 And my name is Bridget Bozak. I'm the current steering committee member for Ward four. I'm joined by my colleague from Ward seven, Jeff Comstock and Matt Horbert. And we have a room full of neighbors from Ward four and seven and elsewhere. And we have a fantastic panel. This is the reason I think why we have NPAs. And we have two subjects. I don't know where to look. So I'll just do this. We have two subjects tonight near and dear to many people's hearts. And that is housing lack thereof. So we have state reps. We have our state treasurer. We have the city of Burlington. Please get your, uh, your questions. Um, they have the answers and it's going to be great. And Jeff Comstock has arranged for the sewer woman to come back and answer questions and, uh, recap and to, uh, bring up to date, uh, about the sewer break, particularly Ward seven. I'm going to turn it over to Sarah carpenter. Ward four city counselor, Sarah, take it away. Thank you all. Um, we have a jam packed, uh, agenda. So we're, we're going to kind of do a little. Speed dating here. We're, um, not as we usually do. We're going to take the time to introduce the neighbors, um, because I want to make sure that all of our speakers have a chance to speak. Um, as Bridget said, I'm Ward four city counselor, Sarah carpenter. For those of you who don't know this, I spent a whole career in affordable housing, both as executive director at, um, cathedral square corporation and then as the executive director of the Vermont housing finance agency. Um, and I'm pleased to be here, although frustrated that we have such a housing crisis. Um, somehow it seems to have gotten worse than better. Um, but we have some great minds here to help us, um, sort that out. Um, I think you've all heard me and maybe public discussions talk about the fact that the city of Burlington needs help. Megan will talk about some of our newer initiatives. Um, but we're going to hear from the state reps first. Um, we also have Brian pine director of CEDO here who is one of the city agencies that oversees housing. Um, so I'm going to start with treasurer P check. Um, who among other things than being the treasure also by virtual was office sits on the agency, uh, the board of the agency run housing finance agency. So, um, by osmosis and fire, he's learned everything he never wanted to know about the housing situation in Vermont. And I'm going to give each panelist maybe seven, eight minutes to talk and then we want to have plenty of time for questions at the end. Well, uh, thank you very much, Sarah. Um, it's a pleasure to be here with you all tonight. I'm Mike P check. Uh, use for, can you? Oh, so it won't, it won't be in the gotcha. Thank you. Thank you. Uh, Mike P check. I use he him pronouns. I'm the state treasurer, uh, for the state of Vermont was elected in November prior to that was the, um, commissioner at the department of financial regulation for the last six years and was the deputy commissioner for two years prior to that. So the reason that, you know, housing was such a key, um, in our first sort of 10 or 11 months in this office, uh, really sprung from conversations I had with Vermonters all across the state. We visited every single town in Vermont as part of our campaign, all 252 towns. And it was striking how similar the conversations were in every community. Uh, I talked to the town clerk and say, how are things going? They would say very busy and I'd say, why is that? And they say, well, we have so many real estate transactions. People have been moving into our community. And I say, Oh, can you talk a little bit more about that? And they'd say, well, they've come from New York or Boston or San Francisco. They're sort of moving here from out of state. Um, they're bringing their remote job with them. They're selling their home in those cities. They have a lot of cash and they're purchasing homes well above the purchase price. And, um, they're really eating up the housing stock. And we have so many of these transactions is keeping us so busy. And then you have another conversation with another town clerk. And it was a very similar story. Um, you have a conversation with a business owner who says, I'd like to hire more people. I need to hire more people, but I can't because those perspective employees can't find housing. You talk to hospitals that say we are having a really hard time hiring doctors, nurses, specialists, uh, because when we offer them a job, they will accept it and then they'll have to eventually rescind because they can't find housing in the community. So that really struck me as, um, something that was so clear of a message from Vermonters when we were going around and I wanted to look at the data to see, you know, is the story anecdotal? I mean, we were hearing it from across the state, but you know, what's the data that we can put to this? And, you know, we did find IRS data when we looked at the 2020 and 2021 tax return data that showed that Vermont had seen an increased number of people move to our state, like 3000 people in each of those years. So 6,000 in total for 2020 and 2021. The 2022 data is not available yet. And you look at the history of that data set and there's no other year where we've seen that kind of dramatic increase in people moving to our state over a one year period or over a two year period. And they've been keeping this data since the early 1990s. And you drill down on the data a bit and it shows that of the 6000 people that moved here, 84% of them are between the ages of 24 years old and 44 years old. So they're exactly the kind of demographic that we want to move to Vermont and we've been talking about for so long, younger people, young families, young children, children in the schools have long careers in Vermont are going to be involved in the communities. And then you look at the income and 77% of them are making over 70 or over $100,000 a year, 77% of them, 50% making over $200,000 a year. The amount of adjusted gross income that they brought into the state in those two years was $850 million. So that's significant. And then you follow that through to our tax receipts. And you can see that our personal income tax numbers went from like 800 million to 1.2 billion after the pandemic up $400 million. Same with our corporate tax for another reason. But so that's all the good news. I mean that, you know, more revenue for the state, more young people living here, more resources to solve the challenges that we face as a state. But it certainly put tremendous pressure on our housing stock. It's quite clear that that's our number one issue from an economic standpoint. You know, I call, I say that it's holding back the full potential of the Vermont economy. You can talk to any business owner and they'll tell you their own story about how many people they would hire and at what salaries, you know, if they could find a housing for them. So one, you know, one of the things I'll leave it here and then, and then, you know, let others talk, but just a little bit about the program I wanted to highlight that we announced in the Treasurer's Office and been working on for the last nine months. But we announced the last September that we were making our first investments out of this program. So because we've had so much more money, the state's bank account, if you will, is flush with cash more so than it's been ever before. High interest rates are something that's preventing housing projects from going forward because, you know, their pre-pandemic costs versus their post-pandemic costs and if people got caught up in that, that's really a challenge to make the project work. But we have the ability to make economic investment in Vermont through a program in our office that we expanded and then directed toward housing. So we announced 55 and a half million dollars of low interest loans out of our office for housing development that 55 and a half million we're expecting to leverage another 340 million of public and private dollars to support 1,100 units of housing. So we thought that was the most important thing we could do at this moment in time to provide low interest loans to people like Vita, VHFA, other community members that are in the housing space ready to build housing that otherwise was delayed because of these high interest rates. So I have to talk about the other parts of the conversation, but maybe I'll just leave it there, Sarah. Okay. Great. Like I said, I hope we're going to have plenty of time for questions. Okay. I think next we'll go to Senator Keisha Rom-Hinsdale and Keisha and I go way back. She's really the queen of housing and did housing work at one point for the city. Then as a state rep, and the representative side of the legislature on housing and now is a chair of the Senate housing committee and was the primary architect of a bill called S100, which I think is now act 47 or something like that. I can't keep doing that, which has a lot of good stuff. And I understand she's going to look at part two. So we'll let you tell us about that. Well, thank you. I consider Councillor Carpenter the queen of housing. So I'm happy to be the princess, the Duchess of housing, but I truly did learn so much from her in her many roles and you are extremely fortunate to have her as a city counselor, especially in this critical time when housing, public safety, climate change are all colliding and we're trying to figure out how to move forward together as a community. Senator Keisha Rom-Hinsdale, I use she her pronouns. I chair the economic development housing and general affairs committee. I used to sit in here folks may remember as your staff person to help you stay connected to the city. It's wonderful to see familiar and new faces. And I am the person who you can praise or blame for the home act housing opportunities made for everyone. And I am okay with either one. I am watching my six month old baby on the monitor because this is one of the first nights. I haven't been able to do bedtime with her. Senator Gullit can the test and. You know, she's really my driving force for why I wanted to work so hard on this bill and why I was willing to. Increase my cortisol and stress levels when I was pregnant as the chair of this committee and pass this bill from the hospital because every family deserves to have a warm safe place for their baby to be sleeping right now. And that's simply just not the case in Vermont. It was not the case in May when we passed this sweeping bill. And then we had a major flooding event that damaged 4,000 homes and caused even more turmoil and chaos for Vermonters who have precarious housing. I believe the home act being part one of this process is critical for two major reasons. One, it ends discrimination against multifamily housing. Multifamily housing is how most people get into the market to be able to purchase their first home, duplex, condo, etc. It's how they build equity and have a piece of the economy in the first place. The governor started in a duplex. I started in a duplex in Burlington. It's truly been the pathway for many people to accessing housing and we now have fewer and fewer options that are not single family homes for people to purchase. So that is in many ways the treasure pointed out we've had more people move into the state and buy homes. This is also in the last three years, the greatest delta, the biggest increase in the cost of buying a home that we've ever had in the state of Vermont. So if you own your home, you've won the lottery. You've seen your home value appreciate greatly. If you are a renter and we're trying to save up that down payment between interest rates and the increasing cost of housing, you are, you know, a decade or more away from where you hope to be in purchasing a home. As the treasurer said, that is devastating to our workforce right now. We have about 20,000 or more open jobs in the state and less than a thousand housing listings for sale. We had everyone in our committee from, you know, cash years to hospital executives say they've been living in motels in the state because they could not find something to buy. We have lost many people who wanted to be Vermonters who wanted to purchase a home here and FEMA is looking outside of the state to help people relocate who were impacted by the flood because there is simply no housing stock for people. So that is the current situation. The other piece of the bill that was really critical. Is investing in affordable home ownership. And I try to make an important distinction in the policy world. So bear with me if it seems really nerdy. But Sarah, Brian, people know this well, we have perpetually affordable housing, which has a standard federal definition of being 30% or less of someone's income. And so we've always had more significant federal investment in perpetually affordable housing. Many Vermonters have said, but I also can't afford housing and I make more than, you know, 50% to 75% of median household income. Where's my affordable housing? And that has been the journey we've been on for the last few years that the treasure has added funding to. Because if you have very strict regulation around what is perpetually affordable for very low income people, it often makes the rest of the housing more expensive for middle income folks who then are priced out of the market and you get second homeowners, you know, who come in and maybe maybe move here, which is great, but maybe just use it as a second home as they fear what happens with climate change in Florida or DC, etc. Speaking of climate change, 70% of Vermont households are two people or less. What we're talking about when we say that are a lot of older folks who want desperately to have senior housing who want someone else to plow their driveway. They want to stop worrying