 I'll call to order this meeting of the Winooski City Council. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Deputy Mayor Renner. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. First up is agenda review. Any concerns about the order of this evening's agenda? No. OK. Moving on to public comments. If anyone is here for an item not on tonight's agenda, this is open space for public comments. Any public comment here in the room? Online? I don't believe so. OK. Let's move on to the consent agenda. We have our liquor control board and city council minutes from January 22. Payable warrant from January 7 to 20. Counts payable February 1. Main street revitalization project USDA loan extension, American Rescue Plan Act, MS4 grant authorization, and Vermont Economic Progress Council tax increment financing district annual report. Any questions about consent agenda items? No. OK. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved. Second. Motion by Charlie. Second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. So we'll do council reports now. Charlie, you want to start? Yeah. So we'll see about housing. The Winooski Housing Commission met on Tuesday, January 28 at 6. The commission reviewed the housing initiative director's data visualization for the fiscal year 24 landlord survey. About 75% of Winooski landlords responded. That helped provide critical information to the housing commissioners as they continue to work with the city and council to address Winooski's ongoing shortage of quality affordable housing. The rental cost data and the graphic skews significantly lower than market runs as it includes all capital A affordable units and only some of market rate housing. The commission also reviewed changes to the language used in the Winooski Housing Trust Fund policy guidelines and added a section to describe the interest rate buy-down program, as well as having an engaged discussion on replacement regulations and inclusive zoning in preparation for our joint meeting with the Planning Commission next month. Later tonight, JAV will present draft amendments to the public building registry as they pertain to short term rentals that were approved at the last commission meeting. Thank you. Yeah. Our next meeting will be at 2.27 at 6. Sorry, and thank you. No worries. No updates from Winooski, except for Blingo, is tomorrow at the monkey house at 6 PM. Hope to see you there. And council, as many of you may know, passed a budget recently that we put to the voters on March 5th. So we are doing some outreach events so that folks can learn more about the budget and ask us any questions they may have. We did our first meeting this weekend at the Winooski Memorial Library, which was great. So thanks to everybody who turned out. Thanks to fellow counselors for attending and the mayor. Our next event will be Sunday, February 18th, from 10 AM to 2 PM. We will be at the Winter Farmers Market, located in the O'Brien Community Center. So please swing by. Then after that, Monday, February 19th, there will be a community dinner and presentation. That will be at 4 PM, also at the O'Brien Community Center. Then Wednesday, February 28th, at 6 30 PM. We will be at the monkey house. And then finally, on Monday, March 4th, at 6 PM, we'll be at the Winooski School District for our final presentation. Please attend to any of those that you can. We look forward to seeing you all there. And those are both council, city Winooski staff, as well as members from the school board. So it's a great time to get a lot of information. Thank you. All right, thank you. Similarly, Councilor Judge and I will be at the senior center on Wednesday, February 14th, at 10 AM for their regular coffee chat. And thank you, Deputy Mayor, for joining me to record our budget presentation and our city manager, Elaine, on town meeting TV. The recording is available on YouTube and on the city's website on the FY25 budget page. This Thursday, the Planning Commission, sorry, since our last meeting, the Planning Commission continue to consider changes to dimensional standards to support Act 47 and council direction to make tri and quad flex more accessible in Winooski, proposed changes, proposed changes reduce some of the standards, but actually better align with current neighborhood development than what our current regulations are set to. That discussion will continue at their next meeting this Thursday at 6 30 PM. That is an online only meeting. That's it for me. The Winooski Bridge Committee is meeting tomorrow morning from 11 AM to noon. No additional public meetings are planned just yet. There'll be announcements as those get scheduled. Tentative plans for an Infrastructure Commission meeting on the 15th. We're still working on agenda items for this month. So if we don't have anything significant, we might cancel for this month. There is a Chittenden Solid Waste District board meeting on the 28th, and the agenda is pending for that. So the updates I have are Safe Healthy Connected People Commission will be meeting on February 13th at 6 30 PM that is going to agenda includes a presentation from our new police chief. Inclusion and Belonging will meet on Thursday, the 15th. So February 15th, and that will be at 6 PM. Those of these should have a virtual option and some might have an in-person option as well. And those are the updates I have right now. Thank you all. Moving on to city updates, Elaine. Sure, so the annual town meeting day election will take place Tuesday, March 5th, 2024 from 7 AM to 7 PM at the Winooski Senior Center at 123 Marlowe Street. All election ballot and budget information can be found at WinooskiVT.gov slash town meeting. Early and absentee voting will be available as always. Learn how to register and find helpful voting resources at WinooskiVT.gov slash vote. Governor Phil Scott and Mayor Christine Lott were joined by state and local leaders including the deputy mayor last week during a press conference at Rotary Park to celebrate the success of Winooski's tax increment financing district, which has led to more jobs, more housing and an increase in the grand list, which helps buy down our tax rate and contributions to the state education fund. Many thanks to everyone who attended and who couldn't make it but were there in spirit. To read the full press release, you can visit the news updates section of our website at WinooskiVT.gov. On January 16th, city council voted to establish a local resources advisory board and the city is now accepting applications for membership to that board. That board supports the protection and preservation of the city's historic, cultural, architectural and archeological resources. Applicants with experience in historic preservation, history, architecture, archeology and related disciplines are encouraged to apply. Members may be from other communities if they provide expertise not met by Winooski residents. The city of Winooski seeks to appoint board members who are representatives of the community as a whole, so a commitment to principles of equity and inclusion are paramount. For full details, visit the news update section of WinooskiVT.gov and if websites aren't your thing, you can always call us at 802-655-64010 for any information on these items or others. Thank you. Moving on to our regular items. First up, item A is a public hearing for amendments to the unified land use and development regulations. Eric, welcome. Would you mind providing a brief synopsis? Yes, I was gonna say, I will be brief. This item is on for public hearing tonight. This is the establishment of, sorry, this is amending the unified land use and development regulations to establish specific local regulations for protection of historic, cultural, architectural and archeological resources within the city. This was introduced to you back at your regular meeting on December 11th. You all had a detailed discussion on these amendments at your regular meeting on January 8th. Text that is before you tonight for consideration after the hearing is consistent with the information from that January 8th meeting with the exception of the change from an advisory commission to an advisory board. Otherwise, the details that are included really just establish a local register of historic, cultural, architectural and archeological resources to provide more specific protections and local oversight of those resources. The resources that have been included are currently listed either in the state register or national register of historic places or included in a state or national historic district. So we've not included any properties that are not currently designated in one form or another. So with that, I'd be happy to answer any questions or allow you to open the hearing. For the public purpose, I would just add that the intent of the Planning Commission in developing these regulations is to balance retention of said resources but also still allow for development and improvements to housing, not to block energy efficiency or accessibility and quality standards, and that there is a process for property owners to both add and remove their properties from the local register. Yes, that is correct. Thank you for that additional information. Are there any questions from council before I open the public hearing? OK. So a public hearing has been noticed for consideration of amendments to the Unified Land Use and Development Regulations. At this time, I'd like to open the public hearing and take comment. Is anyone here in attendance wanting to speak to this issue or ask questions? Would you please join us at the table? If you wouldn't mind introducing yourself. My name is Nick Brownell. I guess more or less a point of information about what this board does that something like a state board might not do. How will this help current property owners or house owners make additions? And sort of, I suppose, if a property itself is deemed to be historic building, but that itself is used, like let's say, for housing, for example, how does that affect upkeep with insulation, heating, things like that? Does