 It is 6 p.m. on Monday, April 1st. I will call to order this meeting of the Winooski Liquor Control Board. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Deputy Mayor Thomas Brenner. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Okay, welcome, Jenny. Good evening. All right, so we have, I don't know the number, many liquor control, or I'm sorry, many liquor license renewals on deck this evening. These are all previously licensed places, businesses, and the staff recommended action is to approve them all conditionally. As presented for either annual inspection, still in process, fees still need to be paid, or certificate of insurance still needs to be provided. Yes. And no concerns from staff on any of these businesses. No. Any questions, concerns from council? Any questions from members of the public? Okay, so the recommended action would be to approve all items conditionally as presented. We can do the whole slate A through P. Would someone like to make a motion to approve? Some moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. And with that, we are at the end of the liquor control work agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? Some move. Recording in progress. Motion by Bryn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. I will now call to order the Winnieski City Council meeting. First up is agenda review. Any agenda order changes? Great. Next up is public comment. I know Judy Lance, you registered advance, so please come up. Oh, and as a reminder, public comment is space for, comments from members of the public on anything not included on the agenda. We do take public comment during all agenda items. Thank you. My comment tonight is about the lot 70 development in progress and was prompted by my reading today in the Winnieski News of an article about that project. I know that the project has changed in configuration and so forth over the years, since I think it was 2019 that we approved the bond. I'm not positive about that. And I know things have changed, COVID and so forth. Brought about a lot of changes and delays. So I'm kind of confused about what the project really does include at this point. What is going to be owned by the city? What's going to be owned by somebody else? Who's going to manage different parts of it? What the benefits to the city are? What the costs to the city are? And I think it would be worthwhile to have, sometime coming up fairly soon, a kind of layman's summary of what's going on there at present. And I understand it could change again, who knows? Nothing has certain has changed, I guess. But when I read that article today, I kept telling myself, well, this is a journalist writing this, who knows if it's correct or not. But it was mentioned that originally, the lot was going to be sold to a developer. I don't know if that was ever accurate or if it's still accurate. I know the city's going to own the garage. And I understand the cost of that has escalated. And there was mention of possibility of using some of our, in this article, of using some of our sales tax revenue to help with the increased cost of this. But it does seem to me like we're already using our sales tax revenue for other things. So I'd like clarification of that to be part of this. And just, there are going to be apartments there. And it said some of them are going to be affordable apartments. Presumably some are going to be market rate. Who's going to own those? Who's going to run them? Who's going to manage them? I just think it would be helpful. And I would hope other people besides me would be interested in having a kind of comprehensive but summarized update of what's, what right now is in the project. Thank you, Judy. Okay. I can work with staff to put something together and share in my next mayor's update. Okay, that'd be great. And hopefully some people besides me will be interested. I think so. Okay. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks for coming in. Is there any more public comment this evening? Okay, we will move to our consent agenda. We have our city council and liquor control board minutes from March 18th, payroll warrant for March 3rd to 16th accounts payable for March 28th and for mainstream revitalization bond sale subsequent to pay out February 24th and planning and zoning manager position description changes. Any questions about consent agenda? All right. Do I have a motion to approve? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. We will move on to council reports. Thomas, can I start with you? Certainly. Also, Dan Hallinuski met last week and discussed a few things, some of note for council, especially given our presentation from their executive director, the Dan Hallinuski finances are actually looking like they are in a really good place, which as we know is quite new for them, to the point where they're looking at being able to increase the hours of the part-time employee that works with Dan Hallinuski who handles a lot of the farmers market and a lot of the marketing. So that was something that the group was really excited about. Sponsorship and donations have been flowing in pretty well. The new group is working very well together and Melissa is really leading and driving continual sponsorship opportunities. The Better Place is crowdfunding projects that I've mentioned a few times in council. Melissa, the executive director, went to the state house recently because legislators are thinking of editing that program or not funding it entirely. So Melissa was there to advocate for the good things of the Better Places grant program does. Wainuski has raised a decent amount of money for our program, just over $11,000. So that was really exciting to hear given everything that they wanna do and renovating Rotary Park and other things. What else was there? One other thing, Blingo. Blingo is tomorrow at last