 They're going to have an executive session until 7. It should have already started. So it kind of looks like they're doing that somewhere else. So I think 7 o'clock. So I'm going to go off. OK, that's fine. Don't take my word for it. Talk to me with a camera. I don't work here. I hope you had a good day. There's an agenda right on this table here. This is Charlie Geekoff. At the risk of being a pest, I'm actually filming the city council tonight, Berlin for the city council. So everything was fine. The Karatek, I got three lights. So I'm assuming that's where it did. Is there any way for you to check if the live feed is working? Yeah, that's fine. It doesn't start for like 45 minutes. Stranger. Hi, and you saw? Our usual suspect here. No, he. Where is he? He's in bed, I think. Is he sick? He's very sick. I could hardly talk to him on the phone. Oh my god. Wow, OK. If I couldn't do it, he was going to come and do it. So I said, I'll do it. My goodness. You want me to go downstairs and see if the custodian is in the building? I don't know, because it's chilly in here. I think the whole school board is downstairs in room 12. They are. They're in conference room 12. They just kicked us out. We were in the board of finance, though. But I want to know why it's so cold in here. Thank you. I asked the guy that's filming tonight. I asked him to go downstairs and turn off the air. It's freezing in here. It's 58 degrees. Right, I'm glad you did that. It is, I just. It's 58 degrees, so. Just as you were saying that one. I am really tired of being. I'm glad I got this. Even with this on, it's cold. OK, so the amendments just include that. 503A, yeah, I got it. 506 becomes 503A. You're not going to like it, but I can't support 4.55, which is really silly. But I can't support it. You're going to consent? Yeah, it's the, yeah, so I'm just going to take it off. We'll put it at the very end. Which one does that remind me of? It has to do with, I don't feel OK about turning over commitments that are part of deeds. I really don't. It was there, said the deed, said that there should be a reading room in Hawaii for people, for anybody to come and use. And frankly, I understand that they don't comply with it, but I don't feel OK about taking stuff out like this. I didn't feel OK about turning my back on tech school and those things. So I just, I can't do that. So I'm just taking it off. I just can't do it. I don't have a problem. I can't do that. OK, where's the debt policy? Debt policy? You didn't find anybody? Oh, yeah. There's people in the clerk's office, but they're not answering my very gentle knock. Well, somebody needs to turn this off. Hey, Chapin, do you know how to control the heat? It is freezing in here. It's blowing. It's 58 degrees according to the thermostat. I can get the heat adjusted. Can you adjust it? Yeah. Thank you. Great. So you want it blowing less? Yeah. Yeah, I don't think it's too far. I mean, I'm going to say that again. Just a little bit here. I didn't say it down there, just because I didn't. I don't know how to do it. I'm not comfortable with it. Well, yeah, it'll be after eight. My hands are like ice. So maybe you won't have to wear your jacket. Debt policy? OK. Let's see. Not bad. August, September. That's, you know, short on. That's impressive. How was your day? It'd be better if I were heading home. But that will happen. Just put your own note or how you want to do it. Put the plan. Get this weekend. So you have this here. But I didn't know if you wanted me to arrow it, or do you just want me to put it in five? Sharon's going to. Yeah, I have Sharon. Yeah. You got printed stuff for Sharon. Yeah, right here. That's how she's going to read it. I've already marked 5.06 becomes 5.03A. Yes, well, I have this. This has everything. That's what I thought. So just make a note on the plan. I didn't do anything with this. You'll have to just read it. So the 5.06 will be now 5.03A. Were you with anybody before? So I graduated college in May after Instacut. Because it's after this? However you want to do it. A little bit of a weather change. Because here, Sharon is the rest of the MOU stuff. So it might make sense to just say now it's 5.03A. You know what I mean? Did you say graduated from UBM? UBM? Yeah. So what brought you here? You know, I've really liked Digger and the non-pocket model and my interview with Ann. Yeah, Digger has been really kind of first started. But the newsroom is bigger than? Lots of other things that like the Burlington Free Press are local. So they just sign you to, you know, pulling in and surrounding accounts. You know, my first couple of weeks is a bit bigger. Stuff in Burlington here for you to come. Sharon will make sure you get a lot more. All right, what is the good news? Thanks. 80, right? Well, at times I meet somebody. I immediately forget the name. I have some friends who have kid name names all day long. I meet somebody and I hear the name and then. But you said, I want to make sure you're okay with me. No, I'll move it. No, I will. All right, start at 7. And we're going into executive session right after. So you know that's your job. Keep being informed. Come on, Shane. You're still going to have public form at 7.30. Same as always. We'll be out of executive session by 7.15 or 7.20. The basics of the meeting today are public form at 7.30. I don't know anything. Talk about anything you want? Where are you? Shelburton? But yet you just said I'm coming back to Burlington. That's too good, right? I'm coming back to Burlington. Where are you going? You don't know yet? When I bought your house from you? Oh, yeah, she does. It's very... I just... All the elections are in November. Not Christmastime. Yes. Go see Chapin. If you want us, if you want to get your G in right away to Laura, you can be sure. I can see it. Are you in my office? Come meet me back here. The high school bond? It has to do with the sewer bond? Yes. It has to do with adopting a debt policy. Yes. So it's really focused on all of that. So it talks about based on we want to keep our credit rating as good as it can be. And so they've been talking to Moody's who looks at us and establishes our credit rating. And we've determined that although there's a school board and the city council, Moody's looks at the city as a city. And so there's cumulative overlapping debt between the city and the schools. And so we never had a policy that said what each entity could borrow and how that cumulative debt, what that maximum cumulative debt could be. So it's a lengthy policy, but it addresses all of that. And so it is our... So we've never really had a formal policy. So this is what... So we've been working on this for a while. So it's coming to be established. I did see there was a long one. It is. But sometimes guidance documents are helpful. But you can certainly form a perfect time to do that. Hopefully not. I've heard that before. Well, it's not early up to me. Yeah, you got my number. That's a tipping point to just make this kind of, say, unnoticed. Shhh. Yeah, I'm sorry. We're going to start this in just a minute. Yeah. It doesn't have a platform. We need the data. Okay? No, but Ann, you're going to have to continue there. Sharon, what's her item become 5.06? 5.07. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. Counselors, please take your seats. We need to get going. Did I include you, Joan? That's great. There aren't many of us. We're not... Mr. China. We don't have... We got... With Brian, we do. And Adam. 1, 2, 3, 4. You're 7. You're 7. Yeah, we get 7. Where is everybody? It's so hard to get a quorum. Oh, but that's okay. We just barely got it. Okay. I'm going to go into the executive center. Good evening. I would like to convene this meeting of the city council tonight at 7.03. Would everyone first join with me in resigning the Pledge of Allegiance? Next item on the agenda is the agenda. Counselor Busher. Thank you. I would move to amend and adopt the agenda as follows. To note the final version for Consent Agenda Item 4.41, Communication Brian Lowe, Interim Chief Innovative Officer regarding BTV Stat Update for City Council per Brian Lowe. No written communication from David White, Planning and Zoning Director regarding Consent Agenda Item 4.50, Resolution Reaffirming the City's Continued Participation in the Lake Champlain Byway and Adoption of the 2017 Lake Champlain Byway Corridor Management Plan. Two committee per Gillian Nanton, per Counselor Busher. No written material and sponsor for Consent Item 4.55, Resolution Termination and Release of Condition Contained in December 5th, 1928. That claim deed to the Young Men's Christian Association Counselor Roof. Then further, change that item from 4.55 Consent to 5.07 Deliberative. Then to add a note motion for Agenda Item 5.03, Communication Beth Anderson, Chief Administrative Officer regarding Debt Policy to Approve the Debt Management Policy as presented per CAO Anderson. No written materials for this Agenda Item per CAO Anderson. No written materials for Agenda Item 5.05, Resolution November 6th, 2018 Special City Meeting, Approval to Issue Bonds for Burlington High School, Counselor Nodell, Hartnett Pine and Ad Counselor Dean as a co-sponsor. To the Agenda Item 5.06, Memorandum of Understanding regarding Burlington High School Re-Envisioning Project with the motion to approve and authorize the Mayor to execute the Memorandum of Understanding regarding VHS Re-Envisioning Project. Note written material for this Agenda Item per CAO Anderson. Note amended MOU Draft 1.3 for Agenda Item 5.06, Memorandum of Understanding regarding VHS School Re-Envisioning Project. Now, after you've heard all of that, we're now going to change 5.06, and that's going to become 5.03A. And I so move. Thank you, Councillor Bush. Any discussion on the Agenda? Hearing none, all those in favor of approving the Agenda as amended, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? We have our Agenda. Item number 2 is a communication from City Attorney Blackwood regarding an executive session, Attorney Blackwood. Yes, I'd like to give you a fairly brief update on where we are in collective bargaining and run through some of that with you, and we would want to do that in executive session because premature disclosure of the city's position in collective bargaining would put the city at a disadvantage. Thank you, and there is no action, expected action coming out of executive session. That's correct. Thank you, City Attorney Blackwood. Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. I'd like to ask for a finding based upon what the Attorney Blackwood said, the premature disclosure of bargaining. All those in favor of the finding, seconded by Councillor Roof, all those in favor of the finding as proposed by Councillor Mason and Roof, please say aye. Aye. And Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. Based on that finding, I'd like to make a motion to go into executive session with City Attorney Blackwood, CAO Anderson, and the remainder of the mayor's team present. Thank you, Councillor Mason, seconded by Councillor Roof. Any discussion? Councillor Pine. Just to point out that there'll be a time certain of 7.30. Yes, we will be. It's expected to be a brief executive session. We'll be back before by 7.30 at the latest. So with that, all those in favor of going into executive session, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? We will move into executive session, and we have to clear the room, except for the people indicated. Thank you. And the next item on our agenda is item, is the public forum. I don't know where three is the public forum. I have three people signed up to speak so far. If you would like to speak in tonight's public forum, there are sheets over here at the side table. Bring them up over here to Lori, and she will get them to me. So it is 7.30. We start the public forum at a time certain of 7.30. So we'll open that now. You have a light system in front of you that when the yellow light goes off, or the green light, whatever, is the middle light, you have about a minute left. When the red light goes up, you need to conclude your remarks. So we'll, we'll open the public forum tonight with Kate Stein to be followed by Albert Petraca. Good evening, Ms. Stein, and welcome. Good evening. And everybody, please make sure to pull the microphone right in close. Everyone can hear you. Good evening. I'm Kate Stein, a parent of a 12th grader and a ninth grader at Burlington High School. I'd like to thank the Board of Finance for the work that they did earlier tonight, saying that they would bring forward the bond for the renovation of the Burlington High School. As a parent of a young child who at the time used a walker ticket around, I remember going to an NPA meeting, probably in 2004 or 2005, where the BHS athletic field was being presented and asking, will this new construction be accessible for those with mobility issues? And the answer was absolutely. I kicked myself for not asking the same about the high school where he would attend 100 years later. In 1964, when Burlington High School moved from Edmonds to his current location on Institute Road, children with a diagnosis such as my son would have been taken from us and put in an institution due to having physical disabilities. No consideration would have been given to his aptitude for learning. It breaks my heart, as I believe, that being part of a community can make us stronger. I am so relieved that our society is moving forward with the civil rights associated with disabilities, and I would expect that Burlington, with his love and progressiveness, would support barrier-free education for all. I first began attending meetings regarding BHS in 2014, only a year before my eldest student would begin his journey at Burlington High School, a journey with many physical barriers that are endured day in and day out. As these processes do move slowly, I know that a school without physical barriers would not happen during his tenure, but is so important for students, staff, parents, grandparents, and citizens to be able to move about the facility when attending school, work, open houses, musicals, and sporting events that I joined the effort. I've heard a range of opinions regarding the physical state of Burlington High School. Some alumni are surprised that it hasn't changed, and others feel there's no reason to change. There are many reasons for BHS's physical plan to change. Thirty millions in deferred maintenance that, if done, would still not meet design directives that creating flexible classrooms, facilitating an integration of curriculum, enlarging the cafeteria, creating additional needed physical education spaces, creating support spaces for the auditorium, reducing travel paths, creating a single drop-off and secure entry points, and providing informal student gathering spaces to name a few. It is so important for Burlington to create an educational environment that shows we are committed to creating equitable resources and learning opportunities for all students, so that our children can learn and all of our children matter. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Stein, and I just want to make clear to everybody there was originally there was a thought we were going to do the mural resolution tonight that will be happening at the meeting in October, but certainly anyone can still speak on any issue that they would like to. With that, Mr. Petrarcha is up next to be followed by Dave Maher. Mr. Petrarcha, welcome. Thank you. This is a hard copy of what amounts to the smoking gun in the mural issue, and what it shows is that the very first people to object to the mural were the Avanaki, and this was a month before the mural was unveiled, and essentially the city, Pierre Hardy and Ron Redman got this complaint, this list of objections calling the mural offensive to the Avanaki, and essentially told them to take a hike, and then suddenly we get renewed interest a year ago in the in the mural, and the mayor decides that he's going to create this mural task force, and the mural task force of course met for approximately 27 hours, 27 hours talking about the mural. So here we have July 2012, the Avanaki warned the city how racist this mural was, and the city ignored them. Here we are six years and 27 hours later of a mural task force, and what do they come up with? Let's keep the mural up for years, and continue this imposition of white supremacist artwork in the public square. And not only that, but they decide to double down with these four mini murals for people of color that will be spread out all over the city with no explanation for how it's going to be paid for or anything else. The idea is to just get past this. So here we have six years ago Avanaki gave us a warning. Now we have another warning and you all are going to have to make a decision whether or not you are going to continue to support this racist artwork in the town square for another four years and why? Why are you doing this? If something was racist on July of 2012 and it's racist on September 24th, 2018 and it's going to be racist in August of 2022 what's the point of imposing further pain and further hurt and further distortion about even basic history of this city and this state? So here you are, you have your chance to read it. You see that you're getting the second warning that you should do something about this because that's what's happening around the country. Cities around this country are taking down these racist memorials and statues and artwork and you're going to have your choice and I don't think you want to be on the wrong side of history on this one. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Petrarcha. Please hold the applause. Please Dave Maher is up next to be followed by Karen Rubin. Good evening Mr. Maher. Welcome. Well thank you. My name is Dave Maher living in the city of Burlington and I would like to thank the city council the mayor and everyone the effort they put in to make the city of Burlington a great city to live in. I'd like to express my support for the $30 million bond to improve our wastewater treatment plants in Burlington. You know our waterfront is a valuable asset and we should do everything we can to make it the best it can be. But there's one area that needs to be addressed that's not included in the bond issue as far as I can tell. That's the odor coming from the sewage treatment plant at the waterfront down by Perkins Pier. You know there's a lot going on down there. There's a bike path, there are restaurants, there's a park, there's a marina. But when the wind blows in the right direction or maybe it's the wrong direction the smell is foul and detracts from enjoyment of that area one of the best areas of the waterfront. You know no one wants to go for a bike ride eat in a restaurant play in the park with a stench of sewage in the air. So I urge you to include some funding in this bond to address that issue. Thank you. Thank you Mr. Maher. Karen Rubin is up next to be followed by Lori Fisher. Good evening Ms. Rubin, welcome. I would ask the city council to approve the high school bond for the November ballot and I ask that because I feel like deciding the fate of the high school shouldn't happen in this room alone and that we have to bring this subject out to the public and let the whole city work it out. I'm sure there are still details that are important that need to be worked out but it's time to bring it out to everybody. So I would ask you to approve it for the bond so we can get to that work. Thank you Ms. Rubin. Lori Fisher is up next to be followed by Charles Messing. Good evening Ms. Fisher and welcome. Good evening, thank you. I'm Lori Fisher, I'm executive director of the Lake Champlain committee. We're a by state science-based advocacy and education organization and I'm here tonight to speak strongly in favor of the stormwater and wastewater utility bond to bring that before the voters. One of the things we do as an organization is we run the lake wide cyanobacterium monitoring program and we do a lot of monitoring of lake conditions and we have seen firsthand the impact of the stormwater flows the nutrient loading that goes into Lake Champlain we feel like the city has long been a leader in trying to address their stormwater and their wastewater treatment issues and we think the proposal that is before you is very well thought out. I think it's a very good idea to be in favor of it and we look forward to you putting it on the ballot and hope that the voters will invest in the future of this region by investing in the future of the lake, our health, our public health as well as the economy of this region is highly dependent upon a healthy lake and this bond and the actions that will be taken if it's passed will really go forward towards achieving that so thank you very much. Thank you very much, Ms. Fisher. Mr. Messing is up next. We follow by Shelly Waterman. Good evening Mr. Messing. Welcome. Is this one work too? It's closer to the cameras. Hi everybody. Mr. Mayor, Council, everybody behind me. A couple of notes. I'm Charlie Messing and I hope everybody out there is doing well. All the people I can't see. I also support the Albert's views on the mural. Okay. Public restrooms. We have a nice new page on the Park and Recs site. It's a 4,000 word document and it's printed gray on white. It's hard to read. I ask that if you change to black and white. I think black and white has worked for a millennium and it's proven to be quite clear. Gray on white is not clear and it's hard to read. So it's a suggestion. Now in that brief quote, public restrooms are a critical element of inclusive and accessible public spaces and must be well maintained and accessible. So public restrooms are a critical city hall park is a small park and a permanent restroom facility would require the use of a significant amount of space currently dedicated to open space and other park activities. Space is not exactly an activity. Instead the plan calls for a small kiosk style restroom and the current plan includes a place holder for potential location for this restroom and the underground utilities. It's got to be connected to the water system. Basically we're talking about one toilet in a 6,000 pound steel enclosure which costs $110,000. I suggest as an alternative compostable toilets which can be useful for public restrooms. So the public restrooms can not add to these sewage in the lake. You could have 10 of them. They cost $1,000 each. You could spend another $10,000 on an enclosure and that would be a better solution to the public restroom. I cannot see having 20 or 30 tourists standing outside one toilet. It's not going to work. Yes, they have about 90 now and it's going to be reduced to 40. You can read about it elsewhere. $110,000. Okay. You know the game whack-a-mole? Anybody ever play the game whack-a-mole? You hit something and it appears somewhere else. If we try to get the homeless out of the park, guess what? We're going to be playing whack-a-mole. They're not going away. If the park is closed to everyone for a year as is proposed it doesn't work. Finish your thought, Mr. Messing. Yes. They're going to be here anyway and so will all of us. We'll all be elsewhere. We won't be in the park. We'll be somewhere else. No one will be disappearing. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Messing. Shelly Waterman is up next. Followed by Allison Seager. Good evening, Ms. Waterman. Welcome. Thank you. I was here I think it was a couple weeks ago and we were talking about the bond for the high school and I was a little concerned, nervous and disappointed that the conversation didn't happen at the September meeting so I'm hoping that the conversation will take place tonight. I'm here as a mom. I've lived in Burlington all my life. I was born here. I grew up here. I'm raising my two children here and I'm just speaking from the heart when my daughter was diagnosed with a degenerative neurological condition when she was two and a half years old we have done everything in our power to make life as full for her as we can and I won't lie and tell you that it's easy. It's not easy when not only do you have to educate everyone around you about the things that you can celebrate with someone with limitations a lot of the barriers that we've had to knock down in our way both barriers in the way people think of persons with disabilities and also the way that we design our buildings and structures. Now I am a graduate of Burlington high school so I think you know where this is going. We began having these conversations just in general with our school community back when she was in Burlington triple E and it started with the playgrounds were not universally designed as we know so we went through a fundraising campaign at Flynn elementary school to get some ramps and it was great. It happened when she was in fifth grade and she did have one year to be able to enjoy the playground with her friends including her little sister but now that that's a legacy there are other kids that will be able to go to Flynn elementary school who can access the playground flash forward to Hunt Middle School that was great we needed were the automatic door openers we were able to get those that was a quick fix flash forward to now her sophomore year at BHS my daughter has never been made more disabled as she is in the high school it makes it really difficult to celebrate the things that we should be celebrating when you have a child that's in high school one of the things that has been dismaying is the fact that this is an issue that we've all known about for years it's not a secret we know it's difficult to get through BHS twofold what that also says is that it concerns me about the way we think about persons in our community with disabilities we're here we're not going anywhere there are people like myself there are people like Kate who are parents who are not going away and once our kids are out of high school you will still have other students whose parents are dedicated enough to advocate that you can finish you can finish with that I am here tonight to beg you to put this on the ballot take it to the voters of the city and go from there it is really important that we stop the discrimination by our environments and we move forward and the city council has the opportunity to do that thank you thank you Ms. Waterman Alison Sieger good evening welcome so I'm here to talk about the mural I didn't get the memo that it was going to be next time so I'm a month early which is unusual for me for anything I guess I'm here to talk about the mural and I really I just really don't understand why it's still there it's just really simple question Abenaki people have said that it's offensive people of color have said it's offensive why is it still there I just really don't understand why not only is it still there but there's a decision made to keep it up for another four years it's kind of beyond me we have a rapid response graffiti team that when there's offensive or any kind of graffiti in our town people from the community justice center send volunteers out to get rid of stuff that is unpleasing to our eyes I would suggest that this mural is very unpleasing a significant population in this community maybe it's not offensive to people on the city council who are white but I know for a fact that it's incredibly offensive to people of color African American people and to the Abenaki community for you to choose to keep it up for another four years it's just really offensive and I really don't understand there is no economic gain to keep it up it's not that people are going to come from other places and go wow what a wonderful mural we have if anything it's going to stop people from coming in this town and it needs to disappear it needs to go send those people from the community justice center who need volunteer hours to go and paint it over and let's start again thank you up next is Casey I can't read the Casey Sears Casey Sears is up next Jason You need to sit down can speak into the microphone This young lady Miss Blackwood already knows this This is documents right here this is an accident report that put me there I've personally been attacked all over the state of Vermont that you already know my sister, Cassandra Morgan, decided to try the FOX Restraining Order Act. Well, there's another thing that's right here. That's purdery, Title A, that's wrong. That's not right. Mr. Weinberger, you know about it. You already have me thrown off your property illegally. Mental health records, medical records are shunted. We're losing you on the microphone. You need to speak right into the microphone. This is documents, this is documents of your so-called judicial conduct board. I flipped it over. There's names of the misans and judges that are in the state of Vermont that haven't done nothing for me. Personal attacks, too much family. My mother in FOX imprisonment for drug overdoses in the state of Vermont says, a attempted murder man gets away with it and this is all the files. Undercover operations, documents that's flipped over, that's the names of the misans, that's the reason why I'm homeless and I've been personally intact. There is discrimination in the state of Vermont or I went and found documents in, somebody found documents in the trash down in the public defender's office. There is discrimination in the state of Vermont that would be investigation's rules. This right here, it says, medical identity theft, okay? There's my mother begging on the floor. I want the public to see it. There's my mother begging on the floor due to you guys showing that, you're throwing everybody out in the streets and what case worker wants to take a case. Well, that's what, CHT, you name it, I have it. I have a 49-page statement that was already done and written in seven years I've been homeless. Right here, Judge Crawford, okay? Do you see this, Mr. Weinberger? Because you haven't thrown me off your property. You have no right to shed my medical or my mental health father. Speak into the microphone, Mr. Sears. We're losing you on channel 17. Okay, well, by the way in fact, there is discrimination. I have been stuck with four drug overdoses in the state of Vermont and due to Fox Incriminating Statements Against Me, Mary Morrissey played off as being impersonated as Nietzsche Panagolis. There's a document right here. The only thing that's sort of the sad thing, this is as reporters and committees, no dash shows on the back, that, no incident took place and why was it that chief del pozo worked for Google to have my Facebook removed? This is all the evidence I've had against the state of Vermont, the state of Vermont legislature that has been nothing but a breach of protocol, breach of contract, why people are homeless. I went down to Washington, DC by myself on $600 of a disability check last year. I was treated like a piece of crap because I had three suitcases full of this federal information. And guess what? I was looked at as a piece of crap. Now why is it that right here, this is the document showing, talk to the doctor, let me get this one minute. Mr. Sears, your time is up, you need to wrap up, you can say your last sentence or two, but you need to wrap up. This is a police liability, why I got my head beat in last year and these are the mason's laws that people are involved in my life. Including state of Vermont legislature, the only problem is, every piece of this is called redemption. What happens with us is there's a person that meets me at a certain time, they encrypt it to the state of Vermont legislature, the reason why the next cop beats me, somebody's gonna start picking up their mask because they haven't right doing this. I haven't, and right here, that's no stalking law. Thank you, Mr. Sears. If you want to submit any of that to the city, you can turn that in and they can distribute it to us. This could be submitted to Supreme Court of Washington DC. Very good. I haven't received your laws. Very good. Thank you, Mr. Sears. Adrian Muller is up next. Not sure if I have the first name right. Thank you guys. Oh, by the way, if I happen before you do that, if I have a stroke or a seizure, can I be registered to the state? Thank you, sir. We have to go to the next person in public forum. Hello, my name is Diane Miller. Diane Miller, thank you and welcome, Ms. Miller. I'm here to talk about the mural. I have found it offensive since it first went up, and I'm not even amnaki, but it was very clear to me that the native person being portrayed is not indigenous to this area. I have now read the portion of the artist's statement to the task force that deals with this. The artist had no intention of having that person represent the local amnaki with the flimsy excuse that Champlain did not mention the amnaki in his writings and that they did not get recognition until 2011. Even more offensively, the artist claims that the recognition of the amnaki and everything else that they've been able to get over the years is directly due to the artist's work. I find it, every time I walk past that thing, I am offended and I would really appreciate if we could simply take it down immediately. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Ms. Miller and Anne Taylor is up next to be followed by our final speaker this evening, Charlotte Dennett. Come on up, Ms. Taylor. No, you are up next, Anne. Okay, I'm Anne Taylor. I live in Shelburne and I'm coming back to Burlington. I miss Burlington. Good to hear. It's too quiet. Well, I think you're gonna change that for us, right? I don't know where to start, but my primary reason for being here today is when I arrived from good old New Hampshire in the fall of 69, Lake Champlain was clean. I don't remember any green slop all over the place. And we're running into a serious trouble with cyanobacteria. And so why I'm here is to offer full support and I will work as hard as I can to make the $30 million bond for storm and wastewater happen. But my recommendation is let's do 100 million. And I know our citizens won't like that because I think the free press today said, what $22 per household for the cost of $30 million bond? No, no, no. Okay, so I didn't get that right. But we definitely need this. And I've been trying to find out why is it legal for the cities, the towns along the Winooski River to dump sewer into the Winooski River, which starts in Cabin. So yes, stormwater, but we have some smart people now, the Rubinstein School, the Green Mountain School. Where is she? Where's the girl I met who's part of Wastewater and Chapin Spencer's group? Listen, I mean, there's so many issues. We need more ponds to soak up the water. I was on South Union Street with the water up to my car. It was a window. And we all know how severe the storm runoff is. And today, we do have a wisdom person in Senator Leahy's office. His name is Tom Barry. I can't read without my glasses. Tom Barry, it's his work to get the federal money here. And guess what? Patrick Leahy got his what? 81 or 84 million for water cleanup. So why don't we just give a big chunk, like 50 million in Burlington, 30 million or 100 million to each town so that they can do their new sewer and runoff stuff. And I will make sure that Don Sinek's and the city place will follow up and do, well, and that we have laws and they know they have to do a super job at the stormwater. And we have a lot of work to do. And why do we let tar take over the absorption of water? And the latest one, I talked to the chief and et cetera, is the state building right across the street. They're putting in cement pavers instead of the grass and the trees are gone. So let's not take out all the trees in the Burlington City Park. Let's get with the program and steal some land and more. Thank you, Ms. Taylor. Holding water. Thank you, Ms. Taylor. Your time is up. We have a lot to do. Thank you. Charlotte Dennett is up next, our final speaker tonight in public forum. Good evening, Ms. Dennett and welcome. Gotcha. I'm here today to testify about the mural and to express a change of opinion. When I first testified, I testified as an art historian, I got my master's degree in art history and I felt very strongly that you should not destroy art. Just like you don't destroy history, you should not destroy art. I still believe that, but with some caveats, so just hear me out a minute. I have a little story to tell about when I was writing a book about the genocide of indigenous people in the Amazon. And I had come to learn that what was being inflicted on them in the Amazon came straight out of the history books of what was going on in our own country. And when I went around to museums, I looked for paintings that showed the horror because there are museums to the American Indian and I found very few museums that portrayed it. I also looked in the history books and could not find the pictures. And that is one reason why I don't want to see this art destroyed. I want it removed, but not destroyed because as soon as you destroy art, you destroy its history and its memory out of sight, out of mind. I want our younger people to know about the horrors that have been inflicted upon the indigenous people. And it had to be an art sometimes. And even up today, that mural reflects a certain blindness and yes, racism towards the Abenaki people and the people of color. The reason why I've had a turnaround is because I saw the so-called smoking gun and I find it very disturbing. The fact that there were citizens, Abenakis that complained about the mural to the head of the marketplace and was ignored, that removes from me my giving them the benefit of the doubt. That would suggest a deliberate effort to ignore their complaints, to be insensitive. And that's not right. So what I want to propose, it's just a suggestion, is you remove the mural, you store it for a while and then you create a museum of shame. And it might be put up in the University of Vermont or in their museum and you dedicate a whole room to all the wrongs that have been done to the Abenaki people, from the eugenics experiments to the denying of their identity, to their denying of their recognition. I think it would be a great education. And by the way, we have Holocaust museums in this country and we have a museum dedicated to slavery and we have an American Indian museum now in Washington but it's very tame. I think it's time, the whole truth be shown and that how we treat our native people be put in the proper historical context and that means right up to the present. Thank you, Ms. Dannet and that will conclude tonight's public forum. Thank you everyone for coming out and making respectful remarks on whatever topic you were talking about. We will now move forward to item number four which is the consent agenda. I recognize Councilor Busher. Yes, I'd like to move to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated. Moved by Councilor Busher, seconded by Councilor Dean. Any discussion? Hearing none, all those in favor of approving the consent agenda and taking the actions indicated. Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? We have approved tonight's consent agenda and that moves us to item number five on the deliberative agenda and that's 5.01 and this is a communication and a presentation from Marcy Esberg, Assistant Director of CEDO and the Director of CEDO, Neil Lunderville. Director Lunderville and the Assistant Director. Good evening and for the record, Marcy Esberg, Assistant Director for the Community and Economic Development Office. Thank you for your time. Tonight, we will have a public hearing for the Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report, otherwise known as the CAPER. And I thought I would take a few minutes to review some of the information in the CAPER and explain where we are in our five-year plan and look at a little bit of the history of that plan and what we have achieved. So we've got the presentation coming up. Thank you. So the next slide, just a reminder that the Community Development Block Grant, CDBG, is funding that comes from the federal government and it was put into law in 1974. The goals of CDBG is to provide decent safe sanitary housing, expand economic opportunities and provide a suitable living environment or quality of life for low and moderate income persons. And Burlington is the only entitlement community in the state of Vermont. So as we go into the next slide, this explains the Consolidated Plan framework from Housing and Urban Development. And if you look down to the right-hand corner, you see that we are at the last year, the fifth-year CAPER of the five-year plan. So that's why we're rolling up some of the information that we've shown you for the past five years. So let's look at some of the housing goals that we have and what I'm going to do is weave together the five-year plan, the five-year CAPER, but also what you got in the communication for this past year. So for example, we have several housing goals that we work to achieve. And the first major one is to increase the availability or access to decent housing. And we look at new permanent supportive housing, special needs housing, and reducing lead hazards. So today, I'd just like to highlight the new permanent supportive housing. And you would see in your communication that this past year we added eight permanent supportive housing units through the Bel Air Motel being bought by Champlain Housing Trust and then being used for people who are chronically homeless. And so our goal over the past five years was to have 22 units and we achieved 38 of those units. And so if you look at the next slide, I just want to connect with you. This is not just about numbers, but it's actually about turning the curve, making a change in our community. So what I've done is I've connected the increase in permanent supportive housing to look at what we've done in the past few years with reducing the number of chronically homeless persons we have in the community. And this is counted every year with the point in time count. So you could see the trend line going down and ultimately a 69% decrease in chronic homelessness. So as you increase the type of housing and the housing first premise and putting people directly into housing, you see that we're decreasing the number of chronically homeless. As we go into the next slide, another group of housing goals include increasing the affordability of decent housing. So we're producing new units, new rental units, new homeowner units, and also providing home buyer assistance. And this isn't something that we do just as a city, but we have significant partners in the city that we work with. So let's specifically look at the reduction of new affordable housing units, rental units. And our goal over five years was 75, but we actually achieved 105 units. So we've exceeded that. But then let's look at the population metrics. So when we increase the number of units, do we see that on the next slide, what do we see with our rental