 Okay, so I'll just I'll start by just introducing so hey everyone I'm Jack Hansen. I'm the chair of the transportation energy and utilities committee. I just want to, before we start quickly explain so we'll have our transportation energies and utilities committee meeting. But first we're going to do our committees has stepped in recently to play the role of the vehicle for hire board because of vacancies on that board. So our committee's been authorized to play that role so we're actually going to do that first. We're going to have the vehicle for high higher licensing board meeting, and then immediately following that meeting will jump in with transportation energy and utilities so if you're here for that just hang tight for a minute it'll sound like we're talking about something completely different we are but it shouldn't. It shouldn't take take long so thanks for your patience and thanks for being here. So with that being said I'm going to call the order the vehicle for hire licensing board at 504 p.m. first item on agenda is the agenda. Is there a motion of now. I'll move we amend the agenda as is. All right. Seconded. Seconded any discussion. All those in favor please say aye. Hi. Okay, so we've got our agenda. Second item is the election of the joint committee chair. So we will. I'm hesitating because it's not really a joint committee anymore it's kind of just the transportation energy utilities committee but that's fine either way we need to elect a chair for this. I would like to nominate Jack Hansen as the chair to be the chair of this board. And I'm not sure it requires a second. All right. Any discussion. To that. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Any post. All right. So we've got our chair. Second item is the public forum. So this is a time where anyone, anyone from the public who has anything to say about the vehicle for hire or relevant to the vehicle for hire board and speak now. Is there anyone looking to speak at this time. I can't see if there's anyone there. Okay. Looks like not. Okay. Seeing none, I will close the public forum. I'll close the public forum later. This is, we're finishing another meeting before the two meeting just let everyone know. So we will now move into the hearings portion. I'll close the public forum will move into the hearings portion of the meeting. This is item 4.01 airport when you ski cab. I reef by reef. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly. Okay. We've got. I don't know who's going to kick this off, but I'll look to a layer other stuff. So, so to the extent you're looking for sort of guidelines on procedure, I would say if the. Complaining party is here. I would give that opportunity that person an opportunity to. To speak first. Since they're the one bringing the issue before the board. Okay. I'm sorry if I mispronounced the name. Please correct me. But gay 10 provost. Is the. Complaintant. Is that person here. Either in person or. Okay. Not seeing them and they were notified of this meeting. Right. Correct. Okay. If, if Sarah Montgomery is present. Is she in the room or on the line? I know that she did send letters. And I believe based on my conversation with her, that the complaining party was, did represent that he was planning to be here. And the last conversation I had with her, she had not heard from the. Taxi driver who is the subject of the complaint. And I was like, I don't want to be here. Yes. Sorry, you're very small in the back of the room. So I did notify him via letter and he did say he wanted to join. Hopefully. I don't see him there necessarily, but he didn't think that he would like to join. Okay. Well, so I'm not seeing, I'm not seeing a present. So. I guess then we would go to. The, the, the complain me. I don't know what the proper word is, but are you, were you the one who received the complaint? Yeah. Okay. Would you mind coming forward to, to speak on that? Sure. Okay. Yeah. We're joining us right here. That way we can all see you. Oh, yeah. So thanks for being here. So we've, yeah, we've received this written complaint and. I don't know if the complaint will show up to speak, but. I think we want to give you the opportunity to. Speak to it and respond. And we do for this process. We do have people. Take a note that they're telling the truth. So. Haley, would you be able to administer that? Sure, I can do that. So if you could just identify yourself. For the, the board's records, sir. And then I'll, I'll swear you in and put you under oath. If you're going to give testimony to the board. Okay. My name is out of polish. Thank you. Sir, could you just raise your hand so your right hand so I can see it on the screen, please. Thank you. Do you swear or affirm the testimony that you'll give before this board this evening relative to the complaint under consideration. We'll be truthful to the best of your knowledge and belief. Yeah. That's what. Thank you. Great. So the floor is yours. Yeah. Please share whatever you'd like to share. Okay. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm from here. And I start my business like 10 years ago. And I don't have any complaint from the airport or from Burlington. Over Vermont or Montreal. When somebody lied to you the first time. Second time you will be tested. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. I'm not from here. Second time you will be tested. This question for you. I need. When somebody has to do some. If you are not. Next. Next time you'll be fast. Me or not. I understand it's not really a back and forth. But I understand. Yeah. Every customer. When you become up. Especially when you call the. When they start. When I take it to Montreal. when they take you to Montreal or to the border, we ask them, do you have negative COVID tests? Okay, then his son, they said, yes, was like two people. I told him, do you have any negative COVID tests? Because I don't like to get COVID. If you have that positive, I will not take it. I'll take just a lot of people call me, they said, I have like positive COVID tests. Can you take me to the border or to Montreal? I told them as well. Because my sister, she passed away because for the COVID-19, I don't like to pass away too. And I told him before I pick him up, do you have COVID tests? He said, negative COVID test. He said, yes. Down his name, I think that I had in my reservation. When I pick him up, I go like to church to the border. And when he make a reservation, I told him that he said, I need to drop off before the border. And when I try, I told him, it's okay, I will cross the border with you because it's like 10 minutes or seven minutes walk. And they like to the customer, they have a lot of luggage, tell them it's okay, I will cross the border with you. When you get to the casting, they talk with the officer by French. I'm not a speed French, I just don't understand a little bit. I hear they have positive COVID tests. And I told the officer, I told him that they have like one of them, they have a positive COVID test. They said yes, one of them, because the COVID test, it came to go through out like inside the Canada, at least 72 hours. If anyone, when you get the COVID test, it should be like before COVID 72 hours to get inside the Canada. And I told him, why didn't when I asked you, from the officer, why I want to ask you like, do you have a negative COVID test? He said yes. He said no, because I had like 10, 15 days positive COVID test. I had like coronavirus before. I told him, you have like positive COVID test. He said no, like now 10, 15 days. I told him how come to the officer told you like, you have like positive COVID test. Okay, and after that, I pulled my car because they said, okay, you can go like, anyone that have COVID test, should be like quarantine 14, 15 days in Canada. And I pulled my car away, like in the back of the car near the casting. And I went inside the casting. The officer of the day said, you can't do anything for you. And after that, I give him the luggage. He said like, you hold the luggage at the trunk or something. I can't do anything from the, the, the casting. Because of the, I can't just stay like, if you, I stay like, I do like something wrong, the whole officer will go outside. And I give him the luggage and I call his dad because his dad, they make a reservation. And I told him, please, can you make reservation online? And he put all the card information on when I call him. I said, I need to charge you extra under 75 dollars extra because I will stay home with three days because close contact. He said, first, he said, yes, after five minutes, when I charge him, he said, no, you can't charge me two times because I can charge, first I charge his son by credit card. And after that, because I need to stay home on three days, if you, he told me that when, before I pick him up, I have positive, I will not take him because I'm not like, and I have my little boy has as the, as the, I can, I can, I stay three days without work. I'm only myself in rule on, on the, bring me all the food and something like this. After that, I want to take test and I get negative. And I try to call him, so I will bring money back for you. Just they sent, every time they send me a message, like something effort or they call me and I said, okay, and after a month ago, they get money back from, because I didn't do for, they said that they do the spirit dispute for the bank and I didn't do for them. And I said, okay, so I don't care about 275, what I do? I missed all the issue. And they said here, like I drive 120 miles per mile or 120 kilometers, I think, 120 kilometers per hour. And for bad weather, who's stupid, they drive like 120 for, like, for bad weather. I have, I have a, like I'm not stupid, I drive pretty fast and have family, I have three kids. And this guy, I didn't trust him because why, I don't know why you like me, why you like me, like, when I pick you up, she can tell me the truth. Like, like, because I have like little baby, like, how's the husband, like 10 years old, like in his school, they have like, for healing and they have like going home and every day, they take one capsule, like from, like, because he came to breathe without them. And if you get COVID from him, because close contact, I don't care if you 10 days, 15 days, enough or no. Just the guy, our his, I don't know, like his girlfriend or sister, I don't know. She has paper and I went to the, to the, the casting two days ago. I told them I need peace, the, the proof for COVID of PCR COVID test and it doesn't get me. They said we can't give anyone for special for people on the set. I don't have anything to do and they sent me a lot of message. I didn't. Thank you for sharing all that. Are there questions from committee members? Yeah, I have a question. So the I'm just looking at the timeline here. So the daughter-in-law had tested positive on the third with a PCR test and she tested negative on the 11th with an antigen test. How come, how come if she have negative COVID tests? Why the officer that don't have that here? You have a positive COVID test. Why? I just, I need to do, if she has like negative COVID test, you will not have like any positive and it was like talking by French language. I'm understand they totally like positive. Okay. And I asked the officer, I told him she has like, I don't remember like I told her she has or I asked. I told me he's like they have like one of them positive COVID tests. That one at least 72 hours. Not like you said like January 3rd. I become out January 17th. Like how many days? Like 13, 14 days. And there was the COVID, the positive COVID test that that one when I close the order, not like January 3rd. If you they have like January 3rd COVID test on date, another one was date. They said the, this is a negative antigen test on the 11th, which was, you know, six days before COVID. If you need, nobody can close the order if he doesn't have negative or positive COVID test at least 72 hours. You can call the customer and talk to them. So did they allow them, your passengers across the border? Did they allow them to cross? Yeah, if you they have the Canadian customer, if they have like negative or positive, if they have any positive, positive, you will stay home and Montreal 15 days no more. Just if you have a negative, when you go to Montreal, okay, you will be to another COVID test or you need to do COVID test at the border. They have like a tent. You can get the COVID test from there. If you get another COVID negative COVID test, you will not, you know, it's okay. You come from outside. Just when you have a positive, you will stay 15 days. After 15 days, you will do another test. I have one other question about the amount that was charged. They prepaid you $175. I charge it and so there was that payment. And then there was an additional payment. Yeah, I told them before to charge because I told them I will stay three days. Like no one close contact. They have like what was the cost test? I charge them that $175. I'm from the old clinic car. He said, yes, after five minutes, he called me back. He said, no, you can't charge. And why, why sound like there was like they have COVID, like positive COVID. Yes. I don't know. I know. So my question is, what was the total amount charged? It was a $350. $350, $175, $175 was charged back to you. There was a charge back against the total amount paid was the original amount. That's all I have. Let me just understand this. You've only collected the feed that you had originally charged when all of a sudden done. Yeah, no, the first time. Just the first time. Yeah, $175. I charged my car. That was the time they had this credit card. I charge $175. And when I hear that one, usually I charge extra because like each day maybe like $150. Like I should, I don't miss. Okay, I will charge $175 for three days quarantine. I will stay three days quarantine. I will lose money. I have, do you know how much I pay like payment every month around $6,000, $5,000. Insurance, like each car, like $600 insurance, personal car, not like the commercial car, about the insurance. Okay. I pay like every six months around $5,000, $4,000 insurance. I pay for like $300 right now. I have for my business. I pay like house and everything like around $5,000. If you guys stay three days, what will be the money? Understand. Understand. And why, why he lied to me? I did just, I don't know, please. Why? He said, no, we don't, I don't know. The officer said they have like, he said that we have wasn't a problem. I didn't do anything like he said, like the whole, the, the language I think, by the complain. No, just I went inside the office, inside the custom to talk with somebody else over there. And he said, we can't do anything for you. Okay. So when did you refund the second charge? I have like, I think 15, 20 days ago, from the paper, they do like a dispute. I sent a selfie. I have all they went through. They go through. They told me they send them money back to them on the complaint confirm that they received that. I don't know. I don't know. Just like, I received two emails from the bank. They said that money, the money already returned to the customer. And you have, you have that under. Yeah. Do we have that document on our side? Or maybe I should be on you. I'm suggesting that somehow we capture if he has, if I need the money down, I will not bring him back. I have all the information with the reservation. They make it, they send me all when I have them, when they make all my reservation, should I have some spot to put the credit card information? Okay. When he put, I have all the information. Just I said that, so I don't need that because I didn't get any COVID. Yeah. You can either send them to me or Sarah, since you received the complaint, and I don't know if you received any other information from the complaining party, if you want to keep all the evidence in one, all of the materials in one place. Sorry. Questions from, well, since we don't have a complainant here, I think we should move on to the deliberative session. Is that, is that appropriate at this point? I mean, if that's directed to me, I think, I think that's appropriate. Chair Hanson, I would just say that, you know, if there's other materials that are incoming that the board wants to consider in its decision, I would make sure those get, get sent through before you sort of close the fact finding or the fact taking portion of the hearing. So it sounds like there's some, some additional receipts and things of that nature. I would suspect the board might want to consider that when it deliberates. Yeah. Great. Have you been able to find those? Were you able to find the receipts? Yeah, I've tried. I sort of got that. Because they seem to be by email. Is it appropriate to close the, this portion of the hearing except documents that would be submitted with regard to the, the, the refused payment