 So we have the two presiding officers or I am acting tonight in the project, as well as Michelle Boyer and counselors Tim Barrett, Matt Coda, and I think, and... And Kate Bailey and Chelsea for our school. Thank you. Okay, all together. Very good. Good to see you. Kate and Chelsea, thank you. Well, welcome. First thing we need to do is, of course, pledge allegiance to the flag. We do this for a reason. And it starts with us here at the local level. So we have a flag here on our deputy city managers. And please, Andrew, will you be... Sure. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, like that, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. And now our city manager, since we are here in City Hall, she will give a construction on how to exit the building in case of an emergency, as well as give us a review of the technology options for those who are attending online. Thank you. So welcome to 180 Market Street. We'll have you all here. So we are on the third floor. So if there is an emergency, go out this door or the doors behind us and then find your way to the stairs either in front or in the back. There is a space of refuge at this back staircase down this hallway here. For those who are participating remotely, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having your cameras on. If you would like to talk, please feel free to unmute yourself and write a comment. Or if you are interested, you can also indicate such in the chat and we will, and the chair will call on you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Jesse. So now we are to items three, which is the agenda review. Are there any additional solutions or changes in order of agenda items? And this course can come from any school board director or city councilor or if our superintendent or city manager. Okay, very good. We will full bore head. Comments and questions from the public not related to the agenda is item number four. We do have some members of the public here. Are there any questions or comments that anyone wishes to make? All right, very good. You're all here for the main event. So, which is number five, we're gonna have a discussion on the school impact fee report from Jonathan Blason. He's here, Jonathan. He's so cute. Very good, good to see you. Very good. And we also, of course, have our superintendent of schools we have a young here. I think we're gonna perhaps take a moment at the end of the meeting. Perhaps that's more appropriate, but I just wanted to say it's a real delight for me to see one person since I missed your official going away party. I needed to be up in Essex for daughter's ballet class and hard to clone myself and be in two places at once. So I'm really delighted you're here. And it's a real honor to be sitting at the table with you tonight. All right, Jonathan, please, if you will lead us as well as David, you might hand out. Yeah, so let me just, I'll kick this off. So Jonathan Slason from RSG is with us. And the purpose of this agenda item is to give some reflection and feedback and kind of current findings that Jonathan has done on this impact fee assessment or study. And I think this was important, at least to my school board, the school board to be able to discern where we are and to inform the city and seek any questions that the city may have as we move forward. Again, overall perspective from the district is that we have been seeing significant increases in growth. We have two schools that are significantly overpopulated currently, Rick Markott and Orchard. And as you know, many years ago, we had impact fees and we made a decision to turn them off or take that away. And so this particular discussion is whether or not we bring those back or not to help offset current growth related to enrollment, right? To help our schools be able to in a fractional way to help defer some of those enrollment costs that are result of those additional students. So without further ado, happy to have Jonathan kind of walk you through and one of the, I think a lot of time for school board members and city council and public to ask questions to Jonathan, really, around the efficacy and expectation and purpose of impact fees. So welcome, Jonathan. Yeah, sorry to be remote. I was under the impression to be remote tonight. So hopefully it will work out all right. I, we have the presentation that we've previously had and we've tabled the PDF of the draft report. And I think, frankly, it'd be more effective. We're gonna just verbally walk through what has happened to provide the history as well as where we must go. I believe that the last time I presented was last week at the school meeting and we went through the process. I think there was a lot of questions, particularly around the magnitude. And I absolutely think that we will spend most of our time today. So backing up to what David just discussed is that we're in a situation where the city had impact fees for schools for many years and they sunset them. And now we're finding ourselves in a situation where we require additional capacity to meet the needs of enrollment today, as well as to meet the needs of future enrollment anticipated by the growth and development within the city of South Burlington. Impact fees, first off, are only a partial solution. We realize that bonding, property taxes, grants, these will... I'm gonna ask the majority of any future funds for capital needs of the district. Jonathan, can you hear? Yeah, I think what would be easier because this is the second time that your voice is broken up. Could you possibly call us on the phone and we could have a cleaner audio? Tell them to turn off this video instead. Okay, I do like that. Yeah. Well, I mean... You can try to turn off the video to see if your voice comes through more clearly, but there's also the option to call in and have your video while you're actually using your speaker, you know, your speaker phone. Do you have a preference? Yeah, okay. I was serious. I was getting a little jumpy audio from you as well. I will call in and we'll go from there because I was not the screen share unless we did too. So I'll be right back. Thank you very much, Jonathan. I think it will just be a smoother presentation. Very good. Well, I'm glad to see Helen that you're here. Yeah, sorry, I was a little way, I was having some technical issues as always. Yeah. We've become a part of the new normal. Yeah. Thank you to all of our legislators for being here. That's very important for us to have this as well. Any news on the black bear of South Burlington? Has he moved on? I haven't seen any announcements of late on the public or Facebook page. My son captured video of it. It's pretty good, yeah, he tracked it. It's pretty good for the next car. Was it recent? No, hopefully we could have. Hopefully he's been moved on. Yeah, yeah. Where was he? He's in Cider Mill where I live right off of Dorset Street. Big black bear, it was pretty neat. Yeah, a big one, yeah. We were up in the Green Mountains over the past 10 or so days and I caught Uncle from early morning walk because I do here. And I saw a black bear who quickly, the birth of my dad used to throw them, thundered off, he thundered off and man, that was my heart for a couple of heartbeats. But yeah, they're magnificent though. More than just a couple of heartbeats. Yeah, yes, that was the last early morning walk I took in the Green Mountains. That's gonna be back with us soon. Very good. And you can hear- Thank you, apologies. I can, can you hear me? Yes, beautiful. All right, I am so sorry. Well, where were we? We were introducing concept of impact fees generally and wanna just set expectations and that as I mentioned, impact fees are only a supplemental source and they also provide us a fair amount of latitude. There's a lot of legal requirements as to what they can legally fund. But we're in a situation where as a complementary and supplemental funding source, there's a political reality that impact fees can adjust to and the impact fees that were articulated in the draft report for your review, represent a legal maximum. And I feel comfortable walking through that process with you if we want to go through the methodology to get to that maximum. But the process generally is that this study provides us the nexus and the legal rationale to relate anticipated land use development and growth to the additional capacity and capital infrastructure needs that has been identified. I'll pause there and simply reflect that the capital expenditures that has been articulated in this plan is one that I'm sure David can provide additional context but Dorwittier has been working for years with the school district and most recently concluded an investigation in the elementary schools after they spent other years working on the middle and high school investigation. And at this point in time, they identified up to 125,000 square feet of space that would be required to meet not only existing needs, there's a 52,000 square foot deficiency across the district, but 73,000 of square feet of new capacity to meet the needs to accommodate future enrollment. So the whole 125,000 square feet in addition to the existing 446,000 of square feet that exists, that's really what we're looking to fund at a total cost of $325 million of capital costs and $335, excuse me, at an average cost of $587 per square foot. We know that these costs have been inflated just over the last year and we don't know exactly where they'll go over the future few years, but this gives us a sense of the magnitude that we're facing and the impact fees are looking to basically address 20% of that total cost based on the amount of new capacity that would be available for future enrollment relative to today. David, do you wanna talk a little bit more about the capital costs and the history and the genesis of those or do we wanna go into the calculation of the impact fee and the kind of the unit cost at a household basis? Yeah, I think Jonathan, it's probably most efficient with time wise to go right on the questions. I don't think there's anybody in the room who isn't aware of some of our capital work in the past as well as our elementary deeper dive and study and enrollment forecasting that we've done over the last 10, 15 years. So just wanna be sensitive to people's time and the opportunity to ask questions. Yeah, well, thank you. And I think then obviously the school board, we had a meeting one-on-one last week and then the city council, I appreciate your time and your review of this document. And I'm happy to answer any questions and walk through any of the document itself. I have a question. Yes, please, go ahead. So Jonathan, you mentioned that we used to do impact fees and then we put them, we stopped doing them when enrollment went down. I'm wondering what those impact fees used to be compared to the impact fees we're talking about now in terms of the actual monetary amount. The school board, I feel like that's the question. I don't know if anyone has that answer. I was trying to find it on Google previously when we kicked off this study and I thought it was somewhere between maybe two to seven K per household unit. I honestly forget what the magnitude was and it wasn't obvious because I forget what the last year of collection, it wasn't clear to me when the bylaw was sunset. Well, do you have that? I do give me one minute. Thanks, Paul. So for those on Zoom, Paul Connor, our planning and zoning director for the city has also joined us up there in that. I'm just going to take me a minute to find this. So can I ask a question while Paul searches? Yes, as long as it's not me. And if we could just, if we could say our name so that Jonathan know who he's addressing. Matt Kota, Subway City Council. Traditionally impact fees are paid by the developer when they pull their permit. Is that correct? Or is it paid by the individual homeowners when they take residence in the developer? It would be typically paid for at that time of permit approval. Some communities do it at CO, certificate of occupancy, but most communities do it when the land use permit is applied for for a building permit. And the impact fees would typically be designed to also be proportional that if a homeowner were to add a bedroom to an existing unit, then that also at the time of that building permit, there could be a fee imposed. And of course we have impact fees for commercial and industrial properties related to traffic, but the impact fees would just be homes or rental properties. Is that correct? For schools? Yes, it would just be on the residential aspect for the school impact fees. Most other impact fees are attributed to all types of development, whether it's residential or non-residential. Thank you for that clarification. I have a follow-on question. I didn't hear the responses of the developer or the homeowner. So this is Michelle Boyer's question. Sorry, I'm in the back. Yeah, the clarification is that whoever applies for the building permit would be paying the impact fee. And that can happen when there's multiple lot development happening, or it would be at a point where a individual building were to maybe go under some expansion. So in other words, it could be both. So if I owned a quarter acre and I wanted to build my own, I would be the payer of the impact fee, but if a large developer came in and wanted to build 50 units and then sell the properties themselves rather than sell the lots, they would be paying the fee. That's right. Typically for new construction in South Burlington, it would be a developer who then goes to sell the building to a homeowner. Obviously the cost then goes on to whoever's buying the house. Occasionally, but rarely in South Burlington, somebody just owns a lot and builds their own house on it as a individual. And then as Matt was saying, if somebody were to do an expansion to a house and that was something that was applicable under the ordinance, then that would be on whoever's doing the expansion to their house. But either, as Michelle Boyer again, either way, it's the homeowner that pays. Well, ultimately all costs associated with the construction or expansion of the house is going to the person who lives in the house. So whether it's somebody pays for it and then that fee gets passed along or it's then directly, ultimately it's the owner or renter that is all costs associated with the build. Thank you. I think that's a really important clarification. I have a question. Yes, please Tim, Barrett, City Councilor. When we retire impact fees for anybody else knows what was the money that used for to have to be something specific, right? That was the capital project, right? Previously for the school one? Yeah. I'm gonna have to look that up. It was back in 2009. My recollection was that the projects that were listed and the school population, the projects that were listed were complete and the school population wasn't growing. And if the projects are complete then there's no reason to be collecting an impact fee unless you've done new projects. And at the time, there was not a proposal saying and here's our next capital project that would continue to fee. I don't recall the exact projects that have been under there. Yeah. Orchard, Rick Markov and Chamberlain had what we call project loans that were added in 1998, I believe. And that was because of significant growth impact at that time. So those project loans were added at that time to give some additional space and kind of in the congregate way. But again, the schools were smaller then too. So that was the portion of that was used from the impactee. Megan? Yes, please, Helen. Do you have any sort of question? So the legal requirement is that the school projects have to be under construction or being constructed during the time you're collecting the fees. You're not allowed to do any kind of proactive planning in the sense that our population grows at X amount and this number of homes seem to get built each year and the impact of schools at some point is going to be greater. Is that right? What has to happen is that the identified project has to be on a capital investment program, but you're able to use those funds in the pre-planning and the project design phases of any of that. And that also