 We do have one person who is joining us online. We now move to item number two, which is the public forum. We actually have two. They're joining us online. And so far, I do not have anyone who has requested to speak in con toys. So with that, we will go to those people who have asked to speak that are joining us online. And the first person is Sharon Busher. And Sharon, I have enabled your microphone. You should be able to speak. Good evening. Just need to unmute on your end, Sharon. Well, we'll come back to Sharon. And I believe that it's actually the only person who has signed up to speak in public forum. So we'll give it another minute going once. Sharon, I do see that you're online. And your microphone has been enabled on our side. Just need to unmute yourself. All right. So that was the only person who wished to speak during public forum. So with that, we will close public forum at 6.05 and go on to the next item on our agenda, which is item number three, which is our consent agenda. Is there a motion to move our consent agenda and take the actions indicated? Thank you, Councillor Travers. And that would be seconded by Councillor Shannon. Is there any discussion on the consent agenda? Seeing none, all those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Any opposed, please say no. We have approved our consent agenda. Before we get to the council's deliberative agenda, there is a brief city council with mayor presiding that we must attend to a consent agenda on that agenda. So we'll recess the city council meeting at 6.06 and we'll pass the gavel to Mayor Weinberger to convene the city council with mayor presiding. Thank you, President Powell. I will call the city council with mayor presiding into order at 6.06 p.m. And I would welcome, yes, as you said, we just have the agenda and the consent agenda. So hopefully we can move through this quickly. Can I have a motion to adopt an agenda? Councillor King. I would move to appoint Stephen Hamlin to the vehicle for hire board for a turn. Oh, sorry. Yeah. Adopt the agenda first. I would move that we adopt the agenda. I'll second. Thank you, Councillor King, President Powell. Any discussion of the agenda? And I'm sorry, I set it up in a confusing way, Councillor King. Seeing none, we'll go over to a vote. All those in favor of adopting the agenda, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, motion carries unanimously. And now we simply need a motion to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated. Councillor King. I would move that we adopt the consent agenda and take the actions as indicated. Thank you. Is there a second for that motion? Seconded by Councillor Shannon. Any discussion of the motion? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Are there any opposed? Motion carries unanimously. And with that, we have completed the agenda for the City Council with Mayor presiding and seeing no objection, we are adjourned at 6 or 7 p.m. I'll hand the mic back to you, President Paul. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. The time is now 6 or 7. I'm gonna need a moment with the city attorney. So if you could just give me one moment, we'll recess for three minutes. Is item three, which is our consent agenda, is there a motion to move our consent agenda and take the actions indicated? So moved. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor McGee. And a second to that motion by Councillor Hightower. Is there any discussion on the consent agenda? Seeing none. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We have approved our consent agenda. And actually, I think we already did that. This is what happens when I don't have a place mark on Civic Clerk. My apologies, we've done that twice. So thank you to all of you for doubly approving the consent agenda. We'll go with the first motions. We'll go with the first motions for those that are taking minutes. My apologies again. We now are on our deliberative agenda and we have four items on the deliberative agenda with one item that was on consent being taken off consent and put onto deliberative. So the first item is 4.1, which is a resolution regarding the authorization of the parking revenue financing for the Department of Public Works. And for this item, I will go to a motion from Councillor McGee. Thank you, President Paul. Give me just one moment to navigate there. I thought I was gonna have to read a bunch of numbers and everything like that, but I would move that we waive the reading and adopt the resolution and I don't need the floor back after a second. Thank you. You do not need? I do not. I need. Okay, so and Councillor McGee, you are moving the resolution that is noted as marketplace and parking garage revenue anticipation note updated per Jeff. Correct. Yes. Okay, thank you. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councillor Hightower. We do have with us D.P.W. Director Chapin Spencer. And I believe Jeff, Jeff Padgett was here with us, but perhaps we just have the pleasure of your company this evening. And wondered if you wanted to speak to the agenda item or if you have a brief presentation that you wanted to give or would welcome your comments. Great, thank you. We are here tonight seeking this revenue bond to fund significant capital upgrades in both large municipal parking facilities, the downtown garage and the marketplace garage. This work has been completed and will extend the useful life of each facility. The terms of the bond are included in the memo, but to clarify, we have updated a revised memo tonight that clarifies that year one and year two will be interest only payments. The original memo had it down to zero, but then principal and interest would be in years three, four and five. And I think it's important to note as the Board of Finance discussed tonight, we are working diligently to return our parking facilities fund and our traffic fund back to fiscal health. Unfortunately, after COVID, we have not seen the level of parking activity as we saw prior to COVID, the office market as we know has changed and as many people are not coming downtown for their work and we are seeing that in our revenue numbers. We are preparing a multi-year pro forma for the Board of Finance in the next couple of months so that you all can see our path and our proposed path to return these two funds to fiscal health. Happy to answer any questions. Thank you very much. So we will go to the council if there are any counselors who have any questions or comments on this agenda item. Councillor Carpenter. I missed the finance discussion, so I'm just curious, you indicated that you feel the reduced activity is related to office. I mean, I'm just curious if you polled what do you think is causing the lower usage? Yes. As with anything, I'm sure there's a myriad of factors. We have seen a stronger return of our on-street system than we have in the off-street garages. The garages are antidotally understood to be the place if you are a regular driver to downtown and you're staying for a longer period of time, that's the place to go. So I think fundamentally we are still down both on-street and off-street, but off-street to a much higher degree. We are going to undertake a kind of rate and policy study over the coming months to understand whether or not we need to adjust the levers in such a way one that continues to ensure that these funds are viable and robust, and at the same time also looks, how do we encourage folks to get to the underutilized facilities? The downtown garage with 1,200 spaces is routinely only full on July 4th. That parking is ready and available in the center of our downtown, 364 days a year without any concern. Thanks, just a comment too, whether, I don't know how you poll people use parking garage, but whether we have any concerns if people are avoiding it because of security? Right, I have not done a survey or we have not done a survey recently. What I will say is we have upgraded the lighting in College Street Garage. We have removed all graffiti in those garages. We have a zero tolerance policy in the garages. If you see any graffiti, please let me know immediately and we have increased security in the garages. So I am pleased with the culture of cleanliness and presentation of our garages. If you have any concerns with them or specific incidences, please reach out and we're happy to address. Thank you so much, Councilor Carpenter. Are there any other Councilors who have any comments or questions on this agenda item before we go to a vote? Seeing no hands, we will go to a vote. All those in favor of the motion regarding the authorization for up to $750,000 in borrowing for the marketplace and Lakeview Garage garages, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously with our thanks to the team at DPW and as well also to the CAO and the team at the Clerk Treasurer's Office. Thank you so much and thanks for being here. That will move us to the next two agenda items regarding the annual budget, the first of which being 4.2 which is a resolution the annual appropriation and budget for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 2023 and ending June 30th, 2024. For some initial comments on the budget before we get to a motion and any further discussion, we will go to the, to Mayor Weinberger and CAO Catherine Shad who I believe have a PowerPoint prepared for us in some comments. The floor is yours. Thank you, President Paul. I will share some remarks and then turn it over to Catherine who will, who does have a PowerPoint to lead us through. This is the 12th time that I have submitted a budget to the council and for a variety of reasons, I believe that this has been the most difficult budget to complete. The largest challenge has been that for a second year in a row we have had again, historically high inflation and as I've talked about many times in the past, the municipal budget, unlike budgets at the state and the federal level has particular challenges in a high inflation environment because our biggest revenue source does not increase with inflation the way that property tax, sorry, the way that consumption taxes like sales taxes and income taxes do tend to go up during inflationary environments. We continue to face volatility and some shortfalls related to the disruptions of the pandemic, especially with parking as we just had a little bit of discussion of and to some degree waterfront revenues. We are importantly in the third and final year of phasing out federal support for the dramatically expanded citywide equity initiatives that we took on during the pandemic, specifically, so we are, whereas we initially had $2.7 million of federal funds supporting these equity initiatives, this budget is the last year in which we have some federal funds and it's down to 970,000. And of course, in addition to all that, we are seeking to minimize property tax increases on residents at a time when they are facing in cost increases in all areas of their lives. Despite those challenges, we have ended this long arduous process with a budget that advances the community in critical areas and I think there's a lot in this budget to be excited about voting for. This is a budget that will continue to advance our public safety goals by rebuilding and retooling the police department. It includes continuation of our major effort to make investments and electrifying everything and address the climate crisis head on as aggressively as any municipality in the country. It continues major public infrastructure investments with the 2022 voter approved capital bond as well as federal and state awards and other capital resources. This budget for the first time includes almost $200,000 to address the opioid crisis. We are, and that number may is actually likely to go up even further over the course of the year as we continue to settle, benefit from major settlements related to prescription drugs and abuses with the prescription drug industry. And the equity initiatives that I referenced earlier include fully funding a reorganized REIB department and what's different this year than in past years is that we have moved away from temporary and limited service jobs towards 10 full-time employees that will advance the initiatives of the REIB department. A final important thing about that this budget does that I feel very positively about is that this budget more so than I think any budget in the past looks downfield knowing that the challenges that I just spoke about are to some degree likely to continue in future years. I mean, certainly we believe inflation will be letting up and the contracts we've already negotiated with our employees for future years already anticipate that and drop back down to normal levels in future years. But other challenges that we're having with the fleet challenges that we face with respect to capital investment at the same time that we're also building a $200 million high school, the phase out of the federal funding for equity, the expected and planned continued and large rebuilding of the police department, all of those factors will make future budget years challenging potentially even more challenging. So this budget includes funding for numerous studies to try to get ahead of that and look at where we can find operational savings, eliminating duplications across the city and increasing interdepartmental efficiencies. This budget includes funds for a fleet management study to establish a sustainable funding plan for city vehicles. This budget also includes continued support for the impact fee study that is underway and the property tax equity study that is expected to be completed in the coming months. We are also expecting funding from HUD for a no-cost technical assistance to complete