that do anything that a state commission would not already take into consideration? Yeah, so the state actually doesn't do any of that and directed us that they do not wish to be relied upon for these things. They have given us the advice a couple of years ago that we need to develop our own local controls. Having this local registry does create a pathway for property owners to access grant funding that could help them with home improvements. And the regulations primarily apply to building facades and not interiors, specifically to ensure that upgrades, like you're speaking of, are allowable. I think what they primarily do is provide some relief to, for example, in our gateways where we have form-based code in place, you have to, a new development has to be built right to the building line near the sidewalk. And this would allow, if you want to retain the historic facade of your building, but still expand it and add more units, you could do that without having to demolish the whole facade and move it up to that line. There's relief like that. OK, gotcha. That's all that I have for now. Thank you. Sure, thank you. Are there any other questions or comments in the room? We do not have any members of the public attending online. So hearing no other comments, I will now close the public hearing. And we can move on to item B. So this is discussion or approval for us to consider these amendments. Any other questions or discussion we have about this topic? I do have a question, Eric. So just as a refresher, are there other areas of the ordinance that provide protections for natural areas? I notice that that is stricken from one section. So we do, and I don't have the citation off the top of my head, but we do have other sections of our regulations that do provide protection for things like wetlands or river corridors, things of that nature. Also natural, sorry, any type of wildlife habitat or things like that are covered under other sections, both in our regulations and in statute as well. So those parts would be covered in other areas. Is there specific reference for what is stricken that you're referring to, counselor? It's, I just need to pull it up real quick. It's section 4.4A. Yes. Yes, so in that context, I believe the language here was a carryover from a previous version of a section on some kind of design review, which was not necessarily really design review. So I think that's just language that's been carried forward that is not relevant with this section anymore. OK. Primarily what I was interested about, I think we've talked, and there's been some interest from residents that they want to ensure that there are protections of the open spaces. And yes, there's like wetland designations and river corridor designations. But I think looking at, I think it might be zone of public lands or wildfire. Sure, so these, I don't believe there are any properties, and I'll look at the map quick, that are actually in our public zoning district, which would be those areas that are identified for open space parks, recreation, that sort of thing. The one property that is included on here that has that type of a use is Memorial Park, but that is technically zoned industrial. So that's why I bring up the question. Yeah, so this would actually provide some additional protection to that property that wouldn't otherwise be there. OK, thank you. I asked some questions about, and this is actually going into some of the definitions, for the certification of appropriateness and listing of properties and stuff like that, is that mostly held with you, or is that also held with the city clerk and property records? So that will mostly be through myself or through this process of, yeah, the certificate of appropriateness would be issued by either myself or the Development Review Board based on a recommendation of the advisory board. All right, and I was also looking through the delisting of properties. I had a question. I think this is a concern that brought up before, but I don't know if I had exactly the right birds for it. What if someone is really, really, what if a property owner is really interested in delisting a property and they stop managing upkeep of that property with the goal of getting delisted? Like they don't get delisted by going through this process, but want to find another way to? Sure. So in that case, what we would probably do is look to other sections of our municipal code or other regulatory mechanisms to require that they are doing the upkeep that is necessary. If it's a rental property that would be through our minimum housing standards, if it's just general property maintenance, we would address that through other aspects of our code as well. Okay, sounds good. Should there be a little bit of language in here that mentions that, or do you feel? I'm comfortable with the way this is because those are really, I think that's more of a specific situation. So it's not necessarily, that's more of a delisting by neglect as what we would kind of term that. So I don't know if it's necessary to reference that specifically since this is really related to more of the step-by-step process of how to formally go through that process. Okay, sounds good, thank you. Yep, thank you. Can I comment on that? So that sort of failsafe is helpful when you're anticipating this particular ordinance to be the primary driver of activity, but actually I would expect those kinds of issues to come up through public billing registry first or property complaints first, rather than through this process. So I think that's another way that we can make sure that it's happening. Okay, are there any other questions? We have had two discussions already, so this isn't a substantial change since our last one. Would someone like to make a motion to approve, actually first what I should say is, we can, our options are, to, someone could make a motion to approve this as is, we could determine that we want to set another public hearing, or we could just hold and revisit this at an opinion. So I will now invite, if somebody would like to make a motion to approve the amendments to the Unified Land Use and Development Regulations as presented this evening. So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Motion carries, thank you very much. Thank you all. Item C, the fiscal year 2023 audit reports. Do we have our guest auditor's presence? Unfortunately, our auditor had a dental emergency appointment that he wasn't sure he'd be able to make this meeting. It does not look like he's joined. He has committed to clearing his afternoon on the 20th to join council and give the presentation. This item for our next meeting. All right, moving on to item D on for discussion or approval, introduction of draft amendments to municipal code chapter 17 to assess short-term rentals. Welcome, Jasmine. Good evening, everyone. So up for discussion tonight is an introduction of draft amendments to chapter 17 to address short-term rentals. You all previously received a conceptual overview of the staff proposed housing commission reviewed amendments of a short-term rental license regulation for inclusion in chapter 17. As a reminder, these amendments would begin the regulation of short-term rentals in the city by explicitly defining short-term rentals by owner occupied and non-owner occupied requiring registration, implementing a license system, collecting fees from said license applications and allowing for city council to cap the amount of non-owner occupied short-term rental licenses. These ordinance amendments are sufficient at the ordinance policy level but significant internal procedure policies and educational material will be needed to develop in the time between a proposed public hearing and the beginning of the rental registry year on July 1st. Council agreed with the proposed amendments in concept with a few suggestions and directed staff to have that version reviewed by the city attorney. These suggestions have been discussed and incorporated by staff in the housing commission. Just to flag, I know Elaine mentioned this during the budget process but one significant change that you'll see here is that the code enforcement inspections for the short-term rentals will remain the same on the quarterly system so there won't be any increase as it had been written at the last time you all saw this. So that should actually- Quarterly meeting once every four years. Yes. So that actually theoretically could fill a deficit in the rental registry rather than incurring additional costs as we had previously thought. So in addition, the draft amendments have been reviewed by the city attorney who has approved this final version. As a reminder, fees related to short-term rental licenses are included in the chapter 28 amendments which will follow and include a minor increased rate for owner-occupied short-term rentals and a significant increase for non-owner-occupied short-term rentals as directed by council. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Jasmine. I'll kick us off. When I read through this, I didn't see language pertaining to the ability for council to cap the number of non-owner-occupied licenses. Did I miss it? How would we address that? No, so I think that that actually will end up being like operational procedure. So once that will come next and we have had quite a few operational team meetings to make sure that it's actually feasible for us to do internally. So I've met with Jenny quite a few times. Eric, code, just to make sure that from everyone's perspectives, we can make sure we have a proper workflow. But that would definitely be part of the official procedure because that actually probably wouldn't come for a year into this. So if we start July 1st, then we don't know theoretically. We have a ballpark of what we can see on AirDNA but we won't have a full registry of names until after the first year is complete. And then after that point, we will have an understanding of, we have this many non-owner-occupied short-term rentals in the city that are registered. And so at that point, it would make sense to put a cap but right now we would just be making up a number essentially. So that wouldn't happen for a year anyways and that would be, we've planned to have that in kind of the more procedure document so that we could adjust it if needed, but. Okay. Procedure, maybe the answer to several of my questions. Yeah, I had a lot of specifics in here and we ended up making it more broad because a lot of it will fit kind of into more of the procedural components like I had the whole license procedure. So that has all been removed, yeah. Well, and that's understandable for things that may require like annual update. Yeah. So in section 1713C where it talks about certificate of insurance coverage, it says if the owner utilizes an online platform that offers insurance for short-term rental, that can be used as long as coverage is equal or greater than that required. Could we align our requirement with what is provided by the top platforms so that we're not asking for more than they're already doing? This is theoretically like the standard. I've spoken to a lot of other municipalities through this process to kind of crowdsource and this is generally kind of the standard. So I don't think we're above that. Okay. But I am planning on having a call with a short-term rental insurance provider to just talk through like the process of that a little bit, since obviously, well, not obviously, but I've never gone through that process personally. But yeah, this is generally between all ordinances that have gone into effect. So like Chester and Burlington, this is kind of the insurance number that is widely used. So it shouldn't be anything higher than that, but I'm definitely happy to call and double check. Okay. And then I would just look for alignment if the rest of council supports that approach that we not ask for something above and beyond the industry standard. You coming up? No. Makes sense to me. Okay. My last question is, I should have confirmed this number beforehand. So for the purpose of federal tax requirements, if you are owner occupied, if you rent less than 15 days a year, you don't, you kind of like are under the radar. You don't have to follow the tax procedure. Do we have a similar exemption here? If you are owner occupied, renting your personal space for less than 15 days a year, do you still need to go through this process? No, cause that won't be a short term. It doesn't count. Anything under 14 days? 14 is the year. Yeah. Yeah. So it's the state definition, but no. So in anything over 30 consecutive days. So a lot of people have kind of the issue of like, travel nurses or, you know, travel medical professional, but generally their assignments are going to be longer than 30 days. So while some of these people may use like an Airbnb platform, if it's over 30 consecutive days, it's a long-term rental. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Christine, before you go on, can I ask? Yeah. So I think maybe I under communicated with Jasmine about the cap. So can I just, I do think we need to enable the council to set a cap even if you don't set a cap until there's more data. So I just want to check on that if that's something you want before it goes to the public version. Well, we do want to make sure that we are able to set one when it's appropriate to do so. Okay. So we're asking whether or not we would like to have authority to. Yes. And us and future councils. Yes. All right. Yes. I believe we do. Yeah. If we need to adjust that, we will, that will be in the version that goes to hearing. Okay, great. I will open the floor to other questions. Sure. Section 1705 inspection requirements. Mm-hmm. There are some that are excluded from periodic inspection. So I just wonder in the third point, specifically buildings owned by individuals, corporations, partnerships or organizations that are subject to inspections by another government authority. I know that there are some buildings that receive inspection from HUD, for example, that most folks wouldn't consider meets the standard that somebody would want to live in. Yeah, I've done this before. Yeah. And then I also question like another government authority, depending on what that government authority may be their level of inspection may not be as high as we as a city would want. Yeah. So I don't know, granted something, like things can always happen. I don't know in this situation for short term rental, if we would run into nonprofits or government agencies operating short term rentals. Again, you never know, things could change. This is the language from the broader chapter 17 inspection language. So this would be more of a John Audie thing. If we did want to change it. I think maybe just maybe another revision, just thinking about that, the fact that some government agencies don't inspect to what I think we as a council maybe is a good level. Yeah, but I do think, I mean, we're working towards inspecting the HUD level anyways. So I don't think, yeah. I think we are trying to get into all of those anyways because it is kind of a, I've done the inspections before, it's a very easy, it's like an online class, so. I think it would be fair if you were able to pass this concern along to Chief Audie and ask for follow up from him, like how comfortable is he with this language and the progress towards that? Okay. And then my next question is really about the fee license, but I don't know if we want to wait until the next topic for that, or if we can dive into it on this topic. I'm happy to talk about it now, yeah. So I appreciate how much you raised that considerable amount. I one wonder how you got to the $1,000 for the non-owner occupied unit, but I also do still wonder if we could go a little higher. The housing commission, we kind of discussed it. Obviously, we didn't want to increase the owner occupied to a level that made it inaccessible for people who are aging in place or people who need help with their mortgage. I think everyone's on the same page about that. For the investment properties, we just kind of talked through the nightly averages. Nightly average right now is 200, granted it's higher in the summer, but if you think about the non-owner occupied short term rental units, which essentially are standalone investment properties, that nightly rate is probably a bit higher than the average, including the owner occupied units as well. So we just did a little quick math of like, okay, well, that's probably like three nights of like a rental. And these are, the occupancy rates are towards like 75% for the year. So we just did a little discussion and crunched the numbers a little bit and we felt like 1,000 was a round number. Yeah, and it was higher than what it was before, but they were very amenable to raising it. Sure, yeah, I would definitely be an advocate for upping that, I think at the end of the day, our desire is to reduce the amount. So if it's three days of renting out their property, I think, because at least maybe look at what it would cost for a week of renting and that could be a fee. Yeah. But I think we should definitely look at going a little higher. Okay, yeah, I am open to talking to them about it. I will say this is granted the 9% tax, for example, that Burlington has, that's significantly higher than this. And that's part of why they were fine with raising it quite a bit, but it is quite a bit higher than any other, which I have no issue being different. You know, I think that's fine. We have a different municipality than other, but I think, yeah, most are around two to 300, which is fine, you know, but, yeah, so I could discuss it with them, but I think they felt comfortable with a thousand. Okay, well that's the question for Councilor. I want to say too, there's a balance there. When does it become so high that they're less likely to comply with registration, which requires more staff than with to try to follow up on. Sure, yeah, no, that's definitely a valid point. I think like maybe a week, like how much does it cost you to operate for a week? Or how much do you get for a week? If this is based on three days, we can up it by a little bit. I think somebody is likely gonna still comply if out of a full year, the fee is only costing them one week of operation. How do others feel? I think that is, go ahead. No, no, you go. I think that really depends on who the operator is, right? We definitely have folks that are maintaining their status as homeowners in Manuski by renting out part of their space. These are the non-unlocked, right? Sure, but fees in general set a tone and we don't want to, I think that there was a lot of research behind choosing those numbers and fees aren't put in places of punishment. And I think that going past, like let's say 1400, right? That seems like a reasonable increase. But if we're talking like a couple of thousand dollars, I just think that that's way too high. Yeah, sure. I mean, the example though, these aren't people who are renting out a portion of their house to try to stay in Manuski. These are people who likely live outside of Manuski purchasing a home that somebody else could have purchased to live here full-time and making a lot of money off of it, you know, living in Connecticut or something like that. That's why I think the owner-occupied rate, I'm fine with that. Those are people who are trying to pay their mortgage, pay off some student loan debt, et cetera, et cetera. But these non-owner-occupied, sorry, non-owner-occupied units, that's not the case. So what would you say is reasonable? Two thousand dollars. I would, I think what Christine said does resonate as well. I would be worried about, already, I worry a little bit about people's adherence to this ordinance, you know, Burlington's struggle. It potentially can be, you know, a group of people who are not super supportive of regulation of their industry, which, you know, makes sense. And I would potentially be worried a little bit about, it could have a negative impact on like the public building registry as well. Like we don't want them to stop paying like all fees or inspection fees