 Hi everyone, welcome to the ORS 2-3 Neighborhood Planning Assembly. I'm Jess Iman, I'm an award state steering committee, and it's a pleasure to be moderating tonight. We're here at Sheville North End Community Center with a small group of folks, and then we have lots of people on the Zoom with my neighbors by everyone. Before we get started, I'd just like to- Recording in progress. And recording is in progress. I'd just like to reach out to anyone who's in the ATAN dealers. We've been receiving by a notification to accept the request to become a panelist. He's accepted that will allow us to see you, and it'll also allow you to unmute yourself if you want to speak with a public comment if you're having questions. So I'm here tonight with our friends from CEDO. Ethan, who's helping us with the Zoom moderation, and Kristen Wilson, who is serving the last NPA during our service. I'd just officially thank you so much for all of your help over these past few months. We're very appreciative of working with you and having the time and energy to support NPA. So thank you. I'd also like to thank Luna and Charlie from Channel 17 Counting TV for the incredible tech support. And then there are also several other steering committee members here tonight. Here in the room we have Charlie Giannoni on the Zoom. I see Tony Redington. Do we have any other steering committee members on the Zoom tonight? I know we have a few people who have some. That's it for now. We have a student committee made up of Anthony Champagne, Kevin Duderman, Patrick Johnson, Molly Flanagan, and Barbara McBride who could be here tonight. So we have a pretty full agenda tonight, but just a few announcements to start off. Our next meeting is November 11th, and at that meeting we're finally doing our NPA by-law. And so the draft by-laws for folks to review are included on the agenda for the meeting. We'll be doing a few updates, and we'll be warning the final by-laws in the weeks before the meeting. So please take a read. These are really important documents that we would like to vote on. Another announcement is that we do have steering committee openings. So if anyone is interested in joining the steering committee and helping to plan these meetings and set the agendas for these neighborhood conversations, please let us know. We do have someone in the audience here today who is interested in serving on the steering committee. And so I would like to nominate Chris Hasley to serve on the Ward 3 steering committee. Seconded. Seconded by Charlie. Chris, would you like to say a few words about why you'd like to serve on the steering committee? And please step right up here to the mic. They've lived in Ward 2 for quite some time and have been living in the downtown portion of Ward 3. And I think that's the perspective I'd like to bring. I think that those of us who live in the downtown ward, our neighborhood is a little bit different. I'd say the traditional north end. I'd like to bring that perspective to the steering committee and to the NPA. Great. Thank you so much, Chris. Thank you. And is there anyone else interested in serving on the steering committee who would like to either nominate themselves or are there any nominations? Tony. Yes. I see Mayumi Cornell is with us tonight. And I know that she's had some interest and I would like to nominate her to the committee if she's willing to serve and perhaps make a comment or two. She could make a comment or two. Mayumi Cornell. Thank you, Tony. And I would second that. Would you like to say a few words? Yeah, I've lived and worked in pretty much my whole life. I grew up in Ward. I'm not sure which one. I'm crew in George. And so, you know, I just, as I get older, I'm just wanting more interest in serving my community. Great. So. Thank you. I think Mayumi is in Ward 2. Yeah. I think so. Hopefully somebody in Ward 2 would be the nominator. I live in Ward 3. Good catch. Thank you, Tony. Chris, do we have someone for Ward 2? Just not required that someone else. You can self-nominate. Okay, I think we're so good. And do we have a second from Ward 2 resident? Do we have anybody from Ward 2? Oh, thank you. Megan Humphrey. It's not second that. Thanks, Megan. Let's see. So how, Charlie, how should we do the vote on this? We have Ward 2. Thank you for that, Charlie. So at the November meeting, we'll have a general vote. And we would, and we would welcome Chris and Mayumi to join our next steering committee meeting, which will be the two Thursdays before the November meeting. And we're happy to have you join that meeting and we'll have the official vote in November. Thank you both for your interest. Okay, so next up on the agenda is public forum. And so I would like to open this up to any announcements, comments, songs, poems, whatever people would like to share. So if you could raise your hand using Zoom and each person will have two minutes. Do we have any announcements? No announcements. This is a first. I'll give folks. Oh, Chris has an announcement. I saw recently in the seven days that tomorrow night's Burlington High School football game, the halftime performance will be put on by the GSA. We'll be having a drag show. So if you want to propose for BTQI community, that would probably be a great opportunity to do so. Great. Thank you, Chris. Wonderful. Thanks. Any other announcements or comments? Okay. Is this public forum now? It is public forumed. I'd like to speak at public forum, if I could. Sure. Go ahead, Tony. Okay. Last month, I think I spoke briefly about what I think we all know is the awful situation of housing in our neighborhood and the older neighborhoods of the city where a quarter of the people live in poverty-level incomes. 30% have no access to a car, and there's 1,000 people equivalent to 10% of the city's non-college population on the housing authority wait list for 30% income max rent assistance. The city and the state do not provide a penny, and you're all hearing about the state policy. It's really, you know, kick them out of the hotels after a few months. That's the state policy. But I really want to mention the work I've been doing this summer on North Street, which part of what we've learned for the first time is when a study came out just this year showing that basically a quarter of our migrant deaths do not occur on the street. They're the result of long-term exposure to pollutants from basically exhaust. And they take the form of obviously heart disease and cancers and other type of long-term disabilities, but they come directly from pollution that's been allowed. And I think that what's important here is that the older neighborhoods where we have the traffic and we have the backup and we have the tremendous amount of pollution is where most of these deaths occur. In the case of Vermont, it's about 22 deaths a year. We have about 60 regular road deaths, but then there's another 22 that's the study that's coming up. So I think that what we have learned and this comes out of the environmental justice work down in the King Maple neighborhood part of which is part of the King Maple is in our Ward 3. What we've learned is that we actually can take a street like North Street and turn it from what's really perhaps one of the most dangerous community streets in the state and make it one of the safest. We'll talk more about it later, but using inexpensive cheap any roundabouts at four of the six high crash locations could really change the character of that street and we'll talk more about it later and stop there. Thanks. Thank you, Tony. Anyone else for Public Forum? Okay. Well, we'll move on to our first agenda item, which is a report on the ad hoc redistricting committee. And this is a report from our two reps, George Love from Ward 2 and Dan Montano from Ward 3. And George is on Zoom and Dan is here in person. And so I think George, what we'll have you do is have you share your presentation on Zoom and start and then Dan will jump in after. If you'd rather stand, just go up there and stand. Sure. And I'm actually not seeing George on Zoom. Oh, my. So, Dan, we might be... It might be just me, although I have the presentation go dry and I currently do not have internet here. I'm here. That would be great. Okay. And for just a moment, what we'll do... Sweet. Great. I'll have to log in with you. Of course. You can also cast your screen with Zoom to that rim. Oh, cool. Amazing. You'll have to show me how to do that. Yeah. Sorry about the technical difficulties. No, that's totally fine. I came in right from work. Oh, maybe. I signed out of everything. I'm so sorry. No, that's totally fine. I can also try and get your computer connected here. I think I should be able to get it. I'm just typing it all in here. Great. So while we're waiting, anyone on Zoom want to tell us a story? Sing us a song? Just unmute yourself and go right ahead. Nope. Let's see if it's going to let me do it. George is here. Oh, George is here. Present in person. Okay. But we'll still need to pull up. We are still going to need to pull up the presentation. That is right. It might have to be on my device since it's asking for two factor authorization at the moment. Oh, yeah. That would be amazing. It's right over there. Yeah. You could kind of... Right over there. I'm so sorry, guys. Totally wasting the public's time on this committee, which is, you know, great importance and both George and I have been together on putting together a survey that's going to go out on from porch forum that we hope will get the community's interest and sort of priorities made known once we deliver the report to the city. So according to the original text of the resolution, that would have been November 8th, although at the first committee meeting, there was some discussions about pushing that back to a later date. So I wasn't present at that first September 29th meeting, but if George wants to talk about what was discussed and... At the time, Chris. Just back up and give a little bit of overview for folks who aren't familiar with what the ad hoc redistricting committee is. Yes. It's all the PowerPoint. So the ad hoc redistricting committee was tasked with getting feedback from the public about the redistricting process. We weren't asked to draw up any of the maps or anything, but essentially just get very general feedback, which is a little difficult without all the census data given the timeframe that we've been given, and also not being able to actually present to the public what these possibilities for districts would look like. So me and previously Chris, now Dan, are on a subcommittee that was tasked with creating a survey so that we would have a universal method of collecting data from the public in order to have meaningful results. So currently that survey is going to go out at the end of this week to back to the committee for any feedback and then to the public. Depending on the timeline that's given to us by the city council, I was hoping in addition to getting it out virtually online with frontport forum, I was hoping to do some canvassing in my ward of ward two and also provide literature that and print outs that other committee members would be able to do the same thing in their wards. Yeah. I could just talk a little bit more about the next steps and sort of the things or the other sort of components of the resolution that the committee is undertaking. So part of the resolution text was that there are going to be two public meetings undertaken in that eight week or sorry like five week period from the time we started to November 8th. So so far only one of them could be scheduled with the city's sort of schedule. So that's going to be next Wednesday October 20th and I'm sure we could send an email out to the MPA list as well as you know, properly warning the meeting to the public. Yeah. So one thing we'll definitely be asking the public and all of your help with is getting that survey out to all the people in your neighborhood. Okay. So hopefully we'll have time for that canvassing effort, but that really depends on if the city council adjust the timeline or not. And sort of the idea was that the next committee meeting, there would be the possibility to propose a resolution to ask the city to extend the deadline. So we don't need to report back for the November 8th city council meeting, but possibly later. So we could actually execute both of those public meetings and the survey to get decent sort of good coverage across the city about what citizens input is on the redistricting process. So this is sort of where we are and where we're going. And as George mentioned, we had the sort of survey text and this is kind of just a little flavor of the kinds