 We have about a half hour to accomplish what Paul has asked us to accomplish. So my name's Gary Holloway. I live in the Townhill neighborhood. It's great to be your facilitator of this particular session. I didn't know I was facilitating this session, in this particular session until about three minutes ago. I knew I was facilitating, but Paul's trick is you don't let me know which one. So a regional commission should be convened to develop a plan for flood prevention. We've read that before. Does anyone have any questions about, we're in the right room, you're in the right room? Okay. So, Oh my God, this is fun. All right, ready? Hi! Hi! We'll be all right, just passing. So we have about 10 minutes here to talk about what, so let me back up. The goal of this is to develop a couple, two, three action steps that we can actually recommend to the commission that's gonna be formed, which will meet a bunch of volunteers to get behind. And I'm gonna pass around, maybe I'll do that now, and I'll start passing around a sheet, and this sheet meant for you to get more information. Okay, and hopefully get behind as the commission forms and these ideas start to kind of come to fruition. So rather than wait till the end, I'm gonna go ahead and just pass this around and please sign up. This is so you can stay in the loop with what's happening. We're gonna spend 10 minutes talking about what steps are necessary to take right now to kind of get this moving. So I wanna give everyone a voice here, so let's be relatively short so we can make sure that everyone has a chance to speak. Guess Matt? I think the first step would be to find out what persons or bodies or organizations already exist which have knowledge and or authority over repairing and management. We have a spreadsheet mentioned, we have a scribe here who's taking notes so that we don't lose any of these thoughts. Guess Matt? I guess Cindy, I guess I feel there's a step even before that which is who is going to do this work actually. You know, commissions are often where ideas go to die and that cannot happen in this condition. Can I ask a question to the group? It was mentioned in the larger group that there was an existing structure already around such a thing. So let's speak to that so we can record maybe who might be doing this, some of this work already. Sure, I can speak a little to it. Christian Meyer, Executive Director of the Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission. We're 23 towns here in Central Vermont and a little few towns up in Orange County covers much of the Winooski water basin. Michelle Veronica points next to me, Director of Friends of the Winooski. So we do have this structure where governments are meeting regularly monthly to come together and talk about these interminable school issues and how they confront them. We were really consumed around supporting municipalities and looking at land use policies. We extended the transportation and the water to a degree and energy and climate change and adaptation. We're often kind of a Swiss army man, whatever do you need, you can pull it out. Can I just ask, are you a body that could identify the appropriate experts and marshal them? Like, are, am I looking at the people who are leading this effort or does it need to be something on top or different from your body? I can't speak to that directly. I mean, it could be our body, but I don't wanna assume that one, that addresses the needs of the residents in Montpelier or two, that we're necessarily best suited for. There are other organizations, I mentioned Friends of the Winooski, there's the Natural Resources Defense Council. There's also the state agencies like the E&M, they want to be addressing a loyal watershed as well as the Winooski, as well as the Black River, et cetera. So it might be part of a bigger thing. We can definitely push the group like that. We do do that additionally, but I think it's for the community to come together and make that decision if we're the best at this. Maybe to dispel the, so acronyms on to get a little bit of a supermod emergency management is the main topic. No, it's okay. So just making sure we got, we captured that. Are these Michelle? I would just say, you know, this, I've worked with the Winooski only about 10 people in the same room, and I think it's fantastic that so many people are interested in the river, and so that would be a reason, I would say not to just hand it off to Christian or me or us to work on this, because I think it's important that as many people who want to be involved are able to do it. Maybe it's important to recognize the groups who may have a role in this as professionals to make sure they have a seat at the table and participate with the community and all that, to make sure we don't miss anybody who's already doing some of this work, right? But I'll be in for it. I'll just throw another name out there. I work as an administrative assistant for the Kamat River Inc. So we're already doing a lot of this work. Other initial first steps? I think quantifying the challenge from flooding, random and flooding, and from ice jam flooding. We can get the data from this last flood from all the gauges on the Winooski and the North Branch and the Confluence, and then get climatologists and hydrologists, whomever, to come up with the worst-case scenario. You know, what, when the next storm or another big storm is 20, and the air is 20 degrees warmer, so we're gonna have exponentially more rainfall. You know, what's that? Is it too much to even contemplate addressing or is it within our means to come up with a plan to know what the greatest probable rain event will be and the flow is coming in through the