 I will call to order this regular meeting of the Winooski City Council. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Hal Kulston. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Thank you. Agenda review, any concerns about the order of the items this evening? So this brings us to our public comment stage. This is a chance for members of the public if they wish to speak to an item that's not included on today's agenda. If you have comments about an agenda item, please wait until we get to that item. If you are attending by Zoom, you can raise your hand or use the chat to let us know you're interested in public comment. All right, it's seeing none. We will move to our consent agenda. We have our council minutes from December 7th, last week and accounts payable warrant ending December 10. Any concerns about the consent agenda? Right, I would entertain a motion to approve both the council minutes and the warrants. So moved. Second. Motion by Amy, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. We are at council reports. Amy, can I start with you? Sure, I attended the Safe Healthy Connected People Commission meeting last week and there wasn't a lot of new business discussed. We just mostly went over updates that I believe have been covered here. So I will pass it on to the next person. Thank you, Hal. I have no report at this time. Thank you, Jim. I have nothing new this week. Thank you and Mike. I have nothing new. I would just like to wish everyone a happy holiday and help everyone stay safe and enjoy time with their family if they can. Thank you. A couple of items from me, both the finance and planning commissions met. Our finance commission started to look at finance policies that staff put together, including policies and procedures for our TIF reporting. We had looked at a draft list of financial policies that the commission could be reviewing for us. Those will eventually come to council at a future date. Planning commission continued discussions around accessory dwelling units tied to recent state legislation that was passed. And those conversations are ongoing. If you are interested, you can check out the meeting agenda from last Thursday at the planning commission, actually looked at a schedule of what topics will be covered over the coming months with that commission at each meeting. The planning commission is going back to meeting twice a month. So it's the second and third Thursdays. I also was able to attend Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce, not exactly sure what they called the meeting, but it was pulled together to let folks hear from our Chittenden State Senators. So just wanted to share with this group that I heard some of what those folks had on their place as priorities. And just generally everyone is very focused on food security and housing security. Thank you, Eric. Second and fourth Thursdays is planning commission meetings. And that's when the legislature reconvenes, they will be jumping right into more COVID relief discussions. So I was pleased to hear that. With that, I will pass it to our city manager, Jesse Baker for city updates. Great, thank you. Just a few updates tonight, as most of you are not anyway, I've only had a week between meetings. I wanna start with a general city-wide COVID update. We are tracking a number of a few situations here in Winooski. And because of that, are restarting our daily huddles with Vermont Department of Health and our community partners. So those are our first thing in the morning and really trying to keep everyone on the same page with emerging issues, coordinating support to our community members, et cetera. I do wanna encourage all of our residents. I believe we are going to see our numbers increase in the next days and weeks. So just encourage our neighbors to please do not socialize, spend time with people outside of your immediate household, wear masks, socially distance, wash your hands, and really pay attention to the guidance being issued by the governor. As I mentioned last time, I just wanna reaffirm tonight, we have set up daily testing, COVID testing at the O'Brien Community Center for the foreseeable future and at a minimum through the month of January. That's seven days a week. Mondays are the evening hour, so that's actually happening right now down at the OCC. Those hours are five to eight. And then for the rest of the week, Tuesday through Sunday, it's nine to three at the O'Brien Community Center. You can register on the VDH website. You can also always walk in. If you are symptomatic, please contact your healthcare provider, but you can walk into the testing site at the OCC. As I mentioned last week, these are the tests that are the observed nasal swab. So they're actually self-administered with a medical professional observing the test to make sure it's not contaminated. And we also have translation on site for every hour of the testing site is open and materials also translated online and via flyers and handouts and whatnot. So do you have a concern? Please go and get tested. Otherwise, please stay in your households. Slightly better news. We did receive the municipal planning grant award this year. This continues Heather's amazing streak of getting grants for the city. And just as a reminder, this municipal planning grant is for conducting an equity audit of our municipal systems that will help build the foundation of the equity director's new work plan. So thank you to Heather and to the state for that award. Speaking of the equity director, we hope to have that up and posted by this Wednesday and encourage all to share that broadly. We're hoping to recruit somebody really awesome into that position. And then just as a reminder is we get up to the end of the calendar year, City Hall has some closed hours and days in the upcoming weeks. So next week we have a half a day on December 24th and a full day closed on December 25th. And then again, the following week, Thursday, half day on the 31st, and then City Hall is closed on Friday, January 1st. Of course our public safety officials will be on duty 24 seven and John Roushers crew will be on call if there are snow events. That is what I wanted to share. Thank you very much. Thank you. Moving to our regular items. Our first item, Ray Coffey will be introducing our new recreation programs manager, Jenny Hill. Who I believe is here. Yes, she is here. So I think Paul is gonna bring her over. There she comes. All right. So I'll just give a quick intro and say I think Jenny's entrance to the city of Wunewski has been strange at best. I think we had what two full days in the office in person before we went back into a work from home sort of approach for our team. With that said, Jenny has been an awesome addition to the team already. You're starting to see programming coming out. I know I have at least two little household numbers here who are very excited about the snow art competition coming up, which was Jenny's brainchild. So there's some really cool creative thinking around how to engage folks despite not being able to get together which has been really a breath of fresh air. And certainly for me, super exciting to see things moving again in the rec world. So Jenny comes to us from Charlotte, North Carolina formerly worked at and you're gonna have to make sure I get the name right but the US National Whitewater Center in Charlotte and a graduate of Wake Forest University. So I wanna give Jenny a minute to sort of just talk a little bit about herself and her hope for the position but overall just really great start all things considered and I'm very excited about what's to come. Yeah, sure. Thanks for this production. Yeah, like Ray said, I went to Wake Forest. I actually studied architecture a while down there but like all things, sometimes you just find yourself in a different place in life. So kind of found my way into recreation as a RAF guide. That's what I used to do in the summer as I worked out in Colorado and lived in either my car or my tent. So a lot of experience kind of out in the field and then post graduation like Ray said was at the US National Whitewater Center. So for those of you that aren't familiar with it it's kind of like an outdoor recreation amusement park in a lot of ways kind of a man made Whitewater channel and rock climbing trails, all sorts of things. So I handled everything from really small scale such as a free clinic of 10 people up to festivals that had 55,000 plus people and professional climbing competitions things of that matter. So recreation has always kind of been my personal outlet and source of fun and finding friends in the community. So I am really excited about this opportunity. I think what excites me the most is there's a lot of room. I'm not coming into a set program. So I know for me and Kate our AmeriCorps it is really exciting to just kind of feel to hit the ground running and explore every idea out there. So like Ray said, it's definitely been a bit weird as I am working from home and living in isolation. So please feel free, my email is on the website. I would love to have virtual coffee or go for a walk outside and just kind of hear what folks want, what they're interested in things they've seen in the past that they're like, please don't ever do that again. Anything and everything. So my door is, you know, my virtual door is always open. So please do reach out. Well, welcome Jenny. Thank you. I'm glad you're excited about the, I guess, flexibility of sitting in new programming. Yeah, for sure. What brings you to Winooski? I am originally from Massachusetts. So I've been in North Carolina for six years and I have never enjoyed the heat. So it was kind of a natural migration back north and have grown up visiting this area. And, you know, it was fairly familiar with Winooski and kind of the diverse population. It seems like a really great kind of city that's really started to find its identity and grow and thought, well, this seems like a great time to jump on board. Awesome. Well, welcome to our community. Do folks on council have any questions or anything to share? All right. I think you gave us a pretty good background on the position here. So thank you for joining us tonight for this introduction. Yeah, for sure. Thanks, Jenny. Thank you, Jenny. All right. So we will move now to item B. This is on for approval. This is a resolution outlining what we discussed at our last meeting about an electronic signature equivalent for town meeting day petitions. So you will see here that staff has put together for us. This outlines what we discussed before. So electronic signatures, we're still shooting for that 5% of registered voters. Our clerk's office will review those lists, the due dates in here. We are seeking zip codes when possible street address, but we aren't requiring it since it is not possible to attain that always in electronic form. So just wanted to see if this meets what we discussed and if we are okay with moving this forward. So some had nodding. Are there any concerns about language here or questions about the content? Mike, I see your hand is raised. Yes, so I'm reading this resolution. It says continues experience the impacts of COVID-19. Now, is this gonna be the new way of doing this from here on out or is this just gonna be through the pandemic experience that we're going through right now? It's, this is still just supposed to be for town meeting day 2021. So that's why it's titled that way. If things continue to trend poorly and that the next local election we're having, I think we would implement a resolution again specific to that particular election. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Amy, were you raising your hand? Yeah, I was just hoping to get some clarification about the statement about the email address being included. I know that was something that came up at the meeting last time. And I believe we told the group that was here that they did not need a petition that included email addresses. So. Yeah. So they don't. That is specific to the person submitting the petition so that we can get back to them. So, you know, whatever makes an effort, it's just that one individual that we want contact info for. Okay. Do you think that we need to do anything to clarify that in here or do others feel like that's clear? I think it's clear. It's written to me that it's a petitioner's email that's required, not the email of the signee. Are there any other concerns on language or questions or anything? Let's pivot to public comment then, see if there are any questions from members of the public. Again, you can use chat or raise hand to indicate you wish to speak and Paul will move you into the meeting here. Hearing no. Oh, no, I see a hand raised. Okay, go ahead when you're ready. Hi. I guess I was just wondering how do we get an official number on the 5% of registered voters? Jesse, you wanna speak to that? Sure. So that is, it's a hard number to get in that it changes daily as people register to vote here or register to vote in other communities and are therefore pulled off the voter registration list. Carol, can you unmute and share what it is roughly? So people have a sense and then as she's unmuting, I'll also say we always suggest with petitioners that or with petitions that they exceed the number of the 5% because we do verify if folks are on the voter registration list. That's actually why we want the email addresses so we can, if they don't meet that 5% threshold, we can go back and request more. But Carol, do you have a rough estimate of what it is today? Yes, excuse me. It's approximately 276 signed registered voters. Thanks, Carol. You're welcome. Does that answer your question? It does. And then my second question was, so the latest it could be received, the petition could be received just January 19th, but if we wanted to have that sort of, that buffer in of being able to get more signatures if it was needed, you would recommend getting it in by the 12th or the 11th? As soon as you can get it in, we, Carol will verify the signatures and get back to folks. The drop deadline is January 19th to get on that final agenda for the council. So we won't necessarily be able to verify if we receive on that day. But earlier the better and we will try and turn them around very quickly. Any other questions from public members of the public? All right. Would someone like to make a motion to approve this resolution? So moved. Second. Motion by Jim. Second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Moving on to item C. This is a follow-up discussion on our master plan goals check-in. So at our, you know, earlier this fall, we tasked our lovely commission members with spending some of their meeting time to check in on their area, strategic vision area of the master plan and how are we moving forward with our master plan goals? So each of you helped facilitate that discussion amongst a commission and attached to this agenda. We have all of those reports. I also produced a summary here. So there are a couple of goals for this conversation. One is to see if this summary is a reasonable summarization of what each of these reports says. And then two, to touch base on the priority areas moving forward and also what commissioners are looking for as far as support. And just so that we are on the same page, we know where we're headed and we can have this information available as we move forward with, you know, budging discussions and other future planning. So I think I would start with the easier question and that is, is this summarization accurate? Is there anything that isn't called out here that you think should be based on the discussion that you had in one of the commissions? I do have a specific question around housing that Jim, maybe you could enlighten me on or Heather. You know, I noticed in the, what is the question? Is there anything that we're not on track towards? Zoning incentivization for affordable housing was called out there, but it wasn't specifically mentioned also in the priorities. So I didn't include it in the summary and I wonder if I just sort of missed the context there, if that should be elevated to as high a priority as the housing trust fund and the bedroom targets. I mean, I can start and Heather, you can correct me if I misrepresent, but I think that was not as high a priority as the, I mean, the housing trust fund funding source is the single most important component where if