 I'm going to call the meeting to order. The first thing is to review and approve the agenda. And I don't believe there were any changes. Does anyone have any objection to the agenda? OK, so we're going to consider the agenda approved without objection. So on to general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on some topic that is otherwise not on our agenda. And if you would say your name or your from and try to keep your comments to two minutes or less, that would be great. And I know we have some folks, I think, for general business appearances. So yeah, if you have something you'd like to say. As I didn't get this on the agenda, Donna Bate, Montpey, I would really like to share before everybody disappears later in the evening this walkable cities rule by Jeff Speck. Many of you may have seen him. I believe he might have been on VPR or someone interviewed him. But the book is incredible. And I just have to read a couple of things. One is, would you rather have a downtown that is quick to drive through or one worth arriving at? The other is that you need to do speed limits in districts, like downtown districts, which we've talked about a lot with our downtown streetscape. And so I just want to bring out that people do understand speed limits, but you have to design the street to match what you want them to do. In Stockholm, they've done that. And in 2016, they had 16 car crashes. So street design is not just pedestrians and bikes, but car crashes. Phoenix, which is the same size of city, had 168. And so I think we can do it with good intentions of slowing people down, having them arrive. But meanwhile, the residents can enjoy a very safe place to be. So read the book. It's really worth it. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening, Steve Whitaker. We need to find new solutions for accountability. Some of my public records requests are three months old. I know some of those, the oldest three month old one. No, the one for the records of conditions on city center bathrooms is older than three months. And there's about six of them piled up. And I keep getting manana next week, next week, next week. Month goes by. It's not OK, Bill. They need to hold you accountable to adhere to public records law. I mean, I've told you, you've worn out my patience with extensions. Accountability for street conditions, the sidewalks, court street, the front steps of city hall, ice, packed snow, and ice. We're paying big dollars for public works maintenance. You need to hold people accountable to do a good job. It's dangerous. I was walking with a lady down Court Street today, and just ice on the sidewalks. That's inadequate sanding. It's not rocket science to fix. But many of the issues that I've brought to your attention over years get a nod and a jot, and nothing happens. You need to invent some mechanisms of accountability. The other, I'm hoping tonight is not what you're calling your public forum on the shooting. If it's just item seven on the agenda, there was not adequate public notice. And it needs to probably its own special meeting. I'll leave you with those for right now. Thank you. Anyone else? Can I ask you to direct the city manager to respond to all the requests this week? That's something that he and I can talk about. I know, but that's been inadequate. So we're going to move on. All right, any other general business appearances? OK, thank you. All right, so onto the consideration of the consent agenda. Is there a motion? Just make a note so you all know what you're voting for here, as far as the liquor license. I didn't put out which one it was. It's for they're both for Sodexo up at National Life Drive. They're the ones who serve the food up there. And it's a first and a third. I move the consent agenda with that noted. Second. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. OK, so we have some appointments to students on committees, which I'm particularly excited about. And for some of these, there are a few duplicates. I think there's at least one committee where there's a duplicate. So we probably should go into executive session for that to discuss it, I imagine. I don't think I see any of the students here to introduce themselves if I'm wrong. Would love to hear from anybody. But so we have, gosh, I think I don't have the list in front of me, but quite a few students for a handful of committees. I think we could probably just go right into an executive session for that. Is there a motion regarding that? I move that we enter executive session pursuant to one VSA, section 313A3, to discuss the appointment of a public officer. Second. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, well, we will be right back. Is there a motion to come out of executive session? So moved. Second. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, is there a motion regarding the appointments? I have a motion. I think we are very pleased to see such a level of interest. And I move make the following appointments for the Tree Board, Erin Kelly, for the Homelessness Task Force, Alex Smart and Sophia Clark, for the Complete Streets Commission, Merrick Moden, and for the Energy Advisory Committee, Evan Rohan. Further discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right, I am particularly psyched that all of these students have stepped up to serve on these committees. This is really great. Yes, go ahead, Dawn. Do they get a notice from the city that they've been appointed? And when your group meets the center? I imagine. Yeah, we'll send them something. OK, we have an Emerald Ashboard update from John Snell, who's here. We're actually going to move one other item to right after that. I know there's a couple of people here for the noise ordinance regarding dogs. We're going to move that to right after this item. I hope that's OK. All right, take it away, John. Thank you. And I'm thrilled that we have students on the committees too. We've been chasing that one for a while, and it'll be great to have their input and their point of view compared to people with hair like this or none or none. I really appreciate a chance just to spend a few minutes with you and tell you what happened this summer with regard to Emerald Ashboard and answer any questions that you have. You certainly have been great support in the past, and we would not be where we are today without the support that you've shown. Basically, over the last nine months, our efforts have involved monitoring of the Emerald Ashboard, which, as you remember, showed up near national life for the first time over a year ago, educating the populace so that if this thing shows up again, we might find it so that people understand what the options are when it does show up, because it will, and being prepared. And we've had some really great opportunities and results there, which I'll go into a little more detail. And then we're focusing on planting, specifically planting the Greening Neighborhoods Program where we planted trees all over the city. We started a new initiative this year where we're planting some of the smaller streams that feed into the Winooski River. We have upgraded the downtown trees again, and next summer we're already planting, I'm thrilled to say, to do some planting along the new River Trail. So we did a lot of education, including making presentations at the Festival of Trees in February, which was attended by about three dozen people. We were here at City Hall during town meeting day. So a lot of what we do through Facebook and just general broadcasts to people in town is to let them know what to look for for emerald ash borer, how to, what should trigger them to call us and let us come out and do a bigger, closer inspection and what the options are for the future. When these trees do die, they become very expensive to cut down so that if a tree looks like it's gonna become a danger, we'd rather have them cut it down while it's still not infested. Makes great firewood, as Glen knows. But we also don't want people just to wholesale cut down all the ash trees in the city before there is a problem with them. So it's a delicate balance of educating. It turns out that we had anticipated that this insect would show up in many more places this summer. It did not, or at least we haven't found it. There were three more ash trees up at National Life, the original site of infestation that were infested. Those were taken down early in the spring and chipped and burned. And we didn't find a single other emerald ash borer in all of the monitoring that we did around the city. So that's really good news. It doesn't mean that it isn't there. What it means is we didn't detect it. And it may well be there. It certainly will be in the future because these things don't go away of their own accord. We did work with National Life people and they've been very cooperative in strategizing with us in allowing us access to their properties and discussions about what to do. So one of the things that you may remember is John Atlesiak who couldn't be here tonight although he wanted to be, wrote the preparedness plan and then the maintenance plan, management plan, and those plans have been utilized by a number of other communities in the state who haven't yet had the EAB infest their towns but it's eminent and so many of them are using the plans that we prepared in order to be prepared themselves. So monitoring was, as I said, a big part of what we did and part of that was putting these 10 green prism traps around the city. You may have seen them in various locations and the idea is that there's an attractant in them. The insects come to them, get stuck in the goo that's on the outside of them and then Adam McCullough can get up there and his bucket truck in, take a close look at what has been trapped and again it turned out there were some false positives but no positive EAB were found in any of them. So we've taken the traps down, cleaned them up, they're ready for deployment again next spring and we'll see what we see. We, as part of monitoring, took a second look at over 450 ash trees on city rights of way around throughout the city. These are trees that we identified in the inventory. We went back and looked at all of them again and determined that none of them were showing the classic signs of infestation. A two dozen were flagged as possible suspects and we got up close to those with the bucket truck and we were able to determine that there was not a problem with any of them. The traps were all checked monthly. We feel pretty good that if something had been out there we would have found it but like I said it's not a guarantee. Excuse me John. Yep. You found, those 450 trees were checked. Do you, could you remind us what the estimate is for the total number of ash trees in the city? Well in the parks it's about 600 and on the rights of way of streets it's about the same. So that's a pretty, you looked at a pretty good chunk of what's out there. We did. That's good news. Absolutely, yeah. And we'll continue to monitor those on an annual basis now that we know where they are and which ones are relatively easy to get to it's pretty straightforward to do that. And we looked for some pretty classic visual signs of what's going on. One of the other focuses was to be prepared and I think this is an area in which we had really great success and in large part again because of your support of what we had proposed in hiring an arborist, Adam Acala and he has been just a remarkable asset to us. He has worked pretty tirelessly on his own and has overseen a lot of work by other parks people so that they really learned from him how to deal with trees. He estimates that he's put in 243 tree work hours specifically and supervised almost 500 other hours by other people so that's been something we just didn't have before and it's made a big difference. He again estimates that his work has been had a value of about $35,000 had we had to farm it out otherwise. Specifically he took down seven ash trees but the big one for us in terms of being prepared is that he dealt with the backlog of other trees that were problems, almost 80 other trees and some of these were really significantly hazardous, potentially hazardous trees. So they're down, they're out of the way now we can really focus our efforts on other trees. He took down over 40 dead pine trees, the red pines that are on the state house path going up to the tower. Those have all lived their normal life cycle and yet they're coming down willy nilly in big storms so we need to get those out and he did that. The other thing that is really important in terms of the future is being able to treat some of the ash trees with a pesticide so that when the insect does land on them it's killed and we had brought this up with you before and gotten the okay to do it. So we're using a systemic pesticide, Emma Mecting, Benzoate and Adam and Alec Ellsworth were both trained and certified by the state to apply this insecticide themselves. It allowed us to reduce our cost by about two thirds and they've treated over 20 of the big ash trees in the downtown area so far. That protects the tree positively, it allows us to buy a little time, as much time as we want really, to grow new trees around them. So I'm really thrilled about that. One of the things that's in the plan for next year is to treat other street trees around town and we'll come back to you or to Bill with some further thoughts on this because I don't wanna step on the toes of private enterprise but I do wanna make sure that trees that are part of the, basically the neighborhood view are treated if they have value and there's plenty of them that are and sometimes the cost of treatment is gonna be a barrier to having that done by private enterprise. So what we're gonna propose is that Adam do the treatment of these trees as part of our tree board budget. Just a question about the treating the trees. You didn't give us a number of how many trees they treated? And at one point you had estimated when we gave you a budget. Remember what that was? We did 23 trees so far this year. And how many could you do? That's, those are the 23 trees downtown and a couple up in the park. I'm gonna guess that the next round, next year's treating some of the other sort of prominent street trees. We easily do that many or double that many next year. Okay. Can I? Thank you. I also just wanted to share with you one of the stories of Adams having dealt with these hazardous trees. There's a pretty noted tree on summer and spring tree. It's a huge white pine tree. It's a beautiful tree. And it's right on the street. And a lot of people have thought, well, that's trees too big. It's a danger. And trees can end up that way. Rather than cut it down, he took some of the upper limbs out of it. Basically it makes it a lot less likely to be blown over. And what he said was that he was up climbing at a height of 60 feet. I love this guy. The limb that