a financial feasibility study for CEDO. And we expect the Cook Treasurers and City Attorney's Office to be looking hard at alternatives to the property tax for future budget years. So in summary, this was not easy, but I think we've arrived, we've completed the process in a place that really advances our collective work and moves the community forward. With that, I am about to hand this off to Catherine to get into some additional detail on all this and doing so. I do wanna say thank you to Catherine for managing this incredibly challenging process, even while dealing with staff turnover and other difficult circumstances. And I also wanna thank all the department heads that worked hard to make the $750,000 in cuts that are part of how we arrived at this successful outcome tonight. So with that, take your way, Catherine. Thank you, Mayor. I'm going to share my screen, but even as the Zoom host, I'm just having a little problem with that, hold on. So I will go through this quickly, but the idea is that for those of you who have not been in every single one of our marvelous meetings of May or have not been able to pay as close attention, this presentation should be able to catch you up. I will go briefly through this. I did not know what the mayor might cover, but this year, this is only my fourth budget year, not my 12th, but it was particularly challenging because we have increased public safety costs. We have the vehicle fleet costs that the mayor mentioned, and we have the outsized COLA increases that we see also in non-public safety staff, as well as general inflationary pressures. We all live in the U.S. and see that prices have escalated over the past couple of years, and that is true for the city as well. Over five marvelous nights of May, many of you provided valuable feedback into each aspect of the budget, and we made adjustments as we went. This is the real big picture. Last year's budget was, and we're speaking just about the general fund, was about $98 million, and this year's budget is just over $101 million. And as you'll see, that's about a 3% to 4% increase. As we entered this year's budget season, we did find ourselves in a $5 million hole or challenge. That was comprised of these items, a million dollars for fleet, $1.3 million of increased costs for the police, and that includes not only our existing hires, but also as part of our new rebuilding plan that includes seven new uniform hires in addition to the community support that people have come to rely on with our CSOs and CSLs, keeping those at the same level. Almost a million dollars of increased costs with our fire department, and that also includes three new hires that were negotiated in the contract last year. And then $1.7 million worth of COLA increases to our non-public safety staff and some of our operating costs. How did we meet that challenge? We found $400,000 from the police on the unassigned fund balance. As you'll see, that's our proposal, and $600,000 from other one-time sources to meet the need in fleet. We are properly funding parks with the two cent increase, and that brings in about $1.1 million. We are proposing repurposing $1 million out of the $2 million of ARPA revenue replacement reserve that we had held aside for FY23. We're pretty confident that we will not need that this year, so we are rolling that over to FY24. We propose using another $500,000 of ARPA funds that was set aside specifically for police rebuilding reserve. And then we did make about $750,000 of additional cuts and adjustments, including doubling of our FY23 attrition. I mentioned that we are using some unassigned fund balance money, and the number at the top is not right, and I am sorry for that. It is not $800,000. It is $590,000 and $59. The numbers in the bottom are correct, and the new balance, what's in the chart here is where we currently stand. We have $7.6 million, and if we spent that $590,000, as suggested, we would be left with just over $7 million, or 9% of our operating expenses left in unassigned fund balance. The amount in our unassigned fund balance is guided by our fund balance policy, which you can see on the website, and that tells us we should have between five and 15%, with 10% being a target. It's not a magic number, but that's what we aim for, and we're still well within that five to 15% window. The tax rate, as you can see here, would be going up to just over 75 cents, the municipal tax rate. It is made up of many different tax rates, which you can see in the chart on the left. It does include an additional half cent, which is dedicated to street capital and green belt, and it does also include raising the exemption for the business personal property tax from its current exemption of $45,000 a year to $75,000. This helps to illustrate the impact of the proposed municipal tax rate increase on homeowners who are at the median price of $370,000 a year. And you can see on the bottom bullet that the total tax increase that we are proposing represents a $13.60 a month increase for homeowners who own a home at that $370,000 price point. One of the things that our Board of Finance asked for, which I think is very useful, is looking at not just the property taxes, which is what I like to look at, because that's my area, but for our constituents, they're looking at this holistically. And so that's what we've tried to do here, is look at for a $370,000 home, what would the impact be on a monthly basis? And so as you can see here, we've estimated the education, the school tax, as well as the increases that we heard about from BED, from our water team, and from DPW on the solid waste generation tax. All of that comes out to about, well, exactly $39 a month. We do have some programs, especially with BED and water, we have our load of moderate income and customer assistance programs, which does provide some assistance. You can see that reflected here. And this does not take into effect any further assistance that would happen on the school side. Just a quick look at our proposed revenues for this year and where they come from. Many of them are from this non-departmental top category. That includes property taxes, our 1% local option tax, that is on all the goods that are sold in Burlington or actually taken receipt of in Burlington, our gross receipt tax, franchise fees, a lot of kind of the big ticket items, but it is worth noting that that other 31% is pretty evenly split across many other departments across the city. And then looking at how we're spending our money, I'll leave that for you, but again, we have a lot, the non-departmental expenses include the money that is for items across all departments. So there's a lot in there. And then of course, public safety, both in fire and police, take up the next biggest chunks there. As many people have referenced, this is a challenging budget year, but it does seem that we are expecting those challenges to only increase moving forward. We know that the reliance for this budget on the use of one-time funds and cuts is not something that's sustainable. That's why as the mayor mentioned, we are in the midst of implementing numerous revenue and operational studies. I won't name them again here, but you will expect to hear more about them in the coming months. We are also looking to increase franchise fees, pilot and other non-property tax sources of revenues. We are also knowing that public safety is a large chunk of the increase, working on a multi-year sustainability plan to pay for those expenses. And then lastly, we are planning to report back quarterly to the Board of Finance on our revenues and expenses in FY24. We know this is a tight budget year, and that will require even more due diligence than in a normal budget year. That's all I've got. Happy to take questions. Thank you. Thanks, Mayor Weinberger, and thank you, CAO Shad. At this point, we'll go to a motion on the resolution that we have before us. I'll go to Councillor Barlow. Thank you, President Powell. I move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution, and I'll ask for the floor back after a second. Great, thank you, Councillor Barlow. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councillor Jang. Councillor Barlow, you have the floor. Thanks. As we've heard, we're entering a challenging period financially for the next few years, and we'll undoubtedly have difficult choices ahead. Our biggest challenges are gonna be to balance the necessary investments in critical areas like streets, fleet, and public safety while finding efficiency and savings in city operations, all while trying to make Burlington affordable for city taxpayers who are also feeling stretched by inflationary pressures. I'm hopeful about the commitments and associated studies to find efficiencies, additional grant opportunities, and sustainable funding approaches for capital needs. It's imperative that we put significant focus on these efforts in the coming months to contain expenses and to minimize additional taxpayer burdens in the out years. All that said, I believe this budget before us tonight is a responsible one. I appreciate that it's been built in collaboration with the council during the budget meetings in May and June, and I believe it attempts to find that balance to continuing necessary investments while minimizing the tax impacts this year, and I hope that other councilors will support it. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Marlowe. So with that, we'll go to other councilors. So the floor is open for the council for any questions or comments on the resolution or the budget before us. Councilor Shannon. Thank you, President Paul. I appreciate that this budget has sustained the level of service that Burlingtonians expect. Over the years, I have come to really appreciate how much the public, anytime we have tried to cut service even in small ways, we have an outpouring from the public to defend the needs for those services, and this budget has retained the level of service that our community needs. It has minimized the deferring needed maintenance throughout the city. I'm disappointed, though, that this budget both increases taxes and dips into our unassigned fund balance, which is really our insurance policy, and it's not a sustainable way to move forward. We cannot continue to dip into our unassigned fund balance because that's what we need. It was so critical when the pandemic hit that we had that healthy unassigned fund balance. It's also critical in this time where we're seeing escalating interest rates that we assure we maintain our credit rating. And I support this budget because it's forward-looking and there's an investment in looking at budgets of the future, bringing in consultants to review what we're doing to try and find those savings because this problem isn't going away in future years. So I appreciate all of the hard work of the city team and the engagement of the city council in building this budget. And I will be supportive. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Are there any other Councillors who wish to have for comments on the budget or the resolution before us? Councillor McGee to be followed by Councillor Grant. Thank you, President Paul. There's no question that this has been a challenging budget year. When we first began the conversations in May about the FY24 budget, it was clear that some challenging decisions were going to have to be made. And department heads were asked to forego hiring and projects that we would all like to see come to fruition and be realized to support the city. And those decisions are painful. But I appreciate the work that the department heads did, the work that the CAO and the clerk treasurer's team did to find a way to bridge the $5 million deficit that we faced in May. I think that work was done in the least painful way possible to Burlington's taxpayers, I think, using one-time funds to limit the hit that folks would see in their tax bill was important and I appreciate that. However, in the middle of the budget conversations, an additional tax was added to the budget to cover additional paving beyond what we needed to bridge the deficit. And I voiced concern about that when it was first raised at the Board of Finance. And I remain concerned about that because for a number of years since the reappraisal I've heard from constituents that had a really hard time and in some cases could not afford to pay their property taxes after the reappraisal. And each year that we ask them to shoulder more of a burden to pay for city services beyond what we might need, I think it does a disservice, especially in a year when folks are gonna be paying higher electric rates, higher water rates, and continuing to see prices for household goods go up across the board. I think we need to be mindful of that in this budget process. And so while it's a challenging decision for me to make, I can't support this budget tonight for that reason. And I sincerely hope that over and above the efforts that were described in the presentation as it relates to finding additional revenue sources that we take steps to figure out a way to ensure going forward the municipal side of the property tax is income sensitized the same way that the education side of the equation is income sensitized. Because the way I see it in future budget years that will be even more challenging than this one, I don't see how we're gonna be able to sustainably fund city services, continuing to ask low and moderate income households to pay money that they don't have in property taxes. So I'll leave it there in the interest of time. There are many things in this budget that I do support. And I think I do appreciate all of the work that went into this. So I don't want my no vote tonight to be seen as not supporting many of the important initiatives that this budget moves forward. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor McGee. We'll go to Councilor Grant. Thank you. I too am really concerned about constituents and my district, my area of the city. We've really been crushed by that reassessment. And in some cases, the reassessment wasn't, when you look at certain homes, it wasn't about the actual value. It was almost like a tear down value. Like that was something that I heard in the community. Like they know this isn't worth this. It's just what the tear down would be if someone would lose the home and a developer would come in and rebuild. It is extremely difficult for working families and our communities. And now we're looking at, I mean, the 370 is almost too low considering how high some of these homes were reevaluated at. So we're talking about hundreds of dollars. And we're talking about, my mom had an old expression. My parents were from the south. You know, squeezing blood out of a turnip. And I think that's what we're starting to do here. Without actual actions, we've had a lot of talk about, yes, we need to find alternatives to property taxes, but we haven't had actual, these things materialize. And so now we're talking about things again. And what has me torn so much because as counselor McGee mentioned, I support a lot of things in this budget. For example, I know the fire department has been doing an amazing job having to handle all the overdoses that they respond to and how a certain funding ran out in April of this year. I'm aware of that. So I care about making sure they're properly funded. I care about the community safety initiatives. I care about the other departments and the work that they do. And I care about employees having fair contracts that have these cost of living increases. But at the same time, we're not actually doing anything to really go forward. The pilot funds has been something that has been weighing heavily upon me. The organizations that do pay pilot funds are underpaying, I think in terms of, of course, UVM. I think there are, there needs to be a deep look to other properties that don't pay anything that maybe they need to start. But where's the task force? Where's the work group? Why haven't we been doing these things? So it seems like each budget every year for the last several years has been getting harder and harder and harder and harder, but yet we've not actually fully taking these steps to help alleviate property taxes. And this is even more sensitive because we need a new high school, right? And so we're getting slammed there and people support that, but it is really painful in a way that I don't think the administration fully understands because we would have these other initiatives in play. We would be making some type of progress and we would be forcing some people to sit down and have hard conversations. So I will leave my comments there. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Grant. We'll go to Councilor Zhang. I was not ready, but. I can go to Councilor Hightower if you prefer. Councilor Hightower, we'll come back to you in a moment. Great. Yeah, I think I also just want to say thank you to all the department heads. And I think the budget is always a huge undertaking to pull together. And I agree that there's a lot in this budget to celebrate. The mayor specifically pointed to carving out an entire new department in 2019 and then that getting an injection of federal funding and now figuring out how to fund it like as that funding is drying up. And in general, I think that's something to celebrate. I think there's a lot to celebrate. And I think for all the reasons that people have said that this is a tough budget. I also agree with everything Councilor McGee has said, but I think more than anything, some people have, you know, at the state level and at the local level, we've really started referring to the budget as a moral document. And I think it's just really hard to look at the decisions that we're making and feel good about them at an individual level. Like it's very hard to say, oh, we need to continue to maintain the standard of living for a middle class and upper middle class residents while at the same time we're not doing much or we're personally not taking on much funding for housing our unhoused residents or even passing just cost eviction, which I know that's not a budget question. But I don't feel like we're meeting our moral obligation with this budget. I feel like we haven't really had a conversation as a public around this is getting hard and harder to fund. What do we really care about funding? What are our priorities? What can we let go? What can we not let go? And so we're making all these decisions piecemeal and it's starting to not add up. And I think the fact that we're like, we can't possibly decrease our level of service that some of our residents have come to expect. But then we know that we're seeing more people who can't afford to stay in their homes. And oftentimes that means that they can't afford to be in Burlington at all. Sometimes that means they can't afford to be in Chinon County. And sometimes that means they can't afford to be housed. That I don't feel good about that. I don't feel like we're making the right calibration when we say these people can't lose anything at all and these people can lose everything. And we say it's too expensive to do the safety nets, the feds won't do it, the state won't do it, we won't do it. At some point somebody has to take responsibility for that. And I feel like with this budget, we're not doing that. So I will not be supporting this budget, which is the first time that I've done that in a very long time. But I feel like we need to have a bigger conversation, not just as a council, but also as a community about that as this goes on and we've got the high school and everything else, it's like who can afford to live here in underwood circumstances and how that's reflected in our budget, how we're, what we're really deciding for people. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Hightower. Councilor Jang, you ready? Yes, thank you. Thank you, President. I have more questions right now for both Catherine, CFO Chad and Mr. Mayor. Can you please explain as to why we haven't seen a lot of revenues compared to post the pandemic? The pandemic is over. I think the revenue should be like at the level, good level right now. Thank you, Councilor Jang. So our revenues have to a very dramatic degree recovered from where they were in 2020 when we overnight saw millions and millions of dollars of projected revenues just disappear. We at one point were looking at the disappearance of as much as 15% of our revenues. We took a lot of actions during the pandemic to mitigate that. And then we got a historic boost from the federal government in rebounding from that and replacing a lot of their lost revenues with ARPA, the American Recovery Act. So we, for the last couple of years, one of our strategies has been to budget for basically a full rebound of our revenues to pre-pandemic levels. And then we've set up these substantial revenue replacement reserves to, as a kind of insurance policy if that hasn't worked out and that strategy basically got us through the current year budget. So when we're finishing up, we did find that some revenues, particularly our waterfront revenues and our parking revenues have been slower to respond. I think in specifically the parking, we are concerned we are dealing with sort of longer-term changes that we may never see exactly the world that we saw before the pandemic there. We all know that we use Zoom a lot more than we did before. Some of the vehicle trips, there's a lot more remote work happening. The vehicle trips that people used to take are down. That's one of the reasons why we were able last week to come in and show how we are beating our very ambitious gasoline and diesel reduced emission goals. But on the other side of it, we do see revenues considerably down in the parking garages and to some degree on the street. And that's a longer-term challenge we're gonna have to deal with. On the waterfront, I think we are gonna get back. Last year we continued to have less events and cancellations and some impacts on boat slips from the pandemic. We have a full summer planned of events this year. And I think we are gonna finally be back to pre-pandemic levels. And maybe we'll even start to go beyond that as we've done these major investments in the Northern Waterfront. We have this new venue at the Moran frame. I think there I don't expect a sort of structural hit to the long-term. Yeah, thank you. And I'm pretty sure you know that I understand the answer, but it's just that people who are listening to also have a picture. And I think in addition, it seems also the entertainment industry has not been doing very well since after the pandemic as well. But gross receipt has been substantially doing well. Is that correct? Yeah, yes. I would say gross receipts and local option tax have bounced back, but just to build off of what the mayor said, in addition to parking, and people do always recognize that Department of Public Works, their budget is affected by parking. Also, there's a lot of parking revenue in the parks budget. And so that is affected as well. Two other areas that it's, I'm not sure it's as affected by COVID, but by interest rates. And that is the recording fees that the clerk treasurer's office takes in. And that's whenever there's a land sale, there's a certain percentage of money that comes to the clerk treasurer's office. And we tripled those recording fees when interest rates were really low and everyone was buying and selling. And so that's come down a lot. Also the fees that Bill Ward's office permitting and inspection takes in, inspection and zoning fees because we have not had as many big projects, that was really down in FY23. So there's COVID effects, but there's also just the kind of craziness of our economy has put some things have really rebounded and some things have not totally. So I appreciate the question. Thank you. And also wanting to ask another question specific to someone mentioned Burlington High School, the impact of it. Will we see the impact of the high school bound in 2024 for the regular taxpayers? Yeah. We will not see the impact of that in FY24 because of some creative financing thanks to our friends at the school. Although construction has started, we are doing a bond anticipation note at first instead of bonding. And so we will not see the effects of those payments in this FY24 budget. You will start to see that in FY25. Wonderful. Thank you. And I think the other question is also specific about public safety. It seems the increase that we are seeking here is due. $1.3 million, I believe, is for the rebuilding plan. And is that accurate what I just said? Okay. Correct. So if you think about this concept really, like revenues have not been rebounded perfectly, right? The impact of the Burlington High School will not be seen in 2024. And also as part of this resolution, there are specific language asking for a plan basically around how do we build the 2025 budget, which is an interesting item, right? You look also the impacts of this budget to the taxpayers. And you even added enterprises, how water rate will be going up, how also electricity will be going up. And it seems, based on my calculation, a household worth $370 million, whatever, will only see... Not $370 million, but a house. $1,000, yes. Yes. I hope that... Which is not picked out of thin air. I think it's important. That is the, you know, there's a comment about this before. That was picked because that is the median home price. That is the median experience of Burlington per the assessment that we are living under. So that's where that number comes from. And of course people and the tax figures that I think you're about to ask for, those people can scale from and we've provided the council a way scale. If you are living in a house that has been assessed at a higher rate, you can adjust it upwards. If you're living in a house that has been assessed at less than $370,000, you should prorate this number down. So, sorry to cut you off. No, no problem. Yeah, you know, and I think people watching are also following the reasoning that I'm putting together, which is that, yes, we need the money, but also at the same time we have a plan. And also the high school will not be impacting anybody this FY24 because of good financing. Also, we care about public safety and personally I can make the correlation as to why gross receipt parking is not up. I can tie it if I want with public safety. You know, there is, but Burlington is safe for those who are listening. Yes, and now if you take the Burlington school district out of it, right? It seems that this will impact a household the year around $360 or $370. If you make the addition, it will be up. Yeah, it will be around that, right? And to tell you the truth, I was really concerned about this budget. I was really, really concerned, right? Increasing the taxes at this time of year is not correct. But the fact that people won't see increases of the high school bound yet, and there is a plan made me reconsider my stand. And yeah, I'll come back again later. But thank you for answering those questions. Thank you, Councillor Chang. Councillor Carpenter. Thanks. I have a couple of questions and a couple of comments. CEO Shad, can you just off the top of your head? You said 69% of the revenue was non-departmental fees, including property tax. Can you divide that a little bit more of that 69%? How much of that is not property tax, but like local option and stuff? Yes, I have that somewhere, but I believe it is about 50% that is property tax. 50%, okay. I just wanted to point that out because I think that's important that the revenue is effectively only 50%. Yes, correct. 