we don't make progress on it, then a lot of the other goals suffer. So I think that was the area that certainly should stand out is the most important thing to keep an eye on. And the, you know, mention of the bedroom targets as opposed to unit targets is really kind of a reflection about the methodology used by the commission to like, if that's something that they want to adjust in the future and maybe not so much a goal that hasn't been met. But I think when we were talking about when the commission was discussing whether we're meeting that mix that we are after in the master plan, we focus on units, should we focus on bedrooms? So I think as far as zoning mechanisms, I think that was more of like a issue that the commission wants to look into going forward, but not necessarily as critical to the goals. Heather, does that sound right? That does sound right, Jim. The only thing that I would add is, you know, when looking through the housing goals, the housing commission talked about how some of them fall within the commission's purview and some of them fall outside the commission's purview. So changing zoning isn't necessary. While we can support that and give background research about that, that's something that would sit at the planning commission. So we didn't prioritize it for ourselves, but are available to support that in any way that we can. That's an interesting point that you make. I see a lot of, there's quite a bit of like cross commission items in here. And I think one of the outcomes of this should be taking this back to each commission so that they can also see like, what are the other commissioners view as a priority? How does that tie into the work that we are doing and help that inform what folks are focusing on going forward? Does anyone else feel like anything is not as accurate as it could be for a strategic vision area? Jim? So this is an inaccuracy, but just maybe a question to you, Mayor, about the planning commission. Cause as I read through, I noticed that too the commissions raise issues around weatherization and energy efficiency. And that was originally one of the incentives to examine alongside with affordability. I'm just curious if the planning commission has kind of dropped that as a primary focus or if, again, thinking about how to connect commissions back to each other is that like something we can communicate to municipal infrastructure that that's been somewhat accomplished or there's a reason it's being dropped from planning commission's work? It hasn't been dropped. It's been pushed back, I think, in timeline. So at the last meeting, this sort of timeline was looked at to work through, Eric might better describe this, but like a subset of zoning that we want to look at and form-based code. So that falls in form-based code review. And a lot of that conversation, we have decided to pause on until we get information back from the parking study. And I honestly, I also think that the, well, I don't know what the timeline is on the latest grant we got. I think that'll be helpful. But also the historic preservation study. So both of those studies are due in March-ish. And so after that, I think the planning commission will be picking back up on form-based code review. I do think though, I don't know where this fits in. I did see weatherization energy efficiency coming up. And it triggered in my mind that we will have at some point in the next year. So the noise compatibility work starting, how do we engage with that? I think there's definitely more to be discussed there. Haven't thought through like, what's the entry point in that discussion and where that begins yet though. But I think that's something worth noting to bring back to, as we bring this information back to commissions to say like this is on the radar and here is a potential timing for getting engaged in that again. Eric, did you wanna correct anything I said? Great. I think then I would also ask if these priorities feel right to all of you. And if anything on here maybe surprises you or just wasn't on your radar up until this point. And so seeing this information is bringing up something new. Jim. Well, I think the one thing I wanna address and I'm not saying this because I think that the commissions are not thinking about these issues but I noticed that only one commission kind of reflected on its composition and issues of equity. And I think that's partly because I see this being somewhat baked into the work being done by many of the commissions. So I don't think it's for lack of thought and attention. It's just isn't surfacing as something that needs to be critically reviewed by each commission and we didn't ask them to do that. So that's fine. But I think I wanna maybe just raise that that's happening and then maybe it signals how much weight we might end up being putting on this equity commission, equity director, equity audit that we're expecting a lot of that to happen in the city staff level. And just to flag I hope to the rest of the council that I think we should hopefully will continue to thread that into the commission work as well. So we're not relying solely on staff to do that that we support either this commission or the underlying that then again, I don't think that's because that's not being considered. I just wanna put that out there in words as well. So that we're thinking about that as we look at the commission's work plans. Jim, I'm glad you brought that up. I actually very recently had a conversation with Hal about this. And we had spoken at some point in the past about doing some, I don't know, some more workshopping or something some way to have commissions engage in that discussion. And I reading through this and hearing from you I do think that's something that I wanna bring back to have us discuss what we think that should look like at a future meeting here. That might be a good segue into what supports commissions mentioned that they were looking for. I do think that is one of the items that stood out to me but it seems like there's also some desire for a deeper understanding of the broader landscape. I think what we're doing now and bring this information back is helpful to do that but I would ask for each of you to think about more the commission that you are supporting reflect on like where do you see connections across commissions or with other work that they are not necessarily engaging in. And we can talk about where it's appropriate like maybe we have joint meetings or other collaboration across commissions. I know I'm reviewing my notes right here and I see quite a few areas of collaboration. The safe healthy and connected commission and finance commission are both talking about planning for TIF revenue. I think what you called out about weatherization earlier, Jim. I think a lot of the work that municipal infrastructure looks at with the planning commission they've talked about wanting a better way to know that policy that we have is producing the right outcomes. And I think some of like the more detailed project work that municipal infrastructure looks at can inform that. For example, around urban canopy planning or the sidewalk repairs and maintenance that because those conversations are happening in another area, folks are not, we're not, they're not hearing about it and wonder if we're making progress there. And I think that's definitely a call to each of us to do a better job of sharing back updates. So that reminds me in planning commission agendas the chair always asked me for a council update. I don't think that's officially happening in agendas but that might be something to consider for each commission that at the end of the meeting there is an update from the council liaison to say here's what else is being discussed that might be of interest to you. Go ahead, Jim. I'm wondering if I'm, as you were speaking I was thinking about how we could also try and communicate what other commissions are working on over the last month as well as part of that because our commission members may not be reading the commission updates from others, other commissions and maybe that's even just to say last month these were the agenda items so that you know that they've helped me talk about this or that many of the infrastructures spoke about that just to keep them in aware of what each other are doing as well as a council that could be a nice compliment as well. I think that is a great idea because we're sharing that with each other right here in these meetings, you know take a note of that and bring that back to your next meeting to say this is the other stuff that's happening. I am gonna make a note of some of these ideas and suggestions. So one thing that I did envision and maybe there's a better way to do this was but just sharing back this summary and the individual reports as a starting point so folks can read this if they wanna dig deeper, look at those and then maybe in your next meetings bring back this conversation and start doing some of that sharing of here's what else is happening. Are there any other needs that folks heard that we should think more about how to address? Amy? I would just say that I think in general Safe Healthy Connected is feeling a little overwhelmed by the sheer number of goals that they have compared to other focus areas. So I think they have 22, some only have eight or 10 and a lot of them are more in order for change to happen and a lot of them some sort of cultural shift has to happen in order for them to be accomplished. So things like food insecurity and healthcare. So I think from the meeting that we had they were just feeling a little bit overwhelmed by the gravity of some of these goals and wondering how they as a commission in Winooski can solve them. So not that I think we need to have an answer tonight but I just wanted to kind of put that out there because I think this commission is a little bit more unique than say municipal infrastructure where there's very tangible goals like we're gonna put a new sidewalk. I think that's a fair point and I think that is part of this improvement in communication that here are ways that we are as a city working towards addressing food insecurity and that they're happening without direct involvement of our commissioners. And I think similar to the example Heather raised earlier about leveraging zoning to incentivize and portable housing that the housing commission isn't responsible for that but it should be on their radar or they might support it in some way. So I think that is something that we can do better at is sharing like here's work that you can support versus where you're really more likely to spend your time. That's also been a challenge I would say with our finance commission and finding their footing where they can really be of service versus, there's some like broad economic development goals that they probably won't directly inform right away. Are there any questions from members of the public on this or comments? Jesse, you look like you might be. I just, I don't wanna give people a chance to speak but I would like to weigh in before you close this discussion. Yeah, yeah. Ready for that? Well, yeah. Are there any more questions? Please. Sure, I just wanna reflect back kind of a moment of privilege if I can. I think that I think most of you have heard me say this before but the city strategic vision and the master plan that you all have bought into and the community's bought into and spends hundreds of hours every year talking about and staff has a work plan aligned to. I think it's one of our real strategic advantages. I have never worked in a community before where there was such an articulated kind of shared goal and shared work plan. And I think it lets us move faster with a very small team than we would otherwise move. So I just wanna commend you for always kind of going back to that plan and checking in on it and making sure that we're all going in the same direction. I also wanna just acknowledge that this conversation you're having and the conversation you had with your commissions is really hard work, you know, taking an eight year plan and talking about what you're currently doing on it and what you're doing on it as essentially volunteers both council counselors and commissioners is really lofty and hard. And I think we do want, you know, we as staff are here to support you as council liaisons to these commissions, you know, really they're your policies advising commissions but if there's a way that your staff liaison can support you in doing this work, we are here for you but also wanna just call out that this is an eight year master plan and we're about a year and a half into it. So I don't want any of you or any of our commissioners to feel like, oh my gosh, we haven't solved food insecurity yet or, you know, rewritten our zoning. This is work that we will do together over many, many years. It's great to check in on it regularly but I really hope you celebrate you as counselors and the commissioners kind of celebrate the successes we have had very quickly in a year and a half because it's pretty impressive when you look at it in a big picture. And I would challenge any other community in Vermont a year and a half into their master plan to go look at their accomplishments and I bet we would win the number of things we've actually gotten done. So just wanted to frame that a little bit. Thank you. Thanks, Jesse. I did really gloss over the first part of this summary memo where all of our commissions feel like we are on track in making progress and touching on a lot of these goals. So that is worth calling out and that these volunteers of ours are really helping us work towards that vision. So I'm gonna summarize this discussion and put that in our next meeting just to document, you know, what we talked about here for all of you in a publicly accessible way. And if you have other ideas or questions individually feel free to reach out to me. Any other, this is a discussion item. Are there any other, you know, questions or things you would like to address before we move to our next item? All right. Well, thank you to commissioners and to council and staff liaisons for the work of taking the time to check in on this. And with that, we will move to item D. This is on for approval, a letter of support for 70 Main Street tax credit application that Heather will introduce. Yep. So pretty straightforward. I've received a request, a letter of support signed by the mayor, but approved by for an application that is being made for 70 Main Street, which is the former key bank building location as it is being transformed into four quarters new brewery and tap room. And the application is to the Vermont downtown program for code updates and facade improvements. It's for tax credits, one of the benefits that we get from having a designated downtown. So I bring that forward to ask your approval to support this project moving forward. Heather, are there any questions or concerns from council? Any questions or concerns from members of the public? All right, so hearing no concerns, I would entertain a motion to approve this letter of support for 70 Main Street tax credit application. So moved. Second. Motion by House, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, Heather. Thank you. We are moving on to item E, FY22 budget for public works and capital improvement plan, which John will be presenting for us. John, you're on mute. There you go. Sure, my screen quick. One sec. Can you all see that okay? Yeah. Okay. And can you hear me okay? I think Bernice- Yes. Basement, so. Great, I guess first off, I just wanna thank everyone for, you know, all the time that you guys have all spent reviewing the full budget. Our public works portion is just sort of one piece of the pie, but I know it's kind of a lot to digest. So I'm gonna be speaking at you for a little while, I think on this one, but let me, I'm sure I can get the slides going. Okay. So here's kind of what we'll be covering during the budget overview. First two items are discussing, ongoing public works initiatives and goals for the last season in this upcoming construction season. The remaining agenda is items that give an overview of the proposed FY22 operation of the budgets. And that's for public works, water and sewer enterprise funds. So we'll also be covering the entire general fund capital plan along with water, sewer and the parking funds. And, you know, all together, that