 welcome so much for coming out tonight. We really appreciate it. And we have a small crowd here, but many of our members of the ad hoc committee on redistricting are here. So we're gonna have a chance to introduce them to you. I'm Diane Meyerhoff. I'm helping out the committee with the meeting tonight and our future meetings as well. Our first order of business is our public forum where we allow two minutes per person to speak. Is there anyone in the room with a remote zoom who would like to make a comment? Hearing none. We want to talk a little bit. This is our agenda for the day, the evening. Obviously we're in the welcome. We're gonna talk about, we're gonna have an overview of redistricting by city staff. We have a facilitated discussion on the criteria and priorities for redistricting and then we'll talk about the next steps. And again this is our first meeting, first listening session of a set of three meetings that we're gonna have between November and December. So next up, this is the committee makeup in purpose. Again this is the ad hoc committee for redistricting that was that the city council resolution required us to put together. The committee includes one member from each ward selected by the NPAs, the neighborhood planning associations. It's independent of the city council, the school board, and former elected officials of any of those bodies. The purpose as stated by the council of the committee is to gather input into the current redistricting plan, review the past plan when there were seven wards and 14 counselors and we'll talk more about that. Hear opinions about the number of counselors per ward or district and consider the current ward district configuration. So that is the charge of the committee and the committee is to hold public meetings like this. They are to provide a report or memo to the city council in the end of January and the council is really looking to get general perspectives around the number of counselors and wards and districts and opinion about the most recent current plan as well as the past plan. So that's the charge of the committee and next up I think is to introduce everyone. Yeah, so let's have all the committee members introduce themselves. You do need to use the microphone for the remote folks and I will also say that I am fairly new to hybrid meetings so I apologize if we don't do a good job of this but we're going to try to put everybody at microphones that's probably number one most important and we can pull one off if you'd rather pass it around rather than stand up. Would you rather have it? Yeah, that's good good okay. So we'll just go around the room and tell us your name and what ward you're from. Hey, my name is Daniel Muntanu and I live in ward number three. Richard Hilliard ward number one. My name is Anne Brynja and I'm from ward eight. Greg Schupler ward five. George Love ward two. Jim Holy ward four. Dude, we get everyone and online. Robert. I'm Robert Bristol Johnson. I'm with wards. I'm from ward seven. Great. Thank you. Do we get all the members who are here? No, Rama. Yeah, I'm Rama Coach Lakota and I'm ward six. I'm sorry, I didn't know you were over there. No worries. I'm also I'm also here. Carol Livingston from ward one. Great. Thank you, Carol. Anybody else? Thank you so much everyone for introductions and now we're going to have Dan Richardson, the city attorney, talk but give you a little overview of redistricting and really what we're trying to do is kind of give level to playing field to everyone starting in the same place when we talk about redistricting. So Dan, I will get out of your way. The next slide and if you don't mind, I'm going to take this off just so I can articulate a little bit better. So the question is what is redistricting and these are some of the legal parameters and background for it, which is that the Constitution requires that the United States do a census every 10 years to determine the distribution of House of Representative seats and on the national level, each state gets at least one house seat plus additional seats based on population. This is known as apportionment. Each state must then adjust its voting districts to elect the number of seats allotted by creating or changing geographic subdivisions to have relatively equal sized population. This is known as redistricting. The same principles apply at each level of government, including the city of Burlington. So every 10 years, the city of Burlington is under a legal obligation to look at its population, its wards, its districts and to establish whether or not it needs to redistrict and how to redistrict because populations almost invariably shift and change over time and as Megan and some of the other presenters have shown, this year is no different than other years. So there will have to be some sort of redistricting and just at the federal level, we have it easy in Vermont. We have one house seat. It never changes. We never have to do any type of redistricting of congressional seats but as we're seeing at the at the state level, there is a lot of redistricting. Burlington is divided among seven house seats. Since 2014 at the city level is eight wards and four districts for local electoral offices and those things are both going to you know at least the proposal at the state level is at that change. And one of the things that you're going to be determining or making record not determining but recommending to see councils whether the city system should or shouldn't change. I saw a hand. If the census had not shown a variance in population among the wards, would there be any need to redistrict? In other words, is there any other rationale for the redistricting process other than equalizing the number of people in each ward? No. I mean you know what which is to say 10 years tends to be generally when cities and towns and states do redistricting. You know even if the population has not overall really changed but invariably it does. I'll give an example of one place that hasn't changed just because the population that hasn't been a lot of growth is City of Montpelier where I happen to live. And we've had three wards since time out of mind or at least I've lived there over 20 years and it's always had three wards. And the boundaries of the wards have shifted slightly over time but not that much. And so they've generally kept the same basic framework overall. Which is ironic of course because in Montpelier the city council can change the ward configuration by mere vote of the city council. It doesn't require like Burlington does a charter change. So there's a certain irony that they have perhaps more flexibility for changing wards but less need than Burlington that may have because it's had it's a bigger population shift over time. There's adjustments but yet it's a more involved system because it's ultimately we're talking about in this case a charter change. Okay but nobody could just say we're unhappy with the way the wards are configured and therefore we want to change them. Oh you can always do that. Okay. But you'd have to gain a certain consensus and one the the driving factor for redistricting is changes in population. Okay. In the year 2000 there wasn't enough change in Burlington to require redistricting. Yep and and I mean look this is a hard process to go through because it involves changing things and there's always that risk of change. You know everyone thinks they have they could it could be done better until you actually try and do it better and then you realize wow we have a really good system. So obviously if you don't have the population shifts that takes a lot of the wind out of the redistricting sale. Yes. Dan you mentioned that it's likely that the state legislature legislature is going to increase the number of districts for Burlington. Well yeah not you it's not it's not set in stone yet. Not at all. Would it would it be advantageous for this committee to wait to see what those changes are before we act? Well yes and no I mean you know that's ultimately I think in part how so let me say on a strict level the city has almost never tied or at least in recent history has never tied its voting wards at the local level to its state districts for the state house of representatives and you see that in in the way it it sort of unfolds now that you know the seven representatives do not match up with the seven or the eight wards in any way shape or form but you know there is that possibility I mean what's what's the big change on the table for the state legislature this year is that the redistricting committee has recommended for the first time single member districts. So a number of districts in Burlington and other communities in Vermont have two member districts so you you elect two or more members from the same district the proposal that is being sent to the legislature that the redistricting committee has announced it may does away with that. Now redistricting is ultimately a political process so I'm always leery to say well it looks like the state is going to do that I think that may be a little bit of the card because it's a political process and so until the political heavies weigh into that it's only a potential and Megan it's going to add something. I think the only other thing that I wanted to add Greg to your question about whether you should wait until the state districts are drawn I think one of the questions that this committee is asking for feedback on is how much Burlington's districts should reflect state districts and so I think that to some degree the answer to that depends on how much that matters to people in our local community. That's a that's an excellent point and I think you know part of this process at least at this level is very much about you know what are the values and what are the goals of redistricting you know based on public feedback and part of it maybe we would like to see that match up. Certainly city staff would like that because it makes elections a lot easier but we're not the ones who drive that because that's not a good reason to adopt or not adopt a particular district that's just a ease of convenience for staff and and we understand that at the end of the day there may be greater values that overwhelm that ease of transaction for you know consistency of neighborhoods keeping them together. So fully recognizing that we can't control the state process but that may be a value people may say you know what it would make sense for it to match up and there are arguments you could put forward and you could say having state reps and city city reps at the in the same district would give them the ability to align interests and would increase our voice we would speak in a single voice all the way up to the state house you know through city hall to the state house and that's there's certainly a value there and some but you know as other people have argued or at least you know as the prevailing systems have have been no these other values are more important whether they be you know our our traditional ward district configuration or you know it may be the difference between having a certain neighborhood with two representatives rather than one on the city level and that may be driving considerations at the end of the day but I think as a as an overall question that's a really excellent one I will go into them so we're meandering our way through