 Welcome everyone, I'm going to call the order this sub-border finance meeting from Monday May 22nd at 5.59 p.m. and we are gathered to go through a number of the remaining departmental budgets that we have not yet reviewed on the entire three marvelous nights in May. So thank you for joining us for this discussion. I would welcome a motion on the agenda. Move to the next agenda. Thank you, Councilor Geary. Second by Councilor Barlow. Any discussion on the agenda? There is a public forum on the agenda. We will come to that in a moment. There's no discussion. We'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. The next item is the public forum. Why don't you guys come and see if we can sit over at this chair. We have one coming up. We have a lot to do tonight. I'm Bruce Wilson and I'm the director of art so wonderful. This is one of our gallery in New York City Mall. This is where our art program was created. We are very happy that the city of Seattle chose an art show wonderful to design and create art. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot to do tonight. We created an art show wonderful to design and create art. We have a lot to do tonight. We have a lot of people to do tonight. What we have done is put on our murals on the nickel. see Black Lives Matter and how these heroes are seeing us through our program. And so we really have an education program that we're going to have and we've always had to have individuals in bomb, what you call bomb the wall, be a part of cleaning up and then be a part of our art program and then showcase their art in our gallery and to fail. So we want to educate them and run them back. And then through our gallery we're talking about, it's about how can we help them understand the thinking and put them at risk as well as the community and call them back. I think I said enough about that. Yeah, no thank you Bruce for setting the stage. I'm really delighted to be collaborating with Bruce and art so wonderful on this. My uncover is community wealth development and like Bruce said we're going to be connecting a dialogue to this project and we actually wanted to extend that invitation for anyone on the city council to participate in a dialogue if you're interested. It's on June 25th so we're doing the first part of this with the art project on June 10th where the community will be a part of painting these canvas murals during the June team celebrations. And then as a part of the dialogue the participants of the dialogue will actually be installing the canvases done on the fence on the waterfront. And the conversation can be centered on community, what it means to be in community and trying to build a collective understanding of our experience of what it means to be in community with each other. And so we wanted to just share that with the council tonight and extend that invitation and let you know that we're working hard to try and build peace soon. All right good. All right thank you both for coming on chair. Okay we have one more hand raised from a participant online former councilor Sharon Butcher Shabila Doc. Thank you Mr. Mayor. If there was a way to get a link to what was just stated that would be wonderful. I could hear most of it not all of it but it sounded like the community not only the council would like to know about this so anyways but I didn't call in for that because I didn't know that was going to happen. I have a couple of comments about the budget presentations tonight so I looked them over and these are things that I couldn't answer for myself. Under regional the VNA is not funded anymore and I just wondered if it's called something else. I know it morphed into some other facility so I just wondered why that wasn't funded. There was a reduction in the cable funding and I couldn't figure out if that's because it wasn't utilized to the full extent last year and that's why that dollar amount these are not big dollars but still important dollars because they go to people who need the services and then the last item under regional was boys and girls club that's been a constant at $6,000. I just know how much we get from that money that we donate to them and I wasn't sure if anyone had if they had asked for more and if we could give more to them so that's it's always well spent. Other comment under workforce budget when I went to pull it up I got the CEDO budget of Brian Pine I couldn't seem to get Kara's budget I don't know if that's a problem with my length but anyways I just wanted to let you know the last comment has got to do with the parks and rec budget when Catherine did an overview of the budget she mentioned that there was a 2.5 million dollar deficit and there was discussion about maybe calling up 1.1 million because of you have charter authority without going to the voters I'm concerned about that but I couldn't in the presentation or in the in the table I couldn't figure out where what where the major where the core of this deficit came from and so I was concerned about that in the budget itself in the presentation it talks about stabilizing memorial auditorium they're words but there's nothing there are no there's no plan that goes along with that and I couldn't I could only see like $32,000 for utilities et cetera so I couldn't see the monies that are associated with that statement in the open space protection fund which is near and dear to my heart there was a talk about re looking at the how to reallocate the percent of monies that are dedicated I have some concerns about that and that probably won't happen during this budget session but if it did my my druthers is that this was a voted by the the residents of Burlington to preserve open space rather than have it developed and I I would question whether we need to go back to the voters if it's significant change and I think that's it so thank you for listening to me and I will listen intently these presentations really help the residents of Burlington understand your priorities and how our tax dollars are spent thank you great thank you Sharon thank you for calling it okay if there she don't well I'm going to make sure is there anyone else in the room who is interested in speaking in the park I've got a pretty full room but I'm not seeing anyone mentioning that and then checking so you know where we can so we're going to close the public forum and we'll go to item three point oh one which is brought the parks recreational waterfront department and welcome directors to be quite take away Cindy let's be the same all right so it's great to be here I've been attending all of them trying to get tips and tricks so hopefully I've answered all of your questions the next slide did I've heard all the questions starting out I've got my first my hand there's fighting in back I'm here to teach but there's a copy here from behind you've got Erin Rose our waterfront superintendent that probably not our sweet and perver master so with our very comprehensive planner very large recreation superintendent and let's say eight our recreation facility superintendent Derek Roche his wife had to suddenly get down to master checks to help with the family so he's in charge of debt so he's not able to pay this but hopefully if there's any questions you guys ask me that I can answer either way all right so we have seven system things that came out of our 2015 comprehensive plan that really provide the work that we do and then we also have department values and those are values that are important to us and that we think about every day with the work that we're doing as a leadership team we decided that we would focus on accessibility and activity as we look for so the goals in each of the various areas and our f by 24 some of those values that we put down they just want to highlight a few of them I know you guys have had a chance to read this all ahead of time is updating our website to ensure that we meet the language standards for people that are coming for to a website for accessibility we've made sure to budget for portlets and our perks you know we don't have the ability to watch toilets at every firm because we don't have those facilities but we do try to make sure that we have them in our portlets in as many perks as we can and that's something that we've been good about holding on that study with another final one there are just just really exciting to us is this five and five years on playground campaign that's something with the perks foundation has voted to take on we had a mess that Callahan that we own as far as accessibility goes we're hitting it strongly with oak wedge and so this five and five years playground campaign will allow us to make sure that we have the appropriate surfacing the port of play surfacing at the next five playgrounds that we put in across the city and then also that universal design so that's a campaign again that will be coming from the perks foundation so stay tuned I'm sure we'll be getting going for money not necessarily as individuals can have it so that comes savings help from f-way 22 that we put in here because we had to make a fair amount of cuts at that time our professional training we continued to hold that it was 50% cut in f-way 22 prepare maintenance was aligned that we had to make some different cuts on but we received some money from the um um post what is the fund balance there the assigned fund balance it was the unassigned fund balance but then it became the assigned fund balance and we will continue to use some of that money from f-way 23 into f-way 24 um that helped us with that line there and then telecommunications that's something that we really dove into to see who really does leave the land a landline and who doesn't you know which line um and we continued that work and she made some additional cuts or shouldn't say cuts we made some initial slimming there um we didn't have thoughts I asked because that was one of the questions that came up was um you did not put it that way but I'd like to think about that is what if there was a money tree it was going to occasionally send me a tree with money flowing off of it when I'm having budgets closed and a lot of it is stopping you know just stopping so that we can do this higher level of care in all of our parks and all of our facilities our waterfront team has really room with the urban park rangers so support there and we had a lot of fun with the last one we all bring a pool so deferment revenue getting to a counselor cast counselor Sharon butchers comments we have some slides here on our revenue because it has come up as a point and we have you can see is an obvious when COVID hit it was a big drop to our budget we have been increasing it and one of the things that just know is that we really took the heart last year the mayor and see a shod really pushed us on our revenue they said you guys need to really get back to those f y 19 numbers try to at least strive for it and we really worked hard at it you know we increased fees across the board we tried to find other grant funding um new programming that we could do with the fact that our recreation team came back strong they were frozen during COVID I think they were about half of their capacity if not less for a while there and so we worked on it and there's been some areas that have come back stronger than others if our numbers for June of 2022 or this we've hit June 2022 numbers we will actually we will hit that budget that we was set up for us and I think as set for us at the challenge and we really again worked hard it was I don't think there was tears along the way but there was definitely a little consternation because it is if you're like you're always trying to make things affordable but we have good scholarship programs and we really thought about where we increase those fees lots of talk about voters and so I wanted to have some really specific slide on the trade these are transient voters so you probably realize there's such a thing as seasonal voters and there's transient voters your transient voters are those that come in to spend the night they generally 60 percent of them come to us from Canada they come in they stay at our restaurants they go shop at our shops I think that we had some AI type at one point place making AI that showed how many of them go over the waterfront to church street so these are people who are spending money in our city in 2019 you can see that's when we had a little dip in our transient voters that's where Burlington Harbor Marina opened and they also do transient voters so that was a little competition for us and we felt it 2021 and the board closed as I just noted about 60 percent of our voters come from Canada you can't make them up you feel like our campground as you'll see from another slide we you know we did it fantastic but now they came in from all over the country it was the priority to get all 50 states when we opened up in 2020 back up in 2021 I do have new numbers Jack or Jack Wallace sent me some numbers because I was like hey Jack any chance you could send me the numbers from 1920 and 21 and I don't need to send those today and so one of the things he notes for 2022 is those were like reservations not actual voter nights and so that number there 2022 goes up to 2858 total voters and then in FY19 if you add his numbers in that was 2545 so what it basically I see is that it's word out that BTB has capacity so even now we're having more people coming to Burlington in our in our harbor what it does not include is data from period of arena that's a private marina that we don't have data on they did indicate to me at one point that when they had their huge expansion that they had because they did not increase number seasonal birds moving transit slips they're focused more on being a seasonal on slip arena but again great numbers and but it's one of those things at times we really be needing to address because that means we just have that many voters in our in our harbor and a little bit more complex they are being exposed being harbor besters here's our waterfront main revenue areas again I'm a little bit more focused on revenue because it did come up about our revenue and I was kind of what regularly what happened there but a lot of it is just the fact that we get a lot of money in at the end of the year our marina slips are seasonal slips we build their final payment comes in at the course the end of the year and then we also take a fair amount of money in in May and June our campground open May 1st and our marina open May 15th we take in a lot of money from immortal they begin imagine both places are both solid so when you'll see there is our campground sites we've already met our budget for F-223 if you look in new rule that might not be showing there was a little bit of new software with our campground and so just getting that new software aligned that the campgrounds if you look at the budget it showed that it's still zero dollars for campground reservations this spring but that is something that we are already working on sounds like Friday everybody's making sure that revenue gets in concessions they've already met expectations that splash and then also the Tiki bar down at North Beach parking parking is one where we just have not come back it was aggressive revenue targets set for us but we weren't really hard to get everything we could we could not make hers park in our spaces and but they are we are optimistic for this next year we're working with DPW it's going to be really key is the enforcement the enforcement of those lots but all ordinances have changed shall allow them to definitely enforce our lots and they're ready to support us with that but otherwise you can see really strong revenue again if we hit those targets from that we hit last year in June I'll not include May but they're just those