Winooski and the North Branch and that exiting from the Confluence downstream can we determine whether or not we can increase the capacity, the flow capacity of the Winooski from the Confluence downstream to accommodate that worst-case scenario where we don't flood again? But we don't know that yet. So let's figure that out. Another thing in this kind of goes with what you were saying at first is also getting in touch with those other municipalities that already have these, have these commissions or organizations happening and it's not just upstream, it is downstream, right? Like, Richmond's gotta be on board as much as Cabot is on board. And so really taking a holistic look at the watershed. One other question for you and I hear that you're meeting frequently about these issues. Are these open to the public or are these smaller different kinds of meetings? What are the avenues for people to get more involved in maybe that's for after this round table? Yeah, I'll punt on that one. I think that it's a longer conversation. And I don't even know all the organizations that are already having these conversations. We are engaged in emergency management. There's a regional emergency management. But that's not just being watered. So it's complicated, but we'd be sitting at the table a lot, a lot of folks can at once already read it, something new. So I'm here. Any thoughts around the initial first steps or actions to help, you know, kind of fuel some of the early stages of this work? I think there's things that we know through Friends of Anuski and Danger to the Tourist Servancy and from our rivers program that we have, Department of Environmental Conservation, things that we could do today. We know about rain gardens. We know about impervious surfaces. So I think it's kind of like that one option that was about developing a tool. We could develop a quick list as we're doing these other things. Here are the things that towns or small motors could do with their own yards that's going to help slow the water down. Not necessarily in the river, maybe, but just helps so it doesn't get to the storm drain so it doesn't get to the river so quickly. I think that would be a good first step to do. I think too, that program would be nice. Well, yeah, I guess I would say, who had the idea of what started the commission, right? Like really going to the regional planning commission from Friends of Anuski, existing groups and maybe soliciting their feedback on what is, you know, they've been advocating, a lot of people haven't advocated for strategies to keep water in the contour and let it slow it down. As a side note, I don't know what's going on with the dog river, what the hell is that? We're going to talk about all the two grandiose ideas and then there's this 200-yard stone in banking. So three days ago, when I saw that, I mean, it's insane. So what is all this for? So there is existing assistance in place. How do we support or do we form a new commission? Another one of perhaps a redundancy? I want to also put out there, we're talking a lot about existing non-profit or government entities, but what about the private sector? It was mentioned several times in the first meeting that there's a lot of professionals in our community, in Vermont who are already doing this work. Jamie, you had spoken a little bit to this, you know, in terms of the people who are studying this stuff in Middlebury College and UVM and Dartmouth and we have people in our community who are engineers and architects. Can we talk about this on that? And I'll thank you, you're a wonderful segue and we're close to the same way. In terms of the experts, I think that there's the convening experts in bodies and then there are the experts who have been studying. The ones I'm familiar with are all based around something called the Vermont Episcopal Book. How is it based out of the University of Vermont that it included St. Michael's Middlebury, Dartmouth, et cetera. I'm going to be the folks who have for a decade, I think at least, been studying what's happened, what's going to happen in terms of how to change watershed. And what I was going to raise my hand for just anyway was to say at the outset of any work like this, I think bringing those folks in to help prioritize where there's a lot to be done, where is the biggest thing for the book in focus going forward. And I know some of the groups in Vermont have heard from some and see others. We already have some of that in your hand, so I don't want to discount the expertise already in the hands, it's in the folks in the room. But to the extent it's beyond what they already have, we have those experts, but I think they should be probably the help guide for the priorities. You can say again the name of that group. It's Vermont Episcopal, I can get it. It's a wonderful acronym, E.T. Episcopal C.O. It's a National Science Foundation. Yeah, it's a National Science Foundation that's doing research in various states around the country, but the point is that the Vermont, one of the focuses of the Vermont Episcopal Program in recent years was resiliency in the chest, excuse me, in New Zealand, D.C., in the Chamomile Basin. So I interviewed them, many of them for things that I was doing, and they talked all the time. What about, you know, fun play, it's a green fall protection. You have a few more minutes here, here in the here. When we're talking about higher education, this, I remember, is New York University. And they have a specific program, civic engagement. It's a huge part of that university is giving back to the community, the engineering program, and all, that university is all about on the ground learning. It's kind of a burden