of questions, the survey and the input sessions are going to be addressing. So it's not just the number of wards and sort of the pattern, how they're going to be overlaid on districts or not. But also this will be an opportunity to consider other options such as at large city counselors should the number of counselors be changed to be odd or even and other sort of methods of representation that when this, when the actual map goes up to a vote, either this March or at a following election that there would be an adequate consideration of all of these different plans. Yeah, one thing that kind of the committee realized as we were being presented with this is actually taken from one of the pages of the city's presentation to us was that there are definitely some trade-offs between these guidelines, these legal guidelines that were given. So trying to get folks to decide what things they want to prioritize is going to be a part of the survey. Yeah, I think that's why we're having that. Yeah, so actually in this presentation that we could say right, really our big thing is how do we actually survey and sort of canvas the community to make sure voices are heard when we're providing the report. So here's an example of just some of the questions that will be included in the survey. So should the final authority in the drawing the lines go to the city? So as it is now, the city will propose one map that the citizens will vote on on town meeting day. In addition to some demographic questions, we'll ask people's opinions on the current system, what they think of the overlaid district over the wards as compared to the old system where there is multiple representatives per ward and also allow people to use a sliding scale to sort of kind of pick out the numbers of counselors and wards they'd feel best represent the city. How do you divide the city? How many neighborhoods really make up Burlington? And by giving such an open-ended response, all the different possible numbers, it could be that we are getting this good feedback. And I think that would be key when we make our final recommendation. So that's all we really have prepared. We'll be happy to take any questions. And I haven't actually attended any committee meetings yet. So it was only just that one scheduled. So I guess that shows how difficult it is to work in such a short time. It's really difficult to get everybody together while following like open meeting rules and everything. Yeah, the open meeting rules have definitely been difficult with this timeline. Also, just currently we wouldn't actually be able to fulfill our duties because we only have one public meeting scheduled. And according to the staffer who's going to help us crunch the numbers on the data, once we have that all in, they were looking to get that the week of the 20th. So obviously that's coming up before we have two public meeting scheduled. Thank you. So let's go to questions. Do we have any questions here at the community center first and then we'll go to Zoom? There's a hand raised on Zoom. Oh, wonderful. Who? Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Miami. Okay, so yeah, we had a few dates scheduled I believe they were the 6th and the 11th. The 11th was federal holiday and I forget what the conflict with the 6th was, but yeah unfortunately neither of those dates worked out. We were wanting to do more than two public meetings, which is why we scheduled three, but so far nothing. I don't know why I'm raising my hand. So how will outreach be done and how will the committee ensure that there's a good representation of the population that knows about the meeting and can attend? So one way we are trying to factor in that this survey can only go to specific demographics is just to ask people what their, things like what their income is, are they a rent or a homeowner while they're taking the survey. So that's one way we're going to try to combat that. Obviously a diversity of distribution methods. I'm hoping the canvassing effort. If I'm unable to go and knock on every door, I will probably select, randomly select across the whole geographic ward, you know, every 5th house or something. And yeah, hopefully having the option to fill it out in person right there and then also leave a little thing on the door knob if not and be able to go and fill it out online. And let's see, Tony, you have your hand up, do you have a question? It's more of a comment, Jess. You have the note there as a possibility of at-large districts. Right now we have four districts and eight single individual, you know, award representatives to the city council. So I am unalterably opposed to any kind of at-large, at-large councilors. Think about how many of you know the names of the six state senators or representatives who are all at-large in Chittenden County. That will, by the way, end this next, this fall, this next year when the maximum amount of senators in any district will be three. That will be a welcome change and we could have perhaps as many, you know, have even single-member senate districts which is often the case across the state. But at-large, representing 42,000 people, the chances of a, at-large city council representing the interests of the old north end is pretty, pretty slight. Thanks. Yeah, I appreciate that comment. And anyone else who just wants to voice opinions, that is another reason that we're here tonight. That will be a specific question on the survey and perhaps even, in addition to that, something that will be ranked on the list of priorities for guidelines. Thank you. Let's see. So we're coming, we're at the end of our time for this agenda item. If there are no more, oh, Mayumi has another question. Yeah, I was just wondering, in terms of, like, who you're, like, how are you, are you going to be doing any outreach at schools or with different community organizations to make sure we pull in a large sample of the people that live in wards two and three which are, you know, pretty varied. Like, how will, how will, how will the areas that the students live in, how will that be, how will that affect votes, et cetera? Do I have an extra one? Yeah, so there will be a, a survey question asking that number of students in, in Burlington public schools, but I think definitely using a diversity of outreach methods will be good. So it could be as simple as including a flyer about the survey or the survey text itself into, in a message sent out to students with other school announcements, if that would be possible. So I haven't been in contact with any of the CEDO folks about how their office will be able to support that, but I hope that we'll be able to work together to include, you know, a wide variety of ways, including just canvassing on the street. So people who live in the neighborhood can give input on what their neighborhood is and how it should be actually drawn and combined. I have a suggestion. You may want to use the corner stores to get the word out better because, I mean, you'll get a large sample like you get people picking their kids up, bringing them home from school. You get people that are grabbing a last minute thing on the way home from work. You know, you'll get, you would get a varied sample of people if you, if you hit the neighborhood corner stores. Just a suggestion. Awesome. Thanks so much for the feedback. So I hope that we could include sort of a PDF of this, of the presentation here, but there are the minutes of the first meeting as well as a link to the city site. The way the previous 2010 committee kind of considered the maps over a long period that gives an idea of sort of the different ways the map could be drawn, as well as a draft of the survey. If anyone wants to give feedback about questions that should be included or any other interests that we could have missed. All right. Thank you. And we do have one more question from the audience here. And if you could step up to the mic so Charlie can get it. I just wanted to piggyback on what Mayumi said about the outreach on the corner stores. I think another opportunity, at least for the Old North End, would be, you know, at the Lawrence Barnards and Nature Wheeler Schools, the Integrated Arts Academy, Sustainability Academy, you know, either in the morning or in the afternoon when parents are coming in with time to drop off or pick up their children as well. But I cannot overemphasize the importance of really getting this maximizing participation in the survey. We want to make sure that it's, quote unquote, statistically valid. So spreading the word to folks is definitely, you know, appreciated. Thank you, Chris. Thank you both for your service on this committee. We really appreciate your time and the energy and also the thought that you're putting into this process. Thank you. Thank you. For everyone's comments. Okay. So moving on to the next item on the agenda. We have several updates on proposed housing developments in words two and three. And as we all know, housing is a big issue here in Burlington and around the state. There simply is not, there are not enough homes for everyone. And so when we see new developments being proposed here in our neighborhood, we get excited. We want to make sure that they're affordable, they're accessible, and that we're helping make more homes available to more people in an equitable way. So tonight we have two people who are working on two developments. We have Don Welch, our architecture, who's proposing changes to an approved development at 157 South Champaign Street that will increase the number of units from 32 to 48. And also Daniel Trahan, who has a property at 111 North Manusky Ave, who's proposing removing an existing structure and constructing a six-unit building and parking. So I believe we have both, we have two presenters here today. We're going to start with the 157 South Champaign Street project. And who is here presenting on that project, if you could identify yourself. Yes, hi everyone, Nate DeGesse here to present on that project. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you. So we have half an hour total for this agenda item. We have about 20 minutes for this first, for the first presentation and 10 for the second and that includes time for questions. And feel free to share your screen if you'd like to present anything. Thank you. So let me just get share screen up here, saying I'm still disabled. So while we're getting that ready, just to give everyone a little background. We were in front of this group back in March, presenting the first iteration of the project, which was a 32-unit building. Our plan at that point, although it wasn't set in stone, our plan was for that to be a four-stale project. We have now decided through many just design challenges and other financial challenges, we've decided the best use of the site was to switch the project to an apartment rental project. And with that, we have updated the unit count from 32 to 48 units. The mix. Basically, we had a lot of two and three bedroom units with the other iteration and this iteration has 24 studios, 16-1 bedrooms and 8-2 bedrooms. So it's kind of a broader mix of unit sizes. Let me see if I can get share screen up now. So again, I'll probably keep this fairly brief because we brought this project in front of the group back in March and I'll certainly field questions. The massing of the building basically did not change. This is a rendering from the original iteration. It's not exactly what we're planning on doing on this next round, but it's very, very close. A few of the window locations have changed, but all the materials, the height, the width, the massing, everything is almost identical to this. So I thought this would be helpful for folks to see what this looks like. And as far as the footprint of the site has not changed since March and the basic overall length and width and all those dimensions has not changed. It's really the unit mix and the unit count that's changed. And I am making a lot of assumptions that most of you were here for that March meeting. And if there's detail I'm leaving out, certainly feel free to ask any questions. I will point out that with this new change, with these new plans, we do plan on doing a priority housing project, which would give this project 20% affordable units. So we think that that's going to be a great benefit to the neighborhood. And we've been in close contact with all the neighbors and for the most part, we're thinking everyone's really excited to see this building come to the neighborhood. I think that gives a pretty good overview of the changes. I do have floor plans here and the site plans, but again, it hasn't changed much since March, so I'm