 I'd like to call to order the Wendyski Liquor Control Meeting. We will start with the Pledge of Allegiance, led by Deputy Mayor Hal Colston. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Mm-hmm. All right, our first item for Liquor Control Meeting is approval of a restaurant-only license for Westside Deli. Any... So I will make a general comment about all of these. All right. So the first two are annual renewals that just didn't make the first annual renewal meeting, and we have no concerns with either of them. Okay. The rest are all permits related to waking windows, which is the first week of May and are specific permits for that one-time event permit. And I believe Ali is here to talk to you about those plans if you are interested, but we as the city have no concerns. Thank you. Well, let's start with item A. I would entertain a motion to approve the restaurant-only permit for Westside Deli. Second. All right, so I'm at... Second. Sorry. Motion by Mike, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Item B, first class liquor license for El Corteo Taqueria, that entertain a motion of approval. So moved. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Don't hear you. All right, sorry. I'm running a little late, I'm sorry. Motion carries. Item C, special event permit for waking windows. Did we want to hear anything from Ali? Or are we good with... Would you like to? I would like for one minute. Sure. Yeah, that'd be great. Come on up, please. While Ali's coming up, I'll also just note, because we did make an administrative exception here, the renewal permit for El Corteo, they got the 2018 permit when they thought they might open in April. They won't actually until right at the beginning of May, so we waived the 2019 payment for them since they never actually benefited from the 2018 permit. Next slide. I just wanted to let you know we are open. Hello, welcome. Thank you. I want to give us a quick overview of the work you'll be doing to support waking windows. Those are all for the auxiliary bars for waking windows. So we have one for Winooski Falls Way, the Rotary Park, 70 Main Street, and 45 Main. And yeah, I don't know if you have any specific questions or how detailed you'd like me to get. They support the different stage areas. Yes. And they're all going to be under the monkey house for those bars. And I think when you came before, it's pretty much the same setup as the prior year. Yep. Nothing significantly. Yeah, we didn't add anything besides a couple of inside venues. We didn't add anything else outside. Okay. So pretty much the same as last year. Awesome. Besides a couple venues. All right. Thanks. I would entertain a motion to approve the special event permit waking windows event for, oh, I guess this first one is for Outer Creek, actually. Brew and Coke. So moved. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. So then I would also entertain a motion to approve the catering permit for monkey hospitality for waking windows event and our house beasters in here, too. So moved. Second. Motion by House, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, Allie. Thank you. And then we have one more item which is outside consumption permit for four quarters brewing, also for the waking windows event. I would entertain a motion to approve. So moved. Second. Motion by Amy, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thus concludes our regular items for the liquor control meeting. I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Motion by House, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. So do I need to wait three minutes? Yes, we definitely have to wait till 6.04. Oh, as does her computer, so. Don't worry, it may sign. All right, paying 6.05 on Monday, April 15th. I will now call to order the Winnuski City Council meeting. Please join us in Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Hal Costa. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. First up on the agenda is agenda review. Are there any requests to change the order of operations for anything here? All right, seeing and hearing none, we will move to public comment. This is an opportunity for anyone who has something to address the council with that's not already in the agenda to come forward and make a statement, please. You may certainly need to join us to the table. Please let us know your name. And there's also copies of the agenda in the back end assignment sheet if you can sign in and leave your name there. Welcome. Thanks. My name's Brenna O'Gleef. I own a house on Franklin Street. And I was encouraged to come and speak to the council about the housing funding fund. I had offered a number of questions to that commission for their March meeting. They were only a couple of hours before the meeting so I didn't have much time and I wasn't able to attend in person but wanted to offer some thoughts just reflecting on the agenda and meeting minutes leading up to that meeting. I wanted to just raise some thoughts I had about the commission to the council as you consider some of the proposals that the commission makes moving forward specifically as it relates to allocation of funds. I think currently it's suggested to be a 50-50 allocation of funds. I am particularly interested as it relates to how that's divided between new housing and existing housing. I think there is a great need for eligibility of funds and increased funds for existing housing. New housing tends to be more modern and tends to meet the modern code requirements whereas existing housing takes a little bit more funding to get to that point. And in terms of the curb appeal also there could be a great benefit to the city in increasing allocation of funds for just simply increasing the curb appeal of the housing as it relates to the owner occupied housing specifically residential housing outside of the downtown core and Main Street corridor. I'm also interested in just the eligibility requirements and frequency of access to those funds. It's the, you know, everything is still in development and just again for the council to keep in mind how they are without having some more specific language then there could be possibility for some developers or some other multi property landlords to take advantage of this over others. And want to be mindful of the frequency of awards to particular developers or landlords as that allocation is looking, seems to be looking heavily at new properties or rental properties as well. You know, again, I know that that's all in development and again was encouraged to come and speak to the council. So I just wanted to raise some of those thoughts early on in the process before it got too far down into the finalization of that policy. Thank you. Thank you for coming in for sharing those. I've taken some notes. I'm actually the liaison for that commission that we meet on Monday and the staff liaison is here as well. So we'll definitely bring those back to the commission members. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Does anyone else have a public comment to share? Sure. I don't see it on the agenda and I'm just here for a urban chicken application. What is that? For what? Urban chicken application. And that said I have to attend this meeting. Urban chicken. So we do have an urban chicken policy and permit traditionally that's submitted to the city clerk who then puts it on a council agenda. Have you talked to Carol yet? No, I didn't really get that whole train. Okay, do you have a completed permit with you? I have the application yet. Okay. If you want to leave that with me we can take it and process it in here. Great. Thank you very much. Yeah. Perfect. Perfect. Thank you. Thank you. Any other public comment? All right. We will move to our next item on the agenda which is the consent agenda. Now we have two items today. The city council and liquor control minutes of our last meeting, April 1st. And then the payroll warrant for the period March 25th to April 6th. We were all here for the last, for that prior meeting. So I would entertaining motion to approve both of these items together. So moved. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. There's a minute. Apologies. I would entertaining motion to approve the city council liquor control minutes of April 1st, the warrant for period March 25th to April 6th and the warrant ending April 12th. So moved. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Mike. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you, Angela. Keep us in line. Yes. This is why we have clean audits. Yes, that's right. Next up is our city update, Jessie. Thank you. So a number of updates today. So first I want to make sure you've seen the press release about that the city now accepts credit cards as payment, both online and at the city clerk's office window. Huge thanks to Angela for really shepherding that through. We see that as a really significant customer service improvement. Angel and Carol and others can speak about how often we get requests to pay by credit card and we have not historically been able to do that. So now we can accommodate that. So thank you to Angela and Angel and Carol and Janet for making that happen. School ballots are now in hand in the city clerk's office. So early voting is underway. If people want to come and vote on the school bond issue, they can do that up to May 6th. And then of course, May 7th is the special election for that school bond vote. Water and sewer bills also were mailed out today. So expect those in your mailboxes this week. As I talked about at the last meeting, the bid closing or bid opening for the Myers Memorial Pool construction was April 10th. We received five responses. The construction cost came in actually slightly lower than we had anticipated, which is great to a very excited about that. We're still in the process of reviewing the qualifications and ensuring that the respondents meet the specs, but anticipate coming to you at your next meeting on May 6th to award that contract. So we are moving forward on our timeline for that. I want to welcome Morning Light Bakery to the city. They are the bakery, New Bakery just opened last Thursday, located in the city lights building where Doberty used to be. To self serve Hong Kong style bakery and it's getting a lot of good press. And we've been written up, Winooski has a hold, been written a couple of times about it. So thanks to Heather for the work she did to welcome them and to welcome to the city. Downtown Winooski has another finalist for their executive director position. They are inviting and sorry, Amy, if I'm stealing your please on them earlier. Inviting the council to participate in interviews this Thursday night at six, that will take place at CCV in room 104. So the counselors and business owners are welcome to attend that interview, if you are interested. Just because we won't meet again until after this event, again calling out waking windows happens May 3rd to May 5th, ninth year of their event. It's a very big deal in the city, brings a lot of visitors to the city, encourage people to get out and enjoy it. But also if you want to avoid the area as residents please do that as well. They, I will say from a staff perspective, Allie and the organizers are work, do a lot of work to work in partnership with public safety, public works, and we really appreciate their partnership. It's a big weekend in the city. Want to foreshadow to you that at your next meeting there'll be two kind of big agenda items. One will be, we had planned it for this meeting but moved it back to the main meeting, the overview of the Ope Bryant Community Center, the history of that building, finances of that building, as well as a series of leases for your approval. And then again the pool ward of the contract but also you will need to vote on May 6th the amount of debt to incur for that project so we can make the summer bond issuance deadline. So just heads up that that is coming. And then ending with community services updates. So we had 61 Husky residents join us on Saturday for the Eco Families Day. Jim, thank you for your presence and leadership in that. It was a great event. Ray and his team are partnering with Tyrex on collecting plastic bags and reusing them. So if you still have plastic bags at home that you want to reuse, bring them down to the OCC and we'd be happy to take those off of your hands. It's a good warmup for our Green Update event but we'll take place also on Waking Windows weekend or Arbor Day weekend or Green Update weekend. Pick your weekend, all the same weekend. So Green Update activities will be from nine to noon at the OCC that Saturday, May 4th. There's still a few spots available for next week's April vacation camp. So if people are looking for fun things to do for their kiddos, please get in touch with us at City Hall or email Kirstie directly. Summer Thrive enrollment is open. So again, if people are looking for summer opportunities for their young folks, please reach out again through the website to sign up for those who are calling City Hall. And then finally, we are recruiting volunteers to help as youth football coaches. So if people know of others interested or if you yourself are interested in helping to coach for the season kicks off in mid-August, visit the City's website to the Parks and Rec website or contact Olivia Miller directly through the website. Thank you. Thank you. A lot going on. Next up, we have Council Reports. Can I start at this end, Jim? I'm not prepared to go first next. So the Public Safety Commission did not meet this week ago. So that hasn't happened, but I have been able to meet with Chief Audie and have a meeting tomorrow with Chief Hebert and also two members of the Public Safety Commission just to hear individually kind of what their experiences are from being on that commission in the past and how that might go in the future. And definitely heard a lot of interest in really defining what that commission or what those commission members can do as we think about restructuring commissions. That was something I heard loud and clear from that group. Jesse, I covered my participation in eco families this weekend kind of on my tree committee side. We did have some nice input from residents on where they'd like to see more street trees and are working on an arbor day planting that comes on May 4th on Saturday at one. So we'll be planting another tree in the city other than that, that's what I've got. Thank you. So my report is relative to the legislature. I introduced the bill in the house about a month and a half ago and the design of it is to provide a process for the Office of Professional Regulation so that immigrant professionals who have credentials can be certified. All too often our new American professionals take entry-level jobs like driving taxes or what have you but have high skills. So I went to the Senate, they passed it, so it's enacted. So I really believe that this will impact many of the community members here who struggle to get into jobs that really fit their skill set. So that's exciting. So that's moving forward to you. They're gonna start looking at how to do the actual. Well, yeah, the Office of Professional Regulation will now come up with a plan to enact it. So it's been approved by the legislature. That's great. Thanks, Hal. Sure. I don't have any updates, that exciting. I, since our last meeting, I met with the Executive Director of Vermont League of Cities and Towns who provides some support to us. She just wants to introduce herself and share some of the ways that they can support us as a city and gave me some contacts with some folks. She knows that did affordable housing work in Concord, New Hampshire that she thought we could probably learn from. So I'm gonna follow up with those folks and see if there's information we can bring back to when you ski. I attended the recent school board meeting. So at the school district, at the school board meetings, they do like a cultural presentation at the beginning of their meetings or they have been doing this anyhow. So their liaison to the Iraqi community did a presentation on Iraqi culture and she also spoke about how to be more welcoming of folks in that culture within the school district. She was focused on the school but I think we could take some of those learnings back here. They spoke about the schools putting together a welcome video in multiple languages that will be available online to give an introduction. They discussed potentially some kind of welcome brochure to give more information and have that translation ready and focusing on the actual entryway of the facility to the point of contact where people are coming in. So I just wanted to share those as thoughts that we might take forward in our own discussions. They also will be doing more of these cultural presentations and potentially putting together a video that pulls them all together. So for those who couldn't have attended, there might be a chance to do some of that material later. And then we all attended the Diversity and Equity Summit two Saturdays ago and we just had a debrief earlier with Jesse, myself, Hal, and then Sue and Keisha who facilitated to prepare for the item that's on tonight's agenda to talk about our next steps as a council. That's it for me. Well, Jesse covered the Downtown Winooski update. My only other update is that in the administrative liaison role, Jesse, Christine and I will be meeting with our treasurer on Wednesday morning to do kind of a meet and greet and go over roles. So if any fellow councillors have questions that you would like us to bring forward to that meeting, please just let me know by the end of the day tomorrow. My report is my update is the Public Sports Commission had a meeting on April 11th. I was on the liaison for that commission and I got to meet the chairwoman, Laura de Lugo-Licky and Kari Berman who was the secretary. Those are the only two members of that commission that were present. John Rasschner, the post-work director was also in tenants. We also are gonna meet someone a little later, Chris Page who is getting appointed or he filled out the application to become part of that commission, met with him. And I wanna thank the people for volunteering, giving back to Winooski, especially the public work. They do a lot of work that I didn't realize. I was on the pool commission, the pool rebuild commission and we had one thing to focus on. Finding out the public's work has like multiple things that they go for. They're the first people that, for the rough draft of presentations and projects that are pursued in the city. And they're also able to play a role of reaching out to the community with projects within the city. There is a pavement index that's moving forth. I think some residents will be really happy about that. Some of the streets are, especially East Spring Street is a mess, so that's coming around. And I was very, very impressed with the backgrounds of each individual that was in that room on April 11th. I think the agenda they presented and currently working with is exciting. There's a lot of stuff coming up in the city in the next few months. And I look forward to going to future meetings for that group. Awesome, thank you. We can move on to our regular items. First of which is appointment of Chris Page to the Public Works Commission. So please join us. Over there. Yes. That's following up with Chris. Mm-hmm. John, would you like to introduce here? Yes. Potential appointee. So we're very excited to have Chris Page on board as an appointee. So Chris is named Hinesburg. He went to UVM. He graduated with honors in environmental science. So currently Chris is, Chris has been in Manuski since 2013. And he has an extensive environmental water quality background. Really an exceptional candidate for the commission. So as you know, we've got a lot of projects that are pretty heavily focused on water quality, contamination issues. So having Chris on board would be a major asset for us to help us to review those issues. So we're really excited to have here. Chris has a child on the way in August. So looking forward to raising kids in