 Hi friends, Janae would be procure with some exciting news. Town meeting day elections for mayor, city council and more will be using rank choice voting and all burling to voters get to participate. Unfamiliar with rank choice voting? Keep watching or visit the link below. Rank choice voting is a simple way to let voters rank candidates in order of preference. First, second, third, and so on. If your vote can't help your first choice win, it counts to your second choice instead. Here's how it works. If one candidate gets over 50% of everyone's first choice votes, they win and the election is over. However, if no candidate reaches a majority, the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated and their supporters votes will count towards their second choice. This process continues until one candidate reaches over 50% of the vote. Rank choice voting is an easy way to give voters more voice, more choice, and makes for a stronger democracy. Learn more about rank choice or try it out for yourself at betterballotvermont.org slash BTV 2024. Hello and thank you for tuning in to Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. My name's Bobby Lucia. This is one in a series of forums that we host an advance of Town Meeting Day Tuesday March 5th, which features municipal officials explaining what you'll see on your ballot as well as the candidates running for office. On tonight's program, we're diving into the proposed ballot questions for the City of Burlington and we're joined to do that by Burlington's Chief Administrative Officer, Katherine Shad. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. Awesome. So before we get started, just a reminder that if you are tuning in live, we welcome your questions at any time at 802-862-3966-802-862-3966. You can give us a call and we will hear your question live on air in the studio. So with that, Katherine, I'll hand it over to you as we pull up your slides here and hear a bit about what Burlington residents will see on their ballot this Town Meeting Day. Great. Thank you so much. We are excited. Town Meeting Day is just over a month away. I thought that we would start with some ballot logistics before we jump into what the questions are this year. First, all active registered voters in Burlington will have a ballot mailed to them by February 14th. If you don't receive a ballot by the next week, February 21st, you can reach out to City Hall to the Clerk Treasurer's Office. This is a reminder. On that day, Vermont also has a presidential primary. Those ballots are not automatically mailed to all voters, but if you want that mailed to you, you can request it online. You can see that here. Or you can go ahead and call the Clerk Treasurer's Office and the numbers here. The number is also online. One more slide of logistics. You may recall that Burlington has undergone redistricting of our wards since our last election that has become official. So it is possible your ward and polling place may have changed. My office has recently mailed out postcards. So if you've received that, you may have put it aside, see if you can find it. If you can't, no worries. You can feel free to call us. You can look on the website here and find that information easily. You can also feel free to return your ballot directly to City Hall in advance of the election or one of the ballot boxes you find around town. Now, what are you going to find on that ballot? Unlike last year's ballot, where we had a large number of questions, this year we just have three. The first is the school budget. The second will be the public safety tax increase. And that's what we'll talk about most of the time that I'm here with you today. And the third one is a BED charter change. I'm not going to spend any time today talking about the school budget question because you are lucky enough to be joined by some of my colleagues next week. And there is a whole separate conversation about that. And I encourage all viewers to tune in for that. There's also a full packet of information at the school district's website. And I have listed that here. What will actually appear as the third question on the ballot, but I'm going to talk about it second here because it's kind of a quick one, is something involving Burlington Electric Department or BED as we call it. And this one is what you could think of as kind of taking care of some housekeeping business. At BED, they have a revolving line of credit. That revolving line of credit is temporary borrowing and it allows them to have working capital. That is in case they should need it. If it's not something they've needed since 2013, so for the past 10 years. But it's an important metric because BED every year gets assigned a credit rating by Moody's. And they need to have a certain amount of days cash on hand available. And having this line of credit increases that number of days on cash days on hand. So they are asking the voters to increase that revolving line of credit from five million to ten million. The five million dollar limit was set in 2007 and of course their budget has grown tremendously since then. It's important to note that this is something that BED's revenues pay entirely. This is not something that affects city taxpayers and the purpose of this is really keeping rates low for customers and rate payers of Burlington Electric Department. And so this is BED's ability to borrow from the city or where are they borrowing from? They are borrowing actually from a private entity. But the reason that it involves the city and this is a really good question is that when they incur that borrowing it is with the full faith and credit of the city. And it is in this case because it is in anticipation of BED revenues and a city charter amendment it has to go through the voters in order to be eligible for that increase. And there are no, are there any sort of anticipated big capital expenses at BED or is it really just about the sort of the credit rating that you mentioned? It is really just about the credit rating. They are not planning to utilize this. As I mentioned they have not done so for the past ten years and it is simply to be able to keep a high credit rating but it's not something that they think that they would be using. Okay, great. Thanks for clarifying. Yeah, good questions. Let's talk a little bit about the public safety tax increase. The administration is asking the public to vote on lifting the current cap by three cents. The last public safety tax increase was in FY20. So we are entering