 Okay it looks like we are ready to begin this evening so from what I can tell it looks like there's two folks on Zoom so Carol Odie welcome and Jeff Clark. Jeff Clark will be serving as our timekeeper this evening. Yeah maybe you could work on being a time filler because we're gonna be challenged with this agenda this evening I think. So just quickly for those of us who are. What's that? Oh yes I'm sure that would be appreciated also yes. So as always we're gonna make an effort to listen to each other while we are speaking and we're gonna respect the agenda and the process. We want folks to share their opinion but to do so respectfully and treat each other well as our overriding goals. So I guess what we'll do very quickly is I think we do have an opportunity to for the folks on Zoom to introduce themselves. So Carol. I'm Carol Odie and I live in Ward 4 and I represent Chinden 6-1 which is farther north than in Brownington. I live along in Bob Hooper who is probably, he told me he was on this call he's not feeling well but I want to make sure he gets on. All right thank you. Jeff. Can I ask Carol a question? Yeah let me wrap up introductions first yes. Carol so Sarah Carpenter has a question for you that we will come back to. Jeff? Jeff, part of Ward 4 in the same community. I'll pass it on to Irvar. Okay we will give you that opportunity and Martha you're up next. You're muted Martha. Oh thank you. Martha Wolfe it's Ward 7. Thank you. Judy you're up. Recording in progress. I'm here. I just want to hear what's going on. Thank you. Steve. Stephen Hamlin Ward 7. Thank you. And Bob. Mr. Hooper. The store's open. Looking for buttons. Bob Hooper. A little bit of a stomach problem. Sorry to not be there. Representative from this end of town with Carol for the state rep. All right well take care of yourself. Thank you. I'm sorry to start by staying here. You're caring for us too I suspect. Lee. Lee Morrigan just attending to get caught up on the goings on. Okay thank you. So around the around the room here Nancy you want to pass the microphone. Thank you. Thank you. Sarah. All right. Well thank you. We'll get back to you later this evening. Yes. Thanks for being here. Okay so with that I would. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for as we circle back to community announcements. Sarah you said you had a question for Carol. Question. Time. With the redistricting. Numbers have changed. Is that accurate? And is that in effect now? You're muted. You're muted. You're muted. You're muted. You're going to be six one you're going to be some other district. When does that change happen? Well, we are still in office until. The new legislature has put into is sworn in and the very beginning of January. However, the new. The new districts when, when everybody votes. And then the new districts will be chitin, and that will be Bob Bob and I are. In what's now. What will be chitin and 18. So when you're voting, it'll say chin in 18. Okay. That's just. Well, I just want to clarify that in there were no street changes at all. The redistricting. No, Bob. Bob, you were on that committee. I don't think there was any change. Not in our district. No. Thank you. So it sounds like our geography stays the same. Yes. All right. Thank you, Carol. Bernhard, you wanted to make an announcement on your own behalf. Yes. Thank you very much, Jeff. So again, my name is Sarah Hart, Monica. I'm the mayor of the district. I'm the mayor of the district. I want to speak some familiar faces from. Out the new North end. I am, as I mentioned earlier, running in the new chitin central district for the state senate. I have been a chitin and county resident, Burlington resident for over 40 years with my wife, Sydney, we raised to adult children here. They went through the Berlin school system. I'm a resident of Burlington. I'm a resident of Burlington. Back in the 80s, when Bernie Sanders was mayor, I was on the city council. I served as the council president for a year and was, you know, part of the group of community leaders that I would say, you know, helped to make Burlington. Some of what it is today is, you know, a livable and inclusive city. And I currently, I'm on leave from working for Senator Sanders. I've worked for the city for over 20 years, working for the Vermont affordable housing coalition. Also worked as the city's legislative liaison for 11 years over at the state house. And also worked for the city of Winooski. So I've a lot of experience in housing. As Sarah knows well, and I think Carol and Bob as well spent many years advocating both for housing and for the city of Burlington and the city of Winooski at the state house. And if elected, I hope to work on, guess what affordable housing, which is a huge crisis for us statewide. And I see my time's up. I'll leave it there. Thanks for the couple of minutes on your time. On your agenda. Thank you. Yep. And while we're briefly talking about elections, I want to thank everybody that the primary is August 9th. And apparently election season is open. So you, you can request. Absentee ballots if you wish to do so at this point in time. So. Okay, I interrupt. Yes. I wanted to thank Jeff for pointing out an error in the election. I was on the front porch forum. Or the Facebook thing that I put out, which had inadvertently drawn the general election into the need to apply for a ballot thing too. Just to be clear, everybody will get one. The primary is must request. Good. Yeah, that's that's an important cause. Distinction cause I think people were kind of getting used to that. To know the distinction for primary elections. All right, so with that, we will move on to the elected official segment of the meeting. And so far. Sarah Carpenter, it looks like. You're our primary guests this evening. So if you could come on up. Join me at the table and. Thank you. It's going to take some getting used to this new setup. And I'm not sure who I'm, who am I looking at here? But hopefully somebody has me on camera. Been a busy month. This is really the prime budget season. In addition to our regular council meetings and committee meetings. We have a budget meeting. So that's sort of been occupying most of the time. I don't think we'll find any surprises. We're quite tightening our bell. And I can try to answer questions best I can. In the midst of that, we happen to have all of the major unions renegotiating their contracts. So it's been a. It's been a long time. We're, I think it's going well, but it's difficult. I personally have been working on. Still working on the short term rental. Potential ordinance was postponed from an earlier meeting in June. And we're intending to. I hope vote on the compromise we have. And I think that we will be long, a long meeting. As I said, we have the budget as a major part of that and a number of other things. One of the things I've been doing this month is serving as chair of the committee that makes the recommendations on all the boards and commissions. It's a five person. Committee. Oh, thank you. And we have a lot of talented people apply and not always spots for everybody, but thank you. Any and all of people who applied. We'll be voting on that at our meeting on the 27th as well. I'm this year serving on the charter change committee. I think we're going to have a resolution on the docket there where there's an intent to bring forward a resolution for a charter change to allow legal, resident non-citizen voters. If you recall, there had been a resolution around that. Really, I think it was the January of 2020. And it just got sidelined. I think it's been passed in two communities. And I very much expect the language that we're going to recommend will be very similar to what has been approved. Legislatively as well as by the voters in those communities. We'll also be considering. Language that would allow us to. Have the redistricting process. And then we're going to have a resolution on that. Other in our charter so that the next time we do this, we would not have to take it to the legislature. You're probably going to ask me, well, so what's happening with redistricting? And I'm not sure as of tonight that I can tell you that. It's some of you have been following it as much as I have. And it's. Clear. There's not yet a consensus on what configuration. I can't give you my best guess on that one really, honestly at the moment, there's lots and lots of conversations about it, but we are not yet on the same page around that. A more minor thing that we may take up is just allowing the option of combining polling places. It wouldn't be a requirement, but there's a sense that in some words and I'm going into the next slide. I'm going to move on to the next slide. I'm going to move on to the next slide. I'm going to move on to redistricting. That might make a prudent sense to. Allow that as an option. I also serve on the community development revitalization neighborhood revitalization committee. That's the committee at the minute. I'm going to move on to the next slide. I'm going to move on to the next slide. I'm going to move on to the next slide. We have been waiting for a couple of months for a legal review and we've not yet received it. In part because we are now missing both. Our former city attorney, Dan Richardson, who's left and just as of a few weeks ago, the deputy city attorney, Justin St. James is also leaving. So the city is. We go assistance in a good vein and maybe a future. Topic for us is the CETO. If you recall about six or eight weeks ago, we, there was a plan part of the plan included the temporary shelter on Elmwood Avenue, but it also included staffing capacity for both the CETO office and for. CBO around services for the houseless and CETO is hired a woman by the name of Sarah Russell, who comes with a lot of strong background. I think that'll be big help to us. She's already been working on interdepartmental meetings on some of the policy. So I might suggest that would be maybe a topic for us in a future meeting. I did not have a chance to check in with Brian, but I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. I think that's a good question. Brian, pilot CETO about the process on the, the progress on the pods. It appears as last planning past planning commission, but I don't have a recent update on that. I think that's. Minute for the last month since I last checked in with you. So I'm happy to answer any questions I can. Are there any questions here in the room? Okay. I'm going to start here in the room and we'll get back to you, Bob. I have a question regarding this redistricting. First, I want to thank Jeff and Robert and yourself for all the work that you've done on it so far. But my question is at what point is the spinning of the wheels just called Jerry meandering because it feels like there's an awful lot of people trying to fine tune it for their benefit. And according to what I call it during mandaring is when you end up with something for a really a term that's used, you know, probably not a great purpose. I think the problem is where we've had growth in the city is it uneven for the traditional neighborhoods out here. Even though word for has grown word seven has not. And so for us to, for it, for example, maintain a district or two words for word seven and. Equal the percentage across the city. It pushes in several map configurations to creep south into the old North end. So that has a number of people concerned. Conversely, the, the ward eight, which really turned into a significantly student ward. And I think everyone was committed to reconfiguring that. The bottom line is we still have two big census blocks with a ton of students in them. And where you parse that out. I mean, we can't just blow it up and make it go away. You know, you put it in word six, you put it in word one, you put it in word three. And so that's, I think those are probably the two things that we're struggling with in the context of people are not very happy with the district system. And people are not happy about the thought of having 16 counselors. So, you know, you throw it up and that's really what we're trying to balance. Thank you. Looks like we have two, two questions online. We will start with Bob Hooper. Thank you. Sarah, I've only heard about a 12 division redistricting. So can you give me an idea of what else is. In the horse race on the table. Out in front and secondly, I only know of three city attorneys. So if two of them have quit. How many more is Haley the only one that's left and she's. We hired a new. I think there's three Haley. Now I'm blanking. There were, there were two, there were two new hires in the last two years. Tim Devlin is the other one and Jared Pellerin. So there's those three attorneys at the moment. Not much has changed. The original instruction wasn't seven wards, eight wards and 12 wards. And as far as I concerned, those are all on the table. Different people have expressed different opinions about their preference for those or not. So I don't think any of them is out of the running at all. It's simply trying to get the concurrence of the majority of the council. And you