 if it looks like, so we'll be mindful of that. Great, Chair Hogan, we're ready to roll. All right, so good evening all and a happy new year to you. My name is Brendan Hogan, calling to order the January, 2021 meeting of the Public Works Commission at 6.33 p.m. Welcome all. First item on the agenda is the agenda itself. Does anyone have any comments or concerns about the agenda? We're ready to entertain a motion otherwise. I'm ready to make a motion to accept the agenda. All right, thank you for that. One second. All right, is there any discussion around that motion? Okay, two eight votes, please. All those in favor of approving the agenda as posted, please say aye. Aye. Aye. So, any post? All right, agenda passes. Next to public forum. I see a couple of hands and virtual hands in the air. Thanks, Chair Hogan, just to let members of the public know if you do wish to speak when Chair Hogan calls for public comment now or later on in the forum, please use the raise your hand feature on Zoom, which you can find on the lower toolbar on the bottom of your Zoom screen. For those who have called in, and it looks like there's at least one or two of you, if you wish to speak during public comment, please push star nine and that will alert us that you wish to speak and you'll be queued up. For those watching on YouTube, thank you to channel 17 for live-streaming this. We do not monitor those comments in real time, so we'd ask that you join us over on Zoom or by calling in, which you can find on our agenda to join us in public comment. Mr. Golden, could you tracking the hands in the air? Yes, yep, just pulling that back up. The first person in line for public comment is Jeff Nick. You'll be promoted to speak any minute now. He's still muted though. Jeff, you should have the ability to unmute yourself at this time. I've hit that button if you're having any, looks like you're, there we go. Can you hear me? Yes, we can, thank you. All right, great. All right, well, thanks for this opportunity. I'm the Chair of the Marketplace Commission and I guess it's a little unusual that I would come to speak during public forum. But the commission has, and our fee payers and customers have some great concerns about the changes that were made to South Winooski Avenue. And staff did pass a visit earlier this summer to kind of explain what was going on. So we certainly had fair warning, but we've received a lot of feedback and all of us on the commission are concerned moving forward what this might do to the traffic that we all rely on to make the marketplace successful. As you know, it's a heavily trafficked road corridor. And we understand the goals and they are noble in terms of bike and pedestrian access. But we just feel that there's some really problematic components to the design. And now they're not showing up with COVID and the parking garage is lightly used and traffic is way off on the marketplace. But we hope and suspect that things will rebound this summer and into the fall. So a couple of the things that we really are concerned about are the offset intersections with Bank Street and the city market and Cherry Street, and I think it's Beale Street and all of the UPS trucks and beer trucks and tractor trailer trucks and delivery trucks and garbage trucks. You throw it all out in the mix and then you throw in students and high trafficked weekends. And even before these changes, you know, two years ago you could see problems with traffic backing up, trying to get onto Bank Street to access the garage. So we see it every day and we are concerned and we're hoping that our concerns are not realized and that this all works smoothly. But we just want to kind of put it on your radar screen that we're not convinced and that we hope that if these problems do pop up that, you know, we can work together to maybe make some changes back the other way or, you know, figure out another way to do things. But just want to put that on everybody's radar screen. Thanks for your time and I'm happy to talk about this again sometimes you like to. All right, Jay, thanks for your time, everybody. Thanks. The next person in queue is Johan Larson. I'll be promoting you over to speak and you should be able to speak now. Thank you. Can everyone hear me? Yes, we can, thank you. Thank you. So my name is Johan Larson and I reside at 50 Charlotte Street. And I'm coming to raise a safety concern and to request information and guidance of you. I brought my safety concern to Philip Peterson and engineer at DPW and he suggested I speak this evening. On January 4th, recycling was not picked up on Charlotte Street. And we were told that the recycling truck could not get through because cars were parked on both sides of the street. And having a critical care nursing background and aging as I am and ending my career in quality, my immediate thought was, well, if the recycling truck can't get through, what about an emergency medical services vehicle such as an ambulance or a fire truck? And I became concerned for my personal safety as well as my neighbors. I voiced my concern asking in front porch forum if others were concerned as well and got many responses from both Charlotte Street and the surrounding neighborhood streets of Five Sisters. I tried to reach the fire marshal via email and voicemail to obtain more information to see if they had concerns about their vehicles but I have yet to receive a response from them. So I have three questions. One is, does the city of Burlington have safety concerns for emergency vehicles access to narrow streets such as Charlotte Street? Two, I'm told that there are 116 narrow streets in Burlington, 98 of which have various forms of parking restrictions. And that Charlotte Street meets criteria for some form of parking restriction. In light of that, I ask you what options you might offer to us as residents that would improve the reliable access of emergency vehicles to ourselves and to our homes. In the event there was a safety issue. And three, Mr. Peterson initiated a C-click fix related to my concern. My question around that is what is the process and timeline for such a C-click fix request to be processed? I'm seeking your advice. Thank you for the opportunity. Thank you for that input. Director Spachner, do you have a response? Yeah, I'll just say usually we don't do a back and forth Ms. Larson, but I'm happy to follow up with you, Phillip. Is the proper point person? This commission would receive a recommendation from staff once we've done our due diligence and bring a recommendation that they can either agree with, deny, change or do what they would like. So we will follow up with you after this meeting and happy to continue the conversation. We share your concern about emergency access. Thank you very much. Thank you. The third and currently final speaker signed up for public comment is under the name family outcomes at yahoo.com. You should be able to speak at this time. Hi, my name is Trina Beck. Can you hear me? Yes, Ken. Great. I live on 77 Charlotte Street and I've lived there for 15 years. And each year that we have a snowstorm, a large truck like a fire truck or recycling or the snow plow cannot get through our street when two cars are parked on each side of the street. And that happens all the time. And all it takes is two cars parked right opposite each other and the big trucks can't get through. So this is a serious safety issue. And I understand that Charlotte is a designated narrow street so that seasonal parking on one side of the street is an option. And that way the plow could get through and other large vehicles. So I hope you can help us figure out what the best option is. And we look forward to being able to work with you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Chair Hogan, there is one more speaker signed up at this time. Asa Levi, I will be promoting you over. I think I'm off you now. I just wanna say that I watched your meeting from December 16th and I really appreciated the thorough discussion on the Shelburne roundabout renovations to that intersection down there. Just quite a complicated project. I just moved into 573 South Willard Street over the summer. And I think the proposed design looks great. I'm a little concerned about the speed of traffic on South Willard Street particularly as it's a downhill entering the intersection which currently has a stop sign. Currently three of the inlets to that intersection have stop signs going into it. And those will be, I think moved when it turns to a roundabout. So people will already whip by the over, like when they're doing the bypass from South Shelburne Street onto Willard going north. They really whip up that street. And I really liked, he's not here today, but and I don't know his last name, I'm sorry, but Norm's suggestion to do geometric improvements to avoid, change the geometry to avoid. And I know there's a merge going in there, but I was thinking if there's any way possible to slow traffic down through geometry of intersection, like either through speed humps on South Willard Street or something else that would be really nice going into that intersection as well. And I emailed and thank you for your detailed reply commissioner overview about this as well. But I just wanted to bring it up here on the meeting. So thank you all for listening to my comments and for all the work you're doing on this. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Chair Hogan, it looks like that's all that is currently signed up. Okay, thank you, Mr. Golden. With that, I will move forward to the consent agenda. There are three items on the consent agenda this evening, largely informational items regarding a 2021 paving program, BHS parking configuration and review of narrow streets policy. Chair Hogan, just real quick on that. You know, we have narrow streets policy as part of our consent agenda. I'm not proposing to make any changes, right? I think it highlights well what the speakers were just speaking to about Charlottes Street. I can't, I don't know for sure if Charlottes Street is on that list. From the sounds of it, I'm suspecting, yes. But yeah, this policy is really glad we have that. And I'm thankful for Phil Peterson's input and his guidance and the documentation here. So it's interesting to see that connection tonight. That's my only comment, thank you. All right. Any other comments or discussion? So since I'm on a roll here, I'll move to approve the consent agenda. We have a motion, Commissioner Archibald. Second. I got that with the commissioner Bose, the second. All right, any discussion around the motion? All right. To a vote, please approve the consent agenda. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, the consent agenda passes. Thank you. Next up, item five, water resources rate restructuring and affordability program updates. Get a staff communication on this. Yes, indeed. We have division director Megan Moyer and... I've got my tardigrade, sorry. Water resources, programs manager, Jenna Olson joining us and also our water resources finance manager, Jessica Lovellette. Great. Thanks for your time. I don't know if you wanna... Jenna or Jess, we're one of you planning on sharing the... I will, yep. More presentations. So taking you back almost a year, it was actually the week in which the pandemic hit Vermont. We were on a path of doing the public outreach, the full blown public outreach on our sort of final draft proposal for our rate restructuring and affordability program. With the pandemic and with a host of the financial pressures and uncertainties, we did put that project on hold. And we are back here better than ever tonight. Jenna and Jess are going to be reminding you where we were, why we were there and then rolling out our current iteration of rate and policy changes. We've made some incremental changes since we last spoke to you that kind of speak to some of the additional concerns that our customers are now facing. And with that, I will hand it over to these highly intelligent, amazing team members to regale you with all of the wonderfulness. Thanks, Meg. Good evening, commissioners. Thanks for your time. As Megan said or Chapin said, my name is Donna Olson. Many of you have met me before, but I am the Water Policy and Programs Manager. And again, I am joined this evening by Jess Galavillette, who is our Customer Care and Finance Manager and Water Resources. So jumping right in here, because we do have limited time obviously, this whole thing started or this whole process started really because there is some tension that exists between the core values that we work on and that's a constant balancing act. Having sustainable funding is really crucial to ensuring that everyone has access to clean water because we need money in order to take care of the infrastructure that produces, both produces the clean water and makes it safe for drinking and then also treats and manages our wastewater and storm water before it drains to our rivers and the lake, which is our drinking water source. The conflict there really arises is that the more financing we need in order to provide that access to clean water and inevitably raises utility costs. And when those utility costs aren't affordable, then that leads directly into our rate payers and can result in rate payers not having equal access to the essential amount of water that they need to live. So when we started this process, the first thing that we really asked ourselves was how much does it really cost to provide water service in Burlington? Who is using the water and are all of those users paying their fair share of the costs associated with providing their water? Now our distribution system has to be sized appropriately to provide adequate flow to all of our customers but each customer class is unique and doesn't place the same level of demand on our water system. So the graphic that you're seeing here shows three rings. The base level demand, that infrastructure is really just for normal residential and commercial water usage and that's what's represented again by that smallest inner circle. Now our pipes would be a certain size and all the fixed costs for chemicals and electricity and pumps, all of those things that are necessary to provide that clean safe drinking water would also be finite. But what happens when we add things like watering our gardens and lawns or that peak demand when everyone's using water at the same time, say bath time for your kids or when you're doing dishes, people are taking showers. We can see that our distribution system has to be that little bit larger in order to provide water for both that base level demand and those extra capacity flows. So that's the second circle that you see. Now that final circle, the largest one that says fire protection, that's how large our system has to be in order to provide flow for all of the private fire services in the city if necessary. Now every building has a domestic water service line but almost all commercial buildings, institutions and large multi-unit residential buildings, anyone who has some type of fire protection system also requires that separate larger service pipe to provide that fire protection. Now, as we mentioned before, as the size of our pipes increase, so do the fixed costs that are needed to treat and deliver the water. So going back to one of our original questions are all customers paying their fair share of the cost to provide their property with water? Today, the answer is no because everyone in the city is paying the same rate even though certain customer classes inherently require our distribution network to be larger and they're the only ones that benefit from it. So I'm gonna turn it over to Jess and she's gonna talk about our rate and policy changes and then towards the end, I'll go over what our next steps are and how things are gonna look from here. Thank you, Jenna. So again, my name is Jessica Lavalette and I'm here to discuss the proposed rate and fee changes along with some estimated customer impacts and what opportunities