 Okay, being six o'clock on Monday, July the 16th, we're gonna call to order the liquor control board for the city of Winnuski. Council service is both liquor control board and city council, so city council meeting will be directly after that, it's turning about 6.05 if you're here for that. But we're first we're gonna open, take care of a couple items as the liquor control board first, we'll ask that everybody please in the call order raise and stand and join us for the Pudge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Nicole Lace. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, we've got two items on today's liquor control board meeting. First up is approval of a second classical license for Christopher D. West, the Dutch Delictessent. I'm LLC for 65 Winnuski Falls Way, formerly known as the Happy Valley Delict. So we have no concerns with this permit. I think somebody was, he is here. He's here, if you'd like to ask any questions. Hi Chris, how you doing? Congratulations, is this new for you? Yes. Awesome. And what are you doing? Anything you wanna tell the public about? Well I will be branding at some point, but I spent 10 years in the Netherlands, my wife is Dutch and I'm looking to do Dutch food there. So it's gonna be a Dutch Delictessent. It's amazing. Yeah. Pigs in the blanket. Well no, cheese is in smoked sausage and snare, which is peace, who thinks that's good. Nice, so. Exciting, well congratulations. Thank you very much. Great, so no concerns from staff in the board? So any questions or concerns from the control board? Any questions or concerns from the public regards to this license? Okay, so seeing and hearing none, I entertain a motion for approval of the second class liquor license for the Dutch Delictessent. So moved. Second. Motion by Christine, second by Helen. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor please say aye. Aye. Those opposed, motion carries. And the second item tonight is the first class liquor license for restaurant license and entertainment permit as well. For LR, Fong, LLC, DVA Mandarin at 22 Main Street or what folks probably remember most recently is down to pizza. So again, staff has no concerns with this one. Mr. Fong is here in the audience as well. A few questions are him and we're excited for this establishment to open. Is it Ms. Fong? Yes. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. We're excited to have you in town. Yeah, it's long time. Yeah. Yeah. So when might it open? Yeah, August 18th. Oh, awesome. August 18th. Well, sure, it will be worth the wait and all the work that you put into it. And so excited to welcome two new things to the circle and two new eateries. It's awesome. We were all 15 pounds lighter before we moved to a new seat. This is gonna ensure we keep that trend up. That's great. Well, welcome. We look forward to working with you. Thank you. Yeah. Great. Any other questions from the control board? Any questions from the public? Great. So seeing and hearing none, I obtained a motion for the approval of first class of the license for Mandarin 22 Main Street. And it includes a restaurant license and event permit, entertainment permit as well. So, motion by the Post and by Hallyne for the discussion. Seeing and hearing none, I was afraid to say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. That concludes tonight's regular agenda item for the control board. I'm going to motion to adjourn. Second. Motion by the Post and by Hallyne for the discussion. Seeing and hearing none, I was afraid to say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. We will now wait approximately 30 seconds for the 6.05 warning of the city council meeting. Okay. And now being 6.05 on Monday, July the 16th, we'll call it over to the Winooski City Council meeting and ask again that everybody please rise and join us for public illusion. It's led by Deputy Marin Colmes. Pleasure to see you guys in the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, liberty and justice for all. Okay, first up tonight is the gender review. This is an opportunity for our council to make any comments, suggestions, recommendations in regards to tonight's agenda or the order it's in. We stack things up to move the conversation in alignment with guests and also a public hearing tonight. Any questions or concerns in regards to the agenda? Any questions or concerns to the public? So seeing and hearing none, we'll move forward with the agenda as presented. Next up is public comment. This is an opportunity for members of the public to address the council about anything that's not on tonight's agenda. Number one, you'll find tonight's agenda on the back podium back there if you're curious about what we're gonna talk about tonight. Number two, we also really appreciate if everybody could take a moment to be sure you sign in the back so we have a record of who attended on your way out to find two if you promise to remember. So this is an opportunity for members of the public to address the council on anything that's not on tonight's agenda. Yes, ma'am. If you'd like, you can join us up there. How are you? I'm well. My name is Betsy Nolan. And I live here in Winooski in our fair city. And I am here as a concerned citizen of Winooski and the world and also as a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. And I sit before you today with two requests for one for the mayor of the city of Winooski and one for the city council. My request of the mayor is our organization is hoping that you might consider becoming a mayor for peace. We reached out to you via email and had an opportunity to meet with Jesse Baker to talk a little bit about this. It is a wonderful international organization that supports peace and actions that pursue peace throughout the world. It costs a whopping $18 a year, which we would be willing to pay for you. I think Winooski is a unique community in Vermont. It's a unique community in the world as it does bring people from all over the world to our community. And I think it is really important that we do, you know, put our money where our mouth is even when it's $18 when it comes to speaking a message of world peace and that we really need to be doing what we can to make sure that that message is really in the forefront, which brings me to my second request. And I have a little bit of literature here and the hardest part of my day was going to Staples today. We are requesting that the Winooski City Council draft a resolution calling back the United States from the brink to prevent nuclear war. And I have a draft resolution. And we are fully aware that the city of Winooski does not have a lot of power when it comes to the nuclear weapons that are used and owned by our country or are threatened to be used by our country. But the United Nations has passed a resolution to disarm the world of nuclear weapons. And even though the United States is not going to sign onto that resolution, history has showed us that when these resolutions that are passed by the United States do become international law, that even though the United States does not sign onto them, they do comply with them. This has happened with cluster bombs. It's happened with mustard gas and other things where when these things become international law, even when the United States refuses to sign onto them at the beginning of the process or when they become, start to be talked about when they become law at the United Nations, the United States does follow suit. So this is just the first step in that process. Other organizations across the country are requesting that city councils and mayors take the step to just request that our country sign on to the nuclear test ban treaty that the United Nations has passed. There are over a hundred nations that have already signed onto it. There are 30 that have ratified it. When they get to 50, it will become international law. So thank you for your time. Thank you very much. Thank you. And we will formally respond to and I will follow up with you, which I owe you. Thank you. Thank you for your time. Any other comment for public comment? So sitting here right now, we'll move forward with the agenda. Next up is consent agenda. We have four items on tonight's consent agenda. We have minutes from June 18th in 2018. A warrants for a payroll period from June 17th and 30th in the works ending in the 7th, 6th, 2018. We also have the head works garage construction phase contracts present and as well as the bridge rail repair project, which again, we've covered at length multiple times. Are there any concerns or issues with the slate of the consent agenda as presented? Great, seeing and hearing none. Any questions, concerns from the public in regards to the consent agenda? Good, so seeing and hearing none, I'll turn and entertain a motion for approval of the consent agenda as presented. Motion by Cole, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing and hearing none, I'll defer to please say aye. Aye. Those opposed, motion carries. City update. Great, thank you. So some updates for the public and the council for tonight. First, an exciting announcement that Janet helped me remember, which was on Saturday, was Carol's 38th anniversary with the city or city clerk, very longstanding city clerk with a lot of expertise, so. Starting when she was two years old. I wanted to give the public just a quick overview. We've been doing a lot of outreach about the upcoming pool bond vote. It will take place on August 14th and thanks to Nicole and Eric for carrying a lot of the water on that as well. So this week, residents should receive flyers, postcards in their mailbox, reminding them about the vote. We've done a shoot a press release and Facebook, social media events, announcements about that, about the upcoming vote. On July 25th, at 6.30 here, I believe, during the community services commission meeting, there'll be a question and answer period where people can come in and learn more about the bond vote and have their questions answered. On August 1st, I believe we'll have a table at Winnowsky Wednesdays with similar information. On August 6th, here as part of the next regular council meeting will be the official public hearing. So if you're curious about the pool bond vote and want more information, those are the times that you can get more information. I also wanted to touch base on the master plan schedule. I sent that schedule around to all city commission members in the council. The planning commission is off and running, led by Eric Fourwald, who you'll meet in a few minutes, and have a schedule lined up for the next four or five months about how they will take up different chapters of the master plan aligned to the strategic vision area. So if you all are interested in hearing what's going on, welcome you to attend the planning commission meeting, as well as members of the public. And if you have any questions about the master plan process or ideas for the planning commission to think about, encourage you to email masterplanatwinnowskyvet.org, and that will go straight into Eric's inbox. Events and fun stuff, it's the summer. So we have a lot of fun stuff going on. July 29th, from one to three at Landry is our Winnowsky Family Fund Day. The afternoon of activities, slip and slide, water fights, et cetera. Alicia's done a huge amount of work to set that up. Winnowsky Wednesday obviously is August 1st, with the quartet and monkey house doing the beverages, and of course meals for kiddos. The Wolfgar Arrow will be Saturday, August 4th, along Winnowsky Fallsway, and Winnowsky Fallsway will be closed that day for the air out. Alicia's also putting together an urban camp out, which we're super excited about, so people are interested in coming in, spending the night outside with us in Cassavent Park. That will be August 11th into 12th, that overnight. $20 per tent, you are expected to register your tent. There'll be cookouts and s'mores and camp games and stories and whatnot, and kids under 18 are more than encouraged to attend, but we do ask that they come with a parent or guardian. And then finally, we are doing a football conditioning camp for kids in kindergarten to eighth grade, the week of August 8th. It's free and open to the public, and you can register through the My Rec website or here at City Hall. That's what I have, thank you. Awesome. Oops. Okay, we'll now move over to council reports. We can start down the air in a little bit. I have nothing to report, Public Service Commission did not meet this one. It's been very low activity. Eric and I met with Ray and Caroline from the pool committee to put together our, we'll just talk about the messaging and plan around the pool bond vote. So we now have a draft PowerPoint, thank you Ray. And a lot of information to pull together for our presentation on July 25th. We are viewing it as an opportunity to provide a bit of history about the project and in addition to the implications of the vote in a PowerPoint type of form. So we can look forward to that on July 25th. I think Eric will also do a modified version of that on the CCTV show the night before on the 24th. So if you can't come on the 25th, you can watch live on channel 17. A planning commission meeting. We had two since the last time we met actually. I think we have, yeah. So great progress. There's some feedback coming in from the commissions and worked on economic development. This last go around. Good conversations. I think they're finding their rhythm on the level of focus and detail that they're gonna have capacity to get into on each topic, which I think for a group like this is pretty natural but excited to see that group up running and functioning at a really high level. Couple just really cool honors, I think, for the city of Muruski popped up in the last couple of weeks, blending my work life with here a little bit, but we were selected for the Vermont Council on World Development's October 1st as a model community for their workshops. So they invited us to put together a panel. A lot of it's gonna center around what we've done around zoning, community services, but sort of very, it's gonna be a very broad subject, but we were selected as highlighted community by that organization and that's a pretty big honor. And then in addition to that, the Statewide Housing Conference has also decided to have us as a central part of a session that's gonna focus on our zoning and the work that was done to put into place the most progressive code and zoning in the state. So that's a great honor from the affordable housing community that they selected Muruski to be in that place in November. So a couple cool things coming up that we'll be working on to get ready for the fall. And then just wanna note that we do have some applications in for the treasure position. Just taking a look at a few of them and we'll be moving forward with Julie. We've gotta get courting around that, you and I in the next couple of weeks and hopefully bring some candidates forward for a panel to have a conversation with Jesse and Angela as well. So more news on that to come very soon. So I don't have a report, but I did submit a council update for the next August newsletter. Thank you. Thanks for doing that. Sure. All right. And with that, and I think we'll just remind folks just in case we didn't say the date is we do have an August 14th primary. I know it's a month away, but we'll just keep saying those words over and over and over again. Primary vote that will include the pool bond issue on August 14th. And just one last quick note is I did meet with the fundraising committee for the pool and sorted through how the municipal interactions gonna work, I think in a little bit more coordinated fashion with theirs, their efforts. Maybe not so much the municipal, but it is mine. And we also just talked