 Well, thanks everyone for coming back. Are we live streaming tonight or are we just video streaming? No, we're just video streaming. So for our later watchers, hello, thank you for joining us. My name is Ben Traver, I'm on the War 5 and the Eastern Committee. And I think we have a small group here this evening that makes sense for us. Just go around for everyone to introduce themselves, perhaps let us know where you live in town. So, I'm Jeff, I live here in War 5, right on the home avenue. You folks stand up there? My name's Ben Olsen, I'm a policy and programs manager for the city of Wellington. And we do not participate in child labor, this just happens. They're literally tall, but too big to handle. She's not on the payroll, but this is Piper. Let me know, I have calls calling her. Oh, Jim? And I make it clear that the Division Head for Water Resources is a charge of water, wastewater, and storm water. Alright, I'm President Smith, I live across the street. City officials, city departments, and so on and so forth. I really appreciate your coming forward as a resident that really innovated the proposal and using this as a forum to discuss that. Hopefully it can perhaps be a beginning of something new if neighbors have something they want to talk about it in this forum. That's great. So thanks a lot. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ushua Cabriolo, I'm a steering committee member here, and I live over on Hyde Park. I'm a scarf, I'm a new story for myself. I'm a new man, and I am the War 5 city councilman. Hi, everyone, I'm Hamdi. Well, did it concern you a little? If we're going on the back end, Hamdi, would you mind introducing yourself? I'm Hamdi, I live on Pine Street, and I'm a student at Champlain College. Hi, I'm Pitt, I'm on Yvonne Witsido. Oh, I'm Savannah, I'm Pitt's daughter. I live in Boston. I'm just visiting for vacation. Welcome. Thanks to your family for always giving up your mom. Yeah. Thanks to Pitt. Alright, well, I'm Mohammed Jafar, I'm right on Pine Street, and I am also a steering committee member. I'm Laura Bistrada, I live in Ward 3, and I just came here to talk about this stuff. Hi, my name's Betsy, I also live in Ward 3, and I live in the floor of the park. What's up? I'm also from Ward 3, so we're good to go. Hi, are we going to be outvoted? I'm Carolyn Bates, I live in 20 Caroline Street. I've been here since 1973, and I've always been interested in being a director at 1.2. I'm Ruby Perry, I live over on Locust Street. I'm Sheree Stone-Bone, and I live on Thunder Road. Andy Simon, I live on Locust Street as well, and I'm on West Street. Thank you. So, thanks everyone for being here tonight. Just a logistical announcement, our meeting's been bouncing around to a couple different locations. Next month, we have decided next month, right? So, next month we're going to be trying out the space that's right next to Pizza 44 in Queens City, Brewery. And we're going to try to introduce some pizza and drink to the meeting beforehand. So, pizza on us, drink on you. But we're going to try that for a couple months, that space right there at Pizza 44 in Queens City, Brewery. We'll post it on the agenda, but just we're excited to check out some different spaces here in Brewery. Okay, so with that, we have an open forum period now, so we'll open the floor to anyone that wants to say something for open forum. If you want to come up here. Sure, yeah. Great. Yeah, join me. Great, so yeah, like I said, my name is Laura Mastretta. I'm Betsy. And to give a longer introduction to why we're here, we are volunteering and work with a group called Community Voices for Immigrant Rights. And this is a grassroots group that formed over the summer in reaction to the Trump administration's ramping up of inhumane border immigration policies. On this group, we don't believe that the immigration crisis began with Trump and we don't believe it's going to end with Trump. So we're really about advocating for, you know, humane border policies that we haven't seen yet in this country. And we have spent time organizing protests and rallies on the national issues that are really hard to make an impact from here in Vermont. But now we're transitioning into actually working on a local campaign right here in Burlington to improve, you know, our city for immigrants in the Americas. The name of that campaign is Nomos Poli Negra, which is Spanish. It roughly translates into No More Immigration Police. And so it's really about making sure that our local police department is not, you know, spending its time and resources on targeting immigrants and separating families right here in our city. I totally worry about what that means and what that looks like. So the state of Vermont, we have a fair and impartial policing policy. But migrant justice, the group that kind of came up with the language that we're working with and the policy that we're pushing, has learned through its, like, consistency from migrant farm workers that there are four really big loopholes within our fair and impartial policing policy that's statewide. And it basically results in that, like, local police departments can and do often share information with ICE and border patrol. And so most recently, like, at the end of November, there was a farm worker, a cheerleader whose name is Louis Louie, who was pulled over, or he was in the back seat of a car. The driver was pulled over for speeding. The county sheriff asked for his documentation, basically. He had a Mexican passport. The sheriff detained him on the side of the road for two hours called, I think, Border Patrol, who took him to a detention center in New Hampshire where he's now in deportation for being in the back seat of a car that was speeding. So this is a kind of example, like, of what can happen with these loopholes. And so what we're working on is language that was adopted in Winooski last year. They, like, have not had any issues with it. They adopted their updated fair and impartial policing policy language unanimously with their city council. And so we're asking the arts to do the same. And it's basically, well, the four loopholes, so I can't remember how to talk to my head, but I can read them to you. So the current loopholes are that it allows for the reporting of immigration status of victims and witnesses of crimes to deportation agents. It evades prohibitions on asking about immigration status by allowing officers to rely on the pretext that the person is suspected of having recently crossed the border. It allows the sharing of confidential information with immigration agents so long as it's justified on grounds of public safety or law enforcement needs. And it grants deportation agents access to individuals and police custody. It's actually turning local police stations into temporary and holding cells for ICE and border control. Yeah, so we've been working, you know, to educate ourselves on this issue. And I'm starting to talk to various people. I think we've reached out to YouTube for this. I'm just trying to figure out who's Gina. Someone from my interest. Gina? Gina. Gina says she's part of the case. But if you just read what she says. Yes. We're working together. We're a group of people. You should be Gina. Yeah, so, you know, we're doing our outreach. We've done our kind of behind the scenes outreach, but now is really the time to bring more people into it and want to be educating folks here in Burlington about it. We want to welcome you to join us in helping us get the word out about this campaign and policies. So, you know, the Community Voice for Ignorant Rights is a larger group. We meet every other Monday at the Rights and Democracy Office. Our next meeting is January 6th at 5.30 p.m. with dinner from the People's Kitchen. And then our group, NOMAS Polymigra, meets every Thursday. Though next week, I don't know what'll happen, but I don't know. Yeah, so maybe next week with the holidays. But every Thursday at the Rights and Democracy Office at 6 p.m. So we would love to have you there. So, you know, take questions if there's time now, or hopefully get on the agenda at another point and answer a lot of questions. Or come to, you know, email us, whatever. We've got an email address on these flyers that you can communicate with us through. So, and sign up sheet if you want to just like know you're already down and want to be added to our list. Or just know about the next day. We may put on. So, yeah. Thank you so much. Here's the Rights and Democracy Office. Yeah, so it's on North Winooski Avenue. 241 North Winooski. So right across from my Butch and Dave's. Yeah. What's the cost for what? Butch and Dave's. It's a restaurant. I don't know what to add then. Is the book verbal then? There's a children's center. You know what I mean? Okay. Sure. Okay. Okay. Nice. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. If you want to get on the agenda at any time. Okay. Anyone else for open forum? Every year we have a chunk of money from the federal government that's called Community Development. And each ward sends a representative to the committee that makes a decision about how those funds are going to be allocated. Sam, who's been on our, I've been a representative. Thank you Laura. Thank you to Ward 5 for the last two years. After two years, people are encouraged to cycle out. So we're looking for a new other representative for our CDBG council. And we have a deadline of January 10th. Yeah. People who asked me if we're interested, we've asked them to submit a short statement of interest on our by January 10th. Because our meeting on, I think it's January 16th, we'll have to select two more representatives. So just so we have a list of who's coming, we've asked people submit a statement of interest on our by Friday January 10th. And it's a really important position, obviously a volunteer position, allocates a really significant chunk of money to mostly organizations, not proper organizations that are doing really good work around the city. But you have to sort of buckle down and really kind of study the various proposals for that money and decide how it's going to be allocated. So it's a significant amount of work. Sam recorded the last couple of years with a very rewarding job. So anybody who wants to do it. Yeah. We'll send out another sort of front-party farm balance on that. So I'm just going to watch this. Sadly, the amount of money that he's throwing down continues to go back to cheer. Just briefly, as you may know, the town meeting day is coming up quickly. The progressive party has already held their nominee in caucus. But I wanted to announce that the Democrats will be holding their nominee in caucus January 12th, 5.30 at Edmunds Middle School Gym. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask me. I am no receiving of the Democratic nomination at the moment. What time do you have? 5.30. 5.30? Sunday at 12. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Jeff. Good luck. Carol? I went to a meeting recently and took this part of it so we can maybe make it more clear than I can. But it was to introduce the use of accessory volume mods into Burlington in the more user-friendly way than it has been. And I believe it's a percentage of your house, 30%, or 800 square feet. You can't exceed 800 square feet, right? That's right. For your backyard. But the percentage that it takes up in your backyard, I guess that's been being negated or being different or something. And there's a parking change that's made it better. But it seems most people, and I have to say that the owner has to live there, either in the house or an accessory volume. But I'm just so excited about it. It's been around for years and years to have volume and trying to be better. And the really cool thing I thought was that HomeShare is working with an architect who sort of seems to encompass everything. And anything you want, you can go to her or HomeShare. And they already have an accessible dwelling unit that's handicap-accessible that's already drawn out for 750 square feet. And to me, my right house is 600 square feet. Say it's like 800 feet great. So I hope you all, I mean, it's the absolutely fabulous way for people, especially some of the people that have a triple lock up there, to be able to burn some of the room for an accessory dwelling unit. But we don't want developers to use it so we just have a bunch of records. That it is for no homeowners. But I was just very excited and oh, we should tell your city council, one of the women's right here, I want to be sure that we really push this and go forward. And I think it's a great thing. We had, you know, being at Champlain Elementary a couple of weeks ago in the Maritime Area, there's not a lot of various houses and initiatives. I know Chip and the Organs Committee has been really dedicated to that. Do you just want to say briefly? From a process perspective, the way we're at it, the first read is being referred to. So there will be a work session held before the city council where this will be discussed at night. Then there will be another opportunity and another public hearing for the public to weigh in. So if anyone has, I'd be happy to, I spent a lot of time with A&E to use, to have them answer questions after the meeting or otherwise. But we're at the beginning of at least two more steps of the public process where input will be solicited. Great. Okay, anyone else for the public forum? So, Megan, I don't know where you are. For advancing. Yeah, you can use it from now. You can use it from this side. Then if you need to go back into, like, right click. Okay. You just let me know. And time check-wise, do I still have time? I think you still have 30 minutes. Yes, we have like a 10 minute break in this building. Okay, no, I just want to check it. And I want to make sure that you have time for questions and I don't go too fast. So thank you very much for joining me here tonight. We did get to most of the MTAs in November, which is why it says November, but this will stay the best for last. And I'm coming to talk to you today about our rates and affordability project. So tonight I just want to make sure everybody knows, you know, where the money that you pay of your water, sewer, stormwater, bill, bill, what is it that we do with it and the capital investments that we've been pursuing. Talk about why it is we're doing a rate study and why we're concerned about affordability and trying to tackle that right now. Look at a summary of the catalog options. So we're still in the, like, look at everything in the purchasing sink and then decide what maybe makes sense for our Ellington Florida payors here. And then want to make sure that you are aware of the project schedule. It's a very fast project schedule because we're trying to get things loaded on by the council before the next fiscal year. And so just want to make sure everybody knows sort of the next time where we're going to be coming back and talking to you more about the specifics. So this is really just sort of an overview, making sure you understand why it is we're doing this. And what it really comes down to is we do believe in the city of Ellington and hope others believe that everybody deserves access to clean water. That's made up of two things. First of all, you need to make sure that you can provide the clean water. You need to make sure that your treatment plants are working and you need to make sure that you have infrastructure, the pipes and the collection system to carry the water in various places. The challenge is in order to really do the clean water piece and to take care of your plants and invest in very, very old infrastructure you often need, and we've seen, rate increases may need more money in order to take care of the system. And a lot of the way Ellington is kind of making up the 1990s there was 10 years of gallery increase. And I just, I look back and if we had just had little tiny ones, back then I think we would have been in a much different place and we would have been able to start on some of these really important projects which I know are messing with your lives during the summer but they are really important. One of the analogies that I give because I think we're going into another season of construction is, you know, when you redo your house it is very terrible when you are having to live without a kitchen and you're doing your dishes in the bathtub. And inevitably when you're doing one project you're trying to redo your kitchen and you find five other things you have to fix at the same time and that's usually kind of what happens and kind of some of the reason why things sometimes take longer in the city is things don't always go according to plan and it is really challenging. I live in the city and trying to get around in the summer is very hard but afterwards, right, when you have a street that has been paved and you know that the water line was fixed beforehand so it's not going to blow up the next season you know, that is a good thing. It's like that really nice kitchen. So in any case, as we start getting into needing more money we are worried that that's going to butt up against the affordability, right? We don't have a terrible affordability problem here in the city there's not a huge amount of relief with payments but we know when we look out as to how we may need great increases in the future we could be finding ourselves where people are having to make a decision between buying food or healthy food or buying medicine and paying their water bill and we don't want to live in a world like that. One thing that's important to know is the money that goes to support water waste water, storm water is entirely separate from the taxpayer base so it's not funded at all by taxes that is entirely separate from money it is entirely from the fees that you pay on that water sewer storm water bill. In total it's about 17 and a half, 18 million dollars that we collect we serve approximately 10,000 connections so all of the residents are Burlington and we do sell a small amount of water to Coolchester and currently we have 43 full-time staff. On the water side the main functions of the water enterprise fund are to provide clean drinking water even though there's a drinking water plant, Champlain Water District at the end of Pine Street Burlington gets its water from its own drinking water treatment plant which is on the waterfront in between the Coast Guard and the Moran plant and the water system, the waterfront has been the oldest of the three waters since 1867 Burlington bought the Burlington Aqueduct Company and from there took things over. The other piece that the water fund or the water system does that people don't think about is the fire protection so all of the hydrants we have to have enough pumping capacity that if a large fire broke out in the city and we actually have to prove this when they go to do the insurance readings for the city that we're able to provide the fire department with sufficient fire flow that they would actually be able to put that fire out so that's sort of a side benefit nobody's technically paying for that all the repairs are paying for it but it's one of the things we're looking at is how we may be able to charge for that in a slightly different way on the wastewater side that's one of my favorite parts of the wastewater system the aeration system this is where all the bacteria live they are the big workhorses of the wastewater system they do all the munching and processing of the bacteria and we call it wastewater but more and more we do try to think about it as water recovery you're basically using clean, potable water right if you're drinking water in your toilet you put dirty things into it it comes to the wastewater plant and our team works to strip all the muck and the dirty stuff so that it can return clean and water as possible to the lake things, you know, haven't always gone well 2018 was not a great year thanks to the support of the voters we are well on our way to making some improvements to correct some of the issues that happened that year but the plant generally day in and day out does an amazing job and removes 95% of the phosphorus if we didn't have these wastewater treatment plants the situation with the lake would be much, much more terrible and we treat an insane amount of water the Halloween storm went off without a hitch the plant behaved perfectly but we processed almost as much water in that Halloween storm as we did in Hurricane Irene the amount of water that fell was so substantial and again, moving on to storm water storm water is the baby of the waters right so in the 1990s people started realizing that storm water wasn't really as clean as they thought it was it looks cleaner, it's not as dirty as wastewater but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see after a storm, events, all of the muck that collects on the roadways and does get into drains there are parts of our system that are on the combined sewer system so that storm water is going into a pipe and it's getting a wastewater plant and it's actually getting into it but the large majority of the system because we separated to get away from combined sewer events has no treatment whatsoever so that dirty water goes into a storm drain and goes right out to the lake, right out to Inglesby and so that's something that we're looking at we're actually trying to now retrofit and figure out how to reduce that pollution because it is a large line of pollution when you look at it year after year and then the other piece that the storm water program does is work really hard to continue to take water off of the combined sewer system not through separation because now we know there's problems with separation but through controlling it at the source and within where we can letting it sew back into the ground because that's really where storm water wants to be you know I mentioned that the work that we've been doing with the support of the council and the voters you can see for a long time we really just weren't reinvesting in our system it wasn't until FY17, FY18 and certainly FY20 these additional bars represent the money that we will be spending as part of the clean water resiliency plan like we're doing a much, much better job and thank you for continuing to realize that we do have to invest in these systems these costs create debt service they create line items where we have to then pay for many, many years and then every year operation they make these costs also go up just like your gas bills and your, if you have employees those bills go up so we're constantly fighting the battle of increasing costs as a result, as I said we have had over the past five or seven years fairly modest rate increases I think for some they look very big when we compare them to the national scale we are with well within the average and when we talk with our financial consultants about how we're doing they actually think we're doing pretty well even to keep things in the four to five percent range that being said if you continue on that trajectory even though the rates are quite somewhat affordable right now you pay about $50 so the average single family home who uses 400 cubic feet a month which is about 3,000 gallons pays just under $50 right now the rates are such that everybody pays the same there's no distinction between a residential user and a commercial user and that's something that we're looking at because when we talk about essential access to water a resident needs water in a different way than a commercial entity does so that gets us to our rate study and the last time we sort of started to come up and talk about rate increases particularly as part of the staffing increases that I need or our team needs in order to really provide you this clean service you know the council kind of well met us where we were already kind of going but made sure that we were going to get there by requiring that we pursue this rate study that we look at a number of things including a tiered progressive rate structure that would protect that essential access to clean water and then we also wanted to look at affordability programs so in total the