Manuski and also all in the father's troupe band, right? Yeah, see? Yeah, well-rounded. Yeah, so. Well, thank you for volunteering and offering to engage. I know we spoke a couple of times when I was going door to door and I was pretty impressed with your knowledge, reading through your application here. It's like, oh, this is perfect for 250 and the whole shebang, so. Fantastic, yeah. Excited to have you here. Is there anything that you wanna share specifically that you're looking forward to working on or that you love about? I mean, to kind of echo what Mike was saying, it's just, it's really busy. It's, there's a, there are a ton of projects that are, you know, kind of hitting the pavement, so to speak, literally, figuratively, et cetera. And to be, obviously it's exciting to be part of the planning process and I look forward to being part of the planning process for things. But also, as implementation is ongoing with a lot of these things, it'll be fun to see what challenges come up and also I am pretty active in my neighborhood and so I intend to kind of use my role to gauge community responses in sort of a one-on-one way, kind of a beyond what, you know, just in another, not like another council member, but just another way of reaching out to people and getting a feel for, okay, is this idea a good idea? Are these priorities making sense? Just, I always have my ear out there and so I'm looking forward to kind of doing more than just yelling at Facebook or whatever, you know, people do nowadays, like engage in politics. That is like one of the key components too of commission membership. It's bringing your own knowledge, but also being a person who's out there in the community bringing feedback, so that's awesome to hear. Yeah, it's exciting for me, for sure, just to kind of get moving in that direction, being able to give back to the community. Winterski's been a really great place to live and it's even in the short time I've lived here, so much has changed and it seems to be growing in so many ways and making sure that we have an infrastructure system that is able to support that growth and keep people healthy and keep people safe. I don't know, there's really nothing wrong with that. Sounds pretty great to be a part of, so. Awesome. Yeah. Are there any questions from any other members of council? Welcome. Thank you. I just have one about, as you've thought about kind of coming on board, especially expecting a child, are there any barriers that have kind of like caused you to hesitate or maybe pull back? Things you weren't sure you could do? So, my life right now, there's a bit of reorganization that is happening in general because by bringing a child into the world, I'm part of a couple different musical projects and things like that and there's just a giant restructuring that needs to happen and need to stay closer to home and one of the things that makes this a great way to spend that time is that it is only, we walk here and it's 10 minutes. So, obviously there's time, there'll be time intensive and demanding in other ways but spending that time closer to home instead of driving two hours to play a gig for 50 bucks. There's just massive reorganization that needs to happen because I don't just, in addition to the Allen Brothers tribute band, I'm also in a lead a band called Tender Bellies which has played a few events for Winooski down at the fountain or I guess the Rotary and so on. Yeah, just, there's a bit of restructuring that's going on there and I just want this sort of thing to, I want this to be one of the posts, like posts or our fundaments that I kind of have. Something solid, something stable, regular and engaging, not something that is capricious, whimsical and you know what I mean? Like, yeah, that's. Yeah, to kind of bound my question, I guess I'm interested to, I'm also interested to know if there's anything that we could be doing to make it easier or lower those barriers. So I was curious if there's any barriers. No, I don't, I can't think of anything specific. Perhaps as I become more acquainted with what the responsibilities are and as the projects develop, that would become more apparent and we'd talk about that then. But at the outset, you know, I'm ready to just be engaged. Great, thank you. Thanks. Any other questions? Any questions or concerns from the public? All right, I would entertain a motion to approve the appointment of Chris Page to the Public Works Commission. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye, aye. Motion carries. Welcome aboard. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. The next item on our agenda is the local emergency management plan for 2019, which she thought he will come present once again. Good evening. So this is an annual kind of check-in with our local emergency management plan, which used to be referred to as the local emergency operations plan. I like the management plan a little bit better because we can tailor it to Mnuski. It's not such a boilerplate. We can, it's kind of a live document year to year and we can, you know, make it tailor it to Mnuski. I would say as we sit here tonight, there's several communities here in Vermont dealing with flooding right now. And these plans are at work as we speak in other communities and other leadership teams. So you play an important role in that plan and we'll do some future training. You know, these plans are adopted not only to help us run the events, but it also opens the doors for federal monies, federal relief monies, and that sort of thing. So these plans work. I know John Rascher has some experience in this prior employment that, you know, when a, for us a natural disaster typically strikes, you know, the last thing we wanna do is being able to figure out where we need to go. We can pull this document, get people around the table and have a sense of direction. So, and I'm not boring you too much with that. That's, this is a annual one. There's now all hazards one that we do every five years. So on the national incident management system, NIMS, as it's referred to, we will need to do some training with you folks. Those are online classes that we'll ramp up and get to you folks to sign in and get, at least a couple of you, get those under your belts. Are there any significant changes since last year or with this, the move from the L.E.O.P. today? Yeah, I mean, this is a new document for us. I did the long form last year, it wasn't required. This year, everyone had to move to this format that you see. So there's quite a lot of the nuts and bolts of the same, just the layout and the flow of the document and the connections are a little different. So again, we're able to tailor it to Wynuski. And certainly with the turnover in the council, that's one big change in the plan. We're gonna take this plan and now start with our leadership team and hopefully end up doing a tabletop before fall. And that was on my work plan to try to do a tabletop, which will hopefully expose weaknesses or where we're good and where we need to focus some energy. So I had, I thought there was some content here that I didn't remember from last year, but I wasn't sure. So that had some insight there. I just wanted to call out, so what I noticed that I didn't recall from last year was the section on, I can't remember the phrase, but like special populations to be looking out for and so listing vulnerable populations, thank you. Where senior housing is having those, the communications put in there and translation services defined for new Americans for that outreach. I was excited to see that in there to know that we have a plan in place to communicate with these populations and in the event of an emergency or frankly, there were some guidelines in there about general communication that I was happy to see. It confirms a lot of things for us. Paul Scharn, our communications director had put our communication procedures together and I was able to take that document and just call out the sections and plug it into this. Regional planning works with us with identifying some of those maps and the vulnerable populations. This is, I was quite surprised when we ran the maps this year. The map came back as our square mile vulnerable population. In years past, it's been just a couple of addresses. So again, it's a live document that we will continue to tailor to Winnieski and know if we're spending, paying enough attention to certain aspects and where we need to go further our partnerships. Winnieski housing, all those folks all count. Just to provide a slightly more context, I think this is one of the things that gets, it's easy for this kind of planning effort to get lost in the day to stay, response to calls or inspections or whatnot. And the chief has done an amazing amount of work in the last year and a half to really prioritize professionalizing our emergency response, getting documents like this in place, suggesting those tabletop exercises where we all sit around a table and actually run through a simulated exercise. So do we all, for those of us who aren't first responders, do we know in that crisis situation what our role is? And I think it really speaks to John and Rick's leadership of our public safety team that we have this level of professional documentation. So I just want to call out your work for putting this together, it's very impressive. Yeah, we should do it. I'll react to that for sure. Are there questions from members of council? Yeah, a couple. Does this plan get updated every year? Yes, this is an annual report. So we update all the contacts, we'll always run new maps. We'll, you know, through the year, if we understand the pinch points, we'll try to address those and call us out in the next. I was also reading it as an emergency management plan. Communications, I was trying to find some, I don't know if it's in here, if I couldn't find it. What happens if all communications go down, if we had a blackout? Is that implemented in here, or is that something that we're thinking about for the future? So I assume you're talking about cell towers. Every, something drastic happens. So we have redundant radio systems that would allow us to communicate locally. Okay. And then through our resource list, we would be able to call emergency management. And that's the key part of having you folks at the table. Emergency management could bring communication, mobile communication equipment. You know, most of your AT&T and Verizon now, FirstNet, that's a, you know, emergency, in emergency situations, God forbid, a school, school shooting. I was just at a seminar about Sandy Hook, and they described it as cell phone signals being a three-lane highway with emergency services, commercial users, and then residential. And typically when there's an emergency, there's so much pressure from the residential users that it pushes the emergency services off the highway. AT&T and Verizon now are saying, no, that's not okay. So during an emergency, and they start to understand what's going on, we can request it through emergency management. They can open the three-lane highway, so it's just our municipality and our emergency services. And they can actually kick the commercial vendors and the residential folks off the towers in Locustin. So again, these plans are what will help us solve that problem. All right, thank you. So should there be like a level three event where you have to stand up the EOC? Physically, where does that take place? Is that here? So there's two locations. This is the primary, because we have backup generation. And then the other one is public works. Public works a little bit smaller and we're in their space, so we would come here and utilize this space. Thank you. Could you give us an example of the last time we activated a level two or three here in Manuski? So silently, we activate an EOC behind the scenes for Waking Windows. That's, there's five to 7,000 people that come through the city. So, you know, our plans are already in place. We know who the players are. We know who's gonna be here that weekend. And we, you know, mostly fire and police and through Jess and the leadership team, we were able to, you know, we're prepared. We're prepared for the weather. We're prepared for whatever may happen there. So we call that a soft opening. The last EOC that I know of that we stood up here was during the ice storm where there were substantial power outages and tree damage, infrastructure damage. So for us, you know, natural disasters, ice storms or wind storms, heavy rains, heavy snowfall, you know, like today going around us, you know, Bethel, Rutland, St. John'sbury, Plainfield, I've heard, Killington, there's a bunch of them. So our community may have $20,000 with the damage, but collectively as a state, you know, $20,000 to Winooski is a lot for cleanup, debris cleanup and that sort of thing. We may not qualify alone, but through having these plans in place and being able to jump in with other communities, the state may collectively be able to close all together and get a declaration, open us up to federal funds. Thank you, that's really helpful. Just because we're on the subject, can you describe the use of outside resources that you pull in, for example, through the Wiccan Windows level two event with the Weather Service? Yeah, so part of the emergency planning, again, it's, you know, avoid Gallysburg is my new kind of kick. You know, National Weather Service, through these plans, we have Wiccan Windows, again, a big event, weather last year. You know, we heard there's some possible weather coming in, so through our plan, we were able to team up with the National Weather Service. They knew the event was happening in Winooski, they knew how many people were here, they knew how many people we had on the ground. We started out with a 12 o'clock check-in, a two o'clock check-in, and then we started to go to every hour because we knew there was weather coming and we knew that we know when they're gonna open the stage, right, the outdoor stage, so the clock's ticking, right, towards that open, and we ended up in 15 minute increments with them. So we were on their screen, and again, through this plan, and 40 minutes before that storm hit, they were able to call me and say, look, you need to get people off the streets of Winooski. I mean, it almost blew their stage over, so had we not been able to react and have these plans and the forward thinking of reaching out to our partners, God forbid. And I think one of the things that that does for us as a community not only protects those, you know, thousands of people who could be on the street and be hurt in a weather event, but also instills confidence in the organizers of that event, that we have the right information and we are managing it well, we're not gonna make an arbitrary decision to shut down something that doesn't really need to be shut down. So while it was very hard last year for Waking Windows, for them to lose their Friday night main stage at it, they all, from a, from a. 700 people we moved out of Armsway. Right, and from a coordinator's perspective, I think they had a lot of trust that we were doing that for the right reasons, not just saying no to something. One last little piece I'll call out quickly is the NIMS Typing Resources, so it's the document, it has a bunch of checkboxes on it. So that's listing our resources. So as a state and as a region, there's these massive spreadsheets that all this equipment, specialized equipment, and when I say specialized, you know, our bucket loader at Public Works, when somebody's in need of another community, that becomes a specialized piece of equipment. For us to get communications equipment becomes a specialized piece of equipment. So in the old days we used to, well, who do I know? Now I can, you folks can say, we need this resource, we need communications. We call the state, they're gonna have that huge spreadsheet and they're gonna be able to look in our region and say, Colchester has this piece that Winooski needs, they have this, it's not a search. It's, and that equipment's all available and it's a matter of connecting the dots. So it matters. So all the towns work together as a collective? We all have to do this, we don't have a choice. We all have to do it and people play at different levels. But for our size, I can tell you that public safety-wise and infrastructure-resource-wise, this is worthy of our time. Any questions or comments from the public? So what's up here? So I would entertain a motion to approve the local emergency management plan for 2019. Motion by Mike, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you so much for your work. We'll pass around some, I just need specific signatures on the document for ends of the night so I can get it submitted. We'd be happy to do so. Thank you. Thank you. Have a good evening. Thank you. We're in chief. Thank you. Our next item is fine. Next item is just for discussion. We will, the GreenRide shared mobility presentation, which John will introduce. So, I'll see you in a little bit. Yeah, I'll see you in a little bit. I think it's better now than earlier. We're gonna get out of ways for these guys. So, city of Winnieski, city of Burlington, city of South Burlington, UDM, and Champlain College have been partnering with CAPMA and CCRPC to look at relaunching our bike share program. That's GreenRides. So, we have one hub in Winnieski and Winnieski Falls away. What's being proposed for this season potentially is relaunching with all electric bikes and potentially doing a pilot with e-scooters. So, we have Bob Dahl from Gotcha Bikes and Brian Davis from CCRPC to kind of present, just to give you an overview of the program. So, we did do a presentation with the planning commission. Jesus, we probably went through it two ago. So, they've also seen a similar presentation. So, this will be the first introduction and just looking for your feedback on it. Thank you, thanks for that. Welcome, thanks for joining. Thank you for having us. So, again, my name's Bob, I'm the local community manager for GreenRide Bike Share here in Burlington, also a local Winnieski resident, as well as our brand new operations manager, Tom Mechelberger's in the crowd, another Winnieski resident. We're both with about three blocks from here, so we're happy to be here. Brian and David from the CCRPC here as well. So, I'm gonna give you guys a little bit of a rundown on some of the new assets that we are proposing to add to the current bike share system. The current discussion right now is sort of relaunching this system from GreenRide into an expansion. So, the best way to look at this is just talking about an expansion of the current bike share system, the possibility of running a scooter pilot program as well. So, with our current system, we have 17 hubs in Burlington, South Burlington, and Winnieski, just one here in Winnieski, just like John said, and Winnieski falls away. And we're currently operating with 105 seven-speed bikes, again, developed by Gotcha bikes. And we are talking about revamping our current fleet, overhauling the entire 105 seven-speed bike fleet to our electric assist bikes. We're talking about increasing the number of bikes to around 200 bikes, and increasing the number of hubs to around, we're thinking around a minimum of 25 hubs, again, spread throughout Burlington, South Burlington, and Winnieski. One thing that we've seen the year to date with the bike share system is we have a lot of destination hubs. We're really looking to expand our hub locations into some more origin hubs in sort of more residential areas so that we can have a very healthy transportation, true transportation style bike share system here in Chittenden County. Brian can kind of touch a little bit more on the current study that we're doing with the company tool design, to have a look at the system to date and see where we can make some improvements in hub locations, again, making some more recommendations on hub locations, number of bikes, and where we can sort of look for some more areas of expansion. So just to give you guys a rundown on some of our new assets here with Gotcha, so we're first