughout the pandemic, seniors and especially those in congregate settings in long-term care facilities and nursing homes are the people who are most vulnerable to this disease. So the city really early on set up essentially a support group which a number of folks have been joining every week to share information, make sure our long-term care facilities are connected with resources. And we've really sort of stepped up that work over the last few weeks. I would guess, you know, many of you have seen the news or have friends or family who work or live in some of the facilities that have experienced outbreaks. And so Elderwood has been top of mind for us, a very significant and serious and tragic outbreak that is ongoing there, that is spread to residents and staff and has resulted in deaths. We are also aware of positive cases in other nursing homes in our community right now. And so this is a very live situation that we are doing everything we can and that requires a lot of collaboration with the Department of Health facilities in question and the city. And I'll just say, you know, again, even facilities that put every protection in place because of the elevated level of case spread in our community are vulnerable and will continue to be for the next few months. And so I continue to urge everyone, even with all the good news, you know, don't do it, you don't have to do it for yourself, but for your neighbors, especially those who are vulnerable to this disease, continuing to take all this seriously, I can't urge you to do that enough. The next point, and I'm going to try to be quick here because I know we're already over time, the city is supporting the state in its contact tracing effort. So this is a very important tool for essentially slowing the spread, stopping outbreaks before they are stopping clusters of cases before they become outbreaks. And over the last month or so, maybe a little bit longer, we had, you know, the state really didn't have capacity to keep with all of this case growth. And so the city actually stepped up. And you should be proud of your municipal government and municipal workers. So we are sending about 15 city employees, virtually sending them to support this contact tracing effort. So they'll be either moving their work plans around or able to participate in that contact tracing going forward. And that I think we're doing at least for the next couple months. And then we'll reassess where we are. So thank you if any of those city employees are on the call right now. Thank you for that. The, I got a question about testing. So there has been a lot going on with testing and this, you know, and I'm not, I want to reiterate news that I'm sure you've heard over and over again, but really getting tested is such a critical way that the community has and that you have to keep yourself healthy and the people you love healthy, but also the community. This is how we are able to control the spread of the virus. So we've been advocating, you know, from the city's perspective, we've been advocating since this all began for more testing resources, more frequently available, easier to access. And we now have, you know, we're able to deliver a lot more kind of over in the last few weeks and the kind of the quick update. And I know the best way for all of you to see this, maybe I can share our page, but we try to keep the RRC website. There's a testing tab that shows all of the available testing sites and their hours who can get there. And we keep that up to date. But the current status is we now have free daily testing continuing through the end of December. Thanks, Jess, for dropping that in the chat at 405 Pine Street, BCA building. So we're able to retool that and make it a testing center. We are also offering free pop-up testing at North End Studios in the old North End this Friday and next Friday. And this was a very important point that the city has been advocating around, which is not everyone has access to a car. It's difficult to get to some of these testing places. I've used, I've now used three different sites all over the place. And, you know, that's because I can drive out to Essex or drive out to the airport. Not everyone has that option. So getting walkable sites has been very important to us. And that's why we have the old North End site. We also have been working with our neighbors in Winooski to make a new testing site available or a renewed testing site available at the O'Brien Community Center in Winooski. And that's going to be every day this week and next week. Some of the timing is still being worked out. And then finally, there are other options. UVM is continuing. It's quite significant available availability of testing, which we are glad to see, even though most of their students aren't in a position to take advantage of that right now. There is also, I mentioned, testing at the airport. Garnet is a, actually a local Vermont company that was able to quickly make some testing resources available. They have rapid antigen testing and PCR testing available. And so the city has used that in some of our free pop-up sites. And we are going to continue to maintain a site at the airport that folks can use. All these sites have slightly different rules and are sort of you, some you do need to register for, some you can walk up to. I recommend taking a look at that site to see kind of what makes most sense for you. I also think it's important to mention that we are making language interpretation available at many of these sites, just to make them as accessible as possible. That's a testing update. I got another question about masking. So masks continue to be kind of one of the most important tools in our tool belt to keep our community safe. We distributed, I think, about 25,000 masks in the spring. We are now re, sort of standing up that process again to get more masks out into the community. And we're doing it, you know, anyone can call the RRC phone number or send us an email at recovery at to get a mask. And we'll make, you know, we'll make that available. But we're trying to be a little bit more pointed and reaching directly out to certain nonprofits and groups that we work with to say, Hey, do you have mask needs? Let us kind of do a delivery just for you. And last on sort of city updates, the wastewater, I saw, I think I saw a question in the chat. I'm sorry, I can't keep up with all the all the chats, but we continue to monitor, you know, Burlington sort of got out ahead of what a lot of communities are doing and is proactively monitoring for increased spread. So this is one of the tools that we have to see, you know, especially when testing was less available, that really allowed us to understand how much COVID is in our community. We've used it a couple of times, we were able to see increased spread in the new North end, and we could put out an announcement. I'm sure many of you saw it on front porch forum. And we know for a fact, you know, we've been told that people went and got tested because they saw that and had positive cases, some of them working in these vulnerable facilities. So that has really proven so useful and a huge kind of debt of gratitude to the team working on that, Brian Lowe and on the innovation team and Megan Moyer in the water department have really been meeting that effort. I think I see a relation on the call giving an applause there. So the last thing about wastewater is, you know, it's not, it's certainly not the only tool and it can't be relied upon to give exact figures on how many cases at any given time. What we use it for is trend lines. And so what I was talking about the beginning, though we saw that spike, that spike hasn't continued in an exponential way. It has leveled off and stabilized, though at a fairly increased level. So that's where we are with wastewater. And I did see yesterday someone got the question at the briefing, is it still safe to drink the city's tap water? And I'm sure Emma and Megan would say yes, completely. So the wastewater, you know, it's wastewater before it gets treated. That's what we're testing for COVID, completely separate from the wastewater or the water that you're drinking, you know, through your pipes. And I, you drink it, give it to your small children. So I'll stop there and maybe just take questions on any of that now, or I can move to the relief programs, whichever you would like. Thank you very much, Luke. I have three quick questions. One is about the, you know, the wastewater testing in the last few days, there was a big spike. And the increased cases that we're seeing now, are those already baked in, or do we expect another big spike in cases? That's question one. Question two, I read the statistic that 70% of the off campus students have stayed, which might be a good thing, which means they're not going home and back. But it also means they might be partying inside their places to not making