effort that we're undertaking this fiscal year is to really look at our financial planning make sure we're collecting enough money that we're not being sort of short-sighted that we're developing appropriate policies for reserve that we are taking care of our capital needs and our repair and maintenance needs they want to make sure that we're actively recovering those costs should different customer classes be charged the same or maybe they should be charged differently and then even once we tinker with the rate and we have that progressive tier we need to recognize as we have rate increases there could still be load income or income burden customers that are paying a significant portion of their annual income just to get this essential access to clean water and so we want to look at the possibility of developing sort of wraparound programs that provide them additional discounts if they are in that income burden situation so some of the things that we are looking at one thing that we don't have right now but a lot of entities do including Burlington Electric as well as Vermont Gas is a fixed charge by meter size so right now the way we charge it is entirely based on how much you use a lot of other utilities have realized that whether you use water or you don't use water I still have to make sure the water is available I still have to have a meter there I have to have all my infrastructure and so in part to stabilize rates or stabilize the fluctuations in rates that may occur due to people using a lot or not using a lot that's one of the things that we're looking at that's going to be a change and there's going to be for some people it's going to mean that they're paying more more sort of as a portion of their bill but that's some of the conversation that when we come back in February and March we really want to bring you those examples so you understand that we're also looking at a number of different fees and charges primarily that would or entirely that would affect either new developments or commercial entities these four here would not affect residential users and then that piece that I was talking about that lifeline biometric rate so if we consider at this point that the average single-family residential home uses that 400 cubic feet a month perhaps that first block of water unlike electrical rates is a little cheaper right and if you are somebody who loves to take long showers and you have those means then go for it and we may end up charging you a little bit more for that and then that last piece I mentioned was the low the low income customer services programs now we don't want to get them to verify people's income we don't have staff for that so we're hoping to leverage other federal programs so if somebody is on SNAP or somebody is on the lifeline benefit that allows access or gives you a discount to internet and phone lines right you show us proof of that and then we provide you some sort of discount right now it's kind of looking just to give you a preview it's kind of looking that the discount would sort of tackle that fixed charge so for some customers that might go away and those customers really would only pay based on how much they're using that being said the world of affordability programs it's huge out there there's tons of things that we can do and want to do so we are we're kind of trying to sort things into a phase one phase two bucket at this point I think there's other programs that we're really interested in like increasing some water efficiency options figuring out how we could provide low flow toilets low flow fixtures to folks don't really help them tackle the affordability piece that way and one of our biggest questions and struggles and this has been a struggle across the nation when people are trying to implement affordability programs is how to help renters because renters most renters in Burlington pay their water sewer as part of their rent and so there isn't a way to specifically help them because you can imagine I could try to help them or I could help the landlord but then I can't prove that the landlord is passing on the benefit to the to the renter and so I think New York is the only place that's done it and they've only done it through right control like that's been the only way to unlock that animal that being said we know that there's so many renters in Burlington that we have to address this and so we're not stopping I just want to make sure that folks don't get blinded by that gap when we try to pass at least a good program when we get through our study and then lastly so we're here we're now in December we're crunching numbers we're you know spreadsheet models tweaking this tweaking that looking specifically at how different tweaks to the rate will affect different classes of customers and so that we can hopefully have those conversations with those various people in February we hope to be having a work session with the counselors and ideally with the public as well to kind of present the options that we've landed on what our recommendations are get that feedback so that we can go back to the drawing board actually so that we can take that feedback also come back to you guys in March make sure you're on board you don't have you know you guys probably have ideas about how you might want to see things tweaked and then we're going back to the board of finance and city council in April to hopefully have them bless some portion of what we're presenting so that we can then use that for our FY21 budget there's more information on that website I actually meant to bring copies of this presentation but I don't have it but I can you guys have copies so if you know you can pose your suit yep my colleague Jenna is outside so if there are any other breaks if you have any other burning dying questions about water or anything that's what she's there for there's lots of great materials out there and I will definitely be happy to take some questions on anything not just rates girl two things I know that a while ago I was a few years ago and you came by at night the house said that if I ditched my garden between the sidewalk and the street that way the water was going off the sidewalk into the ditch into the garden and did not have grass or I didn't I don't have grass then and so it would be real helpful I think if there were some things like that or to make less less lawn and more garden little things that people can actually easily do without I mean it's maybe muscle power but it's probably not additional expenses that we can do to keep maintaining the storm water at least for normal storms on our own property and I know that several of us I know I've done that where all my daughters run down actually what I've done is I put a pipe reefing underground so that the water all just gets back right around there but under that big storm that we had here comes my I'm trying to take this for a really dangerous that that because behind my house are all the gardens for all the people all the way to Shelter Road the water ran for four days for my property yep and maybe there's somebody we can get the gardens to trench all the way down that hill just to let us slow that water and keep it on their property so that would be real helpful to get individual easy things that we can all do and then the second thing is that it was interesting I think everyone I have a fee for however many meters it's maybe $40 we have one meter like I do it's $10 or something and then then after that based on perhaps the split of the building or the use of the building I don't think I should be paying the same as the commercial building is down to I think that's your immediate source of revenue and it might really help trying to do more I don't really feel good that I'm paying the same as downtown building and I have 1,200 square feet on a lot that's too small to build on the rate structure that we are looking at now certainly the commercial folks would be paying a different rate we're not at this point planning on charging the same residential as commercial now how different the commercial rate is going to be higher than that initial bike line water that people are having access to and I just want to give a shout out to Caroline the whole keeping water on your own property I know people think it doesn't make much of a difference but if everybody kept a little more water on their property that means less water in the roads less water in the pipes less water it really feels like not as happy I live in Ward 3 which has 65 feet of sand I can get rid of all of my water but even during that Halloween storm I have to tell you I was in my basement I was shugging socks and all sorts of things in my stone foundation because the water was pouring in so much it was terrible but I think it is more remarkable to have their property in a boldly back storm water did you do the blue BGV program? what? I said you have done a remarkable job around your house just in terms of maintaining storm water and keeping it there and guarding and catching the water but I guess my question for you Megan is so if people were allowed to have composting clothes if that actually caught on and people wanted to do that for one reason or another wouldn't that reduce the water load both the water load and the clean processing load quite a bit and what are the obstacles? the obstacles because somebody actually emailed me about this today it has come up I know that it was a lot harder than any of us wanted it to be and I can't remember exactly why I think it has to deal with the state and or potentially like building permits plumbing code yes I mean it would help it's not again it's not something that we from a policy perspective are going to try to implement but from a environmental perspective anytime somebody uses less water that means less flows at the plant which can sort of like regain some of the capacity so people are wasting water it goes to the plant and that can eat up the available capacity that we have but then yes if you were managing your waste in a different way that can certainly that can certainly help yeah so maybe for your 80 years you can well that's how it came up somebody contacted us about a tiny house and could they have a composting toilet and a gray water system so not so any of the like sink water or shower water would go out into the yard and it's fuzzy in my head like eight years ago but there was somebody at the old North End that was trying to do that and I just know that it was a lot harder than it should be and the regs probably haven't caught up with where people are at and then making sure if you do have a composting toilet that it you know you have to treat it appropriately and it can go south and then you end up not having a toilet facility which becomes a sanitary issue I think that's some of where the stake gets stuck one of the places that come easier is storm water reuse so if you could collect the storm water particularly for commercial buildings and use that to flush toilets because it's dumb in my opinion to flush toilets with drinking water when you could harness the storm water keep it and getting to the combined sewer system and then use it as your as your flushing system so that's sort of my long list of like other icing policy stuff we have so much heavy policy stuff that we're trying now and also development of programs so you know doing things on your own property we did have a pilot program last year Blue BTV where somebody would come and assess your home and recommend a few things that you could do to improve water quality on your property and then we had grant money available so that if the person said hey you're a great candidate for turning your adding down spouts capturing the water and we paid for that because if we can prove that it's cheaper or at least no more expensive to spend that money on your property versus trying to dig up a roadway and put in a bump valve or a tank or something then it makes good cost-effective sense so that's a program that I would like us to see you know solidify and codify same thing one of the affordability