or granted they're too separate in individual programs, but I wouldn't want to disillusion someone to the point where they just fully, yeah, don't adhere. Right, because they are paying. Mm-hmm, a hundred dollars, yeah. Or, yeah, what is it, 110? Yeah, so they have two fees, the licensure fee and the, okay. Mm-hmm. And inspection fees, yeah. I, having worked in environmental regulation, enforcement is very time consuming and very expensive. So you always try and get compliance without doing enforcement as much as possible. I'd be fine for a smaller increase than 2000, but 2000 is a little high to start to out the gate with. I think, you know, we do have a fee ordinance, we can revisit it, again, kind of seeing how it goes. I think, yes, the goal, and I appreciate like, the goal is decreasing the number of short term housing. I think having ordinances policies with inspections is absolutely one way. I think fees are, for me, the fees are to cover our costs of enforcing, of like implementing, developing these ordinances and implementing and having the oversight and doing the inspection. So I think if staff feels like we're able to cover our staff costs, to me that is first and foremost the most important thing. Yeah, yeah, so we, back when we were considering the every year or every other year additional inspections, and Angela did a very thorough cost analysis, which was great. It was a little bit frightening though. So we went back to the table and I talked to Burlington about their experiences with the inspections of the short term rental units and had the conversation with Chief Audie, and we kind of discussed the fact that Burlington's experience was that they were often of higher quality than long term rentals, because in a way they self-regulate because they're operating based off of reviews. They're often newer units. So Chief was willing to drop it back down just to keep them the same as they theoretically should be getting inspected now every four years. And so that brought down costs significantly and so at this point he's not feeling like there's any sort of, obviously like my staff time and the clerk's office and there is going to be some staff hours that will be dedicated to this, but the cost, like the tangible cost dropped significantly since these inspections are already happening. They should be already happening, yeah, so. Right, in that context just, and I'm not saying that this is what I'm recommending in this context, but generally fees are also an expression of policy. So you can use them to express what you want to see or not want to see in the community. And not necessarily, yeah, no way to look at this. I think the unfortunate thing for the fee versus being able to tax is just that some of these are below the average and some are making $100 a night and there are some that are making $500 or $600 a night. And so the $2,000 just impacts them very differently. Which it's an imperfect solution. I discussed a little bit with Angela pursuing the, our own ability to tax, but not only would that be a very long process, she's popping in. She has doubts of if we would even be able to administer. I'm not quite sure how we would do that logistically. And we are already collecting the 1%. Yeah. Which is administered by the state. Any other tax that we would levy in the municipality isn't something that the state would collect on our behalf. So I'm not quite sure how we would go about collecting the data to base a taxation on. And Angela did also, famously, she loves to crunch the numbers. She estimated we're earning about $27,000 on the local options from short-term rentals annually. So about $393 each short-term rental unit per year. So it's something to keep into consideration theoretically. We aren't, we wouldn't be like forcing anyone to stop business. So that $27,000 shouldn't change. Obviously people might change their minds. That would be a nice side effect. But that should hold stable, but it does give us an understanding of what theoretically we would be squashing for future rise. But obviously we've made the decision that that's not the choice we want to make based off of the housing situation. Yeah. I'm holding the feeling of like wanting to make, making them long-term rentals the more financially secure option or selling the buildings with all of the staff side. One thing I'm thinking about though, is could we think of this to not explicitly, but as like a pilot cost because we can revisit these fees next year. I would support that approach when we have more data. But this would be a good starting point. I'm also interested in who are the owners? Like what, what is the population of people that are actually being impacted? Yeah, yeah, I think definitely this first year will be very helpful in collecting data on what kind of short-term rentals we have, who they are. Are they owned by Winooski resident? Even if it's not owner-occupied, are they resident owners or are they out-towners? Yeah, even with the inspections I told Chief Audie, if the year goes by and the inspections you've been noticing that all the short-term rentals are in horrible condition, that's always something we could talk about again. Do you want to do every other year? Something like that. So yeah, I think having the data will be valuable and kind of redetermining if things need to shift. Yeah, because there's definitely gonna be some sort of learning curve. It's a multi-department. Do you want to propose a smaller increase? Yeah, I mean, like I said, I think the week is a good thing to stand by. I don't know what that math is, what you guys did to establish the thousand for three days if you did that on the, on what property cap you did that on, so. Mm-hmm. I would support 1200. I wouldn't go any higher than that. I wouldn't. Yeah, I think more, I mean, I'm just, honestly, when we entered these conversations we were looking at doing bold changes to address the housing crisis and we were all kind of, the conversation was focused around trying to either make the short-term rentals really, the non-owned or occupied short-term rentals either feel a financial burden to try to get those units back into the market or they feel that financial burden and the city benefits from them feeling that and this conversation today seems like that's no longer the priority here, but 1200 is more than 1,000, so I'm good with that. How many non-owner occupied units do you estimate we have right now? Hmm, good question. So when we were doing the cost analysis that was one of the huge issues is that we have very, very imperfect data from VHFA that essentially estimated anywhere from like 50% to 75% split. So I personally believe it's probably closer to 75% non-owner occupied because that's just a lot more common in terms of like the Airbnb's IC marketed, listed rather than like the owner occupied which is just less common these days, but we don't have the, we will have it hopefully in a year, which will be great, but yeah, it's hard to make any sort of decision specifically like when we were looking at increased inspections, like we don't know what our revenue will be because we don't know what the split is and the split is significant, but I strongly believe that there are more non-owner occupied, torture rentals so more income from that, but. And we have about 90-ish, so we're talking probably at least 50, that's $50,000 more to go towards housing trust fund slash costs. I hear your sentiment Thomas, but I still think coming out too high is going to handicap the effectiveness of the policy. Yeah, I understand that perspective. I mean, I think at the end of the day, somebody who's not looking to pay a fee won't pay if it's $200 either or if it's $1,000 or $2,000. I'd also be open to addressing what you said Madam Mayor and Councilor judge that some non-owner occupied units may be Winooski owners, but they have bought another home and they're using that for Airbnb. I'd be up to considering that those folks would have $1,000 per unit license and the folks who truly are just taking advantage of Winooski and live out of state would have the higher fee above $1,000. Yeah, so part of the difficulty in this has been that there is kind of a scale in the Housing Commission's opinion of value of you live in Winooski and you own a non-owner occupied Georgia rental unit is better than you live in Vermont and you own a non-owner occupied unit is better than you live out of state and you own a non-owner occupied unit. So there is kind of this scale but in terms of administrative feasibility specifically for the clerk's office because they're the ones that are gonna be issuing the licenses, I think that that would add another difficult layer of determining residents but because they're already going to be required to have filed for a homestead declaration if they're owner occupied. So I think that would add kind of a layer to the non-owner occupied which in terms of values I agree but I think administratively I don't wanna add additional burden to the clerk's office where we have been able to squeeze this in. So we won't be getting any other information from them except for that homestead declaration to determine if it's owner or not owner. It's the simplest thing that we can verify. Yeah, and the owner and homestead declaration does not have their address on it or it does have their address on it? Well if they don't have the homestead declaration that means they're not owner occupied. So what you're talking about would require another layer of determining their residents outside of their homestead or I guess it would be their homestead but in a different location than the short-term rental. And some of these are owned by LLCs and what does that mean? So there's a few strings that get pulled. Yeah, Bob did mention that but he mentioned that. We asked about if we could cap individuals having a certain amount of short-term rentals or prioritize people that have less kind of target that like wealth inequality but he said it's just so common with home purchases to have LLCs and like parent LLCs and there's