 Okay, we're gonna get started, 6.30. I'm just gonna guess that we're gonna be done tonight at 9.30. I'm just gonna say it out loud right now. I'm gonna try to manifest 9.30, okay. All right, so the first thing we're gonna call this meeting to order, we're gonna review and approve the agenda. So there were a couple of addendums. One was a street closure and the other was a net zero energy resolution. So I'm gonna assume that we can add the street closure to the consent agenda and we're gonna put the net zero energy resolution as, just before the energy efficiency update with Kate Stevenson when she's here. So any other changes? So we'll consider the agenda approved without objection. And so on to general business and appearances. So this is a time for anyone from the public to address the council on any issue that is otherwise not on our agenda. And if you would keep your comments to about two minutes or less. Great. President of the Fighting Third District. I don't know about school streets. And I'm here tonight to speak in favor of what I think has been a really exciting thing around town, which has been, I am someone who grew up in Vermont, but moved out of state. I lived in New York for a period of time, bounced up and down the East Coast and a couple of jobs. And in some of those situations, they got a chance to live a sort of car-free lifestyle for a period of time. Those were very walkable places that I was living. Montpelier, I lived here without a car as well, but it's a bit of a mixed bag in terms of the availability and the ease of getting from place to place. And as someone without a car, I would say that at least in the brief trial period that's been in effect so far, it has been a huge success and a real game changer for me. I commute every day. Commute I guess is a grand word. It's not that far. All the way down to 155 State Street. It's about a 20, 25 minute walk, but a very quick bird ride. And I've spoken to a lot of peers, a lot of people in the community who are curious, interested about using the scooters and almost unanimously, they've had positive experiences. And it is a really nice thing. I have found myself going on short trips to support local businesses that I might otherwise not have taken that I've been walking the whole way. They're very easy to ride. I was a little apprehensive at first before I'd given a try, but you scoot around town like a breeze. That's great. So I know that there's a trial period going on right now. I know that the weather is changing soon and there'll be a sort of weather reprieve until the spring, but I can't say enough good things about it. I think it is a really, really nice way. We can reduce our carbon footprint. We could make the city more walkable, more pedestrian friendly, and more accessible for a wide range of people. So I'd urge you to keep with the program. Thank you so much. Donna, yeah. Oh, yes. So when you went through the app, did you feel it was clear enough in direction so you knew you had to be on the road and follow the rules of the road? It is very explicit throughout. It actually refers to local regulations mandating helmets. I think unskippable as you're trying to access the app. So yes, that was very unambiguous in my experience of this. Good. Thank you. Thank you. Any further comments? In the interest of saving some time and not if you would stay in Whitaker, Mount Peeler. In the interest of not deluding the conversation that's on the agenda for later, I'd like to raise some concerns, issues for the council's consideration. I don't expect you'll be able to take any action on it, but we seem to have a recurring problem with a number of organizations of which Montpelier is a member. Central Vermont Public Safety Authority has been missing statutory deadlines for minutes availability repeatedly, including at the last meeting and a meeting prior from two meetings prior to that, minutes are still not available and the person responsible is an attorney. But when I raised this at last week's meeting, it was met with response from council members and board members that, so what? It's the law. Yeah, we're not in compliance with the law too bad. And that's not appropriate. The law on minutes and public records of open meetings is not aspirational. It is definitive. And when we stray from that, we are outlaws. So Central Vermont Public Safety Authority is one, Capital Fire Mutual Aid is another. They had a meeting in September, which involved FirstNet, which is something else you need to be aware of. Those minutes have not been made available. We've got a recurring problem. I did have a friendly exchange with John about the one time that a new person was taking minutes and they were a little late getting on the website. I'm not trying to be the police. I think all of us need to be very diligent and take, I would actually ask you to consider a resolution to be drafted later that takes a firm stand on your commitment to complying with that law, both open meeting and completeness of minutes. The fact that I raised the issue of the missing minutes at the last week's meeting of CVPSA and my raising that issue is not in the draft minutes that came out today. So what goes in the minutes is also a concern. If I could just mention, completeness of minutes is not a requirement. They have to be up by five days afterwards. And for example, Rutland City simply takes photographs of the raw handwritten notes to post that. And that is compliant with the law and that's been consistently held. What's important is that something be up there within five minutes, five days, five minutes. That's what it feels like these days. But I just want to be clear on that. That- Thank you, Defensive. No, I just want to be clear on that. It's not about anybody being defensive. I just want to be clear on that. Yes, my point is I'm asking you to consider what is the purpose of minutes if it's not to inform the public so that they can- I understand that. If you're looking for complete minutes in five days, I'm not your city clerk. I would suggest you elect another one. There's a lot of other stuff going on too. I'm going to put you on the defense. I'm just giving you the information. And develop a policy of whether public comments including handouts, the other example I'll give Green Mountain Care Board. I wrote a white paper. I spoke about $50 million in missing intellectual property and both the white paper and the comments are missing from the minutes. Steven, the policy of the minutes of the City of Council of Montpelier are mine. A resolution that they pass here will not change that fact. The policy begins and ends with me. Now, the council can vote to change the minutes and alter them however they want, but that doesn't change the fact that the policy begins and ends with me. And I create action minutes which is considered best practices. In fact, I go beyond action minutes, but I am steadfastly against characterizing the comments of people who come before in my minutes. Like I say, another city clerk might be all for it. I am not. So thank you for making a note of that. And we can further discuss it later. OK. Thank you. Any further comments? How's it going? My name's Rob Goodwin. I live here in town. I just want to thank City Council for doing this little bird experiment. I rode them from my house to the link bus at the Department of Labor and Property and Rides several times, a long, cold walk, very quick riding bird. I know there's a lot of discussion about four against them, the trial should continue. And I know that information is being taken by the city and by the police department to try and make it safe and that sort of thing. So thank you very much. Thank you. Further comments? OK. So we're going to move on. So the consent agenda. Is there a motion regarding the consent agenda? So moved. Second. Further discussion? OK. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great. And that was with that. I assume everybody understood that was with that added item. OK. OK, great. All right, so we have a number of appointments to make. So I think what is likely to happen is that we will hear from all of the applicants and then go into executive session and come back out to make all of the appointments together. So the first one is for the investment committee. And I think we only have one applicant for the investment committee. Is Lisa Stewart here? No? OK. Right, moving on. So the design review committee, there were two applicants for one seat. Nick Lowe and Martha Smersky. So are there are there of you here? No. Interesting. OK. Moving on then. An appointment to the energy advisory committee, Donald DeVoie. No? OK. Wow. That's unusual. All right. And Lisa was the only applicant to the complete street group, and she is probably still not here. So team, one hypothesis is that we should just go into executive session. What do you think? OK. Do we have a motion? Still moved. Second. For the discussion. All of you please say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, we will be right back. OK. Motion to come out of executive session. Still moved. Second. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Great. So we have some appointments to make. This is going to be all at once sort of thing. So I move that we appoint Lisa Stewart to the investment committee, Martha Smersky to the design review committee, Donald DeVoie to the energy advisory committee, and Lisa Stewart to the complete streets group. Second. For the discussion. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great. Thank you all for your service, if you're listening. All right. OK, so moving on. So now we have an item regarding the appointment to the central Vermont internet representative. And so if Jeremy, I know you're here, Dan and Steven, you're all welcome to come up to sit up here in the front. Now to be fair, we have read what you said, I'm going to make the assumption team, that we have all read what was submitted to us. So there's no need necessarily to go over any of that content. We'll have a time for if the council wants to ask any clear, oh yes, yeah, please feel free. Yeah, we'll have a time to ask some clarifying questions. And then Steven, if you want to make some kind of a statement that you're certainly welcome to, and we'll go from there. So if you would just run down the line, introduce yourselves. And yeah, I'm going to start because you know me. So as Dan Jones, I wanted to introduce Jeremy Hansen, Phil Feik, who are the chair and the vice chair of the central Vermont internet. And I'm here in my role as the board representative for you. But they have more prepared this, so I just wanted to be the sort of formal introduction. Thank you. And Dan introduced me, but I'm Jeremy Hansen, the chair of central Vermont internet. Phil Feik, vice chair. Great, thank you. Is there anything further beyond what you submitted in writing that you wanted to add? If not, that's fine. No, I mean, the central Vermont internet board voted for us to communicate a message to you, and you all have that message. Great. Any questions from the council for central Vermont internet crew? OK. Actually, I do have a question. Sorry. I watched the video of the meeting. Aside from the discussion of the question of whether there was a conflict of interest, was there any notice to Mr. Whitaker in advance of the meeting that this would be taken up by the board? Formally, no. But there was certainly, as I understand it, individual conversations had outside of more meetings around the outside of minutes, that his behavior was not acceptable. OK, thanks. Further questions? No? OK. Stephen, would you like to say anything? I would. Stephen Whitaker, alternate Vermont failure on this C.V. Fiber board. I think it's important to note there's some dimensions to this question, which are both jurisdictional and protected speech. I have been careful not to represent the city of Montpelier in my comments regarding this level of accountability. I've done so only in the public comment section of the meetings. And I clearly distinguished. When I first raised this issue, but as you know, public records violations are something I've been working on for decades. And when a new organization starts getting off on the wrong foot by not adhering to law with public records minutes of availability, it's important to call them on. And so I appealed to the head of the agency at the end of May for a meeting that was held on the 8th. And we still didn't have minutes. And the head of the agency, in this case, is Mr. Hansen. And he's also a select board member in Berlin. So he should be clearly familiar with open meeting law and public records and minutes requirements. And he just dismissed it, brushed it aside, did not respond according to law with a response to an appeal ahead of the agency. And said it's somebody else's job to find them. And that resulted in me copying the whole board. And then Dan saying, in effect, we're new, we can get away with breaking the law. And I'm paraphrasing. And that elicited a response from the Secretary of State, which I've provided the mayor with copies. I think you all have them now. That email thread lays out both the tact and the decorum and the politeness with which I'm making these requests. I mean, the most unpolite or, I forget the characterizations of my behavior, is your misguided effort to dodge the issue by claiming that you're not the custodian of the records is troubling. But Jeremy and I had had prior conversations where I said this organization isn't born yet. It's going to make decisions of what it call itself, what timeline we're going to build, what rates we're going to charge. And the press had already taken his decisions of those things and published them. So this is not about behavior. This is about accountability and transparency. And the Secretary of State's comments backed that up. I am a stickler for transparency and accountability when items are missing from the minutes, even the most recent minutes of the meeting, where two months ago, the governing board of CV Fiber made a motion to direct Jeremy to liaison with CV PSA and Paco in order such that that plan you're going to see at the next month's joint meeting would be informed by the potential economies of scale and scope. And two months later, that still hadn't occurred. And so I called that to the attention. But then the minutes don't reflect who's responsible for those. So if this CV Fiber is going to succeed, we need to build accountability and transparency in from the beginning. And to shoot the messenger to try to push me off the governing board is more an attempt to evade accountability than anything else. You are all well familiar with my persistence and towards accountability and transparency. So I don't apologize for that. But the fact that I'm doing it in public comment sections of the meeting as a citizen, as I signed this letter, not representative or alternative Montpelier, but as citizen advocates is evidenced there. Even more so, I abstained from motion. Dan wasn't present at the last meeting. And rather than mix the role of citizen advocate and Montpelier rep, I abstained from even voting when I could have voted no on the motion. Wouldn't have made much difference. The time frame for when this option of trying to ask that I be removed to vote was maybe 10 minutes. So I couldn't help but the similarity of a Trump rally of Locker, it's kind of mob rule. It's not the way to do business. I've asked the city council to get more involved in oversight and engagement with this new entity, helping get on the right track. You've been preoccupied, but that invitation is still open. Thank you. Any further questions for Stephen? I do just have a quick follow up. So I was looking back at your application to be the alternate and one of the things that we're trying to, well, we have a different application process now, but are you, I'd like you to sort of further discuss a couple of things. One, I'm curious if you're a physical resident of Montpelier, but also two, I'm curious about whether or not you perceive there to be a conflict of interest. It's one of the questions that we