allows some flexibility as to what the final look and feel of that capital investment looks like. In many instances, the final product is not exactly what was originally envisioned and what the impact fee was for. You have to legally fund the amount of capacity that you were looking for, but there's some flexibility as to, you don't have to be 100% certain at day one because you can play, you can pay for the pre-design and the project planning. So a school could decide to really plan ahead and have a capital planning document that's 10 years out about anticipated needs and plan it that way or not. I mean, does that be the first? Yeah, what would have to happen? Paul will have to remind me, sometimes the CIP has a five plus year category and that way it's put onto the CIP, but yet it's not within the first four years of a kind of guaranteed funding window. And you can then start collecting fees immediately and pay for the project development as it becomes more clear and evolves. And the project could be put in that five plus window for multiple years as long as the impact fees are continuing to go toward that particular investment. Now we would all be in trouble that if no school were eventually to be built. So it has to go toward that eventual funding. So there is some flexibility in terms of the collection and the expenditure to that, but it has to be listed. There has to be a political stated commitment that there is X amount of dollars of new capacity being added to the system. And if a renovation provided added capacity, does that qualify? So I'm thinking of science labs, maybe the way they were originally designed don't allow 40 kids to work on the lab at the same time, but if you upgraded and improve them, you might be able to, you could meet capacity. Yeah, there's very specific, from my experience of the past where the impact fee dollars could and could not go, right? There's very clearly delineated guidelines on what it can and what it can't do. And it all has to be predicated specifically on enrollment based consequences or need. And so I'm not saying that Helen's example isn't exact, but it really needs to go back to what enrollment is doing and not allowing for students to be able to be served. And it's the state law, slavery? I like it. Well, I think it's embedded in ordinance related language that is kind of the legal language of the impact fee process, but I'm not, that's outside my local, the language piece, I'm not sure. I just know that impact fees, you know, and Jonathan can speak to that on a more broad front around, I know you collect impact fees for other things in the city and they have to be related to and collected on new developments and things like that. So it's not dissimilar, right? But similar to how you can't use money you're collecting for other areas to apply to different areas, right? An impact fee for traffic mediation, you can't spend it on it, exactly. Paul Conner, our director of planning and funding. Yeah, so a couple of things. Answer to prior questions in a second, but yes, David is correct that the state law, and correct me if I'm misstating this a little bit, Jonathan, but basically it can be used for increased capacity. How you measure increased capacity is there's some flexibility in what that is done, but ultimately it is only for capacity that does not exist today. If you're trying to bring our current residents up to a new level of service, that's not what impact fees. Right? Yeah, it comes down to service standards is the terminology and that's where for the school system, we're using the Massachusetts based standards, which gives us very clear guidance that suggests that we're under, we have a deficiency today and there's this expectation. I think to Helen's point, well taken, that you can do some of the internal configurations and create an effect more effective capacity, but we do need to hang our hat on those more legal standards of what defines that service standard. So answer number two, yes, John, our CIP is a 10 year CIP. So if that's eligible, that's we're typically looking 10 years out in our capital improvement plan. I would note that what you've reminded me in other projects is to be mindful, not only of the commitment to build the project, but if impact fees are only a piece of the financial puzzle by collecting the impact fees, you're essentially committing that the rest of those funds will also be found. And so if it's 10% of a project and collecting it to do it, then somewhere the remaining 90% will need to be obtained in order to, because the impact fee are only getting whatever percentage of it, so. And accounted for? Planned for, I guess, well, you tell me, I mean, ultimately, if they're gonna be spent, John, is that correct? I think if I'm hearing the nuance of the question is that we need it on the CIP, we need to have accounting to say where the dollar's going. But to Paul's point, once we put it on the CIP and as soon as we collect the first dollar attributed to that project, there is a legal expectation that the project will be delivered. And if the project is not delivered, then we have a liability of returning those fees. Is it as complex as the TIF district or are we speaking more if it's not done then? If there's a fifth that I can plead on the TIF. Well. Luckily, I don't think it's as complex as the TIF, but you know, there's all part of the picture. That for us to be granted something with Pepsi, we have to show how our numbers will actually add up to what is needed to get our projects done, right? There has to be just not a wish list, but actually forecast numbers based in actual fact, right? Actual development fact. Is that something that we need to account for that with that in fact, the district is collecting the matching funds in order to use the 10% on a CIP project? And I see my city manager, sorry, Jesse Baker has perhaps something to say. So I guess how I would answer that, the curious Jonathan's response as well is that there is not the same level of audit process that's involved with the TIF to justify that revenue, those revenue plans and revenue collection. I think the liability and what the council would need to consider of implementing such an ordinance is developers could come, if it wasn't implemented per the school CIP, developers would have a case back against the school and probably by extension of the city or the city and probably by extension of the school for collecting those fees without costs. So it's more of a legal liability whereas TIF it's more of a regulatory liability. It does, and it's good for your distinction to be reaching our ears as well, that the city is in fact held liable if the project does not go forward, right? The other thing, sorry, John. Now, here we go. That's interesting to me is that, we're talking about impact fees. I recently, over the last couple of years, I received back 250 requests permits based on enrollment capacities that said school for this development. And currently my answers are going to be no, I don't have capacity at Rick Markot or the High School. So that in and of itself act 250 permit by the school district when asked, do you have capacity? I say no, right? And we typically haven't had that a lot, but as more and more developments happen, I think that's impact or that is connected to impact fees as well, right? So again, the district at current needs to say, no to high school, no to torture and no to Rick Markot because we don't have capacity. I don't know what that does in connection to the city comprehensive plan and projects that are planned or in the queue. But I think that's an important piece that's also connected to this conversation and impact fee on how we can continue to, you know, evolve. Yeah. The last question that was asked was, what was the fee back in 2009? Back at that time, it was for single family homes, a little over $2,800. And for multifamily, it's about $1,600 per unit. Per unit, yes. And that was... That's the average because it changes based on bedroom size? No, that was strictly single family and multifamily. That was the way it was established. Done by just the unit, not by bedrooms or anything like that at that time. And the eligible projects I'd have to dig deeper, there were improvements at various schools. Thank you. Jonathan, you're at Madcoda City Council. You're recommending by bedroom, or is that just a suggestion? I don't know if that's a formal recommendation. Yeah, it's an attempt. I think the single family, multifamily approach that you just heard was an attempt also to recognize that different households generate different units of students. In an attempt to be more equitable and represent the fair share contribution or impact, it's very clear from the data that studio units or even one bedroom units really don't generate a lot of students at this point in time. And so if we were to put a fee on those units that maybe perceived as unfair or too high for their level of burden on the system, the idea is that then that could be an equity impact and we would be jeopardizing the affordability of some of our units. Now the flip side of that is that three bedroom units, I live in a three bedroom house, I have two children, three bedroom units have more students typically living in them, and so the burden is higher. So if we do it on a per bedroom basis, you can see that distribution and three bedroom plus units arguably are gonna pay more if we do it in that manner. So we have a difficult conversation to say, is it a topic of fairness and equity or is this something that do we wanna average it out and try to find a value that works and treat everybody the same? So it's a political conversation, but it tries to reflect the data that larger units typically have more students living in them. Thank you. Yes, thank you. So I guess the question I have is for the school board and superintendent, how will the matching funds be collected? Because correct me if I'm wrong, but the answers to my questions indicate that we are in fact, Vepsi, right? And we are hearing from you asking for a district with some tax capacity and we need to make sure that the numbers are there so that our liability is we're doing our due diligence here, our fiduciary duty that we are liable and we wanna make sure that we can meet that expectation. What are your plans for collecting matching funds? So this is actually my question as well, Michelle Boyer School Board, being new on the scene, it's a fundamental question. How are we going to meet by my computation 260K, sorry, M, 260 million after the impact fees, which represent 20%? I'm interested to hear the proposals on the table for that. Yeah, I'm not really sure, the computation amount, because I think that's in part of the conversation on what the desire would be for collection. You've had a little bit of conversation just now about how that would happen. Clearly, I think people are well aware of the current conditions of schools at present. Obviously impact fees would have to go towards enrollment related expenses, but as we move forward, it's pretty clear that we have some pretty significant expenses in the very near forecast, not just in our community, but pretty much statewide. So I would see those funds going towards the mitigation of those current issues that are in play, whether it's PCBs or lead, and the legislature has been working hard to create some funding sources, but at 4.2 million dollars, it's probably not going to be anywhere near enough for schools like Burlington High School, which was one school out of 400 schools, the only school that actually tried to do something became identified as a problem in full stop. So the amount of money that, for instance, Burlington has had to spend, and again, this is specific to impact, but it is correlated to impact because you do have growth along with needs, right? And that would be how I would see it play out is the long-term master plan as you revitalize schools and make space for increased growth. I loop back to Act 250 with developments coming on, city plans, there's got to be a conversation around, do you have the space and capacity to deal with that? And as I said earlier, right now I'm saying we don't. So I wouldn't want to get too far down the road when you start saying this development is planned to come on, but then it's going to get stopped up or early stopped up and say, we don't have capacity. So there's got to be an in-depth conversation around impacting growth, long-term need, future development, school wants and needs. So I feel like certainly whatever is figured or however this moves forward, there needs to be a logical collection of impact fees that can be sustained in the long-term. Do you envision the way that that discussion could be had is that a visioning process with the full school board and city council, public meeting of course, or a workshop of sorts, clearly these things cannot be fleshed out in the two hours that we have a lot of this meeting. No, I don't think that's the, I think what we recognize is that we're currently in a situation and as you know, the city and the school over the last 15 years has been back and forth with, we had enrollment situation, elementary, there was then a push to go. We got to deal with the high school because that's more in need. That pushed the capital need, master planning and visioning. I would envision some cooling of those documents with a committee going forward to determine what we're going to need. We have already done a lot of due diligence around the high school, particularly in the middle school. And that's what moved us forward with a capital campaign for the high school and the middle school. I would see that you would revitalize that exact plan, updated figures, updated ideas if need be, and move forward with that. And I think that's a pretty quick way to then ascertain how impact fees fractionally would go towards helping that initiative long-term. So again, the collection of the matching funds is the question that we have to be addressed. Yeah, they have a period of time that they have to be spent. In the past, when I first came on 17, 18 years ago, we had impact fees and it was very clear how you could use those to offset some components that were specific to growth, right? I would see the same thing happening in the future. You have the opportunity to apply these funds to help augment bonds indebtedness or what have you on a going forward basis. And a question I would have for Jonathan, I bit your hand if I could just follow up with question for Jonathan. As you and Paul said this as well, it cannot have to do with just raising the standards of the learning space, but rather the capacity of the learning space. And for those of us who have pretty in-depth knowledge of the plans for that middle school, high school complex, it was meeting both. It was meeting both capacity and raising the standards. How would the funding rules with the distinguish between the two, would it only cover the impact fees that would be allowed to be used for certain aspects of that new complex that David is suggesting would be the plan moving forward? In simple terms, it would just play, it would pay its proportional share. You're not gonna separate the funds to say this is only for this physical room. So it's not to that degree of separation. It's simply to know that there is a capital investment and we've calculated how much of that capital investment is attributed to new growth or new students. And simply it is paying, the fee is designed so that it's paying that proportional amount. So you don't have to do any other management or design of it. That is what's part of the deficiency category if you were to go down to the later part of the report and discuss how the fees are paying for the additional square footage and there's a slight reduction to accommodate the existing deficiency. So we're not paying to remedy the problem today. I'm not sure I understand your answer. So because I'll just kind of lay it out and you can kind of break it down for me, right? Because it involves demolition after the construction of a new complex but the proposal was, and please school board members correct me if my memory is incorrect. And it would also involve having a