didn't mention the IR VRCV. Conversation about it went directly to. Yes. There was a proposal. To, as you all recall, I think it was in 21. The majority of the citizens voted to allow rank choice voting in councilor elections. It finally passed the legislature this last session. And gave the city with some modifications in the language. The option of looking at the methodology for rank choice voting. There was a proposal to. Wave all the reading and enact that immediately. Rather than send it to the ordinance committee and review other options. Of rank choice voting methodologies. That did not pass. So. Councilor Barton and I did not support that. I did feel it should go to a committee. I'm not sure to be honest that would change the outcome. But I thought since this really in fact. Won't. Immediately affect us. There was time to have it go to a committee. Thank you. I need. I want to quickly move on to. Heart. Hi. Thanks, Jeff. Hey, Sarah. You mentioned the short term rental ordinance and I, as you know, I've worked on that some, but haven't been able to pay close attention. Just wondering if you could give a quick update on what the compromise looks like. And then I'll also apologize in advance for having to leave the meeting early. I've got another one coming right up. Actually, it's, it's been what's been on the table for a number of months now as you remember, there was a proposal early in the year that would have. Significantly just shut out short term rentals. I actually propose an amendment that would allow owner occupants to short term rent a portion of their own home. Or short term rent a unit on their property, either attached or on the same property lot. So that's still in there as well as a proposal that would allow an owner of a two unit or more building. To offer one short term rental in return for one affordable rent, affordable rental set at the inclusionary rent. So those are basically all still in there. There's somewhat more detail on it, but that's basically going there. Thank you. Oh, Lee. Yes. Hey. Well, first of all, Sarah, I want to do. Thank you for your advocacy. I think it was last week about the. Transphobic stickers that had showed up. Again, I know I heard that you, you may have had some conversations with people after that or just basically wondering if you have any updates about your interactions with any city officials. I don't, I honestly wish I did. It's very frustrating and very disturbing. But we're being told to date. There's not a lot of way to enforce it. It's not considered hate speech under state law. I'm told it's not considered vandalism unless we catch them in the act. I had proposed and I think we need to follow through on what else can we do? And I'm a little bit stymied. It's certainly a conversation that we can maybe have tonight when we talk about public safety because it's certainly a public safety issue. You know, is there something more as a community that we could do? That we could do and I wish I had an answer for you, but we should not let the conversation drop. Okay. And let's see. Okay. I saw one other. Yeah, Jeff, I was just going to add to the chance, the transphobic stickers. Yeah, just, just to the transphobic stickers piece, because Sarah, you and I should probably just connect offline. There was a member from, I don't know what four or seven somewhere in my legislative district. And we've been connecting with some folks in this side of the old North end who are also concerned with the stickers showing up on the bike paths and Letty Park and other places. So I think it's a great opportunity for us to, to find positive trans inclusive stickers and community based stickers, which I can share more about that. And I just hadn't known that you were in the loop on that. So I'm happy to follow up soon with folks about that. If there's some organizing happening right now to make sure that. That hate speech isn't left left up there. It's very hard to take those stickers down. So there's some folks can be organizing around that. Thank you. Sylvia for. Sorry, I'm. It's working. It's on. I'm a little bit in the dark. What kind of, what stickers are we talking about? Are they hate stickers? They're anti trans stickers that are opposing and offensive and ugly. About trans persons. There's a. A small group of young, young people that go around and try to. Dismantle such. I will say the city. Their, their, their name is the, the Burlington cleanup crew. They have focused on racist. Stickers, posters before. I don't know if they could branch out into this. This area. Well, I, I, I like Emma's idea of a positive thing. I mean, I will say city staff when, when it's reported, they've been very prompt in removing them. So it's just that it keeps. It's persistent. It's continuing to be persistent. And that's the frustration around it. It's. We've encouraged everyone to report it. We've encouraged everyone to report it. We've encouraged everyone to report it. We've encouraged everyone to report it. We've encouraged everyone to see clicks, see clicks and to the Burlington police department. Thank you. Okay. So Nancy quickly. So our, is Emma proposing that new stickers get put over the stickers that are already. This is new to me. So I think. You hadn't coordinated yet. Yeah. Yeah. I would hope that's not the answer. No, I mean, I think there are other ways. Yeah. Okay. I have another question. If it's my turn, we got to move on. Oh, so I know Mark Barlow dialed in tonight and said he couldn't make it, but. Our city councilor seems to be missing for the last two or three. With no explanation or apology or what's going on. Is he still living here? He's an active counselor. So I think, you know, I don't know what a schedule is, but he certainly is participating on the council level. He just doesn't dig this or something. I don't know. Okay. Thank you. And we've discovered that some of us, we think are blocked on his Facebook page. So that doesn't help the conversation either. Okay. So I guess thank you very much. Thank you. Always. Yeah. And just, you know, I, this is just to say the next big, it's very odd. I really don't know who I'm looking at. So if I'm looking weirdly, it's because I don't know who the audience is. Right. Well, we, we. Yeah. Charlie and Sam devise kind of a hybrid system because. Last, last month we had a real hard time with. Yeah. Peter iris get being able to hear. Yeah. I think that the setups to address that. And I think it, it's a good one. Thank you. Yep. Seems to be working so far. Okay. So we'll, we'll move on. We'll, we'll do our legislative. Yeah. Yeah. So, I guess we'll go back to the beginning and so you each have five minutes and then we have. Yeah. Another five. Yeah. Five minutes for questions at the end. Okay. So. Jeff Clark will be our diligent timekeeper and Carol Odie. I'm going to let you lead off. Thank you. You're muted. There you go. Okay. So I thought I would talk a little bit about housing and what's happening with that. So in the second half of our biennium, the legislature allocated $1.3 billion for housing. And broken down. I'm sorry. That's incorrect. One point. $145 million towards housing and broken down. That was $105 million for mixed income housing development. That was $25 million for the remote home improvement program. And $15 million for missing middle housing pilot program. And that continued the con. The commitment that was begun the, in the first half of the biennium to invest in affordable housing. So also, I think. The legislature really had to face that. And I think that was the point. There's a very severe housing crisis. Before the pandemic, the median purchase price of homes in Vermont rose by two to 3% a year. But in 2020 to 2021. But it jumped to 10% a year. So that was a, it's a very constrictive market. And it's squeezing low and middle income Vermonters out of home ownership. So people are losing their homes. And so I think that the pandemic supports and projections are dissolving. And that's creates a further impact on what people can afford to live in. So, um, the Vermont housing conservation board received a $10 million increase to its base funding from the property transfer tax, bringing that funding to almost two thirds of the statutory funding. This is something that the. for full funding of the statutory requirement and I will be joining them. As a matter of fact, the Vermont Portable Housing Coalition will be every month bringing together legislators and candidates and constituents through virtual regional town halls to talk about housing. And I would encourage all of you who are listening to contact the VAHC and get involved, come to those meetings so that you can hear what's happening and advocate for full statutory allocation for housing every year. That's from the property transfer tax and it had been not fully funded for years and years and years and that would have alleviated a lot of our housing problems that we had that fully funded. So that is important for today and going forward. So the governor did veto our charter change on just cause eviction, but for rental housing safety in the state of Vermont, the Department of Public Safety is going to create five inspector positions to implement a complaint driven rental housing inspection program. And for the Vermont Rental Housing Improvement Program, which rehabs non-code compliant units and allows new accessory dwelling units, there's $20 million allocated for major renovation of blighted and substandard housing, and 20% of the funding must be used for the creation of accessory dwelling units. That's a lot of part of what you might think of it, or a unit on land where there's already a dwelling where it can be used for housing. So some things, just a couple of things, but there's a first generation home buyers program. Families who are also first generation home buyers, and that's an allocation of $1 million for a revolving loan fund. That should be helpful in Burlington. It'll be transferred to the VHFA for the administration of the program and for outreach. There's a missing middle program, which should help the Burlingtonians. It's a total allocation of $15 million of the ARPA funds with $5 million from 2022 and $10 million in 2023. And this will subsidize the construction of modest new homes for the acquisition and substantial rehab of an existing home. There will also be a further subsidy that may be paid to bring down the cost to the level of affordability for people. I see one minute, okay. And there's also an unfair housing practices that addresses harassment and discrimination in housing section. And then there's a temporary moratorium on the sale of a home where the owners don't want in property tax payments, water and sewer charges and so forth. That expires in 2025, but that allows people to keep their homes this tough time. And finally, the last thing, Act 250, which you hear about a lot, because of climate change, the logging roads, which used to be frozen for a good part of the year, are fine. So it's, there's a change in Act 250 now that will allow district commissions to allow for trucking of wood products to happen in expanded hours in the forest so that they can get their wood products in an hour on those roads before they fall. That's it. Thank you, Carol. All right, and we'll come back to questions later. So we'll flip the coin and Emma, are you prepared to go next? I am. And I would appreciate that because I'm a solo parenting. So if you hear children interrupt me, they're just not off screen here. So hopefully they'll, anyway, they're cute. They'll be a fun little advertisement. So I just wanted to start as folks know this little legislature wrapped up in the first half of May. So it's always kind of interesting to come to the MPAs in the off session and pick out what to talk to you all about and sort of try to read your minds a little bit. So I thought I would first give you two updates on a policy event I'm hosting in July and then also a bit about the Green Mountain Care Board and its healthcare rates that it's speaking to. I did a bigger update on Front Porch Forum and in the Facebook, New North End group that included a lot more details because I know I can't drop links in, but I wanted to first start with those two pieces, then talk a little bit about climate. So the first piece I want to share, we spoke a little bit last month, Bob Hooper brought this up around just starting to have more of a proactive conversation around gun policy in this state. Then as a mom of two young kids, this is front of mind for me every day. And I'm going to be hosting an event. It will be all on Zoom. So it'll be fully virtual on July 21st from 730 to about 830. I'll be joined by members of Gunsense Vermont and Mom's Demand Action, the Vermont chapter, as well as maybe another guest or two to just round out a discussion, understanding where Vermont's gun policy is and how can we make some more common sense and responsible policy to really be addressing here in the state the whole myriad of issues that our current policy presents to us around community safety, mental health and other issues that