stop if you were able to stop by at six o'clock. That would be great. Thank you. All right, I will start with just a quick thanks of appreciation to the Wainuski School District for hosting several great community events recently. There was a holy celebration, a Francophone and Mount celebration and a community iftar meal where the school was able to welcome the members of the community. I can share that Elaine and I recently met with some legislators about the bridge project funding and had a productive discussion about pathways to reduce our cost share. Nothing set in stone at all. It was sort of an initial troubleshooting session and Elaine reminded us that we do have time to keep working through this before we have to actually commit the full bottom out. So that's something we'll continue to pursue. And I also wanted to address, there's been an uptick in resident concerns about the condition of the railroad crossing on Mallet's Bay Avenue. Yes. And so I just want folks to know that staff have been persistently contacting the railroad and V-trans to request repairs. And we will continue to advocate to get something done in the near future. That is it for me, I'm great. Sure. The Infrastructure Commission met on March 21st. So just, well, you can go. Feels more recently than that. But we reviewed the second half of the fiscal year work plan and the group reviewed whether or not to recommend council allocate $10,000 of unassigned, unreserved funds for two traffic calming studies in the group. Voted unanimously to make that recommendation to council for consideration. The next municipal infrastructure meeting is April 18th and the agenda will be announced in the next week or two. Airport commission meets this Wednesday, hybrid meeting options online or in person. I'm unable to attend, so Deputy Mayor Renner will be attending in my place. And that's it. Thank you. The safe, healthy connected people should be meeting next week. So Tuesday the 9th at 730. Inclusion and Belonging Commission also meets this month, which should be this next Tuesday, the 11th at 6 p.m. Look out for more information on both the agenda and the specific locations should be coming out in the news section over the coming week. Thank you. Thursday, sorry, did I say? Inclusion and Belonging is Thursday, Safe, Healthy, Connected is Tuesdays. All right, and Charlie. The Winooski Housing and Planning Commission held a joint meeting on the evening of March 19th last month. The meeting served as an opportunity for both commissions to discuss building costs for developers, ways to create incentives that will attract developers that wanna build affordable three plus bedroom units, as well as discussing inclusionary zoning and replacement requirements. The Housing and Planning Commission will have a second joint meeting in May to review Housing Commission's Development Regulation Recommendations for the Planning Commission. That meeting date hasn't been set yet, to my knowledge. The next Housing Commission meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, April 23rd at 6 p.m. Thank you. And we will move to City of Dates, Elaine. Okay, so as likely everybody is here by now, not pay attention. On April 8th, 2024, there will be a solar eclipse from 2.14 p.m. to 4.37 p.m. At 3.26 p.m., it will be a total eclipse that will darken Vermont's daytime sky that will last about three minutes. You can look at the eclipse to sun during these three minutes safely, directly. Outside of that time frame, please use the eclipse glasses otherwise you might. Bring your eyeballs. We have a limit of supply of eclipse glasses from the Monewski Library for free for library card holders. You might be able to also get them from local businesses. They may or might not be free, different than how they are often. For all eclipse information, please visit remont.gov slash eclipse. This website provides safety and glass information, updates from alerts, viewing locations, resources, and more. Local public safety agencies will be keeping an eye on traffic and safety during the event. The Vermont agency transportation does encourage Vermonters not to travel all the day if the eclipse is not necessary. If you must drive on White Sea highways and interstates and plan alternate routes on local roads because there's an estimated 20,000 to 120,000 visitors that will come to Vermont. And the weather forecast looks clear right now, so we should probably think that is going to happen. If you stay at home, then you can help reduce traffic and hopefully have a nice viewing experience of your own. For text or email updates during the eclipse, like traffic and weather, you can text VTEclipse to 888-777. You're looking for an eclipse event in Winooski that weekend. There are a few. You can visit downtownwinooski.org slash eclipse. And there are multi-lingual eclipse, especially viewing safety resources available. You can view and share these videos that are provided by the Vermont Language Justice Project. You can find those links in the news update section of WinooskiVT.gov. All right, thank you. We will move on to our regular items. And first up for discussion is a public hearing on chapter five of the municipal code sidewalk permits. We'll have Eric come up and introduce before I open the hearing. Our new director of city planning. Oh, right. Thank you all very much. So this is a public hearing to take comments on chapter five of the municipal code, specific updates related to business use. This is something we've been discussing on and off for about the last two years or so. This latest draft really is more just intended for cleanup and for clarification of specific items to remove some redundancy and identify just some reorganization of the text itself. So we're not really proposing anything new. The biggest changes that you'll notice in this draft are related to