this don't worry so these are traditional redistricting factors which I have started to allude to and I've broken them into two components one are the must-haves these are the ones on which any redistricting plan is judged and whether it will succeed or fail under legal scrutiny and that's the first of all the most important is really the one person one vote that's required by the 14th amendment and that talks about deviations of less than 10 percent you know that's actually one of the criticisms that's been leveled at the one member redistricting at the state level is when you break down the districts into one one person one one representatives you you break down the population so that any fluctuation that occurs which will naturally occur is going to trigger the need for redistricting sooner rather than the more stable larger districts so but you know and and there are always trade-offs in these things the other issue is contiguity contiguity of territory that's one part of a district cannot be physically separate or detached from the other parts and you know there's often and in these discussions ward eight comes up as a sort of classic gerrymander because it looks like a little salamander that comes through the the downtown of the city but you'll notice it all touches each other and that's the basic rule if you you can't have one part here and there and the third part is you cannot make separate districts or do redistricting decisions on the basis of race ethnicity or religion so for example if you had you know perhaps a large religious group that lived in one neighborhood and you said well let's just keep those people together you couldn't do that that it would be struck down faster than you could say have we filed in federal court yet same thing with ethnicity and and race those are just protected classes not allowed should haves maintaining existing political subdivisions or lines and when i say should haves these are things that generally if we think about what you're building here or what you're recommending you you know what currently exists has passed muster survived for close to six years it's not been challenged it's it's clearly acceptable on a certain level we now have to change but you know there's always a question of well how much do you change and this point is just simply the less you change the safer you are in some of these some of these areas but they also represent other certain values so maintaining existing political subdivision lines honoring natural or historic boundary lines creating compact districts are always favored you know it's but again it's not necessary as we see the the salamanders live you know but um obviously a compact district is is is a easier to defend district respect for communities of interest which means that if there is a particular and we we've talked about this at prior meetings but communities of interest are very it's a very specific term and it means you know it it has a flexible meaning but it's something that the community itself says well this is important someone could say the old north end is a community of interest because it has a certain identity to it that's worth preserving or the new north end is in community of interest because it has an identity that's worth preserving another should have providing small districts for meaningful representation you know you could divide the city into just two districts be done go home north south east west but um you know you have the system already where that would mean you'd be letting go of of some of the smaller districts and some of the ability for voices to be heard you know if you divide it into larger districts immediately then you're limiting how many how much voice smaller communities within these districts would have because you're enlarging the district and that's generally you should have better you know voices for the for the population size a 40 000 person city is probably a good seven uh districts or eight districts is not it's not too far off so that everybody has because if you do that then about roughly every five thousand person has or can claim a representative of some sort providing use of census blocks grouping of houses and apartment buildings that are the smallest uh unit the census uses you know obviously we don't divide through backyards we don't divide up properties but the accessory dwelling in one district and another you know honoring those type of things those are just sort of things that are in the background at the bottom but a lot of these things are not absolutely necessary so the next slide is taking up in 2010 these were the evaluation criteria that people in your seats looked at total number of counselors divided by population the number of wards these were all just points that they said let are these are these important to us are these um you know what are the what are the interests here keeping geographic areas intact minimizing the population differences between wards boundaries following major roads as much as possible academic institutions should be in more than one ward ward size matters for citizen communication and campaigning minimize changes from current wards relationship to state districts that question came up in 10 years ago and probably come up in 10 years from now as well um overall deviation of less than 10 percent so these were things that they considered obviously we have a mixture of some of the must-haves and the should-haves and then some policy questions you know so for example whether an academic institution should be in more than one ward that depends and that's a policy decision that ultimately you know we as and if you think of this process part of what you're gathering is what are people's inclinations and what are people's they have a sense this makes sense or doesn't make sense and then from there we can start to develop arguments about why does this policy make sense over another policy and then start to make those you know and the city councillors ultimately making a lot of these decisions these are additional potential considerations for 2021 a lot of these i've put into the form of a question because the question is are these important maybe they aren't preserving a currency is it important you know do you generally like the makeup is is or is this something where we should shake it up where we're getting the sort of wrong mix of candidates and we could do better if we changed the way those districts were or wards were set up do we keep the current number of wards do we keep districts um should areas of large student population be kept together or broken up into multiple wards do we keep neighborhoods intact at large city councillors and the at large concept you know we have sort of modified at large with the districts but you know some cities for example have an at large city councillor who runs for the entire city or two or three that are just sort of at large and there are benefits and there are negatives to it and i'd be happy at any point in time to discuss those but that's one question even versus odd number of city councillors you know we have the mayor who provides the veto but right now we have a city council that if they're you know there's only one way to to pass something and that's to get a majority if it's even it's a deadlock and essentially it fails and so traditionally the legislature has favored odd numbered boards for that reason but clearly Burlington has been allowed to have the even number and so it's not a fatal flaw but you know there may be a reason to change that multiple representatives per ward right now we have one one rep per ward okay um we have uh you know but that's not what has always been historically i know that there was at one point in time at least the last round it was we were talking about two representatives per ward and seven wards so um you know is that a value next slide before we leave that slide i was wondering if i could ask you a question on the student population issue as you alluded to many of these have positives and negatives and of course one of the things that we'll be doing in our ward meetings might be to try to encourage people to look at both sides of the issue so it's helpful for us to to have a your level of understanding if possible sure on some of these so i just find the whole student thing interesting and sort of confusing at the same time because on the previous slide you said one of the things that wasn't a must-have but a should-have is to respect communities of interest and i guess you could argue that students have similar interest and yet on the next slide you mentioned that the 2010 criteria really was to sort of examine that to should be to spread that out and of course that's a potential consideration this time should it what what should be done so i'm wondering if you could extrapolate on maybe some of the advantages and disadvantages i know that previously we talked about the fact that well maybe you've got a large population of students but they may not all vote and so maybe that's a little bit of a misleading situation in terms of when i say not all vote i mean not all vote in burlington i mean i don't mean to be disingenuous sure about anyone's interest in voting sure no that great that's a great set of questions and i'll unpack it and a little bit and hopefully touch upon all of it because i think it's it's in and of itself worthy of an evening almost evening of discussion but you know if you think about it i think you hit upon a number of these you know if you look at a student population you know they are inherently not necessarily a homogeneous group so characterizing them as a sort of community of interest may be worthy and that's why again it's a little bit of an art about what communities of interest are they may not be they may be too disparate you may have people that have all kinds of different interests like you say some people who really don't view themselves as burlington residents but are voting at home wherever home may be for them or you may have people that have very strong local interest or may say i'm living here i'll vote here but i really don't have a connection to this community they may be all over in interest they may be people that are looking to stay people looking to go people you know just it it may not have that coherence that's certainly something that could be could be argued with as large of a student population they may have you know to counter that they may have very strong interests they may have very you know certainly if you asked any student i suspect rent issues might be a common theme living conditions but you know these are also people who may or may not work in the community you know they may be you know attending classes i know and i only say that because i know when i went to college i i didn't work full-time but i have my brother when he went to college he did work full-time so you know can be very different types of connections to the community just in that way the other issue often is that we do see a lot of students student populations that that don't necessarily vote because they're not here full-time or full year round and so especially in this post-covid era there may be a large student population in terms of beds in the way we calculate the population but smaller actual population in terms of being present and actually voting in these