about their utilities and maintaining their housing and they have nowhere else to go to let a growing family take their large historic home in a rural place in Vermont. They are on a waiting list for years and years for senior housing in the state and they are now heating one part of their home to live in and not really experiencing the quality of life that they hope to. Senior housing is a huge piece of this puzzle because we do have the housing stock, but for a lot of people they don't have anywhere else to go if they sell their house where they can stay near their kids and grandkids. From a further sort of economic perspective, some people have said, you know, the home act is great, but it doesn't impact Burlington. We're already doing a great job. I'm sure Megan's going to speak to this. But in Burlington even you could not duplex your home unless you had 10,000 square feet or more of property of acreage. That's classist. And when something's classist it also affects people of color and we now have the fifth largest racial home ownership gap in the country. And that affects new Americans ability to get a foothold in the economy and stay here and to what the treasurer said, if you take it a step further 90% of our population growth in Vermont over the last two census periods has been from the immigration of people of color as refugees as migrants who are taking jobs at the hospital in our university setting in senior centers and custodial roles. So, you know, not only do they deserve quality of life and access to home ownership because it's the right thing to do, but we are not going to have a workforce if we don't start thinking about how abysmal the home ownership rate is for people of color. I will get off my soapbox now home act to soon to be released is essentially you know what I would agree with Burlington or any other community about is we've asked municipalities to do a lot with the first version of the home act. It is generally focused on zoning and local barriers to creating multifamily housing. The state has tremendous responsibility to with duplication that exists in act 250 and the chilling effect of knowing that you could end up in a process that could land you in the supreme court twice if just one of your neighbors disagrees with the project. It's a very expensive prospect to go through both municipal and state zoning. And it's stopping really valuable housing from being built by local home builders because they hit caps in every single community they're in including rural areas including their hometown where they might want to build more than 10 units of housing and if they do they get caught up in act 250. So we're looking at all of the thresholds we're looking at the cost and we're looking at the fairness of the process and ways that we can take our existing designations like downtown and village centers. Neighborhood growth areas which Burlington and South Burlington have taken advantage of but are hard for smaller communities to say this is where we want housing built and the state will get out of the way there and hand the act 250 criteria over to the municipality to administer itself. So we have historic investment in housing. We have a real opportunity. We cannot lose those resources to litigation and delays when so many Vermonters are desperate to purchase their first home. Thanks, Keisha. We're hoping to leave plenty of time for questions. We're going to move on now to our own neighbor senator, Martina Gulick who serves on the committee on health and welfare and we certainly are very conscious in our face of our issues around how many unhoused people are coming and surviving in Burlington. Along with that, the whole issue of drug addiction on her committee deals with that. I don't think we can have an adequate housing answer unless we can combine services and support with it. So we'll let Martina update us. Thank you very much and thanks to all my colleagues for being here. I think one of the reasons I'm here tonight is that I wrote a little piece in the North Coast. I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it. I'm going to read it. Susan Birgit immediately emailed me. Oh, okay. I can try to speak louder. Put my teacher voice on. It's just for, yeah. Yeah. Thank you. And Birgit said, I really like that article. It was very informative. And it was really, it was a really good article that we put together. Which was Greg Colburn who wrote homelessness is a housing problem. It was him speaking to these issues and, and just bringing up a lot of the data and important points that he put in that book. We also had some local folks speaking about the crisis in Vermont. So it was a great, it was a great, I'm calling it a workshop. It was wonderful and I was happy to be there. And the housing crises are the most dire and affluent communities. You know, that was something I really hadn't thought about and it struck me. So really, as I look at this from a health and welfare perspective, a few weeks ago, I spent about six hours at a joint meeting with house welfare help house human services, human services. Thank you. And we heard from. agency employees in the Vermont government. We heard from nonprofit folks, and then we had some lived experience stories from folks who are living this crisis in the state. And so it was a hard day, I'll be honest with you, because a lot of what we heard was quite dire, but I think we also left with some strategies and some work to do. So that felt hopeful. But I did just wanna share with you a couple bits of information that I learned that day. One was that VCAP, which is the Vermont Community Action Partnership, on a daily, on a, sorry, so far this year has received 3,598 phone calls for housing support, and that's just in three counties in Vermont. Washington County has triple the rate of homelessness per capita than any other part of the state. That was surprising to me. We also learned that one of the really large barriers for folks in the state has to do with paperwork, administrative burden, and that was frustrating to me. As a teacher, one of the things that we did when we had a student who was vulnerable was to break down barriers. So one of the takeaways was this one gentleman said he had to fill out a 20-page form nine times. And when he went to his resource officer, that person was not even able to help him with some of the questions that were so poorly written. So those kinds of barriers are really hard to hear and fixable. So that was, for me, something at the end where we said we can make an application that is trauma-informed, maybe make one application that can be used across multiple areas. But I did just wanna share that that was really hard to hear. And I think the gentleman teared up as he was telling us that story. We learned that there are 436 children homeless in our state and that number is going to rise as more folks leave the motel program that we have. That was another number that I found shocking. But for me, just because this is something I hear about very regularly from my constituents here in Burlington, it was more what can we do in Burlington to solve this problem? And I know our city counselors are constantly facing these issues. And at the end of the day, that was a question that we had for the administration and for the folks working in the agencies. What is the plan? And I have to be honest with you, there wasn't clear. So the sense is that going into this next legislative session, this is going to be a focal point for both of the health and welfare and human services committees. This is what we're gonna be focusing on. It's gonna be extremely important to us. So I'm happy to hear that. But a few other things that I just wanted to briefly share with you and I'm sure others here can flesh this out a little bit, but some of the things that we need to do, along with increasing our labor force is also increasing beds for folks, both recovery beds and respite beds for folks who are going in and out of treatment and in and out of the healthcare system. We need to partner with landlords. That was something that came up often. Really encouraging landlords to increase their low income housing stock and giving them incentives and relief for doing so. I think those were my big takeaways that I wanted to share with you today. If I think of anything else, I will grab the mic back and you can certainly ask me questions later, but I did just wanna share that with you and I really appreciate you being here tonight and plugging into this issue. Thanks, Martine. Next, we're gonna ask our neighbor House Representative Carol Odie, who actually sits on the House Ways and Means Committee. And if you don't know what that is, that's the Tax and Finance Committee, which is always an underlying most housing bills for some reason end up passing through there and Carol's been a big advocate. And I wanna speak both heartily of Carol and Martine and Bob Hooper and Phil Baruth from our neighborhood. I get lots of comments and concerns from neighbors and I pass them on to them and I know they're working hard for us, but I still encourage you to pass those comments on to them so that when they return to Montpelier in January, they'll have first hand information. So Carol, why don't you update us? All right, well, we're all seeing play out on the streets of Burlington, what's happening because of the houseless crisis. And we, this is a problem that's a national problem and it's a state problem in our states and it's playing out on our city's streets and we have got to do more than we are now doing as a state and a federal government. So what are some of the things that we have done as a state? Well, before COVID, we had 250 households unhoused and that jumped to 1,800 in 2022. So we have allocated $110 to $140 million in the last three budgets to pay for more housing to be built. And we need to continue at this pace for several more years in order to bring the number of housing units up to what we need them to be to house people in this state affordably and at every income level. Second, we have a general emergency assistance program in this state and it provides temporary housing for people but without services. And we extended that program. It usually ends on the 15th of every March. We extended that to end in June of this past year and that kept 800 households inside housing for three extra months. In the Budget Adjustment Act, we extended those eligible for general assistance to those who were over 60 years old in a household, children who are 18 and over or 19 if they were still in school in the household and pregnant if there was a pregnant member of a household. Those numbers as of the last couple of weeks were 815 in general assistance program. Of those, 443 are disabled, 33 were there because of domestic violence and 78 were displaced from their housing because of housing code violations. So then Act 81, we passed that extended housing for those who were in the motel programs as of June 30th, if they were in a motel room, then they get to stay there all the way till April 1st of this coming April, 2024. And the state is obligated to find those who were in those motel rooms housing going forward. So of the 815 households that are unhoused, we have in Rutland, 224 households, Burlington, 166, Brattleboro, 93, Barry, 96, Springfield, 36 in those areas and then a lesser number in some of the other areas. So transitioning to permanent housing, some of the obstacles that people don't have sufficient income to be able to be in housing, they might have poor credit history, they may not have a good or any landlord references or they can't live independently, they're not healthy enough or they, for instance, 28% of them need mental health supports. And we also have a lack of affordable housing units, which I know you all know, we have substandard motel rooms, which is making the problem worse. We have a transitional housing program that ran out of funds and we have staffing challenges at within the human resources department, excuse me, human services department and also some of the people who live with work in the Department of Children and Families are being threatened by those who they're trying to help. So there's more to do there. So what are some of the, I think hopeful things that we can look at? Because it's about the state, it's also about our community. We have a need for mental health care, we have a need for long-term treatment, we have insufficient hospital beds and mental health care beds. We have plans to add more of those, but still not enough in number. Hopeful, there's a new Shelburne site on Route 7, I think it's called Lakeview and it has 26 people who had been in the old Burlington College building who then moved to a house downtown in Burlington who are now out to Shelburne and they will be more safely cared for there. We need treatment for those who are addicted and some hopeful stories there is, there's a place called Jenna's Promise and if you are willing to do medically assistant treatment, they will help you to break yourself of substance use disorder. And in Brattleboro, there's a hotel that's just been renovated and it's to house people struggling with addiction and Champlain Housing Trust has also got a project for that. We need to get young people safely off the streets and generally, just generally without any specific problems and Spectrum has some new programs that are wonderful for that. You all have heard of Spectrum which is downtown and one of their new programs is to guarantee income for young people for five years enough so that they aren't worried about where they'll live next and they can pay some bills and then they can go on and get jobs or continue education and that's an experimental program they're