and any other thing that's in transit and then to hold a, a deliberative session outside, which does not, I mean, it does not have to be done in public under the records law. So we can do that. And then as long as we issue a written decision, which I think is probably what has happened, I am new to this board, then we'll send you back as long as that's in open, that's open as public. Then we would be all set. Yeah. So that would be fine. Hi, Soda, Summer. Yeah, I mean, so it sounds like we have it now. If you send it to Sarah, then we'll have it documented as part of the process. So for the deliberation, I think, yeah, Councilor Bergman's right, is that we can do that now in public. We can also, my understanding is we're able to do that over email as well. Yes, that's correct. You can, you can just, you know, put everybody on notice that you'll be taking the matter under advisement and turning into a deliberative session and that you'll issue a written decision, you know, at some time in the, in the coming week. Okay, that would be my, that would be my recommendation, just so we can, because we've got folks waiting to take up the two meeting and we still, I'd prefer to be able to review that, the document as well as we deliberate. So does anyone want to make that motion? I would make that motion that we close this portion of the hearing, except to, except evidence that has cut, that will be coming in that's been referenced today. I reckon if somebody were to send it, if the other side were to send in, and I'd make this as part of the motion, it's a little more complicated than civil motion, that we would reopen the hearing. I mean, if there is more that comes in, we can close, you know, we can close it, but given that we're going to be accepting this, I am fine with, with reopening if we get something that's material to this, but absent that I would move to close this fact-finding. And then we can move into deliberative at our convenience, so to speak, and issue a written decision based on the evidence that has been submitted at the hearing and to the committee. Does that work? Yeah, absolutely. I don't see why not. I think it's been summed up nicely. You know, it doesn't have to be in a public session for the board to make its decision, and that can that can happen at the, you know, the convenience of the board. So once all the material are submitted, then the board can enter its deliberations and we'll get a written decision out. I might just suggest, you know, you set a deadline or some sort of, sort of when the, when the fact-finding or when the board will stop accepting materials so that it can move into its deliberations. I mean, if you have sent that, right, if you've already sent it, and I would say that we'd give one week for things that may be in transit or somebody, like they forgot that this was happening and they want to submit something. So, but absent is a very short window that everybody's gotten notice. He is here on a mental fairness. And sir, do you know, like, 10 years, I have a lot of pellets caught. It didn't have any happened though. Maybe there come 1,000 pellets caught in my file. Like, I don't have a, I didn't do that one. Just I call him first after when I drop his son and I call him at home because I need to call a team. I will charge extra 175. He said, okay, after five minutes or three minutes, he called. He said, no, my son doesn't have that. I understand. Thank you. Okay. So the motion's been made and seconded and councilor Bergman's proposing to give an additional week for materials collection. I think, I think we can just give till the end of this week. I mean, these hearings, people are supposed to show up and do it then. I'm good with that. So we're already kind of extending. Okay. I changed that to the end of this week. All right. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. So we've completed the hearing. We'll issue a written decision in the next couple of weeks. So we'll notify you of that. And thanks for, yeah, thanks for being here by testimony. If there's other materials, you can send them by the end of the week. Absolutely. All right. Great. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you. Is there a motion to adjourn the vehicle for hire license for transportation? I think each of those are committed. So yeah. Second. We've been seconded. All those in favor, please say or anything else from staff. All those in favor, please say aye. Were you going to say something? Oh yeah, I was just going to say, Sarah, if you wouldn't mind, I guess just reaching out to the complaining party one last time, letting them know of the end of week deadline to submit anything, that would be great. Okay. I'll do that. All right. Great. Thanks everyone. And thanks everyone who's been waiting. We'll now call the order of the transportation energy and utilities committee meeting at 5.35 p.m. And first, I'd like a motion on the agenda, please. I move to adopt the agenda as proposed. I'll second that. All right. Moved and seconded. Any discussion? Seeing none. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. So we have our agenda. Next slide. Just a minutes from 314. Is there a motion to approve the minutes? So I'm going to approve the minutes from 314. I'll second that. All those in favor, any discussion? All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. I'm okay with it, even though you don't have to approve the minutes, but by all means. Are you going to vote? Yeah, I mean, if you guys agree with it, then I'm going to. Next slide. Just a minutes from March 22nd. Will we approve the minutes from March 22nd? Exactly. Moved and seconded. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right. Now we go to public forum. So I see we have a number of folks here. This is a public forum. Anyone can speak to any item that relates to this committee during this time. We typically we let people speak on the agenda item two, which we have two agenda items tonight. First one is this year, 23 fair policy and proposed service reductions conversation related to Green Mountain transit. And the other deliberative item is around the main street concept redesign. So if you're here for one of those, you'll have a chance to speak when we get to them as well. But that being said, does anyone from the public want to speak now during public comment? If so, just, you know, indicate with a raised hand or otherwise indicate. Does you want to speak now or do you want to wait for? Yeah. Okay. There's one in raise, but I just went down. Tom. Okay. Great. Yeah, Tom, if you want to speak now, that's fine. If you want to wait until we get into the transit item, that's fine too. I'm just checking to see if you could hear me and it sounds like you can. We can hear you. Yeah. All right. Thank you. We can only hear him when we unmute him. So if he was speaking previously. Yeah, we only just heard that last sentence that you said, Tom, just so you know. Oh, okay. Oh, I see the mute button now. Did you make comment prior to that? We can't, we're not hearing you anymore at this point. I did. But I think I'm good. So I think we should just move forward. Okay. So we, yeah, we haven't heard any of your comments yet, but you'll, you'll have a chance, if you're sticking around, you'll have a chance to give them. Okay. And to confirm, you will have to raise your hand so we know to unmute you. Okay. Tom, were you looking to speak now and give your comment now? I would see your hand up. No. I just want to make sure I knew how to be heard when, if and when I should want to be heard. Perfect. Okay. Perfect. I saw Senator Chittenden put a hand up and then back down, but you'll have a chance to speak as well. Senator Chittenden, thanks for being here. So why don't we, is there anyone else right now during public forum, I should just speak? All right. So seeing none, I'll close the public forum and we're going to jump into the transit item. This was referred by a city council resolution at our previous meeting, not last night at the previous meeting. And I will kick it over to, I guess, GMT director John Moore or director Spence, if you want to say a few words that were joined today by all four Burlington commissioners and alternates on GMT board. Maple Leaf and I serve as commissioners for Burlington. We're the only community that has two commissioners. We pay the line share of the local assessment. But we're also joined by Tom Darinthal and Marcy. I'm blanking on your last one here. Thank you, Gowder. And we have been engaged very strongly, made the last meeting, forcibly talked about trying to find other sources of funding. I serve on the finance committee and have worked with John and others to understand the finances in detail. No easy issue. I think John is here with a PowerPoint that can go through some of the detail. And I'll leave it at that. Great. Thanks. Thank you. So we'll give a brief PowerPoint that goes over our fiscal year 2023 budget and touch upon some planned service reductions that we had public hearings for a few weeks ago and then talk about the potential for zero fair continuation pending some legislative funding of this discussion. So next slide, Lenny. Thank you. Sorry. So I always start with just a quick ridership data slide. This is from the start of FY20. So it does include the pandemic obviously and no surprises. You can see the massive drop around February 2020. And then some pizza valleys as case counts have fluctuated. This is important because if and when we go back to charging a fair, obviously the ridership directly correlates with our fair revenue. So this is an important slide with or without a fair but financially more so if we can charge a fair. Next slide. So just a quick breakdown of our FY23 revenue sources. And so we primarily have four revenue sources. FY23 is still a little skewed because of the COVID relief funding that we receive from the federal government. So typically that federal amount is about 45% but because of some of the COVID relief funds offsetting our state revenue primarily that's higher at 60. The state revenue at about 7%. That's about half of what it typically is the local share. So that is made up of three primary pieces. Number one, the fixed route assessment. Number two, the ADA assessment which is actually based on usage by member municipality. And then there's a smaller capital contribution about 50,000 which is spread amongst our eight member communities. And then lastly our operating revenue is primarily from fair revenue. So in FY23 when our board passed the budget we were assuming that we would start fair collection. So we have about 1.6 of that is in passenger fares. The remaining is advertising revenue and some sale equipment. So those are four primary revenue sources. Next slide. And just for a quick overview in terms of the federal funding that we receive, which makes up normally 45 to 50% of our operating revenues, there is a matching requirement. So for operations which is the vast majority of our budget, we need a dollar of non-federal money to draw down a dollar of federal funding. Maintenance capital and new starts only has a 20% matching requirement but that makes up a smaller part of our budget. And then lastly this is kind of a theme to this short PowerPoint. Through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act there is a 35% increase in federal funding which is great but again we need a non-federal match to be able to leverage that which is really the pinch point for GMT at the current time. We have plenty of federal funds, we don't have enough federal match to draw all that down. Next slide. So this is just a quick snapshot of our budget as originally passed. I'll say that this was initially approved by the Board of Commissioners back in December. Staff started working on the budget last fall. Obviously a lot has changed in the world that's impacted all of our budget since then. But we did increase the fixed rent assessments by 4% and so that's about 90,000 total through our eight member municipalities. We were originally planning about a 5% reduction in our service provided in Chinden County's primarily through a frequency reduction during rush hour on the Shovered and North Ab routes as well as eliminating 40 for daily trips on our Mark Puget Home Service. The Board as of last week has reversed some of those service cuts and I'll talk about that next slide. And for the fare collection as of today we are still assuming that we will restart passenger fares on July 1st. We are budgeting about 1.58 million in total fares. That's local routes, commuter routes and the fares we collect in the ADA program. And just from a snapshot, you know, we collected about 2.3 million passenger fares before the pandemic. So that's $700,000 reduction in revenue. We have not seen any operating expense reduction. So that's really created some budgetary challenges. Part of the reason we haven't seen those operating expense reductions is that we're trying to promote people getting back on the bus in service reductions but certainly be counterproductive in the long run. We've also seen a large increase in the ADA program. That's the complimentary service that for folks that live within three quarters of a mile of fixed bus route, but they can't take the bus for any sort of disability. They have door-to-door transit. It's a much higher cost. We contract that with special services, transportation agencies, producing their white vehicles. But as the population demographic ages, the demand for that program just keeps going up and up. In addition, they're feeling the pinch on fuel prices and inflation. So that's one area we are doing some studies currently to look at ways to curb some of that cost growth. But if the demand continues to increase, which we think it will, that will just be more pressure on our overall budget. And lastly, for our urban budget, we just recently signed two CTA extensions, which is great. We're thrilled by that. That was part of our urban operator negotiations. They're fair contracts. But as you know, the labor market is over-competitive right now, especially for CEO drivers and skilled mechanics. And that has put additional pressure on our budget. Next slide. So as I mentioned, that budget was passed last December, and we'll need multiple adjustments to our budget adjustment. So the first one is our board did vote to avoid the vast majority of the planned service reductions after our public hearing policy. So instead of cutting about 6,200 hours of service, we're looking at more of a 800-hour service reduction. And so that would come in the form of only limiting 200-year-length checks. That route just says, kind of, FYI is about 30 percent of pre-pandemic ridership with teleworking or commuter routes have done much slower to rebound in terms of ridership. We're also looking at some schedule changes to mitigate the impacts of those trip productions. So that's great in terms of our passenger service, but it does add about $275,000 back into our budget from originally passed. Fuel is a massive crippling impact right now, as I'm sure TPW is experiencing. We were budgeted at $2.75 a gallon. If we end up paying $4 to $25 a gallon, we're looking at about a $450,000 increase. Fuel diesel fuel right now is incredibly unpredictable. We paid $4.40 yesterday for our weekly delivery, so we do not have an optimistic outlook for fuel. And then for state operating, I do just want to point this out that we are expecting to get $1.1 million in state operating for our urban budget. We're in the process of going through this annual state grant application. That's actually due to the state on Friday. We'll know the award sometime around July 1st, but we work very closely with V-TRANS and we're relatively confident of that $1.1 million number from the agency of transportation. That is about half of what we typically receive. It's not much of an issue in FY23 because we have remaining COVID relief funds to kind of offset that, but that will be the balance of our COVID relief funds. So for future years, we need to get back to that $2.2 million number for V-TRANS or we're going to have some other issues. So all that said and done adds about a $1 million deficit from the original budget. We will have, again, based on what fuel prices do for the remainder of this fiscal year, approximately $1 million of COVID relief funds that we had budgeted for use in FY22, but that we're not going to spend. So roughly speaking, we'll be able to balance those increased costs using those unspent COVID relief funds. And then kind of the other unknown right now is the amount of legislative funding that we'll receive through the transportation bill. So the House passed a transportation bill that included $1.43 million for GMT to continue the zero fare service on local routes in FY23. The Senate passed a version of the transportation bill that