happy to answer any questions that come up. Thank you. So we'll go to the room here first to see if anyone who's here in person has questions. Yes, Dan, step right up to the microphone. I actually wasn't present at the March meeting, but could you talk about the parking and sort of the transportation considerations of such a large project in the old North End area? Thank you. Yes, I sure can. And just to clarify, this site is at 157 South Champlain Street. So it's just south of Main Street between Main and King on South Champlain Street. So it's on the other side of town in the old North End. But parking obviously is still important there too. So we currently have, I believe, 38 or 39 parking spaces with this building. So it's actually quite a bit more than what's required by the code. But we think we can obtain that many parking spaces, and we think that'll be a good fit. It'll allow most units to have at least one space. And we are gonna work with some shared parking approaches. And we're actually hoping to work with some car share programs. There's actually some new technology coming out. That's pretty exciting where there may be a way for us to provide a couple of cars for folks to share. And there's a special software app that kind of helps out with that so that we think that'll help as well. And then we will have EV charging stations, and we will have accessible spaces and spaces for loading and unloading and that kind of stuff. So we do feel like we have an adequate number of parking spaces for the units. Thank you. Let's go to questions on Zoom. Let's, we have a question from Mayumi. Go ahead, Mayumi. Mayumi, I think you're still muted. What is the income threshold going to be for the 20% affordable units? Thanks, Mayumi. I believe, don't have it right in front of me. It's the Act 250 Priority Housing Project. I believe it's more than 30% of 80% AMI. I'd have to be double checked on that, but it is the standard Act 250 Priority Housing Project requirements. Okay, well, as I am someone who is low income and I live in Section 8, my personal thing is that that is usually unaffordable for working poor. So I mean, I don't know if you guys would consider that or not, but my suggestion would be is that you relook at those numbers because for a lot of people that, even people that work a decent job, that it's not affordable. So that's just my personal experience with that. So. Yeah, no, absolutely understood. And we do have, this is the first step in this redesign. We will have a meeting with Todd with the city to discuss the city's affordability requirements, which we do need to comply with. We don't know exactly what that'll look like, but that could provide additional thresholds that are lower than the Act 251. Thank you. Other questions from Zoom? Tony, you've got your hand up. Go ahead. Yeah, hi. Nathan, I'm Tony Redington speaking. I'm really pro developer. I love the housing. The more housing, the better. And this mix of mostly studios and one bedrooms is exactly the need today here in Burlington. And this project is actually in Ward 3. I know that people don't realize it, but Ward 3 goes all the way down to King Street. And this is near the southern border of the wards two and three, but it's still part of us. The real problem, and I understand Miami's comment and it's correct that the so-called affordable housing, which is basically today for one bedroom is around $1,100 a month. That's what the so-called affordables are of the city does that requires. It's a practical matter. The only the federal government provides support down to section eight down to 30% of your income. But for middle class people, those $1,100, one bedroom rents are good. They're good for modern income working folks who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford a department like this. So congratulations. I hope the project is successful. It's as some of us know, everything from Pearl Street down to Flynn on the west side of the city is part of what's called an opportunity zone where there's a tax break. And hopefully this project is benefiting from that tax break. It's good news for our district. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Tony. So do we have any other questions for Nathan? Seeing none, we'll move on to next one. Nathan, thank you so much for coming tonight. And please keep us posted as your plans evolve. And we look forward to seeing more units in the city. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much. So next up, we have the 111 North Winoosky Ave development. Who do we have here tonight to talk about that project? Great. Michael, wonderful. Michael, you're going to take it away. It's me and there's another gentleman here, architect John Rooney, who is here to talk about the development. So yeah, this is a proposal to do a new six unit building on North Winoosky Avenue, an associated parking. So the project basically is there's an existing home on the property. And what John and I are looking to design is basically six two bedrooms, John correct me if I'm wrong, two six two bedroom units behind this building. And I'm happy to share my screen and show you guys the plan. So it's not nearly as big as the project before. It is additional housing added to the housing stock in this area. Let me see if I should let me know if everybody can see it. Yeah, we can see that. So there's an existing two units up here in the front on North Winoosky Avenue. There's an existing gravel driveway. And there's a barn in the back that is currently in disrepair. The walls are still up, but the roof has unfortunately collapsed in. So one of the first things we're looking to do is try to for the safety of everybody in this project is to remove barn. The next thing would be to basically parking lot with eight parking spots and a new building will be put in the back. There's ground floor units in the back. There's two units. There's two separate units on the ground floor. And then as you make your way up, there's another. There's a couple of units on the second floor. I'm sorry, this is the ground floor. And then we have four units on the second floor, which has an additional living room, kitchen, bath. You go up the stairs and you have four bedrooms on the third floor. And that's essentially the first round of what we're looking at for the design. I don't have a rendering like the previous gentleman, but it gives you an idea of just scale of what we're doing. You essentially are coming into the project. You have a ground floor be covered under a canopy. You would be essentially getting to walk up some stairs to the second level where you'd access the additional floor units. So yeah, I think it's a pretty simple project, pretty straightforward. Nothing wildly crazy or anything like that, but it's additional housing for this area. So it's sort of a rat, John. You got anything? Throw it in. No, just simply that we're replicating much the form of a barn behind a building, a house, which is sort of a traditional concept. So the new building takes that very simple utilitarian structure look to it. We're proposing brick on the first floor for durability and board and batten for the upper floors. And what are you aiming for for rent amounts for these two-bedroom apartments? We don't know. That would be up to the owner to set. At this early stage, one, we have to do a cost analysis. And obviously the project has to be economical. And the rents will be based on those factors. Do we have any questions or comments about this project? We'll start with in the room here at the community center. No? How about out there in Zoomland? Does anyone have a question or a comment? I thought we have two. Oh, I'm sorry. Oh, John, please go ahead. Please finish. I'm sorry. I thought you were finished. Go ahead. Well, I was, but then I thought of something. We're looking, we're looking to get a demolition permit for the existing barn. And I don't know if anybody's seen it. Mike, do you have, since you have the screen, do you have photos? No, I don't have one at this moment. OK, so if I pull up a photograph. And the existing barn is on the historic register. Is that, I believe, is that correct? I believe you're right. Yes, yes, it is. I'm going to pull this over. I'm something my stranger on y'all to share yours. OK, so this is the existing barn. And you can see that it's overgrown with, and it's pretty in bad shape. But what gives the best indication of how it's, what shape it's in is this photograph. Can everybody see this one? No. Yeah, we see a photograph that shows the IV on one side and half the building. OK, I'm going to hang on. I'm going to go. Whoops. Hang on a sec. I'm sorry about that. Try this again. Can everybody see this one? Yes, yeah, we can see that. Thank you. OK, that's looking down from above on the interior. And you can see how the entire roof is collapsed. The building is in very, very rough shape. And it's my feeling that it would be impossible to bring it back to life. Yeah, seeing those pictures is very helpful. Thank you. Was there anything else that you wanted to share before we open it up to questions? Great. So we do have a question here in the room from Charlie. So my name is Charlie Gianoni. And I actually put a bid in on this property about 10 or 12 years ago. And at that time, the city insisted that the barn had to be maintained and improved back into workable condition in light of the fact that it's one of the oldest buildings in the entirety of the city of Burlington. So 10 or 12 years ago, the city insisted that the new owner had to maintain the building. So when I made an offer on the property, my offer was basically an offer with permission to take the building down and an offer if the building had to remain. So what steps were taken in order to get permission from the city of Burlington to allow the barn to get into this condition? Because 10 or 12 years ago, that property, it wasn't in perfect condition, but you could walk around inside of it. You could walk up onto the second floor. And it was perfectly restorable at that time. So what steps were taken in order to get permission from the city of Burlington to allow this building to get into this condition and then to be taken down? I'm afraid I cannot answer that question for two reasons. I wasn't here 10 years ago or wasn't aware of the project 10 years ago. I do not know how long the owner today has actually owned the property. And this photograph that you see indicates that it was in pretty bad shape for quite a while. So that's all I can tell you about it. I don't know any more of the details. Well, I'm assuming that the historic preservation people in Burlington have been working with the owner on this property for some time. But I just feel that it's quite a tragedy that the owner was allowed to allow this building to deteriorate to this point. Because as I said, 10, 12 years ago, you could walk right through that building. You could walk up to the second floor, back and forth. And of course, there was one leak in the roof. So it was wet in one spot. But there was really nowhere in that barn 10 years ago that you couldn't walk around safely. So to see it in this condition is a real tragedy as far as historic buildings are concerned. So that's disappointing. However, in light of the fact that the property is being used to provide additional housing in Burlington, which is desperately needed, I can't say that I totally disagree. What my greatest concern is that the city of Burlington 10 years ago said that that building had to be maintained. And now suddenly it's being used for new construction. It's being taken down. So that's the most disappointing thing about this. But I do appreciate new housing in Burlington. Thank you. It is unfortunate that this building is beyond redemption. Because I imagine it was quite a fine building at one time. Yeah. Let's see. For other questions from the Zoom audience, Mayumi, go ahead. My question is, how is the building going to be made handicapped accessible? Because that's a really big issue in the city, especially as we have a lot of Vermonters getting older and not wanting to go into nursing homes and wanting to live out their golden years, I guess, if you want to put it that way, in their homes. The two lower units can be made accessible. The upper ones obviously can't because you can't access them with stairs, but the two lower units can be made accessible. OK. Thank you. Do we have any other questions? Seeing none, well, Mike and John, thank you so much for coming today. Pass along our thanks to the building owner as well. And please keep us posted on further developments. Thank you, guys. Have a good evening. Thank