asked on the new applications. So not even talking about the open meeting stuff, just the sort of the other piece about purchasing the domain and those other questions, I think that's important information for the council. I reside both in town, in a shared space, and in a nearby town. And I, for privacy reasons, don't disclose the person I sleep with. So that's... That is one of the questions on our application. So as we sort of go through this process, we've redone it a little bit. And so one of the questions that we do ask is about residency, but conflicts of interest. Is the other sort of big piece. I don't see, I don't perceive a conflict of interest at all. The fact that one individual chose a name which has regulatory implications and the board has since at mine and others urging, decided to not do business as central Vermont internet, but as CB fiber. And central Vermont internet has regulatory implications that in effect the FCC would preempt the state's ability to put backup power and resiliency requirements and testing requirements on the network. So I have had to continually fight, I early on at the first or second meeting or in an emails to Jeremy asked that we get legal counsel on board so that we, somebody who is a lawyer could advise the governing board on this topic. But it's very important that we not define ourselves as internet and forfeit the ability to regulate within the state. There's a new FCC order that Chairman Pi reversed Chairman Wheeler's efforts with net neutrality and we lost all the state owned microcells connectivity because the PUC was now preempted because that used an internet DSL circuit to feed the backhaul to the microcells. So I continue to raise this much to the annoyance of the people on the governing board who don't understand it, but I feel like I'm doing my due diligence in doing so. And Charlie Larkin, other board member of design access network which registered the name did it with the intent of protecting the options for building a sound resilient and reliable network, which I have been working on a design access network was formed to do 24 years ago. Further questions? Yes, good. I'm not sure how to phase this, it's something of a hypothetical, but if we were to ask you to step down as an alternate would you continue to speak as interested citizen at these meetings and how do you feel that that would change your role as it has stood so far? No, it's a fine hypothetical and it's plausible scenario. The, you wouldn't ask me to step down, you would just say I'm removed. My point, there's only about three or four people on that board that have any experience in building that works or even know what they're made of and I'm one of them. And my contributions to steering the direction in setting the priorities haven't happened throughout the meetings. Virtually I speak in turn on virtually every item that is discussed by the governing board and I wouldn't have that option as my only option would be to speak at the public comment period without having been informed by what happens later, it would not be effective. Further questions? Yeah. And maybe this is out of turn, but I'm curious to know if any of the other people at the table have any responses at this point to Stephen or any further information to add? I mean, I'm able to refute almost point by point the assertions that he's making here right now. I mean, in the interest of you getting out of here on time, I'm not sure that that's useful or helpful. I mean, if there's any specific issues that you want me to address or to talk about, I'm more than happy to do so. I mean, in terms of him speaking in turn, I was extremely close at one meeting to invoking the process to eject him from the meeting when we had a meeting in Middlesex. He was interrupting so many times and breaching the proper protocol. So that's, for example, always speaking in turn, sorry, this is not, that's not true. His assertion that he's the only one who knows anything about building networks is also untrue. We are a very tech heavy, which is unfortunate in a board. It would be nice if we had more finance people. We have one, we do have a lawyer on the board, but we have a lot of technical skills, including designing networks and understanding the technology at a pretty deep level. For those of you that don't know me, I'm a computer science professor at Norwich University and I have taught networking in the past. In my previous life, I've administered and built networks in the past for small companies up to Fortune 500 companies. This is not foreign and I'm confident in the technical chops of more than just the handful of folks that are being asserted here. So I mean, if there's anything else that you'd like me to address, I'm happy to do so, but going through all of them would be, I'm not sure again, I'm not sure that that would be helpful. Ashley. I'm just, I pulled up your email that was part of what we had all received on the council. How many people were voting members at the meeting where there was a motion made to request the council to remove Mr. Whitaker? I think we had a nearly full board. I would have to look back at the minutes, probably 14 or 15 people and I think there were two abstentions. So that, so everyone else voted? Correct, so it was like, yeah, like 12, zero, two. Okay. If you had to break it out, I think. Further questions? I think, go ahead. In that context, I think it's important to consider the issues on which I've been perceived to have been disruptive. The first one is the emails that you see that over the missing minutes from the first. The second was a request for data, which was forewarned. As soon as one of the members announced he had data from Washington Electric Co-op, in the open meeting I said, I'm going to make a request for that. I made a request for that and then I had to appeal to the head of the agency. Again, the appeal to the head of the agency was not responded to in compliance with law and then the data was destroyed, which has another set of implications. And the fact that these, the person responsible for not responding to these public records appeals to the head of the agency is not identified in the minutes, should be an indication of the problem. There was one more issue that came up. Oh, whether or not, I moved for an executive session that in order to discuss not only whether or not I would need to sue on this issue of the destroyed records and not provide it, but whether the district itself should litigate in order to get at the utility data, which is going to fundamentally be needed in order to design these networks. And it's a recurring problem, Green Mountain Power gives out all its polls and line data, whereas Washington Electric and Morrisville Electric say it's all secret. So that didn't get in the minutes either. The fact that folks perceive a more vigorous, and the third big issue is it took seven months for the paperwork to get delivered to the Secretary of State. The vote was done in May, in March, and it wasn't until October 9th that the certification of the existence of these things was filed with the Secretary of State. And I called him on it. I said, that's just not the way we need to do business. That's not accountable, it's not timely. And now the six month clock starts, which is a prohibition, a timeout period in which the district cannot spend any money. So these are very fundamental and core issues of accountability. And this body, the folks that want to shoot the messenger are annoyed by the fact that I call these to the attention. And that's why I was insisting on doing it in public session. Thank you, for the questions. Okay, so we have a request from the board to remove Stephen Whitaker from his appointment as alternate delegate. One possibility is that we can have a motion. Another possibility is, so we could, because this is a matter of an appointment, we could still go into an executive session to deliberate ourselves. What is your preference, team? And I could also ask you to table that as well in that you don't have to do anything here. Yes, I would move that we go into executive session. Okay. Second. Further discussion? All in favor, if you say aye. Okay, we'll be right back. That's why I pushed you. I had to get it away from me. You weren't doing your part. Okay, so do we have a motion to come out of executive session? So moved. Second. All in favor? Aye. Okay. Do we have a motion? Yes, at this point, as the president of the city council, I would move that we replace Stephen Whitaker as an alternate on the central Vermont internet board. I'll second. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great, thank you. And so just as a matter of form, we'll be advertising for that seat. And thank you, Stephen, for your service. And we want to just acknowledge that transparency and accountability in government is important. And holding our collective feet to the fires is a fine thing, but the manner and the tone, they do matter. So thank you, and we'll be finding someone new. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. The Harklet ordinance. So this is the second reading of this ordinance, or changes to this ordinance. And we had one change, which was the last time it said something like November 15th, when it should have said October 15th. So I think that's what it says now. So comments on the ordinance. So yeah, we'll have comments from the public and then council discussion. Oh yes, thank you. We're gonna open the public hearing. Good call. All right, go ahead, Dan. Hi, Dan Groberg, executive director of Montpelier Live and Liberty Street resident. Montpelier Live and the Montpelier Business Association would like to request that the council change the proposed date. You had planned to amend the date from November 8th or something like that to October 15th. We would like it to read through the third Friday in October, such that the Parklets would still be in place during moonlight madness. Hopefully several of you were downtown on Friday from moonlight madness and saw that it was an incredible success and brought a lot of energy and vibrancy to downtown and that the Parklets were well utilized on that evening. So we would like to request that they be in place through that event as always on the third Friday in October. Thank you. Thanks. Further comments from the public? Okay, any council discussion? I have a quick question that maybe Dan's best suited to answer. I guess, so I understand the request and I think it's a reasonable request, but my concern is that if we say no later than the third Friday, doesn't that sort of greatly increase the potential to have them removed by then? You can certainly make it later than that. I knew that was gonna be your comeback. No, I mean, we understand the impetus for the council to move it earlier than the November date. We'd just like it to stay sort of as late as possible. The whole MBA at our last meeting agreed that the vibrancy and vitality that the Parklets contribute to downtown is really important. And I know you've heard from another individual who had some comments about moving the date even earlier to release those five parking spots, but the MBA feels strongly that the Parklet vitality sort of outweighs those parking spots, especially during the tourist season. Great, thank you. Further comments or questions from the council? Yeah, go ahead. I think probably a lot of us were downtown last week on Moonlight Madness. It was beautiful weather for it. There was a lot of people downtown. There was a lot going on. I thought it was, it really just illustrated how great it can be and the value of doing things like the Parklets to attract people to be out and about downtown. And so I will make a motion to amend the time to the third Friday in October. After the third, like the third Saturday maybe? That's fine. Okay, is there a second? I'm just looking at the calendar. It's the third Saturday that might not necessarily be a third Friday, would it? I don't know when it falls, I mean it gets, I think it gets really tricky. So how about the 25th? Okay, well how do you feel about that? It's fine. Okay, all right, so the 25th then, is there a second? I'll second it. Okay, for the discussion on this piece of it. Yes. I think that we might need to adjust the fee provision to line up with the time that it's open. So my motion includes that provision as part of it. Is that okay? Yes, if there is no objections. Donna, is that cool with you? Yes, okay. Okay, so it's a couple pieces. Any further discussion about that? Okay, on favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. All right, any further comments about from the public or council on the rest of this ordinance? No? Okay, sorry, I'm all distracted. Too many things to sign up here. Okay, so I think at this point we would close the, we're gonna close the public hearing. And do we need to, I'm just checking to see if we need to pass any motion regarding the final version of this. Yeah, I think we do. I move that we amend the ordinances as pursuant to the proposal as amended earlier this evening. And I think we need to approve the second reading of it. Okay. We can include that. That's part of it, yes. Okay. Second. Okay, great. Further discussion? On favor please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great. Okay, thank you. Did you, you're good with that, John? Yeah, no, all good. Okay. I'm there, I'm on it. Awesome, okay, we're moving right along. Okay. All right, the Art Synergy Master Plan. I know there's a number of people here for that, so welcome to the front table. Well, that's that. No. I don't know, apparently. I love it. Beautiful, beautiful hard copies. It is great to be here again, talking about beauty and inspiration and community engagement. And we're happy to bring that energy to the council meeting tonight to really talk about the process that's been happening for the last three years around the Public Art Master Plan. I'm gonna frame up really quickly where we've been and how we got here just in about two minutes time. Amanda Golden is back, our consultant on the project and Nathan's been very involved in the advisory team and on the, and on their work. And so Amanda's gonna talk a little bit about who was engaged in the process and what we heard and then I'm gonna wrap up very briefly about the action plan that we're suggesting in the invitation for action from the council. So we are here because of the council's investment in this process three years ago when they pledged $50,000 to match a potential grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, which was awarded and launched this public planning to identify and create a master plan for public art. And of course, we also commissioned an artwork for the Taylor Street Transit Center at that time as well. What we're asking tonight for the council to consider is to adopt the plan as public policy. And I think everybody has seen the plan or I think I've gone, I have met with everybody and gone over questions previously about the plan. So we're gonna just touch highlights on it. So we'd like the plan adopted this evening. And also we'd like the council to pursue a path forward in the budgeting process to identify $50,000 and FY20 budget to fund the first year of the plan. We understand that that decision can't be made tonight but we would like to have the council express its interest in pursuing that in the budgeting process. Great, thanks, Paul. So how did we get to where we are today? We spent a lot of time asking the community about their vision. And I kind of wanna just touch on who we asked and what we asked them. And you can kind of review this on page six is where it begins. We had over 200 participants to kick off the process being engaged over 40 stakeholders. We've got with them either individually or in small groups. And many of you I have met with as well. Many of the old council members actually, a lot of you are new faces that I have not yet had the privilege to meet. We asked about how public art relates to their sense of place, relates to building and enhancing the identity of Montpelier, how it engages the community into