 Hey, good evening and welcome to the special pandemic version of Montpellier Civic Forum. Why are we the pandemic version? That's kind of obvious. We have the pandemic town hall meeting this year, which basically means most of you will use your absentee ballots to vote. Some of you will actually get out there on the 2nd of March on Tuesday and actually vote. And we have an excellent slate of shows this year. Again, Anne Watson has graced us with her time to do a state of Montpellier from the mayor's perspective, which is really good. And she walks us through all corners talking about projects that are ongoing, talk about projects that might be pushed off, talking about projects that might be given the circumstances, and returns with Bill to do the city budget. And that was a really good show as well. Jim Murphy came in to talk about the school budget. And then we have our slate of candidates for school and for city. And those are really, really good candidates and they're really good shows. And tonight I have an incumbent council person with me. In fact, I have my council person from district two, Jack McCullough. Richard, thanks for having me. We've been here before and I look forward to it. How many times have we been? Two maybe, something like that. Right, this will make our third. This will be our third. Why did you want to get on council? You were in appointment at the time. What was going through your mind? I know you weren't thinking I want to get rich. Not a way to get rich. It certainly takes up a lot of time, but it's a really good way to make a contribution to the city and to have a voice in what we think the future of the city is going to be. I love Montpellier and you've heard me say before that Montpellier is the best place in all of Vermont to live and I really believe that. The best place in Vermont or the best place in New England or the United States? Well, it kind of depends on what you're looking for, but I know enough about Vermont to know that I think it's the best place in Vermont. There aren't many places other than Montpellier that I would want to live anywhere. Why? What is in Montpellier that isn't in Brattleboro or in Burlington or Middlebury? It's a great community. It's a manageable size. It has great people who are really involved in the life of their community. I sometimes think of living in Montpellier as like living in the shire. That's the first time I've heard of it. Keep going on that one. From the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. We're like in this warm Middle-Earth type of community setting where you know the people. I have back in my house a picture of my older son's first day of kindergarten with his classmates from kindergarten and those are the same kids that he was graduating from high school with 12 years later. Aside from the fact that you get to see, we have all the cultural advantages that you would never see in a city this size. You know professional theater, great bookstores, the government where you can go downtown and see the members of the Supreme Court walking down the street to have lunch together, run into our senior senator doing his shopping downtown. We really do, I think we owe a lot to the members of the community. From my role on the city council, I see a lot of people because we review and make appointments to city boards and commissions and the people that apply and the people that are willing to serve are people with a tremendous degree of education and expertise in the areas that they're looking to work on. It's just a great community. I want to go back to the Shire again. I've never heard that the Shire was a very homogenous community that they lived in. Your expertise that you brought to council that still is with council. People turn to you on housing questions. Why? I spent a good part of my legal career working and even before I was a lawyer working on housing issues back from when I was in college at Michigan State in East Lansing and through my law school career in my early years of practicing law, legal aid in two different states. I focused a lot on housing and I was always gravitated to that because it's a vital area for people. What happens in your housing is really, really going to affect your entire life and of the clients that I've worked with represented mostly people in evictions or people with bad conditions in rental property. It's the impact of living in substandard housing or even more of the possibility of losing your housing. It's just a tremendous impact on people and so it's always been important to me to protect people's housing rights and to expand people's housing opportunities. Are you concerned? I'm looping back to the Shire again. Are you concerned from when you came to Mount Pilger and were working on housing with lower emphasis on the lower income? Are you concerned that this is becoming more of a gated community and that basically we're becoming more homogenous? When you spoke about the people who volunteer for the committees, those are skilled middle-class people bringing their middle-class expertise. Are you concerned that rising rents and the like and stagnant incomes are forcing this into much more of a homogenous community? Housing availability is a real problem in Mount Pilger and that is a real concern of mine. People cannot afford to rent or buy houses in Mount Pilger. Ordinary people who want to live here or who have a need to live here because they have service sector jobs have a hard time getting a place to rent there. We have not provided and produced as much housing as we really need and we need to do better in that. When we've done, we've produced a reasonable amount of housing just in the last several years. You're familiar with the Taylor Street project. You're familiar with the French block and that is a great thing. If you've ever been there or if you've not been there, I can just tell you it's very nice housing. It's a great location. Someone can live there and not need a car and it really was a boon to the community to take that property that was essentially abandoned derelict