exist for our residents to further reduce their bills. We have six proposed rate and policy changes that are all considered standard best practice within the water utility industry. Additionally, these changes do support our goals of ensuring affordability of water while improving the financial health, sustainability and revenue stability of the funds. These changes are also meant to ensure our customer classes are paying for services in a manner equitable to the burden they place on the system. I'm gonna notice some items in green here. They are adjustments we've made to our proposal since last March in an effort to mitigate the impact on commercial customers while still maintaining affordability benefits for our residential customers. So the first one we see here are fixed charges by meter size. We are proposing a fixed fee for both water and wastewater that escalates based on meter size beginning with five eighths inch meters up to our largest size of six inch. This is important because our current rate structure is entirely volumetric, which means our expected revenue is based on how much water we think properties will use in a given year. And unfortunately a cold rainy summer or global pandemic can't be predicted during the budget process. So incorporating a fixed charge for all meter sizes will ensure a negative revenue that we can count on to provide stability for the funds. This type of rate structure is also viewed favorably when we need to borrow money and allows us to qualify for lower interest rates in some cases. One of the modifications here in green from last spring is a reduction in the amount of the fixed fee charge. We were able to achieve a lower charge by modifying the calculation basis along with the target percentage of our cost recovery. The next one here is the lifeline rate tier. Currently we do have a uniform rate structure where everyone is charged the same amount per 100 cubic foot, which is equivalent to 748 gallons. The introduction of a lifeline rate allows us to define the water needed for essential life activities as 400 cubic feet and charge less for usage under that threshold, which we are calling tier one. Any water consumed above that tier one threshold would be charged a higher tier two rate. Class based rates, as we learned just a second ago, the strain each customer or class puts on our water infrastructure is inherently different. So it doesn't make sense to continue charging all customers the same rate. This change does allow us to recognize that difference while providing support to our residential rate payers. Here we see a modification from the original proposal whereby commercial properties will now be charged the same rate as multifamily properties in an effort to recognize the negative impact the pandemic has likely had on their businesses. We move here to the irrigation rate. We are proposing a higher rate for water use solely for irrigation or cooling towers, but have allowed an exemption for community based gardening initiatives like BACG or the Intervale. Private fire protection charges. So this change introduces a monthly fee for customers with a private fire service or a hydrant, which is standard across the country. This fee will escalate according to the diameter of the fire service pipe and conceptually goes back to our cost of service analysis where we are paying more to have a water system capable of serving should those properties need to use it. Please note this fee will now be phased in over five years, which is a change from the original proposal where we assess the full fee in year one and the water resources assistance program or RAP. This is the change that I'm personally most excited about and believe has the potential to make a real difference in the lives of our customers. We are proposing to waive the fixed meter charge for residents of single family properties who can demonstrate they are at or below 185% of the poverty, federal poverty level, excuse me. There is a whole slide later on dedicated to the details, but I did wanna mention it here and we modified this proposal to now include any senior citizens living in single family homes along with nonprofit housing developments providing affordable or senior living units. Next slide please. So here are the current and proposed rates. We can see now that the fixed charges are assessed on all meter sizes. We have always assessed a fixed charge on meter size that one inch or larger, but this will be the first time since 1996 that five eighths and three quarter inch meters will receive one. So you can see here the five eighths goes from zero to $3.34 per month and on the wastewater side, that's $4.68. If we move down to the volumetric rates, we can see that the single family residential volumetric was previously charged a uniform rate of $4.44, but we now have the proposed two tier rate structure. The tier one or lifeline rate for usage is for usage under 400 cubic feet and that will be $2.49 per hundred. The tier two rate will be applied on consumption over 400 cubic feet and will be 623 per hundred. The threshold of 400 cubic feet was chosen because it's the median usage in Burlington and in 2019, 54% of our residential customers fell into this usage category. We preferred to use the median instead of an average because the median is unaffected by outlier data points. This rate would also apply to separately meter duplexes and triplexes. So if each side of a duplex had a water meter, then they would qualify for the tiered system, but if there was only one meter for both units, then they would fall under that multi-family residential rate you see there, which is a midway point between the two tiered rates. And so to recap, all single family usage between zero and 400 falls into tier one and any usage above 400 falls into that tier two rate. The rate for multi-family residential mix use and commercial is currently $4.44 and we're proposing that it remain the same for all, but at a slightly lower rate of 436 per hundred. This does provide some relief because they are typically larger consumers and would actually pay more if they were eligible for the lifeline rate tiers. Our previous recommendation did have mix use and commercial classes at a higher volume metric rate to reflect the cost of providing service, but we decided for this upcoming fiscal year to leave them at that lower rate to mitigate the presumed negative impact the pandemic was having on those customers. The irrigation rate here is slightly higher than the uniform rate, but it will be increasing substantially to 748 per hundred. This does reflect the cost of providing service and sense of pricing signal to conserve water when use is not for basic needs. The wastewater volume metric rate is currently 620 for all users and we're proposing to reduce that to 608. This is not, there is not a cost of service rationale to charge for wastewater based on customer class. And now if we move to the far right column, we can see that private fire charges are proposed for the first time and escalate based on size. These rates reflect 20% of the intended full charge as they are being phased in over five years. Not shown on this slide. There are two of their charges on the water resources bill. One is for stormwater. That has been assessed since 2009 and is based on property type with single family homes, duplexes and triplexes being charged a flat fee and all other properties being directly assessed. The stormwater rates are proposed to increase by 5% across the board next fiscal year. And the water bill also contains a franchise fee charge which we are required to pay to the general fund based on city charter. It's currently set at three and a half percent of water and wastewater sales. Next slide please. So here we have a snapshot of the possible customer impacts. As part of the rate study, we did create a model that utilize consumption data from calendar year 2019 to calculate the estimated financial impact for each account. As noted, the bills will vary based on water consumption, meter size, available private fire protection and whether the customer is eligible for RAP. Our typical customers indicated by that median volume room and they will see virtually no change in their water bill. This is because they are able to take advantage of that tier one lifeline rate and those savings offset the new fixed meter charge. If that same customer were to be eligible for our customer assistance program, then their estimated bill now drops by about 15.7% a year. Our low volume customers will see an increase due to the fixed meter charge being assessed for the first time. Although being eligible for RAP here also significantly reduces their estimated bill. As we go down the list, we see varying impacts based on customer class with most increases being related to private fire protection charges and the storm water rate increase. It's important to note that a large increase doesn't always correlate to a significant monetary increase. In that first example, we can see a 15% increase is actually only $52 a year or just over $4 a month. I also wanted to share how the pandemic and related emergency order significantly altered consumption trends. This calendar year, we have seen an average increase in residential consumption of about 10% and a decrease in the commercial usage of about 30% when compared to the previous year. So we have developed an account impact summer request form for customers to fill out if they are interested in receiving a projection of how much they will be impacted by the proposed rate changes. This will include data from our model along with information about their post COVID consumption trends. Next slide please. Okay, so we've discussed how the impacts or proposed changes will vary by customer class and habits, but overall we expect the bills to be higher for those customers who have vacant homes or those with unused irrigation meters. This is because of the fixed fee and it's certainly an opportunity for them to consider removing the meter permanently. Properties with protective fire infrastructure should also expect to see an increase. And this would be a chance to validate their internal records against ours to ensure there are no sizing discrepancies. We expect bills to be lower for those customers with that typical use of 400 cubic feet or those who qualify for a wrap. Again, because of that lifeline rate and fixed fee waiver. And of course, any efforts to reduce usage above that tier two threshold would further shrink their overall bills. Next slide. So this program is the very first rate payer assistance program or initiative for water resources. The goal is for us to limit the administrative burden and cost associated with developing an income verification program. So we're intending to leverage existing state and federal benefit programs as our qualifying criteria. This means that customers who already participate in programs like lifeline or three squares from a crisis fuel rental assistance through section eight can apply and just simply use their proof of enrollment in that program to be qualified for a wrap for one year. Or in the case of senior citizens providing proof of their age would meet that eligibility threshold. I also like to point out that we are open to adding other qualifying programs and encourage feedback about other initiatives that we should consider. One of the more difficult challenges we face with implementing an assistance program is how to provide relief to renters who don't receive a water bill. Ultimately, there's no way to guarantee that a landlord would pass any savings along and we are certainly not alone as most water utilities struggle with how to reach tenants in a meaningful way. We may not have an answer to this problem today but we're certainly not giving up and hope to address it with future initiatives. We've also begun developing some additional assistance programs that address infrastructure and conservation needs. These proposals include offering grant funding for condition assessments of sewer laterals making no or low interest loans available for proactive replacement of water services or sewer laterals and efficiency rebates for installing appliances that can serve water, availability of real-time water data to monitor and lower usage and providing free tools to implement stormwater management practices like rain barrels. These will not be ready to roll out in July but we're actively working towards them. And now back to Jen Olson. Great, thanks, Jess. So our next steps here, obviously, we're in the January to March timeframe so we've been attending the NPAs. We're attending the NPAs between January and February depending on space and their agendas with election stuff coming up. It's been a little tight so we did get pushed to some of the February NPAs. We are here talking to you. We will be presenting to the two on January 26th and then doing our targeted notification to those customers with fire services, hydrants, irrigation meters, those higher impacted folks meeting with our key community partners and the other large users. We'll be hosting an open house public meeting for all ratepayers virtually on Zoom hopefully in early to mid-March. We also have a really robust online presence where customers can review all of the presentations we've done to date, provide feedback via web forms and as Jess was saying, make that request to get an estimated account impact summary. Our continuous improvement will be happening between March and July. That's where we're going to be incorporating the feedback that we receive, reviewing, validating and responding to all of those impact summary requests and doing our ongoing QA, QC with the data and making any required updates that we need to make to our billing system. This will also be when we're drafting our RAP policy and making whatever necessary ordinance changes we have. We'll be seeking approvals from the commission and the mayor's office between April and June. So the city council will have to approve the rate and fee structure changes including that water rate affordability program and then city council and mayoral approval of our budgets and rates and ultimately our budget for fiscal year 22. And then we're hoping to roll out through July and August. So July one is when the changes would go into effect meaning that the changes would be reflected in people's August bills. So Jess, Megan and I are here to answer any questions that you have at this point. You can also feel free to reach out to the three of us at any point over the coming weeks directly but we do have some time that looks like maybe 10 minutes left to answer questions. Great, thank you for the presentation. So we'll go bring it back to the commission for discussion at this point. Vice chair O'Neill, would you like to start? Sure, sure, thanks. So first of all, I appreciate your fee adjustments recognizing that COVID is just kind of put everyone in a tailspin. So thank you for that. And also I like this idea of the account impact, estimated account impact summary. Certainly like probably almost everybody else here I saw our water bill go up once everyone in my house was home drinking five cups of tea a day and peeing five cups of tea out of their body. So I was like, holy cow, stop taking showers. My kids are like, well, drink it too much tea. So I think that that will be really useful. I might even take advantage of it myself. And how do you think that's gonna roll out? I mean, is it gonna be kind of labor intensive for you folks to do this impact summary? Are you guesstimating that a certain percentage of your customers will be taking advantage of that? You know, kind of trying to anticipate your labor going into that. And that's a good question. I'm not entirely sure how many people will opt to do the form we've already received one. The model itself already exists. So the existing calendar year 19 that is there, I just pull it, it'll just be going into the billing system now to get the post COVID consumption. Cause as you