thinking about what they think about themselves, also what they think about their community and how it can increase pride and their attachment to their city. And then ultimately what their vision is for the city when it comes to public art. We had our first meeting to kick off the process at Lost Nation. It was a pop-up museum where people were able to bring things that they thought represented their home. It was really interesting to see all the different objects that people brought. Very excited. And they were asked to just bring those objects so that we could understand what are those special qualities about Montpelier that don't exist anywhere else that should be showcased and celebrated through your public art strategy. We also had three artist-led workshops. The first was a collaboration with Kim Bent at Lost Nation. Mime and Clown, Rob Merman. And then we also had Alana Precourt-Finney who was a choreographer. And we really asked the public to think about through movement of how performance art can be public art. The second teaching workshop was with teaching artist, Gauri Savore at Main Street Middle. And I hope all of you were able to see that installation that is actually on the front cover of the plan. But students were creating wind sculptures. And each of those sculptures had small storytelling elements about the things that they love about Montpelier. They were really beautiful. And some of the photos are in the document. The third workshop was led by Ward Joyce and it focused on public spaces. We had five other artists and architects who helped sketch ideas for how public art and placemaking can live in Montpelier. And those were sites specific. And you can actually see the outcomes of some of those sites in the document, beginning on page 30. And then we also hosted three artist talks at Bookspealer Records, Damienas. And then we also had one at the Kellogg Hubbard Library. And that was just really to get the community in to talk about what is public art, how does it live and what does it look like when it's being commissioned and then installed. And then lastly, we had this really interesting info sharing brainstorm idea mashing Q&A session that I think is so Montpelier, where we shared kind of how we got to the point that we were at. And we brought in three experts to talk through the process and what public art is. Sarah Katz from Burlington, Lars Torres from Local64 and then Gauri Savore, who is the founder of the River Lights Lantern Parade. And then all of that was also backed up by an online survey. So anybody who couldn't participate also had the opportunity to participate online and let us know what they thought. And I wanted to kind of go through all of those items to really show you how many hands touch this process so that you can understand, it's been three years since you've committed the funding, but it's also been a year and a half of people hearing about public art and anxiously anticipating the outcome of this document. And we're very proud to put it forward because we believe that it represents the community's voice. And then backing up all of those public meetings and opportunities for input was an advisory council who really played an integral role in making sure that the recommendations were reflective of what is possible in Montpelier. And so we do feel that the recommendations that Paul is gonna talk about really do reflect the next steps in the future for public art in Montpelier. So you might be asking, what do we hear? Great, you talked to the community, what do we hear from them? And on page nine, you can start kind of flipping through what we actually heard from the community. There are six points. I'm not gonna read them because you can read them on your own time. But the thing that I think is really important about what came out of the planning process is the vision for the public art program that you're a city, we hope tonight will kick off. And I do wanna read that. The vision of the Montpelier public art program is to enrich the lives of all citizens through honoring the city's history, celebrating its culture and creating rich experiences for residents and visitors through art and public places. And that vision statement was really worked through and talked about over and over because we always came back to celebrating who Montpelier is, but also celebrating the creative culture and the diversity that is here in Montpelier and really celebrating those quality of life items that exists that everybody knows and loves about Montpelier. And then the last thing that I wanted to talk about before Paul goes into talking about the priority action plan, actually begins on page 30. And a lot of these conceptual projects and programs are direct outcomes of a lot of the ideation that we had throughout the planning process. And you can see the sketches on 31. And as those kind of go through this chapter, these are the outcome of one of the artist-led workshops by Ward Joyce. It's a lot to talk about public art and how it lives and in the abstract, but this workshop really allowed community members to kind of flesh out how public art could actually live in spaces that are in Montpelier. Not just conceptually, what does public art look like in a park or what does it look like in an alley? But these really presented an opportunity for the public to view what public art could be in those specific locations. And when you adopt the plan tonight, hopefully, you're not bound for implementation of these projects and programs, but these are really meant to be conceptual and nature for the newly seated public art commission that will be seated next year. And I did want to highlight some that I thought were really exciting for the community. The one that I think is a really easy to implement public art program is on page 36. And that's the bridges. Something that kept coming up was your history of trains and moving people over your rivers. And these bridges should be highlighted and celebrated. Not every city has a river and not every city uses bridges to move to different places in the city and how can art be something that celebrates that special element of your city. You'll also see that it goes into programs. So programs are things that don't have specific locations but are more programming opportunities to get art into the community. And some of those are vacant store fronts to galleries. There are some really interesting programs like sculptures on loan that are low cost, but really have a high impact. And you can explore these projects and programs if you hadn't already, but they're really exciting. And I hope that when the public art commission is seated that they also find these to be as exciting as the planning process did and those who participated. Great, she's looking at me. All right. So just exactly what does this call us to action? What do we want to see happen as a result of this work? And how do we think it can transform Montalier? So please open your hymnals to page 47 where the priority action plan begins. And I'm just gonna hit highlights. We're not gonna read all through this, but the first two terms, the short term and the midterm really articulate nicely our aspirations for this. Of course, we talk about key partners. The primary thing that the plan will create is a public art commission, which will lead all of the work of the public art plan. So the public key partners with the public art commission or key partners in the plan are listed here. We have some strategic partners and those lists, of course, will grow as the work grows. But starting on page 49, really the big goals on the first two years, of course, we want the plan adopted as public policy, which we hope will happen tonight to create the public art commission. We're also requesting, of course, in this first year that we pursue $50,000 to fund the plan and FY20 so that we can begin implementing and drawing energy into this work. And a really key thing that Amanda's helped us be very strategic about is that there's some very easy to implement projects that we can tackle right away in the first two years to really show wins and to easily draw the community into what public art means and to not spend a lot of money necessarily. That ranges everything from, I know, a new project that's on the table with the garage and how we might animate that through a mural as in the current rendering. And there are any number of projects that could easily be implemented in these first two years. Once we're up and running and everything is settled and the commission has had time to live with itself, the next step, of course, is to start leveraging the city's funds into more funding. And that's one of the critical elements of funding from a city for this type of project is that it immediately allows us to attract other grants and other private funds to make more of that 50,000. And that's not unlike what we're doing right now with the Arts Energy Project where we started with 50 from the NEA, 50 from the city, and raising an additional 50 from the community. So by year two, we fully expect to have awareness of those opportunities and acting on them. And a really critical thing happened in this process that I didn't expect. We started talking about how art lives or how we want art to live in Montpelier and the notion about a broader cultural plan for Montpelier came up in almost every one of these workshops. And I want to be really clear that what's in front of you is not a cultural plan. It is a public art plan. It is a plan to invest in the infrastructure of Montpelier that helps define our city. There's a much broader discussion here around what we want our cultural escape to be. And that would be developed through a cultural plan. And we're suggesting that the Public Art Commission would be the launching pad for that plan in the years three to five, which would take our aspirations to a new level around how culture lives in Montpelier. I'm not gonna talk much about the long range plans because five years is eons away, but basically as this grows, we're looking at large scale works. How can we understand how to manage those, where the funding comes from and start implementing some really iconic pieces in years five, five on. I'm gonna pause. Well, invite questions. Yeah, great. Questions. The council. I'm just really, really excited about this, like incredibly so. Thank you. We are too. That you did so well in the booklet and reflecting the work. It's just beautiful and inspiring. It's very good. And I do appreciate, Paul, that you brought up the cultural plan because people asked me about that and it is different, and so that's good. And we talked a little bit when we met, Paul, about the art on the garage and whether that would go under this art commission and would that be our first expenditure towards, quote, 50,000. So just wanna bring that up too. Right, and I failed to mention that there's that obvious possible revenue source if the garage goes forward and as the rendering has it, there's funding out of that budget to pull into this 50,000. Also, I wanna thank Montpelier Live for their work on this project. Dan sits on the executive team and through lots of conversations with them, they've agreed to commit 5,000 of their DID funds each year into the $50,000 pool. They're currently using the 5,000 for our projects through their design committee, so it made sense that all of those funds be consolidated here. So thanks to Montpelier Live. And of course, they'll have a designated seat on the Arts Commission. There are three designated seats, one for VCFA, one for Montpelier Live, and one from the Economic Development Corporation, and then four at-large members. Great, for the questions. I would just thank you so much for taking the time to meet with each of us individually. I think that allowed us to do a deeper dive here. And as we look at some of the bigger projects we're moving forward on, I think we're at risk of it. Taking on kind of a sterile feel if it's not accompanied by a very vibrant-like arts project, like this here. So this is key as far as our future goals, and really appreciate it. Go ahead, Glenn. I was also very pleased to talk with you about this, and I'm really excited about the prospects for the plan. I am also curious to know, maybe it's somewhere in here that I didn't catch, but I'm curious to know how much excitement you've encountered informally about who might be interested in being on a public art commission. Are there people who have said, if it exists, I want to be on the list? Yes, and I can tell you, without particularly naming names, Montpelier is extraordinarily rich in expertise around art and public art, and Nathan, for instance, we can name Nathan because he's here in his office, in his prior role as Executive Director of the Helen Day Arts Center, has experienced in commissioning art, and he helped us. We have a resident in town who works for the State Department and travels all over the world repairing the U.S.'s art that lives in embassies, and he lives a couple houses down from me. We have residents in town who curate galleries in other communities, so there's going to be no problem. I think we're going to have really a rich pool to draw from of experience and skilled people. And probably a tough decision for all of you to just make for. So I'm very excited about this as well. I think this plan is just, it's so exciting. There's so many great ideas in here. So I'm excited to create the commission. I think that's going to be easy. That's probably the easiest part. But then, and you and I have had this conversation, and so I just want to, maybe you've had this conversation amongst yourselves as well, but just so everybody knows what I was thinking about this in terms of money, and we're not going to be making any decisions tonight. This is a part of the budgeting process that we'll be having over the next couple of months. But one of the things that I am interested in is having some kind of a plan for the money as we move forward. And I know that's maybe not necessarily normal in lots of other places, but what I have learned is that there seems to be no normal. And that, I mean, my, I just want you to, my preference, would be that just like any other committee or, you know, like DID money or even for the Immopular Development Corporation, they come to us with a budget to say, here's what we intend to spend money on this year. And that's something that I hope that, you know, when, you know, when you come to us for money, I mean, maybe it's 50,000 every year, but even if it's just 50,000 every year, that's fine. But having some plan of like, this is what we intend to use it for, even if it's we intend to bank it because we want to do this big thing. I just wanted to know what the plan is. And I mean, sort of similar, there's a lot of parallels there with like the Housing Trust Fund. You know, they have some certain things that they will say, you know, we're going to be spending this money on, you know, first time home buyers program, but you know, we're going to be saving up and there are these big projects that we want to do. So, and that, I'm not sure how that works with the first iteration, but especially if the garage passes, there is kind of an obvious first project that we'll need to do. But what were you going to say? If it's okay to respond. I think it's a great point in terms of the public trust and public funds. You know, I think, it might be useful to look at the process that went into the One Taylor Street project and that commission as a pilot and a trust building exercise between the public and what is possible with public engagement. And I think that, I don't think anybody sitting here in this room would wish to jump over a good process but I could deliver a budget to you tomorrow but it wouldn't include the voices of the yet to be formed commission so that would be cart before the horse. So I would argue that it might be an exercise in trust the first year and then to pile on because you've given me the mic. You know, there are so many wonderful things that a city must do sidewalks, roads, water, unglamorous, absolutely essential