enhancements on the storm water side we currently offer storm water credits for commercial property like here city market they have actually filed a credit application that they would be eligible that bioretention the island that's in the middle of the parking lot that captures storm water makes me so happy every time I come here also not dying when I'm trying to park but so they would be eligible for they would be eligible for a storm water credit but currently residential folks are not I'd like to see if somebody's done something substantial on their property you know give them a 50% discount on their storm water fee it's not going to like it might pay for a nice meal over the course of the year but just in recognition that like somebody's made the investment and is maintaining a system that helps all of us and helps keep our way clean you guys have no grasp I have no grasp that's great to like that what happens in a in a big in a in the large developments that are happening in Burlington in terms of wastewater and storm water management I only heard you talk about really residential and individual things for example that at Burlington College that giant development that's going in are they required to do certain things that actually contribute to the overall improvement of the system of the of the infrastructure financially or just let me start so yes one of the things that we have to look at is leveraging all of the new development and new new development for our chapter 26 ordinance to so if somebody built something new they have to manage their impervious surface whether they need a state permit or not 100% they need to demonstrate to us that it's not going to have an impact in the case of Cambrian Rise that's the project they additionally because they were going to be increasing the wastewater flow in the combined sewer system we additionally made them do even more stormwater and they're actually building or costuring with us a project that will be taking our stormwater from North Ave so we're taking storm drains on North Ave and infiltrating that water to offset the fact that they are going to be taking up more space in the pipe so any that project at least the former approvals for the mall that was fully disconnecting all of the roof water that currently went to the combined sewer system and detaining it and treating it and then sending it to the separate so pretty much any substantial commercial projects that you see like my team is scrutinizing that and making sure that they are doing as much as they can to make things better even redevelopment you can have a parking lot there and one could say if I have a parking lot and I build a building I'm not making it any worse well that's not good enough for us we need to make it better so we actually require them to make it 30% so they go through a modeling effort to show what they need to do to make that site look like half of the site and usually we like to see people do infiltration getting the water to the ground where that's not possible and sometimes they do tanks or rain gardens that filter and slow things down we always try to use green storm water infrastructure wherever possible like the the median because we feel like it provides other community information but it only provides storm water function where something like that provides habitat for birds and bees it's a lot nicer it creates more cooling so we really try to push those types of projects when and where we can does that answer answer your question I've been a campion where I sit down what seems to be so keeping in mind specifically they have infiltration systems so all of their storm water the new roadways have store have bioretention so they'll have things kind of similar to similar to what's in the middle here in the parking lot and then any excess water that the gardens can't handle will actually go to a larger subsurface infiltration system and leverage the sand that is on that site one more questions did you have questions Spencer? yeah I live across the street to play an empty concrete home play for a unit and we have a large parking lot but it just it's very antique yeah so if there's a chance that somebody could come and look at it and give us some ideas of reasonably cost things yeah I think one of the challenges you have the outfall the outfall pipe for the whole area goes through here for a long time yeah so as far as available space it's hard because you are right up on the brook but I believe I'm trying to think if that property was actually assessed as part of the I can ask Jenna and or Alaska but we can connect the two of you up there and we can look it up I think there may be a rain garden a large fire attention area in between the 180 flint and you guys that was supposed to collect the water there is kind of a marsh with some trees between us right I think that was going to be formalized at least I'm remembering in my my mind's eye retrofitting I think you're talking about it's really hard what we're charged to do is these existing properties that have been there and they they were there when there was no stormwater regulation and now we're trying to figure out how to cram stormwater treatment back into our streets back into some of these properties there's a new regulation from the state really large properties three acre they have three acres and more of a pervious are actually going to be forced to retrofit which is a good thing sort of class effectiveness going after these larger these larger properties really hard you know people are used to having giant parking lots and to have the government come after the fact and say guess what you have to put in stormwater treatment even if you are a lake lover it's going to be going to be some headbutting but we're we're trying to figure out how to facilitate that process great yeah well it seems like it's been a really big lift so I commend you and thanks for looking forward to having you back in March as you go from the front yeah so we'll hopefully really have specific examples of what we're planning on presenting or planning on advancing and hopefully hopefully you guys will like some of it or most of it you know no plan is ever perfect but awesome people want to I think you had your website out there but people otherwise want to get in touch with you say any thoughts or comments on it absolutely I got in the minutes okay thank you sounds good thanks Megan thank you we had a great build in but in the interest of staying on track here I think we can probably just go to the next part of the agenda if we find some time till break later on we'll take it then but even so you could get up at any time yeah we got some cookies cookies so thank you and thanks thanks as we kind of blacked out here or looks like maybe they're still organized and that's great better yet congratulations thank you thank you hi everybody I'm Darren Sprague our manager with an electric department joined by with our Director of Sustainability and Workforce Vitality, and we're excited to be here to talk about Net Zero Energy. We'll talk about the vision for the future for the city of Berlin. All right. Great. So, I'll go ahead. Oh, yeah. Do you want me to go ahead there? I'll start off. We're going to kick it back and forth a little bit. So, this is just a brief agenda. I'm going to just give a little background on Berlin's electric, some of the things we've been working on. Jen is going to walk you through our Net Zero Energy Roadmap, some of the key findings of what we've looked at as the city moves towards becoming essentially 100% renewable, not just for electricity, but also in thermal and ground transportation as well. And then we're going to talk a little about some of the programs and incentives that we're offering to help residents and businesses move in that direction. So, for folks who may not be 100% familiar with all this, just some information on Berlin's electric, we have around 118 employees between our Pine Street Office and the McNeil plant in the intervail, as well as the Winooski One Hydro Plant, which is right on the river in Winooski. We operate the Winooski One Hydro and McNeil plant. McNeil is now the largest energy producing plant in the state of Vermont since Vermont Yankee closed back in 2013. So, it's an important plant for us and for the state. We're 100% renewable. As of 2014, we were the first city in the nation to be recognized as sourcing 100% of our power from renewable generation. We continue to do that year after year. And you can see here our customer breakdown is just about three quarters residential and one quarter commercial. About 60% of our customers on the residential side are renters. And in terms of the energy use, it's actually flipped. It's about 75% commercial energy use and about 25% residential energy use. And we are the third largest utility in the state of Vermont and the largest municipal utility in the state of Vermont. So, when we talk about the net zero goal, there are really two kind of pillars for us in terms of the work that we've done to date for the utility. The first is our work on energy efficiency. So, what efficiency Vermont does for the rest of the state, we do for Burlington. We're the only utility that still runs its own energy efficiency program. We've invested with our customers roughly 70 million dating back to the 1990s in energy efficiency and we're saving about 12 million for our customers every single year on energy efficiency in avoided costs on our electric bill. So, we have a good payback on that investment. This has always been impressive to me looking back to 1989, Burlington is using roughly 6% less electricity today than we were in 1989, even as we've grown in population and square footage. If the rest of the country had done that, you could shut down more than 200 coal plants equivalent energy use. So, very significant accomplishment in Burlington in terms of efficiency. And this is our photo of our calendar contest with all the fourth graders in Burlington Public Schools. It was our energy efficiency calendar contest this year for the first time. It was the net zero contest, but fourth graders who do artwork on energy and submit it and can win and come and enjoy a nice night of pizza with me and Champ and the mayor and others here at Burlington Electric in the picture. So, we're happy to provide calendars if anybody needs one. Just stop by. This is just a reference to our renewable energy supply in 2018. So, on the left over here is looking at renewable energy credits. We're 100% renewable even after we both buy and sell renewable energy credits. This is our portfolio of supply on the right. You can see it's a little more than a third is coming from biomass from the McNeil plant. About a third coming from hydro power, both large and small. Both in Vermont and some from New York, some from Canada. And then a little less than a third coming from three different wind projects. Two in Vermont, one in Maine. And a growing slice of our energy is coming from solar. That's the orange slice there. 