sidewalk use and that application process and more intended for clarification and providing detail on what areas are available for use, what the process looks like for the application, including some timelines for when applications can be submitted, et cetera. So we discussed this in detail at your meeting on February 20th. So I'm happy to take any additional questions you might have. Otherwise, as mentioned, this is on for public hearing tonight. So as a public hearing has been noticed for the consideration of chapter five municipal code sidewalk permit updates, I will now open the public hearing to take comment from any attending members of the public. We don't have anyone in the room. If you are on Zoom in attendance and wish to make comment, ask a question, please use the raise hand feature or the chat. All right, seeing no comment, I will now close the public hearing and we will move to council discussion via item B. So Eric, thank you for running through the overview again. Absolutely. Just to be clear, this is the exact same red line text we saw at the February meeting. That's correct, yes. Nothing has changed since that meeting. Great. We did not receive any public comments. I haven't had any like business owner outreach or anything in the meantime either. Do you folks have any questions or comments, concerns about these changes? Nothing else from downtown? No. No. Okay. They are not happy with the whole document but realize at this point it is moving forward. Well, it's better than what they saw last year. Yes. I had two things that I added down. One was if permatee should be like part of the definition section or if you think it works well enough in context. I just noticed that it was sort of defined where it is introduced near the end of the document at the very bottom of page 13. And I don't know if that, just thinking again, is it access? I think so, yes. So the reason that language was added, are you referring to the language in parentheses that says the permatee? Yeah, and just if that should be in our definition section as well. Yeah, so the reason that I added that and absolutely we can add a definition is because of the section heading of liability of permatee. So I think either way it can be, a definition can be added or that could be stricken quite frankly. But that's the purpose of adding that additional text. Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, I was just wondering because it's sort of defines itself with that change. And then the one other thing, and this maybe doesn't exist in this document, is would it be possible to just have a list of all the deadlines somewhere towards the start? So just for ease of access was all I was thinking. So folks couldn't pretty, I mean they can go into this document, but I don't know if it would be easy enough to just provide like a little calendar or something on the website or the beginning of this document. Yeah, that would be more of a procedural thing, which we can certainly consider to make it easy to use. Okay, awesome. Yeah, those are the two things I noted. Anything else? All right, does somebody want to make a motion to approve these amendments to the unified land use and development regulations? I'm sorry, I'm making a wrong one. These amendments to chapter five of municipal code. So moved. There's a motion on the second. Was that a second, Charlie? Yeah. Okay, motion by Aurora, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. All right, motion carries. Thank you. Thank you very much. Okay, moving on to item C. This is on for discussion or approval. Introduction of amendments to the unified land use and development regulations, gateways are registered. Yes, thank you very much. So this is an item on for discussion tonight. These are proposed amendments to appendix B of the city's unified land use and development regulations and to article 10 of the land use regulations. Specifically, these amendments are focused on the O'Brien Community Center and 32 Malletts Bay Avenue, the property specifically, as well as the property of 21 Hickok Street, which is also owned by the city. The purpose of these amendments are really to bring the building itself, the O'Brien Community Center structure into conformity with our regulations. Currently, the building footprint is too large for what we allow in the Gateway Zoning District. So it technically is a preexisting nonconformity as such changes or any modifications to the building itself are not permitted because it exceeds our maximum footprint. So one of the options we have is to designate it as a civic use similar to, there's several other buildings that are designated as civic uses. The school complex is one, the Methodist Church across the street is another. That is a way to, once that if a building is designated as a civic use, it is exempt from some of the requirements of the code, one of those being the overall size of the building. The other issue with the building itself is that it's set too far back on the property. Therefore, it doesn't conform with the required building line or parking setback lines that are part of the code. So if an addition were to be made, it would have to be made on the front of the building where there's already another building. So really no modifications can be made to this structure at all. These amendments would, one, make changes to the zoning map to designate the building specifically as a civic use structure and then also make some changes to the text that would just clarify the civic use category. So that's what you're seeing. The report that's included outlines the specific changes that would be included for this project, both to the text and the map. There's a few other amendments that are being proposed here as well that are cleanup of other sections just because we were opening this up and I felt it was easier to make those