doing and it's very hopeful and that's for Spectrum helps those who are under 24 and then Champlain Housing Trust has, let's see if I can get the number from here. Their goal is 1,000 new units homes and 250 being permanently affordable. They haven't met that, but this year they built 594 apartments and homes in, sorry, in 2022. So they are not meeting their targets but there's very good news there that they're moving toward their goals. This is extraordinarily difficult because of so many issues that are facing those who are unhoused and because of the lack of the number of units of housing we have a very low vacancy rate. And I looked on the web today to see and so you should continue to contact your representatives for sure and you wanna also contact the governor because he's got a council on housing and homelessness and it's a plan to prevent Vermonters from becoming homeless and it is focused on areas where demographic, experiencing demographic declines in the state. So that's not talking about the cities where we are facing this crisis now so we really need action on our streets. Next. Thanks, Carol. I'm gonna introduce you to Megan, title our planning director but a little bit of an editorial comment because our state legislators have been so responsive. Certainly these folks and others, but again, as Carol mentioned, I do encourage you to contact us but also to contact the governor's office. There's, if you all recall, we had a recent resolution at the city council where we've invited the governor to come to Burlington, walk around Burlington, walk on the bike back, walk on our parks and see the number of unhoused that we're dealing with. The state is sitting on $22 million of opioid settlement money and we've been working hard to get it out the door but it's been frustratingly low or slow, low, slow and it's gotta be a priority. And I think it's useful. Sometimes you just gotta keep repeating yourself and I know our state reps wanna hear the antidotes because that's important. It's important to share with their colleagues in what Peulier. We know houselessness and drug addiction is in all parts of the state but Burlington has been particularly hard hit and I don't think that's being acknowledged. So that's my editorial comment. Megan Toddle from the city planning office is joining us and she's gonna talk about our newest initiative in the city to develop more housing. And I think it's important to point out the city of Burlington does not develop housing. We need partners. We need the Champlain Housing Trust. We need Cathedral Square. We need the private developers to build the housing. The city of Burlington gets a little bit of money but not much, we're 5% in to the bigger pot. And so while we are asked why don't we build more housing? We don't own land, we're not housing developers and we don't have the resources. We really rely on our partners. And so again, we've gotta keep loud and clear. One of the things we can do as a city is facilitate the building of housing. And I know the work that Senator Rahm is still doing is critical in on the state side and in a lot of municipalities who may not be that open to housing. I think Burlington is but we need both the state support to do it and we need to take some of our own initiatives and Megan's gonna talk about our newest initiative which is really to promote the missing middle housing or infill housing. You all know Cambrian Rise on North Avenue, it's right in your face but there's lots of little spots that we think are under zoned, under utilized. And so our newest initiative is to try to address that. Great, thank you, Councillor Carpenter. And I just wanna start by saying similar to other panelists here, the work that we're doing is really in the context of understanding that our housing needs have been longstanding and ongoing. I've worked for the city for eight years now and I think not a week has gone by that I haven't talked about housing or worked on housing in some way through partnerships with people like CEDO and Brian's team and others inside and outside of city government. The work that we're doing right now actually came out of a plan that the city put out in late 2021. We were calling this the 10 point housing plan and it included a number of immediate actions that the city took to put out some of the resources that we had financially to help spur both immediate kind of acute housing needs that we were seeing in the city as well as help support those longstanding permanently affordable housing units that we also know we need many more of in the city. So Brian's team has really been leading and CEDO has really been leading a lot of that work. There were also several steps that were taken immediately to create a new position within his team. If you haven't met Sarah Russell, the special assistant to end homelessness, she's wonderful and very hardworking on all of these issues that we've been talking about tonight. Trying to do a lot of really kind of immediate term things to help us with the challenges that we're experiencing on a day to day basis. The work that my team is involved with and the planning commission and the city council have been involved with are really about some of our longer term strategies. So about the zoning laws that affect where and how much housing can be built in different parts of the city. We've made a number of changes to these zoning laws over the last 10 years and we've certainly seen that that has had an effect. There have been almost 1,300 new homes built in the last 10 years in the city but we know we need almost that many more and we need them to become available quicker than the last 10 years as well. So the work that we're doing right now, you may have heard over the summer the city council actually adopted zoning changes to a portion of the south end to create a district that would allow for mixed use development that could include hundreds of new homes, potentially up to 1,000 new homes in that area of the city. We've been working with the institutions to address zoning changes that might be needed within portions of their campus to help support more additional on-campus housing in the form of beds for students. And then we've been working on the missing middle. So these neighborhood scale housing choices through a project that we're calling the neighborhood code. And this really fits really closely with what Senator Rom Hinsdale was saying that was kind of at the core of Act 47 which is about making sure that more affordable and accessible home types are not illegal in the city. As we've been working on this, we've been talking about a lot of the neighborhoods that we all live in, the kinds of homes that we've lived in across our lifespan, the kinds of homes that we may want to live in in the future. And recognizing that some of our neighborhoods are really vibrant actually because they have a mix of housing types and people who can access them at different stages in their life. And really one of the aims of the neighborhood code is to make sure that our zoning laws are not excluding that kind of housing choice and housing diversity. Specifically we've been working over, actually I've talked to many of you in the last couple of weeks we've been working for about the last year to bring forward to a joint committee a series of recommendations to changing the rules that apply to the residential neighborhoods of the city. So places like here in our neighborhood in the new North End. We are specifically thinking about zoning rules that would change a lot of the like super technical in the weeds mechanics of how big homes can be, how many homes can be on a lot, the types of things that really start to become barriers to seeing more housing choices within existing neighborhoods. We're going to be looking at specifically recommendations that would allow for building types like duplexes the Senator mentioned, three unit and even four unit buildings across all of our neighborhoods and making sure that we have more opportunities for how these types of these types of homes can coexist along single family homes in the city as well. So we do have the handout that we shared with you on the backside of that you can see a couple examples of what this could look like on actual real lots here in the new North End. We're looking not only at these sort of duplex and four unit buildings, but also more creative solutions. Somebody mentioned housing as we get older and housing options for staying in our neighborhood. So we've been working very closely with AARP, the state organization on exploring things like cottage courts, which are essentially, lots that are shared, but may have four or five, maybe even six small single family homes on that shared lot to help with affordability and access, looking at a lot of different options through the context of the neighborhood code. So the joint committee is meeting right now. The, some of the meetings are actually listed on the handout that we shared with you and really encourage you to check out our website, learn more about the neighborhood code, come to the committee, share with counselor carpenter and other counselors and planning commissioners that you may know your feedback about the work that we're doing and hope that we'll have an opportunity to talk to you more about it. Thank you, Megan. I, as Director Tuttle said, I sit on that committee. It's a new committee for me and gets in the weeds quick, but I do encourage you to follow it. It will present some changes to our neighborhoods. I think for the positive, it's being supported by the work that Senator Rom Hinsdale and Act 47, the whole legislature passed really. So we're a little ahead of the game, which is actually a good thing, but these are changes that will be happening statewide as well. So I think it will be important for us to pay attention. It will be targeted, not targeted, but change some of our lower density neighborhoods to be not so low density and allow things like duplexes and triplexes and fourplexes. So I think that is a whole other strategy of how we can have housing sort of in film where we've got opportunity. And infrastructure. And infrastructure. And I think that was a key part of the Senator's bill is not all communities have infrastructure, nor do we want building out in the fields. We wanna build where we have infrastructure. And that's a change, but we have it here. And we have all of the opportunity for more housing. And I think that's what Burlington can bring to the table. So with that, I think what we're gonna try to do is open it up to questions. And... Easy. And if someone wants to do... Okay. Okay, thank you. I have several questions, but I think the first two might be for Megan or maybe Treasurer. Would you say your name for those of us who are in... I'm sorry, would you say your name for those of us who are in... Nancy Comstock, Ward 7. So if we were to do an ADU or a tiny house or like a mother-in-law type apartment on our house, I'm always hearing these nightmares about stories about people who rent and the people stop paying or they've trashed the place. Are the eviction laws going to change? And also the second question is if you do ADU are you billed taxed at, that's a second home or how are you taxed? And also are there any credits because the rent is now income? And are there any credits to help offset that as a homeowner? I don't know that Megan answered the eviction one and I'll toss that to somebody, but maybe Brian has some comments on that. On the ADU. So I'll try to address the first question. The state law around evictions treats a owner-occupied building differently. I don't actually know the answer to your question about a detached other unit. I'd have to look into that and get back to you on that one. You're gonna have to... I'll make another editorial comment in front of our esteemed legislators. I don't know that there's proposals and you can correct me if I'm wrong to change eviction laws. I do know that the court system is incredibly backed up and that is a huge problem is the timing. So maybe one of the senators can or reps can speak to that. Do you wanna take it? No, no, I was gonna give it to you. Oh, okay. Okay. The proposals that are currently in the works tend to look at eviction, diversion, mediation, resources that might go to somebody if their reason for eviction is non-payment of rent or something that got damaged. We, as I think it was both Senator Gillick and Representative Odie said that we do have to partner with landlords. They own 85% of the rental housing stock, 15% is landlords that are affordable housing developers, but the rest are private landlords around the state and they're very reluctant to take a risk on anyone right now. So we absolutely hear that. We hear that all the time. We are looking across both chambers at ways to... I wouldn't say speed up the processing court because the judiciary is just extremely backed up, but many people could have another ancillary process that supports the needs of both the landlord and the tenant. At the same time, we do have to face head-on that many people won't accept section eight. Many landlords are being extremely selective. And I try to tell my colleagues, there's only so much we can force them to do. I don't want to over-regulate medium-sized landlords out of the market because as people may have seen in the New York Times just today, I think, Wall Street is buying up single-family homes and we have the least out of state investment in properties in the country. That can change very quickly. And it changes when people say, I'm done. I'm done doing this. Who do I sell it to? And we're hearing that from a lot of landlords. So I think it's an issue we have to address. I don't know where the house