targets in June we were hit those numbers and that is the hard work of our waterfront team to make that happen and of course nice weather just got towed um how we spend our money I thought that was a tough one the questions you guys have been wondering about how do people spend money hopefully this slide is helpful to you it shows that 70 percent of our budget has been our personnel but we also had operating we've operating costs so we have operating higher operating costs than most of our departments have but as you can see 36 percent of those operation costs are utilities as I jumped into telecommunications over the past two years to help see you know where phone lines maybe we're paying for and they have been used in two years we're also going to dive into those utilities to see is there something there that maybe we're paying for some utilities that maybe we're not using I don't really know I've never actually taken that long deep dive into it so that's one of my goals for this next year is understanding that percentage of our budget because we need to really have a great handle the other 25 another big one 25 percent that could sold with contracts if your child ever did lego camp or they did uh the flip side the flip side maiden camps flip side was Brooklyn uh maiden camps or talent camps those are all contracts so that contract number is a big one but that is revenue that comes in also for those contracts and then a new one for us this year is we are actually contracted out our seats our security at the campground and at the arena we've always had two people at each location we did contract this year for one person at each location through a private security contract because we've just have never not been able to get the people the past couple years so that'll provide a lot more security down for our spaces but again it's something we have provided but even with this little staff and we just had a hard time with us just a few challenges concerns as we think about this year we're still struggling to find our higher life guards continue to work on that we do have a trainer in house which is nice but it's got to find the bodies to do it continue to defer maintenance toward parks and buildings um parking revenue again we just really need that support from enforcement um to encourage people to park in our lots and this one's looking out ahead is that recreation and nutrition program i'm thinking out to fy 25 the budgets have been really tight the past number of years and we've had to make these incremental cuts and as we've had grants to infill some of these um these programs we had a lot of good grant money through cobit relief for the recreation nutrition program we're on with one of the grants we've used it's done another grant we're on the second and final year of it we did get a new one in this year from the great lakes fishery grants we are going to really try to take care of that relationship to hopefully that that is ongoing but it's one where we look out to 25 it's a program that brings no revenue it does not um we don't charge anything for the kids to come to that program but again uh we'll continue to always as we have been trying to advance to and the next slides are really highlights for our various funds that we have and i know time is of essence so i'm just going to kind of slip through them really quickly focusing more on the pictures um this is our leddie park comprehensive plan as we are in the process of that it's funded by penny for perks we have a big public meeting coming up next week and that's just kind of you have pictures ever concept design big moves that we're looking to do there we have our bond park projects we have a picture there is funded by the bond was part of the accessibility for oak ledge break and show that we had accessible walkways to spaces and accessible parking spaces uh greenbelt and we couldn't picture that picture there's just a great crew the best picture part i love about that crew is before they all got their summer air cuts and you just see like the pair of bj's and then if you could see derrick agar away the back he still has like the good wings coming up over his hat so that was their free their summer summer dues um the other one noted there the open space conservation legacy program um to picture them at the uh oh was that called the hopefully there's somebody was the name of that event was the that's not narrative oh no just the reason why it was he's along it was oh gosh i can't see you'll be my name right now with that one it was just down at the interval we had it was you had to try to record all your plants for the week um a spectacular nature day that was a spectacular nature day it was really one i got to be ice cream made from not weed and um they had some other tasty tasty things but that's part of our work that the legacy program the conservation team um really were supposed to do the wild ways program um white cut maintenance and improvement funds there's our pretty just beautiful greenway get a team that takes care of that by the voters that many years ago now to make sure that we were able to maintain our beautiful way and central facility so many highlights there uh Kim and her crew do an amazing job um this was day one of the memorial stabilization projects they were in another gym and then we just have a number of donations and grants from projects that that were either working on an hour or coming up to us and i have the fun one i have on a ship letting her path which uh councilor jane will appreciate because i'm not here with the neighbor's name is but we have a dollar bet on when that gets built um he'll ask me when that's going to get done i said well how about we do a dollar bet to this day this it will be coming so that was fast and furious to hit uh ceo shod's timeline she gave me um if anybody has any questions it's great thank you so much it's been a two percent amount but um you got 100 percent um um employees 28 percent then you got two percent but it was two percent you know bruce we don't typically uh it's not really time for like lots of interaction with the public heritage so if you have follow-up questions you're free to send that's the mayor's office all right it's really time the time the council has um before this budget heads up on their plate so um i'm sorry i want to hear i see councillor grant has a go ahead councillor grant thank you um i was wondering and it just may just be a pipe dream is there any way to quantify um how much is spent when our parks employees have to do things outside of their normal job related to um you know the cleanups that they're doing with regards to areas where there has been drug misuse or um you know issues of excessive garbage and things like that is there a way to quantify that do people track the time that they spend doing that that's above what they would normally be doing go ahead and answer that one so one of the things i want to answer first is while it's um it is work that's challenging it is work that's part of what they do and so i think that's a work to understand is um that is work that they do and that's part of your you know job subscription um it is work that's not anybody enjoys doing it's very challenging emotionally physically etc but getting to your question is first tracking hours we the when things come in and work is assigned through our asset management system they put that in that that helps back the hours and i know also our park rangers now are keeping track of the different things that they are doing and the time spent um but it is a uh anecdotally i would say it can be in the summer um a significant amount of people's time that's a quick follow-up does it um does it increase the amount of overtime generally not because we would what it might just do is it might just impact other work so you might be pulling somebody from another project that they would be working on so maybe you might i'm just making something up at this point but let's say that it was the day to mow and we had to um do a clean out um an area that we were not anticipating to be clean but we would they would have scheduled the work to clean out but you just have to shift those work schedules so maybe it was a it was just a mow they mow something every thursday and we determined that we're doing some special clean out that thursday it just shifts it shifts you have to shift the schedules okay thank you you're welcome that's a cover this was it really in the same vein and i'm like bill bowers but i would encourage the department best you can guesstimate to try to track it that's because i think it's part of a much big broader issue and just kind of having a sense of the demand um for that the unhoused and other people are um having on the department not it is our obligation to do it but just understanding cost of the city um i think in the future will be the point okay that's all good i'll take with dirrick and he could be very well he's good and he's not able to go tonight he could be tracking that who he works you know share that you know that's part of thank you thank you for that um and on your second side there was a what if there was more money and one of the things you wanted to spend more money on was a higher level of care in our parks can you elaborate on what sort of things you feel like you are resource constrained uh now whether or not those are human resources or money it's a lot yeah sure so a lot of it is human resources i mean if you um there is generally not a scrap of paper out of place when he gets to city hallmark there's not a cigarette butt that lasts on the ground very long everything's trimmed very neatly um there's not garbage within any of the plants um the mowing frequency there that park is maintained at the very high level which it should be it's our main you know downtown park but you think about some of our other parks where let's use battery is an example we can't maintain that level of care there you're going to see weeds growing up you're going to see different things coming up those spaces because we just can't you can't you can mow we can trim but we can't get to that same higher level of care in all of those other parts i don't know if that answers your question does um and i had another question about graffiti generally i'm going to describe graffiti in our city right now and i'm just wondering whether or not parks does their own graffiti removal or were they or they uh dependent on city's graffiti we generally do our own graffiti removal i mean i think it's one where i get it uh there would be able to best answer this but i don't know if there's times when you know maybe we're asking for some support and they're going to have you hit but generally we're out there uh doing it and it's not that the other teams aren't willing to do it and thank god generally they're going to do it on their own but we do try to take care of our own on graffiti so are you budgeting for more graffiti uh mediation resources to show us it seems like we need a lot yeah yeah we don't have any additional i mean i would basically i guess that would be a seasonal staff level that we because in the winter at the hard part of winter is that so much like graffiti can't can't do because it's too cold can't paint but we have not budgeted specifically well it's definitely something that i think it's like one of them sort of like talked about the loss of our program that was kind of great small city part of it is graffiti issue yeah it's in our parks as much as it's everywhere else yeah that's a good question because is that one i mean there is a special graffiti team that the you and i has dpi and so in some ways this are more efficiencies if you make that team you know i you know i joke like oh because i was just money or more stacking but if we're something like that one is it better to have a very focused graffiti team you know you bolster that and now it would be the conversation it's definitely something we can you know for not a lot of money they get that yeah i'll connect with good i think councillor jang and then i'll come to you councillor bergman oh thank you mr mayor i have to say this is the most comprehensive presentation about budget so i tried to listen to everything i think i think it's really really really well all the questions that were being raised and i think you are supposed to thank you i i also want to understand you know and also i mean another another comment is basically it seems that so far you are the only department is receiving providing 70 percent while the others so far and also we know that you have the operation that only we have restraints which we take care of i don't know how you do but you are doing that i could not really understand from you know the brands that you have on your budget it seems to be at least 20 so we had it nearly 180 it's down to 68 i just don't know what happy to explain now what so that grant there is we received this Vermont Outdoor Recreation Economic Labyrinth Coalition Committee i'm not sure that history on the and that was a grant for us to purchase a lot of its trailers skis bicycles and so that was a to purchase this some this piece there and so that was in a grant line for that specific grant so that reason that one is going down is that we've started buying the trailers we started buying some of the ski equipment and and then we're estimating at this point what we believe that will what will be the remainder that will then spend that next year but that was one grant that we received that we knew about in life of that upcoming budget but with our incredible grants team that the city has a lot of capital projects we've been having success with grants on expect a specific one coming up recently was the Callahan one that was the sidewalks to connect local streets up through to the playground and and also that's a lot of your budget i see that we don't have a substantial number of donations it's it's like much really over the next but i'm really touched on these things and i don't know so we have a lot of our donations when they come in for various projects and such go through the parks foundation and so the generally the donations that we're receiving are smaller scale can get some from through people are making donations to community garden one of the new programs that we started last year and haven't had a chance to check in to see if it's been how successful it's been yet is a sliding scale fee for people that groups that want to volunteer with us one of the things i believe is that we bring great value as we're trying to generate revenue and i'm trying to think of creative ways to generate revenue is that if we're doing um let's say seven generation wants to do a work day at one of our course um that takes a lot of our staff time yes we're getting something out of it we're also providing an amazing staff training to them like they're not just training but a staff bonding opportunity so we now have a sliding scale that will share with groups that want to volunteer with us to say you know based on the size of the group the size of their agency here's our said we call the suggested donation um that they can make to our department to help compensate for the fact of the amount of work that we're putting in getting ready for that project um thank you but i also identified some ways of maybe put out writing the departments such as the wider division and other departments are we not there just thank you yeah no i know you have to share thank you go ahead councillor bernard thank you um i'm having a hard time locating the total amounts uh if there are of of the parks foundation grants and i'm also thank you everyone but thank you i've done that once before hey let's try that again huh uh i'm curious about um the page where the parks foundation