through some technical issues in regards to them taking political advocacy positions and what kind of implications that could have as to their 501c3 status, which is important. So hopefully we'll see that organized and off the ground again soon. The other point about the primary is that you can pick up your ballots now and then city clerk's office. So a lot of folks go on vacation in August. Don't let the vacation interfere with your ability to vote. Come vote now. Great. And with that we'll move on to tonight's regular items. First up tonight is discussion of an introduction of somebody we just heard about. So inviting Eric Vorwal to come up and join us. Eric joined us on July 9th as our planning and zoning manager. We, as you know, we had a vacancy in April. We went through a pretty extensive recruitment process had some very strong candidates. We are very fortunate to have really strong candidates and Eric quickly rose to the top of that pack. He is a certified urban planner. He most recently came to us from Central Vermont Regional Planning Commission as their senior planner. And prior to that worked in the regional planning organization in that sort of state college, Pennsylvania. Has extensive history in community master planning, facilitation, zoning, writing, zoning, bylaws, et cetera, has really jumped in and hit the ground running and had managed a planning commission meeting on day four. So that's good. So we're thrilled to have him on board and just wanted you to get to know him a little bit and put some names to faces. Yes, thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be finally here working with the city of Winnowski. I'm looking forward to working with all of you and with all the other staff and boards and commissions of the city. Welcome. Have you found all the candid dishes? Question number one. I have not actually. I didn't know there were. Good, yeah. They're gone? Was there a health initiative going on here? That used to be the first thing people made a comment about when they started. But there's a lot of things that I haven't been filled in on yet for those little type of nuance things, so it's great. And how long have you been back in the area after state college? My wife and I moved here about two and a half years ago, so yeah, not a whole long time, but long enough to know that this is a great place to be. That's awesome. Well, it's nice perspective to have coming, have worked in other parts of Vermont, too. And sometimes it's, people are quick to plug into the Chittenden bubble. It's nice to have that perspective on your plate as well. That's awesome. And you were really impressive right off the bat with the planning commission meeting, so. Thank you very much. Well done in walking into a complicated thing. Jesse and I both sat there and said, we need to shut up and leave the room and run things. You did a great job already, so. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. It's exciting. Other questions for Eric from the council? Awesome. We look forward to seeing lots more of you. Absolutely. And we're excited to have you. I know the whole team's really excited to have you. It feels like fully staffed. Almost. Nobody's wrong to leave. Mrs, you know, this is the big thing, obviously, on our plate for this year we've talked a lot about is our city updating its municipal plan and making a meaningful document roadmap for the community's future that's going to really steer investments and make those kinds of strategic conversations that we have give a lot of context to it and a lot of guidance and direction on it. So I know we as decision makers are really looking forward to that. And I think it's something that the whole community is looking forward to and ready to be engaged on. So thanks for all your work. Absolutely. Look forward to it. Thank you. Any questions from the public? For Erica, for council? Okay. Thank you. So seeing in here right now, welcome sir. Thank you very much. All right, we'll move, let's see, we're past 6.15. Let's just go ahead and do the approval of the sidewalk usage permit for 35 Island Street for full circle. Hello everyone. City staff has received the sidewalk usage permit application from full circle at 35 West Allen right over here on the corner of Weaver and West Allen. Business owner Melissa Mills would like to hold periodic sidewalk sales over there on a six foot table along the wall on the Weaver Street side. And there's a double sidewalk there. I think she's planning to do it infrequently but wants to have access to that for the season. The sidewalk would remain accessible with a clearance of at least five feet throughout and staff recommends approval of the permit. Any questions, concerns from council? Can I see activity on the corner? That would be helpful to her. Any questions, concerns from the public? Right, so seeing nearing now, I entertain a motion for approval of the sidewalk usage permit for 35 West Allen Street, also known as full circle. Motion by Cole, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those favor it to say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you very much. So we had for our schedule a public hearing scheduled for 6.15 for approval of the head works project funding of no significant impact. That's your story, thanks. Great, and it looks like we're turning this over. Welcome, John. Welcome, thanks. Good evening, everyone. So I'm gonna actually turn this over to these guys. I'll give a brief introduction. So as part of the head works upgrade project, we are funded through Clean Water Revolving Loan Funds. So as part of that funding, we're required to do environmental review with DVC. And tonight we're doing a public hearing based on their findings. They're planning to issue a letter of intent for no significant impacts. And that's because we are located in 100 year flood zone. So there is a footprint of our building in the 100 year flood impact, but it doesn't rise to doing a full environmental assessment impact. So with that, I'll introduce, we have Ty Bryson from DEC, sorry, Bryson Bryson from DEC, and Wayne Elliott from A&E or Consultant. Welcome back, Wayne. Welcome. Hi. Thank you. So as part of the federal funding and having loan funds that are sourced from federal dollars, it falls into the National Environmental Protection Act. As such, we have a number of regulations that need to undergo review. One of those is the flood zone. And this is, I'll just say initially, common for wastewater treatment plants, as many of them are in low-lying areas located near rivers at the low point of system. So it's not something that we haven't seen before in the proposed headworks building is right on the edge of the, what the flood insurance map shows as the 100-year flood zone. And while there is a process you can go in petition to get further detail on that map. It was more pertinent and probably a better use of our time to go through the finding no significant impact, meaning that there's no significant environmental impact due to the footprint of the building. And Wayne can discuss more about that post project. So I've been in here in front of you before here. And so this is a new headwork structure. Headwork is what we call preliminary treatment. It provides screening, sort of moves the inorganic material out of the wastewater stream and also provides brick removal. Those two functions are somewhat currently provided. This is the north end of the site within the existing fence line. There's some grinding that material in an existing structure at this location. And there's an existing grid chamber. The majority of that equipment in those structures are 20 plus years old, so they're dated, older technology. So the proposal is to build a new 24 by 30 foot structure at the north end of the site. So if you're coming down the driveway, it's going to be right to the left. It is in the existing fence line, about 720 square feet. So the flood elevation, 100-year flood elevation out here is about 115. And to mitigate that and make sure we're protected, the lower portion of this new structure is going to be six inches above the electrical. All the equipment areas are going to be a foot above the 100-year flood elevation. We don't have a lot of options of where to put that on the site because the flow comes in the infill line by gravity and needs to lead direction. So we need to intercept that before we can go through the rest of the treatment process. So as John and Tyson mentioned, wastewater plant typically has these kind of constraints. We don't have a lot of flexibility where to place these structures. So we're putting in an area with some good available space and getting to mitigate everything. All the new foundation, finished flow elevations, equipment, electrical that are above the, well above the 100-year flood elevation. Great. And I mean from, this is an awareness issue. It's not a new discovery in terms of proposed risk from an environmental perspective. I mean, it's, and there's an enclosing taking place and it sounds like the mechanicals are being lifted above, playing where. And that's a standard design requirement anyways, for protection. Yeah. And it's part of a process. It's required for the upon it. This is part of this federal regulation that somebody can make a recommendation that you look at a different site for the construction. Do you have to defend the reasoning behind it? Yeah, perhaps. That we find that, likely, financially unfeasible. Right. The same thing that happened. So we have done the public notice of this public hearing. So part of the point of tonight's meeting is to receive that feedback from the public experience. I'm just assuming this is what everybody's here for. And this is the way I'm reading this. There's a letter of intent and then if there's no comment received within 30 days, then the letter of intent moves to a finding of no significant impact. And this is the first opportunity for people to provide comment? Or there's been comments. How does the comment happen, is it? Currently open. It opened, it was June 27th. So it's open until July 27th. And at that point, will we record any comments received and address them and file it? So right now the comments. Yes, so written comments can be provided directly to the city, the consultant, or directly to the state. They'll just check with everybody once that period is closed, just to see if they've got any comments. If they need to respond to them or just confirm they didn't receive comments. And I will say we have all the documents for a public review at the clerk's office. So if anyone is interested, they can come in and rejoin these reports. Good. And the project is about 40% design at a 30% meeting. So we're moving along and everything's on track on the schedules. Other questions, concerns from council? Got this on as a approval item, but it's actually a public hearing. So there's nothing to actually vote on. But we will do one last wrap up to see if there's any comments or questions from council. Now I'll turn it over and see if there's any questions, comments, concerns from the public. Okay. So seeing and hearing none, we will now close this public hearing and thank our guests very much for attending tonight. Appreciate all your working time on this project. We're excited about it. Thanks to the Mooskey taxpayers for supporting it too in last year's budget vote. This year's budget vote. Thank you. That should be good work. Okay. Now closing the public hearing, we'll turn back to the regular agenda and we'll pick up with item C, which is discussion of the Weaver Street bike lane pop up report. Let's pick up John. All right. So you guys might remember, we did a pilot test out here early June. So this is to kind of wrap up that pilot. I think very loudly we heard that the facility that was marked out on Weaver Street was not something. Community members were really in favor of. So, and there's a couple, there's some reasons for that that I'll kind of talk about. But just to go through the Weaver Street overview, we did collect data pre-pilot and that gave us a pretty good baseline for determining future what we do for Weaver Street for any multimodal improvements. But for the pilot, what I think we learned from that is, it's a difficult street to do a protected bike lane on just because of the dry lane wits, the parking issues. The, we did find that the speeds were relatively within the 25 mile per hour zone. So there was an issue for those two areas we tested. So what we're recommending is, if looking at multimodal uses, did you just more of a shared use lane in the future? So basically that means not revising the drive lanes as they currently are, not changing the parking, but adding markings and signage to alert drivers of potential cyclists that are using that street. So that's kind of the overall recommendation that we kind of heard from the community and we're providing for that corridor. So, we are also recommending that some of this data that we looked at, we look at pedestrian improvements for the corridor. That's one thing we weren't really, we didn't have good data on at the beginning, but seeing and talking with community members, there's opportunities for additional crosswalks. We think there's opportunities for some bump outs and that may also help with, if we do need to do traffic calming in the future. So that's kind of our wrap up for Weaver Street. And then obviously we wanna incorporate all this into the transportation master plan as lessons learned from the pilot. And one other thing I'll just add quickly, sorry Seth, is, I think this was a, was seen as a very challenging thing for some members of our community. From staff's perspective, we really appreciate a community that's willing to try things. Wienewski historically has pushed the envelope on a lot of different fronts. And it's, we're very thankful to the community to be willing to pilot new innovations, learn from them and course correct and make decisions based on what we learned. So we know it was disruptive to many and we heard from many and we appreciate that, but are also very thankful that we live in a community where people are willing to try new things. Yeah, and just kudos to staff for handling, handling the feedback well and professionally. And I heard that consistently through the process. You know, we are allotted from a appreciation standpoint of why people want to move here as being a very walkable connected community when it comes to transportation. It's easy to get around and we have facilities that aren't common in Vermont from a pedestrian standpoint. And right now, I think we can very safely say, we've heard loud and clear that we're a little behind on bike facilities and dedicated bike facilities or at least supporting the biking community in a thoughtful manner. I just want to reiterate to people that this project was a direct result of a very, very long master transportation planning process. This was not something that somebody set in a back office and cooked up in their head and said, you know, this is my idea and I think we should just those together. This was actually taken from lots and lots and lots of public feedback and several public meetings with 100 plus attendees. So, you know, this was a shared idea amongst the community. I want to reposition that having read some of these responses with you were trying to carry out that vision. So I think it's really exciting to think about the Cheryl concept just to raise awareness because one thing that did jump out into me is these numbers are not, whoa, those are not small numbers from a pedestrian and bike count standpoint. I mean, I heard people, I lived on Weaver Street. I wouldn't have guessed that some of the bike counts would have been as high as they were but cumulative throughout the day