and extraordinarily expensive, infrastructure is not cheap. In that context this really minor investment has the potential to pole vault this city over and over again to be a leader in this state and in New England as a destination for arts and culture and you look at the sort of multiplier on dollars spent on arts and culture, especially public dollars and it's really tremendous and so I encourage the leadership to consider that strongly look at the One Taylor Street pilot as an example and have the faith and courage to back that with a $50,000 investment the first year and let's keep being unique, let's keep being better than what we are now and better than our neighbors because we want to be special. Amanda, do you want to talk for a minute about that? Yeah, I also, in anticipation of this question, on page 58 there actually is a requirement for the commission to do a public art work plan and that allows the commission to understand what their budget will be and when they come to you and ask, they're going to have kind of a plan. Essentially the artist is who decides what the art is but you can see on page 58 the following steps are going to be taken so they understand how much funding is available, they're going to identify which projects are going to be paid for by the funding that's going to be put forth and then they're going to develop a work plan that includes locations, goals, and budgets for each of the public art projects that they're going to do. Great, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Excellent, Jack. In thinking about this project, I'm thinking about this year is the 30th anniversary of Lost Nation being upstairs in City Hall and it was a pretty big investment of money to be able to improve the space so the theater could work there but I don't think anyone would question that has been a tremendous benefit to the city and Paul, you said to me this morning has anyone ever asked someone to visit Montpelier for the art and I can say my in-laws typically come up here to visit us every fall and they usually try to time it so they're coming at the time when they're they can see a show at Lost Nation and so I think this is great, obviously the budget process is what it is and so supporting this now doesn't mean yes, I'm definitely on board for $50,000 in this year's budget but I strongly support this and I think this is a great job. Good. I want to say that personally at least I will be going hard for $50,000 in the budget and also I want to I've been thinking about this a little bit over the last few days I am comfortable especially with the work plan that you just described with the idea of if we adopt this plan seeding it with the money that will make it function as much as possible I'm also just curious and I don't know if this is a place to go through it quickly but in terms of scheduling assuming we were to adopt the plan tonight we can presumably go right ahead and advertise for members and the commission could be formed very shortly I imagine and their first directive could be to scramble a budget as fast as possible I want to jump in here although I appreciate where you're going with this plan I mean you're kind of theoretically but the manager in me wants to what's the realism so what we're really this is definitely a cart before the horse issue but what the council can hold on to here is that this plan created by one of the country's leading consultants in public art is best practice this has been vetted by friends and members of the advisory team include Michelle Bailey who's here tonight who runs the public art program for the state through the Vermont Arts Council David Sheets was on the advisory team he has also seen this plan have been heavily involved this is as good an assurance that you will ever get that this process will work and we will come out with community engaged and inspiring work there is a leap the first year because of the timeline in order for this to happen we need to be doing everything at once the first year but we won't be able to deliver a budget and a project plan in time for you to get through the holiday season for our budget cycle perfectly reasonable thanks for throwing that out there I appreciate it well I agree with you on the timeline but you've given us the essence to leap I mean there isn't a whole lot we have to trust here so I think we'll find some money all right I think we need a motion I won't make the motion I'm sorry no please no no I move that we adapt the public art master plan as presented tonight funding decisions pending our budget process don't even need that part I will second that oh dinker I'm just so excited so as a part of that might you also want to create the commission yes I move that we create the commission that's okay with you if you're adopting the plan adopting the plan so that's maybe understood to be a part of it okay great we're adopting the plan great for the discussion all in favor please say aye opposed great so it's understood then thank you just one last this is Amanda's last visit to Montpelier for this project I'll be back I want to just extend a huge thank you and recognition to the extraordinary work she's done in leading us and advising us in creating something that we can all be proud of thank you and likewise to Paul congratulations great so we'll be advertising for those seats thank you everybody please leave your copies okay take a look and pass them on all right the downtown improvement districts team do we need a break sorry I'm sorry we're so on the ball just getting right up here too we're gonna take a five minute break okay okay so we're back from our five minute break all right I'll turn it over to you all okay Dan Grubberg I'm the executive director of Montpelier alive David Marco board president won't appeal you're alive so we are here tonight to review our activities with the downtown improvement district and present a proposed plan for FY19 so that's actually the year we're in currently we're a little behind on the due to when I started the position and when we were able to get the schedule so the the downtown improvement district as you know is a special assessment on commercial property within the designated area of the downtown Montpelier alive controls the spending of the budget with city council approval we do not get any administrative fee or anything for managing the funds we certainly supplement a lot of our activities but also require effort on our behalf to expend them so I'll just make that point before I go any further I do want to clarify quickly what you heard from the public art plan which is that starting in FY20 that we plan to propose that there is $5,000 included that would go towards the public art he we obviously can't commit that because the council needs to approve that and also just wanted to clarify that you will not see that in the documents tonight because tonight we're talking about FY19 not FY20 so just wanted to clarify that before we went any further so we're here for two reasons tonight one is to review that what we've been doing with the downtown improvement district funds last year to present a proposed plan for FY19 and also to talk briefly about the Montpelier alive appropriation which is separate from the DID so I'm just going to walk you through the report the paper point if you will I don't have a path so we sort of break the activities into three primary areas advertising and marketing downtown design and our arts and events grants so the advertising and marketing in the plan that was approved by council was about $33,800 a little bit more than half of the total funds available from the DID which is just under $60,000 that's split into three primary purposes one is in-state advertising sorry four purposes one is in-state advertising one is out-of-state advertising one is printed materials or materials generally and one is the website which is serves as Montpelier live website but is also a very tourism focused website towards visitors to Montpelier the in-state advertising is as it sounds focused on attracting in-state visitors so people from Washington County and around Vermont to come visit for all of our events almost all of that money goes towards direct advertising radio, print, social media including advertising events that are happening in Montpelier like Moonlight Madness etc they also I'm passing around some materials you'll see one of those pieces is an ad that appears in Best of Central Vermont magazine that's something that we do advertising in the world has various seasonal guides the Times-Argus has various seasonal guides promoting the various events that are happening in Montpelier we also use funds to advertise new businesses that have opened in Montpelier and work with them on some grand opening activities you may have been at the mayor was at the onion river outdoors and Rome grand opening event a portion of the funds go to out-of-state advertising we work with the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing because they have a match program where they will match one-to-one up to $10,000 funds that go through them they also have tremendous buying power because they are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on marketing at Vermont so they have bulk rates in their papers etc so some of the things that we've spent the money on this last year and I'll just say that we've spent only a small portion of that because we're targeting a lot of that towards coming year we spent money on the Discovery Map which is the tourist map that you see everyone walking around with to point people towards the website so they can learn about events and restaurants and things that may not be on the map itself we've done Facebook advertising Instagram advertising we've done advertising through Waze which is a mapping service so as you drive past Montpelier it will suggest that you stop in Montpelier and actually we've had thousands of actions taken on that for a very little amount of money so it's really reaching people at the point of decision like should I stop in Montpelier which is exciting and then the Boston Herald article which is circulating and there's a picture right here this is something we do a lot of advertorial content where we're essentially paying for the article to be written about Montpelier we get to choose sort of the theme they have a writer that interviews people about it and they actually write the article but the theme of this article that appeared on September 6 in the Boston Herald and also had a digital campaign with 100,000 impressions of the theme was sort of Montpelier as your base camp for central Vermont adventures so stay and eat in Montpelier and also enjoy the things in Montpelier and the surrounding towns sort of acknowledging this more regional approach that we're trying to take where people are not going to spend 100% of their time and money in Montpelier but hopefully they'll stay in Montpelier and die in Montpelier the materials similarly we're reserving a big portion of the materials funds for a project that I'll talk about briefly but what we have spent it on last year was the series on a stick campaign which hopefully you've seen which is kind of a whimsical way to acknowledge that series was not on the state house we worked with the friends of the state house on this project to hand out these fun little paper series that you can take on your travels and take pictures and post them on social media it was really engaging people had fun with it people took pictures of series at the Berlin Wall at the Leaning Tower of Pisa all over the world actually and they all have a downtown Montpelier logo on them and a hashtag that people were using we also spent funds on the street light pole banners which are at DPW now waiting to be installed so hopefully that will happen soon money is spent on the website we've done a lot of work on the website I hope that some of you have looked at it recently it is now up to date which is the first step but also developed a lot of new content for it series of itineraries for different interests so we've now launched three of those one for beer lovers it's like 36 hours in Montpelier for beer lovers, one for art lovers one for history lovers that have been done so they are curated by experts in the area so the arts one was done by Jeanne Kallen the director of the T.W. Wood Gallery the beer one was done by the manager at the three penny tap room the history one was done by the outreach person at the Vermont Historical Society so they are really quite nice pieces we also have been doing sort of seasonal things like what to do in spring what to do in summer and hidden treasures getting a lot of public input on it which has raised a lot of great engagement and we've been improving the business directory and launching photos we've had professional photos taken in a lot of the retail stores downtown and launched a really nice directory of businesses with beautiful listings that show what it's like to be inside the store done some interviews with some store owners we also launched a weekly email newsletter which I hope you subscribe to called Vermont served daily which is sort of our brand tagline every week it has some feature items and also the top five events coming up this week it's a great way to showcase not only what Montpelier Live is doing but all the other wonderful things happening in town and some of the DID funds support the costs of the email marketing client we have about 2,500 people on our email list but actually we're in the middle of a campaign with the state that will add another 5,000 emails to our email list at basically zero cost to us we did a giveaway contest where the Capital Plaza contributed a three night stay and we have $700 in downtown shopping gift certificates that were all donated and people have entered that contest we spent maybe $100 promoting it actually the state spent $2,000 on social media promotion for that campaign at no cost to us we get to keep the emails and in the process people learn about Montpelier so it was really nice the second stop me if you have any questions I'm going fast for your sake the second category which is about $20,000 is downtown design that consists of wayfinding signage, holiday decorations flower planting and maintenance and streetscape wayfinding signage where funds to pay the consultant to continue the plan the holiday decorations you will see coming mid-November to downtown but these funds were for last year's decorations but we get garland to wrap all the light poles lights etc plantings and maintenance all the flower barrels and baskets downtown we spent a lot of money doing a new landscape the plan itself was donated by DD Brash getting a lot of flowers for City Hall Plaza and planting those this year also the watering can I ask you a question about that does that include Langdon Street Bridge the Langdon Street Bridge itself it does not include okay does not include and then $2,000 for streetscape this year we purchased three sets of new metal trash cans to replace the ugly plastic trash cans so there are still nine sets to go that is a work in progress and then the final piece is the community arts and events grants so this is really about leveraging Montpellier Live's promotions and expertise and adding funding to events that take place downtown to really make those events great so we funded four projects and this year it's a public grant application that we make available one of the projects actually was cancelled and the funds have been refunded and we plan to re-give them out next year so to speak but the other three projects are also a series of community art workshops by the Art Resources Association and then Abundant Silence during the last art walk did a public concert in front of the senior center that was very well attended so that's what we spent the money on last year essentially and I will note as we look towards what we plan to spend next year is that first of all our fiscal year Montpellier Live's fiscal year does not line up with the city's fiscal year calendar fiscal year and the second piece is that sometimes we sort of bank funds to