vacancy rates? And we've talked a lot about this in the city. We talk about the fact that we have a very low vacancy rate. And so we would expect to see that as more units come online that the vacancy rate would go up and perhaps the cost of housing goes down. So we're tracking that as well. And you could see that we had a bump in that at the end of last year went over 4%, which is considered a very even standard in a community, but then it went back down to 3.5%. But that is still higher than what it's been in the past. We would also look at increasing the sustainability of decent housing. So preserving and upgrading existing housing, we were just talking about that today in a meeting. We have the seventh oldest housing stock in the country. And we're getting to the point where our land is being used up. So after we put 750 units in Cambrian Rise, there's not a lot of land left. So it's really important to preserve and upgrade the units that we have to keep that affordable housing stock. So we renovate rental units, renovate owner units. And we also work at housing retention because we wanna stop a cycle of homelessness. So we wanna make sure that people who are vulnerable are seniors, those that are dealing with illnesses, that they could stay housed so that they don't cycle back into homelessness. So you could see that, again, our goal over the past five years has been to assist over 1,600 people. And we exceeded that to almost 2,300 people with housing retention. This past year, we helped 125 residents with home share and senior-based services to remain housed. And so they didn't cycle into homelessness. And so then we would look at the housing population indicator showing, again, the decrease in the number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless. So you see a line going down in that respect because we emphasize keeping people housed. The next area that we're going to look at, again, and there's three focuses of CDBG, housing, economic opportunity, and suitable living environment. So let's look at some of the economic goals that we have to increase the availability or access to economic opportunity. Here, we look at both our assistance to small businesses or micro enterprises and also our assistance to larger businesses to help build their infrastructure so they create and retain jobs. So we look at the micro enterprises and we see that our goal over five years was to assist 65 businesses, and we were up to 85. And this past year, through the work that CEDO has done but also the Women's Small Business Program, we actually created five new businesses and seven businesses were expanded. So again, let's look at the population indicator. If you're helping businesses, you would expect that unemployment rates would go down because people would be gainfully employed. And so we see that CEDO has always had a very, the city has always had a very low unemployment rate and it continues to be at the low end. One of the things that we're not showing here but it is in the caper, if you look towards the end with these community indicators is there is a very big discrepancy between unemployment rates generically through the population and then if you look at people of color, the unemployment rates is significantly higher. So there is an opportunity gap that we need to look at and we need to focus on. A continued economic goal would be to increase the sustainability of economic opportunity and we look to access resources to reduce economic barriers. One of the major ways we do this in the program that we support is a volunteer income tax assistance program and you could see again that our goal over five years was to assist 3,500 families but we exceeded that at 5,000 and an economic indicator or a population indicator that you might look at and the next slide would be the downward trend, slightly downward trend of those that are below the poverty level. So as you decrease, I'm gonna get it right, as you access resources to reduce economic barriers, you are hoping that people are gaining economic opportunity and reducing their poverty status. And lastly, we do a lot with an investment in suitable living environment goals with protecting the vulnerable with shelter for the homeless, providing public services for those at risk in food and with our youth programs and our health programs, we actually finished this year a very big accessibility project with the community health centers of Burlington and so we should do some of the pictures of the programs that we've done and improving public facilities. One of the things about the CAPER is that it's not just about CDBG, it's fairly comprehensive, not only of the work that's done with CDBG at home but other work that's being done out of CEDO and also with our partners, so you really get a view of what is happening in the city together to work with youth and interns, our AmeriCorps program, also our community justice program, all the anti-poverty strategies that we're working with. So over the past year, CEDO has administered 14 subgrants with other agencies and five CEDO related programs. So you could see that comprehensive look at what has been accomplished, not only this year but through this presentation, the past five years out of the office. Thank you very much. Mr. Lunderville, did you have something to say? I only can add one thing that is to thank Marcy for this. Marcy told us recently that she is going to escape Vermont's winners once and for all and head back to her warm Florida. And I wanted to say that the work that goes into this plan, the con plan and other pieces that are in Marcy's shop is she does truly exceptional work with a difficult body of regulations to manage with a lot of federal programs and has done it so well. And on behalf of the CEDO staff, I wanted to thank Marcy for her great work, another great presentation on this and best wishes. Thank you, yes. I did wanna say that this will be my last presentation to you all, October 19th is my last day in the city. And it's been an honor and a pleasure to serve both the council and the mayor. So thank you so much. And also for the citizens of Burlington. And I know some of them came to see me today. So that's what really keeps us going and keeps me going is making a difference. And Marcy, on behalf of the council, I'm sure that it's unanimous that you've done a great job and you will be missed. And Florida's gain is Burlington's loss. So thank you very much for your, now we get to grill you one more time. Go Matt. Councilor Bushard. Of course. Yes. I wouldn't let you escape. I couldn't turn it over to anybody else for your last time. So I didn't know that you were leaving, but I was already going to start with a big thank you for once again, this valuable information and tracking of how successful or where we could potentially make some improvements. And so I have a couple of questions, generic questions. The lead program, the funding for that has ended. Is that the end of the money or does that continue on? You said it was the end of the three year in this. Right. And we just started actually a new program. It's a competitive program and we were funded again and so it has another three years. It does have another three years. I just wanted to confirm that. The other piece was that when I looked at all of this and I read this, I had mentioned to the mayor, and this is not to put him, not to catch you off guard, Mr. Mayor, but we were talking about housing and we were talking about food. This was during the last budget cycle and I was told by many in the community that food was really not an issue. I mean, I mentioned it to the Board of Finance during the budget review, wondering if we could do more. And yet here it says, provide public services at risk food, number of people served. We had a target of 20,000 people, but we only served about 6,000. So I'm wanting everyone to, I'm letting the interim CEDO director also be aware of that. If there is an unmet need, I think that during the next budget cycle we should be made aware of that. I know this is money linked to CDBG funding, but I'm just trying to figure all of that out. If indeed we feel like we were successful even though we didn't meet our target number for people with food, or if there was more to do, and I couldn't really figure that piece out from this. So you can imagine that when you make a five year plan, things change in those five years. So when we made this plan in 2013, we were regularly funding the food shelf and with the work that they do, it could have easily been seen that we would serve 20,000 people. Then we changed the way we distributed CDBG and only one agency per, only one program per agency could come in for funding. So Champlain Valley Office of Economic Opportunity has myriad of programs and they actually get very good funding for the food shelf and so they've chosen to come in for their volunteer income tax assistance program. However, we are in the process of putting a lot of money into the food shelf to renovate their facility and it's just taken a while to get all the ducks in the row. We had some brownfield mitigation that we had to do there and that should be completed in the next year or two. We're doing an accessibility project and helping them expand and go vertical in their building. So we'll count that in the next five years. So these numbers may be, for me just looking at them, just overview, they may be misleading that actually the number of people served, even though those are accurate numbers, the other individuals may have got their needs met in other ways. Correct. Okay, and that's an important piece for me to understand. So once again, thank you. I really find your reporting readable, understandable and so important because this is one of the tools that we measure how effective we are as a community meeting people's needs and it's important, so thank you. Thank you, Councillor Bushard. Councillor Hartnett, Van Dean and Pine. Councillor Hartnett. Thank you. Well, I've had really a pleasure working with you over the last six years and you're real and you get it and you know what the problems are and I think you've given us a pretty good start where we need to go to and I think we've had that conversation a lot and these numbers obviously look good and we're doing a lot of good things but let's be clear, we have a problem here in Burlington and I think it would be unfair not to talk about that tonight, right? We have a lot of homeless people living in parks that have addiction issues and we need to do a better job in this city addressing that issue and the low barrier shelter is a start but not a part time one like we have now we need a full time one and then it's just not good enough to have a low barrier shelter with a pillow and a bed but we need to have resources in there, right? We need to have people to get to know these people and find out their addictions and to address those addictions. I had a conversation tonight on my way to the council meeting with three homeless people out in front of the pizza place here tonight. All three of them said they would be in the low barrier shelter tonight. All three of them clearly had an addiction problem they were drinking right out here, right? But they're gonna be on the street tonight because we do not have a full time low barrier shelter and that is a shame in this city. We should have one when I see all the money in other areas that we put some of our resources to and waste and I get it, I hate to say it but we're spending $50,000 a year to put flowers in the middle of our streets. I mean, that should only happen if everything was a perfect world, right? And all our other problems were solved but we're gonna spend $50,000 to have somebody take care of huge flower pots in the middle of our streets and we're gonna let three people sit out here in front of juniors tonight and not have a place to live. I just, it's hard for me to get, to be honest with you, it really is, but would you agree that we need to do a better problem making that connection, getting these people in a low barrier shelter and getting them into housing full time? That's never gonna happen unless we address the addiction issue that they have and give them the resources and get to know these people and find out where they're really coming from and I would just like to know from you your thoughts before you leave here is what are some of the things that we need to do better? So the mayor knows that I have been longtime advocate of a year round low barrier shelter and I think it's great that we've included the 60,000 for the shelter for next year to expand it and have it go longer, but it is all about making those connections, building the relationships and moving people as quickly as possible into housing. And I think we've done an admirable job. There's always more work to do, but I also think that because of the changes that we've made in the last couple of years, and the changes in policies and the procedures of the way that the continue of care and the housing agencies are doing business with a by name list and with prioritization, we could be coming very close to a functional zero for chronic homelessness before the end of the year. My unpopular, but now I could say these things, my unpopular point of view is that it's not always about money. It's a lot of times about the way we do business and a very unpopularly said in a containment of care meaning that I would rather not give more money to another program until we learned how to operate effectively and efficiently. There's a lot of money. This community is extremely blessed with resources. Sometimes, in many cases, we get more money than some larger communities. And so it isn't just a matter of the money, but it's a matter of how we communicate, how we work together, how we prioritize, and that's what makes a difference and that's what's gotten the numbers to look the way they have in the past three or four years. Thanks, and I appreciate your thoughts, but the reason I think a lot of reasons why we got those numbers, the way we got is because we have an incredible CEO department that works hard. You led the way. There's a lot more work to do. I hope we can learn from you. I think you've taught us a lot over the last six years and I wish you the best of luck. Thanks. Thank you, Councillor Hartnett. Councillor Dean and then Councillor Fine. Thank you, President Wright. I have a couple of questions about looking forward and this is a report that really shows a lot of hard work and success and I have heard and seen published thoughts about the fact that CDBG may be significantly less funded or done away with by the Trump administration and I'm not sure whether to trust those reports or not. I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about that and then second question about the future is we are finishing five years. How do we plan for the next five years? So first and foremost, I'm very encouraged to be a part of the National Community Development Association and as a national professional organization and lobbyist they keep us very well informed as to what's happening with the budget and lack of a better phrase, there's an ongoing dance between what the President presents and then what Congress passes and yes, the President has for the last couple of years presented a budget that zeroed out CDBG and Home along with a number of other things but the really good thing about CDBG and Home that we fail to talk about enough and that is the fact that it's federal money coming to local government for local government to decide what to do and quite frankly, the people in Congress love that because they're bringing money home into the community so that we all could decide how to use it. So with that, I highly doubt that CDBG is going anywhere but you'll continue and Trump has zeroed out that but Obama was not a whole lot better either. He cut it year after year after year so it again, it's this dance between the White House and Congress and Congress knows that they want to bring the money into the community and who knows best how to serve the people in your community but the people that are sitting here so I don't see CDBG and Home going away and then in May of last year or earlier in this year, I presented the five year plan and that's the future. So that's the plan going forward between the five year consolidated plan and also the assessment of fair housing. We wrapped those things together and that's what the future looks like and it was interesting too because we're looking at the update of plan BTV and some of those things are rolled into that as well so it's really important that as a community we're not off all doing our own thing but there's some serious issues. There are things that we could work on together coming at it from different departments and different points of view but achieving the same goals. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Dean. And we have to have a public hearing after this before taking any action but Councilor Pine. Sure, thank you. I do have the motion but I'll bring that up after the public. After the public. Yeah, I want to just share briefly that I was on the hiring committee that selected Marcy for the position that she... It's all his fault. Is leaving. And one of Marcy's favorite quotes was on her wall which I think is really perfect for Marcy. It says, after all is said and done, too often more is said than done but with Marcy Esper, that's never the case. Marcy makes sure that the work gets done. She doesn't just want to sit around and talk about it and that was really a pleasure to work with at CEDA for those years that we were together. I do want to ask if you could talk about where the continuum of care, rental assistance that comes through the continuum is because I've heard some rumors that there may be some shifting of how that money is going to be programmed locally and I'm just concerned because it's almost a million dollars of subsidy that we have at risk here. Sure, it's about 1.2 million and I'm always just thrilled the last two weeks of September because all my deadlines converge. So on September 18th I pushed a submit button for that 1.2 million dollars of assistance to go in for the continuum of care and we did reprogram some of the money but not all, we took $50,000 from one of the rental assistance programs to expand coordinated entry and really what it comes down to with rental assistance going back to what Councillor Hartnett said is you need to pair rental assistance with supportive services and that's a dance as well because you need to get everybody lined up and all the agencies lined up on the same page doing it together and it was a little off kilter and it's been a little bit off kilter so we haven't been able to spend all of our money but we're working very hard in changing that and making sure going forward that all the rental assistance gets used and everybody and we keep it. Just full and follow up, so where it stands now now that you're leaving you can say the truth here so I really want you to hear the full unbornished truth where it stands now you think is in a good direction as far as being able to use it all to make sure that folks who really need the help are gonna be getting it. I do and we actually decided well they didn't I suggested that at the COC meeting that they get little bands that say what would Marcy say so when they're faced with these decisions they hear my voice in their head and so they'll continue to go forward in this manner. It was funny, yeah? No? No. No. Thank you Councillor Pine, Councillor Jang and then we'll, Councillor Jang. Thank you President and thank you Marty and we wish you the best to your next endeavor. Thank you. And it looks like you said you've been working for the city for over how many years? Six, it's six and a half years. Six and a half years and have you ever been involved with the housing agreement between the city and the major educational institutions in Burlington? No I have not been involved with that. But can you talk about if there are, but you understand, you understand what I'm talking about and on top of your head maybe you know the percentage of students using renting homes in Burlington. Do you know how many? How much? I don't know that number off the top of my head but I will say that every community has their housing issue. So I came from Southwest Florida and our housing issue was snowbirds, okay? So somebody can take a rental unit and instead of renting it out all year long to somebody that needed housing they could keep that housing for three months and set for three months to a snowbird that came in and paid triple the amount and they paid all their expenses for those three months of housing. So I remember when I came here six years ago and did the consolidated plan all I heard over and over and over again and that hasn't changed is the situation with the students. That is Burlington's housing issue because you have a lot of students that come here and landlords have found a way to make their housing costs pay through renting to students. So that's the issue that we deal with here. But you know, since you were not involved I just wish you the best. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. And with that I think we are ready to conclude that presentation. Again, thank you Marci for the great work and your honesty. So with that we will go to 5.02 which is the public hearing on CAPER, the Consolidated Annual Performance and Evaluation Report. Is there anyone who would like to speak to the council in the, we'll open the public hearing and is there anybody who would like to speak to us about CAPER in the public hearing? Going once, going twice. We will close, go in three times, we'll close out the public hearing and look back to Councillor Pine for a motion on CAPER. I move that the city council accepts this communication, authorizes Martha Yesberg, Assistant Director of CEDO to submit the 2017 CAPER to the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Seconded by Councillor Bushur. Any discussion on the motion? Hearing none, all those in favor? Please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you very much for that presentation. And good luck in Florida. Where it's born. Yes. Item number 5.03, going back to the deliberative agenda is the debt policy issue and the communication and we'll hear from the mayor first. Mr. Mayor. Thank you, President Wright. We are pleased to, after months of work, have before you tonight for action a debt policy that I'm hopeful will go down as one of the more important documents and policies that we work on together as a council and an administration. The need for a debt policy really started to become clear early in the year and the work between the administration and the Board of Finance. As we were reviewing the, really how we continue to make financial progress as we have in recent years. We, after the most recent credit rating upgrade, the fourth credit rating upgrade, which came about in part because we had completed the long list of financial reforms recommended by our auditors and by Moody's in back in 2012, all that work was done and we asked our financial consultants for recommendations on where we go from here to maintain the progress we had made and continue to make progress. And one of the top recommendations that came back in the first quarter of this year was that we pursue a debt policy. That made immediate sense, I think to everyone on the Board of Finance be because we are in a period of taking on some additional debt as a result of long-term, much-needed long-term investments. And we have never had real guidelines about that debt, how much we will take on and then the nature of that debt. So we started working on that in the spring. The urgency around this work became conservatively greater in June when we had a joint meeting of the City Council and the school board at which it really became clear that the, like the school district was very focused on bringing forward this fall a major bond item for a new Burlington High School. And I think it was really clear to everyone in the room that night that to take on an expenditure of like that, we really needed to have some sense of how a $70 million investment fit into responsible long-term financial planning. And so Chief Administrative Officer Beth Anderson and her team, namely Rich Goodwin in particular, really accelerated their work around the debt policy. Following that meeting came forward, spent a substantial amount of time with our professional financial consultants, set up and had important communications with Moody's and the Board of Finance had a number of sessions leading up to earlier tonight, which again, after several rounds of input, tonight we had a short discussion at the Board of Finance about this debt policy and it was unanimously endorsed by the Board of Finance. The, let me just try to kind of summarize really the essence of what this policy says and what it would mean for the city going forward. There are essentially two standards in this debt policy that I think will have significance for us tonight with the decision later on in the agenda and then significant to the city and the Burlington School District in the years to come. The first standard is really about city debt alone. One of the interesting things that have come out of this work is that going forward, the up until now Moody's hasn't really distinguished between city debt and school district debt as a result of this work over recent months. They are gonna make a distinction between that and I think that will actually probably be helpful to both entities. They will look at the direct debt to the city in their first sort of cut, their first analysis and that metric will maybe be the most important metric in some ways and for that direct debt metric, we have laid out in this policy a goal of trying to hold ourselves to the standards of a double A rated city. People will recall that before the Burlington Telecom troubles began, the city of Burlington had for many years been a double A rated city. We are not all the way back to that yet. We are two thirds of the way back to that but we are still today a single A rated city, two steps below the bottom of the double A range. That is an aspiration that I think many of us and certainly the majority of the Board of Finance felt like is the direction we would like to be working towards. The double A, to kind of cut to the chase, the double A rated standard is essentially 1.75% of the full value of the grand list is what they consider a kind of double A maximum for our municipality and that would and the size of the current grand list result in about $85 million of borrowing of being available to the city within that range. The other standard in the debt policy is a standard for overlapping debt which is essentially the city's debt, that direct debt plus the Burlington School District's debt. There, the standards are less clear and there are not as many direct comparables. Each municipality is a little bit different and each municipality has a different environment or climate if you will of other entities that are allowed to take on debt that fall on the shoulders of taxpayers, local taxpayers to pay. There we have settled on a standard that is essentially a standard that applies to single A rated cities, our current standard of a 4% figure. That effectively when you back the city's direct debt levels out of that overlapping debt, 4% total, that would allow approximately 100 and under the current size of the grand list right around $115 million of borrowing capacity beyond the city's capacity which fortunately is quite consistent with the maximum levels that the school district is planning on borrowing in the years ahead. A couple other notes just at the outside of the discussion here. There was properly raised by a counselor some concern that we not be overly rigid in this policy that we build in some flexibility and some variation. Both those figures I listed for you are essentially the target figures in this debt policy. They are not the absolute caps that the policy allows. With basically our successors if they want to exceed the 1.75% and the 4% levels they can do so with a, we recommend them essentially making a special finding that they are doing so intentionally and lay out their plans for coming back down below the target levels in as quick a period of time after that as possible. We think that provides future councils significant flexibility that may be important. Future councils also can change this policy of course. This is being put forward for a simple vote of the city council tonight. A vote by the council could change that in the future. The point of making a policy however is to try to avoid, to have an enduring quality and to try to avoid frequent revisions and amendments that would probably have the effect of being a kind of credit negative over time if we were mucking around with this policy all the time. So we don't think we should have to. Also accompanied here with the submission to you is a projection for debt levels over the next decade which shows us coming up in the years 22 through 24 near the maximums allowed by this debt policy and then overall debt levels combined starting to recede from that point and there's being some additional capacity and we think that we think that would be good. We would like this. We are really, this policy will allow us because of the infrastructure needs in this community both on the municipal side and the school district side. This policy has been crafted in a way that is consistent with much needed and really important historically important levels of investment in this community. Over time the projections would have that level coming down and we think that is something to be worked towards. How will we work towards that? And my final point on this is this is intended to be a living document. I think we have some good precedent for how to work with a document like this. Counselors who've been on this board for a while know that whenever we do TIF borrowing we look, we update the TIF projections and we look into the, we look at where we stand versus where we thought we'd be and we make revisions to our actions depending on the changes to those projections. That's exactly the kind of process we envision happening here. These projections in front of you tonight are projections that could well, that are estimates and that if the grand list grows slower or faster than these estimates there may be a need to change what we do with respect to bonding in the future. If the bond market changes and borrowing terms change substantially from what they are today that could in fact, future borrowing decisions. If the pace of construction by either the city or the school district is not exactly what is projected here, that could impact these projections. Every time the district or the city goes, moves forward with bonding action in the future the Board of Finance will have these projections updated. We'll look at what the updates show and there may be a need for course corrections in the future and that's what I mean by this being something that we continue to work with and be a living document over time. That's what this is. Thank you everyone who's been involved both in the city side and the school district side in getting this work to this point tonight that I think we really are in position to take action and create a new policy that I think will serve us well for a long time to come. Thank you President Wright. Thank you Mr. Mayor and I'm gonna now recognize Councillor Paul for a motion but before I do just want to announce that we have Councillor Nodell from Seattle on the phone. Councillor Nodell, are you there? Councillor Nodell, I thought we had Councillor Nodell. We'll go, Councillor, I think we have Councillor Nodell so I'm gonna go to Councillor Nodell, are you there? Councillor Paul for a motion, Councillor Paul would you make the motion and then whatever remarks you want to make and then we'll move into discussion on that item. Sure, so thank you President Wright. So I'd make a motion to accept this policy as presented and just wanted to make a couple of comments on the debt policy. You know debt when well managed and I think this is debt well managed represents a prudent investment in our future our future as a city. The debt policy that we're voting on tonight accomplishes a great deal. It provides us first and foremost with a roadmap. It enhances the quality of the decisions that we make related to debt issuance and as the mayor has said it states the city's goal of our continued commitment to improving and sustaining the city's financial position and increasing our credit rating. It also does commit us to ensuring an affordable cost of borrowing to taxpayers. The higher our credit rating the lower the cost of borrowing. So both of those go hand in hand. And I think one of the other more important aspects of the debt policy is that it spells out our desire to provide outstanding services to our community and to grow our economy. And as the mayor has mentioned it does set limits and a target so that provided we stay within those limits and that target in terms of given our revenue and the full value of our assets we will be I believe continued to be looked upon favorably by Moody's. But all of that is probably equally as important. What the policy says on paper is equally as important as what it will do for Burlington in practice. I think the policy that we're voting on which represents a tremendous amount of work by a great many people, this policy I think represents the best of Burlington. The mayor and his administration, the superintendent, the school board, the school administration, the board of finance, the city council have all had input into this policy. Many around this table have devoted hours and offered a lot of input to this policy. In the end what I think happened was that there was respectful and collaborative dialogue and an understanding of how important it is for us to remember that we all wanna get to yes and finding a way to get to yes means accommodating all of our needs. And I think working together we made that possible. The debt projections that we all received and are available on board docs show that our debt would be growing from 80 million to just over 190 million. At the same time our revenue and value of our assets are also projected to grow. So both of the numbers are growing at the same time though not at the same rate. This means that we can then take on the proposed debt for BHS and other infrastructure needs in the city such as Memorial Auditorium and normal routine bonding. The proposed debt policy will accommodate these needs while maintaining the balance of debt to revenue and full value of our city's assets. I think that in the bottom line is that we did all of this by not looking at one project versus another project. We did it by looking at the full picture. And for the first time perhaps ever and certainly in a long time or in most people's memory there is an understanding not just in words but again in practice that what benefits our city and our schools benefits the other. While we each have a role to play the council and the administration we are the guardians of the city's credit rating and fiduciaries in ensuring the fiscal stability of the city. The schools also have a very important role in managing the schools and ensuring the best learning environment for our students. I think tonight is a real turning point both with this vote and the others regarding the bond and the MOU. We are all acknowledging that the silo approach does not work if we're to be at our best. What benefits our schools and improves education has long-term impacts for the future of our city. What benefits our city's infrastructure and ability to further economic development attracts families and people to live in Burlington. We can't have one without the other. I hope that this policy will receive our unanimous support. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Powell. And I'm gonna try again. We need to make sure that we can that Councilor Nodell in Seattle can hear us and that we can hear Councilor Nodell. Councilor Nodell, are you there? I am there. Can you hear me? We can hear you, Councilor Nodell. So... And I just wanted to be known. I heard this item from the very beginning. I heard the mayor's entire presentation and heard all of what Councilor Powell had to say. Great. Thank you, Councilor Nodell. President Wright, point of information. Councilor Busher, what is your point of information? Do you need a second for Councilor Powell's motion? Do you like to make that? I'd like to second that. Councilor Busher has seconded the motion made by Councilor Powell and now we're open for discussion from the City Council. Councilor Hartnett. Thanks. I just want to bring up the cost of borrowing because I think it could come up in conversations here in the next six weeks. So what would it be with a double A which we're not out now, single A, but we're trying to get to double A. What's the difference between the cost of borrowing and what are we talking about dollar-wise? C.L. Anderson. Sorry, we had some estimates done. So these are just estimates that were provided by our financial advisor, but for every million dollars in borrowing, the projection was that if we got back up to a double A to that we would save approximately $18,000 a year in debt service costs. If we were downgraded by one, it would cost us another $8,000 in debt service each year. But we don't expect to be downgraded by this, right? So we would stay- No, we don't. Right. We just wanted to be clear about that. Okay, thanks. Thank you, Councilor Hartnett. Councilor Busher. Yes, I just wanted to make just a couple of comments. As the mayor said that this is being put forward as a resolution and I support that. I don't think that this policy should be in the charter because these are our targets for today's world and I can't really project what they'll be in the future as far as the 4% or the 4.25. But I think that this will serve future councils really well. And what's most important for me is that as Councilor Powell referenced, this really, this debt policy really brings the school board and the city council together, to work more closely together to meet the educational and municipal needs. In the past, and I, like all of us have lived here a long time, it was either the schools got their needs met or the city got its needs met, but we couldn't both move forward. With this debt policy in place and resolutions that are now for our consideration after we finish discussing this, we will both be able to move forward because both of us have pressing needs and we need to give the voters an opportunity to say yes or no to these pressing needs. And so I think that this is a major accomplishment. It's more than just what's on paper, but it's a guidance and a reference for today and for the future. And I really applaud everybody who really worked hard on this. I know that there are counselors who are economics professors and others who have other backgrounds in financial. I mean, Councilor Powell, I know has that expertise. I don't, but I have a critical eye for other things. I think each one of us has our own value that we bring forward to make this policy as good as it can be. And so I want to just thank everyone from the administration and thank all of the city counselors for all the work they did. Thank you, Councilor Bush, or Councilor Pine. Thank you. I want to acknowledge the collaborative spirit and thank the mayor and the administration for approaching this policy with the council and the school board in a collaborative fashion because I think one of the points I made at the Board of Finance meeting a few weeks ago was that that one ratio is an important ratio, but there's more to the picture when Moody's and the rating agencies look at your community and investing in your infrastructure, investing in your future, ensuring this is a place people want to live, it's a place businesses want to establish themselves and grow here and a place that young people grow up proud of and they look to come back here and establish their families is really a big part of that. So I think we've struck a great balance here and I'm really very pleased with the outcome. Thank you, Councilor Pine. Any other Councilor Shannon, then Councilor Mason. Yes, I really want to thank the mayor and Beth Anderson and the Board of Finance for taking the leadership role on this. I think going into it, many of us were maybe a little bit fearful as to what this process might yield and a little concerned about how much money there might be available for anything and how would we distribute that among competing needs and it took some courage to really take that big picture view and make those decisions determinations and as a result we now have something that we find we can manage and we can live within when we never knew what those limits were before. It's been completely enlightening for me. I'll say going into it, I didn't know what a debt policy was and I didn't follow it as closely as some Councilors for sure. I went to some of the Board of Finance meetings but not all of them by any stretch and reading the policy, I was so impressed with the work that was done and what this now, the framework this now gives us to work within. So I just want to say thank you for all of the hard work that you put into this as well as to the Councilors who contributed and grappled with finding the balance in this policy. Thank you, Councilor Shan and Councilor Mason's passing so Councilor Jang. Yes, just for the record and I've been hearing a lot about yes, the city and the Burlington School District have been working diligently about this but I think also for the record I was just wondering if Mr. President, if we can hear also from the administration. We will be, Councilor Jang. Yes, and now this, I believe that it is a way forward but at the same time I don't think this is enough because when we talk about debt, let's think about who is paying for it, who is paying for any debts in this community. It's the people of Burlington, the taxpayers of Burlington but I think the next step would be for both the Burlington School District and the city of Burlington to find ways to better work together, to better work together and finding opportunities where we can make sure that we can bring ideas and also resources that will at least give some type of break to the people who are paying for all of these debts. Whether it's getting it slow or having a limit but let's take the next step and for those, this administration, I urge alongside with the Burlington School District to find that way, to maybe create a committee that will outlines these are some points that we feel like we can work collaboratively in making sure that the payers, the taxpayers, the debt payers are giving some type of break but