would include $1.2 million, very similar in 10. They had to play much about avoiding service reductions, which we've already done. So that will really be the kind of determining factor for our zero fare program when we present that to our board on May 17th. And so these are just some scenarios. So we're looking at FY23 and beyond, especially as I mentioned, our COVID relief funds will be gone at the end of FY23. So these scenarios all assume that we will not reuse services plan, except for those two-monthly electric and then the only real difference is if we get the T-bill money or not. So that first scenario was kind of the worst case at this point. So if we don't get the T-bill funding, which seems unlikely, we would go back to collecting fares in FY23. And we would start fiscal year 24 with about a $1.6 million deficit in non-federal funding. The second scenario is we get the $1.2 million T-bill and we continue zero fare. This assumes on all routes for the entire fiscal year. We still will start FY24 at a $700,000 deficit. And then the last two scenarios show if we were to continue zero fare for only six months of fiscal year 23, we basically break even. If we were to get the T-bill money and collect fares, we would start FY24 with about a $1 million local fund balance, which seems great but we're projecting about a $1.6 million deficit in FY25. Now that's assuming fuel stays at $4.25 sets and ridership stays at current levels. So a lot of assumptions baked in there. But kind of the key takeaway is we're going to need more non-federal match. That last scenario I don't think is politically feasible. I don't think anybody would be happy if the legislature gives us $1.2 million. Let me scroll away for FY24. So that's more for illustrative purposes. I think the staff, or I know the staff recommendation to the board would be to continue zero fare in some shape or form if we get that T-bill funding next slide. So this is just kind of a summarize to wrap it up. Planning minimal service reductions in FY23, only those two molecular link trips. At the May board meeting, the GMT board will make a FY23 fare collection policy decision that will be funding the T-bill funding and the language in that transportation bill. There'll be some conversations, I'm sure, if we should provide zero fare on all rounds, just local rounds, or there's been some initial conversations about a BOOMS test program, which could extend that funding and provide that benefit to the folks that really need it the most. And then lastly, consider the short-term benefits and then the long-term opportunity costs, which essentially will be potential future service reductions. And I just want to, again, harp on this as much as possible, that, you know, GMT will need additional non-federal funding in future years, 24 and beyond, to maintain our current service levels. That's going to be especially true with the fuel prices remain high if ridership doesn't rebound and if it costs continue to increase, which all seem likely. And then lastly, just want to highlight that the Chinman County Regional Planning Commission did draft a statewide funding study for transit and GMT will focus on that this summer with our legislative outreach. It's clear that not only for GMT, but statewide that the local property tax cannot support the existing transit levels, let alone any future expansion or continued talk after FY23 on zero fare. So providing that statewide non-federal match is more sustainable and will ensure that we can maximize the federal dollars, which is actually state law. So, you know, we will work with the House and Senate Transportation Committees on introducing that more detail. We've started to do that this session, but that will be our legislative focus going forward. So that's kind of where we're at, minimal service reductions and very likely some level of zero fare continuation based on the T bill funding that we don't hear by the May 17 board meeting. Great. Thank you, John. I want to see if anyone who showed up is wanting to speak at this time. I know we have the alternate board members that are at least Marcy's here. Tom was here. I promoted Tom to a panelist. So, and then Senator Chittin is well multiple times, but does anyone, anyone in attendance looking to speak at this time or we have Meg here? I mean, I'll just say, you know, one of the things that I heard from both the city councilors that came to the public meetings and the public became the public meetings was more of a desire to find ways to look collaboratively at these challenges. And I know it's super hard for us at GMT because we touch so many different communities and the communities are very different if they're rural, if they're urban and the opportunities that different municipalities have to contribute are different. But I do think that it's worth finding ways if there are some for us to think collaboratively about what we can do you know, obviously to increase ridership and you know, is there a way that that looks beneficial to the city, which could result in some kind of a different contribution metric, which would help us draw down our federal funds. So, you know, what what I would like to hear us brainstorm a little bit is what are the opportunities around keeping zero fare? And are there ways to be collaborative as the largest municipality they try to really stick out that as a goal? I know it's important to the city of Berlin and I know it's important to the GMT board, but first and foremost, we have to maintain service. So that's where the pinch comes in is like, how could we increase ridership and maybe find a way for that to offset that? That's what I would like at some level for us to explore probably not not tonight, but that's why I would appreciate about this initial conversation. Thanks, Meg. Others looking to share their thoughts at this time? Yeah, this is Tom. Yeah, I just want to compliment I think what Meg said by adding that it's important that we be that GMT be consistent, that we offer a service that is dependable over time, that if we're tuning it too much where we're going to, you know, add or make a route more service more frequently and then reduce it and then increase it as our revenues go up and down, that that is not going to project a service that people are going to depend on and ride day in day out. Thanks, Tom. Anyone else looking to speak at this time before we go to the committee? Okay. So seeing none, I think at this point we'll go to the committee discussion, counselors. Thank you. So I just wanted just to make sure that I'm clear the 30 minute peak hour frequencies on route six and seven, those are being rolled back so that they're more frequent now they're 20 minutes. So starting on June 13 those will be due down to every 20 minutes starting rush hours. Thank you. Why is there 1.1 million dollars less in the state? I forget what slide it was, Mike said, my note to myself is operating I guess is the operating funds that you get from the state. Why is it 1.1 million dollars less than Fy19? Well, the easy answer is that we got the COVID relief funds to replace those. There's a whole budgeting puzzle at the state level and I think the public transit administration, they lost some of their state operating because they also got COVID relief funds. So I think it's all directly related to COVID. We are relatively confident we'll get back to the 2.2 million level if not higher in Fy24 once our COVID relief funds are gone. But I think there was an opportunity to stay since they're operating as we had the additional revenue. Okay, that makes sense. And then around the price of fuel, I know that we're seeing a spike right now because of geopolitical events and inflation and everything else. But over the last five years or so, I mean, I know you don't have this data available, but what is, can you project? What's the average? It's 425 is extremely high, right? Yeah, I mean, we were paying roughly that back in 2011, then we were paying a couple of weeks under a dollar an hour last summer. So it's been very volatile. I don't have the information, but I'd say maybe $2, even if it's lately not to stay for a quarter. Our fuel suppliers think that it will stay above $4 for the foreseeable future. And the other question I had was around the zero fare. I think it's a great program, but there are people who ride that could afford to pay some amount of fare. I guess it's more of a question. I mean, do you feel like a majority of the ridership are from people who can't or would benefit from the zero fare? Majority, yes. We have survey data. I don't know the number in front of me, but income levels are certainly lower on a lower scale, I would say, for majority of our passengers. I think our board will have to consider if we want to restart charging the fare on the link routes. Those are longer distance, kind of a higher premium service, but they're also our lowest ridership during the pandemic. So that may, I mean, I help get people back on the bus. But the means passive program, I think, long term would be the best solution. So we could be as efficient with any funding we have and provide the benefit that the folks that need it. And I would agree with that, because I think the thing that makes the bus an attractive option is the convenience, right? And so having more frequent times and ability to transfer and get places without having long waits between different bus legs, I think is real valuable and people would maybe that wouldn't necessarily have to ride from a financial standpoint, but just as a convenience standpoint to get places, you might get more ridership that way. We would agree with that. If there was ever a sustainable revenue source provided at GMT, I think we'd have to have some serious conversations internally at the board level once that that's used, so that I could continue fare free or to expand our service. And if you have this means passive program because a free bus that doesn't travel when or where you want to go is not very valuable. So we've always had a staff kind of philosophy to prioritize the service. It can do both great, but I would be short-sighted if we were to have to reduce service in the long run, because we can fare free, but funding that sustainable revenue will hopefully allow us to do both. Thank you. I think that's Councilor Bergeron. First, thanks, John. And if you can send us, if you haven't, I don't think I've gotten the PowerPoint. I did not take Koby's notes, because it's already done. It's posted online. It's posted on the site as of this afternoon when John just emailed it to me. Okay. Did not go back on the site, I will love. Just before the meeting, so you didn't miss it. I was en route on my bicycle. Okay. Thank you. In that vein, I'm really interested in us getting as much information about the revenue study, the sustainable revenue study as possible. Yeah, we can get to that. I think there's an in-depth report drafted by CCR and ZGOT was part of doing that. And so there's $16 million pre-pandemic generated in, say, Vermont, paid 40 divine local communities, agency of transportation or affairs. So that study led to replace those $16 million and additional $5 million that would help with cost containment and service expansion by drawing that on federal funds. So there's eight options listed, all targeted to raise $21 million. And the thought would be that the reliance on property tax would be removed for transit funding. So we can start with the five-star study. Would be very, very, very interested. We have that need across lots of boards. And in regard to revenues and the relationship with Fair Free, and I think that we do not want to pit Fair Free against service enhancements. I don't want to do that. I think it is good to be focusing on low-income folks and what have you. However, let me just throw out that I am a fan of universal programs versus means tested programs. I think universal programs have the greatest success social security in this country. And Medicare are the greatest examples of that means testing leads to lots of social incohesion. And we should look to see if we can avoid that in transportation, which is a vital public need. And so when I think about that, one of the first places that I think about is the link to employers and to new developments and the whole transportation demand management link. So I would ask you to be thinking in those terms as well as how your services can get funds from those people who have historically said those are not my problem. So, yeah, it's that. We've started to strategize on that. We're working with our institutional partners now. If we do continue Fair Free to get some additional funding from them to offset their past contributions, so that would certainly help draw down the federal funds. So point of all taken, I think, you know, both, you know, a 40-foot bus running all over town, you know, it's probably a dying service model. And the property tax is probably a dying revenue source. So we've decided to do a creative thinking of how we provide mobility about the cost of that supply. Yeah, I think a dynamism in that approach, I'm happy. You know, I'm glad that you're starting. I hope that, you know, that you put the energy in that in terms of, you know, the choice, although I don't support the choice, I just want to say that it seems to me that in the urban cores, in particular in Burlington, where we have the density, that this is where we want to go. And I, without speaking for Senator Chittenden, we had a nice conversation the other day at Barrio. And I think that he raised the question of for the more commuter routes coming in that there was the possibility of maybe some fairs in that regard. I'm not a fan, let me just say, but I am more of a fan of that than when we're looking in the intercor or from Winnowsky to Burlington electrification. If ever I heard an argument for the electrification of the bus system, you have provided it today. So with this, can you talk about the ways that we can go from $4.25 to what was it, $0.60? Or a mile that BED said, my God, in a much more sustainable way, talk to me about the electrification of those buses here. Sure. So we have two inserts now. And we are in the final stages of a grant application in partnership with the Hitton Cia Transportation for seven more. So as a federal program provides 85% of the funding and BTrans and GMT through our capital budget will provide the rest. We've had some initial conversations with the good folks at Burlington Electric Department that they were funding a response to the first buses, I think there's some potential there for the additional buses. And so we'll notify that grant award probably some time in late July or early August. And then we will look forward to future electrification as federal funding is available. The buses themselves are about twice as much. So it's been a really good investment. So that's certainly a consideration. But at least right now, there's no shortage of federal funds that process that I think. So let me, without thinking about GMP as being a competitor, we're not a competitor, that they too would play in their service areas or outside of Burlington, your service areas or outside of Burlington. You probably are talking with them about partnerships, but if you're not, I would encourage that as well. Yeah, they provided some funding units for our rural service area. One limitation right now with our two existing buses is on deep charging limitations. We have to charge overnight. So, you know, one strategy would be looking at deploying on-tree chargers outside of Burlington, in Burlington as well. But so we can do that on-route charging. So GMP would sort of be perhaps our state partners like Senator Chitman can help outside of the city of Burlington. And the last question slash point, I'm intrigued about the ADA numbers, you know, because that's rising and I think it would be helpful to understand those numbers. We do have an aging population. It's an area which maybe other communities would be more willing to pony up than just generally, people seem to like little old ladies trying to get, you know, to from the doctor and the supermarket. So I'd be really curious in exploring that, I'll call it a micro demographic that, you know, is a significant cost to you that $325,000. That was the increase. Exactly. A 1.6 million dollar program. Yeah. So it's a big program. It's a program that cannot get any less big, not shrink in other words, because, you know, as we get up there, we're not driving so much or we shouldn't be driving enough. I should get my 95-year-old father-in-law to stop driving. That's another story. So that's an area which I think we would benefit from hearing about and maybe trying to understand how that can play both with service and with revenues and with a sustainable way. And we are looking at some consolidation