he cut off in order to reduce the wind sale effect had 50 years worth of growth on it. So 60 feet up it had grown for 50 years. And I think having the ability to deal with trees like that is worth a lot to us as the tree board. We also met with Green Mountain Power. Some of you may have seen some green markers on trees around town. Green Mountain Power has hired a crew and a really excellent supervisor to flag trees that are in the rights of way or that if they, the ash trees, if they do fall, they'll damage lines or take lines down. So we don't know exactly how many it's gonna be, but it's at least a couple hundred trees that will come down. We're paying for it, I noticed on my power bill that I paid six cents, six cents for the Emerald Ash Boar Initiative. So we're all paying a little bit and we're getting this taken care of so that it doesn't take people off grid. And we worked with them and shared information. And I think that's been very successful. So the bottom line is though, even though we did not find additional infestations, I think we're in a great place to deal with it when it does come and that's inevitable. It's not a question of if it's gonna come, it is gonna come, it is here. And we're ready for it and we really appreciate the support that you've given us. Any questions that I can answer? I only have questions you can't answer. No, I'm just, I'm done it. Just lots of thanks. I mean, I'm glad we have the tree professional, but without the tree board yourself and everyone, it wouldn't happen. So you and John and the rest pushed us. So thank you. Oh, you're welcome. Glenn. All right. I also just wanted to pull out one thing, John. Yeah. That I'm pleased to see that it looks like the trees taken down by Green Mountain Power, if the landowner doesn't want that firewood, it will go to the parks department or lower income firewood distribution. So I'm really pleased to see that. Yeah, it's a great name. They've done that with some of the other ones that they removed. So I guess the one other thing I glossed over and what would just beg to take a moment to come back to is planting. We planted last spring over 150 trees around town as part of our greening neighborhoods program where we asked people, can we plant a tree in your front yard? And it's, if they're agreeable, we really work with them to find the right location and the right species that's gonna make a difference to the whole neighborhood. So there's 150 new trees in just this spring alone. And it's amazing to look back over the last five years that we've been doing this and see these things now 20 or 30 feet tall. I'm really thrilled about that. We also were able to replace six trees downtown that were struggling or had died. Two of them had been hit by snow plows. And we got an incredible gift from a nursery. One of our tree board members works with and they donated three trees and then gave us a 50% discount on three more. So it was really, it made things possible that would not have been easy otherwise. There was a disappointment in that there was a miscommunication with DPW. I can blame Tom because he's not here anymore, right? No, I will own this one too. I'm not sure how it happened, but he and I ended up at cross communications about getting three new tree wells in the downtown area. And we were not able to do that. Corey and I tried to pull it out at the last minute, but it just wasn't gonna work. So I made me to get six new locations next year since we missed three this year. And those will fill in the gaps as the ash trees downtown do die. So thank you very much. If you do have questions at any point, please just drop me in order to pick up the phone. Jack and Donna. Yeah, last time we were talking about this, there was some, it wasn't clear what species would be the right species to put downtown because the ash trees have done so well and we haven't found anything that has done as well. What are you thinking now for species for downtown? We're using a mix for starters. After the elm problems and ash problems and other problems, a monoculture is just a disaster. We've had great results with ginkos. They're all male ginkos, they're cloned male ginkos so that they don't produce fruit which some people have problems with. But we are also using hackberry. Freeman maples have done very well but I don't want to over plant those. There's four Freeman maples in front of Shaw's that we planted about 10 years ago and those trees have done very well despite pretty adverse conditions there. So let's see, those two we've, we have lindens, some honey locusts. So those are pretty much the ones that we do. There's a bunch of oaks over by the credit union. Thank you, oaks too, yeah. And we put oaks in sidewalks and they're doing very well. There's one right at the corner of East State and Maine that is doing really, really well. Great. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Any other questions? I don't know. Being a photographer, I want to know if you have a tree album. So you, when you put them in, you take a picture when they're little and then as they grow. And if you don't, you should do it. I have a lot of pictures of our trees. And you can bring those trees back to the city council next time you need some more money. We do have a trees Facebook page that's doing very well and a lot of times those trees show up there. Yeah. I look. Thank you. Good. Thank you so much, John. Okay. So we are going to skip to the animal and noise ordinance. So for this, I'm going to turn it over to Donna to sort of introduce this. And actually, meanwhile, I'm going to run to the bathroom. So actually, I think you're in front of the show. Okay. All right. So I'm going to pass it to you, Donna. I put this on the agenda and became more aware of it because of some comments and complaints from my constituents on Elm Street. And it seemed a very reasonable request that the only thing on the books when a dog began barking was that the dog had to bark for 20 consistent minutes. And they dutifully recorded this dog who barked often, chronically, persistently throughout the day and throughout the week but never for 20 minutes consistently. So the goal here is just to add that aspect of something different than 20 consistent minutes. I don't know that it's perfect, but what we put here and try to put it in line with what's also in the noise ordinances is that a nuisance means any dog that chronically disturbs the quiet comfort and repose of others by barking, whining, calling, howling for three or more times throughout the day for three or more days within the week. So we're not talking about a little yap here or there but something that's chronic persistent. And we thought that three times during the day, three or more days during the week, that would be in high enough standard. And I know that we have some people here to talk about their experiences. Would you like to, you can sit at the table or speak at the mic? I'm talking to the, oh, sorry. Hello. I should just sit down. You don't want whichever you prefer. Or are you more comfortable? Yeah, to talk right into it there too. Cheryl Rapae Adams and Chris Adams on Elm right near Cummings. And since we moved there, a nearby neighbor has, originally there were two hounds and howled constantly, except for rarely more than 20 minutes. And then they died eventually and that was sad but we were glad also of the quiet. And they got another dog and the puppy was fine but then after a while it started up again because apparently hounds are like what they want and hounds howl. And so we don't really know what to do because we've called and we're told by the police that if we ended up in small, what was it? Court? I don't know. Small claims court? Is that right? The judge would just say, well, the dog has to go out. If the dog is out, the dog is barking and howling. And it's many times a day. It was six a.m. Sunday. It was 11 p.m. Sunday night or Monday night. No, just that it's pretty constant from early morning till late night on a regular, daily basis. Doesn't matter what the day is, it's every day. It just goes on and on. I go open the window a quarter of 11 at night, dogs bark when we're getting in bed. And this dog is not as aggressive. Actually, there's two there now. The two before it, one of them, not only would he howl and sound like a banshee, it was amazing. But if you went anywhere near their fence, he would throw himself at the fence and yell and scratch and bark. And it got to be annoying after a while. It was difficult to converse in the garden. Yeah. Like, we'd have to wait for it to stop before people could hear each other talking. So now that doesn't happen, but it's just the continual, it's the same barking time frame over and over. It's just tiresome, actually. A neighbor came to us looking for the source of it. Somebody who lived across the river on Cummings and had suffered for many months and didn't know where it was coming from. And so we wondered how many people over on Cummings are hearing that and not knowing. It's an echo valley where we live. So I didn't walk over there and knock on doors yet, but that could be something if it would help to have more statements from people. Well, I received two complaints from Cumming Streets and three from Elm. Okay. Thank you. Is there anything more you wanna know from us? That's without soliciting any. Yeah, no. I think that's, well, I wasn't here for the thing, but I'm sorry, thanks. Thank you. I'm open for any questions. Oh, go ahead, Ashley. Well, if you were making a larger, how are we gonna approach it? Well, I have a couple ideas, but what are your thoughts? Go for it. Well, the first thing that comes to mind, I've worked with, I work with humans, but when there is a human, generally a tiny one that cries a whole bunch, it's an unmet need of some sort. And I'm glad to see that there's no spelled out, like we're gonna take your dog or anything like that, but the sort of first thing that stands out to me is I don't really love finds. I don't know that those are super effective way. They are pretty regressive, but I'm wondering if right up front, we could front load the CJC process so that we can like bring people in. And I understand that that's not something that everyone is comfortable doing, but I find that facilitating conversations about things that are super problematic like this, for me at least, that's a sort of preferred place to start as opposed to- It's here. No, I know, but it's a second offense. And so there's the formal warning, which, yes, people need to be warned about those things, but in terms of the second, third, fourth or subsequent offenses, I would really just like to see like a referral to the CJC and that first thing so that if there is an animal that is reported, that is a problem, it's something that the city can sort of reach out in a collaborative way before getting to this point. And the other thing is that, I guess I could see a set of circumstances under which those circumstances may actually arise to criminal liability also. And so I know that that's not sort of what anyone is looking for here, but it is something that can be addressed. There are criminal laws that can also work on addressing people and their, either neglect of their animals' needs or just whatever is going on, but I would, the only, I am fine with this. I would just ask that the CJC part be like front loaded and maybe like the city can try to collaborate on a solution to address this, but I would imagine it's quite frustrating to have to listen to, but I just wanna be mindful that the dog isn't necessarily the one to blame always. So I wanna step back for a second and talk about the process, because I think, I don't know, how do you feel about that suggestion? No, fine, I mean, when the police were called, they did recommend mediation and they were asked for it, but they weren't forced for it, so therefore they didn't do it, so you're right. So just taking a step back, my guess is that the language that we have in front of us right now, we're gonna need to massage or craft into, either, you know, we just add this. I mean, I have some questions, so one possibility is that we just take some comments tonight and then maybe direct staff to come back with, like a compilation of our suggestions. Does that sound reasonable, Donna? Does that sounds okay to you? That's fine, I'd just like to quickly address the part that Ashley brought up, which is that this entire process was added to this ordinance just a couple years ago when we did a lot of work on the dog ordinance and we had a dog committee and this was the process that that committee identified and the council endorsed, so the idea, we can't necessarily impose CJC, so I think the thinking was, you offer it in lieu of a fine so that a person can go through that process, but if they don't, if you say you've gotta do it and they walk away, then the fine was sort of the incentive for them to participate, so I mean, obviously you're welcome to change that, but this was fairly vetted and I think discussed, not only for a long time in committee, but then I think in multiple occasions here with the council, so just wanna remind everyone of that. And if I'm not mistaken, Donna, this is really about the two ordinances, the noise control ordinance and the dog control ordinance. It's sort of bringing them into alignment. Right, yeah. That was the intention, because when you went to the noise ordinance, there was no standard, they just said if they did this and this, they were a nuisance and you could get them through the noise, but you couldn't through here. Okay, Steve. Steve Whitaker, since you're not only dealing with noise, you're dealing with animal ordinance, I'm not sure if it's city jurisdiction that's supposed to enforce the animals in restaurants, but we've got a problem where it's become fashionable, trendy, tolerated, and even encouraged to bring animals into food service establishments and it's getting out of hand. Dogs are barking, dogs are jumping, a dog is jumping up into the cooler, hands on the counter, staff is coming out and massaging the dog and going right back to work without washing their hands. It's out of control and I'm not gonna name establishments, but I'm not sure if it's city or state health department that has to enforce that. I think our health officer would know whether the police should be called to cite somebody for break and the ambiguity over whether a dog is a service animal has become a game. So a merchant will advise the person to say it's a service animal in training and it's not a service animal, it's a toy. It's a guy magnet or whatever it is, but the dogs in order to qualify as a service animal have to be, have been trained to perform a function for someone who needs that. There's a legal briefing I can share if anybody would read it who wants to read it, but same way I defend handicapped parking against abusers of people