structure at least the upper floors and turned into beautiful well-maintained affordable housing and we need to do more of that. Well, we did that years ago over by the bridge on Berry Street. Yes. What are those called? And then we did it with Fisher Auto, didn't we? We've done that, yep. And Elm Street out on Elm Street a long time ago. That's right. The Down Street housing has done a tremendous job in Montpelier. Still hasn't met all of the need. We still need more housing and we need housing at all price points. Even affordable housing, housing for low-income people is very, very important. Also, more market rate housing is also a value. I just saw a paper the other day that I haven't had a chance to read through in its entirety yet on the effects of the whole rental market on development of market rate housing. And the question is, well, if we have market rate housing developed, is that going to, there are a couple of ways that you can go. One is it can essentially drive up the prices of all the housing in the area because it brings more affluent people in or it can provide an opportunity for people who could afford a bit more expensive housing and to move there and free up some lower priced housing for people who need lower priced housing. Well, we did our master plan a few years ago. You were on the council. I think I was just before I got on the council. Oh, was it? Okay. Yeah. No, I worked on it. Now, if I'm correct and correct me if I'm actually, I'll edit this out if I'm not. Jack, didn't that make it easier for people to subdivide their homes into multi-plexes? Yes. The master plan and the zoning ordinance have made it easier for people to do that. I don't think we've seen a lot of that. There's still work that needs to be done. But yes, one of the things that is happening right now is that we have a pilot project happening in Montpelier. Unfortunately, it started to get rolling right around the time that the pandemic started. But it's a pilot operated by the Vermont State Housing Authority to provide grants for people to do accessory dwelling units. Do we anticipate that that will create a significant amount or is this going to just be on the margin? Well, it's a pilot. So the hope is to demonstrate that it can have a real impact on housing availability. And the uptake level has been pretty good. One of the things that I think we're seeing, even though it's not completed, but we are seeing that there is demand. There are people who would do that if they had the money to do that and if they had a guide to see their way from where they are now to the completion of the project. Is the last remaining affordable housing south of the river or somewhat affordable housing as you define affordable housing? Would it be south of the river in District 3 and those houses that were built before and after World War II? I can't tell you where housing affordability is. I know that, I don't know what's happened south of the river, but I know that this past year the housing market has been probably pretty good if you're a seller, but very bad if you're a buyer. And that's before the appraisal. That's coming in two years. Yeah, it's just based on sales in this past year. I know that there are many houses in Montpellier that were going for $15,000 or $20,000 or more over the asking price. And going quicker. And going really fast, yeah. Are we going to see, now you are not on console, but you've been in Montpellier longer than I have, are we ever going to see housing on Sabin's pasture? Interesting that you ask that. We just had a discussion at the City Council just two nights ago on Wednesday night about some proposed changes to the zoning ordinance that are designed to make it easier to develop housing on Sabin's pasture. I think those were working in coordination with the Zorzi family, weren't they? Yes. Now if I'm correct, and I always screw this up so you can be the fifth console candidate to say I messed it up, is it Gin Lane that leads out of the distillery? Yes. I believe that Gin Lane was positioned so that it could in theory go up that hill. I don't know how that property was developed, so I don't have... But I do believe that there was forethought given as to where Gin Lane should be, and that ultimately it would be an intersection in theory that went up the hill, if there was anything up the hill to go to. Could be. As I say, I hate to say something that I don't authoritatively know about, but I do know that there is a plan or that plans are being considered to develop more housing on the lower part of Sabin's pasture, the bottom 15 acres or so I think. We had a couple of changes that we're still considering. There's going to be another public hearing on the ordinance on our next meeting on the 10th of March, and there are two major changes that we're talking about. Stop me if this is getting too deep in the weeds. Yeah, exactly. But one of the changes is to exempt that part of the city from having to develop that land as a planned unit development or PUD. And the other change... What would the impact of that more time be? Or why was it suggested? There are some things that come with PUD development that really don't make sense or might not make sense for that area. For one thing, developing a PUD enables you to get some density bonuses. Density bonus means you can put more units on the property than you otherwise would be able to do. Based on the plans that they're talking about, they don't need the density bonuses to develop the number of units they're planning to. And that would simply aggravate the neighbors as well. If they went to the number of units that the property is zoned for, sure. But I don't think they're planning on anywhere near that number of units. Were there numbers that were thrown out, rough numbers? I think what we heard at last on Wednesday was in the neighborhood of 50 or something like that. It wasn't a huge number of units. So one of the things is, another thing is that in a PUD, all the structures are required to be facing the street. And for this property, it might make sense to