 Okay, okay, awesome. All right. Well, let's, let's get, let's get started then. All right. So I'm going to call this meeting to order. The first thing is to review and approve the agenda. And I think. So I know there's some changes that folks may want to make to the consent agenda. We'll deal with that when we get to the consent agenda item. But also want to note that I know that we had put the Home Energy Information Ordinance on the agenda for today. That was our vote previously. The lawyer had some unexpected delays in getting us a response. And so the committee would like more time and would like to push that back to May 12. We still haven't figured out how to connect. To the. Sorry. So the. Anyway, so anyway, we can talk, we'll talk more about that then, but if anyone can't make the 12th instead of tonight, or if you would just prefer to speak tonight, rather than waiting for the 12th, that is okay too. We're not going to. Someone has something they want to say about that. We're not going to deny them, but just want to know that the committee is. More on target for preparing for a May 12. Presentation. So that's just a heads up there. So we probably will still open the public hearing. If, if folks can. But again, we'll, the committee would like to put that off to the 12th. Any other changes to the agenda? Yes, Bill. If we could move items 10 and 11, the strategic plan update and the COVID reopening plan ahead of the winter operations parking review. Cameron, the staff are who's presenting on all three of those things is not feeling her best and would like to do them all. Together and then be able to sign off and sign out. Okay. So if that's possible, that would be great. Yeah. So the idea is. Effectively, we'd move the winter operations until. I guess that would be the easier way to say that. Okay. Fair enough. So after the summer meeting schedule, is that kind of where you're just after the COVID plan. Okay. After the COVID plan. All right. So we would do home energy labeling pool opening. Strategic plan COVID. And then back to. Okay. Sounds good. All right. So any objections to that? Okay. Great. Any other thoughts on changing the agenda? Yeah. Connor. Maybe a bit early, but I was going to ask if we could take the CB fiber appointment off the consent agenda. I just have to, I think I have to abstain from that one. I do a bit of work with them on occasion. Okay. Well, and there's, I know there's other things to do with the consent agenda. So we'll talk more about that. Then. Oh, there is one other thing that I want to say, which is that just in terms of the agenda, we are going to take a break at eight 30. Whether or not. It is falling in a nice clean place. So if. If there's a presentation happening, I may interrupt you. If there is public comment happening at that point, we'll probably wait a minute. Okay. And then before we start the next person, we will take a pause on those comments. So we can take a break at eight 30. So we just want to give folks heads up about that. Okay. So any other changes to the agenda? Okay. So without objection, we'll consider the agenda approved with those modifications. So on to general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on any topic that is otherwise not on our agenda. And if you would say your name. Where you live and try to keep your comments to two minutes or less, that would be very helpful. And that is true for. Generally all the comments that are made this evening. All right. And so to indicate that you want to say something, you can either physically raise your hand. You can raise your. The hand icon, which I see Peter has done. Or you can, if you're on the phone, you can just unmute and chime in. But yeah, Peter, go ahead. So there may be a number of people attending tonight's meeting with the expectation that the second reading of the home energy information ordinance would have been on the agenda. And that they'd have an opportunity. So since that's not the case, I hope that this is the, this is when we will be able to make those comments. Is that right? No, because if because we'll still take it up at the time that it scheduled. So, because some people may be expected, as you say, some people may be expecting to sign on later. For that agenda item. And so we'll check in again about it then. And then if, if people can wait until the 12th, great. And if they would prefer not to, we'll, we'll let them speak. Item seven would be the time to speak. Yeah. Okay. Thanks. Yep. Yep. No problem. Any other comments. Okay. I have a couple of things that I want to relay on behalf of. John Snell. Who emailed. At least Bill and I about a couple of things. So he wanted me to relay that the first summer mark, summer farmers market will be held this Saturday. At 133 state street from nine to one with over 40 vendors. They were delighted with the support folks gave the winter market. All kinds of weather. And they look forward to that same support every week this summer season. And then the second thing from John Snell. That work is going to begin in the next few weeks on removing some of the dead and hazardous trees. Mostly red pine along the state house trail that leads to the Hubbard Park tower. Buildings in general services. For the state. Is in charge of the project, which will be completed by a contractor. They are selecting the tree board parks and trees. And the Vermont forests and recreation agency. Have worked closely with BGS to develop the project over the past two years. We expect the work may take place over several weeks. During which time. Access to the trail will be monitored and as needed controlled by flaggers. All cut material will remain on the forest floor. We will be making a more widely dispersed public announcement shortly when we have final details, but I wanted the council to know. This is coming. Okay. I just wanted to make sure that I. Got that in there. Thank you. Any other comments? Okay. Great. So we are on to the consent agenda. Jack. I would ask that we take. Item F. The consent agenda for. Fuller discussion. Okay. And Connor. We're also pulling. What is it? Oh, that was that. J. Is that right? Is that right? Connor? That was the one you wanted. CV fiber. That's. J. J. Oh, it's J. Okay. Got you. Okay. And no minutes. And no minutes. So. Absence. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And I'm going to move to. The consent agenda. So. I've moved since. A. F and J. Um, is there any other. Changes. Okay. Uh, so is there a motion. For the consent agenda. Minus those pieces. Yes, Jack. I move the consent agenda as amended. Second. A motion and a second. Any further. Comments. Yes, Lauren. a police supervisors contract or proving this is a transitional contract just noting it because I know that police contracts have come up at the police review committee and at some of the public comment. So I think that is an issue that you know we've at least been discussing a little bit provisions of that but my reading of this is it's it's transitional and those issues could still be part of the police review committee so people have issues like please bring it to that group which again at this point is meeting every Monday at 4, 4, 30 or 5. So stay tuned on the city website and bring those comments there. Thank you. Thanks Donna and then I see you there Constantinos. Okay you saw his hand. I wasn't sure you did. That's all I wanted to say his hand. Thank you. Constantinos. Hi, Constantinos DeVaros district two. I just wanted to actually comment on that police contract and I understand Lauren that the police review commission is looking at it but I feel like this is kind of urgent. I'm really concerned about one of the provisions in this contract specifically article 26 because I believe it actually places the police above the law and will block any form of meaningful change that will come out of the police commission. The language in article 26 which isn't present in any other collective bargaining agreement the city has with any other groups of employees states and this is a direct quote from it should any provisions of this agreement conflict with any city ordinance this agreement shall prevail to the extent permitted by law and quote there. Now to me that sounds like if the city council pass an ordinance for example establishing a civilian review process that would conflict with article 6 or anything else that the collective bargaining agreement would prevail. They also exempt themselves from the C personnel plan to me this sounds like the police are literally placing themselves above the law and they're carving out the special privilege class for themselves because of that so proving this contract with language that ties your hands and advocates a considerable amount of power that this city council has to manage city affairs. I just think it's unconscionable especially since no other city employees feel the need to have this kind of language in their collective bargaining agreements. I think this contract really needs to go back to the negotiating table to make sure that city council actually continues to maintain its power and authority over the city management and employees. So I'll just add that neither of those were changes that were made from the patrol union to this. They've been that's language we've had for a long time in the police with regard to exempting someone from the personnel plan. The way that actually works on the law is that items in the contract that are different than the personnel plan the contract covers if they're not covered in the contract and it defaults to the personnel plan. Most of the contracts do have a severability clause I'd have to take a look at the one I don't have to see if that's different than the others that we have certainly. I don't believe anyone intends to be exempt from any ordinances. I think it's ordinances regarding to personnel, but let me take a look at that one. And we can defer I think to it's not. Actually what it says. Okay, I see what you're saying. Yeah, I'd have to look at that. That is not a change that's been in police contract forever. Doesn't make it right, but it's been there. Yeah, it's an interesting place there. What would folks like to do? Dan. Or I think we could remove this from the consent agenda to go back on that second section. So it strikes me that there's 3 sections there. One is a severability clause that is at least I've seen in other contracts are fairly common just in the sense that if something struck down, the whole agreement isn't necessarily struck down. Just that part that's deemed invalid under the law. The personnel plan conflict is also pretty standard too for I think what Bill described. It's the second section I think has has some considerations and I certainly agree with Konstantinos for bringing it up because it does seem confusing and I would I'd want some greater specificity if if in fact it's about ordinances that deal with personnel. OK, but the way it's drawn up broadly it does seem to indicate that although I couldn't imagine something about this in a conflict with say like a dog noise ordinance or something like that. But nevertheless, I think it would be helpful to at least understand where that second clause is coming from and how it's how it's interpreted. So, you know, maybe we could get in what Bill's indicating I think as well as that if we don't approve it tonight, we approved it on May 12th. It wouldn't be the end of the world with with presumably either a change or greater clarification as to where that that second second clause that's the one that gives me pause. Yeah, I think sometimes there's there are state laws that mandate certain things and it did say to the I don't get much hard to defend this because honestly, we haven't looked at this particular piece of language in 25 years. So just reading it quickly. You know, it still says she'll prevail to the extent permitted by law. So a loss could still override this. I would simply point out that so our choices here are let me backtrack a little bit what the goal of this was that neither the city nor the union sort of by our own mutual rules were allowed to bring anything we wanted changed to this contract. It was simply to take the language in the patrol contract because the supervisors are a new union. And this is they're bargaining their first contract. So we needed to set a base contract. And so our agreement was we would take the base contract from the patrol people and where stuff was silent or whatever for supervisors, we would simply put what is current practice in that neither city nor union could suggest any substantive changes. So our choices are we could not approve this tonight. I can go back and talk to them to see if they would agree to remove this or we can propose different language. Or we can pass this as a transitional contract and obviously make clear we won't approve the actual the next contract that we're going to be bargaining this month starting well May with that language or at least until we've got some clarification around. I think any of them are possible however you want to go. I don't have strong feelings. I mean, I agree that even regardless of whatever this intent is, it's a little awkward the way it's worded. So we should probably clear it up. Yeah, Lauren, go ahead. I'm just going to say, I mean, given the scenarios you laid out, like I'd rather not approve this language if we already think it's problematic and have as kind of a precedent for the bargaining table. Yeah, I don't know that it's problematic. I'd like to get the attorney to look at it, but it certainly is. It reads awkwardly and I'd like to get more understanding of the language and see. So I appreciate that because it is not. It's not a clause we've ever looked at before in recent history. I mean, I will note that that the city personnel plan is in fact a listed under the Montpelier Code of Ordinances. So I mean, it's it's not unreasonable to to have a provision like this. If, in fact, the intent is to very much to very similar to the third clause in this. It's just the way it reads is confusing. So it would be it would be helpful to have somebody who's who's actually thought about or worked around this document a little bit more just just to answer that. Um, as well as if the people are amenable to maybe adding or changing language. But I understand too, we're we're talking about a union negotiated contract. So it's not as if people are going to say, oh, sure, whatever. There may be some some pushback and negotiation, but at least I think having that around it offers clarity in and of itself. And I will say, first of all, we didn't have it was not contentious working through this, but there were language changes that were proposed from the supervisor union. And I said, no, we can't if that's not what this is about. We're not changing contract language. So I suspect that's the feedback we're going to get. And I get that. But I'd be happy to at least talk to him about it or get a legal opinion about what it means or something like that. Because, like I said, we've never it's never been a conflict, it's never been an issue, but that doesn't mean there's not a first time. You like that also means that you can blame us. So one potential pathway forward is if someone wanted to make an amendment to the motion since there is already a motion on the table that does not remove items. See what anyone want to. Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry, Donny, you had your hand up earlier. I thought I was just going to make a motion to I guess you'll call an amendment to remove C from the consent agenda. Any further discussion on that? Second. OK. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right. OK, so we've removed C from the consent agenda. So now it is absent A, C, F and J. All right, so bearing that in mind, any further discussion on the consent agenda in general now? What's left? OK, seeing none. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. OK, and opposed. OK, so I think it would be good if we could take up some of those items just right now, just get them done. So I don't think we need to take up A again. Right, because there are no minutes to be discussed. The next one was F, a conduit. Location in the city, Jack. Yes, thank you. I'm the issue on the agenda is approval of permits for consolidated communications to to place conduits under certain streets. And we can. Done Patrick Sherwood, Murray Hill or city side and Westwood Drive. And we can expect more such proposals as their as their work proceeds. And it was brought up to me. And I think one or two other people that there's a potential that other other carriers may in the future want to provide service to addresses in the city and may want to do that by means of cables under the street. And so the suggestion is that if we simply approve the permits the way they are now that the next time someone wants to provide services, they would need to again open up the the street and and place their their cables. And so the suggestion is to modify the permit to require them to install multi port tubing under the roads or leave leaves larger conduit with a pole tape in the conduit so that if a future company wants to provide services, the the new cables could be placed without additional excavation in the roads. And and so I suggest we should at least be be discussing that before we approve the the permits. But I guess I had not heard this suggestion before this is I don't I'd want to find out if we have the legal authority to require this and what obligation consolidated communications would have to allow other people through there since they're paying for the conduit, would they have to you know, would they be allowed to charge other people for the use of it? I just don't know. This is a new issue to me. But we certainly can research those things. I guess off the top of my head, I'd note that the locations that are being mentioned right now are kind of on the outskirts of the town. They're not probably in the high population area. You know, I guess in the interest of allowing people to do work that they're planning to do, I'd urge you to approve these, but we can certainly come up with a, you know, look at this issue and have a future policy or ordinance requirement on this. People know going in what's expected of this without having given this a lot of thought. One separate question I. So does in this case, consolidated communications, do they also pay to dig up the road and to patch it up? Yes. Well, here we go again. Someone wants to talk. Hi, good evening. Sorry to interrupt you like that. I'm with consolidated communication. My name is Gary Eau Claire. I can speak to some of that tonight. I thought I'd join us to try to clear up any any misconceptions about this. That very thing that you're talking about already exists. We do license conduits and pathways within the city where we do have extra facilities already. That is that's available to people that are out there that want to do this where we're talking today is residential neighborhoods. We're talking about bringing in a fairly small conduit that's going to overlay over our existing copper cable and network. What we're going to put in the ground would not allow for someone else to come in there. It's a fairly small size and to go to something bigger would be much more expensive and probably not something we're looking to do for the residential areas. But the very thing you're talking about for the inner city for the downtown areas where we have conduit systems already in existence, that ability to license conduits and pathways from us already does exist to this day. And in fact, I'm sure there's probably already people third parties we refer to them as that are already doing that today. Thank you. Any further thoughts on this? What do you what do you think Jack or Dan? Yeah, go ahead, Dan. Sorry, I just had a question. You know, for the consolidated is this treated? Is adding something through a conduit treated like a pole attachment? Where there has to be essentially a license and agreement that's formed between you and the person who passes through the conduit. Yes, that's correct. There is a license agreement that we have through them. They do pay a fee to occupy our space. Correct. Okay. Yeah. It's very much like a license agreement for a pole. Thanks. And it's so presumably set set by tariff and. Subject to those requirements that PUC overseas. Yeah, that's a bill a bit out of my purview, but I will tell you, I think those are fixed rates. I don't think we, we, I think those are set by the commission to be honest with you. Right. I know they are for pole attachments. There's a specific rate for one foot, two foot, you know, and there's all kinds of issues around whether something's a one foot or two foot attachment. But I just wanted to understand that it's, it's basically that regimen that that's then adopted for putting a, a wire through a conduit. Yeah, that is correct. And I'll just add to this in case the community doesn't know what we're doing. We are expanding our network to do a fiber optic network to rural communities where this is going on all over Maine to Hampshire and Vermont. So it's to bring high speed fiber to underserved areas like that. And when are you, what's your calendar for when you're going to be doing the work under these proposed permits? You know, if it wasn't for the permit hold up, we'd be already be underway quite frankly where we're looking and anxious to get going with this and move on, but Montpelier was one of our first locations we were looking to do. Okay, thanks. Yeah, I, I like the suggestion of, you know, if we're going to change any of the requirements that we put it on as a separate item rather than sort of changing it in the middle. I don't know. What do you, what do you think about that, Jack? Well, I thought there might be one or two, one, at least one member of the public who would want to comment. I don't, I don't see him here. I think there's a, I think it is reasonable to say, well, that we would go ahead and authorize this, but also study whether there should be a policy for future permit applications. Dan. I would support approving the permit and, you know, one of the things to keep in mind and really the thrust to my questions are that there's already a regimen in place for how conduits are to be shared that's controlled at the state level, just as every pole that comes. So this is the equivalent of the underground version of all the polls that we see on the street. And just as every poll owner is obligated to share the poll, you can't own a poll and say, well, I'm not putting up your fiber on this. You know, these, these underground conduits have the same, same obligations. And so it strikes me that the difference here is that we're not necessarily talking about a conduit, but laying a particular type of fiber where conduit hasn't, hasn't existed. And so it's a, it's a different thing altogether. And well, we can certainly study and I'm not advocating. We don't look into this closer. It also strikes me that it's not a straightforward issue and that there's probably a state presence in here through the department of public service. And the public utilities commission. Jack, go ahead. I agree with that. And one of the, one of the concerns that was raised to me was we're constantly having people legitimately raise concerns about, uh, erosion and deterioration of, of the streets. And every time we're doing, uh, we have more, uh, excavation, there's, uh, More of a danger to that. And so having a policy of, um, what's referred to as a dig ones policy. Could be in, in the city's interest, but, uh, I think it does make sense to, to proceed with the current, uh, to approve the current applications and, uh, and study what we would want to do in the future. I think that it's my impression from seeing what's gone on around the city that, uh, consolidated is, is mostly, uh, Installing their future. And it's, uh, because most of the city, the outside plant isn't buried. And it's probably only where there's, uh, where the outside plant for other services is buried that you're doing the, uh, Doing the conduits. Is that right? That is correct. We're talking about a relatively small piece of, of the town that we're actually going to be doing this in. In fact, the, uh, I would say probably half of what we're looking to do when the, uh, buried areas is going to come under private property. A lot of, uh, condos and things like that that are, that are on private roads and things. So, but the vast majority you are correct is going to be aerial feeds, um, everywhere. So this is, I, I don't want to speak for certain, but I think we were talking roughly 30,000 feet of conduit, uh, was the, uh, what we were looking to place in. And I think a lot of that fell into private property. Having heard that, I move to approve the, uh, the permits. Well, second. Sorry. I was muted. Uh, so having. Um, so. Yeah. Seeing that there's a motion and a second. Um, uh, Peter. Yes. Go ahead. I just wanted to quickly say that. I think. Of course you should go ahead and approve this. But I think Jack got a very good point. Uh, I think you really need to explore a dig ones policy going forward. Um, because the problem with this kind of. Uh, cable is that it is to stand. It's too small to allow another cable to go through it. And, um, even though this may affect a very small number of neighborhoods. People live in those neighborhoods. And I've lived in neighborhoods. They get torn up again and again and again and again again, like in New York city. Sometimes it's dig 15 times. So a dig for a dig ones policy. I think we are very, very good thing to look into. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Uh, Corey. Um, yeah, just, just to add to Jack's. Um, comment. Uh, when we do a reconstruction project or anything where we're. Uh, we're, uh, we're, uh, uh, Electricity or communications, we do get in the habit of placing spare condos. Um, to help alleviate multiple things. That's great. Thank you. Just feel like it's worth further conversation. Uh, but there's a, any further comments on this? Uh, okay. So, um, Um, there's a motion in it. Uh, There's a motion in a second. So all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. And opposed. Okay. Uh, so item. Uh, I've just lost it. Um, item F passes. Uh, so now we're on to item J. And for this Connor, you just wanted to recuse yourself as ever. Okay. I apologize. You probably need to do a roll call since it's on zoom, right? That's okay. Uh, is there a motion regarding item J? I'll make the motion. Okay. Uh, and I assume one of those other hands was a second. Okay. Motion in a second. Um, any further discussion. Uh, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. I'm not sure if that's the right. I guess if you're recused. Okay. Yeah. So we're going to go through the role. So I'm going to go through you guys. There were no dissenting votes. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I support that. That seems, that seems good. So, um, Great. John, was that a hand? It was. I just want to thank Ken Jones for his service and his dedication to CV five. I've interfaced with him for the public safety authority. And he's a wonderful resource. And just thank him. Yeah. I agree. Thank you, Ken. Yeah. Connor. And let me just echo that. And, uh, my abstention is, uh, nothing against Ken. Quite the opposite. Uh, he's fantastic. And the, uh, board we have with CV fiber. Is doing some really innovative stuff. So I think, uh, you're going to be able to, uh, you're going to be able to, uh, You know, you're going to be able to do that. So, uh, I think what I'm going to do with CV fiber. Is doing some really innovative stuff. So I think, uh, you're going to see big things in the next year or two from them. And a lot more options. Um, Anyone else. Okay. All right. So I think we are now ready to move on to item six. Just the E 911 road naming policies. Uh, this is the second reading. Uh, for this. Yes, Bill. Okay. I'm going to move on to item six. I'm going to move on to item six. Um, is still, what do you want to do with that police contract? Oh, I forgot the police contract. What do you want to do with the police contract team? Jack. I move that we lay it on the table for next meeting. Okay. There's a motion and a second. Uh, Dan, I saw you had a hand. Sure. I just, I guess. Specify that it would be tabled until, uh, Okay. Okay. Is your understanding, Jack and Lauren. Yes. I get for the sake of this conversation with the union. Could I get, could you maybe included in the motion for the purpose of. Talking about that one sentence. Sure. Thank you. Is that okay with you also, Lauren? Yes. Okay. Great. Um, Okay. Any further discussion? Okay. I have a motion to table it until the May 12th meeting. Um, okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. They and opposed. Okay. Thank you. And, uh, thank you. Constantinous for bringing this to our attention. Um, All right. So. Uh, we, so now we are up to the E 911 road naming policy, the second reading. Um, I'm going to open the public hearing. And, uh, Uh, Turn it over to. Uh, Mike Miller. Planning department chair. Not chair. Director. Yes. Good evening. So Mike Miller, um, planning director for the city. So, uh, I'm just going to go through a quick, the quick PowerPoint similar to the one I gave last time, just to make sure all of everybody's up to, up to speed on what we're talking about. Um, I don't know if any Cameron to just give me power to do that. I've Mary's going to be our sort of, um, So if Mary, you can give him permission, you just have to click off of, um, under security. You have to click next to, there we go. Never mind. Thank you. All right. So, um, There we go. So, uh, again, this, so this is the second reading of the street naming and numbering. Uh, and building numbering ordinance. Uh, so quick summary, this, uh, existing, this existing ordinance is in chapter three, article six, which is in the public works. Um, and was originally adopted in 1970. And under that ordinance, the public works director is responsible for doing all of these. Um, but in reality. We haven't been following our ordinance. Um, you know, we don't want to always admit to that. But you know, we've, we've started to do E 911 in the late 90s. And since that time we've had me not E 911 coordinator. And we've been, um, Mostly following those rules. Um, New naming and numbering. So what we wanted to do is to make sure that we got the new ordinance in effect. And that would meet the new E 911 requirements. We would pretty much be codifying what we're already doing. So the road naming would still be done by the council, the addressing by our E 911 coordinator. Um, And because the existing ordinance, has no reflection in, in what we're doing it. This is a strike all replacement of the existing ordinance. And after the first reading, we moved this to chapter 17 article two. So it's now under emergency management. Um, as opposed to under public works. Um, hey, Mike, I'm sorry to interrupt you. Um, Um, just had a request or question about, um, the possibility of making the screen larger. So that might be easier to see. Words. Yeah. So you're not showing the second. Next slide. Oh, does it show two? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, does it show two slides at once? Yeah. Yeah. Ah, well, it wasn't on my screen. So, um, let's see what happens. If you go to slouch, you should be able to go and start from beginning. There you go. That's good for you guys. Oh, no, we see. We're seeing his screen. I don't know if we're going to be able to do any better. Okay. Well, hold on. Let me get out of here. Again. And I'm going to that and swap screen. Mike, I'm getting information. If you go up to the top where it says display settings. On your screen. Oh, no. Okay. Sorry. Go from beginning to click from beginning again. All right. Now at the top right now on your screen, there's a thing that says display settings. Now swap presenter view. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. All right. I will try to remember that for next time. So. Authority and purpose. The authority is under chapter 59 and 61. So this is where most city ordinances are that are not zoning related zoning comes out of chapter 117. And the purpose is to protect health safety and welfare. By establishing a uniform street naming and addressing system. And really the, the most important reason for doing this is to enable emergency services to locate every address and structure. And so the issues. As we mentioned is that we are not consistent with the rest of Vermont, which could impact it hasn't, but it could impact. Mutual aid calls. And the big, big reason right now for us is that we've run out of numbers that our current numbering system. Doesn't allow for a sufficient number. A sufficient. Set of numbers. So therefore roads can run out of numbers. Of course you're not running out on the end. You're running out of numbers in the middle. So every structure needs to have a number. So if you have a 39 for a number, you can run out of numbers. Of course, you can run out of numbers in the middle of the street. And so every structure needs to have a number. So if you have a 39, 41 and 43 Barry street. And you have a building in between them. You have no number for them. And that is exactly what has happened on Hubbard street, Barry street and coming street is that we have. Too many buildings and not enough numbers for them. So in, in the ordinance that you have, you'll notice that, you know, you'll notice that the street names 204 for building numbering, which is addressing, we will be keeping our existing system of odd numbers on the right. And even numbers on the left. I mentioned that because that is opposite of what the rest of E 911 in the state is like, but because we already have some numbering like that, the E 911 board has given us a waiver and has says it's fine for us to keep our existing. And so we have to keep our existing system of odd numbers on the right system. And so those, the addressing will be administered by E 911 coordinator, as I mentioned, and it will be consistent with the E 911 board rules. And enforcement, which is a requirement of any ordinance. Not that we expect anything that was really going to need enforcement, but it is a requirement. So it's designated as civil. Nobody will be thrown in jail for this. So I think that's a good point. Okay, so again, I just talked about penalties into a seven, the severability clause. So our next steps after. Once this is adopted, E none, one coordinator will systematically review and read number and non-compliant streets. Obviously starting with the ones that are the biggest problem. We'll get some assistance from the fire department. And there are some streets that are already compliant. I don't want to even get their hopes up that they're one of the ones that address won't be changed on, but there are more than just these three. A lot of them in the more rural areas have been renumbered. So your North Street, your Gould Hill, Murray, the number, the roads that are off of Town Hill, many of them have been renumbered. But a lot of the ones in the in the core downtown have not. And usually you can tell pretty quick if your number 10 and your neighbor is 12 and the next neighbor is 14 and the next neighbor is 16 chances are good you're, you're going to be on the list to get renumbered because we have no way of numbering any other buildings on a street like that. Our plan is to do the downtown core last. That may take years before we get there and that's just due to the impact it'll have on businesses. We will kind of tackle that area at the end. Road naming will continue to be with the city council. With input from the E 911 state coordinator. And that's because the state coordinator will look at and approve names based on surrounding towns as well our post office covers multiple towns so we have to have unique road names not only for Montpelier, but as they expand into these other towns. And we will rename some streets. As well as we're moving along. And I think I pointed out last time that we have a school street in the school lab and the Scrivener Street and Scrivener place so there may be some others that I don't know about. And that was, that was it so what you do have in your packet was in the strikeout copy didn't look like it came out quite right when I was printing out copies for tonight. So I can go over. Dan Richardson provided some comments, which you your clean draft does reflect those. Those changes. And I can go over what those were, but they were relatively straightforward strikeout changes. Okay, first, any comments on this from council. Okay, any comments on this from the public. You can raise a hand. Oh, Peter, go ahead. I didn't expect to encounter this but I've got two questions related to this Peter Kalman. I live on Mountain View Street, or Mountain View Street. How will the coordinator look at names of streets where the post office has it one way, and the town has it another, or the street street or at least the street signs or another. I don't know what to tell people whether it's Mountain View or Mountain View. And, and there are and there are internet forms that I've had to fill out like tax forms. They don't accept it. I can't remember now which one they won't accept it one way it's in their system as no not a legitimate address. So that's one one question how how will that be handled. Will you be in, will you be working with the post office will you be working with the post office or whatever the entities are that establish these. This is a legitimate address. And the second question I have is with more and more ad use additional drawing units and duplexing. And, for example, we converted a law apartment into a rental unit. Suddenly our house has to become apartment one, our whole house, and then the, the, the, the, the rental apartment becomes apartment to I don't live in an apartment. I live in a home. Is there some way to be more flexible about the way these these numbers are going to be assigned. So we follow. So the first question on on the road name so there will be an official road name and Audra would have to look up what is in the E 911 directory for that road. If it needs to change that's something that would have to go to city council. We don't have any plans to go through and review them to that extent but if somebody brings up a concern like yours, we can certainly review it and make an official determination because whatever's in the E 911 directory is what emergency is causing. And if the street sign is wrong. We can always go through and work with Donna and the folks at Public Works to print out a new sign and replace it. If the sign is incorrectly spelled or incorrectly organized. And Mike just to clarify, the E 911 is lined up with the post office. Is that right. That would be because when we make a change on E 911 one of the mandatory ones we're supposed to send to is to the post office notification. Okay, and the second and second question. The second one is a common complaint but it is the E 911 rule so as we add in additional units into a structure. The PDU is a separate building and this is where we end up with problems on a number of streets that number 2022 2426 as somebody puts a tiny house in the backyard that needs a new number and there's no number for it. But if it's a separate structure it will get a separate number if it is within the same structure then you have either I believe an apartment one and two or unit one and two. You know, in cases where people live in one and rent the other one out they don't like the connotation of being in an apartment or separate unit but the way E 911 works is they're coming to a structure and it's a multi unit structure and that's the way the numbering system works. Thank you. Any other comments on this. You can unmute yourself or you can physically raise your hand or you can use the raise hand icon. Donna go ahead. I have a question for Mike so this means a lot of address changing as you go along. Do you do you have an idea as to the timing like how long it'll take to do all these sections. Is the whole town going to be doing address changes in the next 12 months or is it going to take longer. Oh, it's going to take longer than 12 months. We had talked in the past pre pandemic about, you know, maybe getting some help from high school student repair high school students to kind of help with this. I think a lot of it is going to come down to. You know, Audra wears many hats. She is one of our employees that that has a lot of hats to wear and so this is one of those activities that works in while you know when she has windows of time, you know, in the fall or in the winter to really work on these things. It's probably not something that we're going to be able to just jump right in and jump on. We're going to try to fit in to her other work that she's working on. And we're going to try to get, as we said that the most important streets done those streets. People can get advanced warning that this is going to be happening and not be surprised. Yeah, our plan was to break it into I think it's in your strategic plan and our and our strategic plan that the first we broke this into three steps one was change the ordinance number two is public outreach number to make the changes so we'll probably, you know, when we get done adopting the ordinance our next step would probably be to identify what we're going to do and then start doing some public outreach to make sure that we reach out to the folks to let them know this this is our schedule these are the you know these are the streets that we're going to be looking at doing just so people have an idea. I did some of these when I was over in very city when I worked there we did a lot of 911 corrections when we were over there. And we are always very conscious of other people's things so we had policies that we wouldn't after between Halloween and New Year's we would not change any addresses, because we were not going to be the ones who messed up everybody's Christmas cards. We try to be as conscious and work as much as we can with folks. With within the rules. I helpful to know. I also just want to recommend that this might be a good place to to interface with the can neighborhood folks who are working on that neighborhood level. Jack. First off, thank you for these two presentations. They've been very informative and this really just is another instance of how in my view anyway, the business of government is just endlessly fascinating. I was on vacation in Florida last for our last meeting and members of my family were quite entertained by the possibility that we could run out of numbers. Now, with regard to the to the address. And I also noticed just as you were talking that there is a school street in Berlin. That's not in the 05602 part of Berlin. It's in the 05663 part of Berlin. But there could be other instances we need to think about when if you're living in one of the streets that has a that where you have to have your number, your address changed. Will that require the resident to file a change of address with the post office? I would assume the answer is yes. It's a sort of a yes and no. We, when we notify when we do a street change, the, the address change goes to we automatically outreach to there's like five people that we automatically contact. The E911 board, we contact the post office. We contact Comcast. And there's another one and it really just comes down to because all of them, all of them link into the E911 system so we make a number of those contacts. But ultimately at the end of the day, the homeowner is going to have to then reach out to anyone. Not of those. But the post office knows and what happens if they'll start to obviously when, when the date comes, they'll start sending notices that says, you know, you need to update these, you need to update these and then at the, you know, in the end they'll start rejecting mail to an address where people haven't updated their addresses. I think if forwarding that order lasts a year, so to be okay. Yeah, so. But yes, we contact a number of people because it's part of the E911 system but the rest of them are up to the property owner today. Jay, go ahead. Yeah, I just wanted to add one other note. Mike and I'll echo Jack that I appreciate all the information you've shared with us and how sensible these changes are. It seems to me like it would probably benefit the community and all of us if there's, there's even another level of communication that happens to these places to to residents before these changes happen. As opposed to just reaching out and saying, hey, this is this is this change and this is what you need to do. It feels to me like it would, it would be smart to be proactive in our communication and reach out to folks and you can prioritize it on how you see these changes rolling out and obviously you're very sensitive to, you know, it's not like you're just doing it blindly you're very sensitive to how these changes will impact homeowners. But I think the more the sooner we can reach out to people and say, hey, this is happening and this is why and this is why it's important. Safety is involved, you know, the better and then it's sort of like a layer of like this is this is why these changes are happening and then letting folks know that we'll be in touch when the changes start to happen, not just not just having the first point of contact from the city be these are the changes that are happening. I think just so people come into this process understanding the why, not just the process, I think is going to be really important. You know, I mean, it's going to be disruptive just the logistical things that we're talking about here are going to be disruptive for people. So the sooner we can reach out and just engage with folks about the importance of these changes, I think is going to have a lot of benefit. I appreciate that that's, you know, another, you know, layer of work but but I think in the long taking the long view here, it will not only it will just make the process of the transition a lot easier for for our residents. So, thanks. The other comments. Connor go ahead. I was going to make a motion but I think Peter just raised his hand so I just want to just quickly say that Mayor Watson's idea about using the can groups I think is a very good one. Mike, in line with what Jay was just suggesting, I'm a can coordinator, and it would be a great thing for me to be able to go around the neighborhood and to talk to them about it I think it'd be that that's the kind