 All right. Well, we are going to get started. We are just a minute over here. So the first thing is to review and approve the agenda. And just so you all are aware, my hope is to switch a couple of items. One is the very last item on our agenda, or actually item 11 is council response to Halloween. There's a letter from Marissa Earl Centers. Marissa, I was in touch with Marissa's mother, who I think had hoped that Marissa would join us for the meeting. So I'd like to move that item up to, well, we'll see if they're on after the consent agenda. And if not, then maybe we'll do it after the appointments. And then sort of swapping that sort of with the committee assignments to fill councilor Richardson's vacancies, that's going to go at the end where the Halloween response was. So that will be item, the new item 11. And I think we do have one change to the consent agenda, but we'll talk about that when we get to the consent agenda. Other than that, I think I don't know of any other changes to the agenda. Thoughts? No. Okay. Great. All right. So with that, we'll consider the agenda approved and on to general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to address the council on a topic that is otherwise not on our agenda. If you do have something that you want to say that does relate to an agenda item, we'll provide a time as we get to that item for you to speak. But if it's not on our agenda, otherwise now is the time to bring that up. And if you would try to keep your comments to two minutes and say where you are from and where you, oh yeah, your name and where you're from, that would be helpful. And that's true for generally speaking, all public comments. Try to keep it to two minutes name and where you're from. All right. Thank you. Go ahead, Steven. I wanted to speak on the agenda issue. There was significant confusion after the last meeting because there was a request made to pull the dispatch contract from the consent agenda. It was marked for discussion. Even after the meeting, Jack wasn't sure what had happened with it. Neither was the town clerk. Further evident, further research indicates that it was pulled and put back on and voted and approved even though it had been marked for discussion. It's a substantial issue that Dan Richardson had done due diligence on and none, no one else on the council has. So there's significant problems with our dispatch service and that need to be aired in the context prior to that contract being executed, both on the month on both the party, the city as party and capital fire as counterparty has chronic issues with open meeting and minutes, et cetera. But there are life health and safety issues with the way our current dispatch is being run. It needs to be aired. So I had asked Jay and Lauren to add it to the agenda to reconsider last week's vote and pull that dispatch contract item off of last week's vote, re-approve the remainder of last week's last vote, and then add to the agenda or under other business a discussion of the dispatch contract or possibly defer that until you'll have more a whole bunch of public safety people in here next week who can offer other perspectives on that topic. I think I did that use up my two minutes. That was really a point of order. Yesterday, a person fell on a bicycle along the multi use path and one of the trash cramps, bless their heart for being willing to be called that, called 911. There was no response 15 minutes later. I found the same person had fallen again over right by the pedestrian bridge next to Shaw's laying in the brambles with a bicycle laying on top of him. By then it had been 20 minutes. I walked to the firehouse. There was no response to the bell or a knock. Apparently they were out on training. I walked to the dispatch center and was told, Oh, we've got two officers out there looking for him. And I said, Why isn't the ambulance been called? And it's like the ambulance won't be called unless the officer calls for the ambulance. And I said, That's not the way it works. Normally the ambulance beats the police officers to these events. Anyway, the guy had gotten up. I had helped him up. He went and he fell a third time smashing his face into the gravel in the steel rail and was bleeding significantly by the time the ambulance arrived in seven minutes after they were called. But the fact that our dispatch after 2 911 calls had not dispatched the ambulance for close to 30 minutes is a real problem. I agreed with this person and I helped him get home safe. He refused transport against medical advice. And I contacted him today to find out he's all right, but I agreed not to use his name. That's one example of what's wrong with our dispatch. Thank you. Alyssa, I see you have your hand up. Yes. Hi. Because I am here on the police matter. I thought I'd bring up a different matter just very briefly here. The district heat issue in the city. First off, I know I've emailed all the counselors about this issue. But for the public that's here right now, district heat capacity charges are increasing for some of the folks on the system pretty significantly. And so I want to thank the council for paying attention to this matter and working with the city on it. Right now, the city has been working with different nonprofit entities whose charges have gone way up. Like Christchurch, for example, it's gone up from 16,000 to 42,000 this year, which is a pretty significant jump and one that the church won't be able to pay. So I have really appreciated the city's posture in terms of working with us to try to find a way to pay for this. I'm keeping it on the city council's radar because I think there probably needs to be a nonprofit policy created or some sort of mechanism to consider when customers cannot pay what to do with them like any utility would. And in our case, given the significant increase, it will be about $26,000 increase per year over 10 years. It's like $260,000. And we can't finance that because the church doesn't have that kind of revenue just to finance it over time. So I just wanted to keep this on your radar and keep engaged with you all as we're also working with the city to figure out what not only this year could look like in terms of the payment, but long term because we want to, you know, make this work and remain obviously part of district keep for a variety of reasons, including environmental and it reflects our values. We are also an interim just to be clear working with efficiency Vermont to do anything we can to weatherize and conserve heat and then also are applying for grants with Vermont interface power and light to see if we might be able to get like a flow of control on the system, which would help curb our peaks. And so there's work we can do and we're going to commit to doing that work and then also wanted to bring your attention because I think there's a broader policy question here and wanted to keep that matter before you. And I look forward to speaking with you a little bit more later on the police issue. Great. Thank you. Anyone else either in person or online? Okay. All right. Oh, I see. I see you, Deborah. Thanks for raising your hand. Go ahead, Deborah. This is happening for a two minute public comment. Sure, go ahead. Okay. I'm going to read this. Excuse me. My name is Deborah Messing and I live on Charles Street. On September 11, exactly a month ago, my husband and I walked to the state to the taste of Montpelier event. And we thought the situation there was just way too risky. People were jammed into crowded area waiting in long lines, no social distancing, many unmasked, quite a few out of state cars on the surrounding streets. The next day that Digger reported 405 cases over the weekend, over that weekend. On September 13, I wrote Dan Groberg, the executive director of Montpelier alive about my concerns. He responded that he relies on the guidance from the Vermont Department of Health and that countless other events around the state were taking place. The Arts Hop in Burlington, the Waterbury Arts Festival, county fairs, indoor events at the Flynn and higher ground, et cetera. This wasn't very reassuring to us. I want to say that I respect Dan Groberg and I understand it must have seemed prudent to follow the guidance of the Vermont Department of Health. I wrote him that perhaps in this case coming to independent conclusion might have been more prudent, especially at food tasting event where masks even if worn would be lowered frequently. I quoted Lisa Emily, a research professor of population health sciences at Virginia Polytechnic Institute who wrote about outdoor transmissibility of Delta vaccine. She wrote that the Delta virus burst bubble on the idea that outdoor activities are generally safe. Yes, the virus is less likely to be transmitted outdoors, but it depends. You are at greater risk if you are face to face with someone breathing in the breath they are exhaling, even if you are outside. And as far as social distancing, playing sports or exercising outdoors is much less likely to result in spreading the virus safe and being in a crowded outdoor concert, or I would add in a jammed outdoor food tasting event. And here we are a month later, Washington County had the highest daily COVID count since September 2020. Can this be traced to this event? I don't even know how to find this out. But even if not too risky, I was told they didn't expect such large crowds, although they vigorously promote the event. I suggest that in the future, limit the number of people require masks or even vaccinations. I was ratified to read today that the Midnight Madness event on October 22 does require masks indoor and outdoor, and the events seem more spread out. I would hope that those in charge of such events in the future act with an abundance of caution. And one last thing, why can't the Montpelier Health Officer, who is supposed to act quote proactively to protect the community from public health threats, including special situations, I would say, including massive overcrowding in a public event during a pandemic, be around to limit the number of attendees. Thank you much. Thank you, Deborah. And it's actually kind of an interesting lead into our conversation about Halloween that's coming up, actually. So thank you for that. And we'll talk more about masking, I think pretty soon. Alright, so we are going to anyone else. Okay, I'm not seeing anyone else. So we're going to move on to the consent agenda. So regarding street closures, the one that's listed last on the online agenda is the repainting of the Black Lives Matter mural. That was going to be with high school students, but they have since changed their plans, and they're not going to be able to do that. So unfortunately, that is not something that they're they're asking for it at this point. So anyway, we can take that off. Any other thoughts or comments about the consent agenda? Where is their motion? Okay, motion and a second. Any further discussion? Okay, all in favor, please say aye. Okay, and opposed. Right. So the consent agenda passes. And now we are going to, because of our change of order, we're going to jump to our discussion about the Council's response to Halloween 2021, which is coming up. And I we had received a letter from Marissa Earl Centers, who I believe is has joined us through the zoom. And Marissa, if you're there, we'd love to just hear your thoughts on this. We know you wrote a letter to us. But if if you wouldn't mind sharing with us, your your thoughts on what we ought to do regarding Halloween. Can you hear me like Halloween? And I, I like going trick or treating a lot. And last year, I was really sad when we weren't allowed to go trick or treating because it's really fun. And I feel like if you don't want to go trick or treating, you can just like, stay in your house. But for the people who do want to go, it's important to me that we're allowed to go trick or treating. Anyone have any questions for Marissa? Go ahead, Donna. Like to say your letter was very on point, very expressive, and really appreciate the amount of time and thought you've sent it. And it does have us definitely looking at Halloween. And I for one, would like to follow your suggestions would seem very much in line with what the Health Department is telling us that in small groups outside. So that's what I would propose that we do is follow those guidelines and advocate for kids to go trick or treating in that mode. In small groups, outside only. Yes. And you know, it doesn't hurt to it doesn't hurt to wear a mask. Oh, yes, it kind of makes sense, right? It's Halloween costumes with masks, maybe encouraged. And I yes, Lauren. It was so great to hear from you. So glad you're engaged with your city and bringing up issues you care about. So keep it up. If the only thing I would add on the masking, there is a recommendation from some health authorities like don't wear this kind of face mask and another mask over it for kids because it could be a breathing hazard. So they recommend generally avoiding like face masks that aren't kind of like COVID protective masks. So just that recommendation, I know we're, you know, not allowed to mandate masking but strongly recommend COVID safe masking as well, even outdoors. Okay. Any other thoughts or comments? I don't think we need a motion on this. Right? We're just making a recommendation to the community at this point. Okay, any other further thoughts on this? Yes, Connor. Yeah. Would you like to know what the costume is? I couldn't hear you. What would you like to be for Halloween, Marissa? I actually have no idea. Anything could happen. Okay. Well, thank you again, Marissa, for writing to us and we hope you have fun trick-or-treating in small groups outside this Halloween. Thank you. Yes. Pass a statement of the City Council supports Halloween under these conditions. Last year we passed a statement that we recommend no. Right. Okay. Okay, I'll make that as a motion that the Council is supporting people going, children going out for Halloween, trick-or-treating, small groups. We advise regular COVID masks and lots of illumination and outside flashlights, reflective material somewhere on their wonderful costumes. And outside? Outside, yes. Okay, we have a motion and a second. Any further discussion on this? Yes, Jay. Sorry, I just want to ask a quick question. I'm wondering part of this, do we need to make a recommendation or engage in all with Montpelier alive? And the partners in education that are joining for the Halloween trick-or-treating event, which is in place at the Fall Festival from last year. It's trick-or-treating. I think they're doing a mild fun run and could potentially, I mean, especially in light of Deborah's comments around large gatherings. So I know that we can necessarily, you know, they will, we can certainly trust them in that they will be following, you know, state guidelines in terms of what's appropriate for larger outdoor gatherings. But I don't know if that's something we need to address as part of this conversation or not. Interesting point. Yeah, Donna, go ahead. I feel like for adult victims, they already exist. And if we make this statement, hopefully, Montpelier alive and the merchants will reflect it. So I think we can make the statement and they can integrate it into their own. I feel we can go ahead and do it. Okay, I'm comfortable with that. I just want to acknowledge that there is a larger event planned for that day. And so, I'm with you on that, but I just wanted to acknowledge that. Thank you. This will help them be more mindful of small outdoor groups and masks. Right? Yeah, that's fair. Okay, motion in a second. Any further discussion? Including from the public. Okay. So all in favor, please say aye. And opposed. Okay, so that recommendation passes. And thank you again, Marissa, for bringing this up for us. Okay, all right. So before we take up another issue, I'm getting messages that members are very hard to hear on YouTube. So the sound guy might be working on that now, but oh, I think it just picked up. Keep us posted. Keep trying. Okay, thank you. All right, so we are going to move on to some appointments that we have to make. And I think I have seen a number of these folks present with us. And so I'm just going to go in the order that the folks are listed online. Aaron Kasicki, I see that you are with us. Would you mind introducing yourself to us and just tell us about your interest in serving on the planning commission? Sure, thanks. Thanks for having me here really quickly. I just wanted to say I've been on the planning commission for the past three years and I've been serving as vice chair for the past two years. I'll just be very short and sweet with it. We've been working very hard on drafting the new city plan. We are very much, you know, waist deep in that effort right now. And we have a good working group. I think we've been very productive, but we've got quite a ways to go to get that project across the finish line. And I'd like to be continued to be involved in that project, you know, to see that through. And also, you know, all the time we're working on, you know, changes to zoning laws, which there's a certain learning curve to that. And I feel like I'm getting on top of that. So I feel like I'm actually of some value in that department now. So I'd like to continue. So I just wanted to thank everybody for your time. And I hope to be reappointed. Thank you. Thank you, Erin. Arian Casam, I see you're on next, if you wouldn't mind doing same. Oh, yeah, sorry. Yeah, I'll just keep it short. Like Erin, I think I've been on the planning commission about the same time, maybe three and a half years. And I feel like there is a learning curve. And I feel like I am getting more familiar and understanding zoning a lot better. So I'd really like to continue both with the work on the city plan and any, you know, zoning changes that we might be able to make I work in affordable housing, and I really want to bring more housing to the city. And it's really important to me. So I hope to be reappointed. Thank you for your time. Thank you. I don't see Gabriel Lajunez. I just want to make sure I'm not wrong here. I didn't see him online. All right, or Jeffrey Batista. Is Jeffrey Batista here? Okay. And John Adams, I think I saw John online. Okay, and Kirby Kirby is online. Yes, yes. She's a lost one. Hi, everyone. Yes, welcome. So yeah, I'm Kirby Keaton. I'm currently the chair of the planning commission. I've been chair for about two, two and a half years now. Before that, I was the vice chair. I've been on the planning commission for about five and a half years. As Aaron was saying, you know, we're working on the city plan right now. We have about half of the work done there as far as the chapters and our goals and strategies set up. So about half more to go. We want to finish hopefully by the end of the calendar year here. And we're also working on some zoning changes currently, which we'll have a hearing on in about a month. So there's just some things you can expect from us in the near future. While I'm talking with you, yeah, I've noticed that John Adams and Stephanie Smith aren't here right now. In case they don't end up showing, I just want to throw my support behind them, though. Both of them have very deep planning backgrounds and contribute a lot to the planning commission. So I definitely want to mention that if they don't make it that they are very valuable members. And that's all I've got. Thank you very much, Kirby. And Marcella. Marcella Dent, welcome. Hi, thanks very much. I appreciate your consideration and your time. And I will sound a bit like my colleagues, but this is the end of my first session with the planning commission. And so I definitely do still feel in the thick of the learning curve. But I've been just really pleased and grateful for the patience and just helpfulness of both our planning director, Mike, who's just been so great and helpful and knowledgeable and steady. And then also my fellow commissioners who have been really helpful in helping me learn and get up to speed on things. And so I do feel like I do feel like I just started and I would love to continue and see this city plan project through, especially now that we're starting to find our groove and making some progress. So I think the group works well together. I know we will have at least one new person, which I think is great, exciting to have new perspectives always. And yeah, I'm excited and would like to continue to do this work. So thanks. Thank you. Keaton just mentioned Stephanie Smith and she did not apply for reappointment. At least we haven't received one. So just so people are aware of that. That also did not reapply. Okay. Well, thank you. And all right. So any questions for any of these candidates who are present? Okay. All right. So some of these appointments are going to be for what two years and some of them are going to be for one. And so we have to line folks up a little bit here. But what would you like to do? You want to go into executive session or just have a vote? Yes, go ahead, Jack. Pursuant to 1VSA section 313A3. I move that we enter executive session to discuss the appointment of a public officer or employee. And is there a second? Okay. We've got multiple seconds. Any further discussion? Okay. Do you have a comment about the planning commission folks? No, I have a general comment. Okay. If you would like people to stay informed about the city council, you need to learn how to speak up. I have my computer speakers on at 100% cannot hear you. I can hear anybody that calls in online big time. But you need to learn how to project your voices because it's very frustrating. And I don't come out at night anymore. So speak up, speak into your microphones. Otherwise, we can't follow what's going on in Montpelier and it's very frustrating. Yeah. So let's try to, if we can, remind each other to get really close to it and speak up. Okay. So there was a motion a second about going into executive session. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed? All right. So we will be right back. Is there a motion to come out of executive session? Okay. Motion is second. All in favor, please say aye. Opposed? All right. So we're back in regular session. Is there a motion? Jack? I move that you make the following appointments and there are two groups of appointments. The first group will be appointed for the remainder of a term that will expire on October 1st, 2022. And that will be Marcella Dent, Cody Keaton, Jeffrey Batista, and Gabriel Rajanis. And I also moved the appointment for two years of Aaron Kosicki, John Adams, and Ariane Casson. Okay. Is there a second? Okay. Jay is going to second. Any further discussion? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Hi. And opposed. Okay. So that passes. And thank you to all of you for your work on the planning commission. Very grateful for all that you do, my goodness. And we look forward to hearing more from you all as things progress. City plan and any changes to the zoning progress. Thank you so much. All right. So we are now up to the report from the police review committee along with the recommendations in it. And I know we have a presentation from that group. And I know there's some members online and some members with us in person. I will turn it over to you all collectively as to how you want to proceed. Hi, Mayor. This is Alyssa Sharon, Chair, Police Review Committee. The plan is that I will share the presentation on my screen and that Justin Dreschler is in the room there. And he and I will tag team in the presentation. And so he should get in position, whatever that looks like in the room with you all. Feel free to come on up to the table up here. Thank you. And also, I want to recognize that the committee members, which I'll go through all the names in just a minute. And I'm so sorry not to be there with you in person. The whole fifth grade has been like in quarantine and my son doesn't have his COVID test back yet. So I figured I would just skip this in-person session with you all today. So Justin, it's helping to pick up the slack. Thank you so much. Before we go into the presentation, I see that you have a hand up. So should I pause for that? Sure. Abby is a Police Review Committee member. So perhaps it's about the presentation. Yes, I was wondering if I could make a public comment beforehand, if it's like an agenda item that is taking public comment. Oh yeah, that's a great question. So here's how I picture this. Thank you for that because I think laying out how this agenda item will go, I think is in order. So the way we're going to structure this time is we'll have the presentation happen first and then we'll go from there into just clarifying questions from the council. No opinions, just like if you don't understand something or need more information about something, we'll go into that. From there, we'll go into that. That's when we'll go into public comment. So at that point, anyone would be welcome to make a comment or ask a question or whatever about this report. And then the council will have a discussion about the content of it and we'll go on from there. Does that work for you, Abby? Yes, thank you. Great, thank you and thank you for that question. All right, I'm going to turn it back to you, Alyssa. Great. Well, I'm going to share my screen then on the presentation and I assume folks will be able to see it in the room there. Yes. Okay. Yeah, okay, great. Thank you. We can see it. Okay, great. Mayor Watson, we were planning on pausing to take your questions at a couple of points along the way. Should we not do that and just move through and save it to the end based on what you just described? No, you can. I mean, if that's a part of your plan, that's perfectly fine. So just give us a heads up when those points are and we'll field questions at that point. Okay, that sounds great. Thank you so much. So let me jump in here. Alyssa Sherwin, a Montpelier resident and committee chair for the police review committee. And first, I just want to really thank all of the committee members. Each have specialized in different topics throughout this process and are on hand to assist with questions in the area that they've specialized in over the last nearly a year now. And I want to do a special thank you to Justin Dressler, who's there with you in the room for drafting the report and being present today to help me as I cannot be with you. Also, I was told that you have read the report and have the presentation slide. So we're not going to go through every single slide today. We're going to cover the high points and then leave a little bit more time for discussion. So diving in, we worked diligently to complete the committee's charge. And this is the charge here on the slide. The one thing I would just know about the charge is that we were charged with getting you the report by June 30th, 2021. And we are delayed on that. But we are very happy to get you the report today. As you know, this is a timeline which I'm going to go through. But as you know, the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others at the hands of police violence spurred heightened protests across the country and in Montpelier. Community members expressed an interest in police reforms. And on June 10th, 2020, you, the council adopted a resolution condemning racism and police brutality. Around that time, Montpelier Police Department Chief Brian Pete was hired and undertook an assessment of the department. He offered a framework for the future of MPD. And on August 26th, 2020, the city council approved that framework, which included the recommendation to create a police review committee to assess and work collaboratively with community members, counselors, and MPD on a strategic vision for the police department. On October 28th, 2020, the Montpelier City Council appointed six community members to serve on the police review committee. The PRC was encouraged to suggest additional members to the city council. And we explored recommending up to five additional committee members. Three of the five we reached out to identify as people of color. Through this recruitment process, we received feedback from these potential members that the few Black, Indigenous, and people of color in Montpelier, making up about 6.3% of the population, are frequently asked to engage in community processes, share lived experiences, and serve on committees. And that many BIPOC people in Montpelier overtaxed, overengaged, and exhausted, especially given the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial reckoning connected to police violence we've seen over the past year, which that was so acutely felt. The three potential BIPOC committee members declined to participate and suggested that the PRC center BIPOC voices in our work, and we attempted to do that in our outreach. In January 2021, the city council appointed two additional committee members, bringing the committee to eight, which was our total and final number. All members are white, and other identities range from cisgender, transgender, and gender non-conforming, queer and straight, those that live mental health experiences and conditions, disabled and abled, and backgrounds include teaching, mental health work, legal work, criminal justice work, and public interest work. Our approach was to collect and analyze data from November of 2020 to January 2021, and then also consider gaps and needs and engage, I'm sorry, June 2021, and consider gaps and needs, engage stakeholders, and then draft recommendations. Each committee member specialized in a few topics and prepared recommendation rationale, and those then were presented to the committee. We discussed them, we asked questions, and then ultimately we voted, and the recommendations that received the majority of majority vote made it into the report. We solicited community input throughout this process as well, and we also took public comments on the report for a two-week period after it was drafted, and then we present you with the final report today. So let me hand it over to Justin at this point to take us through some of the data, and then I'll come back to you with some community engagement. Good evening, everyone. Justin Dreschler, holler at me if my voice is not loud enough. So I'm going to go through data collection analysis. This is distinct from our community outreach and engagement, which certainly is data, but this is more quantitative data that we looked at from the police department, as well as academic studies, things along those lines. Alyssa, you can go to the next slide. And so you can see this is the type of data that we got. By quantitative we mean just reports from the police department of various kinds, arrest reports, use of force reports, things along those lines, offense reports, dispatch numbers, expert presentations, meaning presentations largely from the chief, some presentations on bias and racial trafficking stops, presentation from DATBO, from Ari Springer on the defense bar, academic reports, news, nonprofit websites, et cetera, et cetera. We tried really hard to cite our work here. So the report has many, many, many, many footnotes, largely thanks to Michael Sherman. And so we tried very, very hard that when we're making a claim that we try to back it up with the data, to the extent that any claim is not backed up in the report that you can see in an obvious way, you should always just click through to the recommendation because there's so much more behind the report, even though it's already pretty meaty. You can click through Alyssa. So this is just the Montpelier police department profile. There's nothing particularly interesting here. These are just stats about the Montpelier police department that a lot of the city council already knows. Some of the public might not necessarily know this. I guess the big takeaway here is, and it's not on this slide, but that the police department is understaffed right now. And so the PD is working. Oh, the chief can give this to me. Let me see if I haven't memorized from the morning shift or day shift has two officers. What I would call swing shift, which is 12 or 6 p.m. to midnight has three officers and then grave has two officers. Full staffing is three officers on all shifts. So you can see we are understaffed that has required a significant amount of overtime over the last year or so. But other than that, no really meaningful takeaways from this. This isn't something we looked at, same size as communities of similar sizes across Vermont. We don't see any sort of discrepancies like we have three times as many officers per capita or anything along those lines. And we cite it to a number of different communities in the report telling you how many officers per capita they have. Next. This is us breaking out the calls that are coming into the MPD in terms of whether they have a police response or they were handled entirely by the dispatcher. And this is just a this is just interesting to look at from my perspective in the sense that it's telling you how often dispatchers are short circuiting some of these things. It's in some ways it doesn't tell us too much because many of the calls that come to the police state, the MPD have no business going to an officer. For example, they are the it's a restraining order holding station. And so the dispatchers are supposed to handle calls like that lost and found property. Obviously, a dispatcher can handle that. So a number of these calls that are going into the PD are not ever going to find their way to an officer. And we actually see a consistent pattern that about 85% of the calls end up finding their way to an officer. And again, I want to be clear, this doesn't necessarily mean that an officer is responding to the scene. It just means that the individual that an officer is contacted at some point along the way, as opposed to just completely cut out of the process. You can go next, Alyssa. This is us bucketing the calls that actually involve the call to a police officer into a number of different categories. And I tried to be really clear in the report here that this involves judgment. So there are 200 different categories that we have that we're taking a look at in this data. And we had to put in more specifically, I had to put it into these buckets. And so this is my work. So if you have a problem with it come to me, and I'm happy to justify it in some way, when when there was a question, I tried to bucket things in the criminal bucket. So if it was arguably criminal, I tried very hard to put it into criminal. And so you see motor vehicle related, those are non criminal motor vehicle related things really anything criminal or potentially criminal found its way into that bucket. You can see that other is pretty big. But there are a number of things that police officers in town do that aren't necessarily related to to public safety. Well, no, that's the wrong way to put it to deterring crime. For example, business to bank escorts lost and found property missing children, lots of things that can fall into that bucket. And so I hesitate to for anyone to jump to the conclusion that that's wasteful in any way without looking at the data. So I hesitate for anyone to jump to any conclusions from this chart without looking at the data yourself, because it's interesting, it's not complicated, and it's all in the resources. So please do look at yourself. But it's important to contextualize it a little bit for the casual reader. Next, Alyssa. And here's the charges breaking down over the last five, six years, excuse me. This is the total number of offenses that we have in each particular category. And these are the leading offenses, the heavy hitters. This, from my perspective, is good news. You can see that violent crime does not appear to be a problem in Montpelier based on these numbers. We also, and if any committee members want to correct me, we did not receive any significant amount of feedback suggesting that people were concerned about violent crime in Montpelier or overly concerned about violent crime in Montpelier. That was not something that was necessarily on people's people's radar. Now, with that is not to say that there wasn't there weren't concerns expressed related to interactions with police and related to violence on the part of police, because we did receive a lot of feedback related to that. But we did not hear people saying that they were worried about violent crime and that, you know, they were worried their kids were going to get hurt in the streets, et cetera, et cetera. All right, we can pass on to the next slide. We're going to blow through this one pretty quickly. So this is pulled from the Stephanie Seguino's presentation to the PRC and from her. Everyone, I would think everyone on this committee understands that she did a survey of police stops across Vermont to try to determine whether they were racially motivated. Long story short, Montpelier shows no such racial motivation, the caveat being there that this is not statistically significant in any way. And so we really can't, we can't take anything away from this at all, except to say that there is no obvious problem in front of us right now, but just keep it on your radar. Next, use of force incidents. This, this chart breaks down the number of use of force incidents when the Montpelier Police Department over the last one, two, three, four, five years. And how often officers are using force as a percent of offenses and as a percent of arrests. And the reason there is that distinction is because an offense does not necessarily lead to an arrest. So all offenses are not arrests, all arrests are offenses, rhombus square situation. You can see that the, what I think is interesting about this data is that the frequency with which officers are using force decreased significantly after 2016, 2017. I don't know what to make of it. Maybe the chief can give us some insight into it. It's, it's good news if that's decreasing for any number of reasons. I would also express some caution about these numbers because I think we all, oftentimes we think about use of force as something quite violent and that is not necessarily, I'm sorry, no, I want to rephrase that. All forms of use of force are violent in some way because the use of words can be considered violent and the use of empty hand controls can be considered violent. I just want to express to the reader here and to the council that this is not suggesting that in 3% of all offenses a Montpelio police officer even puts their hands on someone or causes an injury or anything along those lines. The plurality of use of force by the MPD every year and by plurality, I mean the, the category of use of force that was used most often was empty hand controls. Let's just, that's your hands. Again, can be quite violent. I do not want to minimize this in any way, but if you add empty hand controls and verbal commands, you get to a majority of the use of force by MPD officers over the last several years. So again, I take a look at this. We have it in a, in a spreadsheet in our, in our documents, very easy to read. You can see each year how often they're doing each. We can go to next, Alyssa. Let me see what's on the next slide. I might want to go back for half a second. Yeah, it's actually just the community engagement. Yeah, I want to say one last thing about that, Alyssa. And so you will see in the, in the use of force reports that they categorize, excuse me, they, they have a category for displaying firearms, both displaying a firearm, pointing a firearm, the number of firearm category, firearm related categories. Of course, in 2020, that number jumped significantly very, very rarely. Do, does the MPD ever display a firearm, let alone use a firearm? If you look at the use of force reports, it very rarely are they, are they doing these things again? Police presence with a firearm on their hip can be quite intimidating for many people in many different worlds. But the good news about this is that, that our, our officers are not pulling their gun during every encounter. It's not happening. And if you look at the 2020 numbers related to the use of force in terms of firearm brandishing, we did not have individual resistance response force forms, meaning use of force forms. But I suspect looking at the numbers that the large majority of those firearm brandishes came from the same incident, which would be the Mark, the Mark Johnson shooting. So any who next and Alyssa is going to take over, I think Alyssa. Yeah, before I do, I just wanted to pause just to see if the council had any questions on the data. I know we, it was a whirlwind to go through that and you have been able to have, you know, the more detailed slides and the report, but any questions here on the data before we go into the community engagement process. And if not, don't worry about it. It's not your last time. We are going to have plenty of time to talk about this at the end of the presentation as well. I just want to say as someone who really appreciates data, I just want to thank you for your time and attention and appreciating the nuance of the data. So thank you. You may have more questions later, but I think for now I'm good. Others. Okay. All right, back to you all. It's all you, boss. Okay, I'm going into the community engagement pieces then. So in terms of our engagement, the police review committee engaged community members through surveys through multiple constituents, constituency hosted non-public meetings through a public hearing and through interviews as well as one-on-one conversations with folks. And we asked people, you know, what's your broad perspective on MPD? How would you characterize your relationship with the police department? What is the department doing well? What could be improved? Whatever your interactions, spend with MPD, what went right, wrong, you know, anything that should be done differently and what is your vision for policing? So those were the types of questions that we asked folks in those conversations. On a parallel track, creative discourse, the consultant hired by the City of Montpelier to support the development of Montpelier's equity plan also performed community outreach through a community survey and confidential affinity groups. They included public safety and policing related questions in their outreach and the police review committee reviewed their data as part of our outreach process. In total, between the police review committee and the creative discourse, we engaged approximately 550 people in this process. And in general, themes range from positive to mixed, depending on the constituency, which will walk through constituency by constituency. So in terms of the community survey, you can see there was a real range of responses on the slide characterizing themes from creative discourse's survey with more than 300 people completing the survey. The themes range from non-police responses to need for training, to reducing engagement with marginalized communities. We held a public hearing on April 5, 2021. And there were about 41 people that attended that and we shared and we heard themes on increasing non-police response. And folks got also more specific about concerns around use of force, a desire for accountability frameworks. We also heard a desire from someone decreasing the police budget and also support from the police. So it's a spectrum of opinions that came out of that hearing. In terms of our individual engagement, as I said, a lot of the committee members took on different areas of work and engaged different constituencies. With regard to community satisfaction and the themes that came out of these conversations, local businesses, Councilor Jack McCullough and Michael Sherman, really just they designed and delivered surveys in person to businesses. Think they handed out about 100 surveys and got 31 responses. And the responses from those surveys from the local businesses really praised MPD's prompt response, professionalism, courteousness, and also their thoughtful interactions as well as good communication. The overall rating the local businesses gave MPD was excellent at 76% saying that and 20% saying good or satisfactory at 4%. So really positive reviews. There one request was increased foot and bicycle presence in downtown areas. MPD employees, Justin Dressler, designed a survey and got input from Chief Pete that he administered to two folks at MPD. There were 41 questions grouped into six categories about trust, morale, leadership, resources and training, department policies and community. There were 24 responses. Overwhelmingly, the majority of staff were satisfied with the priorities of leadership, happy with the direction leadership is taking with MPD and believe that leadership is acting on the best interest of the public. A majority also felt well trained to engage with historically marginalized populations. And it's also worth noting that about 50% considered leaving MPD to work in another field over the past year and 12% believe the community had a negative perception of MPD. In terms of affected individuals, Councillor Lauren Hurl and my and I reached out to the community justice center, the Vermont network against domestic violence, Circle and Mosaic to gain the perspective of affected individuals, whether they identify as victim survivors or affected individuals. And some of the themes that we got from that engagement were that officers are responsive, polite, helpful, respectful, and they appreciated MPD's ability to effectively de-escalate situations. Some also noted that the restorative process that run by the community justice center is an effective way to handle incidents and an asset to the community. So those are on the most highly satisfied end of the spectrum. The next bucket of groups, mental health, disabilities, and housing and stable populations. Dan Tau and Councillor Jack McCullough did a lot of work with the mental health and disabilities communities, engaging folks from the disability rights Vermont, Vermont Center for Independent Living, Washington County mental health services, and those living with physical or mental need, mental health needs. From some of the themes on the mental health, from the mental health community, we're both positive and negative experiences with MPD, support for the addition of crisis responders, peer and social worker resources. There were questions around whether or not the Mark Johnson shooting could have been handled differently and desire to improve screening at the first point of contact, better diagnose and respond to mental health situations, as well as offering more mental health and social service training to officers. Regarding the disabilities community, we had heard similar themes on positive and negative experiences with MPD as well as the support of additional crisis response, peer and social work resources. We also heard a desire to increase accessibility of the website, whether that be videos on how to create forms or offers to help fill out forms for folks. A need to update and modernize MPD's disability policy to reflect current time and better center rights and inclusion of population living with disabilities. Regarding the housing and stable community, Dan, Jack and I sought feedback from folks in another way. Good Samaritan Haven, Washington County Mental Health Services, and the homeless task force. Done little. The street outreach worker also worked with me to do an informal survey of folks as well about how they felt MPD was doing. And there were mixed feelings. Some see MPD as a partner, others have concerns. Many encouraged non-police response such as peer support, street outreach and social workers. And then some noted behaviors that really built trust like giving rides to folks or providing flashlights or connecting people to services or assisting folks with lost items. There was a request for additional officer training and concerns around police response to opened and unopened alcoholic beverages. There was also a request for additional street outreach workers. And then the final category more on the dissatisfied side were BIPOC community members, LGBTQIA community members and sex workers. And in terms of the BIPOC community members, we pulled data from creative discourse affinity groups and also did some interviews with by interviews of BIPOC community members. Some of the things we heard where that police can be triggering for people who