who are not handicapped, I will defend keeping animals out of restaurants. So I would hope you would find a way to take either action to amend the ordinance to make it very clear and or enforce it. Thank you. Any other, yes, Jack? I think this is a good approach, a good way to get going. I know in general in terms of people who are asked to enforce a standard, they like to have something very objective and easily measured and I assume that's partly why the 20 minute thing came out because people don't want to be in a position of exercising judgment that then they say, in my opinion, it's this and the other person says no, I disagree, but I think that this is a way to address it without getting too much into a lack of standards. And so I think we should be proceeding to, I don't know if we're ready to schedule a public hearing, I want to have the city come back with the draft language first, but I think this is a good thing to be doing. Connor. Can I just ask where the three times a day language came from? Was that from like another ordinance in another city? No, we were just thinking of what was trying to be a real irritant versus just once a day, twice a day, but three times seemed to be like, okay, now I'm irritated. But you're flexible on that? Yes. On that note, I was, Donna, I have talked about this a little bit, but just the way it's phrased right now, I think if any dog barks three times in a day, then this would trigger this ordinance. And I think that's probably not the intent. Three times a day for three or more days during the week, it goes together. Sure, so if a dog barks just three times in a day, and then does it for three days. Seconds at a crime, okay. Right, like that to me seems too much, but I understand the intent, and so I think there's probably just a way to reframe it, I guess, or rephrase it. So if it's okay, if we can kick that to staff. Yes, Donna. I did receive recordings, and I'd be glad to share them, particularly with staff, because when you listen, you get an idea of what a minute means, or two minute means, when somebody's dog is really howling, whining. Good. As a dog owner, I think if we said three times for a minute in a day, three times a week, that would be just fine. My dog probably barks three times a day because we have someone come to the door that often, but she stops immediately once she figures out who it is, and I think that's okay. She outsets, it's not so much inside, it's being out in the yard where the sound goes, that's the issue. But I understand. Yeah. Anyway, so we'll have staff work on it? Yeah. Ashley? I guess, I'm thinking about this, and I've been thinking about this for a while. It just, it feels to me like we are, I know what the issue is, which is how do we get this particular situation to resolve in a way that meets everyone's needs? It just feels like regulating the number of barks that a dog can have, I mean, and I don't have kids, but I could see a world in which someone were upset about a child crying or about anything else, and I want to address these issues, and I want to address this because it is a problem. I've had neighbors with dogs that bark before, but I don't know that setting a limit on the number of barks or something like that is really the way to solve this because we don't just deal with dogs barking, we deal with other noise-related issues, and I know that having, if it happens this number of times for this many days, I mean, if there's one extra bark, I mean, right, like, and I appreciate that this sounds a bit facetious, but I also want to be pragmatic that if the goal is actually to address the issue and to rectify that, I don't know that setting a limit on the number of barks per day, my partner's dog probably barks more than that, but he sees cats in the house, or he sees the squirrel outside, and again, I know that's not the situation that we're talking about. I would just encourage us to sort of think outside the box and instead of picking a number or maybe the issue is a dog being left unattended or unsupervised or something like that, and I wonder if there is a way that would get to the heart of the issue, which is the unmet needs of an animal who's trying to communicate that in a way that isn't sort of related to this timeframe or this number of minutes, because whether it's three minutes or whether it's 20 minutes, if it's three minutes every 20 minutes, I mean, it adds up either way, or whether it's 55 seconds every 20 minutes or it just, I don't know what the answer is, but I will think on it and I'm gonna try to come back with something that gets to the same result in just a way that feels a little more focused on what the actual issue is, as opposed to like the best way that we can quantify it right now, if that makes sense. Okay, any other comments on this? I don't think we need a motion at this point, but we'll just put it on the agenda for some future meeting, maybe the next one? So you could like the step, I don't- Would you like a motion about that? I just wanna be clear. You would like us to draft this in ordinance language and recommend maybe we can look at what some other communities are doing to deal with this and come back as soon as reasonable. Great, is that a gun? Yeah, maybe just a ballpark idea of how long this process is likely to take for the sake of the folks who've come out this evening, and I'm just gonna throw a guess out there and you can correct me, but if we come back to it and then there are the recommended two public hearings, the required two public hearings, and we end up passing something, we're talking about a couple of months fastest, probably. Probably, yeah. So just so you know when nothing happens for a while. Well my guess is that having something back by next week, because we meet next week is probably too fast. And then, but if we- We'll shoot for December. I was gonna say if we aim for December 11th and then 18th maybe. Yeah, we were thinking December, at the earliest. All right, well, Lauren. Just wanted to thank you for coming out tonight and thank Donna for doing the work on drafting this and putting this forward and I definitely appreciate the city staff taking some of the consideration of, I agree, I think some massaging to make sure we're solving this problem by not creating a whole new slew of dogs that become problem dogs overnight, that nobody's really, but really trying to get at the core of this real nuisance. So look forward to that and thank you again. Thanks, Donna. Yes, your work on this. Thank you. We're gonna draft a member regarding arrest crimes. Okay. Nope, that's not our function right now. All right, so we're moving on to the police officer involved shooting discussion. So this was a time that we wanted to select the public. They had thoughts or issues or questions that now would be an okay time to raise that. And I know we have Chief Fakus here to hear the questions. I mean, we thought we would maybe just like write down like what are the things that people are concerned about and see if we can process all of that to get answers, though they may not be tonight, but in any case, so this is an opportunity for the public to discuss that. So yeah, go ahead, Steve. So I'm not as prepared as I'd like to be because I still don't have the records I asked for. Back in August, I understand they were legitimately withheld while the investigation was going on. The investigation was completed weeks ago and the records have not been produced. The incident reports, the schematics of who was where, distances, et cetera. None of that rose records have been produced. All I've got was an email from Jamie with the video link. That's it. I don't know if we have all of the investigation report. We know that the state police still have a full record. And I know the state's attorney linked everything to, state's attorney's released everything to. Whatever was created here in Montpelier, I was due as soon as it was released from the. Yeah, we'll check. I think we gave you everything because they took over the investigation immediately. But you've still got copies of your officer's reports, but you have your copies here. So I'd like to just pause on the dialogue. If you would like to. I'm asking for the copies that I requested. I'm still talking. So if you would like to just say whatever you would like to say, and then we may respond sort of together. And does that make sense? Let's just take turns with, yeah. Go ahead. I would ask that this be, this is not a 10 minute agenda item. This is a public hearing that needs to be scheduled for the broader community. It needs to be widely advertised ahead of time, possibly even a special meeting because this is a very serious thing. A second killing of a mentally disturbed person unnecessarily. And when I've watched the video, as I said at the last time you took this up, I watched the video, the vocals between the officers, they clearly, he's waving that thing around. They're not feeling fear. They could tell the guy would rather jump off the bridge, but they talk him down and then they kill him. I mean, that is absolutely unnecessary. There's no discussion of, hey, should we get mental health over here? Maybe how do we just cool our jets a little bit? But let's take the guy out. Who's next? Me? This is very serious. And we need to not try to sweep it under the rug or allow the officers to sweep it under the rug. I understand that technically it's a justified shooting because he had a weapon that couldn't have been known. But fearing for their lives, that guy with a pistol could not hit. They're back there behind a cruiser. Probably have the rifle steadied on a cruiser. They're in no danger from a pellet gun or even if it was a pistol. So to take this guy out was a gross overreaction, an abuse of police power. And I'm not suggesting that we fire this guy and send him down to another parish like the Catholics do, but he needs maybe not have gun privileges for a while. Or maybe be taught to train other people how not to take somebody out unnecessarily. But this is not something we can sweep under the rug. This is unconscionable. This is not the city we wanna live in where people get shot randomly because of poor training of a police officer. And where did the shotgun go? You know, I called that last time. Jack asked, why wasn't the shotgun, the beanbag shotgun used? And Bill says, I'll talk to you about that. So was that intentional to not create a paper trail? Where is the discussion? Those records were requested a long time ago. Why was the shotgun not used? Are you, thank you. Let's like to pause and see if there's any other comments. Any other thoughts from the public? Okay. Would you like to address? I'll just briefly say that the reason I asked to speak with Jack was because it was complicated and didn't wanna write it all out. It wasn't to do anything. I'd also say that the issue of the, I assume you mean the beanbag, the non-lethal beanbag was addressed in pretty much good detail by the state's attorney in his statement, which is available to be seen and written. He addressed that. It was not on the scene. There were no other officers on scene. No others in, the only officers at that time were Barry City who had been called to respond. So it would have required leaving the scene to get the non-lethal shotgun. The officers were responding to a felony of a person. The report was, you can doubt all you want. The report was for a person attacking someone with a knife. That's the call they were responding to. Now, you can know what you know after the fact. This is what they knew at the time. So they responded immediately and were on scene. So there was no opportunity to get the other weapon. It was, it wasn't in play. And as I said, state's attorney addressed that in pretty great detail in the press conference, which you can see live and in his written statement. All right, thank you. Anything you want to add to that, Chief Fakis? If not, that's fine. Okay, any other comments from council? Connor. I mean, I would say I walk past the memorial every day and it's like indisputable that this was a tragedy for our community, especially one so small. And you can tell really just how deeply everybody felt about Mr. Johnson. But at the same time, there were two separate investigations, both of which exonerated these officers. And I think I would take issue that we would vilify our police force. They're like any other employees in city government here. And just because you put on the badge doesn't forfeit your right to defend yourself or your partner when they have families at stake. And I have a different interpretation watching that video. I could hear fear in their voices, fear for their own lives there. And to say they were safe behind the vehicle, those doors were paper thin there. If a shot had been fired, they absolutely would have been in danger. And I think we can have criticism on the national level for how police officers act. And certainly, they should be accountable when they are. But I really appreciated how our police department operates as far as the trainings they take part in. And I think they're second to none in the state as far as the work they do. So yeah, I think there's a tendency to vilify people just because they're cops here, but they're employees of the city. And it was an independent investigation, not by the city here, they found them innocent in this case. We're gonna move on. The state police objected to him reviewing the video before. All right. You're overlooking that, you're sweeping it under the rug. Thank you, Stephen. All right, so we are gonna move on. And actually, I'm gonna change the order one more time because I know there are some folks here for the responsible employer ordinance that are here so dutifully. Every time we take this issue up, and I know they're also here from far away. So yeah, is it okay, Connor, if we jump to that? Great, okay. Do you wanna say anything more about this? I don't have a ton to say. I think we're at the sixth, probably hearing from this. So we've vetted it pretty well. I appreciate everybody who's come out pretty diligently for all these hearings. I think we have an opportunity to really set a landmark ordinance in this case that would be a beacon for the rest of the state and hopefully New England and the region here to set the example that we treat our construction workers with the respect they deserve and prevent wage theft, misclassification, and discrimination as Daniela said several times here. So I'm hoping we can pass this tonight. And I really appreciate everybody's time on it. Do I hear a motion? I would move to... Excuse me. Yes, this is a public hearing. We're opening the public hearing now. Yes, so I'm gonna officially open the public hearing. She was doing so well. I know. Yeah, and then we'll take motions afterwards. But yeah, go ahead. Hello again, Danielle Bombardier from Colchester, and I just wanna say thank