1.4% in 2018. It was only 0.3% in 2017. So, it's grown fairly rapidly in the Department of America. It's the number one community per capita for solar in the Northeast just recently. And number four in the country. So, I'm going to hand it over to Jen and talk about that zero energy. Yeah. So, as Darin mentioned, we were the first... Thanks, by the way. It's really great to be here. I would like some more time. I think that the city market space makes this definitely welcome. So, as Darin mentioned, coming on that success, we are now launching into this new world, this roadmap, which essentially means that we're looking at a transition away from fossil fuels in thermal, i.e. heating, for the case of Vermont and ground transportation. So, we knew we couldn't do it alone. So, essentially, we put out an RFP or a request for proposal. We got some very competitive proposals back and we selected a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Synapse Energy Economics. So, they did the analysis for us and they helped us chart our course forward. Their subcontractor was a local group, a resource systems group who was responsible for looking at the transportation portion of our analysis. So, here we are. The roadmap is done and we're here to sort of tell you about it and hopefully get you excited about joining us in this transition to fossil fuels. So, I want to tell you a little bit about the roadmap unveiled for us. As you can see, this is our current portfolio of energy use in the city. We've got transportation. This is the line section here, which is in and out of the city. So, essentially, not BED customers for living in Burlington per se, not BED residential customers. We've got the building sector here and we've got so the dark earth piece is transportation in the city by BED customers. If we eliminate this because in essence we can't control a whole lot of this, you can see the biggest portion of our energy use in the city is the building sector. So, we've got transportation of commercial and residential buildings followed by this darker pie which are Burlington vehicles. So, here we are. This is where we are and where we want to be. If we follow our business as usual from how we're using or transitioning away from fossil fuels now, you can see the trajectory is not particularly dynamic. It's not going to get us where we need to go. The roadmap shows us that there's a pretty precipitous decline in S0, i.e., the off the fossil field by 2030. Just for sort of kicks we decided to see what it would look like if we moved out that roadmap to 2040. So, you can see this less precipitous decline here just as a comparison. But in essence, this is the pathway we want to follow. It's quite dramatic it's going to take work on all of our behalf. So, here is the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Now, essentially this is not a climate action plan, but there will be very significant greenhouse gas emissions reduced a reduction if we indeed follow along a roadmap. Here we have the natural gas that we're going to have to phase off, phase away from as well as the petroleum. I will say again, if we do succeed by 2030 we will have decreased our greenhouse gas emissions by 69%. If we do it in 2040, there's a 50% decrease. So, significant on both counts. But again, we're really aiming for that 2030 gold. So, I think this is probably the most telling or interesting takeaway from the roadmap. This is essentially what we need to do to get that green trajectory down to 2030. If you think about all these four pieces in sort of a pie of what we're going to have to tackle, 60% of that work is going to have to happen in buildings. Essentially, we're going to need to transition our heating and cooling systems to heat pumps, a variety of different heat pump sources. We're going to need to strategically electrify. 20% of our effort is going to entail moving away from what we refer to as ice vehicles or internal combustion engine vehicles to electric. 3%, excuse me, 15% of the third piece of the pie is just heating. And I know over many years you've heard about the potential of tapping what we refer to as the waste heat from McNeil and utilizing that as a heating source. So, that's the third biggest chunk of the pie followed last but not least, of course, by alternative transportation. So, that's 5% of our effort. And although it may seem small, I think it's significant and it's something that we can all start working on in our way, essentially. So, there you have what we need to do and where we need to go. So, this is exciting I think for a couple things, for a couple reasons. One, it's probably the most ambitious local government climate change initiative in the country that I'm aware of. There's not any community that I'm aware of that's trying to tackle fossil fuel use reductions on this scale for heating and transportation. Most communities are trying to get to 100% renewable electricity, which we're in the fortunate position of already building off of. So, I think it's exciting from the standpoint of trying to reduce emissions and be a model for work on climate change. It's exciting as well economically. I didn't mention up front, but we've actually been able to hold rates studies since 2009 at BED. We're entering our 11th year without a rate increase. So, we're delivering that value. But in this transition that we're talking about, if we use more electricity, more renewable electricity and get off the fossil fuels it actually has a significant local economic benefit. If you spend a dollar at the gas station buying gas, about a sense of that dollar leaves the state of Vermont economy. We don't really benefit as much from that. If you spend a dollar at BED charging an electric vehicle, more than half of that dollar stays in Vermont and more than three quarters of it stays in the regional economy. It's actually cheaper to drive electric than to drive on gas. I don't know if everybody has heard that, but if you're driving on electric stations around the community, you'll see a sticker that says $1.46 a gallon equivalent, because that's the equivalent cost. If you're charging up at home, we have a special rate that can get you the equivalent of 60 cents a gallon if you're charging off peak during times when electricity is cheap. So there's a huge economic benefit as we transition away from fossil fuels. We use the local electric companies energy as opposed to the fossil fuel energy. The next two slides are basically a list of different incentives I encourage everybody to visit BurlingtonElectric.com You can read the entire roadmap report is on there. Basically, we have incentives for every type of electric transportation. We have e-bike incentives for folks who want to ride an electric bike at all the different local bike shops $200 off. If you're looking to purchase or at least a plug-in vehicle or an electric vehicle we have a $1,200 rebate and it's up to $1,800 for our low income customers. If you're getting a pre-owned EV we have $800 off for that as a rebate. We also have home charging station incentives. We have electric bus incentives. We're expecting two new electric buses to join the Green Mountain Transit fleet with incentives from VED this month and hopefully be in operation early next year. And then we also as part of the roadmap announcement we've moved into some new areas, particularly cold climate pumps where you can displace a portion of your fossil fuel heating and have very efficient air conditioning and very efficient heating. Heat pump water heaters, also very efficient way to heat your hot water as opposed to using natural gas. I don't know if anybody's looking for an electric forklift, but we have a friend who's kind of programmed for that as well. $6,500 off for those electric forklifts and actually we've had a real big success with our electric lawnmower program. We have seen nearly 150 Burlington customers took advantage of that this past summer. We sold out all the Ace Hardware stores in the area of electric mowers and hope to have another good run at that this coming summer. And when we talk about electric vehicles charging always comes up. We have currently 15 charging stations with 27 charging ports, public stations in the community. We've got one here at City Market that's a private station. We have some of those as well. We're going to more than double the number of stations around the community over the course of next year with a particular focus on getting charging stations at multifamily buildings so that if somebody is a renter or living in a multifamily building maybe doesn't have a place to charge that they're going to have opportunities as well. We want to make this accessible to everybody. And we also have a new charging station right on Main Street and St. Paul with a car share electric vehicle. So if you're a member of car share or you want to sign up, there's a new Nissan Leaf called Sparky. I guess the name of all the vehicles. And you can check it out and drive electric and see if you like it. So I think we'll go ahead and wrap there and see if there are any questions for us that we can answer now or you can feel free to email us as well. And thanks for your time. Yeah. So District Energy has been talking about for at least 30 years now. That's right. And we're not how long it's been there. Why hasn't it happened and what are the real prospects of it happening in the near future? It hasn't happened because of cost I think is probably the right answer. Getting the infrastructure in place to get either hot water or steam from McNeil and pipe up the hill and get it to some of the larger customers who could use it. UVM Medical Center, UVM, downtown buildings is not inexpensive. The reason I have some optimism now is we've been working intensively on this in a very serious way for the last several years with Vermont Gas at the Table with UVM Medical Center at the table, UVM. If I can insert an effort to do feasibility work around it, we think that there is a case for getting probably steam more than hot water. We were looking at hot water, but probably steam getting a connection to UVM Medical Center and then potentially UVM and eventually other buildings as well. It's very tough to compete with natural gas on a fuel cost basis right now. Natural gas is very, very cheap. For customers who are looking at it, there's going to have to be a little bit of a longer view and a little bit of a view towards the carbon reduction benefit because what you're doing is taking essentially lost energy in some cases that's going up the stack at McNeil now and some additional energy we can produce there and utilizing it. It'll be a good thing from an environmental standpoint but we have to get the economics right for the customers on board. So is there a path forward for that? I believe there is. We're at the table with all those folks trying to work through that right now. If it's a pure economic scenario, what's the cheaper BTU of fuel? Is it going to be from natural gas or district heat? It's going to be from natural gas. So we have to have the conversation in kind of a bigger context than just comparing the two fuel sources. UVM Medical Center has been very, very environmentally conscious. They're very committed to looking at the solution with us. We've had good conversations with them with UVM and Vermont Gas actually had an announcement last month. I don't know if folks saw it where they committed to working to decarbonize their system through a variety of things including district energy in Burlington. So we've got some commitments that are helpful. I have some optimism but it's an uphill battle to make sure that the economics can be at least comparable. Maybe not cheaper but at least get them to be comparable where a customer can say, I want to be an off taker of that energy. That's what we're working on. We're also looking at securing some incentives from the state to help us make the project a little more cost competitive as well. What about for a big scheme project from the University of Madison? What about a caretnistic thing? In other words, they have to pay extra if they stick with natural gas in some way but they get incentives from the state. That goes to a point that Mayor is made and others which is we probably need to have a price on carbon pollution in Vermont. We don't have that right now so essentially if you're using fossil fuel you're not really paying for the cost of the pollution. The city is starting to use Mayor announced this in November I believe is going to use the cost of carbon in our own fleet purchases in the city our own heating system purchases in the city there was resolution Councilor Mason and others supported that basically set up a report back in January of all the things that the city is going to do to move towards this net zero energy goal but your point is well taken if we were pricing carbon pollution accurately this project would pencil much easier. It's certainly correct and we're supportive of the state moving in that direction. Yes. I noticed that you had on there the electric hot water heat pumps you guys I