are living with trauma and that BIPOC individuals have and do experience the significant trauma of overt racism implicit bias and microaggression. There was interest in having a potentially having a community oversight board and changing internal police policies and practices to allow anti-racism to better take hold. LGBTQIA plus community members, Abby German and Jen Duggan did some interviews with folks with either outright Vermont pride center Rambo umbrella and heard things around the need for alternative response agencies and noting and folks noted that transgender individuals are not recognized in Belcore data and the way that that data is collected and categorized should be updated. Some did not feel safe calling 911 an emergency and there was some support for police abolition. Abby German also reached out to sex workers through the Ishtar collaborative, the first anti-trafficking and sex workers rights organization based in Vermont and heard from people through written surveys and interviews that some felt targeted based on their identities of sex workers and were afraid to call police a victimized. Concerns that passed attempts to de-escalate volatile situations were unsuccessful and a few felt that police should be abolished and there was an increase for non-police responders. Also a request to educate law enforcement about sex work to criminalize sex work and demilitarize the police. We also had reached out to incarcerated informally incarcerated individuals but only got one thorough and detailed letter from someone which we did take into account in the data but it really it wasn't a whole community. We reached out to the folks engaged with the SRO issue as well to consider data that came up in that process around youth that we should be considering in a police context. So that is basically our outreach and why don't I pause here for a moment to see if you have any questions about our outreach before we move into you know what came of all of this from the data and the outreach where we landed on recommendations. Yeah go ahead Connor don't forget to share. Listen when you say police abolishment just to clarify does that mean no sworn officers on the forester? Yes I mean it was essentially like you know defunding and dismantling the police and perhaps recreating a new model to address community safety and it officers might look different under under that model but it's getting rid of the current model. Okay well let's get into the recommendations and then making drop the presentation and look at each other and chat if that is the next step here. So Justin why don't I turn it over to you to tackle these themes in the next couple slides. Okay so when we started making our recommendations in the PRC we actually hadn't thought about these theme buckets. I think these themes developed over time so individuals were just coming up with recommendations putting them towards the committee we'd debate them etc etc etc but as the report coalesced it became clear that we were that all of our recommendations really could broadly be placed in one of these buckets was to increase accountability and transparency for the police, dedicate resources to non-police response, remove law enforcement from situations where their presence is unnecessary in many situations two and three really do dovetail so they can be jammed together in some situations because when you're removing law enforcement from situations where their presence is unnecessary oftentimes you need other resources that can that can support the individuals who you are trying to help and then investments and strategies and approaches to help ensure MPD can effectively respond to community needs we can go next Alyssa and you'll see where all these fit into these categories. So accountability and transparency, body worn cameras this is a big topic of debate on the committee and there one of the things the committee recognizes is there are clear costs and benefits to body worn cameras this is not a very simple question ultimately we decided that the benefits of body worn cameras outweigh the costs in the sense of the privacy concerns and the fact that there isn't much evidence that body worn cameras deter police conduct misconduct but if the goal isn't necessarily to deter police misconduct but necessary but to increase accountability and transparency we eventually decided or we voted to adopt the body worn cameras because we thought it would get us to that end. We did not take a position on budget because that is the city council's decision but we do understand that there are really meaningful costs associated with storage and implementation of this policy and the city council is going to have to cross that bridge not us. Community engagement part protocol I think we can we all know that this was born of the Mark Johnson incident and so we received a lot of community a lot of feedback from the community related to the Mark Johnson shooting and we also spoke to the police department and the city council and a number of other individuals who were involved in disseminating information related to that incident and there appeared to be a very very clear disconnect between some of those groups of people and so when we it became clear through a lot of our community engagement that people in the community weren't happy with the way that incident was handled from a public relations perspective and from a community engagement perspective and it could be for don't worry I can do it off the dome and it could be for multiple reasons and the one of the reasons could be that the city didn't necessarily do a great job disseminating the information we take no position on that we don't know if that's true or not we do not take a position on that there are individuals that definitely do believe that another reason could be that the individuals who are giving this feedback just didn't that information didn't reach them it just didn't reach them and so even if the community even if the police department if everyone did a great job we just didn't reach these people because a lot of people were saying we where was the information where was it where was the transparency and and so we decided that it's important to have a community engagement protocol in place in advance and so that's really where that comes from data transparency I mean this is an obvious one this is where we're moving towards I think in general in policing to try to make data more transparent the recommendation here suggests that a significant amount of the data that you can access through our shared public folder that we had access to now be available to the public more or less I think that's the easiest way to put it because it was enlightening to read all this stuff and it would be great for the public to read it again this comes at a very large cost this is not easy to implement at all to create a public-facing easy easy access web page that you can that you can filter through so there are costs associated with it but we thought it was best for the public to have access to this policing data next and the reason for that is again just data transparency is good and a lot of the feedback that we received was there wasn't transparency from people who who individuals who were critical of the MPD many of the themes are related to transparency and so this just can't be a bad thing it just can't next yeah and having this in a user-friendly way it is critical for folks to have that transparency a lot of the charts and graphs in this presentation we we created from the raw data and it would be great for the public to have access to that through the MPD sure yeah that's a good point Alyssa because the raw data can be tricky sometimes the fair and impartial policing policy this essentially our recommendation here is to that the city council should look at the fair and impartial policing policy and consider a changing it to better protect immigrant rights in situations where officers engage with immigration I mean that really is the the gist of what we're looking for here militarization this recommendation just suggests that the city council ban MPD's applications for controlled equipment through the 1033 program the MPD does not participate in this program this is prophylactic this is not we're not trying to fix something that's broken but we're just trying to make sure that this doesn't happen in the future the one nuance to this particular one is that there are certain certain pieces of equipment in the Department of Defense's program that have nothing to do with weaponry or anything along those lines they're like computers and office chairs and desk chairs and so this is written in such a way that it doesn't prevent us from participating in that part of the program but it prevents us from participating in the in the true military equipment part of the program officer misconduct and internal affairs the big one here I guess let me start from the bottom and work my way up so from the bottom there are a number of state-level legislative reforms that we think the city should consider advocating for in terms of accountability and transparency and internal affairs in terms of reviewing the internal affairs policy it's just out of date in the sense that it's just I mean it's physically out of date whether it actually is out of date or not is to be determined but the policy is from 2015 and act 56 is in 2017 I would not be surprised given how diligent the chief is if he is already updated it and is uh is getting it ready for public comment and review um the city council creating a Montpelier police advisory committee so the vision here with this police advisory committee is to create something akin to a civilian oversight board that is not a civilian oversight board um the the contract with the police union and we answer this in the public comments prevents such a board from disciplinary disciplining officers in any way that is not something and I just want to be clear for anyone who's listening in the public and who has read this report it was something that was considered civilian oversight was something that was considered but we literally cannot do it based on the current contract it cannot be done and so what we have here is the Montpelier police advisory committee which would be made up of a handful of people it would be dissimilar to the current committee because the current committee is really a an exploration committee and in that sense it's the advisory committee is more of an oversight committee we do envision that committee reviewing allegations of misconduct and making recommendations to the city council also making recommendations to the city council about policies and procedures that could be improved but we do not envision this to be a disciplinary body it is not that it cannot be that next Alyssa okay and so this is for me talking about dedicated resources to non-police response and removing law enforcement when necessary two primary recommendations here around public drinking and street outreach this fits within I want to I want to explain these a little bit more because the city's current ordinance around public drinking intersects with state law and police issuing citations or making real arrests related to public drinking becomes more involved and complicated and time consuming process sometimes it means bringing the accused individual to a detox facility or and or if there's not capacity there taking individual interprotective custody all of which consumes a lot of time and keeps the officer unavailable to respond to emergency calls for service so with regard to our recommendations here we were looking at how the current ordinance around public drinking disproportionately affects the unhoused and individuals with mental health problems police actions to compel compliance with state law around like open containers and public drinking frequently result in escalation of resistance and use of force which then results in criminal charges in addition sometimes local detox facilities don't have capacity so we were hearing and learning that intoxicated individuals are then transported significant distances like Montpelier to Burlington often without their belongings and then they're left there to you know to find their way back to Montpelier the next day and that can create really challenging situations so in addition to this ordinance not being related to to criminal behavior but literally being related to you know open open containers um and public drinking the courts have also deprioritized this type of offense so 12 citations were issued by MPD around public drinking in 2020 and all were dismissed by the court so that is why our recommendation is to have MPDD prioritize you know non-criminal um public drinking which often involves the unhoused community and instead move to adding street outreach worker capacity to help help backfill that support and then any public drinking related issue that was connected to criminal behavior would of course continue to go to them but this is really looking at non-criminal related drink a not a response non-criminal um drinking essentially I want I'll talk a little bit more about these two as well so the social worker and peer support resources Montpelier's co-response model that exists now is very new having been approved and instituted you know just within the last two years and this response so far has been overwhelmingly positive um the considering the the sorry the the committee received feedback from both the community and the MPD that they would like to see more co-response however because the social worker is shared between MPD and Barrie City provided through Washington County Mental Health Services additional co-response is you know currently impossible without more resources so MPD leadership and the mental health unhoused stakeholders also called for integration of peer support workers as part of the mental health crisis response team the use of peer support workers in addition to social workers and utilizing those workers in crisis response in other cities across the country has proven to be very successful and it is done at a significantly lower cost as well so we believe these resources will help really fortify the current co-response model that MPD has with regard to sex work MPD this the recommendation asks that MPD de-prioritize sex work between consenting adults and continue to maintain focus on human trafficking coercion underage and forced sex the issue was brought to our attention by a vocal minority we looked at the data and it showed that when sex work is criminalized workers experience more violence and are more likely to be victimized and are less likely to report a crime in my pillar those sex work may not be obvious it is happening confirmed by an informal survey done by the Ishtar collaborative and by Chief Peake we believe that these recommendations will remove a barrier to accessing police services and will improve the health and safety of a small vulnerable population in the community this has also been an issue statewide with the AG criminalization bill proposed in 2020 that bill did not pass but a good Samaritan bill did pass granting limited immunity to sex workers who are victims or witnesses of a crime the law shields both sex workers and their clients from being prosecuted on certain charges connected to their involvement in sex work but then why don't I turn it over to you for this and then we'll move into the public comment sure so we're going to move pretty quickly through this because essentially what we have here is just I want to start with training first now you know what let me do officer recruitment first because it's on top anyway so there's a recommendation to increase the minimum requirements for the officers this one was also hotly debated the MPD is having well I don't want to speak for the chief but I think it's fair to say that the MPD is having difficulty recruiting officers and so adding any additional barriers to officer recruitment is potentially problematic nevertheless we thought it was best to add these these the additional requirements that we've laid out here primarily to ensure the hope is to create a more well-rounded police force and a police force that is a little bit more engaged in the community now we have here a minimum of one year of post-secondary education or equivalent life and or internship experience we got some public feedback that we should require post-secondary education and that was discussed at length on the during the police review committee and at the end of the day the majority decided that such a policy would be classist and that it would be limiting a number of different individuals from applying for this type of work and there I think we all know that people come from all sorts of different backgrounds and have all sorts of different access to education and whether one having one year of post-secondary education Trump's equivalent life experience I think is very very debatable and that's why that's why we landed here but the goal here is just to create a more well-rounded police force a little more life experience it's already tough you know we thought about raising the minimum requirement to being 21 years or older 25 years or older because of all the adolescent brain development science that's out there but again that just adds another barrier and then there were concerns from the police department that like that you know maybe you do have someone who is 19 20 years old who is wonderful who couldn't possibly be better and so we didn't want to paint with too broad a brush with regard to training again the committee is aware of all of the community feedback related to increasing the police budget and this training could theoretically increase the police budget however some of the feedback we got related to how officers have engaged with youth in certain circumstances and have engaged in during with crowds during certain protests or events in the statehouse lawn led us to believe that it was probably that that it was best for some specific youth-based training to be included in the officer training and for the officers to receive more training on crowd control and there's a lot more detail in these these are michael's recommendations and whenever michael wrote a recommendation you can be sure that there is going to be a huge amount of detail when you click the link so please do click the link because you're going to have pages and pages and pages that i are wonderful that i had to cut for the report in terms of scenario-based training it's just best practice when we say scenario-based training we mean doing the exact opposite of what we're doing right here and it's just best practice and so the chief agrees everybody agrees this is a non controversial idea except in so far as it might increase the budget and alissa i think we can move on public comments you know they're alissa i'm not sure we have to talk too much about public comments because we did talk about a number of them along the way the public comments i would say so we solicit these public comments for a two-week period essentially we released a draft version of the report which was very very similar to the report that we have that you have in front of you and it was ultimately released we did change some things specifically in response to public comments by comments that we didn't necessarily things that we didn't necessarily think through um we advertise the we advertise on the face city's facebook page front port form times the bridge an online comment form paper comment forms drop boxes we tried to reach far and wide den was um was very adamant that we made sure that we that the broadest possible group of people got to read and comment on this report we received 15 comments some of them quite lengthy some of them a bit short and um and you know i we have all of the comments linked to in the report i tried to just glean a few of them that were uh that were representative of the whole and answer them after the conclusion of the report in some instances people were asking us to do things that we can't do like disband the police union in some instances people were asking us to do things that we had thought of doing but ultimately decided not to in some instances people were asking us to do things um that maybe weren't necessarily best suited for us to do so for example there was one particular commenter who who had mentioned the accumulation of micro traumas for police which is something that i think a lot of these committees don't necessarily look into they don't think about it from the other perspective it's very easy to think about it from the perspective of like police are bad how do we change the police when in fact the police mental health is a very real issue in this country and across the world um that was something that we just know from talking to the chief that it's like at the top of his priority list so it's just there's no reason for us to get into that and so that's what the comments fell into it was usually stuff that we either either we couldn't do wasn't really in our purview or in a couple of instances well you know we thought it was really good feedback that we wanted to incorporate into the report so there we are unless you have anything to add there yeah no just said i think we can um just bring this home here and then open it up because i see we have a hand but i wanted to just uh let you know that we did work really closely with the city we appreciated their support every step of the way and with mpd around providing the information and then this this slide just shows the positions that the city took on the different recommendations that we put forward and moving forward um we we were asked moving forward what to do you know in terms of next step so we would we would love to see early action on the areas where there's alignment between uh you know city staff and um the police review committee and then you know of course create some public engagement around that but also then allow for additional and deeper discussion on ones that uh where that is also warranted um we also would recommend a future committee continue to look in these issues and others and this um this document this presentation will be available online for folks who are looking for the rest of the slides and you know to get more detailed with them but why don't we open it up now i know we've been here for a long time chatting so why don't we just open it up and um Mayor Watan i'll hand it back to you and end the show well first of all i i just want to thank the committee for their incredible work on this document it is so professional and and well presented and uh i think it's going to be fodder for some really good discussion and we're i'm just so grateful for your um on your diligence in this task and even though you know we we said maybe could you have it by you know the middle of summer i am grateful that uh we have such a thorough report here even though it's it's october that's perfectly fine um so uh so again uh so um we're gonna jump to clarifying questions um if you don't understand something or need something to be um clarified with the council we're gonna do that and so um morgan and zack i see your hands if you can hold your your thoughts or comments don't forget it um we'll get there in in just a second um clarifying questions if there's none that's okay uh connor they sound like burlington's been talking a lot about you know right sizing the police department up there just to be clear this committee did not come up with a number of what is the right amount of officers to have or if we need an increase a decrease it's we didn't i will tell you um councilor casey connor i don't know what i'm supposed to call you um the uh that is a hard question that is a really really really hard question and i would say within a week of me joining the committee we think we realized that that was a question that we probably weren't going to be able to answer because each community has different needs and each community is distinct in many different ways and i will say that we saw no evidence that there are far too many or far too few police officers in montpelier um we didn't see that evidence and i you know i'm