gonna talk about the new E-Assist bike. So like I said, our current fleet is your traditional seven speed style bikes. We are talking about moving the entire fleet over to electric assist bikes. These will still act just like the current bikes in hub based systems, and again, we're talking about increasing that hub number to around 25 hubs throughout the three municipalities. So it's a really great, very sturdy bike. Again, these bikes, we're talking about leaving these out year round, 365, so they can withstand the weather. They're a very sturdy bike. Again, we're talking about an E-Assist style bike here, so if anyone isn't familiar with electric bicycles, there's basically two different ways electric bikes work. There's a throttle for some bikes. Ours are a pedal assist, so the motor is actually engaged when the bike is being pedaled, which is great for riding around, especially in sort of hilly areas around here. It really helps the bike can feel the torque of the pedals when the rider is working harder, the motor will kick in, it will get you up hills, get you around some of our hilly topography around here. One thing that we've sort of seen to date is it's very easy to take the current seven-speed bikes down the hill. A lot of people then turn around and look back up the hill and decide that they're gonna take another form of public transportation to get back up the hill. So we're really hoping that these E-Assist bikes revolutionize the way that people utilize bike share here in Chinden County. Again, it really takes the hills out of the equation. So it provides a great opportunity for people who are looking to use bike share as a true transportation system. If people are looking to get to a meeting, it's a lot more appealing knowing if you have to bike right up Colchester out from Manuski into town, doing so on an electric assist bike as opposed to the seven-speed makes life a lot easier. You don't have to show up to your meeting, looking like you're on your death bed, sweat and panting. It's a lot easier getting up the hills with these things. So our E-Assist bike has a 350-watt motor. It gets up to around 40 miles per charge. It has a swappable battery. So what we currently do, we currently are partnering with Old Spokes Home. They do a lot of our battery swapping for our current fleet helping to rebalance the system. So we're gonna continue our partnership with Old Spokes Home. So we will have a bank of batteries that are being charged. So throughout the day, our operations team can look through our back and see what bikes need to be recharged just by swapping out the battery, which is really, it makes things really quick and easy. Again, they get about 40 miles to a charge. Internal speed sensors inside these bikes, a brand new basket with a cup holder, front and rear lights, and the new thing with our E-Bikes, it has a retractable lock-to cable. Our current bikes use a metal U-bar that locks to the back. Our new E-Bike has a lock-to retractable cable that comes out from underneath the basket, which makes it very flexible. It can be utilized for bike-share specific hubs, but it also makes it a lot easier to lock to any existing infrastructure in any of the municipalities. Again, very bright LED lights on both the front and back of the bike, and again, very sturdy. They have a carbon belt drive instead of a metal chain so that they don't rust throughout the year. They can stay out year-round puncture resistant tires. So again, a very sturdy bike. And we really see, foresee this switch over to E-Bikes to revolutionize how people utilize the bike-share in Chittenden County. So we're very excited to kind of keep pushing ahead. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback from a lot of the city councils we presented with, South Burlington Burlington, as well as a bunch of committees and commissions. We are really looking to go full steam ahead with the swap over to the bikes, as long as we don't hear any big negative feedback on that. The next thing that we kind of want to talk and present to you guys about is the possibility of running a scooter pilot program. So we're still in discussion for all of these things, for both the swap over to the E-Bikes and the possibility of the scooter pilot program. No pen has been put to paper on either of those things yet, but we are looking forward to the possibility of running the scooter pilot program. We're looking at a timeline for that to probably be mid to late summer, possibly. So to give you guys a quick rundown on our scooter, I have one for you right in front of us here if anyone wants to take it for a quick spin around the room. Just like our E-Bike, we are able to govern the speeds on both of these things for both the E-Bikes and the scooters. I can get into the specifics about that a little bit later on the presentation here. But this is our new proprietary scooter for Gotcha. So we are the only company out there that is utilizing this specific scooter. Very wide baseplate on this, again, a very, very sturdy scooter. We did a lot of product testing and this is our final product. It's a very sturdy scooter. I've taken it out for the past couple of weeks, taking it through some of the biggest potholes I can find around here and it's held up pretty well. Really bright LED lights on the front. There's rear, front rear, and you can see underneath the baseplate some very bright LED lights along the baseboard. So it makes it very, very visible. The top speed for these scooters is 15 miles per hour and for the bikes is 20 miles per hour. Like I said, we have the ability to govern the speeds on both of these assets to cater them to the specific municipalities needs and any sort of restrictions we have in specific areas. With both these scooters and the bikes, we are also able to geo-fence specific areas that the motors can be governed for both speed and just general ability to ride the asset. So if specific municipalities wanna designate areas as no ride zones or no park zones, we are able to do that through our back and geo-fence those areas so that it can either govern the speed on the scooter or the bike, completely shut off the motor. We can encourage riders to return the scooters and the bikes to the parking areas. So again, there's a lot of flexibility we have from our back end operationally to sort of help influence how these bikes and scooters are utilized in the system. So we see the scooters sort of complimenting the bikes that are currently out there in the bike share system, having these as another asset that is out in the field, we will sort of compliment these with the current bike hubs that are out there, but we also have the availability of creating some more scooter specific parking areas. So one of the big feedbacks from a lot of municipalities out there that are currently using scooter share is that the scooters are sort of cluttered all over the place to big fear that the scooters are left out in the sidewalk, left out in front of the business, blocking the right of way. We at Gotcha use a hub-based system, very similar to bike share for our scooters. So the scooters don't have an actual lock two capability at the moment, but we do encourage riders to take them back to virtually geo-fenced areas. If riders do not park these scooters in those areas, they can incur a fee. So again, we will be utilizing a hub-based system for the scooters, which cuts out the big frustration of the scooters just being littered all over the place. From a user standpoint, we have now put everything through for both the bikes, scooters, and we also offer electric car ride share with Gotcha. All of this is streamlined through our own Gotcha app now. So the current bike share system utilizes software called Social Bicycles. We now have our own Gotcha app, which users will be able to use and download to utilize both the bikes and the scooters. Once a rider signs up, they have a number of payment options, which we will be continuing with, very similar to the current bike share system. There's a pay-as-you-go option. There's a monthly membership and annual membership. There's discounts for university students. And we also have a low-to-moderate income payment plan option as well. To unlock both the scooters and the bikes is done right through our app by QR code. And both the bike and the scooter are also able to utilize an RFID card, which we use for people that would like to pre-pay anyone who doesn't have a smartphone. It's very popular for our low-to-moderate income payment plans for people to upload a certain amount of money onto an RFID card. And then they're able to use the bike and scooter share systems without actually having to use an iPhone. Once a user downloads the Gotcha app, it will show them the system area. It will show them all of the hubs, where all of the bikes and scooters are. It will show them exactly how far they are from any given hub. Once they have designated whether or not they'd like to rent a scooter or a bike, it will show all those possibilities for them where exactly where those bikes and scooters are, as well as the electrical charge on any of those bikes and scooters. It will give them walking directions on how to get to that hub. And then while they are utilizing the app, we can also send notifications. So one thing that we really do through our own app is a great platform for rider education. One thing that we really like to do before anyone rents a bike or scooters, before they can unlock the bike or scooter, they need to go through a few different screens that has sort of the rules of the road, do's and don'ts on riding with either the scooters or the bikes, which again is something that we can cater to specific municipalities regulations, which is another great sort of rider education piece to inform riders on the do's and don'ts of riding both the bikes and scooters before they can unlock any of the assets. Once they have finished their ride, it will show them exactly how long they were out, where they went, exactly how much they were charged. Again, both the bikes and the scooters, we encourage riders to bring those back to a hub-based, any of our hubs in the system area. There is a small fee if a rider wants to leave a bike or a scooter outside of a hub area, and then a larger fee if a rider were to take either the bikes or scooters outside of our larger system area and their rides outside of those system areas. Again, encouraging riders to bring both the bikes and scooters back to a hub makes it a lot more aesthetically pleasing. It cuts out the frustrations from a municipality standpoint and an operational standpoint of having the bikes and scooters scattered all throughout, in the middle of sidewalks, you name it, and it really helps from a user standpoint as well, sort of knowing where the bikes and the scooters are going to be on any given day. To talk a little bit more about the hubs, the picture down the bottom right hand of the screen, that is the current hubs that we are utilizing down in Lauderdale, Florida, where we have scooters on the ground down there. So again, we see these scooters kind of complimenting the current bike share system by utilizing some of these geo-fenced areas to incorporate with the current bike share hubs, as well as having the flexibility of adding some of these scooter parking areas outside of the bike hubs as well. So we're really working with our local partners on the ground here, Katma, CCRPC. Again, we are doing a study with this tool design, which Brian can kind of give you some more details on where we are with that to help inform where we want some of these areas to be. Again, the scooter pilot program is sort of an ongoing conversation. We are looking forward to trying this out. The great thing about it is we're kind of marketing this as a pilot program to run for a few months, see how these scooters could be utilized in the current system, taking some of those lessons away to see if we want to integrate them into the system full-time. The bikes in the system, we're talking about leaving out year-round, just like the current system, the scooters, we're only talking about having out during the spring, summer, and a little bit into the fall months, so they will be taken in during the winter months. From a day-to-day standpoint, we also have the ability of catering to the municipality's needs on when we allow the scooters to be out. So currently down in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where we have the scooters, the scooters are brought in, I believe it's around 9.30 to 10 p.m. every night. All the scooters are brought into the warehouse space and then brought back out into the system first thing in the morning. Again, from an operational standpoint, in a user safety standpoint, this is a benefit to everyone. There's a lot of municipalities that have concerns about having these scooters out at the times when all the bars are getting out in downtown from a safety standpoint. From an operational standpoint, it makes things a little bit easier for us to be able to take them in every night, charge all of the scooters and bring them out into the system areas first thing in the morning. So this current system that we're working with does not have a swappable battery. So these scooters do have to be brought into a warehouse space to be charged and then the new scooter brought out into the field. Our 2.0 scooters we're working on a swappable battery similar to the e-bike as well as some more actual lock two capabilities for the scooters as well. So that's a little bit of a rundown on the new vehicles we have. I might hand it over to Brian to give you guys a little bit of context on where we are with the current discussion and some possible next steps. Thanks. Good evening. My name is Brian Davis. I'm a transportation planner with the Chittin County Regional Planning Commission or CCRPC. We're just right down the hill by the river watching it rise. So you've heard Gatcha's proposal. As of this week, the current system is one year old. We launched on April 18th last year. The idea behind the system was to provide another public transportation option to folks. We're excited that it has been to a large extent fulfilling that. When we went into it, we knew that we wanted to expand the number of vehicles on the ground and expand the number of stations over X amount of years. We didn't know how long that would take. In the meantime, the industry has shifted which is fantastic. Now we have the vendor saying we have electric bikes we wanna put in the fleet and we have a potential to pilot the scooters. We wanna understand how the current system has performed over the past year and so the Regional Planning Commission is doing a study that Bob mentioned because we wanna know from folks are the existing stations in the right places? If not, where should they be? Are there enough of them? And if not, how many more should they be? What do folks think about introducing electric assist bikes, sickles or electric scooters into the fleet? I'll hand these little cards out to you. There is an online survey right now that has 15 to 20 questions to help us understand how the public is using and would like to see that system change. There's also an online map that people can drop little pins and say I would like a station here and people can comment on those. I think probably at this point, 500 folks have dropped pins and made comments. We're also interested in what biking barriers exist. For example, the Wienewski Bridge, that's a challenge for folks as is the hell. We might have a solution to that. So one of the first phases of this study was to look at current regulations, both at the local level and at the state level to better understand, is there language on the books that regulate electric assist bicycles and scooters? What we found is that bicycles do fall under some existing state language. Scooters, it's less vague right now. So we've been spending quite a bit of time with the three municipalities and the partners because campuses have their own rules that they want of there. As well as working with the state legislators to see okay, what does the process look like? What are other cities doing that have tried these out and we get to learn from their experience over the past year to get the language that works best from the municipal side of things as well as from the user standpoint? In terms of where can people ride? Where do they look like operationally? Where do we want them? Where don't we want them to go? And so this survey and map we're gonna leave open. It's been open for a little over two weeks. I plan to close them this coming Friday so people can go to ccrpc.org, ccrpcvt.org and fill out the survey. The other part of this was looking at so you did the regulations, the station locations. We did a bunch of maps to look at zero car households, one car households, different population areas. So from a demographic standpoint where might these work in the different municipalities? Bob mentioned different meetings that we've had with the public entities to better understand perception from that regulating standpoint. This plan should be wrapped up in about a month or a month and a half. We're recognizing the timeline that Gatch is working on and trying to get a system expansion but we all want to do it correctly and so we're timing this with the discussions with the other partners in this. So it's all exciting and I think we're happy to take any questions from you. Thank you. I'm happy to hear about your partner with ccrpc and that you're looking into these, how the past year has gone with the regulations and tail and all those logistical pieces. I'm curious if you've had any conversations yet with public safety entities and what they may have to say about having scooters on there on the public streets or sidewalks. Today we haven't had any specific sit-downs with any of the public safety groups. We have had a few representatives from public safety for I believe South Burlington. They had a representative when we presented to the bike pedestrian committee. So there is a few voices out there that we are trying to continue the conversation with and we definitely are available to schedule some more sit-downs if anyone would like specific meetings. Right, we've been having ongoing conversations with John Chapin from Public Works in Burlington, Shrestha from Public Works in South Burlington. So there's other conversations as a part of this. Oh, go right ahead. No, go ahead, go ahead. I was just gonna say, you said that the data you're collecting will close in about a month to a month and a half. Is that then when you would wanna make the decision about e-bikes or scooters? Well, the survey and the map will close in about a week. And then the study itself will wrap up with recommendations in about a month and a half. So yes, we're sort of making the rounds. Burlington hosted a couple of their own public forums to invite people to come and talk. As a part of this, we sat down with four different stakeholder groups. We met with the local bike shops. We met with human service providers. We met with some more transportation partners. And we met with some business interests to better understand sort of how this is working through their particular lens and serving their constituents, which has been very helpful. And so all of this will help inform the direction of the system. You know, as Bob mentioned, we're hearing generally solid support for swapping the current fleet over to electric assist. And scooters were working through that. I think there was some initial, people wanted to try it sooner rather than later, but we knew that there was that regulating piece that we needed to work through and do it correctly and do it safely instead of just, well, let's see what happens. Thank you. Sure, so is there an eligibility in terms of age for the e-scooter? Yes, for both the scooters and the bikes, it's 18 years old. 18, okay. And what considerations have you given for the education piece that you provide to hit some of the major languages that we have here in our community? So we currently, for our current