as such noise and people don't know about it. So I'm worried about that. I don't know what you have to say about that. And the third thing is, I have a 98 year old mother in Florida who has home health care. She's in her own home and she doesn't go out, but her health care workers on their days off, they go, they go shopping, whatever. And I was wondering, I never hear home health care workers mentioned in the priority list. And I'm just, you know, they take care of the elderly and the infirm who are vulnerable. And are they somewhere on the list? Thank you for those questions. And I can speak to them all with sort of varying levels of knowledge. You know, so first on the wastewater point, what was interesting is we could tie that spike essentially back to Halloween, as my understanding of where we were. So that kind of huge spike that we saw was from sort of the gatherings that were taking place around Halloween and not Thanksgiving. And so what Dr. Lefler shared at the briefing yesterday was his sense and the hospital sense and our sense, given our own sort of assessment of the readings is that we were certainly anticipating and thinking we might see another surge in cases, like an exponential surge sort of on that high level of readings already. And we didn't, you know, so right now we aren't anticipating seeing a large increase. Things can change, but that's where we are on that. On UVM, you know, definitely there are, you know, that survey that you referenced makes sense to me. The university has made clear that they're testing, which was twice weekly. And I want to say they put, I think they ran, someone's going to correct me on these numbers, but I think it was somewhere between 20 and 30,000 tests over the last few months. They're essentially keeping that capacity online today and sort of throughout the next few months. And so those students, I believe, are still going to have access to that testing. All the rules are still in place, you know, for anyone, the gathering limits and all of that, we're monitoring that closely, but I think it should give people confidence that UVM and the students really stepped up and the testing resources were available. They continued to be. Students took it very seriously. And as of, I think it was three weeks ago or sort of right before Thanksgiving, you know, students were actually, our UVM students were testing at a positive rate that was much less than the average for Monter. So that should tell you that students were really taking this seriously and following the rules. On the last piece, so the, I think what you're referring to is there's kind of conversation going on right now about how the vaccine will be distributed. These are decisions that the city has mostly a support and advocacy role in. So we don't, you know, the city isn't going to get the vaccine to distribute, but it's the state BDH will get it and then make those available. There are a number of advisory committees that are being formed to sort of make those calls about what is the order. What I understand of where things are is staff, frontline staff in medical settings are essentially top of the list. Then seniors in long-term care facilities and congregate settings are right there. I don't know where sort of in-person care, remote care health workers fit, but I would guess they are also included in that group, but I will have to get back to you on that because I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I will say we, you know, the city and especially, you know, CEDO, we think a lot about hard-to-reach communities. So especially, you know, we are right now laser focused on this conversation around how do we make sure that community is often left out or who aren't getting the communication that they need about things like vaccines are included and it's going to be very important and we actually are used, you know, the way I'm thinking about it is our census efforts. Probably many of you were involved with this, but we set out, set up a complete count committee that included lots of community partners to think about, okay, how do we reach the right people? What type of communication do we need? You know, all flagged. This was part of the conversation today actually that BIPOC individuals especially have a lot of good reason to be suspicious about vaccination programs. You know, there's a really terrible history of that and a real reason that people are saying right now, I don't want to take that vaccine. Why would I, you know, stand up first to take that vaccine? And so that's really on policy makers, on community members to think about, okay, how do we communicate about this in a different way? So, you know, and there on vaccines. So I'll go to just, I was asked to share about the relief programs and can I share my screen? Am I allowed to do that? Yes, you are. And is it how much longer do you need? This will be just two minutes and then I can stop. I just feel, since Jess asked me to do this, so I feel like I'm on the hook. Great. Go ahead. Are you seeing my screen? Not yet. Not yet. Are you seeing the RRC page? Yes. Great. So I really encourage everyone to go to this resources page. I take very little credit for all of the good work that's going on here. A number of folks on my team have been diligently keeping this up to date with resources. So if you looked at it last week, it's different than what it looks like now. There are a number of programs that I want folks to be aware of. One, namely is this COVID testing. All of that information is going to be updated all the time. That's right there. Two is these ventilation programs. What's changed from the summer, now everyone is spending most of their time inside. It's very clear that having good ventilation in your homes and your businesses can make a difference in the spread of this disease. The city has made a significant investment in making dollars available, especially to businesses and nonprofits, to access. If they cannot afford to make improvements on their own, come to us and we will get you support to do that. So that's what this ventilation loans and grants is. And so if you haven't done that yet, if you know someone who's running a business and they are wondering what to do, just tell them to go to this link. We have folks who can offer technical assistance and sort of saying, here's the types of filters you should get. And there's also significant grants and loans available for them. That's two. And then the next thing is just these programs that are moving around here. This will prove the case. So if you're a homeowner right now or if you're a renter, we encourage you to go to these links to see the financial assistance that's available to you. So most of these programs are not city-run funds, but these are state-run programs that are often funded with federal dollars. And so there's a number of utility assistance arrearage programs. So if you are having trouble keeping up with your utility bills, there's also rental assistance programs and rapid housing assistance programs. All of those are or many of those are set to expire quite soon, some actually tomorrow. So if you or anyone you know is in a position where they might benefit from that, you know, please share them with this. And if you call the RRC tomorrow, we can help you get these applications in. And I'm getting my time out. So I will end there. Go to this site. If there's anything that is confusing or you have questions about, just give us a call. And thank you for listening. So let me see if I can share my screen back or can someone take control from me? There we go. Great. Thank you so much. That was really, really informative. And I can't imagine any city or any state I'd rather be living in right now. So really thanks. Next is our representatives updates. We're about 15 minutes behind, but we can go a little over if we have to. I have representatives Sullivan first, and then I see Brian Perry, Max, Jean waltz. Is there anybody else here who might want to say something? Emma, sure. Brian Pine, Brian Gina. I don't know if Kurt wants to jump back in the queue. That's all I saw. Oh, and Jean, if you want to first. So Jean is going first, right? Oh, no. I have Jean waltz. Thank you. I'm sorry. And maybe Kurt. Okay. So there must be something that Jean Sullivan wants to say because she's on the agenda for 10 minutes. Thank you. Definitely will not take 10 minutes. This is my last opportunity to meet with you as your state representative. And I wanted to take this time to thank you. It has been eight years of support. And with that support, we were able to, I heard a ban the box for rental ban the box for criminal background checks was my bill. And we passed that. When today I read the recommendations for Fort Hood, from after the Vanessa Guilin murder, and what it will take to make service members of differing genders, and gender fluidity safe in our