noted, it's very different for some accounts. I mean, I'm hopeful that people take advantage of it. So there are no surprises and have the opportunity to talk to them and engage about, you know, what we're doing and you know, their consumption or just different things going on in their house. We have a lot of great materials, leak detection guides and other things that could help people. They may not have called before or contacted us. And that form, Jenna created the web form is already out online. So we just get the email and we can send it to people via mail if they can't do it online as well. I'm hoping it's not as labor intensive as creating that web form cause that tested me. Sometimes when you front load things, then the things get easier. So I hope, I hope though a question about irrigation when you speak of irrigation, this is, you know, kind of a pet peeve of mine. And I hope this addresses it. Is this residential automatic sprinkler systems or is it irrigation for kind of the interval for wherever else? Yeah. So I mean, the irrigation accounts we have about 244 right now with most of them about 210 being residential. So that would, you know, speak to your automatic sprinkler sort of folks, there's some commercial ones for lawn. And then there are other accounts that we consider irrigation or water only and they're for cooling towers or cooling equipment and things like that. You know, except for the BCG and the intervail we're not intending to provide that lower rate for the other water only accounts that are for irrigation. I was just going to chime in. It depends on whether you have a separate meter. So some people have automatic sprinklers that are just tied in off of the boat and they haven't gone through the process to get a separate meter. So it would just be for people who have waters metered separately because when you do that, you do get a little bit of a break cause you're not paying wastewater for it. Okay. All right. Thank you. Yes. One final thing, your, the conservation assistance is that like similar to the kind of beat the peak that BED has as far as maybe, you know, because I love that idea of, okay, we're raising rates. This is what we need to do to invest in our infrastructure but also this is what you can do as consumers to tighten up faucets and rain guards and so forth. Is there a time in the year like when we have in the summer to beat the peak? Do you guys have a system like that or cycles like that? Jess will have to speak to whether we have specific cycles. I mean, I'm sure that consumption is higher in the summertime with gardens and stuff like that. And just, you know, people are generally using more water outside but the conservation program that we're talking about would be fairly similar. So, you know, we have, we already have a lot of literature for folks. We have a, you know, a conservation and leak detection guide that folks can go through step by step with all of the fixtures and different appliances in their home to do leak detection. The last couple of events we've hosted, we've actually been handing out kits. We are going to purchase more of those and their kits specifically to either test for leaks or put, you know, conserving fixture or conserving items on your fixtures. Like there are certain things for faucets, certain things for showers, toilets, things like that. So the conservation program would be very similar. I think the other thing that we would be looking at is providing assistance with smart meters for folks. So especially in cases where individuals are just really struggling to figure out where they're using all of that water and when it's happening, you know, we would be looking to help folks out with implementing or installing those smart meters so that they could, you know, monitor their water usage in real time. Just to clarify a little bit, building out smart metering network is something that we're looking at and requires an actual network. There is the possibility of being able to supplement people with individual sort of third party devices. So that's one thing that I think Jenna is alluding to. But just so folks know, for a multitude of reasons, we are looking at sort of what our timeline is for being able to have what they call an AMI network where as you're meter, as we modernize your meter, it would then be able to talk to these fixed networks and send that data in a real time basis cause we feel like that does give people the power to be able to alter their usage or to see, oh, I'm almost fully in that first tier, right, if I just save a little bit more water, I could get my bill entirely in that first tier versus going over into the second tier. That would be great. That and like having like cold water turn on when your teenager's in there for more than ever time. Just saying, you guys. As our customer service people say, we're only responsible for the water, not the hotness. So we can't, that is true. I did want to say that we do actually have radio boxes in our meter asset fleet right now about 10% of our radio boxes can data log. So right now, if a customer has one of those boxes, we can at their request just drive up to the property, wake it up and it gives us 96 days of hourly or daily information. And we just did that for a customer today. So if they have one of those, they can really see and it's really great. I mean, you can see at two o'clock in the morning, this is when it happened and it went for two weeks. The dashboard, as Megan said, that sort of thing for people to access on their own will be a little bit later. But for some customers, we have that now. Great, thank you. Thank you all. I mean, I just love geeking out with the water stuff. So thanks. We love it when you geek out with us. I'll send you a water bear chart agree. Yeah. Tiki, I'll get the whole commission. Some of those reusable bags too. All the things are great. Got tablets, we'll have a whole kit. Mr. Archibald, you're in. What a coincidence. I did want to let Megan know that she has a giant water bear sneaking up on her. So if you weren't aware, we don't want to see you get hurt. Questions, tell me a little bit about the private fire protection. I'm just unfamiliar with that. So there are certain properties in Burlington, mostly commercial multi-unit. They have a separate fire service. So off the main, they would have their domestic water line and a fire service line. Or there are some properties that have private hydrants as well. So in their parcel itself embedded, larger properties have those as well. And yeah, there's a cost for us to be able to serve that if they need it. I mean, our system has to be X amount bigger in the event that they do need that. And so we are proposing to charge for that. We're right now. There was, I don't know, there was an initiative in 1991 to do the same thing. And that's the data I'm working off in terms of sizing and sort of doing all that quality checking to see who still has a fire service, who killed their fire service, who has a new one, that sort of thing right now. And I don't know if Megan has anything to add to that. Yeah, I think what's really interesting, we are only proposing at this time to charge for the additional costs that the utility bears as a result of private fire services. There is actually an additional cost for even all of the public fire service that we provide, which at this point we're not, you know, seeking to charge that to the city. But it is a, I can't remember and Dave Fox or consultants online, but it's a pretty substantial number. What that fixed cost is to have the big pumps, the big pipes to be ready to serve in the event of a fire. And it all ties into people's insurance ratings. So our being able to say that we have sufficient fire flow that enables people to access a lower insurance rate. Yeah, it's fascinating. I had not noticed that before, but I guess it's just reserved to larger institutions, say the hospital or the college or would it also be under development? It would be anybody who has a fire service. So anybody who has fire services. Okay. Most of your commercial larger buildings. So not your resident, I mean, there's some residential, multi-family residential, but I would say primarily your people. Mostly commercial and larger buildings. It's the sprinkler system specifically, right? Yes. Yeah. And then on the private fire hydrant, there are places where in their private property, they have their own individual fire hydrants and UVM and UVM medical center or private developments where the streets haven't been accepted. Those have private fire hydrants. Okay. But so actually, Jenna, you made a good point. So that sprinkler systems as well then that would fit that definition. Well, if they have a wet system, they have a fire service. They could have a dry system in which case they likely don't have an actual fire service line, which they wouldn't be charged. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And I mean, I know this commission has heard appeals before about when you go to a third floor, you either have a address or a sprinkler system, for example. And so those who opt towards the system may see this being in time. So if it's a wet system and they qualify, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. My other question would be, you had mentioned the income sensitivity, which I'm really glad for the work you put into this. I hear you did a lot of homework to put this together and it really reflects the values of our community, right? Trying to make this income sensitive, paying for the use that comes along with it. So how would a lower income resident qualify for a lower rate as you all had described earlier? Yeah. So if someone already is enrolled in an existing benefit program, pretty much most of the ones from the state, so if they get section A, if they get Lifeline, if they, three squares, any of those crisis fuel, we worked, we met with CVOO to sort of see what the programs are. They just have to show us, anyone who's approved for one of those programs gets an enrollment letter and it has, that they're approved and it has a specified period of time. They're just gonna need to remit that a copy of that letter to us and we're gonna accept that letter as enrollment in our program for the same amount of time. And we had talked about this a bit with counselor Pine too, and we will be coordinating with CEDO to make sure that there aren't any other programs that we're missing and making sure that all of those programs get incorporated since CEDO has a lot of expertise in that area. Sure. Well, and counselor Pine had suggested that the federal poverty limit is not the best metric of income sensitivity and that we should perhaps be looking at the the high median income. So I think the other point is, and Jess and Jen and I have talked about this, if somebody comes to us and says they're having a hard time paying their bill and they qualify for some program that we don't have on our list, then of course we're going to adapt our program for, you know, reasonable reasons. Yeah. No, I was just gonna say we are working with our legal team to make the policy flexible in that way. Yeah, that's great. And that's kind of what I was driving at to see if it was that flexibility. I'm sure the department's gonna learn things as it's getting rolled out and programs and that kind of thing. So that's great that you're already anticipating something like that to get ahead of it. Okay, that's it for me. I don't have enough good things to say. This is excellent work, thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Barr. Thanks, I just figured out you're going alphabetical. So the great presentation, thank you. And I think this is really due. This is something that I think will really help. I will say that as, and maybe those that might be watching this can learn from maybe my mistake, my hot water heater went and I had to put in another system and I was talked into doing an on-demand system and now it takes almost two minutes to get hot water. So I feel like I'm using more water. So I'm gonna reach out to somebody to figure out how not to do that because cold showers on a 14 degree days, not something I'm excited about. Good for our immune system. Yeah, I'm pretty immune then. I also feel like that's counterintuitive. I feel like an on-demand system should be heating up faster, so. They said something about the size of the pipes because I live in a 200 plus year old house. Okay. And I have to rip everything out to put all new piping in. I'm gonna do it. So I'm gonna ask somebody somewhere to see that because or I'm just gonna make, we can only take one shower a week and pick the day you want or something like that. So we'll figure it out. But great, great presentation. The others already asked some of the questions that I was asking. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Commissioner Bose. Yeah, just to echo what my other colleagues have said already really enjoyed the presentation and the initiative. The questions I had just were about the outreach that you had outlined in your presentation. You mentioned, I think, reaching out to targeted customers who you see as already potentially experiencing a greater share of the increases. And I noticed, I think in another slide, you had, I think it was the school district, the university, and I can't remember another institutional user. So what is your kind of, I'm just wondering if you could elaborate on that a little bit more. What's your sort of sense? Have you already kind of thought of, I'm imagining there will be some pushback, especially given what was the figure that you said institutional users were down 30% this year and home users up 10%, something like that. So I'm just wondering if you can talk through a little bit about what, you had what I would say it's somewhat ambitious rollout to adoption, which is great. But I'm just imagining that there might be a little bit of back and forth. So I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that, thanks. Yeah, I mean, I think that we have really great stakeholder engagement in the fall when we did some outreach then, UBM came, some other places came. So I think part of it will be reminding people that we've given them some information. The targeted outreach will be direct with those folks, sending letters, emails, we'll be setting up meetings with them. We do have all the social media sort of stuff we're gonna do notes on the bills, things like that, obviously taking time if anyone needs to speak with me or Megan individually besides the other open house that we're gonna be holding. It is robust and it's gonna be a little challenging in this virtual world as opposed to just having someone come in or taking that time to meet with people. I'm trying to, I'm blanking right now, sorry. Well, I think- I mean, yeah, I'm sorry. One thing- Again, just go ahead. Yeah, yeah. So one thing is we are going to be taking the time, right? If somebody comes in and requests their bill impact of looking at what the impact is and looking at what the contributing factors are, how many fire services you had. Okay, you have a three inch meter but you never actually use that amount of water. You're eligible for a smaller meter. Like we're gonna do everything within our power to get them to the right bill. It may still be more than they are currently paying. And a lot of that is educating people about the fact that really none of us are paying the true value and cost of water. And that is just a reality and it's a reality that I think communities across the nation are really reckoning with. And of course it's coming at a time when we're realizing the true cost and value of so many other things that we haven't been paying for. So I think it's a careful conversation and a deliberate stepping through that individual customer's characteristics that are affecting their bill. And I mean, actually that leads into my last point which is when you put together whatever these kinds of communications and discussions I would really