thought about a $4,500 bill but because of what BED is doing in some other companies I'm going to get almost $1,800 rebate back on the $4,400 bill so my major heat will be using electric and I've got solar that extra solar coming through about $400 I think now so I'll be able to use that towards the price of running the heat pump but that incentive just started a few months ago right? That's right. So please look into them for the heat pump for heat but I didn't know that you also had one for hot water I've got a wheel McLean that runs the heat plus the water together so I don't know whether in a tiny house in a tiny earth space but I don't know whether we should have you look at that you're coming on the 30th of December for the heat pump. So maybe we do want to connect you with the residential energy services team just to make sure it learns Chris's is in Charlottesburg because I didn't know you were doing the water so I should talk with him. We can talk afterwards Carol and so forth. Thanks for what you're doing now. Thank you guys so much I don't know I'm sure to look at the heat pumps Yeah it's probably each unit has its own heating system. Yeah well that may be easier each person puts their own thing in but it's quite expensive to do 24 of these and we have small income people who support you. So you can't just do your own heat over there yourself? I could if I had the money. But I'm just saying their incentive is half the price so to me it makes sense. Well so that was one of my questions actually you mentioned that the rebate goes up for low moderate income threshold what is your threshold and what is low moderate income? So we use the CEDO metric CEDO has for the city and that we go by and it depends on how many folks are in the unit or in the household but so we use the city metrics but to your point with the heat pumps they're modular so they can heat a space and condition a space fairly efficiently and right now with the incentive we're offering for a single unit heat pump it can run $3,500-4,000 to install but we can get up to $2,200 and there are a number of credit unions well it's not specifically just you you've got the EIC I think and someone giving money for we fund that too we do that part of it as well there's an upstream and a downstream so the customer gets a rebate and then the installer gets a discount to offer the customer but it nets out to about I think $2,200 total but then if you're looking at doing any of these types of things you know VSCCU as a partner of ours whether they're the credit unions, Green Mountain Vermont Federal they all have really good energy loan programs so if there's a gap between the remade covers and what the cost is you can finance it, unsecured you don't have to have collateral for that and you can get a rate that's fairly reasonable much much better than what a regular personal loan would be and they're doing a great job getting access to these projects so there's going to be a payback with the energy savings on a lot of these projects so that hopefully your monthly out-of-pocket is relatively level Question, most of our units are two-story would you need one on each four? Potentially, they have a unit where you have one outdoor unit and it can connect to two indoor units so I keep pumps in my upstairs three bedrooms we have one unit in each of the bedrooms and one outdoor unit that it connects to so that'll cost a little bit more but we do have incentives that can cover some of that they're a real interesting technology it's only five or six years ago that these really started going in and now there's a significant market for them in Vermont for the cold climate the technology has been around forever but it didn't used to work when it was negative five and now it does it's impressive I run them every night during the winter it doesn't matter what the temperature is outside they work it's been about five or six years but you have a second heat source we do so we have a zone heating system so we have like an energy star like you were saying we have a plane boiler because we have natural gas but basically what I can do is turn that zone off and use the heat pumps only for that zone we figured out that the bedrooms were where we were using most of our heating energy because we have two kids we'd be running heat up there from eight at night and the kids go to bed until maybe seven in the morning or six thirty whenever everybody got up to stay significantly on our fossil fuel use and not to mention like I mentioned earlier very efficient air conditioning much better than a window unit much cheaper than a window unit any other questions we can answer now that anybody has it's just that there's little things we can all feel like planning more garden and less grass or something to let us know I wonder if there's much of this there's much of this climate summit that was in the ED anybody else here go to that it was on the third I think it was very good yeah yeah it's a group of state legislators who are working on various bills there are about a hundred people from Burlington yeah that's our spark space our community space kind of like this room a little bit bigger down at Burlington Electric thanks for having us we really appreciate it and if you check on the website if you have any questions let me know we're glad to help answer them so we are in word 5 at the NTA we're committed to doing some segment of our meeting on the climate related to the climate emergency every month so we'll have you back excellent thank you we have so many things we can do I have some electric cars for us to try yeah we can at all totally do that that was a thing recently that we did oh yeah cars it was over at the Wind & Waves parking lot we had four different we had Tesla, Hyundai Audi and what was the fourth one Nissan yeah we had that big building we'll do another one of those it was a fun event a lot of people got to test an electric car that's the thing if you drive one you're gonna like it it's important to get more people to experience it because people will realize that the performance is incredible it's not just more efficient it's not just zero fossil fuel instant torque, lots of good power performance in those vehicles new technology we're working very soon I think in the new year we'll be able to announce that a lot of partnership with some area auto dealers who are committing to do more to move electric vehicles and we'll be announcing that as well, up to 4,000 or 5,000 off for low moderate income for moderate so a lot of opportunities to drive electric I thought there was a 7,000 on the Tesla there's a federal credit that sells up to 7,500 so between the federal credit our rebate and the state rebate it's possible to get 13,000 or so off of an Nissan lead for a Chevy Bolt or some of those different vehicles good opportunities to drive electric we're enthusiasts but let us know we're glad to set up a test drive for anybody anytime maybe that's a spring event a parking lot to pre-eating or something, we'll get our cars here no garbage right now no garbage went to like you can definitely do some spring events yeah well thanks for having us, appreciate it thank you we noticed it on our agenda and here on that oh you're looking at the cans we would you know, we would be driving oh great, but we are we'll lead you to a company who's going to do a demo for the city and local businesses of band companies so we're going to have a band here soon I do want to know more about this he's just a gentleman he stayed for 15 years I am already thank you for listening I wish I could I'll grab a thing alright, so a very un-spent or spent reached out wanting to do a presentation on electric bands and so thanks for reaching out to us we're looking forward to what you have to say this follows really well I just gave one of these to close to Darren he could do an incentive for these electric passenger bands what I'm going to talk about is the idea of public transportation here being electric but not big buses passenger bands which are much cheaper and there's a program that Ford has with an organization called Lightning Systems in Colorado and it creates a Ford body of a van holding like 12 to 15 people and then the Lightning Systems puts in the electric drive train and the price is quite different from an electric bus so I think I've introduced myself already from across the street here and I've lived in Burlington since 1990 and I've really become quite concerned about the climate issue we have a changing climate but life is not going to be sustainable here on this planet for human beings and for many other species so we can feel guilty about that but we've all lived off the fat of the land so to speak in other words even those of us who don't have a lot of money have had a very good life here in the United States compared to so many regions which are now suffering even more than we will in the near future and so this is why we have this refugee problem of 65 or 75 70 million people because a lot of this climate change so this got me really wanting to do something and last spring the weather turned good and I wanted to be out walking all the time I was walking past a couple of times I would walk past the parking lot that famous bridge mud hole which the city should feel the same ashamed of it they haven't paved it in about 40 years regardless of whatever happens in the future and I saw a park not in the city market but behind it there's some land there it's just open and two to four passenger vans they were pretty good looking they were fairly long not like private SUVs or whatever they can hold maybe 9 or 10 people so I began thinking my background is the arts I've been a visual artist and a writer and I write fiction and some poetry and I've done journalistic stuff interviewing people so if I just started thinking in my mind what if these could be electric I had no idea how it could be I talked to what happened to me here it was the June meeting June Uliens who is one of our Senators and we just happened to get to talking and I thought what do you think of the idea that what if we had electric passenger vans so they told her I'd seen these vans they looked pretty good she was very interested so I go online and start searching for electric vans well they're in China all over the place of course they're public transportation but really not in Europe and a lot of these things are used not electric but many third world countries have these vans or they're all over and we don't have them so much here mostly you see them as like a hotel has a van gets people from the airport but they're not electric so I started looking into it and I'll pass this out in a minute we can look through them but first of all the cost between a van and a passenger I'll take right when people are interested yeah you give them two sides here so one bus and you'll see on this one more good bus costs a million dollars now two years in 2017 Senator Leahy apparently told Fremont Transit that he was giving us two buses and it was going to cost $500,000 for these two buses and I wasn't sure if it was clear to me whether he was getting the money for it or whatever so they still haven't come so far as I know and it's been going into 2020 since three years ago so here if you look at that on the first page point A is the advantages of electric passenger vans over electric buses number one of course is the cost for a million dollars you can have one bus for about that money you can have 10 or 12 passenger vans and they can be adapted to handicap they can be they have special safety factors we'll see as you reach further so we can have more buses which is a big problem there's been declining ridership but lives have been declining the price keeps going up the schedules get worse the time street used to run every 15 minutes of rush hour and then I think every half hour in the middle of the day now it's only every half hour so you can walk over to Shelter Road I'm sorry I'm 80 years old it's no one eyes I'm not going to walk to Shelter Road you know and it's we should have