you for City Council, for looking at this and for hopefully passing it tonight. I think it's a really great step forward, as Connor said, for the State of Vermont. And we'll be an example when we go to Burlington, South Burlington, Winooski, Colchester, and on and on throughout the state. So I appreciate all that you have done. Thank you, Connor, and thank you all. Any other comments? Okay, I'm gonna officially close the public hearing. Connor, would you like to make a motion? So recommended action schedule second public hearing. I think we are at the second public hearing, right? Yes, we just had it. I just closed it. Okay. So we can actually pass it tonight. Okay, so I would move to pass the responsible employer ordinance. Second. I have that one language tweak that I would like to add as an amendment to the motion. I read it out last meeting, but it didn't make it into the language. So I can read it out again if you like. That was good. Yeah. Shall I read it out again? Are you just gonna accept? Okay. Well, I know. It's up to you. Okay. I'm feeling federal. National politics has taught me I never agree to anything that I don't know what it is. I'll read it out. That's right, Ashley. I don't think you were here. He's read. He's read. I wasn't here. The issue is that the motion, the ordinance was passed at first reading with the amendment. And just because we had people out sick, we didn't get it changed in here. So the text is not correct, but here is the same as what was passed as it was passed the last meeting. So I think you could either just amend it and pass it again with that, or just say you're passing it as similar as passed at first reading. At first time. Nonetheless, do you wanna just so Ashley can hear me? Okay. So it's not a change. This was section 64. I deleted some language saying as calculated in accordance with Vermont's prevailing wage law because that's a redundant reference. The language as I amended it is section 64. The bidder or proposer and subcontractors under the bidder or proposer must comply with the obligations established by the city for payment of a responsible wage, which shall effectively incorporate the rates set under the prevailing wage law applicable to the regional rates for the Montpelier area, including the appropriate apprentice classification. Yeah? That came up. Yeah, it came back a couple of times ago. Not the last one, but the one before that. That one, that's the one that I want without the redundancy. You don't need any more departments of redundancy departments. So you all then are doing the move to pass responsible employer ordinance as amended in the first hearing? Yes. That's what you all intended, right? Okay. Any further discussion? Okay, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Okay, thank you for bringing this up. Thank you for all of your work on this and good luck in the future endeavors. Thanks for coming so many times. Yeah, thank you. You must know all our local issues by now. I just want to say on behalf of every construction worker in the state of Vermont and New England and probably United States, you folks have been on the foundation of something that's going to help them all and we appreciate it much. And yeah, I think we're going to come back to meetings because I want to see what happens to the ash borer. And the snowplow budget and see if you hire anybody else. And I had a lot of dogs, so that's kind of sensitive. Thank you. Thank you all. Okay. All right, so we are up to the, I think it's our last regular business item, which is the recreation building update. Do you have a presentation? We do. So if you want to take like a two minute break and set everything up and we'll reconvene when you're ready. Okay, thank you. Since we have this presentation. So I'm going to sit down here. So if you actually, Bill, do you have anything to say about this? I'm going to turn this right over to Cameron. He's letting me introduce this. Great. Ripping off the bandaid early. So council and mayor Watson, thank you so much for letting us be here. I'm excited to bring you some of the plans for potential changes to our recreation facility. I know that this conversation began when we discussed the building being inaccessible and non-ADA compliant, which doesn't allow us to serve our community to the best of our abilities. Our rec center is an invaluable part of our community and it serves a lot of folks and our rec center does a lot of really good work for our community, including daycare and really great athletic programs for our community and in a substandard building. So this really came out of that conversation, making sure that we are ADA compliant and then making it better. So it doesn't stop just there. You'll be seeing tonight two different options, a base option and an upgraded option. Those were shown to us today so we don't have necessarily staff recommendations at this time, but we are hoping to show you this presentation, give you the information and then bring it to a vote next meeting next week to see if we want to bring this to a bond vote. So you'll be seeing both packages and both breakdowns as soon as we can get that information to you. We have the presentation to you and we'll get you the breakdowns. I also want to have Arne after we go through this presentation discuss with you the programming that we could expand in a new facility. So thank you and we'll start the presentation. Good evening, my name is John Dale. Project Architect with Breadloaf Corporation. We began working on this project the last summer with Arne and the staff and reviewing and surveying the building for the conditions and the deterioration and so forth of the building over 100 years, the lack of, as Cameron said, the lack of ADA compliance, but also there's a significant lack in terms of just general climate control systems lighting. And one of the most notable things is that there's a whole 7,000 square foot basement that is inaccessible and thus not used except for storage basically right now, which fairly limits the building. So if we could proceed, is that here are some pictures of the condition of the building. This is on Barry Street, just around the corner, you're on the upper left, you see the front of the building that's right across the street from the senior center. The front of the building is a three story building and then it's backed by the old armory, the main reception or gymnasium space, which was the assembly space for the armory when it was originally built. And then there's a basement below that. As you can see in the second from the upper left picture, the windows in the main gymnasium space have all been blocked off. They may be under the plywood, nobody knows really, but essentially there's no daylight into the gymnasium space. In the third picture from the left, you can see the old coal scuttles or hatches for dumping the coal into the basement. There's a deteriorating bulkhead there. And then the upper right, the front steps, the walls are separating from the steps. There's a lot of movement in those walls. There's basically are being undermined as large holes. You can see in the lower picture is some more deterioration to the brick in the corners and so forth. There's a fire escape that's rusting. Next, please. These are some interior pictures. The gymnasium space itself is really quite attractive. It's handsome. As soon as you walk in the door, you get this great golden brick in this nice large room. It's used heavily. Every time I've been there, there's always been a basketball game or a pickleball match going on or a league going on. But as again, there's no windows there. The ceiling is dingy. The lighting's terrible. The baskets are 30, 40 years old. The third picture from the left is the main office for the staff. And then the worst pictures here are on the right side, the top and bottom. This is just some examples of the mechanical room in the basement, which is full of asbestos wrapped pipe bean and old boiler that's been abandoned, a new boiler that's reaching the end of its serviceable life. And there's actually a whole room full of coal still there in the basement. You can't get in that room unless Arnie lets you in because it's a disaster. And then you can see some of the other pictures of the different spaces. And then the one in the second from the right on the bottom is the basement. And that's the typical space down there where it's just full of rec department storage, which is great, but it's not for downtown location. There's better use for this. Next please. So this is a floor plan and it's a little confusing, I apologize, it doesn't show up as well as we'd like, is that it does in terms of this copy that doesn't show up as well. The north is up, on the right side would be Berry Street. So you have that rectangle with the X through it is the three story section in the front with the entrance right in the middle. And this is the basement floor. And as you come down the stairs to the basement, you come into a small vestibule. And then the mechanical room and in the cold room and all that is in the bottom of the right sec corner of the building. The upper right corner is a men's locker room, which is the only locker room facility in there as it was built as an army 100 years ago. And then you have a corridor running down the middle with columns in either side. All the walls down there is CMU walls, block walls. And there's a shooting range presently along the bottom with the lateral room at the bottom long room at the bottom of the page is a shooting range. And then a series of smaller rooms, including the armory room up above. In the rear of the building is a loading dock that is accessible as a garage door that's accessible from the street. This floor is about two or three feet below grade. Next please. This is the first floor, which is about four feet, five feet above grade. You come up the steps which are just off to the right into the front door and then up a few more steps. So this is totally non-ADA accessible. And then you go through the vestibule there and straight into the gymnasium and in the back is a stage or a raised stage area. There's some classrooms and a pool room and so forth that are used on the lower left. And then the offices are in the upper right. And the next please. This is the top floor. So you just have really the rooms on the right side of this plan, which is four rooms around the vestibule area. So what we're proposing to do is to basically clean out all of the, this is the proposed basement floor, clean out all of the walls in the basement except for the bearing walls and the perimeter of the two main spaces and keep and maintain the existing stair down because it allows us to get a stair into a tight space which we wouldn't be able to do by code if we replaced it. And we'd like to. Sorry, where was that? The stair is, is there a point? It won't really let you do that. There you go. Thank you. So we can, so what we'll do is fire rate the entire vestibule around the stair to basically enclose that stair in a fire rated vestibule. And just below that area where he was just pointing is this rectangle, which is where we're proposing to put, oh great, thank you, is just below that red dot is where we're proposing to put a new elevator. So we would add a door just to the right of the red door dot from the outside next to the existing front steps where you would come in and that you would basically be between floors. So if you wanted to be, if you're in the, enter the elevator, you want to go down to the basement, you would go down about two feet and come off the opposite side of the elevator. So you'd enter from the right side, code down to two feet in the elevator and come out on the left side and then you would go up and into the vestibule and that would give you access to the basement floor. On this, going to the new program, what we have is on the upper right hand corner we have to the right of that police camera. Right there is we have lockers, men's lockers on the left in the shower facilities and toilet facilities on the right. And the same thing down below, basically mirrored in below is lock, women's locker rooms on the left in their changing toilet room shower facilities on the right. As you come out of the vestibule and go straight through, we have added a new thinner corridor with some glass walls at different locations to give you views into the spaces. On the right, what we're proposing is to have basically general exercise spaces. We divide it into two rooms with large, where the divided have large sliding doors so they could be joined together or separated. And you could have, we'd have floors and they are appropriate for dance class, for Zumba, for Tai Chi and so forth, the sort of semi resilient floors. And then in the back, perhaps, you could have a spin class and so forth. On the left side, what we're proposing to do is a more fitness exercise area. So in the front to the right, you would have exercise, you know, treadmills, bikes, ergs and so forth, yoga balls and et cetera stretching out spaces. And then on the left is potentially loose weights and weight machines and so forth. The corridor extends out to the back, it's the rear of some steps and goes out a new exit that we would create at the rear of the stage to get out to satisfy code. We're also proposing, by the way, is that this whole building would be sprinkler under this system, under this renovation. We'd maintain the loading dock on the left. And also what I'd like to add in is that we're proposing is to replace, remove all the plaster finishes in the building. Any stud walls that we want to maintain for bearing capacity and so forth would be re-sheet, the new JIP board. The walls down here, the perimeter walls down here would have stud walls built in front of them with insulation and then JIP board over them to improve the envelope and the energy efficiency of the building. And the windows would all have, the existing windows, historic windows, would all have storm windows installed on the inside. I'm sorry, did you say what JIP board was? JIP board, drywall, gypsum board. Just drywall. Drywall. This is the first floor, so you would come up the stairs as usual. We were proposing to rebuild the stairs as necessary to make them stable and good for the next 100 years. You come up the steps again. We would refinish all of the floor finishes in this floor. The elevator, again, is to your right. You would come up the elevator and come out on the left side again into a little vestibule and that would open into the main lobby. Straight ahead off the elevator is a family bathroom at this level. So it would have a shower, toilet, and bathroom in it and that could be locked off. So you could go in there and use that separately. It's also a non-gender bathroom. And then to the bottom of the page, we're opening up that space into one large classroom. And then at the upper