changes now. So for example, the definition for green roof being added has nothing to do with this project, but we don't have the definition currently in our regulations for green roof, but we do allow it as an option. The other part of this, as I mentioned, is the zoning map. So there are two maps included. One is the existing conditions map and a proposed conditions map. So the proposed condition would, as I mentioned, designate the O'Brien Community Center building itself as a civic use structure and then also change the zoning of 21 Hickok Street, which is currently owned by the city and utilized as the community gardens at the O'Brien Community Center. This would also move the neighborhood manners setback from the Easterly and southerly boundaries of 21 Hickok Street to the western, I guess the northerly boundary between 21 and I believe it's 24 Hickok Street, whatever the next property is, it would move the boundary to that location instead. The purpose for this rezoning would allow for, again, the expansion of the O'Brien Community Center in particular for the Winooski Library into that space that is currently owned by the city. So otherwise, there's no other amendments being proposed at this time, just really to kind of clean up this area and redesignate the O'Brien Community Center building to allow for future expansions and additions to the property. Thank you for that. So happy to take any questions. Also, if you so choose, this will require public hearing. A possible date for that would be May 6th. The Planning Commission discussed this at a public hearing that they held on March 14th and unanimously recommended that this be advanced to council for consideration, which is why we're here tonight. I have a couple of questions. Were abutting properties notified? They were not. There's not a requirement in the regulations, sorry, there's actually not a statutory requirement that adjacent property owners get notified. We could, however, notify them when the hearing is scheduled so that they're aware that it is happening, aside from the standard notifications that need to be done for public hearings. I think it would be, I would recommend that it's considered by the city manager and staff to do that. I'm curious about designating daycare, childcare facilities as civic use in the broader context of zoning. So would that mean kind of throughout the city that civic use could be integrated within neighborhoods as well? No, that's a great question. And we did talk about that with the Planning Commission. So in this instance, the only area, because those uses are listed under, in this case, the civic use category, it would have to be a civic designated building in the Gateway District for that to apply. For the rest of the city, those uses are specifically identified in zoning districts where they're applicable, whether it be a conditional use or permitted use. Yeah, which is correct. That's what I remembered. So I wasn't sure if this was modifying that. Nope, this wouldn't have any impact on the other zoning districts. Those are my two questions. Hang on, I'll have any questions. I would just second what Bryn said about notifying the property owners, the adjacent property owners. Any public comment or questions? All right, so we have a recommendation to set a public hearing for May 6th, and also a recommendation to notify adjoining property owners. Would someone like to make a motion to set a public, do we need the introduction, or does that happen? I'm sorry, I got distracted. Do we need a counselor introduction? No, because this is the land use regulation. That's only for municipal. That's the wrong, okay, okay. Thank you, thanks. So, would someone like to make a motion to hold a public hearing for these updates on May 6th and direct staff to notify adjacent property owners? So moved, second. Motion by Bryn, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Great, thank you very much. Moving on to item D, on for discussion, our strategic vision goal updates from Elaine. Okay, so, as usual, we have our so-called all goal update, which I think this year I need to rename as like more than one or multiple goal update because they don't cover all the vision areas. But in any case, so the ones, the goals that cross the four other goal areas I report on under the all goal update. And I'll give some highlights from that from the economic fatality update and from the equity update. So from all goal one, to help Winooski school district and the city rally the community to help address community level findings from the joint equity audit, the city awarded a contract to the creative discourse group. The Winooski school district, the city and the creative discourse group have been meeting since February 26th to refine their approach. The plan is to form a temporary equity action committee for comprised mainly of Winooski school district's anti-racism steering committee members, Winooski's Inclusion and Belonging Commission and a few other people being invited. The role of this equity action committee is to inform design of a gathering, encourage participation in the gathering and hopefully help any action teams that form out of the gathering to continue. The anti-racism steering committee's regular meeting was just prior to this meeting. I was able to go to that briefly and there seemed to be some interest, so that's great. Inclusion and Belonging is planning to meet, discuss this a bit at their next meeting so we'll see how that, how, what the interest is there. And we are, actually I have a mistake in the update. We're actually planning on a June gathering, not fall as stated in the written materials. Let's see, so that was the equity audit event as we sometimes call it. Another highlight from the all goal update is related to the staffing audit. The request for proposals for a firm to conduct that