saying that we is no suggestion that we are on one extreme or another um i think arguments could be made and probably will be made that we are we're too far in one direction or too far in the other direction but no it's just it's not a um it's just not that simple you know what i mean it's just not that simple and it's especially hard in a small town if you want 24-hour coverage i have one question which could either be for you or for the chief the trainings that are recommended in this report i i got the sense that those are not trainings that we currently do i just wanted to confirm that that is true chief can answer that i think in some instances the answer is we already do some of this type of training and we're just asking for more but chief you're better equipped than me mayor members of the city council good evening mayor members of the city council uh folks before i started like to really put out there that the prc were an extraordinarily engaged group they asked a lot of tough questions and they asked a lot of rightful questions and in their heart and their passion was really easy to see they were extraordinarily good to work with and they were critical they were but they were constructively critical um so i've viewed that as as an ally ship of what we did they brought a lot of insight to us um so and and they stepped up at a time that the community was asking for and they volunteered a lot of time so i just want to make that announcement um how appreciative the department is for what they've done and for helping us to give you know more of a north star to the direction that we want to go and to validate what we're looking at as far as our strategic planning uh in answering your question ma'am yes the department does some form of training but we would like to do more so as we're looking at those types of training opportunities some of them could be budget neutral horse i think a lot of them could because we have partnerships uh with subject matter experts all across the the country and we also have a local pool of folks in the community that have reached out to us whether phone or email volunteering their services to provide training to the department thank you very much um okay other uh jennifer if this was covered or not um i'm just wondering as far as like human trafficking are there plans um for human trafficking uh like part of the department is that happening i guess my question is is human trafficking happening no like a committee or is is work being done on human trafficking i suppose the chief could uh could answer that question i i'm not gonna answer for the chief chief sorry boss sorry yes ma'am we are we're part of the vermont state human trafficking okay perfect thank you any other clarifying questions at this point donna go ahead thinking to connor's question about right sizing we've had several reports from consultants saying at various times right size right size particularly as a state capital and yet we have a lot of overtime so if indeed the community is asking for more police services that overtime might be reduced if some of the non-criminal incidents move to another kind of response is do you feel the overtime would be better addressed if we kept the police the same size but directed some of these incidents to a better resource to address them we would get rid of some overtime it's a really complicated question um i mean the chief can answer that but i mean you're talking yeah chief go for it i think that there is a uh it depends type of an answer um some of the training so if we're looking at sending officers and staff members to various types of training we're going to need folks to cover their shifts uh to make that availability and then if we then if there are other agencies that the that that will handle certain calls for service that the department will no longer do the city council will have to look at funding those positions as well so it i think it ultimately depends on the situation and i think at the end of the day there's at the end of the day the city and the police department need to decide what the appropriate amount of staffing at any given time in terms of sworn officers is how many officers do you want on in that moment and that's where this whole thing starts because once it's from there everything flows because it's just math if you want three officers on at all times you have a minimum department size unless somebody's working everybody's working 80 hours a week and so that's where the discussion needs to start and then you can move that and move forward from there and that is the hard question thank you um go ahead follow as a follow-up when you talked about the police of body cameras i agreed with your statements that it seems there's no proof as far as and i wish maybe you could go over your own wording you were saying there wasn't data that really showed they work to reduce crime to reduce incidents i can't remember your language sure yeah there's there is a little evidence at this point to suggest that body worn cameras deter police misconduct and so far as they don't prevent police from doing bad things however they record what they do is they record a lot of things there's also some criticism that well you know officers don't necessarily always turn them on they don't you know they don't necessarily follow the procedures that you should be the best practices with body worn cameras body worn cameras only provide one limited perspective if you ever look through a camera you can see that you have a small window that you're looking through these are all fair and reasonable criticisms all of them but you'll see in the report that the aclu vermont and the aclu generally have developed a framework of policies and procedures for using body worn cameras that they think will maximize accountability and transparency and as a criminal defense attorney i can tell you that i always want the footage hundred hundred times out of a hundred i want the footage i know that some people think that that's not true that like all defendants are guilty you always want the footage because the worst version of anything that you are ever going to see for your client is the police report because that is told from the perspective of the police um and that and again like you are always the hero of your own story i'm not i don't say that to uh as as a slight to the police you are the hero of your own story so i always want the different perspective and that was what really drove me to support this but again huge cost i mean you're talking about the cost of a street outreach worker to put body worn cameras on everybody so and i really appreciate that was there any data on attitude thing that bothers me the most is attitude was there any data on the change of community attitude between police in the community because of cameras i can't answer it okay well i could if i were smarter but i can't answer i'm gonna go to lauren and then alissa i see you've got your hand up so i'm gonna go in that order yeah i just wanted to make sure alissa could weigh in oh okay oh sorry no it's okay alissa go ahead no more alissa yeah no i just was hoping to try to answer um one of the questions that was coming up which is i you know you were talking about the size of police force earlier i think um counselor kasey was talking about that maybe counselor base was all was also talking about that and um one thing that was very clear though we didn't get to a specific number and as justin said we're not out of whack when you look at the ratios you know our numbers of our police forces versus similarly size one thing that was very clear from the community was uh um interest in dedicating resources to non-police responses whenever you could like if you if it wasn't a violent crime matter if there wasn't a missing person like if it wasn't a criminally oriented response that was necessary the thinking was shift it to social worker peer response you know to support you know folks in mental suffering from mental health crises and street outreach workers around helping the unhoused so that was just a true theme and i just want to be clear about that because the fullest application of that theme you know might impact the way that staffing you know occurs and that is something for the council to ultimately consider um if you took that to the full extent oh yes go ahead if i may so it just just uh it's a quick nugget so when when looking at personnel staffing for police agencies there's often a standard formula that's used that's based on training needs uh calls for service and and everything it's uh so i can bring that formula up but in looking at just normal regular staffing based on not regular staffing but just based on what staffing looks like across the nation the fbi releases those types of data numbers in vermont or than mob healers in the center based on the the like the nighttime population of a population of 7200 but then there are other issues that you look at when it belongs to to the daytime thank you okay um the other like go ahead kind of just uh social worker positions lately recommended add in 1.5 it's curious we're sharing it with barry now uh with the thought that it's better just embedded in the mpd or is there a benefit in sharing it between the two communities which do serve similar populations sometimes in terms of the benefit of embedding i'll let the chief answer that but just to be clear the social worker position was social worker or a combination of social worker and street outreach workers and that it was very important to one of our committee members um in so far as the street outreach workers have been found to be more effective in a number of different circumstances i'm sorry did i say street outreach workers i meant peer support worker is what i meant so peer support workers have been found to be more effective than individuals who are necessarily associated with the police department and are better at deescalating and there's just all sorts of evidence that that they could be more effectively used so that isn't totally answering your question but yeah i i think we would i think the committee would prefer to see the social worker embedded with the mpd i know there's an office space issue there's all sorts of issues surrounding it but yeah so i'm with the executive board of cit international cit international position and in mind humbly is that um that there is a partnership less than an embedded social worker position so even though in some communities based on resources or availability of resources that it may make more sense to have a social worker that's actually embedded with the department um but i'm of the position that it may behoove us because washington county mental health services has been doing has had this partnership with mpd for over 20 years and they've been so a lot of folks are talking about the cahoots model in oregon washington county's been doing this as well so i think there's a pride in what vermont has been doing that's not seldom recognized um and what a gem that we have with washington county here i am in contact and conversations with gary gordon and mary moulton to see what that might look like to bring that information forward to the council the council is interested in in seeing what that might look like or what their preference as the experts are but i also want to let uh let folks know that there are a lot of calls for service related to mental health or behavioral health issues that don't even make it to the police department that go straight to washington county mental health services as well and and actually let me just add a little bit that councilor bay can be half a second so i suppose i was um when i was answering that question we actually don't envision a fully embedded social worker in so far as necessarily um part of the police department we envision it similar to what it is right now where that social worker would be contracted out with a mental health services provider like wcmhs and i can't remember the second point but it was important oh with regard to oh damn chief all right councilor b okay because jack also has his hand up but if it relates the report actually says add 1.5 and that's to the half social worker we have plus the peer support right for adding and that's what recommendations are yes the the 1.5 is a combination of social worker and peer support worker from remembering the yeah but it's added to the two two positions we now have not full time the two positions we now have we now have half a social worker and we have a peer peer support well don't have the street outreach worker so there's a outreach worker so a little different yeah and if i also may let the council know that there is a CIT steering committee that includes um uh yes the crisis intervention team and uh so there is a CIT steering committee team that has already been stood up and um kareem from psychic survivors dr depman uh the berlin police chief uh james papriand um joe allsworth uh we have um please come too um christin chandler yes christin chandler is so she and mark depman are kind of like co-chairs of it so the CIT steering committee is basically um voices of the entire community gary gorton's also on that so that CIT team is going to look at what the response model have a recommended response model based on fire ems uh washington county mental health service police the entire gambit homeless outreach uh folks um who are with circle folks who are with just just the entire range within the community what should the response model look like look at having dispatch divert resources based on that and then incoming with the new 988 system so um i would be be remiss to telling you that probably i anticipate standing up an actual CIT program uh in montpelier within the next probably our first training within the next three or four months um jack and then if it's okay with folks i'd like to get to public comment okay go ahead thank you i just following up on the questions that have been being raised um i think it's fair to say that the uh committee for the mo was more interested in in making sure we had enough of a resource for of uh social work and uh and peer advocate personnel than quibbling about whether it's going to how much is going to be here it's going to be shared between between here and barry the bigger question that i think we're mostly addressing was do we have enough to meet the need and uh it's it's very clear from our review of the activities of the montpelier police department that there's a whole lot of if if people think that uh the police are rolling out every time there's anything that looks like a mental health crisis that is far from the case in montpelier there's a lot it's already non-police response okay unless there's any other burning clarifying questions mayor watson so sorry to interrupt i wanted to clarify the numbers that we were just saying because i'm just i just want to make sure we're just clear on the numbers of fte's we're talking about in these two different situations and then happy to just open it up but the additional social worker and peer support resources would add 1.5 fte's and that is based off of the need that we saw essentially um from the calls coming in and conversations with the department and the that those what i just talked about the additional 1.5 fte's is are to to address mental health needs the street outreach worker to focus on the unhoused community would be adding an additional and i believe i think this is very confusing in the way we wrote it and so i totally own this but it would be adding capacity to equal 1.5 fte's total so it would basically be taking dawn's time plus another fte and together they would be 1.5 fte's so that's the difference in those numbers and just wanted to be clear about that and happy to hear from the public thank you uh okay uh jack we're approaching our standard 830 break time i wonder if it might make sense to take the break now rather than break up the uh discussion um we could do that um i yeah um i i guess i'd well i'd prefer to at least start if that's okay and then we might have to take a break in the middle of public comment um but yeah what i'd like to do is i want to start with abby since they had their hand up um before the meeting even began and then uh we'll go to morgan and then zack and then dawn um after that i'm going to prioritize people who are here in person um if any anyone in person wants to make a comment and then we'll go back to folks who may be with us uh digitally so uh and but just as a heads up to everybody we're gonna try to take a break around 830 okay um all right abby go ahead um in honor of indigenous people's day um two days ago and in light of um the land acknowledgement which was actually not acknowledged today in our um vocalization of the report i'd just like to read uh the acknowledgement that i wrote so the police review committee acknowledges that our work was done on the unceded land of the abbenaki people this land was stewarded by the abbenaki people for thousands of years before the arrival of europeans to turtle island the abbenaki people's relationship with this land predates the formation of the city of mont gillier washington county the state of vermont and the united states of america the genocide destructive resource extraction and land theft that european colonizers use against the indigenous population are serious crimes against humanity today indigenous people are still forcibly removed from their lands targeted for violence and criminalized at disproportionate rates the city of mont gillier currently has no policies or practices that strengthen settler and indigenous relations support indigenous sovereignty return land or otherwise uplift the abbenaki people we urge the city to commit to policies and practices that go beyond simply acknowledging the original peoples in a nation founded in genocide racism and land theft we must pursue their antithesis anti-racism indigenous knowledge and leadership and returning land to indigenous peoples thank you and i was also thinking about that that was an important part of the the report so thank you um all right uh morgan go ahead can you hear me okay yes thank you uh so my name is wogan w brown and i'm a mape resident in district three listening to the police review committee report presentation and mention about concerns regarding the shooting death of mark johnson it came to mind and is my observation as well as opinion that all the justifications and excuses employed in defense of the police aside he essentially was perceived as a monster and was put down as if he was a rabid animal mark johnson was not a monster nor a rabid animal and he as well as a community deserve deserved much better my opinion thank you thank you morgan zach go ahead um my my internet my cutting out hopefully doesn't uh i just would like to thank oh no you just cut out that is unfortunate you know if um it looks like he's frozen potentially just a tremendous partner and i just want to point out a couple things tonight i i think it's easy to say we're not going to respond to non-violent situations um i'm concerned that when this was rolled out because it has been rolled out the mpd will not respond to certain situations and we've been told what those are um but unfortunately prior we were not informed of that so in my work we're in my training when i have a client who is out of control and i call for help and i'm told oh call the screeners for that and we're told in our training to call mpd which we did and we're told differently as a client is out of control because a group of people have said let's not respond to certain situations i think that in the future if you're going to do that if you're going to make a major policy shift please let your partners know um because it's not fair that my fellow staff got things thrown at them and we were told oh we're not responding because you need to call screeners for that and i think that people sitting on these committees need to understand what is really at stake plus we rarely call you for help so i just want to be very clear it's my last resort to call the police department in for help on the same token i appreciate you pete for meeting with gary gordon and my director case greer and we worked it out and i am training my workers now with my supervisor to react differently thank you very much thank you and zack i want you to know that um your comments cut out there uh just before between the point when you said i might cut out and then um you were you were just saying i want to point out this this point about calling um screeners versus the um appeal your police department if you wanted to backtrack to what the first part of your comment was i want to make uh what i what i just want to say is just basically the issue of just shifting to a non-police response is not enough for me i think you need to notify your partners that you're going to do that and that we are expected to do something different because it's just not okay i i think before chief p came along we had this expectation they came out they helped us it was a partnership and suddenly we're left with someone throwing things at us and or being out of control and at least two or three situations response was not properly given thank you okay thank you okay i want to just point out it is uh 8 30 uh don you are up next and um i'm hoping that you can hang on to your thought until we get back is that okay um that's that's fine with me that's great okay great um so we are going to take our standard 10 minute break um and so we'll meet back at 8 41 about all right cool thank you okay i have enough time to eat oh we're almost all back here a minute early even i am gonna eat a little bit here though all right we are all back and it is 8 41 um i'm gonna turn it back to don and then after don i'm going to check with folks in person if there's anyone who would like to make a comment who's here and then we'll go back to uh taking comments from folks digitally uh don go ahead thank you um apologies if i'm being redundant but i can't see the the paper or the recommendations um just wanted to comment on two things one regarding the potential requirement for increased post secondary education for police officers i think that would be a huge mistake you've probably already said that but i feel that um strongly that targeted training would be a much better approach and would not eliminate qualified people um so perhaps targeted training in de-escalation trauma awareness of marginalized populations and preventing officer burnout would be a lot more helpful than some kind of degree um the other thing is although i hate to mention it what i've seen recently is possibly because of the changing conditions in the unhoused population seeing a bit more violence out there and i feel like um we need more street outreach both for safety and effectiveness we are working more closely with the police recently but i think that whatever additional support i do think we can reduce the time wastage and expense of officer response to non-criminal situations but i do think that since a lot of the concerning incidents are likely to occur off hours that an embedded social worker i don't know if if you do ever have social workers that go out with the police after hours but i do think that whoever responds there's a greater need for after hours and geographically flexible responses rather than somebody in an office so whether it's additional police additional peer or street outreach we need more street outreach and we need more people who can respond where people are physically and after hours um and just as a minor point current street outreach is also peer outreach thank you um don can i ask you a question about that could you clarify for us and maybe this is also a question for other people too but could you clarify the difference between uh street outreach worker and a peer support i'm the peers both well street outreach is an unbelievably broad term and what it actually is depends on who's doing it and who is hiring them to do it um it also changes in response to needs which change a lot i guess my feeling is that peer peer support can either be approached in a non-hierarchical manner by someone