FY25, so five years ago. The country as a whole has experienced an inflation rate of more than 17% since that time. And of course the city is largely funded by property tax revenue and those do not rise with inflation. You can see here on the slides that the police budget is anticipated just personnel costs to be $1.7 million higher than it was in FY20. Additionally, in last year's budget we deferred asking for a tax increase and as such had to use $4 million of one time funds. We had some of those funds available. Some of them are federal funds, ARPA funds because we knew people were still recovering from the pandemic but we don't have those funds are coming to an end. And you'll see they're still part of a solution here but part of the solution is also lifting this cap. Doing so would allow us to fully fund both the police and fire budgets. As I mentioned, those costs have substantially increased. The current police and fire tax really only funds approximately one-third of the budgets. And that is shown on this slide here. So the public safety tax for this current year is projected to bring in about $4.4 million. The overall general city tax, $11 million. And of course that should go to fund things beside public safety but even if we put all of that money towards public safety there would still be 55 percent or more than half of the budgets for the fire and police department that are not funded by the property taxes. So we have had some spirited discussions at Board of Finance and City Council about the increased costs at the police department. And so we want to be transparent about that. Everyone knows that the 30 percent, up to 30 percent of what people have referred to as defunding the police did lead to larger than expected police attrition. And that did lead to savings in FY21 and FY22. And you can see when that slide goes back up that was savings of almost $1.1 million in FY22. There's kind of a lot going on in that chart. But it's kind of in the middle on one of, at the bottom, one of the gray, can I point, can I, no I can't use this, it's okay. But you can see it there. Interested listeners will see it, viewers. And so in FY22 that is frankly when we had the fewest number of officers and we had not yet established our community support division. And the community support division includes some of the very new and interesting and effective resources like the community support officers and the community support liaisons. Those have really helped to amplify what the uniform services officers have been able to do within the police department. But of course we can see at the far right in the FY25 proposed budget that those resources are adding almost $1.4 million of costs. And at the same time we're rebuilding uniform officers and so those costs have rebounded and so there's no longer savings from attrition to fund community support. And the community support line, that's the CSOs and the CSLs, that's okay. That funds CSOs, CSLs and we are finally getting ready to start the CARES program and that is in partnership with UVM and will provide specific mental health resources out of a vehicle. And similar to the crisis response team that the fire department is providing for overdoses, but this will be for mental health support services. And that's in that line too? Yes. And I think this is an important slide, I won't dwell on it, but this really encapsulates the benefits of the tax increase which is really focused on ensuring that we can fully fund both the police and the fire departments. It ensures that we fund the police department for all 77 officers according to the rebuilding plan. It ensures that all of those professional staff under the community line that we just spoke about, the community service officers, the community support liaisons and the other resources here including the public information officer helping to ensure good communication between the department and the public. There are also some important upgrades not beyond staffing such as body camera upgrades and more mental health resources for the fire department. Can you remind me, Katherine, how many officers are actually sworn in right now in Burlington? So before 3pm today there was 69 and we just swore in some officers and I don't know how many there were, so more than 69 today. I am going to go quickly through these slides, but this is just a reminder of everything that the city has overcome as people are making their decisions. We understand that asking for a 3 cent tax increase is a lot. We know that the school, the education tax increase will be significant this year, but again the asking for what amounts to a 4% increase on the municipal side when there has been 17% inflation, we feel is reasonable and there has been a lot happening in terms of trying to keep staff employed and encourage hiring amidst record low unemployment. Here is a quick slide on really how we propose to balance the budget and beyond the public safety tax, which is at the bottom and would raise an additional $1.8 million through the property tax. We are proposing a million dollars of remaining ARPA funds. We are proposing a million dollars would come from increasing just the hotel portion of the gross receipts tax. And we are doing this for a few reasons, chiefly being that hotels are something that are usually occupied by visitors. And looking at this entire chart, you will see as I go through it, we are really looking to see at the bottom there is $9 million here that was initially a revenue shortfall that we needed to try and make up. And obviously we are not going to ask property tax payers to bear all of that. That's completely unsustainable burden. So how do we spread that around? And by asking the hotels to add 2% to what is already a 2% rate for the city on hotels, that would raise a million dollars and it would largely be not on Burlingtonians. These next two items are very interesting and these are things that the city is doing to ensure that we are competitive and that we are operating as leanly as we can. This user fee analysis is something where we are working with an outside consulting firm who is helping to ensure that things like our parking fees or when you take an art class over at Burlington City Arts or you enroll your child in camp through one of the programs at the rec. Are we charging the right amount for that? Are we charging too much? Are we charging too little? But we are hoping, and as you'll see from this graphic, we are assuming that we will be able to increase fees. So