green ride bike share system, we actually relatively recently have that translatable to us hit all of the languages that we are kind of represented for our new American populations in all three municipalities. That was actually something that, right when I came on board, we tried pushing through pretty quickly, which is something that will continue into both of our new app with the smartphones as well as on the computers. From an education standpoint on the assets themselves, we do have a sticker on the scooter right on the base plate, which is kind of hard to see from here, which has a little bit of user education. Again, that's another thing that we can cater to specific municipalities' needs. If municipalities decide that we're not gonna allow these on sidewalks, that can be the first thing right on there. Again, when a user goes to unlock either a bike or a scooter, they have to go through multiple screens, big letters that say all the dos and don'ts, which is again, something that we can cater to all the specific municipalities' needs. One thing that we really pride ourselves on at Cacha is that we don't really take any sort of cookie cutter style systems and just show up at a municipality in the city and just throw it on the ground. We really like to try and do as many of these meetings as possible, working with local partners to really figure out how we wanna work with educational pieces, specific regulations for all of the assets. Again, that's something that we really pride ourselves on is trying to be as flexible as possible whenever we're launching any assets into any market. And one piece behind that was really spending some time looking into the new American populations here in Chittenden County and having it translatable to as many languages as possible. I just wanna say, I was also excited to hear you mention with the load of moderate income plan, additionally having an option for access without smartphones and adding broader accessibility there. Yep, and that's definitely one piece that we're really trying to expand. Currently, users can go through old spoke zone to sort of prepay for those RFID cards. We're really sort of looking into some more creative ways of partnering with local businesses so that we can really expand the areas, working with community centers, a lot of places, especially that are frequented by a lot of our new American populations to have all of those places sort of educated and trained up on how to allow any kind of load of moderate income populations to prepay and sign up for the bike share and scooter share. And also to help figure out how we can, people who are working second, third shifts, how this can really be a transportation option and transit isn't working, cars are out of reach. So that's one of the reasons the bikes are on the ground year round. And again, once you introduce electric assist, it really shortens that four to seven to 10 mile commute. It makes it reasonable and you don't show up, the hot mess. I got a couple of questions. The scooters, if that falls into the ride share, is that gonna be, are they gonna be buy where the bikes are now? And who's gonna be responsible for picking them up and dropping them off? So yeah, we are talking about, looking into ways of incorporating them into the current pub locations, but the ability of adding some more specific, just specifically for scooter areas in the municipalities. The great thing about the scooter areas is that it doesn't take a lot of infrastructure. Like you saw for the photo in Fort Lauderdale is literally just a painted area on the pavement. So we can be very flexible on where those are located. And it will be a partnership with our current partners, Old Spokes Own, with their fleet team and their junior mechanic team. So we currently work very closely with them to help bolster their junior mechanic program who go out and help rebalance our current system. We will also be bringing on, especially if we bring scooters on the ground, we'll be bringing on a lot more of a fleet team that is hired on by Gotcha ourselves. That is on throughout the day. So we'll have a team that is there to bring the scooters out in the morning, set them all up. And then we have a team that's on there throughout the day, sort of spearheaded by our Alps manager, Tom, who is monitoring the system all day long so that the second any scooters are left outside of a hub area, they're on it. They go to pick up those scooters, bring them back to hub areas. We'll also have a fleet team that's just out in the system, just sort of living out in the wild throughout the day, sort of making rounds so that if they do find scooters that are knocked over, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, they can be right on it within minutes, and make sure those scooters are back in the correct areas. You made a statement about the bikes being out here around. How many bikes are currently down at the hub? Anyone who's here? This very minute or? No, there's a bike share of ones right now. So how are you gonna replace? You're gonna have five, 10? So we currently have four racks down in Winooski Falls Way, so we will be keeping that hub down there at Winooski Falls Way, and probably keeping it around the same number of bikes that are able to be at that hub. But we're also looking to expand the number of hubs a little bit more throughout Winooski, and we're sort of in the process of talking with the partners and figuring out exactly where those spots are, but sort of moving some more hubs out into some more residential areas in Winooski as well, and all three municipalities are one of our big goals is to move hubs out and broadening the system into residential areas a little bit more to provide both bike and scooter share as a real transportation option for locals. We found a lot of our hubs at the moment are great spots for people to get to, but if someone decides that they want to actually use bike or scooter share to get to work, there's a little bit of a drawback of having a lot of these destination hubs, but not as many origin hubs as we think we need. So that's one big piece that we're really working with this study that CCRPC is conducting and with the discussion of our local partners and broadening the system a bit more and expanding out into the three municipalities a bit more. Okay, the reason I was asking that question is if you have those bike hubs with five, six bikes in a row, who's responsible for cleaning them out if we have a real big snowfall? So that will be our Gotcha Fleet team as well as partnering, again, continuing to partner with Old Spooks, but bringing on our own Gotcha Fleet team with this expansion is really going to sort of really cut down on all the response time for any assets outside of hubs, snow events. We're also looking into getting our own warehouse space for all of these things as well, and we're talking about really getting a lot smarter about bringing in all of the bikes and scooters for big weather events, making sure that all the hubs are then clear of any snow before anything goes back out into the system. This is my last question. Being motorized, is there an impairment that folks have to worry about when they rent them to get on them after eight bar closes or if they wanna, I mean, I don't know what that follows under jurisdiction for motorized vehicles since there is a motor on these? So just with the bikes and the scooters, again, from a regulation standpoint, you can get a DUI on any kind of bike, any kind of any scooter from an impairment standpoint. The one thing that we're really looking to do with the taking in of the scooters every night is sort of cutting out the safety liability of impaired users utilizing the scooters. The bikes, again, will be out 24-7-365. So could that be part of your education part as you're going through the steps? Yep, exactly, yeah. So again, and this is something that before we launch any of these assets in market, this is a lot of that education side, I think, is something that we work with the local partners to pre-approve all of those educational pieces, especially from our Gotcha app before we launch any of the markets. Yeah, from the education standpoint, that's again, that's one of the things that they have to do to letting users know that these are not to be utilized under the impairment of any drugs, alcohol, anything like that. Okay, thank you. I just wanted to say that I really appreciate the idea of geofencing and the no ride zones, because when I was reading your presentation to prepare for the meeting, I sort of had this horrible vision of someone trying to take a scooter through the rotary or some other really dangerous area. So I think that a lot of us would probably love to work with you and give feedback on areas that we think a scooter just would not be safe. I think for me, safety is the number one thing that comes to mind with a scooter compared to a bike. One question I had was, since these will all be moving to motorized, is there gonna be a difference in rates? There will be a difference in rates. The rate for the bikes will go up. We're currently working with partners on the ground to sort of keep that relatively comparable to the current rates, especially from the university standpoint, offering that student discount at a very similar rate to something that we're trying to sort of keep in line with the current system. Rates will go up for the scooters and for the bikes. We're talking about going to a per minute charge. Right now there's the set fee to unlock and then you pay in half hour increments per rate to the minute. So we're talking about going to a per minute charge for both the bikes and the scooters. I feel remiss if I didn't ask about safety on the e-bikes given the lift, I think just pulled a bunch of its bikes today or yesterday in Portland from sudden braking problems and flipping people. It looks like the brake design you have here wouldn't be an issue, but when you think about kind of those unexpected safety problems, how do you anticipate to see a similar issue affecting these systems that are happening there? So from the current product testing that we have on both the e-bike and the scooter, obviously those are some of the big concerns that come up. And to date, we have had zero issues with both the bike and the scooter from any mechanical issue standpoints. Again, there is an incredible amount of product testing that goes into both our bike and our scooter, both of which now being proprietary for our company, we really take pride in offering the best options for both the e-bike and the scooter. For this scooter that's sitting in front of you, this thing went through crazy product testing. We're talking guys going off of 10-foot lips on a straight pavement to see if these things will hold up and through all the product testing for both the e-bike as well, the amount of testing that they put into it, it's kind of mind blowing actually, the amount of stuff they put into it, but to date we have had zero issues with both the e-bike and the scooter from a mechanical standpoint. And for the types of trips you envision for the scooter specific to Winewski, can this, would you envision someone taking this up Colchester Ave or riding all the way from Riverside along Riverside to Burlington, or what are you kind of the trips that you envision someone using a scooter in this city in particular? So again, from the scooter standpoint, that's the conversation that we really need to continue with the partners on the ground and utilizing some of the CCRPC study to see where people could utilize them around here. Both the bike and the scooter have a 350 watt motor on it. I will say that the scooter takes a little bit of work to get up some of the long sustained hills, but it does and has gotten me up any hill that I've encountered around here thus far. So again, it's really sort of more a user standpoint where people's comfort levels are, if someone is comfortable actually working to get themselves up Colchester Ave with the scooter or just cruising along Riverside. One thing that we really wanna be smart with again, going back to spacing some of these hubs in residential areas is so that residents can use both the bikes and the scooters as a first and last mile kind of trip getting into the circle and back out as opposed to someone hopping on a scooter and trying to go for a 15, 20 mile ride on. Going to that per minute charge is another way to sort of encourage riders to utilize the system as a little bit more of a first and last mile transportation option as opposed to taking it for a 30 mile jaunt out onto the causeway and back. So yeah, it's again, it's something that we're still continuing the conversations with for all the local partners on the spacing of hubs to sort of help inform how users utilize that, both the bikes and the scooters in all the municipalities. Do they work at the battery runs? Do they work in manual mode too? They do. You can actually push the scooter once the battery is disengaged, but it gives enough drag that it really sort of discourages users from utilizing the scooters when the battery is out or when it is disengaged. Again, that's something that we wanted to do if we have those no ride zones so that once the motor cuts out, it really discourages the rider from continuing in that no ride zone and encourages them to return back to a ride zone where the motor is engaged. But yes, you can actually still physically move the scooter. Again, our 2.0 scooter with the swappable battery and lock-to capabilities will have a lock that actually disengages the wheel just like our current bikes when they're not in use. So while with the bikes, they work manual as well? So the bikes, once those are disengaged, once that ride ends, those have a U-lock on the back wheel and they have to, for a user to end a ride, they need to engage the cable locks so they will have to physically be locked. But for the battery dodging, you can still pedal the bike. You still pedal the bike. Right, right, right, yes, sorry. Yes, yes. And if, for some reason, someone gets stranded in old spokescoms, their tech team comes and saves you, so to speak. Correct, yep. Yep, and right through our Gotch app as well, there's 24-7 customer service through there, which is direct response where you can say, hey, I'm at this location or I'm on this bike, we can then see where they are, my battery just died, we can send someone out to go swap a battery for them or they can actually just pedal the bike back manually. Have you given any thought to how you might incentivize users to wear helmets? Yes, that is, the helmet question is the never-ending question around sort of bike and scooter share, which no company out there really has a great, concrete answer for. So what we like to do is during any sort of launch events, sign-up events, we have a whole plethora of helmets that we give out to users if they were to sign up for either those monthly or annual memberships. We're currently working on a partnership with Burn Helmets to provide discounts for riders, which will then allow us to partner with any local businesses that offer Burn Helmets, which is also that we are looking to sort of be very creative in working with some local businesses on incentivizing people to go in and get a discount on a helmet if they sign up for a ride. So yeah, there are a lot of ways that we're definitely trying to be very creative about encouraging, highly, highly encouraging riders to wear helmets on both the bikes and the scooters. So would like to, any, open up to the public if there are any questions or comments? What are you looking for from us today? I think just giving this presentation in front of you guys this quick little Q and A and just letting you guys know that it's still sort of an ongoing process. I'm working with John pretty closely. So if there are any sort of specific needs from council, I think John can kind of reach out to you guys today. We obviously don't need any signatures on anything today. But yeah, just kind of wanted to sort of give you guys the presentation and just sort of get your thoughts. I have a question. Is there a financial commitment from the city? There is no longer financial commitments from the city. Very good point, Brian. I sort of brought that up earlier. So for the system to date, there has been a financial from the three municipalities. Our new model and looking at expansion, there is no longer a financial ask from any of the municipalities. Good job, Brian. So I think eventually when it's going to come to council, I think we're still trying to figure out how it looks is that we'll have the sort of agreement with White Sheriff, Gotcha Bites, and each municipality college would sign on and sort of rider to that agreement or MOU. And within that MOU or rider, it would say what our sort of requirements, our restrictions are. So geofencing in the downtown, scooters on sidewalks. So I correct me if I'm wrong, Brian, but I think that eventually that's going to be the sort of councilor at last. Yeah, I think that's one of the details that we're still trying to figure out is what does the agreement structure look like. That's one of the key pieces because we do want to tailor the needs of each municipality where we want people to ride these vehicles and what the different rules are. So, but I think right at some point, we'll come back and say, here's where all of the cities and the partners landed on and as many as people willing to participate in that. Yeah, and I think we would be looking obviously for you to you and John and Rick and the staff to have those recommendations of these are the stipulations that we want to make sure. Any final questions, thoughts? I want to use Catholic. Well, thank you for coming in and presenting. Thank you. Thank you for having us. It's very well thought out. Thank you. We can move to our next item, which is the approval of audit contract award with Angela. So this is a pretty simple item. Fiscal year 2018 was the last year of three year contract with our auditors, Sullivan and Powers. City policy requires that long-term contracts go out to bid every three years. So we put out that bid earlier this year. We received three bids back. The apparent low bid is R.H.R. Smith and company. They have done audits for many communities. I contacted both Town of Chester and the city of South Burlington. They gave glowing reviews for the company and that is our recommendation to award the FY19 audit contract too with the potential to award FY20 and FY21 upon successful completion of the FY19 audit. Thank you for your diligent research in trying to keep us within budget. And I could understand from your position, maybe it would be nice to continue on with the same people. There's benefit to that, but being willing to pivot to this other organization for Sullivan and Powers has done the last 32 years of audit would be exception of one. So it's not necessarily a bad thing to get somebody else to look at your numbers. I should advise that's a great point. Are there any questions from council about this recommendation? The only one I had was in switching audit companies to anticipate any increased staff time to make that transition happen and how much would you point in dollar amount, but how much work is that going to be to switch over to entirely new company that doesn't know the system, doesn't know the people? The only person who's previously really worked with the auditors was myself. So I don't anticipate needing any more of my time than I was already giving. I've been doing our audits solely for at least the last five years. So I know what I'm supposed to do and what I'm supposed to turn over. It might be some additional interviews that are going to need to be conducted, but it's probably a good idea that we have our baseline reviewed and make sure that we're complying with our policies and procedures across all departments and not just having them checked with me. Go ahead, Jim. I said one other question. What does it mean when you say plus 300 per single audit is required? Are those right? 