recommend taking elements of the presentation you gave us and translating that into whatever kind of, I don't know, pamphlets, handouts, whatever it is because I actually thought that was a particularly effective part of this communication was to lay that out. In different parts of this presentation you kind of talked about industry standards and how this kind of works across the country but it was also very effective to be able to show like, look, this is everything from like the sizes of pipes or whatever. I mean, that's quite, it doesn't come across as arbitrary. I mean, at this point, a lot of times when we get the rates or whatever it's, I'm not entirely sure what that's based on and this was a really nice explanation of that. So if there are ways of translating that into, easy to grasp graphics as you sort of had up there I would encourage that. Anyway, great work. Thank you. Thank you for that feedback. That's a great idea. Mr. Gilman. Yeah, my comment, I mean, is related to what commissioner Bose just said that I thought the presentation did a good job of laying out dry connectivity between, you know the rates and what drives the cost of service. Obviously with a big change like this it's important to get that message to as many people as possible. So obviously this is one forum for that. And as commissioner Bose said it, good to get that to as many people as possible to, you know, prevent, you know it could easily come across as, oh, there were increasing rates, you know it's just, it's the simplest thing to say. So would encourage you to get this information, you know, in as many forms as you can. Otherwise, I think it makes a ton of sense. So thank you. All right. Thank you. Commissioner Overby. I've been reading through this since we had the original information. So I think it's, I completely understand where you're going with this. And I know a lot of work has gone into the discussion of it and the materials that we have. So I don't have any specific questions about it other than, I think I'm following up on the comment that was made about making sure the materials given to the public are easy to understand and clear. You know, we all are familiar with every time there's, you know, problems with the water, you know or an outflow problem, people get outraged. And part of it is that we just really need to, you know keep educating people about the fact that it is, it is a really quite a deal to have not have to go down the, you know, down to the river and, you know, bring a bucket up and boil it. So I think it's great, I'm looking forward to having it happen. And I know people, every time there's a change, it is something that some people feel like they're being unfairly treated. But I agree that I think all of these things that you've done are good at proposing, you know explaining to people what is going on and how we can make it fair. And so I totally support what you're up to here. And I appreciate all the work that's gone into it. So thank you. All right. Thank you. I just want to clarify a question on my ends. I mentioned about 10% of boxes are radioquipped to be sort of optionally pull a larger time series. Are those like the newest 10% or? Yeah, there are V4 boxes. So we started installing them about three years ago but we have been replacing boxes only when they failed to transmit at this point. So that's why it's a lower percentage. So it's new builds or ones that have failed. All right, thank you. Yeah, that's correct. I think my fellow commissioners brought up all of my other questions here. With that, open up to public comments. Let's see any hands in the air will confirm with Mr. Golden. At this time, there is nobody signed up but for any members of the public who are still on you can hit star nine if you have called in to join the queue for public comment or hit raise your hand. On the bottom toolbar on your Zoom screen. And that will alert us that you want to speak during public comment. Sure. But at this time, there does not appear to be anybody signed up. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Golden. So looking ahead, we are seeking a vote on this and I gather it's generally a vote of support for this moving forward, correct? I mean, I don't know that we were looking for an explicit vote, but we will certainly take one. Certainly helps us as we move forward and more it's just your advocacy as people start to talk to you about this. Really emphasizing that this is all about maintaining access to that essential life water that every resident, you know, the UN lists access to water as a human right and that's what we're trying to present. And so, you know, when you talk to the commercial folks who may be experiencing an increase in bill, if you can kind of draw them back to that and get that agreement on that value proposition, they don't think anybody would disagree that people should have enough water to wash their hands, you know, clean their clothes and cook their food. Absolutely. Director Spencer, are we gonna comment and we're listed in the agenda as a vote? Exactly. I've been airing on the side of listing things as votes just so that the commission has flexibility in how it wants to weigh in. So we would certainly welcome, you know, your guidance or input in terms of affirmation of motion, but it is not required. Sure. Has anyone moved or inspired to make such a motion? I'll move to approve, what do I say, staff's language? That'd be the right proposal. That's why I keep it simple. Yeah, I would say that supports the general direction of the water rate restructuring and affordability program. It's not a formal proposal at this point, but just a general support of your direction would be well. Okay. What he said, right? That's my motion. I second that. Seconded by Vice Chair Arneo. All right. Is there any discussion around that motion? All right, I'll go call roll for this one then Commissioner Archambault. Aye. Commissioner Barr. Aye. Commissioner Bose. Aye. Commissioner Gilman. Aye. Commissioner, Vice Chair Arneo. Aye. Commissioner Overby. Aye. Aye for myself. The motion in support of this direction has passed unanimously. Thank you so much. Thank you. It's good practice for getting eyes from everybody else. Yes. And good luck moving forward with this. Thank you. I'll see you guys in a bit. Genesis item six parking requests for south end green stormwater infrastructure. Yay, it's me again. Yeah. Okay. So I am sharing again. Can everybody, can you see the presentation? Not yet. I have to click share. That would be helpful. Okay. So I'm here tonight. I will be joined by Phillip Peterson towards the end. Just to talk about the actual parking changes, but I'm just here to talk to you a bit about the green stormwater infrastructure CSO mitigation project. And to hopefully get a favorable vote to adjust parking for this project. So as a reminder, I think I have, I have spoken to some of you about it. I'm going to call exactly off the top of my head right now. If we've come to commission about this before. But as many of you probably recall, 2018 was a particularly challenging year for water quality in Burlington. We had a series of combined sewer overflow issues, a lot of rain, several infrastructure issues with our wastewater treatment. Plants and our combined sewer infrastructure. And this was when the city passed the $30 million clean water resiliency plan bond vote. And so in a further response to that, that summer. We applied for and we're awarded a million dollars, just over a million dollars in match free grant funding from Vermont DC in late 2018, which was specifically targeted toward mitigating combined sewer impacts with the use of green stormwater infrastructure. So. So, I'm just going to go back to the slide. So. Pine street CSO is by and large, our most problematic CSO are combined sewer overflow in the city. It also happens to have a very discreet drainage area. The, the area you see circled below is the one that we're actually talking about tonight. There is one area just to the north and additional area, but it is just in the vicinity of ledge road, which is the one that we're talking about right now. So, the area that you see circled below ledge, high ground water, and or heavy clay soils, which is, which are conditions not suitable for infiltrating water with green stormwater infrastructure. It just so happens that the area highlighted in red that you see does have soil conditions that are favorable for green stormwater infrastructure. And therefore that is where we pursued this initial design. And so we're working on the systems that are designed to maximize receiving drainage from the surrounding roadways. In the end, this project will, these, the, the series of projects will provide a net reduction of 10 cubic feet per second of runoff during a 2.7 inch rainfall event, which is what the state roughly considers a combined sewer overflow storm. They do go off in smaller events. And so the systems, you know, are designed to mitigate those stormwater events as well. The, the highlight here is that the systems will be able to intercept and mitigate stormwater runoff from roughly six acres of impervious surface or just about 28% of the area that currently drains directly through the pine street CSO via the combined sewer areas contributing to these overflow events. So it is not an insubstantial benefit that these projects will provide to the pine street CSO. This is just a highlight of the system locations. So as you'll see, there are three here on south prospect. Another three on lower south prospect just at the corner of prospect parkway. This is prospect parkway. There is one on prospect parkway. Another that sort of wraps around prospect parkway and fair mount. One on fair mount street. Here, another on fair mount street just at the, the edge of Holt. This is actually south Burlington. So we're right on the edge. Then another just on the corner of south street in Holt and then two others on south street right here. So we've done a significant amount of design and outreach for this project over the course of the last year, really two years. So we started in July of 2019 with notifying residents via front porch forum that design teams would be out just conducting soil borings in advance of design for this project. In March of 2020, we did a presentation to the ward six NPA and mail the letter directly to neighborhood residents about the project. Then the world came to a screeching halt. So in April of 2020, we sent a direct email to all the residents that we had emails for and did another front porch forum update on the project delay is due to COVID-19. And then revitalized everything in June of 2020. So in June, we, I, okay. In June, we mailed the second letter to residents and counselor Paul actually handed out project flyers to residents. Myself and the rest of the project team also went out and marked out where the proposed systems would be in chalk paint. would be in chalk paint so residents could actually see them on the ground and then following that process we hosted a series of four Zoom meetings over two days to inform residents and accept feedback. We did receive a significant amount of feedback during that process and so this gap that you see between July and December was actually the process of our team making some pretty significant design revisions to the project in response to neighborhood concerns. So come December of 2020 the residents were notified by email the project changes that we made this notification including included all the upcoming meeting links explaining those changes further and we held another two meetings for folks explaining the design changes. In January of this year so just a few weeks back we made the direct notification you know per our internal process to all of the abutting residents of the parking changes and in addition to that did put out a front porch forum post to the entire neighborhood about the parking changes and you know all of the updates are available on the project webpage. So here's just a an overall summary of the design changes of the adjustments that we made in response to the feedback that we received last July. One system on South Prospect Street was removed entirely two of the systems on South Prospect were reduced in size and traffic analysis were completed. Prospect Parkway and Fairmount Street we removed two systems one system was adjusted to add subsurface infiltration thanks to more advanced soil borings that we were able to gather. One system was reduced in length and another traffic analysis was completed and then on South Street two of those systems were reduced in size. So overall you know based on on Philip and our traffic teams analysis this is the overall parking change summary. These are the systems you know the the the number of parking on street parking spaces that would be removed and then the distance to nearest on-street parking at you know as a result. So if you if you look on the column to the right this this between 875 and 865 South Prospect Street there are four spaces removed directly in front of that home but the nearest on-street parking closest to those residences is 77 feet away. So it's it's really not that significant of a removal when you look at it in context to where the nearest on-street parking is outside of that immediate area right in front of the home. So our next steps will be hopefully in early February 2021 obviously depending the outcome of this discussion issuing our request for bids. Hopefully awarding that bid in late February of this year going through all the Board of Finance and City Council approvals to execute a contract through from March to April and then from May to June in that window generally beginning construction. So I did try to keep this brief again Philip is with me so we can both answer questions related to the parking impact specifically but I am happy to answer any questions now or you can reach out to me directly if you'd like. Thank you. Yeah. All right. Let's Commissioner Gilman to start. Yeah, the one question I don't know as part of this. I'm assuming the answer is that it's not an issue but I don't like to assume so the total parking utilization in those neighborhoods is typically something we consider when we look at removing parking, meaning if we're removing 60 spots out of 200 and typically parking is only 20% utilized then obviously that's probably not a problem. I understand the distance data so that was helpful. I'm assuming you left the other out just because it's not an issue in that neighborhood. Philip, do you want to take that one? Sure. I would characterize parking in this neighborhood. We don't have specific numbers on it but it's more of a suburban street. This is not an old north end street. It's not a narrow street. It's not like a Russell and Charles situation where people are packed in like sardines. They have quite a bit of parking resources. Pretty much all of the homes have driveways. They can park multiple cars. So I would say that parking resources is abundant in this neighborhood. Okay. I think in the future just generally if we're going to take parking away it would be useful to just say once at 6pm on a weekday night you have a count just to say yeah, we're fine. I don't think it needs to be a comprehensive multi-time, multi-scenario study. You guys know when people are in residential neighborhoods. That would be useful. Thank you. Thanks Commissioner. I think in this case we didn't do that because the utilization is so low on the street. Yeah, I agree. I know the neighborhood. I assume that was the case. That's why I said it. But again, just generally I think even a 1x spot check would be helpful. It's a fair question and it is something that Jen and I discussed what the occupancy rates are. But to Chapin's point that's the reason we didn't put in the extra effort. Yep. Okay, thank you. Vice Chair O'Neill. Hi there. So I'm sorry I'm looking at two screens. I guess just looking at the design change summary and how you've eliminated three systems and adjusted size of four by six, seven. Does this project still meet the goals of capturing the stormwater? I mean certainly less so. But how does it, what are we losing from keeping some of this parking? And I guess also then what was some of the feedback from the residents? Was it purely parking or were there other issues? There were other issues. It was kind of a mixed bag. I would be more than happy to send the commission our more robust response summary afterward. There was significant concern about aesthetic of the neighborhood. We address that with the response summary. In terms of the design changes, what I can say is that the reason why we were able to eliminate and adjust the size of those systems was because we were able to gather advanced site data and ensure that the design parameters of the project wouldn't be impacted. So the first thing that came to mind when we took this feedback into account is how is this going to eat into our treatment goals? Because obviously there is a very limited area where we can utilize green stormwater infrastructure to manage Pine Street CSO and we didn't want to lose that opportunity in a huge way. And we didn't. So that is why we were able to make the adjustments we did. We certainly didn't win all of the residents over. Some are still bummed out that the system in front of their home wasn't adjusted or wasn't changed more. The reason for that was very specific to the site conditions. We placed these systems in the low points of the neighborhood in order to maximize the area of capture. And so if a system wasn't adjusted or wasn't changed in a specific way, it's because it happened to be in a location that's capturing a very large drainage area and we needed to maintain that. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. That's all. Thank you. Commissioner Overby. I think my questions are sort of related to that, but primarily was conceptually when you design these are I can't tell what the the contour is of that area. And in fact, do you put the the the garden or the facility in a place where you're going to get the you know, a huge runoff of water coming down the hill? I couldn't tell from the maps. You know how you make those decisions because I'm very familiar with how those water the water comes rushing down Main Street and was you know, going into Mr. Mike's now just that kind of river and and I'm visioning that that does this happen on these streets and when you design the locations of these things, it's not obvious to me the way you're going on this and that side that where the contour is, are they is can you just sort of it has nothing to do with parking, obviously, but it does have to do with my curiosity about how you decided where to place these. Yeah, so what what you'll notice is that the systems often coincide with an existing catch basin that that's intentional. So our drainage network is specifically designed in order to capture the low points of areas that the road is crowned a certain way. The roads are pitched a certain way and then catch placens are placed in locations where they're going to capture drainage coming downhill. And so as I was sort of alluding to before, the the location of these systems is not coincidental. We didn't just kind of pick it was hard to explain that to residents in a lot of cases because obviously they're in very defined spaces and I think sort of easy to feel picked on but these are in low points of the road and these were specifically designed in the areas that were lowest and therefore unable to capture the most runoff in those neighborhoods. So but but are there I mean, it may be that those catch basins are not in the best place, you know, from historically anyway, I mean, it's hard to know. So, you know, some of them look like they were on either side. So you pretty much I couldn't I honestly did not notice that they were were existing catch basins were right. The diagrams are fairly challenging for me to read. But so you basically put them in a place where there was a catch basin that already was going to getting a big direct amount of water. And it was going to be hitting that and you're basically in improving the you're slowing down the amount of water dropping into that catch basin using these various mechanisms. Exactly. And I guess just to further clarify, it wasn't we didn't select the location solely based on the catch basins. There was a sense of survey work done to make sure that this those catch basins were in fact in the right place. That's a very good point commissioner over V. They're not always in the best place. So they did do extensive survey work to make sure that the locations that were selected are actually low points. One of the other things that I know there's one of those was placed on Grant Street at the corner Grant and North Winooski. And and that's one that I've had comments made to me, it's a word to that it is it really does do the job. It gets a lot of water in there, but it but it collects a lot of, you know, debris and it also is frequently, you know, struck the the edges frequently struck the concrete barrier. So I'm not sure if any of that is something that's if there's any way to, you know, deal with that kind of problem. I mean, if a big if it fills up and it doesn't actually get cleaned out periodically because you've had a big storm, is that something that you can deal with? If I hadn't had somebody complain about it, the one on Grant Street a few times, because they go out there and clean it up. They live there. I was not quite wondering. Yeah, so we've actually developed a line of how you save us from that sort of problem. Sorry, something just broke up. I think one of my metal doodads from my sweatshirt touched my headphones and made everything crazy. Yeah, so we we developed a municipal green stormwater infrastructure maintenance plan as a as part of this process. That was a big comment that came up was ongoing maintenance. And so there is a systematic schedule now for making sure that these get cleaned out on a routine basis, that the mulch is replaced, that plants are replaced based on mortality. You know, weeding is done on a regular basis, and that includes, you know, that advanced level of maintenance that really needs to happen on stormwater systems. Because as you as you point out, you know, after a big storm, those inlets and outlets can get clogged up with leaves or sand, sediment, whatever sort of Schmagma as Megan likes to call it gets on the road and then gets into the the rain garden. In terms of line of sight, one of the things that we've learned with these, especially with the assistance of Philip and the other tech services folks, Nicole and Elizabeth, is that we do need to incorporate visual aids in the gardens for folks to make sure that they're abundantly clear. And so part of this design does include those those markers, the Schama markers. Yeah, any of the traffic markings that Dan Hill and his his team have to make to ensure that, you know, we got a safe transportation system. Yeah, the last to keep track of. Yeah, well, you know, it's I mean, it's truly needs to get done. And and I'm really glad that you've got the grant to do it. The other question was relating to that area. Do the do they have trouble with sewer backups because they would be benefiting as people in the neighborhood to have this better handled to mitigate the risks of having a sewer backup into their home because of the combined sewer, you know, stormwater design in that neighborhood. I don't know. I know it's came up over in another neighborhood years ago about that. And there are instructions on how to put one of those backflow protectors in. But did that come up as far as an advantage that the neighborhood will see by having this work done? No, we didn't actually hear from any residents that that was an issue that folks face. This is actually one of our newer neighborhoods. A lot of the sewage backups that we see are in the lower portions of the city and also in the areas of the city that have much older homes that wouldn't have had backwater prevention originally. Most of these homes are sort of 1950s era and newer. And so I think most of them do have backwater prevention valves. So we didn't hear that from residents. You know, this certainly will help with that issue. We did receive some feedback about folks being concerned with water coming into their basements. Water flows, you know, to the favorable path. And so these systems will hopefully alleviate that issue that a lot of folks are seeing. So we did describe that to residents as much as possible. Okay. The one last thing is where is the Pine Street outfall? Where does it come out into the lake? It actually discharges just behind the DPW building at 645 Pine into the Pine Barge Canal. And then it travels up the Pine Barge Canal to the lake. So it's not actually a direct discharge, like onto a beach as a lot of folks, I think, believe. But it goes into that super fun site and then that ultimately flows straight away. Thank you very much. Those are all my questions. All right, thank you. Commissioner Archambault, any questions for you? Yeah. Hi there. Just a quick comment. It's interesting to see the CSOs mentioned in that this project effectively, in my mind's eye, directly relates to mitigating beach closings, right? And those problems that we seem to face. But Jenna, you can tell me if I'm wrong. What's your assessment on that? Yeah. I mean, with the CSOs, you know, we're explicitly required to under state statute put permanent signage at all the CSO outfalls, which of course nobody's really going to see the one for Pine Street because it's behind the DPW building. So unless you're rooting around in the woods back there, you're not really going to see that sign. But we also put signage out on the nearby beaches after every CSO event at Pine Street and it does impact usage of our beaches. You know, whether we are mandated to close them or not, it has an impact on how folks perceive our beach water quality and it also can impact that acute level of E. Coli depending on, you know, depending on the amount of the discharge or, you know, what event is happening. So hands down there is a very clear nexus between this work and water quality and our beach usage, you know, throughout the summer. I think everyone can agree that Burlington is heavily dependent on tourism revenue and every time we end up in the news because of a CSO or some sort of wastewater discharge, it impacts the usage of our beaches and our other really key resources here in Burlington. So we want people to keep coming back. We want them to shop. We want them to spend their money here. We want them to park and spend money to BPRW, you know, park and at our beaches. Want them to go scuba diving. Yeah, we want them to go scuba diving. We want them to get snacks at North Beach. So, you know, this is a meaningful, this is certainly a meaningful improvement. And it will move the needle for us, I think. And when this is all done, as you know, we're encountering more severe storm events. So how would this hold up under those types of conditions? Yeah, I mean the maintenance contract is certainly designed to address, you know, any impacts the system may see because of really heavy flows. So if there's, you know, erosion or any scouring or something like that, we are equipped to address it. You know, again, these systems are really designed, it's hard to, it's hard to design to those really flashy high-intensity short-duration events. But that is what we're trying to do here. I mean, we're we're trying to cut that peak as much as we possibly can. And that's, the goal here is to, you know, take off that big deluge and either remove it entirely or slow it down enough so that the system can catch up with the amount of water that's rushing in during a storm event so that the CSO doesn't discharge and that everything can get to our main wastewater treatment plan and be processed how the plant is designed to process it. Yeah, well versus where it's going today, right? It's just flowing down the hill onto, what, Route 7? Yeah, well right now it's combined, it is, it's combined. And so, you know, right now, if it were just to sprinkle a little bit, all of that water would end up at the wastewater treatment plan. It's, the problems arise really when there is a big amount of rainfall and there's so much storm water and wastewater in the pipe that the system can't handle it and that's when the overflow happens. I just want to make what, this is part and parcel of a larger portfolio. This project is going to help a great deal to the best of our abilities using green storm water infrastructure practices. Very soon we will be coming back and if any of you attended the integrated planning outreach that Jenna did last fall. We talked about some other practices that we're going to have to employ largely a subsurface storage tank at Callahan Park, which would be a big lift and a multi million dollar lift but would even further reduce, you know, up to hopefully a five-year return frequency storm. But they are locked hand in hand. We need this as well as things like tanks and other practices in order to achieve our ultimate goal of really not having the CSO happen, you know, except once in a blue moon. Yeah, that's right, I'll make it as you're two steps ahead of me, right? I was just going to mention that these types of projects are going to be so beneficial to our town as we move forward in the future for mitigating those impacts. So it's great. Yeah, thank you, and I see you no longer being attacked by a water parasol, so I'd be glad to do that back. That's all for me, thank you. Thank you. Our chairperson might be frozen. Did we lose Commissioner Hogan? He looks like he's frozen. He hasn't moved in a long while, so... We have a frozen chair. Do you want to take a pulse? Oh, dear. How about, do we have Vice Chair O'Neill on the... We do, yeah. Chair Hogan just joined, here we go. Okay, there it goes. Oh, you. Back, sorry for the network left turn. All right, thank you for the questions, Chair Archibald. Commissioner Barr. Thanks, just very quickly. I mean, I guess it helps to go last because everybody asks all those pertinent questions. I only had a couple of little... I don't know if their questions are comments. I should... I don't know if I should know this, but is there residential parking program, in effect, in any of these affected areas? Phillip? I'll let Phillip take that one. Yeah. You kind of cut out there. Sorry. No, I'm asking if there is a residential parking program, in effect, for any of these areas that'll be affected. No, no, there is no resident parking, and they're not in a designated zone that even could be. Okay. And there are... None of these streets are narrow streets either, so no other special circumstances there, not in a trucking route, just kind of like your basic suburban streets. Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with that area there. I used to walk and bike down through there, and had some friends that lived down there, too. So I guess, you know, other than the feedback from the neighbors, which you've kind of alluded to, Jenna, and thanks. I'm looking at the picture next to the questions thing, and it looks like I'm in Arizona or something. I'm just curious if that's... If that's what the look is going to be, the vibe that we're going to be bringing in the neighborhood? Not necessarily, no. So this is actually St. Paul Street, but this was in the very early establishment phase. These gardens look really different now. It's just that in the summertime and we can get pictures, the gardens aren't always... These are really, really nice gardens on St. Paul Street, and so they photograph super well just in terms of, you know, the curving and everything. But yeah, the vegetation is not fully grown in this one. The planting plans, you know, the designer did develop planting plans. One of the things that we're working with the residents is allowing them to select plants for the systems that are directly in front of their homes if they want to. Again, as I was saying earlier, there were a lot of aesthetic concerns, and that was sort of one of our all of branches was that it really doesn't matter to me what plants you select, so long as they're suitable to live in a rain garden. There is an entire Vermont rain garden manual that we provided out to residents and several of them took us up on it and will be selecting plants that we will then develop planting plans for them just so it, you know, sort of blends a little bit better with their landscaping. It looks great, and I can't wait to get this in the old East End on this, the Burlington 2 on my street. Yeah. So thank you. Thanks. Yeah. Thank you. Commissioner Bose, anything on your end? No questions from me. Thanks. All right. Okay, I guess I'll just bring this back to myself. That's really cool that residents even got a chance for input on their type of, their favorite type of water retaining plant. Is the construction all planned to complete this season? Like this year coming up? Yeah. So it really needs to happen this summer. We were able to get an extension on the grant, but that's only, that only gets us until the end of next summer. And this is actually the first half of the project. So the second half will be in the old North End. Because of the subsurface conditions being so incredibly sandy in the old North End, those systems will be all or, you know, 90 to 99% underground. So we probably won't need the nearly the same level of engagement on that. But we do, we need to get those constructed next summer. So yeah, there is a limited timeframe and we really do need to advance construction on these this year. Gotcha. But obviously the parking restrictions would not be instituted until construction was definitely underway. We would not just, you know, start instituting parking restrictions. Yeah. Yeah, thank you for clarifying. We would potentially vote to approve these restrictions today, but you would, you would hold it from publishing it until until the time is right this spring. That is correct. Sounds good. All right. That will close out the commissioner discussion. Are there any public commenters, prospective public commenters? Not at this time, sir. All right. Thank you. So we back to the commission for a vote here are seeking the commission's approval on the traffic changes and parking restrictions to support these developments. Can you remove the presentation so we can see everybody? Yep. Thanks. It's all right. So I was going to move. I believe there is language on this one in particular. So I guess in this case, I will move to approve staff's language. Thank you. Seconded. I'm going to say who is in with the second? Commissioner Barr. Commissioner Barr. Gotcha. We have a motion from Commissioner Archambault second by Commissioner Barr. Is there any discussion around that motion? All right. Call roll on the vote here. Commissioner Archambault. Aye. Thank you. Commissioner Barr. Aye. Commissioner Bows. Aye. Commissioner Gilman. Aye. Vice Chair O'Neill. Aye. Commissioner Overby. Aye. Aye for myself. All right. The motion has passed unanimously. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time tonight, commissioners. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks, Jenna. Thank you. I just want to give a huge thanks to Jenna. This has been a challenging project just to manage all of the concerns and she has done so much work and thank you for your all support but I just wanted to publicly thank Jenna for really doing an awesome job on this. Thanks, Megan. Here, here. It is noted. Thank you. Thanks, folks. All right. Moving forward, item seven on agenda, asset management. Good evening, everybody. It is a good and big evening and I just want to say that last item was about proactive planning on the team, water and the item before. This one too is a partnership between team water and team technical services. So you're going to get to hear from both teams on this one. That's him. I'm not. He took a little of my thunder away but we are really excited that this is a really collaborative project and we are coming to you tonight. With our next steps, this process started in 2014 when we started talking about asset management and Megan had the great luck of going first in 2016. She started working on an asset management plan and that was really fun but the general fund couldn't join in at that time. We weren't organized enough and in 2019, we added an asset management administrator, which is Gustav, who will be speaking in a moment. Hopefully he is there. Thank you. And we are now here. We've done a lot of research and a lot of planning and we're here to come forward with a great project to actually implement asset management for the city of Burlington involving everybody. And so I'm going to let Megan speak but I'm really excited and we've got a great team here. Thanks, Martha. I'm just here in support super excited there's been times during this project, the recent phases where I've literally, this might be revealing my nerve to not been able to sleep at night because of my level of excitement of how this is going to transform how we take care of assets. We do an amazing job given the tools we have but this is the missing tool in our toolbox. It's been great to collaborate with Martha and Gustav. We have our own staff, Greg Johnson left us but we have imported somebody from California, Rocky Vogler who I believe is listening in. So we are ready to rock and roll on this with your support and I cannot wait to hear your comments and questions and support and feedback at the end of this presentation. And we stole Gustav and so Gustav is our new employee from Parks so we stole him from Parks and I'm thrilled to have him and he has done a great job of moving this forward. I'm going to let him do the presentation. Okay, let's get going here. All right, you seen my PowerPoint? Great. Yes. So again, I'm Gustav Sexauer. I'm the asset management coordinator and I've been working with the city since well, I guess it was two years ago now but in my current position since September and this is kind of a culmination of everything I've been working on for the past four months. So let's get into it. So there's various things that we're requesting you to support today but they're all part of making a robust asset management system in the city. We're looking at a contract for a CMMS. We have a consultant that we've been working with and we would like an amendment to continue working with them We're also trying to make our GIS platform more robust by hosting it and managing it with a third party and Megan and Water are working to get two state revolving fund loans to help support the purchase of these things. So to give you a background of our asset management we currently have a variety of different locations where assets are inventoried and work orders are stored. I know for work orders for different divisions there are at least four different software systems that are being used now and none of them talk to each other. We also have many work orders that are not tracked at all and we can't currently tag work orders and service requests to assets to give assets that we have a history of work in a succinct and easily accessible way. And another component that we don't have is a good asset inventory that is spatially oriented. It's hard to look at all of our assets on a map. Some are in GIS now but some of the assets are not. Some are in binders. So as was said earlier it's been almost a decade of work that the city has put in working towards better asset management and one key thing that they did in the past was they had Barton and Lagudas investigate our asset management systems and give us a report back on the current state and future recommendations. And one thing that they wrote that I'd like to read from the report was that the current administration has prioritized reinvestment into the city's aging and under-invested assets and the best way to avoid such an intense period of large capital expenditures in the future is with a robust asset management system. So that was really one of the key points that they made in their report is that we need this asset management system and the computerized asset management system, CMMS, EAM that's the industry standard and the way to go from here. There are many tangible benefits that they laid out that we will get from having this new system which include having improved effectiveness in capital improvement planning by doing the right thing to the right asset at the right time, extending asset life through using a new asset management system which is done through having more optimal preventative maintenance done on assets, lower borrowing costs, improved staff morale, increased performance and reduced maintenance costs by going from reactive maintenance to having proactive maintenance work plans, energy savings because assets will be running at higher efficiency and using less power and just by having higher quality data you end up making better decisions over time by having actual data to back up what you're doing. So the main takeaway from their report was that was this that we could be saving you know up to 20% in our annual capital requirements once the system gets up and running which there is you know initial startup cost but pretty quickly you can start seeing savings from those reasons that I just listed out. So just a little disgust if I want to say quick thing is that our capital budget annually is between 20 and 30 million dollars so you can do the math on the savings. That's great and I'd say Gustav just keep rolling through it. I think we'll have this presentation online for folks to look at in more detail but I'd say hit the wave tops given the hour. Okay so yeah we we put on RFP to to get the CMMS this fall. We got 19 responses and we ended up interviewing four of the vendors. We also did our due diligence and called up different municipalities and utilities that were using these using these softwares to see how they were liking them and if there were any red flags that came up. And after the four demonstrations that we received we had several meetings with staff from many divisions in DPW BPRW and the airport and we narrowed it down to data transfer solutions which goes by DTS as our preferred vendor. We have also kept BED and the school district up to date on our activities in case they would be interested in joining us in this asset management adventure. So DTS's CMMS is called ViewWorks and it can handle pretty much all municipal assets from horizontal things like pipelines that are easily shown in a map to facility equipment which would be stored as a vertical asset which would be in a more of like a file structure folder and you would be able to look at it that way. It also stores work orders and service requests and those get tied directly to assets so you can easily look up the history of assets or even asset components if it was you know a tank that was component of boiler you could have that be a child asset and you could look at total cost of that or you could roll it up to the greater cost of the full asset. We can also do inspections in the system and one reason that we in particular we liked ViewWorks over the other systems that we looked at was that there were robust risk assessment tools and capital planning scenario capabilities. So the next few slides you're going to see just some screenshots of ViewWorks just so you can get an idea of what it looks like but basically it's very map based and you can turn on which assets you want to look at at a given time or look at work orders and service requests so that's what all the circles are there with the WNM and another benefit of it is that you can look at it through desktop through an internet browser or you can use a mobile device which is going to be key for field staff inputting information. Another benefit of using ViewWorks would be collaboration and awareness across departments. You could see which assets are where in the field and you can easily set up work orders that would trigger other departments to come and work on maybe a separate task within a work order that you already have going so say if water department was or water division was doing some work but they messed up some pavement they could easily tag the street crew that there needs to be a patch put in so the easy use for field staff is obviously a very high priority and one of our top requirements this is a view on an iPad you can look once again at the map view and you can easily pull up a priority of or work orders in order of priority that are assigned to you if you are on the field crew and you can also utilize your device's capability of speech to text and basically we just want to make it as easy as possible for field staff to be putting in information because we know if you know you're writing it down or just waiting until the end of the day to put it in some of that information is going to be lost and or forgotten and then our system will get out of date and not have the real-time data that we really want out of it so by making it easy for the field staff will will be successful one major thing that we'll be doing with the new CMMS is trying to change from reactive maintenance where we just you know hear about problems and then go after them and switching to proactive maintenance so ViewWorks is a does a great job of giving you options of how to set up proactive maintenance you can you know you could set up a monthly check on an asset that you need to do and it would you know automatically make a work order for you to go look at it or you could set it off of run hours or flow rates from SCADA there's just a lot of different ways you can do it and you can even set exclusions for seasons that you wouldn't be using things like if a cooling tower is not operational in the winter you wouldn't be doing your normal monthly checks that you would during its operating season so asset life cycle costs there's a few different components listed there these are all pretty easy to put in when you're looking at a work order and and closing it out you can tag members of the team as you can see in the the middle of the image there that we're working on a given project and you know set if they were working on a regular day or a holiday and that'll easily calculate the labor costs that went into working on that work order for that asset so part of the risk analysis is that you can use inspections and view works to track condition and then you can bring up charts like this where you would look at the actual condition versus the manufacturer's deterioration curve to see how the asset is doing and if it warrants more repairs to get it up to standards or not another thing that is very important and if you want to nerd out about it you can talk to Megan but looking at the likelihood of risk versus the consequence of risk for each asset something that we would we would like to be able to do in many instances and view works gives us a way to house these scores and look at them in relation to a map and actually see you know where are where are the pipes that are the highest highest risk and need to be replaced sooner rather than later so for the ease of reporting this is just a sample dashboard there are many different widgets that you can use in view works to to see real-time readouts and they're they're pretty handy you can just click on things like you could click on facility work orders and then it would take you to the map so you could see the facility work orders in real-time any attribute stored in view works is easy to query to make reports and hope you're onto improved cost tracking so they they also have reporting that's can help with future planning such as the sample you see here you can put in your specifications such as if you wanted to keep your assets running at 80% efficiency then it would give you the potential or the proposed cost to keep them at that level and as the longer we use the system the more