running track, having a performing arts center in addition to I think just nice amenities like a staircase for lunches and things that are very attractive. And it could potentially be argued that just having a flat floor versus a staircase would be the same cost. And all of that would just be covered as a share between the impact fee and then the community match. What community match? Yeah. Oh, am I misunderstood? Well, I don't know. I keep hearing the word match. I didn't see the match in here. Well, it's the payment. It's the 90% of the cost. Yeah. The bonding. Well, wherever it comes from. I mean, but the impact fee just goes towards it has to have a project defined that the money could go towards support engineering, planning and design and then for construction for the purpose of somehow, you know. Would it cover demolition? Well, I don't remember. Yes. All specific to enrollment related need. So it's a fraction. If enrollment has gone up, you know, 10% then only a portion of the money that's being deployed can go towards that project. All other costs to that project have to be buried by, you know, statewide, you know, state, hopefully state funding percentage and local taxpayers. Really, that's it, right, bonding. So it's only the fraction that's related to enrollment that can really happen here. Thank you. That clarifies it for me. Mac and then Tom. Paul, thank you. Paul, how many new units go online or get permits pulled and self-growing to annually on average? About 140 a year is our average home. That includes, you know, single families or, you know, 40 homes in a multi-family building. So it's dwelling units. It's about 140. I think Jonathan, you actually pulled that, right? That's in the report calculation. Okay. So we're talking, we're gonna have a million dollars at their 25,000. Yes, but a bank truck for those would be small. Our trend for the last several years is that a number of those are studio one-bedroom units. So, you know, those would be in the proposal and in the outline that John had put together. They're not all at the high feet. Would the impact fees apply to the profit housing buildings? John, I'm gonna let you take that question. Can you repeat that question? Would an impact fee be levied on a apartment complex that was, let's say, built by summit properties or Cathedral Square or Shandline Housing Trust? The city can decide and it's been common that the city has exempted or I believe the appropriate terms waived the impact fee for units that would be meeting certain affordable criteria. Or used our housing costs for permanent affordability. Now, the other half of that, John, is those students that might come from a building like that, they're still gonna exist. And so the burden of paying to build the full school gets then shifted to some other source if you're exempting a portion of the need. Okay, can we move on to Tom Chittenden's question? City Councilor. So along the same lines, and I guess this question might bother you, Jonathan Slason, I understand that we used to do it based on a duplex or a single unit and then we got a better idea that we could possibly consider based on bad bedrooms. I'm wondering, I didn't see this in your report, but tell me if I just didn't look closely enough as I scan through the 33 pages. Have we ever considered a square footage so to be even more progressive? So as to look at how much square footage in either bedrooms or in house and that way those with the larger homes maybe even make it a proportional ratio to the land usage of that residence so as to impact the higher end homes more so than also adjusting for the affordable homes. But impacting less the homes with three smaller bedrooms and so on? Yeah, I think that could be the next evolution of it. To be honest, the data just wasn't as readily available based on square footage relative to bedrooms. The census data helps us better understand and feel really comfortable with the bedroom count units by unit, but I believe that if we, we could probably investigate the per square foot unit but absolutely, that's kind of the most progressive approach on more or less the best equitable approach. Yes, Grace. So I wanted to sort of step back and make sure I heard Superintendent Young's framing of this, I think what we're doing is what this community did 70 years ago, what other communities are doing all the time is that we are thinking we might need a new school. And if we don't start planning and committing to either a new school or a massive upgrade to an existing school then when Act 250 applications come for the school district, they're gonna say we don't have the capacity. So that's where we are. So I would say in my eight years on this council and I know this has been 10 years, we've been talking about school infrastructure this whole time. So I think this body, the city council and the school board, we've been talking about this for eight years and the different notions that have come up, it was one that Vegas school in the Southeast quadrant, nobody liked. And there was the other idea of another school district. I grew up in South Burlington and as I look at South Burlington, I see three elementary schools where this Shelvern Road and Wilson Road are but where all the growth has been is down in the Southeast quadrant. So as I read this report, it seemed to make sense the most palatable or most feasible thing that I don't know if the community has really put forward to for a voter for consideration is a fourth elementary school. And then the other thing where the real constraints are on the high school is an expanded wing. Now that the South Burlington library is out of the high school, I'm wondering if that's where this conversation needs to go to next to create that project that would then give this impact to be something tangible or if we just need to accept that we're not gonna do these buildings and then start slowing growth. Is that the framing and good question that's before us here, Superintendent Young? I think the first part of the framing was correct. I think the second part has been a lot of work around looking at feasibility, community-based schooling, upgrades to the high school, middle school. There's been a deep, deep dive on the high school and the middle school. And so renovations really on the high school are really not cost-effective at all given the significant conditions of that building. So that being said, you're absolutely right that you've got growth incurring and you've got continued loading on these schools and you do need to put some resources we do as a city and to ensuring that they can continue to run and be effective. And you're right, under Act 250, anything that comes on, again, I'm not the Act 250 board, but I think the school district and community and we're gonna have to start to say loudly, we don't have capacity. And that's, I think, an important component to the evolution of our schools. I just wanna do one more kind of framing in that conversation and David, you and Helen and Dr. Charles and I talked about this little saying on an Act 250 municipal questionnaire that we don't have capacity is a policy decision, right? And it has impacts on the future vision of our community. So what are the implications of that happening? It means if developers wanna develop here, which they likely will continue, they will develop projects that don't have to go through Act 250 because that question is currently not asked in any other place. So I think at some point, also the two bodies need to have a conversation about that policy question. If that's gonna be the answer from the school district, are there other, so impact fees as a tool, are there other tools we could employ to get to a yes on that question? If this community wants to continue to be a smart growth community where people can live and work in a pedestrian bike oriented way. So I think that is also a question we need to answer in addition to just, in addition to infrastructure. Good to differentiate. I mean, not everything that comes through is Act 250, you're absolutely right. So much of our growth can happen in just transitional housing. But I do think that when larger developments that are coming on that are required to go through Act 250, which seems to be happening a little bit more lately in South Burlington, which is positive news people wanna build here. It does trigger the Act 250. And so we do have this, I don't have capacity, right? On the questionnaire. And then on the other side, we're doing what we can, where we don't have to accept our students into the system. So what happens when you answer no to those questions? No, it really doesn't have, it doesn't have a lot of weight under my understanding with the Act 250 board. That doesn't mean it can't, but I mean, I think it's pretty important. I don't think you'd wanna be saying, no, we don't have capacity for fire, rescue water or sewer. That may stop it, but when we say no on education, it doesn't, I think it is important from my perspective and would plead with the Act 250 board to say, they probably ought to be paying attention to that in communities that are seeing significant growth, right? Because again, I think it's obviously unbiased. So I think it's a pretty important service. Paul, I think you wanna respond to this. And then I saw Dr. Travia Child's turn on her camera. And if you wanna ask a question, I'll let Paul respond and then see your turn. Paul Conner, Planning and Zoning Director. Councilor Barrett, that's a really important question as to what Act 250 would do with it. Act 250 is a regulatory body. They're reviewing applications and ultimately they're approving with conditions or denying, just like a local DRB. And so they're not a policy-making board. They are responsible for making a decision on something that's in front of them. As I understand it, the direction that is given to the district commissions is that that criterion is a, can be used to potentially attach conditions to a project, but in and of itself, that's not one of the criterion that a project can just be flat out denied on. So what Act 250 is looking for is what from any party that is expressing a concern, including the school board in this case, the school district, what are you asking of Act 250 to do about it? And ideally that would contain, we have this capital plan and here would be a fee associated with it, just like if VTRANS has a planned upgrade of an intersection to out of traffic light, they can say, you're creating four trips, you pay $1,800 towards that fee. It's a, as I understand it, relatively new area for them to be looking at because not surprisingly, many schools in Vermont are not facing the same challenges we have. They have all sorts of challenges, but growth is not necessarily a statewide challenge. So it's not a fully, it's an area where we're all learning together, I guess is what power the best described it. Okay, so she just turned on her camera, she doesn't have a question. Okay, any other questions? Hey, please, yes, Michelle Boyer, Michelle Boyer, school board. I do want to understand a little bit better. We talk about predicted enrollment as a given. And so I'm curious to hear a little bit more about the modeling that gets us to, I think in the report, something like 150 new students by 2032. Please do correct me if I'm misremembering that. It was a couple of weeks ago that read that. But the short question is just, can you talk a bit about how we got to that number? Does it, and does it utilize the full resource of historical data? In other words, as homes, as permits have been made and as homes have been built and we've tracked enrollment in the schools, what does that relationship look like? In the world of modeling, that's pretty much the gold standard. The best predictions you're gonna get are based on historical data. And then perhaps accounting for the differences in certain conditions. We just had a pandemic. How does that relate to it? Do we have more families? Does that pattern, is it expected to look different? So in other words, would that 150 possibly if we use historical data look bare, would it look smaller? I'm looking for a sense of certainty in the actual prediction of the moment. Is the problem a question? The only thing I'm at a good questions. The only thing I can say is, we employed a demographer we've had now for whatever 15 years. And at least from 2014 to now, demographers have, the demographer has been pretty spot on on predicting growth over the course, including telling us that we would at this point be at a problem state. So it certainly has confirmed, as far as predictions, I'm not, this is not, I'm not in that to be able to look back at the city and to be able to say, what was dissimilar in the city 20 years ago to now? So it's historical projections. You've done some things in the city to bring in more affordable housing, right? So trying to match up historic to now, I think it's hard to forget would be my guess. We'd have to look at every action of the city and to see what that did, right? Including some of the newer infrastructure here on Market Street, right? It's created some excitement, which may have had significant impact on new enrollment, which we know it did, right? On Market Street here with the students. And I think that you kind of need to keep after that on an ongoing basis to look at for every action, what reaction do you have with enrollment, you know? Well, just to respond to that too, what the superintendent said, we have up the city side and in partnership with David been talking about exactly how we build our systems moving forward so we can look at that real time modeling and how we do some combined demography and look back at our last 10 years of permits by address and provide that data to the schools enrollment folks. So they can overlay the school, the student address list to that. So that is where certainly we are interested in, I think both some of you are very interested in making that happen, but it doesn't currently exist in our data structures. Kyle? All right, John. I'm happy to, yeah, I, we, for the purposes of the impact fee, right? There were no forecasts made. We're using the agreed set of forecast that the demographer has come up with, which forecast something around just under 2,800 students by year 2032. And based on those forecasts, that's where the capital needs started to arrive from. So these are the two kind of fixed inputs from the impact fee process. But I will say that based on the changing mixture of households, this is a conversation that Paul Connor and I, we've had from earlier meetings in this process is that there's a profound shift in the types of households, the number of bedrooms. And if we expect that the students per bedroom unit behaves like we, like we're seeing, we're seeing that the average number of increase of students is somewhere between 18 to 23 on the average around 22 students per year. And that actually directly aligns with the McKibben demographic forecasts. So I would say from two different angles, I have a degree of confidence that we're in the ballpark, we're seeing growth happen using that 140 household units per year as a long-term trend, clearly interest rates and things might affect the next few years, but maybe it'll be bumping up after that. So that's why that historical long-term trend is pretty powerful to have that, have that visibility for that duration. So maybe that gives you just some additional context. Councilor Chitlin. I'll pick up Tom Chitlin, City Councilor. Pick up on that thread. And also when I heard school director, Boyer, the person who stated, all models are wrong, but some are useful. So I definitely love that quote, and that's what I think I heard you say there too. And just from a layman's perspective and somebody that knows this community, and we all know that the Southeast Quadrant is a lot different today than it was 20 years ago. What I also heard from Superintendent Young and from City Manager, as well as Paul Conner that even if we say no in that Act 254, there's ways to avoid Act 250 and those houses will still come online. So I just think quite obviously with the growth of the South Burlington scene is we need another school, and they'll