 Okay, regular items. First up is Asian Bistro first and third class restaurant bar licenses. Yes, good evening. So these are three applications, all renewals. The difference is our valley where now the city is now issuing tobacco and tobacco endorsement license but the other ones are just a renewal from last year. Okay, three renewals. I think none of them are present. No, and there's no concerns with any of them. Are there any questions from council? No. And any questions from members of the public. So I can see who's here. Okay. Well, would someone like to make a motion to approve all three items. Motion by Jim second by Aurora all those in favor please say aye. Motion carries. Very easy. That's the end of the liquor control board meeting. Do I have a motion to adjourn? Motion by Bryn second by Jim all those in favor please say aye. Motion carries. It is 602 p.m. I will now call to order the when you ski city council meeting. First up is agenda review any concerns about the order of the evening. No. Okay. Next up is public comment so this is a chance for attendees who are here. We have an item on the agenda, but if there's something else you want to make public, want to make comment on. Now would be the time if you're here for an agenda item, please wait until we reach that item. I know we have, well, we have some registered for the public hearing. I don't see any public attendees for this part of the meeting yet. Okay. Next up is our consent agenda. We have city council and liquor control board minutes from February 6, the accounts payable warrant from February 16 and the payroll warrant from January 22, February 4. Any questions or concerns about the consent agenda? Can I, I missed the liquor control portion. So we split that into two items. Yes. Any other. Okay. Do I have a motion to approve the liquor control board minutes of to 623. Motion by Bryn second by Thomas all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Those abstaining abstain. Did you say I wrote. Okay, thank you. Okay. And then. Do I have a motion to approve the city council minutes and payroll words. Motion by Aurora second by Thomas all those in favor, please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Council reports. Thomas, would you like to go first? Yeah, we have a motion to approve the liquor control board minutes. The liquor control board. So you might have seen on some of the social media posts, but if you have not down, I'm looking to hire a new executive director. The current director. We'll be leaving in several months, so we're trying to get ahead of that and get something hired up. materials that you need to submit with it are all posted there. We have received some applicants, but very excited to continue to receive more and just a big thank you to Meredith and all the work that she's done for downtown Wintersgate. Yeah, that's my update. Thank you. Thank you, Jim. So I don't have any updates from commission work because the housing commission hasn't met. I'll just say, I guess this might bear well. So I'll say thank you to my federal counselors and mayor for the time that we've gotten to work together over the last maybe one to four years. So it's been an honor to serve here at Monuski. And it's kind of interesting to reflect back on 2019, which was half of my younger daughter's life ago. Things are very different. And when I joined council, what I got interested in was keeping things going that have been set in motion. I felt like the city had done a lot of great work to set up a master plan to set important boats around regional dispatch around the pool, around Main Street by vitalization, thinking ahead for economic development in the city. And that was what I wanted to kind of keep moving forward and make sure we didn't falter or change course too drastically and lose all the work that this community had done. And I'm excited today that we have a pool and I already have a full pass for the season. I'm excited that we have important boats being taken tonight on Main Street with vitalization and continuing to move that forward. And I also am just cognizant of how much has changed in that time and how much we still have to do. So I want to thank you all for continuing to do that work for allowing me to be a part of that work. And I guess I've just been moved by how this city works together and how working together has gotten things done for this city. And I think that there's something to be said for finding a way to be together and work together. And I enjoyed that about that part of being on the city council maybe more than anything else. So thank you to the residents, thank you to you all and thank you for the opportunity to be here. And thank you, I should say thank you Elaine for joining and jumping in so confidently and for being kind of a great bookend to this adventure of mine. And I look forward to seeing what you keep doing. So thank you everybody and that is my update. Well, thank you, Jim. You have served for four years. I think like housing, equity, community, engagement, trees, climate, all these things wouldn't be where they are today without you. Really appreciate your thoughtful and strategic approach as a wonderful deputy mayor for at least two years I think. It's only one? Okay. You've always been really reliable. Keep us on process. Everything that you just called out I think has been really successful and more so because of you. So just wanted to acknowledge your contributions and really messed up here. Thank you. I know we'll see you at least on trade committee. For my updates, we had a finance commission meeting last week. They gave us some input on the budget presentation which I'm hoping we can implement for tomorrow's virtual presentation if not certainly the one before town meeting day to be more accessible to the community. Elaine and I were able to meet with a group of high school students who are doing a community based class. Essentially we heard some interest from them or brainstorming ways to try to engage them in an actual city project. So you'll be hearing more about that in the future. And then I want to remind you all that I'm still hosting that monthly housing roundtable call with some of our local housing partners and we are anecdotally there's been an increase in families seeking emergency housing support. So we are actually leveraging this call next month to try to coordinate around that and make sure that agencies in our school and us are all aligned on things. So I'll share more after that happens too. And there's a planning commission meeting on Thursday to continue looking at the section of form based code with changes related to parking and historic preservation. 6.30 p.m. You can come here. You can also join me Zoom. Brynn. Sure. The municipal infrastructure committee commission didn't meet last week because we had some conflicts with the abatement meeting as well as the development review board meeting. So instead we didn't have enough content for an agenda this month. So we decided to cancel. It shouldn't solve waste district has a meeting tomorrow. It'll be a one item agenda on the agenda for getting the council or getting the district members to approve the staff to move forward with bonding for the materials recovery facility. So that will just be an online meeting tomorrow evening. And the next meeting to go over the shouldn't solve waste district budget will be March 8th. So that will be coming up pretty quickly as well. And then also just wanted to extend my gratitude and thanks to Councilor Duncan. It's really been an honor to serve with you for the last two years. And we've been some big shoes to fill. So thank you for all that you've done. Thank you, Pamela. So this week, so Thursday at 6 p.m., we'll have our February meeting of inclusion and belonging. This was shifted back because of some of the budget presentations. And we'll really be focusing on the equity audit, which ties a bit as well into our equity assessment, which we're talking about later in this meeting. So folks want to join. That is going to be via Zoom. Always welcome to have public comment and engagement on that. Also, last week we had a meeting of a safe, healthy last week. It might have been the week before that action. Time has gone away with me for me. We had a meeting of safe, healthy connected people. Primarily we got the commission was given a FY24 budget update. So both the chiefs and Ray were able to kind of catch the commission up on everything that's happening for town meeting day on that. And we also did a review of a community service program needs slash interest survey plan review. I think we're doing a little bit more polish up on that, but that will be going out to the community I think in the next month or so. So definitely keep an eye on that, especially if you have feedback about some of our community service programs. Thank you. Elaine, city updates? Yes. So town meeting day is coming up as a reminder. The election is on Tuesday, March 7. Voting takes place at the Winooski Senior Center from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Early voting and absentee ballots will be available after February 17 at the city clerk's office. For all ballot and budget details, you may visit WinooskiVT.gov slash town meeting. As a reminder, all legal residents regardless of your citizenship status can vote on town meeting day. Translated ballots will be available in 11 languages. If you still need to register to vote, please visit WinooskiVT.gov slash vote for details or stop by the city clerk's office for information. If you have questions, call or email 802-655-6410 or clerk at WinooskiVT.gov. Be sure to visit to join us for the upcoming budget presentations. The city and school virtual budget presentation will be to tomorrow night as the time of recording, Wednesday, February 26 at 6 p.m. via Zoom. And the annual town meeting day budget presentation is Monday, March 6 at 6 p.m. at the Winooski School District Performing Arts Center. And again, visit WinooskiVT.gov slash town meeting for all ballot, budget, and meeting information. This is an announcement that the clerk's office is temporarily for the foreseeable future until further notice different hours than usual. So it will be open to the public Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. It will be closed to the public on Tuesdays. Those of you who have meetings with other staff in City Hall can certainly still make those meetings for Tuesdays during that staff person's hours. This is because of a temporary staff shortage. And on behalf of staff, thank you to Jim also for your service to Winooski and helping bring me on and also to help with the through lines in the past and present. It's been much appreciated. Thank you, Elaine. Okay. So we're on to regular items. First up is the public hearing and proposed changes to Chapter 5 of the Municipal Code. Welcome, Eric. Good evening. Would you like to do an overview refresher for those who are new to the discussion? Sure. Yeah, I'll just do a quick update and overview here. Thank you very much. This is a public hearing to take public comments on proposed changes to Chapter 5 of the Municipal Code related to sidewalk use. This is an item that you've previously reviewed at your meetings on January 17th and January 23rd where you provided comments and feedback on these proposed changes. Additionally, since the, sorry, at your meeting on the 23rd, you did schedule public hearing for tonight. After that meeting, I forwarded the draft of the proposal to our attorney for any comments or input from him. You'll notice that the draft that was included with the agenda does have some text that's highlighted in yellow. Those are additions that he recommended be included mostly for clarification. So I don't believe any of them are substantive and don't actually change the intent, but help clarify the overall language and the overall intent of the document. So other than that, this is on for public hearing tonight. Because this is an amendment to the Municipal Code, it does require a 30-day period before it can become effective. So if the changes that are proposed would be effective for sidewalk use April 1st. So in order to meet that deadline, action would need to be taken tonight. That's not to say you're required to take action tonight. You can hold off and hold more hearings if you'd like, but in order to make, in order to make these regulations effective for April 1st, we need to take action tonight. So again, it's not a requirement, but just so that you're aware of the timeline related to this proposal. Otherwise, we also have, this item is for the public hearing. So there is an item on your agenda after this for additional discussion and potential consideration. So unless there's any questions, I will step away for the public. All right. So this public hearing has been noticed for consideration of those changes to Chapter 5 of the Municipal Code related to sidewalk usage. At this time, I'd like to open the public hearing to take comments from members of the public. Please come up to the microphone. Sorry, for those on Zoom, we'll start in the room and then we'll move over. Hello, everybody. Hello. Welcome. Please state your name and residence. My name is Allie Nagel and I live in Winooski and I'm here as a resident and also on behalf of the monkey house. So I guess my first thought is where or why we're even having this change and if there's been any formal complaints. So my knowledge, no formal complaints, but there's concerns about vehicle safety and liability issues. So if there's no formal complaints in what's been running for 17 years, or at least the monkey house has been, we don't know why anything has to change, especially if we're going towards more of a walkable and bikeable community, then why are we going to make it harder for people to come into the city. I know there's been some back and forth with the proposed change of like moving closer to the businesses, some of the seating, which doesn't like that more inhibits the pedestrians walking, especially with doors opening, sandwich boards, all that stuff. So I just don't understand why it's even an issue if there's been no complaints. So that's one. And then it also seems like this is happening really fast. The businesses were just made aware about this over the holiday season. And then already just coming to public comment today without being able to really talk or express the concerns that people have or at least getting it out to more of the community about it. We feel like some other businesses that I've talked about is that it's going to change the feel of the downtown. We're still recovering from COVID and Winooski's still not where it was pre-pandemic. So having limitations to the sidewalk or having to put money into new structures or new ways to make seating feasible just doesn't seem like the best situation for businesses. And a lot of businesses can't do that or invest into that. And our success is then the city relies on our successes with that. And most people still feel really, there's still a bunch of people in this room with masks on. So they want to be outside. They want to be eating outside, drinking outside. So it doesn't feel like it's the best step to then inhibit to be able to be outside comfortably. So that was another thing. Let's see. Trying to think of what else. Yeah. I mean, just in general, we're really against this. It's really only affecting four of the busiest restaurants downtown. It seems like there's other solutions like curb, one of those like curb stalls or curb stops. I forget what they're called. They're like little cement things. If that's an issue of the, you know, the overhang or you put signage up that also, you know, I've seen in different like areas where you could have a sign that says this is the correct way to park. This is not the correct way to park. Then you have that sign for to get a ticket. And yeah, just overall, it just feels like it's against businesses. And I'm just not sure where it, who it really directly benefits. And just to have to keep the vibrancy of the downtown. And I think that's it. Let me see if I have any other notes. Yeah. And I guess the biggest one is if there hasn't been any formal complaints, I don't see why there needs to be a change. All right. Thanks, Ellie. Yes, thank you. Did you want to make a comment? Please join us. I'm Maggie Barge and I'm representing our House Fiesto. First, I wanted to express my appreciation for the city's work in trying to clarify sidewalk guidelines. I think it's a useful thing for