grants are located and i'm wondering uh with regard to the community gardens whether there is a line for for grants i know that there was the vermonta community garden network but i'm not sure where whether we're getting any any funds from them so um can you help me yep i can so the parks foundation ones those are generally um for projects um some of them may be small some may be large um they go that would be in our capital budget you would see donations there some may be very small um and some may be large and so i'm trying to think of this past fiscal year when we were as the parks foundation oh i know they were hold that might not be this fiscal year might have been last fiscal year will be requested the funds from then that they're holding for the redstone cottage they had 250 000 they're holding for a donation and that got put into um penny for perks because that's what we are doing our project accounting with so generally those are project type based ones and you would see those donations in the capital uh generally penny for purposes where you're most likely to see those donations oh that that is in the city's capital budget as opposed to the parks department is that correct correct correct and then in terms of uh donations for the uh the community gardens is that uh on the line somewhere i was also i mean i maybe i just because there are 42 pages uh i was having a hard time getting through and uh locating yep so two places that generally the community gardens get donations when people sign up for the gardens and they are looking to support scholarships those donations actually go into the admin admin because that's where our scholarship line is so we um that would be the 000 000 on towards beginnings under contributions and then um in their budget any donations um if they're doing plant swaps um oh from these any groups that are looking to volunteer i don't know council improvement if they have to be honest if they've received a rot community garden network grant i don't think so recently because we would have had to get approval for that work so i don't think i remember seeing it so i don't believe they've done any rot community garden network grants i'm going to be as far as i know but i could certainly ask to get back to you on that that's that would that would be good i think there might be some appetite for um a more focused uh fundraising uh effort on the part of the community gardens given uh do you know how many gardeners you've got off the top yeah i think it's about 600 gardeners it's a it's an amazing program and and megado daniel who runs that program for us is just phenomenal i mean she just meets very specifically with all our um you know families that have come in from other countries to just make sure that they understand the process she needs some doc the garden and she goes to the family center to meet with them she's really just really hands on work to helping that happen okay thank you very much you're welcome great um excellent i am missing a counselor oops sorry we're going to get to the beginning there and now or i'm about to next problem thank you so much for your attention welcome i'm not sure if this is a question but i'm curious where the conservation legacy where that is that's a Cindy question so that is um in our 800 numbers it's like eight three four i think it's what the number is there um and that one is in in that one in their budget okay great and if you have any questions on that just just give me holler give me the copy of it is it right i don't think it's actually in that because the conservation legacy would have been in last week's because it's all under the calvary park area so if you didn't get just to see it let me know and it's part of um what uh counselor bergman i think was asking about as well in terms of the park's foundation um everything that we're reviewing tonight is as we have been reviewing through all of our marvelous nights um is the general fund budget for each of these departments um and so where there is um alternative sources of revenue um like bca has their foundation that is budgeted separately um cedo has their sort of general fund budget and then a whole separate grants budget so any questions you have please continue to ask because it can be a little bit confusing to get the whole okay great thank you very much thank you great um i believe is the mayor's office so it belongs here we go to start with the first slide which is our mayor's office personnel costs um we have four employees in the mayor's office to date the mayor and so those salaries and wages are the compensation for those four employees um occasionally we bring in seasonal temporary staff for example we have summer interns to buy us what we don't think that okay now we have a few operating expense budgets um our travel and trading budget is used for our paying for uh mileage mileage expenses for example when we're driving to earlier to our state so thank you lct meetings our discretionary spending case for our annual department heads retreat it in part pays for our annual city employee picnic and it um case for other individual costs that come up over the course of the year i would just like to thank the mayor's office um it's small and everyone's always like it's small but every little bit counts um noting that their operating expenses went from about 22,000 and fy 23 to about 17,000 for fy 24 so every department that can cut their operating expenses i'm grateful so thank you mayor's office so that i'll just go to um question great so i know so i was starting to think are there uh are there any questions about the mayor's office go ahead councillor thank you so much and out of the old salary sometimes we have three exempt employees and what not exactly there's no further questions there um jordan also has typically the mayor's office presents on the regal programs budget people who haven't been through this before the regal programs i would say is the most eclectic part of the budget in some ways it is this is not something that and it had to be this program i guess but let's say we have made several exempts um with the regional programs budget over time have been various um for example we've used to give out more arts grants in that kind of somewhat unstructured fashion and a lot of that uh was um kind of put into some additional funding we created for it and the DCA was given annual community grant funds um me uh some other examples of that kind of uh sort of simplify this budget but this is we sure got in here through many years of um uh decisions and sit down and factor out and i don't know if you have any highlights in particular well no a few highlights um just very briefly uh that i i when the final budget comes forward there will be a few small changes to this budget i didn't review it as carefully as i should have before bringing it forward so i'll just note up to you what the changes will be the visiting nursing association was inadvertently not funded in this budget i think due to the fact that they have actually changed their name is now part of the uvm medical center as uvm home and health hospice um group so um that is just an administrative error that will be rectified in the next budget um similar with the yarrow soluble sister cities fund that was just inadvertently not included uh and those are the two that i noticed as i was looking at this to come forward i would just add um i we have adjusted the board and mission compensation down from we had estimated a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in uh fyi 23 um you might remember this was one of our equity initiatives and fyi 23 is the first year that we have been compensating board and commission members and so um we looked at because we did not want to run out of money um our policy is that um board and commission members don't have to accept the stipend and we weren't sure how many would accept or wouldn't and so a hundred thousand dollars based on this year's usage should be plenty of money so just so people know there's no change to the policy we're still come you know everyone is eligible just based on actuals i don't believe that we need to obligate that for the year 2000 also um we have the expanded mental health the 400 thousand dollars in here um and we have previously discussed that that will be moving to a different budget but since that was put here last year for now it's a placeholder here so you can see that would be allocated i'll just add one additional thing before turning to questions that is um maybe the way this is administered is the determined through this budgeting process which organizations will be included you'll know that a lot of these organizations will see the same amount of funding for an extended period of time um and then those organizations send invoices to the city and the that's been a check back for the amount that was budgeted in the authorized budget great thank you Jordan Catherine floor is open for questions that's fine um if the chamber commerce selection and that's sorry that's our membership fee so maybe aware that many organizations change membership fee so that is the membership fee if the same case um to the chamber uh council meeting all right thank you um I know that we received uh a request from the attorney point seven to increase the $4,500 amount I think earlier today to realize that I went um so I'm just wondering if conversations have happened with them about that I know they also received a grant funding which I think there was some more questions about it yeah thank you for the reminder because maybe um that's part of the question about um regional programs special project emerging to use that way it's flexible funding that sometimes requests will come in for a one-time event or an expenditure from different organizations and that is used to fund those initiatives I'll say something that we're using that fund for and FY 23 was a lot of the trans inclusive campaign marketing that we have on a partnership webcaster fee so we have it's a flexible fund for and it's just a couple of other people yeah we're reporting to the board of finance when it draws out of it for the board of finance and um some of the time the board of finance number some come forward with uh local research for that as well do you want to catch up? This one I remember empty arms of our moms you'd make a $5,000 $5,000 empty arms empty arms oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so so demo connector it's been the pulguries association all of those made the requests and I believe came from the space empty arms is one that is I think on the list the company which is was funded with the REIV and part of it so basically they made new requests and they asked me how am I this is for the chism someone with child dominance yes so my question is specific to the sister series program and you know in years since a lot of people came to visit here and since then we haven't received any relationship with the city and our sister cities and it was this one where you come from to recognize us yes I'm sure that that so each this the um sister cities had a community group that relates with a sort of the other community respected community group and our sister city country I know that the people who are in those sister city groups are always glad to share updates with councils or the public when asked and the $2,000 funding to allocate it in the budget goes to fund that on groups activities over here I mean this way is a question that basically I've been able to visit the sister city program of the city and how do we strengthen it give it more vitality and I think there is there is opportunity that for us to be so and also if there are updates to what specific community does it I think a lot need to be think about a lot about the sister city right now but now these are requests these are organizations that the city in funding for years now what the process of having new requests in to this request to this list like that are consistent and ongoing but will be the process to this resolution or it's mostly through this annual budgeting process that organizations or counselors will come forward and discuss that they would like to see it and another organization and over the course of the year as Councilor McGee pointed out we occasionally get requests for increased funding we evaluate that as early as possible thank you I am not seeing any other hands so I want to close out this further meeting thank you Jordan and we'll get back to the REIB department so let's welcome them okay started I just want to say thank you for the opportunity this is my first time sharing for our budget presentations so hopefully I'm going to give you a little bit of grace taking a look at what we're we plan our vision for FY24 and really with my department moving forward so some of the slides we had to read redo and we had some more budget information so we will provide it afterwards we just want to make sure we have the vision part of the realignment of my office and with my hire we wanted to make sure that we were planning for post-card dollars and sustainability of our office and that would look like not just this year but over the next five or ten years and part of that was taking a look at the 2000 racial equity as a public health crisis and then also looking at the REIB's strategic roadmap and figuring out how we can realign our efforts and and realign the office moving forward and taking a look at both how we meet the needs of our internal and external stakeholders and populations so City of Burlington the 2020 declaration of racism and public health crisis our office is going to provide strategic guidance, training, technical assistance, support to the local departments and community stakeholders to address structural racism the office REIB the most important thing is the office REIB aims to ensure that race and other demographic factors or IDNAs do not negatively influence outcomes of the county city that's very very important. With that we thought we could take a little stab at really phoning in what our mission was I get a lot of questions regularly about what is your office doing do you just do training but what specifically do you do what you provide to the city and our ultimate goal is to ensure that all Braille and Tony's can fully embrace the everyday joys of life free from discrimination and marginalization it seems broad but the work is broad it's ever moving and flexible and so we want to make sure that we're being ever moving flexible and convert that we do in the city. When we're looking at racism of public public health crisis addressing systemic racism to a public health lens is very comprehensive and so if you have time to review the 2021 strategic roadmap we had domains that we looked at which were economy education justice housing and health and as we continued our research we wanted to make sure that we were looking and leading forward and so some of the different domains were expanded one of them was social women development and that was building upon education looking at things like really childhood education retention from our students from page 12 higher education how we develop our existing workforce to keep them in the workforce how we develop our workforce and so all those things are in social and human development when we look at humanity belonging we want to take it past just justice to look at civic engagement how people live and thrive in the community. Housing was a big initiative but we want to look at physical environment what that looks like not just housing but sustainability of things about land use and other aspects that really create a city of belonging and civic engagement that's very very important and then health health pretty much stay the same what we're