right, we're proposing to refurbish the stair to meet code. There would be an office in the upper right-hand corner that would have a view through glass doors to the lobby. And then the upper left would be a conference slash classroom. Straight ahead, we're moving into the gymnasium. It would have fire doors that would be held open on magnetic hold opens. And there's really just a great large opening going from the lobby into the gymnasium and is really attractive. We're proposing to install new windows in all of those large openings on the sides of the gym and have painted aluminum screens on the inside to protect them from balls and so forth for impact. The floor, we're proposing to remove the floor and reinstall a new sprung modern athletic competition type basketball floor. And then in the rear of the stage, we would basically close it off with a curtain so they could be used for storage and equipment that could then be pulled very easily into the room for use. Next please, oh, I'm sorry, go back please. We're also proposing to replace the fire stair that's down here in the lower left-hand corner to give the second means of egress from the space. And then on the upper floor, we are not allowed to have assembly space on the upper floor by codes without adding another stair, which would basically take up much of the floor. So the elevator comes up and you would get off on the right side this time and go into the vestibule. And then we have offices on the two offices in the upside, a conference room down at the lower left-hand corner and another office in the lower right-hand corner. Next please. So this is the site plan of the building. You can see that dashed rectangle around the outside. That is essentially the lot lines. The building actually takes up most of the lot. It takes up more of the lot than it appears when you're there in person. So there really isn't a lot of, there isn't any opportunity for increasing the parking, unfortunately, on the lot. So essentially where we're basically just regularizing the existing parking that's there. So you have three spots along the driveway to the bottom and then six spots, six or seven spots along the back property line. What we're proposing is to repave the existing paving. As I said, rebuild the front steps, add a ramp, slight ramp going down into the new doorway next to the front steps. There will be a new hatch put in the roof, but as a baseline we're talking about keeping the existing roof materials on the roofs. They're both, we were installed in the last 10 years at different times, the front roof and the back roof were installed at different times. And we'd have rooftop mechanical equipment mounted on the roofs. Next please. This is a section through the building. It's a little complicated, a little difficult to read, but you can sort of see how the elevator would allow you to get to all these different levels and so forth. The one note is on the gymnasium we're proposing to replace the ceiling of the gymnasium with a new gypsum board ceiling and put in acoustical panels underneath the ceiling. The floor level that's between the gymnasium and the lower level, if you're in there, if you're in the base, when there's a basketball game going on right now, it's quite noisy. What we're proposing is to fill the joy space, the wooden joy space with bat insulation, put hang gypsum board ceiling on resilient channels below that and then put tectum panels again, acoustical panels again on that ceiling to maintain as much of the ceiling height as possible. If we remove, as one of the options is to remove all of the slabs in the basement, we might be of a chance to actually lower them by six, 12 inches. You're gonna have to see what the conditions are and increase the height in the basement for exercise. Right now it's about eight feet, seven and a half to eight feet when we're all done. Next please. These are just views of the exterior. You can see the upper image is the north elevation. You can see the nice large new windows in the gymnasium and the historic windows in the front being restored and upgrade in terms of insulation values. Same on the south side. You can see the new fire stair with a roof over it as required by code. And then the front steps, if we note, as would be repaired and probably rebuilt as necessary. Next please. As the front elevation, and you can see just the left of the front door is the new entrance we were proposing. We restore, refurbish the nice front doors to the main space entrance. And one of the upgrades we're talking about is putting a canopy of maybe a glass and metal canopy over the front door and extending it over the side. It's a design issue we'd have to really, really need to be studied, but that's one upgrade that we put in some money for in terms of the higher end price. Well, it's not shown here, but one of the things we're proposing is that it might be nice to see if we can come up with a historically, not necessarily historic, but it's sensitive and attractive canopy over the front door to look for. So when you enter, particularly with the handicap entrance, it's pretty exposed when you go in. These are just some computer views of the basement workout spaces and what they'd be like and so forth. On the left is the fitness room and on the right is looking into the, what we're proposing is might be a spin room. You can see some of the glass walls into the corridors and so forth. So the base estimate, which is essentially what we're talking about is gutting the inside of the building, putting all new electrical, new electric service into the building, new mechanical systems, refinishing all the finishes, except in the gymnasium where we like, we're proposing to keep the nice golden brick exposed, putting in, upgrading the roof insulation and where there isn't any roof insulation, which is only a portion of the building. New floor finishes throughout the building, about 50% of the concrete slabs in the basement being demolished and replaced because they're cracking or they're in the wrong height. And then all new, refurbishing the stair, new finishes, new athletic floor systems in the basement and in the gymnasium. New finishes such as carpet tile and linoleum in the classrooms and hallways up in the upper floors. This, and then of course all the new locker rooms, new, all the new plumbing services for the locker rooms in the toilet rooms. Some new, reconnecting the utilities to the street, replacing the oil heat with, hooking the building up to the city gas and repaving the exterior. That's the paving around the outside. That's in the nutshell is essentially the scope of the work there. The cost of this, in terms of construction costs, is approximately $2,750,000 and then we've assigned a construction management fee at this point at 4% and then also a construction contingency of 10%. That gets you to a total estimated construction cost of 3,154,000. Next please. The sum of signing also we listed some of the costs that what you could expect that would be owner's cost us above the construction. So a design services estimated fee of 8% on the construction would be $250,000. Financing would be something that would be determined by you in terms of cost and legal aspect. Having, we estimated the cost to have has its inspection testing done of $5,000 and we paid a total guess at what it would cost to do that has its material abatement of $95,000. That may be high, it may be low, we really don't know what that would be. Again, payment performance above $25,000. We are assuming that permits, you would not be charging permits for this building as it's a city project. And then some basically miscellaneous fees below that and then we also added an owner's contingency of 10%. That adds $500,000 to the cost of the project, total cost of the project. And you would have an overall, when you add these all together, a total project budget estimated $3,900,000. Then if we wanted to upgrade, we added some costs here for upgrade. For instance, in the shower rooms and bathrooms downstairs, what we proposed is a burnished or polished concrete floors and then just a chipboard in vinyl base on the sides or tile base on the walls. If we upgraded that to have tile on the walls in the bathroom showers, not in the locker room, that would be adding $13,000. To remove and replace the entire basement slab would add $70,000. Put the canopy or the porch roof over the front doors. Be estimate of $30,000. A climbing wall, which Arnie's already told me he doesn't want. A $57,000 for the climbing wall and also the reinforcing the structure to accept it. Fitness and weight room equipment where it just took a shot at $63,000. And then upgrades to make the HVAC system, the heating and air conditioning system more energy efficient would be $177,000. There probably would not be a return on investment in a short period of time on that. Enough gradient building lighting of $106,000. Installing a generator and the infrastructure that's necessary for the generator would be $69,000. And by the time we added all of the equipment and new hatch and so forth to the east roof, the higher roof on the east street side, we thought maybe we need to replace the roof and that would be $12,000. So that ends up being, when you add all those things, it increases the multipliers on the owner's cost, which would be the next page. When all that's said and done, that would be a $4,700,000 project, total project budget. So it goes up about $800,000 when you've added all those upgrades to the project. That ends that part of the presentation. Did you have any direct questions for John before we turn it over to Arnie? I have lots of questions, but I can save them to the end, I suppose. Do you have a presentation or should I leave? No, I actually. Go ahead. No, Cameron, I didn't realize I was talking about this tonight, but I was actually prepared for it. Thank you, Arnie. Some of the things that we can do with once the building becomes accessible and we can get people of all abilities into the building, we can go back to doing special events into the building. We used to do our Halloween party there, but we moved it to the high school as a result because of access issues. Other special events, just we threw one out, was like a town-wide garage sale, but I'm just throwing that out as something in addition. After school childcare would become a possibility, specialized classes, the ability to have classes right after school, right now we don't have that ability. We can do group exercise classes and John already threw out the spinning classes, the ability to host more of our own programs. A lot of, right now we have to rely on other space in the school building. Sometimes, you know, events come up and all of a sudden our programs get bumped and we try to work that out the best we can. Vacation camps, evening programming, we can extend our hours, especially if we have a fitness component in the basement, additional rental opportunities for the building. Right now, pretty much alls we rent in that building is the gym and we do pretty well with that, but if we can rent other space in that building, I think we'll see an increase there. And the other thing is additional summer rental opportunities because we have less rentals in the summertime, but with a new space and people really see in what it could be, I think we'll rent it out a lot more. So I see a lot of potential with the space and what we can do with it. Right now we have, on the last time I assessed it, we had quite over 9,000, between nine and like 15,000 people that come through the building over the course of a year, through basically gym use, gym rentals, but I think if we open up that whole basement, which is another 7,000 square feet, we're gonna see that space grow as far as use. So I have a lot of good ideas going forward on how we can expand things and having the ability to after school stuff will be huge. Questions? Go ahead Ashley. Yeah, go for it. So this might be more towards Bill, but I'm gonna ask it generally. So I saw the different price tag choices. And has this been inviting? We just got these numbers today. Okay, so is it possible to get just like the math done out for the next time that we take this up in terms of the bonding potential that we have that was allocated and sort of what additional bonding this might entail depending on how we do it and sort of where that would put us in terms of are we gonna be like up to here if we bond everything and we're really gonna be, I would just like to get a sense for that. And I love to hear that you're thinking about after school stuff, it's so critical. And I used to live right next door to there and that was one of my favorite parts was like here's a place where I know young people are going, I know that they are engaged in safe and healthy ways and hopefully that meant that I wouldn't see them later in life in my day job. But I would really encourage one thing that I've received a lot of feedback about from constituents is the classes that are offered at the senior center. There's a yoga class and a few other movement based classes. And then some people express some frustration just about like the limited offerings. And I'm super excited that this is right across the street and can sort of be open to everyone. So I'm really glad to hear the right after school stuff and opening it up maybe during the day to like younger kids or I love it. Excited. Jack. Great job. This is having had a tour of the whole building and it's great to see what could be. A couple of thoughts. Our one is it's been a year or so since I had that tour but it seems as though we have a lot of stuff stored in the building and just looking at the diagrams it wasn't clear to me whether you're building in enough storage for everything we need. Probably there's a lot of stuff there that's stored because nothing else is being done with the space so why not keep it around but that's one consideration. I would say that would be correct. Is there stuff that we have? I mean the basement basically hasn't been an area that we've really been able to utilize. And the one thing we don't like to do is throw stuff out if we can possibly use it in the future. But as this grows and this opportunity grows with the space we're gonna be thinning a lot of that stuff out. And some of it too is a lot of baseball stuff which is also now has taken on a tour of its own so Little League has become more independent from us and so I'll see if I can also get them to store the stuff for the league versus us storing it for them. So. Great. The other thing I thought about was to the cost. I don't know if you're to that level of detail yet but to the cost estimates include any potential subsidies or participation from Efficiency Vermont for the lighting and HVAC. You should be eligible for several different potential rebates. Say this that they're not probably gonna be huge change or game changers