of thing that will can can help the neighborhood and this having something like this gives can a reason to show the neighborhood of its importance. Thanks. Connor. Right. And I definitely agree with that Peter. I think they'd be excited to do that though. So I guess I'd move to accept the draft the 911 ordinance as presented tonight. Second second. And the second. Any further comments from the public or from Council. Okay, so I'm going to officially close the public hearing. And so there's no further discussion. All in favor please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay, so that passes and thank you so much Mike for all of your work on this and please also pass along our thanks to Audra. And in advance of all the work that I know this will mean for her. Thank you. So anyway. Great. Thank you. All right, so we are on to item seven, which is the home energy information ordinance second reading. Now, I just want to clarify, Bill, yeah, go ahead. Yes. I just wanted to make a quick interruption in the schedule of events. It occurred to me in this will be very brief. That although it's been like more than half a year, most of you have not met Mary Smith in our office in person and she's on the call tonight. So I thought I would actually introduce her to most of you since we've, we've been in quarantine ever since she started with us, but she's helping us out with some of the stuff she's actually going to. She's been doing some admin work that Cameron normally does, but because Cameron wants to go to sleep, Mary's pinch hitting. So thank you, Mary. It's been awesome having her with us. She's great. So this is the person behind your emails. Thanks, Bill. Hi everybody. And it's nice to put faces. To all of your names and happy to be here. Great. Thank you, Mary. Thank you for being here. And it's good to see you. And also put a face to the name. Though I know we've met, but. Just for, for everybody's sake. As you were. Okay. Fair enough. Thank you. All right. So at going into item seven here. I pointed this out at the beginning of the meeting, but I want to reiterate it now. The committee that has been working on this. The committee has requested that we put off the hearing until. Or a vote anyway, until the next. Council meeting till May 12th, because the lawyer needed some more time. He had some unexpected delays in getting back to us. And so we wanted to make sure that we had enough. And we wanted to make sure that we had enough time. That if there was information to go along with this, that it was all together in the same sort of package. So having said that, if folks are. Willing to hold their comments until May 12th, that's great. If you would prefer, you know, you're here now, you would like to speak to this topic that is fine. If you would like to make a comment on this, that is fine. Or if for some reason you can't make the 12th and now works. That is all right. So we'll still. Open the public hearing in case that is true for anyone. But just know that the committee will not be making a presentation tonight on this topic. Hopefully that is clear. If you would like to make a comment on this, that is fine. But if you would like to make a comment on this, that is fine. Or if you are on a phone, you can just unmute yourself and let us know that you want to say something. Again, just if you would say your name, where you live and. Try to keep your comments to about two minutes, if you can. I think that is it. Who is there anyone who would like to make a comment at this time? Oh, Tim. Yes, go ahead. And then. Thanks. Just quick questions. I think we're going to start with the second hearing. I'll go to May 12th. Is that the second hearing and the vote? Well, so one could consider that the third hearing potentially. If we're. So if I'm opening, let's, I don't think I did this. Prior to your comments. And so I'm going to officially open this as a public hearing. So that would make that the third public hearing and potentially. Okay. So, I think that's a good point that you can make. That would be a good point between a public hearing and a vote. If you're doing it all in the same meeting. So you can certainly. Have comments now. This is also pretty normal. For as a process for us, just like we did with the previous item. Where we had a second reading. The second presentation and a vote. Okay. I think we're going to start with the second meeting. I think we're going to start with the second meeting. Which I think was the last one, but I'm not sure if you've had other meetings since this whole zoom things a bear to keep track of. But. It seemed like the city really wasn't ready to implement this. And felt like it was being rushed into. There was no staffing a lot allowance that I've, you really hadn't allocated how it was going to be handled. You know, the algorithm that people are using. It just feels like it's not ready to go. And if in fact, we're really doing this as a political ploy to. Get something going at a different level at the state level. It doesn't. It's just not good public policy for my player for our voters. I don't think it's the right thing to be doing right now. So. I have a lot of concerns about it. And I know you're not opening for a lot of comments. I'll try to. End with that and keep it brief. But I really. Feel like we shouldn't be enacting this ordinance this time. Thank you. Susan. Susan, I think you are still muted. Susan. I live in district two. I think I always have to look it up on election day. I would like to second. Tim's remarks. Strongly. I don't think it's ready for prime time. I don't think it's ready for prime time. I have several concerns. I'll keep it brief. And I'd like to say more at the next meeting. When there's the opportunity to hear the presentation. I did listen. I did listen to the presentation the last time. Just to be brief, my four, my four concerns. Concern. First of all, and my first reaction was God, I don't think it's right to do the same thing. It's wrong. I don't think it's right for me to resort to the executor of my estate because I'm not planning to go anywhere, so my house, but for my son to have to dredge up the information necessary to do this accurately, I think would be a nightmare. Admitting that my file system. If a little random, if not chaotic. I don't think that the one that the kind of standard one wouldn't suit would not be accurate. So that's that. My second concern is the presentation I thought gave us a lot of vague promises about how this was going to affect. I don't know CO2 emissions or whatever it is the global environmental situation in the city. And beyond that, how easy it is how accurate it is all that kind of thing what it really tells you. I don't want these global kinds of statements about how wonderful it is. I want to hear some studies with data and p values and demonstration of validity reproducibility and so forth. No, no, no, no, not not these vague promises about how wonderful it's going to be please let's have some data and what was the size of the what was the size of the study and so forth and so on so we can have some way to judge whether this is even workable. The third thing is I tried to go to the site to put my house in to see how it worked and what was exactly involved and and kind of judge my concern for my executor. When the time comes, and I couldn't get access to it I tried different. Oh, what do you call it. Firefox and and Safari and so forth and it's not it's not the search engine that I'm using it's the site. Keep getting error messages. Sorry, something bad happened we're we're aware we're working on it. Oh yeah fine. And that's going to happen when I'm planning to list tomorrow I mean be serious. And then I think number four, we haven't really heard what's behind the algorithm or you know what's in what what does how does the algorithm work I'd like to hear more details about that. So, that's the gist of what I have to say and I may come up with more details but I'd like to hear the next presentation first, and I do not think it's ready for a vote. Thank you. Thank you. Ben, Ben Huffman go ahead. Thanks. Thank you. I want to just say on a personal note that I'm not somebody who has to chime in on every issue that the council deals with. But, aside from the climate calamity and the relation this proposal has to that. And that's in my interest is the fact that I spent a career doing lots of data analyses that are related to developing policy. And, frankly, the inadequacies in this proposal I've just been driving me nuts. And I just want to say that as the whoever is working on this over the next couple of weeks or so further. I hope that there will be some really careful attention given to what the last speaker just referenced in terms of the the algorithm and what the main point of the profile. As I see it, which is the the rating, the single number that encompasses all forms of energy used in a home. And in my opinion, that is just not a credible piece of information. I think that as people began to use the profile as it now stands they're going to first of all, as I find as I did that filling out the required pieces of information the way that one has to do it. And that gives me a sense of confidence about how my home would be characterized in the profile, which then in turn leads to questioning, however the algorithm is working. It's credibility given that data that's going into it. But more of the point about the algorithm is the fact that it's the proprietary and therefore there's absolutely no documentation offered. As Susan just mentioned, as to the assumptions the data that's other than what's provided by homeowners or any of the calculations. And so it's really impossible to think even understand what it's purporting. And for the city to adopt the probe use the profile as it stands. I believe would be irresponsible. And, but beyond that, given that we don't know what how the algorithm is determined name, the information that it purports. I think the, the algorithm or the rating on its face is logical in that it brings together two sets of data that are apples and oranges. I mean, what are the physical characteristics of the building that are going to have a direct effect on energy use. And that of course has to do with space heating. But except for any use of electricity and heating, all of the electrical uses that are involved in that totality have nothing to do with the physical characteristics of the building. The purpose of this whole thing is to give a potential buyer information about what is this house going to impose on me as a homeowner as to the energy that I use. And all of that electricity use for appliances for devices, etc. is irrelevant. I think what's going to happen if this profile is put into place and actually use as it's been presented so far. That it's going to quickly become realized and recognized among people relating to real estate transactions as something that's essentially meaningless. But a necessary annoyance that you have to tolerate in order to sell your house and that obviously would not be a desirable outcome. So I just hope that some serious attention will be given to that. Thank you. Thank you. Others. Okay, not seeing any others at this point. Go ahead. Okay. So the first thing I want to make clear is that I'm very much in favor of the city taking meaningful and appropriate steps to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in my pillar. And also that I recognize that home energy use is a major contributor to global warming although importantly, I would observe that there are other major contributors. And I think that the city of Montpelier and the city of Montpelier and other cities can also focus motor vehicles and commercial and municipal buildings, facilities, equipment and activities. However, as well intended as this ordinance certainly is its provisions, even if carried out flawlessly, will do very little to help Montpelier attain its net zero energy goals. And I think that this ordinance is a very important part of the city's responsibility to use or attempt to justify such an ordinance as providing consumer protections that in fact already are available to prospective home buyers. Furthermore, and this is my main concern, this ordinance stands a very good chance of causing harm to some of the city's more vulnerable individuals and groups, particularly senior homeowners. And as currently written and conceived the ordinance contains a number of significant flaws in its wording, design, implementation plan, and the overall planning process that got it here. This mysterious committee, the energy advisory committee, all of which makes it unlikely to succeed either for the city, or as a model for other municipalities which has been suggested by some of his proponents. I just want to briefly identify some of the major areas of concern that don't seem yet to have been addressed by proponents of the ordinance. Council Member Richardson has posed a number of questions regarding liability and other legal issues, as well as implementation and technical challenges. Two of these questions appear to have been addressed, at least in the currently revised draft. And the point that was made earlier, if the first time we see a further revision is neck in two weeks from now, and you guys are going to vote on it. Immediately, that just seems like a not the right way to do it, even if it has been the way that's some more routine. And since go ahead, then has raised a number of truly troubling technical concerns about the proprietary algorithm driven VHEP is required by this ordinance, which unless and until it goes through absolutely necessary beta field and stress testing would not be ready for responsible implementation. I spent 15 years as a software publisher and developer, I would have been written out of my industry, if I would have put out something which has had as little real testing as this algorithm driven tool has. I too have shared a number of my concerns, most importantly, the strong possibility that the ordinance has written has the potential to harm senior homeowners, as well as other vulnerable members of our community. And it is my view that it would be irresponsible for the city council to pass an ordinance like this, without first carrying out a fiscally and socially responsible cost benefit analysis of it. I see no evidence that that's happened, none whatsoever. Questions have also been raised about whether there's been sufficient and timely stakeholder involvement in creating this ordinance or at least in reviewing it. The presentation slides referenced only a couple of meetings with real estate professionals and as sparsely attended late August public hearing over zoom. Hardly the quote robust and inclusive stakeholder process promised in the main ninth revised proposal for this ordinance submitted to the legislature. So the entire consumer protection rationale put forth by proponents including clever but deceptive analogies to vehicle mileage labeling appears to be a solution in search of a problem. The arguments offered the assertions made the claims of studies supporting the consumer protection benefits are all almost totally without merit, and I would be glad to provide in detail why that so don't have time now. However, some of the proponents more dubious assertions do not appear to have been checked with knowledgeable real estate professionals, financing institutions or even the city's own assessor. Finally, let's consider the mandatory nature of this ordinance. Problem backlash mandates regarding personal choice, particularly ones that could have significant financial costs. I'm not talking about costs of getting something filled out I'm talking about costs in terms of yours. How much your house is going to sell for fly in the face of attitudes held by many Vermonters left right and center. This proposed mandate has provoked ugly attacks on the mayor referring to her as quote, the self appointed energies are which I don't believe from them. The false comparisons that have been used by proponents, rather than objectively considering the pros and cons of a mandate. Some proponents have dismissed objections to it out of hand with patently misleading comparisons to national seatbelt laws. And I could show you versus chapter and verse about why that is not an app comparison, and then unsupported claims and this is the previous speaker was talking about the statistical requirements of the study. Proponents have defended the mandatory nature of this ordinance by claiming without citations quote, we've seen from decades of evidence of voluntary climate measures. They do not work. Now, while it may be true that voluntary efforts by themselves are insufficient for the climate emergency we're facing. They've certainly already played an important role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions across the country. How else explain the myriad homeowners who have installed expensive solar panels on the roof. The mandate for energy audits blown in installation installed energy efficient with those bought heat pump hot water systems, etc, etc, etc. Evidently, financial incentives and good intentions do work, at least for those who can afford to make such energy improvements. And there's the rub. This mandate will fall heavily on those who cannot afford to make such improvements. We have two weeks to schedule second reading third public hearing of this ordinance. I sincerely hope that the city council and its energy advisory committee will use that time to reconsider the wisdom of moving forward with this ordinance without being certain that the many, many concerns being raised have been truly and truly addressed. And I emphasize impartially. My own recommendation would be that this particular home energy labeling ordinance be withdrawn from consideration that its consumer protection goals be left to more appropriate state and federal bodies, and that the city council pursue its laudable energy goals from up here in more promising and equitable ways, perhaps including some ideas that I and others have proposed. Thank you, Peter. Other comments. Okay, I don't see anyone else. So, give it give it another five seconds here. What anybody else like to speak. Okay. All right, well, thank you. This is all this is actually helpful. It's good to know like what what the concerns are. We were going to take all of that into account. Thank you. All right, so from here. I'm going to close actually, I guess I'll close the public hearing. Okay. So, could there is there a potentially a motion to schedule another reading for next time. Go ahead, Jack. I move that we schedule another public hearing, which would be the third public hearing that at our next regularly scheduled meeting, which I think is May 12. Second. Right, so there's a second me for the discussion. Okay, all in favor, please say I, oh, sorry, hang on, Peter, do you have anything else that you want to say, I have a question. Okay, good. Okay. I intend to say that the vote will occur in the same meeting as was originally proposed, or would you entertain an amendment that has been suggested by some other comments here that a pause be taken between a public reading of a revised version, which hopefully will get a red line of the vote. So having a vote immediately after a second reading strikes me and others as really rushing something very high stakes in that ordinance very high stakes. Madam Mary respond. Sure. You can if you'd like. Thank you. I Given that this is more than a year in the making I don't believe that this has been rushed. On the other hand. I also am confident that if there's a significant degree of public comment at our next meeting that says people haven't had a chance to adequately absorb and understand the proposal that people need more time with it. I would not anticipate the members of this council. I think that the vote while people seriously think that more time is needed to debate it. Go ahead. Likewise, adding to Jack's comment. I don't think it's appropriate we've had. I think it's more appropriate for the council to decide at each hearing whether we need more and not to try to sub guess us ahead of time. So you may be right. Peter, we may be total agreement when we hear the revisions and need more time. But I think it's up to the council to decide at that time. And not make an advanced decision today. And I would I would agree that there is precedent for us taking. So we usually don't schedule the vote together with the public hearing. If we think it's appropriate to take a vote then we usually do but sometimes when we feel that that is not appropriate then we schedule another hearing. That has been our process in the past. So hopefully that clarifies it. So there is a motion and a second any further discussion. Okay. All in favor please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay, so the motion passes. Thank you. That is It's good to know so we are going to move on then to The pool option opening options. So for this I think it's probably either Cameron or Arnie or both. Hi everybody thank you for having us back for the second presentation of our our thoughts here. I just want to ask us to come back with a couple of options because we you know everybody would like to see the pool open. I'm certainly no different. I would love to see the pool. I just want to make sure that we can keep it safe for everybody. So, Cameron or Mary can you put up the presentation on your screen for me. I'm going to go through the We'll go through our slide presentation here. So we want to talk about a couple of options that we've come up with with some different ideas on on how we can make this You know, equitable for the public and also for day camp. Option one is amending pool hours separate day camp and the public by times. Option two physically barricading off public access to a quarter of the pool and the pool house. This will separate day camp from the public physically. These two options have some similarities pool opening timeline changes waiver form requirements temporary user fee changes for the 2021 season, and then masks and distancing. Next slide. So timelines for updates the new timeline for the 2021 season. Goal is to get the pool open by the first week of July exact date to be determined pool closing around August 22, which is typical of every year because generally our staff is going back to school to college or back to teach. So we kind of lose all our all our guards at that point. And also some of the younger guards that are still in high school are participating in fall sports. So that's that's why we end up having to do that waiver form requirements. I've been talking a little bit with another pool that, you know, all full passenger passive purchasers will need to sign a waiver that acknowledges that they will not hold the city, they will hold the city harmless in case of a COVID outright. Swimming license lessons will also require a waiver. And then we'll also have waivers will be posted as a flyer poster at the entrance to the pool. So paying to enter the pool assumes agreement with the waiver. We just really want to make sure people are aware. You know, that we can't guarantee 100% protection from COVID. Next slide. So these are some suggested fee changes for this year, and it would only affect daily fees, it would not affect