military. And I'm happy to say that one of their primary recommendations was transparency. And that was my bill that required for the first time in in the history of this country, a National Guard unit to report to the General Assembly every year. The work is still ongoing. This next session going forward while I'm not be representing you, I'll be working closely with both the National Guard caucus and the women's caucus to put forward a bill to create a diversity coordinator and create a civilian ear for all the members of the Vermont Guard so that we know from what's happened in Fort Hood, that thousands of incidents are not being reported because of the way it goes through the chain of command. We can and should hire a professional diversity coordinator by the state legislature that will be a person who can be called and can be talked to from a civilian standpoint so that we'll have a greater civilian oversight of our National Guard units. I'm pleased to see that we no longer have rent to own in either what either on North Avenue or in the new in Ethan Allen shopping center. It was my absolute delight to work with my committee in commerce to tighten up all of the regulations. And when the owners came and beat their chest and said why we'll have to leave the state, several of us including myself a cackled. We were quite delighted. It was a wonderful thing. I was able to stop predatory lending. It has been a wonderful experience for me representing you. I was so proud that I did single-handedly rewrite workers compensation in the state of Vermont because if my changes hadn't gone in, no COVID related illness would have been covered. It's airborne. There's a there's a hole in the cotton. There's a specific carve out for airborne illnesses. And Dave Mickenburg who works with working for modest caucuses, I did. We worked closely with ledge council and we got that through. And I'm very, very proud of that. I'm proud of the five million bucks I got from minority and women-owned businesses. I am damn proud that when everybody everybody eats couldn't find funding with FEMA. We got funding literally within 12 hours out of my committee, but on the floor it got passed at five million and they're just wrapping that money up. So it has been a spectacular time. I appreciate your support. I thank you and I wish you all well. That's it. Thank you very much. I know everybody thanks you for your years of service. If we could unmute and give her a round of applause, please. Thank you. Thank you, Jean. Okay. This is the order I'm going to go in unless people say they don't want me to. Brian Pine and then Perry, then Max, then Emma, then Brian Gina, then Gene Walts, and Kurt if he wants a second kick at the cat. Okay. Brian. Sure. I'll be quick. The discussion on just cause was something I had planned on sharing with you all, but we just discussed it at length. I think everyone should know that there is a question regarding rank choice voting that will be discussed or should say will be decided on this ballot in March. Essentially it's a sort of a it's just it's rank choice voting light, I would say. It only applies initially to city council races and then it would we would need to revisit it in order to apply it to the mayor's race. So it is it is a compromise to at least get rank choice voting back in front of the public to have this important debate about how we decide who represents us and to have our selecting our representatives be, you know, as driven by the notion of majority, but also driven by the idea that a pluralistic political system bringing more voices allowing for greater diversity of perspectives is really what's good and what's healthy in the democracy. So I hope we'll read up on that. I just want to mention one thing that hasn't really been in the news much and that is a incredible initiative that Payesh Agreen spearheaded to raise money from really from private all private sources as a city program to give grants to people who would like to start up or expand businesses who are Black, Indigenous and people of color. It's just an incredible offering. It's up to seven thousand dollar grants with very few strings attached. So if you know anybody who is looking to to start a new a new venture in the Old North End or the New North End or anywhere really in Burlington. This is an amazing resource that Payesh Agreen has brought to our city at no cost to our taxpayers. But I think it will serve as a great example of what we can do and it may result in some, you know, allocation of resources to make it a much bigger program. I believe if we are successful. So just want to highlight that and and thank Payesh for her work because work that's happening in the racial equity inclusion and belonging department for the city is is really pretty amazing. And we got to we just have to I think do more to highlight what's happening because it's it's really quite remarkable what's happening in a little city of Burlington size. And I'm going to let I think Perry would probably like to talk about the community control of police. I'm going to let Perry take that one. Thanks. Okay, thanks. And what I'm going to do about questions is if there's time at the end, I'll just open it to questions for everybody. Perry, you're next. Thank you. Thanks, Brian. I also do want to give a shout out as well to Taisha. Her work has been absolutely incredible. And when Brian mentioned it, it did make me think of the the racial equity inclusion and belonging department is creating this racial equity strategic plan. And I didn't know if people knew about it, but they're hosting a series of listening sessions today was the first one. It was specifically BIPOC only. But I know that it will be open and sort of tailored to different folks. So I, I can't. And I know Brian just said the same thing, but I cannot speak enough about how incredible Taisha is and the work that she's doing. And so if folks want to continue to kind of like get that out to their networks and support this, I think it's going to be a really great project. So I'm super excited about that. I don't know how brief I'm going to be able to be, but I'm going to try because I know we are short on time, but I do want to give this sort of huge update about the oversight model that I've been working on. And I'm going to try to go between my screen where I have notes and still see all of you on the zoom. So this process started, I mean, it's been going on, of course, for years, you know, we have a sort of very light oversight model with the police commission, you know, when I was involved in the special committee for policing practices, I'm sorry, I'm speaking so fast, but I know we just don't have a lot of time and there's a lot to go over. So when I was involved in that, I did try to push for sort of stronger, a stronger oversight model. There wasn't enough traction at the time. Fortunately, I think, I mean, I feel fortunate that the community has really rallied around this. It's like oversight models are an oversight model, community control of police is something that advocates really look for in terms of reducing police violence because of the ability to have accountability and how important accountability is in sort of this new transform system that we're working, working towards. So our folks have folks like seen the charter change at all, maybe possibly, I'm just going to go, I'm going to try to go over the whole thing. And it is on board docs under our last meeting, because it was on the agenda, the meeting was recessed and we'll be meeting again on Monday where, as people have mentioned, we'll be actually deliberating and voting on the charter changes. So what this proposal does and it creates a board, a new board, and that board's sole purpose is really to do this oversight function specifically around investigations and around discipline. The board has seven members. Those will be, those members are elected through the by, so the city council and the mayor sort of, this is my first time explaining it and not just writing it. So I'm sorry, trying to still piece it all together, the way to explain it, the way that I think about it in my head. So they will appoint organizations, those organizations then appoint members. We do have a series of selection criteria. I'm not going to get into all of that. Folks can always reach out to me and to ask for more information, but I'm just going to keep going through because there's a ton of other stuff. So the board will then, so what does the board actually have the authority and powers to do? They will review and make findings. So I'm pulling this right from the exact language. So this is online, 125, in case anyone wants to cite the resolution. The board has a jurisdiction to review and make findings on any complaint against a police officer including the chief on complaints of excessive force, abuse of authority, unlawful arrest, stop