 Um, everybody in the hall, everybody on zoom. I'm Barbara McGrew. I'm going to be moderating tonight. I want to welcome everybody is this, this is the first time I'm doing this in a hybrid fashion. So please bear with me in terms of recognizing people. Also on an iPad and I can only see 123456 12 to 15 people at a time so. Um, and, and one of those people is the in person hall. So here we go again. Welcome. Another opportunity to become public citizens with the duty and the honor of the and the pleasure of being concerned about the issues in your city and in your community. I applaud you all for being here. I hope the in person people have been able to enjoy some pizza. And I'd like to announce the return of door prizes muskoma bank has donated $225 door prizes to Jake's market. So thank muskoma bank. And I think we'll do the raffle after the public forum. So you can wait for that. I'd like to at this time introduce the steering committee members. I don't think Andrew champagne is here. Is Miami here. Yes, no. If you're here in person waver stand up or something. It's not here. Okay, and Andrew and Miami a war to Kevin Duterman is here for more to wave Kevin good good. Patrick Johnson for more to Molly Clay Pack Flanigan for more to Molly can you. There you go. Nice camera work. Thank you for bringing the pizza Jess. There's me and last but definitely not least Tony Reddington. Why don't you wave Tony. Great. Okay, there's a, there's an item here. Just maybe you can take a look at it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Thank you for bringing the pizza Jess. There's me and last but definitely not least Tony Reddington. Why don't you wave Tony. Great. Okay. There's a, there's an item here just maybe you can present it on agenda suggestion requesting a time slot. That there's a, there's a CEDO submission form. And is that underlying a link to the CEDO submission form? Is that what that is? Yes, that's what it is. Okay. So anybody requesting time on our agenda in the future. We need more steering committee members. And we would like to go away, but we can't go until it's more people. Volunteer. It's a very vibrant group. And we, you know, we do review the CEDO submission form. We review it. Those forms two weeks before the meeting, the steering committee members do. And that's how you get on the agenda. The next thing is an appeal for, we need more steering committee members. Some of us are getting a little burnt out and we'd like to go away, but we can't go until it's more people. But we do review the, the submissions for the meeting, organize the meetings among other things. So I hope you will consider if you're at all interested in enhancing your public citizenship. Joining the steering committee. Our next meeting will be May 12th. And Chris, I believe that's going to be in city hall. Is that right? Is he still there? He'll tell us later. Yeah. Yeah. Recordings can be found on YouTube. The CCT me's website. Jess, would you like to talk about the MPA community input survey? Sure. Thanks, Barbara. So if you'll notice at the top of the, today's tonight's agenda and also in some of the outreach for tonight's event, there's a survey link. And that survey has a bunch of questions to get. Community feedback. So we'd like to hear more about what all of, all of you want to see happen at the NPA. What are the issues that you're concerned that you're concerned about? What would you like to talk about? How would you like to connect with your neighbors? The survey takes probably, I don't know, maybe 10 minutes to fill out. We will be adding some prizes. So anyone who has already filled out the survey will be eligible to win, win prizes. And anyone who's fills it out from now for the next month or so will also be eligible. So that's a great question. And I would like to ask you guys to tell us what the NPA means to you and how you would like to see it change and evolve. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Any more announcements before I open the public forum? Okay. Then the public forum is open. I think there was going to be a person representing car share. To say a few words. Is that person here? Okay. I'm going to start with a couple of people here in person with announcements. Or with, for the public forum. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. Hi, I'm Lucy Gluck. And I live over on Blodgett street. And I just wanted to make a plug because I know a lot of places, including the city and other organizations are understaffed. I'm working for committee on temporary shelter as a housing navigator. So I would like to ask you to let people know that there are many very important jobs available at Cox. Well paid jobs. And so if you could help spread the word and, you know, contact me or COTS directly. If you're interested in doing good, important work to help with the housing crisis. Thanks. Hey, is there somebody else there that would like, would like to make an announcement or participate in the public forum? Yeah. That would be me. My name is Quinn Sallander. I'm an employee at car share Vermont. And just wanted to read, you know, make a quick announcement that we are investigating a new car location. In the old North end. So we are kind of looking to expand our car network. And we're looking at sort of the West end of North street. So Lake side of North street over at on Drew street in particular. And for those who may not know car sharing is kind of meant to make it a little bit more affordable. So we're looking to make it a little bit more affordable. And we're looking to make it a little bit more alternative to car ownership for folks who are kind of getting around by walking biking, taking public transit. So we're looking to kind of meet demand. We're seeing a lot of sort of latent demand in the old North end to get rid of privately owned cars, reduce parking demand. Kind of make a more sustainable public transportation system. So as part of this, we have a couple of them on our website. And then we have the local car owners commission and just flagging this as an announcement. And we're, we have a real simple little pamphlet. You're welcome to pick it up. We'd love if you have any questions or comments to reach out to us. The pamphlet on the table out front has the spot marked and our contact info. So I'll leave it at that. Thanks. Thank you very much. Okay, other announcements. Barbara, we have three people lined up for announcements here, and then there are also three people on Zoom for public forum too. Okay, I'm gonna go back and forth, I think. So I think I'll start with Tony, then I'll take somebody from the floor there and here in the order, I see him in my boxes. Okay, thank you. Tony, go ahead. Yep, hi, Tony Reddington speaking. I live down on St. Paul Street, I'm in Ward 3. And I just know what I think is everybody probably knows we're having a spike in COVID. Vermont is number one in the United States with COVID infections, has been right up at the top now this week. And Chittenden County is the 22nd or 23rd highest COVID rate, case rate in the United States. So just keep that in mind when people saying, we're all tired of this, but if there's any time to be vigilant right now and careful, this is the time. I just wanna mention about housing because we're gonna hear about pods from Brian Pine shortly. And I just wanna point out that Burlington has a rather unproud tradition of never ever helping a person who needs housing with any type of like the federal 30% income max rent. Which I think we're all familiar with this section eight. It's sort of sad that we have the cuts here looking for staff and we have a housing need in which a thousand people, basically about 10% of our permanent residents are on the wait lists for federal housing help. But the state of Vermont and the city of Burlington, the doors are closed and we warehouse our people. What really disturbs me is I have a friend who's been pushed from, who's senior, senior to me even, and they've been pushed from pillar to post, from housing shelter to unsatisfactory forced sort of forced house share situations. We somehow I'm gonna have to face up. I don't know if somebody mentioned to me that they hadn't been here for a couple of years and they looked out and the number of homeless have really doubled in Burlington the last since COVID began. We've got a real problem. I don't think pods solve it. Not when you have 10% of your population that really has been written off for any housing help with the escalation and price. So anyway, keep that in mind when Brian, looking forward to hearing what Brian has to say, but the problem is much bigger than a few pods on a parking lot. Hey, thank you, Tony. The next speaker from the floor, please. Hi, my name is Barb. Brian, it's weird to be with my back to people but I've lived in the old North end since 1983 and I've worked at the food shelf at community action when it was on North street and I work at Legal Aid. So I've lived and worked in the old North end and I'm here to speak in favor of the shelter pod community. I totally agree with Tony that 30 shelter pods are not solving our homeless crisis but there's two reasons why I think it's really important or that I really wanna address. One is that I've just seen so many people I've known for so many years and they have an apartment on North Champlain and then they're homeless and they're staying in a shelter and then they're homeless and they're staying in a park, in a tent and then they get a little bit better housing like real housing through Monroe Place or through St. John's Hall and it gets better for them but their health got so much worse during that period of real homelessness and I think the shelter pods are an important alternative to that. I know there's some neighborhood opposition. Just wanna say I've lived through the neighborhood opposition to St. John's Hall and to Monroe Place and to the family shelter and to Cots on the corner of North Street and North Ab and we're all okay. Like those things happened and we're all okay because the people who live in our community need those services. And so I just hope that the neighbors I understand they're a little nervous but it's gonna be okay. All those other housing supports that have come into our community have made our community stronger, have made us stronger and are a more humane way to treat people. It's true, Tony, we need a lot more but we also need the 30 shelter pods and I hope that the NPA strongly supports it. Thank you. I think you'll have time to weigh in on this too again after Brian speaks. So Abbott, you're next. Thank you. And I definitely echo the first two speakers in terms of the concern regarding the housing shortage. And I spoke a little bit last time about how short-term rentals may be a piece of alleviating that. That's things like Airbnb's and VRBO's. In my house on Monroe Street we actually, I have two of the four tenants are formerly unhoused people. And doing a short-term rental has really allowed us it was just one unit in that building has allowed us to improve the quality when I got the building. It was just all not to code a lot of life safety issues, leaky pipes. And so we've been able to really make that work with that trade-off. And right now we have this old bed and breakfast code in the city ordinance zoning that says like in certain areas you don't even have to like get a neighborhood approval and you can just convert whole houses to short-term rentals which I think we all agree that we don't really want. So I just wanna say thanks to Councillor McGee for voting yes to get that through to the ordinance committee and get that updated. And I just wanna continue getting us all thinking and talking about how we can strategically use some short-term housing income to improve our, continue to improve our neighborhoods and keep them keep the mix of low and high income going. And then there's been a suggestion I don't see if Councillor Bergman is here but maybe there's a way to implement a tax on some of these new kinds of short-term rentals and use that directed to the Low Income Housing Trust Fund. That was something that he brought up at this last week's city council and I think that's a great idea and I'd love to sort of figure out a way to flesh that out and get people's thoughts on that if anybody does have them. Thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Abbot. Is there somebody else on the floor, Jessica? Yeah, we do have one more person. Okay, and if it's gonna be two more people. Oh, it's three more people. Okay, and again, on this topic, please be brief because you'll have a chance to weigh in again after Brian Pine speaks. So my announcement wasn't related to the housing, is that all right? Oh yes, yeah, this is the public forum on any topic. Yeah, so I'm Alicia Taylor. I also with Car Share Vermont and Quinn spoke a little bit earlier. My announcement would just be around we're also, in addition to adding new pods to the neighborhood we're also right now doing our Park at Pledge campaign. So if anyone's in the position where they're ready to kind of get rid of a second car or try going car free it's a good opportunity to give it a try and I put some information in the back there. So it's just a nice opportunity to try car sharing see if living with fewer cars would work for you. So that's all, thank you so much. Thank you. Joel Baird, is this Joel Banner Baird? This is Joel Banner Baird, yeah. Oh, the famous and infamous reporter, welcome. Yeah, I don't know if you all can hear me, can you? Yes. Okay, well, first of all, I am no longer a famous reporter no longer a reporter at all in fact at least in the traditional sense. So yeah, I retired at the end of last year and I'm wading into civic life in modest ways