in terms of the, I hate that term, but huge change, order of magnitude changes in terms of what affects the budget. So, but it's, there is obviously there's, when I said it the mechanical systems might not have their return on investment but the lighting certainly, any lighting improvements we can make will have a definite return on investment in terms of energy. And the mechanical systems will too, I mean it's all just being prudent. It's changing to LED lighting. Chain cut saves. The base would have LED lighting in it. It's more getting into more controls in their occupancy sensors, daylight sensors, things like that, other aspects that we can do to improve the efficiency of the lighting. So, great, thanks. Can we each get a piece of that coal in the basement? I'm totally serious. Christmas is coming. You know, I did get coal one Christmas. I'm not about that again but I think spray paint for that. So, this is really exciting. I think it's great to see all the opportunity. I have kids who use it for basketball and that's about all we've used it. And some birthday parties now and then. So it's great to think of all the different ways that the building could be used. So, really excited and camps and other things. There's such a lack right now in the community. So, after school care and all that seems really great. I don't know if tied kind of into that. I was curious, like is there creating certain spaces? Have you thought about what that would mean for staffing or is it something, like not just so far down the road or is it like okay, if we're gonna build this kind of space that would involve this kind of programs and therefore this kind of commitment of the city to really make use of it or is it not that? Well, I actually have thought a little bit about that because usually like six nights a week right now we have open gym from seven to nine and then Friday and Saturday goes to 10. So during that time I already have staff that are committed to working. So if we have programs going on downstairs I have somebody in the building. So we don't have to hire additional staff in that situation. So a lot of our instructors are also subcontractors. So it wouldn't be staff that would be added to our current budget but they would be paid through the program. That's great. My only other question, well one thought that went through my head when you said it was a shooting range, I don't know for the hazard abatement, like if there's lead issues with all the... That's one of the reasons we... To have the asbestos and lead. You're real fun time. There's quite a bit, aside from the asbestos in the mechanical room and so forth there may be some asbestos we're not sure in some of the plaster materials and tape and different things like that that shows up. There obviously is this wall that I already points out to everybody about that there's a million bullets back there and so forth. So we don't, that will be part of the abatement issue. But in terms of lead paint in other things that are more difficult to get rid of there really would be essentially covered by all of the new finishes. So it's either being removed with the old plaster that's taken out or it's being covered. And the nice thing about the gymnasium with this wonderful brick is it doesn't have any apparent coating on it. So it should be safe. One last question, just the last thing. So you talked some about the efficiency and with our city's net zero goal. I mean, did you look at all like could we put solar on the building instead of getting a fossil fuel generator? Could we get solar and power walls? I mean, are we putting our money where our mouth is and create designing this to actually be, it seems like a probably hard big space to heat and things, but. I think you've nailed one thing which is heating and ventilating large spaces because you have to ventilate them so much is problematic in terms of doing it in a really electrically efficient manner or fossil fuel efficient manner. But I do think is that as we go more into the project or if the project goes forward and we're is that really studying what kind of systems could we use? Could we use heat pumps to deal with most of the spaces and so in getting into that aspect of it? Is it even feasible at all? Do we really want to not insulate the gymnasium? Could we, would it be worth it to, to cover the brick up and beef up those walls in terms of their insulation? You know, that's stuff that we can certainly look into. Just a small one, this is awesome, by the way. And I think when we originally spoke about this, it was almost like we were settling for this, but I'm really excited with some of the stuff that you're coming up with, it's great. Again, minor. I really like the basketball court. We did talk about like a modern floor and everything. I think people generally like the basketball court. What does that mean? I will say that on my tours, when I've been underneath it, it is so loud, so loud. It would be completely unfeasible to have a yoga class down there in any way, shape, or form. So, but, I also thought the floor was going flat. Wasn't there something about that, Arnie, that the floor itself, when it came to balls, something about its tension? Dead spots? From basketball players, talked about the floor and the condition. Like dead spots? Sometimes there would be like a dead spot, thank you. That's more typical over a hardwood floor that's put over cement, because the glue comes on the edge where these are nailed down. Occasionally they might find a soft spot, but it's an old floor. Sorry. We actually spoke with the subcontractor that does most of the wood basketball floors in the state. And we went through three different options and essentially came out to the same price point, which is surprising. The first option, which was to take up the existing top floor, the finished basketball floor, which is pretty close to the end of its life and there's gaps in it around the sides which have been filled in with plywood and so forth. So it's got a patina to it, but it's probably reached the end of its life. But is that to replace just that top layer would involve probably going back in and re-tightening and screwing down the subfloor and probably adding another layer to that to get it to be perfectly leveled before you put down just a finished wood floor on top of that. The third, the second thing we looked at was, okay, take up the dead existing basketball floor, put down a new layer of plywood and do all that screwing and everything and put down a synthetic floor on top of that. And the third one was take up that floor and put down on top of it the sprung wood floor, if you know what that means, is that it's put into tracks and it's got rubber and it can go up and down a little bit. And they all ended up, he thought that they basically priced out the same in the end between labor and materials and so forth. So that's still something that could be explored with the solution is. So it could be parquet. But you described it as a professional flooring, did you know? Competition flooring. Like a sprung floor would basically. Okay, but it's the same cost. That's what I wanted to say. It surprised me because I thought, oh, the baseline is gonna be just replacing the wood. And he said, to really do it right, is it's gonna end up being one of the, they're all in the same range. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to chime in on Lauren's points about trying to make it energy efficient as possible. I really like the idea of using the resources that we have and making them as good as we can. I'm also being advised by someone who I won't name at the moment, who says that it would be better, for example, to tear that building down and build a new one that we can insulate and do well enough to meet some of our more ambitious energy goals. So I suppose it's not a question, but just kind of a point of reference in terms of what the possibilities are. When we're talking about beautiful golden brick walls and a brick wall outside, is there any space between those walls in the main large space? Is it, it's not possible to insulate the gym part and maintain the inner golden brick that you're... Now, it probably, we haven't taken a core of the wall, but it's probably a 12 inch solid brick wall. So that there's an interior face, that's this one, and there's an exterior face, that's red brick, interior face golden brick, and there's probably sort of a basic brick in the middle. But it's essentially a 12 inch thick brick wall. If we went into it thinking that we'll be building a wall inside of the wall, and then we just, every time we kept going back and seeing this, we were like, maybe this is worth it. So I think that is an issue to be explored. Let me say also on the other hand, is that two things about building new is that one is you do lose the embodied energy of this building in the historic history of the building, the very done, but the fabric, the historic fabric of the old neighborhood. The second thing is that if you went in and built this new with the present codes and so forth, we probably, there's gonna be a few things that we're gonna have to do differently, like the stairs gonna have to be treated differently. We actually get an, to a certain extent, the code allows you an exemption for reusing a stair in terms of the dimensions. If we built in, it works perfectly fine. We have to upgrade the railings and different things like that, but it would be difficult to fit a code compliant modern stair into that space. And that obviously that has to do with the configuration of the building as it is now, personally it is now. But the site is so small that it really, it's almost filling the entire site. And it would surprise me when I saw where the lot lines were. It's just not, it's just a tiny, it's not a very big, it's basically a residential lot. Sort of piggybacking on the questions about energy efficiency. Is this something that would be on district heat? So the district heat lines don't go out that way. So if my, correct the sign. You meant just city gas, which surprised me. Yeah, I was gonna say, we don't have city gas. Oh, there isn't, okay. Well then, I'm sorry, I apologize. That's okay. I was like, we have something that I don't know. Our mechanical electrical plumbing director knows this, but I'm sorry, should have brought him tonight. But then we'd be putting in a tank someplace in the proper. Could we expand? I guess I'm only asking about district heat because a few people have asked me like what this whole project was because there's not really been sort of much in the paper about it. And so, about district heat. When it had just, well, when it happened, but people have been asking now like what the city is doing. And so I would really encourage, if we could get numbers for what it might look like to bring that to the rec center, if this is gonna be the plan and we have a facilities director starting, it seems like this might really be the time to start the conversation again about like, hey, can we get this on district heat? And then, where can we go from there? Because the senior center is across the streets. And it just seems like there would be a cost to it for sure. But if this is something that we're committed to doing, it might be worth it to expend some additional funds to get the lines to go out there so that we can then explore what other partnerships or opportunities might exist. Jack. Isn't there a dispute about the available capacity of that plant? Yeah. So that's something that would obviously have to be resolved. There's that and I mean, I think that's probably resolvable, but also the cost of extending lines is very significant at least to the end, but we can price it out. I mean, I think we can just do a rough linear, cost per linear foot. I don't think we need to get engineered, but I think we might be surprised what that means versus the revenue it would generate, but we can see. I think if we were going to do that, we would have to probably, to make it worthwhile, we'd want to explore adding people along the way, but who knows if that load would even make it viable. But it's a good question. It seems like that might be an opportunity, we have someone new starting who could start looking at that and start cultivating those relationships now so that as we plan this to see if we can get any other potential clients, customers interested, it might end up that it is worth it to do that. So I just want to make sure we keep that on. One thing about the PV panels that was raised, I already just whispered to me, is that there is a nice flat roof. It's oriented east-west, so big grapes, so in orientation and so forth. We do have some allowances within these estimates for structural upgrades to make sure, we'd have to review the roof structure to make sure that it could handle the additional load, which is not huge for PV panels. So I have a whole bunch of questions, but I guess I would say if we're going to spend almost $4 million on a building, then I would rather spend $5 million to make it significantly energy efficient and fossil fuel-free, actually. So I mean, I have some questions about the, I mean, so if the plan was to have city gas, which we don't have, but a tank, then that to me says, you know, it's probably some kind of fossil fuels. We had, with the energy committee, we sort of bat around the idea of using locally sourced biodiesel, which apparently you can burn biodiesel as regular diesel with a couple of tweaks to the furnace like some of the nozzles need to be a wider gauge, that sort of thing. So that, I wouldn't mind trying to pilot that if that is still feasible. So that's option one. Another option, you mentioned heat pumps. I'm very interested in the possibility of that. Again, it's a large space, tall ceilings. That's tough. My understanding is that with tall spaces like that, sometimes radiant floor heating is a good option, but if we're also putting it under some kind of, you know, spring, that it's like this professional floor, I don't know how that jives with radiant floor heating. That's the floor in the world. Yeah. Probably just lay down for a few minutes. So I mean, I don't know how possible that is, but it is a high priority for me that we heat this building to the extent possible without fossil fuels, and that includes putting solar on the roof. And I would actually add, I'd go one step further and say that I would love to see what it costs. And I imagine it's on the scale of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if we turn this building into its own microgrid in terms of having enough batteries to supply for an appropriate length of time, I think we need more microgrids. Are you familiar with the term microgrid? So generally speaking, it is, you could, an easy way to think of it is that if there's a blackout, there's some kind of a fault switch that flips that there's enough generation and