staffing audit was posted on March 14th, 2024. Bids are due April 5th, 2024. The target final report date is June 3rd, 2024, which might not be realistic, we'll see. Before I move on to the other two memos, any questions from council? I just wanna add for folks who don't know, Creative Discourse actually organized the first equity summit and dialogue series in 2018. That led to the inclusion and belonging commission and some of these other things, so I'm excited that they're able to be the contractor there. Yeah, nice continuity there. Anyone else have questions? Okay, okay. So highlights from the equity update. So as a reminder, staff activities would promote equity mostly fit into a few categories. In order of most to least number of activities by category, they are accessibility of various kinds, voice, welcoming or belonging, miscellaneous and awareness. These actions range in permanence from one time, mid range say if it's a planning activity or a practice and longer lasting, such as infrastructure changes, procedures, policies or programs with a budget. The memo also available online has many ongoing items listed. Items new since the last update are underlined and I'll highlight a few of those there, of those here. Just a couple. So under accessibility, the finance department, namely Angela Aldera has been promoting the low income household water assistance program, a state level program for those who needed assistance after the city restarted utility disconnections post COVID. We received payments totaling $4,519 and some change on six accounts before the program unfortunately ended in March, 2024. At least two of the participants in the program who received funding were unaware of the program's existence before the city referral. So with that referral, we both helped those residents and the city. Under awareness, we had a one hour neuro inclusion in the work or neuro inclusivity in the workplace training from all brains belong of Vermont based on profit. Although typically I wouldn't highlight a short one time training as anything special. In this case, it was surprisingly effective at spurring alternative thinking and discussion among staff. The most tangible outcome so far is a couple of departments have brought in their approach to training new employees to account for different learning styles whether new employees are neurotypical or not. Before I go on to economic vitality, any questions on that, on the equity update? Those matters are anything else in that memo. Related to previous items, do we have an estimated timeline for when the language access plan slash policy will be ready? No, Paul, do you wanna speak to that a bit? He's had a lot of pressing project work to do. So that's essentially on pause. Although when I looked at the progress that happened since the last quarterly update, we have made some progress. Paul, is there anything else you wanna say about that? Not at this time. I think, you know, pretty hopeful for this year. And I will say that there might not be the document I've written policy just yet, but he's actually been advising us based on based on his learning over the last, you know, several years. So there is more of a procedure in place now than there was before. So the plan is still to come, but there is a better procedure now. Elaine, before moving on, reminder, can we add this and the last series of equity updates to the webpage? I don't think we've posted since the December, not December. I think we didn't share the December one, but we had the previous ones. The December one should be on the website under equity initiatives, not under the goal update page, though. I'll check after. You can move on. Thank you. All right, thanks. So for economic vitality, the highlight I'll bring up is on economy vitality too. So I'm very pleased to finally have a significant update regarding Winooski's Working Communities Challenge grant project. As a reminder, that was a grant from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston to enhance equity and workforce development efforts here locally using cross-sectoral approaches. The goal of the Winooski project is to support our new American residents in particular. The last year saw limited progress due to the lack of a representative core team to direct strategic spending of the grant. That core team changed from its unsuccessful approach of directly recruiting for new core team members unsuccessfully to requesting for a short-term contractor dedicated to that recruitment and facilitating the eventual group to establish their own procedures and develop work plans. The family room hosts this contractor. Three promising entities applied. We eventually contracted with Ruth Steinmetz for this scope of work. Ruth is also on Winooski's Inclusion Belonging Commission. She's a Winooski resident, she's new American and she was part of the Vermont Department of Health's outreach team during COVID. So she has been able to use all that and hit the ground running. So for example, she's already held one very productive meeting of what is likely to become the new core team. And the members represent many of Winooski's new American communities of feet that the previous iteration of the core team was not able to achieve. So, Bravo Ruth, she will be facilitating them to discuss goals in a work plan in the coming months. That's all I have. Any questions, comments from the council? Regarding the staffing audit, is that also, so it says including a skills matrix. Do we have anything that has been completed previously or is this the first time that's been done to your knowledge in the history of staffing? I don't know if it's been done before. It would have been a good question to ask before we put the RFP out, Angela. I don't believe one has been completed in my tenure with the city. So that'd be about 19 years. We did, the HR