arise with fairly easy gun access. So all are invited. There's a registration link for it just to keep the Zoom space a little safe. But if you would like to reach out to me, I would have dropped in the chat. But again, it's in the front porch forum posting at the link to sign up as well as on on the Facebook group. And I'm happy to I'll send it out a few more times so people know how to participate if you'd like. The second piece I want to let folks know is the Vermont health care advocate, which is an extension of Vermont legal aid, which advocates to really help Vermonters navigate the complexities of the health insurance world we all swim in in this state in the country is also does a bit of advocacy and wants to make sure of Vermonters know that the Green Mountain care board, which regulates the hospitals as well as has some oversight on the insurance companies. They're having a rate review hearing in July. I actually don't have the date in front of me, but they're having a rate review meeting in July. And this is an open public comment period. And this is important because Blue Cross is proposing a 12.3% 12.3% increase for the next plan year. And then MVP is proposing a 17.4% increase. So if you'd like to provide public comment, it's through the health care advocate site, you can they can even help put your thoughts together if you if you need some help putting your your thoughts around how this impacts you or your neighbors on this extreme, you know, yet again, another extreme rate increase on insurance, which I think is completely unaffordable. And we need we need to do more there. I saw only less than two minutes. I'm just briefly going to just build off of the climate piece here. I want folks to know that even while the governor vetoed two important climate and environmental bills, I want people to know about them. So the Clean Heat Standards Bill each 715 was something that we got very close to overriding the veto on, but it was really the only major piece of legislation to advance Vermont forward in our pollution reduction commitments that we had under the climate action plan. And it would have really started to move take some significant steps about reducing carbon pollution from fossil fuel based heating systems and sources and with helping Vermonters transition to things that are based off of more renewable heat sources. So I hope we bring that back next session. If I return next session, I'll certainly be supportive of continuing to push that direction. The other brief thing I'm trying not to speed up talking here is just to build off of the Act 250. We tried to also do some more modernization and reforms to Act 250 to both help with the oversight to make sure that we have a good policy making oversight rather than the sort of broken system we have now that would help with moving projects forward as well as giving communities that have good jurisdiction with local ordinances or zoning, as well as with that have designated downtowns and neighborhood divisions to be able to step over the Act 250 process. There's not duplication and the whole bill got vetoed. So I just note that because if we're trying to really solve for housing and place smart place basement for, you know, smart development for housing, this is just a very problematic approach for trying to address both environmental our environmental issues as well as our housing issues. And I'm not and I'm gonna pause there because I don't want to go over my time, but I'm happy to talk about any other topics. And in the future, both the NPA steering committee, if you want us to like focus on particular topics in this weird off session time, just say the word because I want to come and talk about what you want to hear and not simply guess what I think you might want to hear about in the month of June or July or whenever. So thanks so much. Thank you. Robert. I muted myself. Thank you. The good thing about going third is a lot of the high points have already been hit. As Carol mentioned, and I'm a housing was a big issue this year. And I tried to make the distinction that there's a lot of difference between what people talk about, which is affordable housing and housing that isn't affordable. It's not the same thing. One's a math problem. The others are real how things are constructed and what's available. Carol mentioned, I think that there's a direction toward mid market housing, because it seems like either you're getting a raft of small 600 square foot apartments, or you're getting huge things that are well above what anybody would consider affordable. I think we need to hone a little bit more in on that particular part of the market. And it seems like we're doing so. Another big problem that we have had demographics, we addressed some, some childcare issues, not enough, I don't think at this point. That's something that I think is going to continue to be a problem if we want from want to be sustainable in terms of a mixing of the generations. At this point, one of the things that weighs heavily upon our investment funds in both retirement funds in the city also is the fact that we have such a high proportion of people who are elderly looking to take money out of systems than youthful looking to put money in. We did a little bit of work to protect bugs this year. We did those of us from this end of town put a lot of time and effort and conversation into the people funding ratio. We didn't find, I don't think, any great goldmine for high school construction or anything like that. But we did at least get some movement on how much money is going to be coming in to the district itself. Speaking of district, if you're as confused as I am by where the Senate districts are now, blame your senators, they're the ones that created it. It's an interesting looking map. And lastly, I'll pick up on what Emma started to say. I mentioned that last NPA meeting and I sent out a front porch forum questionnaire basically about the gun issue. I think it's going to be very significant in our conversation next year. I think that it's going to be difficult because there are a lot of people who think that the Second Amendment can be wiped away. And that's not the case. It would be very problematic. The language could, I think, be clarified a lot more so that the ability to own a gun does not mean the ability to own any gun. And there are some that are appropriate and some that just are flatly not. So I wanted to get a sense from you all, and I'm surprised at the amount of feedback I've gotten of just where you think this should be going. So if you didn't, you still can. State Rep Rupert Gmail. And I really would appreciate hearing because I suspect there's going to be a pretty radical bill come out of judicial and it would be better if it were not the same thing as what the Senate just passed on a federal level, which does absolutely nothing to address the problem, but is a great opportunity all of a sudden for everybody to be patting themselves on the back for doing something. I don't think, I don't think until fundamentally we changed the meaning of the word gun. Are we going to impact the number of children that get killed for no reason whatsoever? I thank you, Bob. So we have, we're going to go into our question and answer opportunity. And so that everyone on zoom knows that we got a notice from the school board folks that they are not attending this evening because they're at another board meeting. So we'll start with our allocated five minutes. And if there's if the conversation is lively, then we can add another five minutes to this question and answer session if necessary. So I will begin here in the room at Miller Center. Okay, we have a couple of questions here. Go ahead. Thank you. And I I do want to thank the legislators for all the work you did on housing. It's it's fabulous. But we got to build it. We got to find sites to build it. And that's a year to two years away. We have a significant immediate problem with the houses in Burlington, and it lands literally in Burlington's lap. The potential of stopping the Motel program is very concerning to me, and it is concerning to the city. We need some really good short term steps to take the right answers, build more housing. But I don't see that happening till next summer just because that's what it takes. So that's my two cents. And I actually know you all support that, but I'm trying to say it publicly because I think it's very important. And just and maybe Chief Mira can update us, but to know one of the public safety measures that the city has put money in its budget for is a crisis intervention model called so so called Kahootz model. But there's an RFP, it's gone out, come back. And like a lot of things is is way over the price tag that we had anticipated. The city's turning to the state for support. And I'm saying again, this sort of editorial because I think I have your support, but it's going to be that's a critical thing for public safety and it's a critical thing for serving many of our houses residents. Somebody in the back there. Hello, I would like to ask Carol Odie a question. You came up with a number of 10% that is the value has gone up on housing. Where did you get that number from? I got that from a report from the Vermont affordable housing coalition. Okay, I is as a realtor, I think that number very sadly is very low. It's much higher than that. I wish I could tell you you were too high, but I think it's different. It's gone way up and I can check with VAR, get that number and get to you and let you know. I mean, I realize you're just giving us what you have, but unfortunately it is a low number. I mean, I know from our MLS stats in Chittenden County, it's very low. So we have a real problem with housing and I think we all know that. And now that we have higher interest rates, which will go up again this year, that might help a bit. I don't know. But as a realtor who came in the business at 15.5% interest, I know the price has stayed low because of that. So I don't have an answer, but I'd love to work on something like that with all of you and thanks to all of you for reporting tonight. I appreciate it. Thank you, Carol. I appreciate that information and I would love to see it and communicate with the Vermont affordable housing coalition about that. All right. I see a couple of hands on line, but are there any other questions here at the Miller Center? Okay. So let's see. Jeff Clark, I think you were in the queue. Yeah, again, thanks for you all being here our state reps and for all your hard work. What you mentioned, Bob, is that we can't do anything on gun safety until next year. Is there any way to do something sooner than next year? And you've asked for feedback and feedback that I would have is that we should have what is described as common sense gun laws. And we should not have, you know, feedback I would have is we should not have machine guns on our streets in Vermont. Well, thanks, Jeff. I don't think anybody is going to argue with that, but as I say that, I know 100% that there are people who would argue with that. I think the fundamental problem is that Second Amendment is pretty vague. If, you know, we were able to get a Supreme Court that would clarify limitations, and an example of that is Congress in 19, I think it was 34, maybe it was 43. You can still, you mentioned machine guns, but the general public cannot own a machine gun, but people can own machine guns if they go through a particular process. Even now, a lot of our state cops seem to go through the process when they retire. So we could, if we were very good at crafting restrictions around what exists, probably put more limitations on the number of weapons and the type of weapons that people could deal with. But it's a tough hill to climb, and it has to be done legislatively. I don't think the governor can issue an edict. The governor could issue an edict that said, head legislature, come on back in. I got a problem here. I need you to pass something, but it doesn't seem like that's something that he's really eager to do. The federal, the federal people try very hard to keep those things within their jurisdiction. So anytime a state does something, it gets a lot of scrutiny. I think, I think we should be able to have more control over what happens at our own localities. But that's asking somebody else to give up power. It's like a charter change. Sometimes it's hard to do. Thank you. Trish, I noticed you had your hand up earlier. Have you changed your mind, or do you want an opportunity? Thank you very much, Jeff. Jeff Clark asked the question I was going to ask, and thank you, Representative Hooper, for answering it. Okay, very good. All right, so we're going into extra innings here, so we've got two questions that I see. So we'll go Emma first and then followed by Evan. Thanks, Jeff. I just wanted to build a little bit off just to the other Jeff's comment about the gun piece. I met with the reason why I'm actually having a event in July is that a few folks reached out after the Texas shooting, who were parents to Neil Northen, who send kids to the same child care center