and this is one of them just to bring you all greetings from South Manuski Avenue, which is in Ward six. And I just wanted this has to do with the housing problems. There is an ordinance that is being proposed by counselors McGee and Birdman that would lift the prohibition on camping in city parks. And it's an ordinance that goes well beyond that. I mean, it attempts to address some of the problems that houseless people have in getting in touch with city services, state services, food, all sorts of the basics, but it is right now it is controversial in that people have strong feelings for and against it. And I would just recommend that anyone who's interested can check in with the long named community development and neighborhood revitalization committee, CDNR, next Thursday, a week from today at 5 p.m. And you can go on their website, which is a city council committee and you can read some of the minutes from the previous meetings and read the proposed ordinance. So this is just a call to inform yourselves and to see what is on the horizon and how it might be improved. So that's pretty much my spiel. Okay, thank you very much and welcome to Civic Life. Thank you. And next up we have Jacob here in person. Okay, thank you, Jacob will go ahead. Hey there, it's Jacob. Hey, I wanted to tell you about a project that I am working on. So trying to help people insulate their homes better and so windows are a big issue because they're very expensive to replace. So me and a couple other folks in the community have been working on creating a community build where folks in the community can sign up and participate and we're gonna build these things though, a lot bigger. Big enough for your actual window, right? And what this is is an insert goes on the inside of your window that seals up your leaky drafty window. So your house is warmer. We did this the first time last year in November and we built 160 of them. So it was very exciting. And we got home owners, we got tenants and we even got a couple of landlords to participate and come and build these together. And so we're trying to do it again this fall. And so right now we're looking for anybody who's interested in doing this, getting inserts for their own windows. We're getting everybody who's interested and then in the summer we're gonna measure everybody's windows and then the fall we'll build some more. So the cool thing about this project is, all the labor is the people who sign up, the costs we gather, the materials we gather together and we ask people to chip in to help pay for the materials. But we do get donations and grants. So if people can't afford materials that's not an issue for signing up by any means. And so if this sounds like a cool project that you wanna get involved with either you wanna get your own inserts or if you just wanna help out, let me know. There is a nonprofit organization that's been helping us really put this together. It's called Window Dressers. It started with a community in Maine and they've been kind of spreading the idea. So the easiest way for you to get involved is they've got a great website for us windowdressers.org and folks here I've got pamphlets too if you want. So yeah, let me know if you wanna participate this fall and get those windows a little sealed up. Thanks. Thanks, Jake. And Barbara, we have one more person here. Okay, well, I have two more people. I'm sorry. Get one more on the screen and then I'll come back, okay? Okay. Good evening, thanks for having me. I wanna make sure it's okay if I speak here. I'm a landlord on George Street. Yeah, just keep it brief. I certainly will. It's funny the previous speaker hit on one of the things I know. I wanna talk about the housing that's going in, the homeless shelters. I think we are not against that at all. I just am concerned about the permit process that they went through because we wanna put windows in our house on George Street and the permit process has taken us over a year and it seems like this housing structure has just simply gotten a fast track. And I'm curious as to because we are in a historic district and we can actually throw a stone to that project, how, what is the difference in the permit process that they go through? We would love to give our tenants the best home possible and simply have not been able to just do to the permit process. So I'm just curious about that. Okay, thank you very much. And maybe you could bring that up again when Brian, after Brian makes his presentation, okay? I certainly will, thank you. Okay, thank you. Jess, back to you. Hi there, I'm Jay McCaskill. I live on North Champlain Street and I hate to be here and I will try to keep this very concise if I can. I've tried speaking with officials on higher levels, the mayor, acting chief of police, other officials. I have an issue. I've been a owner occupier for two years and since day one, it's been very clear that there's a fairly large and sophisticated illegal drug operation going on out of the building next door. It's a known sight. I came to learn that actually the woman who lives there was previously convicted for trafficking heroin and went to prison about five years ago. And since I've owned the building for two years, clearly when she got out of prison, she came back to the same address and continued operations. Part of her conviction was the fact that she was dealing within a thousand feet of a school, which is the Sustainability Academy. You would think that for the city, this is a known drug house. The police are there several times a week dealing with domestic disputes from inside the building, that this would be a fairly easy operation to shut down and do a victory lap for. But in the crazy world that I live in, that's not what is happening. And so I started to be curious about what kind of drug trafficking rises to the level of concern for the Burlington police. And I am not the best researcher, but what I did find or not find is that there hasn't really been any major drug bust in Burlington for two or more years. There was the Sears Lane one, which was a very public drug bust, but that was sort of an obligation given the situation that was happening down there. And I question whether the police would have been interested had it not been such a high profile situation. So I'm just asking if elected officials, community members can start looking into why Burlington police has not been doing anything to stop, well, to slow the flow of drugs in Burlington. There's obviously a huge problem with illegal drugs here. And if Sears Lane is the only bus that we've had, that's really scary. I mean, we see evidence of drugs all around us. And I look on the news and other cities in Vermont are busting houses that operate very much like the one next to me. So please start asking questions because if something like the pod community is going to be a success, there has to be a slowdown of the drugs that go into the community because it's obviously attracting a lot of people. And obviously people are gonna have a hard time getting clean and having a good life if drugs are so easy to get in Burlington. Thank you. Thank you very much. I know at least two city counselors are on the Zoom site. So they've heard you and hopefully some action will be taken or some follow up with you will be had. I see no more speakers in public forum on the Zoom. What about there, Jessica? Yes, there's one person who has been patiently waiting. So please step right up. Yes, please introduce yourself. Hi, my name is Sebastian Ryder. I live on Norrisham Plain Street. I live actually right next door. I used to share a driveway with the house that Jay was just talking about. About a week ago, we had a glass bottle thrown through the window. Our porch window, another bottle was thrown against the side of the house. All the glass splintered on our front walk. We called the police, they showed up. And we have two cameras in our front yard and I told them that we showed them film. They weren't really that interested in it. They didn't write any kind of report. They did give us an incident number. But when I asked what else we could do to stay safe, they said, well, there's not really anything you can do because you live next door to Section 8 housing. And I found that very shocking and I find it even more shocking that that's the second time I've heard that from a member of the Burlington Police Department that I have to just expect to live through violent occurrences because I live on North Champlain Street. I'm starting to feel that in Burlington, safety has become commodified. That you can live safely depending upon your neighborhood, what street you live on, what mood the police are in. I know that there was a woman who was attacked in the parking lot of her building a week or so ago, called the police and the police didn't even show up. As a woman who has survived two sexual assaults, that makes me really fearful that the police are getting called and not showing up. And when people throw glass at my house, that makes me really fearful. And when people have to start taking care of their own safety because they can't rely on their community, that's not usually a good thing. And I would just like to know that I live in a community where I can be as safe as someone who lives in the nice part of Burlington. So thanks. Okay, thank you very much. Again, there are at least two city counselors listening to this. And I hope maybe in their remarks, they might address some of these concerns. Okay, is that it, Jessica? I just have to say that Jay and I write city counselors all the time and nobody ever gets back to us. So if they wanted to get back to us tonight, that would be awesome. Thank you very much. Do we have any other public forum participants? Okay, and I don't see any on the Zoom call. So we will now move on to the Elmwood Avenue Shelter Pod Village and Community Resource Center presentation by Brian Pine, one of our former city council's counselors. Welcome, Brian. Thank you, Barbara. Does this carry throughout the room as well as through Charlie, through your camera? No. I see a Zoom call. But it does help, it does work for folks who are on the Zoom part of the meeting. Okay. So I'll use the louder voice then for those who are in the room. Thank you for an opportunity to present tonight. As Barbara mentioned, I am Brian Pine. I serve as the director of the city's Community and Economic Development Office and I want to just introduce my colleagues here or have them introduce themselves. Hello, I'm Marcella Gange and I'm a Community Development Manager at Cedar. Hi, I'm Mackenzie Bowles. I'm a communications coordinator for CEDO. Hi, my name is Samantha Dunn. I'm the Assistant Director for Community Works in CEDO. So the homeless issue in Burlington has been with us unfortunately for about 40 years, roughly give or take, when the country shifted its priorities in a major way under the leadership of a president named Reagan who shifted the government's role in terms of providing housing away from the notion that housing is actually something that is a human right and is a right that we're going to take seriously in the way we allocate public resources. And so the slashing of the funding for housing in Reagan's first budget was so significant that homelessness went from being a fairly minor out of very unusual circumstance to something that we started to see happen more rampantly. Properties became more of a speculative tool for people. Apartments were converted by the tens of thousands to condominiums, tenants were pushed out of their housing all across the country. Burlington took a different path under a progressive housing agenda and that path really recognized that a city with federal government can provide some basic housing needs of its citizens, but only if we are able to access federal funds, private dollars through a new tool that was created during the same Reagan tax changes in 1986 to create affordable housing. And so when Tony Reddington spoke earlier about Burlington isn't doing, creating any new affordable housing similar to what was thought of as public housing or what the earlier speaker referred to as section eight housing, there is a slight bit of truth to that, but in reality, Burlington has shifted because of the role of the federal government in providing housing. And we've tried as a city to respond as best we can with our limited resources. I would say point out that Burlington has a very, very aggressive agenda around securing additional federal resources. And so our housing authority has about 18 to $20 million a year that comes into Burlington to provide rental assistance in the form of section eight vouchers. And so when you hear someone say there's not any affordable housing in Burlington, you gotta kind of step back and say what is available for folks? We also have the largest share of our rental housing is permanently affordable and deed restricted of certainly any community in Vermont. And I would venture to guess any community our size in New England and perhaps even beyond. So we've got a huge challenge ahead of us. We've been trying to deal with this challenge, but as a community Burlington does more that it's fair share, but it's still not enough. And what we're experiencing today as a result of the pandemic is a tripling, not a doubling, but a tripling in the number of individuals experiencing homelessness. And so as a city, we have an agenda which the mayor announced in December that I will explain for those who are on Zoom you're gonna get a chance to see this probably a lot better than those in the room, but I will read out what the bullets are the best I can. So this 10 point action plan is really revolves around the notion of ensuring that we fulfill the city's commitment to housing