stands, but that's my big picture. Yes, it's a bit of a broken system and people want change. It's very hard to actually get that done in the legislature, but we're willing to take a look because it's so desperate. There are lots of different definitions around ADUs, tiny houses, mobile homes. We have a mobile home task force that's trying to streamline that a little bit because they all are treated differently. It's getting quite confusing. So I hear you on how is one treated, is one under a different eviction process. Owner-occupied really means the same roof line. So if they are in an ancillary detached property, you are facing different restrictions and laws than something under the same roof as you. But it's something we have to look at ADUs, mobile homes, tiny homes in general, because many people want them and the laws are just really not enabling right now. And I think you were also asking about incentives for people to do ADUs. There is the VHIP money, which is up to $50,000 as a grant. And in exchange, there are certain requirements that last I think for five years around household income. So it's intended to target low income people to live in that unit for at least five years. And Nancy, I'm happy to talk to you a little bit more after about at the local level, how we view properties that have ADUs from an assessment perspective. I think generally because they're only allowed on properties with an owner-occupied home, they wouldn't be considered a second home. But it may affect a portion of your homestead declaration on your tax bill, but happy to chat with you just about what we've learned over the years. And there's been a recent change at the federal level of how federal housing administration looks at ADUs. In the past, FHA sets the rules and lenders follow those rules. And now the lender's view, the income coming from an ADU is a good thing for the person trying to qualify for financing because it now shows up as income, which is the flip side of what you said, Nancy, around it's new income. It's actually gonna hit you on a tax basis, but it's a good thing in terms of qualifying for financing because now you can count the ADU income when you're trying to get a loan. And that wasn't the case before. Right, that's brand new, yeah. Sir, over there? Please don't forget that there are people online that would like to ask questions. Okay, let me get this one gentleman and then we'll go online. Hi, I'm Ryan Frank, ward seven. I'm a homeowner in ward seven and I live on a street that's mostly single family homes, but there's one kind of apartment complex in the middle of the street. It's, I believe all section eight couldn't be built right now under the zoning codes, but yeah, I guess it was built before the zoning laws were there. Those folks are great neighbors. I want more neighbors in our neighborhood like that. And I think it's kind of ridiculous that we have laws that say we can only have single family homes at all. So my concern, and I hear all of the right things from the panel, my concern is that a lot of times these, you get the law, it passes, and then it gets held up for two decades by lawsuits from a neighbor who doesn't want a low-income housing unit on their street or it goes through endless committees, city council committees that kind of water it down because it's mostly developers who are able to get in there or they change it to make it a little bit better for them and a little worse for everyone else. And so I guess I would really hope that you put as much energy as you can into pretty radical change upfront and then deal with the courts later, deal with everything else later. I think if you slow walk it and try to make everyone happy, we won't get real change and we are in a crisis. I mean, there are so many homeless folks and most of them are invisible. I hear the numbers, but I volunteer at the pantry and there's a lot of folks who are sleeping in their cars, are sleeping on relatives' couches, are afraid to report their landlord for a lack of hot water because they can't get evicted. They get evicted, there's nowhere to go. Doesn't matter if that's legal or illegal. So anyway, I guess my question is, what's the plan for follow-up? How are you gonna actually make this stick? Well, I can let Megan talk about that process and Senator Rom Hinsdale can talk a little bit about what phase two of her program was. Help us with. In terms of the neighborhood code, so again, encourage you to follow the joint committee process. The committee currently is scheduled to meet through the, really through the end of the year to work on this and the hopes that we can have a zoning amendment package to refer to the full city council in the early part of the year. As the counselor said, we have a lot of work to do to get there but they're committed to doing that work. I know that from the perspective of the conversations that we've been having, certainly the point that you're raising about doing more from a zoning law, like permissible perspective in our laws is something we've been hearing. We've also been hearing the very real concern that when we start to implement housing at the neighborhood code level, we're gonna need a lot of resources to make this happen. And so I've been really happy to see that the agency of commerce and community development at the state level has been developing resources so that we can help develop kind of a new generation and kind of critical mass of people who are actually gonna build these kinds of homes. Right now, we just don't have a lot of developers that work at this scale because in a lot of places, these types of homes have never been legal or maybe haven't been legal in a generation. And so it's really gonna take training, changes in financing, availability of funding to actually build housing and other programs and incentives to help it get implemented. So there's a whole bunch of other technical things that I could say about implementing this which have to do with building code laws and other really in the weeds things when we start talking about small homes like that, but those are all the sort of things that we're doing in tandem with the zoning proposals that we're talking about. I'll just quickly add, I wanna thank Megan, Brian, Sarah. We need communities that are not fighting what we put in place at the state level and we are watching communities very closely that are still trying to circumvent the work that we did. So it really, we can't do much besides say, by right, you can create a duplex anywhere in the state now and by right, you can create a quadruplex or up to five units anywhere with municipal water and sewer. That is an investment state and federal taxpayers made in people having the convenience of, a public water system that is extremely expensive. And that needs to be shared by more people so we can keep our rural areas rural. Just kind of to say this before it gets lost, we are now also having to move people out of floodplains. So we have to remember that if we push people out of over-regulated areas, they end up in areas with low regulation that are generally in harm's way in substandard housing. And that is who has impacted the most by flooding events. So I just visited Brattleboro where they have moved housing out of floodplains, tried to find places elsewhere, especially for, they moved a whole senior housing project out of the floodplain so that in a 50 year storm they can capture the water and not impact the rest of the community. We need all of our communities to be doing that for everyone downstream from them. LaMoyle County needs to do that for Winooski and so on. And that's gonna take statewide cooperation about then putting housing where it belongs, which is walkable to our downtowns and our village centers and out of harm's way. So I didn't quite address your point. Absolutely agree. We are not slow walking this and we are being very stern with communities that are trying to slow walk it. And in fact, the governor and I have never agreed on a bill line by line. But when we were fighting about homelessness, he said, fine, but I want to move up all of the provisions of the Home Act to this summer, which, who am I to get in the way of that? That just meant that communities had to start figuring this out more than a year in advance. And we're trying to do the same thing early in the session with the parking requirements, which is stopping housing from being built in other communities as well. Thanks, Senator. I see we have two people online and I see you, sir, as well. Councillor Jang, you have your hand raised. Yes, thank you, councillor, and thank you for the panelists. And it's great to see, to hear, Treasurer Pichak talk about the data in terms of how many people are moving here and their contribution in terms of economy of the state. And also to hear Senator Hinsdale talk about the population growth in the state of Vermont is composed of new Americans, let's say newcomers, right? And I think I'm confident that you guys will be doing great work because everything that you're doing will be based on data and evidence. And that's how it exactly should work. I also want to recognize those who are online. We have elected officials, Emma is there, Kendra Shower is there, and many other people. Please, let's bring them into this discussion. But my question is about by 2030, one in three Vermonters will be 60 and plus, right? Many older adults wants to age in place. But most houses in Vermont are not accessible to support aging in place. How can we ensure new housings are designed to be universally accessible? And how can we support home modification, modify homes to make current homes more accessible to everyone as part of the mix? I think it's a great question and would love to hear your perspective around it. Thank you all. I'm not sure if anyone on this panel has an immediate answer. Certainly having spent half my career with housing older folks, I would. I think Megan, you know, with these changes, I think you would be great, at least what you're planning to do. Well, no, I just, I think it is a critical alley that we look at those sort of nuances and they don't get as much play as other programs. Put a little shout out for Home Share Vermont, which is a great program. And they really want to recruit more home sharers. And they've done a lot with that program. So that is a resource that we need to make sure we've got out there. But I don't know if you folks can speak about any of those other programs like home modification. Extremely briefly, we put Home Share in the budget for the first time because it's like Airbnb, but a public nonprofit sort of doing like, it's a way to help align someone with someone they know comes with, you know, risk management and good relationship building. So we said, you know, homesharing is a solution. And we put them in the budget for the first time. Fabulous. That might be a topic of discussion at a future meeting. I'll just say really quickly. I mentioned earlier that we've been working with AARP Vermont on the neighborhood code. We had previously worked with Home Share and AARP on the changes we made to our zoning laws for accessory dwelling units about three years ago. And really they see these types of small neighborhood additions as being critical to helping create more options for people to age in place. We've heard from a lot of people who are interested in building a unit in their backyard, maybe making their house into a duplex, seeing more homes on their street that give both them, their families, potential caregivers more options to live near them that don't require them to move kind of out of their immediate neighborhood or even out of their community into dedicated, really, older adult housing. So that's one of the things, and Councillor Carpenter has certainly brought up making sure that as we think about the specific changes in the neighborhood code, that we are making sure our zoning laws aren't getting in the way of things like ramps and other accessibility considerations for the housing that's being created. Sure, I see you, but I think Amy was ahead of you. Amy, on line, so... No, I'm sorry. No, it's hard to wait. He's been raving in his hands for a long time. Go ahead, I'm sorry. What have you got? Oh, wait. Okay. Amy? Can you hear me? Yes. I'm sort of speaking a little louder, maybe. Oh, can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, hi. I just wanted to thank everyone on the panel. This is such important work. I wanted to speak to the homelessness that's being experienced in Vermont by pregnant women and families with young children. I'm a social worker in the Women's Health Clinic at UVM Medical Center, and I receive many, many referrals a week for all kinds of reasons, but I would say at least, I mean, over 50% in stability or homeless, or families that are unhoused. And currently, and this has changed, I think over the last few months, and I'm curious, Carol, I know you were speaking to the hotel stays and the hotel voucher program and that people that were in hotels, I think you said could be extended till April. Anyway, I'm not really sure what that is, but I will tell you that right now, families with pregnant women or families with young children through economic services are giving 28 days at a hotel, and that's it. And that's a hard stop. Some people can get an 84-stay day. There's some narrow criteria for that, but I have families that are gonna be out of their hotel room in a few days, and it's getting colder. There are very long waitlists for the family shelters, which people are on, but we really, really are in such a crisis and the pregnancy and children thing does not seem to be a protection anymore. That has changed. So I guess my question is really