 I'll call to order the South Burlington Steering Committee meeting on Monday, February 28th, 2022, at 7 p.m. We'll start with the pledge. And I don't, since I don't have a flag, Jesse has agreed to lead that for us. Great, thank you. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. United States of America. To the republic. And to the republic. One nation. Under God. Indivisible. Indivisible. With liberty. With liberty. And justice for all. That's hard to do. I'd hear the other voices in the background. Thank you for your patience. Yes it is. Well, this whole thing is a little weird. I don't know if we've ever had a town meeting that's quite this online. But anyway. Okay, item two then is instructions on exiting the building in case of emergency. Great. So we do not currently have anyone in the audience with us, but if we did, they could go out the two doors in the back. I also, for those of you, we have 38 neighbors on the go-to-meeting link with us tonight. For those of you who are online, if you wanna see which of your neighbors are here, there's a little person icon in the upper right-hand corner of your screen. If you tap that, you can see the names of all the people who have joined us tonight. If you would like to speak throughout this meeting or ask a question, you can put that in the chat. Please note that we are not monitoring the chat for content comments. We are only using it to have people ask questions or indicate that they would like to speak. If you're having technology issues, you can always chat Andrew or myself. Is someone talking? I can't hear anything. Is that normal? Can you, are you on? I can hear you. Can you hear me? Yes, you can. I can hear Jesse. Okay, are you finished, Jesse? Sure, I am finished. Okay, all right. Well, I wanna say hello and welcome to the 2022 South Burlington pre-town meeting virtual information forum. And I think it appropriate on the eve of our expression of democracy, the debate and civil articulation of differences for the voters benefit will be completed tonight and the opportunity tomorrow to freely express our choices. And while we're here, we are also witnessing Ukrainians in the battle for their lives and their democracy. And I think we should take a moment and appreciate our own experience and pray that Ukraine will have the same chance without significant, excuse me, significant bloodshed. When we had to warn this meeting back in mid January where we would be in terms of COVID numbers was uncertain. So we took a very conservative approach in this virtual version. We here at the city have since returned to regular in-person meetings with a remote participation option. And for those of you that haven't yet, we encourage you to join us in our still brand new auditorium at 1-800 or 180, excuse me, Market Street when you can. In a moment, I'll turn this over to Jesse Baker and Andrew Balduk to walk through highlights from this year's proposed budget for your consideration on the city's annual meeting ballot. But before I do, I wanna say that the building of this budget began all the way back in September when the city council said its goals and priorities for FY23. These goals included sensitivity to tax rate increases following a reappraisal, conservatively forecast ongoing impacts of high inflation meeting new operational needs of 180 Market Street, begin to restore pre-pandemic levels of service and finally fund capital expenses deferred due to pandemic uncertainties. From there, the city's leadership team rolled up their sleeves and went to work with our over 140 committee community volunteers and 170 city staff to put together this proposed budget that balances these goals and priorities. Following the presentation, there will be a few minutes for questions before the school district's presentation. And following that, there will be a candidate forum to get to know your school board and city hall candidates up for election on the annual ballot. And I thank you very much for your participation tonight. So Jesse, I hand it over to you and Andrew, thank you. Great, thank you, Helen. So those of you who I have not had the privilege of meeting at my name is Jesse Baker. I'm the city manager here in South Burlington. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm going on about nine months now and really have enjoyed every moment of the work. While I have the honor and the privilege of presenting this budget tonight with Andrew, this budget really is a result of many, many, many hours of hard work, not only by Andrew and Martha Medchar, our finance officer, but also the entire leadership team of the city of South Burlington and the council who spent five or six meetings really debating what to include and what to bring to the voters tomorrow. So credit goes to them for the hard work. I'm going to the next one. Yeah, yep. So this is what we will be talking about tonight. We're gonna spend some time, as Helen just mentioned, talking about the goals, the details of both the general fund budget and the enterprise fund budgets, the pennies for paths in open space, and some capital improvement items that we included in this budget. We'll also talk about some upcoming emerging issues and the outreach where you can find more information. Some of these slides, I will be honest, are relatively data heavy. So I do wanna note that you can at this link here or off the main page on our homepage, you can find all of this budget information available. So if you're on your screen, you can toggle over to other presentations and really drill into any data you would like. So as Helen mentioned, this budget process is a many months process in September of 2021. The council set a series of goals for us as the staff to consider as we developed the budget over the months of October, November, and into December. So again, just to emphasize a few of the points that the chair really made, we developed a budget that was sensitive to towards tax rate increases. We were attentive to trying to recover to our pre-pandemic functioning. We had a number of positions that had been very understandably frozen during the pandemic, during the peak of the pandemic, I should say, and wanted to refund those to ensure that we could serve the community of South Burlington. We were also very interested in maximizing the operations of this beautiful new building here at 180 Market Street to make sure that we were delivering the services that the community had envisioned with this investment. And to strategically use our one-time ARPA dollars to again recover to that pre-pandemic level of capital spending. So with that, I'll turn it over to our deputy city manager, Andrew Bullduck. Hello, good evening, everyone, and thank you, Jesse. For those of you that don't know me, my name is Andrew Bullduck. I'm the deputy city manager for South Burlington. I've been serving in this role since shortly after Jesse Baker was hired. And prior to that, you may recognize me from prior pre-town meetings where I served as your city attorney for approximately five years. So I'm just going to go over a few of these sort of fixed liabilities that we had and forecasted going into FY23. Included in there are increases to current salaries. We are in collective bargaining year. All three of our collective bargaining agreements are expiring at the end of this fiscal year, knowing that we're looking at the time when we forecasted in December about 4.5% inflation. That number is now around 7.5% based on CPI. So we've conservatively forecasted about a 5% increase to our salaries. Jesse mentioned that we refunded some critical positions in FY22 in order so that there wasn't a significant tax rate increased once those ARPA funds went away. We are spreading out the use of those ARPA dollars over five fiscal years. So we're seeing 20% of those salaries funded with general funds in FY23. There's about a 7% increase to our group health insurance. That's actually a pretty good number based on healthcare CPI numbers. A couple of years ago, the city moved from its general, a premium healthcare plan to a captive model. This basically means the city is self-insured. The benefit of that is if there are savings, we get to keep the savings. And in FY21, we were actually able to realize over 300,000 in savings, which we're able to put away towards a rainy day fund. Property insurance, we see an increase. A lot of that is directly tied to now having ensuring 180 Market Street. And there's also an increase in the amount that we raise for the two special fund levies that voters approved in prior elections. That's the Open Space Fund and the Penny for Paz. There's about 200,000 increase. Those are directly increases because of the reappraisal. So just an overall overview of the FY23 general fund. We're looking at a budget expenditures of 28.4 million. That's a general fund increase of 2.3 million. The amount to be raised by property taxes, as close to 18 million. It's about a 3.24 increase over prior years. What you're gonna see on your tax bill is a total 6.27% increase proposed. 5.19% of that increase is in the operational budget. About a little over 1% is from that increases in the levies on Penny for Paz and for Open Space. For an average residential home, looking about a $118 annual increase for an average condo around $80 annually. So back to the budget highlights that Jesse briefly mentioned before. Number one, maximize service delivery to 180 market straight. One of the things we realized as soon as we got here is we don't have the current maintenance capacity to maintain this building. We've also added to the overall city stock, this building as well as 19 Gregory Drive. That was donated to us by Bobby Miller. That's the city's police station. So we have a lot of handy maintenance needs for these facilities that hiring an additional person will be able to help us out. It would also reduce our reliance on outside costs, outside contractors. We also identified a significant need, especially during the pandemic, to improve our information technology infrastructure for better and more resilient service delivery. That includes hiring informational technology staff. That includes Office 365 implementation, which will include our cybersecurity citywide. It will improve the customer service in planning and zoning with new permitting automation. And we're also, for the first time this year, have money in the budget for body cameras for our police department. Jesse and I, when we came on board, we also identified and heard from many department heads that we need more centralized capital planning strategy and connection to city maintenance. Currently, these are done sort of department by department and hiring an additional staff person, a full-time employee, to focus on these capital improvement strategies will help smooth budgets in the future. One other thing I wanna highlight is we did get these one-time COVID monies and there is some of these forecasted or proposed to be expended in the FY23 budget. Some of these are these sort of deferred capital expenses, in particular, new ambulance and dispatch consoles. With this, there are still remaining ARPA funds over four million and Council had a very good discussion at its last regular meeting around how to what its sort of goals and priorities are gonna be moving forward for those funds. More to come on that. I think there'll be a lot more community outreach in the next few months. Thanks, Andrew. So as Andrew just outlined, our total general fund budget is $28 million. However, on the ballot item, you will see