looking for there is quality of health care cultural competency in our health care and address those systemic inequities and mobility mortality and this chronic disease and make sure we're addressing those things holistically what you see here is the program that we're currently doing the programming that we're hitting on all those domains currently and the work that we're doing. What we have here is our proposed FY 24 budget it's up to down about a hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars a share we're actually rolling over 150 from our budget with my late hire in the year we just weren't up to capacity to do some of the initiatives that we wanted to do so we requested to move over some funds. What you'll see in our line item moving forward is we kept some of them the same but we redefined some of them so we better understand how we're spending our money and to work with our communities and things that I'm sure. So what you see here is as most departments the majority of our budget is salaries and benefits. We do do a lot of data informed things and so we must have professional consulting services we're looking this year to expand our cultural events so that line item doesn't just read Juneteenth it's really expanding the cultural events to take a look at the needs and representation of all of our BIPOC community. Raising the crisis we want to deign all two different funds one of them is for programming within the community and there's that nature and the other one is for planning and data as it relates to coming up with more initiatives and then the rest is our general operation budget which could be range from an advantage to have training to supplies all supplies and any of our own different associations and things that were involved. We do do a lot of fiscal partnership in other words in the community if we don't run the programs will we a help support the programs and this is what we've done at FY 23. We supported the Richard Kemp Center and they're back to school then and in January and February we took a look at MLK and supported the content there at ECHO. We supported Black Experience. In April we partnered with the Fletcher Free Library to bring stories about African-Americans since the slavery to library and they did it there. We worked in May with Conversations of Ecoder. It was an awesome event over at the Glen where we bought 550 students in and they had a conversation with him about the book and voting rights. That was the first time I ever saw 550 students in a space with no cell home doubt. They were very, very engaged and then in the evening adults came out and spoke with them and asked questions about voting. And lastly we're partnering with All Hearts Inspiration to highlight this year's monumental time where they actually have a Black female curator and so Samora Jay and Myra Flynn are two BIPOC women that will be headlining this event and so we provided tickets to BIPOC community to be able to access that free. So FY 23 I did want to highlight the direct community investment from our office. We talked about the different funds where we actually give money directly to the community and what you see is there's so far in FY 23 we are already in these $435,000 in BIPOC community businesses and organizations. What you see the top two those are really focused on ARPA and polka dollars. Okay okay what's the support Juneteenth? The new way equity was in regards to Black History Month. We supported VNAC in regards to their efforts to address gun violence and things that nation and community and get a sense of healing. We're committed to doing more work with them to continue that process and then Juneteenth even though it costs quite a bit we also infuse significant amount of money back into the community through vendors and other services that we usually try to highlight and use BIPOC vendors for that. And then what you see is others about another $18,000 to $20,000 that's really looking at working faces that we spend $5,000 less than all in one category. We are committed to continuing this kind of work with the community as well. So Juneteenth this is our big one we want to start off with from on here. Beautiful Sun Kiss People. Say beautiful Sun Kiss People. Beautiful Sun Kiss People. That's one of our shorter promotional videos that you'll see around the time when there's a longer one highlighting last year's event and providing information about this year. As far as I was concerned we were allocated $180,000 for Juneteenth this year. Our actual budget is $148,000. There were some deficits last year. We have estimated about $100,000 donations which brings our budget to $248,000 and we are under budget right now. Working with OKOK and the community and some standards have really been a tremendous help to make sure that we fall under budget or on budget this year. We are kind of re-imagining Juneteenth this year. It's all going to be in City Hall, Park Area and Central Downtown Area. Looking at several locations City Hall Park, Contra, Concourse Theater, Wellington City Arts, Lower Church Street, Main Street and Glen. There'll be multiple difference in spikes and stages. What you saw at Roosevelt Park in the past which had a lot of the activities were now beyond ministry and so we're bringing basically the community to the cultural center. What that does is a couple of different things. It brings people let them know this place belongs to them. We buy from people as well as the inadvertence when we're talking about our vendors of people that are just coming here to New York, Burlington will also get the pleasure of seeing our diversity of our city. It's 12 hours of entertainment and activities. It's 55 performers ranging from music to let's see comics. I think Councilor High covers one of our comics that's signed up as well as spoken word poetry. That will be happening at Glen. This year we're integrating a Juneteenth focused BTB market which does a huge service to our BIPOC vendors by bringing them to customer bates as well as bringing them to our economic center to really be showcased. Lastly we have BIPOC led health and wellness focus events which will be BIPOC led yoga, BIPOC meditation as well as other health conversations about how to to healthy living and things of that nature that provided that day as well. So again 12 hours all in this area and it's on the 17th this year on that Saturday. It kicks off at 11 a.m. with the BTB market as well as the that requirement rush and then the night before all Councilors and leadership staff be invited to take off and we'll provide community awards and things. Looking forward we're planning on and working with our neighborhood equity index what that is a public data portal that quantifies what equity and belonging means in your city and allows you with a real-time look at where you need to thrive your resources through the lens of black and brown people are often the most marginalized in just franchise and so we're working with other internal departments as well as outside groups to start to build that out to figure out the data points we need to follow to track that. Expansion of our cultural events I talked about what we're looking at is to increase our BIPOC center representation in the city to make sure we understand and see them. BIPOC home ownership program really looking at not just poverty but closing that generational look down. City employee training and no I think I have some questions about that we are actually working on developing a more comprehensive program with that not just a training but from hire to separation that you get ongoing training some of the things you're seeing with that is I worked with the police department and the Center for Police Equity to create the training they did around 14th. I'm doing the learning both objectives and help them develop that training it was 32 hour a month training that the police department did very deep and we're looking to actually transition that to the whole city. It was very well done and then I don't know how much you're seeing of our actual newsletter and things of that nature which is self-directed learning that's just one of the most leading ways to learn as an adult that we have our monthly equity spotlight that we set it out with movie suggestions books and all these things that we send out to everyone. I'm not sure if counselors get it but if you don't make sure you start getting it and then lastly our embracing belonging monument this is the next step in our city's commitment in regards to social and racial justice issues we're going to take that semi permanent black lives matter street pain that this is the last year that I was scheduled to do that and transition that into the embracing belonging monument that will be there forever and be unveiled sometime that's why 24 and then lastly a big part of my department moving past the ARPA funding is how do we realign or reorganize our department to the appropriate staff and levels for sustainability. Our current organizational chart has about 14 staff members on it. There are nine full-time FTEs for limited services and one temporary point. What we're proposing is a shift to really focus on driving our staff and our survey matter expertise to address racism as opposed to emergency and through that public health lens. So looking at this what you're going to see as the next slide is financially we're going to lower our staff cost by $150,000 by going to this that possibly could be free aligned or money moved to different places. We're still keeping nine full-time employees but we're not being as top heavy so instead of having five supervisors we're at three. We're going from nine support staff to six. We're getting rid of limited service position and temporary position. I think especially in an office like ours encouraging upward mobility is important. Staff retention is also important because they're really in there with the community and having turnovers is not a good idea when you're engaging in that way and really trust. It ensures our employees have the same benefits and opportunities with other city employees and then most importantly and for most recruitment retention for the city of Wellington for our department that is historically disproportionate by FOX staff. What do those positions look like? I can give you a little bit of blurb but we're going with a data on policy manager. What that would have been before was a health equity manager. We added some some more duties to that and kind of broaden their scope as we look what the work's going to look like in the future. Communications and community engagement manager was the innovation manager and what we did is send in that as well. The financial administrator and coordinator is the same as the temporary position but we added some grant duties there because one of the things for sustainability in my department is we're going to have to find some grant opportunities not just for our department but also for community investment and then lastly the RIB program consultants which are going to be integral and most excited about. This is going to be the true partnership and the link between equity and east department as well as the community. So these people not only will be an expert in a particular domain in which they're kind of lead on they're going to be able to conduct equity assessment so the city is not going to have the necessity to constantly bring in experts outside but we'll have the expertise inside and then when the experts do come we'll have data to provide them to really take a really deep look into the city. They'll also be able to help us set equity goals for east department which is important and this team will be the mandatory statutory and develop that and guide that as we move forward and also assess that so that we can make sure meeting staff needs. They can also do a little bit of civic education as well. Appreciate your time and make your questions. Great thank you Kevin. Thanks for explaining that I'll have um so the floor is there are a few questions. I don't know the question is that I have a comment I said awesome job I just saved money out of the reorg and you brought down the talks to organize significantly so that's pretty good. Professor Grant. Thank you I just wanted to thank Director Carson for her work and coming in and picking up the pieces and getting out into the community to really you know just establish a relationship with stakeholders in the community and to let everyone know that the goals of the department are still intact and moving forward with a vision to keep this department successful because I believe their work is really important. Thank you so much. Professor Grant, Professor Jay. Thank you Mr. Mayor. My first question is about I haven't seen anything that Biden stands for from the mayor's understanding also. Apparently that would be taken care of within that where we said right now we're working on programming money so there's money here and we're working on what I believe is currently I believe we're working on scheduling it's supposed to be in 2024 but we're at the end of the school year and a lot of the people that we're working with actually partnered with kids so we're trying to schedule them but we're looking at next week's budget and our first meeting. And you said so it would be under the electricity. When we're looking at the budget you're going to look at the environment funds money would come out there we don't quite know the need but we did hear Mark about $3,000 just holding on that we didn't know what that was and when we talked about the rollover of those two funds and $100,000 and stick to $1,000 that was to make sure that we had funds available for the ongoing programming that we weren't aware of the copy. And you know if you come to the bottom of this question about the stopping of the change from 24 to 18 I think it's 14 to 19. And what's just wondering is those are like volunteer living and what the retention piece is is is it more you let them go or are they excited to go? What is it going to explain? Yes so before I got here the majority of the staff left with the former director and then since then people have had other opportunities. A lot of the staff that I had were in limited service positions and so currently the staff that have not have one full-time employee one temporary employee and then two limited services and so just to be honest if I was in a limited service position and I'm waiting on a reorg reorg reorg I'm going to look for another job you know there's been a lot of transition and turn over in the last year in my department so I don't think it's anything people want stability but with all these positions that are coming up I will have I think six of them that will be open that's been a definitive statement we welcome anyone back anyone's welcome to say. So basically goes that state thinking of staying. Absolutely. I mean I feel as part of this budget and when you put them there I feel like this is spending a lot of money on celebrations. I mean that's very clean and you know anyway okay okay and from my perspective those are finally aspiring people like me. Some of the celebration is coming. The work of racism is staying here. As part of this budget I haven't seen anything related to providing more access and how working relationships can be established with programs and services in Pakistan like ECA you know we're talking this about what we're going to do with the recreation and nutrition program but I feel that we need to re-focus a little bit into like programming that we are dealing with help into policy change and the weight of supporting the environment instead of investment. That's here's my first observation if this is new it's never came to our committee and I'm being reactive. Those