actual data will have in it and then the more accurate it will become so basically we'll have not just some sort of standard industry number but we'll have the actual reality of how assets fare in Burlington based on our numbers so another thing that view works can do is integrate with other with other software and we we would like to use them for that with a variety of our existing software that we do not want to replace although we will replace some of it but seek like fix is one that we would like to keep and by doing this we keep the user experience the same for citizens who use it but the neat thing that it does is that view works can listen for issues to be reported on seek like fix and then it will automatically make work order that can then be handled through view works by our staff and then once we close it out it can automatically push that information back to seek like fix to send any comments that were part of the problem resolution and close out the service requests there so here's just a list of some of the other programs that we would like to integrate with view works and for example when someone has dig safe request it could come into view works and turn into a work order Granite XP is a way is a program that we use to inspect pipelines and that information and condition reports can come into view works so there's a lot of different ways that that we would like to use it with our existing software so moving on to KCI they have already helped the city with task zero one and two of their contract that was awarded last year and that dealt with project initiation for getting the CMMS the procurement and the selection but now as it calls for in their contract we need to do an amendment to define task three and that scope of work is centered around the implementation and oversight of the CMMS now that we have a selection one nice thing about this amendment is that their quote has come in under what they originally quoted us at so we're working well with them so far and we would like to continue that for the GIS hosting and management component we have been talking with innovation and technology and they do not believe that the current city owned servers will be able to last the five years that the DTS contract would last they're already nearing end of life and they would prefer to go with a third party hosting and management system which would take some of the strain off of INT who are a bit understaffed at the time and we're actually already looking into doing this before we got into the CMMS discussions and in 2019 they reached out to three different vendors to see the pricing of of getting our GIS hosted in the cloud which would be a more secure place to store our data and they identified rock technologies as their preferred vendor but we're still in the process of figuring out which vendor we would like to uh go with at this point there we go so a timeline from here we're going to go after we seek your support we're going to TOOC and then Board of Finance and City Council after that if all goes as planned we would like to start the viewer's implementation in mid-February and they have about a 12-month time frame from their kickoff to having all four of the ASIC groups which we defined live in the system so we've kind of broken it up by divisions and readiness of the different divisions and we would have hopefully some some good results to show and in September and have groups across DPW and parks up and running by March of next year so with that we'll go to questions okay thank you for the presentation back to commissioner discussion sir commissioner Archibald yeah hi sorry that was a lot of detail I get to admit it was a little bit tough to digest a lot of that so I appreciate the level of detail that is necessary to manage the city's assets because they are astronomical and we've known Martha through the years you know to be on top of that so I certainly trust that we have a good team in place to take care of that and I'm you seem to have a command of all of those systems and I'm I'm thankful for that so anyway thank you all right thank you commissioner Barre I agree with commissioner Archibald that was a a very thorough and I saw parts and pieces that just make so much sense on how to better manage the assets that we have so I I support this I think I think that the team that you we've got there is is going to do a great job of it thanks thank you commissioner Bose yeah just echoing the earlier comments very comprehensive I was wondering if you could talk just briefly a little bit more about you said that there it's both a a web based and an app so that staff would be able to update in real time is that is that sort of the the way that it would be rolled out yes yeah what you see in the in the web version is the basically the same that you would see in an app version and the idea would be again to be able to respond more quickly in in that fashion or just be able to map on as as sort of in real time be able to visualize the assets through a map form but to also put work orders in to the assets through the map but both both asset inventories and work orders could be handled in the map view from the app or from browser also we get a real time real time feedback right I mean that was kind of my my question around it is like what is the sort of the utility of that is it to to keep staff sort of is it more of a management of the kind of the system or what's the the sort of logic behind that I'd take a swing at that it's really transformational and what it gives our field staff to be able to do when they go out on site and they see that the catch basin is recessed six inches from the from the pavement surface and they can look back and see it was inspected three months ago and it was only two inches then clearly we have a failure that needs to be addressed they'll be able to see we've been at the site six times before there's a problem that doesn't need to be that's more substantial than a routine maintenance fix by providing information at real time and that our field staff can capture information instantly uploaded into our database photographing assessing inventorying our data in our assets then our engineers and our planners will actually have data to work from right now we have some assets that are captured in Excel spreadsheets it's just not how we efficiently manage hundreds of millions of dollars of assets in Vermont's largest city right I mean that makes perfect sense to me I guess you know the reason that I was asking these questions is that I I completely agree with you I think it's fantastic it's a it's a great way of also being able to troubleshoot and sort of reconstruct when there are problems the challenge sometimes I find is in the actual input of data I mean you you obviously have to have a pretty robust training system so that everybody's on the same page any I'm just getting into the weeds here this is very interesting I don't really have any any real questions about it I'm very supportive thank you I think it's why why we didn't do this before right we were kind of anxious and eager to do it but we really had to have the team in place and the staff in place on both the general fund and the water side because Gustaf and our water resources asset manager Rocky in those early months is going to be having to look at the data when he knows something has occurred he needs to look at it make sure the data got inputted correctly and provide that feedback cycle instead of us just training people once and then not checking back in on them for multiple years and realizing we haven't we've been missing data collection opportunities so we now have the right team to be able to implement this amazing transformational piece thank you great thank you Commissioner Gilman yeah I mean my comments obviously you can't manage millions of dollars of assets without data to do that so obviously very supportive of that I would just encourage you to treat the training and sort of mandatory use of the new platform as like that's not a choice kind of a approach it's not a choice right I understand and I can tell you're all excited so I'm not super worried about that but you know having gone through this before anytime you change how someone goes about doing their work you will find pockets of resistance that don't seem to make any sense to you as people who want the data to make good decisions with so just make sure you really put time into connecting with everyone in multiple different ways because you can't you know obviously capture all the benefits of this if it's not being used globally so that's anyway I'll get off my soapbox that's I do this for a living and have implemented many systems you know for like purposes and you know it's all about it's all about making sure you're connecting with the team members and helping them see what's in it for them as well as what's in it for everyone else so don't underestimate the you know need to communicate and drive that change yeah if I may respond to that that was one of the things that we really focused on when we called up other municipalities that were using the software and you know one of the biggest hurdles is getting all your staff members on board and so that's something that we've been been focusing on having people from every division be a part of every step of the process to get by and now so that we can later have success and people that are supportive in each in each part of the city awesome thanks that's it for me thank you Vice Chair O'Neill yeah I'm going to say the training thing I actually wrote the question down twice in two different formats like the training and the investment of the time and effort to bring everyone up to speed I think is is so important it seems like you folks are dialed into that and this looks this looks great there were a lot of initials in there that I was reading and trying to figure out what the heck they mean but I think it's such a seems like such a better way to manage what we have one thing that would be great maybe for the for the two because I don't need the specific numbers right now but I would love to see like you know kind of quantifiable state savings in staff time and improve schedules you know how are you going to track the the successes that you're having with this with this new system Martha you mentioned about a 20% savings just over the capital cost which is phenomenal I mean like I don't know I don't know what the actual cost of this but if we look at the ROI on on this just based on those savings that seems that seems impressive so you know maybe kind of the the back of your head thinking about what are the efficiencies you're seeing over time but really this looks great so that's one of the things we really wanted to track and have the KPIs on is that that's one way we're going to show that we're being successful is how how can we show the efficiencies that were created in labor and that what what would save savings that we got from going from being a reactive city to a proactive city and I've done it in other places before and it's just amazing as it occurs and it's a huge savings just in in morale as well as in actual time and dollars it makes a huge difference right and then how how you guys have talked about the the binders and the excel sheets you know kind of keeping in mind that all that data transfer to a digital platform needs to be part of that equation I know you know that but I thought of believe me we've all worked in these places where you're like uh who's going to start doing the data entry um um but anyway good luck thanks for this presentation the new commissioner engagement we're going to give each of you a excel spreadsheet and uh have you surprise perfect all right uh commissioner over bait yes I um had communicated earlier about some of my questions which has very been been very helpful Martha and um but I wrote down a couple of other things and I do really want to also somewhat support the discussion we've had about the field workers the people that are doing the job this really has to be clearly beneficial to them because there's so often so often a system is implemented for the purpose of managers to figure out how things are going and and you know meeting their KPIs and meeting their their goals and in fact the poor working person is not getting any value out of it and it's making their life difficult so what I heard from director Spencer was wonderful before I even asked the question I'm I'm that's that's really going to be what's going to help the the raw data it won't get in there unless the value to the person putting it in is right there and it's not like it has to be you know in itself useful to them and it sounds like that's truly a um I also have been involved in numerous software deployment things many of them unsuccessful for the lack of the buy-in and so I've some of my questions directly before the meeting were related to that and um you know so I I the one other couple quick little questions I had would be how long has the view works you know software itself been in use does anybody remember how that was have they been around for 10 years 20 years three years I want to say 1995 but I'm I'm could be off Gustav I thought it was I thought it was 2007 but I don't remember the exact year but it has been at least 10 years and we did talk to at least one municipality that have been using in that entire time yeah that that's great because it gets more mature over time based on the experiences of everybody else which is a good thing the what's the name of a couple of the communities that are already using it that you talked with that we might know we talked to South Portland in Maine we talked to Anne Arundel County in Maryland Springfield Water Sewer you see how Springfield Water and Sewer in Massachusetts when in New Hampshire Dover Dover yeah Dover, New Hampshire and did you talk to the any of the communities from the other three sort of top picks yes yeah I spoke with the at least three for each of them but we were we were not only looking at references that were provided by the vendor but also trying to find municipalities that use the software but we're not referenced so that we could maybe get a a clear look at a less biased opinion of the software and and you'll and and it sounds like I mean I totally support the concept it really is going to make a big difference to the to the whole city I absolutely thank you it's great and I do it sounds like you've done a lot of good work to figure it out and unfortunately what might happen worst case is that yeah you find out in five years it hasn't been too great however you will be so much more sophisticated shoppers if you do have to find something different so you anytime you jump in you you know you could make a mistake and you know but you're going to be very sophisticated shoppers or we're going to be very happy with this and it's just going to continue to be great the one other sort of thing that I was curious about is and this is always a challenge now that we're going into the world of everything being online I take it this is a software as a service product meaning it's online exclusively there's no you know you just you sign up for whatever monthly fees or annual fees and the whole system is on you know in a cloud environment am I correct yes okay so and then relating to that the question is how is disaster recovery and continuity of operations so obviously we know things can be a little bit sketchy with people on the internet and network problems so are there have you discussed with the company the way that you would have to function offline and usually what happens is you figure out what are your critical elements that can't be done you know they have to be done like within a half hour or have to be done within two hours or have to be done you know within a day and you have a way to make sure those are already planned in advance how you do it is there any discussion that you've had with these companies about how they have planned for that and that they are