elections and so you know there may be you know and i would look to you know some of the data as far as voting returns over the past you know we now have six years of data from ward eight which is a very student-heavy population that you can look to and say you know how did their voting turnout rates look to other parts of the community because you know that creates that may be something to for the city to consider if if a student war if a heavily based student-based ward has overall fewer people casting votes than say another ward that you know that may be a consideration of fairness and policy in that you know do we really want to give an entire ward of voting block based on you know what are ultimately lower democratic returns so just as the same way as if you had a it's like a summer community that for some reason counted on your census which it doesn't but you know that that people didn't end up voting you might take that into consideration you know wouldn't just simply count the houses but you'd actually count you know look to see how the democratic participation in that particular district or ward reflected that and that's certainly an argument no the other thing is is that you know look the student population clearly does have some interest and does have some passion and does have some involvement in the city i mean you don't have to attend too many city council meetings to walk away without the understanding that there is a certain portion of the student body that is very engaged in local in local government and very passionate about the decisions that are made so you know i think those all go into that discussion and uvm is an incredibly important partner in the city of earlington as far as jobs and the population go and there may be a reason to to structure it one or another way i hope that hits some of the points you're welcome very good job um my question sort of relates to the outcome of redistricting related to the approximate equal population criteria so i i see that taking one of two forms so the first is is the is the goal that each resident have equal representation or is that for each representative to represent an equal bit of the population and does the city have the flexibility in terms of how to structure uh that outcome does that question make sense i think so and i'll certainly let uh megan chime in if i don't if i don't hit it right on the the head on the answer but um you know the primary legal measurement is the ladder of your two propositions which is you create equal districts with which is to say if if each districts if it's 500 people in ward one 500 people in ward two 500 people in ward three then you're doing a good job um and it's that as opposed to um bow though what if i'm maybe let me unpack your first idea which is if i maybe i can rephrase the question would help it a little bit i and the the reason that this dilemma comes to mind is because i know that the question of ward representation versus district representation is a big topic this time around okay so uh as a resident um i feel like i i have equal representation because i have a ward representative and i have a district representative and so i i essentially have two voices on the city council as does everybody else in the city so oh sure okay so so regardless of the sort of the population breakdown everybody has equal representation right okay and then so if you flip that around you know as far as you know each representative do they represent an equal population technically the answer is no yeah no i see what you're i sorry yeah okay oh sorry yeah no i apologize i was gotta miss yeah okay so that's kind of what i'm getting at is that um you know is that a you know going forward a legitimate legal structure if we recognize that you know we're creating this two-tier system but still providing equal representation for the whole population yes and and i want to strike my last answer in light of your very excellent clarification because uh and say the exact opposite which is that it's the first it's the first part where everyone has equal representation which is you couldn't create uh say give ward one and ward two also district representation and not give district representation to other wards um so so absolutely um that is the that is the key there um and the fact that representatives are of different shapes and forms which is to say some represent award you know then say just use my round numbers because i'm bad at math but you know whereas a city counselor represents a ward of 500 and a district counselor who represents award who represents a district of a thousand that's okay that's that's that's perfectly legitimate and in fact some municipalities like i said have what are called at large well if you think about a select board is is a classic at large where they're elected by the entire town um and so you know you we could easily have at large city counselors who are elected the same way the mayor is with the entire population of the city and they'd still be city counselors with no greater vote um but they'd have to obviously campaign for their entire the entire city to win to win a seat um and there are reasons why that kind of structure benefits because it's the idea that you have that these district representatives or at large representatives bring to the the forward uh uh voices of of a of a district so they kind of bridge award might have specific issues but two wards together might have a different set of issues and a district representative is able to voice those those sort of greater concerns or act as bridges between different city counselors um you know and again this is one of those things where people may say yeah that may look nice on paper but in practice it's it's not so great or some people may say this is great because i have two like you said i have two voices on city council it is a nice way i know last time and let's be practical it it it elided a problem which is they wanted to have like you said two voices for districts but they didn't want to increase the size of city council so they actually shrunk the size of city council um and continued sort of the double voices thank you thank you sure i think the only thing i'll just say too is that um dan was helpful in explaining that that is a legal structure in terms of the representation question but then whether that's a system we want to perpetuate is a question that this committee is also charged with getting feedback from the community on as well that's right right yes so the the point was just for the folks listening at home it's um jeth clarified that he raised the question just to make sure that construct was legally viable yes i do i'm sorry thank you i appreciate you waiting and and this is sort of a maybe a red herring um i'm assuming that we're also talking about the school board commissioners as well because that that's the same configuration is that right i i believe so i haven't looked at the specific school board commissioner but they usually follow yeah yeah this would affect the elections for school board members as well okay so we're really making decisions about both those bodies that's right okay thank you no problem oh okay ready for next slide all right uh this is still me right okay um so um this next slide just shows one of the things that this committee um the ad hoc committee has asked to do is to help gain feedback about the current redistricting plan or what we refer to as the wards that you vote in today and also feedback about the most recent redistricting plan which was the ward system that we had in place between 1993 and 2014 so this map that's on this slide is just showing the two different ward configurations current and most recent past and for those of you that are in the room we do also have them printed and on the wall so you can take a look at them in a format that's a little bit easier to see so we just wanted to share this with you as dan was just going over the criteria that were used to evaluate and make the ward structure that was effective in 1993 and then the criteria that were used um or i'm sorry to move us from the wards that were effective starting in 1993 to the ones that we have today um and then the only other point that i just wanted to make here is that dan mentioned or i'm sorry i think robert actually chimed in and mentioned that we have not always had to redistrict every time a census was done in burlington i think we've had maybe six or seven different ward configurations since the city was founded so you can see here that the one on the left was the result of the 1990 census we did not redistrict after the 2000 census and the one that we have today was a result of the 2010 census so we're now considering changes that we have to make as a result of the 2020 census thanks Megan and that's really helpful and you know this is maybe and i'll just make this quick point it's an observation which is you know it's it's pretty rare that we get to redraw municipal not municipal but governmental lines if you think about it city of burlington is what it looks like and has looked like for a long time and that's not going to change in this county of chitinon is the way it looks since you know the federalists were still in office in large part but we get to do this change and that comes with both risks as well as benefits the risks of course is that you know there are these established and there are these wards for a reason these didn't just arise suesponte or you know from the forehead of zeus if you're into greek mythology but you know these are these represent prior political compromises or political decisions and you know they are here for reasons those may be good reasons they may be bad reasons they may be reasons that aren't valid anymore they may be reasons that continue to be valid but you know part of that is understanding a little bit of the history but also you know understanding why we are in this but also embracing to a certain extent that you know if there are problems with this if there are ways of doing it better this is this is the opportunity and it's rare in democracy go ahead okay so here's a bit of the nuts and bolts and brass tacks of redistricting so redistricting is expected to begin as soon as possible following the census that's why we're here as we all know the 2020 census was a bit delayed first step determine the need for a charter change overall by districts and ward that's been completed we unfortunately have to report to you that because we have had growths and shifts and growth and populations in the city we need to do this redistricting current ad hoc redistricting committee meetings feedback and report and as I think Megan and others have really made a great point about is that you know at this level at least it's not we're not drawing maps we're not making specific decisions if you do you're really going to get lost because you get into the weeds this is really about getting feedback getting these type of issues what are people's feelings what is the public consensus about these kind of issues because then you can start that next process and that really starts at point three city council develops and improves a redistricting plan that is maps and and right now we're on a timeline where we're going from September to January roughly with this public feedback process and then the city council