that my child goes to. And when we were, I did a little bit of research and just looking at some of the, probably in that category, common sense policy that Vermont should really think about, it's larger than just mass shootings, sadly, because the access to guns also impacts mental health, people who are in crisis, who can get easy and quick access to guns. It contributes to a whole other elements that we're struggling within our community around the suicide rate, et cetera. And as I've been talking to more more folks, again, why I'm going to hold this event, there's a lot of ways that this intersect. So I think thinking about waiting periods, thinking about really life-saving measures around the supply chain of how people access guns in the state are all pieces that I think we should examine. And then while there might be other bigger, bolder pieces of legislation, I think there might be different parts of advancing policy changes that can really do this in a smart way to really start to understand how guns are contributing to all the pieces, including the increased gun violence in Burlington. We have to look at how this connects to that as well, and how people get guns, how it's very unregulated on the lack of licenses, the lack of the fact that gun dealers in Vermont are required to hold a license. I mean, there's a lot of things that once you start getting into it is, to me, quite alarming, and I want to explore that more. So happy for folks to also reach out to me, and again, all are invited to that July event. Which I'll post more about. Thanks, Jeffrey. Thank you. So, Evan, you're up. Awesome. Thank you. I'm always so grateful to have all of our legislative reps being able to attend this meeting. It just makes me feel really close to the people who represent me and Montpelier. And I just wanted to thank Emma Mulvaney-Stanek, who came to my neighborhood and my community and knocked on doors and talked to folks and really heard them, many of whom are really struggling and had a lot to say about what, about need just in general. And so thank you, Emma, for coming and doing that. Housing came up. I brought up housing last month as well. One of the things that I just wanted to re-bring up while Representative Odie was here and give you the opportunity to respond back to me because you did email me the other day and thank you. Haven't had a chance to write you back. But I heard you talking about, you know, the squeeze on the lower and middle kind of working class folks that's happening right now. And, you know, you hit the nail on the head. It's hard for me to read, to hear, to read in VPR today that we're spending millions of more dollars to bring more workers to Vermont when they have nowhere to live. And the people who are already here are also struggling every single day on front porch forum and everywhere else begging for an apartment to rent. I just want to re-ask the question, you know, are you willing to take up next session revisiting and removing the changes to the Renter Rebate program that came into effect after five years during this really this economic crisis that we're having and to add to that question, I pulled up the income limits now. And so for a two-person household to even get a partial credit in Chittenden County, you have to earn less than $38,000 a year. So I think those numbers are so egregious and to take those renter rebates away and particularly in a city where over 60% of people are renting from so many people is worrisome to me. And I would like to see more people be able to re-access the money that they lost this year going forward. So I wonder, are you willing, you know, to revisit that? Absolutely. I want to revisit that. And I also want to look at the $47,000 threshold that's in the law. This is, it's very important to me that Chittenden County, where prices are even higher than the rest of the state, does not, is not saddled with perhaps the same number applied in formulas as other places. So we certainly came a long way with our school funding and this is something that I raised as an issue this past session and that I will continue to work on. And thank you for bringing it up and I look forward to to working on it. I appreciate it. I would just add, I think looking at it for each county, it's problematic for every single county across Vermont. So if you want to, if anybody's curious, you can just Google Vermont renter credit and click income, you know, limitations and you can really see that we've really cut out those working lower, you know, the working poor and the lower middle class folks who are renters and many of whom will now stay renters. Thanks to, you know, as some of the realtors were saying in the room, I really appreciated that comment, you know, 10 percent or more. So thanks. Yeah, question. I'm quiet now, Jeff. Bob Hooper, you said, and I probably won't quote this quite right, but there's a difference between affordable housing and housing that you can afford that just kind of really clicked with me. Affordable housing is just too vague for my head. And it seems like everybody, I ask what exactly that means. I get a trillion different answers, but housing that you can afford that puts it in a different perspective. And I think it's given me something to think about now. So I put it in the context of housing that is affordable. And Sarah can probably elaborate on a lot more. But when somebody, when a construction person is saying, I'm going to build a building and 20 percent of the departments are going to be affordable, it's a math equation that's based on the market rate for the stuff that he's building. It's not based on the the ties in with what Ethan was just saying, the general availability of money in the system in which you're working. So there should be a cap set on what affordable housing can cost the same way in Chittenden County anyway, under the AFDC program in days past. If you lived in Chittenden County, you got a, I hate to say bonus because there wasn't anything bonus about it, but your payment for taking care of your children was higher than an arrest of the state. It recognized that in Chittenden County, particularly Burlington, it cost more to live here. I don't know if they still do that or not. I have not heard it applied to any equation that we put out in terms of distribution of funds budget wise. But there's no question, even as even said, there's, you know, you go around the state. It's expensive everywhere, particularly in Chittenden County. If you see where people are building housing, they're building three bedroom nice houses. They're not building stuff that the people who are hanging out on Sears Lane once ago are looking to get into. Thank you. So I'm going to exercise a little discretion and we've, I feel like we've gained about 10 minutes in our agenda. So our next presenter is Mariah Flynn from the Burlington Partnership for Healthy Community. And Mariah, I welcome to our NPA and I'm going to give you the floor. I apologize. So it was a quick transition. I wasn't quite ready for that. I'm ready now. Thank you so much. I'm going to share my screen. I can share some slides with you all. Yep. We can see that. Thank you. Beautiful. Wonderful. So thank you all for having me in the Burlington Partnership. I am Mariah Flynn. I use she her pronouns. I'm the Coalition Director for the Burlington Partnership for a Healthy Community. We are the Substance Misuse Prevention Coalition that serves Burlington. We are a coalition of partners and organizations that are working together and individuals in the community that are working on strategies to reduce the causes and consequences of substance misuse in Burlington. There's a variety of strategies that we work on, but I'm here today just to share with you one specific resource that we and tool that we've made for the Burlington community to use and for neighborhoods to think about how it's relevant for them. If you're interested in learning more about what we do, please reach out to me anytime that we can talk about the other work we're doing. I thought it would be helpful though for us to just do a little framing first about why we've created this tool. So sorry, I'm going to use two different screens. So I'm going to go back forth so I can read some notes for you and stay on time. So the circular graphic on the screen that you see is the Vermont Prevention Model. It's an associate ecological model for prevention that Vermont uses and effective work in our state to be the most effective in terms of substance abuse prevention. We want work happening at every piece of each of those circles. Our coalition focuses on the two outermost circles, the community level prevention and policies and systems, mostly at a community level. That's where strategies have the greatest impact and have the most if you're looking at the environment that people are living in and how that supports healthy choices. But in order to make, like I said, prevention effective, you want things happening at every level. So there are other organizations and folks probably know some of them that are doing work at the individual level and building relationships and an environment that supports folks that are doing work at that level really helps effective prevention happen. So we focus our coalition focuses heavily on strategies that prevent and delay use for adolescents for as long as possible. And the reason why this is so important is because we know that 90% of people who develop a substance use disorder started using before the age of 18. So addiction or substance use disorder really is an adolescent disease. It's more so the more that we can create environments that normalize non use and support kids to remain substance free while their brains are still developing. We know that they have better outcomes and the community thrives. So just again to give a little bit of framing for the rest of the conversation there's a lot of data out there around to help us understand substance use issues in our community. We're not going to get into all of it but just to give you a snapshot of some of the key data that's relevant to the conversation today. So you have a sense of where a Burlington is. This is a graph that shows the most commonly used substances by Burlington high school youth which are alcohol cannabis or marijuana and nicotine. And I'm using the word marijuana because that's what the youth risk behavior survey the survey that asks this questions about this substance that's the language that they use. So you'll see in this slide that alcohol use has been the most common substance of choice for youth in our community. It's pretty much the same in our state. It's also the most commonly used substance by adults in Vermont. And it's the most easily accessible but in recent years cannabis use has also increased to match alcohol use rates. And in 2015 the youth risk behavior survey that all students in our state take in public schools also started tracking use of electronic paper products. So that's why you see that line the purple line start in 2015. And that's there's been a drastic increase in use of those substances between 2017 and 2019. And soon the youth risk behavior survey for 2021 that students took recently will be out hopefully this fall. And we'll have a better sense of where things are. But anecdotally we work a lot with the schools and we also do our own surveying of students and we're seeing again an drastic increase in electronic paper use products both for cannabis and nicotine. So in thinking about that one of the things I should also note is that Vermont some of the highest substance use rates in the nation for youth for alcohol and cannabis. So our organization wants to do something about that. As I think many of our communities do. And what we know can help prevent and delay use for kids is responsible use by adults and helping to make healthy choices easy choices in our communities. Kids are really heavily impacted by what adults in the community are normalizing. So we talk about strategies that both support adults and support kids and particularly adults who are in recovery too and are also trying to maintain a substance-free life. I think you went mute, Baraya. Oh, can you hear me? Jeff, I can hear her. Oh, good. Can everyone else hear me? We seem to have lost her, Sam. It's something at the Miller Center. Yeah. Just give it a second, Mariah. Sometimes we have technical problems at the Miller Center. Are you muted on your end, Mariah? No, I'm not. We can hear her on Zoom. It looks like we lost her. Okay. How's that? Can you hear me now? Okay. What was that? Can you hear me now? Okay. So, Mariah, I have a suggestion. So if you actually sort of log out and then we're going to try logging you back in again. Sure. Is it okay? Yeah. Yeah. So try that. Okay. So Sam will let you back in. And for everybody else, while we're here, we're not going to play the balloon commercial from the drive-in movie, but we actually Dave Kirk has joined the meeting and he did go attend the school board meeting that the school commissioners or members were at and didn't come here. So