our total operating budget is $52.5 million. That is accounted for through our enterprise funds, water, wastewater, stormwater, our TIF district and other enterprise funds that you'll hear more about in a minute. But really just focusing on the general fund budget at this point, because that is where the how tax, property tax dollars support our budget. We want to give you some idea of how those break out across service areas. So here you see, and again, I know there's a lot of detail on this slide. You can zoom into this on our website. Here you see how those expenditures are broken out by service areas. So for example, 20% of the general fund budget funds the police department about 15% of our general fund budget funds the fire and ambulance services. Of course, the other side of that equation is our general fund revenues. Here in Vermont, as you know, municipal government is primarily funded through property tax. However, South Burlington does have the privilege position of being able to leverage many other revenue streams to support municipal operations. So you see the breakdown of about 37% of our revenue comes from dollars that are not raised through property taxes. A great deal of that is through our local options tax and one of the things we have, so that's the 1% on rooms, meals and alcohol and 1% on sales. We have returned those revenue projections to our pre-pandemic level. You can see at the bottom, our analysis of that revenue stream and our understanding of how those will return to that pre-COVID amount. As Andrew mentioned, we also are envisioning about $950,000 of those one-time ARPA dollars for one time and some staffing expenses through this budget. We are also anticipating continued lower programming revenues, but that's offset by our increased permitting revenues. And then on our next slide, we can see how those revenues are broken out across the different revenue streams. So as Andrew mentioned, we also have the pennies on the tax rate. So these are the two special fund levies that the voters have previously approved. That's 1% on the tax rate for open space and 1% for penny for paths. This year we have done something slightly different in our organization of the budget than has previously been done. We are separating out those pennies from our general fund operations budget. This year we did go through a reappraisal which changed the baseline tax rate as well as the grand list. And because of that shift, a penny on the tax rate raises more money. So with that reappraisal, we are adding $95,000 of property tax rate to both of those funds through the previously approved pennies for open space and pennies for paths. So that represents about 1% of the property tax increase that Andrew previously mentioned. All right, so onto the city's capital improvement plan. These are, this is the separate plan that council approves every year to fund our large capital expenses. Any expense over $10,000 is part of this plan. A few prioritized projects to highlight, we continue to fund the reserve for city center at the approximate same rates we have in the past. This is the overall development of the city's downtown. We heard a lot of comments over the past couple of fiscal years now about trying to increase our paving budget that is included in this year's proposed budget at an additional 50,000. We've also allocated 30,000 of that specifically dedicated to our recreation paths. Park improvements to the city parks was significantly cut in sort of the lean FY22, you know, mid-pandemic budget. Those were cut by over 100,000. This year we're looking to bring some of that capital improvement back by funding it at 65,000. And I've talked a little bit already about some of the ARPA funding. These are the utility rates. City has three separate enterprise funds, stormwater, sewer, and water. It's showing very minor increases, overall total increase to the average homeowner in FY23 and utility fees is around $16. Just a quick look at the historic city tax rates. As you can see with the reappraisal, there was a significant drop in FY22. Here is what's gonna be on the ballot tomorrow. Obviously, Article 1 will not look like that. We have a two and a three-year contested council seat that you will see in Article 1. In Article 2, that's the annual city budget. And I just wanna note that there are no additional articles on the city side this year, but we are anticipating final TIF bond votes in FY22 and 23. Sorry, in year 2022 and 23. We have a couple of elections coming up that there may be TIF votes on. And in emerging issues, things that we're gonna continue to track going into this year, talked a little bit around inflation and the impacts that that will continue to have, where our union contracts will settle. We're also still CCPSA is still standing up the Regional Dispatch Center. They just received a Homeland Security grant, but there may be additional costs to the city, as well as revenues coming in from that. Climate Action Plan, we anticipate future funding needs there. This is in the city's effort to become greener and cleaner. And I just wanna note that we had a very lean year last year with under a 1% increase and a number of positions were unfunded. This year, we're looking at a 5.1% increase. Smoothed over two years, that's about a 3% average. And this remains well-blown inflation. So we will continue to look at ways to fund the city's unfunded CIP needs, as well as facility maintenance. Great. At this point, I would like to invite the members of our city leadership team who are on go to meeting today to turn on their cameras and wave so folks know who you are. As you likely know, this municipal budget funds about 180 employees who provide services to you on and the residents of South Burlington on a daily basis. And these folks will stay on the phone with us for the next few minutes to answer any questions the community may have. And again, just my heartfelt thanks to all of them for their work in developing this budget. If we can go back to the slide, sharing the slide presentation for just a quick sec. So these are the services. So again, there's a lot of information here, a lot of information available on our city website. Please feel free to explore this, but if you do have any questions, feel free to reach out to myself or Andrew, call us or email us anytime, not just about town meeting day, but about anything. And then finally, because we are here in advance of, as a manager, my favorite day of the year, town meeting day, don't forget to vote tomorrow. If you've already requested and received your absent your early ballot, but have not turned it in yet, please turn it in at your polling place tomorrow. And the polls will be open and Donna and her crew will be there with happy welcoming faces from seven a.m. to seven p.m. at our three polling stations. So at that point, at this point, we would like to invite any members of our community to either put questions in the chat or turn your cameras on and unmute yourself and ask questions. We have about 10 minutes for this section. We do have somebody in the room with us now. It's very exciting. If you could go up to the screen and turn on the mic, that would be great. Okay, I'm Kirk Minor. I lived in South Brown in a few years. I'm new to this. So I'm not exactly sure what ARPA stands for. Oh, excellent question. So the American Rescue Plan Act, this is kind of COVID money that, yeah. But I assume that he didn't want to just make an assumption and make an ass out of myself. So the other question is, this is a one-shot type of money. And we're looking at a 5% increase in the budget. If I just notice that correctly. Inflation is going through the roof. Costs, business costs, police costs are going through the roof. Would it behoove us to, I don't know, line by line, whether we really were careful about the increases because if inflation continues, there's going to be tremendous pressure going forward on costs and 5% seems like quite a bit. That if we have all this extra ARPA money, what's going to happen going forward when the ARPA stops? That would be my question. Thank you. Thank you, yeah. One of the things we talked about at the city council meeting at the last regular meeting was how we're going to expand future ARPA dollars. We still do have over 4 million. And one of the things we talked about was we could use that funding in future and out years to help ease the tax burden that any future tax burden that might be realized. If we're looking at just smoothing it like we did with ARPA salaries, we'd be looking at about an additional 1 million that would help smooth the tax rate out over the three or four additional years we have to spend this money. So that's one of the things council's talking about. And I'd encourage you to come to some of the community forums we have coming up to express that. I appreciate you. Yeah, thank you. That's very good news. And I definitely plan on heading to more and I appreciate you indulging me with my ignorance. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Anyone else on go to meeting have city side questions before we turn it off to our wonderful educators? Can either just unmute and ask your question or put a question in the chat. If you are on the phone, you can unmute by pressing star six. I think we've either answered all their questions or they're really just excited for the school presentation. Bring it on. All right. Well, thank you very much all for your attention tonight. Again, thank you to the leadership team and the council and to Andrew and Martha for their hard work putting together this budget. We look forward to seeing our neighbors at the polling places tomorrow. And with that, I will turn it, I guess over to Helen to move our steering committee along to the school district. Thank you. Okay. I think we'll now hear a presentation on the FY23 school budget. I don't know if the school board wants to make a comment or just David is going to... Bridget, do you want to introduce David in that? Well, this is David Young, our superintendent. For those of you who don't know him, the school board does not have any prepared remarks ahead of his presentation. It's very thorough. So David, and I believe he'll be getting support from Gary Marquess, our director of operations and finance and Violet Nichols, our executive director of learning. So take it away. Thank you, Bridget. And thank you, Helen. So yeah, good evening, everybody. And my name is David Young. And as Bridget said, I'll be kind of sharing this presentation with both Gary Marquess, our director of operations and finance and Violet Nichols. So I just first wanted, again, I think we've somewhat repetitive with the city, but our budget, as most people know, begins like the city back in September. Actually, it begins before that. Anytime we get more affirmed information coming out of the state, it begins the wheels turning around how we're going to develop a budget into the future. But it certainly does also have input from our entire administrative team, as well as feedback as you can expect from the school board and many of our community members that provide that. I think it also, I want to be clear that it does take into account the utilization of recovery dollars connected to the pandemic, specifically, as you heard Andrew earlier and Jesse speak to, the recovery dollars that have come to us to help emerge out of the pandemic. And so those are in what we call ESSER, which is, and you'll hear more about here in a second, the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief Fund, sometimes also called ARC funds. So you'll hear a little bit more about that in a second. So let us go ahead and go ahead and share with you our presentation. And like others, we will take some time at the end to answer questions that you may have. David, so I made Violet a presenter. Do I need to? Perfect, okay. Violet, let me know if you have any challenge. It says I need to ask permission right now to become a presenter. So while we're doing this, while we bring up the slide, the first slide, just to be efficient, really talks about what we expect out of our students. And many of you have heard this many, many times, but as students progress through our system from pre-K all the way up to 12th grade, we want them to have what we would say the necessary experiences to be successful as they move on, whether they move on into the workforce or higher education or technical education or the armed services, we want them to possess these four very critical pillars. The first in a no specific order is disposition for lifelong learning. We want kids to have the acumen and the opportunity necessary to be a lifelong learner. The other obviously is academic proficiency. We want them to be proficient in the content areas that we provide them so that they can be successful and apply them as they progress in their life and in jobs and in normal life. The other is personal development. Do they possess the skills to really be successful and we want to be able to provide that? And then fourth is really citizenship and so important that our students are listening and seeing and able to move forward to be good citizens and helping other people within our community and advocating for all is something that we have felt very strongly about. So in addition, this budget, as I said earlier, takes into account some of the, both we've got local funds that you'll see here. We also have ESSER funds that are really a one-time use and we have to extend those right now by September of 2024. The part or ESSER dollars you'll not see in here, but we do have a challenge to make sure that when we get through the ESSER dollars, we're able to sustain ourselves going forward because those again need to be extended by that period. Okay, so I think we're back on. Sounds like Violet is good or maybe Gary is good now. I think if you all can see the slides then we're good to go. Not perfect. Okay, you can go take me to the next one, Violet. So here again, folks is what I shared just a bit ago about these major four pillars of what we want for our kids by the time they graduate. Again, developing them along the way. These are what we call the South Burlington School District ends. Gary, I can't, you're not hearing you. I don't know why. So let me go ahead, Gary has, looks like volume troubles, Gary Marcus. So I want to again, this is in areas just factors impacting our 2023 budget. So first is expenditures. Obviously, as you heard from the city, we're definitely experiencing pretty significant increases related to the consumer price index with significant upward pressure on consumable supplies and professional services as well as equipment. So that is definitely a factor in this budget. We are dealing with increased enrollment pressures at both Rick Markot and Orchard School. That's a good thing. We were up a good number of students at both of those locations. We're well over a hundred over capacity at both of those schools. So we're working to have some relief efforts put in place to begin to deal with that. We do have an enrollment committee that's been working hard on that. In addition, also like the city, we have three collective bargaining agreements that are in play for teachers, administrators, and support staff. As many of you know, critical shortage in some of our areas has definitely affected us. And so we're working through that kind of on a daily basis and certainly will be over the summer as we look at how to begin the next school year. This budget takes that into account. FTEs or full-time equivalent staff is what we're talking about here. We adopted an FY22, 498, a little bit more. We filled 485. This is again, as of November 1st. And so our proposed increase over the adopted would be three additional staff, which is represented in what you'll see here in just a minute. On the revenue side, we had a undesignated fund balance from FY21. I do wanna indicate to most people that we were unable to do a lot of things for our students back in 21, for instance, co-curricular activities and travel. Many of those things obviously have resources attached to them and we were not in school for a period of time, as you know, no. So there was money in there, which we have to designate in two years forward for a fund balance. In addition, that emergency, the elementary and secondary emergency relief fund is also in there, which as I said earlier has to be expended by September of 2024. Some of the state factors, CLA stands for Common Level of Appraisal. You heard Jesse and talk about that earlier around the reappraisal process. So this does obviously at 100%. This was a pretty significant decrease from the previous year, 11% decrease. Equalized pupils represents the number of students, not just the seated number, but factors that get attached to them. So for a pre-K student, we only get a 0.46 of a unit. So all factored together, we have a slight decrease in that number. Likely these are to change. These may change a bit as the state goes on, which they normally do. The property yield is also set by the state. As you know, they have about $90 million surplus in the ed fund. They're using about half of that and not sure what they'll do with the other half of that surplus. But this does take into account. It could go up as high as 13, 846. And then the income yield. Gary, are you able to be still not giving me a head shape? Oh, I hope so. No, you're good now. Sorry. Anything you wanted to add Gary? That's a big slide and a lot of information. Thanks, I worked perfectly, David. Okay. Okay, I can cover this slide. We realize it's a little small to read on the screen. Great information. This will be posted on our website in our budget section. But this is how we get from the school budget to all of our local property taxes. So our total expenditure budget is the amount of dollars we're scheduled to spend. We subtract local revenue from that. That is all the revenue that we've received from sources other than property tax. That equals the education spending amount, which is $44,744,715 in this budget. And that is the amount to be raised through property taxes by the education fund. So we divide that education spending by equalized pupils to get our education spending per equalized pupil. So that is one of the numbers you'll see on the ballot along with the top line expenditure budget. We take that education spending per equalized pupil, we divide it by the property tax yield, which we're estimating at $12,937 for this year. And that equals the homestead tax rate to be prorated. And prorated means divided by the common level of appraisal, which is at 100.99. So that gets our actual homestead tax rate for property taxpayers that pay solely on the value of their property. And that's $1.3333 projected for FY23. And then which set by the state, which is the actual non homestead tax rate it's set by the state and then divided by CLA. And the result of that for this coming fiscal year is $1.4675. Thanks, Gary. When you do get that slide, if you do go to the website, it is very helpful. A lot of people, I think it provides great clarity thanks to Gary for putting that together, but it does add a lot of clarity to how you end up with the tax rate. This next slide is just enrollment projections. These, as you know, are pretty fluid and changing. We have seen pretty significant increases in enrollment, particularly at both Rick Marcot and Orchard and probably in that order. We are working with the city to look at ways to become better predictors of enrollment and overall growth in the city. So we've had good conversations with both Jesse and Helen and Bridget and I to really think about ways that we can advance our thinking with a shared demographer type person to help us. But in general, this is where you see, where we were this current year and where we're projected. I think some of these numbers, particularly at Rick Marcot and Orchard are probably low, given the some of the current developments that are happening along Market Street. But here again, a good scenario, unlike most other districts, thanks. Okay, this next slide is comparison from FY22 to FY23 for residential property tax impact. We understand that the reappraisal happened and went into effect for FY22. So this is comparing the actual same home value from FY21 to FY22. We understand that home values went up. So these kinds of savings weren't all realized in actual dollars. But from 22 to 23, which is our kind of litmus test of how we are doing from a financial management standpoint, we're projecting a less than 1% increase in property tax rate, 0.63 actually, or $8 per $100,000 of assessed value increase on the residential property tax. So for the average home using the new values, post appraisal for the average condo, we're talking about an annual $24 increase from 22 to 23. And for the average price valued home, we're looking at a $36 increase from FY22 to FY23. Thank you, Gary. So this is pretty interesting here, coming off the back of such a significant decrease for FY22 seeing a reduction of $309 per tax assessed, $100,000 of value to a really modest and say responsible $8 increase off of that for the proposed FY23 budget. We were able to add what you see here, which is the equivalent of three full-time positions. The way this particular slide reads, they're separated and you'll see three assistant principles. Really, this is two positions. And the model is actually having these positions shared between our two elementary schools. David shared a bit about our enrollment crises at two of our elementary schools, Rick Marcott and Orchard. These positions are slated to really help alleviate quite a lot of that enrollment piece in particular supporting principals and educators to focus on instructional leadership, so full emotional learning and our ends goals. So these FTEs that you see here, again, it would be two assistant principals. These are rough percentages of how they would be allocated toward the schools. And those FTEs that you see those fractional pieces in that third column over are just proposed based on student enrollment right now. So those are two of the proposed additions. The other proposed addition is Executive Director of Equity. This is a really critical position that we're quite excited about and have made good progress in the interview, the onboarding process. So far we're in the interview stage right now and we're hopeful to bring a candidate on soon. We had about 45 applicants for this position, so we're quite hopeful. This position will round out the executive team and really work with our entire organization to ensure that our systems and our programs are equitable. So those are the three sort of full-time equivalent ads. That's what the FTE stands for here. So those are the human pieces. There are a few other expenditures. We did move our central offices from within the middle school to 577 Dorset Street. As those of you in the city remember well. And so you'll see listed here some of the costs associated with the new building, electricity, heating, cleaning. And then there's