say it, I'm following off the city council, so I think it's gonna be before all of you over the next couple of years, but I just think quite intuitively and obviously as you look at where the schools are in South Burlington, we need another elementary school, but that's my personal opinion, not having a vote tonight. And as soon as that is committed to, I think we can move forward with these impact fees. And then as for the high school, which is also in dire need either of a complete renovation that too is something we've already dressed, took it up one, three years ago. And I think that's the next step too. So the next step, that was what I was hoping to get to is, David had suggested that there would be a subcommittee working on this. Is that something that you have discussed in your meetings with Helen Really and Trigga Childs? No, so I think, I mean, what we've talked about Dr. Childs, Chair Really, myself and Jesse is the importance of a shared demographer one. And then as we've already said earlier, teasing out what was permitted and expected based on the numbers of children that these units would bring and then being able to take that exact location and for us to populate it with the number of students that are actually there to be able to compare that data. So that's kind of our work currently in play. We think that will, again, to Jonathan's point, will further validate the need. I think that what's before you right now is to discern whether or not impact fees are entertained. The board, the school board, certainly wants to have your input on how that's to move forward. Do we move forward or not? I think they're wanting your feedback. We did have it, as Jonathan said on one of our earlier meetings, but there were questions and they wanted, I think speaking for the board a bit, they wanted to make sure there's some comfort and understanding about impact fees and what that means, what it does, what it doesn't do. And I think everyone's sensitive to taxation or over taxation and wanting to not tax people out of coming here. So I think that was kind of a concern, but certainly the reason for impact fees is directly correlated to enrollments, right? Similar to what you have currently in play and I'm not sure all of the current impact fees that people pay when they come to this and they build in South Burlington now, right? They have fire and water and police and those types of things, right? They currently have those that are currently impact fees that are on. So I'm turning to my city manager and deputy. Will the voters have a say in whether or not we have an impact fee instated or is that truly our council decision? Ordinance that we go through public hearings on and okay, that we have as a council. Okay, good to know. And timing is another question I have. Well, I think, you know, we've been at the conversation with impact fees for quite a while. You know, I've had it on with Jonathan now for a good bit of time. There's been a couple of years of us wanting to discuss and hopefully reenact impact fees. So I think it's timing is important to begin the process, to begin the collection. I do see that as you move forward as a city, we as a city, you've got to have multiple resources that are going to come in to help offset growth. I think that you're going to do a large capital campaign on property taxes alone is problematic. And so I think every little bit will count to help offset those costs. So you don't have such high tax related matters. So I think the timing is important, but I think you want to do your due diligence as you're doing here tonight to make sure that you're in agreement and understanding and you have expressed your concerns and cautions as the board has, and then it goes back to the council if the board's going to move it that way, because the board really just needs to say, yes, we want you to explore the impact fees. Council takes it, council then moves that to coordinates processes and move forward from there. As the board said that, yeah. The board has not, the board really felt like, I can, I don't want to speak for the board, but they felt like this was an important step to do some sharing and listening with you. And I think they'll need to make a determination whether they let it sunset or whether they want to say, yeah, we'd like to have that move forward to the city council. So Dr. Childs has indicated two things. Yes, please, Dr. Childs. I don't understand why, I mean, because everything's going to fall back on the board of directors, as it always does with getting it approved. So I'm just trying, is there an answer? How about we had a scenario? Okay, we can't allow any more people to move to South Burlington. Can that happen? I don't think so. No. So what can we do? Well, what I was going to ask my next question, Trivia, was we have a city council retreat on July 11th. Is that something that would be included in our discussion? So the first question and the second question was more for the school board and thus for you, Dr. Childs, is this something that you would like to have included in your budget discussions for next March town meeting when you come forward, perhaps with a capital improvement plan? Yes. The timing is an important question for us to, if we're working under a March 2023 town meeting kind of deadline, I think we need to talk about it on July 11th and potentially come to something late summer so that the acting superintendent, the interim superintendent and the school board can really start running those numbers, right? So if I'm understanding your question, so the council can put whatever you would like on the policies and strategies on July 11th at our retreat. If you're asking about, so the voters wouldn't have to vote on the impact fees, but the voters would have to vote on the match or the bond. And that's really something that, speaking solely, it's your staff now and not as David's partner. That's something that the school really primarily owns. The city council traditionally has not, other than being partners, has not been involved in the decision making around what's bonded. There's gonna make one more point. So, and again, as your staff person, not David's partner, I think that I would really encourage the council to receive a specific recommendation from the school board and respond to that politically, rather than trying to understand as a city council what the impact fee level should be, what the match percentage should be, what the capital projects are gonna be, because that's really something that you all don't have visibility into. You don't know the details of what the needs are within the school district. I think, I mean, it's a great report and we can read it, but I think that really is what the policy that rests with the school board and the recommendation from the school board to the council, in my opinion, should be as detailed as possible. And then you would react and do the ordinance process. And I think we'd have to go on a deep dive at the city council. Oh, sure, absolutely. I would just be that big at deep dive. But if the board comes to us with a plan that they approve where they wanna collect impact fees for a specific project, then it's up to us to decide whether we wanna have an impact fee and then determine the formula and then implement it as fast as possible to harvest all the permits that are gonna come from Cider Mill to Spear Meadows and O'Brien Hill side farm and wherever else evolves in the next year or so. Well, I'm not talking a month of a deep dive. I'm talking about several layers of picking about. For the deep dive, it's something to take a look at this report and understand whether we agree whether the formula is equitable in our perspective, right? And then modify it as we desire, that's all. I mean, that could be one or two nights, but it's not. I mean, there's already a proposal there. So we just move forward with that and decide what we wanna do. That's exactly right. Is there an opportunity to maybe add two points quickly if you don't mind? Yeah, sorry. I think to compliment both the two comments from that were just made, the impact fees need to reflect all other funding sources. And so the magnitude that you're seeing in this draft report, you need to be very sensitive that it, A, does not include any financing costs. It also, to David's point, it's unlikely to be only complimented with a debt instrument. We probably expect some grants or other funding. And impact fees, the last in that line of funding. And so the magnitude will be a result of after those other funding sources are generally better understood and defined. And so you need, A, the capital cost estimate, and then you need a better estimate of the debt financing and then whether there's any other grant funding. And then the impact fees will scale appropriately. And to the last comment there, at that point, there'll be the legal maximum and then the political reality can come in and say, how do we wanna fit this to meet South Burlington? Yeah, because I go back to the middle school, high school complex. That was asking people to sign up for a major change over two decades at least, was it three decades? Yes, and that's gonna take some thinking on our part as we have our own capital improvement plan. That's gonna take some thinking on our part as we're thinking, you know. So I think that two evenings is a little ambitious, but maybe I'm wrong. No, Megan, it's not that you're deciding on what that plan will be. What you're reacting to is the impact fees and that you've got growth that's happening. And the suggestion is that you have the ability to collect impact fees to help offset in whatever fractional amount you want to move forward to help offset those growth. And again, I don't, I mean, I don't, the correlation is what do you do if you put in a significant developments on for water? Your water treatment folks need to come to you and say, we need, so they're gonna come up with that plan or sewer, right? Or fire or rescue, they're gonna come up with that. Very much different magnitude here, but the same thing is in play here where then the school board and school community are going to need to figure how we're going to continue to evolve and make space for the added increased enrollment, right? So, I think, you know, and right for you wanting to get deep into the conversation around what that will look like, but what we're trying to indicate through impact fee is that there is growth. Does it substantiate that in the report? And does the report have appropriate metrics where you then can take that and move it forward, perhaps, to help offset that growth? Well, I tend to think that as we, excuse me, as we signed on, thank you. Thank you, Kate. I'll let you speak before I respond. Please, Kate Bailey, school board director. Thanks, Megan, sorry for that. My question to the city council in the recommendation from the school board is whether you are looking for a recommendation of impact fees as a concept and what we want those impact fees to fund or if you're looking for a specific recommendation and endorsement of a formula because tonight I'm hearing Jonathan Slason's report outlines one formula, which is a fee by bedroom. I appreciate council Chivin's suggestion of by square footage. I think that's really interesting and I'm learning for the first time tonight about the previous impact fee based on single family versus multi-unit. And that feels like three very different models and different decisions that could be a part of the school board recommendation or it could be fully in the city council seat. And I would like clarity if the city council would like a recommendation about impact fees globally or specific to a formula. I think we just want the fact that you would like to see some impact fees period and you have a project to receive those funds. That's all we have to hear. Then we can take the report and determine the formula from the report. Great, thanks. I just wanna state then what I was gonna state prior which is that if we are receiving a 210 million now changed for inflation and change in cost of material project and saying, okay, we're gonna just make sure that there are impact fees so that we can move forward with this project. We are marrying ourselves to that project as a board. And I think that it's kind of some kind of, I'm sorry. It's something that we really need to consider because it is a political decision. It is a decision about whether or not we are getting behind a $210 million project. In fact, that is the project that they submit to us. Please, Matt. I wanted to raise up that comment and the comment we made earlier about the timing that you did. Obviously, we know what's coming online. They haven't pulled the permits yet. If we do the impact fees now, the question I have and not for the lawyer in the room but for our lawyer, which is can the proposal from the school board to utilize the impact fees that the city council creates can that evolve based on what happens two years from now or a year from now in terms of the development? Can it be changed? Yeah, like an impact fee could be to mitigate the number of students committing with trailers. Now we don't want to see trailers, but that would be a mitigation expense that seems to me, I'm not a lawyer, be a viable way to spend those impact funds. That's not what we want to do. But if that other reality doesn't, speaking to your point about what's our fiduciary, what's our legal responsibility, if we collect all these impact fees, we don't spend them, we've got to pay them back. Yeah, we're liable. So can we in fact avoid what you said, which is marry ourselves to a project that we don't know if there's political support by providing a plan to spend the impact fees that are perhaps not there yet, but it can involve if there's the political acceptance of a much larger project. I don't know the answer to that, but I'd like to know. But I think that takes more than perhaps just a couple of nights figuring out what how we want to make an algorithm that works. Brian, unless this was a direct response to Brian, my near, I'm sorry, my near, excuse me. Yeah, no, no, no, it's fine. And I'm sorry, I'm having my own technical difficulties. I meant to be there in person, but my car is in for inspection. And I meant to show myself on camera, but I'm using my wife's computer. So various issues, but I think a couple of things. One is we seem to be framing this up as we did a couple of years ago. Sorry, I should say I was a school board member until March 1st, and I am now running for state rep. Don't know if I'll get elected or not. But I do have some knowledge from the last time we tried to do all this stuff. And I'm concerned that we're again, we're gonna go under where we need to be. And there are two reasons for that. One is our demographer, he's wonderful, but he misestimated and he underestimated the amount of kids that were gonna move into our district because it's a pandemic, because the rural parts of Vermont are emptying out. And so these housing units near central that weren't supposed to have kids come to school had a ton. And that effect may still be in play depending on how the pandemic plays out. The other one is there was a false framing of, let's do a $209.6 billion project, or let's do something really cheap. And the truth is if you just wanna fix the physical plants at the middle school and high school, and this is in 2018 or $19. So it's gonna be much higher now. That was 60 million bucks. The financing, that's 100 million bucks. And so we're not looking at something cheap. There is no cheap option. So there are gonna be more people coming. There are gonna be more students coming and there is no cheap option. And I can leave it there. I'm happy to answer anything. I'm happy to join later too. And I'm sorry for the difficulties. But I think that needs to be born in mind when you're considering how to go forward. Thank you, Brian. First Paul Conner and then Councillor Chitman. Just a note for you all to consider is as you're discussing the question of whether to have an impact fee and then the formula of it, the formula to me is a little bit on a technical end. I think a key question for you all would be what John Slason