50% property tax. That's right. Another question, just generally, how much were the COLA's, our whole expense budget went up about 4%, but, and I know there's a lot of stuff in there, but what were we looking at in terms of the contract negotiations and COLA's, you know, what percent was that just out of curiosity? So our four FY24, the AFSCME was 4.8%, BPOA was 5%, and the fire department was 5.75%. And it accounts, the COLA increases account for most of the increase of the budget because we did hold down, one of the big conversations we had in board of finance was 80% of the city's budget is personnel costs. The other 20% is operating costs. That 20% was level funded or in the case of some departments, we actually cut that amount. And so all of the increase you're seeing is on the staff side. So it either comes from the COLA or it comes from the 10 public safety positions we added, the three firefighters and the seven police officers. So essentially, it was all personnel related. It is all personnel related. Thanks. A couple of other comments I made this at, the finance committee today and we have honored to do list a pending study and I know the administration's looking at this but I encourage us to speed it up if we can about how the income sensitivity and the homestead credit affect Berling-Tonians in particular. We are a high involved, I think 70% of our residents participate in that program. It's a fairly high income level at the top end. Graduated from 140 to 90 to 50. And I think it's really, really important because that is the income sensitivity that we use but we don't control it. And that's the frustration. We don't really know how to match that up. And having done a lot of work over the years with a lot of older people, they talk to me about their tax bill but don't talk to me about the homestead credit. And somehow we've got to marry that data much better than we have. And I know it's awkward because the state controls the information, we don't but I just strongly encourage us because I think we can't make good decisions without understanding that. We've had discussions, should there be a city income tax? Well, how does that relate to the income sensitivity we already get? So that's my editorial comment. Well, I have two others. Councilor Hightower referred to the sort of moral value of the budget. And I totally appreciate her comments but given that this budget is so focused on our city employees and our need to support them, I do think that's the moral thing to do. So the question of the day is, what can we absorb in the budget beyond that like human services? I'm old enough to remember when the city did operate services. Nobody in this room remember that we had our own nursing home and we did a horrible job at it. We talk about the concerns of St. Joseph's. That was because that was our foster care program. And we did not do a good job at it. I mean, it's not just us, it's the system. I remember when we had local social workers employed and we made a decision 50 years ago to move that to the state. If we wanna revisit it, we probably do need to revisit it and discuss the role of the municipality but we can't do it this year in this budget. I think I'm looking at the administration. I'm distressed. I've been participating in the county municipal calls that Sarah Russell and all have around the houses. And I'm really distressed all in good faith what some of our neighbors have not offered to contribute to the discussion. So we've got to ante that up. Should we have a county tax like we do with Green Mountain Transit? Don't know. I think we should talk about those things but I don't think we can do that tonight with this budget. And so I am supporting it, particularly understanding that so much of it is going to support our valued city employees. And that is our, as it stands today for this municipality, that should be our first priority. So thank you. Thank you, Councillor Carpenter. Councillor Bergman. Well, this budget puts the council in a pretty untenable position as I think everybody that has spoken has actually acknowledged. We are increasing municipal property taxes on hard pressed, low and moderate income homeowners and renters at the same time as we're raising utility and other fees. Or the choice is austerity, making even further cuts to already stressed infrastructure, public safety and services. That's the untenable choice that we're in. And you've heard me say countless times before that being frugal like Vermonters are does not mean embracing austerity. Austerity hurts tenants who are paying the outrageous rents charged in the city, especially in our ward, the old North End. It hurts low and middle income homeowners that are stressed by property taxes and other fees. And how does it do that? Low and moderate income people suffer the most when our sidewalks and streets are broken. The water and heat and electric bill spike or water lines break or the lake is filled with blue, green poison. So people have nowhere to go to escape the stifling heat. Low and moderate income people suffer the most when parks and neighborhoods aren't safe and inviting and they suffer the most when our government doesn't work. And I would just echo what Councillor Carpenter said about also our support of workers and our own city workers. And we have known for years that we need to invest and that we cannot try to cut our way to affordability. So this budget absolutely puts me in a bind because it does not raise the revenue that we need in the ways that are most responsible to the majority of the people in our city, our low and moderate income residents. It is not raising nearly enough money based on either income, the ability to pay or the spending of disposable and discretionary income. And leave no doubt reappraisal made the regressive nature of our current municipal property tax system even clearer. Hence that resolution that Councillor Carpenter mentioned and we still wait for the results of that. Originally I was reluctantly thinking that I would support what we are euphemistically calling the budget but which is actually two resolutions. And I may be gonna be too clever by halves as the Brits say. And I was reluctantly doing this despite the fact that we are stretched and that we have also parks related and budget driven property tax increases including a very major increase in the bus tax that's gonna be on top of the imposition of fares this winter. So this all had already put me on the edge given that we were not presented with new sources of revenue based on people's ability to pay. And I have to say that the increase in the street tax by $290,000 really pushed me over that edge. Now I think that that money could come from the unassigned fund balance and still be well within the percentages that we have by policy and our resolution close to the number that we've got right now. And I do not disagree with Councillor Shannon in talking about how important that is but we are talking about a one year budget and as others have mentioned the future and as I will at the end of my remarks that is something that we can deal with and we should deal with but we are dealing right now with an emergency of finances by poor and working people in this city. So that would be the way that I would like to deal with the expenditure of funds to pave those streets which I saw as being significant for the people in the old North End and I do. I just saw the list of new streets that would be added to that and they include some absolutely horrific streets in my neighborhood, right? And in front of the community health center and going down the UU it's outrageous the condition. So I'm gonna maybe be too clever by haves by saying that I can oppose austerity by supporting the expenditures that are noted in this resolution and knowing full well that we have got $290,000 in unassigned balances well over it. How many was that Catherine? Was it like what's the unassigned fund balance? Unassigned fund balance per this budget? $7,057,678. There you go. We will still have in the high $6 million there. It will not crush us. We did increase the contingency funds through I believe counselor Paul pointed out the finance board $175,000. That would be the way that I would like to deal with this issue. So I will not be supporting the upcoming tax that will increase the street tax by .005 to get that $290,000. I will be supporting the expenditures, knowing full well that if you do not have the money to spend in the line items, you cannot spend it, right? So it is absolutely essential that the monies get appropriated in the second. But I would love for us to amend that. I have asked the mayor for that, but it seems that we're not on the same wavelength. That amendment, that resolution, but I believe that it is perfectly appropriate to vote in favor of this resolution on expenditures. So we can oppose the austerity that will be imposed particularly on the streets and seek the changes that I would like and I will speak more about that at the next resolution at the next chance, which will be coming up right after this. So that's a long, complicated way of saying that I will support this resolution knowing full well that I will be voting no on the expenditure when you could say that I am opposing the budget, right? In essence that's been presented, but I do believe that the expenditures that we're making and that we're proposing to me make are legitimate and need to be amended. I would hope that you all would join me in trying to come up with $290,000 so that we don't have to raise taxes on folks. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. Did you want, seeing no other Councillors in the, oh, I'm sorry, Councillor Shannon, then we'll go to the mayor. Thank you, President Powell. I just wanted to make sure that everybody had a chance at the first round and I just want to take the opportunity to respond to the things that I've heard around the table. I appreciate that Councillor Bergman has offered both an objection and a solution. I don't think that tonight is the night that we come up with solutions when we've had months to be discussing this, but it is a process right to the end and I think that I don't agree with Councillor Bergman's suggestion and the reason I don't agree is because I think every dollar that we take out of the unassigned fund balance is a dollar we're putting in a can and kicking down the road and we're already putting a lot of dollars in that can with this budget and kicking that can down the road. I also agree with Councillor Bergman's assessment of what all these things in the budget do. I didn't hear Councillor Bergman suggest that we were spending money frivolously, but rather that we're investing money in streets in his neighborhood that will benefit his constituents. And I think that's true for all of us. I know that my constituents who contact me about really in a dire situation because of the condition of our streets, it's usually like the single mom whose car is no longer usable because of either flooding on our roads or because of potholes in the conditions of our roads causing the impairment of that vehicle challenges the family's livelihood. So while I do agree also with Councillor Hightower that this is a moral document, I don't think it's fair to say that this is a document that's giving favoritism to our middle class and upper middle class citizens on whom we are raising taxes and somehow disfavoring our lower income constituents. I think that this budget preserving those services, those are services that are even more critical to our lowest income neighbors than they are to those that can afford to deal with their broken car, have their own yard and are not as reliant on our park system can pay for their children's camp programs at a variety of private entities rather than rely on our parks programming who don't need the library in the way that lower income folks do. And I think it's really important as we're thinking about services that the city should provide that we don't that the services that we do provide are going on our property tax, which is an inequitable tax. If we want equity, we need taxes that are based on income as Councillor McGee had suggested, having our municipal tax that is more income sensitized, which I don't really know if that's possible when you limit it just to the city's municipal tax. One reason that we have shifted things to the state is that the state has the income tax, which is a more equitable tax, to provide broad based safety net resources to the community. And yet the city, unlike other communities in this state has done a lot to provide a safety net. So I don't disagree with kind of the assessment, I guess, of what we should be trying to do. I agree that this is a moral document. I agree that we have a choice between austerity and tax increases. But I don't think that without naming some place where we should be cutting taxes or without naming how we're going to increase revenue at this late date, it seems a little unfair to come up with these reasons now to me. So I hope the councillors will consider how they would be voting if it were their party sitting in the mayor's seat. Because I've sat here under both parties and I have seen the progressive party suggest that we should cut a bus that served low income kids to get where they needed to go after school. And those are the kind of constituencies that I have seen show up here in this room when we have suggested cutting services. It has not been the most wealthy members of our community but those that really rely on the city services that we are sustaining here. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. We'll go to Councillor Chang and then to the mayor. Thank you, President Paul. And I also wanna thank all my colleagues for their remarks. I think those are good ones, especially the one about the $270,000 that you're trying to take away from this budget or at least the increase. But I also wanna particularly thank all the department head that have taken the time over the past two months to show up at night and to speak about the details of their budgets exactly. And I love the fact that already there will be quarterly updates to the Board of Finance that did not exist before. I think which is really interesting, good concept. But I also wanna express my concern over the recent increase of municipal taxes too. I am concerned like everybody else because I'm a homeowner, I'm also a taxpayer and I understand the importance of funding essential services such as education, infrastructure, public safety, but however I believe that the recent tax increase is justified, you know? And even though it will be unfairly burdensome to our residents, but it is justified in here. But I also love the plan that we have put forward in order to do this better next year, right? Next year, whoever's here. But I think as part of our moral document, we also have substantial requests here from the racial equity inclusion and belonging, which is very, very new to the city of Burlington, which I believe is also starting to fly, you know? There has been some reason why I need to support this budget because this is a moral. This is a city established in the 1700. It only recently that we have started to see substantial amounts of progress in terms of racial equity, inclusion and belonging. No one has a crystal ball to tell you this is what need to be done today and tomorrow, right? But the team that we have currently in place, I believe that, you know, we have green, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful stuff are coming forward. And also I know that this budget actually will not be increasing the taxes, the way that I thought about it over the past two months. This is only $370 or even less a year for a household. Imagine $17 a month. Think about it, right? I would be really concerned in addition to the high school bound, but it's not the case right here. So I will be supporting this resolution. I will be also supporting the increase of the tax. Yes, thank you all so much. Thank you, Councillor Chang. So we'll go to Mayor Weinberger and then perhaps we can. Okay, so we'll go to Mayor Weinberger and then we have a couple of Councillors left in the queue. Thank you, President Paul. I appreciate the opportunity to respond to the discussion so far in a few areas. First of all, I do think it's important to speak straight to this. The notion, someone watching this might get a sense that this is somehow an austerity budget. It is not an austerity budget. It is a budget that as stated at the beginning continues to advance what we have a large consensus should be community priorities in the areas of public safety, in the areas of responding to climate emergency, in with respect to the opioid crisis and specifically with respect to homelessness, since that is something that has been called out here. It is a little remarkable to me that this budget and the work to the city team that is done, that goes, there's no comparison to any other municipality in the state in terms of how this team has responded to the crisis and homelessness and put real dollars into that response. And last week just had a remarkable success in reversing state policy that was headed towards kicking 2,000 of the most vulnerable Vermonters out of hotels at the end of the month. And only because, and this has not been captured properly anywhere, only because of the work of the city team in the month between the legislature adjourning and last week that policy was reversed and everyone's gonna get housed as a result of the city work. And it's not right, I think the suggestion was made that we're not paying for that locally so we shouldn't think of that as really something that is a morally positive investment in how we are moving forward. And that's not even right because yes, it is accurate that we are using federal and state resources to fund a great deal of that work but we have also taken remarkable local steps to expand the Housing Trust Fund. The Housing Trust Fund has been quadrupled as a result of the actions that we have taken here in recent years, that is local money going into addressing our housing crisis and if people recall back to the state of the city, I've asked CEDO to explicitly review the, we have so much more money in the Housing Trust Fund than we have ever had before that I've asked CEDO to review if we can use some of those funds to address our investments to end homelessness going forward. Since some of the funds that we have are going to go away, the federal funds, we now will have a tool with the Housing Trust Fund to address that. So, you know, this is not an austerity budget, it continues to make very substantial, groundbreaking, innovative investments in the areas that Burlington Cares most about. I also think it's not, it's challenging to sit here and hear concerns that we have not generated enough non-property tax revenue sources when just a few years ago, colleagues on the other side of the aisle actually criticized the city's financial planning for being too reliant on revenue sources that could be impacted by the pandemic and express concern that we had created financial risk by having these other revenues. So it's a quite a juxtaposition there to hear the concerns tonight. But moreover, I think it's also just flat wrong that there has not been great strides made in securing other sources of revenue to fund our priorities. I just wanna name just three of the biggest ones, actually four of the biggest ones. One of the minority named the Housing Trust Fund we've done collectively substantial work to generate going from about $200,000 a year in funding to what will be, what current projection show will be around a million dollars a year in funding. And that's before we've even gone through a full year of the tax on the short-term rental to know fully what we will get from that revenue source. So it could be even more. Similarly, we have raised millions of dollars from non-property tax sources for our infrastructure investments. We, including unprecedented, never before made investments by our nonprofit educational partners, UVM and Champlain College in the sustainable infrastructure plan are putting millions of dollars in that they never put in before. And we are going beyond that now, having created, used our resources to create two grant positions as we reported during the budget process. These grant positions have already raised one and a half million dollars from other sources and have over $25 million, I believe it was, of grants pending. And I am very optimistic that we will be returning shortly to be able to report major successes on that front as well. And I'll leave it there with the new revenues. There is one other thing that I do think is very relevant to this debate, though, that we have done together and that I feel like is sort of being forgotten in some of the comments so far. And that goes to our responsibility to pass a budget that sustains our policies of having a strong unassigned fund balance and being very prudent in how we build and use reserves. We created just in 2018, this reserve policy, the policy has required us to pass budgets that keep us between five and 10%, sorry, five and 15% of unassigned fund balance. We have, within that for years, collectively had a target of trying to meet a 10% unassigned fund balance target and we have achieved that and actually exceeded that for years. This year we already are having to dip below that for the first time in a number of years. And I do have a concern that a last minute change to what we are going to spend out of the unassigned fund balance on the floor would not be viewed positively by our credit rating partners. And the way the system works, we can't say definitively what would happen, but I think that's exactly the kind of irresponsible last minute undisciplined move that gets their attention and that could well lead to them viewing our management of our finances in a new way. And so I don't support that and I wanna remind everyone what's at stake in that. We've gone from having a credit rating that was on the edge of jump on status to a double A rating. We achieved that just in 2019 and we publish reports on what the savings to Burlington taxpayers and ratepayers have been as a result of that improvement. And the last time we published a report and we will do another one again at the end of this year and the number will be substantially higher. The last time we published a report, the savings were in excess of $21 million. That savings is going to balloon as soon as we start borrowing for the $165 million high school as well. So I strongly advise, urge the council not to make a last minute adjustment to our carefully constructed unassigned fund balance plan for the coming year. And that brings me to my final report point, which is this is not the only night that we're talking about the budget. We have been talking about the budget since April. We've had numerous meetings over the course of May and into June to discuss getting to a document that we could all, that we hoped we could all support. And I respect that Councilor McGee has specifically called out a change that for us to consider that can make a budget that he would support. And I guess we have a similar proposal from Councilor Bergman as well. It is very concerning to have counselors indicate they're going to vote against the budget who have never over the course of the profit, this multi-month process offered specific changes for us to consider. Because before tonight they would have been considered. We can't do it now at the last minute, but we have been open to changes throughout this process. And actually that does bring me to a final report. I appreciate Councilor Bergman's good-natured indication that he could be voting for the expenditures in this budget, but against the taxation, that I guess is available technically in the way that the city has long written these budget resolutions and that we have adopted. And I do appreciate that it was sort of offered in a positive spirit, but I must say it's very troubling that it is not the way any counselors have previously approached it. And it really makes me wonder if we have a structural problem with the way these resolutions are done in that these really are very much intrinsically related votes. We obviously cannot support all, we cannot sustain all the great initiatives, important work, critical services that are in this budget without a tax resolution that is consistent with that. And so I, if you support what is in this budget, I would urge you to vote yes on it, acknowledging that there is no way to actually do that to sustain that budget without property taxes that go along with it. And we have worked very hard through an incredibly difficult inflationary period to keep those property taxes beneath the rate of inflation in aggregate over a long period of time. And that's been our commitment for a long time to the people of Burlington. And that's what we've attempted to do here. And I think you can vote yes on this budget, knowing that that's how we've approached it. Thank you, Mayor Weinberger. So we'll go to Councilor Hightower to be followed by Councilor Grant. Oh my gosh, so much. I'm glad that I got to go after that. Which is first, I think I just agree with Councilor Carpenter that this budget is worth voting for for a lot of reasons. I'm not in any way of trying to tell anyone else to vote against it. And I also would feel differently about voting against it if I didn't know that it was gonna pass. I feel like I say this every other council meeting now, but I am by nature a compromiser, as I think everybody on this council knows, both by practice, like both by just who I am and by practice on this council. And I would happily always work towards a compromise. I've just not always been successful in doing that with this administration in particular, with the cross party lines. Sure, with this administration, not so much. I think that Councilor McGee has voiced concerns with this budget. I think that I have voiced my concerns with how much we're putting towards some of the most vulnerable populations as those votes have happened. And I also just wanna say with the housing trust fund and how much money is going towards that, that came from this council. That came from dissent on this council, where at first we said there's no possible way that we can have an additional tax on short term rentals. And then we found through dissent, we found a way. And so I think I just wanna, I think that there's this attitude right now that it's like dissent is bad. And I don't think that's ever been true on this council. I think that us disagreeing is actually where we come out with the strongest. If I've learned nothing else while during my time on council, I think it's that us disagreeing actually gets us to better outcomes most of the time. Because if we listen to each other and we try to work through why some people are concerned, usually that always leads to better outcomes rather than worse outcomes is what I believe. I don't have a lot of leverage right now, but I do have a way to still dissent. And I think that's important. And that's