as a human right. The first item is to invest at least $3 million of the federal recovery money or rescue dollars, ARPA with at least 1 million designated for initiatives to better serve the chronically homeless and an additional 4 million. Actually, I'm sorry, these numbers, this is from an earlier version. These numbers are actually reversed. We're spending about 3 million on specific initiatives to serve the homeless, which I'll describe in a minute. We're setting aside another 1 to 2 million to build new permanent affordable housing, but that's in tandem with money coming from the state of Vermont that is a much larger portion of each of those project development budgets is funded with state dollars. And so we are continuing to support new affordable housing that COTS is developing on Main Street behind the family shelter across from Edmunds. The former, the VFW site is being redeveloped by the Champlain Housing Trust that will include primarily affordable with a significant commitment to housing those who have experienced homelessness and additional housing being developed at Cambrian Rise that will also serve both low income and formerly homeless folks as well. The city has created a new position for the first time ever with a focus exclusively on ending homelessness. It's actually called Special Assistant and Homelessness. So that position every day is focused on ensuring that we have the systems in place, the dollars, the resources and that we're being focused on those who are actually experiencing homelessness really in a name by name basis, not just sort of a general hope that we're gonna create new projects or new processes, but rather focus on those who are experiencing homelessness trying to find a way to provide them with a wraparound support to get out of that situation and move into something more stable and secure. We're strengthening this system of coordinated entry and coordinated entry is just a fancy word for maintaining a really solid list in a database but that ranks folks on their highest need level and make sure that those who are most precarious and are subject to the highest risk and vulnerability get housing as fast as possible. And when people have barriers to prevent them from getting into housing, coordinated entry assembles the team and figures out how to address those barriers. So that's the goal behind coordinated entry. We're funding a position at CVOEO to do coordinated entry before it was someone's job but now it's two people's job and they're gonna be able to expand what coordinated entry can do as a result of that. Our commitment is over the next several years to support the creation of 78 new homes or housing units for formerly homeless individuals. That is a percentage of our overall commitment to provide new housing in the city over the next several years. The shelter pod or the shelter community being created or being proposed on Elwood Avenue I will talk more about but that's a low barrier shelter facility to meet the most pressing urgent need today recognizing that to create affordable housing takes significant time to assemble the land to assemble the financing to get permitting. All of those pieces take unfortunately several years and right now the crisis we believe anyway calls for us to act more quickly than that. So it's both the long-term and the permit affordable but also dealing with what we have facing us right now. So our overall commitment over the next several years until 2026 is a creation of 1,250 new homes of which 312 would be permanently affordable and that 78 for those formerly homeless is within that number of the 312. This is part of the regional effort called building homes together which is again a regional approach recognizing that one city on its own in a region is not enough. We have to have regional participation. We're finally fully funding the housing trust fund which was created in 1989 and has leveraged $20 for every dollar that Burlington taxpayers put into the trust fund creates another or leverages another $20 and the housing that has been created through the housing trust fund is always permanently affordable. We don't face this time period where owners can sell and get out of those affordability restrictions and then displace people. We will never see that happen with housing that's assisted with our trust fund. That's a city policy that has been in place for 40 years now. We are looking at some major rezoning upzonings that would actually both increase housing density but also take areas of the city that are prohibited from having housing and allowing housing to occur. Think of big chunks or parts of the south end, not all of the south end and the issues that came to a head a few years ago around the preservation of artist space are very much in the forefront of the thinking but at the same time there's a lot of parking lots that are underutilized and those are the prime places for new housing to occur. We're actively working with UVM on rezoning Trinity campus for up to four to 500 new beds there. If this process goes quickly it'll be two years from now but that's a UVM initiative that the city is supporting and we need more, that's basically that's about half of what you really need UVM to be building. And lastly, the notion of eliminating single family zoning as a zoning tool in our city is a goal that the administration has. The idea being that you should be able to build a duplex, a triplex in any area of the city where housing is permitted. It shouldn't be ruling out those because we've had historic development patterns that have said single family is really all we want here and the days of that are behind us. Cities are getting rid of single family zoning all across the country. So we wanted to paint at least that picture so it's not the pods versus these other initiatives. It's all the above. It's not either or it's both and. Next slide. So I think we're due now is. We're gonna show our website focused on these efforts to end homelessness. We really want to draw attention to the fact that there are a number of resources there but we also want to provide an example of a shelter community in Madison, Wisconsin that is the same size. And we want to at least share that with you. It's about a two and a half, three minute PBS broadcast on how this is working in Madison just to give a picture and an idea of what it is that we're talking about. So I think we're gonna run through that. Just while that's getting set up, the website is the best place to go to see answers to frequently asked questions and updated information about this project and the way to contact CEDA by phone or by email with ideas, questions and concerns. Was that coming through Zoom or was it coming through his feedback on the? Well, the Zoom is, we can't hear her. It was echoing or the sound is turned up. I don't know where it's coming from but the Zoom, at least I cannot hear her and we get a terrible echo. Translator. Not one of the only thing is a how to head on. We're not in an experiment. People said you're trying to experiment on this. This concept has been in effect in other communities across the country. And it's really an attempt to deal with the emergency needs for folks who are falling through the cracks, who are not likely to see housing opportunities unless we can get them out of the threat, the safety risks, the entire experience of being homeless and how that makes it virtually impossible to go from literal homelessness and being unhoused to getting into housing unless you have a bridge to get there. And this is intended to create that bridge. And so what we'd like to do is go through some slides here. Also talk about the public process since that was asked in the public forum and hopefully give a little bit of a picture of what the pods look like and what it will hopefully look like. So the goal here is to have this, not just fit in but be an asset in our community. And in order to do that, we're committing to a process that would be sort of a monthly community conversation that would include residents of the shelter community, neighbors, nearby businesses, faith-based partners, really everyone who can ensure that not only is the pod operating as a good neighbor, but that the folks living there have opportunities to feel like they're part of something, they're part of a community, they're not just left in isolation to live in an eight by eight shelter pod. So that's the goal there is to create real community of support. We're presenting tonight obviously and we've had many presentations before this. This is I think perhaps our fourth or fifth. The Development and Review Board is where the permit will be discussed and that's on May 17th at 5 p.m. It's both remote and I think it's in Contois Auditorium. I think just to respond to the question in the public process, I think there's a little bit of misinformation out right now about the permitting process that there's no permitting process or it's been fast-tracked. That's not true. This shelter community requires a conditional use permit as an emergency shelter through our existing zoning ordinance. And so that process is underway. The application is in process as I said and will be in front of the DRV on May 17th just like any other conditional use permit. And that is the city board that decides either after hearing the testimony of the applicant and then the comments or they deliberate at a subsequent meeting. So the Development and Review Board is where that process, the permit will either be issued, granted or it could be denied. We don't know the outcome. So earlier it was asked how do you get through it so quickly? We're not through it at all. It's yet to come. So, and lastly we have the CEDO for reaching us. The CEDO email address is CEDOFD for front desk at BurlingtonVT.gov and our phone number, which is listed here and on our website is 802-865-7144. So actually I think Samantha is better at describing these because she's an architect. So she knows how to talk about this stuff. Yeah, and I think we are gonna be able to show a first draft of a site plan tonight which I think people have been waiting to see but I wanted to go through the different structures that are gonna be on the site. So there's two different types of shelters that are gonna be on the site. They're both the same size, they're 64 square feet. The majority of them are these pallet shelters, pallet. Shelter is a nonprofit organization located on the West Coast that is really is a cool website to check out if you're on our website. They're really focused on providing shelter to those who are living without shelter as an emergency. They work, most of their employees are folks that have had other struggles in their lives and are being put to work. They've got many successful shelter communities across the country and have put us in touch with many of those which has been really helpful to both learn like, can this work in a cold climate? Like it looks great in California but what happens when it snows? So we had a lot of conversations with Madison, Wisconsin and Aurora, Colorado over the winter to get that reassurance and talk about energy modeling and things like that. So what you see on the screen now is a photo of the exterior and the interior of these shelters. They're quite small, 64 square feet. They are climate controlled so they will have heating and cooling and electricity in the unit for lights and charging phone. All of the buildings on the site will have access to wifi, they have a bed that can fold up if people prefer during the day to use the space and some opportunities for storage. The other type of shelter that we'll have on the site are the up-end this shelters, up-end this is a local business that actually started at the generator down on Pine Street building modular structures and they responded to an RFP to have some locally produced shelters where we could be participate in the design process, have potential users of these shelters participate in the design process so they will, 10 of the shelters in the same size will be coming from up-end the shelters. The largest building on the site which is about 55 feet long and 26 feet wide is the community resource center. This will be replacing the community resource center is currently operating out of the BFW as Brian mentioned earlier that site is being slated for redevelopment by the BFW so that lease expires at the end of this month. We're working with CVOEO on a mobile temporary option over the summer while we get this built but this will replace that community resource center. Marcel, I don't know if you want to speak a little bit to what happens here. The community resource center. Yes. So the community resource center has been operating for the last two winters. It was a pandemic response facility that we opened up to provide folks a space to go when other places where the people may go to during the daytime or close because of the pandemic. And it's expanded in terms of the services that CVOEO are able to provide access to there. So it's not just limited. Folks can get access to shelter resources or housing navigation resources. And we're also providing access to different kinds of health resources during the pandemic, testing and vaccinations and access to other benefits and hot food and other essential supplies. So it's really kind of an ever-developing and really solid resource that's low barrier and open for everyone. You can visit the one at the BFW for a couple more weeks, which they have really good food Marcel, include me and you, but it's a really great space to visit to see, to meet folks who are using these services. And we've met with them to get input on the design of this shelter community and just got a lot of really positive feedback and input from