spend on bigger projects that we anticipate coming so this proposed budget you will see that there are some changes instead of how we're spending the money versus last year the biggest is that we're proposing to spend only $2,500 on materials that's because we did not spend a majority of the funds from last year there's about $8,000 in that materials line from last year's budget that has not been spent yet that we plan to roll over so to speak the other sort of most significant change is well two of them one is proposing to spend some money on photography and videography we haven't had new photos taken in a couple years we didn't do July 3rd photos last year we just have to keep that kind of stuff fresh for advertising because it's pretty obvious people see like oh coffee corner is not there anymore so we need to take new photos we work with a local photographer often with Paul Richardson sometimes with John Snow and the other piece is wayfinding signage so we're hoping that this is the last piece that finishes out the consultant and also brings us up to the $100,000 max that I've spoken about previously that's required for the downtown transportation fund grant that we apply to in the spring so I'm happy to go through all of these or just take questions I will say that one of the things that I was passing around was the Discover Waterbury touristy pamphlet went all the way around and we are proposing with the materials funds to do something similar for Montpelier even in the electronic era these are very popular especially with a certain demographic 20,000 of them planning on them lasting for two years and actually they ran out early we would distribute them at state welcome centers at various other tourist friendly locations that's the gist I'm happy to dive into any of the categories or any questions if anyone has any comes or questions okay I have a couple one is I know I just asked this question about did this include funding for the lane street bridge and that's fine it didn't at some point I would like for the city to figure out how we might go about maintaining the plantings that are on the lane street bridge I think they are a great asset they are really beautiful and whether that means that we incorporated as just a contracted item and then we can work together with Montpelier Alive to add it on to the contract that you already have with the person who maintains them or if it's something separate that we do or if it's just incorporated into the parks budget I think we need to figure that out but I just want to flag that as an upcoming we're happy to work with lane street alive we asked them for a specific request for funds and did not receive one and we didn't feel comfortable just handing out city funds without having a specific request for them so we'll continue to work on figuring that out so that's one thing the second thing is that well I love all the graphs they make me very happy and particularly with the metrics one of the things that we spend a lot of money on with this is advertising and marketing and so having the statistics about how effective that marketing is I find really helpful and I think it's you know good to know what's a good use of our advertising dollars like what's the most effective mechanism sometimes the advertising is going to be more measurable than other times sometimes it's about establishing the brand so that it's sort of in the back of somebody's head like I want to plan a trip this weekend and I see something about that cool town in Vermont you know it may be months later that there's an impact it's not necessarily measurable obviously things that we do online you have things like impressions and click through rates and things like that one question there was an abbreviation in the key engagement metrics that's Y-O-Y year over year so what did you say Matt I'm not sure which specifically you're referring to so the increase so it's like 6.3% increase from the previous year correct okay great you know as you were describing some other metrics you know like the decisions that people make over the ways app you know that's those are I mean I know that might be a small thing but it's an indicator for us that like again we're spending our money well and anyway that's another thing that you know as we think through like how do we report out in part like this is kind of I'm trying to think of like there's another time when you all report out to us we're asked to present once a year once a year that's not this time that is this time right okay so it is this time so I mean that I'm happy to present as often as you might think once is fine having anyway all that data you know that says that like this was worth our money and this is what the effect is of as much as there are measurable effects it's great and we as often as possible try and leverage Montpelier live funds or resources when we're doing these things so you know we spent money marketing moonlight madness so that was advertising money that was from the DID but it was funds program funds from Montpelier live that supported all the musicians and performers downtown so there's nice synergy there great done I'm a little confused would you explain the Langdon Street alive I thought it was we're shared I mean you see Langdon Street totally separate because they did a special thing in the summer Langdon Street alive is its own organization which has stole our name that borrowed our wording from our name they are a separate organization from us and they were we provided them with the opportunity to apply for one of the downtown arts and events grants and they did not apply for one of those grants and then when there was a e-mail that circulated I'm not sure if the whole council got it or just the mayor Langdon Street alive asking for funding for the plantings we we found volunteers for Langdon Street alive to water the plants that was one of the concerns that they had is the watering they use our waters we found two volunteers to water the plants for them they had also asked for funding so we asked for a specific proposal of how it would be spent and we did not receive that so if I wanted to see lights on Langdon Street bridge would you like to go to this other organization well there will be holiday lights on Langdon Street bridge this year okay is that a good way of giving you what you want and not answering your question thank you okay further questions okay so I think yes go ahead I know this is an appropriation request so I'm just wondering well we're out of the regular budget cycle so what does this mean how do we do this was this money already in the budget the voters passed but it hasn't been appropriated because we haven't had the request yet or what the funds the tax payers specifically approve the downtown improvement budget tax assessment the funds have been raised by the tax payers and then I can't tell you whether because I've lost track of what was last year's money versus this year's money but the city pays into installments to Montpelier Live there was an agreement several years ago that Montpelier Live would manage the funds and what we are tasked with by that agreement several years ago is to outline a specific plan for how the funds would be expended to city council and that is the plan that is presented today that needs to be approved by the council so this is not a part of our regular budget correct which is why I would feel okay about approving this tonight because it's not it's separate but it's in city funds that have already been raised and passed by the voters yes clear? I know the FY year and calendar year so I would assume what we allocated and the voters allocated for FY 19 you're now spending in your 2019 year we have not spent any of funds from FY 19 yet for one we had because I only came into this position six months into the FY and there was six months without a director in the FY 18 appropriation there were funds that weren't yet expended so I was spending funds that had already been approved by city council for FY 18 so there have not been FY 19 funds spent yet so that's why when they vote for FY 20 for the city budget that would become your FY money I mean your 2020 money correct which I would come back to hopefully in June next time or May I suppose exactly what they voted correct okay is there a motion I'll move to approve the downtown improvement district budget for $59,960 second for the discussion all in favor please say aye thank you very much and then well I do briefly want to also discuss the Montpelier live appropriation which is so separate from the DID budget now we're talking about the general fund Montpelier live receives some city funding it's through the community enhancements line in the general fund budget Montpelier live has received $22,600 since we were founded in 1999 every year it has not increased we pay $2,600 in rent and technology support back to the city so it's functionally $20,000 to receive some specific funds for events like the city sharing a security cost for July 3rd there's also a contribution towards our fall slash winter event as habits frame in the budget it's been used for first night in the past it's been used for flannel Friday other fall events but sort of the base support for Montpelier live as an organization is that $22,600 minus our rent that supports my salary and our general work and like I said it has not gone up since 1999 and so I'll just talk briefly about how the work of Montpelier live has changed we have taken on some functions that the city may otherwise take on I point actually to the DID budget as a prime example of that so even though we are able to expend funds which is a great support to us it's also increased work for Montpelier live we don't get an administrative fee or anything like that to manage the funds so we're administering this grant program we're doing the plantings and blah blah blah that needs management and that amount hasn't changed also obviously costs go up for everything every year including salaries and just generally advertising costs go up office supply costs go up everything has gone up but the appropriation has not I think I'd like you to feel that high from Friday and Moonlight Madness again briefly which is that the work that Montpelier live does is really vital to Montpelier when you go downtown and you have that feeling that you're in a special place that you may not realize it but a lot of that is due to the work of Montpelier live it's the events that we create it's the streetscape that's beautiful and has holiday decorations and plantings and flowers it's supporting the downtown businesses so that we have a thriving downtown with the low vacancy rate full of local stores and restaurants so I again I know that you can't you're not allocating any funds from the budget general fund budget tonight to go forward into your budget process we'd like to request that the allocation to Montpelier live be increased by $10,000 so from $22,600 to $32,600 which I know is a large jump in one year percentage wise but will hopefully make up for some lost time and then we would anticipate increasing to go along with inflation going forward but it would be a catch up year there's also been some discussion which is not finalized yet of increasing the hours of the executive director position right now it's only a 30 hour position even if that does not happen it's likely that we'll need to have additional support whether it's from paid interns or hiring outside contractors to help because the work has only increased the expectations and demands on our organization have increased because everyone would like us to be doing everything which and so I hope you'll consider that request going forward thank you I don't understand why you wouldn't put in your DID budget administrative expenses is that something we won't let you do it was specifically in the original guidelines from city council that it could not go towards any salaries so in order for you to do the ID money we have to give you money as a direct I think we should review that that's interesting any grant when you administrate it there's administrative money so I think we need to review that I acknowledge that that's one option I'd also just say what out of the DID budget would you like to cut in exchange so all part of the conversation further questions okay thank you and yeah for sure okay alright so Kate welcome good crowd tonight I know right theoretically we were going to be also talking about the net zero resolution also the energy efficiency update which would you like to talk about first maybe we'll take up the resolution first okay and I can give a little background on the thing that you maybe just voted on in the consent agenda but give you a little background about what that's all about and then the second piece is just a sue and bill ask me to come in and give a little update specifically on our municipal working group and what we've been working on related to the energy audits and revolving loan fund and kind of status of city buildings so but first I'll just tell you why we put together this resolution basically over the last year or more you know the original idea of the net zero Montpelier goal was adopted by city council in 2014 and as the chair of the energy advisory committee I don't know if I introduced myself the you know as we've been going along just kind of had a lot of discussion within our committee about like well what exactly is the goal and went back through all the minutes to try and find what it said in the city council and it really didn't say anything specific about how to define it so we spent some time as a committee we had a strategic planning retreat in June we you know took a few hours to really try and hash this out and the main question point has been you know I think overall those of you who have been familiar with this idea of the net zero goal net zero for Montpelier by 2030 and the question was is that for the entire city every residence every business all the municipal functions all the transportation so kind of like the bigger definition would be like the whole community or a more refined definition would be just municipal buildings and functions and depending on who you talk to there were interpretations of what that goal was so we basically came after a lot of discussion came out with this kind of the second page of the resolution but basically saying that we are committed to 100% renewable or offset for municipal government operations so again city buildings city transportation heating electrical but then pushing off the community wide goal to 2050 and that's more in alignment with the whole state's goals the state's goal is 90% by 2050 so we would still be stretching and reaching a little bit further than that the other distinction being that the 2030 goal has the option of doing offsets so if there are certain areas where we can't get to 100% renewable like say in the fuel for our heavy equipment or something like that then we could potentially use purchase offsets to be able to say we got to 100% that's it but we didn't allow that option in the 2050 version so we have more time so that was really the purpose of this was to get this on paper get it in the record as this is how we're defining our goal and then the three directions basically at the bottom talk about how we are asking city staff and all the different city departments to be part of this process so basically asking each city department to identify opportunities to align their policies, procedures and practices with the goal and to report on it annually what we'd really like to be able to do is have a little section in the annual report that goes through different departments and helps kind of nudge the departments to identify what they're doing and what they could be doing we recommend that this recommends that city staff develop a 10 year plan basically how do we get to this 2030 goal what are the actions and this would be in addition to the overall energy plan that will be part of the city plan or planning commission is working on and then the third piece was directing the planning commission to just review the zoning