director, our HR director did reach out to neighboring communities to see what has been done around here that's analogous. We got one example, I think, and yeah. So he was able to do a lot of research online to pull together the RFP. So at least we do, we had those references for what one could look like. And we gave a lot, sorry, one more thing. So we gave a lot of latitude to deviate from the RFP unusually because we weren't sure what would make sense for us. So wanted experts to advise us on what would make sense. Okay, that kind of bridges into the other question about the timing and expectations around timing, deadlines coming up. You said on the fifth, so end of the week, Thursday. Ready? And then turn around time for getting a contract signed and then the ability to meet and understand job duties, roles, responsibilities, expectations, enough to compile that succinctly. So just thinking about the timing being early June, is that to influence anything in particular? Why that early June date? Yeah, it's a good question. I was hoping that council would have it in time for a strategic part. A retreat? Yes, a retreat. I looked at it recently, oh, actually, it makes sense, but I still can't remember the order. So yes, in time for that. And I don't want to rush either to your point. If they push back and say, look, there's no way, then I would want to flux with that for sure. This is unusual money, we're spending, so we better spend it well. And then with that, just thinking about deliverables and expectations starting maybe with the goals. Obviously, having room to deviate from the RP, but being, I think, as clear as possible on what your end goals are and how you're hoping that this will help inform goals. Yeah, I'm happy to speak to it a bit now. Although the RP is on the website, if you'd like to take a look at it, we're happy to take comments offline as well. See if I can pull it up. Paul, would you mind dropping the link in the chat for anyone who cares to have it, see. So the scope of the work includes analyzing current conditions, benchmarking, recommending improvements to current operations and processes, assessment of trends and future service demands, recommending future supportive tools, so-called. We gave a list of available data sources. Yeah, so there's a little bit more detail, obviously, under each of those that are hopefully more specific to outcomes and products as opposed to processes, which I read out kind of processes. But yeah, those are the, that's what we're looking for. Great, appreciate that. I don't have any other questions at the moment. Is there anyone attending the Zoom who has a question or comments? Okay. We will move on from this item to item E on for discussion or approval city council liaison appointments for commissions, which I will introduce. So post-election wanted to assess, while this body hasn't changed, wanted the opportunity to assess if we want to retain our current commission liaison assignments or make any changes. That's our goal tonight. I've also included other liaison roles that some of us serve in for other organizations to show the scope of the liaison work we do to consider how appointments to a partner organization could have a useful intersection with a commission liaison role, to show the volume of commitments as we consider our own capacity. And because some counselors have expressed interest in changing some partner or roles, I wanted to pull together all the term expiration dates so we have a vision of when those would change. So first, I would like to begin with our commission liaison assignments and assess if anyone is considering a change and remind folks that the meeting schedules are set by each body and can be changed as the body feels the need to go earlier or later or have a different day. Yeah, so I would invite anyone who wants to say I'd like to keep this or I would not. I'd like to keep downtown Wenduski, but I would be more than happy to pick one up. I have a history of the safe, healthy connected people. So if counselor heard it doesn't want it anymore, I'd like it, but happy to respect if they want to continue in that role. Do you want to change the engagement liaison? Would you like to be the engagement liaison? I could do that. Sure. Switch it up. I would be okay with that. I have a quick question. I was wondering if Wenduski Valley Purse district should be on here. Do we have a representative? We do, and it should be on here. Oversight, thank you. No, I was running, skimming down the list, and I'm sure this was really well put together, so just happy to catch that. Question, do you mean for council specifically or anyway? It's kind of like page three organizations that we also partner and have representation of. Oh, I see, okay. That council assigns work groups. We did appoint that person recently, so I know the term's not up, but it should be included to be, we have like GMT and RPC here. And CSWG even. Yeah. Even though that's you. Yeah. Anything, any other changes, Aurora? No, I do want to keep inclusion and belonging. I'm happy keeping municipal infrastructure. There's no other interest there. I feel like we've got a good group of commissioners who really enjoy working with them. I'm also happy to keep CSWD. I would be interested in having someone take the airport role, or having council consider assigning that to somebody that is representative from the city or within the community. Is anyone on council interested in serving in that role? The time is what's difficult for me on that one. Same. I would support council Oakley's suggestion in giving it to staff or a community member. And I know of two community members who are interested in several of the council agrees with moving it to the community. One of them may be on this soon. I do have language drafted from some time ago when we considered soliciting a resident