them, which was great. The Community Resource Center and this last building that I'll show you, the Bath House are both going to be prefabricated by a company called KBS Builders. They're based in Maine. They've worked closely with efficiency Vermont on building prefabricated, highly energy efficient structures. So every single, all of the four types of buildings I've showed you tonight are prefabricated and they're modular and they are meant to be able, they're easy to pick up and relocate. We're not redeveloping this site. This is a temporary use of the site. We have access to the site for up to 36 months starting on May 1st. And then the city will determine where it makes sense to relocate these. So this last structure is the Bath House. This will have six full bathrooms. Two of them will be fully ADA accessible to serve the people living in the shelter communities. Each bathroom will have its own door, a toilet, a shower and a sink. The elevation that you see the side view that has two doors will be the mechanical room for bringing the water and the sewer connection into the Bath House and heating the water and the other door is to provide a washer and dryer for folks who are on the site. And so this is gonna be really hard for most people to see. So I don't, I won't spend too much time on it. Hopefully maybe at least can like people see my, see the cursor if I move. I want to stand up there, but I don't think that'll be helpful. This is Elmwood Ave. This is the bottom. You mean on the side? Yeah, can you not see the person? No, you can't see the person. I mean, it's hope to go up. Okay. This is Elmwood Ave. So this is the parking lot on the site and the existing chain link fence on three sides of the site. This building that you see here, the building footprint is the proposed community resource center. There will be a new, an additional fence that goes across the front of the site to ensure that the shelter community is secure and the safety of the folks both inside and outside of the community. You can see there's an office here that's sort of on the other side of the fence that has its own door. That's the office for the staff that will be serving the shelter community that will control access in and out and make sure people have the services that they need. These are the six bathrooms here. Both of these structures have sort of a deck with a set of stairs and a ramp for ADA accessibility. This first, these little rectangles, each are the shelter. These first four will be fully ADA accessible and the rest of them have the ability to be adapted. The color, this yellow stripe going down is the emergency access for our ambulance and the entire safety. And then these blue strips are sort of interior streets. All of the doors of each shelter will open up onto those streets. That's where we all know we'll be maintaining clear paths from snow. And then green space is gonna be community gathering space. Well, there'll be picnic tables, shaded space to be outside. And we've had a lot of requests for opportunities to do some raised bed gardening. So they'll be garden beds there. Now the pink is a space sort of in the back of the pods that couldn't actually be like where you could store a biker, things like that. So we're still working on this. I believe time for some questions and answers. So is this just winding down? We can wind down the barber if we need to. Sure, we can definitely do that. Yeah. Well, let's get through these last two. All right. So low barrier means people who are consuming legal substances are permitted and those substances will be permitted to be consumed in their units, not in public, but doesn't mean that illegal substances and illegal behaviors will be allowed or tolerated. So low barrier doesn't mean no rules. It just means and most shelters, they test you for sobriety when you come. And if you don't pass, you don't get a bed. That's how shelters generally work. So low barrier is the opposite of that. It says you need housing, we're gonna house you, especially in this situation because this is the bridge to housing. This is shelter, I'm sorry, not housing. This is shelter to get you to housing. And so the notion of low barrier here as described is limited or minimal focus, I'm sorry, in terms of a focus on harm reduction, but in terms of barriers for entry, we try to eliminate as many barriers to entry as possible because the goal is to bring people in and embrace and not to push people out and reject. And it really does encourage people to develop connections with other people, develop relationships to lead them to better choices and better outcomes and seeking services because trust is built through this model rather than pushing people out because they may have been using substances. We are committed to the CRC, the Community Resource Center, staff seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. The emergency shelter will be fully managed and staffed. We don't have exactly the partner that's going to do that or the arrangements for that is something we're working on right now. We had some meetings on it today. We're trying to work out the details but we're not quite there yet. But there will be 24-hour presence of staff on site, access to on-site mental health services, access to case management, housing search and navigation services, recovery services, really a service-rich environment to provide people with that support. And I mentioned earlier the notion of a community meeting for neighbors, guests, the operating partner, the city, businesses, faith community, anyone to really contribute to that, building of community, but also recognizing that if we experience challenges and hiccups, we have to be upfront about them and deal with them and address them. And that's the goal here. Hey, thanks, Brian. Yeah. Okay, let's end this share screen. Good, good. Jessica, do you have a motion you'd like to offer? Well, I think we should have discussion on this, but I would like to propose... A motion out there before the discussion. Of course, yeah. So as a Ward 3 resident, I live on North Champlain Street and then also wearing another hat as a CVOEO employee, I have the opportunity to work every day next to the folks who have been staffing the community resource center and see the work and support that they put in to supporting our folks experiencing homelessness. And I personally really support this project and I think it's a really important step towards solidifying our resources for everyone because everyone deserves the right to a safe, stable and accessible home. And we don't have enough homes out there for everyone. And this project is a good step along the way. So as, you know, taking off my steering committee hat, putting on my neighborhood hat, I wanted to make a proposal that the wards 2 and 3, I'm only speaking on behalf of wards 3, NPA has officially endorses this proposal. So I'd like to put that out there and perhaps it's something that we could vote on after we have more of a discussion and folks have a chance to get their questions answered. Okay, thanks, Jessica. I see on the Zoom, Kevin Barker has his hand up. Thank you. I just have a couple of questions. One, I'm wondering what the committee believes affordable housing is. If I do my calculations, this project is just about $3 million and it's going to be housing 30, 30 to 50 people and per month, I don't know if my map's correct, but I think that's like $1,300 a month per person where again, I'm a landlord where I charge about $900 a person. So is the affordable housing actually there? I'm wondering also about the application process and what is the surveillance on this and what is the actual, if anything goes wrong, how do people get talked to or what is the process of eviction out of these? I have a few more questions, but those are kind of on the top of my list. Yeah, first thing is it's important to distinguish between housing and shelter and this is shelter, this is not housing, it's not being permitted as housing and it doesn't have permanent foundations, they don't have bathrooms, they don't have kitchens, it doesn't meet any definition of housing, it meets the definition of shelter and there's no rent being charged. And I think, I'm not sure how you count your numbers, but I'm gonna ask Samantha to speak to the development cost because there's the cost to put it in and buy the pods and then there's the cost to operate it and those are two totally different things, so. Sure, and I think the number I'm assuming came from the ARPA allocation that was made by city council in February, which was just over $3 million, just under $3 million and that money covers a wide range of things that Brian alluded to in the mayor's 10 point action plan to provide housing as a human right in the city of Burlington. So it provides for us the full-time staff position, working on addressing houselessness in the city for years and it also funds a full-time staff position at CBOEO, working on the coordinated entry, again to find individual people and help them get connected to the services they need to make that bridge to permanent housing. The capital costs, the costs of actually purchasing the pods and doing the site work and purchasing the bathrooms and the entire community resource center which will continue to be a resource for the city of Burlington is just about $1.1 million and the remainder, so there's staff time and this is in the city council memo and happy to provide more details if that's helpful. But again, this is about a million dollars to provide the 30 shelters, the bathroom facility and the community resource subject. I think another question was asked about perhaps, you use the word surveillance, I'm not really sure what that means but I'm gonna assume it means how will we ensure that disruptive and perhaps illegal behavior is dealt with, I think is what I'm assuming. Yeah, I just, I wanna make sure my tenants are safe that are like a stone's throw away from this and I also would be curious as to what you guys have figured the per person cost per month is in this project. I can promise you, we won't have per person per month because we're not at that level right now but we will know that once we get further into it. At this point, I would say for behavior and conduct, there's going to be essentially a code of conduct and people are gonna be explained, it's gonna be explained clearly, it's gonna be in writing and it's gonna be signed by those who are admitted to live in a pod and Marcel can speak about sort of the tenant selection process for lack of a better word. Yeah, again, a lot of this will be developed through the agreement that we have with the operating partner. There are emergency shelter guidelines that are currently draft but being adopted at state level. And so the way that the shelter operates would of course be within those emergency shelter guidelines and part of that is the way in which folks can contact shelter and get access to the shelter. During the daytime, obviously because the CRC is on site and there are emergency case workers there, then access will be through the CRC. At night time, there could be emergency access direct because there's 24-hour staffing, so if there's availability, there could be access direct but statewide, there's the 211 call service which is the way that anyone would get access to shelter across the state in office hours or outside of office hours. So there are kind of various different approaches because again, you want to have no wrong door approach to shelter and to housing. I hope that answers the question, so. And I wanna just point out that typically with a shelter, people queue up at night to get in and if they don't get a bed, they get turned away. This will be a different arrangement where people will be admitted through an admissions process and they will have their pod for up to six months perhaps. And the goal being that to provide those supports and wraparound services to move them, transition them to something that is housing a lot closer to housing than a pod. Okay, thank you. I'm gonna go back and forth again with questions but our time is limited. So please keep your questions brief and your answers as brief as possible. Jessica, are there questions? Is there somebody from the floor who has a question? Yes, yeah, we've got about four or five people here with questions, so here. Okay, I see two more on Zoom. So why don't we ask the next person? And that's all the questions then, okay. Hi, my name is Cooper Siegel. I live directly across the street from the Elmwood lot that we're talking about tonight. And I'm gonna be honest, I feel really, really defeated here tonight. Tonight we walked out to come to this meeting and we saw that the zoning sign was up and it just really hit me for the first time this is happening. And we've done everything that we're supposed to do. We went to the city council meeting. We went to the public forum, which only 14 other people attended. We went to, we're here tonight. And yet I feel like there has been no one listening, no one trying to hear us and no one trying to hear what we're scared of and what we wanna know. And this isn't the typical process. I don't understand why for the high school, say that was being built, why there were votes on it. And yet this just miraculously appeared the week after the March votes, the town meeting votes. And we had to find out on the news, that is not fair. That should not have been how we shouldn't have had to look this up because we saw a news camera outside of our house. Do you not understand how insulting that is? Like, do we not deserve to be included in this process? And like last week there was the, excuse me, there was the community forum and we weren't invited until three days beforehand. And for people who weren't at home during the day, they weren't invited until the day of. This is not fair. And we were told last week that we're going to have another public forum, that there's going to be another moment. That information needs to be circulated really for much further ahead of time. We should have been in on this conversation from the ground up. This isn't fair. This doesn't take into account the ways that we feel as a community. And no one's saying, stop here. No one is saying, stop. We're saying, please listen to us and please actually provide moments and that we can actually properly engage. This hasn't felt fair. I know that I have neighbors who don't know this project is happening. We live directly across the street, directly across the street. And the fact that there are people in my building and the people in the building next door who don't know this happening, who probably have no way of knowing that this meeting is happening tonight, that's not right. That shouldn't be the way that this goes. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. From the Zoom Abbott, please be brief. Yeah. Thank you. I just, I had one question. I don't know if there's gonna be time for question answer. This is something that I think Brian and I have touched on in a conversation before, but it sort of speaks to Kevin's point too. I don't know if it's comparing the permitting to get windows replaced, which can be really crazy in our current setup versus like the speed, maybe the appropriate speed for this shelter permitting. I do think that developing more housing and creating more units to offer housing to all these folks who are in such desperate need, we need to be able to build more housing in a more expedient and easy inexpensive manner. There've been a lot of articles about this recently. I won't go on about that. I don't know if Brian has any suggestions for that. And then the other question is, after six months, where do these houseless folks go? Do they leave town? I don't know. The Burlington is so much better than other communities. And yet on the Burlington Housing Authority website, there's still a five year waiting list for Section 8 vouchers. I know that's probably more of a federal solution. So I guess the question would be like, who should we reach out to, to appeal to have more Section 8 housing money created? And I guess those, and maybe for folks who are experiencing the use addiction, maybe help it, like putting more pressure on city council to get these supervised use sites created. So thank you. Okay, thank you, Abbott. What I'm going to do, Brian and others, is ask you to take notes on these questions, get them all out there and give you a chance to respond at the end. Is that okay? Oh, yes. Okay. Okay, then next question from the floor. Hi, I'm David Call. I live right across from the parking lot. I'm a senior citizen living with my sister, who was the senior citizen. There's no solution to this problem. We all may be scared, nervous. We all may say, well, what's the next step? But for the homeless, every day they sleep out at night, anything could happen to them. We have to ask this one question, when are we going to actually find the space for all the problems that we have in the city? And we can't, honestly, can't find anything. It's a very scary world out there, but imagine sleeping outdoors. So we have to ask the one question. Are we doing something? Well, yes we are. This is a good idea. And I wonder if there's gonna be a hotline in case if I have to call, if I see something, and or I could just, or Facebook something, or anything that's just quick, some kind of tree, some kind of electric tree, that would be kind of nice. And I would like to see the cops go by every 15 minutes, you know, go with the squad cars, just to ensure the public that we can, everything's okay and all grand. And we also have to think about there are, we've got to have neighbors that don't know how to live in a home anymore. So we'll show them that, they could get back on their feet and just encourage them. And it's gonna be a lot of help from Turning Point and a lot of community services. And the plan is good. And it could be tweaked once it's a great while too. So thank you for doing this. And I hope that we can make this project work. Okay, thank you. Yeah, that's it. Thank you. Thank you. Tony, briefly, please. Yes. First, and I'm sensitive, Tony Reddington, ward three, I'm sensitive to the fact that people who do not feel the process has been open and inclusive. And I think that the CEDO needs to do more effort in this area. I agree with Jess and support, as the last gentleman said, this is not an ideal solution, but I think it's a good investment. And I would support a resolution to have this project go forward. One reference to Brian's comment on Ronald Reagan is that up to then people lived in public housing and had federal housing assistance paid 25% of their income towards rent. He raised it to 30%, which is a very high figure. But in this particular project, I know that parking lot fairly well. And there's a CHT, Champlain Housing Trust project right at the Northern border, some individual apartments. And, but I know the parking lot very well. It's like, I can't liken it as Brian said, it's caged on three sides. And if you go over to the corner, the far west corner, you would like to have a break in that fence. So you could, so the people who are living there can go to the laundromat, can go to the subway and the Dunkin Donuts and access even more quickly the transit center than they can going out onto Elmwood. I would hope, Brian, that you would look to have an opening there. It's a senior project of Kenzie. They're not going to be happy if they probably to have some neighbors going through the yard. But what do we, are we just creating another, a caged area to put some people and not trying to provide walking and bicycling and access? I leave you with that. Thank you. Thank you, Tony. Somebody else from the floor. I have one more person on Zoom. Rebecca, you'll be next after the person on the floor. Hi there. I live around the corner from the proposed project. And I agree with my neighbor. Communication has not been a strong suit of this project at all. And one of the things that I'm wondering is we keep on hearing more information is coming, but we also know that the project is coming. So what I'm missing is the actual code of conduct. What does low barrier mean defining it? Who will be let in? Who will not be let in? What is the city going to do to ensure that the quality of life of the neighborhood where this is being placed is not negatively impacted with increased broken glass, as a neighbor mentioned, not just what's happening in the pod community, but when they leave it, because none of that has been communicated, there's been no detail provided. And it does feel like this is being very surface level from all of you. And so more information is going to help fill in the gaps and gaps create fear. And those gaps are creating fear. And that's up to you all to help us fill in. Thank you very much, Rebecca. Can you hear me okay? Yes, can you turn on your camera if possible? It's not working. I'm sorry. Okay. So my name is Rebecca Hotaling. I'm a property manager for O'Brien Brothers and I manage Mackenzie House. And we have had a recent meeting with residents and they expressed their concerns. So I just want to share a petition that about 98% of our residents signed. So I think it's important to advocate for them. I'll make it as brief as possible though, Barbara. I know you're short on time. So during the recent meeting with Mackenzie House residents and with O'Brien Brothers management, discussion took place. Breaking up a bit, Rebecca. A discussion took place regarding the city of Burlington's proposed homeless housing pod location on Elmwood. The proposed location sits immediately adjacent to both the Mackenzie House high rise and the historic Victorian families building. The Mackenzie high rise is exclusive to those that are extremely or very low income elderly and or disabled. And the Victorian building is exclusive to extremely or very low income families with children. Both properties have been in operation for close to 40 years and are well maintained while operated and consistently receive high marks from their low income housing contract administrators. Red residents unanimously express their frustration to O'Brien Brothers management about the city of Burlington's lack of communication and consideration for their concerns for this proposed use. And a densely populated area of the city that already experiences issues around drug use, crime and vandalism. Many felt blindsided and disenfranchised by the process. Residents recognize that after the closure of the Sears Lane encampment, the city of Burlington is feeling pressure to provide an alternative solution. Overall, residents support the big picture goal of ending homelessness, but feel strongly that the proposed housing pods have no place in a dense residential neighborhood and feel as though one housing issue is attempting to be solved at the expense of another underserved community. McKenzie House residents raised concerns specific to safety, increased crime, drug use, alcohol use, increased traffic in and around the property, privacy and direct view of the pods by children of what could occur on site and noise disturbances. Crime concerns are already shared by many Burlington residents, especially with an understaffed police department. McKenzie House residents have already experienced one recent assault and robbery, vehicle break-ins just in the last week, graffiti and numerous occurrences of illegal drug use and the Victorian stairwell and elsewhere on the property. O'Brien Brothers staff have had to discard of use needles as well as clean up feces, blood and urine. And residents are not confident that an understaffed police department will be able to absorb the demands of the housing pod village next door. Residents express fear as they need to walk their service animals or pets at various times of day and night. And some Victorian building residents have windows that face directly into the proposed pod location. Those residents fear their children will inadvertently witness traumatizing events and or illegal activity. A handful of residents stated they will move if the housing pods are placed next door and others do not have the resources or ability to move regardless of their concerns. Excuse me, how much more of the petition is there? And it's two, a couple more sentences, I promise. Okay. The proposed housing pod project on Elmwood Avenue threatens the health, safety and right to peaceful enjoyment of the premises. And the McKenzie House residents really urged the Burlington City Council, its leaders to change the location of the homeless housing pod project to a location less impactful to residential neighborhoods and the vulnerable population of McKenzie House residents. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. I have a message in chat to read. Let's see what she says. And Barbara, we have another person ready here. Okay. And I have, Rebecca, did you go yet? I'm sorry. That was her. That was Rebecca. Okay. All right, then put on your next person. I'm done here. Yeah, Jess, I agree with you. We'll skip the next one. Please make your comments brief. Hi, I'm Lara. I live on Elmwood Ave. I also echo the safety concerns. I'm a young female. I live alone on the ground floor apartment a hundred feet away from what we set up. I only felt safe moving to the ground floor apartment as a single female because it was a very quiet, safe neighborhood. So I'd love to get more explicit details about what safety procedures will be involved to make sure the neighborhood and I can feel safe in my home or when I'm walking down my street at night past it. I also like previous speakers feel very disappointed in the city with the lack of communication. I again, I myself found out on the news about five days ago, none of the neighbors I spoke to had even heard of the project and nobody actually talked to my friends and coworkers in Burlington had heard about this. So it seems that nobody knows about it so nobody can get a voice or more information. It seems like it's almost being kept quiet until it passes and then nobody can do anything which isn't the way forward. Everybody should have a say and to get everything moving. And I am disappointed that we don't get more of a say because a lot of us in neighborhood can't just afford to up and move. If we do feel unsafe, if we are uncomfortable, not to mention, you know, housing is a nightmare to find in the first place which is why we're all here tonight. So it's a big issue. I fully support the idea of the project and the shelter. I just wish there could be any other location that just wasn't even in the middle of residential neighborhood anywhere else that's still walkable, but would cause less issues to people. So I could feel more welcomed, you know, there'd be less anxiety, less fear. Other cities, I know I've done these shelter communities including my hometown of Boston, but none of them put the pod communities right downtown in tourist areas or in quite residential neighborhoods. And most of them sobriety was required for various reasons. And I'm not totally against low barrier shelters because I do agree that people struggling with addiction or other issues need that help. But I think in that case, another location she considered where there isn't gonna be all that fear around it. I think there's needs to be a lot more thought behind this. Thank you very much. Next person from the floor. We actually have two more people. So please be as brief as you can. I wish we