for them. So Jason, I have to pick on you. We have the principal lives here. And so like, is there a way that we can engage with brought up as it's important to be engaging with youth, engaging with the younger population? Like, is there a way that we can capture that in some of this work? Absolutely. We have a strong community-based learning program. In key, you mean with that plane on Wednesday? That's right, yeah. So we've already started to lay the groundwork of that conversation of how we can attract our students to this work. If you're in a commission next door, getting some invoice on that commission, we don't know if it'll be the next generation that we're carrying on. From my River Conservancy was doing a face-to-river class here at the High School and North Branch at the Center as well. And these students put forward incredible ideas for how we could redesign the town to be from near-tour members. So they're already engaging with these questions. I'd love to, I'm from North Branch. Emily Seifer. I'd love to show fans how many people have seen the films that these students put together and that were shown in the Pavilion building last winter. So you all should, you'll be so inspired. You can go to North Branch Nature Center's website, go to presentations, you'll find it. Spend, get to popcorn, and spend a couple of evenings. Just going back, excuse me, to the whole order of shed analysis as well. Making sure it's just that we have so many different sources of information. The university sources, the one that you mentioned. So taking a coordinated look, one of the things that I think we do need to take a look at is our soils and our forests because our soils are very, very wet right now and we really need to take a look at will they get too wet and will we lose them that way, for example. So there's a lot of upstream work to do which will involve other student communities as well. And there's so many resources here. So what we're about to end up, and I'll have time for me to one more. I just want to point out that, just having been through a lot of these different processes and having people sign up, as the time goes forward, you've had less and less people involved. And so my question to you all is like, or maybe as an action item, how do we keep people, how do we keep the community engaged? This flooding event will go, hopefully stay in the distance for a while, right? Before the next flooding event, five years, 10 years from now, like you may have forgotten what happened during our meeting or you may have forgotten. So I just want to kind of emphasize the point of like try to keep the community engaged in this conversation. And then there's burnout and volunteers and these different commissions and stuff. So just thinking about how we can kind of continually bring in the reinforcements as people are going to step off naturally for other reasons. So any other thoughts on action items, just to kind of kick start? Maybe we'll take one or two more thoughts on the transition. Yeah, I'm Patrick Irwin, little sex and just a late person or Elvis. So I appreciate you being probably experts, but I want to sort of follow a bunch of ideas, but I think in particular, I think we have a lot of questions about the scale of the problem. I know how important rain gardens are and rain barrels and all, small scale things like that, but with the magnitude of the issues like expect to be a coming up or free, there'll just be a drop in the bucket. And so getting the, that EBSCORE group or whatever it was called, really like commissioning them to like design a plan that can be responded to. So we really know what that worst case is. Seems get the, get the ecological engineers involved. So we can really size it seems important and seems like a defined action item that then the commission can respond to. Hi, I'm Diana, I live in Montpelier. It seems like what would be really useful would be some kind of picture of the whole watershed and somebody being able to say the greatest potential for controlling water is here, here, and here. Sounds like a great project for that mighty system. That might exist by K&R. Yeah, it might exist. A lot of, there's just really a lot of equipment. Yeah, we all have great balance and we're just trying to find the main initiative. Oh, there's already an initiative. It's the floodplain initiative. Who's doing that? Functioning the floodplain initiative. It's a multi, big combination of people working together. Union, folks, private companies, non-profits, everybody, it's not. I think they're tied in with that group there. Sure, yeah. All right. What will be up next? Yeah, that's the thing, but I'm exactly with the city of Montpelier. The city also needs to be able to work in this conversation to inform people what we are currently doing, the conversations that we're having, to be in with A&R, with a really different way of thinking about how to even manage the agree that's in there now. Should we be recruiting some of the superiors? How do we interact with the system? What does that look like? How much volume have we lost in capacity from this current event where we sit today? So, can I elaborate a little bit on that? Yes. One of the things that we learned during this disaster is how important communication is. And so, for the city to be able to know what's happening with these conversations, or the various entities that, and all of us who are volunteers, was setting up some kind of a structure of communication that could be accessible so that everyone knows what's happening and they're not reinventing the wheel of doing something on the side that's already happening. So, something that some people may not be aware