one final cost again for this proposed upgrade of $8 per $100,000 of tax assessed value and that is a playground upgrade for Gertrude Chamberlain School. This is a safety and health concern for this school and really it's looking at bringing this playground up to a somewhat comparable level of our other two elementary schools. Yeah, thanks Violet. This next slide recognizes probably not easy to read. There's a lot of detail behind this slide. This is what we call their facility stewardship plan. It's been in play for now probably 18 years, 17 years or so. And what this does is ensure that we're taking care of our buildings from roof spoilers, air handlers, those types of things. And so this shows you the highlighted yellow where we, in FY 22, we bonded in FY 22 and we planned to bond in 24 and in 26. Obviously, if we have some other thing happening which I'll address here and just submit a bit if we're going out to do something different on the building, then this cycle could change either in 2024 or 2026. But in 2022, obviously we put things that needed to be addressed but because of the pandemic and really you couldn't get workers or you couldn't get into buildings at the times that we needed them. So we will likely be moving forward. We will be doing many of those things this summer and or in the 2023. But this just shows you a little bit about what we're currently planning and some of the expenses that could be incurred. So you see on the top total stewardship and then you have what we would fund from the proposed bond funding and what would be proposed from the operating budget. And again, as I said earlier, these all can be looked at in more detail on our website under stewardship and you can see the full out plan. Thank you. Now this next slide, again, it's could be strategic and master planning, visioning. Not sure the title necessarily represents accurately what we're doing here, but we're trying to be thoughtful. These dates obviously, as I said on that previous one with the bonding could change too, depending on what happens. But currently in phase one, which would be this upcoming year and through 2024, we really need to address the emerging elementary enrollment issues. As I said earlier, we have both Rick Markott and Orchard that are over capacity by about a hundred or more and we need to do some things. We are certainly running out of classroom spaces and it's not as easy just to add on classrooms without adding on additional other congregate spaces or added gym space or art space or music space or cafeteria space, because you just don't have enough time in the day to serve the number of students that you need to. So we have an emergent issue. We're trying to resolve that in 23 and in 24. Phase two, we know that the high school is in major need of what we would say a new build based on the work that we did over the last several years actually. And renovation versus a new build was not viable. New build was most viable. So in 2024, 2025 and again, some of these can stretch. We do hope that there'll be some added resources that will begin to come out of the state, federal government and possibly out of impact fees to help offset the cost for the taxpayers as we look at next generation future high school. Phase three, similarly, the middle school has some needs, whether this is a renovation or again, a new build will have to be in play as well. And again, we've just pumped some dates here, 26, 27. Those could go out a little bit further if need be. And then the last phase, phase four, we are working again collaboratively with the city to look at possible property within the city that could be future school site locations. Now again, the city doesn't own an awful lot of property but between the city and the school district looking at where we're building out, what locations and areas may be in their future will make important sense for us to be looking at those spaces. So just in general, these are kind of the four phases that we thought were important to begin to communicate more actively with the community so you know kind of what's on the horizon. Thanks. Thank you, David. So looking now back to property tax rates, we've got some information here on the specifics of net education spending, equalized pupil amounts and the state calculated yield. I think the really interesting piece here is the homestead tax rate. What you see for FY 22 was about $1.32. This year with the proposed budget, the board approved budget, we're seeing an increase of just under a penny here. It's about three-quarter, two-thirds of a penny. So I think when we put it in terms like that, it's helpful to kind of contextualize what exactly the increase is here. And so that's what you're seeing here in that percent difference in the far-right column. And then if we look at another interesting you know piece of information of how to contextualize what does this budget mean for the average South Burlington community member, we've got some information here on some projections for income sensitive property tax rates. And that applies to about 68% of all of the taxpayers in South Burlington. And that rate is set at about $60,000, which is just above the median tax income of Vermont. So folks in that category, again, 68% of our residents in South Burlington could expect to pay around $1,350 in annual property tax next year, which is actually about $138 reduction from FY 22. This next slide, similar to this, so what the city shared obviously gives them history of where both spending has been and tax rate change has been. And so you can see back to 2014, what was happening with our budget increase and the tax rate change. Again, for many of you, if you look back at the information that Gary presented earlier, you can see where some of those factors that are set by the state either yield or our common level reprisal or equalized pupils all play into that for a high level of variability. And you can certainly see that. But again, here, the five-year average on our spending increase, a 10-year average is 3.33. Five-year is 3.46. Over on that right-hand column, the change in the tax rate, you can see our five-year average is minus 2.96 and the 10-year average is a minus 0.31. So that's where we are. This next slide just gives you a little bit of some comparability. I don't particularly like to do this because everyone has a lot of moving parts. But when we look at our per pupil spending on that right column and where others are, you can see that South Burlington is certainly not in the highest spending around. Again, this is just a comparative to programs that have similar size programs as us. Obviously, if you go out into the smaller portions of Vermont, you'll begin to see those numbers go up because of variety of factors and staffing in numbers of students under cost per pupil. This next one is just a statewide comparison. Overall, statewide and then us, so the first one there is growth and total ed spending where we are changing equalized pupil count, growth and spending per equalized pupil and then the average per spending, which is what I referred to earlier. The average of course is a bit higher than where we are. This next one, common level appraisal. Again, I think both city and school have talked about where we've come. So from 2019 to 2023, again, that's where you see that 11% decrease. Pretty significant change for us as far as trying to navigate through some of these pieces, but you can see where we are with those two correlations. Thanks. This next one is what you see on the ballot, actually. So you see the 58,000,344,602 and that spending per equalized pupil and the change in per pupil spending of 3.70. And then obviously, as both Jesse said, March 1st, tomorrow, we're running out of early voting options, obviously, because tomorrow is upon us. So we strongly encourage folks to get out and vote. And certainly I would be remiss if I did not take a few minutes here and just recognize some board members that will not be with us. And although I don't think I have all of them on, but do I bridge it on? And I think I have Laura on if they can maybe unmute and give a little wave. And Brian Minier, I don't see, but do want to just extend the thanks to them. Those three, as they move off, we've appreciated their service. And I'll open it up to questions or back to you, Jesse. Sure, so if... So physically. Thanks, David. If folks have questions, you can put them in the chat. And I think David and I can both see them. I certainly can. Or if you prefer, you can just unmute yourself and ask your question. And again, if you're calling in to unmute yourself, press star six. It's hard to believe we've maybe answered a lot of questions, Jesse, or talk a lot. I think you've wowed them, David. Yeah, I don't know that. I have a question. Sure. David, it might be worthwhile to go over some of the things that we are not doing. And such as, I believe we cut out the assistant superintendent from this budget. And also the annual wish to repave the driveway and parking lot in between the high school and middle school. I don't believe that's in the budget as well. And there may be others that you could tell us about. Thank you. Yeah, so as Alex indicated, there are some things that we, when we begin the budget building process, we don't really know all of the factors that are in play. And we tried to do what we think we need to do to support, you know, our students. And supporting students primarily, it's our classroom teachers and staff that do that. But then the other end of that is making sure that the central office folks are available to support the staff. In other words, you know, paying them and making sure that they're being taken care of is certainly an important part. So that assistant superintendent was initially in there to try to do that. But again, as we saw the budget unfolding, we were concerned with some of those components. So we did not do those. And like Alex said, our stewardship plan, we are not able to do all the things that we need to do in any one year because of the amount of money. So we do kind of reorganize those. We reassess them based on a risk factor. Unfortunately, things are going to begin to get more problematic, but we're also wanting to be careful not to do things on schools that we think may be up for a bigger decision, like the high school. So we're trying to make sure that it runs effectively, but we invest wisely as opposed to putting huge amounts of money into something that may not be there. So anyway, I don't know, Violet, do you have anything else you wanted to add in response to what Alex was asking? I think that's accurate. We like the city had, I have a number of initiatives we're trying to really support and just thinking about how to continue to support our students and to reach our ends, given the effects of the pandemic, really looking at social emotional factors and academic factors. And so, we didn't include many details in tonight's presentation. However, we too have some that that's our funds that were mentioned about five and a half million dollars to span the course of three years and we're currently seeking feedback on our proposed plans which aim to support students academically and socially emotionally. So I think those are the other components. Initially, our wish list was huge and we thought of many wonderful ways along with our stakeholders and our educators and our administrative teams on how to do that. Ultimately, we did come down to the three FTEs that you saw tonight with the two elementary vice-principals