makes sense. So I appreciate that we've identified the need and the opportunity there to at least do something and look forward to supporting those recommendations anyway. Certainly I can or we can as a group. Other questions, comments, thoughts from council in regards to the future recommendations or? I saw in the comments that were shared like a little bonus piece of information that having the actual parking marked was helpful to a lot of residents on the street in not having people so close to the right off to the corner. So it's easier to turn than also people mentioning having an easier time pulling out of their driveway. So I think that was just like a small, while the bike lane itself didn't feel successful to folks. Like there was some information that was helpful there. Yeah, and I think we were talking internally and that's something we might try to do this year is get those parking spaces painted. Because I mean that helps improve parking efficiency because one of the perceived things that we heard throughout the project was there's not enough parking, not enough on street parking but as we did traffic counts ahead of it we realized if you distribute that parking there is enough on street parking at least for the times that we did counts. So maybe if we striped those spaces it'll help people park a little more efficiently and gain some more on street spaces to use. So yeah, there was some good input. I mean, we got a lot of great input. I mean, and we gained some great community member cooperation and got to meet some folks. So I mean it was, at least on my end it was pretty successful that we made those connections and we got that input and now we know which kind of direction to go and we're not spending money on maybe a concept design to look at weaver chute bike lanes that we're not gonna implement. So what do you see as the future for bike facilities in Winooski? I think one of the reasons there was, I mean the Weaver Street plan was part of the transportation master plan but it also I think came up in the context of the main street proposal and folks were really interested in saying a bike facility be part of the revitalization proposal and the response back was we're gonna look at Weaver Street. So now that we know that that's not feasible we're not supported by people in the community. Do you see an opportunity for looking at other options or are we destined for the share of route as a way to increase safety for cyclists in the community? I mean I think it's a good start to, I mean so curb to curb what they've got about 33 feet, 30 feet. So within that curb to curb we can, with some pain do what's getting used on that quarter. So right now based on traffic counts, based on bike volumes we've seen, based on the speed that seems appropriate based on FHWA guidelines. So if you start seeing higher speeds on that corridor, if you start seeing higher traffic counts then we have to look at all right, maybe we need to install a one way bike lane, climbing lane, similar to Main Street to accommodate those uses. So the nice thing is with bike lanes we there's flexibility so we keep an eye on it. Now we've got some baseline data to work with and then if we need to we change it with some markings. But to Nicole's point there is in the plan for Main Street a dedicated bike facility. So that's really where we're gonna be able to address the at least we'll call it that region of the city from a functional standpoint. Yeah and I mean the other thing we're looking at is there's projects north south that are gonna be one next few years coming online that are adding bike facilities. So if the interchange goes in with the multi-use path there's another connection that's gonna come through. If the bridge comes through with a multi-use path. Now we've got potentially a corridor that we're gonna have to address making a connection to Main Street Weaver. So we may have to look at those again down the road. So just to say all of this in a different way to directly answer your question I think that the as the mayor says the plan for Main Street is still to have that protected uphill climbing lane which was really the concern we heard from the community as part of the Main Street project. We then also heard this interest in that that dual way cycle track and that's what we were testing out on Weaver Street. So I think the in terms of the bike network in the city the intention still very much is to focus on Weaver Street or focus on Main Street with that uphill crawling lane and then have Sherrow's on Main Street downhill when the traffic can keep up with when the bike traffic can keep up with traffic and similarly on Weaver Street. And then I think we'll wanna watch what happens along Weaver Street as bicyclists either choose to move more over to Weaver Street because there is that protected uphill lane or choose to stay on Weaver Street or expand use of John Weaver Street because of the improvements to Main Street. Thank you. So John how about you assure safety with the Weaver Street shared use plan? Well I mean it's really for folks that are using it currently. It's more of an awareness for drivers to just keep an eye out that hey there are cyclists using this route. I don't anticipate we're gonna get additional use on Weaver Street by just putting up markings and some signage but I think it'll be more of an awareness to drivers. I think it also makes the point too that when people start to say it's nerve wracking driving down the street it's nerve wracking because you're used to going too fast and our streets are too wide in some areas and Weaver Street frankly is one of them. It's a unique street because it gets a high capacity load for funerals and services and other community things that occur on that corridor. So it's use I can see a lot of the points and I'm not arguing against them that folks have made but I think that's a broader general discussion where we are trying very actively to make people slow down throughout the community not just on this project but that's something that they should people generally should get used to because that's the feedback that we've gotten is that that's what people want to see things like bump outs that do narrow the streets a little bit and it generally results in a safer community to move around in so that's the purpose for that. So that probably won't be the last time we get that feedback on an idea. Are there questions or concerns from council? Questions or concerns from the public? Okay, you put a lot on this one. Thank you for all your work and time investment and to those thinking that that possibly look forward to seeing the other action items carried out. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. We'll now move on to item D which is the O'Brien Community Center update on space planning and potential partnerships. So I will start this and hand it over to Ray and other partners that we have here in the room as well. So when we came to you at our last regular meeting in June, we had talked about coming back at this meeting with a kind of complete financial package as well as some leases and LOIs. Between that meeting and today, there have been some fairly significant changes on the potential use of the building, namely the private fitness center we had been working with for many months. And thank you to UVM for their patients with this as well, pulled out of the project and said that because of the finances required, it really was not something they could continue to work on. So Ray and I reached out to UVM Medical Center and asked them to come in and think about other innovations that we could bring to the table. And so they did in large force, which was great. We spent about an hour with about 14 members of their leadership team last week and then they spent another couple of hours brainstorming. So really what we're here to talk about today is that potential and your interest in seeing an expanded footprint of UVMMC at the OCC, at the O'Rike Me Center, as well as feed you back some of the pieces we've received about the idea of expanding the library footprint within the core of the building and making it more of an early education hub and more flexible space to reflect with how the community is currently using the small footprint of the library. Let me see you. No, I think that's great table setting. And again, it's been a wandering path, I think, to get to this point. So I'm curious to see how this conversation goes and kind of the feedback. I think if I can, I wanted to frame up some questions that would be helpful for us and maybe frame the conversation a little bit because I do think there's a lot captured here. So I don't know if that for council would work. So I'm wondering before you, I don't know what your questions are, but before we get there, if we want to allow UVM to weigh in. Yeah. Sure, yeah, please. You wanna invite a guest up? So we have a number of guests in the room from UVMMC here. I don't know if you all want to introduce yourselves. Steve Milar, I'm the director of therapy. Steve. I'm Ms. Jackson, director of community home improvement. Ms. Jackson? We're rolling in a manager of that site, in the UVMMC part of that site. Steve, why don't you, you know what could be a new relation to being able to have that at the same time? Great. Just so first off, while you're in the room before they get technical, we just wanna extend obviously our gratitude and reflection of what are positive and valuable, valued and enriching relationship it's been from a long-term perspective in working with UVM and all of you in each of your departments. And we're incredibly grateful for that partnership in the way it's gone through the years. Been wonderful to work with. We know that this iteration and the way that this story, so to speak, is unfolded has probably had a few more choose your own adventure to quote something that's probably in the library. Opportunities that we all would have wanted and you were great in following some winding paths and trails and we're extremely appreciative of both your dedication, the community, the space and seeing those conversations through. So thanks for your patience with that. And we appreciate the long-term partnership too. Now. So I think perhaps what might be useful is several months ago when we were here talking about this, one of the things your body articulated was an interest in really fully utilizing the building to be as much open access as possible to serve as many needs in our community as possible, not be solely appointment only, for example. So to UVM MC's credit, they've spent a lot of time in their leadership team thinking about how to reach that value that the council has held in the past and have come up with three different ways of potentially expanding their partnership with us done at the O'Brien Community Center. And that's outlined in the final two pages of this memo from us. But I wanted to also give the UVM MC team time to walk through those three concepts if you are interested or I can do it for you. You want me to do it? Okay. So first concept again very briefly because it's here in your memo is expanding the, so currently as you know, there's the aquatic services that were always housed within the YMCA footprint. So first concept is expanding those, expanding to other kind of traditional appointment rehabilitation services, expanding the footprint of the gym and allowing that gym to have some open access time classes partner with the rec program or their other service provision, essentially expand that type of service delivery. They're members of their team who are very interested in more community-based wellness programs. So UVM MC currently offers an array of tobacco cessation, yoga, massage therapy, acupuncture, other types of holistic wellbeing services. So thinking about the use of that footprint, the community room footprint, the kitchen footprint to expand that community wellbeing specifically targeted at some of our health indicators and providing services either at a reduced rate or at a open access rate again that we could partner from on the community services side of things to offer to our residents. And then the third concept is UVM MC does currently offer some really interesting nutritional services that often sell out and thinking about the commercial kitchen that we have at the OCC and the space right next door in the community room to expand offerings for culinary health and classes, nutrition services again that would be both for pay services as well as some open access services that we would partner on. So those are the three very broad level, I hope I'm not putting inappropriate words into any of your mouths, broad level concepts. And the question for you all tonight is, I think their team is excited to think about some of these options but also needs to go through their internal administrative process to build out these new service delivery arms that would be essentially mid-budget or as the new fiscal year starts. So they don't wanna spend a whole lot of time on that if it's not something we're interested in leasing to them. So I wanted some feedback from you all of is this something staff can continue to work with them to explore. And I think specifically what they're interested in is the footprint of the complete footprint of the YMCA space minus the large gym at the back and then potentially the kitchen and potentially the community room. Okay, okay. And is it one or the other of these three options or is it a combination of the three areas? From what we've understood and correct me if I'm wrong but it would be a combination of those three in some way shape if I'm using those faces that were discussed. And so the idea was the building was built as a community center that was open accessible and provided services and housed opportunities for community members to access service opportunities that they may not otherwise receive. In the initial conversations there was just this basic concern expressed about whether or not what was being discussed was accessible enough for the entire community or not. To me when I read this, this takes huge leaps and bounds to get us to a place where it's providing that broad based support that I feel and reflect that the building is always sort of held as a promise back to the community in terms of their investment in it. So I certainly find these proposals exciting and I think meeting some of the concerns that we expressed previously. I do think we need a gym in this city and I'll be blunt about that. And I think that that's on our maybe our Heather list and Ray list combined but I think there are other spaces that could potentially accommodate that and if you have one tenant coming in with these other great services, these are, and some of these from a health perspective go above and beyond in terms of just the impact from a health perspective a gym would provide. So that's really exciting. Said my piece. Well I too, I think these are great ideas for future use. The wonder that I have is how might we assess the needs of our community in terms of really making sure we're on point to provide them what they might need. So any thoughts about how we might get the community input about. I love the culinary medicine idea but I just want to make sure will it be culturally relevant? How we might make sure it's what the community needs? I would just speak on the impacts of community health improvement to remind everyone that we're in the midst of a community health needs assessment as we speak. And there are a host of needs in the rescue that will be identified through that through other needs. And also prior to opening the awareness center, the College of Medicine second year medical students did a survey in the community about what they would like to see in the center. So we'll certainly test that out on your day. I was very happy about that. Great. I think to that point, what level of open access is would this facility have for patients versus walk-ins or lack of a better term? Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you want to take a stab at that or I can either way. I think it's a little bit in development. At this moment still, certainly this is very conceptual in nature. I think it's, yeah, go, go, go. And then I think the public part for tonight and what we're hearing is kind of that directional input that the broad concepts resonate going forward and working out some more of those details. You know, I think speaking for the therapy services certainly just by virtue of the location, it provides more accessible services for the residents of Winnowsky. Certainly we would look at any specific services or types of services or ways of delivering that that we identify as being unserved or underserved in the community. It's the nature of the services so we would welcome any patient who, for whom this is a convenient location to receive that service, but we would expect that we'd be tailoring some of the offerings to folks who are home, either who live locally or for whom that's a convenient location that certainly is a structure of services to be. Yeah, I think to the top of that, I think that would be something that would be interesting in the final proposals. If you could have at least summary narratives in regards to whether a new service is being added to the region or currently what the experience of somebody in our community would be to access that service in another location would be. I hear the harrowing stories of people trying to figure out how to get the Kennedy Drive for health services all the time. That's pretty heartbreaking because they can only schedule appointments in these little tiny windows of time and they start the bus schedules, et cetera. So those kinds of conversations would be interesting too. Yep. Just as you progress in that. I think too, I just, I want to give the folks from U.M. Medical credit too. I think a lot of these free or kind of community-based services, walk-in services are not necessarily in the financial business model that a lot of these programs are accustomed to working in and I've really appreciated just the creativity and open minds that folks have come to the table with. I think from a financial perspective, it would have been super straightforward to just program more client-based, appointment-based services in there, generate revenue through that and have a cost center that's performing really robustly. I think they've really heard the feedback and come back with some cool concepts here. But with that said, it's got to be a mix. I mean, I think there's got to be realistically a revenue-generating entity happening here. So again, it's hard to say what exactly that mix is going to look like. I think some of that will bear out as the business plan gets more fleshed out but I've sensed a real willingness to commit to a balance that makes sense for Winooski, certainly as we've worked with the hospital. And then the open access, certainly, is largely driven by what people will attempt. Right, yes. And then the other lesson serves that people will attend and we are intent to design the service so that in conjunction with city parks and parks, department or staffing before the types of activities that we're going to demand. I think one of the things we talked a lot about with the full team that was down there last week was the potential synergy there is between the library move and the leadership that Amanda, people don't know this is Amanda Perry, our librarian. The potential move of the library and the move of the community services team to that footprint and expanding service delivery to our residents there from a city perspective that could be done in partnership with UVMMC and really realize that in that core of the building that one-stop shop for both municipal and other health-related services in the city. We've got budget projections of the black in 2020. That is the hope. I think as we look at that, I think it is important to point out and I tried to do that in the versions that were sent by highlighting those pieces in color. I think in the black does indicate in some cases expanded subsidy from the city. So I think with the library footprint moving from current location to a new location, that represents more or less $15,000 additional expense year-over-year just because it's a bigger footprint. So if we're paying a lease amount in, so there's a subsidization question there that I think we need to consider as a city. And I think the gym too, dependent on how that does or doesn't fall into a UVM footprint, UVM medical footprint, it does become an interesting space to try to rent. So I think, and by interesting, I mean challenging. It's on the back of the building, there's not a storefront. So I think that's a question too. We've sort of projected here kind of worst case. So square footage times anticipated lease dollar per square foot, what would that cost be to the city? I think it ends up to shy of $30,000 additional. I do think that there would be ways for us to bring that number down, partnering with other organizations, renting that out to a Zumba instructor, other fitness groups or whatnot. And I certainly think programmatically we could keep the space like that busy, especially in the winter months. But also really wanted to call that out as an area where that's a philosophical conversation I think we would need to have as a city to say, this could be a really great resource to the tune of $30,000, is that something we're willing to kind of look at, consider, or is that sort of DOA? And we need to go out and figure out a different way to lease that out to a third party. So again, in those spreadsheets, wanted to sort of highlight that by calling those pieces out in red. But if someone were paying in on that, which at this point maybe could happen, maybe not, we would be projecting again, that curve turning up into the black by 2020. That's one of the most, it's a little painful to see that court unused during the winter, because they're used to, I mean, not being hyperbolic or facetious. And there used to be 30, 40 kids would show up there on a weekday nights and hang out in there and play basketball. And I know the YMCA quite frankly, and I'm not a bash to say us didn't like that all the time from their customer experience standpoint, but there's a lot of benefits to the fact that the access also though, there's outdoor access and it links back to the library area from an access standpoint. So it would really be great to see if it's programming, even if it's not on a fee income basis to see that space activated again, if only in the interim that would be exciting. Yeah, and I think to Jesse's point, I do think there's a lot of potential synergies between UVM medical services, library services, a space like that and the ways we could activate it. We've admittedly been sort of sitting on it because of the negotiations with SNAP and not knowing what the future was gonna look like. Now that we've got, I don't wanna say clarity, but at least a little bit more information about that short term on the gym, we definitely intend to get that busy again. So- Feel good about those numbers, Angela? That's- Get the model early. I was listening to you, but I was watching her face all your time just to see how- And it's hard. I mean, I think we don't wanna sugarcoat it. Again, it's a conversation I think we need to have. It is an investment that is above and beyond what we're currently making in that building as a city. And I think that's the conversation point to say is there a willingness to explore that? Certainly on our end, I don't think if the answer is yes, then we sit back and throw our hands up and say, great, there's work for us to do. Again, I think finding partners in that gymnasium space, finding creative ways to finance things, working to minimize costs where we can, partner where we can, we certainly don't like to see that big subsidy number there if we can avoid it. But I think the reality is there will likely be some financial impact if we choose to move ahead in this way. Can you- That's Kuduski's commercial program for the community center, having worked with Brian Kuduski for many months now. I think what he's, his words tonight are very insightful and offer a lot of, I guess I'm gonna support on a broad basis the exploration of a balanced approach with UVM Medical for that community center. Thanks for all your work, Esther. What's that? Thanks for all your work. It's what I love to do and Ray and I have worked very closely and these guys that are here tonight, UVM Medical have been absolutely extraordinary to work with. And I think they're dedicated to being good community advocates with their uses in that center. I've had a number of experiences with the Medical Center over the years. And I know at its core, its mission is about being a community institution. And I think this is a great way to support to become part of our community. So I really support this. Any thoughts, concerns? On this one, I'm gonna swing back to the hub because I think that's, we kind of glossed over that a little bit, but. I would say that I echo the same sentiment. Like when I read this letter of intent that like these ideas feel right to me for the space. And then the big concern that I had coming out of it was the basketball court and what do we do with that space? So we'll retouch that a little bit. Okay. So just jumping around on your questions and just to clarify for folks, I think to me I'm hearing green light to go forward and keep working on that. Now let's blend that into this concept of the hub and appreciate the additional drawings on that and kind of a better explanation of what that might look like. Yep. So definitely a tip of the cap to Asher Nelson and the folks at Vermont Integrated Architecture. They were on a really tight timeline to turn this around for us and did a fantastic job. And to Amanda as well who made herself super available throughout the last couple of weeks to just pick up a phone call at a moment's notice. So as we come to you and talked about, I think a meeting or two back, looking at this back sort of southwest corner of that core of the O'Brien Center as a potential landing spot for a new library footprint. So in front of you here is a conceptual kind of architectural drawing of what that could look like. Again, this I think represents operationally a lot of really significant improvements for the library, just better sight lines, kind of more segmented and flexible space, some better office and small meeting facilities for community members and staff. I think that's something we certainly struggle with as a department. And I think to Jesse's earlier point, it does really help to start co-locating a number of community services team members in one footprint so that in theory for clients and community members coming in, it's an easier sort of one stop shot to come in and get your programmatic and kind of recreational needs met. So I think from a conceptual standpoint, certainly would love to hear any thoughts, comments. Again, this is conceptual in nature, that's sort of where we expected we would get to from a design perspective. And then I think to jump into the budgetary piece second and get into those details a little bit, but I just wanted to sort of get a quick reaction to the design itself and any thoughts there or things that jump off the page before we jump into the budget. I think the body expressed openness to this mode of service delivery and you guys have expressed confidence that you can pull it off with the current staff and that we're acknowledging that we're moving into the 21st century library model from the information access standpoint and that we're gonna be doing that with current staff by and large. And I don't know if there's a lot more to say in terms of setup on that. I mean, I think part of the question was the transferability of the promise community's funds too. Is there any big portion there? And we had a conversation last week, kind of a regular check and call with the funder for that. Again, expressing positivity about the concept dependent on tonight's conversation. Our plan is to send this to them and sort of move to the next phase. But I think as we looked at the details of the budget draft, the conceptual budget draft, I think there's plenty of places for us to tag that promise community monies against this project in a straight line way. I don't think we're having to squint too hard at it to see that those finances can get invested in ways that will improve the facility for families and little kids. So that was encouraging too, I think, to see from a financial perspective. It's almost doubling the space. It is about an 80% gain in space, which is significant. I think it's still not fletcher free. It's still a small community library, but I think again, it gives us a little bit more flexibility to program the space in creative ways versus now where it's, Amanda and her team do a great job, but it's a rectangle at the end of the day. And there's not a real way to divide that or segment that up. So I think this does improve that pretty dramatically. In this though, I was, is where I would say, the budget, contract, conversations, negotiations, you're figuring those out with them, that's market-based. This is the one where we're taking more leasable space and transferring it to a public service delivery space. Correct. So operationally above and beyond what's currently being invested in the space. And just to remind folks that the library is currently paying a lease annually. So now that this building is in the general fund, that's a little bit of out of one pocket into another, but we're still carrying a payment in the library budget of $30,000 annually. So this expanded footprint inclusive of the library payment, recreation is paying in about $6,500 annually at present for their space. And then the Winieski Family Center, we would expect we're estimating about half of their current lease payment would come back into this facility to allow them access to some of the programmatic spaces for the programs they run. So when you package all those together and compare what this cost would be on an annualized basis, represents about $13,000 additional subsidy into the facility annually. So again, that's I think a philosophical conversation that we started to have a few meetings back. I will say at that meeting we had come to you with I think it was just shy of $7,000 of additional funding. The reason that that jumped to 13 is that the current city offices were not considered as part of that initial floor plan. We were gonna kind of keep that as a separate space and try to lease that out separately. As we got into the design work with Asher and his team, it became pretty clear that that was gonna put some pretty big constraints on the design. So we chose to move ahead and recommend kind of enveloping that whole back corner versus kind of condoizing it, if you will. So that's what that extra $6,000 or $7,000 annually comes from is that current space. So that's $13,000 loss on top of the $30,000 loss for the rest of the building? Yep. Trying to think of how to say that, but. Yes. Yeah. And that is, remind me, we've pulled now this budget into the general fund. Correct. The reserve has come into the general fund as well. I'm gonna, the reserve is held separate because that was sourced from an outside funding source when it was originally populated. So we're carrying the current reserve balance as a separate. Designated reserve for this purpose. Right. Any new revenue above expenses in future years would