is going to work in this late winter and spring instead of going skiing they're going to be developing the redistricting process and then after that you have public hearings and warnings under 17 vsa section 2645 that's in the fall of 2022 two public meetings following city council approval these are just some of the regulations first meeting must occur 10 days or more following public notice but no less than 30 days before the vote second meeting has other requirements these are just to make sure that these meetings are timely that there's adequate time for feedback that there's adequate time for voter response to this and you know part of this is good and part of this is you know can be frustrating because usually by that point the public hearings there's been a lot of public vetting and there's been a lot of public response and as i said before you know part of part of what they're inviting at this process is for you to collect this public feedback do they have to listen to the public feedback technically no but it's one of those dangers be careful what you ask for if you ask for it and you don't listen to it that tends to perk people voter approval november 2022 that's tentatively where we have it this is last time i think we met as a group one of the last times we met as a group you know we were hoping to do this in the spring but i don't think that gave you a fair timeline to do what you need to do as a committee and get the public input but november 2022 is still i think a fair number because again this has to go up to the legislature which is step six house and senate government operations committee will review it and of course the general assembly will vote in between hopefully if this is a workable plan that has general support this will be a fairly straightforward process governor has to sign it then we will have elections so we're probably not talking about implementing these until the fall of 2023 at its earliest that's presuming we go through and follow this timeline most likely unless the legislature like gets it in in january of 2022 and immediately adopts it for some spring but i would say that that is less likely and so we're probably so if you think about it we have upcoming town meeting in the march of 2022 we know that's going to be under the existing system and i think we can largely if i was a waging individual i would say the 2023 bet on eight wards and four districts so probably the 2024 which of course is the the mayor's term is up as well so that will be a big year for because we may have all new wards and districts so what more fun can you ask for in 2024 hope if you don't forget to use the microphone either side i think so on number three on your list there was city council develops and improves the redistricting plan that's correct any concerns about that personally or professionally well i mean i ask because that is it is the very opposite of the concern about having elected officials on the listening before we have a plan to ask people to think about yeah and then we're we're going to see a period of three months almost four months of elected officials drawing their maps drawing there yeah so i i'm just curious i i i get that they can right well and and and you know part of this is how we choose to you know if you think about the state level the state long ago decided to adopt the redistricting committee by statute the redistricting committee and and and again the redistricting committee is given a more specific charge than you were to actually make some of these critical decisions so they chose to do that and the legislature still can ignore it and and so when i say single member districts maybe but there's no guarantee until we hear you know the the house and senate leadership get on board or or not you know take a position on it it's it's just all possibility i think it's the same thing here which is i think what the the the goal of the city council was to maybe make your jobs a little bit easier so rather than giving you if you think about and i know a couple people on the redistricting committee at the state level that's a lot of meetings and that's a lot of work and that's a lot of you know going through maps and census data and populations that what they've given you i think is a really good charge which is go out and find out what the public wants get these big issues and bring them back to us and we'll make the decision and i think i i don't ultimately have a problem with it because i think there are points checkpoints of accountability and i think the big checkpoint of accountability is number five this has to be approved by the voters yeah but the the issue about the drawing is is that behind closed doors are in the basement of city hall no one knows why a line might have been nudged to the left or right yeah and so the the the point is is that this creates a sense that it's a public process right when in fact you we could leave the room and you just put cassette recorders here and record what community offers yeah maybe some other night but my point is is that the that i i think that to a certain degree what i believe in in my ward the community is asking of us as representatives is to be safeguards of transparency as well as hearing because clearly the resolution just says be tape recorders before we show you the map and ask people's thoughts that is not easier that's harder right but i do want to just i will again just want to make sure that from the context of safeguards of of transparency number three concerns yeah a great deal you know and i'll let Megan chime in and maybe i'll do cleanup go ahead yes you can that cleanup um no i think it's it's a really good question jim i think ultimately we're here tonight um kicking off a process that the council asked for all of us to participate in um so i think if there are thoughts about how the process could work differently it definitely would be worth sharing that with your counselors um i think the other piece about just how the maps ultimately get drawn then is that the council in my understanding of how this process will move after the feedback has been collected is that council will actually establish a number of criteria that they will direct the map makers to use so there should be some level of public transparency about the direction that's given resulting from this feedback that says this is what we want the map to do um and i would imagine that there will be community that there will be public conversations where questions can be asked about that you know why did this boundary move why um is this the result of the feedback we gave you it doesn't seem like it makes sense um and that we would ultimately you know have those conversations at a city council meeting or at a charter change committee meeting or something like that so there would be a chance to answer those questions no and i i can't say that better than megan um i think it sort of gets to my point about you know you you ignore public input at your own peril um and you know i i would say that transparency is good but you know ultimately i i also don't want to be poly too polyanna ish about this that we're talking about politics and it's it reminds me a friend of mine you know was once up for something and it was a board that was making the decision and uh she didn't get it and she's god they were playing politics i said really a politically appointed board played politics how have we not stopped the presses on that headline um you know there is that political component to it and i i don't think it would be but i think you know clearly the council has indicated that they want some level of transparency and if it can be improved and if there's parts of the process that you think deserve feedback i think you know again i don't want to i can only underscore what megan said um this is the same vein of thought there uh where my question is is there a legal path forward for separating this process from elected representatives uh because that that is one of the proposed questions on the redistricting survey draft uh so i guess is that actually a possibility if we get the feedback that this should be a completely separate process from elected representatives yeah there it would but it's a charter change and that could be done either through a charter change committee or through a petition that circulated but you know just as i was and that's part of the reason i was uh illustrating in the beginning redistricting um can be done any number of different ways um you know there might be some some details that i have to to look through but you know part of that is clearly you know monpillier has its legislature um city council vote on its own districts without public input and that's okay and they've done it for years um burlington does it through hr change and there's nothing to say that's actually the beauty of meanspality sorry i'm going to wax poetic here for a moment um but sit meanspalities are often laboratories of small level democracy and the idea you know this is embodied in non-citizen voting where the legislature can make something like that happen because meanspalities are creatures of the legislature and if the legislature says let's try this way then they can do it and so if for example somebody came up with a brilliant idea for a non-partisan board uh that was somehow elected by our wisest and sanest members of society um to represent them and the legislature thought that was a great idea and you could easily do that but it would be by charter change okay and could that be the very same charter change that would redistrict possibly but i guess the only thing i would caution is to be careful about how heavy you want the box to be that others lift um and if you know something radical and i say radical in both a very neutral but potentially positive sense um radical change like that may not sit well with the charter change as well it may also be a part of the bargain as well i i think that's that's a political calculation um but i know like for example like act 250 those last couple sessions they tried to make a lot of changes and it was just too much so and you risk having it shot down exactly yeah okay yeah um and then one thing to add is i yeah i understand that this is how it works across most of the u.s um and it is definitely a big issue to take on sure here i'll go first because it partly refers to what you're talking about but i just like to put in a plug for the um some of the feedback we've got so far has been from the been from the mpa's and at our last mpa um meeting ward one and ward eight uh keith bilsbury who is the ward clerk what um came out with a a raft of folder full of facts um about um the democracy of ward eight and we've asked him to speak on the agenda on the next ward eight um mpa meeting which is next wednesday the 10th um so that's going to be interesting and um if there are any relevant facts as soon as i know where it is i'll let everyone know and uh and any uh relevant facts i'll try and distribute thanks great just a quick question on point number four up there do you have any idea with those public hearings who's going to be in charge of that meeting is your office going to be in charge of it is city council going to be in charge of it is the ad hoc committee going to be a part of it because that goes to that whole issue of transparency that's