basically covers about four and a half, $4.6 million of the $15.4 million budget. So pretty good chunk to get through this evening. So, and as the city manager mentioned at the general government presentation, there's no real big asks for this FY22 budget. Where a lot of what we're doing is continuing the work that we've been doing. So, you know, the large capital projects like Main Street and, you know, getting the operations of the Myers pool moving forward. So no major asks like previous capital plans. And also I just wanna, you know, if you guys have questions as I'm going through, just jump in and ask. I will also stop sort of at the end of each agenda item if in case anyone's holding any questions they wanna go through. So last season or this summer I should say the, you know, our goals were to kind of continue our infrastructure work with what's going on out in the world today. So, you know, we like everyone, we've sort of had to adapt and maintain services to keep moving ahead with our strategic vision goals. We also had to adjust to deliver projects that were already in progress. So this last season was pretty challenging for us, but you know, I think kind of going through accomplishments here overall we were pretty successful in wrapping up the last season's work. So we completed two of the relatively recently approved capital bond projects. So that being the Myers pool and the wastewater treatment plant headworks improvement project. And we're also more than halfway through complete with the Hickok Street reconstruction project, which is targeted to be finished next summer. So with those three projects, we've invested and completed approximately 5.9 million worth of improvements to the city's facilities and infrastructures. So we're pretty pleased with the progress given, you know, the COVID impacts of this season. We've also, you know, begun prioritizing staff time and resources towards sidewalk improvements and street tree planting, some strategic goal initiatives that we've discussed. And we'll talk about, you know, sidewalk capital planning more as we get an FY20 capital budget. And also I'd like to just call out that we've been sort of chipping away at some stormwater projects, some smaller ones. And really this is to set us up for our phosphorus control permit requirements. So the state has required that we have new phosphorus thresholds that we have to meet. And through these smaller kind of stormwater projects where we get some grant support, it's going to set us up so that we're not gonna see a major investment required to meet those thresholds. So we've had pretty good luck with obtaining those grants and just kind of, you know, getting some of those small projects out of the way. So for moving forward into next summer in FY20, we're looking basically to build on some of that previous capital project work. So, you know, Main Street is obviously the big one where we're gonna be spending a lot of time and resources. And, you know, we, like I said before, there's no big ass because we're continuing to move on with work that's already in progress. On this list, though, I do wanna highlight just a few things. So some new initiatives, I think most of you have kind of seen some of these before, but just to reiterate them. The treatment plant phosphorus permit update. So we will be getting a new state permit coming up in the next few months. So we're expecting, we're gonna see a reduced phosphorus threshold at the treatment plant, similar to the stormwater permit, but we don't expect any capital expense that will be coming up due to that. We pretty much think we can handle that with operational changes based on some sampling we've done already. So the other item sidewalks, you know, it's something we've discussed previously, but we're targeting to increase sidewalk replacement for next season. And then traffic calming policy. So this may have been brought up previously as well, but, you know, during this COVID outbreak, we received a lot of requests from residents this summer about traffic speed. I think a lot of that's driven by folks working from home, looking out their window and kind of observing what's going on outside on their street. So this is an initiative we'd like to move forward this winter with CCRPC. And basically what we're looking to do is prepare a policy of the outlines of process for reviewing some of these concerns and then looking at what potential options we have for implementation of traffic controls. So that's more of a administrative task that we'll be looking to start this winter. And then I think the other thing to highlight is VTrans projects. So they have, you know, a slate improvements coming our way starting next season. So we've continued to kind of coordinate with them on a few projects, but, you know, our main concern is we're trying to limit disruptions to the public and the community and especially our local businesses. So that's going to be a major task for us this upcoming season and then FY22. So starting to get into operations budget. This is our org chart. So no new requests for this year. In total, we've got 16 full-time employees. As shown, you know, director myself, two division managers for streets and water resources. And then the city engineer to kind of cover and focus on project development and implementation. And then on the field crew side, we have seven staff assigned primarily to streets and grounds and facility maintenance. One fleet manager that functions as a mechanic. So he keeps our fleet operational and two wastewater treatment plant operators along with two water resource staff that maintain our distribution system for water sewer and storm water system. So kind of starting to jump into operational numbers. I'm not going to go into every line item like last year. I think that killed everyone. Start going through those and it's kind of a weird presentation to do remotely. So we're going to keep it sort of high level. But you can find obviously all those line ends on page 44 through 46 in the budget book. So for FY 22, we're looking at a proposed budget of 1.358 million approximately. So pretty close to what we spent last year for operations. And in general, we're looking at level service funding for our public works operation. I do just want to call out that the percentage breakdown by categories, so you can kind of see not surprising 56% of our budget is salaries which equates to approximately 754,000. And then materials and equipment is the next highest at 22% or approximately 200K. So it's tough. Those two items really aren't that flexible without major changes. But that's a general makeup of our operations budget. And I'll get into some highlights. So as I mentioned, level service funding for FY 22, no major changes from FY 21. And if really, if anything, we're kind of pulling back a little bit from some costs. So for example, like the RPC work planning grant that we usually submit for, we have not budgeted for that this season just because we're gonna have our hands pre-full with the Main Street project, for example. But that's one of those things if there is a grant match that we're really interested in doing potentially coming to you as a fund balance request, if that makes sense. So again, that's pretty high level operations budget. So I'm gonna stop there and pause and see if you have any questions on public works operations side. Okay, keep going. So the fun stuff, capital. So similar to operation budget, I won't be going into every expense detail but those can all be found on page 49 through 76 in the budget book, the next slide. So as you know, the general fund capital plan covers really all general fund departments. So that's police, fire, parks. So it's not just a public works capital plan. And just as a reminder, what are capital assets? So anything with a useful life more in three years and then it has to meet that cost criteria per category to be eligible as a capital project. And that's per city capital policy. Again, just kind of jumping right into the numbers. So total budget for FY 22 capital is $1,03,741. And then below that, you can kind of see the revenue source breakdown. So the escalating funds that goes up by 5% every year, then there's that level 70,335 that stays flat annually. And then the big increase from FY 19, the almost the $458,200 amount, that is those are funds that were designated for Main Street in the pool. And FY 19 is from partial funds from local option tax revenue and the FY 19 property tax rate increase. And then I just noted here that you'll also see in the capital plan, an additional 582,000 from TIF funding for the Main Street project capital construction costs. So that's consistent with what we've been modeling for that project. So next getting into sort of the debt, that side of the capital plan. So these are equipment projects improvements that we have to finance because of a large upfront cost. So it's, you know, you start off with a million dollars and it's like, wow, we've got all this money for capital, but then half of that's already gone. We've got a half a million dollars in existing debt currently. And you can find that breakdown on page 52, but as you'll see, half of that, half a million is the Myers pool construction debt. So for FY 22, what we're proposing is 89,700 in new debt. That includes sidewalk plow replacement. That's a 2012 sidewalk plow that unfortunately we've had a lot of mechanical issues with it and, you know, we've had some level service problems last winter trying to keep that plow running to keep the sidewalks clear. So that's a piece of equipment we're looking to have replaced for plowing operations. And that, and I should say that piece of equipment is about $150,000. So the 39,900 is what a four year annual cost would be for that piece of equipment. And then the second item would be the Main Street Revitalization Project, so 49,800. That would be, that's our estimate of a first payment, first interest payment on a capital project. We'll get into that more when we do the Main Street update to talk about schedule, but that's sort of a placeholder because if, you know, if we don't move into construction that that's from that dedicated FY19 funds that would just push into Main Street dedicated reserve fund but we're just calling it out as a potential placeholder, you know if we're moving into construction. And I will say that also, yep, go ahead. Sorry, John, I was gonna ask for the 99,000 new debt. Does this, this is new, new, like it's not replacing debt that has rolled off. It's completely additional. There's some debt that has retired this year, but so the money that's been or the money that's raised, the million dollars it's out of that pot. So we're not requesting additional funding for capital. It's just part of that million that's already programmed. It could you remind me what's the 5% escalation amount is? Did you have that number? I don't. Does Angela know it off the top of her head? Sure she does. I think I have it. I think it's in about my, it's approximately 22,000 a year. So it's not on the full million. It's only on the base amount that was approved by voters before I started with the city. It didn't know funds that we've added to the capital plan for Main Street and Pool are not escalating by 5% a year. Okay. Thank you. That was it. You can, you can get back to it, John. Thank you. Okay. So that kind of moves us on to, while sticking with that service, I just wanted to call out some changes in the format this year. So for each of these capital projects, we do a project sheet, basically a one pager with any attachments that support the project. This year we changed it up a little bit in that you'll see on the right hand column, this is the one we're showing is the one for the sidewalk plow. We've also added some review criteria. So the thought is, as we get potentially more projects or if TIF funding comes into play and we wanna start ranking these projects or we wanna get the finance commission more involved with ranking projects, we have a criteria now to help with that. And you'll see a lot of the questions, they refer back to the master plan. They talk about what safety improvements they make or what service delivery improvements and we do have a rubric sort of behind the scenes that we can use to rank these. So this is the first year we did a, I did a rough internal ranking just to see where projects kinda, we didn't have any competing projects or projects that were like, ah, we're gonna drop this one off. So it didn't actually come into play this year but I do see it coming in handy probably in next couple of budget cycles. So onto the expense side. So these are the non-financed capital costs. So these are like smaller pieces of equipment, smaller projects that we can, just pay cash for or not finance. So after all the debt service including the proposed debt service, we have roughly $327,000, $20 to fund capital expense projects. And typically that involves, pavement resurfacing, that's usually our biggest cost there. So this is the list of nine projects that we have for capital expenses for FY22. As you'll see the big one is street resurfacing. I'm gonna talk a little bit more about the street resurfacing and sidewalk replacement in the next few slides. But I'll just quickly highlight these projects so you know what they are. So the RRFB installation, that stands for rectangular rapid flash beacons. So those are the signals like the circle. We're proposing to install those at the East Allen Manso Street crosswalk. So that's that new refuge island crosswalk that'll provide better visibility, better pedestrian accommodation for that area. The pedestrian signal upgrades. So that is an existing traffic signal at East Allen and Abanaki way that those pet signals really need to be updated to meet ADA standards. So new heads and they would also include the sound actuated push button modules. So someone who had hearing impairment they could use that or blindness could use that and have a little bit easier access to that crosswalk. The annual PD vehicle replacement. So that is for two vehicles this year. So that's one patrol vehicle and one admin vehicle. And included in that sort of project sheet you'll see the schedule replacements. So you'll see their entire fleet and how their replacements sort of vehicle replacement cycles over. And then the OCC, the O'Brien Community Center HVAC improvements. That is mainly funding that will go towards future HVAC replacement. So we own three air handling units down there. Two of them are pretty tough shape. So we're trying to build that reserve up so that if we do have an issue with one of those in the future, we have funding set aside to replace it. Yep. And then we just do an HVAC upgraded O'Brien in the last year or so. So we did a control update which basically allows us to better regulate the temperature and it replaced some of the internal diffusers and things like that. But it didn't update any of the actual air handling equipment. Okay. Yeah. Fire Department HVAC improvements. This is actually an ongoing project. So we replaced the heating system with one of the boiler systems this summer. This will add basically an AC unit onto that. And then the last two kind of smaller projects, the DPW, we have a heated pressure wash system for we specifically use it for wintertime operations, spraying off trucks with salt and things like that. So it basically keeps temperature warm so that we can clean trucks. And then the last one, the Rotary Park Fence Extension. So during the summer, we put up fencing, take it down, put it up, take it down for events. This would install new permanent fencing in those locations to match the existing fencing. Do we, sorry to interrupt you. Oh, maybe get through those next to it. I was gonna say we could do a pause for questions from the public. Yeah, I can get through the next tool, wrap up capital. Oh, great. Let's do that. And then we'll see if we have questions from public. Okay. Yep. So as mentioned, street resurfacing and sidewalks, I just wanted to spend a little more time on those. So for next season, we're looking at the streets shown on the sketch, which they're kind of outlined in the yellow dash. So that's Hood Street, part of Bellevue, part of Dion. And then Kick-Ock Street, which is part of the reconstruction project. So we'll have quite a bit of paving work next year. One thing I just wanna note though