businesses to really have some clear guidelines to follow so that we know what we're doing. So I wanted to share that. And I also wanted to express my agreement with everything that Allie just said. Those concerns are the same ones that we share at our House Fiesto. And the recovery is still ongoing as far as restaurants are concerned. And this is going to be the first season where we might be back to some sort of normal business. We're all looking forward to that very much. So I just wanted to share my thoughts on her comments as well. One of the questions that I had was about the designation of a storefront and the use of seasonal space. I understand that the city has added if the building lot where an individual storefront is located is wider than the storefront. The business may request use of the sidewalk in front of the entire property. That will apply to us. I'm wondering what criteria the city will use to make that determination. And if there is an appeal process, if the city decides that that doesn't go to the business owner. Part of that question, too, is I know that in the document it said specific deadlines for application submissions are outlined herein. I didn't see it. I looked pretty hard. But I think from listening to conversations about this before, that sidewalk applications will be due way to deliver permit, maybe, which puts the deadline at different times for businesses so that one business might be available to apply for sidewalk space before others. So I just wanted to see how that will be handled if that's fair to do. The minimum of five feet dedicated clear space or the two foot curb, I wanted to point out just a few things to consider. This does impact five restaurants who have all put it. Some finances toward their outdoor dining picnic tables. So this would require replacement of that furniture, which is an expense to two restaurants. The reason that picnic tables are used is because we're on a hill. And picnic tables are levelable so that if you put a regular table in there, the person sitting downhill, the table comes up to about their chin if you're my height, which is uncomfortable. So picnic tables are a fantastic solution for that because you level a picnic table in the people that seat comes up as well. It's a good solution and I think it looks great. I think there are a bunch of positives to being able to use that. And it's a detriment to have to replace those and get other tables that will not work on a hill so well. I also wanted to mention that it looks like from what I can tell, we're talking about our six foot picnic tables being about six inches too long to accommodate the two foot barrier and the five foot walk space. It would be fantastic if the city would consider a four and a half foot sidewalk space or the bumpers that Ali mentioned because then we could all keep our six foot picnic tables and continue business. For the matter of six inches, I think some flexibility would solve this dilemma for everybody. If that isn't an option and we are replacing our picnic tables and we're going with something smaller, I will just use our situation as an example. We will lose about six seats, which we can turn over so many times in our business hours. That comes to for the season that we're allowed to have sidewalk space under estimating quite a bit, a loss of about $15,000. That's just for our small restaurant, we're smaller than the other smaller sidewalk space. Considering that impact to all of the restaurants and to what benefit that our income helps the city out as well, I just would like you to take that into consideration because I think that's just put dollars to it that it isn't just a small impact, it's substantial. I think, oh, and the last one was, this wasn't a change, but I never noticed it before. The furniture that has to be set out or brought in every night and every morning without prior approval. I don't remember that being part of the application before so I just wanted to make sure that I don't remember asking for that permission to leave our picnic tables out there. So if that's something that's going to be on the application, that would be great if it's something we could just check if it's permanent. And I think that was it for me. Thank you. Thank you. Were you here for this public hearing on the sidewalk changes? No. Okay. Oh, okay. Sorry. Okay, let me move to our Zoom attendees then. It looks like Meredith has already moved over. So let's start with her. Thank you so much to everybody, please. Oh, can you hear me? Yeah, sorry, Meredith, just a second. Meredith? Hi, I'm here. Can you hear me now? Thank you. I just wanted to thank everyone for being here again. I know we've talked about this a lot and thank you to Allie and Maggie for coming and giving their opinions. I just wanted to say that I got a few messages from folks that I'm just going to read anonymously. They're from a variety of different businesses in the area. Some of them are directly impacted by these changes and some of them aren't and I'll do my best to indicate which ones which. So the first one is that additional information and context that was provided at the last meeting we had to discuss this was January 17th seemed less intense than the initial outreach. Now it seems to only target a couple of businesses but not sure it benefits anyone. So that was that comment. And then another comment that I received from someone who is a business owner but doesn't have a business that is directly involved with this seating discussion was that for the safety and support of our old vulnerable community, we should be encouraging outdoor seating as much as possible. I think as maybe Allie mentioned, you know, there's there's still a pandemic and we're still trying to figure out ways to serve the community, especially our most vulnerable members. And having outdoor space is one of the ways that we can do that in our all too short summer months. That last part was me not the business owner. And then the next one was this feels like it's an indication of continued negative feelings about the small business community by the city. It wasn't that long ago that there were lots of empty store friends in Winooski. We are not big businesses. We're small and we're often living in Winooski too. We care about this community and we're a part of it. And the other question that was someone who I didn't keep the notes they wanted to keep this anonymous. I don't have a note about whether this was someone who's directly affected. And then the last comment I have was this doesn't directly impact our business, but this feels icky. Those are that's a direct quote. So those are the comments that I received. I will say that in discussions with other people that I didn't get their opinions and writing, I have generally heard just a little bit of confusion about the sort of what we've heard already the sort of why now situation. But in general, there also has been a couple of businesses that have said, yeah, we should be concerned with the safety of people sitting in those tables. That makes sense. So there's definitely opinions across the board that I've definitely I've definitely heard. And I think the general feeling that I got from people wasn't that this particular municipal code change was maybe you know, it doesn't affect that many businesses. It only it seems like it's only affecting a few of them. But that it was sort of one of those things that just seems like an indicator of other things going on. So people reading into the the wording and people reading into kind of the the general vibe. So not quantifiable by any means, but just sort of, you know, feeling a bit like there's an at odds feeling of, you know, small businesses in the community, especially those, you know, brick and mortar storefronts that like the one of the quotes said, not too long ago, there was, you know, no, no support for economic vitality. And a lot of the storefronts were empty. And now we have actually the opposite problem where we don't have a lot of retail space. And so the sort of just general concern about the the the feelings of the city, quote unquote, against the small business community. So personally, I and I don't think the downtown Wendyski board sees there to be a ton of like adversity going on. But there's just this general, very, you know, unease that's going on. And I think that this this council and the city, you know, and downtown Wendyski is happy to be a partner in this, just kind of making sure that there's, you know, positive communication and just sort of generally saying like, this is simply to do with safety and not to do with, you know, an ongoing campaign against small businesses. And again, I, you know, we can't control how people will read into things, especially this, you know, small amount of businesses that are going to be directly and immediately affected. But just kind of making sure that that that the council is aware of the sort of murmurings that are happening. And people definitely very much reading into this kind of action, as to be a little bit a little bit, I don't know what the word would be, nerve wracking to the small business community, especially at a time when there is still so much COVID recovery that's going on. And so many people are still kind of feeling feeling those effects. But I really appreciate all of your time. I know this has been brought up many times. And I will leave it at that. Thank you, Meredith. Do we have other folks attending me as in who wish to make comments? If you use the raise hand feature or the chat. So seeing no additional comments, I will close the hearing. And now we have chance for further discussion. Eric, do you want to come back up? Please. So I'll just start with a couple of the questions that came up. The question about what would be the process for a business to request additional space if their storefront didn't fill their lot? Yeah. So that'll be outlined in the application. We've developed a new application to go along with the changes that are proposed in this section of the code so that the two coincide. So there will be an opportunity in the new application to identify that additional space if it's being requested. And then is there an appeal process? I think we talked about this last time. Yeah, I think I don't know if there's a formal appeal process written in, except for that the initial applications would come to you all as the as council slash liquor control board. And as has happened in the past, when there's been a either discrepancy or some confusion about what space has been allocated, the property owners have come back to you all in your capacity to to address that issue. So I would presume that same scenario could be could be the process moving forward. Okay. And then so would these applications be aligned to the liquor license, which now we see is not happening in bulk once a year? Right. So the way that the way that these regulations are written is that at least for the sidewalk use, the on page 12 of the draft, it says that any business that's seeking sidewalk use would would need to request that use at least 30 days in advance of the desired date of start. So that could come in with a liquor control application if they wanted to and it would just it wouldn't take effect until the date of the sidewalk use, which is outlined from April 1 to November 30. But they could come in anytime prior to that April one date, or I guess anytime knowing that the start is April one, they could come in the within 30 days of that date to make application, it would separate the two processes. But also I think the intent of the way we've laid out the new regulations is that we're also trying to separate the two review processes so that the initial process goes through council slash liquor control versus future processes. If there's no changes or no violations would be done administratively. So they'd be handled, they could potentially be handled at different times anyway. Okay. Over on that topic, there's the three conditions that would allow for administrative approval, but the one that doesn't seem covered is if a business has previously requested the entire building frontage and only occupies a portion of it, that building frontage then receives another business that might want to use sidewalk space. There's no, that isn't covered in those three conditions that would pick up application back to council. So I'd be kind of focused in on that question of allocating additional building frontage beyond the storefront. We might have that the three are it's been issued a violation. The area of the sidewalk use has not changed from the previous year and the ownership of the business has not changed from the previous year. Yeah, I think that would be covered under the area has not changed. So if they are still proposing the same use of an adjacent storefront that would fall under that category, but if they were no longer proposing that it would come back as a change of that space. I'm just thinking more, there's a business, they've got this part of the building and there's part of the building's empty. This owner requests the entire frontage. I open my restaurant here and I want to get sidewalked. This is administratively approvable because nothing is changing, but I would not be able to then request the same space of sidewalk usage. Business A, existing business hasn't changed the area. They haven't changed the ownership and they haven't violated the codes so they don't, they go to administrative approval and it doesn't come to council. I guess I may not be fully understanding your question. That's my making sense. Yeah, so you know we gave Papa Franks a bunch of extra sidewalk space during the pandemic because it wasn't being used. Right. If they came back this year and wanted that, you could approve it, but then some other business, another restaurant actually opened the next door and now like their sidewalk access is gone. Right. How do we avoid that happening? Well, so the, you mean how does that new business? Yeah, how are they going to get their storefront? Right. So annually the adjacent business would need to sign off on or the building owner or business owner would need to sign off on giving up that space. So if a new business came into that now vacant space, that business owner or the building owner would need to sign off on allocating the sidewalk in front of their business to the adjacent business. Okay. Which I would think would be, would constitute a change of their application because it's new space or it's different space than was previously approved. So that would need to come back before, before you all. So just carrying us through the scenario. So essentially, so if business B comes in after the administrative approval, would the administrative approval then carry forward through the end of the season unless the business B said, actually I want that storefront space? I would say if it's already been approved, yes. Okay. That would carry forward because we would have the sign offs from the property owner saying that that sidewalk space can go to another business. So if they then lease that side, that business space that would have to be, it should be known anyway that the sidewalk use is not available for that particular season. Is there a complication there with a business owner versus a building owner? The, I believe it's spelled out that the property owner would need to sign off on that. Okay. So that whoever, whoever owns the building would need to be the one signing off. If the business owner and the property owner are the same person then that's, that's covered. But I believe it's, it's designated that the property owner needs to sign off on allocating the additional space. Okay. What if the building owner and the business owner are at odds for some reason and the building owner signs off on something that the business owner wouldn't, wouldn't agree to or would like? Then I think that would be a matter between the business owner and the property owner and not anything for the city to get involved with personally. Yeah, I feel like it's almost maybe not that scenario, the first scenario be flipped and that we would be allowing somebody to use the space next to them provisionally. I don't know if the business were to come in, like you're leasing the space from the business that isn't there yet. If the business were to come in, like that is their space. I just feel like a term, I don't really know if we have like a ton of open storefronts anyway. Sure. But like in terms of business attraction, if you're going to open up, if you wanted to open a business, I feel like if you knew you didn't have outside space for the remainder of the year, you may not be interested in leasing that space anymore. Sure. And then that puts the on the broaden, but the decision on the business owner who's existing in that space, if they want to expand knowing that there's a possibility somebody could come in, that's up to them and that's their finances, if they buy more tables, etc. I think it's on the property owner, like if they're to really try and lease this space to someone who might want sidewalk access, then they shouldn't sign off. Because the flip side is, if it's like provisional, I got permission to use this space, I staffed and budgeted around it and then it gets revoked halfway through the summer. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I mean, I do think that's part of doing business though, like you could take that risk and take this phase, but I don't think we should limit it from somebody else from wanting to move in there. I think, Councilor, I think that is covered because it's an annual application. So it would only be good for that April to November timeframe and then they'd have to apply again the next year. If the application is the same and the space is still available, they would still need that sign off each year. The sign offs wouldn't be automatic. That would have to be done every year because that's not technically part of the space that's in front of their storefront. So it may be that a business, if it come, if a business, if there's an empty storefront and a business moves in partway through the season, they may not have access to that sidewalk space for the remainder of that part of the year, but the following season, they would potentially have access. So I guess that's a building manager choice to choose that space for a season, knowing that they might have a lessee that then it's disadvantaged for them. So is that a competitive disadvantage for them? They get to make that choice. Yeah, I think like to a rural risk point, like you're taking away from the person actually making the money from using the outdoor space, but that is up to the, if it's over the building owner. Well, they may have trouble filling their space in the... Yeah, no, I think they actually really probably would. This doesn't expressly prevent, prevents the wrong prohibit picnic tables, right? It does not, no, no. Maggie, can I ask, could you shave yours down by six inches? Yeah, if it was worth it, I'd work it down. Shaving it down, we still wouldn't be able to hit as many people out of the place to see it, two seats. So our picnic tables wouldn't be there, it might be, but hey, we usually think so. The regime of that, we would be moving forward, and that allows us to see that return on time. We don't really plan to do it, especially when we're on a picnic. So that's not really that, just that it doesn't seem to work, but it's into the aging, every situation that we might have. If we all do what's possible about the climate outside of our space, when it turns, we can just continue this thing. Well, the cost of shaving that down, it's not as easy as it sounds. So then if they think they're wrong, if you do one snap of your ear, then you shave it down again, it's something that's skilled enough to shave it down on the sand. There's a lot of labor and cost that goes into it. Just to also point out that if you think things are 481 dollars each, they're not very happy with what you're doing, they're individualism. And I think the follow-up question then, Eric, is the six inch discrepancy, if we wanted to accommodate that, it would be reducing the overhang space, right? That or the clear space for the walkway. I guess kind of playing out some of that idea, about how would I guess thinking about ADA accessibility and having flexibility around that amount of space, because I think that's one of the concerns that would come up is businesses who haven't left enough clearance for ADA accessibility. Yeah, and I think as we've talked at previous meetings that ADA is the minimum is three feet, but because of the nature of the downtown core, the minimum that we're comfortable with is that five-foot clearance. I don't know what constitutes a formal complaint, but we did have some current concerns from patrons this past year regarding clearance and table placement and light poles, so it did come up this past season. I think that's, yeah, that's true on the walkway side. Yeah, I think it's like the parking, my impression anyhow is that like the parking, the concerns about parking impediments hasn't been like a formal. Yeah, the parking. Yeah, I know we did receive some complaints about use of the, in particular of the bike rack on the southern end of the main street there at the intersection of West Canal Street and Main Street, that the tables were so close that bike rack was virtually unusable, so we did have to deal with some issues like that, but so we have received some complaints not necessarily related to some of the changes that are built in here, but as we've discussed at previous meetings, we're really focusing on safety and kind of the liability that the city is taking on by allowing use of the city property for this purpose. I'm thinking about, so some of the, just returning to previous conversations is, you're talking about like leasing space, but is that leasing city space? Well, I think I just used the term leasing just to visualize what it was saying. Okay, yeah. All right, just checking on that. Eric, Maggie had brought up moving furniture in and out, but I noticed on the document it's all that person has actually scratched out, so I was wondering if that continues to be included or not included. Is there a page reference? Sorry, yeah, page 7. Yeah, so actually this language was stricken because it's covered further back in the new language. We're basically not, we're including similar language that the area needs to be needs to be kept clear and maintained and etc. Sorry, I'm just reading through what's actually stricken here. I don't know that we carried the specific hours of setup. I think we did eliminate that to allow the businesses to keep tables outside as they needed to, packing them up again as they may for security reasons or to lock them up, but I don't believe we put any parameters on when they could actually have tables set up in that space. I think it is still there on table 14 and I don't need, so this furniture will not be set up more than one hour before it could go three times. Okay, so that was existing language though as well. So it was stricken from one spot, but not that second. But you didn't mean to strike it from both sides? I believe we did. I think that was the intent there is to not limit the setup of furniture. And I don't know if, I believe John Rouscher is also on potentially listening in on Zoom. If I don't know, John, if you had any thoughts on that or any comments since you're maintaining that sidewalk space or the, I was half listening. The language related to setup of furniture in the sidewalk space, it was stricken from one section, but left in another. I think the intent was to strike that from both sections so that the tables could just stay out if they needed to during the sidewalk season. Yeah, that was my understanding too. So I have some sympathy for the timeline here for businesses to accommodate this, like having heard about it over the holidays, having invested in stuff over the last two years to address pandemic. If we didn't implement this for April 1st, but we pursued it for like next year, what is the impact to, I don't know, what does that do to your processes staff? That's a good question. I think it depends on if we're pausing the entire change, including some of the liability insurance and things that we've talked about at past meetings that we're looking for, that maybe something we can just include on an application. I don't know how I'm not sure that we can require it if it's not in the code somehow, but I think the biggest thing is it's an additional year of potential liability that the city's carrying. And if that's a risk, you all are comfortable taking. And I'm not sure, Elaine, if you want to weigh in on anything as well in that regard. Yeah, I would just underline that. And yeah, I understand that it might feel sudden, even though it feels like a long time to us, in terms of the planning for restaurants, I can see how it feels more sudden. And yeah, those are the extent of impacts really. And while we still have John here, would you consider reducing the parking overhang requirement any further? It's for a final sort of, if you're asking to reduce it from two feet, I would not recommend doing that because that is sort of design overhang with any less than that, then you still have that sort of risk. If somebody does get hit there and injured, you've sort of already been told at this point, unfortunately, that two feet is the recommended clearance space. Right. And you'll recall that the cities ensure they recommended that whatever it is, it follows some sort of standard that we have with the two feet. That's the best protection we have against the suit, succeeding against the city if there wasn't injury. Is there a way to move forward with a little wider Williams Insurance portion about pushing back the changes for a year? I don't know that we would need council approval for that piece. I'll have to look into it. Another thought that might not be possible considering what type of document this is, is if would there be a way to do like an incremental change to make it like be in compliance with the course of like this is going into effect, you will need to be in compliance by like three seasons from now, three seasons from now. On I think maybe the thing I'm thinking most about is like the tables maybe being, say, six inches more than we're asking. I'm not sure that quite makes sense with that. Yeah, I think it just comes down to what Eric had said already. So it's that much longer that council is stating that you're comfortable with the liability risk. So I mean, this is our recommendation as staff that the city has been under this risk for some time and it's just lucky that, and there have been accidents that we've heard about, but nobody complained about them. Nobody sued the city for them. But if at some point somebody does then, and it's not just to be fair, it's not that the city would be liable for the full amount, we would have a deductible that we would be liable for. But it could potentially affect our experience modification from in terms of like a premium cost might go up in the next year after such a suit. So there would be some cost to the city. And I'm guessing one thing I'm wondering is if there is a way to bump parking back six feet. And I know we talked about jersey barriers being unworkable. But I'm wondering if there's any way to do a wheel stop that is six inches back from the curb, back from where it is now, because right the wheel stops at the curb and that creates a two inch a rank and you drop one of those parking barrier like the eight inch high ones on there in the summer permanently, still have the snow management, which I know is the issue of permanent barriers. And do we have some ability, at least in this one corridor where this is creating the most adverse impacts to have an option to reduce the parking stall depth in favor of maintaining that five feet and the additional six inches. There's issues on either end. John, do you want to comment on that? Yeah, sure. So we did, we did review that kind of as one of the first options to look to see if there's anything we could do sort of inexpensively to change the geometry and accommodate sidewalk use. Unfortunately, the way the geometry of the parking is set up now is sort of the recommended layout minimum distances. We did look at, did they even make a durable temporary wheel stop that we could try to use and we couldn't find a manufacturer that made sense. And given that VTrans just did a whole concrete project resurfacing, we didn't really want to look at, you know, punching holes in the new resurface concrete either. So there's some maintenance issues there. But that was something we looked at and we just could not find a solution that really worked with the existing parking geometry and just the temporary nature of it. And John, wouldn't six inches encroach on an already narrow quarter on the backside? On the parking stall depth is that? Sorry, right. So the traffic lane behind the parking? Yeah, it's already, I mean, it's less than what the fire department would want currently. So it's, I forget what the dimension is, but it's, I think it's like 12 or, yeah, I forget offhand, but it would reduce that drive lane even more, which is not really in compliance with what the fire department would want to see there. So right now we are just looking at maintaining the walkway at an ADA depth of required depth three feet, is that right? Well, we're not in this. Oh, sorry. Right now, I believe that's correct. John, did you catch that question? I can say it again. Yeah, five feet is what I think is currently the minimum three feet is the absolute ADA minimum. But honestly, in a downtown area like that 78 feet is what's recommended for just the amount of traffic that's pedestrian traffic that's down there. And so John, can you give us a sense for current conditions? I wish I had the sketches in front of me. Hold on. Yeah, I think the, I don't know if you remember offhand air, I believe the paver section is seven to eight foot wide. I think that's right. I was going to say the brick area on the on the upper side in front of the storefront is seven, I think six in some spots six to eight feet wide through there. And then the large granite kind of streetscape belt that where there's a step down, it's it's five foot wide. And then the curbing is an additional six inches wide for both the actual curb at the street and the the step as well. So yeah, so in some spots, it's an additional foot of curbing and in others without the step, it's just the curb at the road of six inches. Yeah, I think what's rough for me is I feel like I left the last time we spoke about this thinking it was going to provide more benefits for businesses and then to hear like actual dollar amounts calculated by one business. So then you multiply that by the others that it's affected by just a lot of revenue loss, given the difficulty we have in the budget. I really don't like the idea of perfect new laws. It's just, yeah, I wish there was a different way we could fix both problems. Yeah, we also don't want to encourage the liability sounds like that could change. And I think Councilor Renner to your to your point, I think it's this is these changes will impact each business differently. For sure. I mean, I've had conversations with at least one business owner that said this will have no impact on my business whatsoever. I'll be able to accommodate all the tables I currently have in the same footprint that I'm using now just shifting it in and I'll be fine. So I think it's going to depend on the specific location as well as as you know what what the expectations or what the current conditions of the business are. So it will be variable. That's I guess it's probably the easiest way to put that. I'd be open to advancing these to start next year. One of the things we haven't talked about is whether to extend or exempt or exclude one section of the city from these regulations that's minimize or minimizing most of the risk but not completely eliminating it. So, you know, risks spread over the entire city is different than risk in one block. And then the other one would be any sort of request for an exemption that Council could make on a case by case basis if they decided to take on risk business by business to review these rules. Those are two options that I'll think that we've discussed previously, which I think I agree that implementing this now, all of this now seems a little bit too soon. That could be something to consider between now and the year start date, the year out start date. I imagine you'd want to talk to our insurer to understand if that we're exempting a section knowing that there's less space than. Or even just exempting like making a really good request of holding a put and a half overhang instead of a two foot overhang as a part of your application. We would be not in compliance with standards. So, it would be less defensible in a suit. But is it more defensible than having nothing? I guess that was what I heard