more of these and this would enable us to have much more coverage and have more frequent and go more places and so on so then the idea of having the bus thinking all that money is a big budget well we'll have it for a little over 20 years but technology is changing a lot people are talking about hydrogen now that might replace the lithium batteries we already have hydrogen here we have hydrogen that's the cars buses oh well I haven't been aware of that we have natural gas I was going to say hydrogen so I would have heard about it well I knew it wasn't normal well it's a fossil fuel so so then if we had instead of like 5 buses we had 5 times 10 50 buses if you have you can do a change over gradually if you don't have all your money so the big technologies our streets are so narrow because so much of the city was laid out before modern you know probably lots of it was before cars if you look at go on Union Street or South British Peak it's a lot of big houses that were probably built in the late 19th early 20th century um in a small advance could not only have more maneuverability on those narrow streets but it would allow more space for bikes, planes and pedestrians and that would be a great plus so as you see if you go out on the page look at passenger trains they're right through to China and being planned for urban use in Germany I think UW is getting one but I don't even know if it's out yet but so far this Ford lighting system is the only passenger van here in the U.S. and I've talked to people at Ford Heritage Ford and that would be a great source of jobs actually if we had a bunch of these they could install the electric systems, drive trains they could have somebody trained to do that and then they could do any repairs or servicing which is a big cost savings I talked to the the guy who's the head of the union here the union bus drivers Rob Slingerlin I think is his name and he said well one complaint I've heard is you have to hire more drivers if you have a lot more vehicles he said I think it would come out as a wash between not having the price of the diesel or the gas and then maintenance is so much less in electric vehicles so and they spent a lot of money on maintenance half of the fleet apparently according to my source at Green Mountain Power it shouldn't be on the road and it's a problem because the Green Mountain budget does not include new vehicles I was told in other words they have to be gifted from the legislature to get a new vehicle people said well are they safe well the Ford vans the SSTA vans that take around older people and sick people so they're considered safe for them and the longer passenger vans have these side airbags which is an additional safety feature side seatbelts and the other issues then we have a problem with cars which this could help with how many people who drive a car downtown are trying to tear their hair from the parking place so and then the roads are all parked up you know good on Union Street or South Lemusky both sides of the street are parked up with cars and I think they're starting to the city is starting to take away some of that like I know they've just taken away a whole block of flint per parking which is good because it's been a terrible blind spot for those of us in the 24 units coming out of our driveway who had accidents because so also there are more and more cars and I think part of it is and I don't know what the thinking is of the car companies but they're producing cheaper and cheaper gasoline cars and so people if you look at the ads you can see 159 a month for a brand new gasoline car and some of them are warm but it seems like because the economy has been good there are a lot of big trucks that are being bought what are called the vanity truck and there's a lot of SUVs for people who live in Berlin who don't really need an SUV and some people can't afford cars some people out of principle will not drive a car but other people just can't afford it you know and so they have to ride the public transportation where the cost is going up even for low income people so on page 3 the last page is how do we get people out of their cars and into public transportation and this is you can read through that partly is we need to have longer service hours you know I can't go by bus downtown to a literary discussion I have to drive down because the bus stops running at 6.30 and this goes to 8.30 and how many people go to the movies or concerts you know you have to or whatever or a bike and some of us I'm not able to bike physically because I have joint replacements but but this is the limited thing so the other thing is we can abolish fares and not an increased ridership apparently apparently I've heard 7th percent I've heard 10 percent that this the portion of the budget that is income fares is only 7 or 10 percent of it so really if you're not doing away with it and we can cover that probably by a 1 cent gallon tax on gasoline in other words you take so you would incentivize more people to ride the bus if it was free and take the bus and the idea I don't know if I put this in here the idea of having yeah it's a .8 here on the last page having free parking lots or high rises exit 12 is soon going to have a park and ride a lot well we had more of those and so people could were driving in could park whether they were going to Williston or to F6 junction or coming into Bowman there could be passenger vans could take them into town so so questions I just want to say if you're interested in more information and want to get involved in this project I feel like I've been struggling with this in a way alone because like I'm a quaker and I'm involved in that group but they will soon live outside the city so they're not too worried about you know transportation in town so anyway, any questions discussion so you've talked to the drivers in the three mountain transit have you talked to the management well the management is sort of temporary the guy who was there for quite a while was fired or on leave or something and I get the impression from people I've talked to in the city and the legislature and also the drivers that he's not doing a whole lot and I don't know you know I've only spoken to him on the phone but what about the board what about the board well I've got the name of somebody on the board that I've just wanted to contact and they say they've never written down a poem yes I know there's a commissioner or a board right so maybe we have the names of the board people they've been censored I've talked to him personally a couple times and he's interested I've talked to Joan Shannon she raised the question about the cost of drivers which apparently would even out because of other reduced costs who else have I talked to well both Lyons and Mary Sullivan who are rep from this board and there was the big meeting that was at BED and I was really hard to see people they're going to have a very strong committee in the legislature a joint committee between the senate and the house dealing with transportation and what we heard tonight this works with it did you sort of just figure out how many buses that we have running in Burlington and it seems like they're all big and when I asked him why they weren't all big and they said well there's rush hour and I said yeah well that's a million an hour but you don't need to run I was saying instead of these big ones that didn't understand did you or were you able to get to a point where you would say hey Burlington could you you know would be best served by say 20 of these little vans and get rid of all the big ones or 10, 15 or any idea probably we should phase out and phase in true but then maybe I don't even know how many buses we have I don't either but it's a good way to store but I think we should probably retire some of the ones that are in the shade I'm sure but we say if we get 20 then we know our goal is and one big bus has 3 vans replaced one big bus is that them sorted out I don't know how many people ride in a big bus they get a whole 30 I think so then we say 3 of these for a big bus okay if anybody wants to work on this do research it would be great so I see you have the list there if people give you their name and the email what's your thinking is your thinking that you're going to try to get a meeting together yeah thank you I'd like to get a meeting together of people who are interested in working on this because I've been one person doing all this research and I have another life writer so on but yeah I'll pass this around if anybody who wants to put your email address on there and your name I sure would talk with BED most people would just on the way out I gave that sounds like the right at least we could figure out a way to get incentives for this so it would be great yeah well they want to reduce transportation so seems like an electrical bit yeah well it would cut the pollution and it would be better transportation coverage I don't know if you should probably you've got a lot more information than the rest of us I mean trying to tie it to the net zero and the original vehicle it would work towards that true BED yes yeah I would take a proposal right to them and have them because they've got figures to be there all the legislation the money is on the legislature most of it if there's incentives it comes from or probably the Fed some of it have the right people in place yeah which is great I knew they were really supportive because when I went to that big climate summit on December 3rd it was very good well Spencer I really appreciate your work on this and also appreciate your using us as a form to talk about it yeah I would like to get all the awards because we really need we really need a swell of the people behind this I think you know so we get the legislature saying well these people really want this they're working for it well there's a new tool I think you used it to sign up with us but there's a new tool where you can sign up relatively easily now yet on the agenda for the other NPA oh really? so talk to one of us we can point you in the right direction okay do we get to hear from Chip? no he wants to be no I don't think we have time well we didn't in Chip's defense we didn't make like Chip to be on the agenda you know but what I will say is that as Chip mentioned the Democratic caucus is coming up and whoever the Democratic nominee is we have a progressive nominee as well for city council and I know that our NDA is going to be planning here at some point in February I believe a candidate forum that we'll be inviting folks to and there will be a school board race as well so perhaps Mike's seat is up well maybe you'll tell us but it's to whether or not you're running again okay well there you go so if that turns out to be a contested race we'll invite Mike and whoever else is running for school board to reform as well I hope you invite him even if he's not but we did invite our school board representatives to be here Jeff and Mike so if you wanted to come up and we have a few minutes maybe we'll turn it over to Chip in the end we'll be quick yes thank you for making time for us we wanted to come and give an update on the school board's budget process so we have to finalize our budget by the end of January and stuff like that there's a bunch of stuff that has to happen before that so we just wanted to share with you where we are and the discussions that we have we haven't really rehearsed or anything so do you want to explain where we are or do you want me to absolutely sure I mean just briefly we as a board meet quite a few times between October and January inclusive we've had several intensive meetings and thanks to our superintendent and finance director and others they've been doing some planning as to what the needs are, what the adjustment should be so we've received a rather lengthy list of potential additions we've asked for some cuts and we haven't made any decisions yet but there are clearly more potential additions and we can we can physically accept and I will say that if you can really look at the additions list that came from