representative. I can bring that to a future meeting for our consideration. Yeah, with the bridge committee, it's, it adds up to being a little. The cohesion is nice. It's been a great group to work with. I think topics that are really specific are pretty concentrated. So I think it's, it should be reasonable. There typically isn't subcommittees work that has to be done in between either. The hybrid option is, I've only met hybrid because it is difficult with work schedule to attend that form. It's helpful. Sure. So until we reappoint and other than this Wednesday I'm happy to continue in that role. And Charlie? I'm very happy on the housing commission. If there are, save the airport commission. I am happy to pick up another one as long as it works with my schedule. Mine's a little bit inconsistent, I think compared to a typical nine to five, but I'm willing to try to make something work for sure to carry my share. Is there anything you're looking the awful of here? Maybe. Charlie, would you be interested in our finance commission and that schedule? I say this jestingly to my friends and I'm going to say it very seriously here. I learned math in Florida. Numbers aren't my strong suit. Finances are not my strong suit. I would be doing it to service to the city to volunteer for that liaison role. I say that at the most serious and ever been in these meetings. That is fair. Okay, I will retain planning and finance. Okay, we will make a switch. Thomas will retain downtown Wemuski, but move to safe, healthy, connected people. Aurora will retain inclusion and belonging and pick up the engagement liaison role. Bryn will continue with municipal infrastructure. Charlie will continue with housing. I'll continue with planning and finance. And then we will put together some language to solicit community representation for the airport role. Otherwise, everything is as it's laid out here. So I would like to make a motion to approve the new configuration. So how? That moves. Motion by Thomas, second by Charlie. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. All right, motion carries. Thank you all. Let me just save these notes real quick. Okay, we are moving on to item F, also from me. This is a resolution recognizing April as Arrow American Heritage Month in Wemuski. We've discussed previously wanting to bring some structure to these sort of cultural or identity recognition statements. And so the goal is to have a monthly schedule. I've outlined one with Elaine so that we can capture these and proactively be addressing them throughout the year. I wanna thank Councillor Hurd for bringing forward the Transgender Day of Visibility at the last meeting. I've added that to the list as well for next year. And yeah, so starting now is the new like post-election year, we'll move forward with doing these consistently. And so for the month of April, this is designated as Arab American Heritage Month. And I have included a proclamation with language from the Arab America Foundation. Any questions or comments? No, I like the plan. I think having a counter strategy for recurring recognition of cultural events is great to see and to plan ahead for it. I think we can credit Paul with that, unless it was the year. It was Paul's idea, that's right. Thank you, Paul. I have two tiny, tiny edits to the language. For the proclamation? Yeah. Okay. Does anyone have any questions? Okay. In the second, whereas could we change it to instead of men and women, just people? Yep. And also in the second one, it says setting fine examples. I'm wondering if we wanna strike fine and just say setting examples. Are you very good at that as well? And that's really the two I highlighted. Everyone good with that? Any questions or comments from members of the public? It's heading to you, Zoom. Okay. I am looking for a motion to recognize April as Arab American Heritage Month in Winnowski with the two language revisions to be made. So moved. So okay. Motion by Aurora, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you all. We can move on to item G, on for discussion approval, the Burlington Winnowski Bridge for my agency of transportation, standard finance and maintenance agreement for federal aid projects. And we have some folks from V-Trans on Zoom, I see. All right. So yeah, it looks like Bob Kleinfelder and Carolyn Cota are online. So just to introduce this, so back in November, we presented sort of a draft version of this agreement. Since then we've coordinated with V-Trans with our city attorney and have made some revisions to the agreement. I've highlighted two of the major things that I'll go over quickly. And just to talk about the agenda here too, so we've got sort of three agenda items. So I'll give an overview and then if V-Trans wants to chime in on any additional comments. We do want to go into executive session, just talk through some legal issues with our city attorney. And then hopefully pop out and then you all can make a decision on how to move forward. So just to give an update, since the last time we met in the memo, I highlighted two of the bigger items. So one concern that we've been working on with V-Trans is on the environmental remediation piece. So you'll see in the agreement in blue, there's some revisions to the agreement that outlines the process, which is mainly driven by federal highways. So we talk about the process in the agreement because we have to go through what's called a deeper process that goes through sampling and warnings before we can actually determine what is their participating environmental cost. So the language talks about that process and how we look at determining the participating environmental cost. So that's a little clearer in this agreement. The other big one that is in here is that in the state regulations, there are some simulations on how much municipality pays for these federal