 Good evening. Today is Monday, April 15th, 2024. Thank you for those of us who have joined us in Contois Auditorium and online for our Burlington City Council meeting. The time is now 6.02 PM. I will just note for the record that at the moment, we are absent Councillor Bergman and Councillor Grant. I am anticipating Councillor Grant will join us. I know Councillor Bergman will be absent this evening. The first item on our agenda is item 1.1, a motion to adopt our agenda. Do I have a motion along those lines? So moved by Councillor Carpenter. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor, we make sure I get it. New Beezer, new Beezer. New Beezer, okay. I thought so. Thank you. Seconded by Councillor New Beezer. Is there any discussion on the agenda? All in favor for adopting our agenda, say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? It's adopted unanimously. We now turn to item 2 on our agenda, a communication from Eric Ramakrishnan, Assistant City Attorney, Brian Pine, CEDO Director, Catherine Shad, CAO, and Scott Barker, I&T Director, regarding discussion of real estate negotiations, regarding potential sale of city property at 200 Church Street. I believe, Mayor, do we have Director Pine on, oh, he's there, you're behind Councillor New Beezer. So, Director Pine, you and anyone else, I think we had discussed perhaps a public-facing portion of the presentation on this item, and then we anticipate we will need to move and do executive session on this following your presentation, but we'll turn to you first. Thank you for the record. I'm Brian Pine, the Director of the Community and Economic Development Office, and with me is... Eric Ramakrishnan, Assistant City Attorney. So, I wanted to present, provide some information that I think will lay the foundation for the conversation about the potential sale of 200 Church Street. The city acquired the property in 2005 to provide both office space and a location. I apologize, Director Pine. Is the microphone on because if it is, it doesn't sound like it's amplifying in the room. But the light is on, so... That's better. Yeah, great. I gotta get really close, fine. All right, so it was acquired by the city in 2005 to provide office space and a location for what was then the nascent Burlington Telecom's network operations center. The city retained ownership when the assets of Burlington Telecom were transferred in 2014 to a holding company that was created essentially to allow the city sufficient time to resolve the legal and financial issues involving Burlington Telecom. Two thirds of this building, it's about, it's 15,000 square feet, roughly 5,000 on each floor. One floor is often referred to as a basement. But two thirds of the building is leased by the city to Burlington Telecom for their offices and their network operation center. Monthly lease payment is plus or minus $10,000 for that space. Total annual operating expenses, so that's just operating. It doesn't include any funds set aside for what we call replacement reserves for capital improvements. It's about $65,000 to operate the building. So it gives you some idea of just order of magnitude what the economics of this piece of real estate involved for the city. We have the Human Resources Department in that space, payroll, which I guess is not really part of human resources, but it's really part of clerk treasurers, I think. Okay, so it's part of HR, thank you, okay. So really HR with its payroll function, as well as the Community Justice Center, not all of their staff can fit there. So there's 80% of the staff is there and the rest are in the courthouse and in Burlington Police Department's building. The plan is to relocate the Community Justice Center at the end of 2025 to a new building being created by Champlain Housing Trust where the VFW has been for the last 50 years, roughly. The city will focus on finding appropriate space to relocate the HR payroll functions because at the end of 2025 with CJC leaving, there will be a whole wing of the building that will be empty and it seemed like a good opportunity to consolidate some of our space that we occupy as a city, some of our footprint. So fast forward to Shores as the company that owns Burlington Telecom. They own and operate six broadband. I refer to them as subsidiaries, they call them properties across six different states. Burlington is one of those and their business model really is, as with all I think broadband companies is to own the building from which they are operating rather than to lease it. They make huge investments in the infrastructure and their buildings and that's just a part of the business model for those who are in this market segment. The asset purchase agreement that you all had access to accomplished a goal which is that of Burlington Telecom and of the city was to give the city time by holding onto this property but giving BT certainty that they would be able to buy the property either through a right of first refusal or through an option, a purchase option and Eric can definitely tell you more about the legal nuances of those but think of the right of first refusal is your neighbor says to you, I'll give you a right of first refusal. If I ever put property on the market, you can be the first one who gets to make an offer and the option is different. You give someone an option, you're saying you can actually buy this property under certain terms and conditions. Whether or not I put it on the market I'm basically agreeing to sell it to you. I think that's okay summary without getting, that's a perfectly summary actually, okay. So the current lease term for 200 church and I'll take full responsibility for mistakenly thinking that it was one of what are called three renewal terms. It's actually the first initial term is the first five year period that really just ended in March. So that's that first five year lease period that we're now in the first renewal term. And so that was a misreading on my part and no one else caught it. So that mistake went into the first document but city attorney Ramakrishnan sent out a clarification on that today. So I think we covered that one. I think two points I just want to highlight in the asset purchase agreement. I think I already did on one of them that is the right of first refusal and the option agreement, the option portion of that agreement, essentially what it means is the city, although it may appear to be advantageous maybe to sit on it hoping that it will grow and increase in value, it still ultimately will be sold and BT is the most I think likely scenario, the most likely buyer under the agreement that we have currently that's both in place and certainly enforceable. We as a city face major systems in the building that are beyond their useful life. And I got some detail that I actually didn't have this detail before. So this is information that is much more precise on how end of useful life they are. The HVAC system consists of three different air handling units and they are anywhere from 13 to eight years beyond useful life, beyond their useful life. Which means that when they go down the parts that you need to repair them are increasingly harder and harder to get. And those air handling units do the ventilation, they do the heat, they do the air conditioning. So it's really a situation where we don't have an option ahead of us other than to invest the substantial capital funds into upgrading that HVAC system and I think I included an estimate and it could be as much as 1.2 million to do that. On the low end, the facility staff estimates it at 8.50 but thinks it's probably somewhere closer to the 1.2. There's also a rubber membrane roof that has been patched and repaired and should make it through this season or this summer but they think that it will probably also need to be replaced, it is at the end of its useful life. Unfortunately, I think one of the things the city hasn't done well for quite a long time is setting aside funds for replacing major capital improvements on buildings and this is no exception with 200 church and so there's not only, there are no reserve funds available for it. It's also I think worth noting that we spend about two, between two and three million a year total city-wide on streets and sidewalks. So that means literally repairing streets and sidewalks and then about another between one and a half and two million for city buildings and turning our fleet over. So when you think of the fire trucks and greening the fleet and turning over to electric vehicles that's all in that number there and that's a very limited amount and we're also limited by the fact that our sustainable infrastructure bond is fully committed and fully basically obligated and we do of course have our high school bond which puts us in a tough place to borrow. So we're really looking at the needs here as both the capital costs that we can avoid as well as the future use of this building for the purposes of Burlington Telecom which was envisioned when the transaction occurred and we think that those reasons are why we're here tonight to talk to you. Thank you, Director Pine. Greatly appreciate you providing that public facing portion of the presentation as is standard practice in order for us to discuss some of the more confidential terms around a proposed real estate transaction. We will need to move into executive session to confirm for the sake of the public there will be no action taken on this item tonight but before a motion on executive session are there any counselors who have any comments or questions focused on the public facing portion of this presentation? Counselor Grant, Counselor Broderick and Counselor Newbezer. Thank you. So I was one who was confused by some of the language so I understand the issues with the repairs that are needed to the building but I guess I wanna be clear as to what is in this agreement. If we choose to keep the building, we could keep the building, we don't have to sell the building. Or is there something in the green? Until 20, we had the dates wrong so I'll just say it wasn't 2029 is what we had in the original document. It's 2034 is when they're exclusive unilateral option meaning they get to buy the building in 2034. They have a whole period, a whole five year period but it starts in 2034. Okay so at some point whether we want to or not we have to sell them the building. If they exercise the option. They don't, it's their option to exercise. So if they want the building, we have to sell the building. Thank you. Councilor Broderick. So looking at the issue, specifically the HVAC issue which you have appraised of 850,000 to 1.2 million where is that figure coming from? It's coming from our facility staff, the city staff based on their conversations and their knowledge of replacing similar sized systems. So it's really, that's why it's a range. That's why the number is such a big range but their costs have gone up significantly since they started looking at this. So they're a little bit probably leaning on the high side because of where costs are now to get projects done. Has the city looked at alternative options in terms of federal programs, state programs, et cetera to replace the HVAC in a hopefully cheaper way than replacing the older technology that we have? No, there's probably, I think that what happens with city facilities is if we're gonna hold on for instance to this building, there's a desire to find any way you can perhaps to make upgrades like that with a building that has a future where you're certain that another entity has got an interest in buying it. There's sort of a trade-off there as far as whether you're gonna make that big public investment for the eventual private entity that has the option to buy it. So I think there's a trade-off to make there and we didn't spend too much time trying to find a more creative way to finance the infrastructure or the capital improvement largely because there's other pressing city capital needs that seem to rise to a higher level. Yeah, I understand that. I'm just looking at the memo when being the chief reason for wanting to make the sale now is the substantial capital investment. I'm just wondering that if looking for a cheaper option putting in that time in research if possible would make not giving it away now a more desirable option and now that we know that we're not waiting until 2029, we're actually waiting until 2034 for that mandatory sell if they so choose to. I personally believe that looking into making it cheaper, those upgrades and potentially raising the appraisal value of the property for that potential sale. It's just something that I've been thinking about since I saw your memo. Thank you. Councilor Nubizer. I have a point of information and questions depending on the answer. Are we gonna be able to speak to this post executive session? Probably not. Okay, I have a few questions then. That's all right. So for the HVAC system, is it the whole system including ductwork that needs to get replaced on all three floors? I'm not a building science person necessarily although I did work for five years for Mont Energy Investment Corporation. So I know a little bit about it. I wouldn't wanna pretend that I know what that scope of work entails. So I don't know if it involves replacing the ductwork or if it's primarily the air handling units and the distribution system and pumps to ensure that it's circulating to the whole building. And really as a result of COVID indoor air quality has taken on a whole new level of importance. So there's, I think there's a need to upgrade what's there in terms of how much air is moved to for safe occupancy. That I do know. Yeah, I know, thank you. A follow up. Yeah, were there estimates done if we did hold on to this building until the deadline 2034, which I assume they're gonna wanna buy it then if they wanna buy it now? What does the increase in value look like? Like has that been thought through just even if it's back of the napkin math? No, I think it's always challenging, especially with a commercial income property. There's so many different variables. It's really super challenging to do that with a commercial property of this type. I'll just give an example with office space. There was a big demand pre COVID and now office space has less value. It's a less desirable thing to own office space. So we don't know where that's gonna go in 10 years. I would not venture to get my crystal ball. It's really fuzzy. No, that's fair. One final question or maybe just a comment. I'm just very, I'm open to being convinced in executive session would love to hear more. I'm very hesitant to be selling off public assets and principle. And given the amount of money coming from the federal government for efficiency upgrades, for infrastructure, for IRA funds, et cetera, if we haven't sort of exhausted all options and we haven't done, I don't know, it just seems like a pretty big give in potential gain down the road. So I guess that's where I'm at now, but we'll see whether info there is. I would note that when the federal government puts out requests for proposals, they're really looking for buildings like this, like schools, true public buildings that actually serve a main public purpose. When you have a building where two thirds of the square footage is used by a private entity, they're not, it's not super competitive. So I can tell you from a little experience, writing some pretty big grants in my life that they're not gonna, the federal government's not gonna look at a building that is two thirds commercial activity as an investment opportunity for federal funds. I just wanted to add as the person who is helping to oversee our grants team, this is something that I have asked them to prioritize because we know that we are running low on bond money and that we have a lot of deferred maintenance and it is something that, as Brian mentions, we have not been very successful in finding grants for municipal buildings for this kind of work full stop and it's even more difficult because we are sharing this building with BT. So I think that has certainly factored into the calculus here that we could always keep looking but really over the past two years that we've had the grants team, that is something that is always on their list as a top priority and we haven't found any grants to apply to at this point. Just one more quick point if that's right. Just that if we could tie improvements to climate and energy in some way, a lot of those federal funds can be accessed for commercial buildings. Just throw that out there though. Thank you, Councilor Newbezer. So I am mindful of time. We had set aside 30 minutes for this which is why I indicate that I doubt we will have an opportunity for further comment after executive session. But are there any other Councillors with questions or comments for this portion of the discussion or the Mayor's office? Councillor Cain. Thanks. So when did we become aware of the urgent needs to replace the HVAC system? I don't work in the facilities department so you have to ask the facilities folks. I don't know, I'm not sure. Thanks. Do you guys have a sense or have you thought about, like have you considered what the return on investment might be in making the upgrades, the capital improvements in the building? Having done energy efficiency financing, I can tell you that owning a building of this type in order to, if you're looking at a straight financial payback, the term of ownership would need to be quite a bit longer than what remains in this 10-year lease period that we have. Payback from an investment standpoint as far as return on investment, it goes out pretty far on an improvement like this. Thanks. And just to be clear, it sounds like you guys have not considered replacing the HVAC system with heat pumps or a greener alternative system. I'd have to check with Kim on that. I think right now the price, I mean the ballpark price that they have is whether we go with a ducted system, we have the advantage of being able to do a whole building heat pump system, but that's still in the ballpark number that I checked with her at least a couple months ago and she said it was still gonna be in that ballpark as far as capital requirements. So you think it would cost at least $850,000 to install a heat pump for the building? She thought so as well because in order to make sure that that is producing, you need to also address building envelope issues and you need to make some upgrades to the building envelope as well, yeah. Thanks. And while you say your crystal ball is murky and you're not sure what will happen to commercial real estate in the next decade, I think the fact that the purchaser, the party with the option in a decade to purchase would like to move forward now, I think speaks volumes. You referenced that commercial real estate prices are down as a result of COVID. It would seem to me like we would be selling at the low point. Our downtown also has a lot of upcoming development, a lot of development that has been stalled for a long time as you're well aware as CEDO touches a lot of these projects. So I'm having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around why we would sell now unless the purchaser was willing to pay a price significantly above current market value. And just to clarify, we approached them, they didn't, it wasn't their idea. We were facing this challenge, so we approached them and they understood us, yeah. Okay, thank you. Just before moving further, I would note to the folks here from town meeting TV that I'm receiving some feedback from folks online that our video and audio feed is not publicly available. So if there's a way to try to correct that. And while we're doing that Director Pine, I know we've had a pretty good discussion here now and open session to confirm, do you feel there's still a need for us to move into executive session to discuss some of the more confidential terms of the proposed transaction? I think it'd be helpful. I think we have certain aspects of the proposed agreement that we haven't felt we could discuss in public. So we'd like to be able to do that with you. Okay, great. We'll become a public document if you all decide to proceed, obviously. Absolutely. Any further comments, questions from the council? All right, if there is a motion to move into executive session, I would turn to Councillor Carpenter and because this is involving a real estate transaction, I'll note that we only require one motion here. I would move that the council enter into executive session to discuss real estate negotiations in conjunction with 200 Church Street pursuant to one VSA 313A2 to include the mayor, chief of staff, legal council, the CEDO director, chief administrative officer and the chief innovation officer. Motion by Councillor Carpenter. Is there a second to that motion? Seconded by Councillor Shannon. Is there any discussion on the motion? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote, all in favor of Councillor Carpenter's motion to move into executive session. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? We are now in the executive session. The council will go to the Bush or conference room. I would anticipate that we will hopefully return in no more than 15 minutes and resume with our agenda at 6.45 p.m. and hopefully work out some of the tech issues in the interim. Thank you. So the time is 7.03 p.m. And the council just exited executive session. We'll ask for order in con toys, please. Thank you. To folks attending online, my understanding is that when we commenced our meeting as a council that perhaps we did not have a video and audio at that point in time, the council has spent the vast majority of the past hour in executive session on the potential sale of city property. So you didn't miss much in short. But I believe that it is now working and it is now 7.04 p.m. We did have a legislative update as item three on our agenda scheduled before public forum and thank you Mr. Fian for your patience. But we do need to turn to public forum now at a time certain. We would like to note that we do have a process for public forum and I speak for the full council that we share a strong commitment to an orderly process and one that honors all voices and respectful discourse. We will turn first to folks who are Burlington residents in person here in con toys auditorium. We would then turn online to Burlington residents. We would then turn back to folks in person who are non Burlington residents and then back online to wrap up public forum. At this point in time, we have 15 individuals who have signed up for public forum and are Burlington residents here in person. As I call your name, we would ask that you please come up to the table here. Please make sure that the microphone is turned on and the green light is illuminated. Told that you also need to get very close to the microphone in order for folks to hear you on these devices. So please do that. As folks come forward for public forum, I would ask that you please direct your comments to the chair. Please be respectful. Please do not engage in any personal attacks. With that, we will start public forum. The first individual signed up as a Burlington resident is Steve Goodkind to be followed by Nick Prasampieri. Steve. Oh, and I will remind folks that we are maintaining the two minute limit on public forum and the timer is over there. Thank you, Lori. I think you need to hit the microphone, make sure that green light is on and then get very close to it. Now, that's the different green light you need on the microphone base itself. You need to make sure that you hit the button and that the green light is on. Hit the push button and then. Thank you, President Trevers. Tonight, BED is going to be presenting an update on their zero energy plan. I think it's part of your reports on the battle against climate change. There were limited materials provided before the meeting, but from what I could tell, it does appear that there's one very critical element, one very critical requirement lacking from their report. As several counselors might remember, as part of the resolution that approved the steam pipe to the hospital, there was a requirement that BED begin to include CO2 emissions as measured at the stack of McNeil in their climate change reports and their efforts to deal with climate change in our city. I don't see anything in this information provided tonight that has any inkling of that. I think it's imperative that the council tell BED they have to do this and basically send their report back for the proper revisions. This was a requirement put in a previous city council resolution. It's pretty important and it really sets the stage for what Burlington's gonna actually do because if we're not gonna look at stack emissions from McNeil, we're really not looking at anything and the zero report isn't even worth reading. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Goodkind. We next have Nick Persampieri to be followed by Laina Greenberg. I don't see the clock working. Do I need to turn it on or? The clock will be running here. You just need to make sure the microphone light is lit up green and if you could get as close as possible to the microphone, that'd be great. Thank you. Congratulations to the new councilors and the new chair. I'm Nick Persampieri. I'm a Ward 3 resident. Burlington needs a new climate policy and it needs to transfer responsibility for development of climate policy away from Burlington Electric, the operator of the largest source of greenhouse gases in the state. It needs to transfer responsibility for development of climate policy to a city official or department independent of Burlington Electric. The city's main policy, the net zero energy roadmap defines net zero as reducing and eliminating fossil fuel use from the heating and ground transportation sectors. This policy is flawed in two fundamentally different ways. First, it focuses on reducing fossil fuel use rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The rest of the world defines net zero in terms of dealing with greenhouse gas emissions. The concept means reducing emissions so that they're in balance with uptake of carbon dioxide emissions. Secondly, the policy is flawed because it emits entire sectors. It focuses only on the heating and ground transportation sectors, ignores the electric generation sector and the airport. We need to end this false distinction between fossil fuels and renewables. Some of the renewables that are promoted by city policy and that large quantities of greenhouse gases. Thank you very much. Thank you, Nick. Next up, we have Lena Greenberg to be followed by Dave Maher. Hey, everyone. Council terms are short. They're very short in this city. Even the mayoral term is quite short in our city. The UN climate chief says we have two years to act on drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. That means it is your job. If you aren't sure where to start, I can assure you that there is a roomful and more than that a city full of people who are on the edge of our seats waiting to help you. We are here. We have lots of ideas. We will write resolutions and email them to you. Maybe we already have. There's so many things we can do right now and there are so many things that will take longer term planning but we don't have time to waste on saying, oh, let's study it or oh, let's put it in the hands of someone who is never gonna approve it or oh, it's simply too challenging to address the defining issue of our decade and of the rest of our lives and our children's lives. So welcome to this new term. Thank you for your service. Please call on the community of people who are here to help and write some good climate policy that's gonna put Burlington back in the good graces of greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Thank you. Thank you, Lena. Next we have Dave Maher to be followed by Greg Hancock. Good evening. My name is Dave Maher. I live in the New North End. I'm gonna tell a story about my older brother Howard. He had a hard time growing up. He was a smart guy. He got 100 on his New York State chemistry regions but he never did well in school. He underachieved. He didn't put much effort into it. He went into college but dropped out after the first semester and he came home and just sat around the house. Didn't get a job, didn't do much for chores, didn't do much of anything. So after over a year, my father said to him, Howard, you got to get out of here. Give you a bus ticket and 50 bucks to get you started but you need to get out of here. So he bought a bus ticket to White Plains and brought the $50 with him and he checked into the YMCA on Mermenek Avenue. After the $50 ran out, he got a job at the deli next to the YMCA. That was the first job he'd ever had in his life and the first time he had any money in his pockets. A year later, he said that was the best thing that ever happened to him. So there's two lessons from this. One is sometimes people need a push. Not a helping hand, not a handout but a push. To get on their feet, to get working and to live independently. And second, we could use housing like the YMCA used to provide. Simple, clean and affordable to somebody making minimum wage. So I hope you'll keep these two lessons in mind as you develop plans to address homelessness in Burlington. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next we have Greg Hancock to be followed by Romeo Herman. Good evening. Thank you. Don't need to push a button. I think the microphone should be on if you could just speak very closely to the microphone. If you see a green light lit up on the base of the microphone, you're good. You may have just turned it off. I'm hearing. Okay, this is good. You're good. Your name's Greg Hancock. My family, my wife and my children lived in Burlington for more than 20 years. I want to welcome the new mayor, Emma, and our new counselors who are here for their first session tonight. I know some of you. Good to see you. I want to thank you all for your willingness and dedication to serving many needs that we have of this great city. My comments tonight pertain to the BED presentation that you're going to assume here and hear about in the road map. BED and especially McNeil Generating Station have been a focus of my and many of our concerned citizens for several years now. There's much to parse and discuss, but my limited two minutes are now 114. I want to talk about the negative health effects and emissions beyond greenhouse gases, mostly CO2, which have already been well covered by other, on other occasions, you'll hear about tonight from some other speakers. We all know that the plant is the largest station emitter of greenhouse gases in the state of Vermont with more than 400,000 tons annually emitted. What about the other gases that are released which aren't in the net zero energy road map or published very readily? Well, the recent US EPA data about McNeil plant shows that there's 149 tons annually of nitrous oxides, 585 tons of carbon monoxide, which reduces oxygen to the brain and the heart, irritates lungs and heart, and the VOCs are volatile organic compounds like benzene and formaldehyde, which irritates eyes, nose, throats and increases the risk of cancer, 16 tons annually come out of that stack. And on and on, it sort of reads like a, like a Tom Lear song about the elements. So I just wanted to bring that up and inconvenient facts are written off sometimes ignored, but it's time to pay attention and act now. Thank you. Next up is Romeo Harman to be followed by Ashley Adams. Thank you, Mr. President. Good afternoon, Mr. President, Mayor, city councilors, city administrative team, city staff, fellow Berlingtonians, residents. I'm here to support item 9.5. The Burlington Fire Department community response team has emerged as an indispensable asset in the city addressing the opioid crisis within our city. With a proven track record of success, extending financial support for the continuation of this vital service is not just prudent, but essential. By utilizing the remaining opioid settlement funds, the Fire Department can sustain community response team beyond the initial six months pilot phase, ensuring ongoing assistance to those affected by the opioid crisis, investing in the CRT, not just now, but long-term, is not merely a matter of financial support, but a commitment to the well-being of our city and safety. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is Ashley Adams to be followed by Nolan Rogers. Congratulations and welcome to the new session. My name is Ashley Adams. I'm a Burlington resident, a mom, a business owner. And as I frequently point out, our window of opportunity to salvage a habitable climate, sufficiently biodiverse to support human life is quickly slamming shut. And that's why I'm here to speak about the net zero roadmap, a document that masquerades as a climate action plan while ignoring 80% of Burlington's emissions. The roadmap boasts that Burlington gets 100% of power from renewable generation. Yet climate scientists tell us we need to switch to non-combustion sources of power, not more renewables. The term renewable has become a greenwashing term that allows heavy polluters like Burlington Electric to continue to run the McNeil generating plant, the largest stationary source of greenhouse gas pollution in the state of Vermont, and call it climate neutral. Many people in our community have spent countless hours trying to educate decision makers. They're lawyers, ecologists, policy experts, and other well-informed people who have attempted to connect those in power with the latest science and sound policy, even working to bring two prominent climate scientists here last June for the McNeil biomass symposium. If you did not attend, I urge you to watch the recording. The climate scientists made it clear that the McNeil plant must shut down, just as climate scientists around the world have been urging for these types of plants. Burning wood emits more carbon pollution than all fossil fuels even pull. In fact, if we were to burn fossil fuels, we would allow trees to continue to grow old and sequester and store ever more carbon, support biodiversity, mitigate floods, and clean our water and air. They would continue, in the words of Dr. Bill Mooma, as quote, essential organs of a living planet of Earth's operating system. Discussions about shutting down the plant and canceling the $42 million steam pipe to the hospital must start today. Furthermore, our climate policy needs to be removed from the electric utility, where the extreme conflict of interest will continue to undermine real action on climate. Burlington deserves a credible climate action plan. No utility should be crafting climate policy. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next, we have Nolan Rogers to be followed by Jane McDougall. Hi, council. My name's Nolan Rogers. I'm a Ward 3 resident of Burlington. I'm here also to just mention a few things about the BED net zero energy roadmap. The main thing is that, well, first I want to acknowledge that I'm kind of grateful that we have energy utility partially operated by the city. And I think they're doing a good job generally speaking, being a relatively clean utility compared to some other places in the United States. But that being said, I would love to see a little bit more transparency or rather a lot more transparency in the documentation that goes along with stuff like this. Obviously we commissioned a report to talk about what we can do to get down to net zero. And that report and updates aren't super clear. I mean, I feel like as a resident that BED is kind of holding the information a little close to the chest. It's not really the whole report or the updates rather aren't easily accessible on the website. And the presentation that you're gonna see tonight has a few of the graphs that are presented as the updates. And so I guess really clearly I would love to see, first of all, if the city council could encourage BED or just to publish the report and the updates yearly from the company that it's commissioned from on the BED or city council website, that would be great. So we can just look at the report as citizens. And then also I would love to see how many gas hookups are deleted or gotten rid of every year in Burlington from a given household. I think that really goes to show how much we're moving away from fossil fuels. And that's kind of a direct measure of how much we can get away rather than some not super strong indicators of reduction that we're gonna see tonight. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next up we have Jane McDougal to be followed by Jack Hansen. Hey, my name is Shane McDougal. And what I wanna talk about tonight is the mono auditorium I've been there. And I wanna say that the auditorium needs a new mic, new heating system. And because I've been in there year 2016, it was like an ice box. We had to wear coats in there and the heat didn't work. So when are you going to get that building fix? It was built in World War II. Thank you very much. Next up we have Jack Hansen to be followed by Ryan Hagen. Hey everyone, thanks for your service. I know most of you, but not all. My name's Jack Hansen. I previously served on the city council from 2019 to 2022. I'm here to talk as well about the Netsier Energy Roadmap. I agree with previous speakers. I think the framework in the roadmap itself to begin with doesn't go far enough in terms of what we need to do to eliminate emissions in Burlington. But even within the roadmap, I think we should all be concerned at where we're at versus where we said we would be. And I was on the council when we originally adopted this. We declared that this was a climate emergency that we needed to do everything in our power to eliminate emissions by 2030. Here we are almost about halfway into that. And we've only reduced emissions by 18%. So I mean, I think it's clear to me that with only five and a half years left, I don't think we're gonna be able to get that entire 82%. But this isn't an all or nothing thing. It's not, we can't just say, oh, we're not gonna hit it, so we're not even gonna try. We have to get as far along the path as we can and get as close to net zero by 2030 as we possibly can. We're off to a slow start. A lot more policy is needed. And I'm hopeful that this new council and new administration is going to really step up from where we've been at and implement a lot more robust policies. For example, and to Lena's point, you've got a room full and a city full of people that are ready and eager to help. So we're not just saying this is on the 12 of you or the 13 of you and the city team to do this. We're here to help you and be a partner in this work. And I think we need, just as one example, because my time's running out, we need building performance standards to drive down emissions in buildings. Our current patchwork of building policies isn't enough. And we also need to enforce existing city policy. Thank you. Thank you. Next up we have Ryan Hagan to be followed by Dan Castragiano. Hey everybody, my name is Ryan Hagan. I'm new to Burlington. And excited to be here. And thank you all for your service and congrats on the new positions. I just wanted to echo what many people are saying here about getting the accounting around the Climate Action Plan to be more comprehensive and acting as quickly as possible in all this. I think it is almost impossible to move too quickly or too boldly on climate action. And yeah, I think the planetary emergency is the biggest challenge we face right now, both globally and locally. And I would urge you, I would hope that you look, that you make sustainability, sort of the organizing principle of the policy and investment decisions that are being made because I think it touches everything and every policy and investment really is an opportunity to move forward in the right direction when it comes to this. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next up we have Dan Castragiano. To be followed by, I'm sorry if I'm reading this last name wrong, Jackson Wolves. Thanks, hi, mayor and city council. Thanks, yeah, Castragiano. I appreciate that. Here to also speak on climate tonight, the Biden administration just approved something called the Seaport Oil Terminal off the coast of Texas, which is going to be new fossil fuel infrastructure, which will be two million barrels of oil every single day being exported from the United States, which shows that we need action at every level and that means locally here in Burlington. So that was news just this week. I urge everybody, all 13 of you to follow through on your campaign promises to take climate action. And speaking specifically to the roadmap, I think we need a new plan. This plan does not include the two biggest sources of emissions that the city of Burlington owns and operates, so that's the McNeil generating station and the airport, so we need to, we need a new plan and we need to decouple it from our utility. So it has to be somebody else in charge. It's been five years, we need a new plan. We need to count everything appropriately and then we need to be really, really aggressive to get to zero emissions as quickly as we can. That also includes things like walk bike infrastructure and public transit and as Lena and Jack both said, there are so many people here who are willing to help. There's a lot of expertise, there are a lot of volunteers. Even something as simple as like quick build infrastructure to put in bike lanes. Like you need volunteers and the city does not have money because there's a budget deficit, we'll do it. So just let us know how we can help and please take action as quickly as you can. Thank you. Thanks Dan. Next we have Jackson Wolves to be followed by Chris Gish and then Lee Morgan is our last speaker in person. Thank you city council. I wanted to echo the concerns of some of the other residents regarding the Burlington climate plan. I agree that none of is being done and I would like to see more done. Thank you. Thank you. We next have Chris Gish and then Lee Morgan. I'm also here to talk to you all tonight about the net zero roadmap by BED's own statistics. We are well behind where we would need to be to meet the goals they set in the net zero roadmap by 2030. In BED's IRP, the integrated resource plan they submitted to the PUC, they admit that they are not planning to meet net zero goals even by 2040 and are expecting electrification to mirror national trends. But that's not even what I really wanna talk to you about tonight because the whole net zero energy plan roadmap needs to be scrapped. The term net zero actually refers to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. It does not refer to eliminating fossil fuel use in some sectors while ignoring most of the emissions that we cause in the city. Specifically, our current roadmap ignores emissions from quote renewable gas and other biofuels and it ignores all the emissions from McNeil and the airport. These two facilities, McNeil and the airport that we operate, the city of Burlington, each emit roughly twice the total carbon budget included in the roadmap. So that means that about 80% of the emissions in the city aren't even counted at all in this roadmap. Our previous mayor called this document the quote, most ambitious climate policy of any city in America, which is shameful to my eyes. It's shameful to make a plan that ignores most of the emissions your city causes and then called ambitious and a model for other cities to follow. I'm really hopeful that this new council and new administration can make a new start and make some real progress for climate action. We should not have our utility which operates the most polluting facility in the state coordinate our climate plan. We need a new plan developed by a new office outside of BED to develop the plan accountable to a citizen advisory board and then we need to take action now. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. We have Lee Morgan and then we have one speaker signed up online, Karen Sita. Hello folks, my name is Lee Morgan. I live in Ward seven and my pronouns are they them. I'm here to ask you tonight to vote unanimously to extend the funding for the CRT program past its pilot period. My thoughts are a little scattered because I was sitting here, I was looking at the agenda items and I read the report for CRT and I'm deeply moved. The results are incredible. I think it's undeniable that it's working. So I wanna talk to you about why I think a unanimous vote is important. Back before I got sober over 16 years ago, clean and sober, I mean the medical intervention dismal. I mean, it was pretty much limited to getting your stomach pumped or drinking a charcoal milkshake. And that was about it. Also the attitude even among medical professionals much different than it is now. I remember having a lot of conversation with medical professionals about willpower or being treated like this was like an issue of my morals or my character or my drive or ambition. And it's just not. And we know that now. And that's the thing that's very different. And I think something that gets lost a little bit when we think of the fire department and firefighters. Any firefighter who's also an EMT is a medical professional and a subject matter expert. And we need to listen to the medical professionals. And we need to listen to the people who have been affected by the CRT program. I've talked to people who live on the street. I've talked to people who've received the services. I've talked to street outreach. And I mean, it's the opinion is resounding that this is saving lives. And if you're thinking of voting, no, I would urge you to think of an amendment that you can live with. I think we need to show everybody how important this is. And I'm just so moved by the results. And I hope you are too. Thanks. Thanks very much, Lee. We have no other speakers signed up here in Contoy's auditorium. We have one speaker signed up online. Will the clerk's office put the timer up online? Or is that something I'm supposed to do? All right. Karen Seda is the one individual signed up online. Karen, you should be able to unmute yourself. Go ahead. Yes, can you hear me, Mr. President? Yes, I can. Okay, thank you, President Pavers. I just want to say, I usually show up, but I've been too busy freeing my girls from the bare minimum and freeing my girls from the imprisonment of self-hate. And most importantly, I've been very busy showing the federal courts. And one day the U.S. Supreme Court, how pretty girl problems are indeed constitutional legal problems. Heavy is the crown, but in my case, heavy is the scepter. I do want to say, Mr. President, it is my hope that the new mayor, Mayor Mulvaney Stanek, will create a proclamation on the behalf of black people, African people, just as quickly as there was a proclamation created on the behalf of LGBTQ community. I understand her loyalty to that group, but I also have my loyalties to my group. And you can't blame a girl for being loyal. And another thing I do want to say, many people might, there's no secret that I hold sincerely held religious beliefs. However, it does not mean that I cannot engage with this new council and the new mayor with an MLK type of love, a Jesus type of love. Because honestly, if I had to choose between my sins, I prefer the sin of vanity than the sin of being a hater. So I just wanted to make that very clear. And by the way, I do want to say, I enjoy seeing women like Mayor Mulvaney Stanek and Councillor Shannon competing for high paying, high leadership positions, ladies, this is where we should be competing. Nothing else matters except competitions like that. So I do want to say that's all I have to say. And also shout out to cowboy Carter, shout out to Beyonce for reminding me that I can be a black girl and enter white spaces and be okay and happy and be a pretty happy black girl. They do exist, especially in the state of Vermont. So shout out to Ms. Carter. Like Ms. Beyonce, you will never break my soul and you can never dim my light. Shout out to all my girl bosses too, boss hard. Thank you, Mr. President. Let's go ahead and close public forum. We'll turn back now to item three on our agenda and welcome Jamie Fian to the table. Jamie Fian works at Premier Piper Eggleston and Kramer here in Burlington and has been the city's representative in Montpelier, this legislative session. I know it's a busy time right now in Montpelier so I appreciate you're making your way back to Burlington here, Jamie. I know we had initially set this for 30 minutes in an earnest attempt to get us back on track. I'm gonna try to shave five minutes off of that and we'll put maybe 25 minutes up on the clock if that's possible or we'll try to keep ourselves honest to that. And Jamie, if you have a presentation of sorts that you could keep up to 10 minutes, that would be great. Thank you for being here. Yes, no, it's my pleasure to be here. It is a busy time. I look forward to adjourn when I get my haircut at some point but I am Jamie Fian with Premier Piper Eggleston and Kramer and it's been my privilege to be the legislative liaison between the city and the legislature for the past several years. I am cognizant of your time so I'll speak to whatever issues you wanna speak to but there are a few priorities that have been identified both by the mayor's office and you all that I am prepared to provide an update. Let me first just speak to the legislative calendar. Things are starting to pick up in Montpelier with a pace towards adjournment. I think they are on target for a mid-May timeframe for that adjournment date. Couple of must pass moving bills are starting to come out of committee first and foremost the fiscal year 25 budget bill is about to be voted on in Senate appropriations. It's that budget bill that really drives the length of the session and everything else has to be ready to go with it or it doesn't make it. As we approach these final weeks we'll start to see some of the issues funnel or window down and also as is typical in the Vermont legislature at least we'll start to see issues appear on other bills. They'll take a bill that is somewhat germane to the issue and combine it with bills to consolidate and make it easier to get across the finish line. The budget bill is one example that often is home to many, many policy bills that up until this point are standalone pieces of legislation. So it'll be a confusing time over the next couple of weeks but we'll do our best to try to keep those clear for you. In terms of specific Burlington issues the this year's municipal charter change is making its way through the process. That is H-881 that is the sole change is expanding BED's line of credit for liquidity and capital purposes if needed. That bill receive unanimous support in the house government operations committee and is now on the house calendar for consideration this week. I expect it will pass. I expect the Senate government operations committee will take it up quickly and similarly pass the bill. So that's on a good track. Last year's charter change H-474 related to just cause or no cause evictions continues to be pending in house government operations committee where it hasn't received any attention to date. I can tell you that there was a study to look at just cause