are just my initial things but maybe on June 6 we can talk about this. Any further discussion? Any further questions? Thank you, Jim. I think that's right here and next you have my mind too. You drive slides. I will drive the slide. I'm sorry. So we one of those departments that violated the uh limit on slides so we'll do this quickly. Captain said either you chop it down or you move quickly and skim over some of these slides but this is such a photo of the brand frame that I felt like we had to share it. So I'm Brian Tye, Director of Community and Economic Development Office really glad to be with you tonight with me is Todd Rawlings, Assistant Director for France Finance and we are it's always crucial to lay out CEDO's mission to engage our community to build environment healthy and equitable city. We were created almost exactly 40 years ago today. City Council was then called the Board of Aldermen's decided after two years of debate to create the department as a way to really kind of focus the city's efforts on the priorities that then Mayor Sanders community had embraced which was to really engage in an equity agenda. At the time it was very focused on sort of social economic justice and economic equity and it expanded that scope to include racial equity within our department as well and really all forms of equity. So we're a department that doesn't just work with not just an equity lens but with a real activist kind of equity agenda department and right here we try to go over the department sort of how we're divided up if you will. We try not to be too siloed. We cover everything from the housing grants and finance team that Todd oversees Community Justice which is Rachel Jolly's team which is almost as big as all of us in City Hall. So we're about 17 that's together in City Hall and CJC has about 15 plus or minus and Community Works is that little engine they could with Samantha Dunn and just a team of one which we're hoping to work on is coming this year and I'll put on that in a minute. Community Engagement, Neighborhood, it's important for its development team is Jillian Vanton's committee and Sarah Russell as you know in the initiative too and homelessness. We can go to the next slide. I should mention Scott Havoc is part of CEDUP and Scott as you hopefully know is the Substance Use Policy Analyst and so we welcome Scott a year ago and continue to support Scott's work. So as you can see this is the department laid out in an organizational chart. I'll just note that we have two vacant positions that are on the sort of left side of the screen that are both housing related positions we're in the hiring process right now. We're optimistic that we'll have both of those still next few weeks. There's also a vacant position at the top sort of over to the right senior projects and policy specialist which has been on our work chart for years. It was once filled by someone named Kirsten Merriman Shapiro but it's been pretty much vacant since about the time she left in 19 I think. We've been proposing to fill that position actually so that's a change for the department. Next slide. CJC a department or a division team of CEDA which is funded almost entirely with non-city sources state primarily funded through the department corrections the attorney general's office and the department for children and families and Rachel had a biggest commitment so she could be with us tonight but there's any questions that goes back to Rachel. So we tried to do is highlight what we've done or what we focused on in 23 and rather than go through the wall because there's too many bullets we want this to be available to you all and to the community to see the work that CEO has been doing on behalf of the people of Burlington. There's a lot here so you know we don't have enough time to go through it all I just wanted to at least you know highlight of course this incredible photo of the Moran property which was a sort of a challenge a chronic challenge for decades for Burlington. I think we've now we believe we've really turned the corner on Moran and the future looks pretty bright for for what we're hoping to accomplish as we continue to support the evolution of Moran as a community asset as you see memorials listed here. I think I heard a question earlier about stabilization of memorials from Robert Councilor Bush or maybe it is work that has taken place in this fiscal year so you won't see much if anything going into next fiscal year. Parks Recreation and Waterfront maintains it as part of their sort of public facilities city facility buildings but our office has overseen they're basically the stabilization of the roof structurally sound and prevent any parts of the exterior falling off and creating an incredible hazard public safety hazard so that's where we're at with Moran. We'll go to the next slide. Obviously our efforts on homelessness is a slide it shows the end result and there's some workers in progress or maybe a CEDO staff member down there in that circle painting the building and Councilor Geary came out to paint and maybe so the rest the mayor was there as well with his parents painting one day so the community came together really to turn a former parking lot into a you know the name of the street New Hope Lane is really not just ended to be kind of aspirational but it really is about what this is about it's creating not just hope but a bridge from being homeless to having stability and security and the safety of a shelter here to get into housing and it's actually producing results in terms of folks who've left the shelter and have gone to permanent housing through the efforts many of them have obtained employment really this has turned out to be you know as good as we could have hoped for it doesn't not without challenges for sure but we believe the challenges are being dealt with quickly and effectively and we're optimistic about transitioning different residents who really expected to have a you know a six to nine month stay or on target to being able to do that for most folks so it's going really well there's a lot of other efforts here around homelessness we don't want folks to go away thinking that oh what is the only thing we're doing it's really quite a bit more that we'll have much more to talk to the council about in coming going into the next slide our efforts around developing new affordable housing we've supported the Cots family shelter we have 85 units that CHT is developing it's in place another 36 housing units that CHT is developing at the VFW will also include space for the VFW and community gathering space there as well as hopefully the new home fingers crossed for the community justice center to be able to move it in that building and out of new interest church which gives some opportunities that we'll come back to you that you do some we can go on here hard to highlight things but I think it's quick CJC is just continuing to exceed all of their sort of funding benchmarks if you will as far as what they're intended to achieve they will have served over 1500 people by the end of June pretty remarkable level of service by far the the most active and in many ways the CJC did I think state looks at as a real model not just providing service to large numbers but to actually moving the needle on on the issues that they deal with around sort of justice and hopefully transformative justice our work around workforce development has graduated students through the LNA program 61 percent of those that's going on to pass the LNA test which actually pretty rigorous exam got the training program that we support through resource it was turning out construction workers who have some skills and credentials they can take to the job site and get not just employment but hopefully employment that inform career practice physicians for the next one our work around diversity equity inclusion this last year has focused on the efforts around mid-engagement for the quality you don't need a resident voting initiative we continue to provide support to trust your community voices reaching 21 per 21 hundred persons per month is social media we have a direct we have a multilingual newsletter that goes out on a periodic basis provide direct support to language access implementation so working with other departments and community organizations that are looking to translate materials to make sure that everyone has access to the information to be fully engaged in CJC completed an equity audit which I'm glad that director Carson mentioned it are you able to help with that because it was we feel that there's some benefits to having it be something the city does sort of board departments and and it may be a way that departments can you know really align their programs and their efforts but it may also be a way to help fund you know we paid for this and we could pay for it again if there was a good service so far the idea was providing that service it could be that different practical relationship we continue to provide the support to the NPAs and that that work has been almost I think since the seat it started 40 years ago so that work continues through our you know relationship with business workforce development our CDG funds flow through the department to provide direct technical assistance to small businesses micro entrepreneurs and local businesses hoping to reopen and expand they're working to help to support right now and a lot of this we do is two departments working really closely together development of the hopefully the spot that will arrive on Pine Street in the future we can go to the next our CDG fund and work is you know it's a flagship program the department it really is one of the reasons why the city created CEDO is to ensure that we were taking an approach to investing these funds which have gone down significantly since it started actually so I'll show you that in a little while but we still receive around 700 over 700 thousand a year and it goes back out to the community through a CDG advisory board which maybe some of you have served on in the past it's very direct democracy approach most cities just get a check from the federal government if you will and the mayor decides where it goes and that's it and that's that's how CDBG is allocated across the country but it's always done in a great different way the impacts I think are huge to requests unfortunately usually exceed our dollars available by five to one very much next slide looking forward to 2024 what we hope to focus on is ensuring the Champlain Inn continues that's a critical resource that's been the challenge with the number of recent developments we need to secure funding to continue the Elwood both the Elwood Shelter and the Community Resource Center we're optimistic about both of those we have funding applications pending or at least from the Elwood Shelter getting continued engagement council around camping, camping policy and those difficult issues that you're trying to be grappling with we continue to deploy and we'll deploy CDBG funds as outlined here our real focus around homelessness is to ensure that we increase the number of homeless dedicated units both in non-profit housing but also in poor-profit housing if we can it's a real challenge but we're committed to that as you all know the gateway block slash memorial redevelopment concept is something we'll be working closely with the council on moving into conceptual design phase for brand phase two and we're funding these projects both at basically nine park districts the barn and all in house renovation that really is a benefit to the community it draws people to Burlington and gives I think folks a sense of some of that piece of our history and we'll move to the next slide going forward in 2024 we're going to continue to support trusted community voices you know to ensure that that our roles to coordinate their work they do the actual work and there are seven I think yes seven members of the TCBs and they all are part-time city employees so they get paid a wage to provide that service to their communities and we think it's a really important innovation that Burlington has led the way on we continue to work on the language access plan we'll continue to do deep in those relationships with both city departments and community organizations to overcome you know barriers to accessing their services their programs due to language barriers we are at the early stages with the crystal care assistant training program working with hopefully up to 25 people over a nine month period getting the skills for moving into the PCA positions of which there's such a huge demand in our system learning and nursing facilities continue to fund the CBG funded business technical assistance through business workforce development in trades and starting trades safety and training program and resource and advancing workforce equity in Burlington is another phrase for what we've called the jobs of people studying which are waiting for both the where the economy is sort of headed in terms of where the jobs in the future will be and how do we ensure that Burlingtonians can access those jobs what are the training supports that we need to put in place so that the investments can move into those positions so what next slide portable housing I think we've mentioned a number of these initiatives you all so we can cruise this later point I would highlight at the bottom the housing trust fund resources are have grown significantly what they used to be both with the increase in the dedicated fund the tax amount but also with short term rental the ordinance that you all passed has directly significant your resources so we're going to be kind of regrouping as a as various departments several departments from the mayor to talk about you know how to leverage those resources to really advance some of these other efforts as also around BIPOC ownership which I'm going to Carson mentioned earlier next is sort of just some highlights of CBG funds funded projects so now you guys cruise these later I think we'll go into the budget overview this is the big one here you know we are an unusual department and if you look at the chart on the pie chart on the left most of our dollars actually go back out the door as opposed to funding salaries and benefits and that's in the form of grants and loans and other programs so it really is you know we serve as a conduit and an intermediary for funding to make sure that it flows to the community to accomplish the goals and objectives that the city has said we do that in a way to ensure that we can continue to manage and it's being funds effectively so that requires there's a lot of work a lot of detail you know a lot of effort involved in that on the other side you see our revenues are very diverse we have a great diverse revenue base each you know each source has its own set of requirements the general fund number of right around a million dollars is slightly less than last year by about seventy thousand dollars less I'll talk about that in a few minutes we can go to the next slide I would note that something we want to call your attention to is that we the mayor and the city council established the RRC the resource and recovery center in 2020 with primarily with our but and that was really a media response to crisis the pandemic and trying to ensure that folks had access to critical support that they needed to navigate the pandemic and that response I think we think made a huge impact it really did help people with struggling with housing health issues employment with maintaining their small businesses and that was in many ways the response that the times called for as we moved away from that recovery mode we're shifting into more of a you know focus on on both economic recovery and some of the development priorities