in your question. Yeah. What's the nothing? One's the nothing? Just leaving things as they are. So, right now we have a 100% risk. Yeah. With these standards, maybe we have zero percent. Would exemptions give us 95%? Yeah. Or sorry, 5% risk. That seems unlikely. But if you want me to ask, I will ask. I mean, where does it end? I think that 100 feet of risk is a lot different than 20,000 feet of risk, whatever the total main street corridor plus all of their sidewalks around the rotary. There's a difference between your probability of injury and a reduced linear footprint. I don't know if insurers and underwriters think about it that way, but it certainly is different. I don't know if I would look at the risk that way. It's more like if something happened, then what's the exposure to the city for that one event? I know what you're saying. What's the likelihood of it happening anywhere? Yeah. I just don't understand what the basis of the exemption is really from a policy level standpoint. That part I would take some thought and I have some concerns about. I think for me in the immediate future, I think it would be good to advance the two million insurance coverage requirement. If we're not going to move anything else, I would advocate that we move that forward. Yeah. I misspoke earlier. I said without council approval. Yes. Without code change was the actual concern. So I'll look into that, whether we can just go ahead with that without a code change. Okay. I feel like I passed this question before to the previous name. Is there no way where the liability of the overhang can be put on to the business and then if they want to use more room or not use more room that's on them and no longer on the city? There's no way to avoid absolute liability because what happens in a lawsuit is they're suing whoever they want to sue and how defensible each it's the opposite of a plaintiff. Defendants. It's up at that point then the defendant either has a strong case to make or not. And we can't enter like a legal agreement with the businesses that they have assumed that defense. I don't know. I guess we could look into that. Then there would be a basis for the exemption, right? Because if you remove all the risk from the city and the business entirely is willing to take it on. So I don't know. I know I've spoken with someone they would be willing to. I don't know if everyone would, but our concern there was that the city, their concern is making money. But I feel like if we, doing what we need to do takes away what they want to do. But if there's a way to get us to be partners on it instead, maybe then a little. I do. At some point, I don't know if we could ever, I'll look into it. And I'm not an attorney, but I do wonder at some point how airtight that would be. Because in any such lawsuit, a good lawyer for the plaintiff is going to go after the deepest pocket to ensure the best outcome for their, for their client. The city is going to have a deeper pocket than the business owner. So, but I don't know the answer definitely to your question. It's not an apples to apples comparison, but a lot of ski resorts lease land from the state. There's a significant amount of liability there. And injuries happen all the time on ski resorts. So I wonder how the state protects themselves from liability. I'm betting that there's some waiver that the skiers are entering into an agreement for their own liability. So, in which case, we don't have that situation. Like not every customer coming into downtown is signing a waiver. I guess for my questions with putting it off here, does that truly, I guess, would that be better for businesses or is it still going to be hard for businesses while also putting the city at risk? So good question. I know, Ellie or Maggie, you want to, would a one-year delay make you, would that accommodate somewhat? I think it would accommodate somewhat. I think really like in reality, it would apply to happen, I hope. Yeah. But maybe there's more creative things that could occur in that next year as well. And I, you know, the idea of businesses taking that liability, I mean that we would have to see what that means, but we already take a lot of liability already with corporate liability insurance. So like it might already be covered somewhere in there at a year or so. And if that's the direction council wants to go, at some point, even if we did have, hopefully that doesn't happen, but if there was a crash in the next year and then we had that jump in premium, then you would have the protection going forward. And so it wouldn't be forever. I'm sorry, can you repeat that? So if you, if council adopted the change in FY and for season 2025, that means that whatever happens next year, that risk, like you'd have a jump in premium if there was a crash in 2023, right? But assuming that after 2024, you don't have that risk anymore, eventually that premium impact would go away. Oh, okay. Because you wouldn't keep it experiencing more and more crashes. Well, I think we have three options here. Elaine, check me on this. Someone can move this forward as is. We could move it forward for adoption in 2024. Well, you could. Or we would just wait and bring this back because we have some questions to still surface. What would happen if this council adopted effective 2024? I guess that it would be a little odd because the ordinance change wouldn't be an effect then or could we build on a longer change? I haven't seen one just like that. Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not sure the logistics of how that would work or the legality of it because it is an ordinance. It is a change to the code, which does have an effective date once it's approved. So I don't know if that can be delayed just by action of council saying that it's not going to become effective until a later date. I think statute outlines when changes to code become effective. So I don't know that you can extend those, but I don't know. I don't have a good answer for that. Okay, so then our choices are we can move this forward now or we could not and we could bring it back for future review with some more information. We have the intent to do it. In that scenario, I'm saying we have the intent to make it effective in 2024. The council could end up not doing it or changing. There's that risk as well. Is there a third option of making amendments or would that need to go to go back out for public hearing? I think it would have to go to public hearing again, right? If you're looking at making changes that are substantively different than what's in here now, it would need to go back through public hearing. Yes. And there's a third option is to, well, along the lines of amendments, everything but the actual two-foot, five-foot, the sidewalk area designation could be put through. Like everything, all the other changes that you have outlined could be included except for that two-foot overhang in terms of making that, providing the other benefits that these changes would have for the city and for the process, but just eliminating that one definition of clear states. So that would be, that's a substantive change. So it'd have to be an expedient public hearing, but that's something that could be considered. That's true. So I think if the proposal, yeah, I believe that probably would be, even though the language is not currently included, we're not, those would be removing potential ads. So I don't know if those would be considered substantive changes because it's substantive for what's proposed, but based on what's currently in place, it may not be substantive. So I don't know that we would, I would probably feel more comfortable with a legal opinion on that question, but my initial thought is that because it's not currently in place, we're just striking the language instead of because it's not added yet. So it may not technically be a substantive change, but I do not want to give you that as advice currently. I have another question and this might not be one that anyone can necessarily answer, but I want to put out does making this change, like taking the money from both the city and the businesses out of it, is making this change going to make visitors and residents when you ski safer? Like, are we putting off something that would make a new ski safer? Are we putting off something that is it's purely fiscal? It will make visitors safer. I think that if it will make the money going, I don't know whether it will then and then, whether it will be any money from the farm, but it will be sort of, I'm not sure that was a way to answer your question, but it won't be people's system, but it will be able to make that new money back to the business. I think we're dealing with a hypothetical, like it's, it hasn't been seen, like a two-foot buffer certainly seems like it's the standard, but somebody could drive up onto the sidewalk. I mean, when you see like bad crashes, like it's usually somebody like driving into a building. So like a two-foot buffer doesn't prevent that anyway. The like, so I don't think you can answer that question. Like we're talking hypothetical ideas here. Well, the reason for the standard is because it is safer. So I'm saying that the standards are telling us this will be safer for people. It's going to be much harder to have someone have their leg crushed between a bench and a car bumper if these are put in place. Yeah. That is almost impossible to happen unless something is set up not according to this code. And then, so I think that I would say that is unequivocally true whether or not it'll happen. Right. It's a question. Right, which I think that was Maggie's point. It doesn't mean it will happen if we don't do this. It just means that the risk of it happening will be much less. So I think we're back to two choices here. Someone could move to, could make a motion to approve this as is, or no one could do that. We bring this back at a future meeting, which is going to be in a month because it won't go on our first March meeting. Yeah. Nice. I mean, like I asked Elaine that question and she was going to ask the lawyer. Yeah. I don't feel comfortable moving anything forward until she's had time to do that. And I've been taking notes too, Elaine. And in a month we're still not in outdoor seating season. So nobody will be sitting outside. It could be. I don't think technically people can put their stuff out until they roll. I don't think our current regulations specify the time. I may be wrong on that. In that case, they must have moved really warm days. Okay. I'm going to just do one last call for action. Does anyone want a second? We will revisit this. Thank you for coming in. Thank you. And thank you. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Thank you. Don't go away. Dear Viewpoints. Yes. Thank you very much. I'm here tonight to request appointment of Emily Morse to the position of alternate on the Development Review Board with a term ending June 30th, 2024. We were a, the Development Review Board has a seven member, has seven members appointed, five regular members, two alternates. We recently had one of our alternate step down. Caitlyn Hayes, she moved out of the city. So she stepped down from the DRB as not being a resident anymore. Fortunately, we were lucky to have Ms. Morse submit an application for the position of alternate basically to fill that the remainder of Caitlyn's term. Emily comes to the, to the, to the board with, as a design manager for Lewis Creek Builders, which provides a, I think a good depth and breadth of knowledge with building activity and basically the same, the same information that the Development Review Board is tasked with, with overseeing the chair of the Development Review Board and myself did interview with, with Ms. Morse previously. We both are recommending that she be appointed for, for this position. And I'm not sure if she's with us tonight or not, but I believe she's on zoom. Emily, would you like to introduce yourself? Hey, yes. Thank you. I don't really have a whole lot to say that the interview was really interesting and went really well. And I'm excited for this opportunity. I started my college career as an economic development major and then couldn't stop drawing houses and thinking about houses. So I think it's a very cool opportunity to merge kind of both of my interests. Awesome. You look very qualified. Sounds like a two. Thank you for your interest in, in serving in this role. Are there any questions? I'm just going to identify potential perceived conflict of interest as we are in a contract with Lewis Creek Builders and Emily in particular is a very good at drawing houses, ours included. So I do want to disclose that potential perceived conflict of interest. And I'm looking at our policy. I can entertain any questions that folks have it, but we already have received our zoning permit and are under active construction. So there's no we're not going to be going through the development review board for this particular project. So I'll dispose that. I don't think that I need to recue myself because I think it can still act fairly impartially in the public interest in this matter, but I don't know what the folks know. And one seems very qualified. So I think she's good. Okay. Okay. Motion to approve this appointment. So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. All right. Motion carries. Thank you, Emily. Thank you so much. Thank you all very much. Thank you. Okay. We've lost Mr. Frega for our next item. Let me do our, let me just do a five-minute recess. It's 720. We'll reconvene at 725 and we will hear the Pine Grove Terrace request patient request. Elaine is going to give an introduction and then pass it to the residents. Thank you. So as you know, representatives from the Pine Grove Terrace Homeowners Association have been in discussions with staff regarding their sewer pump station and the associated dispart charge pipe. The other way is none of the board's main. Their requests include the city taking over the facility or to reimburse them for repair they claim was required by city work in the area. Excuse me. After discussing with staff and the city attorney, I have denied both requests. The HOA has essentially requested council hear their appeal of my decisions. Not reading from the memo. A city council can serve this function of hearing appeals of city manager decisions. A staff does recommend in this case that council declined to take action, thereby deferring to the city manager's decisions in this case. A city council does not have the technical or legal information to make such determinations. And the community is better served by relying on this professional staff and contracted services in such cases. It is also not exactly council's role to make this sort of detailed determination on a specific situation. As mentioned in the memo from the public works director, if council does wish to take up this type of matter, it would be more appropriate to do so at a policy level. In this case, following past practice, that would take the form of directing staff out of the annual policy priorities and strategies process, directing staff to explore impacts of the city taking over private sewer pump stations in the city, of which there are eight. All right, thank you. Would you like to start, Thomas? Well, Tom, I've got a little time to prepare, sir. I have my Vice President, Senator, going to introduce you to us. Hi, my name is Levi, Vice President of the HOA. Hey, I'm Andrew Jeremy, and I'm the treasurer. And without them, I probably wouldn't be. All right, so let's start off with upon after what the city manager has to present to you. I'm starting in the sewer hole, trying to work my way out. There is a lot to do with this, and there's a lot of history to this. But I think the problem is, is that we're not advanced, but the city just said they might have to do. What we're just saying is, have you heard your buddy carries? This is a no-cost safety. We're willing to bear our way. We're willing to do what we've done. In the last few months, they've set $125 each residence funding to rent this, especially feet that upgrade the pump system. We just did that. We paid over $21,000 if they upgraded that pump system. The bills are richer. I believe in that packet. We did what the city reported. If they were going to make it over six months ago, one of the guidelines is, you'd have to meet higher standards. But providing private contractor, some of the city recognized and respected, and they did look over the site, cost $800 just to do an assessment. They replaced the pump, but