presented was what could be allowed? Anything between zero and that number is what you could select anywhere in there. And so how you want to evolve that discussion and whether that discussion starts with the school board as part of an overall funding formula and you get feedback about what the implications of a high number versus a low number are. I think that's, you know, as you consider your discussions and where that should take place of school board council and steering committee. I think that's a key one in there is, yeah. And just for clarity, the legal maximum was 25,000. Was that right as a straight average without applying a bedroom model or a square footage? Right, there is some fluidity to that, to estimating the mix of housing units by bedroom going forward to the future. But the legal maximum by the bedroom units was up to that 42,000 for the three bedroom. And at this point, the rough average of $25,000. So those are the legal maximums at this point in time. Which is 10 times what the last impact fee was. It is not inexpensive. And if I could just maybe comment to Councillor Coda's comment about you could use impact fees immediately to pay for the modular units they're going in because they have a duration of in excess of five years. And you could implement something today and then increase the fee in two years from now if there's more certainty for a larger expenditure. So it is flexible to that way. Yeah, the fluidity of the impact fee number. I mean, as we evolved, as I remember turning it off, we minimized the collection down because there was less and less growth. So between the city and the school, I remember that amount went down who's at some point then we turned it off, took it away. Same thing could happen here too. The school board could say, we'd like you to look at, implementing and working to the ordinance and starting out at this level and be able to revisit it regularly on a going forward basis based on what you're seeing and what's happening within the community. Thank you. Thank you. Councillor Chitner. We're over on time. My comment's not important, but that's really good closing point. Yeah, it is a good closing point. I just wanted to pass along a concern. I told the parents I'd do it tonight and she hasn't appeared. There is very real concern, especially in the communities of Orchard and Rigmarcott Central School about overcrowding. These are elementary schools that David has cited as reaching maximum capacity. In the interim, what do you see going forward for those communities? Yeah, so we are at maximum, we're actually over maximum somewhere 150, 160, over capacity at both Rigmarcott and Orchard and currently in play, again, the board move forward the placement of what we're calling zero energy modules. The financing has to be determined on how we're gonna do that. To your point, we're needing to do that now to help make way for capacity. And as of today, we're hearing that we're likely far exceeding what we even expected for next year, right? So the urgency, these ZEMs are planned and would like to be placed on the school property by somewhere in that November, mid-November timeframe if we could. Again, these are not trailers like you have wherever the school is over here. They're not the trailers. They're actual classrooms they get craned in. They're built at a warehouse and they come and they look very much like a classroom. And they're high energy efficient and can be good for as long as 100 years to give us some time to do the exact type of conversation that you're doing right now as a city and school, how do we want to evolve? And I will say, I've said it in the past and then we'll move on. I've been inside those ZEMs and they're like a classroom. They're truly like a classroom. And I want to say that I would have no issues having my daughter be in a ZEM. All right, thank you very much. That was an important first discussion. I know, was it Tim, were you on the subcommittee talking about the impact? Yeah, I missed the last meeting though. So I want to thank you too for being on that committee. So we're on item number six, hold a legislative session, wrap up discussion with the current Health Wellington State Delegation. And we have Representative Nita Townsend, Representative John Clarke, Representative Anne Pugh are here and did I miss anybody? I don't see. Okay, we have three. And Senator. And Senator Titt, I'm sorry. Over here. Yeah. The second half. All right. And I don't have specifically a person in charge of this discussion. So I see here that we have a legislative summary that hopefully people all have had a chance to look at. Is it the question answer period or did the three of you come prepared to state a few things that you thought were important updates? So I think it's question answer period. And so the way you interpret the looks of the audience. All right. Yes. Jeff. David, did you want to say any introductory things that this was kind of? Yeah, no. Yeah. So we typically again are for so, I mean, we've been so fortunate not that you guys are that have really good legislative folks. And we've had a lot of opportunity to weigh in and be part of. So I think it's a great opportunity to say thank you. First of all, and I know I've been called many times and had the opportunity to testify many times throughout my time. That being said, I think this is a really, really important time to do the kind of conversations. Typically when you get in the session, then it's very difficult to help bring about the change or the information that you need. So I think it's really an important time to have kind of a legislative wrap up and conversation for the future to talk about what are the things that are most pressing and most need in need to be paying attention to. And so I think I just feel like it's always, it never seems to be enough time in exactly the right time. But I feel like this is really a kind of, you've had a bit of pause now, you've come out, you've been able to take a bit of a breath. We've seen now some of the things that are now going to be put into place through the outcomes of the session. What does that look like? What impacts will they have? And what might be the things on the future that we wanna be paying attention to? And I have a few things just from the school side of things around some of the worries and thoughts that I have on a going forward basis. But I think it's important to hear from you folks, if you will, around what you'd like us to be doing, or what you would like us to be paying attention to as you are fresh out of session. Can I just add having part of the reason for this in the steering committee was a growth, outgrowth of our conversation, Jesse, myself, Dr. Childs, and our superintendent about what would be helpful. And I think it needs to be a two-way conversation, which is why I invited or thought it was important that candidates come to listen. This isn't a forum for you, but I think it's our opportunity in a timely way to say these are the things that perhaps haven't been addressed that you may not be aware of, but are really important. I mean, I think it is important to acknowledge what advances have been made and how that impacts us. But I think there's also some really important parts of the educational funding and processing conversation that our representatives need to hear from the school board and potentially the city council. We have issues too. It's not just all about education. So that I think is adding to David's kind of crafting of this dialogue. So I hope that's helpful. Not to put Senator Chitnamis up, you were on the education committee and you're just out of your first term here and that's not quite, you got through summer, early January, but do you have insights having now served on the inside after seeing it from our perspective on what we could be doing better, what Emily and Ryan and you could? Certainly. So I get to claim new guys status for I think another month, but I would definitely want to yield to you, Mata Townsend, John Colackey and Anne Hugh to also chime in on their many years of service and to recognize that. As for the education committee, we did spend a lot of time and I did write this up on my Facebook page so you can speak to it there, but we did spend a lot of time on the new pupil waiting. Happy to hear David Young's thoughts too, his outgoing thoughts on how that's going to affect South Burlington. I have not yet seen the updated or recalibrated numbers as to how that will impact it, but based on the 2020 numbers, it does look like South Burlington. We'll see because of the new waiting an increase in our tax rates or a decrease in our taxing capacity, not as extreme as some other communities. One thing that I think is important to keep in mind and I don't know how much we've all paid attention to it. Again, love to hear David Young's perspective, but the universal meals, the one year that we're gonna use some of the excess funding from the revenue that we, the property tax revenue that we had over and above what we had expected the $90 million we extended for one year universal meals post pandemic. So that will give all school districts an idea of to have a clear understanding what that costs. So that after this year, it'll be a question before this school district absent action by the legislature to continue the mandate of universal meals. It would might be up to individual communities to choose whether or not they wanna ask their voters to pay for a universally available free meals. I personally, as one legislature had real concerns and reservations about that, I ultimately did vote for it. But I'm worried that we are funding universal meals for families that already have the means to pay for and to pay into a system to provide for food. So should it go forward and should the legislature I will push harder. And I did this time for revenue streams to fund that. But one thing that I think that we could have done was online sports betting. That wouldn't cost, wouldn't encourage it. It would actually just allow Vermont to tap into a revenue stream that I would say people are already with the Vermont lottery tax feeds into our school fund or Ed fund. I think that's an extension of that that online sports betting could be a revenue stream for that. Candy tax, I will abide this. Since you asked for insights and you put me on the spot, counselor Amberie, I have a phrase that I use a lot with tax what you don't like and subsidize what you do. I don't think we need more sugary sweets and more candy to be easily accessible. And there's economic incentives to tax those products and to fund schools for it. So I personally am one to support a sweet and sugar candy tax. So those are some initial thoughts. I really like the links that were passed around in our booklets. I could use the whole 30 minutes if you want me to keep talking about these things. I hope that was insightful enough for you putting me on the spot here. But I'm happy to be deeper if you have some more pointed questions. But maybe I'd yield to some of our season legislators to comment on these topics. David, one part of this puzzle of course is Act 250. We thought we had crafted a way to make it more locally and reasonably specific and controlled but the governor vetoed that bill. Which act was that? What was it about? It was to take the Act 250 governance structure and make it more regional. And the governor vetoed it. So there's been no progress on Act 250 despite a lot of legislative time and input from people on it. So sadly, that's gonna be still a complex piece for what we're talking about tonight. And Ann, I see you as representative Pugh. And I was listening to a radio program about the importance of early child education as well as kind of the mindfulness and the emotional awareness that we need to teach our young children in order to prepare them for better learning. I don't know if in your committee, you were able to address any of those things. I know as the parent of a student at Chamberlain Elementary School, they have been on WCAX and really highlighted for their, I would just say excellence in terms of how they prepare students just for, in terms of their emotional awareness and their emotional social preparation in order to learn, right? In order to be open to learning. And I don't know if there are things that we as local officials here should know about your work. And thank you for your 30 years. God, that sounds like a long time. Sounds like a lot of work. That sounds like a lot of good work. And you were real actually was good work. Thanks. As it relates to early care and education or as we're thinking about it from an education frame, pre-K, there continues to be a trying to figure out how to meld and coordinate an education focus pre-K. With a child care focus. Not that their foci are different, but as we try to incentivize more providers and they want higher salaries and as we want to have universal pre-K be more than 10 hours a week and providers are looking to mirror the public schools schedule that does create some dilemmas for those families who need child care 300 days of the year, if not 340 days of the year. The legislature, so we're working on that. I mean, and so that is something that I think the school board may want to think about and provide some input. And that may be something if Senator Chittenden remains on education for him to have be able to share that voice with you. A lot of the things that we, so that be so and that comes down to how do we fund it? How do we fund ensuring that kids have a good start? And then we have, how do we make it affordable? I want to say this begins to sound like healthcare. It's a three-legged stool and to make it affordable, the legislature, I want to say, I think it was two sessions ago, put in place some funding as well as some way, put in place some strategies to make it, to both put more money into more resources into the hands of private providers as well as to make it more affordable to families. For instance, to have the copays be by family size rather than by individual, to have a family copay rather than individual trial copay. And none of that has been able to be been implemented all based on an issue with IT, which is something that being in the legislature for 30 years is not necessarily a strength of mind to understand, but it's a problem. And the IT systems and capacity in the Department of Children and Families predates me and probably predates if we added all of our ages together. And they can't even find people to fix that. So they're not even going to be able to come back with things in terms of cost until March. That said, I think that we have made some significant strides in ensuring during these last couple of years the best we could that children had safe places to go and got good quality early care and education, which was probably more than you were asking for. I apologize. No, this is not more. This is the most important thing. This is what the future of our society is based upon, and so never enough time. Yes, John. I think both purposes of Townsend and Senator Chittin they say, well, we did do a lot of housing and I think that's pertinent to what we're talking about today. And in the spring, there's about $45 million additional federal dollars went into housing for the state. And primarily it's to build affordable housing, but we also took out some of the zoning issues in Act 250, those to housing to encourage communities to do a deeper density and infill density so that has been moving forward and that was accepted. We also have money in there. I was doing our city manager that there's a million dollars to have one community work in an integrated way with housing and zoning and all the city partners working together. So she's in contact with Commissioner Josh Hanford about that. While it's mostly affordable housing, there is about $15 million put aside for what's called the missing middle, which actually could impact South Florida in a great deal where the developer would get their development costs subsidized. So if a house costs $350,000 to build, the developer would get about $50,000 towards that. So it would still be sold at $350, but it would only cost the buyer $300,000 to