and no cause evictions added to a separate housing bill H-829 by the house a couple of weeks ago. That bill has been referred to the Senate Economic Development Committee where its fate is uncertain at the moment not because of the charter change or excuse me the eviction study but there's some multiple appropriations for housing and other housing related issues that will likely end up in the budget bill. The controversy is related to the funding source that the house attached to these housing improvements which is a personal income tax proposal. Mr. President if there are any questions as I move along or anyone feel free to interrupt me on these bills whatever your procedure is I'm happy to reflect to that. Sure very much appreciate your being here and I will say just got some feedback from some folks. I know you have to almost like it's almost uncomfortably close you have to get this microphone but why don't we just take a brief pause there and I'll turn to our counselors here at the table to see if they have any questions for you and then dependent on time if there's any additional issues you'd like to turn back to we can go from there. Yeah there's certainly additional issues I want to speak to. No doubt. Why don't we briefly just stop here for a moment are there any counselors at the moment that have any questions for Mr. Fianne? Okay, Councilor Carpenter. I guess two and the proposal to do an income tax for those over 500,000 is not gonna fly is that your assessment? Well what I'm hearing is that there's not an appetite in the Senate to take it up at this point. So does that effectively kill the proposals for the housing that might have been tied to it? No, as I say the budget will contain the housing it's really a matter of how much is available to put towards housing within the budget construct so I fully expect there will be money towards housing programs, rental assistance, et cetera just a matter of again how much the budget writers are able to negotiate. Okay and the other question I had there's a lot of work going on around permit reform, one of the issues we had followed was wanting delegated authority in Act 250. I understand that's been moved to another strategy of designating tiers that would be exempt which might be acceptable but I'm just curious on the timeline that that might, if they go that route, adopt the tiers what would that mean for a Burlington in terms of our ability or the timing of when that might happen? Yep and housing is one I was gonna speak to a little bit later but absolutely we can speak to it now. The house has passed a significant bill H687 I believe the number is, I'll check my notes which does just that, there were numerous studies over the last 18 months or so that looked at Act 250 reform and the best method to go about doing that. You're right the city has advocated for several years now saying cities like Burlington have robust Act 250 zoning and permitting of its own that don't really see the benefit of having a duplicative Act 250 review shouldn't have to have that Act 250 review. That effort I firmly believe has helped to support what is being proposed in several bills including this house passed H687 which designates certain tiers based upon designation urban versus rural based upon existing infrastructure to be able to handle proposed growth and planning with the idea that the state or at least this legislature wants to encourage growth in these urban areas that are situated for it and in return to have less growth in the more rural areas and so Burlington would fall under what's known as the Tier 1A which is for those locations that have designated areas that have all those factors that I referenced before. Each of the bills under consideration and the Senate Natural Resources Committee at the moment have a Tier 1A variation or element to them. It's not controversial. The controversy rests with other parts of the bill that may or may not be suitable for all. But I'm hopeful that a Tier 1A will get through the process. In terms of timeline, there are some variations depending upon the bill, how quickly that'll happen but there's an effort to move that up as quickly as possible. I believe I remember seeing 2026 would be around there with perhaps earlier implementation steps in 2025. Another housing issue is emergency housing, an issue that I know has been a priority for you all and for the mayor's office. There are several moving pieces here. The FY25 budget bill has tens of millions of dollars directed towards emergency housing. By this, I mean general assistance program. There's also a separate bill H879 that has passed the House and is pending in the Senate that will modernize the general assistance program to be, well, it's put it in statute, have it more transparent, more predictable and that will address the program in FY26 moving forward. The thinking is that to learn over the next year about the implications of this new program and maintain the existing program with additional funding for the next fiscal year. So I'm confident that this will be addressed in either the budget or in this standalone H879. I think we touched on most, there are some other housing bills that I'll continue to allude to in my written updates to you all. I do wanna talk to public transit issues and developments. The annual T bill is one of those must pass bills much like the general fund budget bill, the T bill appropriates money in the transportation sector for various modes, for infrastructure and for administration. The Senate Transportation Committee has included in its version of the T bill a $1 million one-time bridge funding to Green Mountain Transit to address its financial uncertainties. It's contingent on a few things, including a resumption of fares, discussions with other transit agencies on more efficient commuter routes that overlap or interlap various service territories, as well as Green Mountain Transit looking at its own administrative efficiencies, route efficiencies and others. So this is poised to be adopted by the Senate. Possibly by the end of this week, certainly soon thereafter, Green Mountain Transit is gonna be appearing in front of the House Transportation Committee this week to also make its pitch for additional funding beyond what's currently in the budget. And so that'll be a subject I believe of negotiation in the conference committee form between the House and the Senate for the T bill. Also in the T bill is upwards of four and a half to as much as $7 million in some federal carbon reduction funds, which will be used for capital purchases of electric vehicle for transit fleet, both in Green Mountain Transit and other transit providers around the state. So in other words, to remove the diesel and other fossil fuel vehicles from their fleet. There's hope that that can make a pretty good dent in the current fleet and as I say, move towards more efficient and in a lot of cases, right size of the vehicles to be reflective of the route and not necessarily the larger vehicles that we see around now. Switching gears to substance abuse, prevention and treatment. The Senate Health and Welfare Committee is poised to act this week on H72, which will set up an overdose prevention center pilot here in Burlington. That committee has been considering testimony for the last several weeks, including last week from Mayor Mulvaney-Stanek who brought to the committee a couple of amendments, largely in reflection to a meeting she had with Burlington Fire Department as the EMS responders. And those amendments were warmly received. They were primarily related to the trained staff that will be on site to both provide treatment when necessary but also to perhaps reduce the number of EMS calls that may be sent to the facility. The second amendment was to, like any pilot, there's a lot of studies and reports that we'll do back based upon how it unfolds. But the suggestion was originally to look at the impact on opioid overdoses and the Fire Department and Mayor's Office felt why not broaden that study because EMS calls are in addition, not only just overdoses, but in addition to other opioid related issues. And so as I say, the committee is poised to adopt those amendments and a bill moving forward. It has a funding attached to it of $1.1 million that will come from the state's advisory settlement fund. And there is capacity in that fund for this appropriation. So I'm hopeful that will also emerge from committee this week and it'll have to go to the Appropriations committee before it goes to the Senate floor. I think I'll stop there and see if you have any questions of these issues that I've talked about or some others that I haven't. Sure, Councilor Broderick and then Councilor Nubizer. Thank you, I'm going back to transportation. I'm wondering given the current GMT funding stipulations, has there been any talk in the future of having a path and the steps to reach a path to return to fair, free public transit while also being able to keep GMT funded? There has been a recent study to look at funding of transit in Vermont, the most recent being this past year and it's been studied previous to that. That was being driven not only by the declining revenues that GMT was experiencing primarily for going fair, free during the pandemic and until this month. But also the sort of the struggles that transit agencies are facing trying to raise revenue locally either through property taxes, through assessments, through in-kind contributions from businesses, et cetera. Currently the state's rural providers are fair, free and that is a much smaller financial appropriation. I believe it's around a $500,000 appropriation as opposed to 2.9 million or so for Green Mountain Transit to continue fair, free. But it's a different, you can't compare the two because Green Mountain Transit system is different than the other rural providers. The other, some of the other rural providers are already fair for even before the pandemic era in position of fair, free across the state. So it's a driving factor, but it's not a sole factor in terms of Green Mountain Transit's fiscal picture. It really is a combination of all of the above and really a need for a more predictable and stable funding source in the future to be added to what's currently there. So talking about a stable funding source, what has been raised in terms of how can we, in the future, what are our options for a stable funding source going forward on any level of government? Yeah, the recommendations from the most recent study focused on, try to tie it to some sort of nexus, right? So that there's a nexus to the transportation system. And there were a series of proposals that were floated to the legislature. One was to either have a surcharge or increase in the motor vehicle registration fee. You could also sort of change the nature of that fee from a one-time, one fee for all to an ad valorem, which is kind of based on ability to pay, value of vehicle, et cetera. There was a proposal to add a tax on delivery of, home delivery of what we received from UPS and others. What's retail delivery of goods, those in excess of $100. And there are a series of other types of user type fees that I mentioned. The legislature reviewed the report at this point. I wouldn't say there's a political appetite to enact any of those at the moment. I think there's also concern by some in the legislature that they need to look at the transportation fund in general, which is also underperforming because of declining gas tax revenues, because of other longstanding revenues that continue to be a challenge. And so transit will certainly be an element within that larger look. But at this point, we've given them plenty of opportunities and options to find some additional revenues just to rather, as they say, the political will to pick one of those. Thank you. How much time do I have in my five minutes? Am I still good? One more question? Sure. I mean, we have, I would say about eight or nine more minutes on this topic before wanting to move on to the next one. So if you have one other question, then we'll turn to counselor Nubizer and see if there's any other counselors. I'll hold my last question now. I'll put it as an email. It's not as pertinent to Burlington as probably the rest of the questions. Okay. Thank you, Councilor Broderick. Councilor Nubizer? Just a quick comment and then a question for you and a potentially a request. One, I just in general, I hope that the city in your role, just in general, we can agree that we ought to be asking those at the very top to be paying their fair share as a way to generate new revenue. And I know that's a controversial idea in Montpelier. But it seems obvious, particularly when all of our constituents are phasing facing record property tax hikes. Additionally, so I did read through your report which was really helpful and I really appreciate the work. So thank you for that. I didn't see a section on climate in particular. And so I wondered, I imagine it's a holdover. All of your work is probably a holdover from previous administration. You're switching to a new administration in the middle of a legislative session. But I wondered if at this point it is possible to get updates on climate even if it was sort of top priorities. I'm thinking in particular, there's a bill on thermal networks. There's a bill reforming the renewable energy standard and rate payer protection as well that I think are probably really pertinent to our work here on the council. Thank you. No, I mean to your point, I'm happy to add a whole new sort of category for climate related bills. Great. Councilor Litwin. Thanks. And thank you for the helpful report as well. I did wanna ask a question. I became sort of aware that through Dr. Levine's testimony on the Senate Appropriations Bill that there was about $800,000 worth of cuts to prevention measures and simultaneously while we're talking about harm reduction. And so when I read your report, it looked like that $795,000 was coming out of the opioid abatement special fund for prevention coalitions. Whereas Dr. Levine was sort of and I'm paraphrasing a little bit here, but he was saying that essentially those cuts violated state law. And I just wondered, are you in connection with Dr. Levine on this issue? Are you following this issue in these cuts or are there cuts at all? And it's just a matter of the money's getting moved around. I haven't had a chance to catch up on where that's at. Yeah, I don't have the specifics. I can certainly look into that a little bit further for all of you. There has been some disagreement between Dr. Levine and some members of the Opioid Settlement Advisory Committee in terms of permissible uses, et cetera, and how it shows up. But I'll certainly try to find some answers for you on that particular item. Thanks very much. Thanks, Councilor Levine. Councilor Grant and then, is that Councilor Cain? Okay. I also would like to thank you for your report. I really appreciate the detail. And I do encourage the residents in the city to go to Civic Clerk, take a look at the documentations that are attached to the various agenda items to really get an idea of what our legislature is working on. The one thing I had a question about that I didn't see a item on was the situation where we have our state's attorneys in all of the different counties who have a significant backlog and certain cases take a while. And if you have a case that, say, involves an act of violence, that's gonna be bumped to the front of the line with regards to court time before something like shoplifting, even if someone is a repeat offender. So my question is with the governor putting forth the cuts on having more prosecutors available and help for our state's attorneys, the idea of a particular tax increase, like where does that stand? Does that pretty much look like it's gonna get vetoed? Does it, if it is, does it seem to have the votes to override it? Yeah, there's certainly a commitment or a desire of this legislature to fund the judiciary for a number of reasons, but the backlog is of course, right up there among the priorities. There are a couple of different approaches. The House has chosen H-880, which I believe is the bill you're referring to, which is sort of judiciary funding, access to justice, et cetera. The funding for that is supported by an increase in the corporation corporate income tax, as well as removing a couple of Vermont deductions for that are available at the federal tax level for corporations. I think they're offshore intangible income and one other that's escaping my memory at the moment. That bill's been sent to the Senate where I think the corporate income taxes are also facing a challenge. However, the Senate, again, will be using the budget. As I say, it is a priority to fund the judiciary, to address the backlog. And I do expect that the Senate version of the budget will have that funding in it when it comes out. Thank you. Councilor Cain, and then we're going to wrap up. Okay, thank you for the memos. Excuse me, thank you for the memos you've circulated. I noticed there was an item related to short-term rental tax, and the city has a short-term rental ordinance as well that we're using to fund our Housing Trust Fund. So I'm wondering, do you know if the short-term rental tax at the state level would preempt our local ordinance or if it would be unaffected? My understanding is it would be unaffected that any surcharge would be in addition to what's currently being collected. So, and the latest is a bill in Houseways of Means, which will be this year's Education Funding Bill that will set the property tax rates and yields for the next fiscal year, has a 1.5% surcharge on short-term rentals. And I believe that's estimated to raise $6 million, which will go towards the end fund to help buy down a potential property tax increase overall. Thanks. And then a couple other quick things. I just wanted to echo what Councilor Nubizer was saying about climate being included. I would appreciate that as well. I was reading recently that the State of Minnesota has a bunch of initiatives related to networked geothermal grants pilot program. There's also a rebate program. There are, I think, four separate bills, and I'm not aware of exactly what's being worked on at the state level here and would appreciate being briefed on that. And on another note, I would appreciate being briefed as well on universal childcare efforts. I know that there was a bill to explore expansion of universal childcare in the state. I'm not quite sure where it stands. It came up in conversation related to universal healthcare. Brian Cina established universal healthcare caucus and potentially starting with just children maybe providing healthcare as part of a universal childcare program and then increasing the eligibility age would be a way to move towards a universal healthcare system. So it's of interest to me to just be briefed on any movement on that topic. Sure, thank you. Yes, again, on the climate, that'll certainly be an element going forward. I will say, with three or so, four weeks left in legislature, introducing new topics at this point is very difficult. Their benefit for that is pretty narrow. And as I'm sure you're aware, last year was a significant year for childcare legislation, both in terms of infrastructure and funding. And I think the legislature's probably focused on implementing what they did last year, but I'm certainly, keep my eyes open for other initiatives. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Cain. Mr. Fianna, I appreciate your being here. Appreciate the reports. As always, your last report is posted online. We received a report from you dated April 15th, which to Councillor Grant's point should be uploaded here shortly. I'm going to give Councillor McKnight the last word here and then we will wrap up this item. So I'll say a preemptive thanks for being here and now turn to Councillor McKnight. Thank you. I'll be quick. Given the disturbing recent history in Burlington of gun violence, I was happy to see some progress in the legislature with the bill to ban ghost guns. And I was just curious if you could give us a brief update on where you think on sort of the chances of that bill passing because it's very relevant to the safety here in Burlington. Thank you. Yeah, that's Senate Bill 209, which has passed a Senate is currently in the House Judiciary Committee where it may receive a vote this week in fact. So I do believe this chances of passing are very good. The House Committee actually has gone one step further and has proposed amending the bill to prohibit possession or carrying of firearms that's still being worked out at polling places or dangerous weapons. So it would go beyond prohibiting manufacturer sale distribution of so-called ghost guns to also include this other element. That is a change that wasn't in the Senate Bill so I'd have to go back to the Senate, but I am confident that the underlying ghost gun piece will make it across. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor McKnight and thank you very much, Mr. Fian. Thanks again for the time. I appreciate it. We would now turn to item five on our agenda, which is an update from General Manager Springer on net zero energy. But General Manager Springer before turning to you, we do have one other meeting that the city council must attend to tonight, which we had posted for starting at 7.15 in case there's any applicants that are tuned in. We only have a consent agenda for our local control commission. And so I would suggest that we actually recess the city council meeting at 8.04 PM now and just briefly turn to our local control commission and Commissioner Shannon, could I turn to you for a motion on adopting the agenda for our local control commission? I move to adopt the agenda. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Commissioner Grant. Any discussion on the agenda? All in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? We have an agenda. As mentioned before, we only have a consent agenda before the local control commission. Is there a motion to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated on civic clerk? So moved. Thank you, Commissioner Shannon. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Commissioner Grant. Any discussion on the consent agenda? All in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That's unanimous. Seeing no other business, we will adjourn the meeting of the local control commission and we will resume the full city council meeting at 8.05 PM. And thank you, General Manager Springer, for being here. I think we shaved five minutes off the 30 minutes for Mr. Fiann. We'll shave five minutes off the 30 minutes for you as well. But I know this is an important issue and appreciate your being here. If you have a presentation for the council and then we'll turn to counselors. Thank you. Good evening. I'm Darren Springer, General Manager with Burlington Electric. While we just slowed the presentation since we're following the legislative discussion, I did want to add that Burlington Electric's been engaged on the renewable energy standard, H-289. Very supportive of that. We work with V-PURG, Renewable Energy Vermont on that bill, thermal networks. We've been engaged on that as well. So we're working on a number of these items that are of interest in trying to be supportive in Montpelier. Glad to share more on that. I think if we can go to the first main slide here. So Burlington Electric is your municipal public power electric utility for well over 100 years. We have 123 employees, including 86 IBEW member positions within Burlington Electric and our generating stations. We are the third largest utility in the state of Vermont. We're relatively small. We're about 6% of the state's load, even though we are the largest municipal utility in the state. We are 100% renewable since 2014 for city and nation that did that. And as you can see here, we have about a kind of three quarters of our customers are residential. But if you think about our energy use, it's actually flipped. It's more like three quarters of our energy use is commercial. And you think about the University of the Medical Center, the city itself being larger institutions, larger amount of our energy use is commercial. And then in terms of our load, that's a little bit high, the 330,000 megawatt hours. That's more of a pre-pandemic figure. We've been kind of closely getting closer to the pre-pandemic, but roughly a 65 megawatt peak. And if you think about the state of Vermont grid as a whole, it's about 1,000 megawatts. So again, we're about six, six and a half percent of the state when you think about it that way. And we are located on Electric Avenue there at 585 Pine Street. Next slide, please. So we're here to talk about the 2030 Net Zero Energy Roadmap. I've included a few slides where we have artwork from some of our 2023 and 2024 Net Zero Energy Calendar contest winners, fourth grader around the city participate. And this one I really like because this F-150 lightning that was drawn at the top here, predated us having our own F-150 lightning in our fleet, which we now have several of them. So we really appreciate the vision from some of our fourth grade artists in giving us ideas for what we can do to electrify our fleet. The Net Zero Energy Roadmap has been recognized by the Smart Electric Power Alliance as the first U.S. Net Zero plan in the space. As I think counselors know, it's focused primarily on the thermal sector, so heating, buildings, and the ground transportation sectors. And there's a reason for that, which is when we look at the state of Vermont as a whole, those sectors are responsible in a given year for 70 to 75% of our greenhouse gas emissions when you look at the state emissions inventory. Thermal and transportation are gonna make up more than 5 million metric tons of CO2 emissions out of a state inventory that's around 8 million metric tons. So that's the reason why we focus on those two sectors. Doesn't mean there's not work that can be done outside of those sectors, but the Net Zero Energy Roadmap was really about tackling the two biggest sources of emissions in the state and two of the largest sources certainly in the country as well. We update the roadmap annually with Synapse Energy Economics out of Cambridge, Massachusetts. They're our partner initially in putting the roadmap together and giving us the updates each year, drawing on a variety of data sources. And really this is not a Burlington Electric Initiative. It's a city initiative. It's a community initiative. It involves many partners, including all the departments of the city, external organizations, really the state and federal government play a significant role in whether or not we make progress as well. And I'll touch on that a little bit as we go. Next slide, please. So I know there are earnest concerns within public comment about wanting to make more progress, I share that. But we're actually here tonight having made some positive progress since 2022. And I wanna talk about that a little bit. So greenhouse gas emissions in the sectors we track are down 18.2% in 2023 relative to the 2018 baseline. 