just so many layers that it would be almost impossible to determine like the individual from a lot of these properties. Yeah, so they're tricky. Charlie or Aurora, how do you feel about a $1,200 rate? I would even go $14 just because that's a full calendar week at $200 a night and that's the low end of what I've seen in town at least in the summer obviously it fluctuates and because we don't have good data according to Jasmine, I think that it's pretty dependable that it's like 75, 25 for owner occupied versus not. Yeah, I think that you all brought really good points that have made me change like my stance on it being good at $1,000 and I would go as high as $14 and that's... Let's do $12. That's a, well we've already got three in support. But please wait. I might change to $14. Yeah, I think I'd lean towards $14 especially think what's talked about here and thinking about and thinking about the fact that this is going to go to public hearing which will give us some more information. So I would feel comfortable going to that public hearing with $14. All right. And just thinking about human behavior like what Councilor Runner said regarding if the height of the fee isn't gonna sway a person that's going to avoid regulation anyway. So that's just explaining why I think it went higher. I would disagree with that. I think there's a difference between a fee I think is affordable and a fee I think is outrageous for some people. But yeah, we're looking at $14 now. What other questions are coming through there? Going back to the chapter and not to talk about money more. But I just had some questions about the fines and penalties section. I was just wondering when does that second offense start? Is it after 12 months or is it like they, sorry. And look, it's I think it's C. Oh yeah, yeah. It's all within the public building registry year. So they would need to be within that 365 days from July 1st to June 30th. Yeah, it keeps the running tab. We'll have like a big master spreadsheet that'll notate. And then ideally also if PD end up getting violations of the noise ordinance that will all be tracked so that we'll be able to see problem properties essentially. I don't know if we have a ton of those at this point. I know there's been a couple of isolated complaints. But yeah, the hope is that we'll be able to kind of monitor that. And obviously we will keep it historically so that we can see, you had two last year, two this year or two. So that we can provoke that if we needed our discretion. I guess part of my question is if someone doesn't get the license, are they just being charged $400 that year? So they're just going or is at a certain point if they still don't get the license, we know that they should have the license does the second and subsequent violations start kicking in? Oh, yes, so I would imagine that would be, so I think that the process that we decided is that it will go through the minimum housing complaint form to code enforcement team. Because that's really the only existing mechanism for enforcement. So I think theoretically I or whoever would submit a complaint through that system. And then I think code would have to get to it when they get to it, which is an ideal because this is such a lucrative business for people that I would love it if we could immediately nip it in the bud, which is why some of these fine and penalties are higher than code, for example, they're much higher than normal code violations just because there's a lot more risk involved for people who will intentionally flow out registration or intentionally not follow the ordinance because they're making so much money. So yeah, it will have to go through that process. So I can't say how quickly between the first and the second that would be. Okay, yeah, because I'm just wondering, do we set like, if you haven't, so you haven't hear that if they do pay with the 77 calendar days that we waive the first defense fee, but at what point should we start charging like that $200 per day that we have for the second and subsequent? You haven't done this in a month, you haven't done this in two months, we're gonna start charging you. That feels like it should be something beyond just code because we know, and we have, yeah, so that feels like otherwise if I was just reading this, I'd be like, oh, I could pay 14 or I could pay 400. Yeah, so code's really the only, besides obviously PD like enforcement mechanism that we have, Eric does a little bit as well, but that again is like so minute compared to the numbers that we're like are hoping to have as actual deterrence of like negative behaviors. So this was sort of the only option. I can ask Chief what he thinks between like, when does it become, you know, obviously the eighth day you have your first violation. Is it the ninth day that it's the second violation or is it another week or I can see what would be manageable for them? Because I think having that would be helpful. And that's again, not even necessarily like who's going to collect the money. That's us telling them, okay, you were charged $400. Oh, it's now $600. Yeah, like it is racking up to the point where it's cheaper or it's more expensive. So you should be in compliance. Again, having worked in environmental enforcement, really trying to maintain compliance without having to reach enforcement or other penalties. Usually try to get compliance within the lowest dollar amount. I have questions about the real reality and how realistic the seven calendar days are with holidays, vacations. What if our teams are not able to adhere to their own self-defined calendar days? Mm-hmm. Typically, again, with my experience with environmental enforcement is if it's egregious and there's emergency basis, it usually has a very tight window of time. Alternatively, it's about 30 days or for violation corrections, which are about line code enforcement, then there's usually a period of about 60 days, which I think is more standard. So I have concerns about the seven calendar days and I also just want to reinforce that it's really trying to get compliance without needing to use and leverage enforcement because it is exceptionally time consuming for staff. Yeah, I would say that there probably will be a gap between the violation being reported through the minimum housing complaint and then the time that code actually goes and issues a violation. So it's definitely not going to be the tight seven days, but from the day that they have the violation. Yeah, we ended up choosing seven just because I felt like, again, like the risk versus reward, like there's just so much money that could be made in 30 days that. So I actually have another fellow question on that. Sorry. So are you saying that we would not issue penalties in the field? We would come back and write a letter and then issue a penalty? That's a Johnny question. Yeah, it depends on how they would do it. I think the issue, so the first year, I think is going to be the issue or if there's a new one, because if we don't know it's in this at all, it's going to be hard to do any enforcement. So as we go through the inspection cycle, we're expecting to find them once we have the ordinance in place. So if we don't know, we're not going to be able to enforce, so that's one level. If there's one spot, it's going to have to be reported to us most likely, or it'll either come to us through the inspection process or somebody tells us that it happens. So issuing in the field as a matter of like, if our team shows up and they realize, oh, this is actually a short from rental, then they're writing up in the long spot. I would like to advocate for, if we don't already have field penalty authority, basically writing a ticket during an inspection or that is woven into the authority that the ordinance allows for. So basically rather than saying like, oh, well that's a violation, we'll follow up with you on a letter and then come back and then it's on us to follow up with a letter, get approval, signatures, it just adds additional time delay. So my understanding of how the inspections work is that the violations that they see, like that's the day they're noted, they're started. So it's not like there's a gap between the violation and it being noticed. Typically though, with the violations that are happening right now, they have a period to adhere to the violation and essentially not have to pay because they're more like, you have like an egress issue or things like that. So this might actually end up needing a separate work flow because the waiver will be different than what the process is. Yeah, that's a good point, procedurally. But I think that it's not, it would still be issued though. Like I don't think there's a gap between like, okay, well this is noticed and then there's a gap between you having to write the letter and then send it out. Yeah, because it is done. They've already been ruled that they're in violation when they're doing the inspection. And hopefully that's the case. And just wanting to differentiate between the penalty, like observing a violation and saying, okay, you are gonna owe $400 for this observed penalty and being able to say, here's your ticket. You can appeal it, you can pay it or a third option. And then have the period of time where you come back and do a compliance. Again, this is my experience as an environmental enforcement is where there's the penalty and then there's the period of compliance. So again, just wanting to make, in some ways, make sure you all have the tools that you need to be successful. Yeah, normally I would expect John to be here, but he's quite indisposed. So we don't have an answer for you on the spot. My question would be if council wanted to delay not to have the hearing on the potentially in the 20th until you had an answer to that question. I personally don't feel like I need it again. Like, if you guys feel like you're set, then that's fine. I want to make sure that you have the authority to be as effective as you need to be. I am expecting we're gonna be revisiting this ordinance in a year or so. Yeah, well, this