you. So next up, we have Darren Springer, who will be telling us about the net zero energy revenue bond proposal. And this is going to be a ballot question in November. So Darren, please feel free to jump on. And then we will give you the power to share your screen. And Darren, you have about 15 minutes for your presentation and questions. Great. Thanks, everybody, for having me. Darren Springer, general manager with Burlington Electric Department. I'm going to share my screen here and run through some slides regarding the net zero energy revenue bond that's going to be on the ballot in December. And then I'd be glad to answer questions if folks have them. Let me go ahead and get this started here. And can everybody see my screen? OK, excellent. I'm going to skip over the part about Burlington Electric because I'll assume most folks are familiar with us, but glad to offer that information if it's helpful. It's in the slide deck. And jump right to the revenue bond. So the revenue bond for Burlington Electric would require approval of a majority of the voters on December 7th and would be payable exclusively from Burlington Electric revenues. This is not a city general fund obligation. It doesn't affect anybody's taxes. And it does not affect the city's debt ratio or debt policy. This is focused exclusively on the electric company. We've used this tool in the past a number of times, including to help finance the McNeil generating station, the Winooski-1 Hydro facility, and also kind of most analogous for tonight's presentation. We've used it for energy efficiency. Back in 1990, we had an $11.3 million revenue bond that really was foundational for our energy efficiency investments. And if you look at the data from 1989 through today, we're using less electricity today than we were in 1989 by a substantial margin. And that's due to the investments that Burlington and our customers have made over the years in efficiency in part. And so what we're looking at now is having a 2030 net zero energy goal, a significant energy and climate goal, to reduce emissions and eventually eliminate the use of fossil fuels for heating and for ground transportation. And this revenue bond investment is going to help us make progress towards that very significant goal. It's also going to invest in infrastructure that will support reliability for our system. The average Burlington electric customer in a given year typically sees one outage per year with a duration of less than an hour. We want to maintain and even improve upon our strong reliability for customers and do all of this in a way that's financially responsible. So what does the revenue bond do? It's a $20 million proposal. About $12.3 million would go into grid investments. And that's both for reliability, but also to upgrade the grid because if we're going to be moving towards electric vehicles and electric bikes and cold climate heat pumps and other electric technologies, we will eventually want to have an even more significant electric grid than we do now to manage some of that. We also would put in the revenue bond $3.9 million into replacing aging technology systems at Burlington Electric, $2.2 million into renewable energy plants, both maintaining some of our existing plants, but also converting to the gas turbine, which is currently runs on oil. It's a peaker plant that runs very infrequently. We would convert that to run on biodiesel, renewable biodiesel instead of oil. And then lastly, $1.5 million in net zero investments, new EV charging stations around the community, different partnerships to help reduce peak demand using different technologies. That's the revenue bond proposal. But then also, I'm going to skip ahead here. Importantly, by moving in this direction, we also can use a portion of Burlington Electric's annual funds that are approved to actually double our funding for customer incentives. And these customer incentives have been helping Burlingtonians move towards clean energy technologies like the electric vehicles and electric bikes, electric transit buses, electric lawn equipment, and all of those different types of electric clean heating systems like heat pumps and geothermal. And so what we would do is essentially double funding for those incentives over the three-year period that the revenue bond would be in place. What that does is provides additional emissions reduction of about 47,000 tons, which is equivalent to about 100,000 barrels of oil. And so doing that is also a significant portion of this plan and helps advance our climate progress as we head towards 2030. What this chart shows is just relative to state requirements how we're doing in Burlington on those types of incentives, on really switching off of fossil fuel and moving towards cleaner alternatives for thermal and transportation. The bottom dotted line here is the state requirement. And you can see that as we launched our green stimulus incentives back in the middle of last year, we saw that that blue line, the darker blue line that you can see there, really starts to well exceed the state requirements and what we want to do is continue to fund activity at that level to support more Burlingtonians being able to switch. We've done about 1,400 of these incentives already. And in many cases, we have an enhanced incentive for our low and moderate income customers. So for example, with a cold climate heat pump, we can cover up to 75% of the cost of installing a cold climate heat pump. We offer enhanced incentives for a variety of different technologies for low moderate income customers. And that's a significant portion of this activity as well. Talking about rates, we had our first rate case in the last 12 years coming out of the pandemic. And we also had some news with Moody's are reviewing our credit rating and affirming our A3 rating, which is good news. We had our A3 rating affirmed by Moody's in August. Based on maintaining our financial metrics, if we were to try to fund all of the activities that are outlined here and do so without the revenue bond, we could see upwards of 23% projected upwards rate pressure in our next fiscal year. With the revenue bond, we can hold that upward rate pressure down significantly. As you can see here, it would be projecting at 4.9%. And just to be clear, that's not a proposed rate case. That's just a reflection of how much upward pressure there would be on our budget. We would make a determination about a rate case later on in the budget process for fiscal year 23. But that just gives you a sense of what the revenue bond can do in terms of helping us to make these investments while holding down rate pressure for our customers. And then lastly, I just wanna talk about how we'll pay back the revenue bond. And I'm gonna jump ahead a couple of slides here because I can summarize. Essentially, once we begin full repayment of the debt service, we have two important components to help us repay. The first is we have an existing revenue bond that's going to mature in 2025. And that's gonna provide approximately $684,000 of savings that can be used towards repaying this new net zero revenue bond. In addition, all of those projects that we just mentioned can provide additional revenues in terms of new electric use. And that is projected to support approximately 40% over the life of the debt service on the annual bonds and the revenue bonds of the repayment. So what we're seeing is a very, very limited impact when we have full repayment in 2028, beginning on the principle in the interest of perhaps up to 1% a year of rate pressure, which is relatively modest to be able to make all of these investments because we're getting a return on the investment from the electrification projects and we're structuring the debt in a way to take advantage of this existing revenue bond maturity that we have in 2025. So I am going to stop sharing my screen here and come back to you all. And I would be very glad to answer any questions. Thank you very much, Darren. Sorry, I should note, I think I was joined perhaps mid presentation by my colleague, Emily Stebbins-Willoch from Burlington Electric, who's on as well. Welcome, Emily. So do we have any questions for Emily and Darren? We'll start with the Zoom audience first. So please use the raised hand feature. If you have a question or a comment, let's see, I don't see anything from our Zoom audience, anything from our in-person audience. Yes, please come up and come right up to the microphone here, please. If it's up to you. Hi, Darren, it's Kurt McCormack. I want to say before I make my comment that I fully support this revenue bond and want to help you in all these things that you want to do with the money. And I'm very glad that you are where you are. I guess I'm coming to the mic to ask you for some help because I have tried to convince the mayor to the number of small things we can do right now. And they are falling on my suggestions fall on deaf ears. So that's why I'm really kind of soliciting your help. Engine idling. So, you know, all this talk of net zero, and it's mainly been talked so far and we have an ordinance in the city that you cannot idle your engine and we have a state law says you cannot idle your engine. And all I've asked of the administration is to have the police inform people who are idling their engines that they're not supposed to do that, that it's against the law. No tickets, no citations, just say that. And I think we will see people turning off their engines. So as the price of gas stays down, this is an incredible problem. It's good, I can't, I don't want to exaggerate, but it's every time I go downtown, every single time I pass at least a half a dozen cars with engines idling, sometimes with the window open, even in a day like today with the outside temperature is basically room temperature, no air conditioning, no heat, engine running, windows open. So can you help me with that? Well, first, Kurt, it's good to see you. And second, I'm glad to pass on that request to the mayor and I'm happy to share it with him and the administration. And certainly idling, I appreciate the comments that you're making, not only the ordinance piece, but I think one of the ideas is we can move towards more of these plug-in hybrid and hybrid and electric vehicles is we'll eliminate that concern because vehicles on idle will not be running their gas engines, but in the interim, a very fair point and we'll look into that for you and happy to get back to you as well. Great, thank you. I think my favorite thing about EVs is that they don't idle. If the motor's running, the car's moving. Thank you. Thanks, Kurt. Thank you. Do we have any other questions or comments? Charlie. Hello, this is Charlie Giannoni again. So many of us in the city are keeping up halts on the population in the city. And so what's your game plan if this fails on the question on the ballot? Because I go to a lot of meetings and I talk to a lot of people and I know that a lot of people are more agitated today about conditions in the city, whether it's the property taxes or the restructuring of the voting districts or the perception of increasing crime. So there's a lot of dissatisfaction in the city. So I'm just wondering if this were to fail in November, what's your game plan going forward? Sure, no, thanks, Charlie, for the question. And I think one piece is we are trying to emphasize that if folks are concerned about some of those issues, as I mentioned earlier, this does not affect anybody's taxes. However, if this was not to pass, I think we would be in the unfortunate position at Burlington Electric of either having to consider a significant curtailment of some of our efforts to support customers and support infrastructure investments that really move us in the direction we wanna move from a climate standpoint or having made those investments, having to ask our customers for very significant rate increases that I don't think are palatable at this moment, particularly wanting to make sure that we're holding rates as low as we can coming out of the pandemic. And so I think that that's the choice that's kind of before us as Burlingtonians is if we do wanna move towards this 2030 goal in a serious way and we wanna do so in the most fiscally responsible manner, this is the best thinking from your public power, electric utility in terms of how to do it. And that's why we're bringing it forward. But if it was not to move ahead, we would have to make some very challenging decisions in terms of those investments. Thank you, Darren. Any other questions or comments either on Zoom or in person? Chris, step right up here. Thank you for the polished presentation. There was