2018 was the year prior to the issuance of the roadmap. So we've used it as a baseline for the city and we've tracked data every year since 2023 had the second largest reduction at 8% behind the pandemic year of 2020 where we had a 14% reduction for clear reasons in terms of the economy being relatively diminished that year. And in particular, natural gas consumption in 2023 dropped and is at its lowest level since any year we've tracked during the roadmap and I'll get into a little more about that as well. Again, we have a great calendar contest. We have an electric bus there on the front cover of the 2024 Net Zero Energy calendar. And of course, one of our electric buses here in the Green Mountain Transit fleet that Burlington Electric helped to incentivize. We expect to see a number more electric buses coming to the fleet in the very near future. Next slide, please. So a couple of barometers that are helpful in a way to compare. We look at natural gas use down 19% since 2018 in Burlington. Statewide it's down 9% over the same timeframe and I'll cover a little more detail on that when we get to the graphs. And similarly in terms of ground transportation we're seeing progress that's ahead of the pace certainly that we see nationally and maybe at the state level as well. We've listed some of the things that have contributed to the progress here not all of them, but obviously since the roadmap was issued we've had a number of initiatives. We had a $20 million Net Zero Energy revenue bond that we're investing in incentives and infrastructure to support the city's initiatives. I mentioned electrifying the fleet not only the Green Mountain Transit buses but the city fleet as a whole. We have our first electric bucket truck for our line crews pictured here in the state of Vermont that we put in service late last year. We're hoping to have more of those. One thing that may not be immediately obvious but is definitely something that since the pandemic has been a clear driver is we are seeing a sustained trend of reduced vehicle miles travel coming out of the pandemic. I think remote work hybrid work is contributing to that trend and that's helping us in ways that maybe we wouldn't have predicted when we put the roadmap together. EV infrastructure we have invested in public stations around the community. We also support through incentives, properties that are rental and multifamily installing chargers, home chargers, commercial chargers. We really have a suite of programs to support EV charging. And obviously dozens of electrification incentives. Everything from heat pumps, geothermal, electric vehicles, electric lawn mowers, electric forklifts, electric bikes. If you can electrify it, we probably have a program to help. And if not, we are interested in figuring one out. And city policies, the renewable heating ordinance, the rental weatherization ordinance, the carbon fee ordinance all play a role and we'll play an increasing role in this data as we go forward. Next slide, please. So really one of the things we can look at in terms of our progress is we really boosted our incentives in June of 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. And we've seen a real trend upward in terms of adoption after that significant increase. And here you can just see some of our team, Itameno who is our energy equity analyst, Jen Green on the left, the director of sustainability. And one of our advertisements about heat pumps here on the right. Next slide, please. So this is one of the programs that we track. Tier three, which is part of the renewable energy standard at the state level enables us to offer incentives for things like heat pumps. We have over 2,300 heat pumps now installed in Burlington. And you can see the growth curve about 25X in adoption since the green stimulus period since June of 2020. So a really a nice upward trend there. Obviously we want to see it continue to grow more exponentially, but we've seen some good progress with heat pumps in the city. Next slide, please. In addition, we offer enhanced incentives for income qualified customers in almost every category, including our biggest categories being electric vehicles and heat pumps. We've seen a growing percentage of our rebates be for income qualified customers. As you can see here, 21% of our EV and plug-in hybrid rebates, 14% of our heat pump rebates. And we're doing a lot of work to try to boost the adoption rate in those categories as well. Next slide, please. So we're gonna get into a few of the graphs, a few of the key graphs that really define the roadmap trends as we see them for 2023. Next slide, please. So here in terms of motor gasoline and diesel consumption, we basically were flat year over year between 2022 and 2023. So that leaves us with a 13% reduction between 2018 and 2023. That's an area where we wanna see more progress. Definitely getting electric transit buses into the Green Mountain Transit fleet will be help in this regard. Vehicle miles traveled. Really, this data is a function of three things. It's how many electric vehicles are part of the overall mix in Burlington. How many vehicles do we have as a whole registered and how much vehicle miles traveled are we seeing out of our Burlington residents? So that's where you get this 13% reduction. Important to note that over a relatively similar timeframe, we don't have 2023 data yet at the federal level. We had about a 4.3% reduction. So we're certainly ahead of pace at the federal level. We did flat line a little bit between 22 and 23. Next slide, please. Different story on the thermal side. So on the left you can see Vermont's natural gas consumption between 2018 and 2023, 9% reduction. Same timeframe in Burlington, we had a 19% reduction. This is not whether normalized. So one of the pieces of information you'll want, I got this question from Councillor Broderick, is what were the heating degree day changes during that timeframe? And those were 8% reduction. So if you had just done nothing and stayed essentially level, you would expect to see an 8% reduction just in the data because we were seeing a warmer trend in the winter. But Burlington actually has gone well beyond that trend. So I think we can credit some of the work that's being done with heat pumps and with policy initiatives in the city for helping us to essentially double or a little more than double what the trend is in Vermont in terms of reduction there. We saw a bump upwards in 2022, as you can see. So we were very concerned about that trend line. We're really pleased to see it moving back in the right direction. Next slide, please. So overall emissions, you can see in Burlington, 18.2% reduction in the US over again, relatively similar timeframe in the same sectors, thermal for residential and commercial, motor gasoline and diesel for ground transportation. There was a 3.3% reduction. So we are outpacing the trend nationally by a really significant margin. The red line there is the net zero energy 2030 trend line. It's a very, very ambitious curve to get down that trend line. You can see we're not quite on it at the moment. We had a brief period during the pandemic where we did cross with the net zero energy trend line. Then we had a mild rebound, much more mild than the rest of the country. Now we're seeing a trend downwards again. We want to get as close to that trend line as we possibly can, knowing that overall in terms of climate science, there's been a call for a 50% reduction in emissions by 2030. And we're trying to achieve something in these sectors that's even more ambitious than that. So we keep striving towards this goal. Next slide, please. So this is my last slide and then I'm glad to answer questions from the council. I did want to note that every year as part of releasing this, we also update all of our incentive programs. We have some exciting new programs this year. We were authorized by legislation that passed last year to pilot. We're the first utility in the country to do this. A program for what's called super users and these are folks who are driving more miles than typical. We work with VPurg on this legislation. So we have the authority now to provide an enhanced incentive and we're doing so for customers who are driving 2X and 3X, the typical number of miles in Burlington. So this is up now on our website. Those customers can access all of our regular incentives for electric vehicles, income enhanced incentives and then can get an additional incentive. We've also made this available for food delivery, for ride sharing services, for anybody who might be putting a lot of miles on their vehicle. So this is a unique pilot. We're excited to launch it and learn from it and share data with other entities, not only in Vermont but really around the country. We are going to be bringing you very soon a program that our electric commission just approved which will be the first in Vermont heat pump bill credit program. So the idea being that we can provide customers through a federal grant that we've received of over a million dollars in the devices that are necessary to help us send signals to a heat pump during peak time periods and help reduce the usage just a little bit which if you aggregate over a number of heat pumps you can have a real reduction in terms of peak use for the utility. In doing so we can provide customers with a bill credit which will start at $5 a month. We hope to turn this into a long range program but this would be an initial pilot. And the idea here is we want to make it cheaper to run a heat pump than to heat with natural gas. Natural gas is at historically low prices and heat pumps need to be competitive. So this is one way that we're going to be working on to try to drive that price delta down while saving every single rate pair of money if we can reduce peak use. We also have the switch and save program which is for income qualified water heater changeouts. We're gonna be working with Champlain Housing Trust and potentially Burlington Housing Authority trying to get 100 to 125 residents to help change out their fossil fuel or less efficient water heater to a more efficient heat pump water heater. And then we have several other programs as well. I mentioned electric buses. We have new EV charging incentives. We've increased our e-bike incentive from $200 to $300 available at all the local bike shops. We're continuing a lot of work. Again, I mentioned ETA and JAN in particular on making sure that we have equity in our programs and access that we're reaching out in various places. ETA has held office hours at the King Street laundromat. For example, we've had our energy efficiency team at Franklin Square. We wanna reach the community everywhere we possibly can. The federal level, the Inflation Reduction Act, we're still waiting for the state to issue the income qualified rebates which are gonna really drive adoption in a number of these key categories. The tax credits are available now but the income qualified rebates are not. We're waiting on those. We'd like to see those to boost adoption. The carbon fee ordinance does not affect any of the data that you've seen here because it took effect in 2024, January. So we will see as we see buildings go through that process, we will see that begin to impact the data. I also know of interest to a number of counselors, rental weatherization is probably deserving of its own update and the Department of Permitting and Inspections is the lead on implementing that. So they've got some thoughts I think in terms of how we can improve the process there. We are facing a significant backlog. We are facing a workforce shortage and a program shortage there that's impacting the adoption of weatherization through that ordinance. So that's something I think the council will wanna dive in on further. We're doing some work with buildings on decarbonization outside of the policy realm. We had a geothermal webinar last week and we have a heat pump focused webinar happening May 7th. I think I've sent the council all the information if you're interested to join those are open to the public. And then lastly at the state level the clean heat standard will have an impact. That is up for another vote prior to being implemented. So it's being developed at the PUC but it has to come back to the legislature before it's implemented. That'll have a big impact potentially on Burlington and our progress. And I will stop there hopefully having been relatively good on time leaving room for questions. Thank you very much, General Manager Speyer and thanks to really you and the whole BED team for all the work you do in this presentation. We would now turn to counselors for questions. Can I get a sense as to how many counselors would like to speak on this item? Counselors Barlow, Broderick, New Beezer and Kane. So, Counselor Barlow, why don't we start with you? Thank you President Travers, said that for the first time. Okay. My question, I had a couple of questions. I guess one is around the new EV incentives you referenced on the last slide. Could you talk a little bit more about that? I know you and I've had discussions about some of the hiccups with current EV charging incentives and I'm just wondering what new incentives are coming down the pike? Yes. So in terms of the incentives, what we have is either a $250 or $500 boost for customers who are driving the most miles. The issue we've had that I think we've discussed is around the EV rate, where customers who are signed up for the EV rate are sometimes seeing through no fault of their own but through software glitches with the technology a charging event happening during peak periods that then makes them not eligible to receive the credit in a given month. So we've seen that with some of our vendors and we are working on some solutions there which could include bringing forward a tariff adjustment as well as working with our vendors to try to really minimize those types of incidents. And for everyone's benefit, the EV rate basically allows a customer to charge for the equivalent of 75 cents a gallon of gas provided you're charging off peak. The challenge is if you have a peak charging event then you lose the credit for that month, you go back to the residential rate. So you're not penalized but you don't get the benefit. And what we've seen lately for reasons that we're not clear about is the EV charging unit itself is pulling during peak periods even though it's not scheduled to again through no fault of the customer. Our current tariff doesn't allow for us to forgive that essentially. So we're looking at ways we can be more flexible and we'll bring those to the council. Okay, thank you. And my second question was around around an issue that came up late in the last council session which was around extending the carbon pollution impact fee to a cohort of buildings, industrial and commercial buildings less than 50,000 square feet. And I'm just interested absent that the expansion of that fee, what work is the department doing to address that? Absolutely, so there were a number of discussions during the previous council around the cohort 25,000 to 49,999 square feet. And what we did in the absence of anything moving forward is we did convene a group of building tenants and owners who were in that space including institutions, businesses, nonprofits. And we spent some time listening to them about some of the work they're doing, some of the challenges they see. We didn't get deep into the policy discussions yet. What we learned from that though was there was an interest in learning more on their end both about geothermal and other commercial sector heat pumps. And so that's why we were holding the webinars that were holding the geothermal one again last week which is recorded and available. We partnered with the Vermont Green Building Network to put that on. And we had Holly Francis from Champlain College talk about their system that's implemented already and that they're looking to expand. We had George Martin from Ellen Consulting who's one of the local geothermal and heat pump experts. And we had our BED energy services team. So there was a good Q and A as part of that. And then again, we have a heat pump webinar coming up on the 7th of May to dig in a little more on that topic. We're gonna have George Martin back with us as well as Steve Conant from the Soda Plant. The Soda Plant has heat pumps that they're using currently and Steve's gonna talk about their experience with it. And coming out of that, we're also continuing to work with the Building Electrification Institute which works with leading cities around the country. We just met with them today. And we're trying to map out with them some different areas of work that we can do to keep us engaged and well-prepared for any further policy development that might take place. Okay, thank you. So. Thanks, Councilor Barlow. Councilor Broderick. Thank you. So my first question is about a little more on rental weatherization. Again, obviously it's a DPI concern and I can't wait to talk to Bill Ward about that as well. But in terms of what is BED's part in ensuring that these are rental weatherization ordinances being properly followed through on and how could potentially some collaboration if there is any collaboration between BED and DPI help that be even more followed through because obviously besides keeping folks warm and lowering utility costs by virtue of that, it also lowers emissions. So I'd like to know what your side of ensuring that ordinances followed through on is. Yeah, absolutely. So our team was involved pretty heavily in the development of that policy, certainly. And we continue to meet and offer technical assistance to DPI. We meet regularly and partner with them. Vermont Gas is also a key partner in this because they run the weatherization program. 95% of the buildings in Burlington have natural gas service. So they are the primary under the kind of public utility commission regulatory system. They have the efficiency funds and the weatherization funds to support weatherization work in those buildings. Some of the challenges I'm aware of, obviously workforce which is not something that any of our departments can solve on our own but is something that requires a larger effort. I know CEDO is really engaged on this question. We also, I think, are facing some competition in a sense because we're doing a lot of weatherization work at the airport, properties around the airport, and there is a limited number of, not only workforce but there's a limited budget as well. So I think we knew when this policy was developed that the timeframe for getting it done was ambitious. That said, it's disappointing that we haven't seen more progress and BED certainly stands by to help in any way we can with technical assistance, without reach, with engagement to support DPI which is doing the enforcement work and the implementation work around this ordinance. Thank you, and one more question. Is there a place that either council or anyone in Burlington can go to see data on the non-natural gas, greenhouse gas emissions, i.e. biomass? Yeah, so in terms of McNeil, that data is publicly reported and it's available, I believe, on federal websites and for reference, we do track emissions there. The reference is in 2023, we had 326,000 tons of emissions if you only count at the stack. Important to remember, BED is a half owner of McNeil. We don't own the entirety of the plant, so half of that output, half of those emissions would be attributable to us. The way that the state of Vermont and really the way that it's accounted for at the kind of international level, in most cases, looks at biomass is not to count the emissions at the stack but to count the flux in land use. So looking at whether or not we're losing or gaining forests and it's a very complex counting mechanism. So if you look in the state of Vermont, emissions inventory, although there's really good discussion around this and it is probably one of the most complex carbon accounting areas that there is, they don't count the emissions as part of the inventory directly, they count or they attempt to count within the land use flux and that's similar at the different levels of government. So the information's available, we certainly have talked about it in the past. I would just caution that looking only at the stack emissions doesn't tell the full picture for a resource like McNeil. Great, thank you. Go to Councillor Nubizer and then Councillor Cain. So a couple of quick questions and then comments and thank you to my colleagues for indulging me. There's a lot of climate questions in front of us tonight that we should be talking about. Just to be clear, I know we have an 18% roughly reduction across thermal and transit. What's the percentage reduction that we were aiming for in the net zero plan? Yeah, so if you were to look at the 2030 trend line, we had 215,000 metric tons in 2018. We currently have 175,000 metric tons in 2023. If we were on the 2030 trend line, you would have 137,000 metric tons. Just what's that percentage just so the public and the council can compare? I definitely went to law school because I don't do math in my head. So I won't try to do it here, but you would divide 137 by 175, you get the delta between those two points. I would just put forward and this goes in my comments. There's a number of things just in terms of communicating and also getting clear information so that the council has a good understanding of where we are on climate and energy as a city that isn't a criticism, but I think is important information for me moving forward so that I can make informed decisions. And I think I've heard over the last number of years, the public raise similar concerns. I will skip my universal rental weatherization because my colleague hit on that. You mentioned workforce development. I would agree that's probably the biggest challenge as I understand it. Would that be your assessment as it relates to rental weatherization? Yes. Yeah. So I would just pose to my colleagues that asked we're trying to make tough decisions, tough decisions in FY25 that we'd look at workforce development and prioritizing investing there as it relates to our climate agenda. And then just moving forward, so a few reporting requests that would make I think my life easier. So, and this gets a little nitty gritty, but the presentation that you showed and you sent us in advance compares our overall percentage reduction to the US. I don't actually think that's a helpful comparison in the sense that we are a unique community and we have different, more ambitious goals than the US to be fair. And so I hope that we're a leader and I wanna be compared to other leaders, I guess. And so I'm hoping that both in size, but also in sort of ambition around climate that we can find comparisons. I'm thinking like Ithaca, New York, I don't know if that would be a good one or not, but there's a number of criteria where I think it would be helpful to sort of see that as we look at these different areas of work. Just offer a brief comment on that. Yeah, please. So one of the challenges, I completely agree, we are a unique community, we wanna be a leader, we are a leader. We work with a lot of the leading cities through the Building Electrification Institute, through the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. We don't all have the same timelines for our climate goals or baselines for our climate goals. So there is a challenge in getting apples to apples comparisons between other cities. It's definitely something we can look at, something we can talk with some of our partners to see, but there's different baselines, so you won't always get an apples to apples type of comparison. So I agree, comparing us to the US is not meant to be a statement of, this is our kind of baseline. It's more just to give a sense of the trend in the state and in the national level. But really, you can compare to the net zero trend line, which is on the charts. And we can look at some other communities. Ann Arbor, Michigan, for example, has set a goal, one of their challenges, they don't have a municipal electric utility. We've done meetings with them where they've