bylaws and the new city plan to make sure that it's in alignment with these net zero goals so does anyone have questions about the resolution I would just like to highlight that I love this but my highlight is more in terms of the parking garage and I guess it just seems to be an interesting juxtaposition that we're talking about sort of by 2030 100% of our city will be net zero and we can do offsets if we need to but that we're contemplating spending $10.5 million on in essence fossil fuel infrastructure and so I just want the council to be mindful that we're sort of talking out of both sides okay well I voted no but I think it's important that we're mindful that this is sort of in opposite with that in a lot of ways oh sorry I want to cut you off I would actually disagree and the reason is because it's very likely that no single solution is going to exist in terms of transportation for everybody and a very real part of my vision for the future of transportation in Montpelier includes a substantial number of electric vehicles in fact there's probably going to be a lot of I hope autonomous electric vehicles and they will need to charge somewhere during the day and we're already planning for there to be electric vehicle charging stations in this facility and my hope is that we can as that demand increases that we can expand the number of electric vehicle charging stations in that in that area and then we can be removing parking from elsewhere in the city particularly that is not equipped to provide that kind of charging infrastructure so any other questions about the resolution about the resolution I was really glad for the last page it was a bit long but the last page really got very specific thank you for that you probably do need to actually vote on this well we did it was in the consent agenda okay great I'm not sure it was abundantly clear but great if it was clear to you you made the motion to move it to a consent agenda to add it in I thought I added the street closure both of them okay great we're going to great then that's fantastic thank you we appreciate it alright so basically in terms of the municipal buildings update I wanted to kind of go back over the last two years to get everyone up to speed as to kind of what we've been doing and how we got to this point and then kind of explains where we're going next so two years ago September 2016 the council approved the net zero revolving loan fund and that was taking $20,000 out of the general reserve fund and allocating it specifically for municipal energy efficiency projects in a revolving loan fund so as savings are accrued by these energy savings projects it goes back into the fund and grows over time so we started with $20,000 we got a $5,000 kind of match from Efficiency Vermont and then we basically after that happened we were like okay we got to figure out the system we've got to put a committee together so we actually have a subcommittee that involves three city staff and three members of MIAC and we worked with a group called SEI the Sustainable Endowments Institute so they have this whole they support organizations mostly institutions of higher ed in setting up these funds so we've got put all those materials together and we did a first pilot project in 2017 which was a relatively small one it's a capacitor at the water treatment plant not very sexy basically it doesn't actually save energy but it saves money because it reduces peak demand charges so it saved us about $100 a month and we've already we spent the money it's already paid itself back and it was a good like small test of the system and so once it's paid back then we take 50% of the savings for the next two years and that helps kind of build the fund up over time but after we got the fund established we were like okay so how do we figure out these projects anyone can bring a project to the committee they can fill out the application but how do we not just pick like the lowest hanging fruit but the things that are going to have the most impact and we realized that we hadn't done the building energy audits of the city's municipal buildings for the most part that we could find we found one for the rec center but that was the only one that anyone could put their hands on so we came back to council and said we would like $20,000 to hire consulting engineers to do level two energy audits of municipal buildings we picked six to start with that's the six biggest and biggest users we had to put that out to bid so it wasn't until December of last year that we actually completed the audits the six buildings that we did were city hall, fire station, police station the water resource recovery facility office, the water treatment plant and DPW office and so out of those reports they you got that in the packet for tonight's meeting but it's a long report so I can understand if you did not read the whole thing but it basically goes through envelope improvements so how to do air sealing and insulation and then electrical improvements for lighting and some process stuff and so we got this nice spreadsheet of probably like 60 or 70 different individual initiatives or what they call recommended measures and we can look at it by building or by type and sort it lots of different ways if you put all the recommended things together it's about $400,000 worth of work so then we kind of said okay great let's go through this process and do a little cherry picking of figuring out what are the things that we could do that would have the most impact that we could do with the revolving loan money that we have available and part of the revolving load guidelines say we're looking at the payback period of four years or less so we were really looking at payback period and which are the things that we could do that are in the $5,000 to $10,000 range and pick those so then we said well before we go out and subcontract these projects that are on these recommended lists we should really go talk to the city staff who run these buildings and make sure that these recommended measures make sense to them so we spent most of the spring and summer trying to track down like who's really in charge of each building not always totally clear and try and get a meeting with them and say okay here's the audit report do you agree with these ideas and here are the things that we thought maybe the revolving loan fund could work on or could fund for you does that make sense and not all the things made sense so there's a lot of going back and forth to the list of like okay the list says this but what we really want to do is this so that took longer than we expected I think but we finally in the last couple months have been working with Steve Twombly to go out and get bids for some of these projects so there are three projects that we have now approved to fund with the revolving loan fund one is new interior storms at the DPW office about 1600 bucks one is going through all of the windows here in city hall there's 150 windows in this building and going through and checking the weather stripping and adjusting things and they're about halfway through that process and it takes a while because it has to be done sometimes after hours and on the weekends but that's and then there are also a couple interior storms that are getting replaced in here and then upstairs in the theater we'll be doing a LED lighting replacement for the house lights of the theater which is another five grand more or less so those are the projects that have now been approved as of two weeks ago or something when we met and are in progress and we are also getting quotes for replacing dehumidifier water treatment plant but we haven't heard back from that contractor yet so if that's a reasonable amount we may go forward with that so we haven't spent all of the revolving loan fund money yet we've committed 13,000 out of the 25,000 that we have in there right now so I think the bigger picture thing to say is like yeah take some effort to like get all these projects lined up hopefully someday when we have an energy and facilities coordinator on staff this would be part of their job even just like coming up with this took me a long time to try and track all this stuff down the other piece that came out of the energy audits that some of you have heard me talk about before is this thing called retro commissioning and so what retro commissioning is is you go into an existing building and look at the existing systems for heating, ventilation air conditioning, cooling and basically it's like engineers going in and just like taking a deep dive into all the systems and figuring out how is it working are the controls set up properly can they be tweaked or made more efficient it doesn't look at replacement or you know switching out fuels or things like that but it just looks at like is it working properly what can we do so luckily Efficiency Vermont has a program where they will cover the first $5,000 of that process we brought them in and worked with the Efficiency Vermont money to hire CX associates last year to do retro commissioning at the police station which was a huge success we discovered the issue that had caused doubling of their heating load it was a $20 fan switch and by fixing the fan switch we have saved $14,000 a year so big success story and out of the audits they included they said there are three areas that they recommended we do the retro commissioning on and since that initial process has been free through Efficiency Vermont we said yeah let's go ahead and do it so over the summer we did three more retro commissioning studies one was looking at the district heat loop in the summer so how it works down in the basement of city hall and opportunities for improving the efficiency of that another one looked at the fire station it has a snow melting system so basically there is a heating loop that keeps the concrete warm so that snow doesn't build up in front of the fire station doors so they looked at that and then they also looked at the water treatment plant and the deemidifiers and some of the stuff over there so we just got those reports back in the last one of them came in today and none of them were like big aha moments not as exciting or big opportunities like at the police station but there are definitely some pieces that we can follow up with on those and there may be a few projects out of that that we can fund through the revolving loan fund so I'm not going to go through everything we've done but I did send around very belatedly this list of what's been completed for each of the buildings, what's in progress right now and what's potentially recommended going into the future there are definitely some big projects that need to get done at some point that are way beyond the scope of the revolving loan fund in particular the DPW office and water resource recovery facility office they're both like just buildings that were built in the 60's or 50's, 60's they need a lot of work in the range of like $75,000 to $100,000 of like entire exterior renovation, the windows are falling out those are projects that should be on your radar as a council because they need to be in the capital improvement plan they're not going to be going through the revolving loan fund because they're too big but they really would have energy benefits and they just kind of need to happen anyway sorry and that was for the DPW office and what other one the water resource recovery facility office so not a huge building Kate did you send that list in an email I did yeah just before this meeting so it came through probably around six o'clock as long as I know where to look for it what I did in the notes is I put in links for all of these reports so I think one of the challenges is like who's holding all of this information not clear so I've been chasing down a lot of these reports and tried to put links to them in our google drive for me act so that we can track them down in the future because I think that's like one of my biggest fears is like no one's they the email goes around and then just kind of disappears into the ether so the big project that you all have heard about many times is organics to energy so that's not really addressed specifically in this list of building improvements but it is something that we've been spending a lot of time on there are also a lot of smaller projects that are just around air sealing and like replacing some light bulbs and that could be done potentially in house if we can figure out how to do it so the person who was a subcontractor was hired to do the windows and when she is done with all of the windows in city hall I think Steve's idea is that potentially she could continue and do the same thing in the fire station and could potentially be subcontracted to do some smaller projects so I just want to make a note the CIP committee hasn't met yet is that correct? but we already have, we know who's on that board so anyway I just want to make a note of thinking about the renovations of those offices when those you know, when that committee does meet and the other thing just I put it at the very end but the municipal buildings that have not been audited include the schools and then the smaller buildings are the cemetery building the parks department office caretakers house at Hubbard park and the wreck pool building which is pretty small because there's no heating there but one thing that is on my list is I do want to meet with the new facilities director for the school district and kind of get a sense of what their plans are and how we can coordinate because it's the school district but they are municipal buildings so they need to be part of our plan for 2030 Jack this is all great with the is the revolving loan fund was it a one time $20,000 appropriation we haven't asked for any more and we haven't fully used it all up yet so it hasn't really been any reason to ask for more we will get a second infusion from Efficiency Vermont the restriction on their gift was they'll give us $5,000 upfront and then once we've shown that we've revolved the loan twice they'll give us another $5,000 so we kind of have that promise to us if we remember then to go back to them show them the letters they sent great for the questions just wonderful work so impressive thank you we're very thankful and looking forward to having more conversations about energy coordinators I'm happy to talk to you about it any time all the things that could be done thank you jumping back here police body cameras policy super question are we voting on anything regarding this particular policy I also feel like I should disclose I am a prosecutor by day if anyone is not aware of that so I work regularly with law enforcement and MPD in my day job I just I think that should be put out there just she knows you need cameras well first of all this is by one camera it's a big onion many many layers and it's nothing to be taken lightly and so tonight was really a discussion which is I think maybe the first of a couple more community based ones so what first of all a lot of things that are happening one in particular that we're going to be watching very closely there's a case that's one of the Vermont Supreme Court involving the city of Burlington and the ACLU and that I believe this will be addressed by the court in the winter of 2019 but where that's really caused me to pause not the efficacy of what the risk management side of Baltimore cameras but it has to do with depending on the outcome of that the cost associated with and the resources needed to effectively ensure that we can comply with both the inspection of a video as well as the copying of it and it has to do with redaction and after spending time with our vendor on the potential vendor I should say we had a conference call with our team including also our IT staff in the city that was a lot to do with what you know what's evidence.com is the company that we'd be looking at and so redaction studio is one of these things but these are not automatic so anyway so the totality of everything I would like to just our officers have wanted them for some time a couple of years now but yet there's we're also in a pretty good position