able to provide you with some guidance and support and you're comfortable with the continuity of operations options that you have so Gustav I don't know if you can speak a little to that we have done some conversation but it's been more with our innovations department who is struggling with things kept in servers and our redundancy and our management of our own outdated infrastructure that we have within innovations we did speak some with I believe the others but Gustav can you speak to DTS yeah there's kind of two aspects of this and I could have explained this better earlier but the all of the horizontal assets will be stored in our own GIS servers and because we would like to have better disaster recovery plan and services related to that that's why INT recommended that we host our data in the cloud through a third party but with DTS we we did have requirements that we made sure that they checked off with how their data is stored and that would be the the vertical assets that aren't spatially tied that they would be handling but they they've met all of our requirements in regards to that and you know the the response time that they are guaranteeing in the contract and the downtime percentages were within what we were looking for that's great and I just I just wanted it may be premature to actually be trying to plan it in detail but it's really an important thing to fantasize about what if you can't use their software regardless of what their contract says and what are we going to do and which things would that be a problem and which ones find we can wait a week you know that's really an important experiment a mental experiment so that's where I'm getting at what you know that's a discussion that you know I'm not saying this company's worse or better I'm just thinking that that's an important factor to think about in the process of this process so I think that's the questions that I had and I'm I'm very supportive I think it's going to be great I think it's going to be challenging to get it going but I would focus like we all have said focus on making sure that the value is delivered to the field work people and then it will it will then filter up to the management to be able to actually know how we're how we're best spending our money how things are going and keeping everything working as well as we can with the money we have so thank you very much I know a lot of work has gone into this I think Martha you've been working on this for a while and and Director Spencer I mean what is this four years five years I know I've heard about it for many years and it feels like we're getting close so I'm excited to hear more about it thank you thank you all right thank you um on my question is there a legacy work order system that's going to be discontinued after we get get switched over here they're multiple let's go multiple so in in water we have two separate ones for we have keep track on the wastewater side and we have manager plus pro both of which are pretty clunky and as a result probably not everything that should be in a work order system is in a work order system so those will both be the data will be brought over and then those will be abandoned got it thanks try not to know Megan then goes with the facility dude which is used by dpw and bprw right now question on the like pipe failures Megan I know we've talked about like you you have that history of pipe and breakage where and when presumably that data gets transferred over into this new system as well yeah I mean that data lives already in our gis with sort of our work around asset management system this is going to make it that much easier for our field staff instead of having to click on a little tiny pipe it's going to be much more accessible as far as the forms that they're filling out and being able to take pictures and so on and so forth but all of that information would be ported over with our existing gis so is that part of this transition process that like somebody somehow on some date needs to be the zapping data zapping that data over to the new system well that's part of their contract to the degree that we can export things in a way that it can be sucked into their system with unique identifiers we're obviously going to try to automate as much of that but I'm sure there's going to be a fair amount of either rebuilding things you know in the system particularly if the system that it's coming from is not perfect right but all of that is part and parcel we're buying the software we're also buying data migration implementation planning all of that out of thank you for that and is there in the conversation of other systems that we're looking to integrate with this view works one that was mentioned to come out was the the RTA fleet management could you clarify what is what's needed are different out of a separate fleet management system than this sort of general asset management to what we're talking about the fleet management the RTA is a very specific software program for fleet and each of our vehicles are in it they've been using it for over a decade and it does have a work order system in it and it tracks all the assets doesn't do a good job of helping us with the depreciation and understanding when we need to replace so it would integrate in to help us understand the assets and do the capital planning on it and the work order system within it will pull out so that it can let us know when maybe a vehicle even though it's not old enough it's having too many repairs and we need to replace it versus another that might be older but is not causing the repairs yet and it will also help us on our our labor end understanding how much labor we need to take care of the vehicles but it's very specific versus our CMMS it does a lot more we did want to replace it and it did not end up being worth wild to do so okay so if I've got you right it sounds like there's enough vehicle specific management stuff to to keep that around absolutely yeah okay you're leveraging to answer the best parts of each of these tools here yes all right that's all my questions thank you so much this is uh it's exciting stuff thank you with that bring it to public comments we have any anyone from the public still around here there's nobody still with us on the public side Rob we're having a hard time hearing you can you hear me now yes yes okay there is nobody signed up or with us from the public side right now gotcha thank you okay and it's sad that the public is not like beaten down the doors to talk about asset management but I guess so though though we're thinking this later all right with that next Director Spencer we are listed here is is seeking a vote is there a sort of optional thing or might you suggest some language I apologize I think one of the things we need to do a better job is provide a sample motion language we've been a little inconsistent as as of late we are going to the city council on board of finance on on February 8th so if your commission was so inclined a resolution that stated to recommend the city council approve the execution of contracts with DTS KCI and rock those are the three we talked about tonight to implement the city's cross departmental asset management program that would be welcome and and the loan amendments to pay for it and the state revolving fund loan amendments yes thank you I'll make that motion give that motion commissioner overby I'll second it seconded by commissioner bar thank you is there any discussion around that motion all right let's go to a vote then commissioner archambault aye mr. bar aye mr. Bose aye mr. Gilman aye vice chair o'neill aye commissioner overby aye aye for myself that motion passes unanimously thank you so much for the presentation all the work here thank you very much really appreciate it thank you for all your support yeah thank you thanks all right moving forward item eight on our agenda is the approval of draft minutes from our December meeting were there any changes submitted prior to this that we might not be aware of commissioner overby the suggested change I have I have a change that I propose would you like me to read it please okay under the um the item when we were discussing the Shelburne Street roundabout project I wanted to add a bullet that was in the within the questions and comments included and this is what I was going to include commissioner overby expressed concern that the proposed 25 mile per hour approach speed to the roundabout was too fast for the safety of pedestrian crossings at the roundabout she recommended the approach speed be 15 miles per hour DPW staff stated that Burlington is prohibited by state law from setting city traffic speeds to less than 25 miles an hour commissioner overby said she would ask her state reps what steps were necessary at the state level to enable Burlington to set a 15 mile per hour speed limit for the approach to a roundabout that was what I would like to add to the minutes if that's your memory of what I said at the time as well I make a motion to approve the minutes with said edits from commissioner overby second motion by commissioner bar seconded by commissioner Bose thank you is there any discussion around that motion all rights let's go to vote on it commissioner archer about hi thank you commissioner bar aye commissioner Bose aye commissioner Gilman aye vice chair o'neill aye commissioner overby aye and I for myself the minutes with the proposed amendment have passed unanimously thank you item nine directors report all right thank you I'll be exceedingly quick I really wanted to hit one main item which was the waterfront rail and bike path coordination that was first in my director's report after many years of very long negotiations with many parties on the waterfront we are very close to a large step forward for a multi-million dollar investment in sustainable transportation on the waterfront this coming season and to achieve all that we've had to bring to the council we're hoping this coming Monday night a series of legal agreements easements licenses amendments to other agreements to help us get the property rights in place and the finance and maintenance agreements with these assets to have the bike path move to the west side of the tracks between king and college and to bring passenger rail to Berlin this has been a Herculean effort and I just want to thank staff who's on this call and many other departments if commission's interested it should be going to council on Monday night and construction would start this construction season with passenger rail service starting as early as this this late late this year so very exciting just big step forward and happy to talk more to anybody who's interested great thank you for that back to item 10 commissioner communications let's see commissioner overbie should I just start I don't have any specific communication for tonight all right vice chair o'neill mine is just so tiny it was from the holidays walking downtown I got to say I love the Wanooski Avenue configuration crossing to get to the UPS store and to city market was really fantastic and I even drove down there once to city markets like I haven't driven downtown in pages so and I actually remember that I had my car so I didn't leave it but it is it's really refreshing to be moving I haven't ridden my bike down there yet but to be moving walking and driving on a Wanooski app so great job to dbw staff on that thanks thank you commissioner archambow I have nothing this time around thank you all right you commissioner bar thanks I just have a couple of quick items one it was voiced at the recent ward 1a meeting that there's some fast cars going down at east avenue again so I shared that I would bring that up again and one of the requests was that that was said to me on the side was could we get that speed reader back that that shows how fast cars are going so that that was one thing that I promised that I would bring up I also want to just as usual give kudos to snow removal and how fantastic it is and how they've been doing such a great job especially now that they're decentralized it seems like it's getting done faster new north end and and all sorts of different places so kudos for that and the last item last month I shared the old east and winter lude which was supposed to be a winter fest kind of thing where we using COVID restrictions we're trying to invite people to get outside do some activities but in conference with department of parks and rec and and the state quite frankly we thought that that might attract too many people to have hot brevedges and I was all psyched to do sugar hunt snow and I got everything ready and we will probably ease off on that so what just to let everybody know who might be listening into this we still will have activities but it will be a do it yourself there's going to be a scavenger hunt there's going to be a nature walk we're dressing up the barn we've got some lighting going around so it's just going to be a nice place there's a great hill to slide on so we're going to be doing as much as we can over the next couple of months to really improve it so people get out and enjoy enjoy the great outdoors so that was it for me fantastic thank you commissioner bows nothing really for me other than to say that I'm very excited to see the the plans that director Spencer just mentioned thanks indeed thank you commissioner Gilman nothing nothing for me all right yeah I guess I'm I'm I'm impressed with the the breadth of the agenda here who we've heard from most take the notches on a lot of our departments or sub sub divisions within the department tonight it's good stuff I will you know on the on the narrow streets thing appreciate the update tonight I think it would be worth on the on the communication side if we could sort of publish in a transparent way you know where things stand with that I you know as this issue was sort of popping up in my neighborhood that's people mentioned in public comments this evening I was looking back at you know I guess this fall 2018 when we we had in our packet that the table to serve this the sorted list of all the sort of candidate streets for this program in the table was formatting was a little little rugged on it and column not totally lined up with their headers and so forth but if we had I think there's opportunity to clean that up and post that online so sort of as these inquiries come up we could say like yep it's you know it's on your list generally you know the last time we checked the parking occupancy was 26 percent so it's not the top of the list but there's a chance to improve there and the other thing I would add I think I don't know if we do this but maybe we can check with with Lee and his team which is sort of making have a staff they're not already doing this make a note when they get back of the if there are streets where there is issues like you know I wasn't able to get the recycling on Charlotte Street on January 4th say sort of make a note of when that stuff comes up but people sort of time in and oh yeah my street didn't get plowed like twice last year or this kind of thing that it'd be great you know certainly I guess we can crowdsource those reports on C-click fix but as if we'd be collecting that stuff on the staff side it would help also sort of build the case for changes the next time around or help us prioritize issues that are creeping up and you know as I'm saying this a lot of thinking oh yeah we don't we have we certainly have the C-click fix stuff we could search back you know when the time is right to be evaluating future streets that is all I have for this evening with that I'll close out commissioner communications and go to item 11 adjournment and next meeting date February 17 motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second the motion seconded by vice chair O'Neill thank you for that to vote all those in favor say aye aye aye aye and I'll let you have that any opposed all right thank you all we are adjourned at 9-11 see you on February 17th thanks all thanks everybody great see you