is that, so we do an inspection every year of what the pavement condition index is, which basically tells us, is our pavement degrading too fast? How are we doing with our pavement program? So we do it on a two year cycle, typically. This season, the weighted average was 65, which isn't great. We're trying to target at 72 based on infrastructure commission feedback. So we are seeing sort of a steady decline even though we've been increasing our funding for paving work. So I think our goal is next few budget cycles to come to you with some options to look at paving improvements. We'll also see how potentially the Main Street with Heck-Ock Street. And we may see that some of those other pavements aren't degrading as slow as we're predicting. So we may see that number creep up, but just something to call out, it's something we pay attention to for our paving program. So, and on the sketch, it's a little clear on the budget book, but the colors do correlate to the pavement condition. So red is terrible, it's failed. The purplish is poor, blue is fair, and then gold is, or green is in good condition. So that's what the colors sort of represent here. And then sidewalks. So in the capital plan budget, it's shown that we have 10,900 for sidewalk replacement, but that doesn't really reflect the amount of work that we're looking to do next season. So we, in total, we're looking to replace 4,700 linear feet of sidewalk. And that's shown here on the sketch as well, kind of dashed in yellow. A lot of that work's gonna be done on Heck-Ock Street as part of the reconstruction project, the debt portion of the capital funding. And then our DPW crews, we have the skill set in-house to do a lot of that replacement work. And we did quite a bit more than we typically do this past summer to kind of get ready for that. And so next year, we're targeting Reginald, Bernard, and Gale Street, where we've got some pretty poor sidewalk conditions up there. So a lot of that work's gonna be done by our DPW crew and that 10,900 is mainly material and some contract work for the 88 Kerr Brands. So in reality, we're looking at more like $192,000 in sidewalk work next year with Heck-Ock Street. And that doesn't include our DPW labor. So that's gonna be probably one of the larger sidewalk projects we've done in a while. And that will address about 50% of our poor sidewalk condition in the city. So our plan is to, with these local streets, our DPW crews can do that in-house and effectively save quite a bit because contracted out sidewalk work is fairly expensive. So in this example with Reginald, Bernard, and Gale Street, that's our crews doing that as roughly a $69,000 savings. So that's why I wanted to make note of that because it doesn't come across really well in the capital expense line, you see 10,900, but that's really for some materials and a bit of contract work. So now with that, that's kinda the end of the capital general fund piece. Mike, I see your hands raised. Let me unmute myself. I'm excited about the sidewalks and I think a lot of residents will be too, especially up in that area. I think those sidewalks are probably some of the original sidewalks. And I wanna say they must date back 60 to 70 years, I'm sure. Just by the one inch curb they have, I haven't seen those curbs in a long time. So I think the residents, that would be a win for our residents. And I understand it's one of the biggest sidewalk replacements we've done in a long time, but I think that's great that it's in this plan. Thank you, John. I have a question about the snow plow. Now, the snow plow that we got, was it new back in 2012? Yes, yep. Okay, so what's the plan for that? Are we keeping that as a reserve? Are we gonna trade that in or sell it outright? So we'll sell it. I mean, these plows are really expensive. I mean, 50 grand for a plow. So I could see another misspality or even a contractor looking to have a reserve plow on hand. And then that funding could help either support the new plow or just go back into the fleet capital reserve for future purchases. Okay, that was my question. I was like, do we have a plan for that yet? I know you did, but I wanted to hear it. And then the resurfacing budget. Now, trying to figure out some of the roadways that have been complained about West Spring Street and East Allen Street, do you have an answer for that problem, especially the intersection I think of Russell or Franklin and West Spring Street? That those sections are in really terrible shape. And I'm just trying to figure out if there's room in the budget to accommodate those areas. I think you mean East Spring, Mike? East Spring, okay. Yeah, okay. Yes, you're right, I'm sorry. East Spring is a little tricky because that's one where we would like to install sidewalk potentially. So we wanna have a plan for that before we resurface because if we resurface and don't do the sidewalk and curbing work, we're probably not gonna touch that for the next 15 years, hopefully. So I think we wanna understand if we can fit that in but in the meantime, we can do some temporary, more permit patches. There's a section there where it's, there's quite a few potholes, but it's localized because there's trees and it's not drying out very good. So I think in the interim, we can do like permit patching and then try to push that sidewalk design along. So we don't wanna miss that opportunity. We've heard that quite a bit from residents in there and it's in our transportation master plan. So I think we can probably only give it another year or so before we have to look at surfacing. And with East Spring, the other piece of that is it's a class two V-trans road. So that's one where we would look for V-trans funding to help support that paving. Is that East Allen Street? Do you mean? No, so East Allen's getting resurfaced not this summer, but the summer after V-trans. So that's one of those projects we're gonna be coordinating with them on. And that's supposedly going out to bid next year about this time. Okay. But East Spring is also class two, isn't it? East Spring is class two. Yeah, East Allen is class one. Yes. Okay. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to wear a mouth guard going down East Spring Street by the Russell Street area. It's terrible. And I know I get when I see local people out walking or out in the summertime, that's one of the first questions they ask is about the roads and especially in that area. Thanks, John. John, I know you mentioned with the resurfacing work that despite increasing investment, we are still falling behind on upkeeping our roads to the desired level. I just wanted to share that. I think it would be useful in a future meeting to see what would it cost? Like what do you really think it would cost to keep us at the right level of ability to maintain these road surfaces? I think that's something that we should be considering later down the road when we're talking about like TIF planning and other revenues. So I would be interested to see that. Yeah, and we've started some of that modeling. So that's something we could definitely put together pretty easily. I would go even there, push back on what's really relevant here. When I think about conversations we've had about TIF planning and mitigating increasing costs for residents, I think that fits in. I think maybe what does it look like to plan out to fill our sidewalk gaps or some of those other transportation master plan items as well as our fleet cycling, what that looks like. What would it look like to have a debt level that we can roll over to keep up with these items and instead of adding new debt incrementally, that's something I would be interested in in the future. And it may be dollar amounts that are not achievable but at least looking into it. Other, Jim? And this is a minor one. And first of all, I do like the updates to the sheet and I appreciate you calling out more explicitly the sidewalk component because I definitely like that as a mismatch between perception, the level of work that we're doing. So thank you for making that clear. This one's really small on the Rotary Park fence extension. I guess I haven't taken where the proposed location is and cross that with the Parks and Open Space Master Plan but just guess I wanted to ask, is that compatible with what has been approved there for potential future infrastructure or are we building something that'll get moved in the next couple of years or decade? Yeah, that's a good point, Jim. I know, and I will talk to Ray about this a little further because I know there was some discussion about the Parks Open Space Plan that potentially relocate some flag poles and obviously make that front sort of entry into the park more prominent. But that front piece is not where we're proposing to put the fencing. But we'll, I'll make sure to coordinate with Ray so that it doesn't impede anything that's in the Open Space Master Plan. Thanks. Mike, is that you again? Yes. It is, I got a minor question to the new reflective pedestrian signs that have the flashing lights. Do you plan on building a maintenance budget and for those, because I know we've had a hard time with those in the past down at Rotary Park and by Dion Street, I believe, by the housing unit there, how they tend to break down and just keep flashing because once, if they keep flashing, they don't really do their jobs. People get used to seeing them flash. Do you have a plan for that, John? Yeah, we do have an operation budget for that. It's in that traffic signals operation line. So the one issue on, down we talked about, that was like an anomaly where there was a facility that was giving off a signal that was basically flashing that particular RFB. So we did get that one kind of sorted away. It took us a little bit to figure out what the issue was, but it wasn't necessarily an equipment mechanical issue. It was interference. So it was a little weird. And the only issue we've had at the Rotary was somebody hitting it, unfortunately. That unit's been pretty reliable. And actually the one on East Island was relocated. So that's the older RFB that we have. But yeah, it's something we do budget foreign operations to make, we assume at least one or two calls of something that's going on with those. Perfect. Thank you. Yeah. So I had seen a hand raise from members of the public. Is there a question? I didn't catch who it was though. Okay, maybe we answered it back over to you, John. Okay, so onto the waterfront. So no major changes for FY 22. Again, the operation lines are on page 78 through 90. We'll go through each one, but highlights are level funded, no new capital requests for FY 22. We're done with capital on the waterfront for a while. And then we are looking to continue that stepped rate increase that we've sort of reviewed previously to get us away from using reserve funds to balance the budget. So again, jumping right in the numbers. So what we're proposing for FY 22 is a 3% rate increase. So that would increase our rate from, currently it's $40.63 to $42.09 per 1,000 cubic feet. That will give us an estimated revenue of 866,835. So we're still gonna have a bit of a shortfall with the budget. So we'd have to pull roughly 25,142 is our estimate from reserves to balance that budget. But what we're proposing is FY 23, similar increase at say 3.7%, that will balance the budget. So the intent would be to next year's budget, get this one, get this budget. So we're finally balanced, we're paying for operations and capital. And just for reference, that rate increase on a typical household 2,200 cubic feet per quarter usage. It's about a $13 addition per year. So sometimes that 3.6 sounds a little scary when you're thinking about property taxes. You know, water rates, it's not as severe, but it is an increase for next year. Just to go through operation costs a little bit and capital. So, you know, as you'll kind of, one of the highlights is, the majority of our costs here are actually just purchasing water from Champlain Water District. So that's 53% of our costs. That's about 443,000 out of our budget is just bulk treated water purchase. So we don't have a lot of flexibility there. And then really where we do have a little bit of flexibility is at 13% of costs where we're materials and contracts and things like that. Within that 13%, too, is any contract work for water main breaks. So that's usually the big, you know, unexpected factor. So we did budget for, I think, three water main breaks this year. So fingers crossed, maybe things will go. Knock on the wood, John. Yeah, I know, but that's pretty typical. And, you know, a little conservative from what we've had in previous years. So, and then getting into sort of the capital. Capital is pretty simple on the waterfront side. So we currently have $70,054 in capital debt expenses. So kind of see the breakdown of what those projects are below. Hickok Street is landing on the FY22 capital debt. So that's included in there. And then the only proposed capital debt would be the Main Street project. And that would likely occur towards the end of that project because it is USDA finance. So they finance a little differently where they close on the project, you know, at the end. So that would be more towards potentially FY25. So that's actually the waterfront. So I'll just pause there. If there's any questions. Helen. Sure, thank you, Mayor. So John, with regards to the increase and the rate of increase, how does that compare to local towns and cities? Yeah, that's a good point, Hal. So we're kind of middle of the pack, I would say, with other surrounding communities. The nice thing is Champlain Water District, they serve obviously a lot of the communities around us. So based on information, what other Miss Pelley's are charging. So yeah, right now we're the last I looked with this number about middle. And I can provide like what other towns are paying if that's helpful. Thank you. Yep. Reminder, if there are questions from the members of the public, you can raise hands or chat. Not seeing any additional questions from Council or the public at this time. Okay, I will move on to the sewer front. So similar situation would be as a waterfront. So we've been relying on the reserve fund to balance this budget. However, sewer fund is much larger because we do have the wastewater treatment plant and we've got some, you know, pretty expensive maintenance equipment pieces like our vector truck that we have to roll into our capital fund. So for the sewer fund in FY 22, we're proposing a 5.5% rate increase. That's up from $52.03 from FY 21. But what that effectively does is it finally balances our sewer fund budget. And, you know, one of the concerns on the sewer fund side is that with some of these capital projects, some of the revenues that we've seen are unrestricted reserve balance is getting quite low. So under a thousand bucks as of June. I mean, and I would like to see that more in the 10% range just to give us some flexibility if there is something that comes up unexpectedly. So we're really getting to the bottom of our reserve there. We do have a total reserve fund of almost a half a million dollars, but that's pretty well restricted to projects that add capacity to the plant. So, you know, that in theory can be used to balance the budget. So that's why we're kind of upping our timeline this year to really get the project, get the balance, get the sewer fund balance, so that we can kind of move ahead and start actually planning capital needs and rebuild our reserve budget. So that, just to give you, again, a frame of reference that for a sort of typical household is a $25 annual cost increase from last year. Again, here's sort of the operational overview. So, you know, mainly salary and benefits. And I'm sure you all know this, but this, our sewer fund includes stormwater. So it's, you know, the tree on plant and sanitary sewer system plus the stormwater distribution system. And, you know, we are seeing that stormwater expense side kind of creep up with some of the additional permitting requirements that we're seeing come from the state, like phosphorus control. I talked about some of the smaller projects that we've taken on to basically meet those phosphorus limits, but we are seeing, you know, with additional regulations, some of the storm sewer side kind of, you know, creeping up percentage-wise on the breakdown between sanitary and stormwater. The other just highlight is we