could record our neighborhood planning assembly so we could play the old ones, which I'm sure CCTV has, but the same concerns were said before Monroe Place happens and it's okay, the same thing with the family shelter, the same thing with St. John's Hall. We do have problems with neighbors who are problems. They live in homeowner units, they live in rental units and they're gonna live in shelter pod communities. We need to deal with that, but our community is gonna be okay after this happens and we need to house homeless people because what does make someone more dangerous, more crazy and more likely to use drugs is sleeping outside. And when people can sleep in a place that's safe and warm, they're much less likely to do terrible things. And so we have to take care of people even when it's hard. So I hope everyone votes yes. Thank you, could you just identify yourself as well? So again, please put your name, Barb Prime. Thank you. This is the last speaker, I believe. There is one more as well. I'll keep it brief. Lucy Gluck again, Ward 3, Blodgett Street. I do support the pods. I know there's gonna be challenges. I know we're gonna have days where we've got, we've got to really work on making sure the neighbors feel safe, perhaps a neighborhood meeting before this goes in where you go door to door, put door hangers on, get people together. There's gonna be people feeling really on edge. Obviously we've heard from some folks tonight and I'm really glad they're speaking out about that. But a neighborhood meeting I think could really help say, we're here and we understand and we're gonna work on safety issues. And I agree with Barb. We're always right on the edge when something new like this happens, it's creative. It's for me putting out all the resources that are gonna be there are gonna make all the difference because people have multiple layers of, it's not just they don't have a place to sleep and a safe place to call home, but they're struggling with mental health issues. They're struggling with other medical issues. They're struggling with addiction and all of that, it sounds like there's gonna be ways on site to get help if people are ready for that. We can't guarantee that. But I really, really support this and I know we need to find as many solutions as we can in Burlington, including looking at the big issues of people struggling with tax stuff so that they have to keep raising rents when they're renting. I mean, there's just, I could mention 50 things and I won't, but I know the city's working on it really hard and I appreciate all of your hard work. And I know we need to pull together as neighbors to support the pods. Thank you. Thank you. I have, I know I have, Miami are you gonna speak to this? If you have time, if not, I can wait. There isn't, so I'd appreciate it so much. Okay. And the person who's coming to the mic now is the last speaker. Hi, hi. This is Erica Spiegel and I'm on Vladiage Street. And I have a lot of questions because I haven't heard, you know, pardon my ignorance, I only heard about this not too long ago. I don't even know how I heard about it, gossip, news, whatever. So I have a lot of questions and it's so not clear to me. So these are structures that the city will purchase. So the city owns these things, but then you're looking for a non-city partner to operate it. So, and these are just general questions I have like about, say, insurance, like safety, who's incurring risk here? You did mention there's bath house facilities. You didn't mention anything about food or cooking or people are gonna be cooking in these things. I'm assuming they're not sprinkler. What about fire safety? Who's incurring the risk? Is it the city? And then what's the life expectancy of these structures? And then what is the end plan for this? I mean, you know, the city is really good at like, they get free money, you know, from the federal government, let's buy things. But then you never think about what is it gonna cost five and 10 years from now when the roof needs replacing or, you know, just the ongoing upkeep? I'm not familiar with the CRC or what happened down at the VFW. Is this a facility that's only open to the 30 residents? So there's more than 30 people that will be frequenting this community center throughout the day. I don't know if the people there know that. So it's just, I feel like there's a lot of questions about just how this is actually administered and works, stuff like that. I think that was it. And... Thank you. Yeah, yeah, thank you. Brian, if you can just three minutes to respond because we really have to move on. Charlie, just let me know that the other item I'm supposed to speak to, I'll come back at your next meeting or a future meeting and we'll talk about that. That's definitely a longer conversation. I'd appreciate that. So I'm not sure I'm gonna be able to hit on every item. I'll try and ask my colleagues to help me here. But overall, I would say, you know, we really completely understand that the gaps in information that exist do create some fear and some anxiety and totally understand that. We're really coming to you now with what we know right now. We don't have all the answers. We're coming with the information we have now. We're trying to share it as openly as possible and to get specific feedback, specific concerns as one of the speakers listed a number of those concerns several have. That's extremely helpful to us as we think about how to do this right and things that we need to take into consideration and things that we need to do to avoid unintended consequences. I, you know, none of us want this to go into effect and have it be a nuisance for the neighborhood. That is completely not gonna serve anyone's interests. The people living in the neighborhood, the people living in the shelter, the city. I mean, it's everyone's interest to make this go as smoothly and as well carried out as possible. We'll continue to gather community input to help us shape how we are doing things. I would just add that Rebecca from Mackenzie House spoke to us about 10 days ago, maybe it was two weeks ago, about this issue of proximity to the Victorian house. And that was a serious concern. And so the site plan that you saw earlier, the architect literally designed the site plan to make sure there was nothing close to the Victorian house. So that was an example of getting that feedback and specifically addressing it in the way we're planning to do this to create this community. So we'll continue to meet with the community as frequently as we can. I mentioned at the meeting that was referred to earlier last week at the UU, it wasn't a huge turnout. We didn't have a lot of time and in terms of time from when people got notice and we'll continue to meet with folks. We'll be, I will do this multiple nights a week if we need to. I think it's important to recognize we have an emergency. We have a serious issue where people are exposed to living in the elements. We can't get people into another winter to get a project going requires lots of pieces need to be put in place. We did not go out and poll the people in every possible community location that we were considering because that process is actually something we can't possibly do. And I'll just be blunt, we need to move forward because the city council identified that this is the priority. And the voters, the citizens of Burlington spoke through a survey where nearly 4,000 survey respondents said, homelessness is our top issue to address with the use of these federal funds. And as we recover from the pandemic, we're trying to acknowledge that those who are most at risk and most vulnerable are where the priority is. I understand people feel we should have come to every person in every neighborhood when we looked at a site, that's actually not something that was feasible for us to do. What we're trying to do right now, the permitting process hasn't even started yet because we're still doing the community engagement process but we have chosen this site as the site. The site is not gonna be somewhere else unless we are turned down by the development review board and I'll just, I wanna be up front about that because I think it's important for folks to know that. This is the site the city is pursuing, the city council supported it, the DPW commission supported it. I hope the MP will support it tonight but we're not gonna do this without taking all these concerns into consideration. We're gonna develop this in partnership with the community because otherwise it doesn't work. It will not work and it will not have support and we don't want folks to move in and be viewed as a problem from the day they move in. We want this to be a welcoming, therapeutic environment for people and an asset for the community, not something that creates all kinds of hassles and nuisances for the neighbors, so. Brian, I would just say like because of time, I'm wondering if people feel comfortable, like we have a list of questions also to send questions to the email that was on the site. If you send an email to that email that was listed, we then have your email address and we can figure out a way to make sure we respond to as many questions as possible because I know we're trying to stay on time here. And our website will announce the next community gathering that we will hold perhaps, I think the UU is the plan. So in response to that question about community and what we've already held one, we've held more than one neighborhood meeting, but the larger neighborhood meeting was held last week and we've committed to doing monthly meetings and we've just confirmed the dates for those that will circulate those dates fully. I'd also say on our website, there are frequently asked questions. Any questions that you email to us, we'll answer those and add them to the frequently asked questions. So this webpage that we've linked to is being updated and we're putting as much information on there as we have available as well. Okay, thank you very much. Jessica, please advise, are we able to take a vote on your motion now or do we have to warn that for another meeting? That's a good question. Yeah, we would have to warn it for the next meeting. Okay, so we're not gonna take a vote tonight. I would like to revise it if I may. Sure. So I would like to revise my motion that the words two and three NPA supports this project and urges the city to take steps to increase communication to and from adjacent community members. So the folks who we heard from today and who live in the immediate vicinity to the area. And I'll write it up and we can include it. We will, we can include it for the next meeting if that's when it's been open. Thank you very much. Thank you, Brian, and thank your team. You're welcome, thanks for having us. Okay, can we quickly do the raffle because I think we need a little levity before we launch into the next thing. Great, great idea. So we have two raffle prizes, $25 gift cards to Jake's Market and these have been generously donated by Mascoma Bank. And we're gonna do one drawing for folks who are here in the room and one drawing for folks on Zoom. So for the people in the room, I have the sign up sheet here and I've assigned numbers to each person and I've got a random number generator on my computer. So it's totally impartial. There are including the two names over there. We have 23 names. I'm hitting the button. Whoops, and it came up with number one, which is my name, so I'm gonna hit it again. And our, whoops, I'm sorry. Technology is spoiling me. Okay, number 21. So the winner for here is a DP call, Dave. Dave. Bro. Hello. And Sam is doing similar magic for folks on the Zoom. And so if you are the Zoom winner, we will, I'll find a way to get the card to you. And who is that? Sam, do you have a winner? Can't hear you. Is a member of the media allowed to accept prizes? Perhaps we should redraw. Thank you. Okay, great. So next we have a redistricting discussion. Chris Hasley is going to do that presentation. It says 40 minutes if you could possibly do it in 20 so we could have questions and answers that would be great. And also I should say a couple of things. Chris is doing this, not in his capacity as the steering committee, but as a citizen and a member of a group that's been working on this. I also wanna announce that the women who talked about the drug house on North Champlain Street, Jean Bergman, your counselor really wants to hear from you. He's only been on the council for a few weeks, but please do get in touch with him, okay? Go ahead, Chris. Hey, thanks for agreeing to talk a little bit more about redistricting tonight. For those of you that followed the MPA closely, you may recall that we spoke a little bit back in February about the possibility of having a downtown ward. But tonight, basically just wanna talk about redistricting in general, the city had a process last fall where they had community input and a decision has not yet been made. It will be coming up here, I think this month on the council's agenda. And just wanted to kind of engage with folks here and kind of keep it at the forefront of people's minds as the decisions are starting to be made. So one of the reasons I'll talk about here is with respect to the process. There's kind of two things that are driving it. I'm gonna share my screen here. There's a set of legal requirements and that's kind of the top priority. One person, one vote in the 14th amendment. Those are the things that we need to make sure that we hit when we come up with the maps here whether when the city council comes up with the maps. And then the second kind of set of criteria, if you will, is kind of the informal, like the community value set, things like preserving neighborhoods here. And so again, with the statutory requirements, the