the principles and that sort of thing a lot of them have to do with problematic behaviors supporting behaviors social services if you will in the school district and that has been a trend probably right up to speed on this but the schools have become a place to provide not only an education but social services and we've seen that before so there's a real need for more social workers behavioral support to make sure that the teachers are able to teach and not just and the kids are able to learn so the goal of the district is to educate the kids academically, socially as global citizens but if they're not ready to learn they then they can't learn so it's very hard to focus on that academics if you're dealing with trauma or you don't have a healthy home life or you haven't been socialized to collaborate with your team with your colleagues and so I agree with Jeff that the burden has been on the school district because those social services have not been provided outside the schools the other thing that we are dealing with is the environment for funding there is a lot, it's very complicated how the schools get funded if you have eight hours I could potentially explain how to do it but one of the big things is that there's all these other factors that impact what the budget means to your pocket worker so as we're discussing it we're learning bits and pieces there's things the common level of appraisal or CLA there's the yield there's all these different things that have to be figured out and when we put the budget forward we can't even tell you definitively how much it's going to cost each tax payer so we can do an estimate so we are working with our finance director to try and gather as much information so that we know what the environment is that we're trying to plan around and that includes a recent decision around a statewide teacher health care agreement so the legislature put a law forward to get which law and an act was a big negotiation between the Vermont teachers union and the school boards and the decision was just made to arbitrate and went to arbitration and made some paper of the Vermont NEA's last best offer so there will be an impact to the amount that we have to pay to health care we don't know what that impact will be yet the agreement was just made and we could know what would happen and the Nazis just to clarify one point you made we do know in dollar terms how much our school budget is and how much we are going to choose to add to it but the weird part that you're suggesting is if we increase our budget by 4% in dollar terms there's no direct correlation between how much our tax bills may go up or down and we don't know that until these other metrics come in some of them come in until after we've actually voted on our budget as a school board so it's really unsettling so we're going to be as prudent as possible consistent with doing the right thing for kids much could we have 5 minutes we have questions Caroline are you voting on some new building down here are they still doing that or what's happened with that so last year there was a vote for the BOGs to renovate the high school that was passed there was prior to this there was a BOG for maintenance maintenance across all the districts other properties that was supported there was no vote specifically on any school or building a champagne property what the board was considering was using that maintenance bond that financially it made more sense that was the proposal put forward to build an addition to C.P. Smith and a separate building in the behind Champlain the C.P. Smith building was going to be for early education and Champlain building was going to be for early education and Burlington administrative offices the board that got voted in 2 years ago put a halt on that we've done a lot of community engagement there was a task force that looked at the question of what's going to happen with early ed what's the best solution should it be in every school should it be consolidated so they made recommendations to the finance facilities committee who has not put forward a proposal to the full board but the answer to your question is nothing was voted on nothing was brought to the voters specifically about that building and nothing has been decided from the board's perspective about what's going to happen did I go to be my memory and I don't know the exact terminology the state has already put forth an assessment of their increase so I remember 6% their overall estimate 6% all services were the same 6% increase on average for the cost of providing the service it's easy to translate the average of all the taxpayers before looking at your budget we're looking at 6% on the school based portion of our property I don't think it's I'd have to double check what that 6% meant but I don't think it directly yet meant our taxes are going up 6% we do nothing there are some pieces that are not in place yet to be able to determine that my next question is not a great budget question the register tweeted out the sort of update on the school the high school project are you in discussions now about potentially delaying where does that stand so what happened was we did there's various questions about how we're moving forward when you I'm not a construction good act but what we've been taught is that as you move forward with the project you have conceptual plans and they get more and more specific as you go so we did a number of plans up to the point where we said we think we need this much money that's what we brought to the voters after that was generously approved then we did more work and we did more testing so one of the things they did was they found that we had some issues in the soil that the bedrock on which the buildings are built which is nice and stable and it ends at the bottom of where the gym is and there's sandy soil underneath so our plan was to wrap around that part we can't do that it's going to be prohibitively expensive so there was a lot of work that's been done to redesign how we're going to do it in addition as we vetted the plans with staff and students they had all these great ideas but of course all those ideas cost money so the estimate came in from the construction companies way higher 20% it was something like and then these were just preliminary this is just iterative stuff like 90 million but clearly they've been working on calling that down we believe and we're looking forward to an update from the construction oversight committee to something much closer to the 70 that we've approved I guess when I was I don't remember the specific sequencing or timing but are you getting close to pushing out I think you're already supposed to be constructing the drawing I don't know whether that's a hard firm nobody says definite that we're not going to start construction in the summer because of the challenges that the readers have to put poles in so deep to get to the bedrock that would be way too much of our money there and I know that people want like my kids are going to go through school and so there's concern about timing but the other factor about slowing down is the longer we wait the more expensive it gets so we're we're trying to originally trying to see could we start construction in the summer but we don't want to start if we're not I think we'll get an update so we have a completely new design now for the high school it's adjustments why didn't someone put a stick down and see whether there was sand there that seems very simple to a gun before you go on are you feeling for zooming there's bedrock you know what some of the other cost overruns that first appeared were apparently PCBs I don't know if you've all read about PCBs they're everywhere so we can say so it turns out to be a little more expensive than understood can you just briefly let us know what from your all's perspective the next few months will look like for you in gearing up for a search so we have two committee chairs who are now working the first step is to we're going to get some professionals to help us because most of us have not been through the selection of the superintendent they're volunteers so hiring a professional search consultant to help us then the next step is to post an updated job description and start recruiting that to us is one of the most important things it's not just put a post like on indeed or something and wait for somebody but we really want to get the word out and we want to find a candidate who fits as many of the criteria as we're going to perform people have an idea of what the right person is for this job it's a long list we all have our thoughts and so we're trying to get as many candidates who can fit the majority of that criteria but it's still in the early stages and I don't think we've actually engaged we've put out something equivalent to an RFP request for proposal from the there's maybe half dozen to a dozen firms and actually a handle list and so we've pretty much been able to narrow it to maybe a couple right now I don't think we've not signed on with any of them yet but we anticipate doing that and then they have a pretty well defined process which is supposed to be best practice nationwide for iron for finding an iron right superintendent so I think that does, I know that does because we just read the memo from our co-chairs who are Martin Gulick and Kendra Sowers are our two commissioners who are the co-chairs of the superintendent search committee there's going to be some stakeholder community meetings about what are y'all looking for in a superintendent what are the qualities that they'll run and I hope a very good process and advertising so that people will come and be able to provide some input on what we're looking for and then they do whatever they do Is your target higher date overlap starting next fall but overlap with current superintendent? The contract we're hoping starts July 1st and Yau's, superintendent Oven's contract ends June 30th So there will not be overlap? We haven't gotten to that level of detail there should be a handoff I mean that's just for me how executives should hand off to each other just to have an opportunity to actually have that When you say overlap do you mean would we hire even before Yau's term is up or? No I was just trying to get that There's some point of time where transition is clear But you're looking for next fall No we're looking for July 1 True it's summertime but yeah we're next school year but it turns out interestingly enough We're ahead? No That's why I was like wow So there's a lot of I mean you were talking about public engagement in the search for hiring relatively That's aggressive What was it? It's an aggressive schedule It's an aggressive schedule It would be nice to have had the luxury of more time because I guess there is a seasonality for this I see we're a little bit behind that timing So there's a pool that you may not Yau and Yau's twin was that November I think Right And so we obviously weren't looking for anybody as soon as he announced we were forced to get it right on Is there a reason to be reasoned I think he stated that pretty clearly in some publications he published in the community and I couldn't recite it right here I apologize but I think he's ready for some new challenges and that sort of thing We didn't do anything to make him pay for it Did we do anything to make him pay for it? I mean we just had the whole police chief mess up That's a problem I don't really fake Twitter accounts We don't I appreciate Yau and Yau's work It's a lot of hours and I also appreciate you reaching out to us to get on the agenda and continue to engage in the community and if you want to use us in any capacity in your superintendent search I'm sure we'd be happy to have you back to solicit feedback from the MPAA as well Thank you so much for having us We appreciate it Thank you for the questions Is there any time for chat? Nope He doesn't want to talk? No, I'm sure We'll have our meeting then in January as I mentioned before we're going to be over at the space next to Pizza 44 Thanks everyone for coming Thank you