do a large expense for the treatment plant is handling biosolids from treatment plant, basically the leftover material that we need to take to a landfill. So we, you know, we coordinate with Burlington, they have facilities to basically dry that material and then it gets trucked to a landfill, but that's 16% of our sewer fund cost is handling biosolids. So, and that gets us into sort of the capital expenses. So this is where you'll see, you know, much higher than water funds. We're existing capital debt 201,084 and below is the breakdown of, you know, where those costs come from. So, you know, the head work project that just was completed, that's new debt, but that did replace some old retiring debt from some clarifiers of the treatment plant. So it was sort of a net loss there. And then distribution replacement with West Canal, Hickox Street will be likely starting debt payments in FY22 for the work that's going on right now. And then street sweepers out of the sewer fund budget. So no immediately new debt for FY22. The only proposed debts would be, again, Main Street looking at FY25-ish with USDA loan financing. So that's the last, yeah. And that is, oops, I'll pause there for sewer funds. Amy. Thank you. You said that the bio solids account for 16% of the pie chart on that previous page. And I'm just, I don't really have much of a frame of reference for this. So I'm just curious, is that a lot for a city's budget to be comprised of 16% of that? And if so, have we thought about any sort of educational approaches to reach out to the public? Is there anything that they can be doing to help reduce that number? Yeah, so that, yeah, it's a good question. It's one we're thinking about if there's ways that we can somehow reduce that cost. So it's about $150,000 annually to handle those. It is pretty, unfortunately, it's pretty typical for plants like us that don't have the equipment to dewater and trucking is sort of a separate cost. But one way that we've, unfortunately, the one way that we've seen that we could potentially reduce that cost is capital investment, which we're not in a place right now to look at additional capital investments, but installing a piece of equipment to reduce the amount of moisture in that material so that we're not trucking this really wet bio solids where we're basically reducing the water content in it. So that's one thing we're looking at. There's not really, unfortunately, a public outreach piece to help with that, but there may be some ways that we can in the future look at options to bring that number down and be a little bit more self-reliant. Mike? So, John, with this, with the 5, is it 5.5% raise in the price? Is this a healthy growth to help with the expanding development in the city of Winooski with the commercial properties and the commercial residential properties, the breweries? Are we kind of starting to look ahead a little bit? Because I know that you said the reserves are down. Any, any interest to that? Yeah, so I mean, our thought is that we started looking at the proposed development that's coming online and looking at some estimates on what kind of additional flows they're going to be sending down to the plant. Domestic flows mainly. So that will help buffer the rate increase with those additional users. And plan-wise, we do have the capacity to deal with that additional flow. So there's no concern about needing some big capital expansion anytime soon. In that revenue projection for FY22, we do include the added revenue from four quarters brewery, for example. They are, as you know, we pass the industrial wastewater rate structure. They're paying a premium because their waste strength is so much higher. You know, that's great because that does help buffer sort of the domestic users. Those folks are gonna be paying their fair share a little bit. You know, unfortunately, we can't take on a whole bunch of those because then they'll eat up the plant capacity pretty quick, you know, but, you know, so we are looking at some of the other folks that are currently in town that they may have some industrial waste level like effluent. We haven't modeled that in the current revenue. So again, that would help buffer any future increases down the road. Thanks, John. Yeah. In a similar vein, I know that we discussed this last year and stepping up the rate for a couple of years to balance these budgets. So when you're saying that this increase does get us putting money back into reserves here, next year in the water fund, we should be balancing that. Does that put us then in a position where we would see just like regular inflation occurring here in cost of living increase versus larger increases? Yeah, definitely. I mean, that's the plan. Like we do wanna see sort of the regular, similar property tax, 1%, 2%, 3%, or maybe there's, you know, a project that we're trying to ramp up for in the future. So we may increase that a little bit more, but the intention would be to have typical like two or 3% adjustments down the road. I think with that too, we want to sort of build the water and sewer funds similar to the general fund where we're starting to build an actual capital plan because we do, at least on the water side, those distribution lines, you know, there's some hundred-year-old lines within the city. A lot of the distribution lines are beyond their engineering useful life. So we wanna sort of prepare ourselves for those replacements that are upcoming. So yeah, I think twofold, it would be incremental rate increases and trying to build up those reserves to actually have a functioning capital plan for, you know, so we can actually start planning water being replacements and, you know, sewer main replacements as needed. Thanks, Sean. Are there some questions on water sewer? I see, John, do you see that question in the chat? Trying to find it, sorry. This is from Bryn, this might be broader, a broader question than just this. I guess Bryn is what you're looking for, not an overall. So we have our general fund. We're looking at public works right now. I think community services is our next meeting. You're looking for like, what are the rate increases by each department versus just the general overall tax rate increase? Hi, this is Bryn. Exactly, just department by department because that seems like the way that the budget being reviewed right now. So how much would be considered critical increases to cover capital projects versus other aspects that would attribute to essentially smart planning for future anticipated projects? It's a good question, you know, we have the, we do have the tax rate impact in our general fund overview. And then John included those water and sewer ones. I think I would need to reflect and Jesse, maybe you have a response here on the critical versus smart planning. I will pass it to you. So the best summary that exists in the budget right now for the impact on taxpayers is my memo that is the first document in the FY22 budget. If you go to when you see BT.gov but backslash FY22, it's the city manager memo and it describes the tax rate impact in the general fund to an average property taxpayer and the water and wastewater. It's a couple of pages long. So it's not a one-pager, but it's the best overall summary. If the council is interested in a one-pager, we can certainly do that. In terms of critical versus smart planning, I think that's hard to unpack because I think that the, we think smart planning is critical. We're trying to, part of the reason these rate increases as the council remembers are higher than we would like right now is we had about seven or eight years with no tax rate or no water and wastewater rate increase. So we're really trying to catch up from about seven years of lack of that incremental growth. What I've heard the council be interested in in the past is that incremental planned approach to fiscal responsibility, not just funding what you immediately need in that year, which potentially could push off a problem to a future year. But if the council like to give us different guidance on that, we're happy to put that together. That's very helpful. Thank you. Thanks, Ben. I don't see any additional questions. So last fund parking, this is just the capital. So the, you can refer to page 88 that has the breakdown of those capital funds. So we're talking about the on-street parking, the cascade garage and the original presentation did not include the Abeneki garage. So that is also added in here. You know, fairly simple this year, on-street parking, we really don't have the revenue to support any capital work this year due to COVID impacts. So no capital there. And we've, on the existing cascade garage, we have sort of reduced revenue this year. So more scaled down capital work at the cascade garage. So cascade, we're looking at 103,319 available for capital expenses. So we are looking to spend 156,652. And that's utilizing 53,000 in designated funds we have for structural repairs. So a lot of that's just previous structural repair work. We've had some leftover funds there. So we're looking to use those for FY 22. And those annual structural repairs are, you know, basically we're looking at concrete fixes, membrane repairs, you know, pretty standard projects for the existing garage. And then, yeah, sorry to break that down even further, 136,552 for the structural repairs. And then 26,000 we're programming for a replacement for the existing car charging stations in the garage. We've been trying to fix that thing for about a year. The existing one that's there, it's a fast charging Mitsubishi unit. And we've had no luck. So we've been actually working with the EIC and looking at grant options. So those are the two projects we're looking to move forward with for FY 22. And then on the Abinacke garage, much more to come, but PG-86 and 103 kind of go through the funds for this project, but Jesse and Heather can probably provide more info. We'll be coming to council with letter documents for review in the coming weeks, coming months. So the point here is that, you know, we have that $9.7 million bond authorization that we've been buying down the debt on with different grant opportunities and the debt service on the balance of that, assuming we start construction this spring or summer is built into the capital budget. Yeah, and then just to kind of wrap up. So emerging issues, most of these I've kind of covered. The last two are ones that, you know, we haven't talked about, but, you know, future gateway corridor planning, specifically thinking about East Allen with all the new development that's happening there and, you know, looking at how we make that corridor fits the zoning at this point. So, you know, part of that's working with VTrans on some, with the temporary paving work that or the paving project they're doing by accommodating some of those temporary pavement markings and lane reductions that were in the corridor plan. And then the other item is looking at the Winooski Burlington Bridge funding opportunities. So we're going to be reaching out to CCRPC and looking at VTrans to look at how we can start looking for funding opportunities for that project in the future. So those are two items we didn't really cover in the budget. Yeah, and with that, I just want to say thank you. Thank you for sitting through this, talking about infrastructure for a while now. And then, you know, thanks to leadership because they really did a lot of work on the planning side of the capital project. And then, of course, our DPW team, and special thanks to, you know, Ryan, Joe, and John who do a ton of work every day and appreciate their leadership and knowledge. So with that, any questions? Mike. I got a quick question about the Burlington Winooski Bridge. I don't know if you'd correct me if I'm wrong. Is that the only municipal-owned bridge in their state? I don't know about that. I mean, we own the city of the two bridges, Weaver Street and Main Street, those are ours, much smaller, obviously. But yeah, it's a weird one. I don't know the whole history of, you know, how that became ours in Burlington's, but... Because I'd be curious if there's any room to look into having this not-making ask-in or trying to devise a plan to have the speed trans or the state take over that bridge. If there's any leeway on that, because it does do... I mean, it serves two communities, you know, over a major waterway, and it's a main artery into Burlington. There might be some opportunity there to try to save the taxpayers of Winooski that burden. Yeah, it's a good point, Mike. I know we've definitely floated it with V-Trans quite a few times in that scoping study. Jesse, I don't know if you have any further backgrounds on the bridge. So what I've heard before, Mike, although I don't think I can be quoted on this, is that it's the only municipal-owned class on highway that spans two communities. So that's the link between two communities. I have tried to give it back to the state a number of times, and it doesn't seem to be any much interest. But I do want to say that the planning, especially led by CCRPC on this bridge project, has always envisioned a partnership between state funding, federal funding, and a small local match. So I think the state... Everything I've heard is that the state and feds understand that this is a critical transportation pass for many more people than just the Winooski residents, and there is going to have to be funding partnerships to get this work done. Okay, because who was responsible for the concrete work on the sidewalk? Was that the City of Winooski on the rails? Yep, so that was, well, both us and Burlington. Okay. Through a V-Trans grant. So the story that was paid for by V-Trans through a structures grant. Okay. Yeah, and just to, you know, what we're thinking for the future is, is probably a really great candidate for a federal build grant. Those seem to be the type of projects that they like to go for as these interconnected community like bridge projects. So that's one thing we're pursuing now with RBC, if, you know, if they're willing to reach out to V-Trans to try to get that ball rolling for the next application round. Perfect. I think we have an ace in the hole. We should get an individual on that grant writing. Heather. Other questions for John? Jim. I'm jumping back to the original presentation on operations, but I just wanted to ask for an update on the ADA transition plan that you identified as something that's going to be in, I'm glad to see that coming back into the priority mix, because I know we talked about it two years ago. And I'm just curious what the outputs of that will look like and how you might inform, probably not this, I won't inform this budget, but how it'll inform the next round of budgeting for capital improvements or ADA transition planning. Yeah, and actually I should have included that as one of the highlights with the traffic calming. So we've also reached out to RBC to help us begin that process with the ADA transition plan. So sort of the first step is to go out and review all infrastructure in the city that is, you know, potentially non-compliant with the ADA standards. So Kerberamps, for example, like do they have detectable warning? Do they have the correct slopes? So that would be sort of the first step is inventory of those. And then we would put together a schedule of replacement. So, you know, how are we going to get all this infrastructure up to ADA compliance? What's the timeframe and what's the cost? So that's sort of the output. So that will definitely impact future budgeting because, you know, typically that work is going to be coordinated with whatever paving we're doing that year, whatever sidewalk replacement. So it'll be interlinked with that other work that we do, but that's the output. But yeah, thanks for bringing that up, Jim. I should have included that. So we might see some ideas of when those adjustments could start being made in FY23 budget. Yeah, so our intention is to start basically working on that same time as the traffic coming study. So, but I don't, I haven't talked RPC of like what the timeframe is to actually have a document ready for you guys to look at. But yeah, FY23 would be the most reasonable. Mike. I got just got a comment, John. I want to thank you and your team of keeping our city infrastructure moving forward. Even during the winter months when the water mains break, I think your team does a great