the city council that runs those meetings by statute and so it will probably be out of the clerk treasurer's office but so just to make a point of clarification um because it's relevant to the question you're asking when we are highlighting number four here this is um both statutory guidelines and our city process for considering a charter change so those are the types of things that that's reflecting so that will be handled by the city the city attorney's office the council the clerk's office etc um really once we get past well really when we get into number three um it starts to become the city council's convening authority to you know have meetings and discussions about this that's right so quickly as a follow-up to george's question um say for an item 3a if what is what are the requirements for a citizen petition uh on this item if there were interest in uh putting together an alternative charter change proposal to the one that the city council develops if if the ad hoc committee itself or the public at large is not particularly happy with the outcome of the city council charter change proposal uh so what's what's the what's the petition requirements for a citizen requested charter change proposal so i apologize i didn't realize there was going to be a pop quiz on some of this but um there is a petition threshold for charter change i want to say it's like five percent of the population of the city has to sign on to the uh petition and that maybe i please don't hold me to that number but it's it's in it's in both statute and i believe it's in our city charter those numbers but it's it requires a substantial number of of signatories to get it on to the ballot what i guess i would say is that um if we get to the point where we have dueling redistricting plans um i don't know if that well that would not be the best thing in the world there's an element of chaos there um but i i say that cautiously only because who knows i mean this is democracy and it's not always pretty it's not always straightforward um but you know i think hopefully the hope would be that any city council plan took into account public sentiment but obviously if public sentiment is close to split then yeah there may be those other type of things then it becomes sort of dueling um uh you know uh charter change amendments but you know let's say let's sort of play this out and in in a hypothetical because we've seen this actually in Essex recently where you have dueling charter change amendments that are not that are inconsistent with each other and those did not pass but you know i actually have to represent Essex at the time or portion of Essex and that was uh you know the anticipation was the legislature works this out because ultimately charter change goes to the legislature and even if the voters vote and they say we want the elevator to go up but we also want to go down it's up to the legislature to say which direction or reconcile the two if it's possible sure okay are there any more questions i would like megan to get a chance to talk about the census and we're being pretty informal here tonight because we have plenty of time and we don't have a whole lot of people who want to speak so i'm not you know being my usual so but so thanks uh the people on the zoom call are now on the screen so you can see them because we i couldn't tell if they were asking questions and do any of you want to ask any questions because we didn't give you a chance just yell out okay or don't yell too loud because when you speak it like your voice just resonates in contice auditorium which also means hopefully that the sound is good over there as well and if it isn't please let us know so um megan is going to talk a little bit about the census i am seeing one hand actually um barbara hedrick i'm sorry barbara hedrick has her hand up oh yeah oh i see no i can't see that for some reason of the not all there me go ahead barbara okay go for it okay um i'm wondering if it would be worthwhile to have a conversation about the city halls plans for voting by mail if the city is going to continue allow people to vote by mail then maybe the location of the polling place is not as critical as it has been in the past and topic for example right now in ward seven they use the miller center for voting and that's ward seven in its current shape because people don't want to travel so far but if people are going to vote by mail for many years going forward then maybe that's less of an issue second topic is i thought it was an excellent presentation that the attorney city attorney provided of what's nice to have versus what's a must have and what's a legal requirement and i think that would be good to have in a list form so that we know that some of these considerations are not legal requirements and i think uh written list would be very useful to the ad hoc committee thank you very much uh thank you barbara this is dan richardson again i'm just going to quickly weigh in on that first part because i think it's it's an interesting question and it's certainly one that we're starting to grapple with um what i would say is the the death of the polling center is a little bit like everyone predicted the death of a books a number of years ago um you know we're still printing books notwithstanding the internet and the computer i think the polling places we just don't know where that's going and they're still going to be important for the foreseeable future certainly is a public access point but it's certainly a valid question that i think in the next 10 years is going to be and my prediction and strictly speaking this is a speculation rather than any legal is that you know in the the 2031 redistricting when my son is standing here instead of me and i'm in a nice retirement um i'm not that old i'm kidding um but uh when that when that happens i think that's going to be more salient we're going to really we're going to understand a little bit more how this voting by mail works because if you think about we've really only done a few elections this way and we're still working out the kinks and seeing if this is in fact the way people want to vote and i think that'll be a big question post post covid is if that voting by mail is so convenient and so nice that people really adapt to it or and and this is just simply the way of future or if this just becomes one other way but polling places still remain important all right so as diane said um we've been i think this has been a really helpful opportunity to ask and answer a lot of questions and get into the weeds um so just for the sake of this meeting is being recorded and we'll post it so anyone else that wasn't able to be here tonight can see it so i know many of you as the ad hoc committee members have already seen some of the information that i'm about to share but i just wanted to quickly give some context for those that are watching from home or watching in the future about the data that dan mentioned that brought the question about redistricting to us so this table here just shows the results of the citywide population in the last three census senses um 2000 2010 and 2020 and what we see here is that as of 2020 the city's population is just under 45 000 so 44 743 which was a little over a five percent increase in our population since the 2010 census and there's a link at the bottom of the screen if you have any interest you can look at an interactive map that the state's center for geographic information created which actually shows the population change of every town in the state of vermont but i think the key piece of information for the purposes of talking about redistricting is actually this information which is how the population changed in each of the city's eight wards and you can see here that the bars represent the populations in 2010 and 2020 for each of the wards and just correspond to the map on the right hand side of the screen which shows our current wards so the upshot here is that almost all of the city's wards saw population increase between 2010 and 2020 with the exception of wards three and seven they remained fairly level throughout that time the other piece of this information that's important is the idea of equal representation that we were talking about earlier and and thanks to jeff for the clarifying question about what we mean by equal representation we're really talking about the number of people total people that live in each of those wards and wanting to ensure that those wards are of roughly equal size of people the standard that is used in determining a roughly equal size is taking the total population of the city and dividing it by the number of voting districts we have so in burlington's case we divide it by eight because that's technically the number of voting districts we have and arrive at a population if all of the wards were to be exactly the same size it's our population divided by eight and then we kind of look at the variation from that and we're trying to find wards that are about 10 percent smaller or larger than that ideal size so what this graph is showing us is that using our 2020 census numbers the ideal size of award in burlington would be about 5600 people and on each of these bars you can see the 2020 population for the wards so you can see for example that ward one is our largest ward at a little over 6200 people and ward seven is our smallest ward with just over 5000 people because we want to see each of these wards be within about 10 percent of the ideal size that is kind of the first indicator for us that we needed to look at redistricting ward seven is about nine percent smaller than the ideal size so technically still fits but is really close to the edge and ward one is actually at a little over 11 percent larger than the ideal size so too big for meeting that standard we also then look at the difference between the largest and smallest wards in the city that's another test that we can use to see if our wards are approximately equal size and because of the difference between wards one and seven in their population we're seeing that we're actually almost double the ideal span between those wards at a little over 20 percent so these these um ward by ward analyses are what helps us to determine that redistricting is necessary for us to consider just on the population shift alone so there are other data points i think that a lot of people will be interested in and that'll that will probably be discussed throughout the process in terms of you know who lives in these wards and etc but this is kind of the basic information for just understanding why we're redistricting and with that i have a i have a oh okay it's time i'm sorry it's okay um so we're only looking at the wards here but the districts play a role also so that if you have two large wards that are long together into a district that's going to make a large district compared to if you have two small wards long together to make a district that's going to make a very small district so i think we have to take that into account as well when we're looking at um representation we have to take into account the district that people are in as well as what the ward they're in yeah that's a really great point um and because the wards or i'm sorry because the districts are actually made up of two wards put together that's why we looked at the wards as the first kind