have to be, it would kind of be lumped into surplus at the end of the year and would have to be specifically designated to be part of that reserve. Otherwise it would stay in the big pool of fund designated reserves. Right. Now that that's part of the general fund. So, but assuming they're continuing, so we're assuming if the whole, all the pieces come together because it's an annual operating deficit of $43,000 for, No, it ends up, it ends up having a negative impact in fiscal year 19, bottom line negative impact. And in future years with full tenancy starts to get into the black in fiscal years 2021. So that. But we're using our own money to pay ourselves. Correct. So it's moving it from one pocket to another. So I guess what I'm trying to get at are we going to have to raise taxes in order to pay for this concept? That's probably the easiest way to put it. I'm trying to think. So potentially there are ways that it can be partially mitigated with the leasing up the space. We could potentially use the O'Brien Community Center as this thing reserves to offset it partially. Probably not the best use of those funds because it will exhaust them in the first three years. In time it will probably go into the black compared to where we are now. But where we will be in the next three years. Right. I mean where we are now is we've had unleashed space for quite a long time because things were maybe going to happen that didn't happen. So I guess I'm confused about how we get to the black if we have to raise the money from the property tax in order to pay the rent to ourselves. So the way I see it in large numbers, but I think we owe you a much better financial analysis on this once now that we know we can move forward with some of these concepts. If we can fully lease up the Y space which we have not done this year. If we can fully lease commercially the kitchen and community room space. So I think there is an open question about the gym which would be very hard to lease and do we start quote unquote subsidizing that with city dollars and then an open question about the existing library, the current library footprint and do we try and keep that as community room space or do we try and use some of this new library model with the gym with a senior center with other space and try and lease up the current library depending on how we go down the path with those conversations. I think if we keep the current library, public community space, the new community room and expand this footprint and take over the gym we will have to raise taxes to support the building. I don't think there's any way around that. I think there might be a middle ground model if we think about leasing that very attractive storefront that is the current library and doing new revenue models with our existing with the new library footprint and the gym to bring in, you know, not the same as we would through a commercial lease but a little more programmatic revenue that we could break even more quickly. The lease amount for the current library space is equivalent to the amount of subsidization that we need to. Yeah. So if we could lease that space, we could pay ourselves for the gym. And we'd lack of revenue in the gym. I think we need to figure out how to be nimble from a space perspective and talk about public-private partnership on space usages or remind you that when we negotiated the Strain Agreement, we built in a hundred nights per year that we're gonna be available for community use and would encourage that model of conversations, and those spaces, you know, obviously there wouldn't be that much or that many, but that space is seen as a valuable gathering space. So retaining that opportunity is key. I don't see financially how we do this without leasing the library, the current library space. I think it has to be leased. I don't think it's not, it's not a luxury we have from my perspective in looking at these even initial budget numbers. And you're right. I think somebody will jump on it right away. I think it'll be at the storefront, somebody will, you know, want. Less, well, five years or so that that work was done ago, so it's relatively new renovations and it's in good shape. Yeah. Just bring those cool nusky paintings over. Don't leave those behind. Yeah, no, those are kind of loose. And I think to also just be clear on the capital side of a move, I mean, I think there's the operating impact and then there's a capital investment upfront. You know, we've talked about, again, being able to leverage the promise community funding against the bottom line that's here, which ends up being about 280 per the conceptual budget. You know, that leaves a gap. And so there's a couple of grants on tonight's agenda that we're certainly wanting to explore that I think will be competitive for. But I do just want to be really clear that that could represent an investment upfront and in a new facility. So I think there's two kind of financial questions. There's the upfront capital investment and then there's the ongoing subsidization over time. So I just think to call those out very clearly is important. I think if, you know, and it sounds like so far we are, if this is the green light to move forward with us, I think this is then, this is the foundation. You're gonna have a really clear foundation. And from my perspective and the expectations gonna be, you guys are gonna bring back much better, more evolved developed numbers to say this is the plan to get this property financially sustainable. And again, want to encourage think outside the box too. If that means pointing to us and saying we're gonna have to do something outside of the envelope of this building to create revenue streams on the property itself, then let's just get that out there. And VIA has spent enough time and had enough to engage in this conversations to write from that flexibility standpoint. It's a big property and it's underutilized from the physical space standpoint. Yep. What else? I think for us, that's, we've gotten some great feedback here and information. So I appreciate that. Thank you. Anybody else have any leader and concerns, questions or things that you'd like to see worked on? I know it's taken a lot of work. Thank you all very much for sticking with this and finding what is, I mean, we're sounding maybe a little downtrodden right now is it budget members? No, we really are. President Cole just stated to me we've had just empty space there and it's gonna be really excited to see it come back to life. Yes. And excited to hear about these conversations with long-term partners that could be, the critical to that. So thank you. And huge thanks to Amanda as well for her vision on the library front. She's a very quiet leader but really has amazing vision. How's our newest family member? Very good. She'll be one next to you. Wow. Oh my gosh. So fat. I was thinking like, oh, isn't she just like three months old? Oh my gosh. Great. Thanks for all your hard work. Thanks Esther. Thanks to the Tyra UVM team and thanks to Jesse and Ray. I appreciate all your time to work on this. We will still go through the exercise of saying any comments from the public? Great, so seeing and hearing none. We don't actually have anything to vote on. So hopefully we've given it up. Well the next two are kind of the vote. Yes, yes, yes, yeah. Thank you. Great. So we'll move on to items E and F which is approved the building's general services grant for library and early childhood. So this grant, this is an annual grant from the state. I think from a philosophical standpoint it's a really good fit for this project. So due at the end of this month and one we'd like to pursue and move ahead with. So it's for up to $25,000 for the BGS grant. And again, one we're pretty excited to continue to work on and apply for. I'll just ask globally, this has been a building, it's been a flux and I didn't see any kind of hooks in either of these that said that once you take these funds it has to stay coordinated in position the way that our money goes towards in perpetuity. I didn't see any evidence of that either. Likewise, as we look through, I mean, I think certainly with Terrant Foundation that's foundation funding tends to be more flexible fewer strings attached. With the state funding, this is actually funding I've used in the past in a previous job. It's a great funding source. It really supports good projects and it's not unlike the Land and Water Conservation Fund which has that sort of expectation and perpetuity. To my knowledge, this does not. So. Great. Questions or concerns in regard to the buildings and general services grant for the library and early childhood? I just wanted to flag that in the application requirements it says it's supposed to be used for shovel ready projects. Which I don't feel like that's what we're talking about here. I think that's a fair question. I think with the green light tonight and given the timeline on the Promise Communities Grant we're gonna work quickly to try to get there. So I think that's a fair question. And I think that'll be a question for the funder as well to consider. The nice thing is as an annual fund if they determine for whatever reason that we're not eligible this year, it's a recyclable application for future projects on that facility. So that's kind of the way we wanted to approach it. Yeah, it's a fair question. I just also noticed that the square footage is different, it's different in a couple. I noticed that and that was from when we added that office space. Yeah, I noticed that as well. Other questions or concerns? Any questions or concerns in the public? Seeing her now that you're gonna motion for approval of pursuing the buildings and general services grant for library and early childhood? So move. Second. Motion by House, second by Christine. Any further discussion? Seeing none, all those are favorit to say aye. Aye. And those opposed, motion carries. I'll take up item F, which is approval of the Tarrant Foundation Grant for Library and Early Childhood Up. So slightly different process here with a required letter of intent for this foundation funding. So we are requesting permission here to submit a letter of interest to the Tarrant Foundation for a grant of up to $50,000. That budget number is based on historically funded project amounts. So it's definitely at the higher end of what they've funded for projects, but we wanted to kind of leave ourselves that flexibility in our letter of interest to make that ask and work with them to get to an appropriate funding level for us and the funder. So hopefully we can move ahead with that. We'll add in that we're certainly appreciative of the family's support in the past and the community center reserves that we've been utilizing to help figure all this out. Absolutely. So incredibly appreciative of their past, current and continued support of the community and the people who live here. So this is one of the foundations that was contacted by the pool committee. Submitted a letter of interest. It wasn't on the list that I saw from Cindy. I will follow up. I personally wrote this. So I know it's been drafted. Daily noted. So I think, I mean, just in terms of how we're approaching funders, around these projects, I think, I don't know, it just, to me, it feels like we're competing against ourselves in terms of what is the priority and what's the message coming out of Winooski in terms of projects. Also, I did bring this up to the pool committee and pointed out that there is a specific accessibility branch to the Tarrant Foundation and wondered if they might be it and they were gonna talk to you about this and wondered if they might be able to wrap the specified funding into accessibility items for the pool that are currently built and expenses to that project. And it might be a wave. Differentiating. Maybe, but it's a really good point. Thank you for calling that out. I will follow up with them and see. But I mean, it is ultimately up to you all. If you don't approve us applying for these funds for this project, we won't. So it is your priority call to a certain extent. I have to say, I don't feel great about it because it feels like we're, I don't, again, I don't know the ultimate status of the letter because I just helped with drafting. So I don't know if it's been sent. Is there a specific deadline for this? There's not. No. I guess I wonder if we could table it and just connect back with the pool committee and let them know that we're considering submitting a letter of interest to the Tarrant Foundation wanted to make sure we were coordinating our efforts. I would recommend reaching out to the foundation itself and see if there are different. Yeah, there's definitely different channels of prioritization through the foundation, but I think the larger grants are all considered in the same pool, if you will. Yeah, I mean, I would be surprised. I mean, yeah, that would be anywhere. Yeah. I just think it's important to. Have a coordinated front. Coordinate that. I'm going to look forward to hearing how it goes in August. Yeah, so I'll follow up with that and find out. Thank you. Yeah. Do I need to make a motion to table this until our August meeting? Actually, no, I can just call for a motion if nobody says anything that's automatically tabled. Any other comments, questions, concerns? Everybody okay with that or have a concern with that? Okay, any questions, concerns from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I entertain a motion for approval of acceptance of this grant. I'll call again for a second opportunity for a motion. Seeing and hearing none, I'll call for a third and final opportunity for a motion. Seeing and hearing none, this item is thereby tabled for lack of motion. Thank you. All right. And we'll move to item G, which is discussion with all update for economic vitality. Thanks Ray. Thanks for the work on all this. He'll be back. Appreciate it. Okay, good evening. So this is the first goal update for the strategic policies and priorities and strategies that the council adopted for 2018-2019. You'll see it's the same standard package, the memo that we've been using before. We do have a slightly different set of goals here than we had last year, although many of them have remained somewhat similar. And it's set up slightly differently with must do, will do and may do priorities. And I'm happy to approach this in any way you'd like me to. I can walk you through the must do priorities and really highlight those. Or I can walk you through the entire memo if you like, whatever your preference is. I think you just wanna walk through and keep it 40,000 feet. I will do my very best. Let me know if I'm going down into the news. What's your style? Okay. So the three must do priorities for the year were implement the parking study, primarily access control, signage, data and management and the parking app. Work toward full TIF build out with an emphasis on the hotel and lot D. And promote business and employment retention and expansion. And I'm not gonna go through all those individual bullets but I will discuss them later on. As you'll see, we've identified implementing the parking study and working toward full TIF build out as proceeding but slower than planned. The parking study part of that is about us not having designated staff that specifically deals with parking. So we have a team of people working on that. There is forward motion on it right now but it is a lot slower than we had hoped. Work on the full TIF build out continues and is complicated. I think you've heard this update for me, but the only big update on this non-executive session related is we've brought on weight and Burke to help cost out the different TIF models and negotiated scenarios with us in conjunction with our attorney. So they are actively working on that and