would also kind of be on the city clerk's end of them needing to come in within seven calendar days and they would fill out the application for the license at the city clerk's office so do you feel like seven calendar? Yeah, I guess it is calendar. So would seven calendar days be, or do you think it needs to be longer? Seven days is quick. Yeah. It's a very quick term. I also think seven days is egregiously short. Like imagine you live here, you've got kids, you've got two jobs and you have to find time within seven calendar days to figure out do I have insurance coverage through my platform? Did I get a rooms and meals tax certificate or whatever from the Department of State to qualify for this license? I don't think that's viable at all. Okay, yeah, I'm definitely open to having it being longer. We just wanted to make sure it wasn't too long that it was too forgiving because this is already for people who are not adhering to the ordinance and haven't registered. Yeah, but what if they don't know, especially in this first year? Yeah, and that's why we wanted to have the waiver. The waivers because we understand that it's not all gonna be intentional and that some of it might be accidental but for the people who are able to get their license within a certain amount of time, that's fine for that fee to be reduced. And we had a situation in the last year or so where we were understaffed in the clerk's office and not even open all five days a week, right? I don't think that's not going to happen again at some point. Desmond, did you talk about what might be too long of time? Well, I would say as short as we can, as short as you feel it's feasible. So I don't know if that's 14 days or 30 days, but any longer than that, I would feel like that's a lot. I think it'd be 14 business days. I would be comfortable with that extension. I agree that 30 is too much. Yeah. That is a sweet spot, two calendar weeks. Yeah, a little bit less than a month. Yeah, yeah. What do you think if they have to do all those things, like permitting with, yeah, they need rooms and meals, like that's going to take the state like three days to turn around? Yeah, I don't even know how that works. I actually feel like that was a new piece in here, the Vermont Department of Taxes thing. Yeah, and that's all kind of pre-done if you go through Airbnb and VRBO, which most people do, but not everyone has to. Okay, that's good to know. Yeah, so. And there is, I talked to Airbnb today, they do have an area to post license numbers. So those will be required to be posted and then I'll be able to go through, I'll probably do it maybe monthly, and check and see if there are any listings that are in Winooski that do not have license numbers posted and then file a complaint if it's warranted. Yeah, it seems aspirational to think that staff will be able to keep an eye on all public-facing advertisements and platforms. So again, just wanting to make sure you feel like you're putting things in here that are realistic. I mean, yeah, that timeline is monthly is not in there. Maybe it'll be quarterly, but again, there's only like the peak, there was what, like 97, but there's never been any more than that. Right now it's like 60, so it really fluctuates based off of the time of year, but there's not like a tremendous amount. If we were a much bigger municipality, then we would definitely need to contract with some sort of software platform, and I've met with them, several of them. It's quite expensive. So I think that this is our best kind of like ramshackle. Vaguely related to, we have likely 150 in hotel rooms coming to the city in two years, which hopefully will also slow down the amount of people that want to have these. Is there any questions from the public? Is there anyone on Zoom? Any questions from members of the public? Feel free to raise hand, either in person or on Zoom. Are there additional questions and comments from Council? Okay, so this is on for discussion or approval with the recommended action to set a public hearing date. So I'll first solicit a motion to, Christine, before you do that, can I summarize what I think the changes you wanna see? Yeah, good idea. Okay, so enable Council to cap, check on whether that's needed additional language. Check with Chief Audie about Director of Code and Enforcement on governmental non-profits operating short-term rentals and their inspection level. The non-owner occupied license fee is at $1,400, $1,400, and the turnaround time for non-compliance is 14 business days, and I didn't hear anything else for this time. I think just verifying that the certificate of insurance, that's the standard that we're not asking too much. I think that captured it. Great, okay, does someone want to make a motion to set a public hearing date for February 20th for consideration of amendments to Municipal Code Chapter 17? So moved. Motion by Charlie, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. It feels like a milestone. Yeah. Thank you, James. That's great. Okay, let us move to item E, Municipal Code Chapter 28. Do you wanna do the breakdown? Okay, fine, let's take a five minute recess before we convene at 7.15. I will call the meeting back to order. We are on item E, Introduction to Update Municipal Code Chapter 28 fees. Angela, would you like to introduce? Sure, so as you know, recent staff work on the budget, sidewalk permits, and short-term rentals identified areas where we either need to set fees or update our fees. So in order to do that, we need to update Chapter 28 where all those fees are set through the ordinance process. The proposed changes within the ordinance include the addition of an extension and short-term option for sidewalk permits, the addition of the short-term rental licensing fees, the increase of non-resident fees for garden pool library and facility rentals, the establishment of a rubric and rate structure for community service programs, including non-resident rates, and additional fees for things such as parking services for group event codes and the blocking off of paid parking spaces for private use in the downtown. There are other clerical updates that have been included in some additional updates that staff has been tracking for a period of time, but were relatively minor. Thank you, Angela. I'd like to treat this as sort of two separate things. So first, so we're gonna invite our community services director up in a bit to talk about the recreation program fee changes. But before we dig into that, do folks have questions about any of the other fees in here? I have already made the note about your short-term rental amendment. Great. Is it possible to, while we're talking about short-term rental, is it possible to say July 1 to June 30th as opposed to 7-1, 6-30? Oh, sure. Just... For clarity, yes. Thank you. The only question I had is if you could explain the parking a little bit more. I was a little confused by the exact wording. What do each of those things mean? So we get requests from businesses that are hosting events at Waterworks that they wanna do, they wanna pay for parking for their employees or their invitees to an event. We have not necessarily been able to accommodate that. We don't have a mechanism to do that right now, but there is the option within our existing system to issue a code to a group that is for a short duration of time. And we can bill at a rate of $5 per use of that code to that group. And we would like to do that moving forward to maybe facilitate that more and support the event use for local businesses. And in terms of the blocking of paid on-street parking, we get requests frequently, especially in the summertime, to block off paid parking spaces on the Nuske Falls way for moving vans. They have us put out cones to hold the space for them for the day and they are not remitting parking fees. They're not feeding the meter for that moving vehicle for the day. So we're proposing that if they want those spaces blocked off for private use, that they pay the four-hour block for the revenue that we could have received from that space. And make that parking fund full. Wonderful, that makes sense. Both those make sense. Thank you, Angela. I have a follow-up, $5 use of code. Is that like per person that uses that code and parks in the garage? Per vehicle that uses the code and parks in the garage and that is the max daily rate to park in the garage. Should that be clarified? Or am I the only one who couldn't interpret it? I mean, I was just kind of curious about the group event definition. So that was not for me. But code, I think parking meter code or is that way? It implied to me that you paid $5 to access a code that would give you group parking. Like I didn't follow the, it's per user of the code piece. We can update the language a little bit, make it clear. I think that, yeah, that would be good. So I looked at it and was like, what is this? Me too. It sounds good. But I would like to know what it is. I had a smallish question too about why the water and stormwater permit fees went down. But the allocation fee went up. Perhaps that is some kind of offsetting. The allocation fee was reset because every time we open this ordinance, it resets the base rate of the allocation fees. So we have to make sure we update them to what they currently are. So that when you approve this, we don't actually drop down the rates. The right-of-way application permit and the water and sewer permit application fees were decreased after a discussion with John Rauscher. There was an administrative error that was occurring. The application that currently exists for right-of-way permits is supposed to be paid at the time that application is used. But at the bottom of that application, there are two items where there is no additional fee. It was not clear to the people processing that application that they should be taking a fee at the time the application was submitted and there has been no charge for people submitting that permit for quite some time. And so because we are gonna be instituting this, the perception of the public would