of level of analysis we did also look at what the kind of relationship to the ideal size is of the wards themselves and they were also outside of the 10 threshold of the ideal size i'm sorry the districts yes thank you it turns out though because of averaging that once the disc once the wards are made equal within whatever is your acceptable limit because of averaging the districts will also have to be right within me that is actually mathematically the case i like to see i'd like to see that because i don't understand why that would be true because like pick one and eight together they're the biggest wards their average the district of population will be exactly double of their average of their of the mean of the two right the two are brought within the limits their mean will be even will also be within those limits okay i'll buy that okay are there other questions of megan either uh folks who are remote you can put your hand up if you want or in the room okay all right so um i'll let diane then walk us through the rest of the meeting actually i'm going to stay over here if that's okay i think that might be easier because then i can see the people who are remote sorry about that and i know there's about 13 people actually on the zoom which we didn't realize um so uh thank you all of you for joining in the folks who are in the room right now are all members of the committee so we're going to let them hear from the folks who are remote now about um and now that you've heard all this information and i i apologize there's a lot of information taken at once but curious about how you all feel about how the existing system is working eight wards for districts i realize we probably should have said what that was that system so we have eight wards in the city right now a district is made up of two wards uh i think this came up at one of the npa meetings that people weren't quite clear what that what that meant so that's what we have right now so that we have an even number of counselors we have eight and four we have 12 counselors last night right now which was a reduction from our last iteration so um folks out there tell us a little bit about you know what are you do you think the system's working not working what are your ideas for improving it um that you'd like to tell our ad hoc committee who's sitting in the room just wave your wave at me or put your hand up i know you're all out there here we go yeah uh sandy sandy win i think maybe you're on mute there can you hear me now we can hear you now so regarding um ward eight i'm in ward one but our district is one and eight a question um when the census was taken it was taken when i believe the entire campus was shut down and students were gone so i suspect that ward eight is even larger than what the census numbers say because many students probably put their parents address where they were rather than where they technically should have been living on april one physically where they were living on april one was not necessarily even in vermont so weak question just how valid the current number is for ward eight um i suspect the number is much larger and tell me sandy also is it are you interested in seeing the student wards day together or or no seeing them no and i think no looking at the all you have to do is look at the shape of ward eight and it clearly is a gerrymandered ward to wrap around to just include students if you look at the number of actually single family homes that are not rentals in that ward you can probably count them on two hands um it clearly whoever or however that decision was made um you know just intellectually you'd have to challenge what were they thinking anyway my thoughts okay uh megan and if you don't mind i do just want to speak to the question about how students were counted in this census because it has come up before so pit and the other folks at cito were part of a local complete count committee that was doing a lot of work to try to get out the word about participating in the census and we also became very concerned about that issue when it was clear that the campus was going to close the census actually knew that this was going to be an issue in a lot of communities and immediately began communicating two communities and two complete count committees like the cito office setup to make sure that students were told to answer the census as if they were still living where they would have been living on april first had they not been sent home from campus so that was one thing and the other thing is is that um campuses were able to uh kind of bulk report data about occupied beds in the dorms at least on their campus which helps us to ground truth some of that information so um i don't think that there is a major discrepancy in the reporting there um but it's certainly possible a few people could have been missed and megan do you have a sense what led to the student district or maybe and i don't i honestly don't remember no okay all right did i be honest i didn't live in burlington when that happened so i don't remember i'm sort of embarrassed to say i did but um do you know and why yeah why they had the student they particularly made ward a to be a particular you know primarily student district or ward i should say okay and it's going to come and try to answer this question and maybe maybe jim will add something to it as well i mean i could probably answer the question too but yeah i don't know if people want to hear it from me okay let's let let's try first and then we'll go to you yeah i wasn't part of the redistricting effort um back then and i i know i've had conversations with robert about this after the fact um and i i know he has he can probably shed more light on that than i can okay great robert do you want to help us answer that question this is a difficult so if anybody is to blame it's me the the map that we have now uh the exact map that we have i there were two eight ward maps that i drew and on the um on the voter feedback time this is just before it went to ballot the two maps were being decided by city council and this current map was chosen it was drawn by me when i was working i do a lot of work outside of town and i was in california i was sitting in a malibu's or i was sitting in a in a starbucks in malibu when the current map that we have got drawn um the reason why the eight ward map came into being was not directly because we were trying to get students represented it was the incidental reason the real reason was that nobody in the existing seven wards wanted to get their ward mangled when somebody else didn't and in 2013 there were lots of maps being drawn and the division was really between the south and the north pretty much every map that was drawn by somebody in the south of the town uh kept wards five and six and most of the city pretty much intact but wards four and seven got mangled in some way and um the the political impetus was different i i did not share this value but there were some people up in the new north end that what would have happened if we would have kept the seven wards we would have had to expand ward seven into the old north end even further than it was and there were some folks that didn't want people voting in the in the new north end that were from the old north end that wasn't me my issue about that was i didn't think it was very good to make people from say convent square or manhattan drive have to go up to the miller senator to vote um and so since wards four and seven were smaller than the other wards the only way to keep wards four and seven the same was to make the other five wards a little smaller and have that spill into a new eighth ward now that new eighth ward would have to be at the nexus of where these existing bigger wards were namely where ward six and ward one and ward two and ward three come together and that's that's where those that's where ward eight appeared at we knew it would have been student dominated the very first version of um that map and i could probably if i share screen i could probably bring it up have you do that right now because we do out other people who want to speak okay all right but the very first one on purpose i think that's was really well was done with a full knowledge that it was done with a full knowledge that ward eight was going to be a student dominated ward right okay great then jim do you want to add something i would just say have having been in town at the time and having been on the committee that actually part of what was um the the part that has to do with the students really was that we were hoping to see more youth engagement and so there the while it may have served some of the purposes that robert is speaking to um there was a lot of conversation about uh how do we engage youth in city politics and so there was uh the what we were starting to see is pairing of high school students with college students as mentor mentee and engaging them in uh committees in city hall and that sort of thing um that that's that's really where where it was designed to think well how do we actually think about college students as it played out that way that's for for people to think of but i can tell you that that there was it was intentional when we were trying to figure out about student engagement good okay thank you yeah so are there other folks uh i think lee has her hand up terhewn yeah uh you may have to unmute lee she wants to be unmuted no maybe you look like you're unmuted there we go can you hear us lee we can't hear you yet technical difficulty there you go no yeah we can we still can't hear you lee i'm not sure why any theories from the uh zoom folks no no how's this yeah now you're good okay okay um you know i don't know why you close off q and a and chat in these meetings i think there it's a valuable communication tool like right there we could have communicated this mute unmute thing if your question thing was open um i'd like you to answer that question afterwards why you close those off anyway i thought jim hallway had a really good answer and i wanted to point out that the redistricting committee which i also was on we were primarily concerned about democracy we were concerned about people having the most direct representation the most direct connection with their counselors the district idea was not ours we never even talked about that possibility we were we liked eight wards small wards two counselors per ward which gives people the residents the most representation as far as college students go they make of 25 percent of our city's population that means they pay a good bit of taxes in this town so while people will say students shouldn't be rep shouldn't be on council because they don't pay taxes they most certainly do they pay sales tax they pay property taxes through their rent they pay tax i think they probably pay more taxes than a lot of residents here because they shop so much and pay retail tax and rooms and meals tax and things like that so our committee really wanted to see college students young people more representation and i wanted to say in terms of the work we're doing now that we should have the same goal our goal should be the most representative democracy that we can accomplish with redistricting we shouldn't be concerned about protecting incumbency and by the way nobody mentioned that as to why the ward eight got shaped the way