swimming pool season passes. So those will remain the same as last. And then we're open as well as swim lessons, those will remain the same as well. So the fees were just increased a little bit to help with some of the some of the costs for challenging COVID year suggestions for some of the safe guidance. Vermont forward plan requirements effective July 4 2021. No state gathering limit is anticipated universal guidance will no longer be mandatory but strongly encouraged. Municipalities still have the option to enforce stricter guidance so we will staff recommends requiring all pool visitors to be masked when not actively in the water and to remain six feet or more away from anyone not in their group. So the So exploring option one changing hours, the current pool hours. This is what we've typically done in past years morning lap swim from seven to eight general swim, then family swim, and then on the weekends, we had our on both Saturday and Sunday we're open from one to 530. We have our day camp, which we want to provide pariah towards the safety of runs Monday through Friday 745 to 445. They do not use the pool that whole time so I just want to be clear on that. Next slide. Oh, okay. No, we're good. So exploring option one. The recommended updates to the pool hours fully separate the public in the camp access by extended pool hours into the evening and remain in the same on weekend so when camps not there. You know, the whole facility would be available for the public. So day camp. Swimming lessons just to be clear on this. Swimming lessons are typically tend to noon day camp when they swim in the pool is usually in the afternoon and that's usually from one to 330 is the typical time they would use it so day camp would not have the full day to swim in the pool would just be in the afternoon. General swim slash family swim with the thought of being from 430 to 8pm and then Saturdays and Sundays would be from one to 530. Again, that would be given the space to the public after day camp was added so the public could use the whole facility. Exploring option one a little more benefits of changing hours option fully protects day camp from being impacted by a COVID outbreak at the pool facility and protects the public if day camp experiences now break allows the public to fully use all pool hours. The the pavilion when day camps done because of pavilion is another day camp space during the day until 445 and then the pool house for check in and restrooms. Gives allowances for the anticipated lifeguard shortage if we have one if we're lucky we won't as it requires marginal marginally less lifeguard staff. So this option includes barricading off portions of the pool and the the whole of the pool. I can't read part of my slide because something's covered. Okay, this option includes barricading off options of the pool and the whole of the pool house to the public to keep day camp participants distanced and safe. Other considerations Porta Johns will be needed to replace pool house restrooms. One raft will be for day camp use only. And again that's only well day camps at the pool. Then a quarter of the pool deck and pool would be day camp use only hours could be more flexible under this model possibly requiring more lifeguards during this time. So this is the demonstration of the possible pool configuration so where you can see the red marked off there that would be for the day camp use. To keep day camp separate from the public. The green arrows is the entrance at the gate that's a double gate entrance. So we could use that as the entrance for the public to come in and out of. We could use the windows on the side of the pool house and possibly use the pool house. We could use the windows on the side of the pool house and possibly in part of the front of the pool house depending how we section that off as a way for to do collecting money for walk ins as well as pool concessions if we wanted to try to sell ice cream and stuff. We could we could set it up so we could pass ice cream through a window or for the patrons at the pool. Then the yellow dots would be the location of Port of Johns and the Port of Johns wouldn't be your standard unit they would be the accessible units which are much larger. So that way there you don't feel like you're completely boxed in if you go into one. So that was that was some thoughts we had there. Exploring option to physical barriers. Some more there will be a slight changes to the schedule staffing dependent. It would generally be similar to past years with the exception of lap swim which will be moved to the afternoon's as I think we were looking at moving that from 12 to one. The pool entrance would be the side gate in this option allowing folks to check in pay and buy snacks through the windows of the pool house benefits to the physical barriers option allows for more hours for public swim. All groups can use the pool at the same time with safety in mind. The drawbacks to the physical barriers option that blocks the public from using most of the public facilities including one raft. The pavilion until 445 which is normal during the summer because that's a day camp space and the pool house for check in and restaurants. The higher presence of lifeguards which may again may not be available but we may we may do OK so we've already had people reach it out. And then the cost of Port of Johns would be in there as well. New April 23 changes to summer camp guidance new guidance information from a CCD suspends the requirement for separate restrooms from day camp attendees. However the CDC is recommending that program stagger use of shared spaces by reducing group size in the area at one time or remain in and cohorted groups while sanitizing shared objects and high touch services between groups and that preventative behavior such as wearing a mask and Washington and cohorting are needed. Additionally CDC guidance still states that childcare programs might need to implement short term building closure procedures if an infected person has been at the facility during their infectious period. The state will need to determine if my players programs close in consultation with the Department of Health. So we would we would reach out to the Department of Health and they would guide us on what we what we need to do due to a COVID situation. Due to staffing availability and highest safety priorities for children in mind the still the city still recommends separating the pool house in this option. Lifeguards. There there is a still a concern about availability but again, you know, if people been reaching out to me just recently so I have some faith that you know there are people out there that are ready to jump on board. Working with the Red Cross to talk about setting up a training. We'll have training days set up for staff CPR is now taught as a breathless technique compressions only swim lesson availability hinges on any of the higher lifeguards that are actually a water safety instructor so we can provide a course for them to make sure we have at least a couple of guards that have that course community benchmarking the very city pool. Barriers open in their pool under normal conditions and following your universal safety guidance from the governor they do not operate a day camp at their location. They reported they may have to change your operating hours due to low staffing and availability so again, a lot of us are dependent on lifeguards on how how can open our pools and hopefully it won't be like 2 or 3 years ago when when lifeguards were a real struggle to find so I'm hoping that's not the case this year. The Waterbury pool. Rec director has staff who can actually help us train our guard so I'm going to set up a course with him. And they're also going to give us a bulk rate at something we've done with them before in the past. They are capped in their pool limits to 80 people in their pool at a time in section and off sections of the pool to limit exposure requiring reservations for swim lanes. Space and swimming lessons so they're 15 minutes between lessons in the past I guess they just literally had an overlap in so with COVID they've decided to space them this year. They'll be requiring contact tracing through information forms for non pool members. Their camp is also not licensed or their camp is not licensed so they do have a day camp but it's it's not a licensed program. Summer Matters Grant program both both myself and Cameron have attended this training session for the grant on 420 the timeline. It's due on May 5th. The award notifications May 26 and then the period of September award period is June 14 through September 15 2021. It is a reimbursement program not upfront costs. The minimum request is $20,000 which really isn't hard to spend if we can get that grant with 1.5 million available for the whole state. The city aims to apply for increased funding for lifeguards and their training but the opening of the pool does not rely on this funding. License requirements the day camp as a licensed childcare provider follows rules separate from the Vermont forward or universal guidance plan. These rules have been recently updated effective May 1st but are always subject to change. These plans are options and can be modified as needed throughout the summer season as covid statistics change as guidance is updated or as council recommends. The financial considerations of either option or are not really much different. I think option 2 just allows for a little more pool hours to use the pool and that's that's where your differences in cost is is the additional staff costs estimate as well as the Porta John estimate. So that's pretty much the difference in the cost between there. The other startup expenses are are typical from year to year. And as a option 3 as a non recommended option council could also decide to open the pool with its regular hours and no other safety considerations outside of the recommended waivers masks and distancing. Anybody have questions spots. If you could stop sharing your screen there. Great. I think I saw a hand from Dan but also Jay and Donna and Jack and so we'll go in that order roughly OK go ahead Dan. Almost sounded like you're starting a romper room kind of thing. Arnie and Cameron. First of all I want to thank you for this presentation. I'm really impressed in that you took the feedback we gave you last time and came back with just a really nice and robust plan and I want to thank you both for the work that went into this understanding that you have a lot of duties on your plate and I really appreciate your incorporating our feedback into into these and a thought and work that went behind it. The one question that I have because I'm sure there's a number of other city councilors that have other questions is in regards to the swim team where where would that fit into either of the options. I actually had thought that the option one I was trying to get them in there between three thirty and four thirty which is the which would be the option one plan which did change you know that was the separation of the public from taking and then the option to I had them from their usual last time they use the pool I I believe it was from seven to eight p.m. is when they so that's what had them planned in there for although I think they mentioned they started at six thirty but I don't remember them start at six thirty so we'll have to get that sorted out but yeah I did have a space for them to use in each of the options. I seem to remember there being a blurring of the end of the open swim in a couple of times where I've suddenly caught up in a swirl of kids doing laps around the pool so they may have they may have jumped the gun a few times but or not. Okay and is there any option as far as volunteers to help out with either lifeguarding or you know doing swim team work I know I've heard from a number of parents and individuals that are really interested in supporting this and particularly given your concerns about having enough lifeguards and others that is that a viable is that a workable option to incorporate that in. It could be as long as there are certified lifeguard so we can't have people that aren't trained as a lifeguard to actually you know sit on anything so yeah if they wanted to that way we could. Okay. Thank you. We'd be able to get volunteers training with the folks that we're hiring for lifeguards as well correct. I would I would think that if if somebody wanted to volunteer their time and it would be worth it to us to you know pay for their training as well. And maybe that might be another cost that we could seek the grant funding for if that additional training. And it also strikes me to that and you probably are thought of this but you know if we do go with option to where you're going to incur like the port of potty expense and such that that that would be grant funding or you know targeted for grant funding as well. Okay. That sounds good. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jay. I'll quickly echo Dan and thank Arnie and Cameron for for putting putting these very you know sensible alternatives together on a pretty short timeline. I had a similar question about the team but appreciate that Arnie you've given some thought to where they might fit in with that schedule. The one question I do have is just like I know you guys had to deal with changing changing guidance last Friday and had to update the presentation on Monday morning to this. Just if Cameron and Arnie if you have any thoughts around which of these two alternatives might provide you the most flexibility moving forward between now and opening in early July. If things if the governor if you know the governor loosens things up more or if things tighten up more either direction which one do you think will give us the most flexibility that will still achieve the goals but then will give us give you all the most the most flexibility to make it happen. Thanks. I'll jump in first. My thought is option two. I think you know the separation does create a little bit more safety cushion I think that's just my thought process. One of the things I was looking at in the another thing that came out on the COVID-19 health guidance for child care is and this is this is what plays a big part for me. Unvaccinated staff or children who have been identified as a close contact must quarantine so if we have a biggest portion of our group for our child care will not be vaccinated. So if somebody comes into close contact with that group we could have 20, 30 kids possibly that have to quarantine at a day camp for 14 days, which would be a huge huge hit on our, you know, on our revenue for that program. So that's that's one of the things that's still playing into me on this is you know and for the safety of again the unvaccinated population is going to be. So I'll let Cameron add to that. Well to build on what Arnie said you know we spent a good amount of time going over these options and really what we thought they were both good options but what would we be like actively recommending to y'all and I think that would be option to because if things are loosing up the children can get vaccinated more we could take those barriers down very quickly and it keeps the hours to the pool as close to what people are accustomed to anyway, while allowing for a measure of real distancing between what the kids in day care are using and what the public is using. It will be an inconvenience I think for a lot of folks but I, I think at this point we're all sort of used to inconvenience in the year and a half of COVID so. We also are just sort of to drive home a point that Arnie just mentioned is really trying to take the safety of the children in in who are participating, not only just as guests to the pool but also in our day camp where a lot of folks in the community rely on for summer day care, so that they can go to work is protected, which is why also we'd be recommending that folks still wear masks when they're not actively swimming and stay distanced and in their own family pods. We know that the governor's guidance like you just said Jay is changing really rapidly and that won't be in place, but municipalities have still been given the power to make those guidance and those recommendations on their own and we think that that's really important just for the safety of the youth who use the pool. Thank you. And that would also include the kids that are there for swimming lessons. So we got to keep them in mind that they too are under that age group. I just want to jump in here and say that I'm glad that you're wrecking recommending option to because that was my preference as well. Donna go ahead. Yes, me too I like keeping the hours as close as possible. And I think as you both mentioned option to gives you a platform if you have to get more severe or more open. I was wondering about what happened to the pool repairs. Are they going to be gotten before the season or after the season. Some of them will be before the season as far as like repainting the pool itself and also painting the pool house we're going to try to do as much touching up at that as we can, because being our licensed facility. We've got paint falling off that building. So we have to make sure that that that's not happening. But as far as like doing the outer rim of the the pool deck with the having that sealed and stuff I'm a little concerned doing that before the season because that tar or whatever material they use might like run into the water it may not absorb pavement. So I'd be concerned that you know we might get some runoff from that type of material. So will the bathrooms in the pool house be working especially on the women girl side. They're working. They're not fancy. We tried to get a grant as you know for that to renovate the pool bathrooms and unfortunately we didn't get the grant. We are going to reapply for that again in the next cycle. But if we don't get it I think we just have to look at going forward and trying to renovate some bathrooms. Well, I mean that's the other thing about to I really think you need the party pots anyway. So I think that also might be a place where you could use volunteers if we choose option to and you have a separate gate. You could use volunteers that aren't swim, you know, certified, but could help you with emissions, as far as that flow out there. So I was going to ask you to expand public hours for option one but you explain the swim teams taking that hour up so I won't. The other thing I had a question about was the number of kids you're not really talking about limits, unless I missed it you didn't mention any limits here and I know you have a lot of camp kids. I mean I've seen them and the shelter there they're they're really quite a large number do you have an idea what you're expecting for them and to be in the pool from the public side. Our license allows us up to 120 kids and they can. That's what our license allows right now. I have the limit set a little bit lower because of the COVID regulations and we're trying to, we're trying to be practical on that. Right now that we've got lower to below 100 for campers but we also have another site that we could probably use but with the pool open, nobody's going to want to be at that other site. So they'll want to be where they can swim. So right now I think I have it set for like 88 kids a day we might go up a little bit depending on the guidelines but again, the goal would be to keep, you know, similar groups of kids together like they did in school so we don't have a complete over a kids a lot of a lot of kids that participate in our summer camp will be there for most of the summer. So then you feel you don't have to limit who comes on the public side. Beyond our not beyond the capacity of the pool itself. Like our, you know, the fire marshal capacity for the space which I couldn't tell you offhand or need you. I don't know offhand but some of the things Cameron I had talked about because we was trying to section off areas of the pool to try to create some of that six foot distancing keep themselves in groups. Yeah. So, so we're going to try to figure out how we can do that to make it functional and not sort of over stuff. Right. And once we have sort of direction from young which, you know, way you want to go will be able to refine that and how it actually works. I think, you know, Donna to get to your point. I think if there are influx of children and we are a little larger we could move the barriers for more space for the public less space for day camp back or more space for day camp less space for the public, like those things can be worked out throughout the summer as guidance changes or things just change. So it does allow us to be pretty flexible. Well, thank you. This was really understandable. I really appreciate all the planning. Thank you. Welcome. I'm trying to remember who is next that it was either Connor or Jack. It will go just another Connor than Jack. I just echo everybody else. First of all, it's asking city staff to do business as usual. I think is asking like a lot these days, you know what the year we've had and everything. So that have a presentation with both these options which are well thought out, you know, very grateful for the work that's gone on to it. So thanks very much. I tend to favor option to I think, you know, just as we're looking at flexibility. I think you have parents who are working all hours here and to limit it to the, you know, latter part of the day there. I think you could have some kids missing out on that. So again, that was many hours as possible. I think it's key because we're doing it for for kids, right? It's, they've had a, they've had a hell of a year here. And I think to get them out, it's going to be great for their mental health here. It's just going to be good for the buzz of the town there. So I'd certainly favor option too, but you know, I can barely dog paddle. So not married to it if people go another direction. Thanks so much. So seriously, thanks. Okay, before you go, Jack, I just want to recognize that it is 830 Jack. Do you think you can remember and hang on to your comments? Excellent. We're committed to doing the break. Let's do it. That's right. We are committed to the break. So let's take, we're going to take 10 minutes. So let's see you back at 840 and we'll start with Jack and we'll go from there. Okay, thanks. Go ahead. All right, thank you. I was sort of doing a review of what cultural central Vermont cultural phenomena I've missed out on. And one of them is is Thunder Road. I've never been there. And another one is that my family was never a regular at the at the Montpelier pool. So I wonder, Arnie, if you have an idea of statistics of usage by by time of day. The your busier times a day are probably the middle of the afternoon, like during the one to three o'clock time generally tends to be a lot of day campers and there are a few families and childcare groups that come during that time. I didn't have more of your families that do show up a little bit later than that. But it seems to get really quiet typically around seven o'clock and that's why we let the swim team use it at seven because we'd have like one or two swimmers after seven o'clock. That's kind of been the history there. And then of course weekends are usually quite busy. What really pushes it of