 Hi friends, Sinead here would be here with some more exciting news. Town Meant Day elections will be using Ranked Choice Voting for the first time since the 2021 charter change and all Burlington voters get to participate. Unfamiliar with Ranked Choice Voting? Keep watching or click the link below. Ranked Choice Voting lets voters rank candidates in order of preference, first, second, third, and so on. If your vote can't help your first choice win, it counts to your second choice instead. Here's how it works. If one candidate gets over 50% of everyone's first choice votes, they win and the election is over. However, if no candidate reaches a majority, the candidate with the fewest first choice votes is eliminated and their supporter's votes will count toward their second choice. This process continues until one candidate reaches over 50% of the vote. Ranked Choice Voting gives voters more voice, more choice, and makes for a stronger democracy. Learn more about Ranked Choice or try it out for yourself at betterballotvermont.org BTV 2023. Welcome to ongoing Town Meeting Day election coverage by Town Meeting Television. This is one of a series of forums we are bringing you in advance of Town Meeting Day on Tuesday, March 7th, 2023. Town Meeting TV hosts forums with all candidates and covers all ballot items you will see on the ballot. Town Meeting TV election forums introduce you to community decision makers and connect you with issues that shape your local community. If you are tuning in live, we welcome your questions at 802-862-3966. You can watch Town Meeting TV on Comcast Channel 1087, Burlington Telecom Channels 17 and 217, as well as online at youtube.com slash Town Meeting TV. Welcome, Councilor Barlow. If you'd like to give us an opening statement about why you're running and what will be different for Burlington if you are elected? Well, thanks for having me tonight. I am the North District City Councilor, which comprises both wards four and seven, and I've served in that capacity for the last two years. And I'm running again because I want to continue to serve my community and work on priorities that are important to the North District constituents, but also Burlington at large. And I would account among those like public safety, which is a hot topic in the city right now. Housing, we have an acute shortage, general economic health of the city, and affordability as well. And I think there's a lot of interconnections between those sort of major themes. So I'm looking to do it for one more term. Great, thank you. Will you be supporting the Burlington School Budgets 4.9 increase over the last year? And are you concerned about proposed teacher cuts? Why or why not? So I will be supporting the budget. I think it's a good budget. And I think having served on the school board, I know how the budgets are developed. And it's always trying to balance affordability with the needs of the students. So this budget, the one thing that's notable about it is it's the first budget where we're going to have some of the new debt service coming online for the new high school. And I believe that of that increase, 2.75% is the number that I was told is just attributed to the new high school. So the rest of the increase is rather small by historical school budget standards. But yeah, I think it's a good budget and I'll be supporting it. Great, thank you. Burlington, as you know, has six items before voters on the ballot. Proposition zero, instant runoff voting, all resident voting, redistricting, citizen police oversight body, and a polling place change. Of these, how will you vote and what do you feel most strongly about? So then there's also a carbon impact fee on there as well. So the school budget is the first question. And as I said, I'm supporting that. I'll be supporting the other questions up to, but not including, rank choice voting, the community control board, and proposition zero. With where rank choice voting is concerned, my, I don't support rank choice voting. I think it's complicated. I've heard that from a lot of my constituents. I didn't support it when it was in its earlier incarnation as IRV. But even if I did support it, I wouldn't support putting it, putting the other elected officials, the school board and the mayor, on the ballot at this time. Because when they passed, when this council, before I was on it, passed rank choice voting for the city councilors, the understanding was we would have a trial period. We haven't done that yet. We essentially, the East District race special election was the first time we had used it. This is the second time. So I think we would need to see it play out again a little bit more. I also have questions about the method of RCV that's being used. There's a gentleman in my district, Robert Bristow Johnson, who's been very vocal about this, and he thinks that there's different ways to count RCV and the way that's being used in currently in Burlington is not the best way. I know they're having discussions about that at the state. With regard to community control of police, everybody involved in government, most of the citizenry understands that we need to change the way we do police disciplinary oversight. But this model is not the right model for Burlington. And amongst, it's got a number of problematic aspects to it around accountability, around creating a new city department that whose cost is not understood. But most important to me is the fact that we've spent a lot of time rebuilding, trying to create conditions to rebuild Burlington Police Department. And we're going to undercut that if we pass this. I've had officers tell me that past and present officers that this will be bad for attrition that we've already had a problem with, and it will be bad for recruitment of new officers. So I'd rather see us find an accountability or a police oversight model that got the accountability that we needed, but that wasn't as drastic as this one and wasn't going to have those increased risks to trying to maintain and increase the staffing levels of BPD. And lastly, with regard to Proposition Zero, the one aspect of it that I find problematic and the reason I'm not supporting it is because ordinance creation is a complex affair. It requires a lot of public engagement. It requires input from stakeholders. We