they replaced the infrastructure in that. And they put a new lit up, which was clearly needed in the very days. I'll show you some pictures of that. Having done that, and clearly the global association behind that, I also recognize from the city in the last six months, we've got numerous emails that they have communicated with various presidents and various members back and forth, and took over the water shed. You wouldn't say anything to that for 30 years since I've done that. We can't take the exploration. We could never afford to take that water shed. And the specifications for the federal and the state, we really wouldn't give them any guidelines. What if we hired a contractor and paid $20,000 and instantly said it doesn't meet the standards because they changed. But we just didn't do it. We fought back. We said, it was the standards. At least we know what we're going to do with it. The city went through several city vendors at the same time. We kept communicating, we put our trees and brush out of there. But we really just couldn't talk about that state. It wasn't until the city said, we found our way. The city came to us and said, we got a grant, 50-50, whatever it was, and they could do it, all they needed for us to sign off the memo. We had a permit that had been updated. They wanted to fix that. They had all the expertise, all the knowledge, all the understanding. Couldn't have been hacked. Are we going to pay taxes for that? At some point, well, we're $8,000 on average, 22 months of care, paying taxes for the last 30 years. I mean, we're playing consider what we're considered a primary area. But we got a pump station. Do you have pump stations in your neighborhoods? I don't believe so. Well, it's a big issue. So we've been dealing with that as membership. And quite frankly, we haven't done a good job because for changing staff, COVID, we had like one person going to continue to try. And they didn't even collect dues for most of our last two years. When I took over, nobody wanted my position. I walked into it. They didn't have a campaign or anything for it. A lot of things I was able to get in the United States movie. And Andrew stepped up and said, I'll hook up. And the secretary came on board. So because of that, I said, okay, we'll collect all the dues for years and worth in some cases, and we'll get moving and we'll get our fund back, and we'll do what we've got to do. Meantime, I'm right down the road, and I find a poll on the pavement in the street. That whole had an odor come from it. And I said, oh my goodness, I better call the city. I called the city, the police department, go on again. And he said, we got this, we'll let somebody know. So, somebody knows me, a neighbor comes to me a day later and says, do you see this? I said, yeah, I called him on Friday. So okay, great. They did too, sad. Well, nobody's been up here. Well, at least they know. On Monday, I run into one of your children's, and he says, how come you haven't done anything about this? He says, why would I do anything about it? It's under a street. So right away. No, your response for the pipe all the way up the hill. That's news to me. 30 years here. I only thought it was responsible pump station. Well, how do I have the authority to hire somebody to contract me, take the solo? Well, I'll help you with that. Okay. Got a lot of support. We've got a contractor. We've got someone in. I said, I really want a few kids in disagreement that we own. I'll pay for it. I know we've got concerns for EPA. We've got spillage. Let's get this done. Let's do the right thing when I haven't did that. And I think the total bill we submitted to the city, so they know if I have it here, copies of what we paid. After doing that, we probably, not for the city manager, but we actually had time to know that the city manager came one, we gave time to get used to the job or be available. We met quickly. Very positive conversations that we'll let's see what the deed says. We asked the city clerk for support. We got in there. And all we could find was that we were responsible for the pump station, according to the deed. We didn't find any easements or anything like that. There was an exception where we asked our local attorney to one of the homeowners to go if there's any exceptions. There was none. So we thought we had a good case. We've been trying to communicate and bought us up one line for the city, as we can see. But we finally, late in the fall, got further communication and then the email saying, okay, documentation, easements, maps, who owns what. Very surprised to see some listening. But also very surprised to see we have such a cute libel if one of them makes them. But there's some pictures trying to look at the easement for the map and realize that that goes up to a residence, this is not a standard, that goes up to a residence, to a residence that now has a house because they're in the first unit and has a garage. I don't know if that's on top of our agent or controls that, if we were supposed to, but he didn't show up above him and said, you can't build there. I don't know if the city overlooked it for us, because I even can't do that or what. But all I know is we're not really sure, even though that shows a line, this shows a line coming up on this side. The easements are for two residents on this side saying off the curb. I'm not an expert, I'm not here to present myself as an expert. I'm trying to say that the city has clearly shown in several times that they know a lot more about this than we do. They really express that. They also much more organized than we have. They clearly express that. For all the documentation they give us, they show them that. These are the other eight private pump stations. Yes, thank you. I hope to see the stories. You know, I mean, it might be a couple here that actually are personal associations, but then again, do they ever close up 500 feet up a hill, up a road, or are they just 10 feet away from the sewer? I know for a fact that where our agent is, they have a personal pump station. They have a personal pump station right here on that, on that walk just by themselves. Why? Because we were sure of the capacity of ours. And then when they came in and said to park themselves, they want to do one kind of painting. We said, no, you got to join this in a few years. If you do, those are the city required new pump stations. We also have a couple of fields at the beginning of the street right next to the quarry and across the street going by the quarry, it's open field. They came to us early on 30 years ago and said, we're going to tie into your pump station. For a fact, I think it's going to take them an hour, but at the time, we weren't sure of the capacity, we were sure of how good it would be. So we lost that hosting ability or that space for the city to earn tax pay or money, offer us an action. If the city had control of that, maybe that would be different. It makes sense, it can make a common sense way. The argument we brought to the city that started all this discussion that I'm not saying it wasn't the first time. We've had these talks before. We felt the city really shouldn't take the lead on this. When I lived in the fight, when the contractors were running, they were going a great job, I was glad the city gave me up. There was a bend in that fight. Oh, let me show you how interesting. I brought this. So if you look closely, you see a bend in the fight. Now I used to be a helicopter crew chief. I know a little about maintenance. I know a little about stress fractures. I'm not an engineer and I'm not going to over speak to city officials. But I wouldn't tell you that it's hard to get a leak from the bend. Why did the bend come there? Well, it was a huge pile of construction in that area. I'll show you quickly if you can hear me. Starting that far back from the end of the road. Everybody can see it okay. You can see the line where it starts. It goes down and the sewer pump is here. Down here again. Off the road. The line goes up and there's already. The only thing I understood it, well, retired, so I'm home a lot. I see the guys, was that we need to be clear of the roads so the trucks could get down here. Big trucks. Trucks brought them back. Big trucks. They did a lot of digging. They removed a lot of dirt. They had to. Just back here. Well, we all dug out. They moved a lot of dirt, brought a lot of dirt in. Very scientific. I talked to the engineer. Very new technology. Very high end. Special kind of grass was put in here. Pikes were coming in from Colchester Network and had to deal with that. Yeah, they did a great job. But I didn't know there was a pike on the dirt that I haven't been concerned about. And then I showed you that. Here's a garage. Going up to the site. Going up to the hill. I don't know where that thing is. It's in front of the garage. I don't know. When I told her there's a garage, I said, didn't know where I could take a picture. Okay, so I did. So I don't know. There's discussion. There's new pumps. Look what we put in. This is how it looked before. Now, get one went off at nine o'clock one night. I had to go down there with a splash light and look in that hole and see what the heck's going on. I had no clue. No clue. So I called the company just like the city would today. We'd leave the beers with that. The city would do today. Somebody would come and take a look at it and say, you know what? Your folks fell into the pump. But we couldn't get somebody for three days. Now we have a contract with somebody from that night checkers. Because we're working with the city, we upgraded to a monitoring alarm where you get on our phone. That's it. So new issues, new technology, we've upgraded. We replaced all the infrastructure. But I'll tell you at nine o'clock one night, you want to look in the hole and be the citizen responsible for figuring out if you got to turn a pump locker on. I didn't. I said, what the heck? I got to fall into that hole. My wife was like, where are you at? So anyways, we didn't upgrade it. Here's the guy working on the hole in the pipe. We offered the city back in stone. We started this discussion that in lieu of the reimbursement of the $7,000, $8,000 where it was built, we'd wait that. We had about $25,000, $18,000 more in our Astro County. We'd get that to the city. Just keep it open. We work with you. You've got the expertise. And what are you going to do when it was a single halfway up the street, where you put in the little water around us? I took pictures of it. I went to the supermarket and said to me, what's up? I just wonder what it is. Oh, it's part of the pipe. Right where they done. I'm going to put it in. Yeah, that's where we'll be. Okay. But do you have any idea what it's going to be done? I don't have enough people. Okay. What's the plan? We're going to have to hire a contractor. Okay. They hire a contractor. We hire a contractor. This is definitely an excellent idea. All we're seeing is he knew what to do. He knew how to get fixed. And then they had to hire an employee to make it work. So I want that off the table. Really, I understand where it's coming from if we put this burden on them. For all we're asking from the council to say, this thing says, let's just strip the city, like you did with the watershed, figure it out, figure out how to do it, and come back to us with a plan. All we have to do is find a memo and say, yeah, you can do it. If you're going to give us a special fee, which the city manager said it's a city council, first one, which first back approved this and said, yeah, we're going to pick up your pump city, but when these three stipulations, one is that we upgrade. We did that. In that, based on what we do from the city, number two, we'd have to order your special fee. Well, we just charged them $750 and they didn't even get a sweep at any point in that neighborhood because they knew it had to be done. It was hard. It was right in the middle of December. And a lot of people said, can you give me a couple months to pay it? I said, yes. But we got to fix this. We got to put it in the pump and we got to get this up the street. Everyone agreed to. The third thing is you have to get approval and get people to work on this. And I think I don't want to be negative about this. I want to try to stay positive. I think we worked together over the years and I think we worked together in the last few months from this. I don't see if it takes another six months or less or more. We can still get this done. I'm not asking for a change over today. I'm asking that we have the funds that we thought we didn't remember. We can still give cities some funds to help with the ease of their hours or legal returns or whatever it was. This should be at no cost. It's here. I see you budget. I know you were going over 20 to 40 hours on a staff moment that the city should have or shouldn't have, but can you do it with your budget? I don't want you to think it's a budget issue. I don't want that to be presented as a budget issue because we never said we wouldn't pay for it. What we said is he works a little time. He shouldn't have to stop his day and try to figure this out to get 22 residents, 22 homes, 60 residents where Dr. Levi here or myself who might be traveling and saying my phone goes off and I get a call one of them and I say, what's down there? Do we have a power failure? Because it will go up and power failure. That doesn't mean it's a problem. Do I think I'm going to pump it down here or pump it up because it's been there for three or four days? And as the city think, well now we've taken it over, maybe there is opportunity at the top of the hill for some of those empty blocks or empty fields for housing that we badly need. It's not an open shut case. I think it's a room for discussion. It's a room for what we can do for it. And I think the director of the utilities and everyone has their opinion but I think it's right for you to say to them, let's open, let's be open mind about it. Let's rethink this and come back to us what could be done. I think as residents in the community for 30 years, I love the neighborhood. I love working on a very diverse neighborhood. We had a neighborhood community party at the end with very close neighborhood. We're just trying to do the right thing. And when that last field occurred, it could have been worse and I could have been held liable because I might have made the odds for a few days and come back to a disaster going to her bottom. I think it should be in the end of the city to do the right thing. And again, I don't think any of us feel that we can't take our fair share to make this work. Any questions right now? Let me ask, can you not retain whatever the right word is, water mechanic, a person like contract with somebody to maintain this thing for you or to come out when you have issues? Part of the thing that we have done with the city's recommendation, but the monitoring system up there, that monitoring system goes right to the person that will go out and take a look at it and check on it. The point we have is with that is that the city can do the same thing. And our issue still is with the plight and busing. I mean, it's nine feet down. They were down three or four feet deep. I mean, I lived down there. So I know about heavy trucks and vehicles and it's an old road. And it didn't break anywhere else. It broke to the point where they were working. So I mean, I kind of hardly believe it was coincidental. But I think we are doing what the city's asked to do. The question comes up is inspection by the state and all those kind of things. We don't know anything about that. We don't know. But we are working with paying for a maintenance contract with the crew to come in a couple of years, pump it out, clean it out. All again, the city could assess that fee and come up with their special assessment fee for the neighborhood. And we would all be glad to go. The only thing we're association for is to maintain this pump station. And the only thing we're doing back in that eight weeks is maintaining this pump station. We're not experts. We don't know if you'll change it or not. We also looked at the fact that there's been thrown back on us at trying to find an alternative to a pump station, running a line down towards Pine Street. I took some pictures both ways. With new technology, it may, you know, the machines that run bikes under the ground, it may not be as evasive as some people have stated. It might be something that's also, as I'll turn, remove the pump stations all together. Now that might take a