be that they are going from a $0 permit up to a $150 permit. So with consultation with John Rauscher, we decided that we would split the difference and make that 75 so that it's a little bit easier for people who've been obtaining those permits to date that there is a fee that they should be paying and it's not a giant jump all at once. We have clarified that internally and we are working to do staff trainings with the individual departments so that information isn't miscommunicated in the future. Okay, thank you. Should we dive in to have Ray up here? Yeah, that's it. Yeah, thanks for the chance to chat a bit. Hoping most of these changes are pretty straightforward. I think really took a look based on some, I think guidance from council here at non-resident rates in a few areas. I think globally we're really trying to keep our resident rates where possible static and really try to be sensitive to the broader tax increase that folks are seeing and try to keep those local fees down. And then as you see here too added a rubric, again in response to this kind of post-esser environment trying to stabilize the way that we're pricing programs, make it predictable and selfishly get a rubric or a model approved here that we could then use internally without having to come back to council every time we set a new fee. I will say there are programs I fully expect that will not fit this rubric well. I'll use rock climbing as an example, super expensive program for us to run just because of the cost of the activity. So that's one that I would expect for instance, we would have to come back and say, we need to set a rate that falls outside this rubric because the cost that comes out the other end of the rubric doesn't equate to the cost of the program. But I will say we used a very similar, I got to give Angela props for helping develop this rubric. It was really clever and we use it all through Essar to set the billing rates with the school district and I will say it worked really, really well looking at comparables from other. And then the other thing we did want to do again, I think learning from what we've done over the years or I should say not done over the years is add in an escalator. I think we've been not always as responsive to saying the cost of things, the cost of just being is going up, right? And we need to make sure that our rates are kind of keeping track with that. So I'm hopeful that was relatively clear about having to answer questions. Can you ask her an example? Yeah, sure, sure. I got to scroll down to it here. So I'm gonna use my Excel sheet because it kind of splits across the pages. So let's see, I will say, let's pick a summer camp that we were running at the community center for a week. So we would look at this and say, all right, in terms of staffing, we're gonna have to bring on probably one to two new staff to grow. And when I say new staff, that could mean pulling staff from Thrive into the rec department. So that's staff that we are paying for that we wouldn't normally pay for. So hourly staff, I would say, would fall into that new category. It's not we're hiring new people per se, but these are just additional cost hours that are gonna be paid out. So that would score an eight in the staffing category. Equipment, typically with our camps, barring it being a specialty camp, which we'll say this one is not, we can usually do pretty cost effectively. So equipment we'll say would be 500 bucks to give us supplies for the week to run camps. So that's two, so we're now at 10 points. We are gonna be using an internal facility. We'll be using the O'Brien Center and our parks. So we'll say that's, we'll say internal forgoing a fee because those are spaces theoretically we could be renting. So we're at 13 points. Transportation would be parental. So that's 14 points. And then the weekly hours would be 25 plus. So that's what we have now, 24 points. So then we would take that, bring it up here, put it into the rubric and the costs for that program would be for a resident, 175 bucks for the week, which again for our camps is like pretty much right online with what we're doing now. So that's just a quick example off the cuff, but. I think it would be helpful to add some additional narrative. To explain that people should be adding the numbers up or there's really, it makes it really difficult to have a sense for looking at this, like what would I need staffing? I don't know. I mean, if the intent is really primarily for staffing use, okay, but if this is really, if there is some intent for external users to have an estimate of what the cost would be, I don't feel like there's quite enough narrative. Yeah. No, this is definitely for staff use, there'd be a procedure that staff would need to follow to set their fees, but this is the council setting the tiers of fees that we can utilize. Okay. Could you add, I think it needs another sentence then, like this rubric is used by staff to determine this slate of fees. Got it. So that as a public facing document, I don't think that these informations are relevant to me. Yep, yep. And we had talked about whether it made more sense to include this as like an appendix, I think for, I guess for sake of ease in terms of the formatting, we did include it in the chapter language itself. But yeah, very much intended to be an internal tool, not something the public is using to sort of project fees, per se. Well, and I appreciate the transparency and having it in this document and not simply living in procedures that are not publicly accessible. So yeah, I think. I think that's a better fine language about. I think just a little bit more in there, so folks can interpret how to use this or how it will be used would be helpful. Great. And otherwise, I think the fees generally hopefully are pretty straightforward in terms of increases, but again, happy to answer any questions folks have there. I had some questions about the garden plots. Sure. Is there a significant amount of non-residents using them or is there agencies using them? There are actually, and a lot of those are folks that were Wunewski residents who have since relocated or family members of Wunewski residents. So especially at the community center, we actually have a pretty significant number of non-residents. And I'd say that's a change from when I started and when these fees were set in 2017. I think that has really shifted in the last six or seven years. So I think it makes sense for us to be marking that up. I think for us to be putting some of that fee onto a non-resident, we also haven't increased rates in our gardens in quite some time. And looking at kind of per square foot rates compared primarily to Barlington, which is really the most incomparable neighboring community, the rates per square foot are pretty close. Ray and I had this conversation as well. And he noted that we actually haven't had a wait list really for a while. So that's another factor. Like if there comes to be a time that there is, then I would be a lot more aggressive about not, you know. Yeah, it's been making sure that residents have first. Yeah, I think the last wait list we had was pre COVID. And obviously COVID sort of changed a lot of things, but we were seeing pretty consistently prior to that every year, a small wait list. And so we kept adding plots. We were able to kind of adjust our capacity to meet that need. Again, we haven't seen that in a couple of years since COVID. So I'm curious if we will get back to that point, but for now we have not. That's helpful context to have. Yeah, cause I'd want our residents to have the first chance to get where it goes. Sorry, a secondary concern is that we also don't advertise the program. So there's, I would like to see where this goes for a year and then revisit. Generally the plots get taken up by returning gardeners. They receive the first invite to get plots for the new year. Once again. The adult day pass non-resident, we're getting so close to that $10 that I've asked for a couple of times. We're so close, could we maybe just go there? So what I will say is we did a lot of research looking at other municipal pools throughout the state. And these rates are right in if not at the higher end of what other communities are charging. To Jasmine's point earlier, maybe that's fine and that's what we want to do. I will say for day passes, about three quarters of the day passes we sell are non-residents. And so my one concern there is if we crank that knob too hard and we see that number drop off, there's a little bit of art to this too of like nudging it up. I think we did talk briefly about the fact that I do think we should continue to revisit these rates annually based on what we're seeing for use. So we may be back here from now making an adjustment but I'm just, I'm hesitant to make that big leap even though selfishly I like the round number two. It makes organ of the front desk a lot easier when we're doing that. But like, I'm just worried that if we crank it too much we're gonna see the numbers drop off and actually create more of a budgetary issue than we have. So on poor rates, which, and we will be shocked about what I'm about to say but the youth resident rate, I've heard from some youth that our resident rate is higher than some other folks and they're skipping over to the Essex pool with their friends from Essex. So I don't know, maybe we can boost the adult rate and reduce that youth resident rate. So one thing I will say that we did make a really strong effort last year is to get more of our local families into season passes. And we did that through a ton of outreach work over the spring. So we actually saw our youth day pass sales drop but that was, we were expecting that because more of those families were getting onto family passes. So I think for now, again, I'd be reluctant to drop that because I didn't, I think you're right. I think the first summer there were a lot of kids lining up at the door with the change that they'd kind of wrangled for and whatever. And we are seeing that be more of a barrier. I think since