negotiations continue to go up. Excellent, thank you. In terms of implementing the parking study and going just a level down, we are still working with Burlington on implementing a shared parking app. It's been reviewed by our city attorney and we are waiting on some answers back from them on just a couple key questions and then we'll be signing off on the contract and should be rolling out the new parking app. And in addition to that, one of the things that over the last couple years has been R&R radar is doing a wayfinding study for downtown, but we've been using the municipal planning grants for our municipal plan. So this year we recommend that we apply for a municipal planning grant for the wayfinding study. The applications are due on October 1st and I'll come back to council with a request for that. So that will help move it forward as well. In terms of promoting business and employment retention and expansion, that's been something that's been ongoing. So I've been reporting on it, but there are more specifics here about your direction to us about how to go forward. So just at the basic level, since the April update, we provided direct assistance to 12, I will say my department has provided direct assistance to 12 existing businesses and provided information and guidance for five additional businesses interested in locating in Winooski. One of those has since opened in Winooski. One of the things that I'm finding is a lack of available space with commercial kitchens or the possibility of having a commercial kitchen for restaurants is a limiting factor and it serves as a barrier to many potential new businesses. So construction of new restaurant spaces would create opportunities for new business owners in Winooski. We also did the business round table to discuss the Main Street Redevelopment Project and kind of head off any concerns that Main Street businesses might have and be sure that we're there from the beginning talking about ways we'll need to assist business as we go forward with the project if we go forward with the project. So I directly conducted in-person visits to all the businesses on Main Street above the rail bridge to discuss the project, to receive input and feedback and to invite the business community to participate in the round table. Maybe it was a little bit too early because we got one person who attended the business round table but nonetheless we have done the initial outreach and we'll continue to do that probably doing another round table in August. Targeted business recruitment is ongoing based on community need and what was expressed in the Economic Development Strategic Plan. So specifically I've done some outreach to ACE hardware about bringing in a hardware store. It was one of the top two requested businesses and apparently now I will be doing a lot more outreach about a gym. Retention for our large-scale employers usually involves work to find parking solutions, larger spaces for expanding businesses and attraction of necessary workforce. So the specific direction that we were given per the latest discussion of policies and priorities was to conduct a parcel and data analysis to understand our baseline of local businesses and then to use city resources to create opportunities for locally owned business startups and expansions, use city resources to create employment opportunities for residents and expand availability of goods and services for residents to promote business and employment retention and expansion within the context of the need for citywide financial sustainability. And I've included in here for you, I've done the first piece of parcel analysis. I know there's been a lot of concern about Main Street. So I did a parcel analysis of the businesses on Main Street above the rail bridge and it shows you here the results of that local business analysis and it really depends on how you're defining local. So I've broken it out as percentage that are Winooski-based ownership and that's 29% of the businesses on Main Street. Chittenden County-based ownership, that's 87% of the businesses above the rail bridge on Main Street and Vermont-based ownership would represent 94% of the businesses above the rail bridge on Main Street. So based on this initial analysis, which I think probably will hold for much of our business community, it will probably be fairly representative. I would love to have further direction from you on how far you want me to go in doing a parcel analysis. One, do you want me to do every business in the city? And how should we focus our efforts in moving forward? Gateways. Gateways. Okay. Give you my feedback on that. Those are essentially the, that's where the zoning allows for change to occur. We're probably going to see a need to focus on it. That's where the pressure would be, any development pressure. Make sense to everybody else? Okay, great. I'm happy to move forward in that way. And in terms of maintaining local business, what is the definition of local that you all feel comfortable with? Are we talking about specifically owned by a Winooski owner or are we talking Chittenden County? I mean, if we're talking Vermont, that's most of our businesses. If I can jump in. I think from the conversations Heather and I've had about this and she's done a lot of really excellent thinking about this is, could we consider this our baseline? If the community concern is with the Main Street Revitalization Project that people are going to be displaced, that what we take away from that is that we like the mix we currently have. So if this is our baseline mix of trying to keep about a third Winooski owned, but the vast majority of Vermont owned as we think about how to use our resources to retain businesses and to welcome new businesses. If we're using this target, this baseline target is kind of what we want to retain that gives us good direction as opposed to saying, no, we really want to take some of those Vermont but not Chittenden County owned businesses and make them Chittenden County or Winooski owned businesses to us. So I was like, our thinking is that is a very, that would be a very targeted amount of work as opposed to just thinking let's maintain this and ensure that if and when we use our resources to retain and grow our industry that we're staying within this value statement. That makes sense. I think that's wicked complicated because there's so many economic factors that determine whether or not Vermont is our opening businesses or aren't and whether or not specific people in an exact community. I think it's interesting from a moderate perspective to see this as the yes, this is the baseline from a numerical standpoint, what changes occur as a result of future development. I'm less comfortable adopting like a target in this than I think it takes a long time to develop a thoughtful target and that takes understanding correlative and causal information and I would be very concerned with saying, well, this is the way it is. So that's the right way that it should look. Maybe we should have more Winooski owned businesses now. Well, the other piece is the following paragraph which really speaks about the fact that some of the most desired businesses by the community are less likely to be locally owned like a full service grocery store is less likely but would have a huge economic impact on the community. So I think you have to constantly be balancing those two things. In addition, getting one tenant for the country home products space could have a tremendous impact on all of our local economic vitality. So kind of doing a dance back and forth between those two might be the appropriate place to land. Ownership of a business is not in and of itself definitive of what impact that business has. Correct. If there's somebody providing good jobs to the people who live here and employment opportunities, there's value in that and if it can be of a minor, that's great and if it's not, then that's not always a bad thing. Yeah, bringing 60 jobs at a new industrial tenant versus giving one person their own business, you have to weigh that and balance that. Yeah, I'm less, I think it's great that a third of the businesses in Main Street are Munozki owned. I don't see any need to change that dramatic. I think that that's a naturally occurring phenomenon and I think to the extent we're devoting city resources, it'd be good to make sure that we're paying attention to the needs of local business owners and ensuring we don't see a dramatic change in that. I am more interested, I think, in the number of employees that are potentially able to find employment in these businesses and that are from Munozki. I don't know how we better monitor that, but I think it's, I know Eric has talked a lot about the need to ensure that we have businesses that come in that really don't want to speak to the needs of the community, which the grocery store, hardware store, and industrial employer would, but also employee residents. Yeah, it's funny, I actually just met with someone from TwinCraft today from their People Center, they don't call it human resources and asked them to send me numbers and a fifth of their employees are Munozki residents and that's for both their Essex plant and their Munozki plant, so I think certainly celebrating things like that and, right. I think maybe an interesting context, ACS has a number of jobs in a community that would be interesting to overlay into this report generally, so even though you might not be able to hone it in on these exact businesses on this corridor, it'll give sort of like a job status report and the Vermont Department of Labor will tell you how many Munozki residents work in Munozki versus. Yeah, it's 14%, 14% of Munozki residents are able to work in Munozki. We don't, in Burlington, it's 56% of Burlington residents work in Burlington, so we don't have enough jobs in the city of Munozki to be able to employ 56% if every job were taken by a Munozki resident, so I certainly think that's room for growth. And here would be my feedback on this, is we've listed like two or three things. I think if it gets much more than that, we're gonna lose it, right? So I don't think we need a complicated PowerPoint or gobs and gobs and gobs of data. We've brought forward just a couple of things that would be really interesting to look at that are added into this summary to help provide a little additional context, and it says. Yeah, it does. I think it's really great you did this, though. Thank you. I appreciate you guys having other questions, comments, suggestions. Just say to the point about this personal analysis and monitoring for business ownership. I agree, like it doesn't make sense to set targets there, but it is something that I think that we should look at from time to time. And if we see like a rapid departure, then we need to get it investigated at that point. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. How did the conversation with ACE go? It went really well. Actually, it started quite some time ago when I went to a conference. I had just received the Economic Development Strategic Plan, and an owner of an ACE hardware store locally was one of the presenters. So I ran up like a little freak show right afterward, like, here's my card, let's talk. So I've met with them a couple times. It's time for me to follow up with them again, but they had diverted their efforts to another local community and wanted to continue the conversation a little bit further down the road. We pursued as hard as we could the concept of a re-store, potentially going here, but that just didn't work out. We spent a couple years in those conversations, hoping that we would get some youth build opportunities plus hardware types, sales, plus, and I think you're straight back. Alas, they found a location in a place across the river. Other highlights from other efforts that staff have prioritized, the will-dos, as opposed to the must-dos. Streamlining the permitting process can now begin as we have Eric on staff to kind of lead that charge. The implementation of the Economic Development Strategic Plan is ongoing. The first immediate term recommendation was rolling out the Winooski Small Business Loan Program, which has been completed. The next immediate term will be to establish new website tools that make it a more direct point of contact when businesses or developers are interested in coming to the city and we're in process with that. We have executed a contract with Civic Plus to design a new website utilizing the new branding and we had the project kick off last week on Wednesday, so that is progressing. Supporting the downtown Winooski Organization to be a valuable resource to support the business community and city-wide vibrancy. Recently, the board has begun to discuss possible strategies for moving to hire professional staff to lead the organization. They've been a board-run organization since January. So, and they're finding that while they were catalyzed by the emergency, it is a lot. So, I think those will be ongoing conversations. In terms of monitoring for gentrification indicators, when we first put together the monitoring plan, it was mid-year and then we had new census data. It's primarily based on the community US census data. So, I was able to do it a second time in the same year because census data had just come out. But now it has really come home to me that it only comes out once annually. So, in terms of providing a useful monitoring tool for gentrification, I recommend that we do it once a year in January when the census data comes out so I can give you the census to census tract analysis. That doesn't mean that we're not aware of and attempting to mitigate any potential signs of gentrification. In particular, the Housing Commission is developing recommended policies to avoid displacement of existing residents and strategies to avoid growing income disparity between renters and homeowners. So, that will be ongoing. Yes, yeah. The American Community Survey data, what's the lag time on this? So, it's a two-year lag. Is that current? So, I mean, one of the issues that I've had with some of our monitoring reports is that it's capturing data pre-development in some cases. So, I just wonder whether that is the best tool. The last was 2016. So, 2016 covered River House, River Run, Peking Duck House, which is not called that as Mill House. So, most of the development that has happened in the city is captured in the last one that I... So, it was... 2016. So, when 2019 will get 2017 data. That's correct. So, I just... Oh. I don't know whether two-year-old data is really useful in terms of current decision-making processes. I just... It's the best you can do. I don't know what to do better than that. It's what's available. Yeah. Well, we do survey information through the rental registry and other sources. I just want to... For the full range of indicators, it's at a census level, which is how gentrification is determined. It's the only way that I would have that range of indicators. I mean, we could certainly look at rental registry. I haven't received that this year. And the real challenge is gonna be the ACS. Just remember, estimates, right? Right, right. And it's just a very soft look. And the census is gonna come out. And it's gonna change probably everything. The whole baseline's gonna change. Yep, that's right. And where the prediction numbers are gonna change. That's right. That's gonna be a big moment for our community in the city. It will. Well, there's a concern about participation in that. Yes. This time around, because it's certainly questions that have been added. But also a lot of resources that are based off of those numbers. I mean, this is how federal and state monies are prioritized is by that data and information. So from our standpoint, it would be a really meaningful