Dave, I give you five minutes if you want to give us an update from that meeting. Sure. I don't mind. And then we got to continue with our regularly scheduled program. Perfect. So first, the school board staff does and is actually trying to save us money. Apparently that's what they're saying. So I did hear from the superintendent that they got a $10 million grant to put the aviation project at the airport with beta technologies assistance. So $10 million of the cost of the high school will be moved up there. They estimate a $20 million savings, but in clarification from the superintendent, he was unclear how much more than $10 million it would cost us to put that program up there. So there's a little gray area there about saving $20 million. It may not be initially a $20 million savings at the end of the day. They're not really clear about how much it's going to save. So it's a little crazy right now as time goes on. The other thing I was shocked to hear is that we don't have time to know exactly what this project is going to cost us. We need to vote on it in November. So by August 17th, the deadline, we have to have a bond ready to go to the taxpayers so that it can be on the November ballot, which I do understand. But if we don't have all the information, perhaps we should pump the brakes is exactly what I asked for them to do. I do know Representative Ali Jang is 100% behind the spending of the money. And he was quoted on Channel 3 today of spending the money and doing whatever it takes to build the high school is about what Channel 3 said in there right up on him today. So I would just be cautious about this. The school board is going to come to us with, I would assume, will be over $150 million, which city council has said is the top line. Murrow, the mayor has kind of wavered on that a little bit since he said it. But commissioners have said $150 million is our bonding capacity in City of Burlington. I don't know if that includes the $43 million that the school is in debt to us already. But this could bring us well over $200 million in debt just for the school district, not counting the $100 million a year. That's kind of the update. That's your bridge addition that I gathered from it. I'm not speaking as a school board member. I'm speaking as a taxpayer, just trying to, you know, keep everybody on the same track. I don't think the school board has been doing a really great job of getting the message out. I do have three documents I pulled off of the agenda tonight that explained some of this. It was on the agenda at Board Docs. So feel free to look there. Cool, Jeff. Yes, thank you very much. All right. Oh, okay. Mariah, you want to give this another try, please? Sure. Can you hear me now? No. Oh, maybe. Can you hear me? No. On Zoom, we can. Jeff, can you hear me? No, we're not hearing you, Norwich. Yes, I can hear you, Evan. No, I'm sorry. So they cannot hear us in the Miller Center. Oh. It says Sam needs to, or Jordan or whoever is there, they're having an audio problem between Zoom and the Miller Center. Evan, okay, I can hear you. Oh, you hear me? Okay. Jeff Clark. Yeah, can you hear me? Yes. Okay. Can you hear me? Yes. All right. You can hear you. Okay. Jordan heard his name, I guess. Great. Okay. Okay, Jordan and Sam. I'm going to try to hear my screen again. Yes, go ahead, please. Thank you. Okay. Here we go. All right. So just, I don't know, wave to me or if Caller, if you can't hear me. But I'm just going to dig right into the tool that I mentioned that we have for you all. So in the fall and winter of 2018, we completed an assessment of all the alcohol and tobacco retailers in Burlington. We had staff and youth and adult volunteers who helped as well as the health department. And assessments like these were done across the state. So we have some comparable data to other areas of the state. We went to each of the stores in Burlington, we tracked things like product placement, advertising, location of advertising, things like is it under free feet or is it on the outside of the building? Does it light up? And then when we compiled all that data from those audits and we used it to create maps and we put it into an online tool so that people could look at geographically the impact of retail outlets within the area. We looked at density of retailers and impact on the surrounding populations such as there are a lot of stores near a school or a youth center. And then we put all that, like I said, into an online interactive tool. And then we overlaid it with things like the census data showing poverty rates, location of schools and neighborhoods so that you could start to have discussions in your neighborhood about some of these things and think about how you might want to create changes or designs for the community or think about that impact. We are currently in the middle of another assessment right now, hopefully happening this summer with the Department of Liquor and Lottery. They'll be collecting new audits of all the tobacco and alcohol retailers in our state. And so that will be updated on the site later this summer but we have the site ready, we want to share it with folks and then we'll just try to keep it updated as often as we can with new data when it makes sense. Hopefully again doing another one next year when cannabis outlets are a begin sales in October of this year. So that's what I'm going to talk about today. I'll pull up the tool but it is a little bit trickier to kind of look at so I encourage folks to look at it on your own. I'll pull out some of the data and information that I brought from that so that you can think about it and how it might be useful for your own community. So I do want to note to set the stage that all of the images that you'll see in both my presentation and on the website that I mentioned are from our community. We most are taken from youth that took pictures of things that they saw as problematic in the community. So they're all Burlington photos and we'll talk about the again the community level prevention. So we're just talking about things that are the root causes of youth substance misuse at a community level. Things like community normalization of substance use access to and promotion of substances in a community low perception of harm if people feel that there's a that harm is there's not a lot of harm from a substance they tend to use higher rates and early onset of use or use youth using early. And I threw this in here too just so you kind of know why these are some of the things that we talk about. One of the things we know is that that youth are much more influenced by advertising than adults are the data. There's different data folks say at least twice as likely to be influenced by advertising if not four times as likely to be influenced by advertising. And we're seeing the same thing with cannabis or marijuana ads as that we see with alcohol and tobacco advertising that regular exposure to advertising seems to increase youth rates or increase favorable attitudes about using. So in Burlington one of the well one of the things we know that strategic placement of advertising at children's eye level also normalizes use of the substance in everyday life for youth and is a risk factor for increased access and a low perception of harm. So on the screen you'll see that of those of those audits that we did in our community 57% of alcohol retailers had alcohol ads on the outside of the doors and windows that were visible from the store which I think will be really is useful information when you're thinking about the number of retailers that are close to our schools which you'll see in the in the online website tool that we have. And the statewide average for that is 32% only compared to other store audits. We also found that more advertising in Burlington had more inside advertising as well. So now let me just show you real quickly the tool because I wanted to point out a few things that might be relevant particularly for this board. Hopefully I'll just let you link right to it. Here we go. So this is the website and I'm going to you know as I said take some time on your own. I'll at the end of the presentation and within this presentation there's links to it. You can also find it on our website. It's linked within there. So I'm going to scroll through a bunch of things that you can kind of read on your own time. But what I did want to show you is the maps. And so this one there's kind of three maps that we have so far and if folks are really interested in particular information that might be something we could glean or add. So please do let us know if there's things we should add. But one of the things we wanted to look at for this area so first you can see kind of density where are there large groupings of of retailers and one of the things you know for maybe for ward four and seven is that your rates have compared your wards have comparably good rates of retailer density and lower numbers of alcohol and tobacco retailers near schools than some other wards. So this actually I'm going to pull over here so you can see your wards better. So this map shows location and proximity to schools. So you can see the circles, the darker blue circles are 500 feet from a school and where it gets lighter is a thousand feet from a school. So there's not a ton of retailers in there and one of the reasons I kind of point this out for your community is thinking about the impending cannabis retail that's coming into the community. So there will be more licenses that are being issued right now and starting in October. It's the time of year. It's the time for communities to start thinking about how policies can be preventative in terms of supporting youth not to have a lot of promotion near places where they're spending a lot of time. So thinking about the Miller Center or the schools places where they're going to be spending a lot of time. Hopefully don't want a lot of advertising and promotion of substance use around them. And the states that aren't doing this work or that didn't do this work, I should say, are really struggling right now to try to fix some of these problems later. So we have a rare opportunity to make healthy choices, easy choices before we start getting before some of these policies get in place. So that's one of the things I thought might be helpful for this work to have conversations about and you can think more about what makes sense for you all. I'm going to pull you back to our slideshow. There we go. So just took, I pulled here again the root causes of substance use again at a community level and some strategies that research shows have been effective in preventing youth initiation and use. Things like creating buffers around schools and places that kids gather like I mentioned, establishing density maximum. So no more than so many retailers within a set area prohibiting use at places that are very family friendly like parks prohibiting adult only advertising in locations where kids are spending a lot of time. So one of the things that we see in some of the other areas of Burlington is there's a lot of alcohol and tobacco ads on the outside of the building in front of or near schools. So thinking about how you can have conversations with retailers or whatever other strategies you want to use to address some of those issues that have propped up with alcohol and tobacco. So a quick summary and again I'll share this slideshow and folks can look at it. All this information is also on the website. But a quick summary, the earlier people start using the more likely they are to develop problems and helping use delay use for as long as possible. Sorry, while their brains are still developing is an important preventative tool. And the substances the kids almost always start with are alcohol, tobacco and cannabis that lead to other substance use. So there's not one gateway drug. Drug there's really three or any substance use tends to lead to more substance use when you start while the brain is still developing. So social norms and easy access to and promotion of substances can all increase that underage use. And we can support kids by limiting exposure to those things and think about how advertising and use in public spaces is allowed. And we have some work that we're doing to help continue to have these conversations to help think about how we build a healthy community. And so if you're interested in getting involved you can reach out to me. My contact information is on the slide. And we've also helped to create some tools for communities to have these conversations. So I let those resources at the bottom and they're also linked on the website. And I'll stop there so that maybe we have a minute or two for questions. Yep, very, very well done. Thank you, Mariah. So let's see. Any questions here in the Miller Center? Okay, let's see. Well, okay, Sylvia. My thoughts turn momentarily to the Bessie Meat Market on North Avenue. I see a lot of kids congregate around that shop after school. So I'm wondering, I'm hoping he doesn't become a neighborhood shop for cannabis and what we might do to approach him about that. Thank you. See, I