have city departments who have experts on various things that we create ordinance about. And there's a commission, the planning commission, in the case of zoning ordinances and the city council. And there's a robust public process with ordinance creation that doesn't lend itself to a petition drive. So for that reason, I'm not supporting Proposition Zero either. Great. Thank you. As you mentioned, the Vermont legislative season is underway. What are some important initiatives to the community of Burlington that you will be tracking and supporting as part of your work as a city council member? Well, one of the two big ones are funding for the high school. And there's two ways we can get funding for the high school that I think the state should step up and provide additional resource to the community for. And the first is for the PCB cleanup and the demolition of the old high school at Institute Road. We know that's going to cost $23 million. $32 million was appropriated by the legislature and put aside last year. And we don't have a high school, so we have a critical need. We should be able to get access to a lot of that. And we haven't had commitments from that. I know our legislative delegation is working on it. I know the city is also going to be you know, attending legislative sessions and trying to do some lobbying around that. Additionally, the Burlington Technical Center, which is really a regional resource, it's not just the Burlington specific resource. Burlington voters and taxpayers shouldn't be bearing the entire expense for that. So there should be state funding for that. I believe the price tag was $50 million for that portion of the project. There's $10 million that Senator Leahy was able to get us for the aviation program. But the other costs associated with building a new technical center I think should be shared more widely than just in Burlington voters. And lastly, we have a problem with retail theft in downtown Burlington. And right now it's anything under $900 is considered a misdemeanor. So I would like to see the strengthening of our retail theft loss to make it a felony offense for a much lower threshold than that. Just to deter the activity that's so problematic in our downtown right now. Great. Thanks for answering. Regarding housing, do you believe that Burlington has a housing crisis? What do you see as the nature of housing in Burlington and how to meet the need for safe and affordable housing for residents, students, and visitors? Well, we definitely have a housing crisis as evidenced by the vacancy rate, which I think is still below 1%. And the rents are extremely high in Burlington as they are regionally, but they're particularly high in Burlington. And there are no silver bullets for this, but it is by and large a supply problem. So we need to increase the supply. And I think that some of the big projects, City Place is one that luckily has got some momentum and is underway again. That's going to add almost 500 units and 470 units. And over 20% of those will be affordable units. Cambrian Rise out in my end of town is still building. I think they have the steel out for at least two new structures there. So that's going to add units. And additionally, there's this new project in the south end in the innovation district that we are starting to consider changing zoning about that is going to also add housing. So I think all of these are really important in the mix. There's also Trinity Campus projects. So there's a lot of housing projects that are sort of either underway or in the planning stages. But in addition to that, we need to find ways to create additional density in our existing neighborhood. So like in my end of town, it's all single family, a lot of it's single family homes. We could change, hopefully we'll build a change through zoning, the ability to have more duplexes and triplexes. And we also maybe need to make it easier to build the accessory dwelling units as well. So there's all of these things in their entirety will be helpful in relieving the housing crisis. But we definitely have a housing crisis. Yeah, thank you for your answer. Your city council race, as you mentioned, is one of the first council elections to be using right choice voting, right choice voting gives voters the chance to bring candidates in order of preference. Please tell us whether or how this has affected how you're campaigning and communicating with voters. Well, I'm the only one on the ballot. So it hasn't. And had I had a contested race, it wouldn't really change the way I would be doing voter outreach. I don't think I think it's it's it's an interesting question. But no, awesome. Thank you for answering. As a community with the diversity of languages spoken and a language access policy that was adopted in 2020, what ways do you see that the city government can expand access and accessibility to more community members who want to participate in local democracy? It was an interesting question, too. And when it was posed to me prior to this forum, I didn't really have a lot of information about I knew we had we had passed a language access policy. So I actually inquired about it and was happy to find out that that there are some things underway. It is really important that in order to allow participation in our democracy that everybody is able to to access it. And obviously, communication is a central part of that. So when I was on the school board, we had multilingual liaisons and we had a different model on how we did it in the city. We have Jillian Nanton at CEDO who's heading up the effort. And I when I spoke with her, she said that they are just completing some training that they're going to start to roll out on best practices for language access to departments. And they're trying to identify representatives in each of the departments to sort of be the liaison back to CEDO to do that. And the other thing she said that was really exciting is there's a bimonthly newsletter that's compiled from news from all the various city departments and it's translated into eight language. And then it's distributed through the Trusted Community Partner Network. So that's all really good stuff and I'm very supportive of that. I think it's really important. And I suggested to Jillian that we would have them to the full council so