thing. Yeah, I guess I feel uncomfortable saying that's the one source of data we're gonna look at to monitor gentrification. Because it is an estimate. It's a two-year-old estimate. And, yeah, so I just wanted to put that out there. I'm not asking for a response necessarily, but it's... I'm open to suggestions at any point. That's based on the way it's monitored in the academic world. So that's what I came up with. Yeah. From a housing perspective, that's what we have to live with. And it's always a understood thing that that's always gonna be the case. But from a logical housing perspective, two of the arguments made is it also paces your policy and decision-making in a way that's looking at historical trends as much as possible, while also trying to react to what the situation on the ground is. Does policy makers sometimes that measure of delay isn't a negative thing to have built in for us? Except if it's too late. Right, but that's... Where's how we occupied? I think at this point, though, we're not, we're seeing on average third of the events a year. We're not seeing something that's going to totally, we're not seeing seven buildings go up in a year. That's going, that could potentially really quickly affect our population, our demographics. I don't look in the planning world, we usually know about a year out what's coming just from who's looking at parcels and who's looking at projects and even looking out in the next two or three construction seasons. I think we're pretty much on track, the market could drastically change. And I think we're seeing that with construction costs increasing and interest rates increasing. I think if anything, we're gonna start seeing a decrease in development on an increase. I certainly don't predict in the next three years we're gonna see it develop much faster than it's currently developing. Anything else, Heather? Just the last two pieces, a small business loan program. There've been six potential businesses referred to the program, one applied. And I think we should be evaluating this regularly to see if it's effective, if it's not effective we need to make some changes to the program guidelines. And impact fees, we are still on point to be receiving that, for you to be receiving back draft structure in fall of this year. And CSRPC has identified our ASG as the consultant to work with us on that, which is a really good news for our community. And I think the kickoff meeting's the end of the month. Questions, comments, concerns for Heather on the update? And I think too, maybe just if folks wanna take moments and share reflections with Jesse or Heather offline to via an email, individually not to the whole group about any kind of stylistic things that would be helpful or any kind of missing information as you think through the report. If there's something you don't think of now. Thank you. Thank you very much. Any questions, concerns from the public? Okay, so seeing and hearing none, thank you. Thank you. We'll go back to Ray, use of community services reserves for recreation programming projects. So Alicia and I worked recently with the SE Group, which is a Burlington based consulting group to develop a proposal for recreation programming and event assessment process, basically whereby we could go sort of to an earlier point out to the community and hear more definitively from the community. What do you guys wanna see? You know, I think as a recreation department of one staff person and one AmeriCorps member, we wanna really make sure as we're investing in new programs, developing new things that were being smart and strategic about that. We did do a very informal kind of community assessment about four and a half years ago now. And I think have used that pretty heavily, but I'm the first to admit it wasn't a particularly scientific process. So the goal here would be to work with SE to develop, work with them to deliver and develop the baseline process that we could then reuse incrementally in the future every few years to sort of reevaluate or assess. We'd be left with those tools in hand and wouldn't have to go back out and kind of work with a consulting firm. So it's moving here to develop a process and tools that we could then use in-house in the future. So I think it's a really nice investment here upfront to kind of more formally establish a baseline, get some of those community need questions met, and then have a tool that we can use into the future to do that every two, three, four years depending on. Again, it's a community that changes so quickly that I think it is important that we have a process we can revisit periodically. I think it's exciting thinking. It's the engagement. Love some of the referrals they have from the Outlaw Recreation, Sandpoint Recreational Economies. Get the massive, massive buzzword right now in economic development. So I think their experience there is really interesting too. I mean, not to say this is all about economic development. This is about the services for people, but still you engage people the same way of providing a service or product that you enjoy. So thoughts? So I'm assuming the answer must be yes, but this is in response to some need. Like you guys currently don't have a good procedure to follow at this point. I mean, not a formal one. Again, I think we're working off four and a half year old data that resulted from a Survey Monkey tool that we developed in-house here. So I think by kind of looking to some professionals within the recreation field who do this work nationally, the hope here is that we can formalize that process a bit more at a level of sophistication and have that moving into the future. I think the other thing here that is part of this is to look at some program analysis. So program evaluation tools that we can implement at the end of programming, looking at some cost recovery model development too. That's something we've wanted to do, but again, I think bringing some of the professional expertise to the table to help us develop that would be pretty huge for us. So as we look at conversation we've had here a lot, which programs do we subsidize? Which programs do we not? How do we set fee structures that are appropriate to the programs in the community? I think that's some of the analysis and guidance that they can provide up front and then we can then use into the future. Who's the idea to use the community services as an input or intake point and have they reflected upon this proposal? The commission, yep, yep. So they looked at this at their last meeting, felt very strongly in favor of it. They voted as such, but felt like it was a good use of reserves. And again, sets us up to be more intentional and planful as we develop the programs. Are they being provided with resource constraints? Is it a sort of a limiting factor? So one fear I have or question I have is are we going to come back as a result of a robust community engagement process with all the laundry lists of new programs that the community has participated in a process that they say this is what we want and then we have to talk about it's kind of like the pool. That's the risk you run with engaging in a process is that people then expect to see something that looks like what they said they want. And so it's important to me that there's some dose of reality to the conversation as lame as that may be in terms of limiting creativity and excitement, but at the same time we're not in a position, we just had this conversation about the library, that's a big lift. We're not in a position to double our offerings on the REC department front. So I'm interested in your thoughts about how we mitigate or manage expectations. Yeah, I think I'd say two things there. Number one is we've had pretty extensive conversations through the development of this with SE and they understand what we are. You know, we're a REC department of two people. We're not gonna be able to grow staff dramatically. So I think as we've worked to develop this, they understand that having met with us in person. I don't think in any way that's the expectation as an outcome of this. I guess the other thing I'd say is that we are really keenly aware that we're not gonna be able to deliver every program that happens in the city. That's just not a reality of a department of two. And so what my hope is that as we get responses and feedback from the community, we can then be more intentional about going out and courting partners and figuring out who are those outside agencies we can bring in and partner with to deliver the services that people want. I'm gonna know false illusions that we're gonna be able to stand up every program. People kind of check a box next to you. I understand that it's important that the people participating in the process understand that. Yeah. And I think that's really- Lady Services Commission. Yeah, yeah. And they've been very clear that the community vision around the pool is the vision, right? And so I don't wanna repeat that. Yeah, yeah. And we can certainly work with how to sort of frame, again, how to frame that in such a way that it doesn't deter people from participating and kind of cast a cloud over it. But I think it's certainly a very fair question. But again, I think, I guess the flip side of that for me is if we do have limited resources to invest- Prioritize them. I wanna be able to prioritize them and do that in an intentional way versus- Doing the same thing. This program might work. Cool, let's check it out. Right. And then we've spent time developing it and nobody sides up. Yeah, I definitely appreciate the thinking and the need to be strategic and how we leverage. It's just a matter of- Hard balance. A consistent thread throughout all the engagement that indicates we're trying to do the most with what we have. Not necessarily with creating brand new armies of humans, I guess. The space too, just encourage engagement with Planning Commission if that comes up because that's on their topic and list too in the planning process to talk about the natural areas. And that's always been a big discussion. Gilbrook, Cassavan, Industrial, Portions Industrial, whether or not they're natural areas or our creation spaces, what definitions. And we keep walking up to that conversation and turning around and saying, we're gonna do that right now. But just if there's gonna be something that makes some kind of recommendations and then just keep going with them. Yeah, I mean, it definitely mentions the physical facilities in here. I expect that'll be sort of a sidebar of this process. I don't think that'll be the central focus. I think obviously you need a place to run program so that'll be an outcrop of what we learned but we're not intending to do sort of a parks and open space analysis through this phase of a process. This is really more about events and programs. And then we'll have to figure out, do we have the facilities to deliver those? If not, what are the steps we need to take to get there? I might have missed this one. What's the timeline? So I think it's somewhat fluid. As we've talked to them, we've talked about roughly a six month window to get this thing kind of built up and implemented. I don't think we have a hard and fast endpoint that we're aiming towards. Right. I just think about in terms of being strategic, if we do move forward with the library, reconstituted library space and we have a gym, we need to now, I mean, it might be good to direct the conversation around programming in these great new spaces that we're making available. What does that look like? At least, I'd like to see that if we move forward so that we can be paying attention to the revenue side of. I think another interest area was having them help us think about the cost recovery model and being able to build that out a little more intentionally with the FY20 budget. So whether that looks like just reducing our revenue projections or actually setting aside budgeted money for cost recovery, and I don't have an answer of what that should look like, but I think our hope is that they will have helped us do some of that thinking before December when we bring you the budget. Correct. Yeah. Any reflections from that? Yeah, so when I reviewed their project list, it seems like our community is somewhat unique in terms of our rich diversity and based on their engagement approach, you're talking about a needs assessment or a web survey and so the city website and how might they really effectively engage our community with some culturally intelligent approaches to get the right kind of information? That's a great question. I think it's one Jesse brought up in reviewing this. Certainly it was one that jumped out to us as well. Part of doing this project on the budget that we're proposing here is that a lot of the legwork and kind of groundwork is gonna be driven by staff and volunteers. So we're not paying a consultant necessarily to be at every event and go knock on doors. That gets pricey really quickly. So I think we've tried to thread a needle here of getting the professionals to the table to help us develop the tools and then we're gonna rely on staff and those local experts to help implement some of this. I think it's relying on the relationships that we have ideally expanding and cultivating this further, but the ALVs, the VRPs, the Green Mountain Bootnees organizations, kind of bread and butter groups that we're working a lot with and really working directly with those partners to help get this into the right hands and get the right responses back. It's certainly something we're really keenly aware of and gonna stay on top of. You're right. I mean, I think you see a lot of Colorado, West Coast, you know, it's big resort recreation towns and I think in talking to Drew and sort of the team at SE, I think one of the things about this project that was really exciting for them is that it isn't like the rest of their portfolio. It's a very different community and I think they were really excited at that opportunity and being local, they get what Winooski is about. They understand and watch the change and grow. Okay. I guess just the messages that it's important to us that that be paid attention to of the staff are helping to facilitate the rollout of some of these tools that it's, to me, I think to counsel important that the demographics of our community are represented in the employee. Yep, absolutely. Questions, comments, concerns? Questions, concerns, comments from the public? So seeing and hearing none, I would entertain a motion for approval of use of the community services reserves for recreation programming as presented in tonight's packet. So I'll move. Second. Motion by House, like by the colony for discussion. Seeing and hearing none, all those in favor say aye. Aye. And those opposed? Motion carries. All right. Thank you. Thank you for another conversation we look forward to. Yeah. All right, now we'll move to the final item which is discussion of the commission's realignment to strategic vision areas. So this is a conversation we had at the staff and council retreat in June and I just want to kind of keep the momentum going. So I'm not specifically asking for a vote tonight, but wanted to outline where staff was in thinking about this realignment. So I provide some background information here in the memo that I won't read. Our comprehensive recommendation, which I think we've talked about thus far, is to allow the regulatory bodies that we currently appoint, or you currently appoint the planning commission, DRB to continue as is, no changes there. Allow our advisory boards to continue as they currently exist and really be quote unquote user groups or groups who are participating in the service delivery model, who provide feedback not in an unappointed way, but for the library commission to our staff who are