about, A, I wanna be able to advocate to be able to have pregnant women and families with young children get extended stays and extended hotel vouchers. Again, that is definitely not happening. That's my experience kind of doing this on a day-to-day basis. And just if anybody can speak to that and how we might be able to address that. Thank you so much. Thank you. The question is, this is one of our neighbors who works with pregnant women or young children who are homeless and their inability to get temporary housing. And I don't know if one of you can speak on that or at least look into that. I'm trying not to jump in every time. I don't know if I either wanna start at all. Okay, I keep thinking you're actually gonna go for the bite, Martina. So Amy is absolutely right. If you got in the program recently, you fall under the same rules that we had before the pandemic. I'm gonna say something difficult, unpopular, I don't know, but right now there is an extreme preference for the couple thousand people who were in the motels for most of the duration of the pandemic. Those are the people who keep getting extensions and the opportunity to stay. Are those people in need? Absolutely. Many of them need skilled nursing facilities. They need mental health care. They need a different setting than a one-bedroom motel, even if they are a family. But even during the pandemic, if you were a family sleeping in your car and there was no motel room available, there was nothing that the state could do for you. So my concern right now is we are looking at maybe another political showdown around a particular group of people centered on April 1st. All of us want to find more permanent solutions for those people. We have money right now that we will be using up very quickly if we keep paying for expensive motel nights for everyone night by night, $100 to $170 a night. We will be out of money by April. If we start taking that money and saying April is the deadline for this particular program and this particular preference group of folks, and we're gonna take that money and we're gonna buy some of the motels after that, we have better leverage to negotiate if we set an end date and start negotiating with them now about buying those motels and rehabbing them so they have kitchens and reasonable bathrooms and are more comfortable for someone to stay in for the medium term. This is something that human services and the housing committee are discussing. We're discussing it with AHS and the agency of commerce because we're not in a good position to keep the status quo. I know many people don't wanna see those folks end up on the streets, it's heartbreaking. We need skilled nursing, we need senior housing, we need mental health facilities but for someone who's pregnant or facing domestic violence or who has a new emergent situation, they are not guaranteed a stay. We would like to create a policy that makes it more, that's more common sense around you need 80 days, you need longer than 28 days but right now we can't control the number of units that we have and many of them are still taken up and yes, we can't control the governor's administration or AHS but we also have to believe them when they say they don't have the staff to give everyone individual case management because why? Because there's no housing for anybody so we have a shortage of staff everywhere. Yes, sorry. No, it's okay. I just wanted to give a shout out to CBOEO and CHT that took over the administration and the running of the hotel on Shelbourne Road that a new place I think decided that they just didn't have the wherewithal to take that on. So that was a great thing and again, just the need for coordinated care and wraparound services is huge but shout out to those two entities because that was really helpful to us in Burlington. And there is a Champlain Housing Homelessness Coalition excuse me and I attended one of their meetings as a guest and many state legislators were there and we did hear that as the housing that they know about comes up that those who are over 65, those who are families with children and those who are pregnant have priority to housing. So that is something that that group has decided to prioritize. And there is a field director when someone needs services or needs housing there is a field director and that Amy is Karen Duquette Hoffman and that person is at AHS and that number is 585-4863 that's 585-4863 and that person should be able to start to work with the people that you are seeing who are in crisis. Thank you very much. Thank you. Gentlemen, I'm so sorry, it's hard to keep, look two ways but I probably could have put this question in the next session because it has something to do with the all this development we're doing is going to remove a lot of previous surfaces. How's our sewage system going to handle all that? This part of infrastructure maybe can answer it. Well, Megan Moore from the water department will be here to talk about the sewer break and the sewer capacity of the city Megan might be able to speak to that interest because we know it's a concern. Yeah, that's a great question. And I'll say that in the work that we've been doing over the last many years we've been talking a lot about infrastructure in the city to support our growth. And we do know that there is capacity within the city to add more homes. We are talking about the scale of housing that can fit within existing neighborhoods help us utilize streets and other infrastructure that we've already built. And ultimately when we're talking about the neighborhood code we're talking about maybe like hundreds of new households rather than the sort of intensity of development like you might see in a downtown location. So we're certainly talking about kind of incremental utilization of our existing infrastructure. I'm trying to, okay. Well, I see Chris, Matt, we got lots of people here. I'll go with Chris next and then you're next. Want to take the microphone, please? Yeah. I'm, as I look around here, I see a lot of folks kind of like my age, I don't see a lot of young people. And I want to share some comments that were sent to me from a neighbor of mine, we'll call him Caleb who moved here about two years ago from Rochester, New York to be with his partner who was attending UVM at the time. Chris, can you speak up a little? Yes, can you get, is this a little bit better here? Just trying to find the comments. So here we go. So Caleb works in retail and went right into the workforce right out of high school. So here's the comments. Earlier today, a regular came in who grew up here. She is moving. She said living here has increased her depression and she is disabled and this state offers little to no extra assistance with her expenses. Her insurance alone is $900 a month and she cannot work. She has to depend on her husband. It's so many things that are stacked on each other. I mean, even with food stamps here, if two people make more than $2,300 a month in a household, you're not qualified for food stamps. BS, considering that most places here cost nearly two grand. It's crazy how little the government here helps. It's just so much is wrong. This state enables drug addiction and only provides for the rich. You have to be homeless in order to get existence. We wait till there's a problem and then spend big money to fix it instead of investing in preventative measures. If you aren't homeless and you're barely scraping to get by, but hey, at least you have a roof over your head. You might lose it because we offer no help to those who work extremely hard but gain little to nothing besides stressing out about how to make ends meet by the end of the month. It is unfair on both sides of the coin, no matter how anyone tries to look at it. On one end, we are enabling addiction and the rich are just privileged here to no end and just people who are trying hard to make a living here can't do that. It's impossible to actually live here long-term, which is crazy considering how hard this state pushed for people to move here. It's like they had a goal. They met the goal and didn't know how to support so many newcomers that the state directly advertised to move here. I mean, come on. The houseless community has grown in size because it's plastered all over the place about how Vermont is an easy state for them to live the lifestyle they live. It's small enough to keep all the drugs circulating in the same spot. And that was the end of the comments. I just wonder, I often wonder over and over again why we don't turn Memorial Auditorium into housing. It's just sucky got money, many of us fear getting priced out of the home that we worked. It's not a hitting the jackpot. It's working three jobs and buying a home. And why not turn Memorial Auditorium? It could be several apartments. It could be handed over to a private person and say, well, we're gonna designate this to anyone who wants to build housing and get rid of it. We're just, it's just sucking up money and it could be a moneymaker instead. Brian, I don't know if you wanna comment that. It's interesting just today. There was a sort of Facebook thing about the nostalgia. I do wanna remind us that we, the brilliant taxpayers, twice have turned down bonds to renovate it. It's a very difficult building to renovate because it's got so much volume and it's got a big auditorium. Although we were twice close. Well, I'm gonna let Brian speak because his office again is trying to find some use for it. And so if you can speak to where we're at with that. Sure, there's a request for proposals went out last spring and we got a couple of proposals. One was a developer who had a vision for housing in Memorial on its own. And another was a more of a public use of the site. And it's called an immersive art experience which I actually can't explain. But I'll just say it was something it was going to be a public use and that did not come to fruition. That was what was the preferred option for a while. But there's potential for the surface parking lots that are adjacent to Memorial and Memorial together to be viewed as an opportunity to create a gateway to our downtown. And I think housing absolutely has to be part of it. And it'll be, if it comes to fruition which there's discussions happening right now and I think the city council is gonna start to get focused on this. Sell it so we're not paying the tax. You know, like let it make its own money on its own. I think there's definitely, I think you're hitting on something which is there's a way for that property to return value to the community both in terms of providing housing but also for tax revenue. So that's, yeah, yeah. To help the rest of us not get placed out of our homes. We agree. Matt. I just said some very heartfelt comments from a young person in the community and you guys didn't even have anything to say about it. I mean, I think, I mean, that kind of says a lot right there. It's kind of disappointing. It's a, I think a hard comment to respond to. I think if the person would like to contact their legislator, I know our legislators have tried to be particularly responsive to those kind of inquiries. And I would encourage your friend to do that. Yeah. And Chris, I would just add as someone who's on the health and welfare committee, I'm not sure what she meant by we're enabling drug addiction. They're just, I had a lot of questions about her comments. So it's hard to respond when you don't really understand what she was referring to exactly. You know what? Okay. Thank you. Matt. Am I right? So just a few fun facts and they will lead to a question to the panel. I'm in the real estate business. So I'm in the trenches on the front line. I've been for a long time. Okay. Can you hear me all right? Yeah. I'm being in the real estate business. I'm in the trenches and I'm working with people all the time and some of the statistics I've heard are interesting. So I've just pulled a few of my own based on the state's population, the 3000 people that bought in 2020 and 21 represent 0.465% of the population which doesn't sound like a lot. But when I look at the state statistics in MLS in 2020, there were 9,720 mobile home on lease lots, co-op, condominium and single family home sales. In 21, there were 9,636. So those 3,000 people represent about 31% of what was purchased in those two years. That's the big bad media story and the less bad media story that I experienced on a daily basis with clients that are rather buying my clients listings where that I'm representing. The vast majority of my clients that have been from out of state grew up here, were kicked out of their office during the pandemic, have young children and they've relocated back home to be near their aging parents and their siblings so that the cousins can grow up together. So I've caught myself over and over for the last couple of years defending the big bad out-of-state buyer with all this money because really they've been Vermonters returning to Vermont for the most part. Some of them are big bad. They just spun the wheel and Vermont was the place that comes up. So that's just sort of out of defense. Currently real time, there are 1,427 homes for sale in those four categories, mobile, lease lots, co-op, condo, single family. There are 1,144 pending in the state. And based on what has sold in the last 12 months which is less, 7,045 units, 1,427 represent a 2.4 month supply for the absorption rate, which is extremely low, less than four to five months is a seller's market. So it is high demand, low inventory and that's just where we are. So then we come to the talk about who's going to develop housing? Who's responsible? Look at the costs for a developer to procure the land, to spend two to 10 years going through the zoning process of approval