options with SSDA to try to use the administrative costs of that program. So there could be some short term relief, which may not be significant to the whole program, but I'll start that path towards a more sustainable operating structure. Efficiency is really important. Yeah. Unfortunately, the paratransit efficiency is very difficult to achieve because it's hard to prove drugs. Everyone's going to replace the 50-times. But one area of opportunity is microtransit, which we operate much earlier. If we can get more ADA folks on the general public door-to-door service, that could reduce costs. So we are looking at that for some of our growth and greater growth scenarios. That would be great. I'd really love to see that. Thank you. Thank you a lot. And the board is also just looking at how fund ADA spread that cost because it is wildly changing here and here in the assessments. And you'll see this here in Burlington's assessment was generally flat due to the college reshuttle ADA, but other communities had growth of double digits. So 60%. ADA costs are paid by towns. Yeah. So half paid by the federal government, half matched by both of these fellows. Okay. Any other questions or comments? No, that's more than enough. Okay. Great. Thanks. Yeah. And just to, I mean, just to reiterate, hopefully people know this, but anyone watching is the direction from city council that was unanimous was we're trying to have this conversation about how do we maintain prayer-free service and how do we maintain service levels and expand service going forward. So it's not just a one-time conversation. It's going to be an ongoing conversation. And I appreciate everyone being here for that. I think we really need to have a lot of conversations about how we do that. And right now we have this immediate issue of trying to do that in the immediate term for this coming fiscal year. So I guess my first question is, so when we, I wonder if we can pull up the slide of the different scenarios for FY23 based on funding. Can we get that back? I think it's probably at the very end, sadly, maybe. My mouse is not moving. Yeah, this is a, it should make a larger person. So my question is, why are we not looking at the full funding and what that would mean? That the house funding was 1.43 million. Why is that not a possible scenario? Well, I think if we got the 1.43, these numbers would just be decreased by about 200,000. I did send a letter on behalf of GMT to the Chair of the House of Transportation yesterday at a request providing GMT's opinion of the Senate version and the House version and really understanding the intent of the two bills, the only difference is the amount. And so we hope we'll get the 1.43. I think it's probably more realistic at this point that we'll get the 1.2. Okay, but you're advocating for the 1.43. You always advocate for more than less. But in that, you said 200,000, but wouldn't it be doubled? It's by the federal. Yes, that 200,000 would allow us to draw another 200,000. So it would be another 460,000. But these numbers on the bottom are just the local funding deficits. So this doesn't take into consideration that because we need this amount to match that same amount of federal funds. So yes, we could turn 200,000 into 400,000, but these numbers don't change by the 200,000. Okay, okay. And Senator Chittenden, can you give us insight into why the Senate chose the lower 1.3 reduced amount? Happy to. So for the record, Thomas Chittenden, State Senator Chittenden County. So I will say this, when the bill came over to us, there were some voices on the committee that wanted to slash the entire amount to go back to pre-COVID charging affairs. And the arguments were made and I think we tuned into those conversations. I hope that this Council subcommittee knows that I listened and I reached out to GMT. I talked to multiple board members, also to John Moore, who does a fabulous job serving in Green Mountain Transit. You're doing great, John. I'm really glad you're still at the helm there. And in those conversations, it became clear that a compromise, a path forward that would take into account some testimony that we received from Green Mountain Transit. And when I spoke to other board members, 1.2 million with flexibility, allowing to what I just heard one of your members just comment to, allowing the board to be flexible in some of their approaches. I used to serve on the Green Mountain Transit board and I just don't see a absolute equivalence between the commuter routes that people get on the bus in Burlington and get off in Montpelier to the routes, the high density urban core routes. Those commuter routes are a better value with fewer stops and longer distances, saving a lot of money on gas and wear and tear and car. And so I saw merit in making sure that the language was consistent with what I heard from board members that saw merit in giving some latitude to the GMT board, who I have great confidence. I hopefully came through in some of the conversations. It is remarkable the skill and talent and expertise on the GMT board. I think Burlington City Council is very well experienced as well, but I just always am an awe of the great people that serve on the Green Mountain Transit board. And so I wanted to support their language while still getting the 1.2 million, trusting what I heard from them and being able to dynamically adjust to evolving conditions. I also see value in getting the fare free and keeping fare free, finding ways to do it. I think to keep it after this year, we're going to need to look at how to get our local communities to also contribute more. I serve on the South Burlington City Council and that's a conversation I'm bringing to the City Council so that we can plan thinking out a year or so from now. And we might accommodate increased local assessments to possibly match or encourage the state to continue this level of assessment. I don't know if that answers your question, Jack, but I hope you know that I was listening to lots of different points of view and I found that 1.2 million with a flexibility was a path forward that kept a good amount of the money in the T-bill. And it seemed to make sense from everything I heard at the time. But as you understand the process in John just tested for sent a letter to the House Transportation, there is one more step, an important step to this process where we reconcile the two bills. Thank you, Senator Chittenden. Yeah, I just, I think we should be looking to grow and expand transit. And right now, although we've reduced it, we're still talking about cutting transit. So to me, it's a mistake to further shrink that money. And the money saved from eliminating the the wraps that are being eliminated. How much are those savings? About $50,000 for the two Montcly early trips. Okay. So yeah, I mean, that, that to me is the perfect example of we're cutting service to save 50 grams. Meanwhile, the state is, the state Senate is talking about removing, you know, 230,000, which is so it's just, I feel like this is, it's not only we should be preserving, we should be expanding. So it seems to me a missed opportunity, but I would agree with what others have said is that we should be in addition to pushing the state harder, I think the state needs to step up more, we should be pushing on other partners as well, including the city of Burlington, who has saved money due to the fair free state funding, because we've had, you know, we no longer are paying for the College Street Shuttle to be fair free. So unless I'm getting that wrong, there were still some payments for the operation of College Street Shuttle. So the assessment was still there was reduced because the fair collection wasn't there for two years. Okay, so maybe the saving was less than I think it is. It wasn't the full amount of the College Street Shuttle assessment, that improved the 20% operating costs. Okay, but there was, you know, there was meaningful savings there. We recently, City Council recently approved a resolution that was advocating for $50,000 to make the city loop fair free. That's likely a cost that we're not going to incur now if this, you know, if this moves forward with fair free. So the city is seeing savings that I think should be reinvested into our transit system. UVM UVM has also seen a lot of savings, right, due to state funded fair. You have about $400,000 over the last two years. So that's one of the institutional partners we're working with, trying to restructure our women and access agreement. So if we don't go back to charging fair in FY23, that there's still paying a discounted rate, but still providing something that we can drop at those federal funds. So there's still additional conversations to be had and I think that's the next one. But they say, yes, that's a good amount of money in the last couple years. We have not built them at all for the fair free period. Yeah. So I think those are, I think yeah, that's what I'm advocating for and what I would want to be hearing is just how are we leaning on these various partners and looking to get more money because it seems like really it's a money, we're talking about a money problem, a funding problem more than anything. Obviously ridership it's going to take more than just fair free and increasing service. There's a lot we're going to need to do to boost ridership, but a lot of this is just coming down to money, it seems like. I'm federal money, we have plenty of federal funds, it's not federal money, but fair free location. Yeah. So I think we should just be exploring like, yeah, I kind of, you know, part of what I'm getting at, I kind of wish when we look at these tables and maybe when the board's looking at different possible scenarios that, you know, those would be some of that. What does our budget look like if we get UVM to contribute what they were contributing, or we get the city of Burlington to contribute what they were contributing or other partners to be able to see and show that to everyone, you know, not just internally, but show that to us as the broader community. Look, UVM, if you did this, here's what we would be able to do, Burlington, if you fund us at this level, here's what that means for transit service and really make that case and then show that to the public of what could be possible if folks stepped up more, whether that's the state, local or employers, and kind of lay out those scenarios rather than solely these scenarios of like, you know, different types of cuts and you know, budgets that aren't quite, that are using money. So I think that's a lot of what I would advocate and I want to do everything I can to help find those solutions and make those public arguments and show people because I think people want, people believe in the value of public transit, people want to support it. And if people knew what was at stake, I think a lot of folks and institutions would pay more rather than allow, you know, some of these cuts to go forward and there's to be reinstated. I'm trying to see what other questions. So right now, today, are there fairs being charged? Anyone else? So we're fair free until the July 1st. If we get the T-Bow funding, we'll continue that. Okay. Any further approval. Okay. And but with service, some of those have been implemented or are currently, service has been reduced. Yeah, I think it's a little wonky because we, in anticipation of staffing shortages, which actually we're experiencing now two months later than we expected, back in early March, we reduced service because we didn't have enough drivers. Those temporary service reductions were also the planned permanent service reductions, but those will come back online in June. So in June, we'll be back to basically our normal service less those two or three of my trips. Okay. Okay. Oh yeah, I think what I wanted to say too with the partners, the whole theme about asking more from partners, I think Gene brought up the utilities as well, you know, leaning on them. I think that's another big one, but glad to hear that that's already happening to some extent. I think that's an initial conversation. The tier three funding we don't could be used or fair around the replacement, for example, that's what they used to help invite us to the match in the two electric buses. But we don't need that because the state's filling in the difference to the federal funding in a local match. But it could be some opportunity there for checking with the federal plan specific. Yeah, that makes sense. And then with the electric buses, when are those going to be coming online? Well, we won't know about the funding until August. It was supply chain. It could be two years from August before we actually take delivery. Okay. Okay. All right, I think yeah, I'll wrap up in a minute. I think my other thing would just be again to advocate strongly for the importance of fare free. I think, yeah, I don't think we should pit it against service. I think we should view it how we view other public services that are made available with the climate emergency and the desire to get people onto transit and out of vehicles. I think it makes a lot of sense to have it be a publicly provided service that's paid through taxes rather than paid at the point of service, which also makes service worse. It slows down. Service makes it less convenient. So I think there's a lot of reasons to do fare free. And I don't, I think we should be looking at it from a perspective of, you know, maintaining that as a baseline and then looking for additional money to expand. And I think it's what Councillor Bergman said to you about just what programs are successful. And if you think about like the library or something, yeah, there's plenty of people who use the library who could pay $1.50 or whatever to rent the book out, but we don't, we're not thinking about doing that in order to fund the library improvements. We're finding other ways to fund our public libraries. And I think we should look at transit the same way, given the importance of it societally. But I'm glad to hear you say, John, that you are looking, you know, your perspective is to do both, you know, maintain fare for you as well as expand. For 23, beyond that, without some significant changes to our funding structure, we won't be able to do it. But that's the beauty of the UCCRC study that if that gained traction, we could maintain service, look at some incremental expansions in your considerable fare that would provide not federal match to allow all that. Right. And I think that's what we, that's what this is all about really is we have this window right now where we all see what's coming. It's a problem. We all think it's a problem where we're headed next year. So we need to all work together to figure out how we can fund this and avoid that. Senator Chittenden. I have to drop off, but I just want to say I fully support finding a sustainable revenue source to support public transportation. I personally think the most rational assessment would be through an increased car registration fee. If you choose to register a single occupancy vehicle for either commercial or personal purposes, I think you should pay a 10 or 20 or $30 additional fee on an annual basis. And you do the math that with 200,000 vehicles, it gets a good chunk of money. So that's something I've been advocating for. I'm trying to till the soil on it. I think it's the rational way one of many rational ways to fund public transportation. I need to drop off. There's other ideas I have on funding public transportation. I think I've been to Council Birdman's year on a couple of those crazy ideas the other day. But I hope you all reach out to me going forward. And I'm sorry if you're disappointed in the Senate bill, know that there's still some process left. And John Moore, please don't hesitate to reach out what I can do to help GMT going forward. Thank you so much for being here, Senator Chittenden. Really appreciate it. Thanks for making it. And I love the idea that you just threw out. So here's Council Birdman. Just briefly sort of focused somewhat on what the Senator just said. Are you trying to take him stay on? No, I'm not. I'm not trying to use you while you get off. You know, we're at a moment and we can seize this moment where there are lots of collaborations and potential collaborations. So I guess what I want to do is encourage GMT, its board, and its management with its member communities to do this sort of, it's the cultural building. It's changing the culture and seeing that there is something very fundamental that we have got to do differently. And you guys are at a critical position. But you can't do it by yourself. You have member communities. We've got the Regional Planning Commission. We've got advocates in the state. And so something that would start to really build a community conversation that will build the support to be able to assess what we have