who has lived experience or at least training in it's kind of a more it's a more hierarchical less goal-oriented approach where you are depending a lot more on on relationship and trust which really works wonders with the escalation it's slightly it can be more goal-oriented but it's it's often used to describe people with lived experience in in the situation the type of situations that exist in the population we're dealing with um i don't know if that answers your question or not but it's just it's a really broad it's a very broad term not all three reaches peer support not all peer support is street outreach i feel like when you can when they overlap that's really that's really useful um because if you're dealing with really marginalized populations who are disillusioned have major trauma and mental health issues they often respond a lot better to somebody who's perceived as a peer in some way than they do to the system which many people have been have a great distrust of and may have had bad experiences with thank you i appreciate that it may involve training in in peer support models which which i have which not everybody has but and it may not be essential for everyone but it sometimes involves training in methods of communication with people and sometimes it's you know like i said it's flexible okay thank you all right so from here i want to just check in with folks who are present with us for the meeting would anybody like to make a comment uh yes so again if you say your name where you live and try to keep your comments about two minutes that'd be great thank you thank you for letting me join you tonight i appreciate the time that you're giving me to speak out and if you get right up close to the microphone i do maybe i need to tip it you may yes i do ask that you enter this information into your record my name is maggie caron i'm speaking as a Vermont chair for new englanders against sexual exploitation and what i'd like to do is read a short transcript from a little video called the oldest um the oldest oppression so see if i can read through the fog of my glasses right so i'm going to be naming people who are speaking short parts in this and the first person is trisha grant speaking as a survivor and she writes when i was be well in the video when i was being trafficked in vermont i was a minor i was 15 years old and every time when i was in my home in main and i knew that they were going to be that we were going to be brought to vermont i became frightened because it was the one place where i knew i would be brought and i never knew if i was going to end up coming home or not the people who purchased me none of them cared about me none of them cared about who i was or how old i was or if i wanted to be there they had an agenda which sometimes can be brutally violent i know the other survivors that i've mentored and worked with have been brought to vermont in many areas homes hotels motels massage parlors strip clubs bachelor parties i can honestly say that a hundred percent of the women that i've worked with and i've worked with close to a thousand people i have not personally met even one person who said that they wanted to be there and that this is empowering for them or exciting or something they love doing not one next is the executive director for the coalition against trafficking and women who says when you're talking about prostitution you're talking about a system of brutal exploitation then from prostitution and trafficking survivor associate director my life my choice the women that i encountered they are so beaten so traumatized another prostitution and trafficking survivor from a rebecca speaks out the vast majority have been abused manipulated forced into it or they're trapped by circumstance national director for world without exploitation those who are being bought are women and girls of color who are mostly poor prostitution and trafficking survivor peer mentor advocate ria house i was turned out when i was 14 years old every time i tried to run away there was no resources for me not a day that i've ever spent in the life of prostitution was okay for me somebody who's unnamed said 99% of the buyers are men director of intervention intervention exodus cry says you can't fully achieve quality between men and women while there is this gender-based form of exploitation co-founder organization for prostitution survivors says the problem originates with men so unless we tackle the issue of demand there's going to be generation after generation of vulnerable populations who are hurt and precisely this way ceo of child safe every single policymaker needs to go to a hobby board where these buyers congregate and read what they have to say time and again they are demonstrating that what they feel they're buying is a commodity not a human being a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for king county washington says a lot of men are deterred from engaging in prostitution because it's illegal and if you were to take that illegality out of the equation you would have an increase in demand in order to meet that demand you would have a supply that would need to increase vice president of advocacy and outreach at the national center on sexual exploitation says a study from the london school of economics analyzed 150 countries wherever prostitution was legal demand for it skyrocketed and sex trafficking increased prostitution and trafficking survivor rebecca speaks out says i was actually trafficked through the legal system of prostitution in nevada in the brothels and because of that legal market the sex trade in nevada is 63 percent higher than the next highest state co-founder from awaken says nevada is number two in the country for women to be murdered by men number six in the country for women to be raped by men and the top 10 for youth to be trafficked professor from university of rhodo island says rhodo island decriminalized prostitution in 1980 and then ended it in 2009 it was becoming a sex tourist destination it started attracting attracting organized crime and because the local law enforcement simply couldn't investigate prostitution the state could not participate in federal investigations of sex trafficking of minors and then unnamed legalization full decriminalization these have been tried and these have failed both remove restriction on pimps sex buyers and brothel keepers especially full decriminalization where are there virtually no regulations so they can exploit without they can exploit with immunity and then another unnamed says so if you're considering legalizing prostitution my message is talk to survivors of track trafficking talk to people who have walked through this talk to people who have experienced this firsthand not just people who are advocating for decriminalization and finally the last unnamed people say it's the oldest profession it's actually the oldest oppression now I would just leave you with that thank you thank you yeah that would be great thank you for the past 30 years I've been a full-time researcher and focused on evaluating criminal justice policies and and practices and for 20 years I've had a series of of studies funded by the federal government looking at exactly this issue of sex work sexual exploitation prostitution whatever you want to call it and well I applaud the the committee's work to you know get as much information as you can it really actually was very little real data or real research informing the recommendation to fully decriminalize prostitution I'm more than happy to drown you in my bibliography's got over 30 000 sources in it you know so you're you're welcome to it but I just want to get to consider a few things what is being proposed here is just to take the most dangerous way you can make money and that's that's without question it is the most dangerous way you can earn money and it's from 17 to 100 times more dangerous than number two on the list and then the solution is to fully deregulate it absolutely no regulations of any kind right no health no safety no licensing no competency no oversight nothing fully decriminalizing prostitution would allow any home any apartment any nail salon to become a brothel and there's nothing you can do about it because exchanging for money for sex is not against the law if this ordinance were to pass I'll leave you with one other thought you talked about getting community you know feedback I interviewed 47 convicted sex traffickers that were in federal prison for a different project with 22 of them we had conversation about decriminalizing prostitution and ask the question would it have been better or easier for you to be a sex trafficker to traffic human beings if prostitution were decriminalized fully or would you prefer it to remain criminalized the typical response was to laugh and to say you've got to be kidding me that's a stupid question the answer is so obvious and I said well tell me anyway 100 of convicted sex traffickers would prefer to operate in an environment where there are no prohibitions against prostitution so I really want to ask you to consider whether giving sex traffickers the policy of their dreams is something you really want to do thank you thank you hello my name is Seth Collins I live in Berlin Vermont and I would have to agree with what has already been said is that uh in my opinion prostitution is sort of like a warning sign that there is often often some type of predatory dynamic or some type of trafficking under the service it may not be in the specific incident but but there is still there's still often you know there's still often something something that is that it's what it is is to listen to for the untold story thanks so much thank you anyone else in person Steve Whitaker I want to commend the amount of work that went into it I attended a number of the meetings but I want to caution that due to the makeup of the committee which I think was uh selected with uh possibly a predetermined narrowing of the but of the opportunity for critical analysis uh analysis of current police practice having been in this town over 30 years and had police officers steal from me lie lie to me lie to the court uh and steal beer from you know defenseless homeless people unopened beers harass grieving attorneys who are drinking beer and grieving grieving with their friends on private property and then have a chief subvert and a Vermont state police investigation into the shooting of Mark Johnson it is none of this made it into the report I mean this type of accountability and an acknowledgement of what has gone wrong has to be the foundation of building rebuilding trust so this this report while it does have some useful insight and analysis it falls far short of what we need right now this community is is divided over the garage is divided over the mark johnson shooting and we're still pretending that everything's just fine and we can just keep barreling along but for we it's I hate to pop your little bubble um current police practice requires an acknowledgement of theft deceit harassment uh subverted investigation Chad being responsible for two different deaths one where he broke somebody's arm who died soon thereafter and breaking somebody's ribs in an overreaction to a child smoking pot you know so it these these three incidents didn't give a warning flag that maybe this guy shouldn't have a gun just me yeah you say a lot of false no that's a false statement that mr beanbrook anyone's ribs in relation to a pot smoking incident and if you're gonna come in here continue to make false statements I've got the records from the police department documenting that mr you look at that and see which call it was I've got the backup if y'all need it and I'm glad that you put yourself on the line there when you didn't have your facts straight uh this report is really blind to the work that has been going on with regionalization of services that much of this new paradigm of what they're calling reinventing 911 so where the the 911 calls have a whole much broader set of tools at their disposal that folds right into the regionalization and a uh a regional response to dispatch and and PSAP uh and this report is blind to that and this this this ties directly into what I raised at the beginning of the meeting we should not be entering a new five-year contract with a dysfunctional capital west that sweeps all its errors under the rug and then it's marked for discussion and you don't even have a discussion when the one person who did have a handle on it is no longer on the council so I ask you to take action tonight while you still can to reconsider that vote to approve that contract and have a put it on an agenda for a future meeting I believe that clerk called to my attention that a motion to reconsider has to be done at the next meeting so my public comments at this public hearing of the police review commission were not recorded because the city staff was not present and whoever had access to hit the record button in the zoom button in the zoom recording could not was not allowed to start the recording so I was unable to re recall and rephrase in a much more compressed time frame uh the detailed comments that I gave early on at the most recent public hearing on the draft the social worker and and street outreach worker those are you're in effect proposing to subcontract those out to nonprofits that are not accountable nor subject to public records law I believe that any contract that for street outreach to Good Samaritan or another way or even Washington County mental health has to be have a condition that they with redactions for confidentiality uh adhere to public records law otherwise the city is advocating its responsibility for transparency um one other incident where a local person was detained but not arrested and told he was not being arrested but if he either had to go to Phoenix house or go to jail but he wasn't going to be arrested that's coercion that's what our police department does and that that just can't be allowed that stuff goes on investigated I brought issues to the internal affairs officer years ago and they were never addressed they were ignored they were swept under the rug I saw that officer later and he says I was about to retire why would I make waves that's an example of what the the legacy that we're trying to grow out of here but you don't grow out of it by continuing to sweep it under the rug uh dispatch is three to four hundred thousand dollars of our budget of the police budget and in this discussion of how do we reallocate resources that regional approach to dispatching and PSAP in an accelerated manner not five years from now is is the essential is essential to getting this right it's starting to reallocate these resources towards uh human services instead of police response that should be enough for now just trust the breach of trust will not be healed uh by whitewashing with this report thank you anyone else in person wish to comment okay um so turning to um the zoom uh Annie Sawyer I see you have your hand up uh go ahead Annie I would like to speak to the heart of our community um I don't know how many of you there in this committee actually witnessed um seeing the outpouring of love and tribute that happened in the aftermath of um this man's murder because I I do think that myself I would say that it was a cold-blooded murder and um when you look at something like that you could perhaps compare it to say um the case of George Floyd you know where you see communities come out and give these beautiful tributes that and our tributes lasted well past the event um but instead of a person of color you know you're seeing a person in the mental health community now the mental health community is so incredibly stigmatized and I'm speaking out as a peer and I am once again appealing to your hearts if you saw how much love there was for that man how could you think otherwise than you know that he was a someone who was you know beloved and respected in this community and just because you know he didn't act like others should he have just been shot dead you know there must be better ways in which officers can be in fact schooled so that such a thing would just not happen so that we can have guardians of you know of the city you know act in such a way that uh that will spare human life because uh to see it go any other way I think brings great shame upon this community thank you Annie I don't want to cut you off if you have more to say but that's all I will say right now thank you okay um yes go ahead Justin I was hoping to briefly respond to comments regarding the prostitution recommendation I just want to clarify a couple things in case it's not clear in the report the committee is not advocating for the decriminalization of sex work that is not the recommendation the recommendation has recommended that the city council remove and repeal the public ordinances related to consensual sex work in the city the impact that that has in terms of the criminalization of sex work is essentially zero because local communities do not create criminal laws states create criminal laws sex the consensual sex work will remain illegal in the state of Vermont human trafficking will remain illegal in the state of Vermont if you click through to the ordinance that you see that we want to repeal you'll see that it's quite antiquated and quite sexist and um I think many if not all of the individuals that read it would uh would understand that it needs to be repealed but the committee is not taking the position that all sex work should be decriminalized there are certainly members on the committee I think that would consider themselves um of the position that consensual sex work should be decriminalized but that is not at all the committee's position I would also note that in no way is the committee suggesting that human trafficking should be legalized and as an attorney and a criminal defense attorney who has defended a number of criminal traffickers in my time criminal trafficking or human trafficking laws are quite broad and give uh give prosecutors ample power to prosecute individuals in human trafficking really you touch sex work in any way that involves the use of force or coercion you can be prosecuted and we would never ever advocate for those for those laws to be repealed and in so far as the committee recommended support for H268 as Alyssa said that is that's already moved so here we are thank you all right um anyone else online wish to make a comment okay all right so we're gonna um I'm sorry I think it's important that abby yeah sure yeah no that's okay I just uh abby's uh hand go up so go ahead abby um I just wanted to clarify that um there were a lot of instances from the two public comments um in which minors were involved with human trafficking um that is not sex work in any situation of sex being exchanged for money um where there is a minor involved that's human trafficking that's sex trafficking and that's not at all what sex workers want or what this committee wants um so it's really important that we um just have that distinction between the two um yeah yeah um and uh I just if you um there are a lot of resources linked under the sex work recommendation that prove that when sex work is decriminalized sexual health of the population increases and it there are actual benefits to decriminalization of sex work um so it's not I think there was a comment that said it's like the most dangerous profession um that's not true and there are real tangible benefits to this okay thank you all right anyone else um online with us want to make a comment okay all right so um I'm gonna turn to the council for some thoughts about next steps and I I'm gonna start if that's okay um there are so I counted 12 uh separate recommendations uh that are in this report um I think they all deserve for their conversation and um you know I was actually really glad to see that you all the the committee um did the the work ahead of time of breaking up like these are the um recommendations where there's already alignment between the city and the um police review committee um and so that is that's where I would start may not be where I would end but I I think um my my proposal would be that we take these up um at future meetings because I I mean this as a as a whole this even just the report itself has taken up a lot of time and that's fair because it's a it is a meaty topic and it's worth talking about um but each one of these things I think could also themselves have a lot of discussion um as we've already seen um so I would um I would propose that we start to take them up one at a time um and have the the rich discussion about them and uh and then be able to move forward or figure out our next steps um for one one topic at a time if that makes sense to you because I don't um I think we could also get uh sort of sucked into talking about one of these topics um right now and I think they're they're worth um further conversation perhaps with more time than we have even remaining this evening um so and I and knowing that some of these do have budgetary implications um we do have a budget meeting coming up or we're starting to have budget conversations and so um those are those are timely so I would recommend that we at least put those at the um at the at least at the head of the conversation because we're going to need to have some decisions about those sooner rather than later um that is not to ignore the rest of them but just because of uh the timing of our process um that's that's where I'm wanting to start other thoughts or or whatnot yes go ahead um yeah thanks I mean I generally agree with the approach and I'm glad to hear that we want to move forward and and look at these I mean I do think there's a set of them that we could probably you know like sure let's have the conversation but like some of the training ones and demilitarization which is essentially just codifying status quo and there's some that are asking MPD to basically go back and do some policy work and come back to us so I think there's probably like a suite that we could move forward relatively quickly and then I mean it makes total sense then to prioritize the ones with budget implications given the timing and kind of work our way through there but I think we might be able to move through so yeah a bunch of them um more quickly than than than that probably I'm eager to take up all of them and hope we can kind of keep on track and keep momentum going yeah great other thoughts or comments from the council is this oh yeah go ahead Jay there's one good question it's sort of open ended to the committee is um it seems that with with some of these recommendations there might be opportunities to partner with the state or look to the state for consolidated resources and I wondered if you know thinking in the weeds a little bit about sort of archiving body camera footage just as a as an example I wonder if in your conversation um there was any thought given to how you know could we be looking to to maximize or to minimize our budget our budget implication on a local level if we could if we could maximize efficiency on a state level thanks for all of these types of things that's why it's very hard for small towns to have body cameras because of these large overhead costs at this point I would think that if you could somehow um enter into a partnership through with the communities in Vermont that it would be significantly cheaper given how cheap storage is these days um but anyway yes that was a conversation that both happened and should happen and I'm sure the chief can connect you in greater detail about it and certainly a point for further yeah for further conversation um any any other thought this is sounding like an okay path forward maybe there's a suite of things that we can go through quickly but we also need to talk about budget budgetary items okay um then at this point I think we could probably have a a motion to accept the report and you know direct staff to to come up with a sort of a list of future agenda items based on this does that sound reasonable okay is there yeah is there a motion to that effect make a motion to accept the report as recommended by the mayor to pull out the items that we