said, how do we get a municipal electric utility? And so we're a little ahead in that respect. So we can look at some other communities and try when we present this again next year to put some things out there. They just may not be apples to apples. Yeah, no, that's fair. So yeah, I'll just reiterate what we heard in the public. I think it's actually not helpful to just look at, I guess what would be helpful is even quarterly, honestly, but even if it's semi-annual every six months, sort of a city-wide, which isn't solely on BED, but sort of a city-wide report on where we are in terms of moving off of polluting energy in every sector, including taking into account McNeill, including taking into account airport emissions and rental weatherization from another city department as a good example, just so that we can maximize all of our time. The other question I had or just comment I had was, I know that the resolution, 2019 resolution, initially asked that we saw annual report backs on the NetZero roadmap. And I think one thing that I noticed was the previous administration, there's also a section in there asking for semi-annual report backs. And so I read that to mean at a minimum twice a year, if not three times a year, that we're reporting back. And it's my understanding that that's only happened. There's been one report back to the council on an annual basis from BED, is that correct? No, so I think that the resolution had talked about having semi-annual reporting on progress towards the city's NetZero energy goal. The data we get, we only get once a year because a lot of this data, you really can't get it in the middle of the year. A lot of times you have to finish the year and then you can get the DMV data, the different pieces. So, I may have run out of time. You keep going. I'll try to continue briefly. So in terms of the actual data, we get it once a year. The roadmap was issued in September of 2019. We've given, BED, me personally, has given an update to the council every single year on the NetZero data since that time, including during the pandemic and including kind of what we're doing tonight. We've had a number of other presentations, updates that have related to the NetZero roadmap, but may not be data reporting specifically, but may be on discrete items relative to the city fleet or to policy or other things. So there is definitely more than semi-annual conversation at the council in my experience around the topic, but I wanna be transparent that the data is typically available once a year. And we get it around this time, April, usually, to be able to report back. Which, by the way, is way quicker than what you'll see at the state level, where the data is 2020. We're at 2023 and it's actually quicker than what you see at the federal level or even in most communities. So we're ahead of the curve in terms of knowing where we are relative to a number of places. Thank you, Councilor Newbezer. We have reached our time on this agenda item. And so I appreciate you being here, General Manager Springer, Councilor Kain. I know you were next up. I'm also mindful of the fact that we are now turning to our climate emergency reports. And so General Manager Springer will not an opportunity to engage in back and forth. I would welcome your perhaps sticking around for another five to 10 minutes. Because we will now turn to item six in our agenda, which is climate emergency reports. And Councilor Kain, I would give you first crack at it if you wanted to offer a climate emergency report, because I know we're, it's a good segue into this discussion. Thanks, can I still interact with Darren? We've run out of time on the agenda item for zero energy update. And so we're gonna move now to our climate emergency reports. And you know, we're moving to that agenda item now. Okay, well I'm gonna say I guess basically what I was going to say and there are gonna be some open questions I guess, so I can follow up separately with Darren. So there's this graph on page 12 of the presentation, the greenhouse gas emissions you discussed it in relation to Councilor Newbezer's question. So 175 metric tons, right? 1,000 metric tons. Or 1,000 metric tons, is that, does that include, that does not include the airport, is that right? What is included in that number? Well I'm sorry, we've now moved to climate emergency updates. I'll imagine that I'm gonna get an answer later. So I would like to know what is and is not included. Another comment I was gonna make and I wasn't necessarily gonna ask for a response on this. So that's good, I guess I can put it and file it under a climate emergency report. I would have expected to hear probably a little bit more about how we were gonna close some of these gaps. You showed a bunch of gaps on all these slides of where we're not on target. You also listed a bunch of ways in which we might be able to do better. So on bill financing, new carbon impact fees. But I didn't hear any estimates of, we think this is a home run. We think we're gonna see big movement on this particular graph. This data should get us, we should get back on track and see a 5, 10% movement in this particular area due to this particular policy. It seems like a bunch of good ideas. We're just kind of thrown up there and listed, but that there wasn't necessarily the homework done, the numbers crunched to figure out how to get us back on track. Because we're not on track, obviously, and the accounting itself has been disputed. The goals themselves have been disputed by the public at length this evening. I also heard you say that, I think I heard you say that 95% of households use natural gas in Burlington. And I wanted to follow up about what the current split is because you also said I think that we're at 22, 2300, something like that. Heat pumps installed and other on the order of like 17,000 housing units in Burlington. So I wanted to get a better sense of where things stand 95%. Still using natural gas seemed a little bit off from the back of the envelope calculations I had done. And so I wanted to discuss that further with you and I'll follow up offline. Thank you. Thanks, Councilor Cain. Did any other Councilors have a climate emergency report? We're now on item six of our agenda. Somewhat unsurprising given that we just had the good discussion there. So again, thank you, General Manager Springer. I think then that that would take us to item seven on our agenda, which is public health and safety emergency updates. Councilor Grant, I particularly appreciate your providing documents which have been posted online in our agenda with respect to this update. Am I correct in assuming that you have an update to provide here though to the Council? Yes. Great, turn to you first. I'm going to leave on my fellow Councilors to talk about the reports. I'm gonna slightly change what I was gonna talk about because I feel the legislative update that we were discussing earlier there, I wanna encourage everyone on the Council to really review the document because there's some important updates related to a number of items that are working on some of our most common public safety complaints. For example, we know that we've had a huge increase in car thefts not only in Burlington, but all across the state. And Vermont has a very weak statute with regards to that. And so there is something that is in the works to help put a little bit more meat on that statute so that our police departments in Burlington and in the state can make better cases that can be, well not even better cases, in some cases they can't be made so they don't get sent to the state's attorney's offices. And then also the updates on funds that will be allocated to various forms of harm reduction when it comes to battling the drug crisis. So I definitely encourage people to read through those items, both residents and council members. I am trying to get a more detailed update with our friends at Decker Towers. There is, after some additional patrols and security that was put in the building, things improved, but that really didn't last. So there's been some things kind of moving backwards that are concerning. So hopefully at the next meeting we'll have more details about that. There's been some agreement between the city but there are questions as to when exactly the things that are listed in that agreement will be taking place. So I'll save that for a later update. There was a disappointing, one of the ways to get rid of drug dealers who are living in buildings, either Decker or any other buildings is if they don't pay their rent, they can be evicted. It's a very long process but they can be evicted in the absence of law enforcement. Well, we have a situation where there was dealers in the process of being evicted and then they paid up their rent. So now we're back to an issue of a lack of law enforcement and that once again is affecting the safety issues within the community in that building. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Grant. Councillor Doherty. President Travers. I have two items that I wanted to bring to the council and the public's attention. The first is a March 29th, 2020 for a letter that was sent to the previous city council and our previous mayor. I don't know whether it has made it to the desks of our current mayor or our current council but I didn't want it to get lost in the shuffle of reorganization day. It's a letter from the law firm of McCormick, Fitzpatrick, Casper and Burkhard, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly, which is on George Street, which is sort of kitty corner from the federal building. It's a lengthy letter, I encourage us all to read it. I don't know that it made it into the agenda of this, I don't believe it made it into the agenda of the city council meeting, but it should be publicly available since it was sent to all of us and to the outgoing mayor. It is remarkable in that it is essentially a year long listing of the criminal activity that this business has been subjected to. They kept meticulous methods of records, crimes ranging from threats, salt type behavior, vandalism, running the gamut to just garbage, needles, things like that. Really an extensive record and I think emblematic of what many unfortunately businesses have been suffering downtown. They end with a request for us and for the outgoing mayor, or the outgoing mayor, which I'm sure extends to all of us, that they would like a continuous, significant, consistent and immediate police presence in the George Street and Elmwood Avenue area. So I didn't want that message to us from a downtown business to be lost in the shuffle. Similarly, I think we've all received communications from Alan Caruso who runs the Thorn and Roots restaurant, which was vandalized the other night by someone throwing something through their front plate glass window. I think that is a similar, in the similar vein and I wanted to make sure that the public is aware of these incidents and these communications from our constituents as we move forward and address public safety. Thank you, Councilor Doherty. Is there any other Councilor Barlow? Thank you, President Travers. And my update was the second update that Councilor Doherty just mentioned, but this was a random but violent act in our downtown this weekend. And with the warming weather, we can anticipate and increase frequency of people acting in ways that are in conflict with a safe and welcoming downtown for diners, shoppers and tourists. And I just want to acknowledge that we need to do a better job supporting our business community during this public health and safety emergency. They're at the front lines of the mayhem we've been experiencing downtown these last couple of years and it's critical that we get in front of this situation before it worsens with a clear plan for patrolling the streets, challenging antisocial behaviors and enforcing our rules. We can't have another summer like the ones we've had these past two. We also need to find a better way of supporting businesses when harm is done through vandalism, theft and trespass. And I'm hoping and hopeful that this will be a top priority for this Council and for the administration. Thanks. Thanks, Councilor Barlow. Councilor Nubizer. Thank you, Council President. I just wanted to highlight there's four reports on this agenda item online. And I believe because of the Worker Councilor Grant chairing public safety that these reports will now regularly be accessible to the public. It's the chiefs report, the fire department April commission report, the fire chiefs commission report, police chiefs commission report, which I just mentioned and then the Burlington fire department response data, all really helpful and I'm hoping there's a few sort of ways that we're presenting data that I'm hoping to work with Chief Murad so that we can just all have a shared understanding both in the community and on this Council about what the reality is on the ground and what the data is telling us so that it can better inform our policy decisions as it relates to public safety. But I know that as an individual, even in this role and someone who's been involved for eight years, I was trying to get this at this but navigating information given by the city to the public is often hard and so I think we need to be really thoughtful and work really hard. I'm hoping to work with our new mayor to make sure that we all have a shared understanding of what the facts actually are. I'll just mention too, I just wanted to highlight and I know we'll talk about it later in the agenda. The fact that overdoses are down, it was mentioned in public comment is extremely heartening to me. I think it shows that data-informed practices like the CRT program that the fire department stood up are working and we ought to be doubling down and pursuing those strategies. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Nubizer. Yes, Councilor Grant. I just wanted to remind everyone that our public safety committee meeting is this Thursday evening at six o'clock and it is posted in Civic Clerk for anyone who would like to attend and it will be a virtual meeting. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mayor Mulvaney-Stanek. Thank you, President Chavres. I wanted to just offer to this conversation and it's my first time being able to participate on this particular topic but to really also name the hard work that our Burlington Community Justice Center has been doing as we talk about public health and safety issues. I really wanna appreciate one of the Councilors mentioned what happened to the Thorn and Roots business. They've already been reaching out to those folks. When harm happens, there's the immediate response, of course, that we expect from our emergency responders but an important second piece needs to be utilizing all of our resources and concluding our community justice center. And so I've been working to make sure that we elevate and notify and bridge that gap that's been happening between the incident of harm and then the victims. Another example I wanna name that's happened unfortunately in the first two weeks of my administration is the arson attempt at US Senator Bernie Sanders' office. Again, really commend the emergency response. This is another part around the increased targeting of elected folks that is happening in our climate right now that I consider also part of public health and safety in our community. Again, connecting community justice center to Bernie's staff because there were folks who were in that office who were unable to immediately leave with that incident. So I just wanna name that and I hope this gets rounded out in our conversations as we continue to work collaboratively on finding and getting to the root causes while not forgetting the victims and the ongoing care and connections that we can offer folks who are experiencing harm in our community. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Anyone else with a public health and safety emergency update? Then we will go ahead and close this item which takes us to item eight, our consent agenda. Is there a motion to adopt the consent agenda and take the actions indicated on Civic Clerk? Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Newbeeser. Any discussion on that motion? Seeing none, all in favor of the motion say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? That is unanimous. We now turn to our deliberative agenda. There are five items on our deliberative agenda this evening. The first item is item 9.1, the resolution authorizing refinancing City of Burlington's general obligation waterfront tax increment note series 2023. On this issue, glad to be joined by CEDO director Brian Pine and David White from Whitenberg. The floor is yours, director Pine. Thank you. Just for the record, it's Brian Pine, the director of the community and economic development office with you tonight to talk about the refinancing of the waterfront TIF notes. I'm gonna make a few brief remarks, promise. I know that TIF sometimes causes folks to look at their phone and do other things but just bear with us, cause this is important. So the city has the waterfront TIF district debt which is in the form of a note as opposed to a bond that's 18,840,000. The development agreement often called the ARDA which is the amended restated development agreement 2.0. It obligates us to refinance this note because those dollars are needed for the public improvements and the way the state law requires municipalities to conduct their borrowing by a certain date and we met that date last summer. So that money has been borrowed and essentially placed in an account and luckily for the city, that account generated more interest than the cost of the borrowing so there's a net positive arbitrage which doesn't always happen and there's no guarantee that will happen going forward but David will talk a little bit more about that. So it matures at the end of May, the existing note and the idea with refinancing it is to go back out to the market through a request for proposals to see what the best rate and term the city can get. The plan being to buy the city more time to ensure that the financing is available should it be needed but in fact it's going to be turned into or converted to a bond which is essentially using bond dollars to pay off the note so it's taking on permanent financing to take out this is interim financing this note. We have a few key variables that aren't we not not known yet. We don't actually know the entire development program if you will of the whole city place project and if we don't know that we can't know for sure what's the right amount to borrow so we wanna make sure that we're right sizing the borrowing and not borrowing more than is needed and so until we know the exact program for the remainder of the project which is that north portion sort of over the Cherry Street, St. Paul, down to Pine. We also don't know the pricing for the public improvements that will be known in the coming months but until we know that as well we don't we need to right size the borrowing to fit that. I just wanna mention there's no risk there's no cost to taxpayers in this friend refinancing we have safeguards in place and namely the fact that it's a project note means that we can repay it and prepay it at any time so that is a very you know that's an important protection we also have other protections built into the ARDA 2.0 I would just say we're lucky because I feel we're lucky to have David White as our consultant and David is with us tonight to talk a little bit about TIF we're gonna do TIF 101 I think 201 and maybe even 301 so we're gonna be quick but we gotta go through some basic slides here which I think we're gonna get some help on. So, David do you wanna make a few comments before? Sure, so it's in the packet and David's there. Thank you all for the record my name is David White I'm president of Whiteburg Real Estate Advisors and we have been involved in tax increment financing shorthand is TIF throughout the state we are among the active TIF districts there's only one that we didn't either set up or currently consulting on so we're very intimately familiar with how TIF works and so forth and our role is very much in the front end getting TIF districts set up and getting all the approvals that are necessary for that doing the planning and financial projections and helping negotiate the agreements between municipalities and the developers who come in to ensure that municipalities are well protected in the way these things are done we're not actually involved in the administration if you will of it the city of Burlington has another firm called Municap that works and assists the city with administration of the TIF districts that it has but we have been involved with both the waterfront TIF district which is the topic this evening but also with we were have been involved from the very beginning we were the consultants involved with setting up the downtown TIF district so with that said I'd love it if we can get the slides up and I'll talk about it. So the topic tonight does have to do with debt refinancing for the TIF district the I don't know if we can go full screen on that there's probably a way to do that there we go thank you let's go but I'm gonna quickly let's go to the next slide so tonight I'm gonna talk about what is TIF and how does it work for those of you particularly who are new to the council may not be familiar with it and TIF is complicated and takes some time to become comfortable and used to how these things work so I'm gonna give you an overview of that then talk a little bit about the waterfront TIF district specifically talk a little bit about the agreement we have with the developers city place partners the overall finances of the waterfront TIF district and then this specific financing refinancing that we need to do and then certainly an opportunity for questions and answers let's move on so first it's important to understand that Burlington actually has two TIF districts there's the waterfront TIF district which is the subject tonight which is along the waterfront and then extends up roughly between bank streets and Cherry street up to church street so it's T shaped and then there's the downtown TIF district which is shaded in blue here that kind of wraps around that area and they are different they were set up at different times there are subtly different rules around each because of their different time frames but tonight we're talking about the downtown TIF district specifically so just to be clear about that I'm excuse me, thank you Brian of the waterfront TIF district tonight thank you for correcting me on that so tonight's the waterfront TIF district so if we can move on so how does it work so with TIF district what happens is that you first establish through in the TIF district and define a geographic area and it's a very specific one where you draw a map and there are certain properties that are in the TIF district and others that are outside and within the TIF district what you're trying to do is to incentivize new development so it's an economic development tool in fact I would tell you I believe this to be the most powerful economic tool available in the state of Vermont and that it's grossly underutilized in terms of its potential to help stimulate the kinds of development we're looking for because it's very focused in downtowns and places like that where the state through its planning process would like to see this happen and so you set up a TIF district geographic boundaries are established and the idea is that a municipality borrows money to invest in infrastructure that makes possible projects that could not or would not otherwise occur and that could be parking, that could be utility improvements, it could be streetscape improvements, those kinds of investments that make the site feasible for a project that might not otherwise occur. Once that happens then you take at the time the TIF district is established you determine what is the value, the assessed value, the grand list of all the properties in that district on the day it's established or the year it's established. That's what's called the original taxable value or OTV and as new development occurs in the district the incremental values above that are used, the taxes from those incremental values and I'll talk a little bit more about this in a moment because there's some subtleties to it but it's the incremental taxes only above the prior values that go toward paying the debt service on the debt the municipality incurred to pay for the infrastructure improvements and that's important because what it means is we're not taking any taxes away from where they're going today. We're not costing existing taxpayers anything because we're not putting more burden on the existing grand list whether it's for the general fund or the state's education fund. So it's only the incremental and that's where the tax increment financing comes in because you're using the newly generated taxes to pay the debt service. So that's a critical element here. So ultimately what happens is the municipality borrows money, does the infrastructure improvements, the private sector does its private development that creates new taxable value that generates new revenue which then in turn pays the debt service. And what's important as you put these things together is to make sure that you've aligned the amount of debt that a municipality is taking on its commitments in terms of what it's gonna pay for and infrastructure with the amount of new tax revenue that is going to be derived. And a key subtlety here and then we'll move on is that it's not if we build it, they will come. You don't just spend the money and cross your fingers and hope. No, you enter into development agreements that are contractually binding commitments that says okay to the development company in this case city place partners is the key one we're talking about. If you contractually commit to doing this work and you reach certain thresholds we the municipality are contractually committed to doing the support of public infrastructure that will help enable your project to move forward. So each party is bound to the other. It's not wishful thinking. And the way the development agreement is set up is the city does not have to actually incur it doesn't have to commit to the long-term debt until various thresholds are met. So let's move on. So in terms of this, this is, I won't spend a lot of time on this but it varies from TIF district to TIF district. In the case of Burlington's TIF district this is about education taxes because one of the critical elements here is that we're retaining not just municipal taxes but also the education taxes that otherwise go to the state. So we're using some of those taxes to help pay the debt service. And in the portion of the waterfront TIF district that we're talking about 75% of the new education incremental taxes that are being generated go into the TIF fund to pay debt service. 