what I'm gonna do with my vote. I also just wanna quickly add that I think it's, I don't wanna, I don't know, I don't know a better word than like maybe a little, well, a little naive to think that most of our funds go towards the most vulnerable residents. I think we have amazing programs. I think this administration has put in place amazing programs. And I think we have amazing programs to serve the city's most vulnerable, but just because of the way our systems work, most of the things go to like, I've recently taken advantage of renting out Schmanzka Barn and taking advantage of electric car rebates. And those are great, but those are things that are really targeted towards middle class and upper middle class residents, which is true of many and most of our services. That's not a bad thing. That's kind of just the way that cities work. But I think that thinking through that as structurally as we can as often as possible is not a bad thing. And I will leave it at that. Thank you. Thanks, Councilor Hightower. We'll go to Councilor Grant to be followed by Councilor Bergman. Thank you. So I agree with everything that Councilor Hightower just said. So I'm gonna kind of adjust my comments because there were a couple of things that overlapped. But regarding our city team that's been working on the unhoused crisis, I respect that team. I respect their work. I give them much, much, much, much credit. But I think we are forgetting that there have been a lot of voices that have been calling for and including the state legislatures who put themselves out there to veto the state budget as a form of dissent to say, we can't do this and then put this extra burden on our cities and towns. So we really need to be mindful of everyone who has been involved. We can't just for political reasons pick and choose who we wanna recognize. I would also really like us to be mindful and yeah, here's my political naivete kicking in, but can we really just stick to talking about what's right and wrong for the people of Burlington and not making things political? Because I think when we start to really play this political game, it really in fact reduces the level of the conversation. I just am really disappointed that that's the type of game we wanna continue to play. We can do better and we should do better. I am concerned about Burlington being a boutique city. I am concerned about how we are pushing a lot of different people out and that is going to affect the vibrancy of the city. It's gonna affect the diversity of the city, not just racially but economically and the various different types of individuals that live here but don't have the same income level and yes, we can look at some of these increases as well that increase is not so bad, that increase is not so bad, that increase is not so bad, but when you add it all up, it's hundreds of dollars and that can really put people on the edge and as a older Burlingtonian, I really start to think about this, like how am I gonna age in place with a fixed income? And a lot of older Burlingtonians are in that spot and we need to be thinking of them. We need to be thinking about everybody and I think the last step is there is this commitment at times to talk about other things but we really need to make a plan for pilot funds. We need to make a task force. We need to know what a task force is doing. We need to continually be really thinking outside of the box to increase revenues because what's happening is not sustainable for people. It's not and that is just the hard fact and I agree a lot with what Councillor Bergman said as well. Thank you, I'll leave it at that. Thank you, Councillor Grant. We'll go to Councillor Bergman to be followed by Councillor McGee and then perhaps then we and Councillor Carpenter. Councillor Bergman. Well, I don't know where to begin so I'll begin by saying I never said that this was an austerity budget. That's just a plain straw man to knock down for political purposes but let's be real clear, we brag in the PowerPoint that we made $750,000 in cuts, okay? And I venture to say that if you go to any department and you talk to the head, you talk to the assistants, you talk to the line workers, you will not hear that they have too many people to do too little work. I have heard for a very long time and I experienced while working, the tightness that this city's employment system has. So all you gotta do if we're talking about austerity is look at the woefully inadequate street paving programs and in the scheme of things, the pittance that we're throwing at it. Just a spit. So we are and have been dealing with austerity. Leave no mistake about it, right? We could go, I could go on in that but we'll just, that's pretty darn clear for everybody. You know, to talk about us raising the question, the need of progressive alternatives to the property tax by throwing what somebody said during the pandemic that was on this side is just outrageous, should be ashamed to make that. And let's be clear. I sat at this table in 1986 when we got the gross receipts tax, when we got the franchise tax of 1986 to 1992, all of those from progressives that were in the administration with the assistance of independents and Democrats and Republicans. So, you know, I stand very, very clearly and strongly with the fact that we need to reinforce the system of alternatives to the property tax because the property tax is regressive, it is not based on a person's ability to pay. And we need to do everything we can and I hear at this council, real support for something like that, not so much from another part of the table. You know, we've got an unassigned fund balance. I am like stunned at the attack at me raising that. First of all, we're at 9% and I'm sorry, Catherine, because I got to read a little bit of our exchange today because you did the right thing. You answered a city councilor's questions regarding what would happen if we were to take $250,000 more from the unassigned fund balance to substitute that for the street tax. And ask the advisor, because that had been raised, what the impact would be if it was seen as a one-year reduction that would be offset next year with added revenues, including from non-property tax sources for further cuts. If we, 250,000, so I admit it's not 290, right? I think you can come up with $40,000 extra on that. But if we took another $250,000 from that balance, it would keep it within the 9% range, okay? She does not anticipate it would cause a problem with our credit rating. No, we're all, we could be wrong on that. I mean, but I think that's fair. $250,000 within the 9%, it is not an outrageous request. And let's just talk about last-minute ITIS. I raised at the very, very first budget meeting that we had at the Board of Finance about the need for alternatives to the property tax. And I was told there are these studies. Thank you. I mean, it was hard that I, you know, that was kind of late in that process, you know, at that time to do that, but that was raised then. And it was clear, clear from the very first time that at least I and I know my colleagues were concerned about the raising of the regressive property tax. So last-minute ITIS, this street tax wasn't raised to my understanding until June. And I did not go to the June Board of Finance meeting because I had a conflict with the commissions and boards special meeting, which I volunteered to go to. Now, last-minute ITIS is throwing that in, okay? The last point is that the accusation that somehow we should not make a, this kind of dramatic change, 250, 290,000 dollars, because it'll undo everything. Well, you know, the fact is that you can make the change in that resolution that's coming up can not increase taxes for people right now and still be within the 9% that somehow magically is okay. There's a reason why we have a range in policy from five to 15. I'm not proposing that we go to five, but you know, let me end by saying that that would use funds that have already been paid for by overtapped low and moderate income people. They've already paid into the fund. And like Councillor Grant said, you know, we are creating a city where only the rich can live. And I just want you to know, I'm using the word we, okay? So I've done I think a pretty good job because I can be a more partisan than virtually anybody around here equally as partisan as I've gotten here. But I've not done that, right? I'm not going to do that. We are doing this collectively. I will vote for this resolution because I think it funds things that are important. And I will vote against the funding mechanism knowing full well that the money is there in the allocations that will be able to pay for the appropriations that we're making in this one. I'd love for us to be able to amend that resolution when it becomes time, but it's not time yet. So thank you very much. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. We will go to Councillor McGee and then we will go to Councillor Travers. Thank you, President Paul. I will try to be brief. In your response, Mayor, you brought up all of the additional revenue sources that we have pursued to try to avoid raising taxes further. And I do appreciate that. The grants team has done excellent work. But with those federal grants that we've received for infrastructure projects that the Board of Finance and the Council have already approved, and I was at least voting for those projects with the understanding that we had some idea where the local match was going to come from. We learned through this budget process that we in fact don't have a way to pay for the local match right now. And that is deeply concerning. I think the fact that we approved these projects before having a full understanding of how we were gonna pay for our side of the equation, I think it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And so, you know, I myself was surprised to learn that during this process. And as far as the thought that I might have raised my concern about the streets tax last minute, I voiced my opposition to it on the very first night that it was brought up. And again, Tuesday before our city council meeting, and Mayor, you and I discussed the possibility of the streets tax coming out of the budget after that. There might be some openness to that, and I appreciated that. And Wednesday, I got a text saying that steps were being taken to make that happen. And then Friday, I got a text at 3.15 in the afternoon telling me that the streets tax was staying in the budget and that if I wanted to, I could comb through the budget and find additional areas for us to cut to pay for the additional improvements. I didn't bring this concern up last minute and I resent being told at 3.15 the Friday before we're supposed to vote on this budget that I myself can comb through each of the lines and find a different way to pay for this expense. And so, I just feel like I had to get that out there because I don't appreciate one being told that I might be making this vote for political reasons because if we're sitting in the Mayor's seat that's not why I'm making this vote. I'm making this vote because of the conversations I've had with my constituents who time and again from the moment that I was knocking on doors running for city council through the time that I observed on the city council that people are having a hard time making ends meet and that has been the reason for my opposition to the streets tax increase from the beginning. So with that, I will leave it there. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor McGee. We'll go to Councillor Travers now. Thank you, President Paul. After hearing some of the comments here I just wanted to say a couple of things. First of all, my constituents have also been bearing a brunt of the most recent citywide reappraisal. I think in the South End, particularly in Ward 5 our constituents really bear the brunt of that perhaps more than any other neighborhood in the city. I will say that a good amount of that brunt arose from the timing of the reappraisal and related statewide assistance being delayed by a year. I think it's important to note that statewide income-based assistance to taxpayers has now caught up, which is why we can now say that this budget will impact lower income households to the tune of just an additional $13.60 a year, $13.60 I should say a year. So just about a dollar a month. But statewide assistance catch up or not, I agree that the brunt is being borne and I share some of the concerns that my colleagues have raised here with respect to affordability. We have all faced the pressures of inflation these past years, though our families have, we have individually, our businesses have, and our cities are no exception to the pressures of inflation the past few years. Rightfully so, in our new police fire and AFSCME collective bargaining agreements, this council has supported much more significant wage increases for city employees than at any time in recent memory and I'm proud that we made that decision and I'm proud of the administration bargaining for those agreements. Now here we are being asked to fund many of the mandates that this council previously put in place. Now beyond these previously approved mandates, I look at the budget and say, where do our proposed increased taxes fall? And for the most part, I see it falling in parks and streets. I strongly agree with the comments made by my colleagues earlier that that spending in particular is an investment in our future. Our streets to our families and to our visitors, our parks to our kids, with the high school bond in place and with that debt service there, we don't have the same funds available to support our parks and playgrounds. We need to find an