one person, one vote, we wanna make sure that all of the different ward populations are about approximately even. We don't want a lot of variance there. And that's 10% deviation from what's considered the ideal ward population. And that's determined by simply taking the total population of the city and dividing it by the proposed number of wards. So for example, in our current configuration, we have eight wards. So if you divide the city population from the census by eight, it comes out to just under 5,600 people. So you need to keep the populations within that 10% here. They also have to be contiguous. They can't be physically separate or detached from another ward. And you can't divide up and draw district lines on the basis of race, ethnicity, or religion. So that's kind of the statutory requirements that come into play here. The second set of, I don't say priorities, but it's the kind of the community priorities or community values. These are things that are not required by statute but are kind of like the nice to have. So I guess you could say based on feedback that was articulated through the public forums and the various surveys that were put out by the ad hoc committee on redistricting last fall. And some of the big themes that came out in terms of the community values was to minimize the population difference between the wards. We want to preserve our neighborhoods and communities of interest. We want to maintain small wards to preserve meaningful representation, use national geographic features such as the intervallous of boundaries. And we want to balance the student populations more evenly across the city. So I think you have these kind of two sets of things going on here. You have the legal requirements and you have the community priorities. And it's kind of like, what's the best fit here? It's like a balloon. You press on one end, it kind of comes out the other end. So there's, kind of really, I guess you'd say like no such thing as the perfect map. It's kind of like how can we maximize the good for the greatest number of folks here in the city trying to juggle the legal requirements along with community priorities. And it's like, where the heck do we draw these lines here? And what got me interested in this is the way the process had unfolded. I was kind of a fan of the old seven awards with 14 counselors model. And I was like, oh, this can't be too hard. We'll just move a few lines here, move a few lines there. And once I started getting familiar with the district builder software, which is what the city is using to draw the maps, I realized very quickly that it really wasn't that simple. And as I started playing around with the different options, I realized there's really a lot of give and take process. And that's kind of what the point of this conversation was tonight is to talk about what would make sense from the old North Island. What are the things that we as a community would like our city counselors to take into consideration as they work on questions like, how many awards should we have or how many city counselors should we have? As well. So one of the things that we heard here quite a bit was, through the community process was to have small wards. And small wards was prioritized for a number of reasons. People liked having personal relationships with their counselors. We felt that with smaller wards, there'd be a more opportunity for diversity of representation on the council, which I think is something that we need. It also facilitates constituent services. It also allows for more personal door-to-door campaigning when you're out on the campaign trail. It's also more affordable too. As you have to cover a larger geographic area as a candidate, it becomes more expensive both in time and resources just to get out there. So there was definitely a premium on that. And again, people of modest means can be candidates. So the big question is like, what's the ideal number of wards? We have eight, some folks have been nostalgic for seven. I was one of them. I've fiddled around with everything from a seven-word map up to a map with 16 single-member districts. And really what it comes down to is that it's a trade-off any which way you slice it. So what is gonna be the best fit with all these different things that are coming in to play here with the maps? So the folks that I've worked with, we have eight wards. We kinda wanted to minimize the change coming down the pike for folks. But more importantly, eight seem to work from a number of perspectives just from the numbers game and how that would play out. And that's kind of important because when you're dealing with the legal requirements, that's what's gonna take precedence over the community values. So if it comes down to preserving a neighborhood or making the numbers work, making the numbers work is gonna be the priority here. So here's kind of the argument for why eight wards, not seven, not nine, or 12, or 14, or some other number. And it basically comes down to we wanna preserve meaningful representation. We're looking for a small size of about 5,600 people. And this will be minimizing the differences between the various wards. Communities of interest and the preservation thereof was a theme that was heard over and over again. It's something that was prized. And we also wanted to balance the student population across each ward. So that's kind of the argument for eight wards. And kinda to circle back on something I had mentioned before is that, the ideal ward population is based upon the total population of the city divided by the proposed number of wards. So as the number of wards goes up, the ideal population of each individual ward will go down. And so with an eight ward map, you're looking at a population of about 5,600 residents. But if we're the seven ward map, for example, it would be about 6,400 residents. And that's kind of the crux of what I wanted to get into here with the presentations tonight and why seven wards would be problematic for the old North End. The ideal population is about 6,400 people per ward. If you take two wards, ostensibly two and three, which times two, that's about 12,800 people. And our current population is a bit less than that's about 10, seven. So to make the numbers work with a seven ward map, it really requires some jiggling of the lines in a way that would not be consistent with preserving neighborhoods. And that is to say that traditionally the barrier, the boundary I should say between the old North End and the new North End has been the railroad tracks up on North Avenue. And when you get into a seven ward map, the numbers there just, it's gonna require some creative line drawing in a way that would probably shatter a number of neighborhoods. So that was kind of the thrust of what I wanted to talk about tonight here. I just wanted to also point out too that if you look here from the 1993 map, which was the seven ward with 14 counselors map, the population was a little bit less at that time. It was about 5,590 per ward. And if we stick with an eight ward map here in 2022, we'll be roughly at about the same place, which dovetail is very well with, you know, the desire for small ward populations. So that was kind of the point here was just to kind of put that out and let folks know that, you know, this is still out there, that no decisions have been made and that the questions regarding the number of wards, the number of counselors are out there, but that, you know, having had an opportunity to try different configurations, it's all about a balancing act and, you know, what may work well in one situation may not work in another. So that's basically all I have for tonight. I'm trying to cut it short here because I know we're a little over, you know, the time limit here, but if anyone has questions or things they wanna talk about, I know I've talked to some of the counselors about this previously, but they'll be making the decisions here. So. Okay, let's stop the screen share. Let's see who has questions. Thank you, Barbara. Thank you. Okay, any comments or questions from the floor or from the Zoom? I don't see any hands right now on Zoom. Jessica? No, there's nothing here at the center. Okay, did everybody leave? Jessica, I think we burned them out. You just have a talent for clearing out the room. Thank you, Chris. Well, I'll ask a question, Chris. You didn't really mention the downtown ward issue. Would you like to speak to that? Yeah, so I'll happy to talk about the downtown ward issue. So I spoke to that back in February. And so the downtown ward kind of idea came about, you know, it was a historical thing that had existed. And as I was looking into it, I found out that there was a downtown ward, you know, crunching the numbers, doing the math, realized that, you know, eight wards work really well, but the current eight ward configuration, specifically the current ward eight, which a lot of folks kind of refer to as the gerrymander, you know, there was wanting to keep eight wards, but just not the current ward eight, I guess. So looking at how to make that fit, the downtown ward was kind of the missing link that kind of tied everything together. And in addition to having the historical precedent, what we would propose is that a new downtown ward would unify the King Maple Street neighborhood, which is currently split between wards three and five. So that was a big piece of kind of why we wanted to push for downtown as well as the fact that downtown is very different from the old North end. Okay, thank you very much. Again, I see no hands here. Charlie, what's going on there? No, I think there's one on your end, Barbara. I'm looking, wait a minute, let me get to the participants here. No, I don't see any hands here. Seeing none, I will move on and we'll get relatively back on schedule. Barbara, there was a hand, it was Amanda Hannaford. Oh, okay. Amanda, are you there and do you have a question? I think so, can you hear me? Yes. I just had a... Can you enable your camera? Oh, sure. Let me see if I can, I should be able to, yeah. I'm actually, I'm watching while I'm eating dinner. So, there you go. All right, I'm eating too. I didn't know there was a ward, a downtown ward. Well, I guess I knew there was a downtown ward, Chris, but I didn't, I'm wondering where we can see what that looked like. Like when, what years was there a downtown ward and sort of what were the geographic delineations and where can we find that information online? Yeah, so there's a webpage on the city right now that has that. The downtown ward existed, dating back to the city's founding in 1864, right up until about 1967. And the downtown ward went away when the city's little Italy neighborhood went away. But I'll do a quick screen share. I did pull up one of the historic maps just so someone can kind of see what that looked like back in the day. Like this block of orange right here, five was the most recent downtown ward. So you've got Pearl Street right along here. You follow my cursor. I think this here is South Willard Street right about here. Or no, that's South Willard Street, sorry. So this would be South Union. And then you've got Maine and then you've got Maple here. So it's kind of like a square was kind of what the historical in. That's kind of the models that we would be pushing for this time around, I guess. Oh, great. Well, thank you so much. And interesting to know that it went away when during urban renewal. Urban removal. Yeah, urban removal, he says. Okay, thank you. Thanks, Amanda. I'm going to push on seeing no other comments or questions. And the next block of things on the agenda are the reports and comments of elected people. I'm going to start with the city council and I'm going to start with the newest councilor, Jean Bergman. Okay, I'm going to maybe cover some things that Joe would have covered because we're working closely together. So let me just, and this is between you. Say that again. You have five minutes. Yeah, I'm just going to list things that we're going to just get them quick. Joel Banner raised the camping ordinance and it's really something that we should have a conversation with the NPA at a future time here. It's in the CDNR committee, but we've met with the parks commission, with the Smalley Park neighborhoods of which Joel is a part and we're going to go into the conservation board in May. We are really planning on getting a lot of community engagement. So I see this NPA as being a big piece of that. Just so that everybody understands there are union negotiations that are about to start and the budget for the next year is going to be happening and that is going to really start to take place. The budget is going to take place in the second week of May. We should let you know that the defeat of the tax increase is going to make these both very difficult. And I was on record and I am on record is saying that our affordability crisis is not to be solved by austerity, but I'm faced with having to make some really, really hard choices. And so for me, making sure that revenue ideas and cuts to departments and other things that the city does are made with equity in mind so that our old North End neighborhoods are not left further behind. So that's going to be critically important. I'm working on North Manuski Avenue and the bike paths and I can talk about some of that with people later and also both police transformation and a comprehensive review of the tax appraisal system and the fairness of our property tax system are on the table and those are really high priorities for me. So that's enough for me. Joe. Thanks, Gene. Thanks everybody for sticking around for representative updates here. I know these meetings will go pretty late. So appreciate everyone's taking the time. I will keep it brief