storage to keep the lights on in that facility. And one of the reasons is not, I mean, there's some obvious benefits there in terms of emergency preparedness. I think it would be good to have a place where a lot of people could go in the city. Shouldn't we need to? I mean, there's a question about whether that's the right place because it's sort of near the river. But barring that, there are some other just good reasons to have additional storage in municipal buildings, just in terms of lowering peak demand and so making it cheaper for the city, et cetera. This feels like an opportunity to really do some good digging on that, especially if we were already millions of dollars in. So I just wanted to put that out there as a priority for me. I had some questions about the layout. I couldn't find the existing boiler room or mechanical room on the drawings in the basement. I'll pull it up and while I'm doing that, I will say that I will sort of live or die by the idea of having a generator in both the base plan and the upgraded plan because I think you're right. I think this is very important to have for our emergency preparedness. Right now, there isn't a building that we have that has a generator that has a big enough space to host a Red Cross shelter. If there is a flooding event or if there is an event where a large amount of folks lose power, then we don't have a place to put them, we don't have a place to host them. We could find one, no doubt we will, everyone always does, but it would be nice to already have a prepared space that we know would be safe for folks to go. And to add on to that, I would love to not necessarily be dependent on national life in that sense. I mean, because that's sort of like the obvious place to go because it is up on a hill, but that's not under our jurisdiction. So the existing boiler room is in the lower right-hand corner. Right here? Yeah, so. No, I got you. Okay, thanks. So the boilers are actually in this space here, the abandoned boiler, and then in the more recent boiler, which is about 30, some years old. This is the room, this little room is the room with the coal in it, right? And then this back here is, so you can see those little slots down in the lower right. Those are the hatchets where they dump the coal in. So that space would be a women's locker room and shower space and bathroom. So is there a new planned mechanical room? Yes. Where is that? So it's tiny, it would be in this space in here. Oh yeah, okay. It's really not, for the most part, it's gonna be sprinkler entrance on what you eat or things like that, electrical entrance. If we did, I mean, I'm not saying that we would go down the route of a microgrid, but if we did and we needed battery storage, my guess is that that wouldn't fit in that space. No, I think, you know, I'm thinking about this is you're gonna have all these power walls and stuff like that. Yeah, yeah, that's fair, that's fair. Okay, thank you. So, oh, I just wanna make a note. The lighting on the outside of the building that abuts the bike path at present is pretty poor. So, and I think it'd be a not hard thing to ask to just have great lighting. Right on, what is that? The east side of the building? West side. It's not just the bike path that exists now, but along the side where it's gonna connect with Berry Street. Yes, yeah, yeah, so both, really. Both sides, yeah. I just, I used to live right there and they're like, once a week we would call in like dirty needles, the better lighting that we can have there just, it's right on the train tracks. So this is the west side, so you're basically talking about the back of the parking lot there on the left. And along. And then along, yeah, we could do building mounted lighting that would be fairly low, so it's not gonna disturb the neighbors. So really, when you do this clockwise loop around the building now, you're actually exiting across the neighbor's property. Yep. On the top. So people, yeah. People drive in from the lower side, go clockwise around the building, and you're exiting out, and I guess the neighbors do the same thing, right? So to get to their backyard, back of the house, they go around the rec center. Okay, I wanna be really specific about one of the spaces. I'm really grateful, Arnie, for the list of ideas of things that could happen. At present, the upper classrooms are, I don't know, underused, I guess, but they're effectively classrooms now and that we would refurbish them to be classrooms after. What is the vision for the use of that space, if anything? For the upper classrooms, yes. Well, one of our ideas, too, was to not only use it as a meeting space, people could use that area as a meeting space. We could rent it out for meetings. I know the senior center right now does meeting space rentals. We could also use that as a yoga room upstairs, so they wouldn't be under the gym and other quiet activities that might wanna be utilized up there as well as after-school art programs. We'd use that for right now. I know that once the building is ADA compliant, it'll be easier to get our folks from the senior center across the street into those classrooms. They don't have as much space as they would want ever and so there is opportunity there to share between those two spaces. So the reason it's underutilized now is because there's no elevator at peace. I would argue that. Okay, yeah, that's fair. One of the things that Arnie says, we set this room up as an after-school room in that so you, kids can be here and they can have direct access out to the, this door doesn't exist now, it's the added doorway out to the gymnasium so the kids can go back and forth between this area. I noticed that you still have the stage over here. Is it ever used as a stage still? It's not used as a stage, but the elevation of the stage is constantly asked. Why don't we just plow it down and make it the same level? Is then that would make that loading dock below unusable. So to reduce the ceiling height down to five feet or something like that. Okay. And right now the stage is used, sorry Arnie, for storage and I think that answers some of Jack's questions about storage is that's our main storage space and I think a lot, they did build in some little storage cages into the downstairs areas, but I do believe that once we consolidate the stuff, hopefully it would fit in that stage area. There is foosball and air hockey that the kids really like on the stage right now. What's that? And pickleball. And foosball and air hockey and some other really fun games that the kids like up on the stage right now. Is that being used, the foosball or air hockey? Oh yeah, I mean, like siblings while the other kids playing basketball or something. Okay. Or for birthday parties, it could certainly be better used. We can, that's awesome. I was really glad to see in the sort of computer modeling of what the interior of the basement would look like with workout equipment. It looked like there were windows sort of at a reasonable height. I mean, one of the concerns, of course putting anything in a basement is having enough light. And I mean, I assume these are windows. Okay. And so there would be a, it seems like there would be a, yeah, how much light are we talking about here? So I think the interesting thing is that the, I'm not sure why it was done like this, but there aren't that many windows on the north side, which is the upper, I mean, there's windows on the upper side, the north side, excuse me, at every bay, you can see there's a good five foot wide by four foot high window. That's fairly high. That's the upper wall. Yep, yep, but down here. But the lower wall hardly has any windows in it. So that's the only two windows. Yeah, okay. So that was one of the reasons why we put the exercise equipment down here. I don't know if that was the right choice, I don't know, but you know. Well, I think the other reason too, I think they didn't put windows in there as that's where the firing range was. Oh, of course. And there's not an opportunity to put windows in, or like there was, were there windows that were boarded up, or there were never windows there? No, one of those things is probably the vent. I think that's an actual window. But that could become a window. I think it's big enough. You could make windows. It's a, it's, it's, it's a foundation. Yeah, it's, well, I mean, it's, it's just, you could, it's just, it's, I don't think it'd be historically that big. Yeah, okay. Fair enough. Actually, it does get quite a bit of light with the windows we do have down there. So if there is some glass ways through that hallway, I think the light will come across to some degree. And I assume these are, this is closet space. That's right. Here, same as the other side. Okay. I just want to observe that the mural on the back of the building is just a little faded. And I just want to note that we could maybe either get the art commissioner, someone to like touch it up, you know, after we're done with all this good work and or just commission a new mural. And either, it might be time, sometimes, you know, art has a lifetime and that's, that's okay. But anyway, I just want to make a note of that. Thank you for raising the question about the FTEs associated with managing this space. I'd love to, I mean, one possibility, as you said, is that it's the same as what we have now. I mean, I worry about somebody trying to monitor things going on on two different floors at the same time. But I'll just put that out there. How, I'm sure this is information that was shared when we went on the tour, but I don't remember, unfortunately. Is the shooting range currently, like how much is the shooting range currently used or not at all? Let's make this thing close. Oh, okay. Great. Okay, I think. We've been since we come under the city. Two years. That's pretty recent to me. Two years, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That is pretty recent. It seems like a long time. Okay, yeah. Okay, I think that is all of the questions I have at this point. Just want to reiterate high priority on the no fossil fuels. We just built the Taylor Street build. We didn't. Well, we did. I guess we did. Anyway, it's not important. The point is Taylor Street building is not being heated with fossil fuels and I would like to keep that as a precedent for us. If we can. We didn't get you some. Okay. And I recognize that will probably be more expensive. So, okay. Can I ask, John, can I ask you publicly, how long do you think that will take you just so that we know maybe we don't want to, maybe we want more than one week or just. Can I get back to you tomorrow? Yeah, of course. Great. This is all very much like, this is a big decision. And so if it takes a couple of meetings, I've already asked for this to be on the agenda again at the next meeting, but the next meeting might be too soon. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll see. Yeah. Mayor's questions about the mechanical room brought up a possibly stupid question, my mind, but I'm taking this as an opportunity to educate myself. So a couple of slides on there's the elevation, I think, and I noticed the elevator shaft. And I think someone explained to me recently that elevators have to extend either below where they're functionally usable or above. Like either you put the mechanicals up on the roof or down underneath the rest of it. So this would have a hydraulic pump and machinery in a room next to it in the basement. So there's a room next to where we showed the mechanical, which it's titled EMR, the elevator machine room. The reason why there says 12 foot 11 above it on the right side up there is that's the clearance that the elevator will require at the top. So even though the cab is seven foot six inches tall or whatever, it needs more space above it to the shaft that's the big stand above the floor by 12 feet 11 inches. And it just makes it nice without going through the room. Yeah. And I guess the other part of my question is to do with flooding and so on, does it, is it a smart idea to consider putting things like mechanicals and so on up at the top if you can in this space? Or is that not necessary here? Well, when we were talking about this baseline mechanical systems, they would have been on the roof. When we're going back to, if we were using heat pumps and so forth, they'll probably be, it could be mounted on the roof, but they may be on the outside someplace. I'm not too concerned with that stuff being in the basement really. I wouldn't be, with the electrical entrance, sprinkler entrance, that all has to come in through the basement. So there has to be a mechanical room of some type that's for just those types of systems. I want to echo that question, but in the context of if we, if it's a micro grid and there are batteries to put them in the basement, I don't know. You know, we can, putting the finding space for the wall panels in the, you know, on the stage someplace, I think we can find it. We can find it. I also want to put in a plug for finding a day in the summer for citywide garage sale. We've talked about doing that. And you, you're on board. No? Yes? Yes. I don't know how you set prices. I also feel like if we're gonna have citywide garage sale, we probably should specify like, this is going towards blank. And I don't know what that is yet. But can we, can we pick a day in the summer and like plan for it now? Sure. Okay. Who knows where are we at the time? Can we find a social worker with the money that we raise or work towards it? Well, my only hesitation with that is that this is one time money. Right, so it should be like a, I would recommend it be a one time thing as opposed to like, if you want a social worker, that should be an ongoing. But if we get the money now. Anyway, we can, we can have that conversation. But what would it go towards? I don't know. I mean, July 3rd is the funnest day of the year. It's true. I mean, to be fair, it could help fund. I mean, it's gonna, it's gonna be not that much money. So. Yeah. As garage sales always are, right? That's amazing. A great idea. It is a great idea. It's just, I think we, we're not gonna raise a million dollars with it. We might raise a couple thousand. Really? And I suppose it would be a question of like, whose time, whose time is it? When is the one at the senior center? Sounds like the mayor's volunteer. I mean, I would. The mayor's citywide garage sales. What else do I do in the summer? If we coordinated with the senior center. I would gladly help. Yes. Are we talking about, are we all talking about the same thing here? Because when you talk about, this isn't like an opportunity for home owners or residents to bring stuff, to sell stuff. This is for the city to sell all the surplus stuff we have lying around in the public works garage and all over the place. I guess the proper word would not be citywide, right? It's just, it's a city. It's a municipal. Municipal tag