alternative way to support this really an essential city service. I served on the Parks Commission for a number of years as Councillor Barlow and we really viewed our parks as an essential city service, no different than our streets, no different than our police, fire and public safety infrastructure. We wouldn't be a city without our parks. And but for an increased tax, where else should we find these funds? We haven't really heard many suggestions here with respect to how else we should find increased funds to support our parks. Should we increase permit fees at Oakledge? Should we increase skate rental fees at Letty Park? Should we increase the cost of families who are camping here in the summer? That's not acceptable to me either. And I do appreciate the suggestion that was raised by Councillor Bergman because I too wish there were ways that we could find additional cost savings here. I agree with my colleagues though that I'm not comfortable with further tapping into our rainy day fund because I do think that if we have a rainy day, I wasn't on the council the year before the pandemic came, but I suspect that that council had no idea a pandemic was coming the following year. And I know that this city needed every penny in the unassigned fund balance and in any rainy day fund. So I'm not comfortable tapping into that rainy day fund, but I appreciate the suggestions that councillors have made for us to find additional cost savings because do I want to vote in favor of a budget that's going to increase the taxes of my constituents? No, I don't want to vote in favor of a budget, but we also have a responsibility to govern. You know, I wish that I could be in a place to vote no, but we have a responsibility to govern and our Board of Finance, the administration has put a great deal of work into this. I think it's a very responsible budget. I do think that it is a moral budget. You know, when I look at it, I don't really see where the other cost savings are going to come from in the face of, again, the inflationary pressures that we've been facing. So I will be proudly voting yes for this because I think that it aligns with my responsibility as a councillor to govern. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Travers. There are a couple of councillors who have not spoken to this agenda item. If they wish to speak, now would be that time. A number of councillors have spoken twice and I don't think that it, I don't think there's a good use of our time to go to a third round. So if there's anyone who hasn't spoken and wishes to be recognized, now would be that time. Otherwise, we're gonna go to a vote. Okay, we're gonna go to a vote. Seeing no others and trying to enforce the same role for everyone who has spoken at least twice, we will go to a vote. And I think it probably makes sense. Councillor Hightower had to leave and I believe was going to join us by Zoom and I don't know if that has happened yet. Is there anyone? Yes, I'm here. Oh, you are. Oh, great. Okay. So Councillor Hightower is joining us by Zoom and great, so we will go to a roll call vote, Laurie. Councillor Barlow. Yes. Councillor Bergman. Yes. Councillor Carpenter. Yes. Councillor Jang. Yes. Councillor Doherty. Yes. Councillor Grant. Yes. Councillor Hightower. No. Councillor King. Yes. Councillor McGee. No. Councillor Shannon. Yes. Councillor Travers. Yes. City Council President Paul. Yes. Ten ayes, two nays. Okay, that motion passes by a vote of 10 to two, which moves us to item 4.3, a resolution regarding the annual tax assessments on the property tax grand list of the city. Councillor Paul, can I have a point of order, please? Yes. It would be appropriate and acceptable to have a, like a five minute recess, please. Yes. Thank you. It is now 8.05, we'll be back at 8.10. Introduction of the agenda item, which is 4.3, a resolution regarding the annual tax assessments on the property grand tax list for the city, for the fiscal year beginning June 1, 2023 and ending June 30th, 2024. CAO Shad or Mayor Weinberger, did you want to offer some comments or did you have anything else you wanted to present before we would go to a motion on this? President Paul, I did just, if you'll allow 30 seconds, I did just want to clarify, since clearly one of my prior comments was misunderstood, I was not suggesting that Councilor McGee has consistently, certainly over the last week, repeatedly made the suggestion on cutting the street investment and the associated tax with it, and I was not suggesting that was a last minute proposal by any means. My concern was what I think we're about to discuss, which is making a change to the tax rate that, and funding it out of unassigned fund balance that is a new idea to me moments before the Council meeting started tonight, which I have significant concern about as I expressed, but that is what I was concerned about happening late, and I wanted to apologize if I said something that caused that misunderstanding, which I must have, so thank you. Thank you Mayor Weinberger for that clarification. That doesn't answer though my question, which is whether or not CAO Shad, did you want to offer some comments before we go to a motion on the resolution before us? Yes, just briefly. The tax resolution before you lays out in words the chart that you can see on the website that I had included in the PowerPoint, and it goes through our, we're gonna try and count them here, let's call them 12 different tax rates that make up the municipal tax rate. The one that we've been talking about tonight is street capital and green belt, and that is in a category called rates capped by voters. And just by way of clarification, we talked about this at Board of Finance, but so that everyone in this room and everyone listening is clear. In FY22, because of the reappraisal, we held those rates down to try and ensure affordability for the residents of Burlington. Last year, we thought that we brought all of those rates back up to their maximum level. We wanted to fully fund those. As you can imagine, when there's this much detail and there's this many tax rates, some of which the ceilings have changed throughout time, I want to own the fact that the mayor specifically asked me twice through this process, were all of those rates at their maximum? I said yes, because I thought that they were. And it was my mistake that caused us to come back to the Board of Finance and City Council with the half a cent increase. The street capital and green belt rate, which in FY23 was at five cents, is actually capped at 6.17 cents. That's obviously a huge increase. So together working with DPW, we settled on a proposed half cent this year for a proposed increase. But the delay was mine and it was confusion and I just wanna set the record straight on that. Otherwise, I believe that the resolution is self-explanatory. Thank you, President Paul. Thank you, thanks very much, CAO Shad. So with that, we will go to a motion on this resolution. I'll go to Councillor Barlow for that. Well, thank you, President Paul. I move to waive the reading and adopt the resolution and I do not need the floor back after a second. Okay, thank you, Councillor Barlow. Is there a seconded by Councillor Shannon? With Councillor Barlow not wanting the floor back, that would open the floor to any other Councillors for questions, comments on the resolution before us. Councillor Bergman. Thank you. Let me just finish the comments that I was gonna be making about revenues and then I'm gonna propose an amendment. But this is clearly not the end of our financial discussions and I'm glad that we have the information in the PowerPoint regarding what we need to do in fiscal year 25 and beyond. So as to this first, I'm disappointed that none of the ideas listed speaks to income sensitizing the municipal property tax like the state education tax. We passed a resolution in 2021 that raised this very issue. I think we need significant tax reform to make the municipal property tax based on the ability to pay and not simply on the value of property itself. Second, I believe we should be very wary of the urban three study. That's the revenue study. This study will highlight the areas of the city that are underperforming from a valuation perspective and have the most tax revenue potential for redevelopment. That's what the RFP says and what the memo says. This in my mind has a great potential of encouraging public policies and investments that drive up value and hence property taxes and drive out even middle income residents. Urban threes analysis of the long-term economic impact of exclusionary housing covenants on property values and the neighborhood and neighborhood fiscal health does not mitigate this threat of displacement unless the study of potential future value of reinvestment in these neighborhoods includes proposals for significant anti-displacement investments. Let me make this just simpler. We have to also study the significant anti-displacement investments that need to accompany such an analysis. There is no mention of studying means to protect residents from displacement and absent that it will simply give us a roadmap for intensified gentrification. So we should be very wary. And finally, I believe that we should take a page out of Mayor Sanders' book when Ronald Reagan eliminated federal revenue sharing. He formed a broad-based community task force to investigate and propose revenue-raising alternatives to the loss of federal funds without the reliance on the regressive property tax. And it seems that this would be appropriate for the pilot fee discussion. I believe there are other ideas being raised and discussed including the creation of a transportation utility district and income sensitizing the municipal property tax which would benefit from such a community-based working group. And I look forward to working with the administration and other counselors on alternatives to the regressive municipal property tax system that we currently have. Because I'm sorry not to be able to support this resolution but perhaps will, although I do not think that this will be successful, I would move to amend the resolution on line eight by deleting the words and one half cents and then changing by deleting the parentheses with the number and changing that to simply dollar sign period or point 0.05. I guess you could do 0.0 as well. And that would be my motion to amend. I, Councillor Bergman, can you, would you mind repeating that? Sure. Because we all, line eight. Just make sure that we all have that up while we're, while you're saying that. Line eight. It is the deletion of and one half cents right there after the word five. Is that clear enough? And then making the change in the numerical equivalent. Yes, removing the number five. That's right. And then we have to add the five cents and underline that to make this effective but pretty simple. Okay. So first I would go to the maker and the seconder. Would this resolution, would this amendment be friendly to you? No one. Okay. Councillor Bergman, a motion has been made by Councillor Bergman. We need a second to that. Is there a second to that? You second that. Okay, seconded by Councillor Jang. So we're gonna talk about the amendment as made by Councillor Bergman and seconded by Councillor Jang. Are there any additional comments or questions from the council on the amendment only? Okay. Then we will go to a vote on the amendment. And I believe Councillor Hightower, you're still with us. Councillor Hightower. I'm gonna make the assumption that Councillor Hightower is with us. So we will, because this will be a divided vote, we'll go to a roll call. Oh, I'm sorry. Mayor Weinberger, please go ahead. President Paul, thank you. I think we should have some discussion if I'm understanding this amendment, which I think is a material amendment to the amount of revenue that the city will generate. I'm unclear if this amendment passes, which I think we're about to vote on, and then this resolution passes. I'm unclear we have fulfilled our core charter responsibility of passing a balanced budget before the end of the fiscal year. I believe we would be reducing a revenue that is in the budget assumptions. And we have just passed a budget that does not reduce any offsetting expenses. And I believe that's what we'd be doing if I'm understanding this amendment properly. I would tend to agree with that. So if we are reducing something, are we increasing in some area? Are we cutting something? What are we doing? I see nothing in that resolution that sets the amount of the unassigned fund balance. So while I believe that you would have to amend the budget and we do this by amending line items all the time, the funds are in there unassigned and able to be appropriated. So I do not think so. Okay, so first we thank you for that. Thank you for that response. We will go to Councillor Jang and Councillor Doherty. No. City Attorney Steven, I believe, or Catherine Chart or whoever can answer this question. What the policy of tapping into the unassigned fund balance? Is it to resolution or mayor's executive order or council? What is it? Here's what I believe the case to be. And then if I don't get anything quite right, the two women to my right can correct this, but the budget, where we are planning, no, it does not just happen by executive action by the mayor. This is something that requires council action. The way the council is the plan for the night, the way in which the process works is where we have been anticipating using unassigned fund balance. We have created new assigned fund balances. So through the overall passage, which has been sort of laid out in these budget presentations, how we are doing that, the mechanism of moving money from unassigned fund balance either into the budget or to these assigned balances has been made. So it is something that requires explicit council approval. That was my question. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. We'll go to Councillor Doherty and if there are others, we can continue. Councillor Doherty. Thank you, President Paul. Councillor Jang asked my question. Okay, Councillor, are there any other Councillor Carpenter? Well, it's my own clarification, but I had always assumed that our mandate, tonight we're mandated to pass a balanced budget, but things happen like pandemics or disasters or so that during the course of the year, we could be called upon to move money from an unassigned fund balance if something subsequently happens to tonight. So that's my, and I'm trying to clarify that tonight we decide on a balanced budget and I would concur that Councillor Bergman's would make us unbalanced without an offset. Six months from now, we might have to move money just because. Yes, I would offer the example of when we had recently completed the TIF audit and there was about $500,000 worth of expenses and I came to you and that was mid FY23 and we all agreed that we had reduced those expenses as much as we could and there was nowhere else for them to come from, but the unassigned fund balance and so as a Board of Finance and City Council we obligated that money. I did pull up our fund balance policy which everyone has access to on the website and I do think that in addition to the fact that the City Council obligates it, it may be worth reading this one sentence from page four. Generally fund balance should not be used to fund recurring general or routine operating expenses of the city. It should be used to fund foreseeable projects or goals, unforeseen emergencies, one-time property tax relief and to provide financial stability to the city and I'll just leave that there. Councilor Carper, do you still have the floor? This is unrelated to that, but I just wanna make sure we pointed out that in one of Sierra Shad's slides she presented all the taxes and fees that we are expecting increase. The property tax, school tax fee and to some degree the municipal are not income sensitized, is that right? You based it on a $370,000 home but it doesn't account for the fact that those two could be income sensitized? It does include the $370,000 home assumes that home is qualifying for the homestead. It does not include any of the other eligible credits and other income sensitive. But how would you know so I could own one and my next door neighbor could own a $370,000 house and I could earn twice as much money as my next door neighbor so it's gonna be a different number for one person than the other. So how could you have adjusted that? Because you don't know the income of the homeowner of that $370,000 house. That is a question for the school district. I don't make those numbers. I just get them from them. Because they must have had a qualifying income. I can't answer that. And I think that's important to point out and I will say as I said before it's a black box. So the income sensitivity program from the state is intended to be based on ability to pay. Can't certify whether that's done well or not well but that is the point. And so if I earn half as much as another homeowner my taxes will be reduced substantially more. And I just plead with us that we get that data. We don't have it tonight but I will point out. I don't think that's a fully sensitized number. The other thing is there's a circuit breaker for people under $50,000. And I don't believe that's. That is not. That is not in there. So if you're under $50,000 you will get a break on your municipal taxes as well. Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Councillor Carpenter. So we're just talking about the amendment as proposed by Councillor Bergman. Are there any other comments on the amendment as proposed by Councillor Bergman? Councillor Bergman. Just wanna say this would be a one-time tax relief. I do not anticipate us being in this situation because there are all these revenue ideas and we're gonna be doing some income sensitivity work as well I hope. So this fits within the policy. I appreciate CAO's bringing that to our attention. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. Seeing no other, Councillor Adorti. Thanks, President Paul. As one of the newest members of the council it's enough for me usually to listen and try and keep up with what's going on. And I may not understand the situation perfectly as we sit here. But it strikes me looking ahead that the situation that we're in right now risks setting a very difficult and challenging precedent going forward. I can imagine if we proceeded along this track and set this precedent that anytime we have funds in the unallocated fund balance, $7 million, $5 million, $10 million, whatever amount of money it is, that when it comes time to vote on the budget it would be very easy for a group of councillors to vote in favor of the expenditure side and vote against the raising of revenue with the solution being well, we've got this unallocated fund balance and we'll guess we'll have the mayor work it out, the mayor's administration work it out later. And that does not strike me as a sensible or good precedent and I think we should be cautious of setting it. Thank you, Councillor Adorti. We will go to a vote on this. So this is just on the amendment as proposed by Councillor Bergman. Councillor Hightower, can you hear us? She said she posted it. Yes, sorry, it just takes me a second to get off me. That's okay, that's all right. Just wanted to make sure we needed to go to a roll call vote. Laurie, if you could call the roll for us. Councillor Barlow. No. Councillor Bergman. Yes. Councillor Carpenter. No. Councillor Jang. Yes. Councillor Doherty. No. Councillor Grant. Yes. Councillor Hightower. Yes. Councillor King. No. Councillor McGee. Yes. Councillor Shannon. No. Councillor Travers. No. City Council President Paul. No. Bye bye, 7-8. Okay, so that motion does not pass. That motion fails and we are back to the underlying resolution. Are there any other comments or questions from Councillors before we go to a vote on the resolution as presented? Seeing none, we will once again go to a roll call vote. Councillor Barlow. Yes. Councillor Bergman. No. Councillor Carpenter. Yes. Councillor Jang. Yes. Councillor Doherty. Yes. Councillor Grant. No. Councillor Hightower. Yes. Councillor King. Councillor McGee. No. Councillor Shannon. Yes. Councillor Travers. Yes. City Council President Paul. Yes. Nine ayes, three nays. That motion passes and actually the resolution. So we have a budget and we have a property tax grand list assessment for the coming year. That moves us to the last item on our deliberative agenda, which is item 4.4, a communication from Councillors, Jean Bergman and Ben Travers, who are co-chairs of the Joint Committee on Oversight, which is the Ordinance Committee and the Charter Change Committee together. This is a memo regarding a decision on an extension of time for the report to the full council as per the February 6, 2023 resolution. And this was Consent Item 3.3, and Councillor Grant, you had requested that it be removed or be moved to our deliberative agenda. So as you had made the request, I'm happy to recognize you. Or if you wish to go to the co-chairs, I can do that as well. Sure. The reason I requested that it be removed is because there's been a little bit of a rocky start with it in terms of the public engagement and people knowing when the meetings were and things like that. So I felt that it was really important with anything related to this Joint Committee that it always be discussed, even though it's just a simple update to the public that it be discussed during our actual meeting as opposed to just being in the consent agenda. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much, Councillor Grant. Councillor Bergman. So I would move to waive the rating and place it on file and get the floor back after a second. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. Seconded by Councillor Travers. Did you want, you did want the floor back. Well, just to say, so it was very clear that this Committee of ours had way too much to do for the June meeting that we had the deadline. So the very first conversation that we had included the need to schedule for the entire summer to have some meetings and to push back a substantive report until the date that we have in the memo. And I thank Councillor President Paul for making sure that we at least had this. And I thank Councillor Grant for being able to remind us that this is so important that it deserves floor time. We are meeting again on and next on July 6th, that's a Thursday. We are then meeting the next week after that on the 13th, we will then meet, we have scheduled meetings on the second and the third of August. Councillor Travers and I have been talking about the list of items that we need to get decision points on and how to frame that. We've shared one document and we'll obviously know that the budget is over. We'll get a chance to chat this week about the rest of that list and get it in time for our meeting on the 6th, which is a week from this coming Thursday. And I would defer to my co-chair if he has anything to add. Thank you, Councillor Bergman. We'll go to Councillor Travers. Thank you. I don't have much to add beyond what co-chair Bergman had added. And I appreciate the feedback from Councillor Grant and from others throughout the process about public engagement. I'll say that in my time in public service here in Burlington, I've yet to come across really anything where folks have not felt like they've wanted to have more feedback and more engagement. I think that's both the blessing and the curse of Burlington is that it's a lean-in community where so many people are invested in our community and wanting to be heard on issues that are really important. I'll say I think it's mostly a blessing. I do think it's important that people, when we get to the end of this process though, have faith in the process. I think having faith in the process will be having an understanding that folks and stakeholders have really had an opportunity to be heard. The Joint Committee has had three meetings thus far. Those meetings have largely been information gathering, as Councillor Bergman just mentioned when we meet again on July 6th. The intention is for us to really turn the corner and trying to put pen to paper on potential changes to our ordinance or our charter. I do want to be clear that unlike in really any committee process that I've been involved in since I've joined the council, we really are making an earnest effort to specifically invite really all the folks we've identified as stakeholders to each of our meetings so that certainly includes leadership at the police department. We also specifically invite representatives from every municipal union. We've also invited representatives from the Howard Center AFSCME union. We've invited representatives from the people for police accountability who were the individuals behind ballot question seven. We've invited multiple city departments as well as the administration and the mayor's office has had a representative at each of our meetings. We have members here from our various NPA Steering Committees and we've invited each individual NPA Steering Committee member throughout the city to attend these meetings. And do I wish we had a better response and more engagement from the folks that we've been inviting? Yes, do I understand that we're in the summer and it's summer schedules? Yes, am I hoping that we're sort of beyond the information gathering stage and as we turn the corner to more substantive work that there will be more engagement? Yes, I'm hoping for that and expect there will be two. I'll also say that Councilor Bergman and I served with Councilor Carvender as well on the Charter Change Committee when we recently went through the all resident voting matter. And I think if there is really an example, at least since I joined the council of what I would like eventually the community engagement on this issue to be, I think it's the work that was done on the all resident voting matter. I think that one of the differences there though as compared to here is that there we had sort of a very clear, concise proposal that was on the table and then engaged in really much more expansive public engagement. My hope is that we'll be able to use that as a model as the committee with stakeholder input continues to sort of winnow down what we're working with here and that once we have a proposal that we'll be able to, as we move something back to the full council, engage in much broader public input at that point in time. Thank you, Councilor Travers. Seeing no other comments from the council on this agenda item, a motion has been made and seconded to waive the reading except the communication and place it on file. All those in favor of the motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. That motion passes unanimously and with that completes our deliberative agenda and with that, I would ask for a motion to adjourn. So moved. Thank you, Councilor McKee, seconded by Councilor Barlow. All those in favor of the motion to adjourn, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed, please say no. We are adjourned at 843. The next council meeting will be one month from today, four weeks from today on Monday, July 24th and just a reminder, I'm looking forward to seeing many of you at the Independence Day celebration next week on the 3rd of July on the waterfront. Thank you so much for joining us this evening. Have a good evening.