have the structures oriented to the south so that they can take advantage of the southern exposure for the sun. The other change has to do with impact on surrounding intersections and removing the requirement that any incremental reduction in the quality of an intersection would be an absolute bar to development. So traffic is still considered, but as it's being discussed in the proposed ordinance, it would not be an absolute bar. Because as you know- No, we're talking about hypothetical intersections. Well, we're talking about the actual intersection- With Berry? Of Berry Street and Main Street, yeah. Because if there's more housing developed out there, it's going to be putting more people onto Berry Street and then to Main Street. Was there any discussion, if we're going into Main Street from out of this hypothetical development, was there any discussion of the impact on Sibley? Of putting even more cars coming down Main Street or going up towards- on Sibley towards college? That was not part of the discussion the other night. That's an interesting question. In terms of Saban's pasture staying there, we did do some sewer work recently. So at least we've started some infrastructure down there. Now this is a TIF region? I believe it is in the TIF district. Could you explain to people what a TIF is? I can try. You could probably do a much better job than I. The TIF stands for Tax Increment Financing. And the basic concept is that some of the infrastructure improvements that are needed to create the development, some of it are funded by taxes that come from the new development. That's a real real quick but essentially accurate way to say it. If a developer were chosen for Saban's, would it be a year, two years before we saw potentially 50 houses? It's hard to believe it would be that fast but you know one of the things that people need to keep in mind is that zoning ordinances don't produce housing. Zoning ordinances create certain conditions which developers can then use to develop the properties that they're going to develop. And so what actually happens, totally out of our hands. Once we've created, we've worked with the potential developers to produce the conditions that they're talking about needing for the development and then there's a whole lot of other factors that control whether something happens. None of the people watching this or you or I have gone shopping downtown and parked in the parking garage. Is this subject to possible court challenge? Could this be tied up in years of court challenge? The hypothetical 50 houses. Are the court challenges over on that property or is it possible that that would be tied up as well? I have, I wouldn't want to predict what might happen. Any development, as we've seen in Montpelier, developments are regularly challenged at the development review board level and but that doesn't mean that a properly designed project that's a permanent use in that district shouldn't go forward. I'm in favor of development. In theory that would be our district two, wouldn't it? Yeah, that's district two. Your district? Yeah. Would those be all-income housing or is that a possibility that those be very, very expensive? Let's start again. Would that be all levels of housing economically or would that be a very expensive part of town? Not having talked to the to the owners about what their plans are. I really can't answer that question. Did council consider mixed income housing in terms of zoning? What we're talking about is the number of units, the use of the space, the people who are living there is not part of the conversation we've been having for this zoning ordinance amendment. Is there any other section of town where you can see we have virgin land to actually build new houses? I think there is. I know and I hate to get into this kind of conversation because it might make people think, well, the city government is sitting around talking about what they're going to tell this person or that person to do with their property and we obviously can't do that. But I know that there was a time where over in the western end of town, Alan Goldman had a bunch of permits for housing development and turned them back. But I don't think there's anything that could prevent that property from being developed. There is some land over on the south side like offshore would drive in that area that could still be developed. Is that the land that other people are talking about as a park? Off of Sherwood, behind Sherwood? There's all kinds of things that people have talked about doing over there. This is Montpelier. It is, yeah. Jack, I want to go on the flip side. I want to stay in housing and what happens when the eviction moratorium ends? What's your thought on this? Because if anyone on council has given some serious thought to it, you have, and I know the rest of council has turned to you. What happens two months later in our town? Well, it depends on a lot of things. I'm not doing housing representation at my day job anymore, but I know that at legal aid where I work, we've been very aggressive at trying to defend against evictions, come up with plans to prevent evictions. A few years ago, we did a study that showed that if the state would just put a little bit of money into essentially rent relief at the point of eviction, we could prevent almost all the evictions we have. A couple of thousand dollars is enough to keep somebody in housing, and that seems like a pretty good deal to me. But wouldn't that be during a normal period? During the pandemic right now, a couple of thousand is two months for people who haven't been able to pay their rent for months and months. Where do those people go if you're evicted? This is why one of the reasons that I've always found housing to be such an important area to work on, because it's a terrible catastrophe for someone to be evicted. That's always been the case, and it always will be the case. We've got, the way the moratorium is working, it has not just required landlords to eat these terrible losses, because of course they can't do that either. But we still