25% go to the state to the education fund. So the state's gaining 25% of the taxes that it would otherwise have gotten it's getting. The 75% though goes into the TIF district. In the case of municipal taxes in the waterfront TIF district 100% of the incremental municipal taxes go into the TIF fund. So we've got 75% of the education taxes 100% of the municipal taxes. What's critical though is that the end of the life of the TIF district you've paid off the debt and all those taxes that had been going to the TIF fund now are available to pay other costs. They'll go to the education fund they'll go to the general fund. And so you start to get those revenues and that's a key element here that you're really investing in your own community's economic future. Let's move on. So the waterfront TIF district very quickly it was established in 1996. Originally it was only along the waterfront kind of west of Battery Street but then it was a few years later expanded to have this T element along a cherry and bank streets up to Church Street in order to incentivize and enable some of the developments that have occurred along that area including what was then Filene's Macy's building that's now the high school and the Hotel Vermont and the Marriott and so forth. And TIF paid for some critical infrastructure to support those projects. Importantly, and this is gonna be important for you folks to know is that most of the TIF district expires at the end of next fiscal year. We're currently in FY24, at the end of FY25 the most of the TIF district expires. The only pieces left are three properties that the legislature extended the life of those to 2035 an additional decade. Those three properties are the ones that encompass the former mall, Burlington Square Mall or Burlington Town Center except for the Macy's Filene's building. It does not include that portion but it includes what's under construction today for city place. It also includes that portion that is so-called phase two that's still fronts on Church Street. Those three properties only, you can think of as kind of a mini TIF, it's a subset, have an additional 10-year life and that's really what we're talking about here. But in another year or 18 months or so, less than 18 months, you're gonna suddenly start to see additional money that had been going to the TIF district will start to be available to the general fund and similarly funds to the education fund. Let's move on. So the Waterfront TIF district has done a wide range of projects over its life. I'm not gonna go through the whole list but most of the improvements you've seen along the Waterfront over the decade since then have been paid for at least in part if not wholly through TIF. That includes much of the bike path, the Lake Street upgrades, the both the Westlake and Lakeside garages that were critical to what happened with the Hotel of Vermont and so forth. The Fishing Pier, the Moran frame, those are all TIF projects, let's move on. So City Place, talk about that for just a moment because that's the core of what we're doing here. So there is a development agreement which Brian referred to the ARDA, the amended restated development agreement 2.0 and there are some critical pieces. It's a complicated agreement, there are a lot of elements in it but for tonight's purposes, some of the key things to understand are first that in the development agreement, the city gained ownership of the Pine Street and St. Paul Street rights of way that are necessary for reconnecting those streets that got bifurcated several decades ago at no cost to the city. The developer who owned them had no obligation to give those to the city but the city negotiated a deal where those were provided at no cost. The city didn't have to pay for them. In exchange though for that and for the helping incentivize the project, the city's paying for the infrastructure to build the streets that will go on those rights of way. So that's a municipal cost and that's a key piece of what TIF is paying for. In fact, it's the core of what TIF is paying for is the recreation of St. Paul and Pine Streets. But as I described with the way TIF works in general, the incremental property taxes from City Place itself, and right now we're talking about just phase one which is the South Building which you're seeing up today with all the yellow board on it and the North Building facing on Cherry Street, the foundation of which is underway, the rest of the building is not yet vertically up. The incremental taxes from those two buildings alone, not including so-called phase two which fronts on Cherry, excuse me, Church Street, those, the incremental taxes from those are what are going to pay the debt service. And the contract, the agreement with the developer says, we're not gonna borrow any more money ultimately than your taxes are enough to pay off. And if your project's not gonna pay enough taxes to pay that debt, we're not gonna borrow that much, you still have to build the streets. You're just not gonna get reimbursed as much money for building the streets. So there's a lot of protection for the city in the way this agreement is written. We get the streets regardless. If they generate enough taxes for us to support the debt to pay the full cost, the city is obligated to pay it. So there's a real trade-off and strong agreement. And there are a lot of other protections for the city included in that agreement. Let's move on. So this is an image for those who may not have seen it of the South Building that's underway. The masonry is beginning to go up already currently, and ultimately it's gonna be like the building you see in the white stone here. You can see this is an image from the corner of St. Paul and Bank looking north along St. Paul, and the northern building is showing in the red there. Let's move on. Just giving you an idea of what we're looking at. So with this, what's the city committed to do here? Just so you understand the context. Originally the agreement was purely that the city was going to pay for using TIF, again subject to there being enough tax, incremental tax revenue to pay the debt service, this reconnection of Pine and St. Paul streets, and then also some upgrades along Cherry and Bank, abutting the project itself. But TIF, and this is a critical piece here as well, the fact that the city is putting up this 18 million or whatever the final number turns out to be, it'll be 18 million, 840 or less. It's not gonna be more than that. Allowed the city to obtain other funds. So it's gotten two major grants. One is $12 million, congressionally directed spending that Lehi did, Senator Lehi did shortly before he retired, that will help pay for major reconstruction along Cherry Street all the way from battery up to South Manuski Avenue, and then also what's called a raise grant, which is through the Federal Transportation Administration, $22 million for a total of $34 million in federal grants that have been leveraged because of the city's willingness to do its investment here. In addition to that, there's another roughly million and a half the city has obtained through the sales tax reallocation program the state of Vermont has. So substantial additional dollars. And what this has enabled is from the original project, which was just Pine and St. Paul to actually do much, much more, which is now what I described on Cherry Street, the entire length, and then also Bank Street from Pine to South Manuski Avenue. And all of those will be done to the Great Street Standard. So this is a huge upgrade to downtown that TIF has made possible. Let's move on. If at all possible, David, to turn specifically so near to the question. This is a quick image, thank you. So this is a quick image of Bank Street. Let's move on of what we're anticipating. This talks a little bit more about the details of the dollars that are from the various sources and where they come from and go to. But it's total of $54 million of which 188.40 at most is going to be out of TIF, the rest of it are from other sources. Let's move on. In the downtown Waterfront TIF district, the original taxable value back when it was established in 1996 was about 42 million. We're currently at 151 million. It's been incredibly successful in terms of generating value. Incremental value to date is about 109 million. The estimate for city place phase one, which is under construction today is an additional 115 million in incremental value. And we rough, very rough estimate because we don't know enough about it yet for phase two. That portion which is not yet under construction fronting on Church Street is an additional 60 million. Let's move on. So in terms of taxes and debt, at the end of next fiscal year, so 15 months from now, whatever it is, when most of the district ends, there's roughly $800,000 a year that's currently going into the TIF fund that will go into the general fund. Those additional funds will be available to address other expenses and costs and challenges the city faces. In addition to that, by that time, all the older debt will be paid off other than one final payment on a very small piece of HUD 108 loan that'll get paid the following fiscal year. It's less than $200,000 in debt service that final year, but the debt will have been paid off for everything else the city has done up till now through TIF, incremental taxes. 10 years for the, at the end of, 10 years later, at the end of FY35, the extension on these final three parcels and we estimate that it's gonna add 10 years after about additional $1.4 million to the city's general fund at that stage of the game to be available for other purposes and those estimates don't even include what will be going to the education fund. The state gets even more because there's a larger portion of this currently from the education fund. Let's move on. So refinancing to get to the final point. So the debt that we're talking about is $18,840,000. It's a one-year note that matures at the end of May. We need to be going out with an RFP to the funding sources in the near-term in order to be able to refinance it by that time. So we're proposing to refinance it for a second year and then ultimately do a long-term bond. Now this may not be the final time it's refinanced. We're hopeful that a year from now we'll be ready to go to a permanent bond, but we don't know for certain. It depends on whether we know definitively at that point or sufficiently definitively what the incremental values are for city place. We expect we will. If we have all the construction pricing we need for all the improvements, the public improvements, and thus we know how much of the debt we really need. So the first one is about how much we can afford. The second one is how much we need. And finally, has the interest rate environment improved enough or do we think it's gonna improve more and thus be beneficial to extend? So those are the three key variables that we're waiting on. But in the meantime, we're advising that we proceed to refinance for another one year note. I think that's it. I think the next one is a picture with Q and A. Perfect. Thank you, David. Thank you, Brian. Councilor Carpenter, I'm about to turn to you in a moment for a motion. I'll note that this matter does come before the council with the unanimous support of the Board of Finance. I appreciate the broader presentation here to the new council with respect to these TIF districts. I know Director Pine, you'd reached out beforehand to ask for a bit more time there for the presentation. So even though that beep went off some time ago, we'll provide some time now here for councilor questions. But Councilor Carpenter, could I turn to you first with a motion? Sure, thank you. I would move that 9.1 resolution, the resolution with the authorization for refinancing the city of Brillington's 18 million, 840,000 general obligation, Waterfront tax increment note series 2023 that we waive the reading of that resolution and adopted. Thank you, Councilor Carpenter. Is there a second on that motion? Second. Okay, thank you, Councilor Grant. Councilor Carpenter, did you wish for the floor back after that or okay? Are there any Councillors with questions or comments on this item? Councilor Grant. Not really a question, but just a kind of statement of concern with the audits. And I know we had a not great audit and then we city brought in consultant and then we had another audit with some questions on it. So just as we approach getting to the point where the districts will no longer exist that we make it out in one piece with regards to the audits of these monies. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Grant. Any other questions or comments from Councillors? All right, well again, I appreciate the detailed presentation. Before we close out the item, we do need to go to a vote on Councilor Carpenter's motion. The motion is to waive the reading and adopt the resolution. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That is unanimous. Thank you for your time. Thank you, and I would just offer if there's any Councillor who has questions about TIF and how it works, feel free to be in touch. Happy to chat. It's a complicated subject. Perfect. I appreciate your being here. We could have a fun with TIF introductory presentation. You just had it. So our next two items here are 9.2 and 9.3. 9.2 is with respect to the Winooski Bridge Finance and Maintenance Agreement. 9.3 is with respect to the Colchester Riverside Barrett Mill Intersection Finance and Maintenance Agreement. There is some overlap here, and so DPW Director Chape and Spencer, I would turn to you to introduce your team here, and hopefully provide the Council presentation that perhaps covers both of these items. Yes, thank you for the record. Chape and Spencer, Director of Public Works. I'm joined by Senior Public Works Engineer, Laura Wheelock, and Public Works Engineer, Maddie Swender. So tonight you have two related generational investments in front of you and a request to approve their finance and maintenance agreements with our state and federal partners. After years of advocacy at the Burlington, in all levels of Burlington, I'm pleased to report their strong alignment among our partners to advance these two projects. And while in particular, the Winooski Burlington Bridge is owned 5050 by our state, excuse me, by Winooski and Burlington. And the state and federal partners could say that it is our responsibility only to make these investments. I'm pleased to report that both the feds in the state are prepared to fund the majority of both of these projects. For without their participation, there would be no viable way for our two communities to move forward. Winooski is moving quickly. They've already approved a bond for their local share of the project. And tonight they are also voting on the finance and maintenance agreement between them and the state of Vermont. I will lastly say that we are committed to the ongoing engagement with our stakeholders as the design of these projects is refined. We know in particular has been discussion around bike and pedestrian accommodation. There's also been conversation around construction impacts for adjacent stakeholders. You'll see tonight in a presentation that the modified design that we are exploring will reflect the effort to engage stakeholders and modify the design accordingly. With that, I'll turn it over to the project team to give a quick overview of where we are. Thank you. So I'm gonna just go through some, a very abbreviated version of a public presentation that was given in January of this year. It also shows the updated cross-section that Director Spencer mentioned. So for orientation's sake, the project includes both the replacement of the Winooski Bridge as well as reconfiguration of the Colchester Barrett intersection with Riverside, highlighting those out. The two projects are federally separate. They have different project numbers, hence the reason why there are two different agreements in front of you tonight. The bridge has a more certain timeline, the raise grant funding that the two communities applied for with the state has a time-certain start of construction obligation funding of June of 2026 and a total completion of the project by 2030. So that one has a little bit more of a constraint. The intersection is not as time constrained but recognizing constructing them separately in sequence one after another would be really challenging for both communities. So we're pushing to do them both on the same timeline. So what's happened to date? So VTRAN's Procurity Consultant in the spring of last year from that point in time with the relatively short funding obligation for a federalized project on a project of this scale, we kicked off with some community meetings, some surveys, local outreach, visiting different pop-up opportunities with farmers markets and other events that happened within the city of Winooski, Burlington Farmers Market and the little zip code survey shows the different communities and the volume of response we've had from different communities and then this is the focus of the things that we've received with the different size of the letters highlighting the more popular times that it's been noted in our outreach. So to back up just a little bit, it's important to recognize federal projects are slow projects. This essentially started back in 2017. Both the intersection and the bridge received an opportunity from the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission to be scoped and really what that does is it asks to look at different opportunities and different ways in which a project's goals can be met. The intersection and the bridge proceeded through some robust public outreach, community groups, stakeholder groups and ultimately through the city council early in 2019. After receiving those approvals of a preferred alternative, DPW has been working to find different funding for them. That includes in 2021 where we applied to the state to have the intersection be reconfigured and in 2022 submitted the raise grant application. Ironically, the award of those came almost at the same time in August of 2022. From that point, we've moved fairly quickly with our state and community partners and putting out updated conceptual plans for the bridge itself. The intersection is lagging behind and you'll see in just a few minutes why that is, but we're essentially early in 2024. We're looking to start heading into our federal permitting and ultimately by 2026, soliciting contractors. So this is gonna be a design build project. It's not how the city has often done our projects. When we go for a contractor, we're gonna be about 60% design. It's gonna be asking the contractor and an engineer that they are hiring to finish the plans to 100%. So when we go for bid, we'll still have more work to do. When we select this contractor is when we will know all of the final choices which are, it's hard to do it now. It's still a little bit up in the air because they will submit a proposal to us that will say, these are the things that we will do and this is the cost we will do them for. So the bridge itself, what we have committed to already with the raise grant application is a complete replacement. It is providing separated bike ped facilities from the vehicles and it is maintaining four lanes of travel. And this is what's in our raise grant application. And these are the fundamentals as to what the concept is bounded by. I apologize, the graphic is hard to read but it is part of the council's packet if you needed to open up the PDF to zoom in. So the top image is our existing structure. It's 57 feet out to out. The proposed structure inside of the scoping study is a 76 foot wide bridge which has four travel lanes and two 12 foot shared use paths. And then the lower image which is something that we've been working on with some of our bike ped groups both within the city of Burlington and Winooski is an alternate that allocates a little bit more space to the western side of the bridge which is the downstream side to create a better entrance from the river side path and then looking at whether or not we can take that from the upstream side of the bridge or what other alternates exist there. So that is what's still currently in study. One of the things that is highly challenged with this area is just the limited amount of space. We have buildings on the Burlington side, we have a dam on the Burlington side and those are some pretty significant constraints. This would not be a great project if we had to remove either. So in addition to the width we also have to look at what the alignment looks like. The scoping study and our bridge that we have out there now is the straight version that is on the left. However, as we've taken a closer look at the structure, its constructability, the amount of traffic that is being passed on it each day, the consultants have looked at the curved or shifted alignment which provides a couple of other benefits that we hadn't even realized until they started looking at it. It provides some natural traffic calming which is one of the things that we've heard from a lot of our community members who walk across this bridge is the straightness increases perception of the speed that people can travel. This shift alignment would also potentially allow for a path underneath the structure on the Burlington side similar to what the city of Wynuski has. So then to move quickly over to the intersection and this is the reason why it lags behind until we have a better idea about the bridges alignment it's challenging to align the intersection. Both of these would still be signalized intersections, the one on the left is the one from the scoping study, the one on the right is one that more straightly aligns US route seven actually with Riverside and creating that as more of a straight path which is the predominant traffic direction and leaving Colchester Ave and Barrett to come in as side streets. So what is the intersection working to do? We are headed towards an intersection focused meeting. We've had a lot of bridge focused meetings but we need to start having a couple meetings with our community to talk about where the intersection is as well as some of the choices that we can make in advancing it. But really we're looking to maximize safety focusing on all of our roadway users but recognizing that we do still need to maintain it as a class one highway to pass the truck traffic in a way that is calmer than it exists today. So what are we gonna continue to do next? There's still a lot of outreach planned both around the bridge and the intersection. The bridge's next choices are coming up with its aesthetics related to the railing, related to lighting. Intersection needs to start from the very beginning but again all of this is really still looking at bike pad safety and mobility and those types of refinements that we can make headed into permitting. And that's what I have for the update on that. All right, thank you very much for those presentations. I appreciate that is a question that will be coming back before the council in terms of the design and construction but thought this was nonetheless a great opportunity to introduce this generational project to the new council. Just as with 9.1, 9.2 and 9.3 do come before this council with unanimous support of the Board of Finance would like to now turn to councilors to see who has any questions or comments on this item. Councilor Newbieser, Cain, Grant, Doherty, McKnight. So we'll start with you, Councilor Newbieser. Yeah, thank you so much and sorry not to, I have a few questions. I have raised them to Chapman before in general but I should have, I'm learning my council etiquette. I should have emailed you in advance. So I understand this doesn't, the decision we're making tonight doesn't lock us into a specific design just to be very, very clear with folks, particularly in Ward 1 who are concerned about this. And I'm seeing not, so. Yeah, we can put that on record. That is correct. It does not obligate us to an alternative as it relates to exact dimensions but it does still require and keep the commitments that the council has made to both projects. That, thank you for clarifying that. I will just say and I guess I wonder if maybe briefly you can explain the number one thing I've heard. I didn't see it on the chart, I was surprised. The number one