it did but most city counselors will admit that it got shaped the way it did to protect incumbency in that area and i don't know why nobody wanted to say that out loud anyway democracy representative democracy small wards two counselors per ward thank you so much labor we appreciate it are there other folks who want to weigh in i can't see you so somebody needs to let me know maybe megan no any other yeah may i just say one other thing about about the eight word map the the one numerical thing that was accomplished with it is that 82 percent of the city got to stay in the same ward and vote in the same place and that would not have happened with any other map at all and it was probably everybody watching out for their backyard whether it was incumbents watching out for their their hind end or whether it was voters just not wanting to go to a different ward 82 percent of the city got to stay in the same ward and vote at the same place thank you robert anybody else hands we're just checking to see i would i'd like to know if barbara hedrick is still here he put a lot of time and effort into actually working with the mapping device and she came up with something very interesting and if she's still here i'd like her to talk about that a little bit at least and talk about the process of how she worked with that barbara if you're there and would like to share please do but just remember that we're not actually dealing with mapping tonight that's not we're not there yet so we're looking at yet but my question add what you can if you if you're i am here and i won't go into the details of the map but what i did is i just tried to think about what wards four and seven wanted from the last time we went through the redistricting and i thought about the personality and the culture of each different neighborhood and i talked to different people in different neighborhoods and heard what they wanted and i just tried to design the new proposed boundaries in a way that i thought would please all wards and they're just sort of penciled in lines they're just an idea for people to tweak and change as needed i did not try to put any constraints on like it has to be on a major road or has to be clunky and square i just tried to really focus in on what are the issues that are common to certain neighborhoods so those neighborhoods could be joined together and i think that's really important for the survey if you ever do one don't use a survey that's going to result in something that people don't want you have to have neighborhoods that are cohesive based on common issues that they're addressing thanks the latest i hope that answers your question do you think that so what you heard was that was really the number one priority that folks wanted was the neighborhood cohesiveness is that what you heard i just want to make sure i i heard for example between the last time this top redistricting happened in this time is you know there are certain things that ward seven and ward four people want ward two and three want something different so i just tried to reflect those and how i drew that straw model okay great thank you um others on the um what what i think is important about the map the mapping is that part of the transparency of this depends on whether or not we trust for example what robert said was that that's that salamander ward eight was the only thing that would work the only thing that would work it's the only one that would get us 82 percent well i think if people can do the mapping themselves they can check that okay this is with the 2010 numbers i'm not saying it would be no and we have i i get it i understand okay i have another person who has their hand up who oh jones shannon yes hi hi hi there i um just want i was also on the redistricting committee and just want to say my advice would be to move on from the process that we had last time that i think most people who participated in it felt it was awful and to say that we the redistricting committee wanted any one particular thing i i think that's pretty hard to say because there was uh there was a lot of disagreement about what we wanted um and what we wanted largely depended on where we lived um the eight eight wards the concept of eight wards i think was favored by people who lived in the new north end who wanted to continue to have two wards in the new north end so it served that purpose and there was also advocacy for a student ward at the time um and those aren't things that i personally agreed with but uh majority rules and at the end of the day we were simply looking for a solution that could get a majority vote in a very divisive situation so it was a matter of just getting i think well we have 14 counselors so we needed eight votes to pass something so what we passed was by virtue of that was the only thing that could garner eight votes at that time um i don't think it could be argued that it was the best or only solution and hopefully we will come up with something better in this process um i do agree just by being an incumbent i would say i agree with lee that incumbency is really not the most important thing to be concerned about um but that's uh that's the end of my my history with this thanks joan others uh carol hi i just want to raise the issue about what we continue calling the student ward and just i i hear people's um positive um efforts to make that decision um just a plug in a couple of things about the reality of it is for example it's very hard to campaign in ward eight uvm um is not at all helpful in making um the dorms or even the student center available for people to just meet with students um so even just a whole process of trying to involve students in um council elections or um ordinances or whatever we're voting on resolutions um and keith again keith pillsbury from ward eight who's the ward clerk um as richard said he can count you know he can go through with you all the difficulties it is to even just get people to to man the um the the clerk's office um the election clerk's office when they need to vote you know he's he's looking to other places for december's vote because he won't get the support that he needs to run an election in that ward so um i just think we need to think carefully about what our goal was and how we get the information that that really um represents that goal you know who who is saying that who wants that thank you thank you carol appreciate that others okay i think at this point we want to try something um that we would normally since we don't have members of the public in the room we're not going to do our dot-mocracy um but we have something set up online that i'd like to see uh do a test run and see if it works so i'm going to actually ask the folks who are remote to be our guinea pigs for this and and people that's right we can do it it's called a mentee and we have a a slide up here maybe megan will explain how to use it and this is just going to give us a little straw poll of the criteria that we talked about and kind of helping you having you prioritize them to give us a little bit of information so yeah as diane said this is an opportunity that we're trying out um in this hybrid meeting format to allow people to weigh in on these criteria um so we're going to make one of these for each of your meetings that you'll be able to participate in during the meeting or after um so on the screen there's a link menti.com you can go to that on either a computer or a smartphone right now and enter in this eight digit code yes it's three five zero nine eight one four five so when you sorry i walked away from the microphone talking to the people in the room when you go to this site you'll see two different opportunities to weigh in the first is asking you about the criteria that are related to the size and the configuration of the council so the questions about do you like eight wards and four districts do you like having 12 counselors etc the second second screen will ask you questions about how the ward boundaries are drawn so what is available to you is a slider for each of these criteria if you slide it to the right you're indicating that it's one of your top priorities for consideration in this process if you don't think it's a priority or one of your top priorities don't slide the little dot across the line so we're testing out this format to see if it'll work and in just a second um i'm going to go to the menti and actually start it so that you can actually participate in it sure the question is about the third one actually let me go to it so that i can i actually would like the city attorney to weigh in on that i don't think that that's true or maybe uh councilor shannon if you could confirm that i'm sorry couldn't hear the question the question was whether or not the mayor has the ability to vote in a tie vote i don't think that that's true right the mayor um i think the mayor may get a vote on this not not a vote in a tie vote but has a vote on the um particular body that that makes this decision because it's it's technical i'm trying to think what it's it's called the um board of civil authority which includes the mayor it's technically not the city council so the board of civil authority is the is the council with the mayor so are you are you asking about the process of yeah can you break a tie right in a regular city council meeting i think that's the just a regular city council meetings no he can't yeah okay which is why that question is a key question okay it is three five zero nine eight one four five and i'm going to try to share my screen again so that i can show you all harrell do you still have a question no i'm sorry i'm lowering my hand i apologize great and barbara did you have a question um no i just wanted to say i think that the surveys um can can really send the wrong information because people don't really know the ramifications of what they're uh you know when you say oh let's have eight or ten wards that could look like anything it doesn't necessarily come out to be something good right and so i think we're not asking for um anyone to provide a specific number of wards we're asking for feedback on the current number of wards if you think it is a priority to maintain or not same with districts if you think it's a priority to maintain the current number of districts or not we're trying to get a general sense of how people feel about the plans today right all right that's a great piece of feedback all right so what i'm showing here on the screen is actually your live participation here so as people in the room and online are choosing which of their priorities for council size and composition we can see the bar starts to get bigger so um it looks like there are definitely a number of votes five people who have indicated that keeping the number of current number of wards is a priority for them um maintaining an even number of counselors also has five people who have voted for it um and we can see it looks like one or two folks have indicated that um some of these other criteria are in their top five so it says 1.6 so i think it's it's just trying to create an average of how many people have voted for this and this is why we're testing this we can see if this is actually too confusing a way for people to indicate so you don't really vote from one to five you're actually just voting if you keep the dot on the left on your