searches, other unlawful acts, discrepancy, disrespect, offensive language, theft, discrimination or untruthfulness by police officers. Any other complaint shall be heard at the discretion of the board. The board shall conduct investigations of alleged police misconduct into those complaints and in those cases hold hearings and issue final decisions with regards to police officer discipline and removal pursuant to section 189, which is, this is in section 190 of the charter or it would go into section 190 of the charter and it also has it partially is referred to in section 189. So any complaints that fall outside of that jurisdiction would continue to be investigated and disciplined by the police department, specifically the police chief. Those decisions would then be presented to the board and they would have the ability to appeal it essentially vacate the decision if they disagree and refer the complaint to their investigative office. So that's where this investigative office comes into play. The board would have the authority to establish an investigative office. The director of that office would be hired by the board and then they would have that director would have the authority to request other staff or consultants as needed, which would be approved by the council and that would include legal independent legal council. I'm trying to think of anything they have subpoena authority they can hold hearings. I'm just trying to make sure no one's in the comments asking any questions and I know we said we want to do it at the end. So just a little bit to like step back on process. This kind of came about through a lot of research done over the years. We did look at Jean Berkman as former city attorney who helps me write a lot of this policy for council and specifically this policy. We worked a lot of hours on it together and we looked at NACO, which is the National Association of Community Oversight of Law Enforcement. There's another resource called Campaign Zero. I can try to throw some of those in the chat that had a really interesting sort of sort of model that we were able to use a lot of for this in terms of their proposal. We also looked at the Human Rights Commission on the state level of course and then the city attorney prepared a memo with a like a review of there's like over it's like 160 around that models across the country and so we looked at a lot of those and there is language from some of those that have been pulled into ours and then of course the ACLU. I promise Barbara I'm almost done so we also use the ACLU as well and the sort of key principles were you know complete independent authority of investigation and discipline being properly resourced transparency and being represented of the community specifically communities. Yes I would absolutely be willing to come back and and represent of the communities that are especially communities that are most marginalized by police violence so and then there's just been tons and tons of input from the community and I think that's really what's guided my process is working with community groups there's a group called community people for police accountability I think sorry my brain is feeling frazzled now that I just spit all that out but um yes I would absolutely be willing to come back I know I just like threw a bunch of information um there yeah please feel free to reach out at any point a few questions and thanks for letting me just sort of brain dumps that whole whole project. Thanks very much and thanks for your work on this and we will definitely have you back because there probably won't be enough time for all the questions that people will have. Um just as a process point we have you know eight legislators, counselors, etc we only left a half hour because we really didn't know how many were coming and we didn't know who would have a major presentation like this and I think we have talked about the the um steerers have talked about asking the counselors and the legislators to tell us if you want time on the agenda and how much because otherwise we assume either people won't be there or they'll just have a you know a very short report so um that's something to think about a new norm for next time maybe but thank you very much um I have max next. Sure thanks and thanks for going over all that pairing I think it's super important that people are tuned into that because we're going to be making the decision on whether to put this on the ballot on Monday so um just want to also encourage folks to reach out to to um other counselors as well I mean I fully support this but um if you are supportive of this we do need people to reach out and support this um just wanted to also just draw folks attention to two other potential charter changes that we'll be dealing with on Monday one of which is an idea that's been kicked around for a while but that has not been acted on which was to add an additional um Wenuski member to the airport commission recognizing the impacts that the airport has on Wenuski this would be accompanied by an additional Burlington member to keep the number of commissioners odd um this is something that as I understand it our neighbors in Wenuski very much have been calling for and are in support of so I'm glad we're able to put that on the ballot potentially for this year South Burlington already does have representation on that board it's nowhere near a majority or a driving force but it is important to have a designated seat in my mind for them in addition to that there's also and still another charter change there's a lot of different things that we're going to be seeing on on our ballot this year and this one has to deal with does has to deal with decarbonization and specifically giving the city the authority to regulate thermal energy systems and to assess fees associated to carbon intensive heating systems and this is an idea towards as charter changes tend to be it's really about giving the city the the the authority because that's really in so many cases like with just cause eviction and so many of these other cases what they were looking for the authority to be granted from the state to be able to create a regulatory framework so there will still be other additional steps coming out of this process but the first step is to get the authority to be able to enact such a system um because we don't currently have that authority under charter and then building off of that and building out additional ways of trying to get ourselves off of fossil fuels where we see um that we have not made nearly enough progress when it comes to how we heat and cool as well as how we transport ourselves and so this is specifically geared towards addressing that heating and cooling piece and trying to get us off of fossil fuels and specifically natural gas and transition to more sustainable sources of heating um and cooling for that matter but um really heating tends to be the biggest use so um in terms of the process for charter changes is that what will happen is that should these all get voted on and have a majority they then get um put on the ballot um I guess the mayor can veto them um and did veto rank choice voting earlier those go on the ballot there are a series of public hearings that take place in January then in fact there are two public hearings at which time people can weigh in based on that feedback further changes can be made but only based on what is feed feedback that's occurred and then later in January you put the the final ballot language on um and the ballot has to be ready by the end of January essentially and so that's kind of the process moving forward then you all vote for vote on it um if they get onto the ballot and then they then go to Montpelier for approval there where they need to pass both chambers and then get the governor signature so there's a lot of steps um to these to to enact charter changes but that's just the process for any of these that we've been talking about um from now until town meeting day and beyond thank you max again if we have time which we probably won't but maybe if people want to say we can um ask questions later um I have Emma next great thanks Barbara hi everyone um so I'm Emma Mulvaney-Stanek I'm the new state rep elect for Chittin six two which is basically um Park Street North Champlain over to the lake and then up to um uh Letty Park and Ethan Allen Park and I'm happy to be here tonight I wanted to just say a couple quick things about the legislature I'm still in elect mode so I'll be sworn in on January 6th but our legislature will be in zoom mode at least until town meeting maybe longer uh to just really abide by all the public health needs for the state and not to spread the spread COVID unnecessarily so we um so I've been working on a number of different issues but I just wanted to raise three quick ones just so folks know kind of where my focus will be um going into the session the