encourage sort of the upcoming middle class. So the young families, the first time home buyers to see if they can buy into this market. It's sort of a big experiment and it is with federal dollars. So we'll see if it works. We had to push to make sure there was a kind of permanent affordability to those kinds of houses as well so that your family got one and then you flip it two years later for the full price and it's like, well, wait a minute, yours was subsidized and was, because it's a different model for the state to invest is usually it's investment and permanent affordability or a shared equity model. So we did have to put a shared equity model into this as well, but it's a brand new experiment that's gonna be happening in the state to help us. John, is there an impact fee concept embedded in that for the education, for the schools? No, no. But that would impact all of us here that seems obvious that we have to do this with schools where we won't have schools. So anyway, the state sadly, as I understand, it stepped out of helping with construction costs and the state is hearing that from every community that there has to be a different model. And so I think that that's gonna be a big issue and one that needs to really be loudly said to the legislators and, I mean, Senator Chitnery knows this, that will be a big cause next year about what is this due? Because we're trying to have the costs in South Burlington, it's billions of dollars, that is real. If I could add in on this, first of all, so that I don't forget to say it, in the budget which has been enacted now, and we'll go into effect July one, there are substantial investments in the functions of state government as they relate to being able to support vulnerable for monitors, families, communities, children. Over a period of years, state government has in effect been starved in terms of support for the human factor, the workers, as well as things such as Rep Pew was referring to the IT components. We now have in place really substantial investments in rebuilding in terms of personnel who are there to provide services as needed, assuming we can find the people to hire the personnel there, as well as that the nuts and bolts necessary to deliver for any number of programs, including the early childhood piece, all that IT, just millions. And with a look forward, not only in just one year, and not only the implementation, but the maintenance thereof, a lot of thinking into. A piece that I would really ask you to contemplate is the degree to which there will be so many new people in both chambers. And you may, you folks have always been great about having conversations with us, reaching out, knowing full well it's not helpful if you wait till the last minute to share, because then it's like, what do you want us to do? We can't. But you may find that there are different thoughts on various issues. For instance, the sports betting, for years, that has not, it's the house, that has absolutely been death on that issue. I have no, he leaves, but there may be a different take on that. As just one example, moving forward, I'm not saying that I vote for it, because I wouldn't. It's a reality. There are going to be so many new people, and heaven only knows what their approach will be on any number of issues. With regard to the universal meals, it's important to keep in mind that there is work being done through joint fiscal between sessions, looking at potential sources of revenue. But it's also important to know that part of the thinking that went into, ultimately, at least on the house side, ultimately saying yes to the 29 million to come out of the Ed Fund, for that the, I hate to use the word surplus, but the amount of money that was available from the Ed Fund to be used for various supports of the schools. Part of the thinking was, well, you know, granted there are families that perhaps do not need the assistance to pay for the meals, but we don't divide by way of capacity that families may have as to who gets to ride a school bus or who does or doesn't pay extra to have their books. And, you know, the belief was, and this was really strong in appropriations in the house, that it's part of what school is all about. People can't learn if they don't have food, and we didn't want to get into. What's even interesting is that they were wearing the same t-shirts for the promotion day at Fifth Grade at Chamberlain Elementary. I think there's something to be said where we're all on the same, right? Just trying to bring forward two different ways of thinking as they have been, and who knows what the ways of thinking will be moving forward on any of these issues, while at the same time we already have in place some stronger than has been in the immediate past supports for communities and the families through the investments we've made in state government. Investing in state government is not a bad thing. It is a bad thing when people turn to their state government and we don't have the capacity to respond, we respond just inadequately. So we try to address that. My suggestion would be to repeat a meeting Jesse you did with us a year or two ago and sit down and say, hear the needs in the city and maybe have our new head of our schools as well there, and just the legislators and do it after the November election because there'll be four new house people, right? And probably some new senators as well. So it'd be really important to hear how we can serve the city, and what the needs are. I think that because you're gonna be needing to educate all of these citizen legislators. You certainly educated me when we got that meeting. But I was very clear about what you saw were the needs in South Burlington. And I think that's a good point, in South Burlington, and I think that was really helpful. And then we were able to, and our different committees in the cross chambers, we worked together on it. And it was before with Martin, LaLonde and Ampue and we were a team with Tom and we actually worked behind the scenes on things together all the time. But we also knew what was important. So I think that that is a really key, we'll have our new school leader, right? And maybe if the two of you would be willing to do that. Us no longer relevant legislators will be glad to come as well. Okay. No, certainly willing to be advocates, but there's no longer relevant thing. Oh, I think. Yes, thank you so much for that was really kind of USA. And I agree with you, I think that that is something that I know Andrew and I have talked about doing after the election. I also want to just acknowledge that our current elected officials have done an amazing job using the professional expertise that we have on staff through Chief Burke and Tom DiPetro and Bob Fisher and Paul Conner. You know, we have a lot and I know the same that happens with your team as well, superintendent. And I really appreciate that mutual shared professional respect almost outside of the politics of it, but just what would this stormwater regulation mean on the ground for the folks running the stormwater utilities? And I really appreciate that shared relationship over the years. So we will continue to focus on that. I'm thinking of, I trust there's already been or will be soon, if not already outreach with regard to the beginning steps on that dispatch. Yes, thank you. We may have a new fire chief coming on board who may be the chair of the regional Chenning County Public Safety Authority who was on top of getting that funding in place for us. Yes, thank you very much for that support. On the guardrails, which the mutual agreement for solving the solution was obtained. And the changeover is profound in the house. The 11 committees, seven committee chairs are no longer returned. And in appropriations for every dollar goes where the policy, they are the dollar people. Every dime. Every dime. Seven of the 11, seven of the 11 are not returning. So it's the complete leadership structure of the house is going to shift radically with people in new roles. I don't know if that's going to be as profound in the Senate or not. I have a quick question. If it's a quick answer. I think the city is concerned about the Vemur's pension and the school board is concerned about the Vester's pensions. Can you just quickly say what action was taken about those two pension systems? Well, S286 is the bill which ultimately became law upon, we'll take that unanimous override of the governor's veto of that bill by both chambers, unanimous. And goodness, there are several components to it. If you want to do the deep dive into the detail, you go to the Joint Fiscal Office website on the legislative website, Joint Fiscal Office and you just look up the fiscal note for S286. And it's as clear as day. It is a fabulous 13-page step by step by step. Vemur's was not included in that bill. Vemur's was dealt with separately because that came up in a different timeframe. And it was more just if nothing is pro forma as it relates to many things in state government, but it was more a pro forma shift that needed to be made for the Vemur's every so often. It has to happen. It start contrast to the months of effort on the part of the task force to come to their own unanimous agreement on the steps to move forward, which are articulated in that fiscal note, which when all is said and done, takes $2 billion right off the unfunded liability in terms of changes right off the top. It's for both VISTAs and the state employee, the teachers pension and the state employee's pension for both there are changes in how much people pay, there are changes. It does not impact anyone who's already retired. There was great concern over that. Let's go to joint fiscal office as 286 fiscal note. It's fabulous. You have any trouble? Let me know when I'll send you a link. Any questions that people still have for our very, very fine and green, very fine representatives? Over many, many years, Mayda. If I could, I'm sorry, I need to apologize because I kept saying beamers. Not everybody in the world knows what beamers is. Beamers is the Vermont municipal pension system, whereas VISTAs is the teachers and VISTAs is the state employees. You got to see those acronyms to understand that exactly. Thank you, Mayda would take calls even past January. She has definitely got a handle of all the fine nickels and dimes and details of our state budget bills and all kinds of things. Any other questions? Thank you, I have a question for Shom. You mentioned the expected change in the overall funding for South Brownington based on the change in purple voting. Do you have even a fact of the nap and the estimate of what that's going to look like? Part of what the House passed capped the total possible increase in our taxing capacity or burden to us to no more than 5% each year. So I liked what the Senate had passed, which was actually in a rolling average so that it would just phase in over six years. I thought it would gradually increment in. This could create per person-centered increased spending in a district while you can't be penalized by more than 5%. But short answer to your question back to the envelope for the next five years and there was also a mechanism that forces the legislature to reconsider this over that time period and by the fifth year or else we're back to the previous weights. But the South Burlington tax rate will not increase based on this new pupil weighting more than 5% each year for the next five years. Correct me if you have a different interpretation of it, but that was the cap that the House approved in order to phase in these adjustments. That being said, I'll put aside South Burlington when you look at what the 2020 figures were and what the rates would be based on those numbers would have seen based on the new pupil weights a 5% tax rate increase, so that was mid-range. Some of the most impacted communities are CBU, MMU come to mind. If those numbers had been taken into effect, it would have seen a 23% increase on their tax rate. So that might give you some frame of reference. Based on these adjustments, communities like Burlington and Winooski will benefit greatly from this. So their communities will see the opposite side of that and decreases of up to 20 to 30 cents, I think at some calculations. Based on how we assess the true cost of some children that have English language or English multi-language learners that are also on free and reduced meals plans. So this adjusts the pupil weights based on indicators, trackable indicators. So the bill also adjusts how we measure those, how we track what a student truly costs based on some work done by University of Vermont professor. Very complicated. I'm happy to point you in some reason. Yeah, I've actually read the legislation. I was curious about just that bottom line dollar. What does that look like in terms of the budget we're at before SR 55-ish, 51-ish, 52. Is it 5 million less? Is it? I'm waiting for the figures that come out, I think after July 1st, when these. They're doing the modeling, yeah. But we know it's gonna be significant, although phased. And I know we're at time and I don't wanna elongate, but I think this is in part connected to a lot of the current conditions and the work forward. I've been at this a long time, 34 years, and never been in education where the funding is predicted. Education funding is not predictable. We're not in a situation where you can predict what the tax rate will be next year. It's very hard to build upon a system or sustain a system if you don't have financial predictability. When yields and all of the factors that you just talked about have significant play makes it very difficult to sustain programming. So financial predictability is a big, big need in Vermont. The way in which we do it, we don't get our data until we're well into the budget adoption or after, makes it extremely difficult to do where you could have a six to 10% swing, either negative or positive in a two-year period. That could be in year one, you have a slight 5% reduction with the same budget, with a slight increase in employee costs, could see a 10% increase because of a yield, common level of appraisal, and some of these other factors that are put on there. And I could go on. I think that the biggest takeaway for me would be is to really develop some thoughtful discussions in the city of South Burlington to try to be as proactive and planned as possible. And I think to your point earlier, John, it would be really helpful to have an earlier session than even November. And what I've said off into my own group of the Superintendents Association, it would be important for me in the future to say, what are the things that we need to have happen in the future? And what could we do for build construction early so that we could plot ourselves appropriately into more predictable? But from my perspective, we've been in a reactive and unplanned arena in education funding for a long time. And when you're dealing with children, that's very, very difficult to sustain programming, right? And similar to what you just talked about on the weighting study, that has implications where there may need to now be significant reductions to cover that increased cost, right? For us down the road, which may impact certain programming, that's really important. You talked about pre-K and childcare, absolutely critically important foundation, just like the conditions of our schools and the statewide funding for school construction or the ability to address and fix them. We don't have anything. There's $23 million, a lot of money. But we're talking significant amount of money. We get a Burlington high school, one of 400 schools, the first one to do anything had to shut down. The risk and liability right now in education is high. The likelihood that schools will have to shut down as we move forward to the PCB testing is probably high. Is it 1% maybe one more school or two or four? I don't know, but I'm really, really worried about that. And I think that there needs to be a really immediate, thoughtful conversation about how to endure that. And you're right, childcare and pre-K, that is the very foundation of the start of our experiences. We know that if we do that right, then children come into