year or two to really think about just getting it all looked at and figured out. But we're willing to work with the city. And when we're just asking the city to continue to work with us and look at it from a perspective of, rather than know, more like the watershed, we'll keep it in mind. And if there's something we can do about it, we'll do it in the city's right thing. The watershed's amazing what they did and how they did it and what they came up with. And there's still water running down the hill alongside of it from another area. But our water runs into that watershed. And so we've got the right thing done. That's a good question. Well, let me say, I think this at your ask is fairly aligned with just to reiterate from the staff recommendation, like our role in the scenario would be to at a policy level direct staff. Yes, look at these private pumps, not just yours, it would be all of them or no. And I want to re-emphasize what staff recommended as well, that that's a decision that should be made in concert with our strategic prioritization. Because maybe for face value, think it's a good idea, but we need to also think about the big picture of all the things we're looking at. So if there was council interest and further exploration, I think we would have to pick it up during that discussion. But now would be a good time to again, if there are more questions about the scenario or what is being asked to get clarity. So I could use some clarity. You mentioned the field kind of up the hill. And can you just explain to me the what's prohibiting development on that right now? So it is no access to so we would need a pump station or a look into ours. And did you say you had a sense? Do you have a sense now for your capacity? It could be very painful doing it. As long as we weren't maintaining it, we weren't you know, worried about how others, you know, when you get more people on a system, there's more chances for concerns and issues. So I don't know. I think I would really have to be upgraded. But it happened. I think we met the expectations. When we did pump it out, I said, well, what happens, the line goes up, the power goes up. They said we could go three days before coming with the residents we have now. So when you mentioned working with the other residents at pump stations, I'd like you to really look at this list. That list was little, I don't know. This is something for us. When we said private pump stations, I find it hard to find that many of those are private pump stations. I don't think the school business is a private pump station. When you look at those lists, they're going to agree that they're probably authentic with private pump stations. Well, they're private in the sense that the school is maintaining and operating that and not the city, just as you're each away. Right. And then, but they have a school budget which the city votes on. Right. So I doubt that the city school district would come to you and say, okay, we want you to take over our foundation. You have a tax base already. That's a different number. What would you build your soccer field? So I don't see that as an issue. I think it's your point. It is a school district. But it's a separate and it would not be taken on us. Take the city under your command for that. I mean, you might take a contract and follow their guidelines to the city. But that would be. That's already happened. Yeah. So that would be maybe something. But then that wouldn't be a cost to your city budget. That would be coming out of school budget. I would say in the city for that. Would it be okay if I read a little statement as well? Right before you do that, Eric. The empty land at the top of Pine Grove Terrace, I think the quarry owns that. Right. So with Mr. Fraga, his understanding is that it's not developable because there's not sewer access. But I feel like you've mentioned before that there's other reasons that that land is undeveloped. My understanding is that land would be protected as a buffer to the quarry and is not able to be developed. There's a restriction of development on it. I believe it's through their application. Okay. But there's two spots. If anybody knows George Cross and the fact Eric. So there's a big spot between the mailboxes and number one. Yeah, I don't know the whole board. We can get more information, but I just wanted to. Is the quarry at any point in time off of the city that is donating that space to the city for apartment? I doubt anyone here has that historic knowledge. Yeah, Tom. Okay. Tom's quite passionate on the subject. He's thinking about the 30 years. Still qualified under the Act 250 regulations. The one that just has to be green and undeveloped. But I want to go too far down that rabbit hole. Go ahead, Levi. Thank you. So I'd like to read just a brief comment from Andrew and myself on this topic. And I will say we understand this really isn't your situation to deal with, but we came to you guys after six months of radio silence from the city. So it was kind of a way to get their attention, I guess. But we share many of Tom's concerns. We'll try not to belabor the same points and we'll keep it short. It just seems unusual to us in Vermont's most dense city that volunteers from neighborhood homes are responsible for transporting their own waste through city property to private property and back to city property. There's a lot of issues associated with this whole agreement. When neighbors want to build in our easement area, we are expected to assess whether or not there will be implications to our sewage infrastructure. When the city repairs property, we should be acting responsible and supervising their work to make sure our assets aren't impacted. If the city brings in heavy equipment, we should assess whether the road can support and protect our assets from the weight. Among many other things Tom mentioned, right now we are solely responsible for this. But I feel like our vendors can't be fully honest and in our corner about this because they need to protect relationships with the city and politics and make their own money. City contractors or workers aren't as focused or concerned with our assets because it doesn't belong to the city and basically it's not their concern. We recognize the effort Public Works has done to help us, like the EPA report this summer, but seriously, how are a bunch of volunteers supposed to write that up? How are we supposed to fulfill all of these obligations responsibly while not being Public Works people? We're not trained. We're volunteers. We're busy people. We've been in the neighborhood for two-ish and five-ish years and it's already apparent to me that the neighborhood HOA model is flawed. No neighbor wants to be responsible for everyone's waste. No one wanted to be on the HOA. We're doing this reluctantly. We don't want to be responsible for your toilet flushing. There's many issues with having an HOA. It comes with inconsistent communication between the city and residents, weird neighborhood hierarchies and inequities, uncomfortable boundary issues among others, lost institutional and historical knowledge when officers burn out or rotate, which happens frequently, and ultimately it's the lack of time and expertise. We don't have staff and, again, we're not trained. In 1988, the developers in city agreed to pass this burden on to the neighborhood and if anyone wanted to live here, they'd have to accept it. After 35 years, I think Tom and others have paid their dues. My neighbors have lived through this arrangement and have come to the conclusion that it's not really a good model. Should we be managing this? Should other HOAs be managing this? You've heard our arguments. I don't think so. My neighbors don't think so. Other residents and people I've talked to in Winooski don't think so. In the end, the city staff is presenting logistical issues and objections and we hear them. We're living and breathing those very issues. We're here asking for help talking about what's right and wrong. Please consider making a motion to pursue an alternative to the current waste management responsibility of the Pine Grove Terrace HOA or help us guide to a mutually beneficial solution within the city. Thank you. Thank you for that. Do other folks have any clarifying questions? You've said a couple of times that this wouldn't incur any costs on the city and I just don't understand how that would be possible. Special assessments. We're not asking for funding through everyone's taxes. Give us special assessments every time something breaks. We'll pay for it. We've already showed that we'll pay for it. We just did one two days before Thanksgiving and everyone paid within two weeks. We just don't want the responsibility. Everyone on the block is willing to pay, so it wouldn't increase financial burden on yourselves. We would pay for it basically. Yeah, I don't want to fight. I want something that doesn't work. Yeah, how is it our responsibility to go around and collect from our neighbors? What if someone is hostile? Why is that put on us? It doesn't make any sense. It's dangerous. It could be dangerous to collect. I mean, I didn't pay my taxes one day late. I got a percentage to pay extra. I get that. I understood 30 years that they don't value. I approved this week, but that's still doing it. There is no money for the cost to you folks. We're paying. It's going to be assessed what their fee is. Once that assessment comes, then let's move forward. It's not. Now, maybe on the other pump stations you want to reach out to them, but we don't want that. We like what we got. We're handling it. We're only three feet away from the sewer line. We don't worry about it. I think we're on the same lane. Do you want to speak to costs or operations? I would I would rather not because of my request. Yeah, if if you want me to comment on the on the estimated costs, I will. Well, I feel like in the packet in response to them, you had noted staff time required and some other things. That was another part of my wonder is I know that we are understaffed at the moment, so I don't know. Well, let me answer for my question. I'm the staff of I'm both Paris. I put 100 hours in collecting. I put 10 hours in contracting a contractor and having showed up and looking at doing the job and making sure he did who was recommended by the city. Hands done. There is no additional cost. We don't have to hire a new employee to say, oh, I'm going to get a contractor now for the super city. Now, I'm going to crack the ones that are going to want to leave the mansion to give me if I sound too aggressive here. The guys don't have done this one out. But my point is that yeah, if you're going to take on pump stations, sure, like if you're going to take on a single halfway down the street, because you didn't have this act, so what did you do with contracting it out? On a good year, on a normal year, it's like 10 hours of time to like oversee this station. Most of it's collecting news and having an annual meeting. When there is an issue, like this year, you know, it's a bit more, but annual maintenance, it's like 0.01 FTE full-time equivalent. It's not a big commitment. To losing a pump was me going down the alarm going on, looking down the hall and saying, I don't know what I do. I know I could turn off one pump because it's falling into it. It was just running dry trying to break that pump out three days. But I called the guy and I said, you can come check it out. Love you, Tom. We've got a subcontractor. And the other guy won't be able to come out for a couple days. And when he did get there, he says, oh, I'm going to have a dead pump. And a little bit of experience can save a lot of time and money. Someone who knows what they're looking at. Yeah, and I'm sure John knows what he's looking at. He's gone to conventions. He just came back from a convention at the ball, but he gave us the idea about the monitoring station. They have the expertise. They have the knowledge. And I said, if it amounts to being assessed for contract to have someone monitor it like we're doing now, okay, we're not asking you that the world. We're just local taxpayers who said, all right, we'll be the highest taxes practically in the whole city. Sure. And we're not going to want to take on additional fee. We just don't want to see a spill on notice over the weekend. We don't want to have a pipeline that breaks at 500 feet on the road and it's under a garage or through a woods or something that we have no way to figure out how to do. Maybe you can run a pipeline out through it. Maybe someone knows that engineering us. Maybe somebody said, why don't you do this? Because now they're making the responsive voting. They said, you know what, we're going to redo the whole road in a couple of years. That's the worst on the list of the worst roads in Buenos Aires. Why don't you take a pipeline and check it out through and get that easement and get that done. I don't want to do that. But let's say, let the experts think about that. But what I look for in the city council is one comment. Let's keep this open and let's ask the city employees who know who did the water run-offs sites and put some considerable time and effort in it and found a grant and made it work 30 years later. Let's at least take this on, look at it, come back with something that might be feasible to make it work. That's the way the council do it. When we voted the council in to do things like this, let's listen to their citizens and say, what's the right thing to do? And I listen to you guys for the last few months about budgets and everything else. And I said, we are not going to go in there and put this on you guys. All we're asking is that, as City Manager first said, I'd say, no to the city council because we don't want to take it on. But if we did, there'd be these three actions. We looked at that and said, okay, let's open mine. Let's do those three actions and we'll work on it. We did the infrastructure, come money into it and fix things and put a monitoring on. We're doing what we think is in good faith. All we're asking the city to come back and say, why would we in good faith take a good look at this? Let's take a look at it as if we would do it and see what we can come up with. Yeah, we may have come out a little aggressive after six months of not hearing back in our original email. So it seems that the city has been on the defensive kind of, but all we're really looking for is some collaboration and perhaps maybe not just a hard no, but can you give us an estimate of how much a monthly tax would be if you were to take it over or something? Just consider us, or our liability in terms of our easement requirements and where our responsibility starts and stops. I just want to say I hear the logic here, the concerns you have, the request you're making. I don't think tonight we're giving a hard no, but I would not be a fan of giving a yes to direct staff to spend their time and resources trying to figure out those details at this point. I think that's a decision we have to make in a bigger picture discussion. And I think there's also more to consider here and the implications of this being an HOA and like where are the lines between when the city, what precedent or resetting of the city taking over maintenance or whatever issues from HOA is because they don't feel like they're equipped to handle that. So I think there's just a lot of reflection that I need to do before I can make a decision. Well, good. Yeah, that's great. A lot of reflection on figure this out. Yeah. I understand. I mean, we've got back and forth with the city manager and we started, you know, Six Months League and a lot more documentation that we even know existed. And so we've learned a lot and I learned a lot about home stations that I never really wanted to know. You know, but I think you're in the right time for us. With that kind of concept, coming back and asking us to come back and saying we're looking at this, even if it's, if the city had a policy for saying we would accept HOA under this guideline, then everybody can look at that guideline slightly. Well, that's not what we want to do, but that would be that would work for us too. With that kind of balance, that's a choice. It's given the city, it's given the choice. I mean, our other member is online. Okay. Just noticed there's a hand in Zoom. We can bring Catherine over. Hi. Welcome. My name's, thank you. My name's Catherine Bergeron Radu. I've been watching the whole meeting. I just wanted to come on first of all to say that I'm here and I am the secretary with the