need to consider particularly this year for budgetary considerations sure is there a second okay um there's a motion and a second uh further conversation okay all in favor please say aye and opposed okay thank you again um and please pass along our thanks to the rest of the committee yes I think uh I think it makes sense we we've had a city uh employee accused multiple times in public comment and I think it's important to point out uh that the person mentioned was cleared by two independent investigations of the state police and the attorney general so I I think you know the council does need to make a statement just to stand by that employee if indeed we do and I think we do in this case the mark johnson um case was an absolute tragedy and I think we need to learn and hopefully some of the recommendations in this report can steer us to avoiding a situation like that in the future but um I think city council does need to stand by our staff in this case and uh just wanted to put that on the record thank you any other comments folks want to make okay oh yes jack just uh very briefly as we're coming to to an end um from working on the committee um people on the committee put in a tremendous amount of work um everybody on the committee came to this project with open minds I think everybody on the committee had their uh had their minds changed and did not wind up at the end of the committee of the process exactly where they were at the beginning of the process I think the the chief in particular and the uh Montpelier police department and uh and city staff also were very receptive to the work of the committee and to uh moving forward I think in my uh view of almost a year of working on this project I would say that one of the headlines should be that uh we have a lot to be proud of in our Montpelier police department nobody including us is perfect and there are things that we can do do better but I think we're on track to doing that thank you okay anything else folks would like to say before we move on okay oh lauren go ahead just adding the gratitude you know so it was incredible amount of work um that went into this like city staff uh the chief the whole team at mpd and um all of the volunteers and also just wanted to thank I mean it was referenced in the report that we got 550 you know pieces of public input there were so many people that took their time to show up and present to us to have you know offline conversation so we got an incredible amount of public engagement around this and you know just a lot of people's like time and stories and heart like put into you know what we're doing well and what we can do better so I just wanted to express that gratitude as well and my you know ongoing eagerness to keep moving this work forward so thank you to everyone on the committee and everyone in the community and city staff who contributed so much to it thanks um there was a question about whether the report could be made available in hard copy and I just as a start I am guessing that if someone got in touch with the city and wanted a hard copy that we could provide that for them okay great all right super thank you again um yeah yep okay I just want to acknowledge that it is about 920 and I am going to turn into a pumpkin at 10 and so there is not I I think we may not get through all of the rest of our regularly scheduled things so um yeah did you mention that to me that we continue with the homelessness task force they've been waiting yep um and then the other two items the budget and the strategic planning was staff driven and we can see what time we're at and decide which one you want to do and what and the other one will have to be put off okay so whichever you decide okay sounds good thank you um all right we can get them both in or maybe we can uh all right well I do see uh Ken Russell and rick de angeles uh here with us via zoom um so I'm gonna start with with with you all um turning it over to you hey good evening everybody um Ken Russell uh homelessness task force really pleased to be here um and I just want to start off by thanking our task force members who are incredibly dedicated thoughtful folks who show up at pretty much every meeting and have done for two years um and done a lot of great work done a lot of great work in coalition with um other folks in washington county working on these issues with city staff I'm really appreciated the support of council um support of folks from the faith community and in collaboration um and and it's very interesting coming after that previous conversation and I feel that a lot of what we are proposing is helping to build a system um for the unhoused um that goes in the same direction uh that that was just being discussed um not non-criminalization of folks meeting folks where they are meeting folks peer-to-peer folks with lived experience helping each other um so really glad to be here um and I'm gonna turn it over to rick who I'm uncertain if it's time frame at this point so go ahead rick yeah hi everybody good to be here and I think Ken is exactly right I thought that discussion um the police review committee really helps set the context for our budgetary recommendations I I'm gonna add just a little bit more context and I'll do it as briefly and concisely as I as I can and um what I'm gonna try to just argue with a few statements is that homelessness is a really serious challenge right now for the city of Montpelier and the county as a whole more so than I think in any other time that I can recollect and I've been in the city for over 30 years I was your uh town service officer for I think 10 years at least so um the first statement is that um you know the incidence of homelessness right now in Washington County is more than twice what it is in the state as a whole now if we could do that calculation for the city of Montpelier and there are some challenges with doing that I would say it's probably three times the rate of what it is as the state as a whole so secondly um right now there is a large unsheltered population in the county I think I we're we're right behind Burlington in that regard and a great deal of it probably most of it is centered in Montpelier um there's uh by the numbers there's three numbers that I want to share with you one of them is 300 the second is uh 200 and the third is 50 the 300 number is that's how many people who are on the quote master list or the coordinated entry list for Washington County who are homeless that's a very big number it has changed very little or last year and a half and I don't see this changing dramatically so okay 200 what is 200 that's the number of people who are living in motels right now who are receiving state assistance of voucher and guess what um uh and this isn't the 50 but there's about 50 of them living in Montpelier in the Oconelodge every room in the Oconelodge right now is occupied by somebody that has a emergency voucher so this is right in our right in our city uh the other there's another 50 the third 50 and Don probably will probably give something a little bit higher but it's around 50 are the number of unsheltered unhoused people who are on the streets uh and camping outside and Harbor Park and other places so you know I guess for a big city this wouldn't be uh large numbers but we're a rural community essentially these are very very high numbers so with that that's the preamble that's the context I think most of us kind of know that we've got a problem and with that we're going to launch right into our budgetary recommendations I'll kick it back to Ken thank you and over here in the studio um I'm going to go ahead and share if I think I'm allowed to do that am I allowed to share my um screen if if not we can like yes okay theoretically yes um here we go all right okay is that showing up yep okay so the first uh recommendation is pure outreach expansion through Good Samaritan Haven and um you know this this would extend current funding um it would cover half an FTE for a year and Don Don is currently working um let me let me get the right numbers here because um she's a .5 FTE and the city pays three quarters of that and Rick is cobbling together other funding for that um you know there was conversation previously about pure versus street outreach Don considers herself both um this certainly goes in the same direction um as as a previous conversation and Don do you want to talk about the importance of pure outreach hi I'm sure um briefly what I not to repeat what I said earlier I think a huge thing with with street outreach is that it reaches underserved populations who are often the most vulnerable are often chronically expensive in terms of contact with police and emergency services are often mistrustful or unable to sit into traditional services they're also geographically they may not come into the offices we have to go out to them and so the you know the other thing is again a lot of this stuff can be after hours you can't really schedule emergencies or opportunities so um and at the moment pretty much the only people out there after hours as far as I know are the police and the street outreach people so I think I've gone over a lot of this before but um I think it's really vitally important that we do have people who can reach out outside of office hours and outside of office buildings and we often do have the trust of more people but we are really really stretched right now and we do we do definitely need more hours I'm certainly working over the hours that I'm paid and there there are other people out there volunteering who are not being paid who are doing really essential work thank you and Zach did you want to weigh in on peer outreach yes I'll try my internet was cutting out a little earlier um I'll do it as quick as I can just that me and Don have had to work together a few times uh just give you a picture uh we worked with someone for five hours out there um and then we had to uh drop him off at one of the parks just to let you know how that is at 10 o'clock at night having to do that because we weren't able to secure uh resources for this gentleman so I just want to give you a snapshot of what that's like out there I know some of you on the task force are new it's that you'd like to come out sometime and kind of see what that's like I'm just giving a snapshot of what that looks like and we do provide a combination of street outreach and peer support I know earlier that was discussed and street outreach does provide peer support as well thank you thank you and in the same vein we are also asking for um some indoor space from um basically five to eight at night um Monday through Friday and four to eight at night on Sundays this would provide some continuity for folks who um before the for the virus would often go to the churches or the congregations during this time of day another way where I work is open till five the the warming shelter would open at eight so this would allow a continuity of place places for people to go um oftentimes it's getting on 211 the emergency line to try to get accommodations or figure out where folks are going to go for the night there'll also be access to bathrooms we've been in conversation with Green Mountain Transit they're they're very open idea um and it had been you know be discussed that um another way would manage that and I just I'm wearing two hats there I recused myself from this boat um we had we had several instances of that when we went through this package because when it comes down to it the folks who are able willing and able to provide some of these services are also the folks serving on this committee um and so we would um so there would be some combination of street outreach workers some of another way staff um and we're hoping volunteers from the congregations to to um have a good strong presence um and the the money we'd be asking for the city for this would would be that that first staff member for each shift but um but I think the staffing does need to be um you know we we want to make sure everybody that that one staff member is well supported in that um there would you know and there's some you know questions about how there's like the transit center program and this is the after hours program um but you know there are those are all details that can be worked out um moving on to emergency motel rooms and Rick I believe you're going to speak to this yeah I'll speak to this uh folks this is just another tool in the toolbox essentially uh to protect life um a good solution on a cold winter night when you can't house somebody somewhere else is that you get them into a motel room as soon as possible and uh you know we've paid for this our our agency quite a few times and uh with the unprecedented unprecedented numbers that we're seeing this year um we thought that this could be a helpful solution uh and what's nice about the O'Connellage if there's a room open there is that people can walk there um so again um nothing magic about this number other than this could be very helpful for us to protect people that have nowhere else to go and you might say well why isn't the state paying for this two reasons uh one some people are not eligible for state assistance and secondly if it's too late at night you can't you can't line up state assistance yeah and and I'll just point out this is a tool that um we've paid from another way budget we we've put up people in crisis um recently mental health crisis uh escaping domestic abuse you know it's and it would you know and it would be I will just advocate right here it would be really great if the governor would keep funding motel rooms because this is what has kept people out of off the street and we're and we're looking at um in two in less than two weeks we're looking at um an infusion of folks onto the streets as winter approaches um and it's going to be dozens of people and I've I've lost track of the exact number Rick do you know the donor anybody else know what the what that number is looking like at this point people who would be ineligible um well there's over 200 in the motels now um I can't um I think it's a very very significant number uh I'm gonna guesstimate about uh you know a third at least yeah um and and then um um all right let's see we're gonna see emergency and we'll we'll move to public comment after after we go through this unless there's a is Morgan do you have a fact insert here or Don I can wait okay yeah just just for clarity on on the facts at this point and we'll have I was just getting in line okay thank you sir okay um moving on to emergency transportation support this is a big need um and it's it's difficult um there's insurance issues um but we we need to make a difference and again it's that after hours time sometimes uh police departments are have some downtime and are able to transport people um you know oftentimes and sometimes it's individuals out of the goodness of their heart out there getting people from point A to point B um and again just fast forward to winter time and when folks it's life and death and and and folks needing to get to medical appointments needing to get to housing needing to get to um you know an office somewhere to get their services needing to get you know food for the for the night you know you can imagine the gamut uh getting to work trying to get you know interview for work so so uh we we um we're investigating different options about this would look like we we do have uh somebody we we pay to to drive right now we can expand that um the ideal thing would be to have the taxi service that would show up or my ride to expand what they were they are doing but um there's other efforts on the countywide level to address this but it's frustrating frankly um how challenging it is um and Don I you're faced with this all the time can you mind adding on a little bit to that yeah I mean to to say what would seem obvious there are three really vital components to getting someone housed there is access which has been a huge problem I think the transit center helps to address that there is capacity you need somewhere to put them but if you can't get them there it's useless um we do absolutely need more transportation support there is zero taxi service at night or on the weekends um it's it's just it's essential I mean it's completely pointless and frequently in the past people have lost their potential emergencies south for 30 days or more in the winter because they were not able to physically get to a room that was reserved for them and that's that's seemed so unnecessary and ridiculous um there there there are other transportation needs as well I think you've mentioned a lot of them can but there there is a serious need here and without transportation some of these other things are completely meaningless so you have to have all three legs of that there if you can't access it if you can't get there if you don't have the capacity then having one or two of those legs is pretty much meaningless for it to work we need all three of those items and you make reference to them losing a motel voucher for a month I mean there's often very punitive rules in place around the use of these public benefits um the other you know in terms of access also the the thing about the transit center it would not just be a warming place for people going to the shelter or a bathroom although these are important but people need a place to use the phone to call for emergency shelter they need a place to wait and a phone to get a call back or they don't get the shelter um and and likewise if they don't have transportation then it's useless and they may lose not just shelter for one night but shelter for 30 days because they didn't get to their room you know and we can't address that at the mum bubble we can do is try to make the system more more effective you know what we do have I don't know if we can increase capacity but we can at least make what we do have actually usable for people yeah and I and I think it's important to point out that imagine your you know bad customer service experience waiting on hold in a really frustrating way imagine doing that when that's the difference between being inside or outside when it's 10 below or or being able to go for a job interview the next day um that there is just one of a bunch of hidden barriers that that unhoused population faces um winter overflow shelter support um Rick could you describe this please yeah sure well as you might imagine with the need that's out there we need emergency housing um I our project at the Twin City Motel unfortunately is not going to be ready this winter we're planning we're going to have two other shelters one in Barrie and one in Barrie town and we have an agreement with the Christ Church to lease the their community building to provide up to 12 beds and so my budget for that this is November 15th through April 15th is about $70,000 and the state will pay I'm hoping the state will pay most of that about 65 and I've asked for a 5,000 here to fill the gap and one thing that I want to provide with that money is food because people come in late at night and they often haven't haven't had anything to eat and um uh it'd be really nice to provide some meals when they show up thank you and then moving along um number six is and this this is um basically planning study money um you know there's sort of two pieces of this a planning study to to to look at the needs and we change some of the language from you know originally it's like a long-term study to a responsive holistic study recognizing that we're not solving homelessness with this year right now that there is a huge tragic situation happening on the streets and we have to be responsive there's been conversations about building little shelters you know pallet homes different structures looking at different pieces of property people trying to push the envelope you know you're up against all sorts of things when you're trying to develop something like flood planes um you know legal challenges ownership issues siting is very very difficult um and so what we need to to push on this there were um there was a great set of um designs for day shelters done by students at Vermont um tech um at a Randolph um and a well done study could be could bring down bigger bucks by having a plan and like okay this is what's really needed what are the nuts and bolts um you know if we if we're going to make a real difference here this is what it's going to take so it's a it would be a planning study and and then the the secondary piece of this is in the something that's been discussed at the county wide level is some studies of the like the root causes of of of why people are out on the streets um and in a good um story that indicates how that can be important there was a there was indication that I think it was 80 percent of a population of unhoused individuals had some form of traumatic brain injury and um some of our local folks um had contacted the researchers on those and and it sounds like that does bear that did bear out they had a sample size of like 123 in the population they were studying um and so that you know that right there were led to like understanding how folks are out there what's what's going on um can help you design a better solution on the other hand you can also say we know what's going on the cost of housing is high um and so I mean there's you know there's there's some balance there I mean and and that sort of give and take between what the heck can we do right now we have an emergency get people you know we need to get people off the street and what can we do everybody's impatient to to fix try to fix this problem um it's incredibly frustrating when the state pulls the rug out um it without a real plan and I and I guess I should also qualify I don't know if everybody is I mean everybody in their hearts wants to solve this problem but people don't know what to do um but this this will move move it forward in a in a in a in a good way that provides some specificity and some planning um so that is our you know our package we we we have exceeded the you know the money allocated um we with some understanding there may be extra money um you know you know from on high that could be available um we're we're grateful for the ongoing support of council um um and we recognize that we're not it's it's frustrating because we're dealing with a lot of human tragedy and we're working really hard to to do the best we can um and but this is with a lot of hard work amongst very dedicated people this is what we've come up with so um and anybody else um from our task force want to add thoughts to this yes this is that real quick and I just want to say that we are attempting to address as many concerns as we can um yeah we've heard a variant of them and you know not it isn't a perfect situation but it's a lot better than what we had 20 years ago here in the city certainly has opened up a lot of discussion and thank you for the continued support of the community and the council and I will just say we're we're having people from other parts of the state contacting us asking us what we're doing what they can learn from us um we're meeting some of us are meeting tomorrow from folks from the from White River Junction um we're getting calls from Rutland we're getting calls from LaMoyle and there's folks all over the state you know trying to to respond to this situation and there's just a lack of affordable accessible housing there are folks working on that Caroline you have your hands up yes I want to do a little bit of clarification on that transportation which is as I understand it it's what happens as somebody shows up late at night it's cold outside they spend a couple of hours they get a voucher for a hotel room the hotel room is in Burlington they have to go to Burlington and there's no way to get there what happens is that they haven't shown up and taken advantage of that so that's when they get put on the list so that they can have housing for 30 days or some other length of time because they turned down what was available so this would would alleviate that situation you could get them to Burlington or White River or wherever the vouchers this is going to be used okay and then I'm gonna I'm gonna pull this off the screen and