job. And I don't know, I'm sure they get their backs padded but I want them to know that I want to thank them as the city council for doing what they do to keep our city going. Thanks, Mike. Let's call for questions on public works and capital improvement plans. All right, thanks, John. And please stick with us for item F, Main Street Violation Update. Not done yet. Yep, so this is our quarterly check-in for the Main Street project. We're not asking for any council items tonight. This is just sort of a progress update. In the packet, I provided sort of an outline of details of what we were reviewing. So one progress set in September when we last chatted, 90% documents that we've posted on the webpage. I'll talk more about that. Cost estimate update, schedule update and sort of next steps for our next quarterly check-in. Just to give you sort of a high-level summary, we've made pretty good progress on the tasks we laid out in September. We've uploaded the consultant teams draft 90% drawing set. So take a look at that. And if you have any feedback, let us know. We're sort of just entering the 90% document phase. So plenty of time to get any of your comments in. I will just note that, you know, a lot of the surface transportation work, you're not gonna see really much of a difference from the 60% documents. A lot of the work is still coordinating a lot of the underground utility work, water sewer, private utilities. No real updates on the cost estimate currently. So not, again, not a lot has changed on the sort of general funds, non-private utility scope. But we are waiting an estimate from Green Mountain Power on the electrical utility undergrounding. So we do expect that cost estimate will change and we'll pass that along as soon as we have that available. So no indication of it, you know, lower or higher, but it will be refined. And then schedule, that's probably the biggest change. So based on the sort of the current pace of the design phase right now and just outside agency responses and, you know, getting some additional feedback from our consultant on remaining design tasks, we do expect that the remaining design schedule is gonna be delayed from what we provided in September. So just kind of go through the milestones of, you know, where we think the schedule is gonna land. 90% document completion. These are sort of final drawings before we go into construction documents. Right now we're targeting February, March for that completion. Previously we were targeting January. The right-of-way process, which that is when we, the city goes to the public, basically the property owners along the corridor and ask for temporary easements for construction or permanent easements for, you know, utility pads that are gonna be on their property line. That was previously estimated to be completed in March. We are currently estimating that will be completed in June. So that's assuming a six-month timeframe starting in January. So VHB will be providing the city with right-of-way drawings in January and then we will be basically going to all the property owners that are impacted or we're requesting easements from to start that negotiation. So six months, that is a critical path item. So we're gonna see how that goes. That's really gonna impact how the schedule moves forward by the next update that we have with you guys in March. We should be, you know, ideally halfway through that process based on our current schedule. So we'll have a pretty good sense of, you know, where we're at in the right-of-way process. But that's always one of those critical path items that we have to go through in order to bid documents. So once, you know, once that is complete, then we can go to construction documents, which now are targeting July, August. And then ultimately construction, award and start, that is right now looking like more like fall of 2021 versus, you know, we were thinking more of like summer next year. So just wanna kind of set some expectations on where the project is right now. And, you know, there is a pretty good chance that, you know, we may not be able to get to construction next season, given that we have a lot of long lead items that we would have to get through in order to even get to construction. So for example, you know, if we're awarding in the fall, we still have to work out a traffic control plan with the contractor that was awarded. That's gonna take, you know, some time given the corridor. So just wanna be fully transparent. That's kind of how the schedule is laying out right now. That really, you know, we've talked to our funding partners, USDA, BTRANS, SRF. There's really no concern on the funding side, but I know that, you know, the perception is we would be starting construction next summer. So that's probably the biggest update for this check-in. But I do wanna kind of go through like what we're thinking as far as next steps for our March meeting as well. So the next steps for March, we would finalize 90% documents. We would be updating utility undergrounding and service connection cost estimate. We'd also be initiating those GMP underground cost share discussions now that we would have the refined estimate. We'd also be finalizing the stormwater design. We could share that in March. Submitting permits by our next check-in. Again, right away status. We would have an update for that and initiate the sort of USDA versus Bond Bank financing on the general fund side. So still have a ton of stuff to do, but that's kind of where we are in the project status right now. So thanks for this update, John. Something that has been on my mind with this project is business impact. So we have our business community already not in good shape this year. Next summer, probably not gonna be like a massive recovery, right? And I know that we have done engagement with property owners that would be impacted in the past, but I think that we should be doing that again, engaging this timeline with them to see if they have concerns. Is that something that you all have talked about? Is are the right-of-way discussions an appropriate way to do that? Or via downtown Manuski, curious your thoughts on the best way to approach that? Yeah, and I'm definitely gonna lean on Heather we do start those discussions, but to me, yeah, the right-of-way process is probably the best time to start doing that because we're gonna be interacting with those folks along the corridor to explain what's going on with the project and what the timeline is. And they're obviously gonna be concerned what the disruption is going to be. So we're gonna start that in January. So probably, this winter is a good time to start having those discussions. I know, I think we tried a really early round of discussions and it was way too early to have that. But now that we have some pretty refined plans and a pretty good idea of like, okay, we think this phase would happen first and maybe this phase, we could have those more meaningful discussions with the business orders, business folks along the corridor. Heather, thanks, John. Yeah, I just wanna add that I think, we had always intended that there would be business round tables that Meredith and I hold together in order to come up with a plan for really promoting Manuski business throughout this and giving out the message that Manuski is still open for business. The one thing that I would question about is approaching people too early while we are still in the middle of an emergency, if in fact we're actually looking at it, pushing back beyond fall. Because I think that there is no need to alarm people too soon before we have an idea of when this is actually happening. And I think it's important to approach businesses with some kind of a a la carte list of some of the things that we can do to assist them. And I think that's incumbent on Meredith and I to go to them with and then get feedback on what would be helpful for them. Thanks, I think those are some fair concerns that you raise about timing. I would like to, I would hope that in March at the next update, we might have a better sense of that timing. I would like to hear more about the phasing approach and with the right timing, have a discussion here about that with that feedback from engagement with the business community before we say, yes, let's just, this is when we're starting it. I don't want to say like this starts on X month without having that discussion here first. Yeah, thank you. Do folks have other questions or comments on this update? Amy? I know that some of the work that we were trying to do, the schedule we were trying to line up with VTrans and some of their projects. And I'm just curious if any of the delay here means that we'll miss that window of coordination or if we think that we can still line up with them. Yeah, it's kind of interesting there. It's actually, it works out better with this delay. So for example, the work that is occurring with the concrete replacement at the top of the circulator, which is basically the self-end of our project, that is scheduled to start not next summer, but the summer after. So we're talking with VTrans about, how do we make it look seamless? So it's one project, one traffic control plan. Because that timing would line up. And as far as exit 16 goes, they're starting some utility undergrounding work next summer is my understanding. And then the main portion of the project, the most disruptive portion is the following season. So, I don't know what's better, if the whole corridor is in disarray for two years altogether or staggered. But right now they are kind of lining up so that at least our traffic control would be coordinated. And to the passerby, to the driver going through, it may look like just one sort of corridor project. And we can coordinate that with VTrans. Thank you. Sir, did you just say the bulk of exit 16 would be in 2022? And the rotary work would be this upcoming summer, 21? No, so the, there's, yeah, it's a little confusing. There's two VTrans projects associated with the rotary. So right now next year, they're proposing to do what's called concrete repair work or just be the joint repairs. So that would be in the rotary itself. The concrete replacement work would start basically at the top of the rotary, up to the bridge. That would be not this summer, the summer after, when potentially we would be starting Main Street. Okay, thanks for that clarification, Mike. Yes, I know we've talked about this VTrans work and the rotary in on Upper Main, or not Upper Main, but the hill up to the BFW. Have we devised a plan or do we expect a night schedule for that work or a day schedule? And have we devised a plan to notify downtown Winooski in the surrounding businesses due to, because of a poor year on their budgets? Are we gonna be sensitive to the businesses down there and try to make them, so I think night would be when those businesses make the most, when they're the busiest, compared to the day, but I know traffic's an issue during the day. So we're kind of in a catch 22 here. John and I have discussed this repeatedly and I have also alerted the downtown Winooski forward to this issue. So John has requested that VTrans meet with downtown Winooski and the downtown businesses prior to formalizing what times this will be. And we've given the feedback that it would be better rather than starting at 7 p.m. It would be better to push that back as far as possible in the evening. Even 10 o'clock would make a difference for our businesses down there. So whatever we can do, we will do, and we have already mobilized that group to facilitate some of those conversations, yes. Awesome, thank you. Any questions or comments from members of the public? All right, so as John indicated, no action steps at this point. So thank you for that. I know our next item G is pretty dense. So I would like to call a four minute break before we dive into that. We will reconvene at 8.15. Thank you. I see you now. Great, let us reconvene for item G. This is on for discussion. This is the transportation impact fee presentation. John is with us again. Yeah, last time, I'm just intro-ing this one. So you may remember back in August, RSG presented this, presented an overview of impact fees, including a framework for a Winooski transportation impact fee in the corresponding study that went along with that. So, and just a reminder, so the impact fee is an RPC funded work plan grant. I think it was FY19. So Marshall Distal is also joining us from RPC family questions. So since our meeting in August, RSG has prepared a draft final impact fee study, a land use lookup table with a handbook to help fee pairs potentially determine what the cost of the impact fee would be for whatever type of development. And then a draft impact fee ordinance. So we wanted to sort of come back to you guys and one, I think, just give another overview of the impact fee, it's pretty dense. It's pretty dense stuff. So one, just a refresher to start. And then I think just get some initial feedback on how far you want us to move forward with this. So, should we go back and really refine these documents, the ordinance have our attorneys look at it, spend some resources there to bring it back to you all for a potential implementation or if you wanna take another route and look, push pause on this. So I think that's generally what we're looking for tonight. So I think with that, I'm gonna pass it off to Jonathan Silesian from RSG to do the presentation. I'm not sure Paul can we, can Jonathan present? I can, I'm just trying to find the right screen there. John, thank you. Yep. Well, we'll go with this one. So can you all see the presentation? Yes. All right, wonderful. Well, thank you, John. And so as John mentioned, I'm Jonathan Silesian and I think we were together in mid-October last and it's my challenge to make this as, make it not dense, make it as painless as possible to go through. So please interrupt me. We're gonna go quickly through some of these slides because some of the introduction slides are ones that have been in front of your eyes before the last time we met. And we wanna share with you kind of the end picture in terms of the fee, the magnitude that we've come to in terms of our final numbers. And that reflects changes that have happened since we met, which are primarily it's been the confirmation that we have three projects that we aim to fund through these revenues and also the Main Street project has come in slightly lower than we originally anticipated for the transportation costs. So with that, I'll continue forward and I believe we had Marshall Distal from the RPC on as well. So that's with the team here. So first off, we'll review what are impact fees. We'll discuss how do we calculate the fees at a basic level and some of the rules that administering the fees. And then as John mentioned, some of the study outputs that we've provided thus far. So basically impact fees. This is the quote from the Vermont State Statute section 5201. And I know this is never a good thing to start any presentation with, talk about dense, but in essence, the most general requirements are that you need a plan, which we have. We've discussed levels of service for transportation and we have a capital budget and program that you've already been reviewing tonight. We have identified locations of these improvements. We have projects and mines, we have cost estimates and we also have the array of funding sources. So thank you to Angela, who I saw was on the line as well. She's been instrumental in helping us collect some of the financial information. And then we've derived a funding formula for this process. At a high level, the concept is that we have growth, both in terms of residential growth and employment growth in the city of Winooski. And we're using a 20 year horizon. So we're going out to 20 year, 2040. Those additional users generate more demand on our transportation system. And what we're trying to do is identify how that extra demand can be mitigated in a way of funding capacity in a way that's fair and proportional to their impact. And so that's what mobility fees are there as a way as a financial instrument to help mitigate and offset the impact. And the idea is that eventually the concrete trucks will show up and we'll fund that additional capacity. Now, as John mentioned, you could decide to park this project for a while or move forward. And these are the options that you have in front of you is that you