because neighbors show up and don't want it in their backyard. All of those things combined and then have a conversation with those developers about we want you to offer affordable housing for the folks that can't afford market rate and it really doesn't exist that those developers can afford as a business model to build privately and rent in those fashions. So I have to turn the table back to the panel and say I've heard for 28 years a lot of talk about affordable housing, we need to change, someone has to change it. So realistically, what are your ideas? What is sustainable? Who can build? How can you work with private developers to encourage them? And on a side note, I can say that working with the city of Burlington and no offense to any of you all the people I work with are wonderful people but it's a broken system. It's not a servant to the public system. It's very difficult to get through these processes very expensive and just when you think you're there a trick door opens and it's more and more and more so it's just really, really difficult. I don't know much about a lot of other cities but this particular one is not that friendly for development. So what can be done on a city level and what can be done on a state level? Honestly, to roll up our sleeves and create additional affordable, truly affordable housing. Thanks Matt. We're getting in, I knew we were gonna run out of time. I'm gonna let Megan quickly respond and perhaps Senator Rom, I see one more question and I know that representative Odie, two more, three more questions. And I know that Director Morris here as well. So I'm gonna steal about five or eight minutes from her presentation to try to get to these. So quickly, yeah. I appreciate that comment. We, Brian and I's teams are talking all the time about the realities and hurdles to make more permanently affordable housing available. And so things like the increase to the housing trust fund that was recently passed in Burlington and other tools that have been flowing from other state and even federal sources to help actually contribute funds to projects. I think are really important resources and I think are one of the big things that we need to keep expanding. And then I appreciate your comment about the hurdles. I know one of the things that was part of Act 47 was to try to make some of these housing types more by right is what we're calling them like have fewer hurdles that people have to jump through in terms of making those homes available. We've definitely been thinking about this and been making changes to that here in Burlington, particularly through our downtown code. We have been able to document the changes that we've made in the downtown area in particular for two kind of like projects about 10 years apart. One of those projects saved over six months in a permitting timeline and about $17,000 in permitting costs just at the local level. And that's to say nothing about the duplicative process that they didn't have to go through with Act 250. So I hear your point certainly. And as we think about these code changes we're also thinking about how we improve the experience of what it means to actually build them. I would say don't take what I'm saying as being negative at all. I'm just coming from the heart and from the people that I work with. A little known fact I was involved in developing Heineberg housing for about $58,000 a unit. It's probably costing us $400,000 a unit. And so that's the expanse over the last 35 years. Carol had a quick response for Chris and then I'll recognize Diana and then Christopher and Deb. And then that's it. Okay. Response for Chris, it doesn't get to the heart of the issues that she's facing but we do have a I'm on the House Ways and Means Committee and we have a very progressive income tax system here. And if you own a home Act 60 is an income protection act. And if you don't, we have renters rebate for that and actually a representative, Milt Vainy-Stanik and I have a bill in to help Burlington renters more than they're now helped considering the cost of living here and the cost of rent compared to the rest of the state. Healthcare, we do have Vermont Health Connect. It's still expensive. Housing, you can hear what we're struggling with now. Childcare, we did another thing young people have to have we did just pass a bill to improve affordability and accessibility there. So these things are on their way. And in terms of public sustainable and being able who can build, the University of Vermont and you probably have all seen this in the news have entered a public private partnership in two areas. One is in South Burlington near the near healthy living and that will have about 600 graduate students and staff housing. And then behind what we all used to know as the Sheraton across from what was the Staples Plaza and that is going to be about 600 dorm rooms. And this will all be for upper class housing because of the commitment to stay at about the level we are at UVM with undergraduate numbers. Thanks. Again, I know we got lots of questions. I'm going to acknowledge a few more people. Also, I just want to hold out that I know that all our state reps and cooling representatives, Stanek and all our counselors myself, Allie, Mark you can field us questions and we'll try to field them back to the state reps. So Diana. Talking about the existing housing stock. Crashers. Sure. Yeah, my name is Diana Karm. I used to be in Mord 7. Now I'm in three and now I'm going to be in two next spring. But we all have this city issue in common and state issue, national issue. My concern is with the, not only the new housing that's being built but also the housing stock that is presently available. And I unfortunately, because on my street when a house went on the market and a young couple was going to buy it we were delighted. Many people bit wanted it also. Retired couples and other people the young couple bought it. We were very delighted. It turned out it was an investor group 30 days after they bought it. They indicated that I guess that's the law. You have 30 days to register an LLC. We knew there were other people on the deed but I said, oh, it's probably the parents helping them out. Oh, was I naive? Anyway, this is a concern for me, short-term rental. It's an industry. It's Airbnb. It's VRBO. And in Vermont, it's the short-term Vista, Vermont short-term rental alliance. And they are having a conference on November the 12th to the 14th. And it's called, what will it take to save your STR? Come and learn about advocacy, education and litigation because that same person that bought the house on our street we were delighted that the council passed the law. They had a year to keep the bookings. And on June 1st, we said, no more parties, no more cars hanging over the sidewalk. They'll have to stop. Are you kidding? The bookings were still on Airbnb and still are on Airbnb. There's been no enforcement of the rule. And Bill Ward is trying hard and I know there's so many issues in Burlington. I understand. But the point is, laws need to be passed and they need to have teeth in them. And whatever the state does, because this newsletter, it's a lobbying group and they go down and they say every single community that is facing STR pressure and how you can go and speak up. And they speak up as individuals. They do not speak up as part of this group. They do have an executive director who speaks but these people speak up with their sob stories about how they have to buy a house and turn it into a commodity, an illegal hotel. That's really what it is. That's my question. I don't know what you can do to answer it but I'm really concerned about it. New York City, if you read the New York Times has addressed this. So please be conscious of it and I don't know if you can do something. Senator Romion still is familiar with a bill that I spent a lot of time working on and the governor vetoed. And so there is an appetite, I think with the legislature but he vetoed it and so there's still more work to be done. Because we're running out of time I'm just gonna take the three quick. Yes. What we haven't talked about is we have the highest rate of second home ownership in the country. 25% of our housing stock is second homes and 90% of our short-term rentals are someone renting out their home on a short-term rental site. I am not going to attack statewide short-term rentals because it makes sense to do it municipality by municipality but if you then make it illegal for that person to do that that's actually more housing that's just not available to anyone. And you actually have a lot of traveling nurses, part-time staff at ski areas who rent those options because there's nothing else available. And I wish we would talk about the real elephant in the room which is the highest second home ownership rate in the state and a lot and a quarter of the housing stock being cut off from anybody else to be able to access for most of the year. Sarah, we really need to wrap it up. Yeah. Do you wanna take one more? Yeah. Yeah. Off the street where people live there and they rent to persons. Okay. Thank you. Diana, maybe you can follow up with a little more in detail with Brian. I wanna get Christopher and Deb and then we gotta wrap it up. I just said it very quick. Yeah. And my comment is I've always thought there's excess land that's not used that wouldn't impinge on school land, like excess like right across the street here. Wait a minute. Where, what direction are we should? That's not used. You could build some houses right on the edge here and the school board, the district could get a little money and have some houses along there. And I just think it could be, we hope the neighborhood code makes it easier. That's all I wanted to say. Especially if you should come in and work with us. Yes. Okay. This is a very big topic and I appreciate what you were all talking about today. And as far as long-term housing goals go at the reforms to Act 250, that's great, streamline the process slash as many of the regulatory hoops that are in there unnecessarily. But on a, and I understand the chain effect to housing and how important it is that we focused on all of it. That being said, what I'm, my question tonight is really focused on helping a very particular group of people and throughout the state. And that is the benefits of halfway houses in providing a supportive care for people who are just new on their pathway to recovery and to sobriety. It is imperative that we have these facilities in especially in our metropolitan areas. And in Burlington, we've lost two in the last few years. This is horrible. This contributes to people relapsing and living on the streets. So we need to fix that. And as far as the hotel program and going into winter is concerned, I really think that it's imperative that we learn from our mistakes of the past. Many people who are, not all, many people who are in the hotel program do suffer from addiction and from these issues. And sadly, rundown motor lodges where a lot of people go to do their drugs in the first place. So we're parking them in a place that's high risk and not offering any supportive services. We need to, if they're going into the hotels again, we need to make sure that all around the state, these service organizations are reaching out, making sure that harm reduction strategies are being deployed at these motels. We know that we parked them, these homeless people addicted to drugs in these motels and that overdoses went up and deaths went up and they just died in the shadows. We need to learn from this and not let it happen again. We should also be making sure that we can get some services like AA and NA meetings that to go over there to actually get to them, to meet them where they're at. Thank you. Just like Senator Rom Hinsdale, I think we're going to need a part two on this and we'll take that into advisement. And I want to thank all of our panel that came from near and afar and I know our local reps you can get in touch with and certainly Treasurer Peechak makes himself very available. So there you go. So thank you all. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you. How about you? The big policy proposal. You are taking that home back to track the work, whatever it is, send it to us. Thank you, Sarah. Thank you. Where did that make? Oh, there's Megan. Yeah, I have plenty of time. OK, yeah, I know. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about. Yeah, what's up? We're going to if if the sorry, sorry, sorry. I thought it was to get on the zone. If the room could quiet and down. Thank you. A spirited conversation and a spirited follow up. And on behalf of the NPA ward four and seven steering committee, thank you very much and thank you, Sarah. So, Megan, I have a little something to say. I think I need to apologize. You weren't here and I called you the sewer lady. He heard about it. And I am pleased. So it's a new somebody that's the new superhero. So let me just get on Zoom here so I can share some slides. So for while she's doing that, I don't even know where to turn. So, ladies and gentlemen, on the zoom and in the room, this is Meg. Is this Moir? Moir, yep. This is Megan Moir. She is the Burlington City. I can't read it. Division. Water resources. Yes. I don't have my glasses with me. And some of you know that there was a break in an important pipe. Yeah. And Megan was kind enough to come to us a couple of NPA meetings ago and to explain what the city is doing. And she has agreed. I this is a special day for Megan. I won't mention what it is, but she has agreed to come back this late in the evening to give you an update. It's not my birthday today. It's next. My birthday is on Halloween. I think originally we thought it was going to be. OK. So she had nothing else to do and she came to the NPA meeting. I'm trying to end when you're ready. I'm trying to get on Zoom. I should I wasn't sure how long you guys were going to go. So I should have gotten on before. That's OK. No, I'm just wishing I had I'm trying to get on the zoom. Let's see. See. You can ask me questions while I'm working. Yes. The pipe is out in front of my house. Yep. What is that? It's the pump kicking on from the temporary pump station. OK, so we're just just not a clickable link for some reason. It's nothing harmful. It's literally like I just know I just didn't it is a weird noise. I didn't realize it was going to make that noise. It goes. Is it every 20 minutes? Thank you. It's going to depend on why is this not working? It's going to depend on the flows that are coming in. It's just like you're just making things things are starting to settle and you're going to worry that they're going to build up in one. So you it kicks on. There's a channel. There's a storage area there. And so depending on different times of the day, there's different patterns to sewer flow. So in the mornings and the evenings, right, when everybody's getting up, showering, poop and all that stuff, you're going to have more flow or when we have a storm events, like during a storm event, you're probably kicking. It's probably pumping all the time. But in between the day when nobody's home, it's not it's not happening. Is there a different place I can go? The for whatever reason, the link is not working for me on the PDF, which is what I'm having a hard time with. Because I have great pictures to show you all and I know you're all eager to get home. So that's why I'm let me see if this works instead. We like pictures. Yeah, well, I like pictures, too. That's why I'm like, ah, OK, let's see. Why is it not working? Open link and new tab is going to talk out loud. Dang it. Hmm. Is there is there a place online where there is the link? You know, you. Yes, yes. Email me the link. What other I can answer other questions as I'm on a mom so I can multitask and put the dinner and your MMO I are at Burlington VT.gov. So I'm in the question of when it goes underground and then comes back up. Yep, are you going to? Oh, when it goes underground and comes back up, are you going to leave it underground there because why not? You're talking about the black, the black. Yeah, yeah, because it looks like because you paved over it and then it comes back. Yeah, so we are I'm really bummed that I'm not getting your email yet for some reason. Thank you so much. I am connected to the Wi-Fi. That's why I'm all very, very mysterious right now, connected, open. Let me see if I refresh. So wait, what our plan is because what I was going to come and tell you is that we are actively working on a in river emergency repair. So if you've driven down there, you've seen cranes. We're clearing the area and we are doing our best to do as best as we can within the river. Our plan is if everything goes well to decommission the pump, like so all of the mechanicals that over by Platsburg have, but probably to leave the black pipe in place at least for some time period. So that's all because if the in river repair fails or something, we don't want to have to go through the whole process again. We're going to leave it there. And then and then I was going to tell you, we're still also working on the like real, real, real, real repair. Type this into your browser. OK, that would work. Oh, no, I just got your email now. OK, the interrupts are slow. It's going to be super great and exciting after all of the. We can turn this into karaoke night real quick, Megan, if my son frequently asks, are there are there any particular questions for Megan while she gets ready about. Well, I guess how many people were here? I'm recognizing a lot of faces, but not all the faces. How many people were here for the last sewer pipe? Because I got a lower question. OK. OK. Well, it was more it was more like I didn't know if I should go through my original slides kind of quickly. Just everybody's oriented or exactly. Well, everything that does is because you just want to show the mechanism of how it goes in progress. Yes, I think so, which is which is why I think it would be good to maybe just run through my slides, because there's a couple of visuals that we can just pause on. I know you all are eager to get curious. You're trying to visualize what the heck is going on. Yep. So I am close. I am sharing my screen. Yep. I can't. Oh, last meeting. So the last meeting, you talked about Haunting surface water, Haunting surface water. Yes, I was wondering in Northampton, seems like an ideal place to collect and traverse water. So I would either go to 127 gully or I was wondering if you started any plans on redesigning road structures to capture that surface water, gullies and ditches and aquifers, little miniature things. You know, let me let me come back to that at the end, because I think it's it's peripherally related. So I know some of you saw this. So I will just go through quickly, sort of how how we even got to talking about this weird pipe in the river and what we're trying to do to make it better now and also within the next probably 18 months. There is, in fact, a river sewer crossing. This is pretty standard back in the day when all of the sewage in the city just went to the rivers or went to the lakes. We started, you know, as we realized what was going on, we started then trying to put infrastructure to keep it out of those rivers and lakes in some places. At the end of those pipes, we put a treatment plant and in the case of at least one of the the discharge points in New North End, because the sewer plant was at the end of North Ave. So that's your sewer plant down there. They looked probably at pumping it, but pumping, putting in a pump station requires constant energy, right? Right now we're expending constant energy to pump that sewage against gravity and get it to to to North Plant. So in the old days, it was very common to, you know, you always try to use gravity instead. And so they basically these are the two sewer siphons. You can see there's the the blue arrow and the red arrow. So all of the sewage before 1959, probably just discharged right here into the river. And so they're like, OK, well, how do we get it to this new fancy plant that we're building? And so they did one crossing here. And then they went across the land and then they did another crossing here to get to North Plant, as I explained last time, that first two are crossing actually broke in 2005, if anybody remembers that. I think people were less the Colchester Bridge. Yep, that's the Colchester Bridge. So this this crossing broke in 2005, not because of storm events or anything. We believe the main mechanism was that Colchester that Colchester side. They did some armoring of banks, some some hardening because they were having erosion, which which the river does, right? It's a natural process. And the problem is with humans, once we start trying to fix mother nature, usually she bites us somewhere else. And so she bit us in our pipe there. It wasn't a FEMA related events. At that point, they fixed it by directionally drilling. So right now the pipes, this picture shows how they laid the pipes, which was basically to put the pipe on the ice and then I think blow up the ice and then it just sinks to the bottom. Pretty rudimentary, but it frankly has worked for many, many, many decades until we've gotten to this situation. So that pipe, both those crossings, the pipe is just laying on the bottom of the river. And so when the first crossing broke in 2005, the option to fix it then was to directionally drill, so it's it's using sort of robot drills to go underneath the the about 20 or 30 feet underneath the riverbed and then popping up, it's pretty amazing. One of my engineer, Steve Roy, he was there for that. And he's like, they came up within like a foot of where they were supposed to. And he was just like, whoa, how do you do that? It was very expensive. I think, yeah, I think we're still paying for it. And at the same time, they looked at that second crossing, right? It makes sense. First one broke. Crap, we better look at the second one. They determined that the second one was not as risky, didn't have as much risk of breaking, given the the river conditions. And they said, you know, they didn't say it wasn't ever going to break, but they said compared to the first one, wasn't as likely. And frankly, the fixes for it, we definitely didn't have the money to directionally drill and some of the fixes that they were proposing, like bearing it with additional rock also didn't really seem to pan out. And so it it it was left for better or worse, that sewer pipe, the sewer siphon. And some of you have asked, well, how does that work? Because if it's going down, it's going up and it's going up and down hills. How does the water, how does that work? And as long as the origin of the siphon is higher than where it's discharging, it'll do the loop-de-loo. Because I know people like, how does that work? This is the approximate area that drains to that. So you can figure out if you your poop, you can tell your kids if your poop or pee goes through this pipe, if you're in this area. So it's about half of the the New North End. So what happened? Frankly, you know, when the floods hit, I was like, we did it, nothing happened here. And I didn't I didn't officially jinx us. But who knows, maybe that is what happened. Because I actually asked, I think I asked the day of the flood. Steve Roy said, you know, I wonder if that pipe is OK. And he reminded me that in June of this year, we had actually had divers go through and check out the pipe and we do dye testing every year to make sure that there's no leaks. And he's like, hey, we inspected it. It looked good. We're good. And then, unfortunately, in the morning of July 12, which was after the Winooski floodwaters hit us, I got the call from an operator at the North Plant saying, we got a problem. There's one manhole, one utility cover, the circular things where the pipe from North Ave comes in and the pipe from the siphon comes in from the river. And when the operator showed up and saw that there was like virtually no flow coming into the plant, right? He's like, OK, there's a problem. That operator, for better or worse, was here for the previous one. So he immediately was like, dang it, something's happened. He pops the manhole and he sees he sees the flow coming in from North Ave, not going into the plant and actually going back out in the river. So. Our first springing into action by 845, our crews, they got on site and they were able to block off the river siphon part so that at least we could get the flows from North Ave and we could treat those, right? So we we fixed half the problem. We then immediately switched. Well, I started getting engineers doing what I call iron chef engineering, which is like, you need to get me a plan within the shortest amount of time possible. So I had team working on that. The rest of us were working on the major issue of public notification. Y'all, this is happening. We need to let everybody know. We also were reaching out to Colchester to make sure that they were aware because it's not just going to impact Burlington. That's the the beauty and the challenge of water and watersheds is everybody can be impacted. We then switched while my team was working on developing the plan of like, how could we actually fix this? We started, we hired BP wastewater to basically haul sewage 24 seven. It didn't mean that we were getting all of it, but we were able to cut down the amount that was going into the river substantially on average, probably half of what was still going in. We were able to capture and overall we prevented about 2.5 million gallons of sewage going in during that time period that would have otherwise gone in by July 14th. So I'm still high five in my team. Two days after it happened, we had a design and we were starting to talk to a contractor about putting that big black pipe in and putting these pumps in. I think I joked with you all last time. I definitely I started warning my team that I was very prone to high fiving and hugging during this time period, not until we built it, but like just was so proud that they were able to figure it out. So by July 17th, we had started mobilization and we were constructing this 5000 foot long 12 inch force main, which is that black black pipe. You see down in the right hand corner and which some of you are very familiar with, probably we should name it, but I'm going to leave that to you guys. I follow the pipe. There we go, the poop pipe by July 25th. That was when we had the full thing built. We and we got the pumps going. And so that was when the temporary bypass force main, what we're calling it, it was operational and under most conditions. And we'll talk about the fact that it fact that it has had a couple of hiccups, which we were fully anticipating still. Overall, it's much, much better than us discharging probably on the order of 350 to 400,000 gallons of sewage every day. Like if we hadn't come up with a plan, that's what would have been happening. And, you know, when the flood waters were happening, I wasn't so worried because really none of us should have been anywhere near any of the water when that was happening. But when once those receded and the water started to clean up, it was imperative that we be taking care of our challenge. By July 28th, we did additional lake testing to determine that the E. Coli levels had died down because we were seeing a couple of spikes, obviously, during the flood waters, whether they were due to us or everything, who knows that matter. And