grant projects. So the good news for us is that the project is a 5% local match. However, it is capped at a 50% increase of our current grand list rate. So right now with our current grand list, that match is 3,087,312. So we are capped at that for participating costs, which is great because we did not have that previously. And that occurs at the time of execution of the agreement. So fast forward, if the reprisal occurs, we don't have this executed. The new reprisal value is our new baseline. So that could be five million cap or whatever ends up being. So that was a concern previously given that we were going through the reprisal. So we have that. VTrans was kind enough to put that in writing with the actual number that Angela provided. So that's already helping out our bond vote value. So, and that's the other thing for the general public. So this obviously is coming after having a positive bond vote. So we didn't want to try to skew this before a bond vote and not know if we had financing available. So Bob and Caroline, do you have any other items, any feedback you want to share? No, I think you're touching on the two that we focus most of the effort on. There were some other changes in there. Some of the comments came from Manuski, some came from Burlington, which has a very similar looking agreement. So hopefully it's all clear, but if there's any questions, happy to talk through them. Would it make sense to invite public comment before we go into executive session? You could. Yeah, it's okay. Let me open that opportunity and just see if anyone who is attending via Zoom has a public comment or a question they wanna ask before we move to the executive session. And as a reminder, you can use the raise hand feature or the chat. Okay. So an executive session has been worn pursuant to state statute 313, which exempts from public inspection contracts. I am looking for a motion to find that we should have this discussion in executive session. So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Brynn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. I am looking for a motion to enter into executive session invioling John Rauscher, Elaine Wong, Caroline Kona. No, probably be trans folks. We can leave you out of this one. Okay. Angela. Angela, all DRI. Ryan Lambert. And Ryan Lambert. Okay. Staff focused discussion first. Did you say Bob De Palma? Sorry. No, it was him too. Yeah, he's the most important one. Okay. Yeah, so motion to enter into executive session with the folks named. So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. So we're gonna enter into executive session solely for the discussion of this contract. No action will be taken and no other topics discussed. We will exit the executive session and return to this public meeting for any action on this item. All right, we are back. Can everyone hear me? Bob, Caroline, would you like to rejoin? I see. Yep. Yep. All right, thank you so much. And thank you for coming tonight and sitting in silence while we background discussion. You know, we had a good discussion on this agreement. I wanna first just thank you for working with us. You know, being able to add in the Kaplan language. You know, Caroline, you've shared a bunch of information with me as we've been trying to navigate our cost share and understand from staff that you guys have also been really good to work with throughout the design process. So just wanted to appreciate that. Oh, and all of the outreach efforts. And we have one primary concern with the agreement which I don't expect you to answer in this public session but I wanted to share this concern so you can follow up, have your team follow up with ours. And our concern is how this agreement interacts with claims that the Winooski hotel group may have against the city for breach of development agreement and how would an enhanced claim of value from them affect the state's determination of what part of a condemnation award would be deemed a participating cost. We are hoping that your contract folks can work with our staff and attorney and maybe come back to us in May. We can also email this question to you. Yeah, I think that we are on a tight timeframe with respect to what's going on. It was our hopes that the city would sign this agreement this evening so that we can continue on. But if you could email that question specifically to Bob and myself so that we can actually read it and that's with others. You know, I'll just mention just not sure if John told you on this or not but we can't move forward on right-of-way negotiations until this is executed. So we have that queued up and ready to go but potentially maybe we can come back in two weeks if that works but the sooner we can get this executed the sooner we can get that moving. Right. But right now we're in a standstill till this was executed on that effort but we'll try to work through this quickly. Yeah, we have our next meeting, April 15th and could certainly invite you back. Yep. And these questions are about liability. We have concerns about our liability related to the right-of-way work. So we'd like to spend a little more time on that. Okay. Yep. Yep, that's fine. Like I said, we can, we'll set up a meeting right off Bob. We'll get right on that. Okay. We'll follow up this evening with the questions, specific language and I'm sure you can reach out tomorrow. Yeah, Bob, I'll currently, I'll reach out. We can coordinate and try for the 15th. Sounds good. That sounds great. Okay, before I let you go for the night we do some folks participating via Zoom so I wanted to just open for public comment if there are any questions or comments from members of the public. Seeing no further comments, thanks again. We'll see you again in two weeks. And that is the end of this evening's agenda. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. We are adjourned.