need, of course, as I've been saying, more housing. And probably something else you're going to get to. We need more housing resources for people who don't have housing at all anymore. We're talking about the homeless. What does our homeless task force do? We've had that in place for a while. We've had that in place for a while, and they've been working a lot at understanding the issue, at developing and supporting services for people without housing. We have allocated money to provide to hire a service person to work with homeless people, and hopefully try to keep people, rescue people from the condition of being homeless. We also have a social worker, don't we? We also have a social worker who's working with the Barry and Montpelier police departments. But yes, it's been a rough winter for people. I can think back to, it was either New Year's Eve or New Year's Eve day. I spent probably six hours on the phone with Ken Russell from the homeless task force. Yeah, and a variety of people to try to pull something together to keep this guy from not being stuck outside overnight, and we were able to do it, and they were able to arrange a place for him so he would not be stuck outside overnight. It's a real challenge. Is that the city's responsibility or the state's responsibility? Or does it fall between the cracks of the city and the state? Well, I've been thinking about that a lot because it's a problem. You look at the problem and you think, well, it has to be somebody's job to do something about it. Where I think I come down is that the city of Montpelier really doesn't have the resources to provide housing for everybody who needs housing. The state of Vermont has really shown in the past year that we can do a lot. We can start thinking about housing and homelessness differently from the way we've looked at it for years. Congregate shelters where people are all staying in one place and then at night and then kicked out during the day. We've shown with the resources that have been put into hotel space that we don't have to have those big group shelters that provide not much more than a warm place to sleep at night. But at the same time we had surplus hotel space. In theory, when we get rolling back into normalcy, we lose our surplus hotel space. Potentially. Yeah, I'm not sure. In theory, it would go towards use of people coming into the state. It's original use, wouldn't it? Well, it might. I think that there are hotels in their hotels. I don't know how some of those hotel rooms or motel rooms are in places that probably don't cater to a lot of interstate tourists. But isn't, I think you're pointing to a regional problem, aren't you? Oh, it's a statewide problem, yeah. To where Barry doing its own thing and Montpelier doing its own thing. A lot of the client population is fungible and moves back and forth between those. Yeah, and we're recognizing that. That's partly why it's made sense, for instance, to have Montpelier and Barry share the social worker between the police departments. Whether that's enough, I think that's an open question. Maybe in better financial times, we would look at making the social worker and Montpelier police full time, not necessarily sharing. But I don't know that at this point. But yeah, it's a regional issue. The fact that the Good Samaritan Haven, for instance, provides services and both Barry and Montpelier is an example of that. And I think that we're not going back to not having regional cooperation once the pandemic is over. The schools right now are rethinking the school resource officer. And they defunded it and the school resource officer went back to the city and she's our 16th full police officer. They're rethinking the role of the police vis-a-vis the schools. Are we rethinking the role of the police vis-a-vis people who travel around the country and end up in our town with signs saying hungry and the like? Are we rethinking how the police interact and relate to those people? Is that a policing issue? Well, we have done that in a number of ways already. For one thing, I don't know if you recall this, but a couple of years ago the ACLU wrote to the city council and said, you know, you've got this ordinance on your books that says panhandling is illegal and people could be arrested for panhandling. And other states that have had laws like that, the laws have been held unconstitutional. And we got that communication. I immediately proposed that we repeal that ordinance. It was unanimously accepted by the council to repeal that ordinance. We're not locking people up for panhandling. What do we do with aggressive panhandling of our children? That's something I think we have a community consensus on that we don't want our children aggressively panhandled. Is there anything that the community can do to end that? Well, I mean, I understand when you say that that's free speech for someone to approach my wife or myself, but to be approaching elementary school children, is there a way that that can be curbed? Or is that free speech? I would look at it a different way and think that we shouldn't be in a position. Their society shouldn't have people, shouldn't be set up so that people don't have a place to live and don't have enough money to support themselves so they have to be begging on the street from children. But in the meantime, before we reach that societal goal, is that something that the city of Montpelier can do nothing about? No, it's not something we can do nothing about. We have the, we've got the homelessness, I don't know if she's a social worker, but we've got service through the homelessness task force. We have a social worker with the police and those are the kinds of things that are, it's probably more effective to have a social response to that kind of activity than a criminal response to that kind of activity. When we go into homelessness and we go into the lawsuits around the country, there's been various kinds of disputes, decided different ways on homeless people sleeping in the parks. Do you anticipate that we'll have that conflict over Hubbard Park, which is closed