first is I've asked the rest of the Burlington and Winnieski area delegation so state reps and senators to start meeting on a regular basis just to be proactive around being coordinated on especially non-partisan Burlington issues and to also coordinate with our counselors and mayor on issues that would be good for all of us to be on the same page about and the first thing that bubbled right up of course was VHS um so Burlington high school's issue and how we as state leaders can really uh link arms with the school board and really leverage what needs to be done on the state level to get the resources needed to help our high school students get back into a safe building and to mitigate the overall big price ticket which is looking like it's going to take um to either retrofit Macy's or and or move the building process for VHS on a as fast of a process as possible. There's lots of unpack there but we we're meeting tomorrow the those of us on the Burlington delegation who can make it to just really move that conversation forward and continue to leverage and pressure where we can on the state level either COVID funds to be reallocated so general funds can be earmarked etc it's a larger issue than Burlington so we're also trying to use this as an opportunity for Burlington to connect in solidarity with other schools who will face the same issues this is not uncommon and uh just really how to coordinate when we test and find a problem how do we make sure the resources are there so local communities aren't left with a huge bill to clean up a property that they technically own it's complicated I'm sure the school commissioner's gonna say a whole lot more but we've been in touch and trying to thanks G uh move that forward so more on that soon. The second and third items are two things within economic justice and education which were two main areas I ran on and the the first being um trying to put together a bill working with folks from the workers caucus that and doesn't it's not the official title but really around um workers rights issues that have been not um not at the forefront until COVID hit and one of the biggest issues is unemployment so I like to think about it as modernizing and responding to the issues that so many Vermonters face during COVID and that's basic fundamentals of having a unemployment system that people can actually use the website is a mess the process is a mess I helped a constituent the other day navigate it and it took calling through the governor's office to get to get her system reset um and that's ridiculous for people to spend hours of their time uh just trying to navigate a simple claims process that everyone has a right to so there's the actual technical system but there's also just reimagining how we support folks who are who are experiencing a gap in employment so I think there's a lot there that we can unpack I'm looking forward again to um that and a few other issues related to supporting working people who don't have access to a union per se to really move forward and then the the third and final thing I'll just mention tonight is around education um by Enchina who's on the call tonight helped to put forward with another representative from the what your rejunction area a bill last year around anti-bias I don't like the word training but I'll use it tonight anti-bias training for all school employees and school leaders uh to really up up our game in terms of bringing equity lens and giving people the resources the professionals working in our schools what they need to really move the conversation and to consistently do so and um so I'm looking to work with the act one working working group it's been working on uh reviewing our curriculum standards in the state to really work in cooperation I'm a big process person so I never like working in isolation so really unpacking what it takes and then also making sure it's a resource bill so something that's not just an accurate legislature and said good luck districts fund that too so that that is certainly um not something I'm interested in so figure out how to move the AOE and find resources to make that happen so I'll be back for more later but thanks for the time and let me know if you have any questions I'll put my contact information in the chat thank you Emma um I'm going to go to Brian Tina if you have anything to add of course I have I have so much to add but I am going to set time for myself briefly briefly thank you what happened to equity anyway um so I will hit I'm going to time myself and try to keep it to three minutes I feel like that's fair considering others have had like five to 20 so I'm minutes I'm going to be very happy okay I'll do three minutes I'll try so I'm pressing start now so hello everyone I'm representative Brian Chena I am a state representative for Chittenden 6-4 I live in Ward 2 in the Old North End but I represent part of the Old North End and uh and the East District and um I'm going to just share with you just some ideas about the upcoming session I do want to start by saying that um it would be good to hear from people between now and January about your priorities and maybe we we could do a listening session in January for the representatives to hear people's concerns because that's always helpful but I am going to listen to some of the things I'll I plan to work on sort of the top things going into the session so first I want to continue fighting for us to have a regenerative economy that ships from an extractive economy that exploits workers and destroys the environment to a regenerative economy that takes care of people on the planet and I'll be working as co-chair of the work in Vermonters Caucus on a massive workforce development plan it's really complicated so we might want to make time for that in the future to talk about the details um I'm as a member of the racial justice alliance we are bringing forth a bold package um with the acronym ACT ACT A is address historic systems of racism and systemic racism C is create new systems and T is transform existing systems of government and so we will probably be asking for some time on the agenda in the future from the racial justice alliance where we can go through that in detail but it covers a few examples are a bill addressing health disparities in the health care system a bill promoting BIPOC land ownership as well as some bills about reimagining public safety I am a member of the health care committee and I'm going to be bringing forward a universal primary care bill again that looks at transitioning from our current health care system to full universal health care with universal primary care as a step um I myself and my district mate Selena Colburn who's um who lives in the east district part and couldn't be with here be with us here tonight we're working a lot on decriminalization efforts um we're looking at defalinizing all possession and use of substance substances and substance use should be treated as a health care matter and not a crime so we're doing a lot in that area and then um last but not least um I'm finishing up my fellowship in artificial intelligence with the Bertelsman Foundation and from that I'm bringing forward some ideas around AI policy for example um a bill regarding algorithmic accountability which means any companies that the government works with needs to meet certain strict tests to make sure that their algorithms and artificial intelligence are not reinforcing racial bias or other bias but I also am going to be working with some local scientists to propose that we follow through on the other recommendations of the Vermont artificial intelligence task force because we need to get ahead of the curve and um recently there was a Vermont company that that is using AI to detect COVID and blood samples so there's some examples of how AI can be used to help us through this pandemic and in our economic recovery so that's three minutes and four seconds I will stop there because I said I would be three minutes so thank you everyone and um I will be requesting some time in the future with the racial justice alliance and others where we can get into the details of some of these um proposals so thank you thank you and well and um there may be questions later so I hope you can stick around uh Kurt McCormick can I ask you to hold um anything else you want to say so I can recognize the school commissioners yes but I do have a couple things to say I'll I'll be a half a minute okay I'm gonna time you you want to do that now then okay yes quickly um a lot of charter changes in the works and I just want to say that I'm a longtime supporter of choice voting and we'll try to help get that through the the house um uh Brian Pine I'm going to make you eat crow on my um rent control bill I'm going to pass it might take more than one year but it'll be two of the most and that value of charter change also if Burlington decides to do