a lot of information to digest there. I was just wondering if we could perhaps get a copy of the PowerPoint presentation posted on the NPA website alongside the minutes. It's already there. Oh, perfect. I did pop the up front. To do my homework. Good. Okay, well, Darren and Emily, thank you so much for being here tonight. And folks can find the presentation on the CEDO website on the words two and three NPA page. Thanks for your time tonight. And we'll move on to the next agenda item. Thank you all, appreciate it. Okay. So next up, we have Max Madalinsky from the Parks and Recreation to talk about the Champaign Street Park Improvement. So Max, feel free to jump on screen here. And if you have a presentation, you should be able to share it. Great. Thank you so much. Again, I'm Max Madalinsky. I work as a project coordinator for Burlington's Parks and Recreation Department's Planning Division. I do have a very short presentation for you. And then I'm just gonna open it up for questions, comments. And yeah, shouldn't take too long. Give me one second to pull this up, please. And Max, we have about 15 minutes for this portion. Great, yeah, that should be plenty. I'm not planning to spend too much time on this presentation. All right, so I'm gonna jump to my next slide here. Can everybody see my screen all right? Yes, we can. All right, so I'm here today to talk to you about Champaign Street Park, which I'm gonna jump in by just giving a quick overview of where this is since a lot of times when I bring up that we are planning to make improvements to this park, a lot of people are unsure that we have this park or where it even is. So Champaign Street Park is a little, what we would call a pocket park. It's one residential lot in size, approximately, that is located between King and Maple streets on South Champaign Street. It's in this upper image here where my cursor is kind of hovering. It's this little green tree here. And basically this long, skinny lot here that's tucked between a residential lot here and then a vacant lot and a parking lot in the south. There's some green space that belongs to the owner of 180 batteries and free street there and then the Gideon King building over on King Street right here. Down here on the bottom is a picture of the park from the street. There are a few wooden benches in the park, some raised garden beds that are sort of in a mixed level of tending at this point and a small playground that has come to the end of its 30 year lifespan that's due for replacement. Generally we see this park as needing just some love and some care and so we have set aside some funding. We actually set aside a while ago, but due to the pandemic we're finally getting back to getting this project online and moving forward. So to touch base on the next part, we have done some outreach around this park already. So pre-pandemic, we held two in-person events. One was at King Street Youth Center. The other one was in the park and we had several activity boards at site at each of these that were sort of aimed at like getting some feedback from different people about different kinds of things they wanna see in the park, what kinds of issues they're seeing in the park as is, what kinds of things they'd like to see improved. Unfortunately, because of COVID and reprioritization of a bunch of our projects and budgets, we had to put this project on hold and it was sort of on hiatus for about a year starting in sort of that spring up until now when we are gonna try to finish sort of gathering our outreach, making one last push this month and into early November to get more feedback and hopefully use that input to generate some design ideas which we'll put back out for more feedback and aiming to make improvements to the park in the spring. So really what I'm here today to talk to you all about is whether or not you have community contacts in the neighborhood surrounding the park, if you're interested in the park yourself, ideas for how we can reach more people and get more feedback on what they'd like to see in the park, what kinds of things aren't working, those kinds of things. We do have an online survey we published which I've got a link here in this presentation and I will be happy to send this on so it can be included in the minutes afterward and lastly, I'd like to just get your help spreading the word and answer any questions or comments or any ideas you have about the park while we're here today. I will share these slides so they can be published with all the meeting minutes but here's my contact information as well as the survey link and you can also find a link on our website where we'll keep things kind of updated to our website as the design various stages been put kind of move along here. So that's the brief presentation I have for you. Thank you so much and I'm gonna stop sharing here and open things up for questions. Great, thank you very much Max. And I must say I work right down the street from that park and I enjoy sitting in it eating my lunch. In fact, I've even harvested some of the overgrown kale and herbs to add to my lunches when I'm there. It's really a lovely spot. So let's see, we'll go for questions from Zoom first. Mayumi, go ahead. I don't have any questions but I did have some suggestions about outreach. Trying stuff that carries quick stop and also I'm not sure there's a building, I believe it's on St. Paul called Decker Towers that would be another good place to get outreach. And also the public school, Champlain School would be another good place to get outreach. And maybe even Champlain Housing Trust like putting a notice up if they have a board in their main office might be a good idea for outreach. Thank you so much. Yeah, those are all great ideas. I am working on printing the flyers and getting those things up for the survey. And actually at another NPA meeting made a contact with somebody who works at CHD and they're on board to sort of help us get the word out there. So awesome, thank you so much. Yeah, we'll definitely be firing in all this locations. Any other suggestions or comments or questions from our Zoom audience? Nope, how about from the folks here at the community center? Nope, I don't see any other comments but we will post your contact information with the meeting minutes and encourage everyone who might be watching this later to reach out to you, Max, with any comments, suggestions, ideas to help spread the word. Great, thank you all so much and thank you for your time. Thanks for coming tonight, we really appreciate it. Okay, so next up we have our representative updates and we have some reps in the room here and then some on Zoom. And so let's see, why don't we start with, we'll start with city counselors today and then go on to our state reps and senators and then school board. So let's see, we have Joe is on Zoom and Max is here in the audience. Why don't we start with Joe and then go to Max? Yeah, so Joe, the floor is yours. Thanks so much. So I don't have too much to offer. I think Max will cover some of the stuff that we have coming up on Monday's agenda that's gonna be important to folks. I want to apologize for missing the, my first NPA meeting as a city counselor. We were tied up in con toys that evening, but I'm certainly glad to be here and look forward to being here going forward. So, you know, right now I'm working on addressing the concerns that a lot of folks have are reappraisal. And so that's kind of taken on a process from a lot of conversations that I had speaking to folks in the neighborhood and others in the community. And it's gonna kind of, I'm hoping to really start the moving the ball on having a conversation around how we can improve the process and really improve the communication from the city side of things and address some of the real equity concerns that we have in terms of how the process was worked out and hopefully start to get at some of the questions that a lot of folks have around where those dollars are coming from and how we might be able to be more equitable in that process. So I would really love to hear from folks. You know, my email's always open, my phone is always on. I'm gonna be also working on trying to figure out a time to have office hours, you know, in person on Zoom. Hopefully at varying hours in the evening and in the morning to really try to accommodate folks that maybe don't work in nine to five and are free on weekends. So if folks have ideas on that front as well, I would welcome that. So that's all I have tonight and welcome any questions and thanks for having me. Thank you, Jeff. Why don't we have Max will speak and then we'll open up questions for both city councillors. You can stand over here. All right, so hey everyone, I'm Max. I'm the board to city councillor and city council president. We have a number of different things coming before the council on Monday at our Monday's meeting. It's gonna be a pretty eventful meeting. We'll start off with the, there's gonna be a presentation of quilts that were made during the Juneteenth event that took place this summer that kids collaborated on. So that's gonna be a really fun element of the meeting. We'll then transition into talking about the strategic roadmap from the racial equity inclusion and belonging office. So really getting a sense of the work that that new office in Burlington is gonna do. I guess it's not so new anymore, but it has been an office that has been pretty dramatically expanded over the last year. And so we're gonna, as part of their work, what they did is they put together a pretty incredible roadmap for really advancing the goals of equity inclusion and belonging in our city for and with BIPOC folks in the community. And so that's gonna be a presentation that we'll hear from Director Green on Monday night. In addition to that, we'll also hear a little bit about a Main Street redesign, or at least the beginnings of a Main Street redesign. So that's another piece, again, just a presentation, not really a decision point that's gonna be made on that. Another piece that will come forward is that Councilor Freeman had brought forward a resolution about sex work and updating Burlington's very outdated ordinances around sex work. And so the ordinance committee sent back a resolution on that. So we're gonna see an update on that resolution. Basically repealing certain pieces of that ordinance that were really, really outdated and that included some really sexist language in them. So that's gonna be on the table on Monday. In addition to that, we do also have a number of resolutions having to do with public safety, the first of which has to do with convening a mental health summit. So the police commission put forward that idea. This was something that has been talked about for quite some time. So bringing together a variety of different stakeholders to discuss changes to mental health. So that's the first piece. The second piece, our second resolution has to do with community oversight of police. So what had happened, just to kind of go back a little bit, is that we, meaning the progressive counselors, put forward a model for community-controlled police that was an independent model of police that passed the council on a seven to five, but was ultimately vetoed by the mayor back on New Year's Eve last year. And so since then, it's been kind of up in the air. We have a group that's been working really hard to get signatures to advance a model that's very similar to that. And I think that that's ultimately where we need to land. However, one of the pieces of that is that the charter change process is quite a lengthy one and involves getting, at least in this case, significant number of signatures in order to get it on the ballot, because you're basically, you can get it on through the city council, but clearly with the political dynamics as they are, it's not gonna be possible to get that on the ballot at this point, at least as I see it in that specific model. And so there is a lengthy change process that'll take place there, but there is, I think, a need to address oversight and to expand oversight in the short term. And so what the proposal that came out of the Public Safety Committee was to expand the role and purview and not necessarily the authority, because again, that goes back to the charter change, but to expand the investigative abilities of the police commission. And when I say the disciplinary authority, that's really vested in the chief currently. So that's the real problem or the real challenge that we face right now is that all that disciplinary authority is vested in the chief and I see that ultimately as a conflict of interest in the sense that