at dusk and has always been closed at dusk, that indeed we might get a lawsuit that would have homeless people sleeping in Hubbard Park? I don't anticipate that, but I don't know what's going to happen. I don't like to speculate about what might happen, and I really don't think it will happen, but it's pure speculation. Is that desirable? On one side, it does give clustered housing to people who need clustered housing for their own safety, if nothing else. On the other side, that's the crown jewel of our community. Yeah, I don't think it's desirable because I don't think it's desirable as a society to have people sleeping outside in the cold because they have no place else to go. Those people who are homeless along with the rest of us have access to free mass transit in our community. Do you have that on your phone? Do you know anything about it? What are we talking about? Explain it to people. We have a new system called MyRide, and it right now it's replacing the circulator, which much of the day would drive around with no passengers. The idea of MyRide is that you can use your app on your smartphone, or you can call, and you can say, I need a ride from here to the food co-op, or I need a ride up to the hospital. And it comes, picks you up, and delivers where you need to go. Sure sounds like Uber to me, a free Uber. I think part of the difference is, and I unfortunately haven't written it myself yet, I keep planning on doing that, but the idea is that it's still a bus, it's still a way of having more than one person riding at a time. And I think it's another way that people have thought about how to not have so many cars downtown, so many cars parked downtown, and to enable people to live a reasonable life in Montpelier, even if they don't want to have a car. The model when that thing was granted, assumed a number of people working downtown, do you think, and up on the Hill, in the National Life Complex, do you anticipate a return of working in actual workplaces, or do you think that people will be working at home for the foreseeable future? Oh, that's a real question that we would love to know the answer to. Obviously, it was a hit to the businesses downtown when the state workers were sent home to work out of their houses, and nobody knows, or at least nobody in city government that I'm aware of, knows what the plan is going to be, how many people are going to be moved back into the offices and when that's going to happen. I know I'm working out of my home. I've been to my office for visits a few times since last March, but I'm working in my house. I'm actually doing trials in court from a table in my family room. I would think that it will be much better off if we can have workers working downtown in their offices. The density, the contact that people have with each other, the social interaction and the commercial interaction are all a great benefit to the city. Now, you also zoom council meetings now. Yeah. In terms of citizen participation, what is the difference in your mind between the type of person who's zooming in and the type of person who would get up before the microphone? Are they the same people who are responding to city council with questions in the old days used to go up before the microphone and talk to you? I think it's a lot of the same people. I think that we've had some meetings where we've had 30 or 40 people logged in on Zoom and either listening or speaking. Some nights we don't have that many, which is very much like in person city council meetings. Sometimes there aren't that many people there. I would like to be able to get back to in person meetings when we can. I think that the quality of the interaction is different and better when we're in person, but we're certainly not close to that yet. When we do go back in person, I would imagine and I would be in favor of retaining Zoom as a way for people to participate without coming in in person if that's what they choose. One of those 30 to 40 person meetings or a couple of them would have been over defunding the place. What do you take on that? As a city council person, when you hear defunding the place, how do you react? What's your thought? You've heard extensively on this from other council people, from Bill and from Chief Pete and from the citizens. What do you take on that discussion? I think that public safety and law enforcement are a core public service. They're a core function of local government and we need to maintain that level of activity. I don't think Montpelier is overly overpoliced in any way. I think we've got a pretty bare bones police department and we are able at our current level of police to have coverage 24 hours a day. If there were a significant reduction in force, that might not be the case and I think people would not be well served if that were to happen. Now that said, are there things that we have police do that maybe someone else could do better? That's certainly one of the things we're exploring. Jack, I want to thank you so very much for being with us tonight. I love talking to new incumbents because we can go into depth on things like housing and you don't normally hear that. Even in a council meeting, you don't hear that kind of depth. Again, I would urge people to watch the show where Anne talks about the different projects in the town because it's a really good show. Watch the two budgets with Anne and Bill and with Jim Murphy because those are good shows where they really dig into the assumptions that underlie those budgets. Each of these shows with council candidates dwells on a different focus and where their passion lies. Same with the school board candidates. They're all worth watching. They're all on Orca, either on the access cable or Orca the YouTube channel and most important, I'd urge you to get out and vote. Send in those absentee ballots and if you can't send it in, go out and vote on Tuesday and you won't find many people. The crowds, the lines won't be obscenely long but do make sure during this era that we do have a healthy turnout for our town meeting day. Thank you so very much.