HOA, but I have been here since 2015 and seen just the progression of changes throughout the neighborhood. And we are a very tight knit community. I echo everything that's been said by my fellow HOA members and the board of directors. And I just wanted to kind of piggy back on what Levi said. And ultimately what Andrew and Tom said as well, that our concern is not one of cost savings. Our concern is one of environmental impact and really ultimately cost savings not to us, but as a whole. So if we had more experience in how to manage something like a station, I think we've all learned more than we've ever wanted to know and never will want to know. Then the fixes could have come sooner. The impact on the street could have been decreased and the total financial costs would have been decreased as well. And I think a lot of that had to do with time to resolve the issues that came up that we knew very little about. And so we needed an intermediary. So we were just basically an extra step in the process to getting these fixes resolved. And we're not looking to diminish our cost in this. We're looking to diminish the role we play in slowing down the process to repair anything that happens with the pump station. And that can then impact our community. If any of you aren't familiar with our neighborhood, it leads directly down into the pump station and that pump station sits directly above Landry Park. In fact, there's a trail that leads from the pump station directly down to the skate park and down into the park and then further on to the pool. Personally, I would hate to see anything happen down there that happened as a result of us not knowing what the correct next steps were to take because we were waiting on expertise from either a contractor, the city, the EPA, what have you. And we just want to take that delay out of the equation. So again, it's not one of financial responsibility. It's one of expertise responsibility. So we thank you for taking these concerns into consideration. Thanks, Catherine. I appreciate that sort of summary. In our case, don't forget on the table is our hospital fund to help transition. I don't know if other, that could be a part of your protocol. Is there funding to help transition the transition of S&P's, men's, legal fees, whatever, rather than mentioning that money included, we are willing to put that on the table too. We're moving forward best we can in the way I know how the city works. I was on the school board for a while. I know the budget. I know the concerns. And I've driven around the whole neighborhood the last few days. So I know we're at a community. Can I ask what kind of timeline you're thinking about? We do our strategic prioritization in late May, early June, every year. Oh, cool. That's pretty good. Well, I talk too much, but I appreciate you listening. Yeah, thanks for clarifying. Thanks. Okay. Thank you. Were there any, I don't know any questions I have for answers. So thank you. Yes. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. We will move on to item E. Oh, sorry. I'll let you guys grab your stuff first. Okay. Item E, Main Street Ritalization and Construction Phase Services Approval. Great. Good evening, everyone. So this, I kind of previewed this last meeting with the bond resolution. So this is for the next phase of construction engineering services for the Main Street Project. So this will cover the remaining scope of our consultants, including the resident engineering throughout the construction phase work. And it's also going to provide fitting supports, construction administration, and some of the like post construction support. So this proposal was reviewed by all our finance stakeholders. So USDA, the DEC, SRF folks, and we've incorporated their comments. So, and it does include, I provide a breakdown. So financing-wise, general funds, we approved up the bond resolution last meeting for the 814,700. The remaining scope of this $1,783,322 is water resources funded scope. So $278,430 is water fund scope and then $690,192 is sewer fund scope. That will all get rolled into the USDA financing. So that's how that scope is funded. And this is all within the approved $23 million bonds. This is part of that budget work. I also have Evan Dietrich from BHB. I think I saw him in the participants. I'm here, John. Great. So Evan is our project manager from BHB. So he can also answer any questions you have on the proposal. John. Are there any questions from council? So your financial partners reviewed this. I missed it if you said our legal council reviewed it. Yes. So this is actually the contract we use is what's called the EJCNC format. So our attorney reviewed that. So this is a continuation of an existing contract basically. And then we did have our city attorney just re-review the insurance requirements to make sure that was all set. Okay. And I should say, I guess the ask is actually, so the ask tonight is to authorize the city manager to execute the contract. Are these insurance terms standard for a project of this scope? Yes. Are there any questions from members of the public in attendance hearing no other questions or concerns? Would someone like to make a motion to approve authorizing the city manager to execute the construction phase services amendment for BHB? So moved. Second. Motion by Jim. Second by Tennis. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Forward progress here. All right. So next up item F, lot 17 municipal garage bond resolution. It's a revolutionary bond. So in January 2019, I'm just reading from the memo. So if you're ready, you can check out for a minute here. City council decided that the city would be served by a new parking garage on Abenaki Way. In March 2019, voters authorized bonding for that garage of up to $9.7 million. In 2020, the city entered into a development agreement with Netty Real Estate LLC for the redevelopment of lot 70 in the downtown. The street address is 17 Abenaki Way for anyone who wants to understand what lot 70 actually needs. That is to include a parking garage. In late 2022, citing recent inflation, Netty Real Estate requested more funds from the city for the parking garage. On December 5, 2022, council voted to commit $11.4 million for the garage on lot 70 to seek financing or alternative funding up to the $11.6 million for the garage on lot 70 as outlined in Netty Real Estate's December 5, 2022 financing proposal with some contingencies and authorized the city manager to enter into an agreement with Echo Financial Products to manage a request for financing proposals. We did receive three proposals from three banks after some negotiation and clarification with the banks. Echo Financial Products recommended the city select the Northfield Savings Bank proposal. The city's bottom council has prepared the necessary documents which were enclosed in your packet. To proceed, city council must authorize A, incurrence of debt via the resolution enclosed and B, execution of remaining documents. You'll have noted that the enclosed agreement and notes are in draft form with options because the interest rates are changing every day. So the motion is awarded to allow staff to optimize the final financing arrangement. Thank you, Elaine. Any questions from council? I have one very little thing which might be more of a correction. I notice it mentions a meeting on January 28, 2019. Never mind, actually. I answer my own question. I read the same thing. Yeah. Anything else? I just want to note in the cover sheet this for folks about be watching, there's the 11.6 and 11.4 amounts but the resolution is still for that bond amounts. This is the debt being incurred is still below that amount approved by voters. I think that just wanted to call that out for this discussion. Thank you, Jim. Any questions from members of the public? Okay. I'm hearing no concerns. Would someone like to make a motion to adopt the resolution? Authorize the city manager to conclude and the mayor to execute the financing agreement based on one or all of the options in the agreement provided substantial conformance with options listed in the enclosed agreement. So moved. Second. Motion by Thomas. Second by Bryn. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Another step. I will say I want to appreciate Bill Niquet for telling us about this option. Wasn't something I knew you could do to request financing proposals based on our best interest and it certainly paid off and they an echo did quite a did quite a bit of negotiation on our behalf. It was a very low touch interaction and one underline again. So during those discussions echo pointed out that we were in a good position partly because of the financial situation we're in and the reporting that Angela manages gives confidence to lenders that they can lend to us because we're physically manageable. So I want to credit staff for that specifically Angela. Okay. Let's move to item G resolution setting fees for community services programs and thrive. Hey. So I'm not sure if everyone here has gone through this process with us in the past but per our city charter any fees that are levied are required to be set in ordinance and so through our ordinance chapter 28 we have provisions in there that require us to come back to city council annually to set the rate for thrive and then for any other additional fees for programming that are not already previously established. So that is what we are here to do tonight. So a couple things to note here that are you know also captured in the cover sheet but wanted to just talk about in person. So the rate for thrive summer we are proposing to increase from $160 per week to $225 per week for full week care and that is to mirror the updated base rates for state subsidy which were changed in early July of 2022. What that allows us to do is maximize the drawdown for families that are accessing subsidy of which depends on the year but a third to a half roughly of our families are accessing subsidy at any given time and so for us financially that's beneficial but also wanted to note that given the anticipated presence of ESSER funding for this coming summer out-of-pocket impact for families will remain at zero for summer programming. So for families this this shouldn't hit anybody's wallets this is really an opportunity for us to maximize drawdown from the state. Conversely we've not we're not recommending to increase the rates for after school we did just do that fairly recently and are finding that the current after school rates I think are comfortably where they need to be. I think we're seeing good enrollment but also hearing from families that an increase could become challenging problematic for for after-school care for thrive and then the other pieces that are included here in the resolution are non-resident rates for recreation summer camps at $200 a week and then a slight increase for the cost of swim lessons for non-residents over previous years. So I'm happy to answer any questions that folks have. Thanks Ray. So question about timing we had talked about some other ordinance and this may be best for the city manager. We had talked about some other potential ordinance fee changes so just curious about the timing of this versus you want to consider all fee changes at the same time because that's yeah good question. Yep. So these are not these are not reflective of a change to the ordinance. These are in response to ordinance language that asks us to come to council and set fees by resolution. So this doesn't directly impact that ordinance change that we are talking about in the future. This is already captured in ordinance that says fees will be set time to time by resolution. Okay so for clarification so the other fees that we were talking about are specifically stated in the ordinance where here it's just saying we need to come back to council for correct correct okay thank you. Yep and just for history bren the reason we did that was basically every time we wanted to run a new program we didn't want to have to come back and do an ordinance update. Yeah that makes sense thank you. Yep. Any other questions? I just have a clarification question. Sure. A group swim lessons right? The $105 a session is a session like a day of swimming. Great question so those are six week sessions with one hour well depending on the age group 30 minutes to one hour per week for that so it's a six week session. Perfect thank you. Yep. Any questions from members of the public? Oh they're gone okay. All right I have a motion to approve the resolution setting fees for community services programs and thrive. So moved. Second. Motion by Aurora second by Thomas all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Awesome thank you. Thank you. Okay so it is 8 26 p.m. I am going to call a recess on our city council meeting or I have to say a time don't I? A five minute recess. To enter as the order of trustees? Yeah do I have to recess the council meeting? Yes and I don't think you have to set a duration for recess. So it's 8 26 p.m. I will recess the city council meeting and I will call to order the Wenuski Community Development Trust Board of Trustees meeting. We have one regular item on for discussion approval the Wenuski Community Development Trust FY24 allocation. Yes so the Wenuski Community Development Trust used to have an independent Board of Trustees that organization received tax increment revenue. The Board of Trustees has since dissolved and turned its assets over to the city. So city council serves as the trustees of the Wenuski Community Development Trust. Staff recommend council receive the Wenuski Community Development Revenue and allocate those revenues back to the city's general fund for the community development budget. And as a prelude to that as part of the city council's approved FY24 budget $200,000 was budgeted again to the Wenuski Community Development Trust from the tax financing budget as that payments on the existing note. Do folks have questions? Only about if there's a way to do this differently in the future. It's only Angela, I think that's only for one more year right? Yeah this is actually the last year that you'll need to do this because we're approving it for the FY24 budget. And this is actually recommended to us by legal council in response to a state audit finding. Great problem solved. Thank you. That's good news. Okay do I have a motion to approve FY24 Wenuski Community Development Trust allocation in the amount of $200,000 to the general fund for the community development budget? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Jim. All those in favor please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you. That is the end of the trustee's meeting agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? Second. Motion by Jim, second by Thomas. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. It is 828 p.m. I will now reconvene the Wenuski City Council meeting. We are on item A FY24 Community Development Fund budget. So for the sake of your city council minutes, on December 5th 2022 the city manager, meaning me, presented an overview of the fiscal year 2024 proposed budget to city council. Since that meeting council has received presentations from each department and this time asking council to approve that community development fund budget as presented. Any questions? All right. Do I have a motion to approve the FY24 Community Development Fund budget as presented? So moved. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Bryn. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Last time. Okay. We are on to item B, equity next steps for council. So I'll introduce and then pass it along. At our last meeting we reviewed policy equity assessment tools in use around Vermont. We would like to adopt one for ourselves. Councilor Herd presented a draft tool she put together, I'm sorry, they put together using those other options. Councilors had the opportunity to review and suggest edits following the meeting. So we have a revised version attached here. The inclusion and belonging commission will review this at their upcoming meeting. So tonight we could choose to adopt what exists now and revisit it if there are substantial suggestions from the commission. We could wait until after they've had a review and we could also wait if there are more revisions that we want to make tonight. So Aurora would you like to do a quick overview of the tool again? Yeah. So this is thinking about again a tool for reviewing policy budgets, strategies and priorities going forward. Some of the changes that were made is to put some specific language in about what kind of protected groups and protected classes and marginalized communities. We're intending to cover with this and make sure that we're moving forward equitably in these different ways. And following that there are just a bunch of questions getting at those specific areas. I think there was a slight move. Clarifying purpose has been moved from I think item three to item one and everything else kind of shifted down from there. So the idea then would be to really start clarifying the purpose of the policy, procedure, strategy, priority or budget. Then identify and plan outreach to the stakeholders. Consider impacts and my one question here is kind of do we want to include considering impacts kind of more than once just to check in? And one item under considering adverse impacts is specifically thinking about racial equity just to kind of acknowledge the need of that in the city's work. And then finally there's examining alternatives or improvements. So that's it. There is a concern that is kind of raised or if there could be ways that positive impacts could be increased. And finally kind of an audit process at the end to make sure during a final vote that all kind of all these considerations have been taken into account before putting a policy in place. I think that covered it. Thank you, Matt. So questions or was there any additional feedback from councillors? Well, first off start with some appreciation Aurora for councillor for doing this and making these changes. I really appreciate what you've put together here. And I only question I wanted to ask was around including the practice and the goal is used throughout and evaluating practices. And I'm curious what do you speak more to kind of what was intended there and how that would differentiate from a policy budget or strategy priority policy? I think it's in in the goal the first line of the goal statement and then further down the audit stage. I think it shows up as well. That is a good question and might be one that maybe we want to specify the language to replace where it said practice with strategies and priorities. Thinking about our city context in particular that might be holdovers from some of the other languages. So I think that I'm going to mark that down. Let's replace it with strategic priorities. Yeah. Great. And I found the other location is in. I lost it again. Section three, bullet four. Yes, thank you. I did want to raise a question about in the protected groups and I think, Elaine, you shared this from somewhere I forget. VLCT. The term for physical and mental attributes. I'm not sure how if you have any knowledge of how that's been interpreted in the past. I have a minor concern that it would be it's like vague in the way that character of the neighborhood is and keeps coming up as a problem and somewhere other work. But I might be over consent. Does it? That's funny. Did I did the physical and mental attributes to that language come from the VLCT as well? Yeah, I think it's that this is the thing that you pasted in the chat for us. It's funny. I don't remember having what the conversation was about those two items. Because I would have thought it would be covered under the disability. Yeah, I'd noticed that they're the covered groups are different also in our declaration of inclusion. Oh, do you have that open now? I do. What do we have in there? Okay. This feels more broad, but where are the differences? This is race, color, religion, national origin. Oh, we don't have religion in this one. And then the other thing that's different from this is the list, the VLCT list, which is, I don't have this in order to find out. Sorry. I know you're right. It is from Elson. So the economics that is religion. Is religion in the line? Yeah, it's kind of a, it's got a lot of space. So that might have just not been on the ground. Now your systems are in the VLCT list. Oh, you know, that one I was concerned about too in a similar fashion. So there's just so many inconsistencies. Is the only thing I'm pointing out between, it's different in three locations. And I don't know what would be the best way forward in that regard. Yeah. I think ideally consistency, but I believe Marilot, one of your comments was, maybe we want to use more of the VLCT language kind of going forward and even. I think it'll align us more to other stuff, other activities, other places, and it's broader than what we adopted initially in that resolution. Well, sounds like what we might want to add religion back in, but maybe remove the physical and mental attributes. Because to my mind that would be covered under the disability. Yeah. And I appreciate the little parentheses in there too. Yeah. Believe it. There's some other changes. Like I believe it would remove political beliefs from the VLCT. They don't have that one? No. No, wait, sorry. I apologize. That's not so small. It is really small. It won't get bigger. I know I won't. I'm not as weird as I try. It was a screenshot and I couldn't. No, you did a great job. I'm just happy. I have it to reference even if it's small. So thank you. The other ones that we have and include are sexual orientation or marital status. I think we have sexual orientation. I was looking at the inclusion statement. So we may need the declaration to come back to council about a future date. We're updating. Could we reference our inclusion statement from this and use that as a foundational document rather than duplicating it? I usually think it's recommended practice for policies to refer to other policies. It would be just a matter of ensuring that it's easy. We can easily find it. I would hate to see this fall out of step or go further. What were you saying? Just strike all the language and just reference our statement of inclusion. I'm sorry. I was busted in the groups resolve for in our statement of welcoming to all persons, regardless of race, color, religion. This language then becomes incorporated into here by virtue of the resolution. I know we made some edits and I can find the inclusion of inclusion anywhere on the website really easily accessible and I might have missed it. But I think if that would be helpful to both those kind of maybe on our equity page that we could link back to. I think kind of jumping on to Jim, what you're thinking of if we're going to reference that, we could also reference our land acknowledgement statement to kind of include those things to keep in mind or like goals we have already set out and making sure we're aligning with them. That could be something I could bring up with the inclusion and belonging commission and just see if they feel like it would be really important to include the language within the document or if it would be better to kind of link out. I think that's a good question. So I think what I'll do is I'll add religion back in, remove physical and mental attributes and then offer kind of the either or to the commission. Can we add marital status to that as well? Yeah. Is there enough clarity in the goal statement as to whose role it is? I mean, I understand used by goal, but for someone that's not working in and with this document on a regular basis, would it be like what expectations I guess would come from this? So my interpretation is anytime we are doing a policy update when we go through our annual prioritization and our annual budget, this document is attached to the agenda item to prompt us to do this thinking and have these discussions. We've put in language like maybe even specifically have those examples, so like including but not limited to like thinking about the budget, thinking about strategies and priorities and any policy changes and then we have those specifics, but then we would that touch on. I guess what I'm looking for is like for purposes of discussion or whether or not it would be captured in the form of a memo. Gotcha. Is it something that someone fills out ahead of time that we then discuss or during the process itself as council we go through this list? Right. Yeah. I think I think what I would lean to is kind of involve having the list within the discussion. It's like initial discussions itself and work on filling it out as a whole council and maybe think about moving that like if we have different expertise. But I feel like it's valuable to kind of specifically have within a discussion. I think we have to start there anyway, like we can't ask staff to fill this out for us and it's new for us. So I'd like to ease into it. I think that would work and then say that we have an equity director someday that might be it might be a tool to kind of partner with some staff expertise, but for now, yeah, I don't think we have this. We don't want to burden the staff with something that they don't have capacity for. Can I ask potentially consider revising the cover sheet to include a staff recommendation of whether this is reviewed, like whether council go through the equity assessment on a given policy program item. That could be a way to institutionalize it for our written documents and that's like it's just a link that says like here's the link to your equity assessment and staff thinks this is minor or this is major and you need to review it. So we get just thinking about how it gets kind of baked in instead of like being lost three months or four months from now, but doesn't require staff to actually fill the assessment just say like council you should look at your own assessment and do it. And one thing I noticed just in our own agenda tonight that things that are brought forward by the city manager have a cover sheet but things that are brought forward by council are memos. Staff does not do cover sheets for us and so I historically used a memo. My point being to council Duggan's request that that doesn't cover the council portion of agenda items. So budget and strategy and priority would come from staff like those would come in cover sheets. Policy usually comes from staff too if it's like city policy that we brought forward is like how we operate you know. So there is some onus on us then to keep this on a radar. But like when we were doing like scholarship policy or something like that like that comes from staff with a cover sheet. We can also amend our rules or our rules and procedures to require a cover sheet submission with a request for an agenda item from the councillor. And right now it's just like I want to see it on the agenda and I provide you one sentence or several pages right. So it could for items that are coming from councillors could ask for a simpler cover sheet potentially but that includes that. Does that make sense Elaine? I don't know if there's a reason we've always had separate processes. Like you using cover sheets for staff and then maybe just make requests and send memos to you. Well so from my perspective if it's from council I like the point of my cover sheet is to introduce something from staff but you are not staff it's your prerogative to introduce items. So it's I would be subverting your rule to be able to provide information to council directly by providing the cover sheet myself. So I don't hear that that's what council ducking is proposing. Is that correct? Yeah I would say that the councillor fills out a cover sheet that might just be a title, a date and maybe background information and should an equity assessment be included. So because all agendas are set by me ultimately I would expect that you would you would be directing the city manager to remind whatever councillor or mayor proposed item that there was this thing that you should look at. So a reminder to you to put it in whatever memo you've got going to council. Right but we could bake that into our rules and procedures. Yeah I appreciate you trying to procedureize it. Because then it's something that you can point to and say no sorry I can't accept this until you follow your own procedure which I think we would I think would be helpful. I see yep and it gives a degree of accountability to council. So all of that gets away from I think what started this was you know the content around like what is it do you have to say what this is being used like what the output of this is. I feel like there is some comfort or some discussion that gave me comfort as to whether or not the uses should be fully documented like line by line point by point or whether or not it should be brought forward as discussion item and I think I there are a number of things like I think overall I want to hear from the Inclusion and Belonging Commission and I appreciate the recommendation of the mayor to let's frame this as discussion first and kind of walk before we run. We can codify it as we go. Yeah yeah so maybe in the goal I could just add a brief line on expectations like expectations that this would be used on policy budget strategies and priorities and other areas where applicable or is that still I think in terms of the goal not for now. I think in terms of the goal that's fine but I'm comfortable with that like applied in discussions of yeah yep I think that makes sense. Is it as simple as at the end of the goal it's just these questions will be discussed during agenda items related to the both uses. Yeah. Jim, throw them down. Last one. Last meeting. They're asking me to say it again though. Sorry it's being recorded. So how do we feel about getting these changes getting this reviewed by our commission and then adopting it with our new council? You're comfortable with that? Okay yeah so no motions for this tonight we will revisit it. All right thank you. Okay we are on to item XC the city manager review process. Councilor Hurd would you like to introduce? Yes so at our last meeting on January 23rd Mayor Lott presented a memorandum proposing the process for an annual review for the city manager part of the intent of doing it now is that the reviews being done before we have any turnover in council to kind of ensure consistency and I guess avoid any bias before not knowledge of an incoming councilor. The timeline was slightly shifted from the initial recommendation. The evaluation tool was sent out to the leadership team as well as the council on January 27th. The due date was February 10th it was extended a little bit to allow for additional time and then I compiled the results and sent them out to council on February 12th. A couple things that I want to flag is we are missing two reviews our two department head reviews so I think that should definitely because we're such a small team two things missing that can that that should just be kept in mind as we go through the process and definitely thinking about how we might improve this for the future of kind of building in some more accountability. I think the anonymous nature has a lot of benefits but still probably want to build in some process to have that accountability so either an additional little survey that's just like name checkbox I did the thing would I think be my recommendation at this time and then the final part as we kind of go into this is making sure you know any changes and then my thought is like I can volunteer to go back and create copies of the most recent process and edit those into templates that we can just copy and move using forward with the changes already in them to kind of prevent to yeah provide more consistency going forward that is fantastic of you to volunteer for that and I did finally find notes from our last process so we don't have to change so I do okay thank you for that so we've worn an executive session to actually dig into this but if there's any like general questions or anything before okay so I'm looking for a motion to find that pursuant to one vsa section 3133 appointment or employment or evaluation of a public officer employee provided that the public body shall make a final decision in open meeting and shall explain the reasons for its final decision during the open meeting I'm sorry this is poorly worded on my part that we can have this discussion in executive session because it is about employee performance any actual votes or decisions would happen in public though so I'm looking for a motion to find that to move second motion by Bryn second by Thomas all those in favor who say aye right motion carries and then I'm looking for a motion to enter into executive session inviting city manager Elaine one so motion by Thomas second by Aurora all those in favor please say aye motion carries so we will enter into executive session now to discuss this topic no other topics will be discussed and when we exit executive session it will solely be to adjourn the meeting