either do not pursue any types of mitigation you don't charge. And as new users come onto your system, you would accept lower levels of service. You'd accept more congestion, potentially people having to drive where if we put sidewalks in, they could walk or bike if there's bike lanes. What's more typical is the ad hoc process where you allow your DRB or other town planning processes to say, this is gonna be your impact. You go through the regulatory process and you mitigate it in some way. The risk of that it is that it's not a comprehensive. There's been no guidance from the city council or from other from the city to say this is the type of city we want. And so you can have a DRB say, this is the type of mitigation we want that may not align with your vision. The third option is localized taxes. You could have a special district or authority much like a water district where it's very clear this is the cost to get these benefits. And it's geographically, spatially defined. And then lastly is general funds. If we require a new capacity, we're gonna pay for it through property taxes. And we know that for the main street, there's a part of the main street that will be funded from property taxes. So it's an asset, it's an improvement to a facility, but we realize that there's gonna be a community benefit and so we all pay. So going through some of the basic criteria here is that impact fees have to be linked to that impact. It's a rational nexus is the term. We identify what is the impact of new development and then we have to say that that new development will accrue some benefits as a result of paying for that impact fee. The fee has to be also proportionate to their fair share or their degree of impact. And we can't assess higher costs than what would be expected to complete the projects onto the new development. And that lastly, this is an important one is that we cannot address existing deficiencies. So we cannot go and replair potholes with impact fee dollars. We cannot also cover normal maintenance and operations of those facilities once we're built. So that's often an issue where if we add more capacity, more sidewalks, more shared use paths, we're gonna have to plow them and maintain them for the future. So there is always a consideration depending on how much we do build. So that was the introduction to what are impact fees. Now we come into how are they derived? We first start with that growth that we discussed and I'm gonna walk through how much growth we anticipate over the 20 year horizon. We identified deficiencies and that's been the project team. We've worked with John and his team as well as Heather, we've worked with Jesse and other members of the city staff and the RPC as well. And we've taken the sound work that was done previously on the transportation plan as well as the downtown parking plan. Both of these infrastructure plans provide us a really good background of what types of capacity would be looked at in the future to accommodate future needs. And so that's the mitigation side is that what projects do we determine being necessary to mitigate the impacts that we see for the coming 20 years? We then identify what the cost is of those projects and then the base fee. This is simply the cost of the projects that we identify divided by the unit of growth and the unit of growth for a transportation impact fee are trips. So how many trips does a land use generate? And we're looking at the PM peak hour which is a period of four to six PM, one hour within that time period that's commonly used because it's the busiest time on our roads much like Mike I think mentioned that we have a traffic congestion but it's kind of focused during those peak commuting times. And then there's a net fee and this is where it does get a little bit more cumbersome to discuss and I'm gonna spare with us the details here because it's all in the report but there's a process to reduce the fee for credits and I'll discuss that closer to the end. So here's the growth for the 20 year horizon in Winooski we see about a change of 260 households approximately 600 people of new residents expected over the 20 year horizon. That's a modest growth. The city is pretty well built out even though more density is expected but employment is still gonna be robust and we're expecting somewhere north of 1500 almost 1600 new employees over that time period. And what we do is then translate those households and employment numbers into square footages or something that generates trips that we can then assess. And Mike also testament to your comment about the bridge this is a graphic that we use to try to understand if we build capacity in the system we're not the only ones using it. And the reality is that we have approximately according to our traffic models less than 60% of the traffic capacity in the city is really being utilized by Winooski residents or even Winooski employee activity that's associated with Winooski land use. So we have over 42% more of our traffic there is external to the city. And so that really stands to reason that there would be some other funding sources brought to bear. But the reason why this graphic is here is that although other users use our capacity in the city we still have to fund new capacity but we're only able to charge land use that happens within the city. And so the reality is that there's gonna be new capacity that's being built. Some of that new capacity is gonna be funded by new users of that capacity that we can charge. But the other new users in the city the people who are just passing through that's what this yellow this 877 number these are new people coming from outside the city that are consuming capacity in the city we're not able to charge them. And so it's going to be born on the backs of the existing property ratepayers today. So there's a portion of every project here that will be split between new development and existing development. And this chart just summarizes it in a different way. We have the 263 households the almost 1600 growth and employees we generate almost 900 new peak hour PM trips coming from outside of the city passing through. And we have 1100 and change almost 1200 new local trips that are associated with land use change in the city for a total change of 2062 trips. And this is an important number because this is the total change in demand across our transportation system. Now we've worked with the city and the regional planning staff for some time trying to identify what are three projects that have enough confidence in that they're going to be pursued as well as confidence on the cost estimates and add new capacity. And so these are the three that have been selected Main Street Reconstruction East Allen Street Project which would basically be a shared use path with some other accessory improvements. And then there would be new two sidewalks at least for this fee which would be on East Spring and North Street. These three projects combined to be about $7.6 million but based on the amount of new capacity that's adding because of that requirement that we have to be paying for only new users to use the system the impact fee portion is gonna fund $2.5 million of it. So there is a for Main Street we're gonna be reconstructing part of the existing facility and we're only adding some new capacity at a percentage of 27% of the overall project. The East Allen Street, for instance we're replacing the existing five foot sidewalk but widening it with a 12 foot. So that's why it's only a percentage of the overall project that we're able to fund through impact fees. But the sidewalks, however, they're 100% new. So that's why we're able to charge 100% of that project to new development within the city. Now we bring these two pieces together. This is the $2.5 million of new projects and then we divided by the 2062 growth in total trips and we get an average cost of how much does it cost to deliver this capacity divided by the unit of growth and it comes down to be just north of $1,200 per PM peak hour trip. And this would be assigned to every land use development that would be coming into the city if this impact fee were to go forward. And this is the base fee prior to any other reductions that I'm gonna discuss here briefly. Now administering the fee, it does come with some complexity. The funds have to be maintained separate from any other city funds. We need to have a tracking mechanism which we've provided to the city in an Excel file right now. And it would coordinate with any of your administrative financial software packages as well but we would identify who paid fees and where would the fees go? Meaning which project did they fund? There are some statutory requirements is that once we collect a fee, we have six years to encumber it and spend it. And once we start the fees on a particular project, we have an obligation to complete that project. There is some flexibility. If it's not exactly the East spring sidewalk that is pursued it could be something close to it. So there is some flexibility to the actual use of the funds. And because of that flexibility, there's some benefit of cashflow is that you don't need to pursue each of the three projects at the same time. You can wait for a few years for them to accumulate. You can also use them to pay yourself back. So if the city were to pay for these projects up front and get them starting to be constructed, you can just collect the money. Say it went into that fund, you pay yourself back. Now, this is where the last one is that there's a credit process and I'll just discuss this coming up here is that I've mentioned alluded to it a few times but is that impact fee payees cannot pay for the same capacity twice. And so the way to kind of discuss this is that we have our three projects, Main Street for instance, we have a portion of the project that is not eligible for impact fees. That is the replacement of the existing capacity. We have a portion that's impact fee related. Out of the portion that's impact fee related because of the folks who are traveling through your city that are not related to land use in the city, there's a portion of that cost that we cannot charge for. So at the end of the day, we have $7.7 million of projects. We're assessing impact fees on $2.5 million of it but our revenue to the city is only $1.7 or $1.8 million which is approximately $90,000 per year. That's based on a linear average of how much growth is expected over the next 20 years. So that's the revenue side. But now we come into the credit piece which is this $750,000 over the 20 year period. This is the amount of new capacity that is being consumed by people who don't live here or don't work here. They're not associated with the land use. So approximately $37,450 needs to be generated by property taxes to fund that proportion of the project. And why a credit is developed is that we have impact fee payees who own a piece of property and they're gonna develop the property and they're gonna continue to pay property taxes. And so that payee pays a impact fee and it also pays property taxes. That's a double payment for the same capacity and that has to be mitigated. And the way we do that is that we reduce their base fee by a credit which is calculated through a process that's articulated in the report. And I know John and Eric are very excited to walk through anybody with that process but it has to do with identifying how much property tax does a parcel pay so that it's in proportion to the total revenue of that $37,000 per year that the city's paying. So basically there's a tax rate that's established, how much does a house or how much does a general property pay and we reduce how much property taxes. So it's in the order of magnitude of about 10%. I think reduction off the base fee is the typical property tax credits that are applied. So coming to the end here and I realize this is a dense thing but I appreciate your patience is that the study outcomes is that we have an impact fee study. We have a final draft in front of you tonight and I welcome your comments on that. We have an ordinance that we've circulated around and there are a few edits that we've already been aware of and this has to align with general policy as well as other ordinances in the city. So this will take some work to be fully agreed upon and obviously agreed and accepted by the city council once you decide to go down that route. Other deliverables include a fee tracking spreadsheet. John mentioned a land use lookup which we try to make it simple for a land use applicant. They can go to, we believe Eric will be your impact fee administrator but I think yet to be fully determined but the land use lookup would be an easy way for a developer or a property developer to say, I'm gonna develop X amount of square feet roughly what would be my cost. And so there's a process there that has some specific land uses that we felt were more common or expected to be in Winooski. And then there's a fee handbook which kind of walks through the process that an applicant would rather than read through the whole report, they can read through the handbook to get look here for this value, look here for this value, multiply these things together and you get your fee. So that's where we are and I would more than welcome any questions and discussions, I know it's been a long meeting and this is a lot at the end of a meeting but the city's been a great partner and this has been two years in the making, we're here at the end and I wanna support you in any way that you go forward. Thank you, Jonathan. I personally have a number of questions about the draft ordinance. So I would like to hold those and see if my fellow counselors have questions about this part of the presentation first. Amy. I just had a question around timing and I'm sorry if I'm missing this somewhere but it seems like if we want main straight revitalization to be a part of the impact fee, we would have to move the impact fee forward before we start that work, is that correct? Or is it that we have to pass this before the new part of the development like the sidewalks or the bike lanes are started? No, fortunately, because the main street will create capacity with the expectation that there's spare capacity today or let's say main street was built tomorrow, there's gonna be future capacity there for a few years because we've selectively said all trips and the city is focusing on a multimodal transportation system. The extra capacity on main street has to do with bike lanes and some of the bicycle infrastructure as well as the improved sidewalks. Once those are in place, the city frankly can pay yourself back but the question is if you hold the impact fee for two years from now, you've lost out on two years of potential revenue. So that's the impact of timing. It is not an issue so much of losing that project as being eligible. Got it, thank you. Christine, if you're gonna get into Ordin's questions, can I interject for a quick minute? Yeah, please do. So going back, Jonathan, thank you very much. That was really helpful. Just going back to John Rauscher's intro here, I do wanna call out, this is a lot of information and would be a significant change for our community. So we did wanna bring it to you for thought and discussion tonight. This ordinance has not been reviewed by our attorney yet. It is, we didn't want to expend those dollars if this wasn't something you were now thinking about moving forward on. So just wanna put a huge caveat around the ordinance that we are not asking you to actually set a public hearing on this yet. If you are inclined to move this forward, we will review the ordinance with our attorneys and then bring it back to you for introduction to set a public hearing date. Thanks, Jesse. So I recently saw a presentation from the Vermont Housing Finance Agency on drivers to the increasing cost of housing here in Vermont and affordability. One of the takeaways there was the complication of differing regulation, like numerous regulations in different localities and that driving up costs. I do see we have in this draft ordinance exemption for affordable housing, but I am wondering if you have any general, is there any information on impact fees and an impact to the cost of housing that is created after those are implemented? Yeah, I think you mentioned that last time and I have, there are studies and it does have an impact. The quantity of impact, the