in terms of relationship with the community and the trust factor and I'm going to cut right to the chase that it'll be a conversation in our budget process but where it falls it's more of a we certainly would appreciate the appropriation to have at the ready if it is the right direction to take but I'm going to I think it'd be smart for us to be in a holding pattern right now and a lot of it we don't have the resource even for Burlington that has a specific records division that just handles that public records request per year so we're certainly well versed in doing that but this is really a Pandora's box because of the balance of what we're trying to do from a risk management standpoint and really accountability for the public about how our officers are acting especially around use of force but also the exposure that the public may face and the damaging exposure if through a public records request because we don't again under Title I we can't say why are you requesting this and there's a significant case out of Washington State where somebody requested all of the records body camp footage of an agency a municipal agency as well as some for the state patrol and it was immediately just uploading them on YouTube and I will just tell you, I mean being at the capital city we sometimes are under more scrutiny than our neighbors so anyway it's something I don't take lightly it's a very important tool and I also mentioned in my in the discussion overview of why why we are interested in this technology potentially what it can accomplish but it's with it's a real balancing act, more so than I think almost anything else technology-wise that we're dealing with that we have in our inventory or season three so with that said I can talk a lot about everything from where it falls in the discussion piece of the President's House report on 21st century policing in particular the use of pillar three and also some very positive statistics and reduction in force as well as incidents as well as officer complaints against the officers so but that said I'm also concerned with somebody what happens when somebody said hey I heard that you know I'll put your PD responded to X establishment and took so and so removed and you know just wants that copy and then what they do with it, I mean once it's out it's out so there's a lot of and the other thing is fortunately for us our numbers our involvement with the use of force we do document with every other means available to us which including even our cruiser cams but it's a very different when you put that camera right here and what you're going to see and also what you're not going to see and also from a prosecution standpoint or even looking at something after the fact there's two schools of thought also for example do you allow officers on a critical incident do you the footage ahead of time so they make sure they get in one regard get the report as accurate as possible with all the information they can but then you're also taking away that's not that does not follow best practice with trauma informed interviewing and also really capturing what was in the mind thought process in a very traumatic evolving situation so then we have to consider how that impacts the with the Supreme Court you know the State Supreme Court has said about Graham versus Connor about officer use of force and it cannot be with the hindsight of 2020 so that being said there's a lot here the roots of the policy that I sent out is a draft only we already have since then we've already looked at also some additions we'd like to make to it some recommendation came from the ACLU's model policy specifically working with our school resource officer that we would not use these things in our school environment unless it was a real life and death situation that we're responding to for example the SRO would not have a body camera so that said anything how much do you want to talk about this or a little do you want to talk about this I have a bunch of questions there's a lot here go for it so I was looking at sort of all of the various options well let's just start at the beginning is this going to replace dash cams or is it going to be used in conjunction with it would be used in conjunction with and one of the things that the actual products that are our police cars right now it's coming to watch guard against the proprietary how their systems work so one of the things that we're looking at with evidence.com and that's why we had Seth with us on the conference call as well we're looking at a way that instead of us managing the data in house we would not be able to do that with body the amount of data needed with body cams so we're seeing if we can also then upload our cruiser camera to evidence.com and we would should be able to do that I guess it's just important so evidence.com is a cloud based storage that allows law enforcement to send those videos out to prosecutors for discovery and also to defense counsel for discovery purposes so once a criminal case is filed then you get the link in essence to download that it expires within a certain period of time it can be re-sent if for some reason someone doesn't download it in the appropriate amount of time so that's the portal that you have to log into as the sort of end user whether you're the prosecutor or some other party who's receiving it what about integration with CAD and any sort of records management well we're ready to go with Washington County's attorney's office is not made available the ability to take through Valcor the full case transfer as done in Washington County that used to be my day job as well I built the prosecutor's case management system and so it's one of the things statewide it's a bigger conversation statewide and so I know that you guys use well you have access to Spilman as well no well there's a VGIS called it's for sharing portal but it's not full access so these would live would there be a link in Valcor with it or is it two separate things or would there be an API that for right now my understanding is that just as it would be right now with a mobile that video if there's a video exists you know the Oscars it's documented in several locations it's first of all it's not an affidavit a probable cause that there's a video as well as it's a notation that that there was you know their footage available and I looked through the policy and one of the things that we've litigated across the state particularly I guess in the last few months I've even litigated it a few times myself is this question about sort of how long we retain videos and I know for DUIs there's a particular timeframe spelled out in title 23 but for other kinds that's a big separate policy that we haven't formulated yet and it's something that we're wrangling with as we talk about not only data storage but also some of the flexibility and some of the options that you have with evidence.com so for example you can set certain video files unless you tag it that can be automatically purged after whatever prescribed time that is appropriate to also report with you know secretary of state and Vermont's law open records law at any time if we think that this encounter with let's say as a citizen and somebody would feel right how this went there could be litigation here you know we can keep that indefinitely through evidence.com so that's how we would manage that and then the rest it would be what is the retention policy and that really is something that the government you know municipality should really you know look at and it's something that has to do with we're keeping boxes of hard files that we no longer need to keep to making sure we have things and so it's and certainly statute of limitations is a consideration there as well both civil as well as criminal if I can just also one last thing just on the price one of the other things with evidence.com these are all historically been five years you know I call these deals with the devil because to lock in a technology over a period of like that it's still the best it's still one of the best platforms in the nation and I've had many conversations with other chiefs particularly even Mike Shirling who was instrumental he was with Burlington PD of getting putting Valcor together and I said well if we can do Valcor why can't we just do something like this on our own you know I said no way can we replicate that the the evidentiary security protocols that are in that platform so that said the you know person the cameras the initial layout the equipment and hardware but then the terabyte the two terabyte two terabyte storage that would come with that the ability to import our others in the docking station and all of that and would be about seventy one thousand dollars seventy one nine over the course of five years so the initial outlay is the big the big hit breaks comparable to what I put on the sheet so the first year would be twenty nine thousand five hundred dollars and then for the next four years it's ten thousand five hundred ninety six with that is an automatic replacement and upgrade of the cameras in two and a half years so two and a half years from now we would have to be an upgrade of camera and technology and then at the end of five years but one for four thousand four dollars this is where I'm also learning because they're trying to keep pace with the technology one area is in the policy that I had I added something from the law enforcement advisory boards model policy was the event that something happened so quickly that the officers of time I don't want to change whether it's a block or drawing their weapon in an unexpected situation I didn't activate my camera one of the things we looked at we included in this proposal is a small sensor he's a sensor that goes on our holsters so if the weapon comes out of the holster the officer doesn't automatically activates not only that camera but you can set the cameras in a range around that officer there's even devices so we did include that in this proposal if we were to go forward with this and there's even technology now where it can be done if an officer is calling for help a cruiser can activate it in these small modules in a police car to activate all the cameras in a certain range and these cameras have a pre-record capability between 15 seconds up to two minutes of activation similar to our other cameras so that aspect of it is where it's a really valuable tool for better documentation and our investigations but again it really comes down to how do we balance significant privacy challenges to the public as well as the officers want them because the few complaints that we do get or we hardly get any complaints at all around our motor vehicle stop and I will tell you the first year when I was a sergeant when we implemented the mold of the cruisers the cameras in the cars the complaints that would come in and be like okay let's look at the video and it's like oh what and it's the public unfortunately in many cases it's also behaving badly but we also know too why this was so important to talk about in the Tassler's report on 21st century policing is that in parts of the country there's a huge divide a deficit if you will between the police and the public and so in some areas it would be a much higher necessity than I feel it is in my piliar at this time because we need to demonstrate to the public hey are you so forced maybe it's through the roof we need to get those numbers down the public thinks that we're just out of control so therefore the body camera is a very important device to say look let's look at what we're doing and how we're doing it so that said we are not perfect here my player we're going to continue to make mistakes but at the same time you know I feel strongly that we have a good relationship with our community and we want to be always want to be accountable to our community so but at this time there's so many things and right now I would like to I think the smart move would be to hold off and let's see what the Vermont Supreme Court does because theoretically if the court says that even if you have to go ahead and make those redactions for just a viewing that's still time to do that and again we're dealing with a lot of big city issues like the police department for a very small police department and I don't want to come back and say well we now need to hire and that might be in the future anyway but a full time person that's all they do is handle these records requests so I just have a couple more things so I suppose first off we did talk about this policy change along with the sort of plan and the committee was comfortable with me reporting back that the committee supports the idea generally but would like to sort of see that policy and be part of the community conversation sort of what that looks like the only other thing that I will point at now I can touch base with you directly because I've done these kinds of implementations before data storage is like the most significant part of this looking at the fine print I think it's 625 per gigabyte if we go over whatever plan it is that we have and sometimes you know encounters take quite some while to investigate which can truly if you've got a few officers on scene that's multiple gigabytes of video for just that one case and so in looking at the pricing information that was included with our stuff my hope is that we would be looking at that kind of storage I know it's pricey well the 71,900 that was the two terabyte storage so it is oh that seems like a little bit different than what we yeah what I had was something was on the website from Axon and then this is then after working through all the which I didn't have at the time when I presented the packets for you this proposal came after the schedule conference call that we had so I got that this Friday and we talked about two or going to three terabyte and that was the company thought that was sufficient for our anticipated usage and needs and do they do like sort of tiered storage so for example like your most recent cases would be the quickest to access and then they sort of bump it down no it should be should have automatic access to any one of these regardless of the time frame one of the things that they would need is again what would our retention cycle be and the policy around that and there is some guidance from the in general on record retention from the Secretary of State's office which Chris Hepburn has also had training on she's our administrative assistant for our public safety support services but this is but usually these fall on the captain Neil Martel one of the sergeants to manage those records request because we don't have a staff you know legal counsel and many of these we have to go through and you know it's in title one section 317 see the exceptions are pretty clear but the impact of title of 317 you know with all this information that because it now sits with the law with the mafia PD it's it's a real you know people need we we as a community need to be absolutely clear eyed to what the exposure is as well as the risk management side because I mean the risk management side for me that there's since I've been chief in 11 years less than 5 cases we've been involved in where man I wish there was additional footage and things that we've been successful but even when we don't even though we've not lost and I and nobody wins when we're when we're soon but when we but the time to change to that we just roll over and we had one that almost went to the second circuit sometime ago and we didn't have penny other than of course our legal costs I have got a wonder that had the video cameras been on seeing we had an audio record because our cruiser cams that may have prevented some of that extra navigation so and and again as we know this investment might be you know pale and what a payout could be or you know what the impact on that just caution the council that if there is an ask that we do sort of fully fund the storage pieces for the most critical piece and if there's any overages it's hugely expensive and you're locked in for years with these contracts so I would just I just put that out to my fellow council