of this community to install or at least put on the back burner so we really shifted our emphasis to begun to shift to you know more staff resources to vote into these projects these priorities moran city place the gateway block redevelopment when you utilize sites down the south end for high density housing and other projects to realize this goal of housing as a human right you're sure a more equitable economic conference that's that's important piece I think to share and go to the next slide to talk a little bit more with them looks like so we really have a few positions I highlighted on the org chart that have been left vacant for years and those are positions which advance these community development projects but the funding has been available to support those positions so we're proposing to fill that vacant project in policy development position that will really support that community works team of one spent the Duns team to get some of these projects you know really advance them and try to bring them to fruition so that's the the goal of that best we're also proposing to essentially not fill an existing vacant position and to to no longer fund the position of community outreach coordinator which was a position that was direct response to to the pandemic and was an RRC position but we are recommending going forward that that position not be funded next fiscal year next slide um the key thing that we want to um highlight here is it you know we as a department we've lived many ways we sort of lived died by the grants so with a shortfall of the production of of armor funds that we used to fund some of those positions we thought it was you know most prudent to look at at what positions could be primed from the department and and resources reallocated to better achieve some of the strategic objectives of city so that's what you're seeing here now the ARP funds are out of CEDA's budget are are diminished significantly home ARP as a source but we're going to have spent all those funds at least to be taken the coming fiscal year and UDAG which you've all heard about occasionally is an old funding source that is a legacy program that we have available but those dollars are are being spent rapidly so we're spending down those funds um and really we want to highlight the federal funds we've relied on home and CBG have decreased to the point where now there are between 33 and 40 percent of what they were in 1993 and funding levels here we come from inflation so really seeing a huge you know slippage in terms of federal support for the work at CEDA we wanted to highlight these items here under sort of the consequences of where we're at um you know without future action to the council um it'd be in the fiscal year 24 TCBs doesn't have a dedicated funding source that is a that is a time limited funding source the shelter operations in Elmwood and FY 25 comes to an end in terms of funding commitments community resource operations we have funding through 24 hopefully we can acquire additional funding um language access has again funding that is highly dependent on on ARPA funds that we've been using as well staffing to end the initiative to end homelessness but to to support the initiative and assist that's 25 and staffing for community work that this rate of spending is going to be fully depleted by the end of 25 so what's the solution we'll cover that solution in just a minute um we wanted to highlight a portion of the total CEDA budget on the left in the pie chart just under a billion dollars um out of 11,432,000 budget um so sort of why the why did CEDA get general fund as a department because there was a time when it got very very little and really since the since mayor's first um term in office CEDA's general fund support is from significantly from um from a couple hundred thousand to where we are today these are the reasons why really you know we have the the department which is often the department gets to respond to pressing and emerging challenges without dedicated funding and so that's why the flexibility of general fund support is so critical um our backbone funding from from HUD has decreased steadily over the years to the point now over 30 33 percent of what we were getting previously 30 years ago the needs continue to grow and so our ability to respond is dependent on having some level of support we've seen continued inflationary pressures lester's cola was significant pressure on us it was obviously justified by the cost of living it's their point experience and you know the initiatives that are listed here just some examples of ways that our staff is spending time on things that we don't have like an actual grant source to go to so really important point that out going forward into um FY 24 we're engaging with a technical assistance program that HUD offers um a little funny to call yourself a distressed community but HUD considers us a distressed community so we went to them and said help us find a way to fund CEDA as a department sustainably going forward look at other cities look at other comparable sized cities and come up with some models for how to fund the work that CEDA does so we're not in this position where we're struggling to keep our office staff and we can't respond to pressing needs so these are just you know visible here ideas to maybe capture some future tax revenue over projects that we but for CEDA's involvement wouldn't have come to fruition obviously aggressively searching for for new non-general fund sources is our charge and then we take that charge very seriously so that's it great thank you Brian score is over two questions okay this isn't really uh asking this isn't really a time or a public question thanks there's a lot in there um I have a couple of questions one's more general one which is uh around the um in the funding challenges a lot of the consequences there were certain uh programs ending in school 24 others ending in the school 25 it'd be nice to know what the like what ones you had of like a level of confidence you can find alternative funding sources from you know other than the general fund board and what those impacts might be if you quantify those um at some point I think you might be good to know as we extend the plan through that I think that's something we could probably put some time that should be clean now and the other next couple weeks maybe that'll be I could give you a whole lot off the I'm going ahead right now um we are yeah I don't think I don't I mean we're pursuing funding right now for the Umwood Shelter and the Community Resource Center um we don't have a specific so you know I think that's a slide about getting technical assistance from HUD to figure this out it's a big part of what we're hopeful we'll come back to you with the report that says here are the ways we can look going forward here's the roadmap you know it's not entirely a clear map but hopefully we'll work there I think there is yeah thanks and I don't know that it's not necessary for these budget discussions but it's certainly like you know something we need to be aware of next bunch of those and we appreciate that and these I don't want to apply to these programs around the chopping block these are programs we think are incredibly critical really their critical responses in the city has stepped up to provide these services to think that the community is much stronger and much better and it's part of our role as a municipality so we're focused like a laser beam on this stuff we're really going to find a way this is what I don't want to I don't want to give you false expectations that we've got to figure it out let's go okay thank you um and then my other question is more more narrow and specific and it's it's around like the shantyne and um and I'll note is there we can't find um a provider to manage that for the city do we have a contingency plan and sad it's not accounted for in our budget I would say that the state of Vermont is very committed it's luckily Sarah's here to help me with this one but um it's very committed to continuing the operation of that shelter in one way or another and there are some capital improvement needs that we actually funded and they weren't able to bring those that project to fruition with CDPG funds so those dollars will be coming back to the city and we have those dollars available and there will be other works we think from the state of Vermont on housing conservation work to upgrade the facility and um we don't have any news to share about an operator but I think we're there's there's some prospects it's not entirely um we haven't hit it yet on that Sarah is there anything you want to add to that yeah I would just say that we continue to work in really close um coordination with the state on ensuring continuity of operations of the Champlain Inn um and we have um about been meeting as frequently as every week or every other week for the last month or so um with stakeholders um and we're meeting again tomorrow um as Brian mentioned some of the um biggest concerns around um assuming ownership of uh or assuming operations of the property involve um the question of ownership um of the operations of program um the concerns are around assuming um ownership of the property in the state of of the building there as well so um there are a number of conversations going on including with VHCB as Brian mentioned um they do have all of the funding um or have committed you know the funding uh to support all the necessary rehab um that needs to happen at the property I'll just add that I I'm very focused on let's find a way to continue my thought very hard to get this facility open I think we're in a period but I'm beginning to expand an emergency shelter for an extended period of time until housing production efforts like you know start to make uh that have been identified by that so um it's not just a state uh state interest for it's I'm rather the city since uh for me hope I am pleased that through Brian and Sarah's work we have a chance to be placed to uh operate here in September I think sometimes I figure out a transition to another operator with respect to um I just want to quickly go back and to give you a comprehensive answer but I think with this budget season and the kind of ending of the this period of you know unprecedented federal funding it's um it's clear in the FY24 FY25, the FY26 budget says we've mentioned that the kind of the overview we have some real real challenges um I we're gonna um I think we work on starting to understand the FY25 budget is going to be a process of work finance it's working on throughout the year we're we have a variety of studies um what are going on and if you talk about the past I mean the court the early early part of FY24 um clearly we have a lot to be focused on including the go the the initiatives of Brian runs out here but there are some others as well we have some FY25 budget it's going to be uh something we have a lot of conversation and real challenges but as a department that's charged partly with growing the tax base that's obviously part of the answer to the race. Councillor Chang, I understand that you're welcome. Go ahead. Thank you. I mean um is it really housing in the department you've been almost everything is it from language to what game to housing, double off land, can you name it? Like it's it's it's not health, let's tell me. At least we're not on the streets. Okay. I'm not carrying guns either. So it's it's it's okay but I I feel like you know step out of this is so much but most of it does really well and one question is specific to the plastic community voices also to be implemented implementation of the language access points right. I mean from just the first glance it's definitely blames to the IAB and you can see it with a restructuring it's programming it's the community vision. It's a bracket which anti-violent, bad end policy that it puts you one you won't have a problem in FY24 after FY24 because it's either new department and I feel like it was definitely passed down from this company. This is an observation without digging into the details but I was surprised really surprised at the contrasting community voices they serve one thousand two people in the process. This is this is amazing. This is this needs to be stricter and solidified and supported because it's really challenging to identify this need depending on it and I couldn't believe that you know how it made it really difficult to do it. It's it's great. I also identified that you know your purpose for the coming years are more about you know modern plan is one city place is one but I didn't see anything specific to economic development of the community right but I know if you develop their taxes will come jobs will be created I understand that but how to strengthen the training programs that you have in the work is a resource with LNA I think those need to be looked at and required as well but this is my first observation and what's amazing about that. Thank you Councillor Jang. It is generally so I'm going to move on. Thank you Brandon Todd and next up please keep a chance on the fire department. Good evening everybody. Thanks for having me. So this is uh I apologize my slide shows to make sure so we're a pretty simple organization. You call we come and do our best to take care of the problems you have so my pretty simple organization. We're authorized for 96 personnel we have staffing as you can see here for three engines two ladders of tower truck three ambulances of the behind chief ship commander we operate from the same five stations we have for years and years one of them being the oldest active firehouse in the city in the state which is pretty cool. Admin division is with more personnel training division as one person prevention has three they take care that fire marshal's office they take care of all of our inspections time of sale inspections as well as our investigations of incidents and the EMS division is staff group one. Calendar year incidents 9,900 calls and calendar year 22, 19 and a half percent increase from 21 31 structure acquired the 29 percent increase in 21 and 6200 medical calls of 75 7.5 percent increase from 21. First we did some numbers first four months of the year year over year from 2016 to 2022 and we're up to 50 percent EMS calls since 2016 the first four months so significant increases you know we all we all talk about we all know why but we're doing our thing so next slide please. Pretty simple organizational chart I know it's funny when I was the deputy chief of administration I never liked this slide because I said but it doesn't seem like I do a whole lot but that is you know HR and 84 firefighters so you know that's that deputy chief administration does that work battalion chief of training you know it's like what does that person do and that person is in charge of all the training for the fire training for all of the all of these folks you see here there's EMS training certifications need to be kept up there's fire certifications that need to be kept up rope rescue training has my training all of that is managed by the battalion chief BMS by battalion chief of training battalion BMS is a position that we struggle to build we're excited to build it soon but with three ambulances in you know over 6000 EMS calls as you can and advanced EMTs and paramedic service there's a lot of there's a lot of training to be done with that there's a lot of organization with the hospital there's also QA QI of EMS calls we do quality assurances on all paramedic levels calls and that's all stuff that's going to be under the BC to EMS as well as just working close more closely with our partners at Vermont EMS to make sure that we're who we need to do fire department allocation salaries is huge of course and benefits