I can put it back up but I think the next step would be clarification questions from council on any of these asks that is that's fair any clarifying questions I feel like I do have some questions but I'm going to hang on to them for the time being because I want to hear from the public okay any other thoughts questions yeah Connor go ahead I just want to thank the task force for all their work we asked for some specificity in the last few weeks and this is a very detailed report it's a group of people they think who know how to sort of duct tape together budgets and make it work and they know exactly what they need here I would point out that spoiler alert three of our goals the top priority is addressing homelessness out of the sex there so I think this is in line with the direction we're going and it's a very real and immediate need I mean it's pretty unconscionable that the Scott administration would consider in a couple weeks letting so many people out on the street just as the weather is getting cold here so this is very much a band-aid I think approach to fixing some of that but it's very necessary and the consultant dollars I think a lot of the time we feel like we're shooting in the dark here just to have some data have some clarity on how to move forward as we look at a bigger maybe infrastructure project is desperately needed for the conversation so we have all the information we need to make an intelligent decision but again I want to thank Cameron for the through the staff work on this and the entire committee for a really really good set of proposals here oh jack go ahead thanks for the report I think it was great one of the questions I have I'm right on top of the microphone um yeah how's this I'm trying now can people hear me no it's not okay um yeah there I am okay thank you for the report I think it was very good and as Connor said provides exactly what we're we've been asking for one of the questions that I have and it's not the precisely the same hours of the day but there is the proposal for funding for for staffing at the transit center and we we've heard a number of times at our meetings that the the Green Mountain Transit is required contractually obligated to provide staffing for the transit center that they're not doing and I wonder if if Bill or anyone can can give us the answer to what what's going on there is the question I'm not sure how you'd want is is is there a contract that requires that there is a lease with the with GMTA that requires bathrooms to be opened pending their budget their budget availability resources so I so to answer the question we have a lease with GMT that that calls for the bathrooms to be open and them to staff at pending their budget resources and their current resource which comes primarily from the state does not include enough funding for resources now so that's that's the situation I think they're their desire to have it open full time uh as much as we do you know that's I think they're what's causing this request here oh thank thank you that's a great explanation whether we like the outcome or not is another question but but thank you for that clarification any other clarifying yes j go ahead it's um I'm curious I'll project us in case you can hear me I'm curious where the cost estimate for the or how the numbers put together for the emergency hotel rooms where the the 80 plus nights is this meant to be sort of a backstop an emergency situation for usage or is that a number a number based on a certain number of nights relative to folks who are in there now is this just something for kind of a worst-case scenario where it's late at night and there's bad weather to help get through through the next few months in the winter thanks it's I did it it was a back of the envelope calculation and it's what you said right at the end there I called up the owners of the O'Connellage and Hilltop they offered me a negotiated rate and uh and then I just picked the number of nights and that's how we got it and it's I think just go on anything they're just going to say that I think this is particularly necessary in light of the fact that in a normal year pre-covid we would have had 45 am I right on that maximum we would have had 35 I'm sorry 35 overflow shelter beds available per night most of which would have been full in light of the fact that at the moment we are looking at 10 to 12 shelter beds plus I hope this motel room that Rick is talking about we will have the same or greater number of people as we did pre-covid but we have only 10 overflow rooms so you know and we have more people also competing for the I believe competing for the motel room so I would say that this this particular item is is more necessary than it's ever been just on that we've asked the very city council to match that number counselor was as act is uh going to bring that to their attention on future maybe just want to note Don I know you had had your hand up a little earlier if you if you had something else you wanted to add now would be an okay time okay um yeah just again what I what I said is that we do as I just said we have less capacity than we've ever than we've had in the past three or four years and we have more need than we've had so I think this is it's not adequate but it's a really necessary step and even in a normal year when we did have that 35 bed capacity we often had people who did not we often needed an emergency room at that time so with greater need and less capacity we will certainly need to use that okay thank you um can I just with my question well certainly not to uh to question the the really under request but I would we're concerned that it was um too small of a request based on on what the anticipated need was so um that if we if we could get more that would be great good job Don okay uh Stephen you have a comment you want to make and then we're going to go to Morgan yeah the uh as you recall I advocated strongly for a long time to get you to form this task force and ask that you dot packet with service providers who are going to drag anchor take the status quo unfortunately four of the current members are working for another way our good Sam right now and in effect having to recuse themselves leaving less than a quorum voting to approve this budget there is no plan here this emperor has no clothes uh I point to the printed today from the city's website uh the homelessness task force is charged with to provide the city with a report in three months that includes concrete ideas for longer term structural systems budget timeline that was a year and a half ago so they have indeed dragged anchor for two years so you didn't get your report and nobody thought to ask for where's the report in three in three months so the scope of the report was to include the scope of homelessness the needs of people experiencing the perceived barriers the systems currently in place potential solutions and existing strategies in other cities now they're saying we've had two years we didn't do our job now we want to pay somebody 20 000 25 000 and by the way we're not going to spend that 25 000 putting a roof over anybody's uh body this winter it's absolutely absurd it's unconscionable to spend all this money on peer outreach what good is peer outreach if there's no services to point them to you know that it's outrageous that I also take issue with the city manager's characterization it's not pending budget the lease reads that it's pending staff and the staff there has expressed willingness to work more hours they just by working more hours they will trigger benefits so they they got nine million dollars green mountain transit got nine million dollars in federal funding uh for COVID funding so there's no excuse to not honor the terms of the lease and there's no excuse to misrepresent what the lease says to the city council so we set at the first meetings of the homelessness task force toilets showers phone charging lockers designated camping areas and digital privacy of the what I call the the homelessness management information system they refer to it as the continuum of care I call it the continuum of don't care the this plan or lack thereof includes no provision for those who are banned or mistrustful or otherwise uh unwelcome at some of whom I talked to this evening who are unwelcome at another way or good Sam for various reasons and it's like oh they're disposable good Sam our partners who aren't subject to public records law can arbitrarily tell somebody don't come around and they're left outside and there's no appeal route and this council's not going to be an appeal route or maybe you strike put that in your contract you hear appeals from people who are told they can't go to these places since we're paying for it with public city public taxpayer dollars folks that have left some people have left those organizations for because their property was being stolen because they were being sexually exploited or hit on one case by a registered sex offender who wasn't required to register the the christ church proposal for 12 beds during a pandemic is a disaster waiting to happen without adequate ventilation and separation to put people in a congregate shelter was deemed unconscionable last year and it's unconscionable this year the Econolodge uh rick just said that it's full so you might allocate seven thousand dollars or more as jay inquired into and find that we we can't put them in in the rooms that rate and that budget that budget allocation is only for a seventy dollar rate for a hundred nights at Econolodge that doesn't allow you to send somebody up to comfort in or uh capital plaza for in worst case uh so there's no protocol here there's no protocol for do you need to exhaust your appeal with 211 first do you who's making the ultimate decision whether you get a local voucher or not there's no plan here this is made up stuff over the last few weeks and then they shut down public comment in in the last hearing of the task force where we were trying i was trying to comment on troubleshoot some of these budget areas the state rules one of your first priorities would be to remove the state rule that punitive state rule that bans somebody for 30 days from getting a voucher just because they missed a night in a hotel that that's absurd and that can be changed very quickly in the legislature uh he did raise the insurance issues with transport uh that thing could blow up dramatically if somebody gets hurt in a in a car when it's not properly insured fundamentally this entire program lacks the dignity i i always asserted that dignity had to be the foundation of these and to ask people to move every night to constantly worry about where their belongings we proposed soft shelters either conistoga huts or uh pallet shelters located on available land with plumbing and shower trailers and and toilet trailers and they didn't want to do the work even to put that in place for this winter so to keep people disrupted and moving every night throw them out of the shelter at eight o'clock in the morning not let them back into late 30 at night in the hotel transport them it's it's a it's a horrid existence you're wishing upon these people all for lack of your task force having done their job over the last two years so these folks need support they need continuity of a safe place to sleep a safe place to keep their belongings they need hygiene access there's plenty of jobs out there right now but they're not even believing they're capable of applying for one because they don't have that continuity of where their personal possessions and where their sleep is going to happen so this is a gross abuse of public dollars to approach it in this way and say kick it down the road for another year to start putting a plan together why would we pay the transit center water and sewer when we give them that building for a dollar a year it's a it's our it's the city's building we give it to them for a dollar a year and we're proposing to pay them for water and sewer charges i mean that's just absurd uh they've been months and months in violation of the keeping the bathrooms open from 11 to 230 as a penalty for that they should just write off the water and sewer and even the cleaning they are a business they are they have a much bigger budget than our homelessness task force why are we treating the green mountain transit with kid gloves when we're leaving people out on the street without access and then they're crapping on the bike path during our so i also proposed a local answering service so that these callbacks and and they could patch together 211 211 doesn't insist on speaking to the person who's going to be availing of the service but our answering service could make those calls and sit in those hold queue and just patch them together when it's when it's they actually get through all of these things were just tossed aside by your esteemed homelessness task force ineffective homeless homelessness taskless force i would call it that's enough oh one other thing i would ask a question and ask you to get an answer i found this a message from montpellier's homelessness task force that says it was a paid advertorial that appeared in the april 28th issue of the bridge whose money spent whose whose money was spent on that you know a puff piece of all the work they haven't done for two years thank you steven nad to be fair i know you're a critic of the group though i remain very grateful for this group and the work that they've done and just like the homelessness task force sometimes folks i'm not the homeless the police review committee took a little extra time it is i'm grateful to have this report here in front of us now and i think there's some really great suggestions here and i think it does um line up with uh some of the goals that were set out at the outset so um having said that um i uh i do have a couple other questions um for this for the group but um oh i'm sorry morgan yes please go ahead morgan uh yeah morgan looks frozen right now did you have something you wanted to oh yeah please well while we're waiting for more i mean morgan may oh okay go ahead morgan now okay good sorry about that morgan w brown appear as in the district three uh can you hear me all right hold on hold on i can hear you okay so um first i want to address something before i go into what i was gonna say steven woodica uh just asked who was it that paid for the ad in the mapega bridge for the homelessness task force to give a message and i want to go on record to say the anonymous person was myself i used nearly half of the covid-19 stimulus check to do it and i don't regret it and if i could do it again i'd do it i didn't want to come forward but since he's challenged it there it is okay there's your answer so uh for the benefit of the new city council member of my district three jennifer morton who might not know me i want to i want to say that i'm a person who uh had lived almost off and on for quite a bit of my life since i was 17 clean of the use severe abuse and although i you know wasn't always necessarily homeless and sometimes there's always a lot of times it was uh you know culture and in such uh i wasn't permanently housed you know the last go around was in the mapega area mostly and that was 12 years until like a house you know where i am now and i have been housed for just over 12 years now thanks to a lot of different people that helped made a difference so what i want to say is oh and by the way i'm a former member of the task force what i want to say is i fully support the additional ask for the $35,883 above the uh $45,000 and i asked that the city council please support this it will help you know sometimes a band aid might not be enough but it's better than nothing and i know and please you know and jay thank you you know hey if you want to buy and allocate more hey you got my support thank you thanks for listening thank you morgan um anyone else either oh yes right go ahead bob it's bob gowns it's for rick rick on concerning the christ church if you could um or somebody in a staff get holy to myself a chrysalumber probably sooner than later so we can get in there and develop a life safety plan for that a couple years ago when when we looked at there were two or three things not big deals but need to be corrected before we can let people sleep in there so if you could just reach out to either myself or chris we'll work with you on that yeah thanks bob yeah i'm sorry i didn't think to to check in with you beforehand it's been moving pretty fast but i will be in touch thank you gotta love a small town uh don't go ahead is my look at planning money i always think of there's maybe places to get grants and you know uh kevin uh kasey in planning who does a lot of community development grants that's the only amount that i really look at twice is when you're looking at a short term emergency fix that this is then i would look elsewhere for planning money i just wondered if you've been able to check into any of those places that might give you money for planning when they won't give you money for operations i i know that we did ask kevin i don't know if cameron's in the room um she was going to touch base with him on planning um it's not i don't know if that's exactly what you're asking but i hear what you're saying and and i would assume that there you know there there is other money out there and i appreciate always looking for that well and i believe it's is it charles brown who's uh families the department of families and i always children on brown yeah sure okay he spoke at rotary a few weeks ago and he certainly gave the impression that there was funds there not only for services but perhaps for some planning money i unfortunately don't know the services i would just rather see us try to go after a grant for planning money if that's possible like can i just say i mean at least from my vantage point is folks are maxed out working 24 seven on this issue um responding to crises on the street so this was i think a way to say okay we need to keep our eye on the bigger systemic solution absolutely yes didn't um did we also word that so that part of the mission of the the people who are working on the survey would be to develop plans practical specific plans that would help us to overcome the barriers and put out proposals that might produce results that we need i mean i know that i know i remember having emphasized that and i thought that we had also put that in there as one of the goals of the consultancy whoever does this uh was not just to determine the causes but to come up with information on how to get through the barriers and put together an actionable plan which as ken said we are incredibly maxed out um okay so it's it's very difficult to get through all that i wasn't saying otherwise totally you need you need to have consultant assistance to get what you need to know absolutely so i can build on that yeah i get staff perspective is we have talked about finding grants for that um finding planning grants there's not a lot available for the planning side especially for infrastructure especially for housing there's a lot of money for creating the housing and housing partnerships and part of their homelessness task forces conversation was to get funding so that they could be ready to apply for those larger grants that could get us an infrastructure sort of project going um you know recognizing that um all of these folks are volunteers community members um who may not have the expertise to create such a plan so um that also does not dissuade us from applying for grants if we find them so if there is any funding opportunities that folks are aware of we will welcome those thank you thank you carolin did you have something to add to that i saw you you had a hand up and i think she basically covered it that what we were looking for was substantiation something to back up a grant application so that it would carry more weight okay thank you i mean if there's anyone out there who wants to come up with a specific plan a specific proposal a grant proposal that would address some of these problems more effectively sooner on a larger scale we would absolutely i think i speak for everyone we would absolutely welcome anyone who has the time the expertise whatever thank you i'd like to have your hand up uh yeah i just um i have a very specific request if the council does take action on these items uh the item about the uh street outreach is called peer outreach um i said some of the guy that's got a higher the person um i i would request that that just be called street outreach um it i understand the value of peer outreach and having a peer worker we have one right now and that's fantastic but um it's going to make it difficult for us to to fill the second position who we already actually have a candidate working in that capacity so so my question was um was really about the same one that don i had a question about the number six the consulted study a day shelter um the i i just uh i guess my question i don't know how to frame this you know a way that's easier somehow but um i mean as far like when i read day shelter i think another way right and so um i i do want to say like this is like one one part of something steven brought up that i did have some concerns about which is that it it does feel a little conflict of interest e um because you know if we study this and then maybe we're creating some competition for another way or maybe it's something that another way expands into and so i i don't necessarily understand the relationship between um what's being proposed and and um another way of services and if i'm off base on this like that is fine i just need to yeah no i appreciate that question i mean i mean from my perspective it's acknowledged it was with the homeless task force hat looking at the need in the community there there is a gear there is a balancing act in terms of mission at another way we there there's some back and forth in our conversations internally about psychiatric survivors versus homeless population um and there's some work we're and i mean we we're not a shelter we have a program and so we and we're not a low barrier shelter i mean right now we have required to be vaccinated and masked to access there are folks who are outside right now who who could come to another way who are not because they want to abide by our rules so that that's a piece of it um i as far as the you know i in terms of the conceptualization of this piece i i frankly had no concept that another way would be part of that it was like what's the need in the community um and but but there is this you know folks in who are my constituents at another way are like the city's always looking to another way to solve the social service problems in in the town and we have a different we have a different mission and so as executive director there i'm trying to always find that balance okay thank you that's that's actually quite helpful um separate question and this is kind of a meta question where that's we're gonna need to talk about i think as a group this proposal is uh you know reading through the cover letter um on the one hand it looks like it's maybe a request that's coming from that $50,000 that we set aside from ARPA money that's one potential pot of money that could go towards this um there were a couple places where it sounded like it was maybe coming from the budget which would make it a a budget request because i think of ARPA money as a separate that's that's a different pot than the budget conversation that we are about to start if it is a part of the $50,000 that we set aside for ARPA there is a question that the like that money is going to come to us over a couple of years and so one question is is this does this $50,000 come out of sort of this year's allocation or next year's allocation or is it split 50-50 or some other way um and i know that we are going to be having further conversation about this very topic um next meeting i think it's next meeting yeah that's fair that's fair yes no it is scheduled for next meeting okay um so i want to recognize that with the ARPA money at least um lauren we had had mentioned you know maybe we could have some kind of public process about getting suggestions for