you're having to manage folks and maintain and you have a certain closeness by nature of working with those officers and then to discipline them really makes it, I think, a really challenging situation and one that has, as we've seen, led to some very disproportionate discipline. So that issue, I think, is still there, but I think that it does make sense to do what we can in the short term to at least give them some more investigative ability and ability to create some oversight. So that's one of the resolutions, but I do absolutely think there has to be a path forward on that. I support the effort to create an independent body because I think the police commission has quite a bit on their plate. And then the, so that's the second resolution and then the third resolution has to do with the cap or the police, the officer cap coming off of the, or coming out of the the CNA report. This was the report that came out of the Rachel Justice resolution that passed in June of 2020. CNA was a consultant firm that does this work and that was, that looked at all the, did a full functional analysis of the Burlington Police Department. They came back with over 150 different recommendations. And so what is coming forward in resolution format is really specifically just focused on one of those recommendations or one of those elements, which is raising the officer cap, which has been an issue that's been debated by the council twice before, sort of prior to having received this report. What the report effectively says is that at least specifically with regards to the cap is that there's a need for about 72 to 75 patrol officers and that you should allow some wiggle room in terms of hiring, in terms of hiring for, because it does take a year or so to get people on board. So that's the recommendation there. And then there's also a question about the airport and how the airport figures into that cap total. So there's currently eight officers at the airport. The report however says that we only need to have four. There's no FAA guidelines that say that. The reason that there are eight is related to a contractual issue, which is that the officers have 10-hour shifts, which the report recognizes is actually not a best practice. The best practice nationwide is to have 12-hour shifts and because that results in more time off actually in between, so that's kind of the nationwide best practice. And so if you move to that, you're able to, by nature of that, decrease that. So that's another finding, but that's one of the pieces that within the report will have to be dealt with in contract bargaining with the BPOA, which is the police officers union. So that has to be collectively bargained and their next contract isn't up until next spring. So that's, there's a whole host of the recommendations that will have to, from that report that will have to be collectively bargained or that fall under the current contract. And so I think, and so there's all these questions within this debate that we're trying to sort out in terms of the total, this issue of CAP, how much wiggle room do you allow for people to be in the process of hiring, but not actively serving? And then how do you figure in the airport officers? Do you count them aside? Because they don't come into Burlington, they just serve at the airport. So there's, and they're only at the airport and that's an FAA requirement that they have. What we found is for officers, they're not a, but by nature of the contract and how the staffing works, they've had eight there. So that's the last resolution on the agenda for Monday. So that kind of gives you the full scope of Monday's discussion. So it should be a pretty long meeting, pretty interesting meeting, but happy to answer any questions that folks have. Thank you, Max. So do we have any questions or comments for Max or Joe? Anything from the audience here? Chris? Yeah. With respect to the redistricting issue, I've recently reviewed the resolution establishing that and the understanding the ad hoc committee was to make this a non-political process, which is commendable. So the question I have for the counselors is having stated that desire, would you support a charter change that would remove the city council from the process permanently and delegate or convey authority for determining maps and district boundaries to an independent commission made up of representatives from the various wards as articulated in that resolution? Yeah, I mean, I don't really have an issue. I don't really think that, you know, that it's necessarily great to have counselors doing it. Like I think we saw some of the impacts of that the last time with ward eight. One of the things with... So if you don't know, ward eight is a ward that has a very small arm that's like Buell Bradley Hungerford and then it goes up and captures all of the University of Vermont campus. That was really the result of advocacy from counselors who wanted certain other areas like Maple Street, Robinson Parkway, some of those neighborhoods not to be included in ward eight, but rather their own wards. And so that's what led to that and we've seen all kinds of issues with that. So I think that there can be that. I think there may be some drawbacks to that too. Like I think there is something to be said for like having people's like political, you know, their alignments out there publicly, I guess like to think that like people would be totally independent or that like politics wouldn't creep in to like an quote unquote independent body. Maybe unrealistic in some ways, you know, but like I'm certainly open to like a charter change. It wasn't a process that I think was particularly, went particularly well. And I think we see the results of that with the way that this kind of confusing hybrid district ward system we have now. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, I mean, something like that. Yeah, you know, I think the way we task the MPAs with appointing folks to the shout out committee, I think it was really important. I think having buying from folks in neighborhoods to select the folks that serve on that independent board would be really important going forward and I think I would support not having the council involved in that process. Thank you. Thanks. Any other questions from here? Any questions or comments from the Zoom audience for our counselors? Thanks a lot. Thank you, Max. Thank you, Joe. Next, we'll move to our state reps and we have the pleasure of having Kurt McCormick here in person today. So Kurt, would you like to share what's been going on at the state level? If you can grab that and then stand right about there. This is fine if I can take the question. Yeah, that's fine. Thank you, I'm Kurt McCormick and I represent most of wards two and three, which is most of not all of the old North end and all of downtown. I think you've heard me say this before but I mean it more than ever. I'm going to be prioritizing climate issues over everything else. This coming session, I think that when we look at the weather extremes that we've had, not so much in Vermont but around the country, I think people are finally ready to do something. If they're not this year, then we're really doomed. So I will continue working on the things we've been working on. I'm the former chair of the House Transportation Committee. I had some health issues and I had to step down but I'm still on that committee and we'll be working on more for incentives for electric vehicles, especially for moderate to low income people to actually get them in these cars. We've got the price quite a bit lower now with all the different, with the federal tax credit and this incentive, a new EV actually costs less than a gas car of the same size. I think we should be requiring all new buses to have to be EVs. There's a couple running around Burlington right now. If you've been on there really great, the drivers love them. We should not allow any agency to continue, including a school board, school district, to purchase a new diesel. These things are lasting at least 12 years and they last much more than that. Then they go down to Guatemala or someplace afterwards where they'll continue to burn fossil fuels. So, but even here, we tend to keep them for 12 years. That's much too long to be investing in a brand new diesel vehicle. So they should have to be purchasing EVs. The state can take care of the difference in the cost, which is in fact great actually. We need to expand Amtrak, it's a great time to do it. We have a president in the United States who is more supportive of Amtrak than probably any, well, he clearly is more supportive than any president we've ever had. And we'll be getting Amtrak service, the Ethan Allen Express coming into downtown Burlington and we need to get that train up to Montreal as soon as possible. And then keep working on other services, possibly like down to Boston. Fair free for transit. I'm gonna be frank with you. Every year we've been able to do it. We haven't been able to do it in a permanent sense. It's always been something that we fought for in the budget and we got it. So it's an annual fight. And we could use help from people in Burlington on this even green mountain transit does not support it. So that's a problem, okay? So we really use people's help to keep transit fair free. And you know, that's a really important issue to me because of my district. People who have been in the NPA for a while will remember this study that I did of the district comparing the carbon footprint of the average person who lives in this district compared to the average person in Vermont and the average American. Would you believe that car ownership in this district, 32% of the households, not even the people, but the households have no car, okay? We live in less space. We obviously live closer to each other. We live in town of much higher percentage of people in this district walk to work. And a lot of it has to do with work. The census collects these things and they have it right down to the state districts now. More people walk to work, more people ride bikes to work, much more. More people take transit to work. And then when you consider that 32% don't even have cars, that rivals big cities. And this district, frankly, if we could get more people around this country and around this state to live more like the people in this district already do, we would be well on our way to solving the climate crisis. So that's why I couldn't help but say what I did to Darren. There's much that we can do already. And it doesn't cost much money to not have a car. It's in fact, it's a savings. So I see this district really as truly, it's gotta be the most progressive district in the whole state. And I'm very proud of it, this district. And I'm very, I think we need to provide the leadership to the state so that the state can provide the leadership to the country. You know, it's not so much our emission. Sometimes conservatives will ask, well, how much is, what difference do we make anyway? Because we're so small. It's a good point. The difference we make is leadership. And I've been involved with bills in the past. You know, I was in the legislature back in the 80s and 90s, I won't get into all those different things we did back then. We passed some bills that influence the debates in Congress because we were the first state to actually do it. And when a state does something, industry listens. Lately, some industries are ahead of the government. Certainly ahead of the federal government. And so that's a nice dynamic that I really enjoy working in. And a couple of other ideas about how to do these things. Feebates or luxury car taxes. We need to get big cars off the road. You know, I have a dream that this state will actually look different than other states. So that when a traveler from an American comes to this state, it's gonna look different. Like when you go to Europe, it looks different. And what the housing buildings are older and the beautiful is far more people on the street walking. There's far more bicycles if you go to Northern Europe. And what's the big one? Electrified rail, all over the place, okay? That's why they've always used less than half as much energy as we do with higher standard of living and much better healthcare, okay? So I think this state could become a place where when people visit here, they see small cars, small trucks and vans like Europe. So a luxury car tax puts a tax on the price of a car because the more expensive ones tend to be bigger. It's not necessarily so, but it mostly is. And even if they're smaller, they're gas guzzlers, like Lamborghinis and Maserati's and those things. They're not