quantified amount, I have not found anything reliable to say, an impact fee does has 10% less affordability. There's not that type of easy measure. Impact fees are passed along. They are simply a cost that a developer bears and they'll attempt to pass on as much of that cost to the residents. We have a possibility to wave fees for affordable housing. That's stipulated by Vermont statute. We also have state statutes say that any city council, any local government can wave fees if those fees conflict or can further comprehensive city plan goals. So you have a lot of latitude here. If you feel that things negatively detract from affordability, we have structured the fees in a way that are on a bedroom basis, which I think is a unique advantage. It's not often done. And that way we can structure things so that larger homes with more residents pay more of a fee than a single bedroom, two bedroom unit, where typically it's done as a single family house is just charged regardless of how many bedrooms it has. And so that's some sensitivity that's built into this report. Thanks, Jonathan. It's definitely something on my mind. You know, in this draft ordinance, we are exempting if it's a home for purchase, the household income can't exceed 120% of median income. For rentals, it's set at 80%. I think that doesn't quite, yeah, go ahead. I'm sorry, this was provided, this is the official definition of what is affordable. Yeah, so I think the thing that I am thinking about is the goals that our housing commission has set forward. So incorporating those specifically, so we are actually have been trying to incentivize the development of middle income housing and are now looking at family housing. So like three bedrooms plus. And so I think we might wanna construct something in this exemption that supports those. And I wonder if that is a discussion that we would wanna send to the housing commission. I'll just add one point of comment is that my responsibility to you is that an impact fee is meant to fairly allocate fees based on impact. And so any development can be waived if it furthers your goals. That gives you that latitude in statute. What will happen is that those projects will, they need to be pursued. Well, if you have an impact fee study or if you have an impact fee ordinance, you have then a responsibility that those projects are gonna be pursued. So that's kind of a first, if you go forward, you have an obligation to complete these three projects or something close to it. So the money has to come from somewhere. And so any land use that you waive, the general fund will make up. Right. Jim, you wanted to weigh in? Yeah, I was just gonna echo that thought about having this looked at by the housing commission. I think this question about what affordability brackets we wanna use and how we wanna pass those costs on. Cause I see this as really a way to target costs to the people who end up occupying these spaces more so than spreading it across the city. And so I think that there is a need to really think carefully about when that's gonna be appropriate and having a consistent plan for how the city is gonna waive or not waive those costs rather than trying to decide per development whether this is furthering our goals based on some less clear criteria. So I would love to see a little more discussion on the criteria we're gonna use for exemptions around this. I think I will just say that in a general sense, I do think this makes good sense for this community. I think that we are the benefits of these projects will be felt across the city but they will accrue more explicitly to this corridor than it does to places far from it. And so I think there is some sense in rebalancing some of the burden of paying these costs to the corridors and away from the general property taxpayer. So I generally, I am generally supportive of it provided that we can figure out the affordability and equity pieces that we're gonna confront in picking winners and losers or the exemptions. Well said. To that point, Jim, I see the housing commission for sure having input here. I'm working through like who else do we consult like thinking about the equity side of this beyond just these are the goals that we already know about Heather. I see your answers. I just wanna say that Jonathan did talk with me about this and the waiver for affordability, the language that he used was taken directly out of our housing trust fund. So the way that I propose it is that it's by right for affordable housing based on square footage. So the amount of square footage within a building that is dedicated to affordable housing is then exempt from paying impact fee. And so if it's, there's one unit that's 600 square feet, then 600 square feet would be waived from that impact fee. So I think there's further discussion to be had for sure and I would love to take that to the housing commission and get recommendations. Yeah, I think that's something we would probably look at before having lawyers spend time on this and Jim. And that just makes me think about the form-based code review that'll happen related to affordability incentives and how this will intersect or potentially undermine our own efforts there. And I know the timing does not work as favorably in that respect given the work plan the planning commission has in front of them in the timing there, that this would be their review of form-based codes and that particular incentive is coming much later in the year. So we'd have to put this off for a potentially a while to have both housing and planning look at this in an integrative way and potentially have housing look at what planning might do with form-based codes and how it would impact with impact fee and affordability and incentives in the form-based code. That process sounds incredibly lengthy based on my current understanding. I think there's a good question there about what would it look like to change the ordinance later on if needed? I mean, I do feel like the housing commission is the right place to start because this touches so directly on that. And then potentially we can bring that back to the planning commission as they think about form-based code. I do think it's possible to have this process going already because we would have to go through some amount of public hearing. So it's not like in the next couple of meetings we could implement this. So we can check in on where that timeline is going as far as the other discussions being held at planning commission. I have one more question and I'll stop. But this is just kind of brought up as a comment in the ordinance that circulated the question about whether this is permanently affordable or does it carry forward to affordability have to maintain. And I know that there's a balance point there. Are there examples where people have chosen to go one way or another on the exemptions around affordability? Do they have to get paid back? Does it tie to the useful life of the projections or the infrastructure that was added? Are there any models out there? I don't know. We don't need to have that answer tonight but something I would be interested in hearing more about. In a most basic sense is that it typically there's a clause in there to say if you change from affordable then you pay a market rate impact fee at the time of when it was changed. I work though with homes. Like if a developer is selling homes that are affordable and then later that homeowner sells at a higher rate. That's where often the affordable clause has to be in a either in a trust somewhere or it is sold once off. And if it's a home either there's a clause that it's in perpetuity that's where it's typically in the trust. But if it's a one-off home that's sold as affordable and then afterwards there's no clause to say that it has to maintain in affordability. I don't know. I haven't seen an impact fee. I've seen it only with the clauses in the ordinance to say if you convert then you have to pay a fee. But I think you would basically get away. If a home was sold as an affordable home and then it eventually had no limit to say what the next homeowner was like. I think the impact fee, we wouldn't be able to get that back. It does seem less likely with the kind of development we're seeing that that scenario payout. Yeah. And affordability is just one piece that we can exempt, right? But there are other things that we could potentially waive. I'm just thinking about how far down the line do we wanna go? But in thinking about some of our master plan goals say someone developed a daycare or someone developed a health center of some kind. Like to what end do we want to think about some of those things that will better our city and help residents that go beyond housing? And I guess where do you draw the line? That's the perfect conversation that I'm glad you're having and planning commissions and the like typically have these is that daycares, laundromats, health centers, schools they're most often the land uses that are exempt or waived from fees. And my comment still stands that any land use that is waived you're not gonna collect obviously the revenue but there's land uses that may not come into your city if these extra fees are in place. So that's where there's that balance. Yeah, it's certainly an opportunity for new revenue but that we need to be really smart about and think of it also as an incentive to maybe direct the development that is happening. I feel like a next step for this could be to start at housing commission to just have a recommendation of like this is what we would like to see incentivized then work this into Eric we'll have to talk about timeline. A planning discussion about other possible land uses there is some discussion happening and planning right now about land use. It's not really the same but like considering additional land uses in some of our zones. So we had a discussion about trying to be supportive to daycares for example. So I could see some tie in there. Jim. I could see some connection with safe healthy connected just based on the discussion that we had in terms of getting some sense of potential priority uses that would further those goals. And maybe it's pretty obvious from the master plan and we can just ride with that but it could be helpful as well. Were there, I just wanted to be cognizant to make sure that we did cover a lot of ground on the technical front. By all means, don't hesitate to reach out if there's any technical questions but these are the questions that frankly these are the things that often are the more complicated ones. The planning questions, the land uses. We got over the project selection hurdle but now it's these types of issues. Yeah, thank you for bringing us the tool and sorting that out. And we need to now figure out how we would use this. Does staff have any other questions or anything else from us for direction? So just to say back, so I understand the direction the direction is to work with the commission liaisons to shuttle this through a couple of commission meetings and then based on what we hear from those three commissions, bring it back to the council at some point in the future. Yeah, I think so. Does that sound right everyone? Yep. Well, thank you, Jonathan and Marshall for joining our late meeting. Yeah, well, thank you. I do see Jason as well from the RPC. So he was on the team as well. Oh, excellent, yes. A whole crew here. So yeah, thank you very much and good luck from here and I'll be in touch with Jesse and John and Eric. Thanks, Jason. Were you going to chime in something? Yeah, I did. I didn't have a question when John was going through the presentation. John, I was just wondering if you could just clarify, you know, it sounds like, you know, you administer the impact fee, but then you have to give a credit to people to account for those people that just passed through the city. Is there, is that just the way it has to be done? Is there any way to not charge them that large of a fee at the front end so that you don't have to reimburse them with a credit? Just seems administratively that might be a little easier, but maybe that's just the way it has to do. Yeah, we can talk offline. I think there is, there's a bigger philosophy of impact fees have to be, each impact is equal, those people driving through as well as a local impact. And so you can't charge the local impact differently than the people driving through. So in essence, we're charging the through people, but we're not able to collect the money. So that's why we have to find the revenue from somewhere else. So that's kind of the philosophical reason. And we could potentially lower the fee down to deal with that, but then the reality is that those people are paying, there's other funds in the mix. And so to be complete in our picture, we're trying to be clear that there is a funding source for all of these, for all of this capacity and to acknowledge that how all the pieces fit together. So it's, this has been the methodology. I think it's an interesting question though, but that's my initial response. Okay, I'll send you more questions afterwards if I feel like it. You know how to reach me. All right. Oh, we do still have one member of the public. Any public comment questions? All right, thank you all. Great. Well, thank you very much. So we will move on to item H, Vermont Community Foundation Spark Connecting Community for Skate Park Improvements Grant. Yeah, that is a mouthful of a title for a grant program. But this is a $3,000 grant that we had support from our commission member Bruce Wilson and some of the community members who folks have seen come to our commission meetings in recent months to talk about the skate park. So this is a $3,000 grant to help start some repair work on the skate park moving towards the goals that were included in the parks and open space master plan. And there's no match requirement. And the funds here would be again, focused on just really safety repairs and some surface repairs. Thanks. Any questions from council? Any questions from the public? All right, do I hear a motion to approve the grant for skate park improvements? So moved. Second. Motion by Mike, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Ray, next we have Vermont After School for All Recreation Programs grant. Yeah, so this was a sort of surprising second way of a funding in this grant program for this year. As you saw in the cover sheet, pretty quick turnaround, but we were able to pull together an application. I wanna give Jenny Hill, who I think mercifully departed before the impact fee conversation, but she put a ton of work into getting that application together and it would be for funding elementary school age camp programs, STEM programs for February, April and then two weeks of June. That's great. Any questions from council? Do I hear a motion to approve? So moved. Second. Motion by Mike, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. And finally the childcare workforce stabilization program for Thrive grants. So we'll end on a really good note here. Kate Anderson again continues to keep a near to the street and got this funding secured. And essentially this represents a one time bonus payment to all childcare workers whose organization is applied. So it would be a $938 bonus payment one time that would come through payroll, but it's for anybody that worked at Thrive between September and December. And it's sort of an acknowledgement from the state of the critical nature of childcare workers during the pandemic in particular. So it feels really good to be able to provide that benefit for our staff who have been working really hard. Awesome. Any questions? I can just add to this. I think this is a really real kudos to Kate for going after this. And as we see school closing for a few days, those there, the Thrive staff are hourly staff so they don't get paid when they don't work. So we're hoping that this at least mitigates some of that impact for them on a human level, obviously. Do I hear a motion to approve the grant for Thrive? So I'll move. I second. Motion by Mike, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you everyone and thank your team for looking out for this stuff. This brings us to the end. Do I hear a motion to adjourn? So I'll move. I second. Motion by Mike, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you all for your time this evening. Happy New Year. Happy holidays, everybody. Happy holidays.