thing I've heard from constituents is the desire for a roundabout. Even if it's a single lane, I don't tend to be a street design expert. But, yeah, I've heard a lot of folks say the South end get a roundabout. We won a roundabout in Ward 1. So I'm wondering if you could just briefly give folks context to that because that's the thing that I keep hearing. Yep. So this consultant team has also reviewed a roundabout alternative and it still is functionally not feasible to install a roundabout in this location. The number of vehicles per day is double what the current Shelbert Street roundabout is seeing. It is more than a single lane roundabout can pass. Geometrically, it doesn't fit without extending out over the river and interfering with the dam, which provides a whole host of federal regulations that I have not ever crossed and very intimidated by. But we do have more information that the team is packaging to be publicly outward facing. And I've also heard from several Ward 1 residents that are just looking for a better understanding on that. Yeah, and then just a brief comment, I guess out of those three designs, I know we're not having a conversation on design, but I do just want to note as early in the process. You know, like we have that Main Street crossing with a bunch of UVM students. Increasingly, there's that building in Manuski right over the bridge there where a lot of college students are populating a significant number of UVM students increasingly. And so I think we already have a lot of folks who are probably getting across the bridge, but it's not particularly safe, it's not particularly comfortable. So really having those separated lanes, and I think I've heard from public works folks during our onboarding that there's potential challenges when you have separated bike lanes in terms of like snow plowing, et cetera. But I do think that the benefits are really huge and not only is that already a main corridor for travel, but I think it's increasingly going to be particularly with students who don't necessarily have cars. So we're gonna see a lot more foot traffic, bike traffic, et cetera. So just wanna note that and I'll pass it on. Thank you. Thanks, counselor. Counselor Cain. Thanks for the presentation. I have a few questions. So first, the bridge would need to be widened from 76 to 77 to get the 15 feet on one side with the five feet for bike lanes in each direction. I just wanna clarify what is the process for getting that extra foot and how likely is it to happen? And how much additional funding, would there be a separate funding measure involved for that that we're not looking at right now? V-Trans is also supportive of the 77. And so really they're just looking to make sure geometrically and permitting wise that it'll still fit. Feeling pretty comfortable that we'll get to that point, but they're still checking before we can say fully yes. For funding, because V-Trans is supportive, it will still follow the same funding split, 80% federal, 10% state, and then 5% to each community. One of the things we are constrained by is even though they are supportive of this alternative, mass widening of the bridge really comes out about a 300 to $500,000 per foot cost. So it'll still come at a cost to us and to the project to be able to widen it that one foot. Thank you. Next question is in relation to the financing. If we move forward tonight with this aspect of the financing, we ultimately do need to approve the design. So say that we don't approve of the design in the end. Would we be on the hook then for project development costs like over the time in between now and then? There's some interesting clauses in this finance and maintenance agreement about ways that we get out of it and ways that we can't depending on cost. One of them hooks with a community bond vote that's failing and then we don't have to repay anything. But ultimately, if we don't come to resolution on the base technical concept, I'd have to go and refer back to the document. It does address that, but I don't remember what specifics or if there's a percent we pay. Okay, I can follow up separately on that. And then you mentioned that there are some specific commitments that have been made like in the grant application. So like four lanes is happening, like there's nothing that's gonna, that cannot change, right? So I just want to clarify a little bit, you know, what can and cannot change. So is a circle, a single lane circle like ruled out that would like violate the grant proposal? Like it's just not possible. Yep, the bridge and the intersection are different. The bridge is the only one that has the grant. The intersection is 100% federally funded through the safety program. However, the council in May of 2023 confirmed the signalized alternative and that is how we submitted a document with a letter of intent to VTrans. So we would jeopardize the funding if we tried to get a circle, okay. And then lane width though, like would not be a violation. Like if we said the lanes are 10 and a half and that's just it, like we would not jeopardize our funding. Mostly. So the communities can request a 10 and a half foot lane. It is, it's a waiver of a federal standard. Both communities have expressed openness to going to 10 and a half, but only on the straight alignment. And that's because of vehicle tracking on the curved alignment would overlap lanes and then overlap where people are next to them. So that's one of those ones that I was trying to highlight. We can have preferences, but we won't know until we see the contractor's proposal if they choose the straight bridge, if they choose a curved bridge, which one we accept as to the two communities, which direction we can go with that choice. So we can't make the 10 and a half to 11 foot lane choice until 2026. But we're gonna investigate it that it is the wider 11 foot lanes. It's the more conservative approach to take during permitting. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Cain, Councillor Grant. Thank you. Councillor Cain asked a lot of my questions. So the only one left was, so what will the process be? And if you don't know exactly what it will be now, but just to make sure we're in the loop in terms of being notified when the contractor is selected and then the contractor comes forward with a design just to make sure that we have council and public input before we say yes or yes or no. Based on what you've just said, obviously there's some limitations because we don't wanna endanger the funding that we have, but still this is a really important project to people. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Grant. We have Councillor Doherty and then Councillor McKnight. Thank you, President Travers. Councillor Nubizer asked my question about the rotary. I would just reiterate, which, you know, and ask you to do what you just said you were going to do, which is as part of your community outreach program, you know, really layout with specificity for folks why a rotary is not physically possible in this location because there's a lot of people are really interested in that. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor Doherty. Councillor McKnight. Thank you, President Travers. And thanks to the other councillors, you asked many of my questions already, but I wanted to get a little bit more specific on when people can expect to see the next version of the plan. Can you just say that out loud, even if you already said it because I think it's really important? Relative to the bridge or the intersection? The bridge. We have a design team meeting Thursday where we're discussing what they've been finding. The widening conversation happened late March and so they've been working for the last three weeks to kind of double check what we talked about with our walking, biking focus group meeting. So I'll actually know more on Thursday, but we can get back to you as to what the rollout of that information is. Okay. And then, so it seems like there's been a lot of public involvement, which is great and thank you for that important work. Can you, as a brand new councillor who wasn't here for the last round of discussions, could you just speak to a little bit how the plans have evolved to become more bike and pedestrian safe? Were there major changes in the design that we can report back to the public on? Yep, so the significant change on the bridge is moving from a 12 foot shared use path on the downstream side to 15 feet of space allocated and having it striped to be five, five and five. So bi-directional bike striping and then a dedicated pedestrian space on that side. Okay. And final question. Are separate bike lanes, bike and pedestrian lanes, is this like councillor Kane was talking about before with the four lanes of traffic? Is that totally off the table or is that something that's still under consideration separating walking from biking? Yep, my apologies. We have looked at it pretty extensively because the public has asked for it in both communities and it's geometrically, it's not something that we probably even have the width for with having to create different barriers in between each spaces, having the elevated sidewalk without really a really wide sidewalk is really challenging for maintenance, both the safety of the sidewalk tractor operator who under the current bridge has fallen off the sidewalk and rolls their tractor sideways into traffic and are there until they are picked up? Wouldn't be quite as dangerous with a bike facility there but it is still immensely challenging. Even some of the local motion group and advocates who originally requested the separated barrier separated or vertically separated bike ped facility have rolled back after doing their own case studies of Montreal and some other Northern communities seeing that that's just not what happens and the design team lastly has hired an expert and we internally received a presentation that really outlined different communities much larger than us that have very successful bike ped facilities without barrier separation. Thank you. Thank you, Councillor McKnight. Are there any other councillors that wish to speak to either 9.2 or 9.3? Councillor Shannon. I just have a quick question which is in the slide that shows the cross section, it looks like there is a barrier. If that's not a barrier, what am I looking at? That's one foot wide there. Yep, that's the barrier between the vehicles and the bike pad space. So that is one of the things that was inside of our raised grant application is separation between those two modes of transportation. What's being requested is a barrier that then further separates the bikes and pads. All right, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Shannon. Any other councillors wish to speak on either of these items? Councillor Cain, yep. Just one other brief question. So I think you mentioned to get the 10.5 foot lanes, we'd need a waiver. Could you just detail a little bit more of that process, the timeline, the likelihood of getting it, just what that involves? It's a pretty simple request. Both communities just need to put it in writing. We did request this actually when V-Trans just recently refinished Main Street, those lanes they wanted to put back as 11 feet. We pushed back asked for 10 and a half so that we could guarantee a four foot bike lane down the street versus the three that they were attempting. So it's a pretty easy process. It's just they can't ask for it themselves. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Councillor Cain. On item 9.2, there is a two part motion and Councillor Barlow, could I turn to you for those two parts? Sure, President Travers. I move to authorize the director of public works to execute the FM0449 standard finance and maintenance agreement for federal aid projects. Burlington-Wanewski BF raise two from the Vermont Agency of Transportation for design and construction of the Wanewski Bridge with the funding split for this project being 80% federal, 10% state, 5% Burlington and 5% Wanewski. And to authorize the chief administrative officer or their designee to affect all necessary budget amendments and transfers of funds to and from the above referenced funding sources as needed, the above referenced project expenses in FY24 and overall project budgets as further detailed in attachment to. Thank you, Councillor Barlow. Is there a second on that motion? Second from Councillor Broderick. Is there any further discussion on the motion on item 9.2? Just really briefly, sorry to double dip. I'm just assuming if there's a conversation about pedestrian versus bike and separating it there that the reason you don't go to the 10 foot on the other side is like the Riverside Ave shared path. Is that the thinking? That is the general experience that we've seen and heard from our outreach. We are actively counting the bridge and those numbers are just preliminary coming in as tests but we can also, we'll be able to confirm the balance of use on each side of the bridge soon. Thank you. Any further discussion on 9.2? We will then go to a vote. All in favor of Councillor Barlow's motion say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That is unanimous. Councillor Barlow on item 9.3. There's also a two part motion if I could turn to you for that. Of course. I move to authorize the director of public works to execute the FM, am I on the right one? Yeah, I am. I authorized the, I moved to authorize the director of public works to execute the FM 0477 standard finance and maintenance agreement for federal aid projects, Burlington STP 5029 from the Agency of Transportation for design and construction of the Colchester Riverside Barrett Mill intersection with a V-trans commitment to cover 100% of eligible project costs and to authorize the chief administrative officer or their designee to affect all necessary budget amendments and transfers of funds to and from the above referenced funding sources as needed to pay for the above referenced project expenses and FY24 and overall project budgets as further detailed in attachment to. Thank you, Councillor Barlow. Is there a second to that motion? Second by Councillor Carpenter. Is there any further discussion on item 9.3? Seeing none, we will go to a vote. All in favor of Councillor Barlow's motion, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you very much for that presentation. Thank you very much. That now takes us to item 9.4. Appreciate your patience, Nathan Lavery. We will have one other deliberative item after this. 9.5, also appreciate the patience of Chief LeChance and BFFA President Blake. But first, Nathan Lavery on a resolution, authorization for reimbursement from public improvement bonds for school district capital improvements for Integrated Arts Academy. This similarly comes before the council with the unanimous support of our Board of Finance. As no doubt, Mr. Lavery, you'll discuss here momentarily. This is from a capital bond that was approved by voters back in 2017 and felt it important given this new council as well as the time that's gone by since then to receive a brief update from you on behalf of the school district with respect to the status of that bond. So the floor is yours, Mr. Lavery. Great, thanks. Good evening. I'm just gonna pour myself a quick sip of water here. Okay, thanks. Good evening, everyone. For those of you who were not part of the Board of Finance Committee meeting, there's a memo that is circulating and that I've also sent electronically just drafted today that provides a broader update on the status of a few different funding sources that rely on city's general obligation debt and the projects. So this goes beyond the item that's specifically before you all tonight. So I'll start by just touching on the Integrated Arts Academy reimbursement resolution that is a resolution that will allow the school district to reimburse itself with the proceeds of the bonding for that project when that bonding takes place. The work for those of you who've been in the area of Integrated Arts Academy, the work is already beginning there. You may have seen some of the equipment out on the fields and it will really ramp up once students leave for the summer. But we know that and of course as that work ramps up we will have bills to pay. The bonding is for the school district. For those of you who are new is actually done by the city. It's the city's general obligation. And so we are content operating on the timeline for the city's planned issue that debt. This resolution just ensures that we can reimburse ourselves for the costs we've incurred up until we actually get the proceeds of that debt issuance. So that's really what the reimbursement resolution is about more broadly. And this memo talks about it. We have three major ways that we can access city debt to support infrastructure projects. Number one is an annual $2 million authorization that we can use and do use each year to make investments in our infrastructure. The city has a similar provision in the charter that allows it to borrow money without having to go to the voters every single year to ask for the authorization. Second, we have a $19 million voter authorized a capital infrastructure bonding authority that was from 2017. And that at the time was envisioned as part of a larger $39 million effort to improve school district facilities over a 10 year period. So it was the $19 million voter authorization plus 10 years worth of that $2 million that I first mentioned. So that $20 million plus the $19 is how we got to the $39 million. And then of course, many folks are familiar with the more recent $165 million authorization to support the construction of a new Burlington High School and Burlington Technical Center. Again, for those who haven't passed the site recently, the demolition of all the old buildings is now complete. And while there's a little more cleanup to do, we're shifting very heavily into construction mode finally, which is great because as the weather improves, there'll be more opportunities to cruise by there and see things going up, including probably some of the beginning of the structural steel in the near future. So that's really exciting for us. So we've got those three funding sources and then we have a lot of products that are going on. So the intent of this memo is trying to give people a sense of what's going on and also let you understand what is, what of these projects are being paid for with that debt and which projects have other funding sources that are supporting them. So the big one obviously is the high school and the technical center project. And that is obviously the $165 million, but also some money from our $39 million, really that $19 million authorization for the capital plan. Originally we had a plan to use a portion of that capital project authorization for the high school and then based on the availability of federal money to support other work, we kind of did a little swap where we put more of our capital plan money into the high school and redirected some of the federal dollars to the integrated arts academy project. That integrated arts academy project has a major HVAC component to it that we can use $10 million of federal dollars that were part of the major COVID recovery legislation pieces, the American Rescue Plan. So we are essentially doing the IA project with a combination of $10 million of federal money and then the additional $7 million give or take is coming from our debt authorizations associated with that capital plan. When that project's complete and when you combine it with the fact that we are using approximately 20 million now of that capital plan money to support the high school, we pretty much have tapped ourselves out of that authorization depending on where final project costs come in. So those are the two big pieces that city tax supported debt is supporting. We also have projects going on at Rockpoint, right now, which is a partnership with the Episcopal Diocese there where we are renovating space entering into a long-term lease and we're gonna have our on top and horizons programs which are going through a rebranding effort right now but they are going to be co-located at that location. That project does not require the use of any debt to accomplish. And then we also have an exciting project going on up at the airport right now where we have, and the council has seen this I believe is we have entered into a long-term lease with the airport where we are leasing a hanger up there. We have an existing aviation program, training program up there for maintenance of aircraft and so forth. That is that project is being funded primarily through a $10 million congressionally directed spending award secured by Senator Leahy as well as some additional district funds that we have set aside to support completing that project. So there are some really four major projects that the district is taking on right now and that's a lot to be honest with you in terms of the amount of work that's being done, the amount of coordination, planning and so forth but they're all really exciting projects and we're really looking forward to getting students in all these new spaces. Going back specifically to IAA because I think that's important to wrap up with that. The project there for folks who aren't familiar with it that is going to displace students for the entirety of the next school year. The project there is going beyond what I would say what is strictly necessary today to do and the reason it's a bigger project is largely because of this need to displace students as we set out to kind of design and look at the options for the project. We identified the fact that displacing students is one of the most difficult things to do both in terms of the instructional impact on students but also from a technical perspective we need to find space that we're allowed to put students in. We need to identify the ability to transport them to the new spaces and so forth. So we recognize this as the opportunity to do all the work that we could on that campus that requires displacing students. We could have split this project up but over kind of made it multiple projects done a little bit now and done some later but that would have required us in a subsequent year at some point in the near future to displace students again and we felt like that was far too disruptive to try to manage and try to put that learning community through. So we opted to put all of that remaining effort and the financial resources into bringing IAA's campus up to where we believe it needs to be and we also felt comfortable doing that and the board felt comfortable doing that because all of the other schools in our district have more recently received significant investments. Integrated Arts Academy was the one school that really had received very little in terms of meaningful infrastructure improvements and so like any governing body, the school board had to grapple with the fact that there's a trade-off inherent in investing more money in that school than the original capital plan had envisioned but based on the progress we made at the other schools and the opportunity that having the swing space available to displace students, that opportunity presented it. We felt like it was in the best, both financial interest and kind of long-term districts financial sustainability and support for instruction to kind of make all the improvements at IAA right now that we can do. So that project would be slated to be completed at the end of next school year and students would then be able to return to that school for the following school year. All right, thank you very much for that presentation. Just so you know I'd also, if you'd not provided this already, I did send you an email asking if this could be sent to the Council's clerk for posting on our agenda. I did send it to Lori during. Great, perfect, thank you very much for that. Before turning to a motion, we'll turn to Councillors to see if anyone would like to be heard on this item. Councillor Doherty. Thanks so much for the presentation. Incredibly helpful. I believe I'm the only member of the City Council who has, is the parent of IAA student. In fact, all three of my children have attended IAA. My third grader is there right now. Want to just say two things. One, it's an institution that's obviously near and dear to my heart and have spent an incredible amount of my life in IAA and it is sorely in need of these capital improvements. So I'm grateful to see that they're happening and I'm also really, really grateful about the thoughtfulness that you folks have put into the impact of displacement on the elementary school students. My kiddo Malachi will be spending his fourth grade year in the swing space but I'm grateful it's only gonna be one year and so is he and he's really looking forward to returning to IAA and fifth grade and they're already enjoying all the construction that's happening. So thank you, much appreciated. Yeah, right, that unanticipated benefit. Thank you, Councillor Doherty. Does any other Councillor wish to be heard on this item? All right, seeing no one. I will turn to Councillor McKnight. I will just flag for members of the council that an original version of the resolution on this included a not insignificant clerical error indicating that the city has issued $3 million under a certain series of general obligation bonds when in fact that number should be 300,000. So we are looking at the revised version that's posted on Civic Clerk and Councillor McKnight I would turn to you for a motion on that revised version. Thank you. So on item 9.4, authorization for reimbursement from Public Improvement Bonds for School District Capital Improvements for Integrated Arts Academy. I move that we waive the reading and adopt the resolution. Thank you, Councillor McKnight. Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Barlow. Is there any further discussion on this item? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That carries unanimously. Thank you very much, Nathan. Thank you. We now turn to the last item on our deliberative agenda which is 9.5, Bronx and Fire Department Community Response Team. Very glad to have with us here. And again, as mentioned before, thank you for your patience, Chief LeChance, as well as BFFA President Kyle Blech. Good evening. It's the item you've all been waiting for, the last item. But not least. But not least. First, I'd like to thank the council. I'd like to thank Romeo and Lee for your comments. We really appreciate the support from everybody that's been behind us through this program. What we're looking for tonight is the ability to continue spending the money that was allocated for this program back in October of 2023. We were allocated $182,598 for a six-month pilot that accounted for two people, 12 hours a day, seven days a week, which we knew wasn't gonna be possible being that we were staffing it with overtime dollars. After six months, which ended yesterday on the 14th, we still have $48,213.65 available to us for continuation of the pilot. We're asking permission to continue this pilot through the end of the fiscal year. Councilor Carpenter, I appreciate the amendment to the motion at the Board of Finance last week. That $48,000 will get us about two weeks shy of the end of the fiscal year. So Councilor Carpenter made an amendment to our motion to allow for us to work with Mishad to find some funding to get us that last two weeks and we're confident that we'll be able to do that. So the future of the program will come see you for that for FY25, but for now we're just looking to continue spending the dollars and get us to the end of the fiscal year. I do have information, if anybody has questions, I'm happy to share it, but it's late if we don't want to see it or I'm happy to send it to you. Now, thank you very much for that presentation. I know that there's data that's posted to our agenda as well on this item. Every deliberative item here, I think is a Board of Finance item and I'll mention it again that this item as well comes with the unanimous support of our Board of Finance and would encourage folks to check out the agenda for some very encouraging data since the CRT has been stood up. I will turn to counselors for anyone who has any comments on this matter. Councilor Grant. I'm a big fan, as you well know. I appreciate the data and it is one of the reports that I had attached to the public safety updates. I think it's really important information because as we continue to work on community safety issues and especially the drug crisis, things have to be very data-driven and I just love the way this came about from the ground up and the leadership around listening to your team and bringing this forward and one of the things I want people to also think about as we go in and we're looking at how hard the budget process is gonna be this year, this also saves a lot of wear and tear on the larger vehicles, which are significantly more expensive to replace. So it's just hitting all the buttons. It's hitting all the buttons. I also thank Romeo and Lee for their comments this evening. I think they reflect what a lot of people are feeling in the community about this. Thank you, Councilor Grant for turning to you for a motion. Do any other Councillors have comments on this item? Yeah, Councilor Litwin. And thanks. In the same vein of trying to get us out on time, I'll just say I really appreciated Councilor Grant's comments. I completely agree with them. And Lee and Romeo's comments as well. Rarely, just from a prevention lens, rarely do we see this type of success so quickly. And the type of relational work that goes into this that your folks are doing takes time to play out. And so six months just isn't enough time to have a successful pilot of this nature. So I will continue to support this particular program. And I would encourage us all to keep working together to do that. And thanks so much for everything that your team is doing downtown. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Grant, as Chair of our Public Safety Committee, can I turn to you for a moment? Oh yeah, sorry, Kyle. I'd just like to add to the membership of the Wellington Firefighters Association is appreciative of your continued support for this pilot, for this program. One of the key pieces of this was trying to reduce, Councilor Grant talked about the strain on the vehicles. There is strain on the human capital of this city as well, which are the men and women on the front lines in this department that were responding to so many calls last summer. And this pilot program, the CRT, is really helping to reduce the strain on the employees as well. So I just wanted to highlight that. I think that is very important to point out that the work they are doing is helping to reduce some of that burnout, that compassion fatigue we've talked about, making sure that the men and women on the front lines are fresh and able to respond to the true emergencies and the CRT sort of picking up some of the slack, still providing that emergency service. But it is a breath of fresh air when that truck is responding instead of an engine or an ambulance constantly over and over again. So thank you from the membership for your continued support, allowing us to continue this into the summer, which is when we talked about it earlier. Our call volume is going to pick up. And we're just, we're already at 11% above where we were last year. We're gonna see where we're at come August. So thank you for your continued support. Councilor McKnight. I wanted to echo other sentiments here and also call out from a systems perspective, your department is absolutely innovating in the way that we should be moving government systems forward. And Mayor Mophani Stanek, I hope to have the chance to work with you on how we can take this model of innovation and kind of study how we arrived at this success and implemented in other departments across the city, because I think this is truly the kind of leadership and success that we need city wide. And I really want to applaud you for that. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Councilor Grant, can I turn to you for a motion now? Thank you. I'd like to move to approve and authorize the Chief Administrative Officer to make any and all necessary budget amendments to allocate the use of the assigned opioid money fund to support operating costs of the fire department community response team until funds are exhausted with a budget not to exceed the original approval of $182,598 and to further authorize the extension of the CRT pilot program through the end of the city fiscal year 24 or the end of available funding. Thank you, Councilor Grant. Is there a second to that motion? Second by Councilor Litwin. Is there any further discussion on this item? Seeing none, we'll go to a vote. All in favor of the motion from Councilor Grant, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Passes unanimously. Thank you, President Blake and Chief LeChance. That concludes our deliberative agenda. The next item is item 10, committee reports. The standing committees of the City Council have now been posted online. I know that our committees have been scheduling their first organization meetings. The committee reports are an opportunity for generally committee chairs to provide a brief update as to upcoming dates and times for committee meetings and any discussion that may be taking place there. With that in mind, are there any counselors with a committee report? Councilor Barlow and then Councilor McKnight. Thank you. The Transportation, Energy and Utilities Committee will be meeting on Tuesday, April 23rd, 5 p.m. at 645 Pine Street. The agenda is still being created but we will have a discussion about two of the bus routes, the College Street Shuttle and the city loop and their fare status with GMT returning to fares next month. We'll also be discussing committee priorities and possible agenda items for the coming year. Thank you, Councilor Barlow. Councilor McKnight. Thank you, President Travers. Just a brief update on the Parks, Arts and Culture Committee meeting. Our first organizing meeting has been scheduled for next Thursday, April 25th at 12 p.m. here at City Hall in the Sharon-Busher Conference Room. Agenda is still to be determined and that's, I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Great. Are there any other Councillors with committee reports? Councilor Newbyte, New Beezer. You're the first person to get New Beezer off the bat versus New Beezer. All right. I'm very impressed. Well, after two years of everyone calling me Traverse, I need to get it right. So just a quick update from CDNR. We scheduled, and I appreciate Evan and Joe, we had a scheduling marathon in Christine but we locked down a date that's gonna work five thirties monthly on the third Wednesday so the month with our first meeting on Wednesday, May 15th. And then I understand that there's a FY25 budget presentation. So instead of starting at 6.30, I think I just said 5.30, starting at 6.30 monthly, we're gonna start at seven following the budget presentation. Thank you. Are there any other Councillors with committee reports? Councilor Grant. I mentioned the Public Safety Committee meeting, which will be this Thursday. The REIB committee will be meeting on April 30th. Thank you. Thank you, Councilor Grant. As a parliamentary matter, I believe, and correct me if I'm wrong, Councilor Grant, here that your intention with the motion that you made on 9.5 was to read the full motion as is listed on Civic Clerk, including $10,000 contingent upon available funding or the end of available funding. And without objection from the Council, I would, including yourself, I would consider that being the motion that you read on 9.5. That would be correct. That additional amendment didn't make it to one of the pages and I was looking at the wrong area. So I think we could all be in agreement of that. Okay, any objection from the Council? All right, any further committee reports? Okay, that takes us to City Council General Affairs now. This is an opportunity for if any City Council would like to speak on General Affairs, they may do so. Does any City Council want to speak on General Affairs? Councilor Broderick. Yeah, so the, sorry, the Ward 8 MPA is meeting Thursday, April 25th at 6.30 at Sharon-Busher Conference Room right underneath Contois Agenda TBD. Thank you very much, Councilor Broderick. Any other Councilor on General Affairs? Councilor Grant. I can't find it, but we received an email earlier today regarding the, it's a meeting that students and staff members of the University of Vermont, it's called Community and Coalition. And it talks a lot about the issues that are experienced by and affect off-campus students. I try it when they have their meetings to listen to them, like, it's during my work time. And sometimes I participate when I can, but it's very, very interesting. And given that off-campus student population from the University of Vermont, we all know how many of them are in our community. And they did a survey of them. It was a pretty significant sample size, about 1,200 students. At the last meeting, they started to talk about food insecurity, insecurity paying, rent paying, utilities. And they're gonna be going into some more details as well as talking about the spring move out dates that are scheduled. And we know last year that even though these spring moveouts are really helpful to keeping the streets clean, there were a number of issues last year. There would just seem to be a higher than normal complaints but we're able to give feedback to them as well. Thank you, Councilor Grant. Any other, yeah, Councilor Newbezer. Sorry, I know I'm extending. Just a reminder that May street cleaning is coming up for folks or one residence where zone E, I think it's coming up on May 1st. So just make sure your cars are off the road so you don't get towed. And I just appreciate our first meeting together. You all are wonderful and I'm excited to see what we can do. Thanks. Thank you. Any other Councilors? Yep, Councilor Litwin. One more and I'm mindful of the time as well. So as folks know, I just joined and got my email set up and was traveling unable to be here during swearing in and came back to quite a few constituent concerns about some tree clearing that occurred in Keyslake Park. And I've been in touch with Director Cindy White of Parks and Rec and also with Abby Duke. And Mark Barlow came and walked through with me recently and so I definitely want to check in with you. Councilors Cain and Grant, because we share a boundary line there and your constituents definitely use the park. It appears there was an error by the construction company and it's quite shocking to many people to see. And so what I understand right now is that a plan is being worked out with the City Arborist and some folks on Cindy's team for a proposed restoration plan. And I just think that that plan should potentially live within a committee or at least have public input and public communication about that plan before it's agreed to with the developer who crossed the boundary line into the protected space. It's in Ward 7 but it's right on our ward boundary so. Thank you, Councilor Litwin. Anyone else? All right, that takes us to item 12 which is City Council President Update. So I just have a couple brief items here. One is I want to echo what Councilor Nubizer said which is thank you all for working through this first meeting, first real meeting together. It's been a privilege to be here and I'm looking forward to the year to come. The second thing I wanted to mention is that this is our first meeting we've held since the eclipse and I think a lot of credit is owed to former Mayor Weinberger as well as you Mayor Mulvaney-Stanek and so many city staff that really had Burlington at its best on that day. We received updates as a former council from a number of folks in Burlington City Arts and Business and Workforce Development as well as at the Parks Department and they among many others just made it truly a banner day here in Burlington so huge credit goes out to those folks. Two, just two other calendar updates. One is that you will soon see posted online if not already annual vacancies for all the city's boards and commissions. So I would stay tuned to that. It will be posted online and would encourage councilors to inform their constituents about those vacancies. The deadline for the annual postings will be on May 15th and I've been in touch with councilors about trying to put together a nominating committee for us to hopefully hear and decide on those appointments at our meeting on June 10th. And then finally I will just, I'll send a follow-up email on this as well but we have a number of local establishments with annual liquor licenses that will be expiring at the end of April and if our local control commission doesn't take action on all the renewals that may be coming in between now and the end of the month, we'll have some establishments who sadly will have their liquor licenses expire between the end of the month and our next council meeting on May 6th. And so at the board of finance meeting on April 29th we will be warning a meeting of our local control commission which as you found out tonight is the full city council. We can work together to see if truly everyone needs to be there. We need seven for our quorum of our local control commission. The board of finance is four. We have no overlap with our license committee and if all three members of the license committee can be there as well, that would make seven but I just wanted to flag for folks on their calendar that on April 29th on the same night as our board of finance we will need to warn which should be a fairly brief meeting of our local control commission to ensure that the taps keep flowing through May 6th. So that is it for my city council president updates and that brings us to the last item on our agenda which is the mayor general affairs and we have eight minutes before 1030 Mayor Mulvaney Stanek. Well, I take that very seriously council trappers after starting my city council career and ending at 2am. So I'm committed to helping you stick that landing. So thank you everyone. I now see why the mayor's report is at the end of the agenda and I'm gonna take that seriously but I do have a few updates because I'm sure many of you are curious how the first two weeks have gone in the mayor's office and there's a lot going on and I wanna make sure you are updated. I will start a practice of offering a written piece because I think it's helpful for folks at home and reading your council packet to know what's been going on. So we'll turn this in and probably do two at the next council meeting. So first I really truly and generally wanna appreciate the warm start to this role on organization day two weeks ago. The energy in this room, the optimism, the opportunity of really starting a new government not only in the administration but also with the council here was really electrifying and I hope you feel that optimism that's really throughout the city right now regardless of who won or not. There's a coming together that's happening in our community and I attribute that to everyone so I hope you're feeling that. I again just personally wanna appreciate the warm reception two weeks ago, almost two weeks ago. I also wanna really acknowledge my new staff who've entered in with me on the first day in office about two weeks ago and if you haven't had a chance to meet my chief of staff, Erin Jacobson. She was sitting behind me here tonight. She's fabulous. She is serving in the chief of staff role. I've also hired Joe McGee, many of you are familiar, former city counselor and now I'm moving hopefully that position into a deputy chief of staff position to really start working on some of the bottlenecking I've heard from many department heads that was happening under the prior structure. He'll still be working on communications but I think this new system is I'll explain a little more in just a moment. I've retained Emma Allen as the scheduler and assistant in the office. She's been fabulous for continuity of government purposes which I've said in the past is really important. And then for a temporary two month period, Darren Fergeron who was my transition director and prior that campaign director is helping so we can set up some community engagement systems which more on that in May. The chief of staff, Erin and the deputy Joe are gonna be really looking at our department spread. There's 18 direct reports as department heads to the mayor and holy moly that's a lot. So we're trying to split it up in terms of a portfolio between the two of them in a two thirds, one third role. So I've heard good feedback from department heads already on that and I'm happy to share that list when I have more time and we'll put this in writing in case you're curious about that. We're trying it on. So we'll see how it goes to just again help department heads get the information they need really sort of create zones of genius or content expert areas within liaisons within our office and again work a little more effectively with supporting our departments. I've also appreciated starting a regular meeting with your council president because I think this relationship is one of the most important ones in terms of functioning our city and moving it forward. So I look forward to many more meetings with them as we develop our relationship. I also wanna just thank some staff who both inside city government but outside city government for some additional support because on a little bit of a serious note I have received threats as the new mayor coming in. The day I started walking into this building the morning after and I continued to receive those and some of them have been unfortunately serious. I name that because this is important for folks to understand what women in office are facing what queer folks are facing and it's happening here in Burlington. So I particularly wanna thank the US attorney's office the state's attorney's office and the community justice center and also some department heads who've been collaborating to figure out how we create a safer environment for folks to serve and that extends to all of US city counselors also to our state delegation because I know I am not the only one and we're working on a procedures and safety mechanism so stay tuned for more on that. I just wanna also let's see what was I gonna say next people have been curious around priorities and vision I wanted to say two brief ones I'm already running out of time the first two priorities out of the gate will be the budget fiscal year 25 I'm spending a lot of quality time with this woman to my right here and we're taking this quite seriously because throughout the campaign I talked about the importance of a lens of affordability, transparency and engagement with folks understanding our own city budget we have a lot of very important information we'll be sharing soon with all of you we'll need your partnership it's serious work ahead and I wanna underline serious if I can verbally that we're gonna need to really roll up our sleeves together I will also be naming some budget advisors from the community tomorrow I'm meeting with them tomorrow because we have such serious work ahead I wanted to bring in some folks who are former electeds and to round out the conversation and their perspective on a high level around how do we start tackling this big issue the community safety is the second and obvious other big priority and I'm only stating those two for the next three months because you have no priorities if you list 100 so those are the two clear eyed ones I'll be focusing on budget is the first one out of the gate and community safety is the second you'll hear more about the community safety special assistant idea I've had for the office as well as the general commitment to making sure that folks are safe and feel safe in our community and then just very briefly because we're getting so close to 1030 I wanna just mention I've met with virtually all department heads at this point which has been great one on ones with those folks we had our first full department head meeting which I think was received well and people really showed up in a collaborative way to think about how they can offer advising to my office but really I continue to be impressed by the deep dedication of our department heads so as you develop your relationships if you're new to council please really understand these folks are content experts in their fields they deserve our respect and collaboration and as you get your feet under you please feel free to reach out to my office to support their good work and their teams with them and let's see for community engagement I've been out in the community quite a bit and I've really appreciated trying to keep my door open and carving out time as you imagine everyone and their mother wants to meet with the new mayor and I've been trying to make sure that community members have just as much of a chance to meet with me and me going out into the community so just two or three highlights quickly I attended the Iftar celebration last week at the local mosque by the Islamic Society of Vermont I celebrated Eid last weekend with the Afghan Alliance of Vermont and then the Pancake Breakfast at the Sustainability Academy in the Old North End I know a few counselors were there as well so I name that because I encourage you to come and to participate and join me at any of these events it's a great way to show up to community and make sure that we're going to the spaces that these folks are already convening in and then finally I just wanna mention the highlight going way back to the agenda pop quiz around legislative issues I, as I said, weeks ago in my former role that I just resigned two weeks about our relationship with our legislative delegation can be improved and I really look forward I appreciate those of you who are available to sit in on my first attempt to collaborate with state representatives and council and our lobbyists to start to get on the same page about where we're at for folks to be able to ask questions and answer questions where policy is at I'm gonna be doing another meeting with state senators in the next few days I invite you to we'll make it virtual again so you can participate and then when we're through this session most importantly I wanna debrief and understand what works, what doesn't work I have my own opinions as a former state legislator we have so much room to improve and I wanna collaborate with you to develop an agenda that serves this city and not be just my agenda but our agenda and then work in the months leading into the next session with our state delegation so we can be effective in Montpelier so look forward to that and I always welcome feedback so open invitation look at that 1030 counselor thank you so much thank you mayor thank you for naming some of the backlash you've unfortunately been receiving allow me to say that we stand with you in rejecting that hate that brings us to the end of our meeting is there a motion to adjourn? move to adjourn thank you councilor Grant is there a second? second by councilor McKnight all in favor of the motion to adjourn say aye aye any opposed? we are adjourned at let's say 1030 thank you