and to survey and all this stuff has been done a gazillion times. But, you know, in this moment, what is working and what needs to work and what are we, you know, ideas to improve revenue sources and service to promote it. This is a project, whether you have the capacity to do it, I know you guys are stressed. Everybody is stressed. So trying to figure out how we can build such a thing. We need that. I mean, I mean, I say that I say collectively, without that sort of effort, the status quo will not change. So, and we will be far forced to deal with austerity and to deal with affordability. It is a failure. It is, it is just slow suicide. I'm going to get off the stove box right now, which I just jumped up on and say that this is another idea where, you know, if we can do that, then all of the collateral benefits that we can get from the study on sustainable revenues can come to pass because we will have done the work so that people's first reaction is I'm not taking us, right, which is what the numbers show, right. So that's an additional piece to the extent to which I can assist in that process. I will be happy to do that. Well, and I'll say this statewide transfer funding has been studied, I think seven or eight times over the last 20 years, and that's happened obviously, but I do think there is some changes happening now. I think over it as part of that, but Tom's a true champion in the Senate with Senator Herschelich and House transportation, but I think it's important making sevens or could be champions for him as well. I'm not going to admit it. So I do think there's an opportunity to get that grant as well. We can do this. He said, great. Great. Any further comments from anyone? Anyone looking to speak? I see some chats. Maybe that came in. We're from Senator just about his contact information and having to drop off. Okay, great. If there's no further thoughts, I think we can kind of wrap up this conversation. I don't know that there's any. It says action on the agenda, but I don't know that we're thinking of taking any action at this point. I'll say councilors have any questions? But I think it's pretty obvious that this is going to need to be an ongoing discussion with all of us. And I'm really glad that we're able to bring board members and legislators and you here, John, to kind of begin to, you know, break down the silos a little more and break down those barriers and have this conversation practically. Yeah, definitely. It's going to take us all and I think government is has an obvious role to play with this shift that we need to take towards transit with the climate emergency. Is there anything that the GMT would need from us that would be appropriate to have an action today? Is there an ask that you have? You know, I think not that I have the resolution. It's been very helpful. I've said that multiple times with legislators. So that was the action that I think of. Is that your treatment? Sure. Well, you know, you mentioned seven different studies. I remember three over my 20 years of the GMT board, but maybe some of those were multiple efforts. We have at various times on the board tried to set up separate board committees to focus on regional funding. Our board day to day is not going to have the time or focus. However, there are partners out there. We're not going to do it alone. Now is the time to start for next legislative session. And our problem is going to be in FY 24, not FY 23. So we have a one year window now. And so if there is interest in the community and politically, then I think the goal then would be for us at the board to discuss and the community members discuss how do we set up some public private campaign, figure out what our goals are, what is our agenda for legislative level, and figure out those nontraditional partnerships that are going to give us more traction beyond the usual suspects. So if you're willing to give us a run, it ain't going to be easy. We haven't succeeded in 20 years. Dramatically, we have succeeded in growing the system. Commuter routes are new. Regional routes are new. That's good, but we're built on a house of cards. And I think to your point, Jack, we could fall and end up contracting in FY 24 and 25 if we don't figure out how to stabilize the base. We would have already put in the color relief. Yeah, that's really hitting the problem over the last two or three years. So yeah, right. And we are I mean, again, we are talking about cutting service. I know it's less than what we thought, but it's still at a time when I feel we should be expanding. We are reducing slightly service. So I think even this year, it's didn't, you know, we didn't achieve what I think are collective goals. Marcie, did you want to add? Yeah, I was just hoping to comment just because Senator Chittin had brought this up in conversations with board members about Fair Free for the Link Express. And I've been pretty vocal about this on GMT's board, but I just want to say I personally do feel that there's a strong value to have in Fair Free for the Link Express. As a Link writer myself, I agree that there's a lot of value to that route. However, I do still feel that it is not as convenient as driving. And if folks are carpooling with even two people, a lot of times with the with the fare, which is four dollars, at least to Montpelier, it was still cheaper to drive if you had another person in the car. But yet that's, you know, a lot of emissions going from Burlington to Montpelier, Burlington to Waterbury, Middlebury, that, you know, folks could potentially justify not using a car as much, sharing a car, not having a car, if they, you know, got used to using that kind of route. But if it's easier and more convenient for them to drive because the bus costs just as much money, I don't think that they're going to make that transition. So at least for folks that I know that commute to Montpelier, it's kind of or had them and pretty tough to get them to use the bus before it was Fair Free for the Link Express. Thanks, Marcy. Did you want to respond, John? Well, I would just say you need to do some more research into this, but if we were to say Fair Free only on the link routes, the way we do our driver schedule, the bus scheduling, we would need to have all of our fare boxes on back online and do the cash collection. So we may, you know, raise $150,000 in revenue, but, you know, it costs $100,000 to collect it. So, you know, that will be a consideration, will present to the board where it may not be worth the effort to collect the fare on just those two routes. So in those scenarios, we assume that we would go Fair Free on all routes because of that, we need to do some more depth kind of analysis on that. But that's only a consideration in addition to the benefits of continuing to carry on those routes. Okay, yeah, that's great to hear. I totally agree with Marcy. I think $8 a day for commute people. That's a strong disincentive in my mind because people don't think about their commute as costing, you know, 54 cents a mile or whatever it is. They only think about gas and they look at $8 and they say, I'm not going to say $8 by taking the bus if I have a car. So I just feel like that disincentive, I think it's meaningful. And yeah, if we can keep it Fair Free, I think that would be meaningful. Just to think about that, I'm taking the topic now. Thank you. But you asked for action items and I just want to throw out there that I've seen the City of Burlington convene some sort of interesting conversations to address challenges that the city's facing in regional areas are facing, particularly around like health and some of the racial justice pieces. And if it was something that was appropriate or possible for you to do, I wonder if this committee could act in someone as a convener of, you know, some of the RPCs, not just in Jitton County maybe, but really make this a bigger thing and look at, do you have a like committee in some of the other areas around here or parts of the state to really, you know, do sort of what Jean was talking about, but at least provide an opportunity for people to come together and say what are our opportunities in our different regions and what are our challenges and even, you know, three or four hours of something really intense where people could really think about that and especially to find like where are we being duplicative, where are we not being efficient in what we're doing that we might be able to save something if we were, because I just, I feel like it's going to be hard to address these issues if GMT is trying to figure it out and Rutland Regionals trying to figure it out and our full valley is trying to put Vermonters or beings in general that are traveling through Vermont, they just want to know that the system has some similarities to it and some places are doing really interesting things and other places are lagging behind and it seems like, you know, I don't know if it's appropriate for you, but I do think that if you're really serious about kind of looking at this in a bigger way, it would be helpful for us, at least in Jitton County, if not in the five counties that GMT serves to say, could we carve out some time and really pull out the invitation so people would come and really start to really dig into this and, you know, would just say like for me, for instance, I'm conflicted to be a GMT board member and be looking at these decisions and know that I represent the city of Burlington that has like these climate initiatives at the same time, like how can we help the multiple goals that we all have find the intersectionality? And because climate and transportation are so closely tied along with housing and social justice and not all these other things, I just wonder if that's it's putting out there as an idea that maybe something that this committee could do at some point in time would be to decide if convening something like that would jump start the conversation in a way that communities would look at this differently than as, you know, Jean was saying in the past, I don't think so, you know, eight dollars to get to more failure. I can listen to my music in my car. Now, that's, that's great. Like, thanks for that. And I think, yeah, transit summit could be really powerful because it touches so many big issues like climate, like economic justice, racial justice, safety, etc. None of us are going to be able to do it alone. That's, that's the thing. The lift is really heavy. And I do think it would find ways to come together. I'd love to hear a GMT board request that sort of you guys thought about it, gave us some ideas said here. What do you think about doing this? These are people that you could work with. We'd work with you. That kind of thing, something that just went down the line. And it is, is sort of like the follow up. Okay, if we're going to build something for next year, what's the step where the players, you know, when do we do this? We just start to do that, knowing full well that everybody because it's up to water up to right here, which is, you know, when, when, when the, when the climate goes really to hell, the water is going to be a lot higher actually. Yeah. There's a lot of other partners too that we haven't mentioned, like some of the advocacy groups that have worked a lot on this, rights and democracy, some of those groups. Great. Any final comments or thoughts on this? Great. Thank you so much both of you for being here. And thanks so much to everyone who showed up, Tom, Marcy. I think we're going to close this item down. And we're going to jump into our other item, other deliberative item, which is the Main Street concept. We're going to go to Laura Wielach and Olivia Therese. Therese. Therese, sorry. Yep. So thanks for having us here tonight. You guys don't have to stay. Your item is done. We are here. But this is really exciting stuff. This is exciting stuff. Kind of along the lines of the past presentation, we are looking to transform Main Street for six blocks from Battery Street to Union. Tonight we have a small portion of our design team here who are slowly coming to life cameras. There's one in the attendees list for some reasons we can't seem to find a way to promote. Also, we're echoing. I would maybe suggest that Mackenzie try logging back on. No, he doesn't actually have to. He's with one of our, my team is telling me that I'm echoing. Yes. All right. Well, I don't have a lot to say. Basically, we're here. Maybe if you sit over here because I don't, were we, were we echoing back here? No, but I'm not hearing Laura echo either, so. Oh, interesting. I'm hearing everybody in that room echo. Oh, everybody. Everybody. Yeah. I'm not on. I don't know. Has it been happening this entire meeting? No, just, no, it just started. How about now? Or is everybody in the room now? It's still, it's still happening. It's you, Laura. It wasn't happening for the people on the attending remotely as well. I can't even talk because it's so distracting. Let's just begin again, I guess. Oh, is it still happening? Yes. Can you, can you test it with that one muted? Hello. Hello. Still happening. All right. So we definitely only have one mic on. It might be because multiple people have, are unmuted on your end, like going to the same rooms. Oh, yeah. They are very much not the same person. I wonder if it's related to our, our background teams conversation? Is that possible? Yeah, it's possible. One of you all is generating, yeah, the feedback. Oh well. Now is it echoing? I didn't hear an echo. All right. Yeah, I think everyone online has, I just muted, uh, Susanna and it stopped echoing, so. All right. Susanna. Is it me? Okay, so now when I speak though, do I echo because I am going to need this? Oh, you're fine. Okay, sweet. Sorry. I've just been on reset, so. Sorry for your patience. Thanks everyone for waiting through the other items. So we're here to, to give you guys, you know, the inaugural example of our great students concept that is debuting tonight. We will be visiting the commission tomorrow and the public on Thursday, as well as a few other stops. But we have a great team here with us. I'm going to not hold up too much so we can keep, uh, advancing through our slides. This is the Great Streets Main Street project. Our team is composed of BHB, agency landscape and planning and grayscale. We have team members from the BHB and agency here tonight. But it also involves a lot of city departments. So while you're here at the station, we'll be doing a lot of the outreach. We do have teams from IFCs, Parks, CEDO, Marketplace, BCAA. We've met with REIB. It's, it's been a pretty significant city project. Those are just the visible departments. It's BCAA on my list. There's a lot of other support departments that are going to project forward. So with that, I'm going to give it over to Evan to bring us through the next few slides. Okay, thanks, Lar. I'm Evan Dietrich with the engineering firm VHB and I'm the overall project manager for the consultant team. What we're going to talk about tonight, I'm going to give an overview of the project. Then Susanna Ross from agency is going to talk about the engagement we've been having with the community at large. We're going to look into the deep dive of the toolkit that we've been using to make decisions about what the concept plans should be and what they're going to look like. And then Steve Woods from agency is going to walk you through the concepts in quite a bit of detail, but we'll try to be succinct and move it along so we don't take up too much of your time, but we do have quite a number of slides to get through. So as many of you know, Great Streets is an ongoing project with the city. A couple years ago, City Hall Park was reconstructed with much fanfare, as was two blocks of St. Paul Street. And now we're working on the next installment of Great Streets, which is the Main Street Project. And Main Street section that we're talking about, here's a map. So the lake is off to the left there in the west. Main Street is highlighted. And you can see the project extends from Battery Street all the way up to South Union Street. So it's seven cross streets and six full city blocks is what we're looking at for the project. The idea with the project is to advance the Great Streets concepts that were developed back in 2016 and implemented on St. Paul Street and further refine those concepts and bring the project into construction. And we're roughly going to be following this schedule that you see in front of you. We got started in late October of last year. And since that time, we've been doing things like field survey and geotechnical boardings, looking at existing utilities, and working towards developing concepts in addition to interacting with the public and a number of different focus groups to get feedback from Berltonians and business owners from the downtown area to help inform what we want to do with the concepts. We did have the first big neighborhood meeting and that was followed up by a business owner meeting at the beginning of February. And since that time, we've been meeting with a number of focus groups and developing concepts that you're going to see tonight. Once we get through the concepts, we're hoping to get city council approval in May on the concepts. And then the project will advance into the design stage. So we'll start with refined conceptual plans throughout the rest of this year. In 2023, we'll largely be preparing the final design drawings and then going to construction in late 2023 is the goal right now. And it's a big project. So construction will extend through the end of 23, 24, and likely into 2025. And that may even get extended depending what other initiatives the city has going on with projects like the ravine sewer. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Susanna and she's going to talk about the engagement. I sure will. Thank you, Evan. We have, as Laura mentioned, been out and about. And when I say we, that's the design team. That's Olivia and Laura, DPW. We've had a lot of engagement, including focus groups with underrepresented groups that you see listed here, 30-ish city meetings that we'll list on the next slide. And, you know, in the meantime, doing public meetings, taking online surveys, and lots of advertising, hopefully you've seen some of it yard signs, postcards, et cetera. And so we're getting some good feedback. Again, these are the sort of city meetings. I won't run through them. There's the ones highlighted in blue are yet to happen. So this is a living document. We'll be doing another one tomorrow and another one the day after that. Next. And so just to let everyone know, you know, we would really welcome the chance for you to dive into the public feedback a little bit more deeply if you want. We've got posters like this one summarizing what we heard at the public meeting at greatstreetsbtv.com. Next. We have, similarly, from each of our underrepresented focus groups, we've got the takeaways from those meetings. And again, I'm not going to sort of drill down into each of them here, but what we end up with are some sort of high level topics that really seem to cut across both residents and businesses. That Main Street's vital cultural and civic resource for newcomers and those who, you know, are from Burlington, that it should represent that diverse and rich culture, history and identity of all of those people. On business side, they're looking at investments needed to support future needs and last for years to come. In other words, make sure Main Street is maintained. And then also make sure that it's coordinated with other city priorities. Again, that's a priority for businesses. And then combined in the middle, we see the overlap where we talk about or we're hearing from folks that they want to see Main Street to have places for arts and programming for all ages, that it be accessible and safe for pedestrians. And that we have a clear parking and wayfinding strategy to support the businesses on Main Street. So next we will look into sort of our toolkit. As Evan mentioned, we are not starting from scratch here. We have a section that was for the most part determined back in the 2016, you know, sort of Great Streets Project. And so we're sticking with that. And what you're going to see here tonight are a couple of different ways of looking at this cross section. And it's important to know this is what you're looking at here is a kind of typical cross section, which will vary. There's right of way encumbrances up and down Main Street that we'll have to deal with. Sorry, wait back one more. I sort of jumped ahead and talked about encumbrances. But just to be really clear, what we're looking at through the middle is streamlining the roadway, the two drive lanes, the two parallel parking lanes, to kind of a minimum dimension in order to achieve a much more sort of holistically sort of functioning street for pedestrians, for bikers, for stormwater and ecology. And so at the same time, you'll notice underground, we're going to be replacing utilities. So this is not all just about changing things at the surface, but really digging down deep and making sure Main Street functions at every single level. And so yes, while that's our ideal section, the next image here shows a few places where we know we have encumbrances on the right of way at the Griffin at City Hall. So while we're striving to kind of achieve an ideal section throughout, we know there are places that won't be able to happen. And then we'll just work with that next. And then just to sort of put some numbers to what we just described in section, existing is roughly 50 to 70 feet of roadway. We're talking about getting down to roughly 40. We will lose some parking spots as a result of gaining all of this sort of ecological and pedestrian and cyclist benefit. Sidewalks will maintain a consistent and generous width, rather than going from very skinny to very wide, it'll be sort of a much more continuous stretch. And we'll have a lot more space for stormwater treatment, green space, and space for arts and gathering, which again is a really big priority from the public point of view. Next. We understand parking is going to be a concern for businesses, for lots of folks. We do have again another kind of toolkit of ways we think we can sort of alleviate those concerns from leveraging technology, parking management apps, variable and peak hour pricing, the real-time feedback on parking locations, creating incentives, building out better infrastructure in terms of where bike parking happens, in terms of transit accommodations, wayfinding, and then very parking restrictions along the length of the street to reflect land use, seasonal demand, and think about flex spaces. And so with that, I will hand it over to Steve Woods, who's going to talk about two sort of conceptual ways of treating what is essentially kind of a similar cross-section in each. Thanks. Yeah. Hi, good evening. My name is Steve Woods, with HCC Landscape and Planning. In talking about the two options, we have two different approaches, as said mentioned, that look to approach the site in two ways. So these two sort of simple graphs, graphics or diagrams you see are sort of basic representations of looking at the area, we looked at before, Main Street below. So if you can imagine looking down on the plan and how those areas are broken up by block. For the architectural gateways approach one, it's looking to take the plan and make really clean gateway sections and really clean interactions and opportunities in each of the area sections. The Lake City mountain option begins to break it up into different zones that reflect the qualities of Burlington. So starting with the first one, we looked to create a dignified and continuous streetscape for all six blocks with infamous emphasis on placemaking and focus at the crossroads in the gateways. So we have these large bubbles that are representing each of the intersections and the larger one at the center space. The plan as it were begins to reflect this in a very clean and symmetrical manner. You have a consistent street line of trees that reads down the roadway going from east to west from Union all the way down to Battery Street, culminating at sort of the heart as it were of Main Street between Church Street and St. Paul. In this block we looked to use a shared roadway or a curbless roadway in this condition where there might be more flexibility of movement between the pedestrian realm adjacent businesses which are rich and bountiful in this area and obviously City Hall Park with this new renovation and activation. The lower images begin to show some blow-ups in these areas. Our enlargements within each of these zones are corresponding with the blue circles above starting at Union Street down to the middle section between our centering on Church Street and then also holding down towards Battery. In the plan you can begin to see the differentiation between the roadway, parking where that exists, opportunities for turn lanes going on to different streets, a bicycle track or bicycle means of movement that's indicated in green. In this option it's shown as a clear consistent line. At the intersections at the corners we have opportunities for clear pedestrian crossings much closer and shorter crossings given the reduced roadway width. We also have opportunities for expanded green in most these cases. We might see storm water being handled within these areas at these intersections. Taking a little different look at it looking at it in cross-section starting down between Champlain and Battery. We have a cross-section that is shown here that begins to express how a pedestrian movement is occurring at the edges of the space which is shown in orange. A tree buffer zone between that and the main cycle movement area. Parking and a sort of furnishing zone as we call it. This is where you might find your typical street signs and roadway lighting. Clear movement of vehicles both transit and single rider vehicles. There was some notion or a moment where we were talking about flex spaces. In certain areas there may be opportunities to use some parking space for expanded cafe seating or dining. We see this a lot. We've seen this happen a lot over the past few years where outdoor dining has become much more needed for space and health reasons. We see this as being opportunities for seasonal use and expanded use in certain areas, select areas. And then the cross-section begins to run back towards the opposite side. Again with cycle track on both sides both uphill and downhill. Green barrier or green buffer zone and then the blocking and pedestrian zone. In some areas you see a little red cross hatch. This again is expressing the incumbrances we might have given grade change. We all know the dramatic slope we have going from east to west. Allow those incumbrances are associated with allowing for accessibility to adjacent businesses or frontages along the street. Another cross-section. This one is a typical cross-section right in the center of Church Street. An opportunity as I mentioned before for a curbless section here similar to what's happening along Church Street. Celebrating multiple uses of people within different spaces. Sort of seating the space to the pedestrian when appropriate. Opportunities for art happening at the ground plane and possibly above the ground plane. I also forgot to notice and mention that you'll see these little bubbles pop up where there's blue notes. These are taken from the community outreach in different surveys and groups that we spoke to and heard from and some of the comments that they made during those meetings. More signage to know where parking is. Even having the signage speak to good places for drop-offs and sidewalks and activity. In the third cross-section this is closer up toward Union. Again looking at the bubbles. Obviously the public wants to see more shade trees, street trees and to offer shade. Branding that speaks to placemaking and different strategies for speaking to Burlington specifically along Main Street. One of the challenges along this stretch you'll notice to the right hand side is a very large and deep running encumbrances. In this case in retaining parking that uphill bike lane becomes a shared path to maintain the ability to have the gesture of green space, bike and pedestrian movement and parking with all within that lessened cross-section. As was mentioned before we're looking to be nimble in making sure all these different activities are being captured within the multiple different cross-sections. Art used as a gateway element is a very strong strategy within this option. So looking at the intersections as key moments or key opportunities to express art. Potentially being able to use cool sculptures interactive and inviting opportunities of art for kids. It's one of the things we heard from the youth focus groups. Being able to make sure that the art is representative of all the different groups and communities that are here to translate the signage in art into the primary spoken languages of all the people there. The horticulture and the green space as it's expressed within this option begins to continue along this clean and crisp and ordered system of planting where available. Nice even rows of shade trees that repeat being able to pop the corners and intersections you will if you will with color and possibly different heights of trees and textures of trees at those intersections. As well as being able to have the center pick up on that color a bit more between Church Street and St. Paul. Stormwater and its management is also being considered along Main Street. In this case we're looking to use very clean and ordered systems of capturing stormwater. We're best available along the street wearing communications with all different groups within the city understanding the challenges and using strong water management in these steep slopes. We want to make sure that they're located and being handled appropriately and to avoid scarring and misuse in these sloped conditions along the street. And then a final blow up of this artful gateways one begins to take a closer look at the streetscape and start to identify specific zones that are present in both options. We have the adjacency to business spill out space which is basically the front zones that happen along buildings. Some opportunities to expand that were possible or to have that even extend into special amenity zones which are shown in yellow or even furnishing zones which are shown in the darker pink. In most cases those furnishing zones will be the space where we would land street trees in large planting pockets with available soil. Potential use of structural soil or cellular systems beneath gray to make sure that trees are growing in appropriate soil capacity zones. When those areas aren't being used for green space that's where you would find seating pockets and in this option they'd be more in a kind of clean manicured and normal rhythmic location along the streets. The last portion is this light pink which is shown weaving in and extending out into parking spaces. Opportunities to convert these spaces into special event or seasonal spill out spaces is where these are being shown. Again, locating these opportunities were best suited adjacent to businesses or adjacent to community areas such as a park. The second design option the Lake City Mountain looks to break down the street into three distinct zones and having these zones be expressive for the landscape character both in planting and in materiality of the sort of three main moving downhill from growing, moving downhill towards the lake. So we have the mountain which is located at the eastern end of the site city located in the center in lake as you move down towards the western end. The same plan view begins to show how this plan expresses itself in a large grand scale. As you zoom in you can see opportunities for the bike lane to make more of a meandering movement in certain areas where possible, creating larger planted pockets and offering more of a varied planted aspect as you move down the street. Again looking at the portion up next to Union we see that we have a bike lane that's weaving in and out providing these larger planted pockets. Same thing as you move towards Church Street and towards those intersections. The same gesture would be expressed in a more clean and accessible portion of the streetscape between Church Street and St. Paul where we have again a curbless street section with accessible pedestrian movement across towards City Hall Park and then back towards the Flint and other businesses to the south. The meandering begins to pick up a bit more as you get down towards the western and after Champlain Street. The cross sections are pretty similar. We're still containing the same types of activities in both opportunities and even with these minor movements of the streetscape occurring in the bike lanes occurring. Still opportunities for rain gardens to occur, many opportunities for sitting and hanging out along the street where available. In this option we use art and signage as you will see later to focus on the multicultural, multilingual opportunities that are available within the city. Again street signage and lighting and wayfinding will be used to help identify where parking is occurring both on street and adjacent areas off of Main Street. As you move towards the east we can see how those planted pockets offer possibly a different type of experience for the bicycle rider where they're moving and weaving between planted areas that are buffering them both from pedestrian traffic and also from parking and vehicular movement. We still have on the south side of the street in this