it and then max on the airport commission changes I think that requires a charter change also and therefore legislative approval and that will go to my committee so I think I agree with you on on having a new ski added to it and I will uh work with you on that that's it thank you thank you very much Kurt and certainly last but not least Jean waltz and Stephen um are going to go together please hi Barbara I just want to say it's been a long day and I feel so inspired by I don't know how you all are like keeping up the good fight but you're doing it um yeah that was pretty inspiring um I I just want to start with I'm going to share in the chat um the and I said the crazy reason if we run out of time um the office of equity is uh sharing a open to the public totally free webinar series that I really hope people tune into um Stephen actually took all the notes and has an overview for us I'm basically the cheer leader right now Stephen thank you that's fine that's getting our report that's fine we have so much to talk about and you know I used to teach four hour classes and uh I'm going to try to make this really fast and we're going to have to cut some information but I do want to mention to everyone that you know we try to be as transparent as possible on the board and there are committees that meet regularly and that's published with the agendas and everything and a lot a lot is going on in the committees this year perhaps I mean perhaps more than ever before I've been on the board for I think my fourth year now and um I mean we have a curriculum committee a finance committee that just met a couple hours ago we have a facilities committee that met last night we have a negotiations committee of which I'm a member and I can give you reports on all of these tonight if you want if we get there we have a diversity equity inclusion committee of what genie is a co co-chair of that so there's a lot of very interesting discussions that happen uh you know on a regular basis throughout the month and I do encourage people to tune in because we you know when we came on the board there was this idea that there was not a lot of transparency and we've tried to work on that I think we've done a good job and I just want to get that out there that those committees are available for participation almost every single one of them except the negotiations committee okay because that's kind of private until it happens but anyway I'm going to give you an update on BHS that's what we were last time and I think that's what people might Stephen what you meant to say is every single committee meeting every single public meeting there is a place on the agenda for public comment yes yes and we run them you know we we dismiss the Robert's rules regulation so we run them as just discussions and it's a it's a nice way to participate it's a nice way to just be aware of what's going on so in terms of BHS update you know so much is going on I I'm I just want to let you know that what I mentioned last month the seahorse engagement center is open it's above LL bean right now and it's a student access center for teachers it's a special ed department there's one-on-one tutoring going there going on there the succeed program which is a school within a school is set up there there's classroom space in the afternoon for teachers to meet with students in person and there's club there's a club meeting venue and there are councils and college scheduling going on in that location now last month it was about to begin it's in it's fully it's operational right now you might know that our high school students are going to Edmunds on Wednesday so Edmunds closes down to the middle school and the high school students go there on Wednesday so finally since March our high school students have some in-person time which is what we heard from the community was so important it is so important and they're very happy you know I walked by the school on Wednesday when they were being dismissed at noon the first half of them and just the faces and the excitement on the students faith on the students face was really a pleasure to see and it's something they've really missed for a long long time and of course we're not there yet but we're getting there so you know the other board meeting the other night I don't know if anyone tunes in you know we had four of five presidential scholars recognized at the board meeting the other night I just want to read their names briefly because you know it's another opportunity for them to get the awards that they've worked so hard for in terms of public recognition recognition the first of the we had passion we'd be like a we had Samira Henning we had Penny Lee Julia Correll Dominic Brown crystal Kristoff Bristol who are all presidential award winners BTC in fact had four of the five statewide presidential award winners presented this week so that was quite an accomplishment for this group of students they were just incredible kids the descriptions that their teachers gave at the board meeting were just unbelievable and you can of course tune into that and see that if you'd like to anyway can you hear me and see me everyone okay excuse am I going too fast too slow too much I don't know but how much how much more do you have I have a lot more but I can stop however whatever you want I could talk about the what would you like to hear I would like to know from the group is it okay to go to nine o'clock just nod your heads great okay you have 10 more minutes okay I'm going that so in terms of the downtown high school you know we are on the verge of finalizing the deal with the owners we're waiting for the final test of the air quality which is a result of this dry cleaning business you may have heard about this recently in the paper I think it was on the news there was that there was a PCE and TCE contamination from a dry cleaning business that used to be in little Italy that part of that part of Burlington before the mall was even built but we are very confident that the state agencies do not believe this will result in it will impact our occupancy date and we're expecting a report on that tomorrow and if not we don't get it tomorrow we're expecting it on Monday but we've been reassured we've been assured by the state agencies that this is not going to stop the occupation of what we're calling now the downtown high school so um what else I want to say so the deal the deal is you know it's it's in the works it's it's it's basically a feta complet after this um after this uh this air quality measure comes in so the deal is to rent the downtown high school uh previously known as macy's for three and a half years it costs 1.9 million you just cut out you're muted you're muted you need to unmute yourself steven it costs I don't know what you heard it costs the rent the rent agreement is 3.3.5 years 1.9 million per year and 3.5 million fit up costs and I'm so happy to hear out Emma talk about the state awareness of the of the costs that's been incurred at Burlington and the help that we believe is on the way at some point I'm not sure how but at some point but Governor Scott's team is developing supports for Burlington school district to alleviate some of these unforeseen uh costs this year construction is begin is scheduled to begin on december 15 right around the corner and completed by february 22nd which means that the high school students will be occupying that new downtown high school by february 22nd I think is the day and so that's at the end of the february vacation I can talk a little bit about the budget genie want me to talk about that now we just had it's up to you but I think we should make it clear that the downtown situation macy's high school it's still an a and b schedule yes we're not we're we are still mitigating any kind of covid um you know we're still taking all the precautions we were going to take in the fall yes at macy's yeah so it's not it's not a full five day full school schedule it's it's more like what's going on in high schools around the state you know it's a hybrid schedule designed to keep the classes small the people away from each other and it's it's abbreviated no doubt no no doubt about that it's safe it's safe it's safe and you know tom mentioned the other day that we're very proud of the fact that the community and the student body has been relatively safe um from covid contamination up until this morning so that's public knowledge because he did send a letter out to the the superintendent sent a letter out to the families today indicating that there was one case at edmund's and they immediately went into uh operational you know function and isolated it and it was it seems to be like one class it's a small group it's been isolated the state recommended that we not close the school and we did not so edmunds is still functioning the only case but okay the first case of covid positive case of covid and what