running programs and then realign the commission structure to the strategic vision areas. And we've outlined a proposal of how that could be done. So I wanted to give you all an opportunity tonight to give us a little more feedback on how any thoughts you had on that. And if generally you're in agreement, how we propose to move forward is to fine tune this model, the realignment of those commissions to continue the survey that we currently have out on the ground with commissioners to get their feedback on how we could approve our support to the commissions. We heard from you all that we would like to have a meeting with the current commissioners to talk about this concept and to talk about how, you know, to feed some of the data we're hearing from them back to them and get their feedback. And I think we would aim to try and do that. The end of August, beginning of September, it's a hard time of year in August to schedule big meetings like that. So maybe airing towards the beginning of September. Then we'd have to go through a process of updating the charters and launching a new system. We'd also talked at the retreat about developing inclusionary policies and training opportunities. So don't wanna lose that thread and want to have that, want to get your feedback tonight on efforts you would like us to undertake to support that effort. And then also wanted to outline the process improvement we've already internally discussed about how to provide more systematic feedback to the commissions and give them the tools they need to do their work. Finally, we've heard some kind of really interesting ideas already through the survey. For example, and Ray actually brought this up in a meeting as well. The idea of having all commissioners, all commissions meet on the same night of the month to enable us to lower some of those barriers to entry. So provide childcare on a night, perhaps even provide dinner or technology support or other things that might lower that barrier to entry. It would be a pretty significant change for us, but it's intriguing. We've previously talked about that as a way of possibly also having more cross commission pollination where they could meet on similar ideas where if there's somebody coming to talk to one commission on something that makes sense for them and to do that it's, and if logistically that can be worked out, I think that's a really cool idea, I don't know if that's fair, but I am. So we're happy to keep moving forward in this direction, but I wanted to give you all some time on an agenda to further discuss. Here's initial thought that popped into my head today. Sorry. But one thing I think is really important to a frame is that we came up with a strategic vision in the absence of a functioning workable strategic plan. And the idea was for it to serve as a sort of stock gap or a bridge to getting the municipal plan finished. And that's really why we did it. It's because, hey, we're making all these big decisions and every time there's a conversation, we end up falling into these strategic conversations that just bog down the decision-making process. I guess the one thing before making this leap at this point in time that I would like to have real assurance of is that there's not gonna be a proposal to blow up this theoretical structure in the strategic plan, right? Master plan? Yes, yeah. So because really, as soon as that master plan comes out, it replaces that strategic vision. And that strategic vision is still there as this sort of baseline focus, but really we should be coordinating ourselves to work around the execution of that plan and that vision, right? And so far, they've adopted the strategic vision as the guiding concept for that. And so right now it's being written in a way where they're grouping things underneath those. But there was the beginnings of the nibblings of a conversation around the edges. And the last time about sort of proposing some reworking of some language, which I think is great that the planning commission's taking on that conversation and concept to push back the council and say, hey, we think you could say this this way and cover this, we think too that this should be included in that visionary statement. So I guess from, I hate to say push pause, but that's one thing I think would be really good to see settled before taking action on this because conceptually I love it and I think it makes sense. But it would, I'll just say it in the way I would say it, commonly it would suck to have, to all this work go into that. And then the municipal plan to come out and be structured in a different way, if then suddenly we're all looking like, oh, wait a second, where does this target goal fit into this structure? So I mean, I... So I guess my initial reaction to that is, and you guys have heard me say this before, I think one of our enormous community strengths right now is that we have a strategic, we have so much alignment to the strategic vision. So I would, and I agree with you, I think that the planning commission is the right place right now to have conversations if we're going to fine tune or tweak the strategic vision areas. And I would do a lot to ensure that we stay aligned to shared goals. I don't quite frankly care if they're those specific words, I think certainly fine tuning of those words and concepts is important. And you know, they're three and a half years old at this point, correct? The doctor in 2015. So I mean, it's a good time to check back in. So I think it's a, I mean, I think the frustrating thing with not moving forward with this now or pressing pause or slowing down a little bit is that kind of the word is out that we're thinking about this. So some of the commissions may feel even more uncertain about what they're working on. But if that's the case for four or five months while they provide feedback through the master planning process and engage in that process and engage in that implementation plan, I think that does make a lot of sense and ensures that we maintain that alignment to a structure. And just so the council knows the conversation the mayor is alluding to is the planning commission took up on Thursday night the economic vitality chapter and had started to have that conversation about small town that remember the small town feel language and how we define that and what that means to us. And is that the right phrase or is some other phrase, other definition capturing the sense of community and connectedness we wanna make sure we maintain. So that's what he's referring to. So I think we're happy to, I mean, I think there are aspects of this. I think we can still have conversations about lowering barriers. I think we can still work on inclusionary policies. I think we can still work on training procedures while not kind of pulling the plug on the change right now. Well, I think as soon as we have a commitment to what the structure of the plan is gonna look like, then it's go. And that shouldn't take that long. I mean, I think we're really there. I just think it would be a good thing to run up to say, hey, planning commission, maybe at their next meeting, we're thinking about doing this. Are you guys good with the way this is set up before we really blow that up? So I guess, again, we're really thinking out loud on the fly here. Because that planning commission who is incredibly engaged in this process and doing huge amounts of work is relatively new to this structure as a whole and has really only had the conversation thus far about economic vitality. They'll start the municipal infrastructure conversation at the next meeting. I would like to give them some room as a group. If we're really going to allow them to run with that concept of, are these the right value statements? I'd like them to get through the conversations about all of them before I really ask. And that work will be done in September. That's not work that's gonna bleed over into March and April. And it's less about the words than it is the categories. I think that's the, I mean, the words don't matter from an organizational standpoint, right? It's the categories of issues and work that we want the groups focused on. So I think there's just a commitment to the structure, the theoretical structure of how it's gonna be organized than we'd see that. Am I gonna leave for Mike, Mary, and Cole running right now? Well, you're there. So I can't speak to sort of the risk associated with embarking on a totally different direction. I find it hard to imagine that we would end up with four or five fundamentally different areas. I think, yeah, is it vitality? Is it small-tone feel? That to me is not a substantive change. But so I think I'd be looking for a signal from the planning commission around, I mean, to your point, is that are these the strategic areas of focus for the city because that's how we wanna orient the commission work? I mean, this is all about trying to ensure that the commissions are supporting the focus areas for the city and the work that we're trying to achieve rather than operational activities within departments. Yes, that is the goal. So I appreciate the heads up that it might start to take a turn because I thought it was, we've oriented the master plan around the strategic vision. And it is, it's just, it's not done yet. And that's the part that that process unfolding is just the only thing that made, again today, I'm sorry, maybe like have this moment of pause and thinking about this and that, what if in the middle of, you know, drafting, there is a shift and things but you know what, maybe all this does is reinforce what we think it should look like from a conceptual standpoint. I just, if we pass this, I want that word to go back to the planning commission and if we're gonna wait and have that settle, I would want them to give feedback to say that conceptually this seems to make sense to us too. Because then a lot of ways, a lot of the information work that's gonna happen at those commission levels are gonna filter there too before it comes to counseling in all the cases. That makes sense. So I feel like either way here, no matter what comes out of the master plan, we're still talking about changing the alignment from departments to strategy areas. So like we're pretty sure I'll work with that at this point. And just like reading through what's in this memo, like these process improvements can move forward without having that information available. Which I think honestly, speaking from my experience serving on a commission, like those are the pieces that were the least clear to me. I think some of this other stuff that we're talking about potential next steps or like these other, sorry, the other part, like other ideas for consideration, learning the barrier, potentially changing the meeting schedule, like that's stuff we have to talk about longer. Like obviously could continue to investigate ideas about that, but we couldn't really reconfigure, do the actual reconfiguring or rescheduling or reappointing or whatever until that piece of the master planning is, there's long-winded way of sort of reiterating what Jesse said, that part of this we can move forward with and it sounds like the other part we should hold on a little bit. I actually like the idea of shifting how we meet and if we could do it all in one evening and remove some of the barriers of participating and increasing the participation. I think that's invaluable and I think it's a lot more efficient and synergetic and that's gonna take some time to shift the culture of working together and then meanwhile we dovetail with the master plan coming out and getting revisioned about the work. But I think that's something we've talked about, talked about, how do we get more people involved in this work and that to me makes total sense. So let me feedback some, say back some things I think I'm hearing maybe a path forward. So like the idea of onboard with the idea of moving from departments to strategies, like the idea of going to one night and really thinking about lowering those barriers, want to give the planning commission room to kind of run and finish a process. I also think that there is going to be a readjustment on the, especially for the safe, healthy and connected people commission, there is going to be some adjustment there and I think that there is a value to waiting, so to waiting until the planning commission does the work on the implementation plan of the master plan to recruit members. So over the next couple of months, they're doing one and a half meetings each about each content area and then spending time working on the implementation plan of all those content areas. And I think those community conversations about what the implementation looks like would be one good to have before we give the charges to the commission because really those implementation plans are the charges for the commission and two, those community conversations might get new people interested in serving who haven't thus far been served. So I think there are some steps we can make between now and October and November on process improvements, scheduling policies and training opportunities and then the real alignment of the commissions will happen with the adoption and implementation of the master plan. Is that a little bit what I'm saying? Or even once it just becomes firm what it's gonna look like, right? I mean, even if the plan itself isn't passing down, I think we could preempt that potentially, but once the formation of it is clear, the configuration of how the work's gonna be organized, does that make sense? I think you can preempt the actual plan being passed by a month or two because you'll have a draft form that you'll be working through. You know what I mean? You guys are gonna go through lots of process of approval. We can fast track through some of that part. And I'll say too, I'm a little defensive about making changes to commissions that quite frankly have been nothing that when we make this next change it's always gonna be something we're trying to improve and do better at. We've had too much box over the last several years with them. I mean, I think we've had too many theoretical changes as to what they were working on, what levels we've asked them to do, too many different, I don't know. I think it's been hard for commission members. And I think it's right for us to make sure that we're making a change that we're not gonna have to undo again really quickly. Or be tweaking again because I mean, you see our roles, I would. So I think that's true and I certainly have not been here through all of that. I think it's also important to remember all of the work the commissions have done to date. You know, I think without the commissions we wouldn't have the pool plan. I think without the commissions we wouldn't have a transportation master plan. I think without the commissions we wouldn't have gotten the grant for the crosswalks along Main Street. We wouldn't have a tree board. We wouldn't have a PD strategic plan that's about to be enrolled. We wouldn't have a city councillor, I think two city councillors. I think that while certainly some of the direction has been unclear and we can do much better to support them, I think we have incredibly strong volunteers who have done amazing work. And we need to honor that as well. Well, thank you for helping me think through this. This is really helpful. Any other questions, comments, thoughts? Anything else we can blow up for you today? Any questions, comments, concerns from the public? The senior hearing none that concludes tonight's formal agenda. I entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved. Second. Wished by Christine, second by Alan. Any further discussion? The hearing is adjourned. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Those opposed, motion carries.