option the combination of bike and pedestrian movement in the uphill movement due to encumbrances that are adjacent to this area. Again back with the art it's less of an application of art in the expression of gateway but more of an application of a network of art being weaving through and sprinkling throughout the whole strength the length of the roadway. Opportunities that have this art really speak to the co-creation of it both with community members as well as professional artists. Installations could be temporary where they would appear and reappear in different areas along the street. Interactive work that give people and kids an opportunity to play and have a voice. As I mentioned before the overall concept of planting is one that's a little bit more organic and begins to draw off the type of natural and native species that may occur in different areas of the biomes of the area of of of Burlington and speaking to the sort of natural systems of the mountain more orderly systems of the city and back to some more natural storm water and the management of water is still occurring within this design but again looking to see if there might be more of a naturalistic or place appropriate expression of water and how it's captured and converted and moved throughout the systems. Native wetlands and more naturalistic systems happening to the east the opportunity for more structured or channelized systems that are happening within the center portion city portion of the streetscape and then back to a naturalized and gathered or baffled system happening more towards the west and then finally looking at the different types of zones and how they're treated you can see that all the different types of zones are still represented but the actual length and location and form of the zones begin to shift a little bit due to the movement and change of the bike path so you might have opportunities for longer more contiguous furnishing zones are larger opportunities for special mini zones at the corners that coupled with the the access and movement from adjacent businesses to spillout spaces begin to make a really rich and unique streetscape so once again two options that we're working with very similar they all sort of need to function they all need to be safe they all need to work well but they'd like to try to find opportunities to differentiate the spaces a bit either through landscape through materiality through form through engagement and access by the people who are using those spaces so I think I'll hand it over back to Evan to talk about the next steps okay thanks Steve so as I mentioned earlier we are developing concepts now and trying to get through the development of the concepts we have a neighborhood meeting Thursday night so that's coming right up this week and we're meeting with the DPW commission tomorrow night so we're getting the word out on the concepts making this presentation and then as I mentioned before also we are hoping to get city council approval in May we're going to be following up after the engagement with city council and doing additional listening sessions for anyone who wants to participate in the project and the development of concepts will continue through most of the summer if anyone wants to be engaged in the project for the 14th of May you can visit great streets btv.com and there's an online survey to give your opinions about things and or you can always email Olivia Doris at the city there so the plan then going forward will be to get really solid concepts together by the end of the summer and then proceed on to the preliminary plans which should wind down in early 2023 and then final plans in the large part of 2023 and bids for construction should be in late 2023 and then on to construction so that's the plan moving forward a lot of outreach in between now and then including this meeting and that's all we had for formal presentation so we would open it up at this point to any discussion or questions you folks would have. Yeah I would just like to mention since this is the only two meeting between now and it's actually the council meeting on the 23rd that we're going to look for an action where you plan to bring presentation on the 9th and also encourage public if they want to provide feedback other than that and then subsequently are also visiting the dpw commission to hopefully meet their supports and church and marketplace commission and the parks commissioners they all have regulatory rules and what we are proposing for the concept so we'll do that throughout May so we are seeking hopefully your support to bring this concept presentation forward to the council so that the council ultimately may be able to provide direction to the city team project forward we also have Martin here from our water resources group it's not highlighted we talked a lot about the pre-service stuff but if you guys do have questions about the underground utility work that's happened with this project it's also here. Great, great thank you so much was there a chat that came out that had come in at some point about it? It was just Marcy saying thank you. Oh okay great great thank you so much very exciting stuff very interesting stuff um councilor's questions comments um did this presentation get made to the NPAs or was there a previous one? There was a different version of the presentation that happened throughout the months of February and first half of March where really we were introducing re re-introducing the idea of Great Streets kind of some of its milestone goals but really trying to take an organic feedback about um what the community is looking for now what their concerns are what their aspirations are. So this concept here really developed on top of the base plan for the previous effort to to hopefully update it to where we are today. So tonight's the first. Right I sort of I wanted to nail that down because my thinking and again I keep adding things for y'all to do is you know that this would also then go to the the NPAs and be made available through the front porch forums. I think it is really really important you know all of these big projects that people see that the input that they have made has been listened to has been considered has been incorporated or can ask questions about where it hasn't been so that it is not a dog and pony shield but it is a real iterative process to get to a place that the community wants. So I I'm hoping that within the concept of your timing for coming back to the City Council that all that stuff can be done front porch forums sent out so that there's more solicitation if the May 14th is a deadline we've got a few you know weeks or a couple of weeks so that people can do the survey through the link. NPAs are going to be happening in the middle of that month you know and that may be more difficult but maybe there can be something that would integrate that and I and this is a citywide thing so it's appropriate that y'all are are working citywide. These people in Mark's area care as much about all of this voted on it just as much as you know people in our words which are like these are our words right. So the plan was not to go back to every NPA before we hit the City Council in May we've been kind of collecting people along the way we distributed to everybody who's participated in any of our structured meetings email invitations for Thursday night as well as indication that the survey is there we've collected throughout our focus groups just a really large distribution list we've already sent out notifications on front porch forum of the upcoming meeting we've placed yard signs and we will continue that kind of outreach effort you know hopefully collected the people who want to actively engage us so that they are formed of our our next steps. The NPAs I will admit was probably one of the most challenging engagements that we did the the time that NPAs have to be able to hear all of the same issues is really challenging so you don't get significant engagement while you can push information out it's not full engagement because we're not able to hear everything back whereas our meeting that we're planning on Thursday we're working out in small focus groups so that our design team is going to be able to hopefully hear in smaller groups feedback from the community as they're able to provide quality engagement back we saw that in our small focus groups it was there's some of the most impressive engagement that I've done in my time in the city was the small focus groups that we met will work with our BIPOC with our mobility challenged just the the ideas that we're able to hear because we're able to give people time to small groups the NPAs haven't provided that to date I've been to basically every NPA since January on this project we're certainly happy to go and give presentations I don't think and as Evan indicated you know the Boatman City Council in May is related to help provide positive direction that you're responsible for voting in the line the the change of the line in the grid at the road so changing our curve line from 50 to 70 feet down to 40 feet is the monumental step that we're looking for in May as it relates to the rest of the community output we still have that time and we still want that time there's a lot more specific questions that we're going to need to answer as it relates to different user groups of Main Street and also so that's my take on it also just add that at sorry at the NPAs we were very clear about what those next engagement opportunities were and how people could stay involved through the concept design process we were very clear about that we'd be coming back with another neighborhood meeting that we could be going back to City Council that we'd be coming to all the commissions and the Duke and that that process would continue so we never indicated that we'd be back to NPAs but we are very clear about how people could stay involved stay engaged with the with the project and that seemed to work very very well for us so I'm not entirely sold on that I think that may be a more focused conversation there maybe even around the just the question that's going to be placed to the City Council like the appropriates of so much information just to get people so that we can get that feedback because it will spark some people to reach out or I wonder if we could do those part of DPW's construction season overview and have that as a key element of the our rounds that we would do with the head around construction I did just something I mean I think that public engagement is tricky and it's essential and I don't think that we've done this great job I I've sat on your side of the table as you know and so I I take full responsibility for being part of that problem so I so yeah anything that you know is just keeping the same anything that we can we can sort of reach out to these places would be very very we'll try I'm just hearing from Rob that there may not be space on the agenda this for me at this point I mean if they if they decide that they don't have time for you then they decide that I mean like I can take that horse to water but right the other avenue that we have is that you know these these employees you have their own distribution lists and so we can push them out to their steering committees so that they can at least provide their information out um to to let people know that this engagement time period is happening that would be that would be great and again if there's a there's a focus on what the city council would be asked to do that might be really helpful yeah yeah we can structure our outreach yeah that sounds better thank you anything else so um this is really exciting but I'm wondering about what you'll be asking the city council you be able to ask me to choose between these two concepts or are you asking us strictly to just provide you the the narrowing of the roadway so that you can implement one of these eventually or and are there other concepts that might evolve or are these the two that have been sort of narrowed down um a little bit of both um obviously we are looking for the support to change the the curve line of the road to allow for either of these two options but we are looking for your comments um and or direction I don't know that there's really been a significant other alternative concepts maybe um Steve you're still here of course you can speak the second half of council Barlow's question yeah that's a good question I think that the intent moving forward is to take these two options which are actually sort of summaries of multiple options that we've been developing and getting feedback from from all the different engagement groups and internal groups and technical reviews um and we're in this next neighborhood meeting that we're having later this later this week um is to really dive down and let people begin to respond to the different aspects of these of these areas um there's we've always thought about it as being there's some fixed items um that are sort of incumbent on travel ways and movement there's a lot of the uh kind of not only intangibles but the things that really make spaces special to the people who are going to be using them um we really that's what we're kind of trying to glean from we're trying to hear back from the community to say what's what is a successful um open space along the street for you hey businesses what's what's the engagement between um uh proximity of your space to a bike path mean to you what is how much shade is too much shade how much seating is more none of seating all these different aspects that begin to really form the design um after we get that information I think the intent or the hope is to have would mean that being some sort of a hybrid um quality plan concept that's been presented um for acceptance and um as we move forward um and as Laura said um there's still much more um development within schematic design and uh continuing design that happens after that approval um that will happen in these listening sessions um so I think it's not necessarily choose option a or choose option b it's going to be something that's going to be more of a hybrid that's more reflective of the community feedback that we're going to get this week and moving forward great I like both of the concepts I think we just representing the airport gateways it's I really like that and then I like the lake city mountains it's like wow I can see everybody so it's strong like that so I'm glad that we made up the ask to choose option a or option b I think it could be as daisy as some of the district across the state we did I did see Rob's hands up I think in response to your question too so before you keep going yeah Rob were you looking to answer Councilor Gallo's question sorry uh Chair Hanson I was more intending to speak to the NPA question if that's relevant now or later on in the meeting okay yeah go ahead well I was just going to say to speak to um I think what we heard from Laura about the way the outreach has been laid out and certainly from Councillor Birdman's uh interest in the NPA I don't think that there is time generally at this point to get on this current month's meaning May's NPA sessions but um what we have done in the past is go to the public forums to at least share information in that two-minute slot at the beginning and that that maybe is a compromise it's a tight compromise given that it's only two minutes and not a 20-minute presentation but that would be a way I think we could share information in those forums at least how people can watch the videos of the meetings that have happened learn more and then certainly get the contact information for the project team should they want to follow up directly and that would give us probably the ability to get to half of the NPAs by the middle of May uh if we were to do that got it thanks Rob um sure I was gonna say with regards to the NPAs you're in we're in lock because word 47 is tomorrow night so I can at least um make an effort at um getting the word out on this and I would even be willing to give it my my update time to dbw you wanted it because I'm sure that but I'm also willing to share what we uh will you communicate tonight um and I could link people to the presentation if that's appropriate um yeah yeah in some fashion we'd love to be represented at his dbw commission night it's a week from right now right so we'll have to talk through that okay we'll find someone let me know and you can ask me tomorrow um the other thing I was wondering about with regard to the survey I went to the survey are you going to like poll people on these concepts maybe or is there any intent about getting feedback on the way that we were hoping to run the meeting uh was to not use polls we're also going to run it as a new meeting so that it could be a little bit more personal kind of like the setup and um so that people do feel like they're