course is the weather if it's 90 degrees it doesn't matter what time of day we're usually busy. So the weather is the biggest driving force for us. In the town I grew up in the evening hours for the pool were dependent on the on the temperature humidity index and had to be above a certain level in order for them to think it was worth opening the pool. After six o'clock or something like that. I, my immediate thought is that it seems like it would be significantly harder to manage the two and that it really struck me that the the temporal separation plan option number one would would be easier for the for you to manage. But now as Connor said I'm not married to that idea. And I certainly have no problem with the with going with the with the option that you support and which the majority of the council supports. And that's all I've got in. All right. So any other comments from. Yes, Lauren, go ahead. Yeah, just just briefly because I think everything pretty much has been said, just wanted to echo the gratitude for pulling together these options. Yeah, I mean to me I think option to even just because it would require lining up the porta potties and the equipment for the barriers and stuff it makes sense to plan on that. You could always do the temporal later if it, you know, we needed to tighten down or if you know you come back to us and had, but having just the equipment to pull off option to seems to give us the most flexibility to respond to kind of conditions as we're coming. And I, you know, love the idea of having more time for people to have access to the pool if we can make that work and really appreciate again all the thought that went into it. Great. I am guessing that we have some members of the public here who would like to potentially comment so if you would like to make a comment now would be a good time. Either physically like turn your camera on and wave or you can use the raise hand feature and under reactions, or you can, if you're on a phone you can just unmute yourself and let us know that you want to speak. Donna, do you have something. I think the public was really good and reaching out to us. I mean, I had like four calls before I got back from the Cape about this issue, and I've heard from at least four to five more, just this last week. So I think they definitely want the pool open and as maximum as possible to the regular hours. And one thing is that the kids in the afternoon come without their parents on their bikes walking. It's a really good opportunity for kids to have independence. And also, it just, it's a great break for the household. So, I would love to see us do option to and would like to make that motion that we input as the staff to implement their option to and that they'll keep us posted to do whatever we can to support them in this effort. Okay, so there's a motion in a second tonight. I see there Alicia, that you may want to comment I just want to make sure that I've noted that there's a motion in a second with Dan second in there. So Alicia, go ahead. Am I unmuted. Can you can you hear me now. We can hear you yes. Okay, super. So I just popped on to listen to this section and see what was being proposed and I can clearly see that it looks like the council's headed in a certain direction. I just wanted to say thank you to the pool director. For pointing out the option, the unrecommended option that it would be okay to just that the city council could go ahead and approve to open the pool with with a limited, you know, the very least limitations. And I think that that's awesome that that he went ahead and put that out there and that my family is is super in support of that we have a lot of friends in other states that didn't experience the level of mask mandates and shut down the Vermont has experienced and we're like go ahead and and and swim and interact and everybody's fine. So I just I just wanted to voice that and that we are we are our family, you know would be would be definitely in favor of that option but like I said, sounds like sounds like there's a different direction that's going but I wanted to to really say thank you that that that was put out there as an option and to hear that the city council does in fact have the power to go ahead and approve that. So, thanks. Thank you for that. Yeah, thank you. Jack, go ahead. Thank you just, I think it's clear that if standards from the Centers for Disease Control or the agency of commerce and community development change to loosen restrictions that it would be within the discretion of the other department to do that, regardless of what we're proving. I just think too that it's easy to kind of forget this and just another reminder that we are also running a daycare at this site, and that is different from most other pools. And so we've got two distinct groups that need to be kept safe and, and, you know, a daycare group people are signing up to watch their kids while they work. And while I certainly my I had four kids, they all went to the pool we were pool regulars I know how great pool is. But if you shut down the daycare then you got a bunch of families. I just lost their option while they're trying to work. And so there is a distinction between the Montpelier pool and and other pools I just want to remind everyone that that's driving the recommendations. Peter and then Dan. Thank you I just had a quick question. Because of the year we had the schools are actually ending this season. I think it's June 11. So I didn't know. And this is a question for Arnie and the rec center with the daycare program and the pool. Will there be any consideration of opening the pool and the facilities earlier than the first week of July, being that the kids will be out of school in the first weekend will be the weekend of the 12th of June that you know they'll be out of session. So that was that was my only question and again just thanks for listening to the public last meeting and moving forward with this proposal was really good to hear. I guess just to answer that question Peter with our timeline and how much work that has to be done to get that pool ready. I think this is probably the earliest if we get lucky and get out a week sooner than July 1 I think we'd be very fortunate. But there's a lot that goes into preparing this pool. Just to open it. Okay, Dan. I'll just be quick I mean I think option to, as everyone said preserves the best option. The best sort of middle road with all the competing sort of stakeholders whether it be the childcare, the general public swim lessons and some team, everybody gets as close to normal. With protections in place and obviously if things change. If they loosen up or they tightened up tighten up, you know, we, we understand, I understand at least, you know, your need to adjust and certainly any approval that I give tonight it comes with that understanding of the need to adjust as things either loosen up or tighten up and so again, it's something I think this is really a workable plan and and I think option two is the best for that. For that reason. Okay. So I think we, we do have a motion and a second. Is there any further discussion on this topic we're moving towards. Well, it's the motion is to go with option to. Okay. For the discussion. Okay, all in favor please say aye. Aye. And opposed. Okay, so that passes. Thank you for your work on this. We are all very appreciative of it. All right, so in the next item, this is where we were switching something. So we're moving on to the strategic plan update. Yeah, or the COVID-19 whichever one. Cameron, do you feel like doing both of them or do you want to skip one. I can, I can do both. I think the COVID one has a little less conversation I think but I'm fine with running through the mall nowhere. I have medicine. I'm here. Ready to go. Okay. Let me share my screen here real quick. So I've got a presentation for you that goes along with the report you were given the full report that explains where we're at with the strategic plan for this year we are now in quarter three. And as a reminder, the strategic goals that are included in the council strategic plan are community prosperity COVID-19 response environmental stewardship, getting more housing responsive and responsible government and sustainable infrastructure. Right now, we are a little behind. I think you remember last time in quarter two we had a 45% progress bar. You can see this, this quarter we have far more projects on delay. There's more detail in the full report, but a majority of these delays are COVID-19 related. We are continuing to see sort of a domino effect on COVID delays. So a lot of the delays are on larger projects, most of them are DPW infrastructure projects, because they can't move in the past. And so we are behind on our completion goal, but I'm not super can I mean I can speak for myself looking at the strategic strategic plan I'm not very concerned because we know why they're delayed. We're not running into staffing issues we're not running into capacity issues we're running into purely almost bureaucratic issues in the face of COVID-19. So, there are a little bit more details but we'll get into each project that's included in your strategic plan in this presentation. If my computer will work, questionable at best. We're going to get into the initiatives that support your goals. So for community prosperity, we have an initiative around our budget processes that is doing well and is on target. The budget was adopted. The budget passed with 84% of our voters. The budget was submitted to council with a baseline survey for community engagement which we intend to build out in the next year's budget process. So we've already started working on our fiscal year 23 budget process I think Kelly has kept you all pretty well abreast of what's going on. She's also been giving you all quarterly updates on our budget. So I believe she's given you the third quarter and is working on the fourth quarter. And we are still in our fiscal year 21 deficit mitigation plan which is still working as intended. So as far as COVID-19 response, we are on track with both of our initiatives. The city has also I'm just going to present your reopening plans for how the city facilities will open tonight right after this in alignment with the states for my forward plan. And we have been supporting can and how they've been looking for funding from other organizations we've been supporting them in that work. So we have some updates in the MDC and not clear alive partnership initiative. MDC has announced to you all that it is dissolving. And so we will be recommending economic development structure recommendations at the next council meeting. So MDC is currently providing grants for startup businesses and not pure Montpelier alive is planning for a loosened restrictions for retail restaurants and public gatherings. So that's an issue on this one though and we'll be coming it becoming a larger issue and I think we'll get into that next council meeting is that there's no current funding for economic development in the city budget. Environmental stewardship, your initiatives there net zero 2030 plans are on track. The city went out for RFP for developing a net zero plan, and has hired the consulting firm, the IC to implement the plan on the city's behalf so they're currently building that out. The stormwater master plan is one of the plans that is in delay right now. There's no internal capacity, because there needs to be an external contractor that needs to be engaged and so we're working on getting that external contractor, and there's no timeline on that right now. So we have done our internal planning and DPW has worked that out we just need to find a available contractor to work for us and the funding to pay for them. So for the goal for more housing the initiative to implement the city plan housing initiatives is going well it's on track. The housing task force is meeting to discuss new programs and project options for the upcoming budget year. The city has continued to issue first time home buyer awards and has continued the ADU program and has developed preliminary information on map. The city staff continues to work with developers on two potential housing projects and zoning updates to remove barriers for additional housing were approved by city council that is on track. I'm sorry I caught your hand. Um, could you explain the initialisms of ADU and MAPA please. I wish I knew MAPA I wish Mike was still here so I could explain that one a little further ADU is an accessory dwelling unit, and I knew what map I meant until you asked me what I meant. Oh, okay. And I admit I don't know it either. I do. Oh, come on. It's the municipal administrative procedures act. So it would allow. So the way that works is DRB would actually hear here. So there would be applications on the record people would be sworn in there would be, you know, formal testimony and so instead of it being de novo, an appeal de novo would only be it would be appealed on the record for what it was heard at DRB. So the theory is something there's a little bit more upfront work at the local level but it can streamline some of the appeals because you don't get to start all over fighting everything all over. So they're evaluating whether it's worth doing for all applications or just, you know, setting a threshold above which, you know, so anyway. And I think I actually just spoke at length with Mike today that's why I'm so knowledgeable at this. And we're talking about maybe having it as an upcoming agenda item with DRB and planning commission and some of you know, doing a little workshop meeting where we're to see what we think about proceeding. That's a long answer to what MAPA means. No, that's great because people at home watching don't necessarily even know what they should care about until they get a little more content. That is fair and that is a good feedback and I'll make sure to spell those things out in these presentations in the future. So thank you. There are some reminders on that often but you get in your own headspace and you're writing these things out and forget. So thank you. So your goal for responsive and responsible government. Your lobbying subcommittee has been meeting and has met with the delegation is on track. And the childcare option study is another thing that is currently on pause. We're currently working with bread loaf who did the initial design for the renovation of the rec center to we've asked them to sort of look at what it would cost and what it would look like to build a new building entirely out by the rec fields. And what would that look like if we wanted it to have infant care or childcare in a larger capacity. You know, I'm going to call out an employee that no longer works for us but we did have a new program manager in our rec department his name was Nick and he had some really innovative ideas and one of them was if you're going to bond for $5 million why not ask for a new building. And I didn't really have a good answer so we figured we would ask. And so that's sort of where we're at because right now the answer to council on that childcare option study. Is that we don't have facilities that would illegally allow us to have infant childcare. There's no way to renovate the rec center in a way that we could afford to make it appropriate for infant childcare so we are asking for cost and impacts studies from bread loaf right now and that should be coming to us around So we'll have more information moving there. You know we had y'all had tabled the bond question for a while because our community is not really ready for $5 million bond in the wake of covid so we took this as an opportunity to maybe look at other options so that is moving in a different direction, but it is still on hold because technically, we don't have an answer for you yet in its totality so. And then your goal for sustainable infrastructure and protecting maintaining and improving our built infrastructure is got lots of different moving parts so I've sort of split out what is on delay and what is on track. Overall, it is on track a good majority of the things that DPW has on this initiative has been completed which is great. There are some other things that need to be, sorry, that need to be finished including the Granite Street sidewalk repairs. The state is currently reviewing that contract. There is a major disruption in the Grant Road bridge. We are planning on submitting for grant applications to start raising funds to narrow the funding gap for that repair. And then the Moat property project has been delayed but the contractors say they are ready for spring 2021. Again that gets back to contractor availability, which has been a pretty substantial barrier for a lot of the progress in these initiatives. So I'm going to pause there and try to see if anyone has any questions I can't see everyone so. Okay. So this is an essential for new new building that incorporates lots of childcare. It's great. Thank you. I figured that would go that would be a welcome conversation. So, I also just wanted to make note that this will be another time that the public dashboard is updated so after this report is given to y'all and I am good to return to work I will be updating the public dashboard. And folks go to our homepage and click on our dashboard you will be able to see all of the progress that we've made on our quarter three updates for our music plan. So that was my presentation on that I didn't know if y'all had any further questions. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, just a comment I was like an early critic of this sort of method I was telling Bill I thought it was some sort of witchcraft but as it's gone on, you know, it's it's amazingly satisfying seeing the bars go to like 80% than that type. And I think it's really helpful when you're like, look at the budget process. So, just an idea that I didn't want to like get away. I think that's one of our committees to if the sort of voluntarily choose to look at their charge and kind of have a status report each year of what tangible things they delivered. I think that would help us especially, you know, as we're looking at MDC disbanding. Where does the money go to different groups like Montpelier alive. It actually might be helpful to have some data like this. And hopefully not too much staff time but if they could do it as a committee maybe before budget season. Thank you. I'm definitely going to put that on my resume is witchcraft. I also wanted to make a note that while we focus in these reports on specific things that y'all strategic plan, the city's staff also has far more initiatives that they're working on that support these goals. So I think for the end of the court like the fourth quarter I'd like to give you this report and also the full report of what everything that's the city has been doing so that you can see sort of what we've accomplished in that way as well. Just because I think that that gives a whole nother understanding of the work that they're doing to support some of these goals as well. So, it'll be a really big report. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Thank you that was great camera. Thank you. And I agree it is fun to watch the bars change progress. It's, it's motivating. Well, I may not motivating it's like it's exciting. I definitely agree. Aim for excitement here. All right, are you good for doing the COVID. Okay, great. All right, I don't have a presentation for this one. But you have received the draft plan that I put forward so we worked really, really hard as staff to sort of determine where we were at with our internal planning where our different departments were at. What our staff capacity was what our staff is vaccination status was for those who are electing to get vaccinated. And I think came up with a plan that not only protects our staff but will protect the community as well from potential exposure with our staff. Do you have to know that even with limited, limited open hours, our staff still really works closely with the public and is with the public often. I think right now I'm a really good example of the fact that you can play everything right and still get very sick. So, the executive summary of our opening plan is to comply with the Vermont forward plan. We would stay closed to the public the way we are now until July 6 at which point we would open full scale all of our facilities back to normal hours. Also, city facilities would be open for walk in services at that date. Appointments would still be encouraged of course that we'd really like the public to make appointments for their safety and ours, but we would be open for walk ins. The facilities will require further accommodations, but that's really just the senior center because they serve a an at risk population the state has different guidelines for their opening so this would not cover the senior center, but all other facilities. So, the timeline that we're recommending to y'all is would allow both city staff to become fully vaccinated. We think as many Vermonters as possible since that is the goal. So we'd be serving a vaccinated residents and our staff would be vaccinated as well. We would like masks and distancing to remain required in all city facilities, even after July 6. And for the foreseeable future, honestly, I don't know I don't have an answer for when we'd want to lift that. I think that's really up to y'all but you know municipal municipalities have that power, and I would recommend that we take that just again for safety. And the thing I think that's most important for y'all is city council meetings will need to return to fully in person when the state of emergency is lifted. That date is to be determined that we don't really know I'm assuming July 15 he might lift it earlier. The council can choose to implement a hybrid in person zoom format starting on May 6. So we do recommend that will my recommendation for y'all you can do with this what you will but would be to have y'all stay on zoom. And we would open city hall. So folks from the public could come and participate we'd have computers set up for people to participate chairs that would be distanced until July 6 where we'd be able to open that up for everybody to be in person fully. Also, if folks wanted feel wanted to come in individually we could we could accommodate that. But we would want to have city facilities or city hall anyway be open for in person council meeting so folks can participate in person via zoom in city hall, starting May 6. And so council will be able to return to fully in person meeting starting after July 6 when we be opening city facilities. So I could go in to more detail, but that is really the crux of what we're recommending, recommending for the opening plan. Sorry, I'm like losing my voice as I'm speaking. Dan and then Jack, and then Donna. So just a quick question. When you're proposing, we go back into in person and in July, would that still would that be masked. Yes. Okay. I think we're sort of like partitions or barriers or be just normal. We had thought about putting plexiglass between y'all seats. So it would just be sort of pending their ability to put that in. But if you would like that we can do that for you. Yeah, I don't have strong feelings necessarily one way or the other because I've heard mixed mixed things about