that big, but they use a lot of gas. So that's a luxury car tax. I'm gonna try that. I've got an intern working on it. If we don't, if we can't sell that, there's something called fee bates. Fee bates are, it's a made up word, it combines two things, rebates and fees. So you pick a number, like the car has to get, let's say, 35 miles to the gallon. Anything less than that, you pay a fee. Anything more than that, you get a rebate. And we need to have this money be big enough so that it actually matters and affects the market. Doesn't take much. Look at the price of gas. Look when the price of gas drops. Look what happens. Immediately SUV sales go up. It's incredible. It happens almost overnight. So one more thing, I'm not gonna work only on climate, but that is gonna be my main thing. I'm gonna try to do the rent control again. Now the bill I had last year, we actually had a hearing schedule for it, which was great. It was, I can remember the date because it was the day that we were kicked out of the state house because of COVID and we never returned. We hopefully will be returning in January. So I'm gonna try to revive that and it's reasonable. It's just that rent cannot go up any more than inflation than the CPI, consumer price index. So it is allowed to inflate but not on its own because real estate and rent and health care inflates much greater at a much greater rate than the rest of the economy and that's the problem. I think I've talked enough. I'm not gonna get into all the resolutions that we'll be facing as we do a lot of resolutions. Excellent. And that's next time. No, no, no time. You don't wanna hear them. So any questions? Well, actually, why don't we hear from Emma first and we'll ask the questions to both of you if that's all right. Thank you so much, Kurt. Next, Emma Mulvaney-Stanik. Hi, everyone. Thanks, Kurt. I'm Emma Mulvaney-Stanik and my trusted assistant here, Ruby, my daughter, loves to tune into these MPAs. It's the cutest thing. Actually, I think she'd be a future legislator one day. So I am the state representative who's to the west of Kurt McCormick's district and in 6-2, which is the west side of the Old North End, roughly up North Champlain and Park Street, out through the intervail and the southern portion of the New North End. And I thought tonight I'd offer just a few pandemic-related updates and a couple of thoughts moving forward as we get closer to the next session in January. She's gonna drop things and that's the way it's gonna be. Anyway, so the first thing I wanted to mention is that there's been several folks who reached out to me about a table that has been set up outside of feeding Chittenden on North Winooski. Maybe folks have seen this where their cell phones being handed out at a pretty low rate, but with very big contract information for people who are taking those particular phones. And so I'm investigating this with the help of the attorney general's office that has a consumer assistance project. And I mention that because one of the responsibilities of the House Commerce Committee is actually consumer protection. And so we will be looking into that and make sure things are above board and folks aren't being taken advantage of and to make sure that, especially I've heard all sorts of reports about the phones working or not, but to make sure people are protected because it is questionable about low-income folks, need access to phones, of course, but if this is questionable, we wanna make sure it's above board. So that's the first piece. The second piece, I wanna just mention a couple of things that are programs that have been refunded by federal ARCRA money, which is the American Rescue Protection Act. I think is what ARCRA stands for. I should have that burned in my brain at this point. But there's a few, I consider economic justice recovery programs that support working people. And one in particular is the Vermont Temporary Broadband Subsidy that's put out through the Department of Public Service, which is a $40 credit for folks to help cover your internet bill. This is something that will run from, you can do it retroactively to March, 2021, all the way to the end of this calendar year, if you qualify. And there's a lot of qualifying factors, such as loss of childcare, loss of the job, being laid off, all sorts of things. And you can look a little bit more. I have some information that I've posted in a few sites and I try to post in the Old North End Facebook group as frequently as possible. So I'll make sure that gets there as well. Could help, every little bit helps to cover basic needs. The other economic assistance program is that there's been more money put into the Vermont Emergency Rental Assistance Program, which is both for rent and for utility bills. So this is an assistance program. The rent side of it are for folks who have 80% of the area median income. So that's higher in the Burlington area than it would be, say, in Sutton, Vermont or Newport, Vermont. And that's another assistance program for folks who need that support to help keep in their houses and stay housing secure. And the second portion of that program is to utilities. So that's everything from your water bill to your electric bill. This includes utilities that are publicly owned, like our water division, as well as Burlington Electric Department. Similarly, it's for folks who have a qualifying, pandemic-related need, but that one I wanna emphasize is going to end on October 24th. So I really wanna make sure people get their applications in and look into that if it's something that you might be able to benefit from. It's designed for people who get behind in their utility bills. So it might benefit you, so please take a look at that. This is my like comic relief over here. So the other piece I wanna mention is because it's on a lot of minds of legislators and certainly a very scary reality for almost 1,000 Vermonters is that the housing assistance program that has been housing folks in motels and hotels and other means is ending very soon and it's been questionable about whether there'd be another extension. We've been playing this kind of anxious game since July. There is federal money available to fund this through the end of the year and it's been very questionable about whether the governor will extend it yet again. I've heard, I haven't confirmed this yet, but I've heard that he might be extending it, but it's unsure about how much if we're doing another 30 days or we're doing to the end of the year. I raise this because there's, as I said before, almost 1,000 people who are going to be impacted by the decision of the governor and there are actually some activists on the stairs of the state house at this exact moment, camped out for the weekend to make sure that the governor doesn't forget this impacts real life people. So I wanna make sure people to amplify that so people know there are people organizing and trying to draw attention to this very important issue to really make sure the governor's the right thing and that we actually think beyond the end of December even we had a moment where we have housed all these people in Vermont who needed access to secure housing and so essentially mostly ended house homelessness in the state and so we have this opportunity to really do continue this going forward once we hit the session again and we need a governor who will partner with the legislature in that regard. The last big thing I just wanna mention is looking forward, as Kurt sort of mentioned, transportation and climate change being his kind of focal area, labor issues are an issue that's near and dear to my heart and so one bill that I'm working with a few other house reps on around a $15 minimum wage by 2025 is a bill that's already on the wall but trying to really advance that and add to it eliminating the tipped minimum wage which is a sub tier, has a very sexist and racist history to it actually I can go into it more with folks but it's a chance to really modernize our labor laws, really learn from the fact of why people are not returning to low page work that's hard on people's bodies and souls frankly because it's low poverty wages and it's time for Vermont's wage minimums to catch up and the last two pieces on there is that the piece of that will also hopefully be requiring reliable work schedules so this is another pattern in retail and service industry jobs where people aren't given reliable schedules so it's very hard to secure childcare or work a second job when you're not sure what your schedule is week to week until the last minute so I'll stop there actually and happy to take questions when we're done hearing from other legislators. Thanks so much. Thank you Emma and I think that you two are the only legislators who are on today's call we had a few more who had wanted to join us but I think weren't able to because of because of other meetings tonight so we can open it up to- Yes, yeah, yeah, Senator Ron Hinsdale on, just so you know. Oh, good, she did make it on, wonderful. Yes. Great, yeah I didn't know if you wanted to do just house members and take questions but I really feel from what I heard from Curt and Emma that were very much aligned and on the same page about priorities that have long been delayed priorities for Vermont or sorry about that. I, my computer charger has decided to stop working my battery so I'm a little bit sort of informal on my phone but first of all, Emma, great assistant, good job Ruby. Curt, really nice to see you sort of out and about again that's really heartening and I hope you're doing well. I have not had a chance in one of these meetings to congratulate your new city councilor formerly Joe McGee but he joined me and so did Jess and a few others on a housing forum that we had earlier tonight. You know, really just to take the pulse of our county around what some of the biggest issues and concerns are. Many people emailed, you know, long stories about their own experiences and their neighbors' experiences or solutions, ideas they have for what we should be funding, you know as well as having, you know, upwards of 50, 60 people on the call to wait in and listen. You know, I think what the only really heartening thing right now is that we have more money than we have almost ever had, especially since I've started, you know post great recession in 2009 to put towards housing solutions, everything from bringing mobile home and manufactured home communities to higher ground to deal with some of their flooding and sewage and water issues to, you know, how to bring more housing online. We had an economic development housing meeting where the governor's team said over and over again how much they want to house the homeless and, you know, it seems we agree except as a representative Mulvaney-Stanak pointed out, you know, we seem to not be able to agree on keeping the precariously housed folks we already have in motels there so we can make sure to give them all the options they need to remain, you know, in stable settings that work for them. So we, you know, I'm in full agreement that this, it would be nice to have the governor, you know, kind of not play this game of, you know extension once a month, you know we have the money through December and it's only going to get colder from here and we should really give people some certainty and give our motels and hotels some certainty. And I think one of the most encouraging stories has been a 17-year-old student out of Wyndham County who has, you know, single-handedly brought a lot of advocates with lived experience around homelessness into the conversation other young people and called herself called, you know about a hundred or more motels who have been housing, you know, those Vermonters who need that support and heard from about 50 of them that they love to continue the program. So, you know, she is really a great example of what everyday Vermonters are doing. Addie Lenzer to try and be part of the solutions that we know we're capable of in Vermont to make sure everyone is the house, everyone has a warm meal, et cetera. Two other, you know, quick things I want to mention that are big priorities for me this session just in case I don't get to talk to you all again actually next month, I feel very privileged to go on an exchange for government officials in the US and Germany. And it's for BIPOC and marginalized community elected officials. And so, you know, just really excited to see what's happening with their transition and be part of, I think, a really important exchange. So may not be here, but you know, really just wanted to talk about an environmental justice bill. As some folks know, it's been a priority