here in the meeting they can see who else is in the meeting with them and then we're really going to rely on the breakout rooms to allow people to vocalize what they're interested in there there is the separate survey so that um we can take any feedback on these concepts but it's not really an idea to to vote on one of them I think as you heard from Steve today and as you feel I also feel that there's elements of each that I think will make a great team street um but there's also some of us people like me who see the the Artful Gateway and go it's so clean and amazing and my engineering brain who loves squares goes this feels great but then I get inspired by the Lake City now I just go that feels like so I do hope that we come to a compromise but uh that's for the public to help with this thanks it's all in it okay but to be clear the council is not going to be asked to choose between the two no but we we know that you represent your constituents we want to hear your influence and you know hopefully coming out of the May mind meeting uh hearing hearing from all of the public then and then at the 23rd you know giving suggestive direction that's the preference to see the concept okay yeah I mean I love I love them both I really do this is so exciting I think maybe what would be helpful if you are looking for feedback from us between the two designs is maybe like a grid that shows the differences you know just showing like likeability walkability from stormwater like if there was a way to kind of say like which one was better on different criteria I don't know if that's applicable in this scenario but that's exactly sorry sorry to interrupt that's exactly our plan for the breakout rooms on Thursday night to actually have folks in smaller chunks of you know 10 to 15 whatever people kind of evaluate each scheme on those like comfort and safety and you know ecology and things like that and so we hope to have a lot of qualitative as opposed to you know it isn't so much like tallying up votes as it is like you know a series of comments and questions that were literally like writing down and putting on sort of virtual sticky notes um to share with everyone whatever one else is saying and really you know land at what'll end up probably being some sort of um hybrid of the two okay okay yeah that makes sense I mean I I don't know who all is going to be participating but for like for me I would have no idea which one would be better for stormwater or it was a little unclear for me to tell which one to have more like continuity for the bike lanes just stuff like that um so if my if there's anything you all can right tell folks when you're asking for input about okay this one has more continuous bike infrastructure or this one is going to deal better with stormwater like just anything to tell us about some of the quantitative differences between the plants I don't maybe that's not possible that I think and along that those lines would also be useful to know like they look great and they look in those summertime photos but are there differences in sort of wintertime maintenance or is one more you know or do we lose more parking we do not we uh we we've settled on retaining 90 spaces of the um it's actually 157 out there currently but our math when we do the the number statement there should have been able to be 160 out there um but in the in the concept now that's being shown there's there's 90 routine parking out every every face of every block it's some fashion um as it relates to the the idea of some of the tradeoffs or the pros and cons of the two options I think that the bike facility one is one that we highlight a little bit stronger um it's not mentioned here but it was mentioned in our original major presentation that fills that come in and out of you know this core area are fairly steep um and they certainly have our design team thinking about ways that we can continue to encourage safe speeds for both vehicles and bicycles going through these areas and so the mountain city lake creating the meanderingness of the bike facility could you know provide a natural traffic on it um whereas you know the other one it's it's really going to have to be done in a different fashion so there are a few of those types of qualitative you know pros and cons of a natural design achieving a goal that I think both of them have yeah I think it seems like you're trying to get away from this maybe so I feel kind of bad recommending it but just any like side by side comparisons you know and it seems like you're trying to do it more holistically which is great um but if there are any of those I think were you gonna say something Steve no it's it's a really good point the the the ability to kind of clearly rank and score between the options can often help in decision making it's it's tricky because um we want both of them to be winners we want both of them to success to be successful in all aspects um not that they both can be but I think we're at a point in the design early enough that we're not letting that be a limiting factor in selecting any of the options that are happening here we really want to be able to make sure that we're responding to the feedback we hear from people about the quality of the spaces they want to have and and how that's included knowing that we'll need to solve for those options of appropriate safety appropriate containment and use of storm water in any option that we come out with so um I don't think we've gotten to a point where we've designed ourselves into a position that one is offering a better option than the other in those aspects okay Steve just to put a fine point on it so I think what Jack's getting to we could get to pretty quickly which is both of them have continuous bike facilities except for where it gets pinched up on the top block of between Winooski and Union where going eastbound the bike and pedestrian facility is merged other than that both have the same continuous facilities both have generally the same abilities for storm water the cross section is generally the same it's really the flavor of the street and the kind of aesthetic that is different so um you we're not going to get like this one has bike facility this one has wider sidewalks it's a more organic versus a more linear kind of design from what I've taken in would that be fair Steve? Yes that that is fair I think um there are nuanced conditions in different areas which I think are really special and interesting um the thing that we don't know and I think that we're looking to glean out of of all these engagements and especially this community meeting is to learn from people who live and work and play and stay in these spaces where those where those hidden gyms may be that we really need to to let sing more to really make the streetscape as a whole space be of of the of the place so I just I think that we have a really excellent team very very um talented group of engineers and designers and and thinkers that can solve those problems as you mentioned before we just want to make sure we're not missing um and skipping over what the people really need to have the businesses in the place be rich and and giving back to the community. That's great yeah that all makes sense yeah maybe it's just showing people okay here's what each one has that the other doesn't and people can say and maybe people will say I want all those things that we like you said we just merge them into one that has everything or maybe there's a few that people don't seem to care about and drop those or whatever but yeah and if I'm able to if we're able to achieve that project that gives everything everybody wants then I'll just quit so retire not retire yeah there you go great um so before we contemplate any action is there anything else from the team okay so what uh what are you are what are you all seeking from us at this point um we are seeking your support uh to bring the concepts for main streets forward to the city council okay that you feel like we've done enough diligence that we've collected enough information um and that results put together that's okay I don't feel like you need our permission for that but it's partnership it's it's a funny thing yeah does that well yeah that's true to bring your message so does anyone so I would move that assuming that you were going to take those extra efforts um so you know offer tomorrow so I'd make that motion yeah I think I think that makes sense that okay it's just quick probably a lot less of burden on you all because you know it'll be right up front at the beginning of the meetings um but yeah I I think even if there was time like for for our NPA if they were to have 20 minutes of DPW I know they would want it to be on the sidewalks or something I don't think they would want it the interest that our NPA of DPW staff there's a lot and this isn't at the top of the list so I it's the opportunity for people to say I don't care what you want and then you go thank you very much yeah so so I don't I don't I don't think at this stage in the process I don't feel like staff should or needs to give presentations at NPAs right now but obviously I don't see any issue with giving a plug at the forum and allowing people to access this information that won't see it and then want that presentation they can watch it you know on their own time so any other discussion I've said a question about the the meeting on uh Thursday night it's not on the city calendar is it published somewhere so the challenge with the city calendar is that that's for one meeting okay Main Street doesn't meet that criteria to go on the main city calendar it is on DPW's calendar we are going to republish it on all of our social media so that it can be as visible as possible but it's an unfortunate quirk okay so it's on DPW's calendar I just need to know that but and yeah that looks to work yeah yeah and if you just google the Main Street Great Streets we have a special website with all the engagement opportunities great yep it is a hybrid meeting so if you want to add a person we're actually going to push a conference room I think it'll still work better though if we could encourage people to do it remotely thank you both all those in favor please say hi hi that passes unanimously thank you all so much yeah thank you Laura so take care thank you thanks for your support thank you great so now we go to your director's part give me an hour I'm happy to defer unless there's any questions under council updates all right councillors anything questions for purchase this is council update council update slash questions I would just like to say that since the sidewalk presentation last night I was out walking my dog tonight and I found myself evaluating all the sidewalks so thank you for putting that right yeah same here but I was walking to come after council with Zariah we reached this stretch on Willard and we were like this side was amazing it was like brand it seemed brand new I know I feel like as you can read stretch yeah serious or we're going to hire you all as our inspectors yeah you can rate the sidewalks well they're our first sidewalk inspection citywide was a observatory inspection it was a subjective inspection we now move to um so I'm allowed to respond this council member brought up a great point you know between now and the next tooth meeting um you know any engagement or questions that you guys have from us to be able to help us with what we're going to provide you um at the next meeting would be would be great one of the things I forgot to mention last night with our new inventory is that every section that was measured has to work out with it and we do have a public facing tool that we didn't have the last time that we're working on being able to be ready when we roll this out um after Q and QC processes so if you guys do get questions from people saying you know this is the worst sidewalk that I've ever seen in the city you know we can look at this tool and be able to be like is it it doesn't compare to these other examples um that the ranking system has as kind of our worst sidewalks so that's also as part of what we see behind the scenes that I forgot to mention yesterday which we were doing before but it just required me going there in person yes it's made it streamlined in the process okay so it would be very helpful to have a to have every street and sidewalk on a list that's that with its ranking I mean at the end of the day that's what people need to to know they need to know that this particular street that they care about where is it where is it ranked and and then we get to you know understanding how it is and it's ranked um that would be an incredibly valuable piece of information for people to be able to access because I think at the end of the day what you're looking at is you know you're you're ranking them and going this is higher than than that and if things if there's a tie you know or there are there's even if there's a bucket that says all these are in this particular category and we look at them sort of eat you know like equally that's it really is just that's really important information for people to know I can get on board with the bucket concept um the individual specific ranking because really challenging um because you are assigning a number to something that is it is still somewhat subjective categories and they change over time so the inspection period is five to eight years and a tree would be in the sidewalk now substantially at that time depending on the tree sure um but yeah easily and we've had an aspect about it yesterday or today even you know let's put out that category of you know what is our serious sidewalks but not say you know this one's serious because it's an 87 this one's serious because it's an 86 and you know that's not how we're going to end up ultimately programming the final work plan so I think that that's second step about the programming of the final work plan that you know most people that's what they really care about you know where is this and so you know you're doing what you have now but then having something if it's down the line that's okay but that allows people to say okay you're making a decision as to which individual street or sidewalk is getting done and which is not so you are ranking them maybe you're saying this is elevated and the rest of you are staying in the bucket so that you know there there's that's really what people are going to look at I think yes I forwarded your email to the team we're talking about it I think the key here is change we gotta balance transparency which I think we all agree is important with putting out data that is going to shift and change and people are going to feel upset and want to know information and just the level of minutiae if it's not valuable and things are fluid for example a tree we're even creating a situation that's different than the number we've had paving projects like on first that have been on the paving list for four years it's going to happen next year it's going to happen next year there's all sorts of things we can talk about why that shifted but how much time this crew is only five people day if we spend all our time answering why first and is this that and the 37 52 we're not going to get it done so it's a balance I accept that it's a balance and so I'm I'm pushing for a little you know a few more pennies on that you know on the scale on this side to bring that and I spent time with city cook this weekend because I've heard concerns from her and others about how things are getting prioritized I want to try to be an answering question and I want to respect staff's ability to focus yeah yeah I think we'll work together I'm sure we're going to be talking about this in between and also at the next meeting as a focus yes because I'm hearing it a lot too we can sit you on yeah so so really appreciate it and I just this team managing grade streets at the same time managing sidewalks at the same time managing abstract the Berlin standard park where I mean I got to keep this team yeah and you know they're amazingly talented aren't working how many meetings so they work this week so we'll work together to find a way and I I want to help you succeed and I know you want to help us so we'll figure it out yeah that's great yeah all right I think in the future I would like us to the next meeting too but what the the progress is on their foods yeah the TDM stuff sure yeah email wanted to the four of us okay and just tell us to add it I'm going to put it on to see if you need to check out it it's right now yep I have it so yeah does it you want the email or no you don't need it no I haven't in the minutes and if you're having it to do yeah we have a coordination document of everything that's coming from different meetings so we hope it's our minds okay great all right most of you adjourned while I put that so all those are okay