see one hand online so far, Matt. Thanks, Jeff. Mariah, I just had a question. You mentioned that statistically Burlington retailers are 57% for marketing in storefront windows versus 32% in the rest of the state. I just wonder what the relationship is to youth abuse for Burlington versus the rest of the state. Are we an equidistant 25% increase? Are we the same? Are we double? What is that statistical quick? Yeah, we are not. So it's we are, well, I guess it depends on what substance you're looking at. It's a little, it's kind of all over in our data, depending on like what substance you're looking at, which populations you break it down to as well. We are in a lot of our areas, as we have actually less substance use than more rural areas of the state. Some of the more rural areas of the state, but there are certain populations in our community that are showing higher substance use rates. For instance, LGBTQ identifying youth show high substance use rates. Students who identify as for marking the box for male in certain grades. So it's harder to say, but on average, if you're comparing the average of like alcohol use to the rest of the alcohol use for the state, we aren't, we're fairly comparable. So even though there's a much higher advertising rate, the actual outcome of abuse doesn't really change all that much. I'm just curious. I like stats. Yeah. No, it's an important point that you're making. Thank you, Matt. I mean, I don't like them, but having a real impact, I guess would be my question. Yeah. It's tricky when it comes to like those kinds of conversations to make, you can't make a correlation, right? Between that type of data, it's really, there's a lot of different things that play, that have a play in why substance use rates are the way they are. So I can't say that, you know, that is one of the things that we know from the research is that promotion of substance use in a community impact substance use rates and tends to need people high to higher rates, whether that's correlated to like looking at our specific substance use rates. I don't know if I'm answering that or if I'm like explaining that well, but I don't know that we can make a direct correlation. So we're trying to look at the strategies that science says will help us reduce our substance use in our community and implement those strategies. So thank you, Mariah. So if you could actually make that slide deck available to us, then the steering committee will post that on our neighborhood forum. Perfect. So I think all of that information would be really helpful so that folks could have a chance to ponder it at their own speed. Yeah, that sounds great. Should I send it to you, Jack, or? Yeah, you can send it to any of us on the steering committee or Evan can help us with that, certainly. Great, yeah. Sounds good. Thank you. No, he's our inside trader here. So yeah, thank you so much for having me and us today. Thank you. I appreciate that. All right, well, we're maintaining our schedule. So we're going to move on to the next subject. So I will invite Chief Murad and Alec. You want to join the chief up here, please? Thank you. So our next segment is Chief Murad and Alec Keating. He's with the Parks and Rec Department, but he's leading the new park ranger program as part of the overall public safety strategy. So gentlemen, I think what we're going to try to do is Chief, we'll start with 10 minutes and then Alec, if you want 10 minutes and then we have another 10 minutes for conversation and dialogue after that. And I have a feeling this is one of those topics where folks aren't going to mind extra innings. So here we go. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I'm glad to be here. And I've brought some paperwork that is available to everyone online. So one thing that I've tried to do over the past two years is make what we're doing at the BBD as transparent as possible. I haven't been as successful as I'd like. I would love to be able to invite everybody into the police department to let them understand what the men and women inside the department do, who they are as human beings and the motivations that we have for the work that we do. It's not entirely feasible, but what I have done is increase by I think almost 100% the number of directives that we keep up online. So it's all available on our website at the city website. I put when I meet with the police commission, the independent citizen police commission every month, I put together an entire presentation for them and I post all of those presentations on our website. It's got recurring amounts of data. When I have had to make drastic changes to the police department over the past two years owing to staffing issues, I have put those presentations around those changes up as well. Last May, in May of 2021, we implemented a priority response model. And this past May, we had to amend that priority response model. And the reason is that our staffing is down drastically. In June of 2020, we were authorized at 105 officers and we had 92 or 93, depends on whether I'm counting one who was already on terminal leave. We were then, there were changes in funding and changes in headcount allotment that brought that number down an authorized number to 74 through attrition. That number has since been increased in October of 2021 to 87. But in the meantime, we fell from that 90, low 90s and a historic hovering of around the high 90s to where we currently are, which is at 63 actual officers, only 52 of whom are currently effective because a number are off on military deployments. Some have long-term injuries. I have three who are on what we call terminal leave. They've expressed their desire to leave in their burning vacation time that they've accrued over the course of a long career. Those changes have made us have to make certain kinds of alterations to the way we normally deploy. The biggest of which is the creation of something that we call the city center area. We've gone from being a police department that used to spread out across the entire city, putting officers in five geographic areas around the city, the new north end, the old north end, the hill section, the downtown area, and the south end to being a department that really only focuses on the downtown core, something we call the city center area that runs essentially from Maple to Riverside. So it is the old north end and the downtown core and a little sliver of the western part of the hill section. And we are not in the old north end, excuse me, in the new north end with the frequency with which we once were. We are not in the south end with any real frequency. As we have gotten smaller with regard to sworn officers, I've worked hard to build other kinds of resources because those were some of the things that our neighbors asked for in June of 2020 when we thought about how to re-envision policing. And some of the things that we've built are new positions that our social workers embedded inside the police department. They are called community support liaisons and they most have master's degrees in social work or other commensurate kinds of education. They work on issues around houselessness, around substance use disorder, around mental health crisis. We also have a position that pre-existed my tenure here. It was called a community service officer that is an unsworn unarmed member of our department. Somebody who does not carry a firearm as I do. I'm a level three police officer certified in the state. I can arrest people. I can enforce the law. CSOs, community service officers, cannot. They can write certain kinds of municipal tickets because they are employees of the city, but they can't arrest people. They can't use force. And they are now responding to a number of quality of life calls, calls around noise complaints, calls around issues with people who may be intoxicated but not belligerent or otherwise dangerous, calls around, they do patrols on church street and in other parts of the city to project municipal presence. I have gone from having only two of those to having eight and I'm seeking to have 12 in the new budget that is going to be, that has been presented to the city council and will hopefully be approved at the end of this month. I invented, as I said, the CSL or community support liaison position. We had none of those prior to June of 2020. We now have three plus a supervisor. I am hoping to have six plus a supervisor if the budget is approved as the mayor and I have put it forth. And I want to be clear, the mayor's support for these programs has been instrumental and constant. It was not, he didn't believe in the idea of having the department get smaller with regard to sworn resources, although he has been incredibly supportive of the need for other kinds of resources to be built. Now, among those things that we've been building also are ways of using those different kinds of resources. We are deploying those CSOs, as I said, on church street in the marketplace on foot patrols. We are using the CSLs to do follow-up work with people who have exhibited issues around, as I said, mental health around substance use disorder. An example would be officers go to every single overdose in the city if it's reported to us. They obviously can happen without a report, but a concerned person sees a friend overdose on opioids is the majority of the time. They call the police and fire. Police and fire arrive. It is oftentimes, it can be a dangerous situation. Sometimes people who have overdosed and are interrupted in that overdose through the administration of Narcan can become very belligerent. They don't like having their high reversed by the Narcan. Fire will not show up for many of those calls if their preference is met without a police officer present. But we also have a CSL respond either with or immediately after the officers in order to try to connect with that person who has overdosed in order to say, are there things that we can be doing to help you? Can we get you into treatment, et cetera? So I would urge everybody to take a look online at the very head of the Burlington Police Department page of the city of Burlington website, the very top. There's a clickable link to our priority response plan that spells out the way we prioritize the 130 different kinds of call category that we count through our valve core system. Some of them are priority one. Those are things like robberies, like assaults, like domestic incidents. There are also things like 911 hangups. What makes an incident a priority one is the idea that we are always going to go to that. It is not something that we can safely say we don't have the ability to go right now. Priority twos can go either direction, depending on whether they're in progress, depending on whether a caller articulates that there's a life safety component. And those would include, for example, a burglary. A burglary happening is absolutely a priority one. If you're home and you believe somebody's in your house, that is a priority one call for us. If you are coming back from vacation and you report that you believe your house has been burgled and it's after the fact, that is not a priority one call for us. And the way we currently are resourced, you may not get an immediate response for that. That becomes a priority three, and it may end up having a response that is delayed or what we call stacked, so that a call comes in to dispatch and the dispatcher says, we don't currently have enough resources available to respond to that immediately. I'm sorry. And then they look to have additional resources follow up. I've changed a number of those priority threes to CSO only response. I've changed a number of those priority threes to online only response. And those are all delineated in that report that you can look at. That report also talks about our overall incident volume. Overall incidents, which are not crimes, they are merely a record of police action are down. They are down over the past several years, from the early 2010s through 2019, about half of the decrease during that period actually came from a voluntary diminishment in traffic stops by police officers. We do fewer traffic stops. But there has been a diminishment in call volume overall. Our priority one call volume, however, those important calls that I say that we always go to are higher this year than they have been in the past six years. And I generally track in five year trends plus the current year. And so I can go back all the way to 2016 and not find a higher year for priority ones than we currently are experiencing. There are a number of different data trends that are in there as well that you can find, including some discussion of the gunfire incidents that we've seen a very troubling increase in. And I'm working, I'm actually having me a meeting tomorrow with the state's attorney and with the U.S. attorney, or a member of the U.S. attorney's office in order to discuss some approaches to these gunfire incidents that we find so troubling. And that you can also see sort of the pattern of when they occur or don't occur in that report. But you can also see the ways in which we're