our systems, parents are supportive and guardians, and we have a much more regulated and planned outcome versus unplanned, how we have to put additional support people in front of our students who are having some struggles or trauma. So, well, in our technical education, our state, university systems are all untired. And then, I don't know what you think of the Supreme Court decision or remain, but it indicated that private schools are eligible also for public funding. Yeah, religious schools, it just passed, right? I mean, I think that one of the things that you mentioned, again, here are opportunities for us all in our community to think about, but currently we have struggles in pre-K to 12 education. We've got enrollment and issues in a higher ed, certainly CCB and some of our state colleges, and we have businesses that are looking for qualified people that you talked about. There should be an opportunity. And so, we're only to model this where we look at connecting those silos more appropriately, right? How can we work with CCB and the state colleges? How can we work more connected with businesses? We do, we have some successes there for South Burlington at the hospital with internship programs that we work hard to get, but they're hard to hang on to. Why? Because you've got to have staffing to help make those things happen. And it's not really sustainable from the funding model that's currently in place. So, again, I don't want to ramble any more about it. I just want to put a plug-in for high schoolers to serve on our board. We put that. Yeah, so the climate action, you know, yes, in that transfer field, we've got, you know, they're eager and excited to join in to your climate action committee. So our high school and middle school students are excited to do that. I think as you move forward on those contacts, Matt Tranfield at the high school at Burke, Dave Hyatt and Scott Sivo, who will be coming on board as a principal, are excited to make those connections for our kids, relevant opportunities, which, you know, I highly support. Okay, so do we. Very good. And it is a segue. We're going to move on to the next agenda item. I really hope that we can all just thank you. I don't know if applause is appropriate on a meeting, but I certainly think it is. So I am just going to... It's amazing to think that there are 34 years plus to 36 years of service in our state house sitting here and was meeting. That is tremendous. Am I counting correctly? 30, 10, 40. Oh, I missed a decade, 40. That's the sign of my age. Not yours, my age. We've got a fifth member in the house in the south room. So we actually will have more voices to serve our communities. Yeah, very good. A lot of training, support that meeting whenever after the November election. So a big thank you. All right. Leaving big shoes to fill. All right. Now to the update on the climate action plan and the request for South Grounds and School District participation. And Helen, you were going to be. Helen, really our council chair will be there. Yeah, but I'm not presenting this. I'm hoping that. Gold is in the ground. Oh, good. Cause I can't tell. So I'm going to take it up to Ethan and he has a short presentation and we're looking for new some input back from the school board about what you are doing and what you think you could do and comments on some of the things that we feel as a whole community might be items that the school can participate in and help us meet our goals of reducing CO2 and improving with climate. So Ethan, you have a slide deck or something, right? Thanks, Helen. Actually, I'd just like to speak and. Rather than put up a bunch of slides today, there's going to be an opportunity to put out the full plan. You'll get pages and pages with graphics and numbers and all sorts of things to entertain you. But tonight I just wanted to sort of open the conversation and maybe have some time for some dialogue. So I guess I just want to open by, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the threat of climate change. I've thought about it a lot over 20 plus years of career and sustainability, but really the opportunity to think about how can we rebuild our communities and take advantage of the creativity going in here and all the amazing technology and resources that can really create a solution that will work for generations for us and around the world. And so this is really the start of the head conversation. The task force, the climate action task force was convened last year by the council following resolutions in 2017 and 2014. And this was really the start of a decision to let's make a concrete plan, right? Let's actually figure out what are the steps we're going to take to move forward with this. So convened this task force with seven committee members and chair really sitting on it and Paul Connor representing the staff and bringing in the CCRPC, the regional planning commission to be the consultant to really do the work on crafting the plan. So that's what we've been working on the last several months. We are sort of wrapping up the draft of the information and recommendations that we've been preparing and getting ready to deliver that in September back to the council. And really at this phase, we're starting on this community outreach, sort of listening tour and have a bunch of plans of where are we gonna go this summer to go and talk to folks throughout the community and lots of different organizations. So this is sort of at the beginning of that process to go and get some feedback from you all. So really, we wanna understand what people's interests are around climate change, what their concerns are and what opportunities there might be to partner on building these solutions together. So I'll just give you the sort of high level of some of the things we've been talking about just to sort of set the stage for what sort of challenges we're looking at and the context for these solutions. So the goal that we have set forward, it's a science-based goal based on recommendations from some other folks who've been working with are to reduce CO2 emissions, greenhouse emissions by 50% in the year 2030 and then to basically eliminate them by the year 2050. So really focusing on the 2030 goal because it's much more concrete. 2050 sounds like someone else's problem, right? 2030 is just around the corner and 50% is not something we can wait to start on. So the good news is that the electricity supply that we have from greenhouse power is effectively carbon neutral. So really the places that we're looking at for the current emissions that we see in town and where we can reduce our transportation is about two thirds of emissions. Buildings in thermal is the other third. So that's the broad brush we have to look at there. And so again, while we've got lists and lists of things into agriculture and solid waste and land use and all sorts of stuff, that's really the primary focus of what we're recommending. And so I'll give you some of the sort of highlight recommendations that we've put together, include things like moving toward electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid electrics, about 37.5% should be EVs and the same percentage should be plug-in hybrids by 2030. And then reducing vehicle miles traveled by 2.5% a year. This is sort of modeling we've been doing. So again, just to give you a sense of the scale, right? And 2.5% doesn't sound large, but every year more and more, right? We need to shift off of personal vehicles. And then in the building sector, right? We need to electrify about 8% of our commercial buildings by square footage every year in order to reach that goal. And so some of the strategies include like a 2030 district, which is a benchmarking protocol to sort of create a competitive atmosphere and expose where the sort of best opportunities are for improving commercial buildings. So that's a national program that Burlington and other Vermont cities for spade in that we could join. And then some other strategies include an ordinance to prohibit fossil fuel use in new construction buildings and then creating some kind of mechanism to regulate fossil fuel use in existing buildings which would require a charter change. So that's a larger lift, certainly for the council to have to take on and talking about things like net zero new construction policies. So some of these that I specifically am highlighting because some of these particularly I think touch on areas that overlap with the school's interests and responsibilities. And so hopefully that can feed some of this conversation. So I wanna sort of frame up the conversation around the school in a couple of ways, right? So when we're thinking about the different parts of the community that we can work with, we think about the school and the task force in a few different ways. So one, it's one more part of our community that's submitting CO2 and having direct buildings and vehicles and people and actions, right? So that's one way, right? We've got to work with everyone in all the different sectors and you are in that category, but also in a couple other ways, right? So as an educator of next generation, it's super important to make sure that the students coming out of schools are equipped to be part of the solution, right? It's gonna be a generational problem and they're all gonna be involved in it. And then thirdly, as a real community hub, right? As a convener of people throughout the community and as a leader to showcase strategies and to lead by example and communicate with all different sectors of the community. So we think that's super important. So to open up the conversation, tonight, really just wanted to open this up with a discussion about like, here's the size of the challenge we're looking at. Here is the urgency and the schedule that we're looking at. And listen to some of your concerns about climate change and about some of the strategies that I've described and the effort it's gonna take to get there. And then also to ask for ideas and ways that maybe we could work together and partner on solutions and how we can find the best opportunities to use the strengths that the school has to help be part of the solution. So with that, I'll open it up for questions or thoughts or- I think so, I have a really, it's a broad general question because it sounds like this is a very local kind of startup organization. I'm curious if as a part of your longer plan, you see partnerships beyond the local community, right? To the extent that climate doesn't end on the borders of Vermont or South Burlington, what kind of relationships do you think of building beyond those actual physical? So let me answer that in two ways. So tonight I'm here with the hat of chair of the task force, which has been convened for basically a year or two to produce this plan together with the Regional Planning Commission. So there's an open question in terms of this entity as an agent of local government and whether it will then turn into some kind of an implementation task force to continue working on the Climate Action Plan. I will say the way I heard that question sort of in my other hat, which is as the founder of a community climate tech startup because I'm offering a pilot to the South Burlington community to help track these carbon emissions. And so as CTO of Howard City, we are working with communities all around New England, but conversation tomorrow with a group in Missouri, working with folks all over the country. So absolutely from that hat, yes. The solutions that we're looking at are going to be shared and replicated in a lot of what that pilot that will happen in parallel with this will result in like that will then be brought to other communities. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunities to sort of connect the work we're doing here in South Burlington with this sort of whole consortium. And that's always been important for communities to be able to like share techniques and you don't have time to try everything, right? You've got to go and share a trip with other folks. Thank you. Paul Conner planning, zoning director. I just, I agree with everything that Ethan said. And I would also note that the starting point for the task force was to look at and build from the state's climate action plan. And so what is being considered a statewide level and being shared with municipalities across the board? And then the challenge for us is what are the areas that the community has direct influence over here as the sort of sub-work here of either a regulator, an investor, or an influencer or a lobbyist, I guess, to our, to at least to the state level and not to necessarily focus on federal car emission standards because that's maybe a little bit too far up the line to have a significant impact on it. But there's a lot of areas where we do at the local level and tying it to what is being done at the statewide level so it's not sort of ships passing in the night are really important subject. It's really helpful to see the connections. Michael. Yeah, I just like to pick up on another thing that you asked about, which is are we working with other communities around us? And my hope is that what we do will be infectious like COVID. Everybody will catch it. And as an example, Burlington has passed an ordinance to prevent the use of fossil fuels in new construction. And we've learned from them how that works and what we have to do. And that's a best example. There will be others of learning from other communities and what they're doing. And we hope that the communities around will learn from what we plan to do. So yes, we are working with our surrounding communities. So Burlington in fact has a revolving loan fund used for municipal investment that is being modeled by some other communities. There's been a lot of interest from some other energy committees around the state. And so we've helped support the planning commission, regional planning commission with some information based on our experience. How can we get parents to let their children, I know we've had difficulties with school bus drivers and shortage, how can we get parents to let their children ride the bus? Well, there's a huge, I mean, obviously it makes sense that that could happen and we could reduce then the number of buses that are in route. That's also coupled with safe and secure walks to school you know, and current conditions that are in play in and around our environments as the city closely connected to Burlington, et cetera. So it's generally when we get into traffic mitigation and crossing, you know, those things start to enter in as you can imagine a young kindergarten or first grader walking to school, those become in play with making decisions on whether that's a appropriate or safe place to walk when traffic and people aren't always, we have, it's very difficult right now, we have probably at least 10 to 15 infractions of people going through the bus every day, right? And so we don't do opposite side crossing. So we have to elongate our routes to do same side pickups or drop offs because of that, even though we have a police car sometimes behind them and issuing tickets, it still occurs. So I would say on a, again, on a going forward basis, we have had for the last 15 years a very active group of students and advisors around our green teams and our energy conservation teams. They've been instrumental in the development of our solar array here. We're gonna be the first, I think in the state of month to bring up four new school bus electric powered school buses. We just got one in, I think this past week and people are looking at us like, how can we also do that? We did get the charging station in from Green Down Power to do that. And again, students are celebrating that. We've made some heating upgrades and control upgrades. Of course, our older buildings, which we talked about earlier, can only be so efficient. But that's also been wrapped into the past capital campaign discussion. And we had, I think, your committee that was part of that up through those years looking at the conditions and how we can build to either lead gold or some lead standard. We've done some work, obviously every work that we've done at the Chamberlain noise mitigation we did