mine for 15 years, it's what got me into the legislature. And I think now is a really critical time to recognize that environmental health is such a big contributing factor to social determinants of health, your access to housing, you know, safe, habitable housing, transportation, the environmental costs and benefits that exist in your neighborhood and in your community, in your zip code can really influence your outcomes, you know, whether or not your kids have, as we know well in Burlington, the presence of lead paint in the home. And if you have the wherewithal to talk to your landlord or get that remediated through the city or other means, you know, these are all contributing factors that we know are only compounded with a pandemic that makes it harder to reach services and supports as well as has people in their homes a lot more than they have been in the past. I think we have a great opportunity to finally pass that bill and join 40 plus other states and having an environmental justice framework and a civil rights lens on our environment and climate policies. And it is likely to be a priority of the climate council as well, a bill that I've introduced to S148. Finally, you know, one of the reasons I asked to be on Senate government operations is because there has not been someone from Chittin County on that committee in a while. You know, when I look around, there's not so many of us, you know, who have been through redistricting in 2010. Redistricting can be a very messy and emotional process, you know, and then sort of five years later, people forget we ever did it and we have to do it again in another five years. So every 10 years, we have this redistricting process. You know, given that we're a state that has won congressional district, we don't have the same national concerns around gerrymandering that we're seeing in other states seeking to disenfranchise voters. But, you know, Burlington and Chittin County are often, you know, the kind of marginalized group with other legislators who say we already, you know, frankly have enough support or power. And yet, you know, Chittin County once again has grown, Chittin and Franklin counties have grown. And we've seen some loss of population in Rutland, Windsor, and the Northeast Kingdom. So we're just trying to sort of gauge all of that. And whereas the house usually is, you know, where a lot of the fights happen, may or may not be the case, but a lot of people are watching the Chittin County Senate districts because we have set in motion a process to break up the very large Chittin County Senate block into potentially three or fewer smaller blocks. There can be no more than two senators, you know, for actually, that's not true. Not that there can be no more than two senators, but, you know, we just have to break it up potentially while we're also, if the numbers really pan out, potentially getting a seventh Chittin County senator. So, you know, I'd like to bring Huntington back in to Chittin County where it belongs and, you know, have a conversation around Colchester, which has, you know, had a prime place under Senator Mazza, but, you know, we can't sort of build our boundaries around personalities and specific legislators. So, you know, we have to have some real tough conversations around Chittin County, but I think ones that will, we ultimately have some alignment, you know, trying to make sure we keep certain communities intact that have, you know, relatively similar characters. And giving people an opportunity to think about running for the Senate who may have felt very daunted by a larger district, such as all of Chittin County, one in four Democratic voters, or, you know, one in five members of the state population. So, that is a little bit from me. And again, I hope people see, from porch forum posts, et cetera, see messages. I would just like to add next Tuesday at 5.30, I hope I'm right about this, but next Tuesday at 5.30, a lot of folks, you know, have been very outspoken in the past about refugee resettlement was a bit of a liaison for immigrants and refugees in Burlington when I worked for the city of Burlington. So, I've been getting a lot of requests what can individual people do to help asylum seekers and resettled refugees, particularly from Afghanistan right now. So, we're gonna bring a lot of the experts together and there's some really promising new developments out of places like Brattleboro and Rutland to help join that refugee resettlement effort. So, we'll be having a Zoom town hall about refugee resettlement and especially how we can support our new Afghan neighbors as they arrive. Great, thank you so much. We're so fortunate to have such a wonderful representation at the state level from the folks here. So, thank you. So, we can open it up to questions for all three. Mayumi, you've had your hand up for a while. You go first and then Tony. Okay, hi. I had two things to say about the one who spoke before Keisha. I'm sorry, I can't remember your name. I apologize about the phone thing. I've actually heard from my neighbor about that and I would be happy to help in any way because I live really close to the food shelf and then I had another one and I'm sorry, I lost it. And then in terms of Keisha, when you go to Germany, if you get any information about the Berlin housing where they're with what they're doing, I would love to hear about that if you find anything out about that. And that gets off. Very excited to hear more about their social supports and programs and the ways they invest in human capital. So absolutely. Yeah, I've been following that for a while. So when you get back, I would love to meet up with you and hear what you have to say about that. I would love that. And Mayumi, it's Emma who spoke before Keisha and I'd be happy to connect. So you, since I can't chat on this Zoom setup, which is totally fine, you can either find me through the legislative website or on Facebook. You can even message me there and you should be able to just Google me. I'm the only Emma Moldy standing in probably the country or maybe the world, but please do reach out because I am trying to just gather pieces of information. It's been a little funky. So thank you. Tony. Yeah, hi. My question is for Keisha, first they're happy that there's efforts being made to bring refugees and particularly the Afghans to here at the Vermont. That's really worthwhile and to hear that there's activity across the state. I heard your comment about the governor saying he liked, he was in favor of helping the poor with housing. And this is really part of the big lie that we have in housing. I think you're aware that the term affordable really is the big lie. There is no affordable housing provided by the city or by the state, it's all federal. I think the Center for Budget Priorities just this week brought everybody's attention and said, hey, wait a minute. The only thing that meets the needs of people who cannot afford housing is the housing choice voucher that's only available here in Vermont from the federal government. And earlier tonight, we had a report on the South Champlain 48-unit housing project of which 20% of the units, which I guess will be about 10 units will be quote unquote affordable. They're part of the inclusionary zoning requirement which is a wonderful requirement we have in our city charter. And those units are gonna go for $1,100 a month. That is what the nonprofit community provides is $1,100 a month apartments. They're not affordable by anybody with low income. It's nice to have the housing, but we really need to have a first, the rental, the rent control at McCormick spoke of briefly and we need the state and I would hope that the city to begin a program that provides the same thing as section eight for the feds, which is 30% income max. And we need a legislator to stand up and sponsor a bill to start that up, start that rolling. Otherwise, we just continue this, again, what I call it, just like the big lie on who won the election a year ago, we have the big lie on the word affordable applied to the efforts of the state and the city on housing. Well, I mean, Tony, I always appreciate the way you frame things without sort of giving us a lot of wiggle room which holds our feet to the fire. As I said, I really feel like housing, which is often we sort of forego for shinier objects, a really, really big priority this year. And you're right, you know, so much of the money we put towards it is federal. I do, you know, I wanna put a small plug in, you know, for the program that Governor Cunan started so many years ago, the Vermont Housing Conservation Board, which is where we funnel a lot of our state resources to really try and have high impact in developing what sometimes become international models for providing affordable housing and home ownership. I think of the shared equity home ownership program that has been internationally awarded. We have first-time home buyer tax credits, which is a way of us foregoing state revenue to help first-time home buyers. And we do give state money to some of these housing projects where they all say, you know, the state money you give for every dollar you give, it can be leveraged into $18 from other sources like federal funds and grants and, you know, other supports. So we are certainly very conscious that every dollar we put into housing multiplies very quickly. We still, it still has never been enough and we're feeling the effects of a lot of our lack of investment right now. And, you know, while, I mean, this is certainly an issue in Burlington, but maybe not as much as it is in other places, you know, ways of rehabbing existing housing so that it's a lot more useful and valuable and, you know, safe and habitable for folks. So, you know, I think we have a one-time opportunity to put a lot of money, not again, federal money, you know, mixed with some state money into housing projects and bringing more housing online. We, I think, as you're rightly noting, we can all agree on that with a lot of disagreement or sort of, you know, stuff to pay attention to in the details of that. And so, you know, Tony, keep watching us, you know, keep paying attention to what we're doing or not doing. But, you know, I think we are, when we look at, you know, 100% of federal poverty level and just thereabouts maybe up to 120% of federal poverty level, you're right that, you know, we need housing at all affordability levels on that lower end of the income spectrum. And, you know, we also need, frankly, what we heard loud and clear from this housing form is we need our institutions to help take some responsibility for their workers, their students in the case of UVM, which we've heard perennially, but, you know, just knowing that we're reliant on a lot of workers, you know, in certain parts of the state who cannot find housing period, let alone housing that they can afford. So, absolutely hearing you and trying to think about creative ways to bring those investments online quickly. Thank you. No question for the housing and for what the Housing Conservation Board is doing, but we have 10% of our population, over 1,000 households on the City of Burlington wait list, and those units that the Conservation Board and that are being developed are, they won't provide a single unit of housing for those folks. I mean, it's a question of the low income. And I don't, there really needs to be a breakthrough at some point. It's happening, Nash isn't just here, but anyway, keep up the good work. I believe there will be a breakthrough at some point here in Vermont to actually address the people who are tonight desperate here in this city. Yeah, we have to keep focused on them. And, you know, it was devastating to learn right as we finished our meeting that, you know, this year's lane encampment was, you know, going to be disbanded when there had been so much, you know, I mean, I don't want to comment too much on city issues, but, you know, there had been a lot of promise for other alternatives and opportunities and, you know, yet more folks that we need to sort of figure out where they can find a place that works for them. Yeah, thank you. And we have a responsibility as a community to make sure that everyone has access to safe and affordable and equitable housing. And so we can do more and we can do better. So I think we are at time tonight. And so thank you all for being here tonight, everyone who's on Zoom, everyone who's in this room, all of our city and state representatives and legislators, we are so grateful for your service. And we will see you next month, November 11th. And have a wonderful rest of the evening. Thanks, everybody. See ya. Thank you.