along the lines of redistricting. It looks like we're probably going to be having the most conversations at the city council in the next few weeks here. We'll be getting the conversation. But so there will be opportunities for folks to provide input there as well. And I appreciate the work that Chris and we and others have done to try to envision what some maps might look like. In terms of the shelter project, I really appreciate the work that Brian and his team are doing to address the urgent need that we have in the community for more shelter, acknowledging the fact that there are a lot of folks that are going to potentially lose shelter through the state motel voucher program at the end of June. So there is an urgent need here for more shelter and more housing projects. So I think this shelter pod project is not a perfect solution, but it is something that we can do immediately to address the need that we have. So I'll be working with CEDO and with Gene to make sure folks are informed about the project and continue this community engagement process over the next few months as the project moves forward. So I guess I'll end there and open it up for any questions. I don't know if we have any state reps on. Right, we do have full board members. So what I'm gonna do is go to that presentation and then see if there are any questions for any of you. Are you both able to stay for a little while? Okay, thanks guys. Polly, I see you are on the call. Exciting things are going on with high school options and we look forward to hearing from you. Let's see. Oh, there you are. Hi, sorry. I was just in the webinar as somebody watching and then you put me in here. So thank you. Yeah, exciting things are happening and that is what I would like to talk to everyone about tonight. There's a lot going on, but I think the most urgent issue is BHS BTC and we currently have four-ish design options and I just wanted to quickly show people a few of the ideas and then direct you to where you can see presentations from the architects and the design steering committee. So I'm not actually gonna present anything tonight. I just wanna put it on your radar. Some really important dates for you to think about before I show you anything is that tomorrow there is coffee with Superintendent Tom Flanagan at the Bagel Cafe on North Avenue from I think 815 to 915. I'll check that again. And that's for any topics, but also BHS BTC to talk about that. That on April 27th, we as a board need to make a decision about which conceptual design we are going to go with and that we need to have our questions ready for the design steering committee and the architects by Monday, April 18th. So we're on a really aggressive timeline, but that's because we do not have a permanent high school and we really badly need one. There was someone who wrote to me who said, a community is only as rich as its citizens are educated. And I so appreciated what she said in the context of needing a new high school. So I'm gonna share my screen. Can you see something that says BHS BTC conceptual designs? Okay. So just to give you a super brief overview, this is something that was presented to the board at our last regular meeting. And then we had a community forum this past Tuesday that was both in person and on Zoom. And all of these things have been recorded. And I'm gonna share that with you in case you wanna go back to it and watch the recordings. So this is the current site, shows you the parking lot and the current school, the extended parking lot and sports fields and some of the opportunities and challenges of the site which include naturally existing geography like very sandy soil and shallow ledges and then also the contamination that exists at the site. This all is stuff that I can forward to Jess as part of tonight's meeting. So I don't need to spend a lot of time on each slide and it's also stuff that has been walked through in previous meetings. So they're looking at creating a school based on 21st century skills of course and flexible spaces. And this is going to be a traditional high school and a tech center and a space that is used for education and also for the community. So when we're talking about the gyms and the auditorium and the tech center and the classrooms, we're not just looking at it as this is for students but this is for the community. And how is this best going to work for everyone? Every single design space that they shared has 300,000 square feet of space and has a three station gym, looks different in different iterations, a larger cafeteria student commons area, a larger auditorium, more parking spots by I think 25. So they're looking at 375 parking spots versus what we have now and more bike parking spaces. So they're looking at different ways for students to share the space but also for the community to access it with these different ideas about parking, biking, larger auditorium, a number of gym spaces and a student commons area. So this is just a quick overview of each of the five options. I said four and a half or four ish earlier because C one is connected to C and then it goes through each one of them, option A and then you can see the floor plan and second floor and third floor and lower level. I think it's probably best that I now actually go through all of these tonight and that you watch the architects presentation but I wanted to make you aware of this by sharing my screen to show you there are 3D models, there are specific floor plans and then there are slides that weigh each option against the other. Most of them have the new high school built on the current site which would be on the Northern side of Institute Road. There is one of them which is called option D. There's some price tags, sorry. I just jumped ahead significantly which would essentially close Institute Road have a new road built which would be next to the cemetery on the Southern side of the baseball field and create a unified campus with a much stronger civic presence of the school next to North Avenue. So the first three options have the school on the North side of Institute Road and then this one has it closer to North Ave and I would honestly say from what I've heard and from listening to constituents is every single option at this point has pros and cons not least of which is the bond and the price tag. There are the current estimates for the different plans. So I'm gonna stop there. Are there any questions? Okay, do you want to leave the share on or do you want to go back to the gallery view? I can go back to the gallery view. Good. And I can always share again if needed. Great. So it looks like things have quieted down. What are your questions or comments about these choices? It's very exciting Polly. Anybody? Tony? And then Lee. Yeah, hi. Thank you Barbara. Thank you Polly for the presentation. I just want to share the concern. I would say my first reaction at building a new road is that that's a lot of expense considering that the approach and the access now on North Avenue is I think a fairly good one. My concern and I will send this as an email to you and the other district representatives are that I want to make sure that the building does not interfere with the North Avenue Corridor Plan which calls for a roundabout at the intersection of Institute Road and North Avenue because of the safety for all users. And that and it's important also that a large number of students come via transit. So the transit location and facility on each side of North Avenue and at that intersection needs to be carefully thought out. I would think that in fact, I would recommend that the school district spend 10 to 15,000 to get a pre-feasibility study of that intersection as an important aspect because it would help guide the on grounds pathways and sidewalks and so forth. So I would provide that as input. I want you to get the best school possible. I'm 100% behind whatever bond issue is necessary and I really appreciate the effort of the school board to say let's go first class in Burlington and be tops in the state. Thank you. Thank you, Tony. I have Lee and then Mayumi and I think that is all we will have time for. Holly, I just wanna say that everything you can do to make this a community education center, a multi-purpose center, multi-ages, job retraining, career preparedness for young people, retraining for older people, everything you can do to make this multi-use community education is gonna help pass that bond issue and I too support it 100%. Thanks, Lee. Mayumi? There you are. I just had a question. So is the site gonna be where the old high school is located? Is it gonna be somewhere on that property? Yes. And so if you build a new road, how will people get to North Beach then? I mean, I know that's a weird question, but I mean, will the road then connect? Because I know that a lot of people, they take that road to go to North Beach. So how will people then access North Beach? And I think that's it. Thanks, Mayumi. Okay, so I went really quickly and I didn't actually explain any of the options other than option D, which would require of us to get zoning permission and build a new road to create a new campus because that was honestly the most kind of out of the box design of all of the ones that we were presented with. So to answer your first question, yes, this high school will be built on the existing property at Institute Road and it will require that we raise the buildings that are there. So completely tear them down and properly dispose of the materials which are contaminated with PCBs and then build a new high school at that site. Most of the designs have the new high school kind of up the hill. So if you're imagining Institute Road, how it's this hill that goes down to North Beach and the campsites, the new high school would mostly sit further up the hill from the current high school. And then the various parking options would be where our current high school is. And there are a lot of questions that have come up at meetings. Like I said, I will send you links to the recordings about how are we going to contain the PCBs? How are we going to contain the soil contamination? And there have been some reassuring answers as far as that's concerned. One of the things about option D with the new road is that we would have to get zoning permission from the city of Washington. And I think many of us know that that's easier said than done. And we also would need to figure out like that, that stretch of getting down to North Beach. So we're talking about access to Rock Point and Rock Point School to the campground to North Beach and to make that work for everyone. So I'm not saying that that's a preferred option. I'm not saying that's the only option. I was just putting that out there tonight to say, it's an idea that exists to create a unified campus. I also hear what Tony is saying with the necessity of having really safe transit areas around the high school. And I think these are important things for us to consider as we look at any of the plans. So I hope that answers both of your questions in terms of where the school is going to go and some of the factors that we're dealing with. There are a lot of things to consider. And if you have more questions, please email me. I promise I will send the links to Jess and hopefully you've been receiving emails from Superintendent Flanagan, where he puts posts to the Facebook site for the, sorry, the Facebook, whatever it's called. I don't do Facebook for the Burlington School District and the YouTube channel where they have these meetings recorded so that you can actually hear from the architects and hear some of the questions and get in touch with us before we have to make our decision on April 27th. Thank you, Polly. What are the questions for Polly or Joe or Jean? If there are any. Seeing none, I will say I have bad news and good news. The bad news is that we have no state reps or senators tonight. So we can adjourn the meeting. And I will adjourn it unless I hear an objection. Oh, Barbara, I hate to prolong the meeting, but I do want to say one thing. Although our state reps and senators aren't here. At the end of the day today, the house passed. H448, which is the Burlington charter change. Bill. And so that has passed. It has passed the Senate that passed the house and is heading towards the governor's desk. So it doesn't. Is that. So is that rank choice voting and what else? That's just, that's just cause of fiction. Oh, okay. Very good. Thanks for that. And I can just add on rank choice voting that was delivered to the governor today. So. Great. Thank you, Jess. Anything else for Polly? Sorry, just one more thing, because we have not yet properly introduced on Fayiza Hassan is the new school commissioner for ward two. And she's not here today. But she was sworn in earlier this month. So just so you all know, I'm the current ward three school commissioner. Fayiza Hassan is the ward two school commissioner. And then Jeannie waltz is the district commissioner. So in case you want to get in touch with us, those are the names to look for now. Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. Again, see, are there any objections to adjourning? Seeing none. I will call the meeting adjourned. Thank you very much for staying. You are exemplary public citizens and. Counselors and school board members. Thanks everyone. Thank you, Barbara. You're very welcome. As usual, we try to stuff too much stuff in here, but. Well, you did a job stuffing it all in there. Thanks. Take care and good night. Right. Thank you very much for staying. You are exemplary public citizens and counselors and school board members. Thanks everyone. Thank you, Barbara. Thank you, Barbara for excellent facilitation. Thank you. Thank you, Barbara. You're very welcome.