is happening is that particular pod is going remote that's it yes yeah so that was a really good immediate response and barbara you're asking covid test and regimen for students there's no way that anybody in our community or state or country would mandate students regularly get tested it's just not possible barbara um there is a program in which voluntarily staff are privy to as far as routine testing but we cannot mandate um students to be tested you do for college students uh that is a contract that they enter in with their this is a public service school going to um public school we are serving them they are not indebted to us think again i mean of course i think that you know but that's anyway i don't take up time on this now i want i want even to finish this presentation i can talk a little bit genie i'll talk a little bit about the the fiscal uh 22 baseline budget projection which we talked about in the finance committee just several hours ago and you know it's um it's scary at first i mean we have a 96 million dollar budget for the school system in burlington we're we're looking at a five million dollar increase from 21 which is typical of what happens on a year-to-year basis um we got a letter from the task commissioner and people you may have seen that that that the statewide averages it looks like it might be nine percent for school spending growth uh and the school spending growth of an additional 3.5 percent we add that together it looks like that burlington might face a 13 percent tax increase but i don't want to align people because burlington school district is committed to lowering that tax impact in different ways one is exploring the surplus funding from 21 because of the COVID you know the fact that we haven't been teaching and working in the schools there's a there's a big surplus for this year another is seeking support from the governor legislature for bhs btc construction which we talked about earlier and emma mentioned i know that brian sena mentioned it today to me and i've talked to current mccormick mccormick about that as well but um you know and then and then what we're what we're looking at in terms of the district itself but what we what we have control over is trying to uh look again at our current programs and ways that we can be more efficient in the way that we deliver uh our programs without um uh diminishing the quality so that's where we are right now that the budget discussion has just begun it has to be completed by in the late december um december we need to make a decision in january so it's moving on there there are meetings every week and again those are public meetings if you're interested in attending and voicing your opinion you know support or whatever please feel free to join us you know now so so that was what i wanted to definitely get across tonight i have other information about what's been going on in the committees if you want me to go through it quickly or you know i can wait on that however you want to want to go like shall i do a quick committee summary yeah like three minutes three minutes okay curriculum the curriculum committee you know is is focused on pre-k curriculum because we we acknowledge that all kids can learn there's a equity gap in our system there's a achievement gap that we see reflected throughout the elementary schools that starts in the very earliest grades so the curriculum committee is is committed to looking at those programs and seeing where we can improve them and that's a really encapsulated version of the the notes that I have in front of me but I have can answer a lot of questions in that if you have any the facilities committee met a couple days ago and there has been just some discussion about efforts to fund improvement of on the iaa school grounds and a path between cp smith and hunt the kids use that's kind of just through the woods but the reality is the financial reality of this year kind of precludes any kinds of progress on those on those kinds of projects until we can figure out exactly what's going to happen with the regular school program in a level funding way the discussion on bhs and the reconstructed bhs continues we're at a point what in the re-envisioning project where we need to fund the next phase which is um it's called a design cost estimate so it gives us precise information about what parts of the building cost what so when we end up finally re-envisioning a rebuilding bhs we'll know exactly more exactly how much that's going to cost us in terms of negotiations committee we've settled two of the three contracts we have an ask an ask me group that it settled several months ago genie know you know about that it's the it's related workers it's custodians it's bus drivers it's people who are who are employed by the district the bea teacher contract is done i believe it has been signed if not it's about to be and then the power educators and the bea power educators contract negotiations are still going on and then our famous diversity equity inclusion committee you know with there's a discussion about about the retention of minority hires at bsd how we can get more BIPOC people into the system what are their ways so we can do it by connecting with the uvm graduates who are past students there's um you know we had a conversation at that meeting last week it was you genie i believe it was two weeks ago with andrew stiles who is the president of the uh of the union for the teachers and the power educators um and and the conversation was really around outreach and furthering outreach um as in higher new hires of bIPOC people as classroom teachers specifically we're looking for more we really want to um there's a deficit in our classroom teachers but also somehow learning uh different programs or developing programs or pilot programs that will help people who are are already a part of the district as in multilingual liaisons new americans are already you know four years deep working for the district but for multiple reasons cannot forward like as in get a certificate to teach because their schooling at a different country doesn't transfer is not honored in our country we're looking into ways that we can work with uh not necessarily fast tracking uh people's uh educational backgrounds to be able to be antiquated i mean equated to um what is uh credited in the states but just ways that that system is just somehow revamped okay thank you sorry about it that's okay what i'm going to do is ask for a motion to adjourn the meeting and ask for any public officials who can stay in any community members who want to stay i will stay and entertain questions from you but i think um just to to keep our timelines which are already a half hour out of whack within a reason i will entertain a motion to adjourn so moved okay is there i don't know if that requires a second or not i will adjourn if formal okay good i um all is in favor hi hi i oppose no okay i will stay here that adjourns the formal part of the meeting but anybody who can stay and wants to say i will stay to moderate questions so are there any questions jess could you see anybody with a hand up okay i want to thank everybody who attended the meeting and all of our public officials who took part this was tremendously tremendously informative and important and i want to encourage those of you who know you have major presentations to make to um contact the steering committee to ask for more time on the you know the kind of time on the agenda that you really need because i think i really would like to see more interaction between the members of the community and yourselves but we just didn't leave enough time for it no worries thank you thank you sevan for making it really clear that people are invited yeah definitely i really the school board stuff we're all in this together you know yeah right the next school board meeting is the 15th right next Tuesday um well but but what sevan is talking about are the committee meetings that happen so yeah so like the one related to like the macy's building when would that be there'll be some information about well that that will be discussed most likely we haven't seen the agenda for for next Tuesday that will that will be next week perhaps you know i think the i think the final agreement is going to be signed next week because we're expecting the air quality report friday or monday so the the meeting is tuesday so my guess is that that will be that will be finalized on tuesday and there's always there's always at the very beginning of the meeting the public comment you know you can make any kind of comment you want about any issue involving burlington schools and that's true again with the committee meetings that happen regularly throughout the week like the next de and i is next week isn't it the 22nd and the and the curriculum committee meets the day after the regular um monthly regular monthly board meeting so it's gonna