that. I don't think the mask would be the more important of the two. Yes, the state actually it's interesting because universal guidance for most everything is just please wear masks, please distance but for public returning public meetings. They've asked that folks are checked in so the public who wants to come into the, to the city hall to participate in a council meeting we need to sign in, and you have temperature checks there. And that's the state has put that guidance out for us to follow so it's a little stricter or meetings of a public body. So our committees would also need to follow that rule. Oh, that's, that's interesting. Right that any, any committees would have to do that as well. Just to follow up on that I assume that temperature checks would be would need to be done by a staff member. It doesn't have to be that was specified in the guidance is you could ask folks to do that themselves at the door. Okay. Okay. We did, we did something similar with teachers at the high school. Self self checking temperatures. Anyway, sorry, Jack, go ahead. That's, that's quite all right. Yeah. I was wondering about the, the physical arrangements. If we're talking about six foot separation, would we be sitting in our usual places or would we be moving to one of the possible physical arrangements that we talked about a year ago when we were considering how to proceed. Personally, I like the idea of just doing the meetings from, I can't believe I'm saying this, I like the idea of just doing the meetings from home until July when we're required to do it. I had a choice and if my preference would be to do plexiglass barriers between the members of the council and no masks. I don't know if that's a possibility. My, my immediate pushback to that is if we're asking every, every member of the public and our staff to wear masks, we would, we would ask that y'all wear them inside the building as well. I totally get that. But, but as I said, that's my feeling at least masked until people get into their plastic cubicle. And then, but you know that's I see that there's a valid point to not making other people follow restrictions that we're not holding ourselves to that. I don't know if I should check my notes but I think that might be, might be all I have for the moment. Thank you. Donna. So Cameron, just to go back to the temperature when you first spoke about temperature. I thought you were talking about the public coming in but you also mean everybody gets their temperature taken. It seems to be what CDC is emphasizing mask everywhere. But I don't understand about committees would it would seem like committee still need to plan remote meetings for a while just because of the logistics. Yes. Yes. So we're recommending that committees stay in place until after July 6, but they if they come back and meet there are a member like it's a public meeting so they would also need after that time to follow the same guidance that y'all do for your your meetings. So do they need them to go through you or somebody they have to be quote committee approved to have live meetings that that the city knows they set up the right situation that follows all these guidelines. Yes, we would ask them to do that. Okay, and, and is there anything that allows us to ask who's been vaccinated who's not. No. So we have to assume that there are unvaccinated people in the room which brings us back to mask, etc. Okay. Thank you. So we stated in the guidance that committees can operate in a similar fashion to counsel. They can determine on their own if they want to meet in a hybrid fashion we're recommending that they don't but they can decide that after May 5. In the same way that y'all can if you want to, but they would need to reach out to us to make sure that the scheduling works and that they're in an ADA compliant room that allows for distancing. I see hands from also Lauren and then Jay did you have some a hand up as well. Okay, so we'll go Lauren then Jack. So, just on this point of the committee meetings. Like I know that there were changes around public meeting and access for like due to the state of emergency is there potentially going to be an option to keep doing remote meetings into the future like I think for a lot of committees that would be making a more convenient option for for some committees. If it were an option is that going to take like legislative change or something. It would it would VLCT says that that's not going to be an option. What we could do is much like what we're planning on doing after May 6 for y'all is a hybrid model where the staff member the staff support can be present in a room for members of the public who cannot participate via zoom and I assume that will still be allowable and that's my understanding of what they've written and if that changes I will let y'all know but that's my understanding what's written. And then, thank you, and then just one follow up so our and then are you anticipating that after July 6 when we are in person masked with or without plexiglass like the we're going to still have a zoom option is that what I'm understanding so other people can still call in. Yeah. I really would like to implement that and that that would be my goal is to have a computer on the side where folks can zoom in and see what's happening. Because I think this has been really invaluable for a lot of folks who aren't able to leave their house or just want to drop in for one thing. So I don't want to get rid of something that we really gained in this sort of new world and this new technology so I'd really like to make that work. And then we'd always be able to turn to the zoom screen in the room and ask if anyone had anything that they wanted to say. Yeah, that's great. Jack go ahead. Thank you. I remembered what I was going to say, which is that that where I work we have developed an electronic self certification form for any employee who's going into the office. It includes service self certification of all conditions, including lack of a fever and, you know, given what I've seen or read and experienced about the inaccuracy or questionable accuracy of the no touch thermometers it might be might be just as good and less burdensome to ask people to certify that they don't have a fever or even to certify that they've taken their temperature and they don't have a fever rather than have everyone be subjected to one of those no touch thermometers. One time when I was going into the into my dentist. I was tested as having a temperature of about 93 and it's pretty clear that that was not accurate. Because I was still walking around and doing everything else that The health screening form itself. If you click through to that is a state health department form and it really just says, especially I agree with you I don't think those handheld ones work very well. That you basically self report. Do you have a fever or do you feel feverish, because, like you said, those might not be available or accurate, but we will have one on on hand if people do answer yes to that question we can check. Gotcha. Thanks. Other questions. Folks may have. Okay. Well it is exciting to at least be having this conversation. What does it look like to get to a place where maybe we can be back in person even if it means potentially with masks. There's a possibility that I want to float out there which is that when we can go back to being in person but let's say the requirement is that we wear masks. It's possible that some folks may, some of us may want to continue to participate remotely. So that we don't have to wear masks is. We don't want to open that up as a possibility but then that person would also be participating by zoom. We would include them the same way anyone have thoughts on that I just wanted to put that out there as a possibility. If not that's okay. Yeah, go ahead. No, I guess the only thing I mean, there's an awkwardness and I think that's part of the reason why I would support not going back and until or doing a hybrid model. I mean, it's not like we're going home until July. It just limits the participation. It's one thing if we're all on sort of the equal, but that said, I mean if people have a strong feeling or a strong need, and we have the technology we've proven it works. I guess it would just be a matter of sort of working out some of the kinks, but I would favor sort of a general, not to be a peer pressure person but I think it's, if we're all on the same platform, it makes the discourse easier. I just want to point out, are you are you saying Dan that if we waited until July that we wouldn't have to wear masks because I don't know. Okay. I meant I meant just as as opposed to saying like right now some of us could go back and some would stay there that hybrid model I think Cameron said, you know, has is out there but didn't recommend and I agree with that completely. For these reasons. Jack, any other thoughts on that. I feel the same way the quality of the interaction is better if we're all on zoom or all physically present. Okay. Okay, I just wanted to make sure that we touched on that. Any other thoughts or comments on this reopening plan. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for all your work on this Cameron. And I hope you go get some good rest. Thank you. So did you want to vote to approve this opening plan or Sure. I'll make the motion to approve your opening plan. Well done. Okay, so motion and a second from Lauren and any further discussion. Okay, I'll in favor please say aye. Hi. And opposed. Okay, so that passes. Thank you again, and Go home. What's that. I am home. I am home. I will go to bed now. Thank you. All right, so our next item. Our next item is the winter parking. Update or review. And I know that there are multiple members of the Department of Public Works here. But I'll, I guess I'll start by turning it over. Well, either to, to Zach or to Donna. Whoever. Yeah, go ahead. So just a reminder that, you know, this winter we tried a new parking system. Which we do the great work of our DPW staff created. Pretty quickly late in the fall and we, we, you know, we got a lot of work done. And so the council had appropriately asked to do a debrief of this as well as just in general, how the winter went, but I think specifically the parking. And to do it while it was still relatively fresh in our minds. And we did have snow last week. So I guess it's pretty fresh. But the, the parking, the winter parking. A restriction season ended April 1st. So this is really on the second meeting since that ended. So hats off to DPW. They've put a lot of work together. And with that, so that's why we're doing this. I'm going to turn it over to Donna and Zach and let them take it from there. So I'm not, I'm going to allow Zach to present. So I'm going to turn it over to Zach. I'm going to turn it over to Zach. I'm going to turn it over to Zach. And the majority of the conversation tonight. He, he was the person who really identified. This opportunity for us. I think we've had. A lot of success with it. There are definitely areas that we feel can be improved. And, and it's getting late. So I'm going to stop. Talking and turn it over to Zach. Okay. One second. I just need to share my screen. Can you also my screen? Yes. Okay. Great. So we're here tonight to talk about the winter debrief from this past year about the changes from the, the alternate side parking that we implemented. So tonight we're going to first talk about the winter weather and comparison from this year to the previous year. So we're going to start with the rain, snow, temperature and salt usage. Then we'll take a look at our, a few different graphs. The first graph is a sanding, salting and plowing only graph of both regular and overtime. Hours spent. And then we will look at the same thing with snow removal, a regular and overtime hours. And then we will can look at a graph that combines all of those sanding, salt and plowing and snow removal. And then we'll look at some of the, some of the pros and cons and then we'll talk about next steps and where we would like to head from there. So as you all can, can see in the 2020 season, 2021 season, the temperature was a little bit cooler than the previous season from 2019 and 2020. We had last year, we had about 71 inches of snow. This year we had 61 inches. And last year we had around 18 inches of precipitation and this winter was 13. So not as bad of a winner in terms of severity, but it did also have its challenges. So here's a graph. Many of you are probably familiar with what this graph looked like a year ago. I added another year out. So as you can see this year, we spent, well, we used the 1900 tons of salt. The corresponding snowfall is was 61 inches out. As I just previously said, the temperature was on average 28 degrees with lower precipitation. We had previously talked about the number of overtime hours is for some reason, but this is kind of a correspondent to the actual number of tons of salt that is used every year. So as we get a little bit further, we'll talk about that in more detail. So this graph shows a comparison from 2021 to 2020 broken down by personnel, regular hours from people worked overtime hours from people and then equipment from both 20 and 21. So as you can see, we spent pretty much across the board. We spent less hours doing salting, sanding and plowing, which translated to less cost. Now do also keep in mind that the winner was not quite as bad as the previous, but there are obviously some measurable benefits for moving to this alternate system. When we look at snow removal, it was fairly comparable for the two years. We actually spent a little bit more in terms of personnel cost and equipment cost for this, this winter season in comparison to the previous winter season. But overall it was, it's pretty similar for the two years that we had there. They're close into Verity and the snow removal, regular and overtime hours spent were barely, we're about to wash there, fairly similar. So now if we take a look at everything kind of all together, you can see that in 2020, we had about $70,000 in winter related costs and snow removal related costs. And then in this year, we had roughly 49,000 on the equipment side of things. We had around 215,000 in the 2020 winter. And in the 2020, sorry, the 2020 winter had around 215,000. And then 2021 had 175 or so. And then if we look at the regular hours spent for winter related operations, you can see a fairly dramatic decrease there as well. So what does this mean for, how does this compare with the tickets that we issued for this year? So as you can see, there was a fairly drastic increase in the amount of tickets, which was, we kind of expected because we were regulating a lot more streets than we previously were. So in 2018, we had 2018, 19 and 20, those were all the old, the parking band system. And then this year was the alternate parking band. So as you can see, the tickets have dramatically increased, but the number of van events was this year was zero and that translated into far fewer cars being towed. Just beneath that, you'll see that a breakdown of the violations in 2021. There were 509 violations for even day, 240 in the downtown and 463 for odd day violations. So the no parking in the downtown, the 240 for 2021 is comparable to 2020, the 197. There was two streets added, the lower section of Elm Street and a section of School Street. So it was kind of expected that that number would be up a little bit and it fairly closely followed the previous year. Here is a breakdown of the tickets that were issued by individual street. So we totaled 1200 tickets this year. And as you can see, there were some streets that had a higher level of non-compliance. The major ones were Berry Street, Elm Street, Liberty, Loomis and Summer Street. So pros and cons. I've talked with staff about how they thought this past winter went. They really actually enjoyed having the alternate side parking system. It really gave them a lot of autonomy to do the work that they needed without having to manually go post signs. They could really adapt if the weather changed. So if we started in the morning with doing snow removal on Berry Street and then we had some winter weather and we had to stop and go plow or salt. We were able to do that. And no one really, we hadn't told people that we were going to do snow removal. So it wasn't a big deal. We had that luxury to come in and go out and to do what we needed to do. And that would seem to be very effective. Some of the other pros that we had for this year was we had almost no emergency access issues. We were able to keep the snow banks removed and clear for emergency access. There were a few things early on that we had some emergency access issues. However, we worked to resolve those and one of them was on one senior Crosby. It just wasn't working out. So we reverted back to the old system for that street. We towed very few cars this year and also we had way less complaints than the previous year. We were able to provide in what, in my mind, was a better level of service. As we spoke about before, we managed the costs better throughout the whole winter season and we didn't have to do any manual posting. There were a few times that we did just as kind of, you know, just a courtesy for the snow removal that we were doing. Some of the cons that we did experience, we had to have an employee assist with ticketing. That was a DPW employee. It was a heavier lift for the police department. So we, what we were asking them to do was to go out and to look at a lot of streets during the night and issue tickets. And so five years ago, they had a list of, that was very short and they could really go through the routine in a matter of minutes. And then that changed this year and there was, you know, they had to spend a couple hours each night going out and actually assessing the wrong, who was parked incorrectly and issuing tickets. The other thing that I think took a little bit of time to get acclimated to was just figuring out which side was which and they, you know, they felt like when it was dark out that they had to shine their lights on houses and stuff, which didn't really make them feel completely comfortable doing that. But I think as the winter went on, they got a better handle on it. And but it still is something that we should maybe think about how we want to address that. We did issue twice as many tickets. There were some areas where we had a very high level of compliance. One area in particular was over on Elm Street. Elm Street, even though it's mostly residential, does have a couple of businesses. They have a dentist and a chiropractor and there, the people that were coming into those businesses were consistently getting tickets all year round. And so it would be nice to find a way to have a better solution for them. And then lastly, the alternate side system, it's just not a, it wasn't a perfect fit for every street. I know we talked about streets with only one sided parking, like East State Street, Cedar and some of those streets were ones that we also did have ticketing issues as well. So the next things that were that I would like to talk about are where do we go from here? And I do have a, I have this image. I've been working with a vendor to get some conceptual designs for potentially some signs. So it's an illuminated sign that is activated through either your cell phone or the internet. And the way that it works is when you illuminate the sign, there's a sign underneath it and says no parking when flashing or you can really make the, you can have the sign say whatever you need. So the thought is that it may be a good solution in some particular areas to have a sign like this. You know, the biggest one that comes to mind is Elm Street. It was the area with the highest number of tickets. It was the area that we seem to be fighting the most amount of complaints, appeals. So something like this could, it could help with, it would give us the autonomy to illuminate the light only when we needed to do a snow removal event. With that being said, I will open it up for any questions that you all may have. So just to clarify, so you would be thinking about this sort of a no parking sign that would be illuminated potentially for places like Elm Street or some of these other streets for which this was not working well. Yeah, that's correct. Elm Street is the big one. Berry Street, we had a high level of tickets. However, we didn't have the same type of complaints on Berry Street and they weren't specifically isolated around a particular business. And the, so would that change? If we were going to pursue that, I assume that would also accompany some ordinance language change or not so much. There would be a little bit because the ordinance as written didn't have any. Yeah, you would need to, you probably need to add a section that didn't, that wasn't odd or even, and it was only under a light indication. Right. Okay. Okay. I think I saw some hands. So we're going to go Lauren, Jackson, Connor. Yeah, thanks. This is really helpful back. Thank you. One question I had. So just thinking about, you know, this was obviously a year where there's less people coming into town than usual for a state house business for city. Or state business. I mean, just curious your thoughts, like having reflected back on the last, you know, trying this, this season. I mean, I would just imagine like the non-compliance or like the tickets would go up significantly at least the first year where it was a more normal year where you have a lot of people from out of town that aren't familiar with the streets. Just, just curious how you think this would go in a, in a year with a lot of out of town visitors compared to this year. Yeah. So it was interesting because before I looked, took like a closer look at the data, I would have told you that I thought we issued a higher number of tickets to non-residents, like so daytime tickets. And it was Jack that asked me to, to take a look at it. And when I did that, I found that we issued them like two thirds of our tickets to residents at the nighttime. Well, I assume that the residents, we don't exactly know, but the way that I kind of broke it out is that if it was between midnight and six 59, I generally assume that those were residents getting tickets. And if they were say after 7am, that those were people that were coming into the city. It's not exactly, you know, the, the best because you don't actually, there's, there could be people that work night shift and are coming in. So that was very surprising to me because I 100% thought it was going to be all of the people that were coming into the city because that's where we're, that's where we're hearing most of the complaints. I don't know if the people that were getting tickets were just kind of okay with it. And I did hear from a couple of people that they kind of just told me it's the cost of doing business. And if I get a ticket every other night, you know, that's seven and a half dollars, like I can put that in my budget. So I don't know how much of that there was. There were, you know, when I looked at the license tickets, there wasn't one, I mean, there was a couple license plates that got a lot of tickets, but there wasn't really one that just stuck out. So I don't really know how it's going to be longterm. I think it's would