trying to grow and we're trying to get out of this hole that we have found ourselves in staffing-wise. And that includes, as I said, seeking to build these other resources, such as the community service officer and the community support liaison. It also includes a very clear plan from the mayor for us to be able to get back to that authorized number of 87 within a reasonable timeframe. I believe that we can do it. It's achievable, but ambitious for us to do it by within three years. But to do so, we're going to have to increase our rate of hire of new recruit officers by 50% over historic norms. And I'm not counting 2020 and 2021 where I couldn't hire anybody. Looking at 2010 through 2020, the average number of recruit officers we brought in was 4.1 per class. If I can increase that by 50% to 6 per class, if I can increase the number of lateral officers, those are officers who are already police officers in another state or another police department in this city, excuse me, in this state, but they come and they have a shorter time period for them to become officers on the road. If I can increase the number of lateral officers by 100% from an average of 1.4 per year to 3 per year, and if I can improve our retention by 50%, then I can get up to... Oh, sorry, thanks, time's up. Then we can actually get to a point where we would have that staffing back over three years. Those are lofty goals. They're going to require a lot of effort and frankly, money. And that is a component of the budget that the mayor has presented. And I apologize for going over. Thanks, Jeff. That's okay. You can coordinate without it. All good. Well, thank you all. My name's Alec Cady, and I'm the Waterfront Operations, Waterfront and Parks Operations Manager. Sorry, I'm still getting used to that new title. Fancy way of saying I manage North Beach, all the beaches and water access points, along with the urban rangers. New program just started, literally. We're just getting out. We have now, as of today, we have six members on the team, two full-time, four seasonals. And we have a lot of parks that we try to cover. If you happen to be out in the parks and you happen to see this logo, a little bit easier. Stop, say hello. They're very approachable. We want them to be that way, just like any park ranger. I bring that from my experience in the Michigan State Parks. We want to be out there for everybody just to say hello. If you have a question, stop and talk to the rangers. Our job in the parks is to be educational. We are out there to inform people, not to say, hey, you can't do that. I'm sorry. The ordinance says, you can't have dogs here, but we like to give options. Here's, there's a dog beach over here. A lot of people don't know that. Perhaps trying a new program, opening different parts of different beaches to send dogs to or let people know. For the safety of the dog, it'd be a good idea to have the dog on the leash. Just some examples that we see in the parks and regularly hear from people with. They will be out on bikes. They are out on bikes. They're on the bike path daily, bright yellow helmets, bright yellow bags. We do have lots and lots of parks with only the six to cover. So you may not see them in every single park every single day. We want to get out to the parks where you don't get to see people too often. Maybe the guy that does the garbage in the morning. And that's it, like Baird Park or something like that. We'll be the ones that are out there checking out, saying hello to people, checking the playgrounds, you know, just walking around talking to folks. So we'll be very visible in the parks, very visible on the waterfront this year. It's a new program. We're starting from scratch. So we're trying to work through all the kinks and kiboshes that happen with it. And we're hoping to pull it all together to make a program that Burlington can be really proud of. Thank you. Okay. So we'll start with some questions here at the Miller Center. Okay, I have some questions. First of all, thanks to both of you. And to Chief Mirad, you have done the most incredible job with some of the most horrible people that you've had to deal with on the city level. And I apologize for that. And I have no problem calling them all the time. And letting them know how I feel. You've just done an incredible job and working with so few people. It's really appreciated. Now I'm going to ask you a tough question. I, as a volunteer with the court system for the past 20 years, have some real issues with the Chinton State's Attorney's Office. And I'm hoping that there's a big change there this year. How do the police officers feel about the way the court, not the court system, but the Chittany County Attorney's Office reacts or does not react to what you folks need? Thanks. And thank you for those kind words. With regard to the State's Attorney, I have a good relationship with State's Attorney George. We meet for lunch every other month or so. She's under some challenges herself. The court is still in a state of emergency. The governor rescinded the state of emergency more than a year ago. The mayor rescinded the state of emergency with the city council's approval more than a year ago. The courts have extended it until August 31st. There is currently, there have, I believe there's been one jury trial in Chittany County for a Chittany County case in the past two years. There are real challenges there. That is also affected by a philosophical belief on the part of the State's Attorney about what should and should not be prosecuted. What we have done at the police department in order to address that is that we preemptively refer an increasingly large number of cases to our community justice center, which is a part of the city through CEDO, the Community Economic Development Office. And the CJC, or Alternative Justice, allows for certain kinds of cases to be addressed through a restorative process where people participate. It also prevents what had been the norm for a while of declinations. That is cases being presented to the State's Attorney and then being returned to officers with decline to prosecute owing to the pandemic, owing to court, the fact that the court is closed, owing to sometimes a sense that this might be more appropriate for alternative justice. And so we've basically sort of seen that writing on our wall and moved a lot of these cases towards alternative justice. I think that, you know, I'm hopeful that tomorrow, for example, I'll be able to have a very good meeting with the State's Attorney. We did a press conference with the Mayor and the State's Attorney, I guess, two weeks ago now around the issue of gunfire incidents. She has indicated a desire to help us address this unique problem that we're experiencing. She has, to be clear, every time we've presented a case to her for a gunfire incident, she has sought to hold that individual without bail, which is the highest standard for the law with regard to keeping someone. The prosecution after that fact can be affected by a lot of things, by whether or not witnesses are cooperative, by whether or not victims are cooperative, by the vagaries of the current court. All of those are things that we deal with. I only can encourage my officers not to worry about what happens after them, aside from knowing that you need to develop strong cases and that mere probable cause, which is our standard to present a case, is not our goal. Our goal is to present cases that are going to meet the burden of beyond a reasonable doubt. And I believe that we generally do so. What happens after we do our work is not something that necessarily affects whether or not an officer is going to take action. And I don't want it to. An officer that encounters a situation in the field needs to take action based on that situation that he or she is encountering in that moment to keep people safe, to respond appropriately, to do what's best for the public that is called, the victim who is called, the perpetrator, and for the officer, and not to worry about whether or not this is or is not going to be prosecuted. That shouldn't be part of the calculus that we address when we tackle these problems. I'm curious if some of the staffing issues that you all have could be addressed by technology. Is that the question? I just, I didn't want to. Thanks. That's a terrific question. And I'm sure that Parks has given some thought to this too. So I'll try to go quick. But can some of our staffing issues be addressed by technology? Well, as I said, a certain number of our calls for service we are now diverting to online reporting. That's always something that's been available to us. But frankly, the default has always been up until now when a person calls, we send someone. Dispatch's default was you called, we're sending somebody. We're now trying to divert more resources to online. So that's a method by which technology helps. We certainly are hopeful to be able to get some additional camera coverage in certain parts of the downtown area in order to both keep an eye on things and build good cases after the fact. That's a way in which technology can be helpful. I think that there are a lot of ways in which technology can help us upstream. Again, if I'm able to explain what we do more and get more community support and understanding of what we do, I believe that ultimately has an impact on how many people commit crimes in the first place, how many cooperative witnesses we have, cooperative victims we have. It builds on the trust. And frankly, trust hasn't been as strong for police as it should have been over the past several years now. So I think that there are technological ways that that can happen, social media, different kinds of information sharing. But insofar as sort of the tools of the trade and finding out ways to apply technology to crime solving, I would love it if I could have three people down in our basement in a pool who can tell the future and let us know when a crime is going to happen. And here comes a red ball and we'll go take it out before it happens. But those are the ways that we currently deal with it. Just quickly, I want to start with Alex. I'm curious, so how does the Ranger program going to coordinate with the CSOs on your staff? Is there a link to those efforts? Yep, we've already been to their training. I've worked with the CSOs before. They've been huge help to us this year with our staffing levels being so hard to find people. The CSOs are familiar with myself and my staff already. But the Rangers have actually done training with the CSOs and the CSOs. We meet on a weekly basis finding out issues within the park system with Lacey. And we have all their... We're on a text chain, I guess you want to call it. And we keep up the date on everything now with issues within the parks. So we have a direct line to all of them and they have a direct line to all of us. So Lacey, who he mentioned is Lacey Smith. She is the community support supervisor and is in charge of that three person, I hope soon to be six person team. And they are instrumental in dealing with people who are houseless, including people who are tenting in parks, etc. The other part of our department that works really closely with parks is our beach and parkers. And so those are generally young folks, usually people in between semesters in college so that's a summer job for college students. You'll see them in bright yellow polo shirts and they ride around on the marketplace, on the bike path at the beaches as well. They're going to be clearly overlapping in with regard to their remit with the park rangers. And they have a lot to do with that in the same way that they also liaise with the lifeguards at the beach and they go to the beaches. It's a pretty good summer job if you're looking for one. Sorry I forgot about that. The employment ad, you forgot. Burlington Police Department or Will Burlington Police Department be affected by the new dispatch system? That's a terrific question. Thank you. So for those of you who don't know, there is a effort at hand to regionalize our dispatch. Currently, our dispatch sits in the Burlington Police Department and we were understaffed with dispatchers just as we are with police officers. I've got an authorization for 12. I currently only have seven. They are really a terrific resource because they know this city and there are people in there who have worked in that room for years and years. They often know the people as well as the, that is the folks whom we encounter on a recurring basis and like most of life, there's sort of an 80-20 rule. About 20% of the people cause about 80% of the issues for us, whether they are service users who are having problems in life that we want to help or whether they are people who are committing crimes or are active disorder. It is a very small number of folks who create a lion's share of issues and those names come back again and again and again and dispatchers get to know them the same way officers do. They get to know the streets so that they're not blindly sending somebody. When I was a New York City police officer for 12 years, the dispatcher I