and we put in, heat pumps, high efficient heat pumps, which were paid for by the federal government for the noise piece. So we've done some of that work. Green Down Power and Vermont Gas have been kind of our collaborators. But I would say that one of the most important things we could do is marry you folks up with our green team groups, which is pretty large and to work collaboratively, city, school-wide. And for us, we do have it embedded in our curriculum to make sure kids are learning about carbon neutrality efficiencies and things of that nature to try to help mitigate some of these things. So I mean, I could go on. We've done an array of things, no connection to solar. But I think it's awesome that what you guys are doing and what we've done as a city, but we have a long way still to go. Even as I think about the buses, it's like we've converted most of the old ones now to new technology and mission more efficient, whatever it's called. But we still have a long ways to go unless we'd like to get all of them off the fossil fuel. But Kate Bailey has a question. School board director. Hi Ethan, nice to see you. Thanks for being here with us. I just wanted to ask from the school board's perspective, I'm hearing transportation and buildings and infrastructure are important pieces. So for us as a school board to hold, to make sure we're hitting these measures and benchmarks and monitoring this progress, is it just as simple as asking the question that are we considering the most environmental option when we are approving new school buses and building infrastructure? Or are there other questions we should be asking as a school board in terms of that progress and measure? Well, I guess I'd answer that in two ways. So certainly looking at transportation and buildings and focusing on spending the most time there is the sort of easy answer of when you have a decision in front of you and you're about to spend money, it's much easier to spend it on something that improves the situation rather than trying to fix it after the fact and you've already spent the money. But I think that the decision from the city's perspective to create this climate action plan was a step forward from similar strategies from what you're describing in the past, which was when we have a decision in front of us, let's think about, could we do it a little bit better? And basically the conclusion that we've come to with the climate action plan is that we can't just make good decisions organically as they come up and hope to meet this kind of aggressive goal. We actually need to take a step back, look at the whole picture, where are our emissions coming from and where are the opportunities and then proactively figure out what are the investments we need to make? Do we need to bring in more funding? Are there cost-effective things that we could get financed ahead of time? Are there things that we need to be thinking sort of across the spectrum, right? So some of the things when we talk about transportation for school, well, that's also connected to where are the new houses going up and what are the transportation options from those houses, right? If you get into the plan, we actually coupled transportation and land use together because they're so tightly connected. And so there's a lot of discussion about trying to focus the emphasis on new construction in the transit zones and bike-ped infrastructure in the transit zone and really trying to create those kind of dense development patterns that allow safe bike and walk to school. And you can't do that in an individual decision, right? No individual decision shows that pattern. That's really stepping back and going, why do we have the emissions we have now? What would need to change? Okay, where's that system? Where's that coming from the system? Where do we need to start thinking about how to create that change over the next 20 years, 30 years? So that's what I guess I would recommend from the school perspective as well is to step back and think about where are the emissions coming from? What are the opportunities to change that? And then what do we need to start doing in a long-term basis to set ourselves up for making those kind of decisions? And it will include a lot of the small things that you're talking about, which are not small electric buses. I know I'm not cheating, but I think it goes beyond those individual better choices. I think a farm to school, that truly transformed, I think your whole approach to delivering food to the students. And it turned into a way to educate students about where food comes from and what kind of food do we need in order to be healthy and to enjoy eating and to enjoy cooking and preparing and serving and bringing home recipes to the family. And I mean, it was truly a cultural change that farm to school brought as I saw between one of my sons who are 21 and 23, and now my daughter who's 11, a huge cultural shift in the schools. And that's what I think we're gonna have to do here. It's a true cultural shift. I think it's kind of interesting, the conversation and Chris Jesse and I, we put the agenda together along with Helen and Dr. Childs. But I think it's, there's a neat connection here, right? I mean, we talked about impact fees and we talked about schools and we're talking about kind of the future. And currently our schools are okay, but they're in need of some, some pretty significant review, if you will, or upgrade. Here again is the opportunity, similar to what we did at the high schools when we went through that conversation to whether renovate or new build, a lot of those conversations became in play. When we started to say over time, when we put all those factors in, over time they mitigate themselves and pay for themselves because it can be more net neutral, right? And so I think that along with transportation and safe routes to schools, and can we put schools in places where we aren't crossing over major, major intersections or putting them in places that have those kind of difficulties as we look to the future, probably more than 30 years too. It's kind of a neat, an important connection and certainly educating our youth who are gonna be leading our country, how we do that. I think a lot of them are very cognizant to your point. They know that what I'm eating today comes local and when it comes local means that it didn't have to travel very far, which means it didn't need to burn the energy that it needed to get here. And so a lot of our kids are very, very astute to that. And I think we wanna continue to perpetuate that at a larger scale. So I mean, I think it's just a really nice and important connection for us to hear tonight. And it doesn't come out of a plastic container that you peel off and throw away. It's actually someone with their hands who are washing and shopping. And it's a wonderful thing. Yeah, Michael. Yes, this is not necessarily climate action, but it's education. Children are terrified of what's coming to them and what we're leaving them. And I think the schools need to have a very, very much expanded and intense curriculum to prepare these children for the sacrifices and the changes in their lives that they're gonna have to make and live with to keep our planet habitable. They're going to be significant. But I think if there's a strong curriculum to teach them how to cope with what's coming, we might be able to alleviate some of that pain and terror and fear that they all feel. I mean, it is really, really a serious issue for children today. I can't emphasize it enough. I'm not a parent of a child at school, but I have grandchildren at school. And they're afraid. I've spoken to other parents in South Burlington. Their children are afraid. So afraid that they say, we're not gonna have children. We can't bring children into the kind of world that's coming down the pike. That is really sad. And I think the school curriculum can do something to help alleviate some of that. I went back to our city council meeting on Monday. I went back to, I remember my earliest, kind of social studies class, what human beings need, right? Food, shelter, water, and where we live, clothing. That's my earliest memory of my social studies. And it's truly those basics that we're gonna have to cover. Other questions for Ethan? Very good. Yeah, Michael. On vehicle miles traveled, we talked about electric school buses. But school buses, a lot of students don't use the school bus. It's there, but they don't use it. Those who can afford drive their own cars to school. And that is a big chunk of, I don't know how many school days they are in a year. What? 180? 180. And times the number of kids who drive to school, that is a big chunk of vehicle miles traveled. And it's something that maybe you and your colleagues can think about how can you expand the use of school bus service, which we're paying for anyway, and reduce the vehicle miles traveled in that way. I think it's also an equity issue. Because there are a lot of kids who must use the school bus because they can't afford a car. So it would kind of level the playing field a bit if we could get more kids to use the bus rather than drive to school in their own car. I'm carpooling it out. Oh, go ahead. But one of the issues are, we can't force these parents that a kid must get on the bus. That's not our job. So it's hard to say, well, what we should be doing, but we cannot do that. So we need to figure it out. Go ahead, go ahead. I mean, we need to figure out some type of way, but telling a parent said, you told me, well, your kid doesn't need to drive. That's not your business. Because people will be offended then they'll be calling us at the school board, saying, well, why can't our kids drive their cars? It's always gonna be something, but we need to figure out how we can work together to find the solution. That is exactly what I've said. We're not talking about forcing anybody to do anything. I don't know where that idea came from. I said in courage. Well, what I can say, it's my favorite UVM story. They simply made me move my parking space to the other side of campus. And I'm like, you got me on the bus. It's rossed me off right in front of my building. So there is something to say about parking management that can really incentivize- There are lots of tools. Absolutely, I think that's the, we have a lot of tools that we need to talk about, I think, from educating to looking at like CCTV, right? How we could maybe take buses off. I mean, how could we make, I mean, they don't go everywhere, right? So could that be expanded, safe routes to schools? How could we have kind of more partnership with city to help walking school buses, right? Volunteers that are vetted and safe to be around kids. I mean, many different ways. And we've worked hard with that, let's say, routes to schools, but there are some limitations to that. And again, I think this is a absolutely a concerted effort. And many of our kids, as you say, they're scared. And many of those scared kids that they're not gonna drive. And some of them don't wanna come to school either, and because of that, right? Some of them are not feeling comfortable. Obviously, most of this is connected to COVID stuff, but many of them have not wanted to come back to school. There's a lot of fear, and I think you're right around many ways, right? Whether it's our current conditions in our society with COVID, or whether there's other pieces that are connected. And we want them to be able to love to come to school, love to learn and love to take advantage of the things that we have to offer. But I think about transportation, and we've worked hard to get some buses, like CCTV buses in certain areas for our kids to participate in an internship program. Difficult, right? Difficult. So I think, again, there's a societal conversation needs to happen around, how can we circle up together to make sure that we're being good stewards to the future, well, well beyond the 30, 40, 50 years, you know, so. It seems it would be helpful to do a study of a sort, right? To dive into and truly understand what the motivating factors are. So for example, I would guess at some point in a kid's life when they're old enough to drive because I see this play out in my own life. I have two kids, one just graduated, one's a sophomore, rising junior, who will get a license in October. Time is a factor, right? She spends maybe an hour a day on the bus. If she can cut that time down, she gets more time back into her day. So if that is, you know, one example, well, what is our response to that? Is there a way we can structure and have kids maybe group up at certain points so that you can reduce the transit time, right? Like, but we can't really address them, I don't think, until we understand what the largest pain points are. Cause if we can relieve some of those, then we might be able to create more incentive to get folks on the bus. Gas at $15 a gallon before a sport parents put their kids on the bus. Yeah. And I learned to do all kinds of things on the bus. I do my emails on the bus, I read books, I actually read papers. It's a working office when I sit down. Yeah, I was a bus full of kids though. No, it's not. That's about how the bus is configured, right? Island buses in Georgia have Wi-Fi and kids do take advantage of that. But I think again, Dr. Boyer's right, the differences in schedules, right? Predicate sometimes the riders. So in many cases, in order to load the bus, we want to increase the routes, which increase the times. So that deters then some to ride because of other obligations, you know? So it gets complicated again. Taking all the time to get to my next thing if I take the bus. That's right. And I think when you start to overlay like the city of South Burlington and the routes, you got a CCTA bus going, and then you've got school buses going and then cars going and a lot of them are going in the same places many times. So again, I do think there's an opportunity to be more efficient, but you got to be careful to not make the change and see it adversely affected. Emily, yes please. Yeah, I just, I don't need to remind folks here because I know you're all very thoughtful of it, but just in, when you do messaging, and remember that some people can't take the bus due to accessibility concerns or other disabilities, both my nephews, they don't live in Vermont, but cannot take the bus to school. And so it's just important to remember that while we push for some things that's not accessible for everyone just in messaging and inclusion as well. Thank you. Well, we have buses with lifts, but the point being is that not all buses have lifts and not all students or children are able to ride on the bus that has multiple numbers of students for a variety of, could be disability reasons, et cetera. Right, and not just physical disabilities as well. Thank you. Are there other questions or should we move on to other business? No questions? But I'm sure this is gonna be an ongoing conversation. I really thank you, Ethan, for coming in and giving us your time on a Wednesday evening. It's for another business point. If I don't see any hands raised, I think this is the moment where we really thank David for his many years of service. Well, thank you all. And we know that we got probably, I'm gonna say it, even though it's public meeting, the best out of you. And so we're just very grateful for what you gave. And as I truly believe, superintendent is like a police chief. You are one of the pillars of the community. So. Well, it's been a, it's been a real pleasure to serve the self-promoting as a superintendent. And I am a community member still right around the corner. I wanna stay actively engaged and involved in a lot of the things that you're doing right now. So I'm looking forward to that. I need it to go back to the discussion. Yeah. But thank you, David. Truly, I have three children that all for very much in your care for many years. So I appreciate it. A lot of great students that have moved on, coming back to us too, which is really nice. All right. Very good meeting, this is a full meeting, good boy. Now we gotta bring into action. Okay. I move to adjourn. Thank you. Third section. I'll move. All in favor. Aye. Aye. Aye. Well, thank you all.