still need to be, we still need to educate. I'm hopeful that we can try it again for another winter and get another kind of season under our belt and then reevaluate the effectiveness of the program with two years data. Thanks. I've got a few questions or observations and I think this is a great report. And then I took up a lot of bills and Brian's and Zach's and Corey's time yesterday and today, trying to get, trying to figure out what this, all this data teaches us. Cause one of the things that I was thinking was, well, geez, 1200 tickets means we're really kind of slamming people. But, and so I started doing my own calculations and Zach did his own calculations about, about the costs. And the aggregate cost of tickets and towing this winter was $18,450. And the aggregate costs for tickets and towing in 2019, which is, I think is more comparable than 2020 was $32,740. So even though we issued a lot more tax tickets in 2021, we still charged Parkers a lot more two years ago when we were towing them instead of taking them, ticketing them. And I think we could all, everyone would agree that it's a lot worse to go out to the street and find that your car has been towed than ticketed. So from that perspective, I think it's, it worked well. Another thing that I was interested in, and I don't think we really have an answer is, you know, I noticed that Barry street and Elm street were the biggest, biggest streets for tickets. And so I was wondering, well, are we disproportionately affecting some segment of the population or people who don't have a lot of money getting hit harder? And it's, it's kind of hard to say that because as Brian told me, the only way we would really be able to analyze who's getting the tickets is by having someone sit down and manually go through all 1200 tickets and figuring out something about them. But although those two streets were the biggest ticketed streets, right under them were, or the next cluster of streets were like Liberty, Loomis, what, Hubbard and spring or summer, summer, I think. Yeah, the Meadow Liberty, Loomis, all of those kind of 40 or 50 tickets. Yeah. So I don't think there's enough information to say that we're disproportionately affecting a segment of the population, although that might bear some further scrutiny. And then I think the last question I have is what happens when someone appeals their, their ticket, what are the arguments, what are the reasons they give and how likely are people to not, or to get their ticket voided if they do appeal? So I think this year we were fairly generous on the appeals because we did have, you know, quite a bit of sympathy with, I mean, a lot of what we heard was I didn't know about this. I don't live in Montpelier. I'm coming to Montpelier, you know, for once a month or not even, I'm coming for a dentist appointment. How was I supposed to know? There was no signage. And then when we would say that there was signage, they would say, well, okay, fine, it's too small. So, you know, I think, you know, in, in general, there were, most of the complaints were the ones that we kind of predicted we were going to have. You know, there were certain places that just felt that we should make an exemption for them because there was a business nearby. And then other than that, it was a lot of, well, I didn't really know about this, you know, I'm coming in. And then, you know, I think the residents that were getting ticketed, and I heard this from a couple people that, you know, some of them just said, well, I screwed up and I parked behind the wrong, you know, there was a couple cars there and I parked, I followed the lead of someone else and it was the wrong decision. And I should have gone and looked at the signs and, you know, that was my bad. So I think we got a little bit of everything on that, on that front. But I think the biggest complaints were that people still didn't know about it. That, you know, they said that they were from out of state or not at a state but out of town. So I think those were some of the biggest things along with signage. The other thing was signage. Either conflicting signs, which we were actively addressing all winter long. If there was a sign that conflicted it, we made sure that we went out and either put a bag on it, took it down. So there was, there were some of that as well. Well, thanks. Overall, I thought this was a great report and it was a successful experiment. I think, you know, we'll, we don't have a lot of residents here wanting to talk about it tonight. But as the fall approaches and we're talking about, if we talk about doing it again, I would hope we get some resident input. Thanks. Yeah. Connor and then John. Yeah, great presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Zach and I appreciate DPW was really nimble throughout this. And that like, if you had a group of constituents, we raised an issue with a particular street, you know, you were adjusting as you want to log. So it wasn't written in stone right from the beginning. Of course, I had was, I, I thought we had implemented a pretty long grace period. This winter where we didn't ticket people. So how many weeks did we actually ticket people this year? So what year we ticketed from 12, eight to right around March 23rd. At that point, the, it was getting to be nice. So the DPW person that was doing the ticketing, I had him go into the street sweeper so we could leverage street sweeping while we were on, still in the alternate side program. And so typically, you know, we're starting the winter ban as early as like 1115. So we're not going to be doing it, but most of that action doesn't occur until like, until you get into December, because that's when the real heavy snow starts coming anyways. And that's when you have your calling winter ban events. So yeah, we probably missed about that front month. Window from November 15th to December 8th or so. And then the end date is always April 1st. So we pretty much went all the way out on that, on that end minus a week. Okay. Donna. Yes, thank you. Yes. Great report. Do you also have the data of how many tickets you voided? You said you were generous. How generous. I don't have an exact number on that. I could get it for you, Donna. That is. It was a little, I tried to get it out of the data. It was a little hard to, it was just a little bit hard to get an exact number on that. Because they're. Yeah. Because part of my question related to that is, did ticketing, do you have it by month? Did people get better? Was there a learning curve for some people? Now I know people on my street, North Franklin, they would just mess up like you said. Well, I saw her car. So I parked behind it and it was the wrong side. And they got a lot of tickets over here, but they just knew it was their mistake. And then they caught on by your second month, they were getting pretty smart about it. So I wondered if the tickets decreased by month or. I could, I had, I had the data and it is formatted in a way that I could do that. Of course I didn't prepare that. At this time, but it's, it's already, it's all readily available and that I could actually come up with an answer fairly quickly on. That'd be, I would like to know. And the, and I do appreciate the ones you've avoided because that's showing that we listened and we're trying, but I do wonder about the businesses are a way that we could give them information that they could insert by the person in their office who makes an appointment, especially on Elm street, that upper Elm street is mostly offices. So we, we did work fairly closely and we gave them the flyers and we know we asked them to like, we had the conversation like, well, do you send out appointment reminders and be an email? Cause nowadays everyone gets a reminder, you're going to the dentist tomorrow. And so like the natural instinct was, well, when you send that notification out, why don't you attach the flyer and say, well, and reminder, make sure you park on the correct side of the street. But I don't know if they actually utilize that flyer in that way. If they really did what they needed to on their end, you know, we tried to support them with that. We offered to give them some cones to help, you know, it put out cones on the days that they shouldn't be parking in front of their businesses. So we made some attempts there. So I'm not really, I'm not a hundred percent sure how else to change that. You know, I think from the person, the DPW individual that was doing the ticketing, there were like a couple of hotspots. Like even on Berry street, it was near the coffee shop, right? That was one of the areas that there was always parking violations on. And at the corner on Elm street, at the, at spring street, the, the dent, there was two locations. There was a chiropractor and dentist and both of those had, they actually, they struggled a lot. They both reached out to us and asked for exemptions. And so those are two locations that if we did get an illuminated sign that I would actually, that I would like to put it there. Because I think that it would, it would help to really reduce probably all of the ticketing, the majority of the ticketing on say Elm street. Well, I want to help them. I just don't want more signs, especially as big as these guys. And so I guess I would hope this next year, are you thinking we need to do signs this coming year next winter? Or are we going to try to just do other things to make it improve? That's, I guess, I'd say, I guess up to you all, you know, we could, we could look at getting one or two signs for trial and see how they work out. The illuminated, the nice thing about the illuminated signs is they would go up on a post and I think I would be able to remove five other signs on the street because on Elm street, there's spring street, there's vine street that like every, there's so many signs because every intersection, you had to put a new sign so that when someone turned on to the road, they couldn't claim that they didn't get a sign that they didn't see a sign, even though that was one of one of the complaints that we heard a lot. So with an illuminated light, you know, the thought is that maybe you could actually reduce some of the signs, but that is one of the other complaints that we heard is like, you guys just have way too many signs out there and you have sign pollution. And I don't really disagree because there are so many signs out there already. Okay. And to go back and you were around, I believe way back when Tom first suggested, we might do something of this year round change, not just winter parking, I thought you also mentioned that we might consider doing alternate parking year round. I would, I would love to still be in the same format right now because it would, we'd actually have the ability to get to the curb line and be on some of these streets and sweep right now. We're, we're weaving in and out and you know, it's, it's so sad to see the debris that's left behind instead of a clean street. I would like to see us to do this year round. I really would that we just, and that people get to know it and we get posted and we able to do it with less signage on the street. So that's where I'm aiming. Thank you. Yeah. And just as a comment on whether or not to move forward with a sign for a particular, for the locations that maybe it was not working very well, or this plan wasn't working very well, that I would be absolutely in favor of that, especially if it's just a couple and we're going to try them out and see how it works. That, that seems reasonable. It also feels like it could be the kind of thing that's like a slippery slope and then everybody wants to sign. But if we can say, you know, that there's, there's some good reason for these particular locations, then that seems fair for now. Jack, go ahead. Yes, I just had one more question. Your, your presentation mentions that doing the ticketing at night was, was burdensome for the police. I certainly see that, but you, there was never an occasion where you were bringing police officers in who were not already on duty that night to, to do ticketing was there. Not to my knowledge, but I would just have to confirm with, with GP. I don't believe that they had to pay anyone over time. I think that they, I think if they, if push came to shove, they were not enforced. If they got called out to do something, then it was known that their priority was policing first over, you know, parking enforcement. That's what I figured. Thanks. Yeah. Other questions, thoughts. Yeah, go ahead, Dan. Yeah, actually I had one question. You know, the one, the one comment that I received from constituents was a complaint about the idea that, you know, especially on sunny days that they had to go back and switch the cars back and forth on either side of the street. You mentioned that the complaints overall were, were less. Does that factor in all complaints, not just. You told my car complaints or, or those types. Is that just factoring in any, any complaint about the system whatsoever? Yeah, I mean, we don't track calls in a way like a dispatch unit would. So it's a little hard to actually like quantify. Most of it is just based off the people that are taking the majority of the calls that there seemed to just be a lot less. There were certain things that we heard like the signs and, you know, I didn't hear too much about having to move it on sunny days or, you know, there was some front porch forum chatter about people kind of disliking it. And, you know, I think on, you know, at least on front porch forum, you're always going to kind of get a little bit of both sides. And then we had residents on prospect street that said, you know, the cost of, you know, having to move your car every day, you know, it's at the end, at the end of all of this, it's, it's not so bad. Yes, it's a little bit of a burden, but we didn't have to go find a different area to park. We were able to park in our street and it was just on the other side. So was that, did you hear a lot of that, Dan? No. Yeah, not, not significant. That's why I, has date even to sort of racist because it, I mean, I had individuals complain of that in part. Out of frustration. But it wasn't, it wasn't any sort of overwhelming. So I'm just, I'm just wondering if there is, you know, especially when you talk about the number of complaints that you get or not, how that was sort of quantified. And if there was a specific, you know, because I think, I think the system, if anything, and I think your feedback shows this, which is that for certain snow events, this was a better system, which is people didn't have to find new places. He didn't have a lot of people towed because of a snow event. You know, those pieces of it worked the best. And I just wondered if, you know, if people saw that as a trade off or if people were frustrated, you know, it's a, it's a sunny day. Why am I moving my car? Because I wouldn't have touched my car otherwise. And if there was any sort of line of feedback, it would have been a lot of trouble. But it sounds like that may have just been incorporated with the general feedback, which overall was much lower. Yep. That is correct. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I'd just like to note that again, the alternative backdrop to all of this was we used to have a blanket winter ban. November 15th to April 1st. For overnight parking on any street. And people were scrambling every night regardless of the weather. So, you know, we had to find all the parking and, you know, so, um, and that was proving to be burdensome to people. And, uh, so we came up with a winter ban and that had its own setting problems. I think that there's always going to be those trade off. So, you know, I say this, you know, recognizing the best intentions of all people, but I'm sure people would like a perfect system where they don't have to move anything on the sunny days. So, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, we haven't really found that. Um, So there's going to be, you know, I think one of the things we really wanted to do is weigh the tradeoffs like Zach did with, you know, here's sort of what worked and what didn't and what the impact were to people. And, you know, perhaps do it another winter. Like as Lauren mentioned, when we made, we have a more, more normal usage to really get a sense of how it works and then I, you know, continue evaluating it. The same with the potential alternatives. I don't think we're here to say, you know, buy these signs tonight or anything. I think we're here to say, look, here's these issues, here's potential solutions. We're going to look at them and talk about it again come late summer or fall when we get ready to wind this up. You know, I will say that from my conversations with PD and my conversations with the DPW employees, if we asked them their preference, they would rather go back to the old system. It was less cumbersome for everyone, but that doesn't always nest that, I mean, that doesn't take into account the complaints and the burden that we're putting on, on the residents. And so cumbersome for city staff, but, but definitely not friendly to residents. So the, the biggest benefit to this system and that we had this year was you could adapt, right? If the, if we were doing snow removal on Berry street and we got to Hubbard, Hubbard street and it started to snow, we could stop what we were doing and we could go to snow, it's either salting or plowing and it didn't matter. We didn't have to, you know, our plans hadn't changed. We hadn't put it out on social media that we're going to do snow removal. We hadn't coordinated with towing or any of the other stuff. We had the autonomy to, to do what we needed to do and change really at the whim of the weather. Because that's at the end of, at the end of all this, we don't always, we don't dictate what we have to do. It's, it's the weather, it's the conditions. So. Jay and then Donna. Yeah. I just wanted to point out that I think for rolling out of a new system like this, obviously there's a lot of learning to be done and fine tuning and accommodating, but for, for a new system, I think overall looking at this data, Zach and I, I think it was very successful and I appreciate it. And to me, you know, think, you know, I know Dan heard from folks and I heard from folks, we all heard from people about, you know, sort of that transition into this new system. I think probably one of the main, if not the main reason that it, the rollout was as successful was, was because you were really accommodating. And, you know, you, you listen to folks like particularly steep, narrow streets like cliff street or, you know, Montaigne Crosby or where you could say, all right, yeah, well, this is how we set it up. But we could, we acknowledge that it's not working for you. So we're going to make it work for you. So, you know, having that mentality that it was a partnership, I think was really important. So as we look to, you know, potentially doing this for another season, continuing that sort of partnership, thought we were going to be able to make it work. And so whether, whether it's with, you know, with new lighting or considering how we're accommodating some of these commercial areas like Lake on Elm Street and Lake on Berry Street, I think we'll, you know, help continue the, the success of the, of this new process. So I think we're going to be able to, you know, continue the success of the, of this new process. So I just want to say thanks for that. But I think it really, it made a difference and, and will help this, this, you know, system, you know, be more successful moving forward. So thanks. Donna. This had a couple of questions. One was when you said you liked the old way, you meant the total street ban. Old way. Not me, not me personally, but in terms of the staff, yes. I just want to clarify which old way. So yes, because then you didn't have any problem. They were mostly empty. And that was the same for PD is that it was, yeah, they had very like no issues because there was no one was on the street ever. Yes. You looked really odd parking on the street then. And my second question was, are you, are DPW looking for us to say definitively move forward? We want to continue this and keep fine tuning it. Do you need some guidance from us tonight? Or maybe I can fill that question. I don't think, I think we came into it mostly as just a debrief tonight. If you guys were ready to move forward with. I guess I'll let Bill speak on that. I don't think we're ready to make a recommend, a hard recommendation yet. Last I knew, I think we wanted to talk it all over. I just wanted to give enough support that you continue to refine it and think about what would solve some of the problems. And if it is those signs, those light signs, then what's the cost of that would also be helpful to know. I think we're ready to move forward. So, we've got 2400 dollars a unit. Excuse me. $2400 for her location. So they're fairly similar to the rapid flashing Beegans. That's what I thought. Yeah. Okay. So obviously you don't want to put them on every street and you would have to be a little bit strategic in, in kind of rolling those out. And there is. from the one manufacturer that we're looking at there is a kind of a long lead time so I mean this could be something that we could continue to review the data and we come back in the next couple months and with a recommendation to you all about whether or not we should or shouldn't purchase a sign or how we're recommending moving forward. That would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah. I will just jump in and say that I appreciate all the comments tonight. I think Zach and my expectation was that this was our opportunity just to go over the data to give you the information to hear your thoughts but also so that you can give some additional thought to it and we'll definitely want to come back and talk about this again in the context of do we go forward looking at the lights looking at the options and I would say that you know we did not put out to the entire community half a year in advance or at the tail end of the winter season preceding this past year that we were going to change to this procedure so we came at it and I think while we weren't in a a rush to do anything I think it was something new and changing behavior is something that takes people quite a while to get used to. First they're going to reject that for the most part then they're going to figure out what their problems are then they're going to still potentially dislike what's going on before they actually get into a habit and I think I think that it's in our best interest at least from my perspective that we really think about another year to look at tweak some things whether that's lights or other things maybe different messaging maybe some other ideas that pop up and then make a real decision about whether we're going to keep the system or how we're going to continue to move forward and so I think we've been expecting in the department that we'll have another conversation with you sometime soon. That's helpful so it also well it's helpful to clarify that you really aren't looking for a we kind of vote at this point so but thank you though this has been very helpful it is really useful to know that we yes we did issue a lot more tickets but the