is, from 2011, we have a list of hotspot areas that we checked before every single storm and that actually helped prevent further flooding that may have occurred. But we had staff at the front line breaking out the inlet to make sure that it didn't go over to top and let them out. Fantastic. So, I said last one, but I'll give you one message. No, no, no, I didn't transition to the right sources, but okay, okay. You can speak it into it as resources. So, we're gonna spend, 10 minutes, we're gonna spend seven minutes and we're gonna recap the last three. So, seven minutes, let's talk about what resources we need to enable this group to get funding, do we need, what do we need, what are the resources that it's gonna take for this group to really get going? We need someone to collect the resources, intellectual resources that already exist. We need a list maker and it should probably be someone who's pre-integrated into the river or natural resources community already, a group or a person. So, they can make comprehensive lists of what talent we already have and what they're doing. Any thoughts? What are the resources we might need? Just a piggyback from that. So, I did this for a product in Northfield where we created the spreadsheet. You have the entity, what their assets are, their intellectual assets, their equipment assets, whatever it may be, contact information. So, you have to know what each person can bring to the table for you. Contact information of what their skill is or what they can bring to the table. Right. Any other resources you might need? I just, knowing how often people are in meetings, try to connect to information with another, I wonder if there are other ways that we could be using technology to share information with one another. I think meetings are great in connecting with others is great. And I know none of us need to sit in another meeting just to collect information from another partner organization or whatever. So, I think it can be creatively about how we share information across these different brilliant entities. That's right. And just for these three meetings alone, people have been able to participate originally because they are single-parent at home or if they weren't able to actually even participate originally, then you go on to the board and they can communicate. So, those kind of technologies and you know, it's accessibility too, where people might not be able to participate in these types of discussions in person. What I was going to say, in addition to studying this commission, being responsible for studying and laying out what the action items might be in conjunction with the experts, might be the purpose of this commission to also be doing the outreach and gathering volunteers to actually complete the work getting those people who are going to go out and plant trees on river banks who are going to help get involved and actually get their hands dirty, much like the disaster preparedness for a good idea that we talked about before. So, like Paul said, an idea that maybe didn't make it into a group can actually get incorporated into all of the groups. Like that volunteer really should be integrated into all of these ideas, right? So, great example. Like the concept of the CCCs, you know, the CCCs where our roads literally got built, pretty much everything we used today, we have built ferries. We can't force it on CCCs, but we can create a more peculiar CCC and I bet a lot of views. We already have one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that was really interesting on just one fact note, you know, Alex, who locked lots of parks and had all of these volunteers for other purposes and got put in to work because they were having to be here through that program. So, they did an amazing job. Spend it. So, it's a few other resources. The technology, I take your point. And if we are in search of a good meeting room, I will offer up more furniture center as a place to meet. We have a lot of programs that we run and we'll have to work around that schedule, but there's plenty of furniture that was of interest. It would hold this number of people really comfortably and there's even a breakout space. Is that? No. Okay. Is there any, you know, is there any funding that's necessary? Yeah. I mean, obviously there's gonna be funding in the patient side of it, but is there any funding that's necessary or kind of planning or kind of the ground market is necessary if you focus no sources of funding that might help support it if it is needed? I just think there needs to be administrative assistant type of funding. Possibly you could get a volunteer temporary leader to coordinate information gathering, but I wouldn't want someone to be tasked with collecting and organizing all this information without paying. I just would be in support of finding funding for such a person. It sounds like we're gonna learn more about this, but it does sound like there is gonna be a paid staff person who's gonna be kind of the overarching paid person who's gonna work directly with the commission because it's a point here as well as various other interest groups, but that doesn't mean they can do all the administrative work as well. So we have to consider that. So we have just a few minutes left before we get changed back. So maybe two more minutes on resources and then we'll spend the last few minutes recapping. Okay. Just on the resources and the finances. I brought it up in that first meeting. I know there's some work bubbling around the state with this, but the concept of outcomes-based financial social impact investment is it's a really powerful investment tool that's being used more and more around the