what to do with that 50,000 and uh on the one hand like here's a proposal this this is good but we haven't really talked about the process for how we were going to allocate that 50,000 and if we wanted to have any more robust process around that so i realized that is sort of a meta question um otherwise i'll just speak for myself and say you know thank you for this report i want to i want to support this and i you know whether that's it's easier to do it through the ARPA money but i don't want to jump to that if there hasn't been a process around the 50,000 dollars um and i see some hands starting to go up so um lauren and then jennifer maybe yeah okay i mean in terms of what i was thinking when i proposed that we pull 50,000 out and i was thinking of it as that first kind of set of money that came in um and i was really thinking about it and i think the conversation we had was about emergency needs i was specifically thinking about the homelessness task force and i think we talked about that as a likely venue for it i know i've talked about public process i was thinking more of the 700,000 that's not yet allocated i mean to me this is basically what we asked for was what could we do that's really addressing urgent needs of community members and instead of just putting the full amount into infrastructure that we set some piece aside so to me it's very responsive to that and right in line with our conversation i mean i guess i'm like i don't want to hold up getting things going um i mean it could be that a big chunk of this is the 25,000 for the longer term planning we could move forward the other pots of money if we wanted to that um and have you know that's that's a big chunk of what is being asked for we could have a longer process if we think there's more i i'm not advocating for extra process to me i would be happy to support this proposal today um and i've got some other thoughts on the proposal in general but just in terms of your process question i think that's where i'm at no that's that's helpful um Jennifer thoughts yeah um just just to put it out there i've worked with the homeless populations both on the west coast and here in vermont for 20 years and just looking at this proposal feels very gentle compared to how much work needs to be done and i feel like this isn't a huge i mean and i'm talking you know i worked in very big city so and i currently work with homeless populations here in vermont but um i feel like this is a really nice proposal and i would like to you know just put that out there as somebody who's worked with these communities for a long time yeah great thank you um any other thoughts around the process for that 50 000 yeah good i think this was my recollection of the conversation when we set aside the 50 000 uh the homelessness task force was specifically brought up and we did make them aware that this money could be available for things like this it is a pretty pressing emergency so i think it's reasonable um john i can see you want to say something oh yes right so and not so much just staffing at this level um but if you could take the 25 000 out for now as far as right now taking the 45 that we've already allocated and then add from the 50 to balance it but not yet the 25 without a little more talking i would feel more comfortable but i'm a little confused the 45 what i believe 45 thousand dollars in this year budget that's where the first 45 thousand this year budget got you so they were only asking for 35 000 and 808 out of the possible rescue money i think what donna says take 10 000 883 from the 50 000 of arbor we've set aside along with the 45 give the for tonight and then continue the conversation about the 25 000 along okay yeah that's what i meant okay okay go ahead connor are you you're saying you would use other funds besides the arbor money for that or you would just i don't know i don't know for the discussion on it yes because i'm i'm still i'm concerned about plugging some of that money of the and you guys abbreviate it and you say arfa but i'd never get it right so american rescue money um to more clearly going after the core issue of housing i mean i would much rather work towards having a facility in place and put the staff around that but yeah other any other thoughts on on that possibility i go ahead connor i might just ask tenor rick or somebody from the committee at 10 000 of that i know is set aside i thought that was a bigger piece of the pie for the continuum of care uh that might be just going into a bigger pot so i don't know if there might be a bit more urgency on the 10 000 within that 25 all right 10 000 for what connor do you see the research in the washington county continuum of care right 10 000 within the 25 000 and if that was time sensitive with the bigger group there no i i don't think it is i mean i mean part of it on the the first the research we put the language in there for responsive so the thinking was if somebody can come up with a quick solution not a long-term solution you know that that allows some latitude for time for for being responsive to the to the situation the most urgent piece of that 25 well i i think that 15 000 was to provide the basis do the research to support going after grant money that was my understanding when we were talking with carmen in our meeting and so it's not immediate but it is immediate in the sense that one would want to go after bigger funds at a different in a different location you know from the state or whatever pots are available so we would want to be prepared to support that request this is maybe too much in the weeds but uh so i i you know just as an example i would support the the peer outreach expansion that's the that's 23 000 uh 680 in my mind that is not a one-time cost and so i would prefer that kind of thing to come out of the budget rather than the ARPA money which is one time um but but this is yeah sorry go ahead be a well i again i'd like to i'm not here to defend or argue for against but 45 000 of the 80 000 is coming from our budget right so oh i see so that could be a part okay thank you so there's only 35 000 that's on top of that that they're asking for from ARPA right now um and you recall so so if i can just allow me a second when we when we allowed the 50 000 when we set this 50 000 aside at that point we only were aware that we were getting 380 000 this year that was the only number so we said we were going to allocate 330 000 to capital and equipment which we did and keep 50 000 aside for to be determined but i think you know so yes housing was mentioned as well as homeless services so we never voted on what that last 50 000 was going to be i think we've since learned that we're going to get 1.1 million this year and 1.1 million next year so we we have the 1.1 million in hand now and it's been sent to us so what you have said collectively is that 1.5 million out of the 2.2 will be will go to replacing projects that we cut out of the budget so it still leaves i think this is where lauren said with the 700 000 or maybe 650 if we take the 50 000 out it should be determined what that needs to be used for over and then the just the question is we hold that 650 this year next year do we split that up how does that go and i think that's a conversation we need to have but you have a lot more ARPA money that is not yet called for that could do many of the projects or initiatives that you're talking about or could just go back to do even more capital i mean you've got a lot of choices so i want to make sure that we're putting that in contact that you know this 50 000 isn't the last bit of rescue money you have and that 45 000 of this request is from the budget is from our approved budget that's a good call fair enough so what is your desire to do team yes go ahead jack as i think about this am i being heard okay as i think about this i think i share where donna's thought that we may need to give some more thought to the planning component the item six of this and and i also think you know what wanting to support what what the task force is is asking for the other thought i have is that we may very well find that the the amounts they're asking for and items particularly items one three four and five are not enough and those seem like those would be valid ARPA funding requests if if we if we need to go that way so i think my inclination is to uh take out the item six from their their request for now to hold that for further thought and and also keep in mind that and and approve the remainder but also keep in mind that i would be open to further funding requests out of the fiscal 2022 ARPA or the first tranche of the ARPA money if if there are needs that can't be met from any other source or emergency shelter and i don't know if ken or rick have any thoughts about how consistent that is with your assessment on me or is that sorry i i i like what you just said because you're being very supportive in your comments and you're leaving the door open and this is it you know it's um as you're trying to plan solutions um yeah everybody wants to think big but we're trying to make things happen and respond i thought that morgan's comments were right on target nobody wants to do a band-aid but um it's something and it's responding to the the human suffering immediately so i i i don't i can't speak for the whole committee but i like what you said and i frankly i'm i'm in accord with you on number six i think it needs more discussion and planning myself so here's here's a possibility team um uh it's getting late and we're gonna be talking about this like the how we apportion this $50,000 next time um i think i you know i hate to do this to to the homelessist task force but i think it might make some sense to take this up next time in conjunction with that conversation so that we can make a decision all at the same time unless you want to vote on it now which would be okay too um okay that's great i think we just need to like do we need to do something i love listening to everybody you know because i always have these shifts it's wonderful i really think that i i'm gonna make a motion okay okay so my motion is that we award this request as asked for we apply the 45,000 that's in this year's budget and the remaining 35 whatever from the are for money but we leave 20 the 25,000 a little more open to be refined but we still dedicate that much money towards some sort of planning and i do know i mean just recently with the public safety authority having the consultant come in you think you all know everything but it just pulls things together that expertise that focus that time so i want us to do it now okay one i'm not going to be here next meeting too oh okay that's where i mean sweeten and i have a different time zone but uh all right so yeah that's my motion okay i'll second that i just emphasize the point i think we we can sit on the consultant a bit but as donna's saying you know the homelessness task force can't do a ton unless we have an idea of where you could build something who could run it how much it's going to cost and what the population is and i think we still have a lot of question marks in those meetings so this would go towards that purpose so thanks donna um lauren go ahead one clarifying question um and then a couple thoughts just on the restroom piece like i know at various points we've talked about you know getting a trailer with showers like is that just it's just not available or why is that not an option anymore and so we're paying instead for a few hours of gmt per day yeah we were working with the baptist church on the trailer but as more information came out it turned out a couple things the laundry didn't would it would only be towels right so that was a bit limiting the second and biggest is it won't withstand the cold um okay so once i went below freezing it would be gone anyways and that would only get us a month so we're seeing this as a better year-round access yeah so okay thank you that's really helpful um yeah i mean i i am going to support this motion i think we need to get things moving show the clear support for this i mean i'm frankly sickened that the state is not doing this i don't think this should be falling on communities i think this is absurd and egregious and um you know but here we are and we have to help people in our community and so this these are some steps we can take as we look at longer-term solutions you know i'm glad to see the consultant doing you know it looks like if we can refine that further that could be really good work um to to move this forward and looking at root causes um you know i i think we could also simultaneously just hearing some of the barriers that these are addressing it sounds like you know are is there an opportunity to maybe advocate for some state community grants where we don't have these strings that seem to be really making it hard for people to access services um are there policy changes we should be advocating for as came up a couple times tonight um that you know it sounds like there's some really well known problematic criteria like you don't show up and then you're you know out of luck for 30 days like so i think trying to also catalog those as either you know part of the task force or part of the the study but i mean some of that it would be great to also be trying to address some of those issues too so that more state resources are actually available to more people thank you all right uh okay there's been a motion a second any further discussion not it okay all right um all in favor please say aye and opposed okay um great so thank you uh again yeah and and thank you and i just sincerely appreciate um all y'all and and and the collective wisdom trying to crack some really tough problems and you know any the thought the feedback adds adds wisdom to to this and it's really is true it's like it's like freaking frustrating try you know and you know and so i appreciated like that time when we all had Sean Brown come in and Sarah Phillips sort of set the stage and sometimes you don't think big enough you know and so i appreciate you know do this do we're doing the best we can and sometimes it's like we're don't see what's in front of us so thank you thank you all right so i just want to check in it is getting late here team we could we have at least two other items yeah i've already communicated with the finance director we'll okay the only question i think was whether you wanted to go ahead with the community survey and the council survey you will get to work on those that was part of her presentation okay about the budget the the budget present we're going to do the overview of the budget and kind of how the process was going to go and all that stuff but that can wait till the next meeting okay as long as we don't stack that one up yep and then we have the strat plan uh camera just have a presentation but it's really up to you whether you want to do that um i know i will receive it better if we do it another time i'm really sorry um we can send out the slides and things that we were going to do yeah i think that the key part of that was your straw poll votes on ranking the uh priorities you know the initiatives and we were i think what we were really looking was for you to officially adopt those and we should so because and then the idea was if you did that tonight then we were going to present have the full strategic plan for your approval at the next meeting so that was the only but we'll we'll see what we can figure out okay all right um and we did not take up uh the appointments to the vacancies left by councillor Richardson uh that's well no there's no there's nothing urgent about it i as i understand it at the moment is that pretty accurate i think i mean the biggest issue probably a cvpsa but did we did we replace him on cvpsa no okay that's the only one that i know that's okay it's right now Montpey is the only one on the public safety authority board that doesn't have both positions filled okay well maybe we can talk about that during council reports too because we have to talk about cvpsa anyway um you can check in with folks and if it's not apparent what we want to do then we can i mean even if you just you can advertise it doesn't have to be a council member it's nice when it is we have Doug Hoyt right now as the one representative from Montpey okay uh okay then um so we're so we're pushing off those couple of items or three items really generally um thank you so we're on to council reports and i'm going to start with Donov yeah i brought up that i emailed you all the dates for the central Vermont public safety authority along with our consultant is presenting to the joint councils on the 19th uh berry city had that change from the 20th and they are doing it in their chamber so they are doing the zoom link they're the host bill has informed us that we all need to post an agenda but when you post that agenda it should have berry city link in it uh and my question to an was were city council members planning to go to berry in person or were people planning to come here i reserved this room in case you wanted to do that i'm not sure i mean i think you could we're looking into that whether we actually have to have a physical i think you can also just go remote so you could either go to berry we could choose to meet here or you can just remote in i think the consultants are doing it by remote no they are yes well they are but i i was going because i'm also presenting and right sort of facilitating it so i'm going to be there correct but we will have somebody here for public safety authority because especially people who belong to capital farm mutual aid a lot of them have weak wi-fi at home and so they want a place to come that they can get stronger wi-fi so we have this space so there'll be somebody here from public safety authority right now we should be sure to make sure we have our tech yeah and well and well we haven't used that but um camera is going to show me after the meeting tonight how to connect it yeah okay okay i just yeah that's news so that's good to know okay and it is this whole zooming who links et cetera is confusing but i just thought perhaps the council wanted to discuss whether they had a preference to be as a group in live it is somewhat dynamic to meet another council and their council has changed quite a bit over the last couple years so i don't know if you're making that decision now or not but that was one of my questions the other we're also meeting and using this space on the 20th as the core host an in-person meeting for the consultants to meet with capital farm mutual aid and hopefully several of their select town board members will be connected this will be the in-person place and then everybody else will be remote for whatever it's worth i'm planning on going to berry to be there for that meeting but i i don't yeah others are welcome to do what makes sense for them um um any other thoughts on that i was planning on just go just going remote just using zoom but if you know if the group thinks that there's an advantage to all being here in one place then that then that's fine too but that was my original intention i don't think it matters doing it remotely i my recollection from the uh from the last time we did one of those joint meetings it was just all crammed together yeah that's it was it was suboptimal that's so sure in a workshop format it's just very not as interfacing as you think it would be yeah no okay well that helps me just to know who may be here and and help the space will be used okay and um are we okay with either not appointing someone to is anybody interested in the the cvpsa position um that's vacant right now if not that's fine so we need to advertise okay all right thank you um great anything else uh no that's all other than i will be in sweden and because i'm going because of a severe family illness i don't really plan to be available i actually arrived there on the 27th and will be in my own little chime zone six hour difference so i don't know how fit i'll be even to try to do remote in the evening but i'm trying to make no obligations to uh interface while i'm gone anyway so don't do anything i don't approve of that's council meeting all right okay i'm good too oh wow okay sorry we're all talked out no just one really quick thing so i talked to bill about this but there is a an open comment period right now on the PFAS treatment of leachate i am going to be working on a potential letter for us or for the city because i think we should be weighing in on it because we're such a big offtaker and i saw that it was a priority of council on our list um which i was excited to see so anyway just if you see a letter um going out i just want to give you the heads up of it's it's a kind of wonky permit process that's ongoing but because it has ties into like monitoring and stuff that will happen here um i thought it would be good for us to weigh in with some thoughts is that the thing at a and r that uh connor and i just got an email about probably okay from connor and i got an email from shana casper saying she'd like to talk to us about it and so i figured that was yeah yeah i regularly rely on your expertise on PFAS issues spend more time on it than anyone should thanks you and john oliver i know so is this online online we can make an opinion yeah i mean it's an it's an agency of natural resources comment period so we'll just we can like submit a letter yeah i'm sorry i don't want to cut you off i'm done thanks yep um just to reiterate i know we kind of blew past this um a few minutes ago but uh because we are approaching budget season i just want to give you a heads up that just like last year i'll be sending out a uh survey about what your priorities might be around um budget and i hope to get that out ballpark late october so just keep that in mind and look for that um yeah that'll be helpful that's it um stop okay bill so a few things um on budget because we were going to do a presentation tonight i'd certainly ask you to read through the material that kelly sent which gives a lot of background information um and i would say with regard to a budget survey which i think is great but i really do appreciate um you're filling out that straw pool and we approve that you know this is between the goals you've set and those initiatives this is probably the most clear policy direction we've ever gotten from a city council going into budget you've really laid out not only what your top priorities are in order um so it was very it's helpful for us as we go through that but you know obviously those when we're preparing the budget we'll be thinking about that and as you as you'll see from kelly's material you know we've got a lot there's a lot of budget pressure this year and we'll be probably talking about even more um so the next meeting we will be talking about the budget um and our our schedule um we're just taking a look so we've pushed that off we'll be trying to do all the strategic planning the initiatives and then the final i think unless we change our mind on that but we'd like to have that done prior to budget um we'll be getting a presentation for vote and approval on the downtown improvement district i'm just trying to have everybody visualize how we're going to spend our time at the next meeting we think ahead um we were we were going to talk about the arpa funds uh the big funds not just the 50 000 but the five or six or seven hundred thousand dollars we um i'll push the i don't have anything on 12 and 16 main street anyway we had tentatively scheduled legislative agenda that could probably push and then we haven't really even talked with our committee either uh so that would and then of course we've just added the three things from tonight so right so there's that i was going to remind everybody um about the next Tuesday's meeting but we've already covered that and i just want to say a very sincere thank you to all of you and to all of our staff i've had a lot of professional and personal things going on last month or so and everyone's been super supportive and we need a lot to thank you very much um all right so uh i think that is that's it so without uh objection we will adjourn this meeting 1050 thanks everybody