3,000 per single audit? Sure. So single audit is required to evaluate grant programs if we expend more than $750,000 of grant funds in a single year. Given where we are in the year and the amount of grant funds expended to date, I don't expect there to be a single audit this fiscal year. FY20 is likely to be a single audit year. So the more outside funding we leverage into the city, this is one of the costs we open ourselves up to. And then what happened this year because next year is when Main Street starts and that's when the goals, grades come up. Yeah, that's when a lot of the big funding comes in. We've had grant funding that we've expended, but not to the tune of $750,000. This, our HR Smith company? Yeah. Can you repeat that? The other municipalities have used them? So I contacted the town of Chester and the city of South Burlington. Town of Killington was also another reference that they gave, but I wasn't able to reach Lucretia. They both gave glowing recommendations. City of South Burlington was a particular contact that I wanted to get a hold of because of their TIF that they have. Give me the comfort that our HR Smith has worked with the TIF before and conducted an agreed upon procedures audit and compliance with the state laws. And they do have an office locally here, right? Fairly local, yes. And they are certified to conduct audits in the state law. Okay. Any questions or concerns from the public? All right. I would entertain a motion to approve the audit contract award. So second. Motion by Amy, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. We'll be back when we have their engagement letter for you. Excellent. Because of the charter, you specifically appoint the auditor as opposed to me. There's more requirements for you all to take action on this item. Next item is discussion, Capital Improvement Plan Presentation, which John will present. Can we take a two minute break? Oh yeah. Thank you. Let's have a two minute recess we'll reconvene at 7.35. That's right. All right. Let us reconvene the city council meeting for the Capital Improvement Plan Presentation. So if I can just table set for a second here. So this is, the Capital Improvement Plan is a very big deal. And it is a plan that is absolutely a multi-year plan. So you all are inheriting decisions that were previously made about financial models and revenue streams, et cetera. So with the at the mayor's request, we wanted to come before you and kind of give you an overview of the plan. I think it's also important to note that John started with the city in February, 2018, which was after the FY 19 budget was developed. So what you see here is really the first year of this comprehensive CIP across all funds, which again, kind of echoing what I said earlier about the chief really shows a level of professionalism in our organization and being very thoughtful about how we're investing. It's also important to note that with the FY 20 budget, we literally doubled our general fund allocation to capital with the addition of Main Street and the pool debt service. So we went from about $480,000 the previous year to $900 and some thousand dollars for the FY 20 budget. Yeah, and we, you know, as these projects start coming towards you with the mayor's pool and Main Street, we thought it'd be helpful to kind of give you a background on how we got here, as Jesse mentioned. So this kind of goes through, hit the first slide, kind of what is the capital plan just to start right from the beginning. And then it gets into sort of the modeling for Main Street and the pool, which we actually aren't using our CIP funds, our general CIP funds. We have earmarks and property taxes that sort of fund that and we get into the model. The general fund, which is our sort of base CIP items like road replacement, fleet replacements are typical items. And then we also are gonna go into sewer fund and water funds, because those hit Main Street as well. We left parking out of this, just so we can keep us a little bit briefer, but I'm sure you'll see that with the parking garages. So what is the CIP? We have a policy that finds it as a five year tool to plan our construction capital assets. And then we've defined kind of what the capital assets are per policy. So land improvements over 10 grand, building improvements over 20 grand, equipment over five grand, and infrastructure over 20 grand. So when we procure a capital asset, if it hits any one of those items and it has a useful life over three years, it goes into our capital plan, which means we have to fund, how do we, is it debt payment? Do we pay out of our expenses? How do we fund for replacement? And really have sort of an outlay of, with the whole pie of things that we have to replace, how does that fit into our capital planning? And kind of what are our goals of the CIP? So we have to look at what are our current assets and what are the conditions. So what I won't show you and bore you with is the massive spreadsheet that lists every fleet equipment that we have, when we bought it, how are we gonna replace it? What's its useful life? So there's a lot of data behind some of the general information we're showing in this. And then what are our financial capacities to pay for everything? So we have to figure out what are sort of priorities on to the next bullet point. If you look at every piece of equipment and every asset that we have, and you try to build a plan on replacing that based on its useful life, I don't think there's a municipality around that has a fund to do that. So we really have to prioritize what we're replacing. And then we wanna build on sort of that public consensus on and be transparent on what we're replacing. So the public knows where their tax dollars are going. And then it's a good tool to see, like, okay, are we keeping up with our assets? Like, are we effectively managing or are we replacing those items on time? It gives us a clear understanding of kind of where we're going with our capital needs. How do we select them? The easiest one is just replacing what we have in kind. So snow plows, our big equipment, fire trucks, those type of things. Operational enhancements, there may be times when we are looking to get a piece of equipment because we wanna do something better. We recently purchased, it's called like an Asphalt Hotbox, that allows us to do pothole replacement work in the wintertime and provide better service to the public for our roads. Unfortunately, regulations sometimes plan to capital asset expenditures. So, example would be if we have to do a capital improvement because of DEC phosphorus limit reductions due to the Lake Champlain TMDL. So that could mean a capital improvement at our wastewater treatment plan. And then any sort of community driven studies, strategic vision. So Main Street is an example of sort of a capital plan that came out of that sort of process. And then ultimately the council is the body that approves what those capital assets are during the budget process. The other thing to remember too is this is constantly changing. So numbers will change, they'll get refined. It's a five year budget that every year there's a new last year drops off and new year adds on. So it's constantly evolving. So what I'll do is just kind of get into the Main Street and Pool funding model and kind of how we got there. So this, the Main Street and Pool are kind of a separate funding model that we're not using sort of fixed CIP funds. So for example, for FY20 we have a fixed $501,340 to put towards general fund capital items. The Main Street and Pool projects are not part of that general fund planning. So what we're doing is we've sort of used a mix of year markets and new revenues and tried to, the remaining costs would be a property tax increase to fund that debt. So if I can just say that a different way. This was a decision that the previous council made. The previous council said we don't wanna use our existing capital dollars to fund the Pool or Main Street. We wanna identify new dollars to do that work. That is a value judgment about how we're gonna prioritize projects in the city. And I think the new council, and Helen Christine correct me if you have a different opinion, really wanted to ensure that we were maintaining that level service of capital investment in streets and sidewalks and facilities in the rest of the city as we took on these big new capital projects. But in theory, we could say we're going to use a percentage of that existing capital budget to fund other things as well. Does that make sense? Yeah, and feel free to stop me if you have any questions. This might be relatively new to folks and we've been living with it for a year. So Main Street, for example, this is a very kind of simplistic overview of sort of general fund versus water resources costs. But the items in blue are typically general fund costs. So those pieces outside the curb line on either side would be funded through the general fund. So that's items like sidewalks, street trees, the two sort of boxes in the middle are duck banks for telecom electricity. So those items would be funded through this sort of earmarked modeling. So the streetscape sidewalk landscape portion is approximated at some point four or five million. And then the sort of relocation of overhead utilities is six and a half million estimated. So a total project costs around 14 million. That's based on concept plans that our consultant put together in an estimate that they also prepared. And then looking at, before we get into the modeling, some assumptions that we use for both Main Street and the pool. So with Main Street, we're currently assuming that the project will be phased for streetscape. And basically what this does, it allows us to sort of do the general fund work closer to that TIF expiration and pull from that TIF expiration money to help fund the project. So what we're proposing to do currently is with Main Street utilize the USDA funding that is specific to the water resources piece. So the sanitary sewer and water main work. Focus on that work, because there are deadlines attached to that grant funding that we have and sort of do a portion of that streetscape work. So that portion of the general fund streetscape work could just be moving the curbs in and then whatever work we have to do behind the curbs to get it back to a useful condition. Or it could be, you could do a portion of the full streetscape build out for sections that we know aren't gonna be developed soon or provide some streetscape where there's new development coming in roughly the same time. That all has to get fleshed out a little bit more once we get into sort of design phase which we're just kind of entering into. And then we'd be coming back to the council to look at sort of options to move forward. The other assumption that we have in here is that the utility provider, private utility providers are gonna provide a cost share for the undergrounding work. That's the wiring and pulling wire and the equipment piece. That's something we've had pulmonary discussions with the utility providers on and based on other projects that seems to be pretty reasonable but just wanted to mention that is that's one of our main assumptions right now. Are you saying at this point that you think a 50% cost share is a feasible number to work with that they might, they could agree to that? Yeah, no, I think so. I mean, typically what they've done in other projects is they say, okay, we're gonna pay you, if they have utility lines in the street, aerial utility lines and they have to relocate them, they'll do that cost that's their cost totally. Requiring them to go underground is an additional cost for them. They'll pay up to what it would cost them to move aerially within the right away. So that's typically around 50%, just that aerial relocation. Okay. So we still have a long ways to go to the utility providers, but just wanted to be aware that that is one of the assumptions we're working on. So John, who's gonna be responsible for doing all the hookups to each individual residence or commercial space when we do this underground? The, on the electrical side? Yes, water, even the water too. I mean, it's all gonna be very new. So is there a plan? Is the city gonna hire contractors to do this, or is this plan? Yes. Or is this a new part of vision of it? Yeah, so all the sanitary sewer water services, those would be performed by the contractor that would say, if we move forward with the water resources piece, that would be all contractor. So there wouldn't be any city work that we would do besides inspecting on that piece. The electrical, the private electrical, private telecom, you know, I'm assuming that's probably gonna be done by the private utilities, either contractor of choice or them, or that utility provider. So utility hire, does this have to do from the transformer that's on the ground now to like the metering? Potentially, yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, those are discussions. Once we get into sort of final design, that's where we're gonna start hashing us out with the utility providers. On the pool side, this is what we assumed for the modeling. So the engineering, the first kind of line in engineering and construction administrative costs, 305,000, that's an actual cost that we have an agreement on now. The remaining piece is what we sort of modeled based on the estimates that we had during design phase. And as Jesse mentioned, the numbers actually, the bid numbers that we received came back lower. So great news. And so next meeting we're proposing come back to you with kind of what those construction numbers would be. So I can tell you, for example, the bids came in around 3.1 to 3.2 million, the construction piece. That includes, you know, the estimate, building permits, bonds, the overhead and profit. So we're looking at, you know, we're still gonna have to probably have a contingency number in the bonds and some other costs, like, you know, third party inspectors. So I'm guessing it's gonna be somewhere around 3.5, 3.6 for the full project. And then the council will decide what the scope of that pool project will look like. So that's something you'll see next meeting. And then as far as other pool bonding assumptions, you know, there's an assumption of a fundraising goal from the pool committee of 300,000. We also threw in, you know, 500, 5,000 for a bond ban interest amount. So the bond amount on the bottom is what we assumed for our annual debt. What is OH&P? Overhead and Profit, I'm sorry. I should have spelled out Eric. That's okay, just a lot of abbreviations. Yeah, yeah. And similarly, can you explain the ban? Yeah, the bond anticipation note. So, you know, we only have a certain times a year to get a bond. So to bridge that funding gap, we will get a ban. So that's what that ban interest would be. So they would charge us interest to take out that funding. And we already took that out, yeah. That was like money we took in advance to move forward with engineering before being able to get the actual total bond. So, going to the model side of Main Street and the pool. So this shows sort of the expense sides. Sorry, it's a little hard to see. But what we're trying to show is the first sort of phase that first row, that's Main Street sort of phase one. That would be the water resource focus project. So, kind of looking at FY20, for example, we show a debt of 144,320. That would be the bond amount for the engineering services that was approved during previous council meeting. So that's assuming, and that number may be a little conservative, but we think it's gonna be about two interest payments. So that's where that number comes from. And then you can see it incrementally goes up to around 370, 360. That would be the actual debt payment for general fund-related costs for the project. And then kind of moving down the phase two piece, I kind of showed that red line. That's the magical estimated TIF expiration that we're trying to sort of reach. That would be the potential start of another streetscape phase. In this case, that's the amount for the entire streetscape phase for the project. And then we break out another phase of Main Street for wiring and equipment. That would be for the private utility wiring and equipment piece. That is an asset that would not be owned by us. So we have to take out a commercial loan to pay for that. If that's the agreement, we decide to work out with the utility providers. So that's why we show that sort of separately. And then of course, under that, you see the pool is sort of last row there. FY20, we expect that debt to start. The pool is a little easier because it's one project, sort of one debt piece. It's all general fund. So again, these models will be updated again once we kind of decide how you want to move forward with the pool project and the debt for that. And then kind of underneath that section, you can see there's some modeled pool operation and equipment costs. That's also included for this expense model. So I just want to make a statement for people at home and potentially, I know, I think all of you have talked to Jesse about the tip before, but when the down, when the, we pay off the debt for the downtown, we then receive that increment of taxes that has been paid to pay off the debt. And so in this model, like what we discussed as a council before was working towards that date so we could take some of that money that the city will see, that new money, and pay for this new infrastructure work. And so I believe what is assumed in this current model is starting at 50% of that money, that TIF money would be applied here and then set down over time. So for me, when I think about this longterm financing plan, I think that's an important thing to keep in mind is how we want to be allocating those funds in the future. This also doesn't show the new sales tax that we approved either, does it? So on the next, thank you, perfect segue, yeah. So these are the revenue offsets. So this is what I was saying about, this project isn't in our capital or fixed sort of capital costs. So what we've done is identify your marks for new revenues and then basically tax, property tax rate increase to pay off the remaining piece of that debt. So in this new revenues option, we've kind of earmarked the local options tax, both of them, the rooms, meals and board and the sales tax. You can see the TIF funding set aside which as the mayor mentioned is 50% and then it's sort of 50% max and then it steps down as debt is repaid. And then below that, we have some kind of main street driven new revenues. So with the development of Main Street and based on some historic development that's already occurred, there'll be a grand list growth from that new development based on just, you know, you're gonna have an increase based on these new buildings that go up. So we've modeled that over a 20 year period and we've conservatively used sort of a 40% build out over that 20 year period to model that. So that's what we're showing there. And again, that kind of, that steps down as sort of that gets paid off and this scenario it's, you know, FY28. And then below that you can see we have some impact fees we're looking at right now to also offset. So right now we're working with the consultant on the transportation impact fee. That transportation impact fee will set up a framework that we can also use for potentially other impact fees like utility under grounding. So I expect council will start seeing that probably next month get a presentation from RSG on how we implement that and how that would work. And then the other piece is new revenues from the pool that again, that pretty, we tried to go pretty conservative with these modelings. And so if you're interested, there's data behind these numbers too, if you ever did want to take a peek. So based on that, you know, we looked at sort of, you know, the debt and new revenues and then what would be the required property tax increase to kind of cover the remainder. And so that's where we ended up with FY20, you know what? Sort of dedicated 3.6% property tax rate increase. And then you can kind of see in FY21, we're looking at