that's that's where our dollars are we do have minimum staffing requirements for you know the trucks we can't run and we will run below 22 a day so you'll have 22 firefighters on duty minimum per day and that just a lot makes it so that we can meet requirements for come close at least a minimum requirements for fire any of us responses by concealing utility services and operations are pretty small least per budget so you know when those when those pieces are level funded as we did our best to do this year it does get expensive it does get tough to cover things bunker here for example set up one fire but it was just bunker here helmet gloves boots clothing jacket is is $4,265 per person we have 84 people that have two sets each we're trying to reduce our cancer risk we have extractors in the stations when we go to structure fires we do our best to get them to work we do our best we require them to wash their bunker here when I started in the fire department it was filled with 55 gallon thermal water and you know it was dry in the sun and that was it now we have extractor three extractors in the fire stations we've got a long way to really protecting our fire butters from cancer risk which is a huge risk for our responders two sets a gear for each responder is a huge expense but it's something that's that's really protecting our folks you know the goal being you know we want them to meet their requirements we want them to you know meet the sense of duty that you guys expect but we don't want to cause them everything in the end and that's that's truly our goal and we're and we're doing our best to be kind of good but again it's hard to do level funding budgets we need to we need to just to stay just to stay at level that we are because of NFPA requirements and everything over the last 10 years data manufacturer we need almost set on $78,000 a year just to replace coaches and fans and say nothing about everything else so it's it's very difficult okay this is revenues and expenses we are revenues we are very heavy burden on the general fund we do have revenues our revenues consist of fire marginal dollars for inspections time sale inspections permitting things like that and EMS we do charge bill for EMS and that is the bulk of our revenues as you can see our expenses here are they are mostly staffing and benefits. Accomplishments for FY 23 you know we we did start having to work through a little more aggressively typically you know historically more our time filling fire department jobs honestly the last week I've been doing my best to build seven positions we had to we interviewed we've it's been a struggle the last week but I think we're there we successfully completed and started one recruit class completed one in FY 23 with 14 employees we also took over the fire desk dispatch which was a new thing for us since 1992 I think it got it was taken away from the fire department police department just having some struggle filling the positions so we took over the fire dispatch and we hired trained and have been managing that since December three of our three of our four dispatchers I've actually are going to start recruit school on the 30th we hired four more and we started them today actually so training on those four dispatchers began today so we did implement 4896 shift rotation this year I know that might not sound like an accomplishment being at work for two full days but we've been on a 24-48 for years and years and through COVID we did have some struggles with folks just the stresses of being at work it always felt like you're either just getting off duty and recovering and we're getting ready to go back to work pretty much the case so and then we had very high overtime burdens during COVID we had a lot of COVID leave just because there's a lot of exposure in the fire department so we decided to try to implement a 4896 shift rotation it actually reduces the drive to work by half and it gives folks that four days it's two days on four days off it gives folks that four days off to really actually feel like they're normal humans again before going back to work it's just really you know what you're what you're there it's hard to imagine sometimes to be someplace for 48 hours but waking up the bells but once you're there you're kind of there you're in the mindset and it just reduces that that change of mindset in half really and we negotiated that signed a four-year contract for the Royal Department of Association so it affects a lot of public ownership the sustained the budget will sustain an increase of three FTEs as negotiated in the BFFA contract this was negotiated to reduce our overtime burden and help us to retain full staffing as much as possible we also worked with CEO Shad and the department to see a 20% increase in the EMS supply budget to support increased costs as in the EMS supplies EMS supplies are just like hunger deer they're very expensive we hadn't seen an increase in our EMS supply budget since we put our third ambulance in service we've seen a lot of increase in responses and a lot of that increase we own now we're not relying on our on our mutual aid partners so there's cost to that on the flip side we are seeing that revenue as well so we should be able to cover these costs pretty easily with increased revenue and then all other operating budget expenses it's pretty well status quo you know we're we're unfortunately it's just it's tight fiscal times and as much as we'd like to expand things like our our training to to more more things we're just unable to move and hopefully we'll be able to induce more stamina in the future looking toward FY 24 when you have some new fire trucks coming which is always exciting we love new trucks this was bought with bond money so we appreciate the citizens of Berlin for supporting those bonds um ladder four is scheduled for january of 24 and june 19 and three are scheduled for june of 24 which seems like a long time away but it is taking a long time to get trucks um we are getting a new ambulance supposed to be this year ambulance deliveries are about three years to get an ambulance and fire trucks are about the same it's just you know the increased costs and increase it's hard to get things um in the supply chain just like it's hard to get things for you folks uh regular things to nothing about um you know uh fire trucks and and parts so i'm sure that you guys have heard from dpw and and they're struggles but uh just keeping trucks in service uh based on parts it's it's been a difficult thing um station two and station three upgrade we're pretty excited about this to support the first plan workforce uh those two stations have bunk rooms which is um not ideal for for folks that are uncomfortable sleeping in the same room as everybody else uh so we're working uh we have a we have a plan for station two's bunk room currently we're working on a plan and it's it's pretty great it's going to be five bedrooms instead of a bunk room and station three is to come uh the new radio system is being installed uh or being uh planned and we have funding set aside for it thanks again citizen superlative on supporting that bond uh they can be able to support our new radio system and honestly it's just going to be much more reliable and uh far further reaching for our response so that we know we can hear them when they're we're going to have hopefully some fresh staffing and key leadership roles the deputy chief of administration and the EMS chief working to get those positions filled um and recruitment and retention of firefighters is something that we're always looking to do uh retention has been a little difficult over the last couple of years COVID certainly did not help um we're really going to be focusing on employee wellness both mental and physical um and uh just trying to reduce the high levels of overtime that are causing uh folks in the family so just making this this of the fire department just a place they want to be and they want to work and are excited to work on it so that's it thank you chief great um what is up that's yeah very quick i think to understand you know what i'm talking about is having uh to what you're starting to continue to be safer um thank you and also you've continually been taking photos yeah with the ambulances for all of that balance i think that's what i'm thinking and it was like 400,000 dollars coming yeah fy 22 22 i believe and i and uh if if i were to make a fairly uneducated guess without the budget sitting in front of me i would say that uh we did have a very serious uh used uh amount of overtime with the COVID-19 pandemic it just it really hit the fire department hard uh again with minimum staffing you can't fall below that by by union contracts so we have to fill to it and honestly i have a spreadsheet with every single person that had COVID leave as i managed it when they were they were gone uh you know on your vacation time your your leave time then you have that COVID time on top of that and that's just time that we had to cover it very expensive and you know it's really inspiring to be able to send all of it and what is it for me thank you thank you thank you can't change anyone else all right it's like uh we're getting tired here too so thanks very much to two more presentations yeah i've uh done and we're very in the silly suckers thanks hi john agree with me like an assessor excellent we're a small department we have four people in our department one of the next slide why don't we do our main goal is to try to be despair and have equitable values as much as possible we just came out of a reappraisal showing good numbers and upmarket but part of being equitable is having public access to to all of our property values and having the public be able to review their property as well as other properties we've had that for a long time we also have business personal property that is in its last year's next year's last year for business personal property tax and right now we are in the week of holding our property valuation appeal hearings that's very light this year which is wonderful and hopefully in the future it'll be right as well and have a great staff right now that does a great job ahead of time so our goal is to it's in the equitable here's our here's a quote right there that's the best myself a city assessor deputy assessor works on a lot of commercial residential stuff we have an associate assessor and assistant presidential appraisers they're both union and they're both qualified appraisers the trend from the prior year to the current year is now that we are staffed up with full full time appraisers we were able to remove a temporary limited position that we had that was somewhat seasonal so that's that's gone that saves a little bit of money we are asking for a little bit of a money for integration with this new state-supported software called axiomatic sometimes the the name that the state uses is vt pie we need that to collaborate with paper properties what we call it 85 software system and most of those that connection has been made but we want to reserve some money so in case we need to redo some of our forms if you want to make sure we can have that full integration for the following year we are going to retire the nimrex software so this new software needs to be integrated this is our small loan department what our revenues are is about 103 thousand dollars comes from the state of mind that in most cases should be put aside for the next reappraisal and the administration is doing a good job of that um other small costs is just basically for our staff and their polo adjustments and then um we are actually not needing um insulting money set aside in the event that we have to go to court for certain cases or hire professionals to come in so we were able to save some money there our goals um well we always want to increase the amount of reviews that we do i think that makes more accurate individual property evaluations as well as overall i think that um what we're doing that year after year after year it creates a better more fair database um a lot more confidence in what we are doing and what their information on their record card is uh and then of course the other goal is just to fully integrate our software systems together um we want to review we want to boost our review of all the properties that sell uh and because that those are the the properties that we measure the market with i already had one more thing that didn't make the list here is just the language access i've been putting a lot of thought to that lately and understand cedar has money and we want to update our website with multiple languages um and also we want to update it i think for equitable purposes uh statistically uh new americans don't appeal to property values and i think that and just lighten up some of those barriers great thank you jan and um appreciate the last tool and that's something else to be talking about in the year ahead as well as the one of the studies coming back is this sort of analysis of the equity uh the property tax system and uh john speaking i kind of preview of uh some of the funds that uh coming up yeah that's very good information that's good um that's correct um two questions we have the um report back from the appraisal appeal committee with lost recommendations this is very more for you but we're how are we going to take that forward i mean that there's a lot in it um and i think i said that our meeting now we've got it i i don't want to put it on the shelf so i think either you should come to us with a proposal or we the council should think about process because before we know it very soon there's going to be another re-appraisal and i think we have some good recommendations so i just want us to go forward with that um thank you councillor carpenter the um i think it's a fair important point i i do we're in this it's a lot going on right now in this space so the the state um where the kind of do we even know where i guess where where did the legislation end up yeah so the bill was the bill was h480 uh and the state uh was examining this there's many many towns that are required to do a revaluation and it's an overload and there's not enough resources out from the whole state to do that so this came about because of that and they're trying to set up a plan more of a statewide possibly a way of tackling city-wide revaluation of all that work so the work that the ad hoc re-appraisal committee put together they mentioned it but the bill was still active i think it still needs a governor signature and that may change how everything is done i think one of the recommendations in the bill is that uh there's a re-appraisal in every six years and not putting so much pressure on statistical measures uh in that bill going back to the committee's uh work but i think there are items uh that they recommended that don't cost a lot it's just a matter of putting some time into it and i think that's a little more about informational things that we can provide to do a better job of notifying the public of the processes and that we a lot of work on that stuff this year that doesn't cost anybody there are other things where staff needs that will be more expensive actually this is just on that informational thing i don't think we do this but do we list the complete sales prices anywhere in the city i mean because of the property transfer tax front of the office knows every sale that happened in the next city and i i would ask as a city service if we could think about that there's probably between your two offices somehow just listing those because it's as i understand it's not difficult information to get we got all the time that the hfa be downloaded so just suggesting we give away to list that information for people's own curiosity so um to