members because it's a really it's a it's a significant investment but as long as we are smart about it and we sort of do our due diligence up front and I know chief is all over that as as are the law enforcement partners it's just critical that we fully funded and and don't sort of oh well we'll just do this for now you know if it's something that we're going to do we need to commit to doing it and doing it the right way I do have a few points I I looked at I think this is great I think we're definitely I support the idea of moving forward on this I reviewed the draft policy and the you know the ACLU has a model policy I don't know if you've consulted with the Vermont ACLU to talk about you try to get them to review what we're doing and get some ideas I think it would be a good idea to do that I've got there I've not I haven't had any relationship with JDS unfortunately as far as talking about those but I do have and I have reviewed the June 2018 model policy from the ACLU there's some really important good points that's one of the things I would like to add to our model policy as the most specific one that I think we were missing even though we in practice we wouldn't but it's the schools there's other things that absolutely I would not support and at the end of the day it's a policy that I have to implement and the MetaWim with the Multiplayer Police Department are my primary responsibility so some of the things so it's a different lens but it's still something that does involve the community support conversation and I think this is a much greater conversation beyond for tonight for the Montpellier community I would love to have even a town hall type maybe a coffee with a cop on steroids if you will to look at because it's it's not just you know a new gadget that some agencies I think have taken quite lightly one of the things one of the objectives in the policy is the last one is to enhance public trust and there I think we're in good shape because as I said I think as you said I think Montpellier public has a great deal of trust in the police department and I would I certainly do personally and I don't think that the police are violating people's rights but I would encourage you to specifically add to the objectives that we want to protect civil rights and provide accountability for police conduct because you clearly want that absolutely and and stating that publicly that we're protecting all the people including all the citizens you're interacting with is a is a good public statement and I also was not struck by the cost of this it didn't strike me if this is out of line for the value I'll be interested to see what the Supreme Court does with with this case because the cases before the Supreme Court is someone who observed an interaction between the police and some other people he was just a bystander and said well I want to see the video of what happened and the cost of redaction was the stumbling block in that case and maybe there could even be a different standard for costs or assessment of costs depending on whether it's someone who's been recorded on the video versus someone who who isn't but hopefully we'll get some guidance from the Supreme Court on that just real quick on that the case involved juveniles and so there was some heavy redaction and the individual had the ability to pay which he did pay $220 I believe to get a heavily redacted copy of the footage and the judge decision was in the first lawsuit with the ACLU saying that's not right that's not the end so that's why it's the Supreme Court now because Judge T. Chow I think is the one that said that this was a reasonable cost because that was the cost and I know just from what our sergeants do and Sergeant Pearson wasn't back in the room I know Captain Martell a lot of time has taken of our folks doing this so that's why some of the costs, operating costs and it's a time will tell and you're no different from any other public agency that has an obligation to respond to public record requests and also statutory right to charge for certain elements of meeting a request and Montpelier does not have a special scale so we have to automatically defer to what's said in Title I so that's kind of where we're at right now so again as we have more technology this question is just going to become more and more complicated I'm glad you brought up the cost for the public records request because you are allowed to charge and I think the courts need to look at that more clearly of the burden and especially when you have to give it to everybody so I would feel a lot more comfortable going to these kind of cameras body cameras if the court was in a better place some real clear statements about request like that guy putting it in social media just goes really quick well yeah I mean it's not just your privacy but me as the victim or participant in some way but that aspect though is not going to that's not what the Supreme Court is addressing or just to decide and I'm saying that's part of the balancing act here of if this technology is here and the record is available it's not for us in statute to say what is the motivation or the reason why or are you party too I understand that but it needs to be modified I think anyway well I would not argue with that but that's way above my my pay grade at the moment when you talk about risk management and accountability both of those who are involved in the activity as well as the officer we haven't gotten everything in place within the law and especially within the open meeting all to look at these kinds of things and I'm really bothered about the whole regular monthly cost I mean those are things you go into then you're there forever and I just would feel to me it's a a sign of community trust has been broken when we have to go to body camps and I would rather see money at least now invested into does another officer to help everybody be safer more training more community meetings I would go a long ways in that direction going back to the report and some of the pros and cons it has a chilling effect I even feel it when I see an officer with a body cam is the camera on or not you're in Manhattan you ask for directions is it on or not those little things that's just me but also what happens these are conversations that we have been batting around at our department for some time now what happens if there's a records request and somebody personally is damaged by the release of that video by another party and it's out there is that going to have more of a chilling effect on police community relations is that going to prevent somebody from wanting to call the molecular police department for help so-and-so calls you for help and the next thing you know it's on YouTube and that's part of why there's such a double-edged sword they really talk about it a long time I think Pennsylvania has some of the most restrictive protections around public access to body-worn camera footage but I'm not sure that they have a lot of provisions but again, then at some point too does that become counterproductive to what you're trying to accomplish from a trusted accountability standpoint well I'm other comments you probably guessed this would come up not anything to do with body cams but we're all hearing a lot about the scooters are you getting reports and doing any more awareness to get people off the sidewalks and stuff like that the direction of staff some reports are trickling in and we have directed staff right from the start to really just be educational opportunities not to be out there to writing tickets the complaints that we're getting it's everything from how they operate in traffic sometimes people if you're not if you look at something the scooter is going to go there so there's that, we're going to complain there was a couple one or two about them being left blocking a sidewalk so that impacts mobility and accessibility issues and we've had one so far that was vandalized and then tossed over the whole street so that's the these are not out of line with what the large communities are seeing and people aren't calling us it's not our program to say hey these are great so we're generally going to have more negative comments what we are doing to track this so we can provide as much data in particular the assistant city manager if it's a formal complaint like hey I just had an accident these things or motor vehicle complaint they cut me off in traffic I almost caused an accident that will be a police incident called for service these other ones are the general ones where I am afraid to walk downtown because I can't afford to get hit by one of these things especially with our age population those we keep trafficking on a spreadsheet as they commit a dispatch and then at the end we're going to sue so we have as we can be as clear as possible this is an appropriate device from a player from a safety standpoint again our I've kind of dodged this one with the reporters including the bridge today about what do I personally think I was tired that they're fun but really our concern is really safety and there's certainly a downside that I'm a big fan of bicycles for mob failure as alternatives because I think our infrastructure is more suited to that and certainly it's a lot safer to have a 26 or 29 inch wheel rolling over something than I don't know what these things are seven inch wheel when you hit a little stone pot hole and what have you thanks you know we were both there for the demonstration but obviously this is not going to work if people aren't safe Jack I just add that we will have a report at some point we're collecting every shred of comment and I would encourage the council if you get emails with comments feel free to forward them to me and they'll go right on to the spreadsheet and we'll have a full report apparently follow a front porch forum because it's gaining the possibility it is true they're supposed to be 18 years old and have a driver's license and a credit card so there may be people breaking that but I just want people to hear that they're supposed to be 18 years old have a driver's license and a credit card and I thought there was an app part of the app was they looked at your facial recognition with what was on the driver's license no they don't do that oh wow let's not talk facial recognition we're still on this they had a passport I want to add that some people are just saying I'm seeing people illegally riding these without helmets helmet is a recommendation for safety helmet is not a requirement Connor on the topic of scooters I do have the latest data from the bird company as of this morning if people want to hear it a bit so Saturday was the busiest day where there were 267 total rides 3.5 rides per release bird I think you can look at Saturdays being one of the nicer days like most analogous to the spring time there we've had pretty nasty weather since but overall 18050 rides on scooters traveling 967 miles which would have surpassed probably a thousand today was the projection if that was to be traveled in a car and of course it's not apples to apples because a lot of people would use this as a novelty that would be 861 pounds of CO2 emissions reduced so if we're actually looking at benchmarks here there's some very valuable stats I think we can take from these devices here that's the data we don't get oh now you can get them for you I should also say we handed out at the farmers market over a hundred bicycle helmets over the course of the weekend there and there was a button on the app you can push to get a free helmet sent to you if you just pay the shipping cost which is about $1.99 I think thank you very much okay sure and I can loop back and write this down for you Stephen but 150 total rides as of this morning okay we are almost done here team we have no other business so council reports who would like to start I'm going to pick on Jack I was just going to say I've gotten a lot of there's a lot of public discussion about scooters I encourage people to keep it coming because we want to be in a position to make the best decision at the end of this experiment so I'm happy to get communications from anyone about it positive or negative and I've gotten plenty of both more than about any other topic since I've been on the council right so true pass I also just want to ask people who are using these e-scooters to mind your manners in traffic mind your manners in traffic you are having fun with it and you want it to work then it's really important that people follow the rules of the road and I think it's delightful when I see people on it they seem to have a lot of fun keep talking scooters so Bard does have a couple safety ambassadors on the ground who are trying to be mindful and give people tips if anybody wants a lesson in it they can contact I'm happy to be the liaison on this and I really appreciate it I want to shout out to both Sue who's taking the lead on this at City Hall and of course acknowledge that this has put a bit of an extra burden on the police department who have been great partners in this pilot you know I think it's generated robust conversation in the community but that's largely what a pilot project is for and I think we would take any concerns very seriously but I would also encourage people to try writing the scooters because I found overwhelmingly the positive input has been from the 156 unique people who have signed up to take a ride on the bird here so there'll always be a few bumps in the road but let's have an open mind about this and an open road good yes I am looking forward to trying the bird scooter shortly I don't know exactly when but any moment now not after nine o'clock yes well good I'm too tired at the moment anyway but by any moment now I mean one of these days shortly coming up I also want to emphasize that for me at least even if we move forward with something like the electric scooters in town I think it is a small part of what I hope to do if the scooters are useful for getting some cars off the road some of the time then I am in favor of them and that's my broader goal so I am in many ways more excited about transit options that for example allow you to carry groceries or other things that the scooters are not designed for and it's understandable they don't tick every box I am looking forward to this as one small step to a larger goal of fewer cars and more safety honestly on the streets because the streets are not safe streets in general are not safe because they have 3,000 pound objects driven by everyone that can go 100 miles an hour so anyway that's my anti car rant for the moment and if you want to hear more you can show up tomorrow morning at 830 at Baguitos I will be happy to talk to you or listen to you I prefer that so tomorrow I am taking a day off from school and I am going to Brattleboro where I will be hanging out with the central Vermont well yeah, people from the central Vermont solid waste district as well as Lucas Herring, Mayor of Barrie we are going to Brattleboro to check out their municipally run trash recycling and compost operation as well as their only town in Vermont that has a plastic bag ban and it's apparently been going well and so I want to hear about how they did that and city-wide or town-wide composting operation and see if we can bring back some of that wisdom more to come on that to say that early voting is robust that's all I will report yep, public hearing on Monday on the ballot items and I'll just say quickly you will be noticing I don't know if you all remember this but we had some funding in to do flashing lights on some of the busy crosswalks and that project was delayed but those flashing lights are starting to go in so you'll see them at four crosswalks in time and then very quickly there's a public hearing tomorrow night at the high school at 5.30 on what we might want for a recreation center going forward do we want to preserve the rec center we have on Barrie street a new recreational facility that might even have a pool or two so people have opinions show up at the high school tomorrow at 5.30 excellent okay so without objection we're going to consider this meeting adjourned 9.33