really wanting to prioritize putting those on local funding to ensure that they could be available so not wanting to link it with ESSER funds hoping for some more consistency there and then same with the executive director of equity really just trying to solidify for that position in particular the permanence of it by prioritizing the funding of that for local funding. That's perfect. Thank you, Violet. Awesome. Any other questions? So, David, there is a question in the chat if you don't mind me reading it. So, JG asks, are you looking at relocating a new school on the SBHS site to keep the newer playing field along Kennedy Drive? The plan that was in place before with the bond though that did not pass had the high school moving to the east of the middle school and so there would be obviously fields that would be disrupted but would be repurposed eventually that after the high school would come down and it would be repurposed there but as far as the current field, the turf field where the bleachers are that was not on the proposed change that would stay where it was but again, a lot of things could change simply in this budget presentation wanted to address those three phases to make sure that the community was aware and that we do have to make some decisions as we move forward with these buildings. I am not seeing any other questions either in the chat or folks unmuting. David, if you don't mind, Andrew and I would like to just take a quick moment and thank you personally for your service to our community. It has been just our pleasure working with you, me for nine months and Andrew for longer than that and your service is very commendable and I look forward to ways to celebrate you in the months to come. Thank you, Justi. It's been an honor to serve self-employment. So seeing no more questions, Helen, I would turn it back to you to officially close the steering committee meeting. Well, I would make the motion to adjourn the pre-town meeting. I'll second that. Okay. Is there any discussion? Okay, all in favor, signify by saying aye. Great, that seems unanimous. Well, thank you all and thank you public for joining us and the leadership team from both the school and the city. And we will continue this pre-town meeting with the candidate forum and Vince Valdu will be leading that. So again, thank you. I hope to see you all at the post tomorrow. Thank you all. Thank you. So for those who want to stay on this link and participate in the candidate forum, if you are, I think we have all of our wonderful candidates here. Thank you for stepping up and being willing to serve. And Vince Valduk will facilitate this next hour of discussion. Very good. Thank you very much. Yeah, my name is Vince Valduk. I'm just gonna facilitate this. I'm a volunteer. I lived in the community for 45 years and so I'm just a facilitator for this. If you have questions after the candidates have spoken, let's follow the same pattern that we've followed before and you can unmute and turn on your screen and then you can ask the question. For the three unopposed school board candidates, and I know that all three of them are here, we've decided that after their self introductions of three or four minutes, then we ask people to either write a question in the chat room and I'll read it or to unmute and then you can ask it of them. Since we're giving them three or four questions, we have sort of a standard here for keeping track of it. I have a simple timer here and I have something that I hope says 30 seconds left or does it say three seconds left? I hope it says 30. Okay. And then a sign here that you might recognize suggesting that it's time to put the brakes on. The four city council candidates are running for two and three year terms and those are contested and so we're taking a little bit longer with those. I wanna thank everyone, all of the candidates for agreeing to do this work. It's oftentimes unrecognized, it's oftentimes thankless, it's always hard work and so for anyone willing to serve on the school board on the city council, thank you very much and I know I speak for the community in expressing our appreciation. So let's start with the three unopposed candidates for the school board. They'll now take three or four minutes to self-introduce why they're running in alphabetical order there. Kate Bailey, Kate, raise your hand. I think the size of the font is large enough, we can see you and then Michelle Boyer. Michelle, raise your hand so we can see you and Chelsea Tilling-Hast. Chelsea, thank you very much. Kate Bailey, would you start us off just by explaining a little bit about yourself and why you're running for the school board? Okay, thank you so much, Jensen and thanks to the community members who are here tonight. I'll keep this short. My name is Kate Bailey and I moved to South Burlington five years ago. My professional background is in healthcare advocacy and I'm running for the two year seat on the school board this year because I think that I have useful experience that will come in handy as we manage the hopeful end of the COVID crisis management phase and move towards more evaluating and addressing the long-term impacts of the pandemic, such as mental health, learning loss, staffing shortages, there's the increased enrollment, we have a lot on our plates. So I really want to prioritize student engagement and student voice in particular in the board's work around anti-racism efforts and the equity policies and I will be voting in support of the city and the school budgets this year. I support the school budget and I look forward to if all goes well tomorrow and I get elected working together with my fellow board members and community members with the hard but important work ahead. Thanks. Good. Thank you very much, Kate. Second alphabetically is Michelle Boyer. Three or four minutes, Michelle? Sure, good evening. And I will also be short. I know folks are probably interested in moving on to the main part of the program. So my name is Michelle Boyer. I've been a resident of South Burlington, a member of the community since 2009 when I moved here with my family. We had two young children at the time that were three and six. So they've really grown up in South Burlington schools. My oldest has just moved. I graduated last year, has moved on to university and I have a sophomore currently at SBHS. My professional expertise is in educational research, measurement and accountability and also in policy. I've spent much of the pandemic working directly with state agencies of education, specifically supporting their plans for fair assessment, a lot of work around reporting and transparency of not just assessment results, but of all of the other various opportunity to learn data collection that's been going around, going out around the country at this point. And so I would hope to be able to win some of those skills and perspectives and contacts to the hard work that is ahead of the full district in the recovery of lost learning and the many other impacts that we've experienced under these extraordinary circumstances. So really my main priority is about the recovery of lost learning and specifically looking at how that process of monitoring and accountability happens. Given my background in accountability, I not only know a lot about what good accountability looks like, I also know what bad accountability looks like and so I hope I can kind of lend a hand there. And another big priority that I have is in increasing working towards transparency of outcomes really and including a broad diversity of input into the process of developing policy to help advance our ends goals. Thank you. Very good. Thank you very much, Michelle. Chelsea, your turn. Hi, thank you so much. I'm Chelsea Tilling-Hast and I've been a member of the community for about four years. I've lived in the Burlington area for close to a decade. I moved here to attend UVM and my bachelor's degree is in microbiology. I'm also a small business owner and not in microbiology, I'm a dog trainer, but I did just welcome my first daughter into the world in October. She's four months old and she's really just inspired me to find any way that I can have a meaningful impact on our world. I think it's pretty sobering the things that we're facing as a global community, global, just humanity in general. And I definitely can't solve all the problems but I'm looking for work worth doing and I think there's a lot of work to be done in this district and I'm looking forward to serving. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you, Chelsea. We certainly have time for some questions. If you'd like to ask a question, it would be helpful if you would frame the question in such a way that all three candidates can answer it. So just take yourself off mute and put your camera on and we can watch you ask your question. I think two of them have already answered this question. So it's basically directed at Kate Bailey but could you give us a little bit more about what your professional background is? I happen to know what not everyone does. Thank you, Wendell. Could you hear that, Kate? I sure can. I can hear it basically through the walls since Wendell is my neighbor. Hi, Wendell. So my professional background, I'm a paralegal at Vermont Legal Aid and before I moved to Vermont for that job five years ago and before that, I got my masters in New York City and healthcare advocacy, healthcare policy. And my background is I worked at a variety of different nonprofits. I'm also involved in quite a bit of equity and racial justice work at Vermont Legal Aid and in other areas. And I've been involved in the, in South Burlington specifically through the energy committee appointed by the city council and with the fair and impartial policing practices citizens group. So that's sort of what I've been involved in up and to this point and I'm really looking forward to doing more with the school board. Thank you, Kate. Other questions? Well, very good. Hearing none, do I hear any? Vince, we do have one quick question from the audience here at City Hall. Oh, good. Good. He or she, yeah, should I ask it? Yeah. Is this on? Is the little light lit up? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Okay. Not maybe in order of importance, but I do have an issue with the school boards about their opinions on Black Lives Matters. I've seen the flag out here at the school for a couple of years and it concerns me that our children are not getting proper education on critical thinking skills that Black Lives Matters is joked about as burn, loot, and murder. Their organizers have been indicted on spending tremendous amounts of inappropriate use of money and the concept is inherent racism of anyone no matter how they were brought up. And I wasn't sure what the issue was here in Burlington, whether the critical race theory and BLM is supported in that respect. Thank you. Thank you for the question. Since it is a candidate forum, we should turn to the three candidates to answer it. And if we move outside of the three candidates, I'm afraid we're going to have a broader discussion that would be very appropriate in front of the entire school board, but maybe not at this forum. So thank you very much for that question. Who would like to take the first shot at that? Kate Bailey, you're alphabetically first, you went first. Is there something you want to say about that? Sure, happy to. Thanks for the question. And if the three of us are elected tomorrow and sworn in, we have our meeting on Wednesday evening at seven. So if you do want to talk about this in more detail, then I encourage you to join us at our school board meeting on Wednesday. What I really want to say is that Black Lives do matter. And unfortunately in our society where we have interpersonal and systemic racism and we had 400 years of slavery in this country and Jim Crow and a long history of housing discrimination, healthcare discrimination, I could go on and on. It's really important, particularly to our Black students and our students of color, but really for everybody and all of our students and our community members that we affirm that their lives matter to us. And that's why I believe Black Lives matter. And that's why I support applying the flag. And I think it's really important for us to have age appropriate conversations with our kids about race and our white kids about race because our students of color are experiencing racism from a very young age. So we need to teach it and we need to have those difficult conversations. And I'll turn it over to my colleague, sorry to take the time, but I didn't catch your name, sir, but there is a wonderful Vermont Digger commentary by the Vermont Student Anti-Racism Network that I really encourage you to read. Like I said in my introduction, I want this to be student led. And I think that we as the adults can take strong cues from our students to really partner with them and how they see anti-racism work looking like in their schools. Thank you, Kate. Michelle, is there something else that you would add to that or something different you would add to that? Sure. I think the first thing I'd like to say is to put an exclamation point on Kate's comments. And then what I'll add is, I think in these matters, and I understand and appreciate how polarizing that they can be. And I think one way to manage that is to just be very clear about our definitions. It's one thing to say, I believe in critical race theory, it's another thing to be very clear about what we mean by that and what it means very specifically, developmentally, along K to 12. And the other part is just a kind of a simple slogany thing that I'm not usually good at, but I think this one is important for us all to keep in mind. And that is learning is not zero sum. When we talk as a board, as a community about how to find ways to chip away at systemic racism, that we're doing it with thoughtfulness and we're not saying we're going to replace English literature with a class on critical race theory. I'm not on the board. I do hope to be elected tomorrow. I can't say for certainty how it's going to look, but what I can say with certainty is that there is room for all of us to learn in this process. I continue to learn, I very much support teaching compassion to our children. It does not have to be something that removes some core subject from our curriculum to make this a part of our community's learning process. Thank you. Thank you, Michelle. Finally, Chelsea, do you have something that you would like to say? I mean, I think Kate and Michelle expressed very similar sentiments that I have. I'm not sure I totally understand what the question actually is, but I 1,000% support teaching compassion and I'm really trying to examine why we do the things we do and where they come from. And I just think there's so much work to be done. And so I don't really understand the question, but I definitely echo and agree with the sentiments made by Kate and Michelle. And then maybe- Thank you. To clarify, I agree with a lot of the statements that each of you made. I am completely against racism and inherent superiority of any child regarding their race. My question, my question I think was about Black Lives Matter flag in organization representing the concept that Black Lives Matters, which I think everybody agrees. I think all lives matter. And to highlight that organization is a mistake because it's very divisive and they rioted all last summer, caused untold damages, killed people. Their organizers are Marxist liberals and they don't represent the average person in this country. So I'm saying absolutely no racism, Black Lives Matters, but the BLM group is not the organization to hold up to represent those values. Okay, thank you very much for clearly expressing your opinion. We've heard from the three candidates and we've got to remember the purpose of this is to hear from the candidates. And so thank you very much. On having gone through one question, unless there's one other, it's time that we switched over to the city council forum. Do I hear any objection to that or are we ready to switch to the city council forum? Okay, I think it's time to switch to the city council forum. Michelle, Kate and Chelsea, thank you very much for your willingness to serve and for your time tonight. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Good one, tomorrow. Yeah. Yep. Okay. I'm having a little of my clock here. Okay. Now we're ready to start with the city council. As most of you know, we have two positions that are open on the city council. One is the three-year seat and we have Linda Bailey. I can see Linda's there. Linda, wave to us. Linda Bailey is the challenger for Tim Barrett's position who is the incumbent. Tim, wave to us. Okay. And then we have for the two-year seat, we have Megan Emery who is the incumbent and Chris Trombly is the challenger. Thank you very much. There will be two minutes for each candidate to introduce themselves. And at the end of that, we'll give them three minutes for them to talk a little bit about why they wish to serve. And the sequence of this was previously announced. The candidates know this. It's been predetermined so that there's an alternation about who goes first, who goes middle, who goes last. And the candidates will always be paired with their direct opponent. So people not familiar with people with the candidates. I'll say this is so-and-so and so-and-so. And so we'll know that that's what we'll be facing on the ballots tomorrow. So at the end of their introductions, the two-minute and then the three-minute explanation why they want to serve, if you have a question, we'll do the same thing. Turn on your mic and turn on your video. So here's the first one. It'll go Bailey and then Barrett. Linda Bailey and then Tim Barrett with two minutes to introduce themselves. Linda, would you start us? I would be happy to. Good evening, everybody. Thank you for sticking around for our forum. In case you didn't catch it, I'm Linda Bailey and I'm running for the three-year seat on city council. A little bit about me. I've lived in South Burlington for nine years in Chittenden County for 20. I grew up in Johnson, which is a little town, all about an hour east of here up to 15, raised my kids in Jeffersonville and moved here. This is my first time running for any sort of political office and it has been an amazing time. I am so enjoying meeting more and more of my fellow citizens. I wanna let you know the staff at City Hall is fantastic. They're great with answering any question that you have. A little more about me. Almost all of my family lives here in Vermont for my children and my siblings and their children. South Burlington, I'm very aware of the future. I've got 11 grand children and that keeps you very focused on the future. I want to see our city continue to grow and prosper. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. Then Tim Barrett. How much time do I have? You have two minutes for this part of the personal introduction. Okay, thank you. Hi, everybody. My name is Tim Barrett. As you know, you've seen some signs around town that say this because I'm running for the three-year seat. Thank you very much. I've lived in Vermont since 1981. I came here directly from the University of Rhode Island where I had a bachelor's of science in electrical engineering and I went to work for IBM. I've been there ever since. I now work for Global Foundries. I did take two and a half years off to do a stint in the Peace Corps where I was a teacher in a Catholic mission school, which was a surprise for me when I got there. I am married. I'm married to Katie O'Brien. She's a local family here. She has four siblings. Perhaps you've noticed that she and her volunteers have painted a lot of utility boxes around town. We have two kids. My son, Sam, is in his fifth year of a PhD program in Boston in biology, and my son, Julian, just recently graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in anthropology and is currently teaching or working in a school system, in fact, creating a tutoring learning center in the library. That's all I have. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Next we have Megan Emery, followed by Chris Trombly. Well, thank you very much, Vince. I really appreciate having this additional opportunity to talk to people. My name is Megan Emery. This was also the first place I came after I finished my schooling. After finishing my PhD in Ohio, I got my first teaching job at UVM. It's the best teaching job anyone could ever hope to get is their first teaching job. So I am a professor of French literature and culture, including French thought, came here with my husband and two little boys who were two and four at the time in 2002. Now they're big 21 and 23 year olds. And we have an 11 year old who's a fifth grader at Chamberlain. And it is at Chamberlain where I started my service here in South Burlington first as a member of the PTO, organized some after school foreign language clubs. Saw the charter change go through for voting on our school and town budgets and decided to join the charter review committee. I put in an application and they selected me and then a counselor urged me to run, which I did in 2008. I served for a total of 12 years. Since then took a two year hiatus at one point. And it's been really the honor of my life. This is a place where we've raised our family. We've really set down roots. Kind of an old stomping ground for my family. There were some old long ago relatives here. So it's fun for my parents to come out and to see this beautiful place called Vermont. But I did grow up outside of Chicago after my birth in Minnesota. So I've lived in, I think five states total, four or five, and have lived overseas. And it's just been a very rich life. So I'm very fortunate to also be serving you all. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. Chris Trombley. Hi, good evening everyone. Chris Trombley live out in Dubois Drive and here in South Burlington. I work at Cubes United Bank and I've been there for 19 years. I serve as a vice president of operations, assisting homeowners, experiencing hardship. I'm also chair of the affordable housing committee here in South Burlington and vice chair of our Board of Civil Authority. I also serve on different other nonprofit opportunities in the area focused on the betterment of folks lives. Some of our recent work in the affordable housing committee was to expand the inclusionary zoning and advocacy for zoning that was more inclusive and balancing affordability and natural resource protection. Also I've had the opportunity to serve on two school committees, the budget advisory committee. So we could advocate for a school budget that the community could support. And I'm currently on the enrollment committee at the school. I have two boys, they go to Chamberlain School, two dogs if you wanna see a picture of my dog for at christrombie.com. But excited to be here tonight and engage in some questions and I hope we have an opportunity to address the topic that the prior speaker brought up in our school board so I'll quickly respond to it. Thanks so much. Very good, thank you, thank you, Chris. Now in reverse alphabetical order, we'll do the trombly emory contest. So Chris, you're going to have to put your speaker back on and the next three minutes explain why you wish to serve as a member of the city council. What do you wish to accomplish? What do you think the top concerns are? Whatever you think is appropriate. Yeah, sure. So again, thank you for the opportunity to engage with you on these crucial topics. At the community, we do have shared values of clean air, clean water, and being an inclusive and welcoming committee. Community that's opportunity-oriented, South Burlington, this fortune to have engaged and informative community members, our representative democracy as well suited to handle these matters and work out and balances over time. Wherever there's strained relationships that have developed, I'm pledged to work and heal those to work together on other challenges that come our way. As your voice in the city council, I'll stick to input from our residents before voting on consequential subjects. Be well informed to make decisions based on facts. Public input and our best judgment, I believe that representation of diverse opinions delivers a wiser outcome. In my discussions with voters through several different channels, affordability, enhancing our natural protections, expanding our bicycle network so that we have more protections throughout the city, clearing our backlog at the community parks and paths. And sometimes it's just as simple as making sure that the roads are plowed in a timely manner. So I don't come to this with a personal agenda. It's really my campaign's been focused on, what do you wanna see the city council focus on? And I believe that the more that we're community driven, we seek input from the bottom up to drive those agendas. And as your voice, I'll be that voice to focus on what you would like to focus on. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Chris. And now Megan Emory, and remember, it's three minutes for this, not just two. Well, thank you very much. Well, I wanna say that affordability has been at the heart of my campaign since 2008. When we moved here to South Burlington, we were first looking in the area. And the only house that my husband could find in the weekend he had to look was here on Myers court in the Chamberlain neighborhood. And I immediately learned, we immediately learned how expensive it is to live here. And I have since that time been seeking also to work and protect and enhance the quality of life of our residents living in the Chamberlain neighborhood. I'm very sensitive to the encroachment of commercial activity, such as the airport in particular, which we love. But at the same time, we've had to really protect this neighborhood. And I think that between Chris and me, you're not gonna get a better advocate for the Chamberlain neighborhood. And we're entering a new phase with the rezoning requests that the airport has just put in. In addition to that, I am a big proponent of the conservation of open spaces. I believe that it's something that people value here in South Burlington, throughout Vermont. And I think it's a very common human value. We need to be outside in the outdoors and we've raised our children to appreciate that. And I think also, something that our children have learned ahead of us is how important it is to actually conserve because climate change is teaching us that we have exploited this planet to a degree where we are in fact in danger of our children not having the future that we would like them to have. And so I continue to be very mindful of that economy. I am a huge proponent of economic development, keeping taxes reasonable. A big word for me is sustainability. So economic, fiscal and environmental sustainability. So why I'm running is specifically because I think that I've done the job that the people asked me to do when they elected me several times. They know who I am. They know what I stand for. They know that my actions match my words. And so I think that the job is still to be done. We've just passed major land development regulations. We have more to come with infill and commercial mixed use rules. And I also think that the Climate Action Task Force based on a resolution that I wrote myself will be coming up with some pretty major proposals that I would certainly like to be on the Council to vet and to see move forward. So I hope that I've gained your trust. I've certainly worked hard for it and it would be a true honor to work more. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. Now we go to Tim Barrett and Linda Bailey in that order. Thank you, Vince. You know, I try to be immersed in volunteerism in this city. And if I look back far enough, I can see a lot of it. In fact, David Young and I used to coach one of the great school Rexon Parks soccer programs in the fall together. In fact, that's how I first met him before he became superintendent. I also served six years on the library Board of Trustees where we spent a lot of time trying to envision a new library. And then it's in fact a reality now, but there was a lot of time spent by that board trying to work on that vision. And then I was appointed to the Development Review Board where I served for four and a half years. And for the last year was actually chair of the DRB. And in 2016, the Vermont League of Cities and Towns voted us the citizen board of the year, which I thought was a really great award to be given to acknowledge not just the work of the planning and zoning at the city hall that gave us the work to do, but it showed how well our DRB worked together. And I'm proud of the work I did there by the amount of nuanced architecture you can see around the city that helped keep the types of buildings that we have to have a little bit more quality than they would have had if people had just rubber stamped them. I have served two terms on city council and I've been very thankful for the voters who have elected me for both terms. And it has been an incredible ride to learn how the city functions, to work with city staff, especially the city manager, assistant city manager, and to go through all the budget processes. You know, I've also volunteered painting murals with my wife around town. You may have seen me out trimming the bike paths if they've been overgrown on Dorset Street and going over to Butler Farms. And I wanna make sure that everybody knows that I was one of the three people that did vote for the new land development regulations that give more protections for some of the natural areas in the Southeast quadrant. I am hoping that I will be re-elected tomorrow. And if so, there are a number of things that we need to work on here in the city. We have a bucket of money, that's ARPA money that we have to decide how to spend. There is the possibility of spending some of that money on affordable housing projects. We have to finish our TIF district and make sure that that gets completed. We only have two more votes possible. I wanna make sure that our police and fire departments don't have too much overtime that leaves those employees stressed and stretched beyond their means. We need to take a good look at the rec center to see if we can get that project going. The Dorset Street signals there's money for it and we have to get that work done so the traffic moves more smoothly down through that corridor and also get that area paved. And I'd love to see the regional dispatch project finally get off the ground so we can get all those towns together and have one dispatch center that's covered all the time. And that's my stop sign. Thank you very much, Vince. Thank you, Tim. Linda Bailey. Okay, my turn. I have been watching our city, listening to the city council meetings, listening to the other departments and most importantly, listening to the people out in our city. I've heard a lot of the same things that Chris Trombly has heard, affordability. I think that's a big thing that our city needs to continue to look at. Things like the bike paths, things like hearing a little bit about the rec center, hearing about our schools and listening is one of the big things that I want to bring my fresh eyes to the city council for. I would like to see work on getting more and more of the people of our city involved in the decisions that are going to make a difference in their lives. I want to support us to be a place for people from all across the economic and cultural spectrums. I want to protect the environment here while recognizing the needs for housing for the missing middle and as well as the affordable for everyone housing. South Burlington stands at a crossroads. It's a crossroads that the whole world is standing at and we need to make sure that we take our place in that working with our region and our state so that we would need to remember we're not in a bubble. What we do here affects outside of us. What happens outside affects here. So there needs to be a lot of cooperation. I want to make sure that none of our city is left out of prosperity and the good things that are being brought by the good clean tech companies that are here that are expanding and that are looking to grow and move in our area. It needs to be a community, like I said, where everyone has a voice. So that's one of my biggest things that I want to bring would want to bring to the city council is someone who's working to make sure everyone can hear tonight, tomorrow and hopefully for the next three years. Thank you everyone. Good, thank you very much, Linda. That's a pretty good introduction to all four candidates. Let's see if there's some questions from the public. And if you have one, I would ask you to open your mic and turn on your video so that we can see you and let's try to form questions that all four candidates can answer. That would be better than just asking one person one question. So if you would do that, we're open for questions from the public. I have a question for the public. Is there anybody here that doesn't know who they're going to vote for tomorrow? If not, can we just all sign off and say, see you at the polls tomorrow? I'm just kidding. Good night. I'm just kidding. There's a question. There's a question here. Yup. Sandra Dooley, would you please ask your question and they'll have three minutes to answer this. Three minutes to answer this and the order will be Emory and then Trombly, Bailey and then Barrett. Okay. Thank you. Sandy, go ahead. I know it doesn't necessarily relate specifically to your duties, but I would be interested in your response to the gentleman's question about the Black Lives Matter flag and the role of addressing systemic racism, perhaps not only in the schools, but within our community. Yeah. Yeah. I am for- Thank you. Go ahead, Megan. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Sandy. I am for that flag to be high and waving in the sky and we have had lots of discussions about this at UVM. And I do believe that when Black Lives Matter, all lives matter, we have to take care of those among us who have historically and continue to experience disadvantage. And I think that it is something that we cannot deny. So that has to do also with the city. Chris and Linda talk about inclusion and I am all for it. I think we are going about it in a different way. I think that our inclusionary zoning, which has 15% of all new homes to be affordable is laughable. I've heard housing experts call it laughable. That is something that our affordable housing committee put forward as their best foot forward. And I think that we have to stop the virtue signaling. I think we have to do what the experts are telling us, which is to invest public monies in order to truly have affordable neighborhoods, mixed income affordable neighborhoods, a new Chamberlain neighborhood somewhere in the city and in a place where we can have public transit. I would love it to be a cross from the medical complex that is on Tilly Drive on that Hill Farm parcel, excuse me. I think that would be an ideal location. And I think we could do it. I think that this is something that the state and the federal government have identified. We have millennials and general Z young people who are just swallowed in debt because of their college costs, healthcare costs and now housing costs. So it's not only in black lives matter. I think young lives matter. And that's why these new LDRs are so important because they are clustered these new homes, smaller lots, smaller homes, energy efficient, making sure that we have more buffer from our wetlands and our forests. They are gonna protect us from the storms that are to come. And if we don't do that, we are gonna see flooding. And so we certainly don't want to develop affordable neighborhoods that are gonna be flooded out because if we do, we have created again an injustice. And so we have to be very, very mindful. And I think these LDRs that they are the best foot forward and that they do much better than than what the affordable housing committee has so far been able to do. And I fully support the spirit behind these LDRs and we'll work to ensure that they work towards fuller integration of our city. That's my pledge to you. If you work in South Burlington, I believe you should be able to live in South Burlington. And that includes everybody, including the people who service every day, our essential workers. Thank you. Thank you, Megan. Chris Frombly, next. To the gentleman that asked about the black lives matter flag and critical thought in our schools. I reflect personally with my two sons who attend Chamberlain and the black lives matter flags every day. And to them it's, they see that as commonplace that they're starting from a better position than my own experience growing up and going through the education here in Vermont. So it's fantastic that as a community, we can affirm the impact to the community and say black lives matter. And we can apply that in a way where we can have that critical discussion about the past and how that has impacted different communities. For example, in the affordable housing committee, we had a book discussion regarding the color of law and how systemic racism within the United States impacted housing patterns and who that impacted. It's really, it was helpful for us to, or at least I'll speak for myself to guide understanding that those systemic zoning barriers that were put in place held back folks for a generation from building their own wealth. So through that lens, I think we as a community should continue to have those critical discussions, talk about our past and how that's impacted us, but also talk about our current state. If we can't talk about uncomfortable topics, then we're not going through that continual improvement as a community. So that's my response to that. I really just a shout out to our school board candidates who have brought focus to this. Their prior debate forum was heavily focused on this topic. I think it's fantastic and I'm encouraged by the direction we're going. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Linda Bailey and then Tim Barron. Okay, this is a interesting subject. Has a Vermont or who grew up in rural Vermont? I was literally in my 20s before there are any people of color around me for me even to talk to. My exposure was just from television shows and such like. So this is something that I know I need to learn more about. It's the whole Black Lives Matter movement has made this much more real to me, living in pretty white still Vermont. I look forward to our community expanding. And I'd like to see, it might be that some of the ARPA money could be used to help with some community programs that can bring discussion about and help all of us know what our prejudices that we don't even know we're holding are so that we can improve the quality of our city's culture. Good. Thank you, Linda. Tim, Tim Barron. Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate that the three candidates for the school board we're on, we're able to answer the gentlemen tonight and all I can say is ironically what a teachable moment that was. And I hope that he is able to go back and review that literature that was suggested to him. So you gotta understand, I was raised in suburban Washington, DC in Montgomery County, Maryland right in the early 60s. And my mother was very active in the civil rights movement as much as she could be. And she took me down to the National Mall, to the poor people's march to Resurrection City. And we stomped around the mud in April. I think it was serving coffee to the vast armies of people who were parked on the National Mall protesting for their civil rights. And that struck a very deep chord in me. And so when I drive down Dorsey Street and I see the Black Lives Matter flag at the high school, and I remember like, I think it was just over a year and a half ago when the Tuttle Middle School students were the ones that sponsored that movement to get that flag raised. And they held gobs of people that were on either side of the road to show their support for Black Lives Matter and how much that means to the community to understand that. And so I know we have a long way to go. As far as the city goes, we had an agenda planning session with everybody from the leadership team and the city council. And we talked about the fact that we didn't have enough representation in the room with us, that we're people of color. And what could we do about that? How do we get more participation from that part from those people in the city? And I mean, we could look at our charter to see if we should go to a ward system so that we have representation from different parts of the city that instead of having three people from Southeast quadrant and one from the airport area. And so it really is an interesting question. We do have possibilities. We do have money in the ARPA funds. The gentleman that presented the plan for the two summit buildings at a Ryan Hillside farm had a line item for their financing, thinking that maybe he should ask the city for a chunk of that ARPA money to help finance because affordable housing when it's done right is usually built in blocks and then it's usually paid for with tax credits that are sold to bigger financial institutions. So we have the ability to help there. We have also the ability to maybe contribute some more money to our housing trust fund because the housing trust fund ends up being able to sometimes pay off the permits that are needed to build these buildings in the city. I guess, and the last thing is that we need to keep focus on the fair and impartial policing work that's being done. And that's why it's important to have the police chief come in annually and report on the training that's going on with the police force. So we know that we have to train the officers to recognize their implicit bias so that everybody is treated fairly and impartially, especially during police stops. And there's data that helps us understand how we're doing in that. Thank you, Vince, very much. Thank you. Nice series of questions and answers. Do we have another question for our candidates? It's 8.52. We probably have time for another one. The meeting started pretty intensely at seven o'clock. Up to you. Do we have another question? I don't see any in the chat room. Do we have any from the people online? I'll ask the question. Does anybody here not know who they're gonna vote for tomorrow? Is there anything that you can ask to help you figure that out right now? Because the choice should be pretty clear. You've got my vote. In my race, just in my race, the other race, somebody else is gonna talk about that. I just wanna thank the challengers. I know how much it takes to run a campaign and not knowing the outcome tomorrow. I just want you to know that you're admirable. It takes a lot and I know that your families have given a lot because my family certainly has. My husband and my daughter, they're on my rock and I need them when I'm campaigning and working and carrying on with all of my other responsibilities. So I thank you as a member of the community. It's important for us to have a thriving democracy. And so we need people to step up and to run. And same for those three school board candidates. Even Kate Bailey, she has her signs out there and trying to educate the public. And that's all that this is about. So we have a lot to be proud of here in South Burlington. Any other candidates wanna make a final comment? This has been a amazing journey, getting to know everyone, learning what it does take, because you're right, Megan, it takes a lot. And I didn't know how much it was when I first got myself in this. So it's been great. And I look forward to serving my city. Thank you, everyone, for your support. Anyone else? Just a quick thing, you know, I'm really glad that the pandemic had receded enough so that we could go door to door and talk to people through their doors with a mask on, give them some literature. Because, you know, we couldn't do that the year before that, you know. Right. And the good grade cookie sale at Chamberlain. That's great, Ken, cookie sale. And I wanna thank Linda because it does take a lot of time and effort and concentration and you learn a whole bunch of new things when you run for office. And so that's great. Thank you. And Chris, it looked like you were ready to say something. We're in closing arguments or closing statements. Yes. All right, thanks. A warm thank you to Megan, Tim, and Linda. This democracy is about civil discourse and I'm glad where things have settled here. I'm really looking forward to tomorrow. You know, I've got a terrific group of supporters who have helped sustain me through this process. And, you know, it's just, the way that we're ending this is fantastic. I have a lot to offer as a new voice on the council. If you want to counsel or work hard to make South Burlington a great place to afford a home, pursue a work path, raise a family and spend your golden years for all your ages. In comes and backgrounds, I asked for your vote March 1st, 2022. You know, that's been my motto from the beginning and I think it's fitting. That's my final statement as we end up the discussion here. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thanks everyone for all that you've done. This has been wonderful. So at just about nine o'clock, I think we close the discussion. Wendell, was there something I see your cameras back on? Was there something you wanted to ask? We're kind of closing here. Oh, I thought upon it, I just shut my mic down. I was done, but no, I was thinking of something but it's been answered. Thank you. Okay, very good. Well, everyone, thank you very much for everything you're doing, especially to all the candidates who are willing to serve. It's hard work. Good. Okay. Thank you, Miss. It's a big American party. Oh, it's a big American party. What's that guy's name? Who is that guy? Have a good night, everyone. Thank you so much. Good night. All right, bye. Good night. Get out and vote. Yeah. Jordan, are you good?