everybody could be apprised of that important work. Awesome. That's really interesting. I didn't know that about the circulated. Yeah, I didn't know. That's very cool. I did just want to remind folks that if you're tuning in live, you can call in with questions at 802-862-3966. This question though is regarding development and change. The Memorial Auditorium, the Pitt, the Catholic Diocese, the Vermont Department of Health Office, Perkins Pier, King Street, the Southern Connector, and more. Burlington is undergoing a lot of change and growing pains. What do you see as the most important locations that need redevelopment and how will you use your role in the city council to address these issues? I think we touched upon it earlier a little bit. I think housing is number one. So I think the one project that will need council action is the housing that is proposed to be built in the South End. So that's something that we definitely will be working on. Some of the other projects like Memorial Auditorium is a good one. One of the things with the building of the new high school is what we've done is constrain the ability of the city to do a lot of capital improvements because the high school took up a lot of the debt capacity in the city. So for the next 10 years or so while that's paid down, or if we can find additional funding when I spoke about earlier, finding those other sources of aid from the state for PCBs or for tech center, that may reduce the size of the project and free up capital resources earlier that we can use for other projects. But something like Memorial Auditorium right now, we're sort of constrained that way. So we're looking to be more creative about how we do it with public-private partnerships. And so I think those kinds of things will be important. And as a councilor, I would be supportive of being creative on how we approach some of these things. I think the public infrastructure that needs to be built around some projects that will require capital spending, we're just going to have to be just fiscally prudent about what we're spending money on for the next bunch of years. Awesome. Thank you for your answer. I don't have any more questions. I'd love if you have anything that's on your mind that you're interested in sharing about your reelection or the time you've spent on the council, if you want to share anything, that'd be great. Well, you know, one of the things, and it was in my set of questions, which I think was different than yours, but the one thing that is important to me right now, and it doesn't even involve my district, is the downtown is a real concern to me. I've lived in Burlington since 1974, and I've seen a lot of changes recently. I've had people come to me daily and say that they won't shop in Burlington, they won't dine in Burlington, and now I've had store owners, and I've spent time down on Church Street talking to some who are, you know, they're at their sort of limit of what they can tolerate. We don't have a public safety presence a lot of the time downtown now because we don't have the resources in the police department. So, you know, I have been sort of prioritizing that as a sort of a fundamental problem that needs to be solved. We need to be able to resource public safety, and that involves rebuilding the police department, but also standing up the crisis response team that we just got a $600,000 over $600,000 grant for, and getting those resources into the downtown so that we can sort of fix what's ailing us. We have a lot of issues down there right now. And so, you know, one of the things that's sort of informing a lot of my work on the council is going to be, how can we create conditions to fix that, and those things are going to be prioritized. You know, even like things like street outreach, they can't approach certain situations without a cop with them because they're too dangerous, or the people they're trying to serve are behaving unpredictably, so they can't do that. Fire has told me they can't go into situations to provide aid without police presence sometimes. So, having, being able to rebuild our police department I think is central to solving a lot of what's going on downtown right now, and providing deterrent for behaviors that people aren't sort of emboldened to exhibit right now, because there is no public safety presence. So, that's a big one for me. You are definitely right that the question was on here, and I glossed over and I failed to ask. That's fine. I'll just reiterate it for folks. It says the city council is at squarely in the middle of a conversation about crime, police accountability, and racial justice. What is next in your mind for this conversation? And do you see problems that exist and how will they be addressed? But thank you for addressing that, Councillor Barlow. I appreciate you having a keen eye. But yeah, that's great. I appreciate your answer. Are there any closing comments you're interested to make? Well, I will say that in my race, I don't have an opponent, but in the school commissioner, Kendra Sellers, doesn't have an opponent either, but just because there's no sort of candidates to vote for, the ballot questions are really important, and I would just encourage all of my voters, but all the voters city-wide, to make sure that you return your ballot that should be mailed to you in the next few days. So, vote. It's important. Yeah, I think it's February 15th, is where the city says folks should have ballots by. So definitely check your mailboxes. It's wet and warm and there's snow melting. We don't want folks to get soggy ballots. That's right. Great. Well, thank you so much, Councillor Barlow. I really appreciate your time here today. I spent with me and spent with CCTV. And thanks, folks, for tuning into Town Meeting TV's ongoing coverage of local candidates, budgets, and ballot items. You can find this and more forums at www.channel or ch17.tv. As Councillor Barlow mentioned, please do not forget to vote on or before March 7th. Ballots are not mailed automatically. So, please go check with your local clerk to request a ballot or make sure to get to the polls on March 7th. You can also double check your voter registration. Thank you for watching and sharing Town Meeting TV. If you are not already, please subscribe to our Town Meeting TV YouTube channel.