country. It's a great success to fund projects that wouldn't get positive if you'd like to be in the construction projects. When the standard bond issue kind of thing doesn't allow for that kind of creativity. And I think that I know I've heard of this, but I'm not in the sense that I've been involved in these things. In searching for funding and for planning, I think it's probably gonna do better if it's locked in in terms of getting money with the implementation side. Yeah. Yeah. So not keeping those as separate with Don. Adventures. And I will put it out there to explain where I work for the state Department of Housing and Community Development. I know that there's conversations happening with the legislature right now. There will be a climate resiliency bill. There will probably multiple climate resilience bills. So I encourage maybe one idea would be to have some listening folks participating in those conversations. And though there's some nonprofit groups that quite a bit hear me already in those conversations, but there may be some other citizens who may wanna listen in on those conversations and kind of help influence where some of that goes, which may be related to funding, likely be related to planning and implementation. Yeah. And I don't have the answer here, but that's great. That's not happening like this month now. So, and I don't think we wanna spin our wheels and tell them. Yeah. Definitely. And if you bring up a really good point, I think all of these groups are gonna have to think about, what is actionable in the short term? Identify what the short term means. Is the short term, what can we do in the next few weeks and months? Cause there are some things that we can do in the next few weeks and months. And the kind of longer short term, like what do we do in the months and years? What can we do in the longer term? The planning in kind of the five or 10 years. I think it's all important. And maybe in the short term, we can do things like organize public presentations of some of this information. Right? Any other final thoughts in our last couple of minutes here? We just wanna say one, I think it would be helpful to think, walk along in the short term and think of other social movements that have succeeded in doing that. And the example that I came to my mind is what we did with childcare. The childcare bill that passed last year by the legislature is an amazing bill. It's gonna transform childcare as we know it. That took like six years over a lot of organizing throughout the whole state and a lot of money to help the organizing. But they did well. They helped the childcare centers and they helped childcare professionals and then they did the advocacy. We already know how to fix these problems. It's just how do we get the whole society and the landowners, everybody to do the measures and the organizations and professionals. I've already told us that we need to do it. So we just gotta find a sort of goal and societal will to do it. So using that example of what's been successful here in Vermont for a while, what's been successful in other states, someone else mentioned that, what are the other states and other countries? You and I research, are we? Yeah. Okay. Last thought here. I'm gonna cross the word. I chant often about ecological design. Because there's examples of how we work in agriculture, managing and housing. And I think when we really get down to it, what our opportunity has is going back to what you said. You know, like we could, they've been fighting environmental issues for a long time and it's this, now we have climate change. Often the answer is within the environment. And the social structures too, like it's about broken relationships. You know, we're a society, the relationship is broken. So if we can do something rather than perhaps forming a committee, what can we do to restore those relationships? And that could really put us in a good state. At least we're still talking. Like, because we're gonna burn out. We're kind of, the crowds are gonna start to dissipate a bit. How can we even make that not happen? Can you, just a little bit like, when you say relationship, relationships between? Well, if you look at ecological design, it's about interconnectedness and synergies between things. And when we design in our culture, we often isolate the same, but how so? That's not gonna be involved in the water that flows by. We're now 56 years later. So when you really get down to it, the interconnectedness is about our relationships. And we have Montpelier alive, that talks about celebration. You know, we have to watch out for burnout and we gotta celebrate. And so- Well, and one of the things that combat burnout is saying hopeful. And seeing that there are other people who wanna be in the room to be able to solve the problems along the way. Yes. So just keeping these conversations going there is a really important part of this. Alongside of that asset, what are the existing entities that can do the thing on the floor? Right. Well, thank you all for putting all these together. Oh, and existing entities, for example, being visual, I'm saying, okay, so the watershed maps, there'll be plenty of different ones that we can probably get our hands on and even to look at and become familiar with the overall watershed. So thank you all for all this input. I'm gonna apologize in advance. I'm supposed to summarize this in 30 seconds. But I probably will not capture all these ideas. Believe me, Katie has taken all these notes down and I'll leave the sign up sheet, wherever those are, some small people can be looked at as we continue this conversation with Michael. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.