the other thing um so i think that are right here you're saying and i mean there certainly are lots of ways to see database for the information available but i'm not sure we do it exactly the form that you're saying so we'll follow up on that the and you know another thing happening in this space is this property tax this urban three study that is um completely same so i think um it would make sense for to sort of these three big things committee report the state legislative action the servant three report coming i think in the months ahead we should sort of hold that all together and the piece of set of recommendations for other kind of memorialization decisions to come back with it's going to take a little bit of time to get it by the end of the quick councilman um there were some other things that were in the report though just to kick up on um professor carpenter's point around educational material like one pagers on how to rub your record card or what the process is for um for appeal and there was some recommendation about videos and things and i'm wondering if you couldn't budget for those things this year and just have if if if uh assessor office resources weren't available to get you know contractors or something so i do think that information is important um so i'm not i'm not sure of this if we have to wait for the other things um to sort of show you're off you know the state processes and things to get those kinds of educational materials sort of correct and done if we have the entity has resources that are not working on it that's great but non it'd be an opportunity to link people to some of that stuff i don't think that's open mind i think there's some capacity for us internally to do a little work on this and there is a lot of resources out there that's what we can maybe say there's a lot of resources out there there's a matter of putting it together so that people know where to go and then also enhancing a dashboard on what's going on with the market and i'm not the only department that has put some information out there that we can we can do i don't think any of this stuff is overwhelming but you know outside of the later items let's get it there um cancer permanent thank you i just want to echo what counselors carpenter and barlow said and would like this to be part of the work plan for this year i can see uh taking a few months maybe in the fall october september to deal with the state legislation and i think that's around the times that the the study is going to be back but this other work i i think we need to commit the resources uh to uh to correct the problems that we had in the reappraisal thank you okay very good um thank you john and that brings us now to do our final presentation of the night and the whole uh during um it's even just so important to development part of welcome cards last but not least yeah i'm giving a shout out to my two assistant directors uh stuck it out tonight this is my goodness and we'll put up and i'll try and make it brief this is some workforce development um so for those of you who don't know we divide the department into three sections um the church tree marketplace which has its own budget separate from the general fund we're an enterprise fund there that includes full maintenance of the street all the marketing promotion um over 30 events annually um either once that we produce ourselves or that we host for um community members um we have incubator business programs which are us our carpenter program and community arts and culture then we move to business support city-wide you may have seen the brand love burlington that's the brand under which we support our small businesses throughout the city i hope you'll follow it on social media um we do micro business development uh we recently launched a revolving loan fund which we'll get into later we do a lot of direct training and technical support for these businesses uh business recruitment and retention um and as uh director karson mentioned um these annual markets that we have in conjunction with bca are part of our business incubator program and then we have the workforce development side under which we have the early learning initiative which we view as a workforce development program 83 of the families we support um in the early learning initiative say they wouldn't be able to work without our support um we are starting our second pilot workforce training program with let's grow kids to address some of the uh worker shortages in the child care industry and we're coordinating uh with new and expanding businesses to find out what their needs are in our workforce uh highlights of the past year um i'll run through these quickly the early learning initiative um what we're really proud of here is we've sort of expanded our marketing and um our translation so we're reaching more people members of the community um we have more fully translated we have the website fully translated as well as our digital forms um and we're also now providing what we call language access grants to our partner child care programs so that they can have some of their own materials translated so they can properly communicate with families um who are not native english speakers um we are um still managing uh what's left of the 27 million arpa dollars um in conjunction with cavern's office of course sorry see you shod um and um and in terms of business development as i mentioned um we have two small revolving loan funds that together equal half a million dollars um we are utilizing kiva which is a um uh platform uh for the smallest loans um which is a form of crowdfunding as well as using our dollars and then the larger piece for the larger loans we manage in-house we have um an underwriting committee which are members of our community members of reib and members of our banking community um we have assisted 40 businesses with technical support um and as you can see the vast majority of those are women and five-house fund um again we did the uh how they built its speaker series um which we held at local maverick where we had local business owners speak to people who are interested in starting businesses some of the challenges that they faced um and the rewards that they had um as you know we have the summer winter and one world market um and then on the church street marketplace side we launched a brand new website um we revamped a lot of our programs um we hosted over 30 events and the holiday season was back to pre-pandemic levels for the vast majority of the businesses on the street which was um um really a goal of ours i wanted to expect expect from the department in the coming fiscal year um more free community events we have some new donations that we are expecting from some local businesses and families that will help us expand our free events on the street we have a new which includes sponsoring a new summer event series um we're continuing our business uh incubation and uh supporting BIPOC business owners looking to operate on the marketplace um and we work closely with the Howard Center street outreach team of BPD we meet weekly to discuss some of the challenges in our downtown um and as always parking which we know is an emotional issue um we're always working with DPW on that what to expect from us in terms of business development city-wide um we're expanding our technical support classes loan education um we're marketing um is targeted to BIPOC and women-owned businesses um we have the summer winter markets um Love Burlington the Revolving Loan Funds which we will continue and recruitment retention and workforce and real estate support again on workforce development we're helping parents re-enter the workforce as i said we're doing our second pilot project that lets grow kids as a workforce training and we're hoping to launch our own this fall or planning to um and um we are anticipating given the new legislation coming out of Montpelier that um many of our families might not need scholarships but the problems and the weaknesses in the industry will show up in the form of capacity there will be a surge of demand for childcare once some of this additional funding comes through the state we anticipate that it will financially make more sense for both parents to be in the workforce and increase the demand um on that industry and we're seeing a reduction in some of those spots right now because of the teacher-child ratio that they can't keep right now because we're having trouble staffing um so we're really focusing on that and we're also working right now with Forbidal Factory in the south end um and trying to hopefully reach an agreement to structure and launch a sewing training program which we've had a lot of interest in this is the early learning initiative budget um where as you can see the capacity grants we're anticipating hoping to get 500 000 out to help stabilize the the existing programs we have to help support um workforce training in the early childhood fields um scholarships I left at approximately the same again it depends on when the state's new legislation actually takes effect and when um their CCFAP numbers uh actually change um that might take a while and that might lead into our next fiscal year by the time we really see those impacts in terms of the budget for citywide business support um we are as you see very staff heavy and that is definitely um we're not changing any of our staffing we are fully staffed right now um and uh you'll see we did reduce um some of our expenses as best we could um and hoping to capture some revenue from those markets um and this next one is the budget for the church tree marketplace um this year we are recommending to council a five percent increase in the common area fees that fund the church tree marketplace that's the first increase since 2016 or fiscal year 17 um and that is just to try and keep up with inflation and cost of living increases on staffing um otherwise the balance of this budget remains relatively the same I know it's my speed round great thank you guys okay final answer the questions the commission said about the increase commission oh the commission approved the increase and now it comes to council you know I do believe that CEDO IDIB and your department need to sit down on our board yes and we have I mean uh director pind and I meet every week and um right now we are focusing on the child care industry because that's where our funding is but I don't disagree with you um also you could include BED because they also have a workforce development manager in the burlington electric department and I think we're all approaching from our perspectives um and we do have a plan actually to sit down with our grants team and coordinate um applications for grants and if we can find synergy thank you yeah that's right um when director award was here I don't know the other budget nice it indicated that the graffiti move was that on was that on your budget so no I have helped coordinate the response to graffiti um and so I'm involved in it and part of my involvement started with we used ARCA funds to try and address the graffiti that close pandemic was um and I know it's still there a lot of it um so we did um arrange for some funding for director works department to hire more seasonal staff for that um as one of my peers mentioned earlier the winter season is tough um and we need to work a little more on some of our private property owners um we can't just go up to buildings and start spraying chemicals on them uh ourselves so some of our private property owners also need to be involved in taking care of their properties um but we are working to get that team out there this summer to do the best they can at the moment um the marketplace manages their own graffiti and graffiti removal um as they're able to um but yes I do recognize the problem and that would do some response to the the ask of private property owners they'll tell you that if there was an increased public safety presence they wouldn't mean they wouldn't be having their graffiti there in the first place so I don't know that's the argument it's like it's like it's been an event thing and so speaking to help uh get rid of yeah the egg is completely graffiti yeah I will say we do um chief Murad has dedicated two officers to the downtown this summer um it's 40 hours a week and I am getting a lot of positive feedback from the business owners on that just the the visual presence even the cruisers park on the intersections I think has an impact so uh I'm feeling like we're we're turning that corner so I'm really hoping this season will be will be a good one I am as well I got that feedback too yeah I'm really encouraged about the season the graffiti that I think we still have to stay on and it seems like any graffitiable surface seems to become available is used as a canvas by somebody and there are certain tags it's like if I could find the bad person I know we get them into a distorted process yes and removing ripping for us yeah um so anything we can do that I guess might sort of bring on to this this by just using this to get more as many resources I think that's perfect thank you um I'm wondering whether the business development program is doing anything uh on um employee ownership businesses and with the employee ownership opportunities center that has been around actually was created by the city yeah we do some work trying to also bring businesses together in a cooperative structure um and maybe I'll let us direct it with all address some of that yeah um the speaker series that we did one of the businesses that got the most attendance was the oak street co-op right around the corner for view and Matt Crop was there talking about how they structured that deal and purchased that property with the help of residents and so we have a lot of interest from businesses who have scheduled meetings with Matt to learn more about employee ownership options coming out of that but we work pretty closely with Matt he's part of our micro business alliance and send people his way whenever they're looking to explore different models excellent as a member of that co-op I'm pretty happy about that so keep up that good work thank you okay that's same work hands online no more oh can I take sorry yes and I mean that's also about what we've done about that maybe you know there's process the whole process every day almost which is good but at the same time the private sector is not waiting for this the private sector already have that that they're playing moving and I don't know if you're having conversation early part model or BCA friends it's theirs yeah no no no no business association bba the bba yes yes I mean they they're cooking something beautiful they are and I thought that they see it's in collaboration because we're working with them to get it started yes and uh yes and I can address the brilliant business association's um plan which does involve sort of financial support from the Palmer Lowe Foundation um would help to get graffiti removal products into the hands of private property owners there's a specific product that we use that it its name is world's best graffiti remover and it really is um and also trying to educate them on removing graffiti and putting an anti-graffiti coating on their surfaces on their buildings and properties yes and on top of all of that too I think creating graffiti arts yes displays yeah all of them and I think that's a great sum of this you decide on it's just going to be great yeah I'll send you a couple of things and pass the details okay I appreciate that yeah great um I'm not seeing any more hands so I think with that we will well and uh we I think there's no objection when we completed our visit tonight and we will adjourn at the accordion one yeah thank you all for sticking out the spread out