towing was way down and we ended up costing city residents a lot less money in total that I think is very interesting um so um great thank you any other comments questions yeah Donna go ahead this is peripheral but being on the bike pedestrian committee I really heard a lot about not cleaning all the way to the curb and and so that's part of why I also want to get cars out of the road when you're cleaning streets is so that the bicyclists do not have debris is there a way to make sure that we do get way over and clean so that bicyclists don't have this debris that they're riding on I mean the easiest thing is to consistently get the cars out of there and so that because it's you know with the debris on the side of the road it it takes several passes before the street's actually clean it's not like you just go over it and it's magically you know all good so you know it takes many passes and it is a little hard to get the brooms like right up tight I mean in terms of like within the last six inches but you know I would say that they're able to ride along the curb within six inches or maybe even a little bit closer but you know they also run the risk if they get too far over that they if they get stuck that you know it can screw up the the brooms if they get it caught on the curb they'll but they actually bend the arm and that has happened and our mechanics really dislike when that happens so they have to be careful and aware of where they are so especially on turns and stuff that's they're usually a little bit generous when they come out of it because they don't want to get that piece stuck on a piece of the curbing but the biggest thing to help get all of the debris to the curb would be to get the cars off the street thank you yeah thanks any other comments or questions okay all right well thank you again thank you appreciate all your work on this all right so we are up to our last business item which is the summer schedule and so for this I guess I'll turn it over to Bill yeah this is a terribly complicated issue just typically we've dropped one of our summer meetings um over the last few years it's been in august um we there's no reason to it just seems to be the way it's fallen I think you know when if you if we just drop one meeting then sometimes we go a whole month you know four or five weeks without meetings so I suggested that we split the difference between the two normal august meetings and go on the third week instead the 50th just to have the one meeting in august but you know you we don't have to drop any meetings we can keep our regular meetings we can drop any different one so I just frankly put the one that worked best for me so just full disclosure but we can make it work however so or or you know it might be a little early to decide but the sooner we do the sooner we can plan for it um I will almost certainly not be available for the July 28th meeting but we have competent people here you can get along without me well that could be the one we dropped to other thoughts I also may be gone on the 28th oh we gotta be gone on the 23rd of june I might be as well on that one for the 23rd of june oh Lauren I feel like you're about to say something yeah go ahead um yeah I think I also am likely out July for the July 28th one um I think the earlier July one I can do but I would be remote which might be our first day person one which would be a real bummer that's true that's right huh that's interesting right like do we sorry go ahead wait to solve that problem we just cancel all our summer meetings and then we don't have to decide how it's no business we need to do it's fine uh jack well um or yeah yeah um I I think this proposal is fine you know me I don't like to skip meetings because I like to have our our meet come to our meetings but it sounds like July 28th might be a better meeting to skip than uh then August 25th um and I'd be happy to either solidify that schedule now or if those of us who think they're gonna be missing have a date coming up fairly soon when you'll know with more certainty if you're gonna be away then I'd be happy to wait but for right now if people think you know your schedule I would say let's pick the date to skip and set it up there's yeah so there's a couple of things we could do one is you could skip we could we could skip July 28 and then just do the 11th and 25th in August as planned I'd suggest the 18th just to to break those up but we could just go back to the normal and have the July 28 one be the one we miss or we could do the one just one in July one in August we've tried that before sometimes it gets a little uh much or we could send out um I could have we could send out like a doodle poll of all the Wednesdays in July and August and see who's available on which days and see when we get the most attendance and then decided at the next meeting let's do that we are a little early for this so that we're ahead of the game yeah like I will know for sure whether or not I'm available on the 28th probably within the next week or so so yeah so let's do that but uh Jay did you want to say something um so uh I was just I think a doodle poll makes sense I was gonna I agreed with Jack that if we if it sounds like a bunch of folks would um not be available on July 28th that we should just sort of swap that for the August 25th date um but if it makes more sense to just sort of put it out there and just count our numbers that's fine I guess I'll also throw in since we're talking about it that probably the I'm guessing uh that Lauren's with me on this but the June 9th um meeting will be available but be late um because that's um the uh close the Union Elementary School graduation is happening that evening at the high school so um anyways so just putting that out there I don't we don't need to change that date but just so folks know what's going on that's good to know uh well so and actually that all feels like some good reasons to do a doodle poll because you know maybe in June there's there's a different day that would work better for for more folks um maybe it's the first and third that month I don't know we'll see um yeah we'll send out all the Wednesdays in June July and August and see just just because you are available does mean you're committing to me it just means we want to see which dates have critical mass and assume that the default is the second and fourth Wednesday maybe we'll try to mark those somehow that those are the ones that would be you know tiger's are you assuming the six only one time for that poll 6 30 or are we going to get some options of time let's get the dates first we have to you know if there's one meeting like the ninth that sounds better to start at seven or something well let me doodle polls give you a choice of time too I just I was just people wanted to start later in the summer oh usually people early in the summer to get out and do summer night things but whatever um once we start we never get out early so we start later by the evening well I don't you know that's fine whatever I think sure we can do that too but I was really just thinking let's get the dates lined up and then we can decide the times yeah once we know which dates then I'll be happy to send out the doodle poll tomorrow thanks Mary that's right you're on yay awesome okay so I think we're I think we have clarity about this I don't think we need a motion or anything right any other comments about this okay so we are on to council reports and so I am going to go in the normal order if that's okay starting with Donna Donna sure what you consider normal anymore but I really appreciate getting appointment to most of the committees I asked for thank you and I did want you all to know that I actually was put in as chair for the central Vermont public safety authority board and one of my first official acts was a letter to the senate finance committee dealing with h 360 about broadband and how broadband bill right now propose excludes handheld radios and public safety communication features that also need fiber so we're just asking them to expand their language to the to include municipals to use broadband services to enhance radio systems to plan for the public safety communication systems that will be using wireless in the future so we just are asking them to expand their definition so that municipals can also get money to to use for the broadband in relation to their communication system so I also reached out to our Washington delegates so heads up it's another plea from them to do something and pay attention and any questions you all might have please ask me you can ask Dan he's got a copy of the letter I sent one to Bill and Anne I could be glad to send them to all of you if you're interested so thank you very much great Connor all right a couple of things and I don't want to steal John's thunder if he has a better update on this but I was just texting with Senator Perchlich and our non-us citizen ordinance got voted at a committee on Tuesday it'll go to the floor at one o'clock tomorrow and Senator Polina will push that so so that's huge Senator Ballant the President of the Senate was very passionate and caucus recently said we never treat ordinances like this you know none of my watch we're going to get this passed so that's really hopeful they think they have the floor votes but if you feel like you want to call anybody in the meantime that'd be good you'll probably hear some pretty rough rhetoric about you know some of our immigrant community on the floor tomorrow but again we've got some really good champions for this and I think you know you know John Odom thought of this ages ago right and has really done a lot of work a lot of people here have done work I know Dan did some of the legal heavy lifting on it so that's going to be a great win for our city if we can get it over the finish line I think I'm not sure if anybody has additional information on that but that's what I just heard from Senator Perchlich other item I had my first homelessness task force meeting today really happy to be on that I tell you they don't pull any punches they talk about elected officials and I appreciate it you know we heard some staggering numbers last time when the task force was in and really emphasized hit at home today you know thousands of people are just going to be leaving these hotels pretty soon and you know I think we've had a pretty calm period actually you've seen some like shelter numbers decrease in some cases because you know if it's a choice between that and like a hotel room you might go the hotel room but I think we've got a pretty rough bump on the horizon so we're really going to have to be all hands on deck just to see how we handle that I had an idea I want to float out to you folks I get so much out of like doing some of the work site visits you know whether it be the water treatment or the fire station you know if we're putting money behind positions and it might be limited just because of privacy issues but I think it'd be great if we could get in a rotation of maybe shadow and dawn the homelessness liaison person we have or the social worker we have embedded in the police force or at least just spend some time on an individual level as we consider refunding these positions in the next year there I think you know getting out there and talking to folks there's so much more than a report whatever do and makes it a bit more real so I'm going to be talking to dawn about that but I'll hopefully put something together that folks could maybe sign up the shadow or a little bit so that's it for me thanks great Jay I actually don't have anything tonight thanks Dan so I took a tour as Connor mentioned that we we do with the water treatment plant and got a tour from Jeff Wilson who's the operator and really an impressive operation that he runs up there and I commended the public works and Kurt for the tour I felt better than I ever have having a glass of water after the tour of that facility but I certainly recommend it to anyone who hasn't taken that tour yet it's really an impressive facility that's very well run and a credit to our city and and you know the water that we get is the cleanest in in Vermont for surface water he said we lost only to one like groundwater system and he said that's not fair that's cheating but you know I think it's a really impressive system and and and again you know another asset that we really have to keep our eyes on in our in our city infrastructure Jack Glass is empty Connor huh a couple of points one is that we know we have townwide assessment coming up and I think we've we just saw a bad example of how to handle the public information that aspect of it and so I think that we can learn from the mistakes in Burlington of how to do it better and we're already ahead of doing it better because Bill had a piece in the bridge last year setting out how it works but I think we'll it'll be worthwhile to keep up the public information so that people know what's going on and realize that just because your assessment goes up does not necessarily mean your text bills going up I also have have an article that I will be sharing with the members of the council it was from the actually an opinion keep piece from the New York Times earlier this month titled how lower income Americans get cheated on property taxes and I'll just share that to look at for us to consider if there's anything that we should build into our our system to treat people fairly and I think we do a good job of treating treating people fairly on taxes in in Montpelier and speaking of public works Bill were you going to say something about the award wasn't okay well I will I was I it's not really new news now it's old news but Montpelier Public Works Department got an award for the best local project from the American Public Works Association and it's a it's a big deal for the water resource recovery facility project and this is a big deal and it reflects how well our entire team did on having the vision to do the do the project and then and then bring it in so congratulations to to everybody involved in the project and while we're talking about public works Dan the water water treatment plan when I was working with working on the Murray Hill water system extension I learned that the year that I was doing it Montpelier water system was rated the the best tasting surface water system in the state of Vermont and whatever else you hear I think our public health is is well protected and the and the quality of the water is is great too so that's all I've got thanks today Lauren thanks yeah just one thing just wanted to remind folks that we right now have a community equity survey out in the field we're trying to hear from at least 300 community members you can find it it's been posted to front porch forum it's up on Facebook it's up various places or find my email address and I'll send you a link if you are having trouble finding it any other way up on the city website but we're really hoping to hear from a wide swath of people so anyone who wants to send it around to folks really want to be getting that input to inform our our equity work that we're doing through the social and economic justice advisory committee and we're on track for some I think really interesting input for for council in the coming months from that process so looking forward to that that's it for me tonight thanks okay uh question for the oh wait is yeah I guess it is my turn uh question for the council uh do folks have any interest in taking tours as we have in the past of different city facilities and I know um uh just for just thinking back to last year we had the town town meeting day and then boom we were in COVID so we really didn't get the chance to do tours last year um I'm seeing some nods thumb scale of like yeah I'd be interested in doing some tours okay I have even though I've done tours multiple times I feel like I always get something out of them I think they're really helpful for us and and honestly like I think it helps us make better decisions on you know when it comes to things that pertain to city departments so um is that something that I can uh just pitch to you there Bill to to arrange maybe this isn't maybe this is a doodle poll thing as well no that's okay but I mean you thought you're talking about group all of you as a group or just sets them up you know I know some of you some of them you folks have been doing them individually and others you know have some we've done them a bunch of different ways we've done them some years where we warned them and had you know the council go and other times when we did them in groups of three or you know however you want to I'll just say I really don't want to happen yeah I appreciate going together with other people because I know I learned from the questions that other people ask um but I realize I can be more of a bear to schedule um but Dan go ahead I'm just gonna say I like the opposite I like I like the you know just being alone and sort of getting the full attention that the the operator you know as opposed to sort of the tour group but references it's all good no worries um other thoughts well we they're available to anybody at any time whether you want to do them as a group or individual I mean obviously we schedule them and for some of our folks it's obviously easier to do two or three than seven but we will make it work however you want to set it up yeah Donna go ahead well I just like the interaction that we had as a council there was a of just doing the the visiting together whether it was three or four of us or all of us it was enjoyable on that way to be outside the council room so if you post them then we can all decide what we can do and that's helpful yeah and everyone may not be able to go to all of them or you know they folks might want to do some on their own that's okay um but I I'm picturing tours of all the major departments not just to get familiar uh you know especially sorry uh well I'll say I'm especially interested in um the updates to the water resource recovery facility I know that's an ongoing project but in as much as it's available for a tour that I think would be very interesting yeah I think they've asked us to wait about a month before we tour have people touring just because of the construction status maybe as it wraps up it'd be nice to tour to see all the things that just got completed so maybe what we'll do is just set up a series of tours dates and let you all know that this is one the group tour is and those that can make it make it and those that can't can are welcome to go to that particular thing on their own I imagine we do police fire water treatment sewer treatment the DPW garage rec facilities if you want to include senior center um city hall if you want um so okay you know you get too many that starts to wear people out you all out so okay schedule them over the next you know one one every other week over the next 12 or 14 weeks or something so that's not too much great okay thank you awesome and by we I mean Mary I know what you meant okay great also just a heads up that seven days got in touch with me asking about just opinions on this bill that would allow utilities more freedom making decisions making authority or giving more authority to municipalities instead of having to go through the charter amendment process all the time so anyway just just a heads up there's an article coming out about that soon I hope you spoke in favor of that madam there I sure did many charter amendments that we have passed over the past three years my goodness yes I have lots of examples to draw from anyway um so that is it from me uh john sorry I was having button issues there uh nothing nothing all's good and bill so the only thing I really have other than thank you jack for reminding me to thank DPW for their great work and for their national award uh is not great news we just heard today from congressman welch's office that none of our projects were recommended for funding so that was a bummer so we will now figure those in with um you know our recommendations for federal funding interestingly we also got I think it was today or yesterday something from senator sanders office soliciting requests for funding uh I don't know if this is a different pool or whether senators and you know whether they're all gonna so we intend to resubmit them all through senator sanders office and see how we do there so uh there you go that's that's all I can tell you about those so um but we are then being at least informed a little bit about this we will be working on our presentation to you about federal federal what we expect for federal money what we see is the lost revenue component and what probably would have been done if we hadn't had to cut our budgets for for that money and then uh you know what else fits in and obviously you'll have some room to move that stuff around yourselves um we we still haven't got the guidance yet on those funds so we're still just working off the loose descriptions that we've had we're hoping that before you know by the time we actually present to you we will have more specific guidance from the treasury about exactly how those funds can be used and what what restrictions there are and those sorts of things but um we're you know we yeah we have a fair amount of lost revenue so I think a vast you know a lot of it will fall into that category that we can you know things that we were just going to do in our budget projects equipment those kinds of things that we had to cut out so hopefully we can restore some of those so we don't fall too far behind so that's all I have sorry to end on that note it's okay it's good to know you can still reapply with sanders office we'll see I will all right one thing seeing Constantinus's name still on the uh screen reminded me um to remind you all that in addition to what we were just talking about the police we actually have all four of the our unions we're going to be negotiating this spring that's will be a first for me you get two of them two of them well first of all having four is new because the police supervisors union is a relatively new unit but both DPW and police are actually a year over we just held them in with their agreement held them in abeyance throughout COVID to sort of see what happened financially and didn't you know just extended them and then fires is expiring on June 30 and then the the supervisors one is new so obviously that's that's just so you know that'll be a huge lift um you know a time thing but at the next meeting I was going to schedule um an executive session with you all just to talk philosophy and issues and if any of you would like to participate on any or all be a council rep on the bargaining committee or uh to talk about how we include the police issues and those kinds of things in what is you know normally a pretty straightforward bargaining process um and being respectful of the collective bargaining process and its impact on our budget so that's all just a heads up no reason to discuss now okay all right thank you all right uh well everybody thank you uh and that's the end of our business so without objection we're going to adjourn 10 40 who seemed earlier you know how it suddenly became 10 40 45 minutes on the consent agenda set us back that's all right okay have a good evening everyone good meeting folks see you next time