another increase. And really that is for the new mainstream debt that would come online moving forward with that, you know, a bit of streetscape piece that would kind of work with the water resources project. Is the hotel assumed in this modeling and under the rooms assumption? And if no, so that should be another, because obviously the rooms tax there. Yeah, so that's a great question. So there's actually, so the way, again, we were trying to be very conservative in this modeling. So the way we modeled the local options tax revenue for both sales and rooms and meals, rooms and meals on call was to look back at the prior two years actual receipts in the city and then escalate that by 2%. It's actually escalating around 2.5, 3% a year. We use 2%. But what we did not model out was any new local options tax from the rooms that would be added with hotel. We also did not model out new sales tax. There was a result of the statewide chains around Amazon deliveries. So that has, that changed at the state level, but was not reflected in the past receipts. And because we have no idea what that's gonna be, we didn't use it in this modeling. So we'll get, I believe our first lot installment in October and at that point we'll have a better under, that won't include obviously hotel rooms, but I think it will include the Amazon receipts. We'll start having a better sense of how close we are to that projected model. I think that we are very concerned, I think we will absolutely not be under this model and we could be significantly over this model. Does that make sense? Yeah, thank you. The next couple of slides kind of go into just general funds. So I don't know if you have any additional questions on Main Street Pool at this point. Okay, so sort of the base general fund CIP. So this is the sort of fixed CIP funding that we have for all general fund operations in the city. So this is sort of a new framework that we built this year. So what we've done is we've categorized the debt into sort of debt service, so stuff that we have to finance, typically those larger kind of equipment pieces or large projects, and then two capital expenses. So those things that we can purchase with our own funds without having to finance. So typically smaller items like police cruisers and like passenger vehicles would be an example. And the general fund side, we've broken it down into sort of different categories to help us more with the planning side. So number one, transportation. So all those things related to streets, roads, paving, signals, our fleets, our facilities. So all our buildings that the city owns would be under general fund, except for wastewater treatment plants and their water resources buildings, parks and then any planning for future capital projects. And then the other miscellaneous item that doesn't really fit into other boxes. So this is just sort of a brief overview. So to highlight, so for FY20, we have roughly 500,000 or sorry, 501,340 in sort of dedicated revenue for general funds, CIP. Above kind of shows you where those buckets of money are. So existing debt, we have 224,000 of existing debt right now. So the remainder could go towards new debt and new expenses. And then down below you can see that where that kind of revenue is generated from. So our annual allocated general fund capital is this year 431,000 and then it increases by 5%. So that was, I believe in, I don't know what year that was. So that was a ballot item, I think it was in 2006 where the voters approved a 5% increase annually to the CIP allocation. We have maintained that past practice since then. It is not an obligation of the council. It is not something we have to do. The voters can't forward commit councils like that, but it is something we have maintained because we believe that we need a growing level of investment in capital. And then just kind of delve into the details a little more of the general fund. So for example, the sort of top piece shows the existing debt service that we have. So Big Chunk is a road reconstruction on West Canal. And then you can kind of see the other items that are large equipment pieces. So what we've done in this new sort of framework is clearly show like what the equipment is, when does it expire, what our future debt looks like over the next five years. Below is sort of our proposed debt. And as you see in Main Street is not included in the general fund debt. But we do have your typical fleet pieces for replacement. In this case for FY21, we have Hickok Street, the road pavement reconstruction portion of that work. And then this just gives you a preview of sort of the expense side. So these are the smaller items that we would use our city funds to finance. So for example, street reconstruction, road repaving. So typically the city would finance road repaving. So this year we have roughly $153,000 for road resurfacing. And that's the grants, part of that grant request that we came to you last meeting for East Spring Four. So this just shows you a quick preview of like what the transportation sort of piece looks like for that. On the general fund side, so. Water fund. What's that? Water fund. Sorry. Skip your funds now. Yeah, yeah. So water fund side. So water fund does include Main Street because the enterprise funds do support sort of that, the water resources pieces project. And this, the water resources side has a pre substantial USDA grant funding, financing portion that helps with that. So again, this kind of gives you a preview of what the sort of overview is for expenses and revenues. So for FY 20, we have a total of $117,024 in revenues. So those are not sort of dedicated funds like the general fund. Those are basically the overage amount. So whatever revenues we exceed our budget by or operations budget by that goes to capital and that funds are capital. And as you can kind of see on the bottom, we're unfortunately having to dip from reserve funds to fund our kind of current capital fund load. So that's why we're proposing sort of this rate increase over the next couple of years to help balance that better and to get us to a more sustainable capital plan for the water fund. So the rate increase was recently enacted. Does this assumes that's flat across the board or is this actually assuming a previous water rate? Wouldn't you have these in this five year budget are you including that anticipated increase in the water rate or? Yes, yep. So we are, yeah, we're assuming, I mean, it was a direct proportion. So, you know, we're assuming that a 2.5% rate increase would equate to, you know, higher revenue without looking at, I guess what I'm trying to say without looking at sort of new development coming online. So I think we're being a little conservative because we're assuming sort of flat usage but a higher revenue increase. So I hope that we're gonna see, you know, with new development, higher revenues and we can relook at those rate increases. So one of, just to add, sorry, John, to add a little, one of the things that we looked at during the past budget cycles, you're looking at that potential rate increase was how our rates compared to other communities and what our history of rates in the city had done. And so we found two things. One, we are very middle to low pack right now in our water and wastewater rates. And two, if we looked at the rate increases over, I think we looked back to 94, what the city has traditionally done is hold the water rates level for a period of time and then have a significant spike. So for example, we had not raised water rates since 2012. At that point, I think that increase was 17% or something like that. So instead of, so the discussion the prior council had was how do you smooth out that line and have rate increases that are manageable for folks over time that allow us to raise the revenue we need to actually fund capital and not be relying on reserves to fund capital. But that will be a future decision for you all. Annually, you will need to approve any rate increases. And again, similar to the general funds, within the budget we show this kind of breakdown of existing debt, new debt that'll be coming online. This is the finance debt that we're looking at. As you can see, this does include the main street debt as part of the water fund. And that equates to some of the rate increase as well. Tell them I have a question. It says water tower allocation. What is that? So we, yeah, it's a great question. So we purchased our water in bulk from Champlain Water District. So we actually have an allocation up at Water Tower Hill that is for the city of Wienewski. So when they constructed that second tank that was for us in South Burlington. So we helped fund and version that project. Okay. I'll see the water tower when it's... Yeah, right? And I don't think they helped us on water reserves or anything. Yeah. And again, this is just an example of sort of the existing proposed expenses side, the non-finance side, which in your budget you'll see a more detailed breakout of what those items are. And we've categorized them based on sort of function of the water funds, distribution, what type there, meters, fleet, that sort of thing. And then on the sewer fund side, very similar to water funds, we've been pulling from reserves to kind of fund those capital needs. So we're, again, we're looking at increasing rates to get to a more sustainable place with our CIP budget. And then again, we have sort of the same breakdown of existing debt versus proposed debt. And you can see the main sort of debt pieces on the sewer fund side are treatment plants. We have, you know, clarifier upgrades to the plant. Those projects are typically very expensive, you know, 30 to 40 years worth of debt. We currently do not have, besides the headworks that's in construction, there's nothing really upcoming on the treatment plant side that we, they're planning for, unless we have to do something capitalized due to regulations like phosphorus control. Is there a reserve for the sewer fund? So same as water fund, we have reserve, undesignated reserve. So right now, our undesignated reserve balance is around 697, 879. The reason I asked that question is because of this, the projects that are going to be going on with the phone base code, is our sewer plant up to snuff to handle all these developers are proposing to do in our city? Are they going to build a hole? And is there going to be reserve fund in case we have to start increasing the flow of sewage? Yep. So yes, our plant is large enough to handle the full build-out of Main Street. So right now, flow-wise, we're like probably 40% capacity. So we're pretty, I don't want to say under capacity, but the plant is okay. Even with looking at sort of full build-out of Main Street, we don't anticipate there's going to be sort of any major improvements required to handle additional flow. And we track that capacity quarterly? Yep. So also things that have been committed, capacity that are not yet constructed, we take that into account will be available, capacity that we have with the plant. Okay. Well, because it's just not Main Street. It's East Island and Mounts Bay. Once developers get the hooks on everything. And the reason that I'm bringing this up is to have a resident bring this up to me just the other day about our wastewater to make sure we're not going to be another problem for the rivers or the lake. Yeah. I will say one, that is one thing I'm not concerned about, flow-wise. I am with a caveat that if we get some large industrial users in that have like high strength waste, that's where I have some concerns. So like loading-wise is more of a concern than say like your typical residential building. So, you know, if we get a bunch of micro-breeds in, which sounds great, you know, on the tree-man plant side, it's really tough for us to deal with that. So that's where we have some concern and we really have to work with developers on understanding, you know, the strength of the waste and what kind of use they have. But... What kind of pre-treatment options? Well, I think we need to urge developers to help. I'll stop that cause too. Or I'll have the rainy day fund available for, because the breweries, I have a feeling they're going to come in soon with all the development and new skis going on. That's the new thing. I mean, look at Pine Street-Rollington. So we have a framework in place called like an allocation. So basically what happens is a developer will come in and they'll say, hey, we want to develop this property. This is our allocation request. So they basically say we want this much of your plant capacity. We review it and we say, yep, looks fine. You know, you have enough flow or we have to say, no, we're sorry. You know, we can't accommodate you basically. And then there's a cost to that. So that revenue that we receive goes into a fund. That is not reflected here. It's a restricted fund that can only be used to expand the capacity of the plant. Okay. The storm, okay, we'll talk about that. No, no, no. Is there any question? Well, I'm just thinking the storm water, that doesn't go to the plant, does it? No. The storm water, that goes- So luckily we are a separate system. We're a separate system, right? Okay, that's another question I had Res and asked me. I'm sure they're going to be watching this. So that's fine. I want to make sure I got my point out. Yeah, so if you see, you know, communities like Burlington that are having these overflow issues, some of that has to do with sort of the combined system they have. So large rainfall events overwhelms their plants. Luckily we don't have that concern here. Good. Yep, so just getting back to sort of the overview. Like I said, similar to the water funds, same sort of finance breakout and similar with the expense side. So this is, you know, pump replacements, things that we don't have to finance, usually at the plant or any distribution needs that we need. And our sewer fund is both our sanitary sewer fund and our storm water fund. So those are combined. That may be something we look at splitting up down the road. And we've started kind of looking at that. Our neighbors have sort of separate storm water funds and given sort of the regulations that we've been seeing on the storm water side that might be something to explore. So first of all, as Jesse mentioned earlier, John has put a ton of work into and with the support of other staff as well. Angela. Angela. Angela. I've seen some of the spreadsheets behind this and it's significant amount of work. So thanks for putting it together in a digestible presentation. I was wondering if you could, this is probably a question for Angela, explain the undesignated reserve fund to us. So each fund has a small pool of funds that have not been allocated for any specific project. So we have the bi-policy 45 days cash on hand that is designated as your float to cover costs until the first set of bills come in in a fiscal year that's designated. Anything that you've allocated for a specific capital project is designated or assigned. Undesignated, it's free-floating. We haven't assigned it to anything in particular yet. So we can put that towards whatever decided brought to you. In the past it's been assigned to fill budget shortfalls. That's the assigned use. Thank you. So I just wanted to mention that what I noticed in each of these funds is that as we go further out in time that number is reducing in all of them significantly. And is this what it's showing us is that we are using so much of this towards these projects that we have chosen to move forward with? Yeah, and I will say on the general fund side that we've sort of modeled the next couple of years as pulling out reserve funds but in actuality, we don't usually stick to that number. We just prioritize those needs. So for example, on the general funds like the sort of fixed general fund not the main street pool, I think we have around $500,000 that's earmarked. Next couple of years we show like, well maybe we should be spending $600,000 but we usually prioritize and get it within that $500,000 range. I think what's important for me, one of the things that's important to take away from here is trying to get this bigger picture financial view of what resources we are currently allocating towards the current projects, what needs might arise in the future. Like these are things we need to keep in mind when we are coming up on boats around Main Street, around the pool, potentially other requests for funding and when we get to our policy and priority strategy discussion, it's good to have this base knowledge of this long-term planning of our financial picture. Can I ask a question, kind of digging in on the designated reserves because I'm just trying to put together the numbers that are shown here with kind of what you're saying that if you were to come back in a year and we're having this discussion again, would your modeling actually show like would these numbers basically be holding or are you saying that you'd actually be prioritizing budget expenditures to try and actually not have this drawdown on the unassigned reserve? Yeah, so for the general fund, we are showing up above, we've modeled out and I will say that's 637, that's mostly existing debt due to or additional debt due to like a paving program that's somewhat more sustainable than we have. So that's like an idealized sort of debt for our assets. In reality, I think we would probably try and actually this is up to the council. We would usually prioritize tickets that for FY21, for example, that $585,092 or FY22 to 637 and not or sorry, not take from the additional reserve funding the 62,000 and the 92,000 in this example. Yeah, that's generally the past practice is getting the number to equal what we've got available for revenue, the unassigned reserve balance from the general fund is generated by operations. So that's not something that was specifically capital related, that's caused by vacancy savings, low health insurance, expenditures and things of that nature and it's kind of been being held as the fund that we can go to in an emergency or to fund these one-time projects, the scoping studies and the regional dispatch types of projects that we don't have that are operating. So I think if I can, Angel, feel free to come join us to a more comfy chair. There's two kind of two philosophies about money and reserves I wanna call out. One is this savings account ideas, especially in the general fund, where we always have one-time expenses through the year, whether it's a grant comes out that we need a grant match or community priority comes up and we wanna do a scoping study or something like a new thing emerges and we have in the past couple of years taken the value that saving some money in those reserves for those one-time expenses that don't need to be built into a tax rate and therefore raise more money from our neighbors is a value. Having said that, we also right now do have, not looking out many years, but just looking at FY20, we have fairly high reserve balances and there is a balance for policy makers on do you hold that money in your savings account or do you use it on the projects that the community has prioritized because it's money that's come from them? So it's money they've paid through their water rates and waste water rates. Do you keep that in your bank account or do you use it to offset costs so that their rates don't rise as much? And that is a policy value judgment of where is that value to you of what reserve balance do you want to maintain and what do you want to actually, what either tax dollars or rate payer dollars do you wanna use to actually enable projects to happen? There's no right, you can look at debt policies across municipalities. There's no right answer to that equation. There's nothing in the GFOA books that say you should be taking the reserve balance of 10%. There's nothing like that. It's what's the political will of the community. Yeah, when we have a fund balance and reserve policy that sets the reserve at 30 days cash on hand for the general fund, 45 days for the enterprise funds and then it specifically states that the remaining money if