be on the 14th yeah i mean 16th so yeah and and kevin you can make a comment in public comment about anything at any of those meetings cool sounds good does anybody on the school board feel as uncomfortable as a lot of people do about giving don synex nearly 10 million dollars yes really i'm the one with that said you know jimmy is about to evaporate they're moving to pretty much all online i know a lot of patrick they looked into dealer it didn't work out that was that was one of multiple places down in the south end and also i do have to say of course that's a concern but there are two other who are 50 with don who are local so i don't know if you know it's not just don and whoever that was that entity before it's work field two other yeah there were three three other owners with with synex synex owns 50 that's the that's the problem and it was a long and involved negotiations that went on it was not always pleasant i we understand right but anyway synex does not own more than 50 at this point they own effectively 75 percent no that's that's that is in the past there are two there are other people that but their shares are so much smaller no it is oh they own 50 and he owns 50 percent there are three local owners who own 50 percent and synex is the other 50 they own 50 percent of don synex's prior they of of of brookfield's share and synex owned the other part so you add it together they own 50 percent of a share so the math is not actually 50 50 but it's okay we it's a we wait i don't know this this is not something i do i do not know this what are you talking about i don't know i don't even know i've i have lost track of what is part of executive and what is part of known to the public so if i've spoken out of turn accident that is no no that would be whether that is your executive or my executive that is not privy so how do we find how do we get to the bottom of this um i can clear who are there other people aren't max and max and brian have left are they that they can't help me clarify um i will text both of them right now i'm sorry and if i've misunderstood that i'm sorry because as we know with this project there are like constant moving parts and it's hard to you know like kind of um on top of everything that's shifting so quickly but that was kind of my understanding is it was kind of a bit more complicated than like a 50 50 split so well just i will ask i will i it's been presented to us that don is 50 and these vermonters local are 50 so um previously san x was 49 previously san x was 49 and brookfield was 51 i have a question um a little off topic um um steven and jean is building a new high school still on the table the final design for the for the site is still in discussion because the because the uh the readings haven't come back yet we still don't is that that's right janey right it's still up in the air i mean we're going forth with the cost estimates so we have a better idea of what the final decisions will be in terms of re either restructuring or building a new high school whatever i don't think that i don't think we're actually going to be building a new high school but you know the plan to save what's what's worth it saving is still in the works and uh until we know more about about the final soil testing and the cost estimates that are coming in next we won't we won't be able to answer that question and barbara when you say build a new high school that can mean something very different oh yeah one person to the other when somebody says build a new high school sometimes they don't mean actually build it in the spot in the spot where it is right now or it means completely tear down that building and build something new so when you say that what do you mean build it in you know i out of but i say level it build build a state of the art in the same in this in the same location no downtime i would think i would think so i i you know i that i don't know because i don't know what's available what i'm saying is like everybody has a when they ask these questions they have a very i like when i hear that question i have to say give me a clarification of what that actually looks in my mind it's starting from leveling it and starting from scratch that's that's how i think about it i just want to say practically speaking as much as can be salvaged is probably the most financially advantageous but at this point we don't know we could actually work with if we even wanted to work with it so there's that so your idea of getting a shiny new high school might come true out of default we have no idea okay it takes months for the i think that would take we have to actually be animated 70 million is still budgeted for that i think a brand new high school from scratch would take more of the money would take another bond issue but and i know people in the city who would support that but right now we're just trying to figure out what to do with the high school that's there how it's going to be restructured or is it possible to do it even there so we're trying to figure that out right now but in the meantime i'm excited about the kids getting back into the high school the downtown high school because i think there are lots of creative possibilities for pursuing intellectual studies in the heart of the city and you know the whole movement toward place-based learning we have kind of an advantage of being down there so that the high school kids will be there will be at the downtown high school for the next year for sure and uh we will have a fully functioning school in that in that location with all the potential around it just think of the proximity to the theaters down by the lake the lake itself the bike path you know there's so there's so much possibility the church street i think anyway i'm an optimist and i feel optimistic about this decision that had to be made and i think it was i think we're we're at that spot now and i'm i'm kind of happy that we're moving forward in that direction anyway even though we're still waiting until the end of february that means the high school kids have not been in a regular classroom for almost a year in burlington and of course around the state it's the same things going on like genie pointed out earlier it's still a hybrid model we're talking about until we we know what's going to happen with coven it's just a hybrid model but at least they'll be where they need to be and you've read the reports about the damage to educational progress because of this all around the nation so you know our burlington kids are are in a tougher position because of the pcb's have discovered at the site of the high school it's really unfortunate uh but people are dealing with it you know and in heroic ways i think especially those kids who won those presidential scholar's awards they were just unbelievable those kids that when they would you know their their work ethic and their um their drive to be successful and their creative energies they put into their projects it's just unbelievable it's rewarding in that way anyway anyway thank you or any more questions so i don't want to make this meeting go any longer than needs to but all the other buildings you guys have explored this was the only one that had possibility uh building for the old ymca yes you guys are brilliant i know no keep going yeah uh the memorial auditorium yeah how about how about how about exploring eminent domain the mall and the mall in south burlington yeah mall in south burlington jeez there's a the hannah fritz on sylvan road just yeah eminent domain that hole just put the building right there uh yeah good job i wouldn't want it to have to be on the school board right now but thank you thanks for holding it okay is everybody tired enough yet okay that was the best thing ever that we need to leave on that okay amanda what did you say my friend amanda put something in the chat let's see what it is i'll make an appearance i was watching on youtube um but then i couldn't see the chat and so i i was cooking latkes sweet potato latkes are the first time ever it's a mess um but they came out well so um so it was it was on the background it was in the background when jimmy and amanda will you save some for me we have we we um grated a lot of sweet potatoes so we have extras so yeah we're gonna make some tomorrow too okay great so anyway this is the first night of kanaka happy kanaka to those who celebrate mary christmas because we won't see you until january 14 well it's very nice seeing all of you and i miss you so i miss you amanda and i didn't actually know it was on tonight and i was looking up something and i i saw it was live so i just spontaneously turned it on and it was it was a lovely evening you guys so it's the second thursday it's gotta be war two three i don't even know what day it is anymore more days i mean i'm not the only okay good night everybody and thanks again for sticking it out thank you take care