I appreciate this effort from the mayor's administration, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang and we'll be hearing from the School Administration and School Board on the MOU in a minute. If we can get there. Councillor, Mr. Mayor. Thanks, President Wright. I just, a couple final points. I appreciate the reactions from colleagues on the council and I share the kind of sense of hope about this policy. Again, and here's, I think I didn't quite capture this up front, it's a funny thing, we're setting essentially limits on the amount of debt that we think is responsible to take on. That in some ways is defining a cap or with some flexibility in it as we've discussed but we are defining a maximum and I think that's important to do. I think it's a tenant of living within our means and being responsible. At the same time, one of the things that excites me about this is by creating that limit, I actually think it creates the opportunity for both the school district and the city to invest more in infrastructure and I actually think it's gonna lead to more infrastructure investment over time than we've been comfortable doing on a regular basis in the past and I'm hopeful that that means that not only are we going to end up tonight approving a couple of historic investments in our infrastructure but between this and between the efforts that both institutions are doing to bring an asset management approach and put more efforts into preventative maintenance that this will be one of the important tools to ensuring that these investments aren't just made once and then forgotten about for decades that we take better care of these assets and the rest of our assets going forward at once we start thinking in these terms and planning in these terms around having a responsible amount of investment that we can make. The other point I want to make is goes to, Councilor Hardin asked a question about affordability and I do want to bring people's attention and the media's attention to one of the attachments in the packet tonight which essentially defines, just projects what is the estimated impact for the average homeowner, average Burlington homeowner if first of all these debt limits go into place and then second of all we actually incur new debt that takes us up to these limits and essentially that's what the charts show in the packet which is that between now and 2028 so over a decade the annual payment made on new municipal debt that would be allowed by this policy beyond the debt that we have already had voters sign off on the new debt that would be allowed by this policy would be about $250 more than today 10 years from now so and it ramps up to that starting $7 next year, $44 a year after that and the school district there's a similar chart that shows a pretty similar number about $302 being in the maximum amount and that's the reason why it gets into details about assumptions being made by each entity on how long the debt would be taken out for why those numbers are as close to each other as they are even though the borrowing levels are somewhat different so that's the maximum and I hope people understand that and I hope people understand also that the decision is going to be ultimately theirs from here from the passing of this policy it then will go into the voters hands to determine whether or not we actually want to spend up to those levels and again circling back to my first point since I do support and it gets into the next topic since I am going to support very strongly the high school proposal since I do support the wastewater treatment proposal that is on and I do anticipate coming I have supported the past infrastructure bonds strongly that we took to the voters and I think there will be some years from now not immediately but some years from now there will be additional investments that are needed to be made I hope that this policy will give the voters the ability to say yes to these investments without fear that there is no limit to what they're going to be asked to do in the future they can now look out over a 10 year period of time and understand essentially the maximum that they're likely to be asked to invest in and I hope that will give people some confidence moving forward from tonight. Thank you Mr. Mayor and I think with that we should be ready for a vote so if we do not have a unanimous vote with someone on the phone then we have to have a roll call so let's see all those in favor of approval of the debt policy that's been presented to us please say aye. Aye. Councilor Nodell we have any opposed? We have a unanimous vote on the debt policy congratulations to everybody the administration school board everyone that worked on that including CAO Anderson will now move forward to what was item 5.06 but is now 5.03A and that is a membrane of understanding and I'm going to go to Councilor Paul for a motion with brief remarks and then just a motion and to just get that out there and then we'll hear a few remarks from the mayor on this and then we'll bring up someone from the school administration and the school board to tell us about the special meeting that they had earlier this evening on this issue. Councilor Paul. Thank you President Wright. So I would make a motion to approve and authorize the mayor to execute the Memorandum of Understanding regarding the BHS re-envisioning project and as you said there are a number of people that are here to speak to this and I'll keep my remarks to that. Thank you Councilor Paul seconded by Councilor Pine so we have it moved and seconded and Mr. Mayor would you like to tee this up for us before we bring up some people from the administration and school board? Thanks President Wright I'll try to be brief. I think this also is an important document leading up to the next item on the agenda which is the Burlington High School Investment in that this Memorandum of Understanding lays out the way in which the school district and the city will work together going forward with respect in part to these debt issues that we've just been talking about and kind of lays out some mutual expectations about how this policy will be administered. It also articulates how the high school project will be managed and the oversight will be received throughout the life of the project and third it defines a modest ongoing role for the Board of Finance. I think each of those three elements of this agreement are important and here's why. One, again not to belabor it but this debt policy is gonna require ongoing work, ongoing collaboration between the school district and the city. Every time either entity goes for borrowing the intent is to update the projections and reassess where we are and this Memorandum of Understanding I think really lays out pretty clearly what everyone's expectations are about how that will work and hopefully that will make, that will avoid surprises and will make that work in the future go as smoothly as possible. The second point around the management and the oversight of the project, I appreciate the collaboration with the school district here and in particular Superintendent O'Bang and Chair Claire Wool. And here I think there's gonna be some value in this too and this comes from the fact that we're talking about a $70 million project, a project that is really one of the largest public expenditures in the city's history and one that will take years to complete and one of the things I always found on large multi-year projects is that people involved for such projects change over the life of a project like this and I think that's particularly can be the case here. New school board members are elected, there are changes in city makeup, there are changes in staffing on both sides. I think having one document which clearly articulates what the expectations are for how this project is going to be managed and overseen, I think we'll serve the project well and what could be multiple years before this project is complete ahead. And then finally, the city, I think what we've all grappled with a little bit in this process is that the city charter lays out a role and our practices lay out a real role for the city in municipal bonding and in Burlington School District bonding. We share a credit rating. The city actually does the work to access the bond markets when the school district seeks to do borrowing. The Board of Finance and the city council takes action both now at the time of going out to the voters, but again in the future when it is actually time to go forward with that bonding. And the final piece of this document that felt important to me was recognizing that city responsibility and authority and role that some ongoing role for the Board of Finance for the city essentially be defined in this document even though we are at the same time mindful of the fact that this is the school district's project to run and we are very mindful of not wanting to create delay or complication in the administering of this project. For me, this is a very important document. This essentially, if you add all that up, what this document means to me is that as we enter, as we try to build really one of the most important buildings this community will build, the chance of getting an outstanding new high school for our students and doing so on time and on budget, I think is greatly enhanced by having this memorandum of understanding that lays out the way in which we'll work together. And this is the final piece that personally I needed to be fully confident in supporting this project and I'm hopeful the voters will understand the effort and the thought that's gone into this and see it as a value add to this proposal as well. Thanks, President Wright. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And if we can now have the, I'm sure we approach it here from the superintendent and the chair of the school board to report to us. I know that you had a special meeting to that you can report to us the results on the memorandum of understanding that will be signed hopefully after a vote by the council. So if you could report to us and after you're done I want to, I don't want to turn it into a free-for-all with the council with too many questions because we would like to, I know there's people in the public who would like to see us get to the high school bond and deal with that issue. So we can't take questions, but just try to not, you have the floor. Thank you, council president Wright. And thank you, councilors and mayor. And I mean, I'm Beth, thank you. Tonight in our special meeting we had 10 commissioners, school board members present and there was a unanimous vote to approve the memorandum of understanding to absentee board members that had also- Director Wolk, can you pull the microphone in a little? I mean, chairman Wolk? Yes. Chair, woman, Wolk? Sorry. Thank you. So we had 10 school board members present. It was in a unanimous vote to approve the memorandum of understanding. Okay. I'm sorry, my apologies. We're just hearing from councilor Nodell that she's having some trouble hearing. So really make sure, speak right into that microphone. Appreciate it. Good evening. Thank you. Tonight at our special school board meeting we voted on the memorandum of understanding between the Burlington high school re-envisioning project. We had 10 school board members present, all 10 unanimously voted to approve the memorandum of understanding with the city. Thank you. Anything else, superintendent Omang? Just a quick thank you. Why don't I really reach out to the board of finance and the mayor's office? We, you know, over the last few weeks there's been a lot of conversation. I think at the end, we ended up with a good result. And so it was impressed with the level of collaboration that's gone through this to bring something that's gonna support the entire community. This is a significant milestone for Burlington. And I think it'll be a good example for the rest of Vermont in terms of how to move forward. I look forward to following this document. I think it's gonna help the school board in terms of the oversight and some of the critical steps in it. So we welcome that collaboration. And I also think it's an opportunity for us to look at beyond this project and how the city and the school district can work much better together to achieve the goals for our students. So thank you so much for listening to us and for your patience and your indulgence. And I commend the council, the board of finance, and of course the mayor's office for all their efforts. Thank you, Superintendent O'Bank. Thank you, Chairwoman Will. Any burning questions from the council? Hearing none, thank you very much. We appreciate your report and appreciate your willingness to have a meeting tonight before we met so that you could give us those results. So we appreciate that. Yes, on behalf of all the school board members, we do want to say similar to Superintendent O'Bank, thank you. We have respected this process. We have respected your concerns. We are committed to this project and the debt policy and the memorandum of understanding. We are invested like you as stewards of the city and taxpayers, so we greatly appreciate your work on all this. Thank you very much. Any, back to the motion now, is there any other discussion, comments, but on the MOU? Hearing none. I think we're ready for a vote. I was just checking with Councilor Nodell. Any, we're ready. All those in favor of approval of having the mayor and the school board execute the memorandum of understanding as Councilor Powell made the motion. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed for the record, Councilor Nodell. Also voted aye and that is unanimous and we have an agreement on the MOU. Thank you. With that, we will, the debt policy is in place and the MOU is also ready to be signed. We'll move on to the actual high school bond. That's item 5.0, Councilor Busher. I have 5.04 as the wastewater. No, sorry, it's been changed. 5.04 is the high school. So we are moving forward with the high school bond issue and that will be moved by Councilor Pine. Councilor Pine. I move to adopt the resolution, waive the reading, request the floor back after a second. Seconded by Councilor Hartnett. Councilor Pine, you over the floor. Printed, I put this on paper and big enough font but I'm gonna use my glasses just in case. I feel that this decision is a critical one for this council, for this community and I just wanna make sure that I cover my points here. Rather than read the whole resolution, I'm gonna share with you some remarks that focus a little bit on the national picture, a little bit about schools but also personally why this issue I think is so important to this community. There's a 19, I'm sorry, 2016 report, State of Our Schools, America's K-12 facilities that was jointly issued by the 21st Century School Fund, National Council on School Facilities and the Center for Green Schools. In it it called for massive increased investments in our nation's crumbling school facilities. Cities that invest in their schools see stronger families and communities, to increase property values and healthier local economies. The report noted the scale of U.S. public K-12 school facilities is staggering. Every day, nearly 50 million students and six million adults are in close to 100,000 buildings encompassing an estimated 7.5 billion gross square feet and two million acres of land. Pretty impressive what we do to educate our future. In fact, state and local governments invest more capital in K-12 public facilities and in any other infrastructure sector outside of highways in some jurisdictions. And research shows that high quality school facilities helps improve student achievements for students of all abilities and backgrounds, reduce truancy, suspensions and expulsions, improve staff satisfaction and staff retention and raise property values. Schools are also integral to ensuring equity and educational offerings and opportunities for students. They send a tangible signal of a community's willingness and ability to provide an excellent and equitable education to all of its students. Our high school impacts the social and cultural environment of our entire community in ways that ripple well beyond the school property. Collectively, students, faculty and staff, and I did the math, I checked it, spend over 1.3 million hours each year in Burlington High School. A quality physical environment is key to having a quality education. Across the U.S., school districts worked hard over the last 25 years to operate, maintain, modernize and meet the enrollment growth of our nation's K-12 public schools. In the span of these 20 years, school facilities changed more rapidly than at any time in recent memory, fueled by improved health, energy and safety standards, stronger accessibility requirements, increased use of technology and expanded community programming within our schools. BHS, however, is an exception. It's an outlier, as they call it to this trend. And we need to take action, decisive action today to prevent further falling behind and creating an even more costly solution down the road. Action is needed now to keep Burlington as a place where families sit down roots and build a stronger community. I'll just close by saying, I'm the proud father of two BHS graduates who went on to really great universities. Honestly, our sons had all of the opportunities and privileges that made them college-bound students from a very early age. In their case, the dilapidated conditions of our high school were an annoyance and an embarrassment. They didn't really want family that was visiting from out of town to come see their high school, but it didn't really affect their educational outcomes. This isn't about my children. This is not the case with all of their classmates. For many of their classmates, that dilapidation and outdated condition at BHS really deprived them of the learning environment needed to level the playing field, which is what our schools really seek to do. The conditions at BHS have sent a clear message, I believe, to kids who come from families that may struggle academically and economically, and that message has been pretty clear. We don't value you or your future enough to provide a high-quality school facility. We're really sorry about that. Now's the time to say, we're not sorry, we're proud. Burlington is a place where we're gonna stand behind our children, we're gonna make it a model 21st century school and make it crystal clear that every student, we want every student to reach their full potential. Our world-class city deserves a world-class high school, and I'm especially proud to be on the council tonight to help make this happen. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Councillor Hartnett. Thank you, well said. Well prepared. As we passed the last two resolutions, I sat around the table tonight, and we do a good job of a council of putting ourselves in the back when we do good work, right? And I'm not saying it wasn't deserved, but at the end of the day, all the credit goes to the people out here in the NIS community that worked their ass off to get this done. Kate, Shelley, those tours at Burlington High School when it was 95 in August, never giving up on us. Because let's be clear, four months ago, this was not gonna happen. Anyone that tells you it was gonna happen is not telling you the truth, right? It was you, the public that pushed us. Some needed more pushing than others. I for one was not. I knew not only recently, I knew four, five, six years ago when this was talked about, when Amy Melanchem had the vision that we needed a new high school, right? And groups of parents back then realized it. I only wish we could have done it. We would have been way ahead of the game. Public education, public schools, public buildings, they define who we are as a city. I traveled around the Northeast many years on putting high school baseball and college games. I would spend weekends in these towns. The first place I would go to when I went to these towns was this high school. And when I looked at their high school and I saw that they had first rate high schools and the buildings were great in the classrooms or great teaching environment for kids, and I didn't have to go anywhere else in that city. I knew, I knew what it was well cared for. I knew the people cared about their businesses, their homes, their property taxes. I didn't have to go anywhere else. And we have failed over the years to recognize that. I was at Burlington High School two weeks ago for the homecoming, or last weekend for the homecoming. What an atmosphere. It was incredible. All good things happen at our high school. No matter where you go to school, K through eight, we all meet at the high school, right? We meet new friends, we meet new families. It breaks down so many barriers, economical, racial. It's incredible, the school that we have there. The atmosphere that night at that homecoming was incredible. I looked around, fireworks, kids of all different colors, backgrounds, playing together. And then I look behind and I saw the dump. And that's what that building is right now. It's a dump. And there's no reason for that. To have all that excitement, to have all that atmosphere, to have a building that is crumbling, to have families send their kids there with special needs, and take 25, 30 minutes to get to a class aren't acceptable in this city. We always say this is one of the best places to live. We want to be like the first in everything. But we never really wanted to invest in this building. I agree with Brian. Tonight is a big night for this council. And one of the best nights I've been on this council actually. And it's a huge statement for our community. And the people in November are gonna have a choice to make, do they want to invest in our city? Not in our schools, in our city, because that's what this is. It's an investment for all of us. And we're all gonna have to sacrifice. And everyone's gonna have a little skin in the game. And I've heard people say, and let's be clear, this is a huge project. Big money, $70 million, never done this before. We got some work to do over the next six weeks. We need to sell this to our community. I heard just the other day, well, everyone that doesn't pay taxes and just rents, they're gonna vote yes. Well, they need to think about that as well because this is all gonna fall on the landlords, right? We're gonna see rents go up. There's no question about that. So everybody is gonna have skin in this. And we as a council, after tonight, need to move forward and sell this to our community and sell the benefits. And if we can get this passed on November, first Tuesday in November, we will all be better off for it. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Hartnett. Councilor Shannon, then Mason and Dean. Councilor Shannon. Thank you, President Wright. I think my first introduction to Burlington High School was when Mayor Weinberger first came into office and you decided to run the city from the high school. That was probably naive, huh? I was council president and I had to meet the mayor in the high school. And that was the first time I got beyond the auditorium. And I didn't know why anybody would want to meet in that building. And we had some city meetings in the building where they couldn't possibly have started on time because who could find anything in the building? And that was many years before my daughter was there who's there now and I've had to go to open houses. And sometimes I won't actually go to the classroom where I'm supposed to be because I would be sweating too much. So the misery of Burlington High School is quite apparent to many people and I won't belabor what Councilor Hartnett has already belabored on that point. But when this came forward, I was not on board immediately and I know the school district put something out on front porch forum that people should contact us and let us know how they felt. And people did let us know how they felt and my inbox was full of a lot of mixed messages. There's a lot of concerns in the community. So some people, I think particularly people with students in the district were mostly supportive but there are also a lot of taxpayers very concerned about their taxes and that have a lot of questions. And I think that I had a lot of questions too and over the course of the last several weeks a lot of things have come together and I appreciate all of the effort on the part of the school district to answer my questions and everybody else's questions. The hard work that was done on the debt policy and the MOU, I think that we are so much closer than we were several months ago to having a plan that the public can have confidence in. But I also don't think the public at large is necessarily there yet. So I agree with Councilor Hartnett, there's a lot of work to be done because while we've had our questions answered and I think most of questions out there have very good answers, the public doesn't have them yet and it's gonna take a lot of effort because this is, I believe it is the largest bond. I have voted on in my long tenure on the city council and I really, I will be supportive of it tonight and I really hope that it passes. I got a tour of the high school that went further than what I've experienced in the past, which really was enough. It's barely navigable for people who have no disabilities and when it was built, we probably didn't have people with disabilities in the school, but I think in a lot of ways it was obsolete on day one. So we've suffered along for so long and it really is time for this investment in our community. So I would like to really thank all of you who have worked on getting all those questions answered and on moving this project forward. Thank you, Councillor Shannon, Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. As a BHS grad and the parent of two BHS students, I think I was in the same position everyone up here was. It was really never a question as to the need. Really the question we were struggling with was timing or at least I was struggling with, whether November was the right time or March, I was a skeptic as well at our joint meeting in June. I had concerns about the lack of public outreach, I had concerns about the cost and I had very deep concerns about the impact on our credit rating. We were just starting to sort of grapple with some very serious questions. Since June though, I will echo sort of the appreciation for the work that has been done by a lot of people sitting in this audience right now at the district level on the board and as Councillor Hart had mentioned, the volunteers who have gone above and beyond in answering every question that we've thrown at them, multiple letters from the mayor, sort of summarizing our questions, making themselves available for tours, even for those of us that are in the building on a regular basis, I'm feeling more positive sort of about the collaborative nature and where we've gotten to than I frankly have at any point in time. The work we've done tonight together in terms of the debt policy, the MOU, sort of to me provide the guardrails and sort of the path forward, at least in terms of me satisfying what I think is my fiduciary duty on behalf of the taxpayers. So I feel very comfortable moving this to the taxpayers for them to now put their input and I'm also committing along with others to sort of spend the next six weeks trying to get the answers that we've gotten to members of the public because I'm sure there will be a lot of questions just as we've had them and I look forward to doing that over the next six weeks. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Mason. Councillor Dean and then Councillor Tracy. Thank you, President Wright. I think there are significant questions when we are being asked as a community to invest $70 million. And I'd just like to kind of go through those questions as I ask them to myself. So question number one is, is this project really needed? Is all this amount of investment really needed? And I think tours to the high school have shown and the materials that have been presented to us show that teachers and students are working together in inadequately sized single purpose classrooms without the technology that they'd need to support a connected curriculum. They can't be flexibly used these classrooms for both large presentations and small group discussions. So they can't support a project based learning model. The teachers in the school are compartmentalized by subject rather than working as teaching teams. And there's almost no planning space for them so that they can learn to work together and plan to work together and our science labs are way too small. We've already heard from people about the significant issues of accessibility and connection. We have a campus of dispersed buildings that are connected with unheated ramps that don't meet accessibility guidelines and it makes it difficult for students, even able-bodied students, to get between their classes on time. The elevators are outdated and students and teachers in this complex can feel dispersed and somewhat isolated. And these buildings are failing. Stereo walls are uninsulated, the windows and doors are deteriorated and leaking and the constant breakdowns that we see in electrical systems and pumps and pipes illustrate the fact that these are at the end of their useful life. And the egress stairs and building fire alarm systems need improvement and only limited areas of the building are protected by building sprinklers. So in the answer to question number one, is this needed? This is truly a dire picture and yes, this project is truly necessary and needed. Question number two, is this solution the right project? Does it provide the right kind of learning space to support future models of education? I think the design team and the building committee examined multiple alternatives and arrived at a solution that reutilizes much of the core of the school, the gymnasium and the auditorium and the cafeteria and then builds densely around that to meet program objectives. This solution provides for a single main entry overseen by administrative space that can actively monitor for safety and security. Students of all physical abilities can reach their classes in time through conditioned space. The project enlarges the library and moves it to an appropriate place at the front of the school and it provides teacher planning space and flexible classrooms and a main street at the heart of the project, reinforcing connection and shared purpose. So to me, this is the right project. Question three, we've heard about $70 million is that a reliable cost estimate? Can we really trust that we have a realistic understanding of how much this project will cost? Well, once again, I think that the materials that have been provided to us by the school board and by the district show that there were multiple alternatives examined and this one that was identified delivers the most value for the money that we're going to invest. Those cost estimates came from an independent cost estimator and the dollar per square foot number that we have seen are consistent with what it cost for K through 12 projects both built in this state and elsewhere in the region. So yes, this is what it costs to build a school of quality that will take us forward 50 years and we are building for the future. Finally, or actually question number four before the final question is this project going to be well managed? I think there's a great team of engineers and architects with experience in this type of building who are leading and helping the school district and to make the decisions. We're gonna have an owner's project manager and the MOU provides for the oversight committee, a VHS building oversight committee. So I'm confident from what I've seen that the checks and balances are in place to manage this significant investment. So the final question for me is will this transformative change to the high school be supported by the voters in November? And I believe we should give the citizens a burlink to the opportunity to examine the project and judge this for themselves and I'll be supporting the VHS re-envisioning project pre-included on the November ballot. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Dean. Councilor Tracy, then Councilor Busher. Thank you, President Wright, certainly appreciate it and thank you to all the members of the school, the school board who have worked so hard on this as well as the re-envisioning committee and the BH and the district staff who made special accommodation to make sure that I was able to see the building and see the tour as one of the things that really struck me on that tour that we haven't talked about tonight. We certainly addressed and talked about the incredible and quite glaring inadequacies of the access or accessibility of the building for folks with disabilities. And we've certainly talked about just the appearance of the building but a couple areas that don't necessarily, that were particularly shocking and disturbing to me within the building as it currently stands were the safety of the building. We exist in unfortunately an era of mass shootings where school security is of utmost importance and I was shocked at the inadequacy of the building that there are doors that you have to open to lock, that there are open access points that someone could come up a ramp that's not very well seen. There's all these access control issues in this context that are frightening. They're frightening to me and that's something that again, like the accessibility issue is unacceptable and that absolutely has to be dealt with and that I'm confident that this plan deals with. Additionally, the other things that were particularly scary to me were that some of the tiles, the nine by nine tiles have asbestos in them and there are remediation issues within that building that they told us about and again, these are things that are horrifying that should not exist in any school let alone a school in a community as strong and as proud of our high school as we are. So seeing those things, seeing the tape going into the boiler room and seeing the insulation basically crumbling off of the boiler, looking into the cupolas and seeing the birds having eaten off the insulation there and them having to pump heating into a heater that's on one side of the room trying to satisfy a thermostat on the other side of the room creating a complete mismatch and then in that same room looking and seeing that and knowing that or getting explained to me that all the kids have tablets and tech but that there's only two outlets and those outlets are at the front of the room so what happens if those things don't work? I mean, it's just, it's not only I guess what I mean to say what isn't there and what is horrifying to the eyes in the sense of the lack of security, the lack of the environment that the physical plan of the building falling apart but then it's also sort of what we're not able to do in terms of the advantages that are provided or the full use of the technology that we've invested in namely the tablets is remarkable, it's shocking quite honestly as someone who goes into high schools as part of my line of work I've been in over 200 high schools maybe even 250 high schools in the last 10 years around the country, around the world some of which are public, some of which are private I gotta say that this was one of the worst high schools I've been in and that made me embarrassed, that made me sad and I wanna change that and I think that I look at my vote tonight as an opportunity to do that. I think we've waited long enough and hopefully this will be the first step and that the community will follow suit in November. Thank you, Councillor Tracy, Councillor Busher and then Councillor Jang. Okay, thank you. So I entered the high school 25 years ago when my daughter was a freshman and some of the things we're talking about tonight were present then. The inaccessibility for some people, those ramps that were unheeded, they iced up in the 90s in the winter, they were slippery and dangerous. So I just wanna say that when I reflected the materials that were presented to us by the school board and the administration and they came this weekend too with more information too, it was dropped off at my house. I don't know if others got packets or got electronic communication, but anyways, this has been a real education for me and I just wanna say to any voter that's watching, we were given alternatives, we were told what $30 million would do and we were told that only addressed deferred maintenance and it didn't address accessibility, it didn't address the security issues and it didn't address the routes and how people have to go from one place to another. It was designed in 1964 and I'll just put that as a reference point. In 1964, I was a freshman in high school. So you can imagine how long ago that was and that was the time where everyone was building modular and newer buildings and they weren't really thinking about accessibility, they really weren't and so they weren't even thinking because it was a different time, you weren't even thinking about safety because there were safety issues certainly but not the kind we face today. So then with the alternatives, there was the 50 million option which did better but did still not address the unreasonable access routes and excessive travel times and that 50 million dollar option meant that we had to find a place to displace students. We couldn't actually do that without finding another place to move the students to. So my point to all of the people that are watching is that there will be this information for you to look at and we need to get that to you to understand that 70 million dollars is a lot of money but when you're talking about a high school complex, I really think it is the money that we need to spend. It is the money we need to spend to invest in our high school and in our community and so I don't want another parent to go into that high school and realize some of the problems that every one of us have faced trying to either visit there, go to programs for your student work there or try to get an education there. It's really important that we do this. So I'm hoping that my vote will help people understand that I understand how difficult it will be to come up with the money to make these investments that we need to make in our community. I get it and I think all of us are trying to really do the right thing for the community and also be sensitive to you the taxpayer. So I will be supporting this. I hope that you take a long and hard look at it and ultimately at the end of the day I never tell people how to vote and I won't tell anyone how to vote but I'm hoping that you'll find it in your capacity and your ability to say yes to this question. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Busher. I thought you were going to take us through the history from 1964 right up to the present, but thank you. So Councillor Jang. Councillor Wright. Councillor Jang, then Councillor Roof, then I'm going to circle back to Councillor Pine and you may be ready. Yep. Thank you, President. I think it is important for us to also think about the high school re-eventing committee, the people who worked diligently to get us where we are today and some of whom are new NorthEnders. I think their work is incredible. I did not get a chance to go visit the high school when it was touring because I knew, exactly I knew the condition as someone working in the Burlington School District. In 2015, we run a Penn University program at Burlington High School but during the second week, some parents stopped coming because we were in the sea building. They were pregnant, some of them were old, so they stopped on coming. And we are not in Cleveland, we are in Burlington. We don't have a labyrinth gems that can come here and build a $200 million high school. All we have are the people who live here. I got the opportunity today before I come here to go knock on some doors and just tell people, this is what we are going to vote on. And if you have to choose, which one would you choose and why? Some people, frankly, told me that I won't choose to any of them. This is too much, we're paying too much, it is enough, I'm gonna move, I'm an elderly. This is too much. But I'm like, yes, but we are talking about the future. My kids are no longer here. I cannot afford these taxes, I'm gonna move. And then the next door, young guy, and I said, which one would you choose? He's 24 year old, 24. He said, I will not choose the high school. I think I will choose the sewage if I had to choose. I'm like, why? Because he's like, I graduated there, there is nothing wrong with that building. I said, since when have you gone there? Since I graduated, I've never been. So just to say that even if it passes today, the school district, you still have a lot of work to do. 70 million dollars, it is a lot of money. A lot of money. And there was some ideas here that was generated for the district to not only rely on those 70 million dollars, but to at least raise some of it so that the taxpayers can pay it the sooner, the better. I will definitely give my vote to this. That's clear. Yes, I'm an educator and a parent, and I have kids in elementary. I'm gonna give my vote to this definitely. But I urge you also to work with businesses, to work with philanthropists, at least to raise 5 million, 10 million dollars in order for the community to pay it the fast. I was also in the steering committee with the partnership for change, which was an Alime grant between the school district and also Winooski. We talked a lot about proficiency-based learning. We talked about community-based learning. We talked about so many ways around education in the 21st century. Learning environment, design thinking, all of that. And this high school is going to provide it. It is going to provide it not only for these students, but also for generations and generations to come. My only, something that I'm really passionate also about is this high school won't be only for students. I think in the MOU, the mayor articulated very well for that committee to also look for ways that high school can be a multi-purpose building, not only for students, but also for the community. Yeah, so we are not going to just send students but we can have meetings. We can have the Vermont Ignite. We can have Burlington Telecom. We, it is going to respond to so many important things. And lastly, I think the superintendent also of the Burlington School District, as well as the board members of the Burlington School District, we are proud of your work and we know so many concerns and so many pressure that has been put on you. I won't stop here, me as the consular, and I will continue to talk to my residents, to talk to my constituents why this is important to vote on it in November. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Jang. I have, councillors lined up and I just have to request councillors to keep it short and concise at this point because we are about to lose councillor Nodal. She has to leave in a few minutes. She will, she understands if the debate's gonna go on that she will have to, but if we can keep the remarks just a little bit concise. Councillor Rufio on the floor. And we're not telling you not to make comments. So please proceed. Well, we are really, but. No, no, no, Councillor Hargan. No, we're not. I want you to make your comment, just I'm asking councillors to make it a little shorter. I'll do with this for them. I did not go to BHS. I don't have kids yet, but I anticipate that they'll go to BHS. And so that is why I'll be supporting this tonight and on the ballot, not for a lot of things including the rug rats that someday I'll get around to having. But this will be one that I'll remember. So I'll just do a quick one now like that. Thank you, Councillor Rufio. Councillor Powell. Thank you. So, you know, I think there's many around the table that have acknowledged the hard work of many to move this forward. And I hope that the camera will occasionally pan the crowd so that the people that are home know that there are a good number of people from the schools, the school administration, as well as a lot of school board members who are still here with us to watch us vote on this. You know, I think we all have a role to play and I appreciate the fact that perhaps there were some that were sold on this from day one. I do think that it is our job to ask difficult questions. $70 million is a lot of money. And I think if we're gonna ask the questions, it's better to ask them now than be asking them later. And I think that the school officials in saying this from the board of finance as well as at council meetings and as well as conversations I had with individual school board members, I feel that all of you rose to the occasion and in many ways appreciated the questions that we asked. And I think that the outcome tonight has made for a project that stands an excellent chance of becoming a reality because of all of the questions that we've asked and because of all the hard work that has been done. There's four of us at this table who went to and graduated from BHS decades ago. And I think in all of our cases, if we were to walk through BHS today, we probably would feel like we never left because other than the fact that there's probably a new coat of paint here and there and there's a new door here and there, any changes that have been made are cosmetic and not meaningful. We all know the need and I think tonight we are honoring the past by making for a brighter future. So all three of these votes tonight, the MOU, the debt policy and this one work together to ensure I think that the community knows that their elected leaders and administrations are focused and committed to making this project a reality and I will be supporting placing this on the November ballot. Thank you, Councilor Powell. Mr. Mayor for a brief comment. Thanks, President Wright. I just want to share the sentiment that I think tonight is an exciting night. I think this is a milestone that I hope becomes an important night in the ultimate success of this project. Since as Councilor Shannon said, I spent a week in the high school back in 2013, I've never really had any question about whether there was a need and the timing has never been a question for me. I did have other questions a few weeks back. Was this a project that we could afford? Is this something we could do responsibly? I think together we've answered those questions. The biggest question on my mind was, is this the right plan? And when you're talking about a $70 million investment, you get one chance to do it right. And the son of an architect, my always said that the Churchill quote always stayed with me, that he says we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. And we have one chance to get this design right and what the district with its efforts over years now preparing for tonight. And in recent weeks, explaining has convinced me that this is a plan that not only addresses the clear deficiencies around the outrageous ADA circumstances of the current building, the terrible energy deficiencies, but that this is a plan that in its early stages sought to understand what makes for a great 21st century education and has sought to incorporate that learning and that vision of 21st century education into this design. So I look forward to signing the resolution, putting this on the ballot, and I certainly will be voting yes on this election day and urging others to consider doing so as well. I look forward to the day when our high school students go to school in a building that properly supports them, inspires them and fully helps them fulfill their potential. Thank you, President Wright. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Councilor Pine, and then I have to read the actual ballot language and then I'm gonna wrap up with just a very brief remark and then we'll vote. Okay, the resolve clause is that the following question be placed on the ballot of the special city meeting to be held on November 6th, 2018. Shall the legal voters of the city authorize the city council to pledge its full faith and credit by the issuance of its general obligation orders, warrants, notes, or bonds in an amount not to exceed $70 million for the purpose of making capital improvements to the existing Burlington High School property, including both new construction and rehabilitation of facilities? Thank you, Councilor Pine. We're, Councilor Jang, we really need to, you have a really brief comment? Okay, because we're gonna look, Councilor Nodell, and I wanna just finish with, I wanna make clear that I appreciate all the work that everybody's done. The school board, thank you all. The tours, we've all said this and I'm repeating it, but just I wanna, as a president of the council, thank everybody for all the hard work for the administration council, the school board. As Councilor Mason said, it's about timing. Everybody on the council has come to their own conclusions. I have ended up at a different place, but I wanna make clear before the vote is cast that there is no question in my mind, or anybody else's mind, that a major renovation is needed at the high school for all the reasons that have been mentioned, including issues of accessibility, of safety, and all the rest. So I, while the vote will not be unanimous, I certainly will be, will not be out there fighting or not supportive. It is a question of timing that I simply believe that I thought more public input was needed and would have been useful. But with that, we are ready to vote, and I will ask the clerk to call the roll please. Councilor Bushor. Yes. Councilor Dean. Yes. Councilor Jang. Yes. Councilor Hartnett. Yes. Councilor Nodal. Yes. Councilor Mason. Yes. Councilor Paul. Yes. Councilor Pine. Yes. Councilor Roof. Yes. Councilor Shannon. Yes. Councilor Tracy. Yes. City Council President Wright. No. 11 ayes, one nay. That passes by a vote of 11 to one and will appear on the November ballot. Thank you, everyone. And thank you, Councilor Nodal, for hanging in there throughout long debate. And Councilor Nodal, did you want to make a comment? I'm sorry, Councilor Nodal, I thought I heard you say something. And thank you, everyone in the audience, for hanging in there through this long, important debate. Thank you very much. That, we will now move on to the next item, which is item five point, which is stormwater 5.05. And Councilor Busher. Do you want to wait for a second? Well, I just need to ask everybody so that we can move forward with, can everybody take the conversations out into the hallway, please? Thank you. Councilor Busher. Okay, so I'm going to move to wave the reading and adopt the resolution. And after a second, I'd like the floor back. Seconded by Councilor Dean, Councilor Busher. So this is a resolution that the title is November 6th, 2018, special city meeting, issuance of revenue bonds for wastewater and stormwater utility projects. And for the voters that are, and people that are watching, it asks for a almost $30 million bond that will be paid back from the net revenues of the wastewater system and stormwater system. And so I just wanted to point out that in the debt policy, which we just adopted, and I think this is a good read for anybody in the community, there are definitions of what a revenue bond is. And it tells you revenue bonds will only be issued if available or projected revenue sources are adequate to support operating expenses and the new debt service requirements. And so I think that that is one thing. So this is not going to be on the taxpayer, although if you use the wastewater system, you will be paying for this. The other piece that I think is really important for the taxpayers to know is in this resolution, there is a clause that says, whereas the city intends to study and adopt effective FY21, an alternate rate structure for water and wastewater to relieve the cost burden on income constrain small users. So that is an attempt by the city council to acknowledge that there will be a relook at what we charge for these services and an attempt to make this more affordable for all of the small rate users. So having said that and the hours late, I think that the residents know that one person spoke during the public forum, Lori Fisher, and she said it best that this is an investment in the health of our lake and of our city. And so I hope that people will understand the importance of it. Counselors around the table have said that some of them have gone door to door and that people are generally supportive. I have not heard anyone speaking against this. So having said that, President Wright, I'll stop talking because I can feel your eyes on me and let other people speak. Just your imagination, Councilor Bushard. Just your imagination. Councilor Bushard, thank you. And who would like to speak next? Councilor, Councilor Jang. Thank you, President. And thank you for being here. But me, I have just a couple of questions and it looks like the people who are using water or the wastewater treatment will be paying on $5 like the months? Approximately $5.36 a month, 36 cents a month. And that's for the typical single family residential user, which we estimate uses approximately 600 cubic feet a month. So when you look at your rate, you multiply it by six. You could look at the current rate of 582 multiplied by six that gives you your current bill. Assuming you don't use more water, you would have the $5.36 a month. But do you know the number of customers currently using the water or do we know? Yes, we have approximately 10,000 customers. I don't know off the top of my head, the residential customers. I think you had asked a question about how $5.36 could possibly raise 30 million. Yes. And I did lay it out and I'm not sure the email has come back to you. Remembering that 30 million translates into a certain debt service, the maximum debt service, say on the wastewater side, if we were to spend all of our authorization is about $1.1 million. And so we can actually calculate one cent on the rate with all of our users given our current usage raises about $13,000. So you can divide through the $1.1 million by $13,000 and it gives you that rate increase. So you have to remember that not everybody is going to be charged $5.36. Some people are going to be charged much more because their bills, their usage is much larger. Yeah, so that's what I kind of have a little bit. To me, personally, I don't think this plan is very well vetted. I, as a counselor, in order to make a very decision, like a decision that's really well vetted, I need the numbers, I need the details. And to me, I think this is the one that is being rushed. And also we know that this issue did not date from just a couple weeks ago or a couple months ago. And we know that in 1994, there was a bound that was already passed and the city is still paying for it, right? And also, we know that you gain some revenues. We also know that some boats that are parking in the lake are paying some type of fees. Not to us. Yeah, but to the city, right? To the city, but they're separate funds. So there's the general fund, and then our funds are entirely separate. So just to be clear that we're not getting any revenue, even though that is near to our water plant. Yeah, so those are a couple of points. And also I think, to me, personally, I don't see myself voting for this, yes? Because I don't see any figures, I don't see the numbers, I don't know. I'm just reading from the news. And I also was in one of your meeting presentation here. And it doesn't sound like even if we end up 30 millions, there is no guarantee from these outbreaks to happen. There is no guarantee. Reason why I do think we should take more time to study this more. And I think it requires to be vetted fully. It requires time. And if I have the power, we will take at least until next month to put it in order for us to vote on it. But tonight, I don't see myself voting for this. But, and I also see, don't see myself voting for $700 million tonight for the Burlingtonians who live here, taxpayers or people who use the water. You just give them 100 million tonight. I don't feel comfortable, especially when I don't have the numbers. I also do think that we just ask for $70 million. And if it passes, that Burlington High School will become definitely a, will become, not only will become an asset for the community as well. And looks like we know that the Memorial Auditorium will be coming also. It might be asking for another bounce. Yeah, to me, let's sell Memorial Auditorium to respond to our housing shortage in order to fix our water sewage problem. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Chang. Councilor Pine. President Redd, I would just ask if the staff could describe the various times which you have presented. I attended the Board of Finance where you did present and perhaps that would be useful for all the Councillors once again, even though I think you were here presenting the details about maybe a month ago. And maybe you could just talk about that quickly what your presentations entailed. Okay, happy to. We presented to the City Council for the FY18 and 19 budget. Both of those presentations included a slide about the upcoming capital needs within wastewater and stormwater. Staff has been working on this for the last two, two and a half years, bringing us to the point today. Then we did a presentation in front of the Full City Council. I wanna say in the summertime at your request after one of our discharges, we also then presented to the Board of Finance on September 5th and then have been keeping the DPW Commission regularly informed as well. We're pleased to report that we're planning on having a town hall this Thursday in this very room for the general public to explain a number of the details of this clean water resiliency plan. That's helpful. The other thing I'd like to just remind, I think the Council and the general public just needs to remember tax payers, rate payers, not the same thing. We need to remind ourselves that. Large institutions that pay no taxes make small in lieu payments, by my opinion, too small, but that's another issue we'll get to another day. And they pay large water bills. So I think it's important to remember the average homeowner is not as burdened by their water bill because of the fact that it is spread across more users. It's a much more broad based fee than the property tax. And it's really important because we have lots of tax exempt properties. They all use water. They all flush their toilets. They all wash their hands, I hope. And they get the bill that corresponds with their usage. So it's really important that we emphasize that over and over. They're not the same. They're really not the same. Thanks. Thank you for that important clarification, Councillor Pine. Councillor Hartnett. Thank you. Chairman, did you mention the TOOC meeting? You presented at the TOOC. I did not, but thank you for that. You presented at the TOOC as well. I think what might be confusing is it usually takes so long to get things done in the city normally that we're not so used to this being presented so fast and getting great work done. And I commend the Mayor, really. I think he put this on the fast track. We weren't gonna go through another summer with beach closings, right? We just can't do that. And so I do think that this was done well, done right in all aspects, really. I like the fact that it will be an impact on people's water bills, I understand that. But minimum, really, when you think about really the rewards in this project, right? And we're talking about Lake Champlain and we heard in public forum tonight that people don't even wanna be on the bike path, right? With the sewer treatment plan. Hopefully we can address that issue as well. But this is very important and I appreciate all the work that the staff has done. I said that in TOOC last week and I appreciate the efforts on the Mayor. I think he really got this one right and got it done fast. And I just appreciate everybody's hard work on this. So I'll be supporting this in November as well as the schools. And I hope the general public will also be supporting it. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Hartnett. And just to be clear, this was a plan that had been in the works for a while but was accelerated due to the issues we had during this past summer. That is correct. Thank you. Councillor Mason. Thank you, President Wright. I just sort of also wanted to follow up as a little confused about not seeing numbers because my recollection, which I'm sort of scrambling on the side is we did get a pretty detailed wastewater reposal that had numbers. And looking through my email, that was also sent to the full council on the 18th, you know, prior to the press conference. So we have had numbers, you know, I appreciate and maybe way to solve some of the confusion is this proposal is not on board docs, we just have the actual resolution. So if it's possible to at least move that proposal on the board docs, I think then it might be more accessible to the public. Great, we will do that. We're also creating a webpage that will have all these resources available. We understand that this 24 page document that we provided with all the numbers, you have to drill fairly far into it to get to the meaty stuff and we want to make it more accessible. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Mason. Good suggestion. Councillor Shannon. And if replying to questions, please pull the microphone in close. It was a little far away with Dr. Spencer. Councillor Shannon. Thank you, President Wright. Yeah, I wanted to note that we did get, we have the line items for exactly where the $30 million goes and I think that you've provided us really thorough information and it's been a very thoughtful process and I appreciate you putting it on the fast track because the input that I've been getting from my constituents is that this is their highest priority. There's nothing more important to the residents of Burlington than minimizing any pollution that we contribute to the lake and I appreciate all of your efforts to do that both under the present conditions and trying to move forward and do better in the future. I did think it was interesting, the comment that we heard in the public forum about the odors that come from the wastewater treatment plant and as somebody who rides by that regularly as I am sure you do as well. And every once in a while when the wind blows exactly from the wrong direction that odor comes right into our neighborhood. Is there anything, is that on the radar at all? Is that a concern? Is that, can that be addressed? I would say in our current proposal that's not a specific focus. A lot would have to be done to make an entire city's waste, not smell at all. We do have odor control and encourage that if you are noticing it becoming smellier than usual that you let us know because we can essentially ramp up some of the chemicals that we use that mask the smell. My understanding is in order to truly do away with the smell we would have to do a lot more covering, roofing of some of our treatment processes and we have not looked into that. It is on my sort of long-term horizon but it didn't rise to the level of the priorities that we were trying to address with this specific plan. So definitely on my mind because I think the waterfront and I know Parks has long talked about expanding marina there and we wanna be as good stewards and neighbors as we can but to my knowledge there's nothing currently in this plan that would specifically address the odors. Well, thank you. That's helpful to know and thank you for all of your work in putting together a really comprehensive proposal that I know that the citizens of Burlington appreciate. Thank you, Councilor Shannon. I think there was a good line in there somewhere but I'm not gonna touch it. Other Councilors? No. Mr. Mayor. Thanks President Ray. I know you've heard from me a lot tonight but let me try to be brief. Let me say certainly I was hoping I was hoping we'd be able to get here tonight and did encourage that but the people who did the hard work to make it possible to have this proposal in front of the voters in November are really Chapin, Megan and the team behind them which is not a big team. It's a small group of people that have worked really hard nights and weekends to make this possible since the unexpected discharges on planned discharges began in June and July. This is not being rushed. It's not right to characterize it as being rushed. There's years of work. The reason this was possible to bring together on that timeline is that the city has had its eye on this for years and went out and secured third party independent professional reports to back up virtually everything that is in this plan it is something that has been thought through and it's been vetted by multiple bodies and by moving forward with it I think we really fulfill our generation's responsibility to keep moving forward with this long battle really to better protect the lake. You know, when you have 40,000 people living right next to a body of water is not an easy matter to keep that lake clean. For a long time we didn't even try. Our systems was set up to pipe sewage directly into the lake. That started to change in 1953. We now have had 75 years of trying to be better stewards of the lake that the original initial creation of the wastewater treatment plan was a huge step forward. The next really large step came in 1994 when we started for the first time treating stormwater up until 1994. We didn't even try to protect the lake when it rained. We just let pollutants run straight into it. That changed with that historic 50 plus million dollar investment. The next big investment came in 2009 with the creation of the new stormwater utility and now here in 2018 it's our turn to really take the next, write the next chapter, step up, make investments in these seven areas that if we don't make them, we will actually move backwards. This is a chance to do better, to do our generation's role to be better stewards of Lake Champlain and really ensure that we can all continue to enjoy that wonderful natural resource for all that it is and all that it means to our economy. So I hope the council will have a strong vote in support of this tonight and then the voters will join us and make this possible in November. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Any other councilor wish to speak on this? Hearing none, I'm gonna have the clerk color roll. Mr. Bushar. Yes. Councilor Dean. Yes. Councilor Jing. No. Councilor Hartnett. Yes. Councilor Mason. Yes. Councilor Paul. Yes. Councilor Pine. Yes. Councilor Roof. Yes. Councilor Shannon. Yes. Councilor Tracy. Yes. City Council President Wright. Yes. 10 ayes, one nay, one absent. That passes by a vote of 10 to one and we'll go to the November ballot. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for all the hard work. Thank you for your support. Appreciate it. With that, we will move back to the deliberative agenda to item 5.07. This was 4.55 on the consent agenda removed by Councilor Bushar. So I'll go to Councilor Roof for a motion and a second and then we will hear from Councilor Bushar. Sure, I'll move that. We waive the reading and adopt the resolution. Seconded by Councilor Shannon. Councilor Bushar. Yes, so I'm sorry I had to pull this off consent but I'm not going to vote in support of this. I really don't know why the city put this stipulation as I read it. This deed is given upon consideration and condition that the said young men's Christian association shall establish and maintain a free reading room for public use in any other building of set association thereafter erected and maintained for the use of set association. I wasn't quite sure when I read that if it meant that if the Y sold that building that that room had to be, had to remain. I didn't think so, but I thought that the new building might have to have that. It's really hard for me as a city councilor to sometimes wipe out some of the agreements for stipulations that were put in place either by a benefactor or in this case, the city and the Y when they were first established in 1928. I don't really know what the motivation was but if it is for providing free access to a space within a facility, I'm not so sure I want to eliminate that. So I feel like sometimes we take these actions and I'm not, I don't feel I'm well enough informed. So that's why I'm not going to be supporting it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Busher. Is there anyone that can give a brief explanation? City Attorney Blackwood. As brief as we know, we got a call from the attorney for the Y who was somewhat as puzzled about this as the city was when we looked at it but the title insurance company for the buyer of the Y property said, we just need to dot eyes and get a quick claim deed from the city to make sure that there is no claim on this in the future. To my knowledge, there hasn't been this space at the Y and a free public reading room at the Y so whatever it is hasn't been happening for a long time. It also seemed to us unlikely that it purports to say or any other building that the Y establishes, we don't know how a clause in a deed for one property can possibly put an obligation on the Y to do something somewhere else. So from our perspective, it will just extinguish when they sell the property anyway. So it didn't seem to us that there probably was any interest that the city had to hold on to here. All right, thank you, City Attorney. Any other comments, questions from the city council? Hearing none, all those in favor of passage of this, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? No. Councilor Bushard, so the vote is 10 to one and that passes. And we'll move on now to item number six, which is committee reports. Any committee chair who would like to report on committee activity, Councilor Hartnett. Thank you. Just want to give you an update on PAC. PAC was going to meet this Wednesday, that meeting has been canceled. We are going to try to meet next Wednesday at 5.30. And I believe that's the third. Yes, it is. It is the third. And we will be discussing items, but mostly I don't know what the official name is going to be at first night, but we'll be discussing the future first night and role of city arts. And I know there's counselors around the table that have called me with some questions and some interest. So the PAC will be meeting on the third at 5.30. So that's it. Thanks. Thank you, Councilor Hartnett. Other committee chairs hearing none. We'll close that item out and go to City Council, item seven, City Councilors on General City Affairs, Councilor Hartnett and then Bushard. Oh, Councilor Bushard, go ahead. Councilor Bushard. So yes, I will be very brief. I have been called by a constituent on a regular basis and may probably the rest of you have been also called by this constituent who lives in Ward 1 on a regular basis. But on his behalf, I am just acknowledging that there is still work to be done on making pedestrian crossings safer for people. Whether you have limitations or disabilities or whatever, there is a need to address it. So I am saying that we as a City Council, this person doesn't feel like we are taking this seriously enough and haven't done that for years. And in some respects, I feel like we take it seriously, but it hasn't been the top priority. And I know for myself, if I, when I go to cross South Gnusky Avenue, even though it's the pedestrian crossing, part of it is right on red. You know, I sometimes, I'm an obnoxious little gray haired woman that says stop to the car that's going to turn into me, so it is frustrating. So anyways, I just wanted to acknowledge that. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Bushard. Councilor Hartnett. Thank you. Often around this table, we mentioned people that have passed away and no longer with us and their contributions to the city. And I think that's an important role that we do. And usually there are people that have contributed to the city and big names. But tonight, I would just like to mention a passing that happened actually in the New North End. His name was Fiber. And Fiber was an 81 year old Vietnam vet who died at Letty Park. And I haven't officially got any word I've asked. I've asked a lot of questions about this. I believe it was on 9-11. I'm not sure. That was the date. It was either 9-11 or 9-12 in the morning. Fiber really wasn't home. Fiber used to come down and see me at the store every morning, have coffee. And he made his home at this homeless camp at Letty Park over the last four or five months. He was only homeless when he wanted to be because Fiber had an apartment up in Ward 1. I think in Fletcher Place, Flipper. And so, but he was a very kindhearted man. He was very good to the homeless. He was very good to the vets in our community and also over in the Plattsburgh area, often giving them cigarettes and candy and money when they needed it. It was unfortunate the way he died. But make no mistake, Fiber told me every morning that was his plan, that he wanted to die. So I hope he's resting in peace. I know Fiber has family in the area. I believe it's in Underhill or Wollaston. And I wanted to thank Fiber for serving our country. And I think it's sad that Fiber had to die in a park overnight in Burlington. And I think we need to address that issue as a city and how we're gonna deal with that. And I know that's coming down the pike soon. And I hope it is, but I think that was unfortunate. But Fiber died caring for people and giving to people. And I learned a lot from him and I will miss his visits in the morning. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Hartnett. Recognize Councillor Mason for a motion. I'd like to make a motion to suspend the rules to complete our business this evening. Moved by Councillor Mason, seconded by Councillor Roof. This requires a two thirds vote. All those in favor of suspending our rules to complete the few item agendas we have left, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That passes unanimously and we'll complete, we'll go back to the agenda and I have Councillor Pine and then Councillor Roof. Yes, I got a call from a constituent from Ward 1 asking if I knew how much had been spent on the planters that are in the street and what was the purpose of them and what was the plan? And I actually say someone came to our NPA asking the same question and I think it'd be good for all of us to just know a little more about that. I don't think I know enough to answer the question responsibly. So I wanted to be responsive to this individual but also to others. Because there were some folks at our NPA a couple weeks ago asking and I just didn't get the information on time so I didn't have an answer perhaps as well. The other thing is a separate call today was from a constituent who was attempting to apply for a job with the city. It's not a computer user is, as he said, I'm barely a smartphone user. I think I'm a dumb user of a smartphone is what he said. He could not fill out the application he's been trying for quite some time. So he walked down to DPW to attempt to fill out a paper application and this is what he reported that this council adopted a policy that there would only be online applications. I don't know if that's the case but that was what he was told. And so therefore he said he doesn't know how to apply to be a crossing guard and he needs that income to supplement his social security and companies really struggling. So I didn't quite know what to do. I asked our city council liaison staff person to help him out and she did that. But yeah. All right. Thank you, Councillor Pine. Councillor Roof. Three quick things. That same week that that Fibber passed another friend of Burlington, friend of mine as well, Ryan Murphy passed. He went by the nickname of captain as he earned that nickname down at the bar that we used to work at together. He was a ball of life, a ball of energy as a martial artist, and a boxer and unfortunately it was that passion that put him in a situation to get hurt and pass away. If you've seen the news stories, he suffered a blow to the head in a sparring match and then he'll wake up. So I wanted to just bring him up into this conversation. He was a young guy. He would have wanted us to continue on enjoying life in the way that he did, but he will be missed as well definitely lost too soon. Second item, there was a, I think a good letter that came out of the vehicle for higher licensing board. It was item 4.44 on consent agenda. There's some interesting storylines in there if you wanna take a look. We conduct the audits every year of our TNCs which is important. Remember years ago, that was an important issue. We still do that. Important to recognize also that we earned from that ordinance 25 cents per ride, $147,000, which is quite fascinating to think of. Take that almost 1,600 or so rides a day that we're doing in Burlington. There was debate about whether or not that ordinance was going to really add to our transportation network or just eat into existing taxi companies and it looks at least over this last year that there really was a gap in the marketplace and people are really using those TNC services which I think is important. Last and quick thing, as many of you know, I'll be traveling to Yaroslavl, Russia again to represent the city as part of our delegation to the sister city program there. It'll be doubling as my vacation, but I can't think of a better way to spend my time than going and bragging about the best small city in the world. I will do my best to represent us all well. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Can you make sure that they're not interfering in the elections, will you? I will be bringing or returning no packages or dossiers of any sort. Thank you, Councilor Roof. Any other Councilor on General City Affairs? Councilor Zhang. Yes, so one of them I think I'm gonna let you talk about it with our meeting with high school students. I'm not a president, but this one on the 16th, we had a town hall meeting with Bernie Sanders at the One Art Community. And it was just amazing. Making sure that people who live here who mostly don't vote showed up and they showed up strongly. So the event was basically just to inspire people to run and also to hear directly from our Senator, Bernie Sanders, and we are very glad that he took the time to plan it with us and to execute it and also to provide a wonderful, inspirational speech. And the other one is on October 1st, you know, as we know, I think there was an email going on asking for the president to appoint Councilors to go to the summit coming up. It will be on October 1st at Casselton College. I think it would be amazing also to be there, to also share the great work happening here in Burlington. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Chang and Councilor Pine will be attending that as well. Any other Councilor? Hearing none, we'll close that item out and go to item number eight, City Council President Updates. Just a couple of things. Just reminding everyone that the downtown improvement district work session will be at the next meeting and I think we're gonna need about an hour and a half. So it will probably go from maybe 545 to 715, that type of thing. So just keep that in mind. But also just to remind everything, I was alerted to this just recently and I think this is probably one that could have easily slipped by, so thank you, City Attorney Blackwood for reminding me. We passed a resolution on the Burlington Telecom sale that dealt with the carried interest and we are supposed to actually have two public hearings coming up. So what we're thinking is that one will be a public hearing, maybe there will be an in-between Monday night and maybe the second public hearing will be part of a city council meeting. So just to put that on your radar also, it'll be coming up in the coming weeks. With that, I'll conclude that item and item number nine is the Mayor on General City Affairs. Mr. Mayor, take us home. Thank you, President Wright. A few things for me. First of all, I wanna congratulate Siba and everyone, the hundreds of people really that are involved in making art hop happen every year. Again, we had another wonderful addition of it. The weather cooperated this year much better than last year, which was nice and it was great to see the Pine Street Mile added to the offerings of that weekend and that tradition continues in great form. It's also, it's just very exciting to see how the South End continues to evolve to go into the new AO Glass space this year. It was very exciting to see how the Soda Plant, Steve Conant has transformed that space and a whole new set of entrepreneurs setting up shop there. The Unsworse and their new construction project going on, the South End remains just very dynamic, exciting part of the city and was great to see. Speaking of exciting and dynamic, the Mayor's Office is happy to welcome or back up to full strength again in the Mayor's Office. Olivia Levecchia has joined us just in the last week as a communications person. If you're lucky, they clap on your way in and you're lowly out as you saw tonight. But we hope that time will not be anytime soon, Olivia. Welcome. Did hope people caught and that the public saw that the discussion over water quality and the clean water resiliency plan that the council just endorsed tonight will continue and there will be a water quality town hall in this room. This Thursday at 6 p.m. right here in Contoys, and we look forward to much more discussion then and throughout the fall on this exciting plan. Another piece of positive news put out a press release on this tomorrow, but at the end of the last week, the airport received from Fitch Rating Agency a another credit rating upgrade. Fitch essentially brings them up to the level that Moody's had placed the airport earlier, kind of caps off, like it's too early in the year to say caps off, but it's another exciting element of a great 2018 for the airport. The, you know, in addition to the management improvements, the financial improvements we've seen out of the airport for years, what's really starting to happen in 2018 is that implements are finally going up. Almost certainly 2018 will be the best year that we've had since the recession a decade ago now, and that was, numbers were saying that even before the new service to Orlando by Frontier, which it was announced. So congratulations to the whole airport team for the great work out there. And then finally, you know, I wasn't gonna get into this, but given that there have been, I think, three comments tonight, one way or another about pedestrian efforts and the planters. You know, I will just say a couple of words. And look, I think we've had a really productive night tonight and we've agreed on a lot of things. We've gotten a lot of important things done for the people. Another important part of what we do is we debate things and we air our difference of opinions. And I guess I moved to say something tonight because I think it's a little challenging to be criticized on one hand for not doing enough about pedestrian safety and to have another counselor criticizing the expense going into these planters. The planters are primarily and large part about pedestrian safety and in some cases, by safety. And I for one, I'm very excited and I think we've heard a lot, I've heard a lot of constituents weighing in to say how exciting is after years of progress being too slow, these new quick build mechanisms which use very inexpensive materials, planters, plastic ballards, paint, less than $50,000 total for all of the work that has been going on this summer that that is actually making our community safer. And I don't think anyone really disputes that if you look at the five way intersection that where St. Paul Street and Willard Street and Howard Street converge, very popular intervention there with planters playing a big role in dramatically reducing the lengths of space that pedestrians are exposed to automobiles as they cross streets. Same thing happening on Main Street at where Champlain crosses, South Champlain crosses, much less exposure of pedestrians trying to get across Main Street and what has traditionally been a bad intersection. You know, it's too early to show stats for those particular intersections. I will say these other similar improvements, the use of paint on North Avenue to change the configuration there. Quarter after quarter, it's now very much statistically significant that the actions of this council to change the configuration there have stopped dozens of people every quarter from being injured on North Avenue, dozens of people over the course of the year. So we will come back as Councilor Pines suggested. You know, I think maybe we let's get through the rest of this season and maybe give a full report out on the second year of implementation of the walk bike master plan. I think there's a lot to be excited about where we're going, no doubt there are missteps and things that should be improved and can be done better. But I think we're on the right track and I look forward to talking about much more about that in the months and years to come. President Wright with that, I'll set. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And just to close it out before we adjourn, I want to thank you personally, Mr. Mayor, for the wonderful text I got the other night from you at home while watching the Red Sox clobber my Yankees and win the division. I really appreciated that nice text you sent me. Thank you. So with that, I will entertain a motion to adjourn. Moved by Councillor Ply and seconded by Councillor Bush. Are all those in favor? Please say aye. Any opposed or adjourned?