you have over that amount available to you can be used for one time or capital expenditures and that was the policy that was set by council but it is several years past when it was established and could be reviewed. Yeah. Is the city, will they use those funds seeing if it's needed, especially if some particular bond bills come up and get approved? Only with your approval. With our approval just to help the tax. You have to. You have to offset the tax rate for some people. I mean. So that is a question that you could think about or I mean, these models force you to think about them. How much reserve do you wanna allocate to these projects to offset the tax rate? But for every fund, you have to actively take that vote and say, yes, we approve this budget that dedicates these reserve funds to this project. We can't do that. We don't, we can only implement those votes that you all take. We can make recommendations. But you want to talk to people. Would you recommend doing that just to help the taxpayers? I mean, if certain, I'm just. Yeah. I know there's some big bonds coming in. I think that we have a positive reserve and if we could use it to help the taxpayers, it might be something that we wanna think about. So that's a good point is when we are coming up to about having this information available, that's a discussion we can have. So we wanna buy down some of this debt in advance. Do we, do we have enough money? Do we feel comfortable doing that? The pros and cons, that's good. So we could be having that discussion soon. I agree. Why don't we need a specific bond, but. I mean, and then the other thing to keep in mind is that with the enterprise funds to Water Sewer, those have very specific usages that are allowed. Is there a rough estimate of the emergency expenditures that happened with the Main Street water breaks this winter? Like how much, guys seem to have came out of un-designated reserve, so how much, if you've not. That came out of operations. So it's about 20 grand. Okay, but is that money that you didn't have to cut other service to make up the 20 grand or that's never been seen? We usually plan for a couple of water breaks a year within the budget. It's price to do in business and a very cold climate. We have only had one year where we've had to had council approve money for water breaks. And that was 2015 with the, I think it was 15 water breaks and two sewer breaks that were caused by the frost. Yeah. And so what would be, I guess I'm just kind of trying to get a sense of order of magnitude, which point you trigger the inability to absorb an emergency cost or something like the water fund? Yeah. I mean, I guess, I'm trying to think of sort of the, so yeah, the worst emergency I could think of on the water distribution side is if one of our, say 16 inch water mains failed. And that would be a pretty substantial cost. And that's something we could get an idea of, you know, worst case scenario of that 16 inch main broke, like what would be that repair cost for something like that? Cause we don't, that's all we own. We only own pipes and hydrants and valves on the water side. We don't have a treatment system per se. So it'd just be one of those major, major repairs would be the worst case scenario. And is that possible? I guess I'm thinking what the floor is, like if we were to look at buying down tax increases by thinking out some of this reserve balance, like what the floor is in each of these funds that you would feel like start to get nervous and sweaty, which I know we're talking about maybe only having 60,000 in the water fund. Cause we were like, that would be helpful. Cause I don't know the scale, basically. Yeah. And I would say on the water and sewer side, like the way we're modeling it right now, we're basically drawing down that reserve to get to a sustainable sort of CIP. So I don't think I would be comfortable pulling anything on the water and sewer front at this point unless our modeling came back a lot better than what it's showing right now if our revenues came up or our main street debt came down. The general fund, totally different story. So I think another thing to take away from this is the modeling that was shown earlier, the discussion that we had previously about phasing the main street work is because we don't have the money yet to do everything all at once. And so what we have phased, what John has shown us is like, we can currently, with our current funding, move forward with phase one, this water sewer work, and then we wouldn't start that second phase until we get more funding lined up for that. So something I had talked to Jesse about was potentially seeing recommendations from staff on what that would look like, how to move forward with those phase two pieces. Being that another part of the discussion that we've had in the past is can we also align that to development as it comes online so that we aren't duplicating work. So trying to find the balance between can we align with development projects and do we have funding for this at this point? What is the bigger picture there? Yeah, and to your point, one of the things we're trying to keep a good tab on is along Main Street, what developers are getting ready to move potentially and which ones may hold on and not develop for a few years so that like you said, we're not redoing work because with form-based code, as you know, the building is right at the property line so they're gonna be disturbing that streetscape work. So we don't wanna put in brand new sidewalks and curbing and all that and then have developer come in and excavate for foundation potentially. But then there is cases where some of that story that development's built out and we could move forward with the streetscape version. They're knowing that it's not gonna be disturbed. Yeah, I think for me what's key in those scenarios is understanding how that gets funded given the current modeling doesn't actually account for that work at this point in time. Right, yep, yep. And I think, again, once we get into more detailed design and really get those numbers sort of more concrete and look at what developments are gonna get ready to go, we can break that out there. And to be clear, to our previous discussion about potentially buying down debt, the pool sits in the general fund. Correct. Are there any other key takeaways that you would like for a council to have? If you need more information, feel free to stop by. I'm always happy to talk. But seriously, if you do wanna go through anything, I know this is kind of a first run through. It takes a while to sort of digest this. You'll be seeing the Main Street models again and again. You'll probably hear some of the same questions again. Yeah, that's fine, yeah. I guess I do think that this was a really important conversation to have tonight to understand some of the foundation of the dollars. I think at the next meeting, when you see the pool contract recommendation and that decision of how much debt to incur, you're gonna walk through a process of what do we fund with our debt, what do we fund with the donations, et cetera. That will give you a kind of sense of how projects can be portioned out with different funding sources in a finite way with one funding source, with one project, et cetera. I think the next step in June or July is to actually do the similar thing with Main Street to your phasing point of we won't have the final design and therefore the real cost estimates yet. But there are multiple options about how that phasing could progress or what revenue streams we're gonna wait for. If we were to get the Northern Border Commission, that's a half a million and that's not even reflected here, what would that mean? What are those kind of key decision points that are going to come up in the next year or two and not necessarily how do you make a decision about it, but have you understand what that timeline, what those phasing options, what those decision points might be? Does that make sense? Sure. It all makes sense. No, no, no, don't worry about it. Any other questions on a Keppel improvement plan before we move to our next item? Well, thank you both again for your work and for coming to explain this to us. I think this also gets you guys started before we approach budget season at the end of the year. You'll have some foundational knowledge. I'm a spreadsheet. I haven't had any doubt. So our next item on the agenda is a resolution proclaiming May 3rd, Arbor Day. Who do we put on this? Oh, we only have this. I take no credit for this one. So all credit goes to Councillor Cochran on this Arbor Day celebration. I will introduce it by saying that we did this last year down at the OCC and it was a really nice event. We had tree planting and the tree committee there. This is a piece that's required for TreeCityUSA, but I mean, it's more than that. It's a nice day to celebrate what trees do for the community. Do you want to add anything, Jim? I think it's a great proclamation. I'll support re-proclaiming this day, Arbor Day. Any questions or concerns from Councillor? What's May 3rd? What else is on May 3rd? Can we have some other significant? The Greenup Day on May 3rd? So that kind of goes with Arbor Day, right? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if that's intentional. Vermont has an Arbor Day this about a week later than the National Arbor Day, so it might be, I don't know if it's aligned for that or the fact that you can't really plant trees. I'm sorry, I didn't catch this before. Is it really meant to be May 3rd or May 4th? I think it's May. It's the Friday. Oh, it is the Friday. Yes. Okay, okay. We're celebrating it on May 4th, religious to all reasons. Okay. Good job. So I would entertain a motion to approve the resolution proclaiming May 3rd, Arbor Day. So moved. Second. Motion by Jim, second by Amy. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Our next item of business is discussion about the tree ordinance. I believe John has come back with some staff recommendations based on our last discussion. Correct. Very minor items. Just in general, I think it's gonna be very beneficial to us public work side just to have some framework around our tree assets and have some guidance on as far as like removals and trimming and just overall operations. Again, this is one of the other requirements for Tree City USA. But I just had a few minor things I'll go through quick. We had some commission and agency feedback. Basically all were positive. So Public Works Commission has reviewed this a few times. They are in approval to move forward with it. There's a couple of questions in the back that I believe were from the response from the tree committee regarding private utilities and tree warden in the memo I attached. We also reached out to Vermont Urban and Community Forestry Organization. So they're an agency that helps a lot of municipalities put together tree ordinances. There's a great link on the website that actually lists all the tree ordinances in Vermont. And then as you can see, it's pretty similar to what's being proposed for Benewski. They also reviewed it. Again, no really major comments or issues. We looked at budget. There's really no budget issues that we can see. So most of the items that are in the ordinance, we do anyways. So for example, if we remove a tree, we try to replace it as far as tree contractors, all the tree contractors that we've used previously have a certified arborist on staff. So we see no issue with that. And then this is also assuming the tree warden is either someone on staff or sort of volunteer with some background in being an arborist. And operations, we put in a few minor comments. Just, I think our only concern was for doing some late trimming work instead of having sort of tree warden approval, just making sure the tree warden's consulted on that. Either way, I don't think it would be an issue if we kept the language as is, but it's more of a, I guess, streamlining the operations. And then we did just revise some enforcement and penalty language just to make it consistent. That may help with some of the concerns about sort of residential penalties. If a dead tree is overhanging the right way, it's sort of similar to what we have right now for civil penalties. Councilor Duncan, we had some discussion on sort of defining the street tree versus private tree. That's also in some of the track changes. That is one that you could go either way on. So for example, you could say a street tree, which is city owned, is mostly contained in the right of way based on some parameters of the tree. Or you could say, if a part of the tree is touching the right of way, then it's a street tree. The other reason I bring that up is that's probably one of the things I've run into the most with trees who owns it. If it's partially in the right way or a little bit in the right way, that's one of those items that seems to always come up. So I think we'll just have to clearly define how we want to structure that. But no, overall, I think it's gonna be a real benefit of us. Yeah, looking at the track changes in your notes in here, I think everything that I had noted from our last discussion on this was addressed. I don't have any particular specific questions. Sounds like you and Jim already touched base, so that's good. I think that's on editorial points. Open it up too. I just have one question about the tree warden. She will be selected from her staff. How will that person be trained or supported to kind of have a lot of enforcement authority? Yeah, that one needs some discussion. Who will be the tree warden? So the way it's written currently is if the council doesn't point someone, then it reverts to me. I am not a tree person. So I would have to rely on an arborist to sort of place direction, which that's what we do now. So if there's a tree that's really in question of what has to be done, we reach out to an arborist to look at that. I'm talking with the Vermont Urban Community Forestry folks, other municipalities, the way they operate. It sounds like it's about 50-50 with municipalities, so it's either a volunteer person, typically a retired person that was in the forestry department or has experience. They're the tree warden, or it's someone on the sort of administrative staff that does that. I saw in here that it said something about the city couldn't perform the abatement and then charge the resident later. Can you just talk a little bit more about what that process would look like? Yeah, so that was some example language from an ordinance, I think it was in Montpelier. So what that does is, so if there is a private tree that needs to be removed or trimmed because it's creating a potential hazard for the right-of-way, that would allow the city to come in or hire a contractor to come in to do that work and build the city. So the one benefit of that is instead of having that sort of day charge that's currently in here where you get a fee every day that you don't comply, this would let us take action on that and potentially put it on their tax bill or... And then there's just charge of flat rate versus that fee every day that it's not taken care of. Yeah, so one, I hope this doesn't happen. I mean, so in previous Ms. Kelly's, I've never seen this actually occur where there's a tree that's right on the right-of-way and it's a hazard and we have to like force the property or take it down. Again, I hope this never becomes an issue but what I've seen done is, or what I would imagine being done is a contractor would have to come in and cut that tree, which unfortunately that's a pretty expensive cost and then somehow that has to be paid by the property owner. And I think at the last meeting we had talked about, was there any sort of special fund that we could maybe help offset some of that? Was there any further discussion about that for residents? I am not aware of any funding can be used. Especially if someone's in financial hardship, you can't expect them to pay $2,000 to remove a tree. Well, I think it sounds like some of that would be taken care of by the city up front. Yeah, I think it's- And then they'll be billed later, but still if it's $2,000 or something like. Yeah, I mean, the only scenario that would happen, so say it's like a limb or something the right-of-way. So to me, if there's a private tree, the limbs overhang the right-of-way, that would be our responsibility to cut back that limb. We've seen that done before, but if it's the entire tree that's private and it's kind of overhang the right-of-way and it's deemed to be a hazard, then we would have to take some sort of action. So we would have a contract to remove it. We would get a bill and then the bill would be sent to the property owner by some means. Again, I think that's a pretty rare case, but that's the way it's written right now. Is there anything in that? I guess if someone has like a bill structure that's failing next to a right-of-way, that could collapse, the city could actually remove that, cause that structure to be removed. I'm not sure. I mean, it's pretty typical from when I've seen other municipalities, their ordinances, but I'm not sure if ours carries that. Yeah, I was wondering the same thing. Like generally, do we have other scenarios where we abate something because we need to, because of liability or something, and then it's dealt with in a similar fashion? Great. So I think the closest we have is emergency scenarios where we take action to like board up a property that has had a fire, but often that's translated to, like it's passed on to insurance companies. It's not a city-funded thing. So someone that lives on a fixed income may have a real hard time, even if you add it to their taxes. I'm trying to figure out in my mind how someone without experiencing another hardship somewhere, if it's not, I mean, act of God or pass. I think we need a public better solution for someone that's in that fixed income bracket or a financial hardship bracket. I think something needs to be done to help the citizen in my opinion. But I find it hard to speculate with something that's rare. So it's, you know, what do you draw the line? I mean, we can't, I don't know, we can't prepare for every possible scenario. And it's a property made this question. It ultimately comes down to maintaining property to be free of threat to yourself. And now there's nothing insurance looks at that too. If insurance came and looked at your house and you had six dead trees around, you're gonna up your premiums as well. So I think there's kind of a, there's a set of examples of trying courage against having trees become dead and hazardous and threatening life and property. And I think that I get the challenge that it could pose in a few outside cases, but a tree doesn't die overnight, it's been dying for years and that's not been taken care of. So I see that as kind of a, is it deferred cost that then ends up being born all at once versus right over time? And I don't know if the city has the ability to say like spread it over several property tax bills instead of filling it all at once. I mean, that would be something that where you could we spread the impact out potentially, but ultimately the cost is still property maintenance cost. Well, and I think what that really gets to is there, this work is being done right now. They're gonna see this bill later. They get more time to come up with funds. But also what if they don't pay it? Like do we have procedures in place to deal with that too? Yeah, I mean, so what we're kind of recommending is pointing back to the standard sort of civil penalties that we have in our ordinance instead of sort of creating a new penalty structure. So it'd be basically what we're doing now for those, I guess, civil penalty type issues. One thing you could do. So we had talked about this. So street tree, city tree versus private tree, you can define it as fully in the right way or partially in the right way. So one mitigation measure would be if a tree is touching the right way, then it's considered a street tree and it's a city tree and it's our issue versus saying, okay, if it's mostly in the right way and then it's