then, as I said, this is a picture of one of the issues we had. The pumps, you know, they're pumping on and off. One of the discharge hoses cracked. And so we had poop waters flowing into the sky. So it hasn't been perfect. It's not as robust as a permanent pump station. But by and large, it has done its job, which was to get us through this initial time period and try to capture as much of the flow and get it to the right place. You know, there's been a couple of other issues where there's been either a float issue on the pump. So the backup pumps don't get gone or so on and so forth. We have alarms. So our folks are notified immediately. We get out there. I'm not saying that there hasn't been some sewage that's gotten into the river. We do the state postings. We notify people. So we're following the process. Not perfect, but it's much, much better. All along, we have known that while winter time operation of the system was possible, it was not something that anyone on my team really wanted to do. We don't need it. You know, we already have enough trouble with water main breaks. We don't need to be dealing with with this sort of situation in the winter time. So we were we've been pushing pretty hard to figure out how we could get off of this system and get on to at least a slightly better system. Some of the characterization of the problem, we did two rounds of dye testing. The picture up in the right upper right, you can kind of see the green. So we put in very, very concentrated dye into the pipe. And both times that we did it, the dye came up in the same location. So from this we inferred, OK, it's a limited area. We then we had to wait a really long time. I was starting to get really frustrated. We had the divers mobilized and ready to go right from the get go. But they basically we kept checking in with them and they're like, the water's too cloudy, the water's too cloudy, like we can't see. It's not safe for us to go in there. So finally, we were able to get them in on August 17th. Which when did I come talk to you guys? It was before then time is flying by because I'm having so much fun. So exactly, it was after the divers. I thought it was after it was after the really. OK, is that right in front of the food plant? Yep, it is. Yep. Anyhow, we got in. I didn't have the sketch, so that's what makes you think that. OK, so it was right before this. So the week after that, we were able to finally get the divers in. And I say they were able to inspect it. They were inspecting it by feel. They couldn't really see anything. So they're creepy crawling and they're they're trying to get in their head. What they're what they're touching. This sketch was prepared by Steve Roy, our engineer, basically having the diver tell him what he felt. And Steve Roy kind of recreating what that looks like. So this was our working drawing that we then went out for an RFP, a design build RFP to do this in river repair. And so we ended up hiring ECI engineers construction. They're the same ones who laid the the black pipe. And we mobilized them on October 9th. With the with the intention that they were just doing this sort of near shore fix, like a 50 foot offshore type fix, which on its own was already going to be seven hundred and ninety three thousand dollars. Last week, early this week, it's all blending together. They were able to get additional divers in and do more inspection. And unfortunately, the there's another joint or two joints that are also unstable. And so Monday, we're going for another change order of about four hundred thousand dollars to address the fact that they need to replace more pipe. We are barely confident that this is not going to just keep going on. The rest of the pipe. So basically, we're repairing all of the pipe until the part where it actually dives into the muck. So we believe once it's in the muck, it's probably more stable. It's these areas that didn't have the support of the muck that because you interrupted this one joint, it kind of destabilizes everything else. So everybody fingers crossed. Like I have a Ted Lasso candle like that to make sure that hopefully this will get us to our repair. You know, we are fighting against the winter. The divers can't work if the water gets too cold or if we get a lot of rain vents and the and the the turbidity, the the chocolate brown water kicks up. So we're kind of like, go, go, go, try to get this done before the winter. And then separately, we have selected Stantac, which is an engineering firm, to partner with us in evaluating the alternatives for what we're calling the resilient long term repair. The hey, maybe we shouldn't have a pipe on the bottom of a river situation. There's two main alternatives that we're looking at. One is directionally drilling like we did with the other one. In this era, the modern approach for directionally drilling is not to drill one pipe, but to drill two pipes so that you have that redundancy. My. I'm kind of I'm curious to see where it goes, because my worry about that one is then we will have repaired one crossing and the other crossing, but we still have that half a mile on Half Moon Cove over there that is not if I go back here. It's not as it's not as at risk as the stuff in the river. But I have a pipe from 1950 that goes from here to here. That's all that small. Yeah, so it's not a place that I really want to deal with the sewer main break or have to get in there and replace it. So I were also looking at the option of like abandoning this whole situation entirely. Do you want to go up there? Can you not see it? It's kind of faint. Where the blue is the black hole? Let me see if I can get my. OK, so right here is the coal chester bridge. Up at the end of the Belmont. Yep. OK. It was the fishing access and you know, so it goes under here and then it crosses, it goes cross country. And then the other challenge is even directionally drilling, although clearly they have cranes and barges, directionally drilling this side is going to be harder because like the first one, you kind of had access to dig something over on this side. You've got that road that comes down so you could easily access to get the receiving pit put in on the other one. There's no roads, it's swamp and, you know, and, you know, are we going to do more harm trying to traipse through what is probably nice forest and wetland right now? Don't really like it. So the two options are looking at directionally drilling underneath on that crossing. And then I will have to figure out what to do with the other pipe at some later date or preferentially putting in a permanent pump station. So in that Plattsburgh ab location, putting in permanent pumps with permanent storage and then basically burying that pipe, not that it would be in the exact same location. We don't know where the location would be. It would probably be in the road right of way, not crossing people's properties and things like that. Down by that, near under the bridge, is it moving to the area on Plattsburgh ab? There's a path that goes down. So down this right here, can you see that? That's where that's probably where the pump station would go. Kind of where the the temporary pumps are right now. And my pump station, what's the size of the pump? You know, I don't know how big this one would be. It would be one of our bigger pump stations. We have 25 pump stations throughout the city, so they range in size. The modern ones, you know, usually you have to have the pump station. You have to have either I think either backup power, like emergency generator, or you have to have a certain amount of storage there so that if the power from BED goes out, we're able to still keep up with the sewage and not have to bring in trucks, although we do have trucks. And it's pumping, not treatment. It's pumping, not treatment. There is no treatment whatsoever here. It's just grabbing it and getting it to where there is treatment, which is North Plant, you know, and I've been trying to be really transparent with the challenges that we have inherited from, you know, all the things that we've learned. This is a challenge. And then ultimately someday we need to figure out North Plant because it's not in a great place either, my friends, as far as being on the bend of a river. It with with the wastewater update planning that we're doing. So we've been working on comprehensive upgrades for all three plants. We're certainly going to make North Plants as resilient as possible. And it's like they did on that corner down by the back. I mean, there's a lot of stuff really. I mean, yeah, I would like it's more when you think of massive scale flooding like and I don't have the full picture, but the sort of like if the river decided it didn't want to turn that way and it just wanted to go the easy way, which rivers do sometimes, we're kind of right in that path. And so if we get into an event of that magnitude, rocks are not necessarily going to to save us. Do we have any questions from people on Zoom or there's a let's I'm just very, very conscious of the time right now. Why don't we take one question from the audience and can you speak on to the microphone and introduce yourself? Hi, I'm Gordon, Gordon Dragoon. Just random question. Appreciate all the stuff you're kind of getting into here. Is this the type of thing that we can get some economies of scale from like through a partnership with Colchester or something? I know Chinden does do a very good job with like our relationships. So there had been long standing conversations about having this Colchester doesn't have wastewater treatments and getting them to send their wastewater to North to North Plants. And I honestly don't know the reason why those died, per se. We've also kind of looked at East Plant, so the plant that's on Riverside. As part of our upgrade, we're trying to consolidate that to main plants. We certainly looked across the river in Saul Winooski, but when our engineers looked at it, the permitting, the MOUs, the sort of paperwork that would be involved in also because of the phosphorus limits that are being given to every plant, it could get more complicated than it might be worth. So we have those conversations, we have those ideas. And unfortunately, they often they die. But maybe to the point of economies of scale, we are looking at that locally because Burlington, a place of size at Burlington, probably doesn't really need three plants and supporting three plants long term in every 20 years, having to upgrade and renew three plants. So some of what we're looking at is it's going to cost a little bit more money this round, voters, but in, you know, 50 years when we look out further, it will save it will save the community money to have something like East Plant be a pump station and not a treatment plant. Moreover, it will be better water quality because we're investing a lot of money in main plant, the one that's on the waterfront to add tertiary treatment, which is additional sort of supercharged phosphorus removal. And so it will be better to kind of get all our eggs in one basket and be doing the best level of treatment that we possibly can over there. So hopefully I'm answering your question. Is there anyone on Zoom who has a question for no, OK. And I don't even know how to ask you this, but can we skip to the last slide because we have a concierge who was we need to be out here by now. Oh, yeah. No, my last slide was just how the heck are we going to pay for this, because that's usually my question, because I'm writing checks and, you know, hoping, you know, it is it is female eligible. We've been in constant contact with our FEMA partners at a minimum. Their FEMA will cover 75 percent. And then because of the planning and then Tuttle's gone, you know, because of the planning that we've done with the planning department, we are then eligible for state emergency, something ERAF funds. So they will cover half of that local match. Fingers crossed. I think if you heard the news, it appears that Vermont has crossed the threshold that's necessary to at least be eligible to get more FEMA funding. So in theory, if the federal government authorizes it, we would be eligible for up to 90 percent local match, at which point then we were just looking at 90 percent of FEMA money. And then we only have to deal with how how we in the state are going to pay for that 10 percent, which particularly on the the long term projects, right? This project we're looking at one point two million after. I can't remember how much we've already spent where we're already we're already in a couple million zone. The big projects, if we end up putting in a pump station, you know, we're probably looking at 12, 15 million, like not insignificant numbers. So walking in on that 90 percent is going to be I'm probably going to have a little bit of a party if that happens. Oh, and you're all invited. So if there are no any other if there aren't any other questions. Thank you very much. No, really, there's one thing I've learned as being part of the steering committee of NPAs is that I'm always I think all of us are very, very grateful for the city councillors, the city public servants. It's your dedication. It's your passion that makes us all feel a little bit better and about the community we live in. So we're going to wrap it up. Thank you, everyone, for staying. Megan, you're probably going to be around for like two or three minutes. He has other questions, questions that Megan is very responsive. So I'm sure you email her a question. Yes, Sarah Carpenter said anybody should email Megan directly. That was from Sarah Carpenter. That's better than you'll keep track of whether I actually got the email. Good night, all. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I love.