sale. Municipal tag sale. Yeah. That sounds fun. It does. This is okay. I expect lots of road cones though. I was picturing people bringing all this stuff that when they're all done, leave it. You're like. It's all yours. Municipal tag sale. Okay. It's an anecdote. In 1980, I was an intern at the town manager's office in Brunswick, Maine. And now my first job was to arrange just that. And we sold old parking meters that you couldn't open. So they were actually. They were full of money. No use. But no, and people spent, at that time, like 10 bucks a piece for them. We sold like 40 of them. And they had, basically they were like a door, paperweight or a doorstopper. And they were a good one. But they were the heads of parking meters. And so we were like, you can use it for a bag, but you can't get your money out of it once you put it in there. It's a savings plan. It's a food for savings plan. So somewhere in the bath, Brunswick, Times recognized on the front page, holding a parking meter for sale. Municipal tag sale on the agenda. Okay. All right. So thank you. We'll bring this back to you with some more information and the bond out information as well. Thank you. Oh, yes. Yeah. Go ahead. Oh, please do. We're looking into this. I'm actually new in town and this is one of the things that I feel Montpelier is lacking, this exact kind of facility as shown in the improvements. So thank you for taking this up. And also thank you guys for asking the right questions about sustainability and, you know, doing your jobs. Well, so I appreciate it. And what's your name? I'm Kevin Webb. I live up on state and Hubbard. Okay. Thank you. Okay. What did you come for? Actually, so I met with Glenn at a Beguitos the other morning about the design review, excuse me, design review district. Is that what it's called? Yeah. And I was wondering whether the changes to that are actually going to be discussed tonight. It might have been before I came in. It was actually last night. There was a planning commission held them. I mistimed it. It's fine. I think it will come to, will it come to us at any point? Oh yeah. So the planning commission in the, I think the historic district commission had a workshop. So they'll then, planning commission will then have a hearing to just, you know, their own meeting to decide what they're going to do with it. And then it will get forwarded to us for a final action. So there'll be other opportunities. So yeah. No hard feelings, not discussing it tonight. It's been interesting. Kevin, if I gave you the wrong information, which is totally possible. It's okay. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay. So onto council reports. I just immediately just, if you don't want to start on it, you don't have to. No, other than the meter sale, made me think of the rotary coat sale that the kids Miller, Karen kids Miller started as a way to, to advertise for her campaign. So instead of buying ads, she sponsored a coat sale. And rotary is taking it over from Warren. He feels no longer able to do it. But it was amazing. We did it through community national bank. And we had over a thousand coats. I want to say like 1500 of all types and mittens and gloves and scarves. And it opened at nine o'clock. It was lined up at 830 all around the building. Yay, city hall. Let's just use it. And people came and they were so gracious packed. I mean, more than Macy's parade packed, but they were all polite to one another. Very grateful. And if you have a chance next September, bring your coats to community national bank. And we give them out all day the next day. And it's really great. So thank the community for giving the coats and the community for coming and taking the coats. Hope it'll be a warmer winter. I'm not trying to rip off Glenn, but I'll be a rabble rouser at one o'clock on Saturday. If anybody wants to buy, I had a couple of constituents. Mentioned, why can't you be as good as Glenn? So, see you there. I would do that. I prefer to talk about the self-explanation. Is this every Saturday or just this Saturday? Just this Saturday. I encourage anyone who feels like ripping me off, go for it. It's fun. And I'm glad that, Anne, you mentioned the mural on the back of the rec center because it reminded me that I got to go to the public art commission meeting this past Monday for the first time in a long time. And I'm really glad they're chugging along. I think that we will hear from them shortly with an update. But so I won't steal their thunder, but they're doing well, I think. And I'm really glad that they are in existence and enjoying themselves. And I'll be at Baguitos tomorrow morning, 8.30 and 9.30. Ashley, I just wanted to acknowledge that I know I have not been, I wasn't at the last meeting. And I left early a few times. I've been really sick for the last six months or so. And I'm finally feeling human and great again. And I truly appreciate all of your patience. I know it's hard when there's one person that's not here constantly. And I know that my responses to constituent emails also dropped precipitously. But I was reading them, and I was keeping up with them. And I just want to thank everybody for really just meeting me where I was at at that point. And I'm glad to be back. Great to have you back. That's all I have. One thing just wanted to prepare you all next week to expect to see the Social and Economic Justice Advisory Committee coming here with a presentation. And so look out for that, figuring out kind of next steps and where that group is going. So look forward to that. That should be great. One issue that a constituent raised to me was the city's use of Facebook as a medium. We had a very interesting exchange about some of Facebook's practices. And he had read the New York Times Exposé on child pornography and how they're essentially doing protocols now to make it easier to do that kind of thing with encryption. And we all know about the political disinformation campaigns and other things. And so we had a robust exchange about the value of reaching as many people for safety and welfare and other issues, but also kind of supporting platforms like Facebook. So I just want to put it out to you all that this has been raised. It was an interesting point. I also got a really nice note from a constituent about the great mountain biking trails and all the work that's been done and a lot of gratitude for the crews and the vision and everything that's gone into that. So just a really nice note to see. So good work to all the folks that are doing that and great to see people using them and staying in the community and then using our restaurants and all these good things tied into this great resource for the community. So I just wanted to share that really nice feedback that we got. Great. So I have a few things. There was a lady in town who approached me about forming a, she was very interested in creating a dog park in town fenced in. And so she was very interested in starting a group to explore that, possibly raise money. And she was very interested in this being a city committee. I chatted with Bill briefly about does that make sense as they would have to keep minutes and follow up in meeting law. She's still very interested in that being the case. I don't have strong objections to that. But then I think it, I don't have a dog in that race. But. You can never get a dog in that race. But I think before we move forward with that, I think it would probably make sense for us to just check in with the parks commission, give them a heads up, see if they, how we want to interface on this topic with them. But just as a heads up, so that this is a topic that may be coming up and if they are going to end up raising the money and sort of managing it themselves, then that may mean that they're going to be looking for a lot of folks to be a part. And so if you hear of anybody who is interested in that, for now you can send them my way. I'll connect them with this lady and we'll go from there. So let's. Ann, do you want me to bring it up next Tuesday's parks meeting? Oh, that would be great, actually. Okay, anything more you want me to know email me. Sure, that sounds great. And I may connect you with this lady to coordinate that communication because it mails make sense for her to go to. I don't know. Okay, so, well, the other thing too, is that we might just want to, I don't know if this should be an item on their agenda. We can let them figure that out, obviously. But anyway, so yeah, let's be in touch about that. Just want to recognize that we had a great opening last Friday for the shared use path. I think they were expecting something like 25 people and 75 people showed up. So that was pretty great. And it's the Sibawi Nebay. It gets two words, river water, Sibawi Nebay. Yeah, Sibawi, Sibawi Nebay. Anyway, so that's the name of the path. And that's the Abenaki word for river water. And there were some representatives there from the Abenaki Nation. That was pretty great to have them be a part of it. And yep, so just wanted to make a note about that. Thanks for everybody's hard work with the city to make that happen. And then just another update on the Home Energy Labeling Committee we did just take a vote at our most recent meeting to make a recommendation about a mechanism for the tool that would help account for the modeling of the energy. So there's a lot of steps yet to go with that but we at least have an idea of what tool we think is gonna make sense. Anyway, so just more on that. All right, so that is it for me. John. There's one thing I'm that ready to announce that is really cool. And another thing I'm a little bit further from announcing it. If it happens, it'll be incredibly cool. I can't do it. And I can't yet. I just can't. There's a member of the press in the audience. It's too soon. Next Wednesday. Next Wednesday, very possibly will be the really cool one. The super cool one's gonna take a little longer. I'm getting ready to my notes. Two non-issues. This one. So your news is that there's no news. Most apropos. There's no news. For counting. Almost news, but there's no news. You've got specifically no news. Okay. You get exactly no sources. There's a story. But I can't tell you. Just tune in next week and save that time. Save that time. He could tell us, but then. Yeah, I know. He'd have to kill us. Right. Which would be a problem. Especially with the press. I don't think he's disappointed. Yeah. Oh, dear. Anyway, tail. I don't know if I can tell if he had a six-kilometer. Yeah, I don't think we have a whole actual lot to report other than the stuff we've already gone over. We are in hiring mode. So we've been starting some interviews for both our positions, finance director and assistant to the city manager. Got some interesting candidates for both. We, as you all know, the judge made a decision about the appellants. So restricting it to two people. So while that's an interesting decision, it still, I think, doesn't really change the time or trajectory of the case or the issues to be raised. I think that's what I'm missing. But you could think, I'm not totally, I just went to parking, we never heard from Tony. It's like, I'm taking that's good news. So the issue with winter parking ban, so we're not talking cryptically. We'll tell you next week. You'll just have to wait and see every morning if you get the ticket. That's right. As of yesterday, we hadn't received any bids for towing. So the chief was gonna reach out and let me know before tonight's meeting whether they had resolved that. So if we don't have towing, then the winter parking ban, by almost necessity next week, we would be looking at going back to just the blight ban because we can't have a partial ban and not Toby balls. And of course, we don't really wanna do that. So he was going to speak with one of the tow companies today and see if that could be worked out and let me know before the meeting, but we've all both been busy and I haven't heard from him. So I don't know, I don't have anything electronically from him. So that may be on next week's agenda then. Perhaps this is an opportunity to expedite the previous plan that we discussed about perhaps starting in January about even. I just got a text from Tony saying we are all set with towing. Oh, okay. Okay, inside job. Is he watching? Yes, he must be. Thank you, chief. Okay, well, I'll get to that, but anyway. Nevermind. So in that, taking all of that back, the November 15th is the beginning of the official legal date in the ordinance for parking BM. So we will be calling those and people should be aware and we'll try to get information out as usual about what the options are. We'll also have, there are two streets that we wanna add. There was a prospect street I think needs more. We can't really get fire trucks through some of the streets. We wanna add a portion of that and Sibley Avenue, just from Berry Street up to college that's also too narrow there. So we'll be bringing a first reading of adding those into that parking ordinance at the next meeting. But the ordinance also allows us to sort of as an emergency call. So we're gonna start sort of including those immediately but with the idea that we'll change the ordinance so that it's permanent. I guess that's all I have. Is the discussion about potentially alternating sides for the parking ban on the agenda in December? I didn't see it, maybe I just missed it. We didn't have that now, I think. I think it's a fair thing to add. If we're gonna, I mean, if- We're gonna do it this winter, we better talk about it. Right. I mean, even to consider it. And we can, if we, well, let's soon. Yeah. I would also just, as a renter, trying to find places to live in Montpelier that have parking is really tricky. And though a lot of the selling point is you can park on the street at any time so you don't have to worry. So I just, if that does change, I know a lot of people in the block where I used to live would be really impacted. So I just wanna make sure that we have a really effective get the word out campaign if that's what we need to do. But it's a practical reality of living in the Northeast, but I also have been told by landlords in the area, like, oh, don't worry about it. There's on-street parking that doesn't usually become an issue, but. Yeah, go ahead, Don. Just maybe part of the discussion you also missed was just discussing the idea of parking, shifting sides of the street year around so they could sweep the street, et cetera. But we have fenced ourselves in when we changed our zoning, I remember being a minority, and not wanting to reduce the landlord and businesses' requirement for parking, but we did it. And so, lo and behold, the market is bearing. And let's hope our parking garage happens. That's right, it's overnight, winter parking. Anything further? All right, so then, I think we are at the end. So, without objection, we're gonna consider the meeting adjourned. It's only 9.02.