that won't hit taxpayers, but it will hit people who use those, take advantage of those services. This city earns 13 million dollars approximately annually from them. So we are looking to increase those fees. Then the city is starting an operational efficiency analysis and that we are looking to save three million dollars over last year's budget and that is not on public safety budgets, so that won't be looking at police or fire. That's partially because we've got a fire study that's wrapping up now and viewers might recall that the police had a study in 2021 and so that has recently wrapped up. But other departments will look at that and then we've got about nine hundred thousand dollars of organic revenue growth and that's growth that happens anyway, I like to say. Do you have questions? Because I can stop there, there's a lot. So the public safety tax, this is something that's bundled into the property tax, so it would be felt in the property tax? That's exactly right, really good question. So Burlington's municipal tax rate is actually made up of several different rates and when people might know when they get a copy of their property tax bill, if they turn it over they will see a few different things. The one that people know the best I think is the penny for parks, it's the most famous. But you'll also see library tax and highway tax and so police and fire is also one of those kind of splinter taxes and so that's the tax we're talking about here and we sort of use public safety or police and fire interchangeably. And you mentioned here that there's about three million dollars of cost savings, are there any anticipated, are there services that city residents are going to lose as a result of the three million dollars in budget cuts that you're doing there? That is a great question. We are really at the beginning of this process and the city council's done an excellent job of asking for regular updates and we will keep them informed. But I think in April and May we'll start having some important conversations as a community about what the impacts might be around those budget adjustments because you're right, that is approximately five percent of the non-public safety expenses in our general fund budget. So in past years we've been able to kind of shave off one or two percent and residents haven't felt that five percent, there probably will be an impact. So just reminding people that assumes that the three percent tax passes and we are doing that and so those things sort of work in conjunction there. Right and none of those cuts will be related to public safety. Excellent. Yes. Thank you for the reminder. That's right. And can we just go back to I think the slide here that summarizes, okay so this is the benefits of if the voters pass this increase, right? So and we talked about how many officers, do you know how many CSOs and CSLs there are in Berlin? Is this the amount of new community service officers and liaisons or is it just the total that we'll have? So that is a great question and I will not take the time to pull up exactly how many we have right now. I will say these numbers are the current numbers that are authorized in FY24 and will continue to be authorized in FY25. It is my understanding that we are pretty close, I think we have five or six of the community support liaisons, they're pretty close to being fully staffed. It is not as easy to keep people in the community service officer position and I don't want to get too far out of my lane here, but I'll just say I've heard from Chief Murad that part of that is because sometimes we get people into that position and then they're able to and want to move to become officers. So that has been something that's interesting, but it has not always worked for us to be able to keep all 11 CSOs. And could you characterize the difference between the community service officers and the police officers? Yes, that is a really good question. One of the things I think we wish we could do over is give them more names that were more different because their functions are quite different. The community support liaisons are essentially professional social workers and they work with our houseless population largely and try and provide them services as they're ready and shelter as they're ready. The community service officers work really closely with our sworn officers and they take calls that don't require a badge or a gun. So think something like a dog that's stuck in a car, someone who just needs some assistance for flagging traffic, sometimes with a more experienced officer and so both have been important resources while we've been down on officers and you can see why sort of for different reasons. I only have a few minutes left here, I have one more question which is just so as where you mentioned this tax increase, you're expecting, you said $1.8 million, do you have a sense of how like we have these benefits here listed, the difference, just how much of that is going into the police department, the fire department versus those other community resources that, yeah. I don't have that, but sorry, I thought the question you were going to ask was how is this, you have the benefits, what are the costs to people? That I have. So let's answer that question because your question I will say we are in the midst of these budget conversations and so those conversations will happen throughout March and April of exactly which money goes where, but I think the commitment is should the tax increase pass, then those budgets will be fully funded. Should it not pass, then I think we're having sort of a different conversation, also we'll need to have that conversation with our new mayor, so there's a lot of things there. But I do want to be upfront with this table here, which is of course only four property taxpayers who would be paying the full homestead education rate. It is also if the full 13.97% education tax rate were to pass, in other words this is your worst case scenario everyone, but we do want to be transparent, so thank you for letting me share that. Awesome. Yeah, thank you so much Catherine. I think we are out of time, but thank you for joining us, Chief Administrative Officer Catherine Shad from City of Burlington and thank you for tuning into Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of Town Meeting Day 2024. You can find this and many other forums that we'll be hosting at cctv.org slash 2024 and on our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel. Thanks so much for tuning in so long.