us or mostly in the private lot, say the other side, it's private. So that's one way to mitigate potentially one of those issues. But again, to Hal's, as Hal mentioned, it's, I think it's pretty rare that you're gonna see those types of... Would that be in the easement zone for the city? I mean, what's the, like 15 feet from Southern Road is that? What's the easement? Yeah, so the right-of-way differs. It depends on the street. We have a list of different right-of-ways for each street. So that's the determining line. So center of the road and then if it's a 66 foot right-of-way, 33 on either side of the center line. I'm more than comfortable aligning this to existing civil penalties and not creating something new. That's actually one thing that I liked about the edits that were made is that we do point back to existing guidance instead of creating something new and it streamlines and aligns the process. Are there questions, concerns that remain? Are you all comfortable with leaning on the existing civil penalty structure? Yes. For now. So this item is only out for discussion. I imagine you would be coming back at a later date with a... Next week. Yep. Awesome. So we can move to our next item on the agenda, which is another discussion item. The equity and diversity summits. Thanks, y'all. Thanks, guys. Thank you. So, do you want... Sure. So first, thank you all so much for giving so generously of your time on April 6th. Much of the feedback I've heard about the day has been very positive that people really enjoyed the opportunity to come together as community and have some conversations and connect to one another. My purpose in bringing this to you today is really to codify the discussion you all had in the afternoon affinity group and make sure that that conversation was now out in public, as well as to provide you with the participant feedback that people put up on the wall at the end of the day. Helen Christine and I did have a debrief meeting as we said earlier with Sue and Keisha today to start to kind of talk about our experience of the day, what worked well, what didn't, and to start talking about some next steps. But really we wanted to, I wanted to allow the five of you to have kind of a debrief conversation. You know, ultimately this is a council priority, so how do you all want to move forward? Thanks, Jesse. So one thing that I wanted to, for us to discuss is, do you see in this memo like your takeaways reflected, what do we think is the biggest takeaway from this meeting? And then thinking about, we have this contract with Sue and Keisha for this training and there's still additional work that's to be done and we have flexibility on how they're gonna carry that out. So we can get a, I'd like to get a sense today of, you know, what we might want that to look like. I thought it was enlightening. I thought learning some of the history was, it wasn't enlightening, it was kind of dark. Some of the stuff in the past histories and I think if this goes on, like the next summit, I would like to see more positive moving on. How do we, how does everyone in the diverse community coexist together by interacting together? I think the first summit was great, diving into the past, of passing and indiscretions, but now I think maybe second or third summit that we go on, how can we do people are positive on instead of dwelling on the past? How do we look forward to 2020 or 2021 would be something I'd like to see. I mean, Jesse, thanks for putting pool party on us. You came up with them several times. It was interesting meeting some new people too. The high school students did a great job, I felt. They're really prepared and I was impressed by them and that was a positive thing that I've learned some things about when it was getting out. And I'd be interested in doing it again. I would share that to your comment about how do we move forward together as a diverse community in a positive direction? I think that's the end goal, right? And one of my big takeaways was about relationship building and trying to build more relationships across communities and groups simultaneously as people in position of power thinking about the relationships that we do have and don't have as we're making decisions and that we can be leaders in that work of relationship building. I mean, I'll say that I agree that I think that these do reflect my understanding of our conversations. I think it was nice to have them around and put them down. And thank you, Jesse, for also taking a stab at kind of some summary commentary on that. And I also think that having skimmed through some of the analytical tools, like maybe this is just where my mind goes and kind of process development. I thought the analytical tools could be really useful places for us to be thinking about how to institutionalize some processes that we, because I think there is a tendency to slip, especially when we get into budget season or we're gonna be busy with other things personally and professionally that how we have tools in place or processes in place that kind of keep us grounded or have bound like guardrails or guide posts to keep us going. So I think some analytical tools like that could be worth evaluating as a group to see if we can start applying some of these similar to we apply which of our strategic vision areas that these fit in. What is the equity assessment around these? It takes a lot, it takes more work and I think it should take council work to do some of that work. But I think that could be a useful next step to consider. And then I think looking through the long list of input that was put up on those pieces of paper and thinking about what are measurable indicators we could actually move the needle on in two to three years as a council will be something that's worth discussing in our strategy session because some of them I think sound like great ideas but they're not very measurable and some of them are measurable but they take a long time and there's probably some there in that sweet spot that it would be nice to have at least one or two items we could focus on trying to move the needle on say engagement commissions or supporting childcare if that's the need I think figuring out what those needs are. So that's kind of some takeaways as I was reading through this is like how do we pick up from this really big list of good ideas, how do we pick up something that we can manage and also try and bring some of that learning and sensitivity into our decision making process through tools or process. That could be a good idea. We take some of the ones that we choose and maybe have a summit on those topics and move on, you know, branch off those. I think that's a good idea. Like the highest rating. Yeah, I mean. So from the debrief today with Sue and Keisha and kind of like what the contract was sort of structured as is that I think the initial description was something to the effect of they would move forward like a, I guess a smaller group of people like a more of a focus group. And a very diverse representative focus group would move forward through a series of dialogues as kind of a deep dive. And so what we discuss is potentially going that route taking this information and having that group work talk it out, talk to others in the community to get to that point of like what are the priority issues? Where do you want to see work? Are there things that aren't represented? Which would be kind of like a, kind of like how our commissions are committees function but in a different way, which would also be a little bit of a, it also be kind of trying out a different structure. Learning care for sure. Yeah, the other, the other option or sort of the other direction that was described is taking more of a broad approach. So trying to bring these kind of discussions to more members of the community. That I feel like during and correct me if I'm wrong, but doing our discussion, see more logistically ambiguous to move forward with. Right. And I think to the point of having this small, select, diverse group that's more representative of our community, it could be structured as a pilot. So it gets to your point, Jim, about how to come up with a process and that can be applied to housing or wherever, in terms of how we make these policy decisions. But I think concurrently it's important to be aware that we have to do our own work. So it's just like with implicit bias, if you want to work on your implicit bias, you have to become aware of your implicit bias and then you have to learn how to manage it. And I think the same thing with equity, you have to learn how to recognize inequity. And then how do you think about interrupting it? So that's all personal work. So that's all important as well as figuring out how we're gonna come up with a list of things we wanna do. I think that's the ultimate goal, but I think we can't forget to do our own work as well. And how you had suggested doing learning sessions during council as one way to continue that personal that still seems like after this discussion they've had that seemed still like a potential path forward to us. That's interesting, because we also had a conversation about how we meet and all the different meeting structures that we have are somewhat rigid and kind of by the book and how do we come up with other ways of engaging people that allows for some deeper level conversations. But yeah, I think learning about this on an ongoing basis as a council might be something to consider. We'll have a moment for a 15 minute presentation from someone in the community about whatever that we can learn and grow as we continue working. And I've, people have requested to do that before from organizations around here to present to us and just let us know what they're doing, so. No. Can I just have a clarifying question? Is this follow up with Keisha and Sue above and beyond the $5,000 that's allocated? No, that's several, that's $5,000 separate. Okay. So it's actually part of a prior contract that was prior to anything. So it's not like we're picking out just a bunch of things. And is the timeline on that contract was the kind of timeline for next steps or is it like we need to be done by a certain time or if we can work like one hour a week or like what's the kind of intensity of duration? Through the summer, they wanna, we should, whatever we're gonna move forward with, have it happen before the fall. I like the idea of a small group. Like I think it's just a lot more manageable and we could get a lot more done. I think my only concern is, is there gonna be bias in who we choose? You know, because how do you do that in an unbiased way? There's a lot of people, I was actually surprised when I walked in and the senior center was full and I was like, wow, it was quite the experience. So maybe just getting their feedback about like how do we come up with a process to even like choose the individuals to be a part of this group that's not gonna be problematic. From what they did that choosing, is that something that we would need to do? Or we query them to see who's interested. I think that's where we start to see who's self-select. Yeah, who's interested. Hopefully you have a large pool and you can call down from there. Yeah. I think we'd have to reach out. I mean, I think some business owners should be there, some of the people in the community that are involved, volunteering or organizing, should be, you know, they might have some perspectives. I think the business owners will have a good perspective too because they will, like the Asian market, most of the people that go on there are Napoleon or they're from their language barrier. They know, they see them every day. So they might have a good insight of what their neighbors are talking about that can enlighten us or the community. Yeah, so we could potentially invite folks who did not attend the training to participate in these discussions. Can you ask them what a good number would be? They suggested six to 12. Six to 12? Yeah. Including us. Yeah, I was just saying. So we wouldn't all be involved. I think it would be similar like there could be a kind of like, I mean, depending on interest, I think 12 was the number we kicked around. And in fact, I wouldn't want more than two members of council there for the meeting on. So is there other input that you need from the rest of the council to kind of move that forward between three of you already with them? Is that, with this enough? Or is there other kind of aspects we should clear up or not clear up but clarify or decide upon kind of kicking that off? I guess I think if we think having a smaller, diverse group to kind of model this next step with this, that's something I think we could support. I think that'd be important to pass up. Yeah, so we could pass that along to Keisha and Sue and then they'll come back to us with a recommendation of how to take that forward. Yes, I'm thinking with the summertime line that we don't actually want to wait to many more council meetings. We do not. No, we don't. We don't get that going. Yeah, that sounds great. I'm not straight to me, I should say. But I guess I would just add to that. I think this conversation has been enough to move us forward immediately with their work, but I do think that this broader conversation is something we should all hold on to for our retreat planning as well. Because I think there might be some parallel work here between that small group and then other things like learning sessions at the beginning of council meetings or other things that we could consider that are less resource heavy but would be responsive to the participants in the room that day. That is a good segue to our next item. Sorry, I was just to clarify. So by May 6th, we'll have basically a plan for how those sessions will be conducted. Yes, and yes, Jesse, I'm glad you brought that up about also as part of our story due to the prior discussion and the work that we need to do ourselves. So let's, we want to schedule this. Jesse, do you want to introduce? Yeah, so this is something we have done for the last two years, which has come together as a leadership team and council on a Saturday and go through strategic planning, prioritization, conversation aligned to the strategic vision areas. I think from a staff perspective, it's worked really well to give us clear expectations of what you all want us to be working on aligned to your values. And then it's set up a reporting structure where we come back to you on a regular basis and report out on how we're doing to achieve things. I do think this year's will be a little different because we do have a lot of community votes and a lot of big projects that are underway and the master plan work that really outlines some very strategic, some very specific efforts. So I think it will be a little less, what's the universe of things we could work on? It will be a little more of a targeted conversation, but I still think it's worth spending some time together to do that prioritization. So really my goal of today is to say, are you all okay with doing this and try and come up with a date? Because as you see in the memo I gave you on the process of next steps, there is some pre-work that we do as staff to do some planning on our side to be able to give you good information and a good process in which to have these conversations during the retreat. So my recommendations were, so assuming you're gonna say yes to let's do it, my recommendations are, we don't actually have a date in May or June that our entire leadership team can do it, but June 1st and June 15th, the majority of our leadership team is available. I don't know when. No, you're doing the first, right? No, I'm here the first, I'm gone the 15th. Okay. Yeah, that weekend's usually graduation weekend for a lot of schools, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And Memorial Day weekend's a weekend before the first, correct? Yes. So are others available June 1st? I could do June 1st, yeah. I'm good for both. And you said it's a half day, Jesse. So historically, we've done it nine to one. I think, I don't think we would need more than that this year and I think we might, it might be shorter. I can do it. Yeah, I could do that, that'd be perfect. We get my little league game out of the way first. So, and Jesse, you included here the policy priorities and strategies as they exist now, which were in your orientation packets. And so this meeting is a chance to take this list, see if these priorities are still balanced the way we want them and have that more holistic conversation about the work that's coming in the year ahead and where we want to focus staff efforts and our own. And can I ask, will we also be discussing commission restructuring during this as well? Mm-hmm. It looks like it's gonna be a lot of fun when it's forward to watching on it. And I think that sounds like a good thing to say. Where are we holding this retreat? So historically, we've held it at the OCC. We might do it at the senior center. I'm open to suggestions. It is a public meeting, so we need to do it some more accessible. I prefer the lighting in the OCC or I'm gonna win this. As long as sneakers skaters, I'm fine. I'm just gonna go with the game. Request for sneakers. Although, I do recognize that we don't have full control over that room any more come June 1st likely. Well, thank you guys very much for being willing to give up another one of your Saturdays. Sure. The fun never ends. The fun never ends. All right, so we're all in agreement on a June 1st. I gotta say, if you don't like strategic planning, you hired the wrong manager. Actually, none of you hired me, so you're all stuck with the wrong manager. I get really into it. All right, so we can move to our final item of the agenda. Can I ask a question on May 6th or May, week of May 6th or May 13th? Does that have anything to do with us? No, that's for staff. That's staff. We do that. Okay. So this last agenda item is your consent and approval of a resolution that's in your packet regarding the UMB versus when you ski settlement, litigation settlement. We had an executive session at your last meeting about this, if you want, we can go back into the executive session. But I can tell you in public session that this resolution is very similar to the motion you took at the end of the last executive session with the last sentence in the first paragraph added, which is specifically calling out that the sale of the real property, specifically the ground leases, that you find that it is in the public's interest to sell that asset. Often in land deals like this, as we get towards closing, the opposing attorney likes to fine tune this language to ensure it meets their transfer needs. So I don't think it changes anything about the conversation you previously had or the vote you previously took, but it makes them more comfortable executing the agreement. The documents all stay the same. All of the other information stays the same. It's literally that finding of a public interest to sell this asset is the new thing in this resolution. And I would say that if it is not in the public interest to do so, we probably shouldn't be moving it forward. Hence why our attorney said it wasn't necessary, but this makes them feel more comfortable. So Jesse did put this on as an optional executive session. If anyone wanted to go over the decision that was made, but that is not necessary, if we are comfortable with this change, we could just move forward with an approval. The decision that was made at the last meeting, yeah. I'm comfortable with that. Would that make an executive session? Same. Same here. Then I would entertain a motion to approve it, the resolution, finding a public interest to execute the settlement documents related to UMBNA versus Wenduski. So who? Second. Motion by House, second by Jim. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. Thank you all very much. That is our final item on the agenda. I would entertain a motion to adjourn. So move. Second. Motion by Amy, second by Hal. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Meeting adjourned. Jesse, thanks for bringing us one more document.