we've made that effort to get more families into family passes through the scholarship program, that's actually helped get more kids in the water, which is good. And what is, just on the side though, say you got a group of kids, one of them doesn't have the $4. They're from building up all their change. Are we turning those kids away? I would say generally no. We have had some scholarship funding that has allowed for supporting day passes. But again, generally what we are trying to do is get those kids to take a sign up form and go home and get it filled out and come back. Which we do actually, I'm one kid in particular who I remember to this day just like dripping sweat because he like sprinted home, got mom and dad to sign it and sprinted back from Elm Street. And so I think that has worked pretty well again. We had quite a few youth season passes that received scholarships last year, especially compared to the year before. Yeah, the other thing too is that kids under 14 need an adult with them. So that also is something we're generally finding. There's an adult that's bringing kids that's covering that cost. Let's hope for more cool days next year, unless. Yeah, I know, I know. Another question I had was kind of struggling with this one. Is the late pickup fee, which I both very much understand why that's something we would want to have, but I'm very concerned that this will hit our most economically challenged residents. The hardest, especially because often those folks have less flexible working schedules and stuff like that. Yeah. So I'm trying to figure out how do we weigh that with yes, this is valuable staff time, but will this hurt? Yeah, yeah. And I will say putting this in here is giving us a tool in the toolbox. This is not necessarily a fee that, if a parent is late once for five minutes, it's not an automatic markup of five bucks. This is more giving us a tool to say, this is a family that's coming 20 minutes late every day. And we have staff who have, our staff, many of them start work at 730 in the morning at the school and like out of respect to them too, we do need some tools to be able to say like, hey, this is, because unfortunately right now without that, that sort of stick, we haven't had the same ability to have an effect when we have those come. That's why the language for that item says may be charged and not will be charged. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah, and that was very much by design and that we don't, we wanna have it there if and when we need it, but not make it something that is deployed every single time. Cause I think you're right that there are circumstances where we're gonna be lenient and flexible. Gotcha. Okay. That's very helpful context to know. Cause yeah, I do wanna respect our staff's time, but also protect our families. Something that isn't on here for proposed changes or the dog licenses. When was the last time we had any fee increases for dog licenses? I would look to Jenny because I know some of the fees for dog licenses are set by state statue. I'm not sure if municipality is allowed to change their local fee. So they can. Jenny, come on, sorry. Thank you, Elena. I have put that that and I think we've been the same for six years at this point when I last revisited it. And if we wanted to increase our fees, right now the state receives $5 for every dog that we license, either altered or unaltered, we would have to host some sort of rabies clinic. So I've reached out to Colchester and I need to connect back with her. But what is the cost of hosting rabies clinic that we're able to raise our fees? Okay. If we were able to do that. He's saying that as a former Winooski resident who had a dog, this was the fee 20 years ago. So I propose that we explore looking at increasing fees from dog licenses. I don't know that we'll be able to incorporate in time for the public hearing. But I would ask how much we collect as it is. It's not a ton. I would have to take a look. Also, please keep in mind that we have already started collecting dog license fees for the 2024 calendar year. So there are people who've already remitted their licensing fees in January for this year. We have a seconder. Sorry, go ahead. No, just to say we have 88 licenses that we've issued so far than 24. And we average around 200 is what we're averaging. We have a secondary issue with this. We have no way of knowing who has a dog and is not licensing their dog. So it's kind of back to what Fran was saying earlier about enforcement. We've been brainstorming how to encourage people to license their dogs. And we haven't come up with a good way. Well, I wanted to bring that up too. As I've heard from folks, why would I bother? Like what is the benefit to a dog owner to register? Well, one is state law. But the benefit is that there is... So rabies is one of the most deadly things you can get. And if you can't prove that your dog doesn't have a rabies vaccination, then there's impoundments. There's, it's just, we don't know what the rate of rabies vaccination is necessarily. Maybe it's really high. But this is part of that process. It's actually, it's helpful for that piece and just being able to enforce if there's a dog bite issue, even if there's not rabies involved. Which we've experienced. And dogs at large, some of you know, but a few calls for dogs at large. And if we had a license, we could identify what is the predominant breed. Maybe a contact number, because we have neighbors that's saying, I have a stray dog. So I looked to search who might have a dog of that breed. We can search by breed. But I also provide that list every couple of months to our animal control officers. So they have the list of what dogs are licensed and the rabies. I think before the 20 years of having the same fee, I completely understand how we may wanna up that. But I would be curious as to how much it's gonna cost us to do that rabies class that we would have to do if we do up the fee. And is that something that we would have to provide every year? I don't know. I need to get more information on that. Can I suggest that we just put this in the backlog for strategic prioritization rather than ask the clerk's office to take on more work right now? I currently carry a list of potential fee changes for future times that we open. I can add this definitely to a future amendment to the chapter. I also wanna note that this is a January one to December 31 fee structure. So regardless of when changes are made, we will be somewhere at some point in time in the process of issuing licenses. So yes, 88 licenses may have already been issued now, but that will be the case for any point in time in the year because of the way this calendar is structured here. Right, so up today for first after April, so on April 2nd, which is a Tuesday I believe this year, there's a late date that goes into effect the bulk of the licenses are issued before April 1st. It's a handful and usually the ones that are coming in after June tend to either be new dogs or dogs that are caught running at large without a license. I just want, I don't want it to be the reason why we don't consider changes is because we're already in the process. It's like it will always already be in the process. Well, this is also that I think at least during my short time here, the first time it's been raised, so it's in the hopper now and we can think about that. And if it has become a priority for next fiscal year, that can also be indicated by council. I think any fee that's 20 years old should be reviewed. So let me use that as a jumping off point to ask when is the last time that we updated the, where's the title? The commercial property fees. So that has been on the list for a while to be amended. John Audie is actively rewriting the commercial inspection categorization to be based on risk of the business rather than square footage. I've had it marked on my pending list for a couple of years now and I have just recently followed up with him to see where he's at in that process. But I know that the other amendments that he's made to his ordinances took priority over this one. Okay, thank you. Do you have any public comments, questions? Additional questions from council? Okay, so we've got dog licenses, the commercial property fees, potentially pull stuff all in the hopper for future consideration. But if it sounds like we're relatively comfortable with what has been presented, would someone like to make a motion to set another public hearing for February 20th for introduction to update, for updating municipal code chapter 28 fees? There's, I think there were three changes, minor ones that you'd want to see in that. Oh. So instead of saying July, or someone wanted to sex 30, it's July 1 to June 30. Yep. Clarify so code is $5 per vehicle or something to that effect. And for community services rubric that it's used by staff to set fees. And the update to the non-owner-occupied STR fee. Right. That was discussed. Would someone like to make a motion to set a public hearing for February 20th, for chapter 28 fees as introduced with the revisions discussed? Second. Motion by Aurora, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you all. This brings us to the end of our regular items. We have worn an executive session, pursuant to state statute 3133, the appointment or employment or evaluation of a public officer or employee. I am first seeking a motion to find that we should have this discussion in executive session because of the sensitive personnel nature. Second. Motion by Aurora, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. And now I am seeking a motion to enter into executive session, inviting city manager Elaine Wong. So much. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. So we're gonna go into executive session for this discussion. This is the only topic that will be discussed. We will return from executive session into the public meeting solely to adjourn. Hey, we are at the end of tonight's agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, meeting adjourned. Thank you, everyone.