screen it's not one of your priorities if you move the dot to the right on your screen it is one of your priorities so these numbers that are here are just we can just disregard that um it's it's kind of averaging things we really wanted to prioritize you know one to five like you do dots but this program wouldn't allow us to do it and we only figured that out a little while ago so so i mean we can try to we can try to tweak this a little bit more for the future yeah i think ultimately we're not worried about the numbers we just want to see is this one of your top priorities and right now what i'm seeing is that for example five people have said keeping eight wards is one of their top priorities so we can look at the um the next one the question is about your priorities for how the ward boundaries are drawn and these are some of the the criteria that dan talked to us about earlier today um and right now it looks like um we have fewer people that have answered these questions so i'll give folks a second if they want to weigh in on some of these questions about priorities for drawing the word boundaries again slide the little dot to the right all the way to the right line if you think that this is one of your highest priorities for the redistricting process for drawing boundaries and we were really here looking friend for magnitude i think that's what and and honestly it seemed like it might be kind of fun you know and maybe it's not and we we don't have to do it for our other meetings but we thought we throw it out so right now it looks like um we have kind of a split on folks who think that they want to minimize the population difference between wards um similarly a split between keeping neighborhoods and geographies intact about four people said yes and four people said that's not one of their highest priorities um fewer people are concerned about following major roadways and natural boundaries um fewer people said that it was a priority to create a relationship between city and state districts and so far no one has said that it's a priority to keep students in one ward our guinea pigs will continue to work on that yes and i just have a question about the top one the minimize population difference between wards isn't that a must have yeah so should that even be in the question uh one of the questions yeah that is i that's actually a really good question good point i mean you can you can minimize that you could say it just has to be within 10 percent or you could say oh it should be really as close as possible to even yeah that's a good point yep how close to even is it or how close to ideal yep i had a question about the um the whole ward eight thing so i mean if i were a student i mean there's two ways of looking at it you could say okay the students get to vote as a block and they would have more um uh influence that way but you could also say oh we put all the students in one block so that they that they're not going to have as much influence so it i i i think that they're as in terms of um respecting uh i forget what dan what dan's words were but you can't put all the people of this particular religion in one block you can't put all the people of particular race in one ward um because that would although it looks pretty much actually like they're getting power you're actually diluting their power by putting them on one spot so how are the students feeling about being all in one ward are they happy about it are they unhappy do they care i think that we care what they care the ad hoc committee to try to find some um back about so i think we don't know yet um i was interviewed yesterday by the vermont cynic um so i think there's going to be a forthcoming article about this and but i i think we we need their participation to know what they what they think excellent okay i think we've got only 10 minutes left believe it or not we've used up all our time um and i really wanted to give the committee uh i think george is going to talk a little bit about the survey that you all are doing um to make sure that folks out there know about it um as as he's coming up i just want to also state that the agenda has a list of our upcoming meetings and i just want to be sure we didn't put on a slide i apologize um the meeting at next listening session is november 17th five to seven p.m at the miller center in the new north end on goss court december 6th 6 to 8 p.m unfortunately this is also called the miller center and i apologize for this this is the shampoam college miller center at 175 lakeside avenues so the south end those are our upcoming meetings they will be on the website if they're not and they're also on the agenda so george i'm gonna turn over to you for the survey so just to talk generally about how the process is going uh we're hoping to schedule a committee wide meeting i believe that was the consensus in our last planning meeting uh was to have yet another planning meeting about the survey in particular um and one of the things that i think is a priority uh to look at is how the list of priorities is actually explained to the public uh in a short enough format that their attention is maintained um and without too much uh legal language in there uh so that everyone will be able to understand uh what you know some of the implications of these priorities would be obviously there's it's a very complicated topic um and we can't talk about all the implications but i'm hoping by having input from the whole redistricting committee that will be able to flush out something that is representative of the whole city uh and i i also am prioritizing that because i think i think rank the ranking priorities question is is really important uh because of the conflicting guidelines that we're we've been given um yeah in in terms of the rest of the survey uh there was some very brief discussion last time about demographic questions uh which are currently in the draft where we ask folks about whether their renter homeowner uh what their income level is uh also for the school board commission uh how many school age children are in the household uh so there was some hesitation about including those just i think because it lengthens the survey and then also because people might be uncomfortable with income questions but i i would also like uh that to all get flushed out at the next meeting um can i just ask when you expect to have the survey out and how you're going to distribute it if you know so my current proposal for distributing the survey would be to distribute it at each of these public meetings uh but in addition to that uh distributing it on public forums such as from porch uh facebook and additionally having either um sido assist with canvassing um the city and and go door to door if that's not possible um you know taking a sample of the city and trying to reach out face to face with people um i think that's always the most effective way to get feedback that's genuine uh my current proposal has a small graphic that can be left on people's hanging on people's doorknobs uh with a link to the survey of people aren't around uh but yeah that's that's generally what what i'm proposing and we we have yet to have a planning meeting about the survey specifically so it's hard to tell what us as a committee is has decided on okay but we just want everyone to stay tuned it's coming that's what i really want to be so people keep an eye out forward especially if it's something that you are particularly interested in since you've come tonight i'm sure you are so more information to follow on that hopefully we'll know more about even by the 17th by our next public meeting yeah yeah and i wanted i want to also point out that we considered rushing the survey to uh fruition in in um in order to get it out in an issue of uh the community newspaper uh last meeting but we decided against that because as many members of the public have pointed out surveys if they're not done right can simply add confusion and not produce valuable information so i i think that planning meeting will will be really essential great and and you want to add something i have a question for george so our final committee meeting is december 6th december 15th 15th okay is that the date where we're going to hash out the survey questions i believe what we said last time was that we wanted to schedule an additional meeting somewhere in the month of november i'd assume okay yeah that's acceptable for people's schedules um i know the timeline has been all over the place okay so this survey could potentially be available by sometime in december i would hope so yeah okay okay good so stay tuned um i i understand why you bumped the didn't want to put the survey in this the deadline was a couple days ago but what about putting it in the next issue of the community news is that a possibility what is the next date do you know anybody know lead you know what the next date is do no but it's about the same it'll be towards the end of november and it'll appear in early december okay yeah i would definitely see what we can do as it's it's just important to realize that in the new north end people are more likely to respond to a paper survey as well as seniors and a barcode on a door knocker isn't going to get used in the new north end the way it might be used in say ward one or ward eight so we really need people to have that hard copy survey in hand and the community news has a lot of stuff in it about schools so although we've been light on on including the school districts in all of this discussion i don't think there's one person on the committee now that is advocating for schools i could be wrong about that but that community news has sports information in it school information city councilor reports a lot of people read that it's mailed to every residency in the city okay we will definitely take a look at that and see if we can we can pull that off yeah and just to go into more details about distribution real quick that that was definitely consideration paper survey at the door would be priority and then after that there would be the barcode option but also an option to call into the CEDO front desk in order to fill it out by phone great thanks so much appreciate it George and Barbara's had her hand sorry Jim you want to add something December 1st okay it's a deadline for the community news um Barbara did you want to add something i just want to make sure that the survey doesn't lead us to the wrong conclusions because when people say they want the boundary lines down the middle of major streets they're not going to know the ramifications of that and some of these things are just considerations nice to have they're not must-haves so please be very careful designing that survey and interpreting the results great thanks so much appreciate it all right i think we're going to we're just about eight o'clock we're going to wrap up next next project we've got two more public listening sessions coming up again they're on hopefully on the website and on the agenda and we're going to or there we go that's our process moving forward so the meetings will be the same format which you're welcome to join again if you'd like but please invite your friends family neighbors etc because we'd like to have a big crowd so so next next meeting November 17th at the Miller Center in the New North End so thank you all so much for coming