would be speaking to in the Bronx would actually be at the Metro Tech Center in Brooklyn and would have no idea about the street that that chi or he was sending me to. The fact that ours connect is really important but regionalization is an efficiency model whereby all the regional areas that is South Burlington and Colchester and Winooski and Burlington and probably Williston are going to pool resources into a single dispatch center that will dispatch for that entire area and there are going to be real efficiencies realized and there are going to be some real gains with that. However, there are also going to be losses and some of those losses are the intimacy with which these people know us and help us. It is happening. One of the things that I believe Fire Chief Locke went to South Burlington to help work on is he created or was a spearhead of the regionalization movement here while Fire Chief in Burlington. It will sit in South Burlington and I think that going there is a way for him to actually continue to work on that project that's important to him. So it's something that is happening. The state too is divesting itself of what we call PSAPs or public safety answering points. When you call 9-1-1 you don't call my dispatchers. You call generally you get the Williston PSAP and a person there says okay what's the issue and then they say where are you coming from? Okay and then they connect you to dispatch. The state is getting out of the PSAP business. It doesn't want to cover them anymore and as a result this regionalization model is going to be happening in a lot of other places and there's a lot of money at the state level to try to foster that. Thank you. Okay I see a hand online with Trish. Yes thank you. Thank you this is for Chief Murad just two quick questions. First of all Chief Murad thank you for embracing the CSO model and the social workers the CSL officers. I've attended a couple of recent police commission meetings and was very excited to hear about this positive outcome. And I want to thank also Councillor Zheng for insisting on more resources for mental health so officers don't have to do everything. This is a really positive outcome to the reform movement but my question is one what percentage of calls to the department are now being diverted to the CSOs and the CSLs? And the second question is if there's a problem in a public school some kind of incident which officer or you know goes to the school to deal with the incident? Thank you. Thanks thank you those are two terrific questions. So I don't have data on the number or percentage of calls that are being diverted to CSOs. As I said you can see on that sheet the kinds of calls that are CSO only response. I believe they equate to probably around 10 to 12 maybe 15 percent of total call volume that we are sending CSOs to. CSLs on the other hand we don't divert calls to CSLs. CSLs generally are follow-up and the analogy that I use is that in policing we have patrol and those are people who do a mixture of proactive work or answering the radio that is calls for service from the public in 911. We have detectives who do follow-up work that is usually generated by patrol. Patrol takes the first report says this case is a little too complex for us. It's going to require a time devotion that I don't have because I've got to go back to answering the radio. I'm going to refer it to detectives. And then we have an emergency response which in some big departments is a dedicated group of people like in the New York City Police Department they have emergency services. We have officers who are both on patrol and officers who are detectives who trained to be part of our ERU or emergency response unit. The CSLs in this analogy are somewhat similar to detectives in that they take calls for service that have been originally responded to by police or CSOs or street outreach which is a function of the Howard Center and those calls get referred to the CSLs for longer term more sophisticated follow-up. Sophisticated isn't fair because that sort of suggests that the groups that did the referring maybe don't have the skill sets but it's more about the amount of time that they have to devote to really trying to connect people with services and address problems that caused that initial call for service or police encounter or CSO encounter or street outreach encounter in the first place. So that's the way in which we work with those with regard to your question about the schools we don't have SROs anymore. That was a function both of the resolution in June of 2020 and of a survey and task force that the school system put together and most importantly our staffing. When I currently have 22 officers available for the entirety of our patrol response and that is wrapped around seven days and 24 hours a day that means that at any given time there's only five to four or four to five people available and overnight it's much less. So I don't have the room to have a dedicated school resource officer but what we do have is we have people who were school resource officers. If an incident were to happen in the school and we had time to think about the response and my former SRO were on shift I would probably send her or the sergeant or officer in charge would probably send her. If it is an immediate thing, something terrible or something that requires an immediate response it's whichever officer is closest is going and all of them are going. And I do want to say I have been really disheartened and troubled and even sickened by what I've seen out of Ivalde and the current status of what happened there. I think there's still information that will be learned. I don't think we have nearly a complete story but what I have seen so far has been extremely troubling to me and upsetting to me as a law enforcement officer and leader that is not the response that we train for or that we would engage in. We are going into a situation like that whichever officer is closest is going in and engaging. There is no waiting in a situation like that. There is no deciding that this is something too scary for us to tackle while people are being hurt. It's absolutely antithetical to how we operate an anathema to the philosophy of the men and women inside the agency. And anyway, I hope that answers your question. Thank you. So there was one other hand up there online and we're going to try to squeeze it in. I know we're at nine o'clock but Evan you had your hand up and I'm going to give you two minutes. Oh my. Not for your question. I'll be really quick then. It was sort of a dual question for the two of you. One was I guess I misunderstood the park rangers program because I thought that there was going to be more of an enforcement component. One of the things we hear just a lot in the north side of the city is what's happening on the beaches and in the parks in the evenings and at night. And so I and I think people are looking for somebody to turn to to sort of be a response when when able of course. And and it's not lost on me chief mirad you know what those what those restrictions are. And then the second so maybe you could address that what your plan is for the evening and how you think folks can utilize you or should they call the police or whatever. And then the second part of my question is and I think some folks have brought up the you know concerns folks have had about the repeated folks just being released over and over and over back into the community until things escalate to the point where it is a gunfire incident or it is a more serious incident. And just a couple days ago I realized that's out of your control. So just a couple days ago South Burlington however arrested a woman who had gone back to the cricket wireless store and tased the employee there and tacked her with a taser and that was reported in the news. And after after the police responded they flash sighted her. So I wondered if you might I realized that South Burlington in a different jurisdiction. I just wondered if you might talk about you know how how your officers use flash sighting as discretion and sort of if somebody engages in a violent incident why would we want them you know released back into the community on their own recognizance. The Rangers will be there to cover the beaches as well as all my other staff that's there. We do have people that go over from North Beach to exactly we'll say Letty to cover over there whenever we can. But the Rangers will also be there as well. They're based out of Letty so that they can be there later in the evening. We recently were able to purchase since the campgrounds doing so well. We've been able to purchase a couple more vehicles which gives us the opportunity to post more staff if I can hire them. We got to find them first at Letty as well. So we're hoping to the dual threat of not so much dual threat but you know we'll have regular staff there as well as Rangers into the evening. And if that way they'll have eyes on and if need be call the BPD for help or let them know what's going on. We've already been successful at getting a couple very inebriated very young kids off the beach and able to get their parents to come pick them up. For example when it could have been bad if because their friends kind of left them. So you know the situations like that the Rangers have already shown that they can be useful or something like that. So I realize Evan's question was fairly complicated with the South Burlington situation. So if you take a short stab at it. Sure I'll try. I know that's not my strong suit. I think everybody's seen that that is not my strong suit. I will try to do it short. So I cannot imagine having somebody be tased and issue a flash site. That is an aggravated assault. It's a felony assault. That shouldn't be a flash site. That should be at least an attempt to hold. Now the decision to hold is not the officer's decision. It is the decision of a judge. The officer brings the person into custody says this is the situation. This is what we would recommend and the judge either approves or doesn't approve. But the decision to flash site in the field is usually the decision of an officer. The difference between a site and an arrest by the way is a little complicated. An arrest is what you think of. It's handcuffs go on and you go back to the station and you get fingerprinted and then you maybe go to jail or maybe you get released from the station house depending on what that judge says when you consult the judge. A citation is more like a ticket. But it's a ticket to appear in court at a later date. And in Vermont there are a number of things for which you cannot arrest. We have something called Rule 3 in Vermont. And if a misdemeanor is unwitnessed by the officer, not by a person but by the officer, then the officer cannot arrest for an unwitnessed misdemeanor with the exception of certain misdemeanors around violence and other things. There's some tiny exceptions. But for the most part officer, caller says my car was vandalized and I caught the guy and here he is. Officer arrives and got the person. He vandalized the car, broke into the windshield, et cetera. Officer can only issue a site in that case unless there's a case for felony that the vet damage was of such nature that you could call it a felony. But for the most part that is going to be a here's a piece of paper once I can affirmatively ID you and you will be on your way because Vermont doesn't want to hold people in custody. We're really against that as a state which is good. In New York every single person I arrested would go to central booking overnight. And that has, there's some things that are good about that. There's some things that are not. And so Vermont is a very different thing in that way. In this situation in South Burlington, you know, I have a very close relationship with Chief Burke. I admire him a lot. He sat in my, when I was deputy chief operations, I succeeded him. But when he went to South Burlington, that's why I was able to come home to Vermont and take this job. So I really admire Chief Burke. I don't, I don't understand the situation as you're describing it there, Evan. It doesn't, it doesn't make sense to me in its particulars. I can look into it and try to find a better answer for you. No, I think that's a great answer. And thank you for, for letting me have time. You never should have let me ask a question. It's always going to be complicated, but I appreciate it. And it was sort of short. Well, my remarks wasn't, my remark wasn't intended as a dig chief. It was more of try to respect the balance of the, what we invited you for. So, okay, so with that, I think we're going to wrap it up for this evening or really appreciate you being here. And so that I know the community and the steering committee would love to have you back in the future. And we will try to play in with you for that ahead. It's great to be here in person again. I've missed these. We really appreciate it. All right. Thank you very much. And so I guess we're going to wrap it up folks. Thank you for being here, especially for being in person. All right. Good night, folks. Thank you.