 Welcome everybody. We're going to get started. This is the Ward 6 NPA June meeting last one before the summer break. Thanks everybody for taking the time out on a hot night. Appreciate it. There's pizza over there for people who are just showing up. Help yourselves. We're going to get started as we always do with kind of call the order and announcements, public forum. So if anybody has anything they'd like to share with us, any news, comments, questions, open floor. I'm going to introduce myself, Nelson, but I can wait until announcements. No, go ahead please. Yeah, so I'm McAnderson. I'm a work at Champlain College, being at Champlain College for nine years and I'm the director of planning and operations. And you probably all know or have met Sandy Houston in the past. She attended many an NPA. She was a neighbor kind of relations expert. I'm kind of filling in for Sandy's role at this point. So I just wanted to give you a name and a face. If you've ever got any questions, comments, concerns, anything that you'd like to know, I wanted to say hi and say feel free to contact me. A little bit about my role is kind of a conglomeration of many roles, where I'm in charge of kind of all campus planning. So that's, you know, long range planning, construction, building and things. It's also overseeing grounds and building maintenance. Lots of buildings up there. And then also all campus services, so food service, mail center, campus store, all of the things that keep the students happy and going and alive. So even if it's a random question, I'm probably your guy that hasn't answered. So yeah, feel free to reach out. I have some business cards here and be like, oh, I want Nick's email. But yeah, I just wanted to step in and I think hopefully over the next, maybe not if you've got a break coming up, but over the coming months after you reconvene, I'll try and visit and just be, again, a name and a face for you to contact at Champlain, if you want. Yeah, thank you. Since Nick introduced himself, I realized I think I brushed right past introducing the steering committee here. So my name is Nelson Martel, our voice assistant committee, Anita Rapone, Nancy Harkins. Sorry, you guys can introduce yourselves. All right. We're all here. So any other announcements or comments or questions before we get started? Okay. So we're going to get started tonight with an update, I guess, from our state representatives. We're joined. I see, let's see. We have Gabrielle. Gabrielle's online. Mary Catherine is here and Mary Catherine's stone. So great. I guess I'll turn it over to Gabrielle said that she wanted to kick us off. And I don't know, we should check in with Mary Catherine just to make sure that I don't know what her time constraints are, but we're starting earlier. So it should be fine. That's fine. I'm probably gonna keep my camera off because I'm getting ready to go down for something. So but I'm here and it's okay. Okay. So thanks again for continuing the joint format. Do you hear a feedback or is that just me? Okay. So you might hear my five and a half year old in the background. Both my kids are homesick and my husband's out of the country. So apologies for not being there, but I figured he'd be glad not to have me come in with my two sick kids. So to sort of just set the stage as to where we're at, you know, normally my district mate, Representative Bloomley and I send out lots and lots of front porch forum posts and various other news updates. It's a very difficult time, frankly, because we're not really certain what will move forward and what won't move forward. As some of you I'm just going to move so that maybe you won't hear my five year old quite so much. As some of you may have read in the news, the governor has vetoed the budget. And in my first year, one of the things I learned was actually technically the only bill we need to pass is the budget. All of the other bills that we pass are sort of nice to have because the budget is really what shows our priorities. So having a vetoed budget means that we will be going back into session on June 20th. Right now we're slated to go in June 20th, 21st, 22nd. There are several other bills that have also been vetoed, a couple of which we've already overridden before we adjourned in May. But they're about anywhere from eight to 12 bills that we might end up trying to override if it turns out that there are the votes for them. Within the budget, and as background, the budget is it starts in the house and then it goes to the Senate where the Senate makes changes according to what their policy vision is. And then obviously it goes to the governor. The governor has his budget had an increase from last year. And the joint legislative budget ultimately showed a 13% increase from last year. The challenge I think that some of you guys may have heard is that there are just incredible concerns as there should be for the fact that we're having a three-year program, a pandemic federally paid program that had quite a few, quite a few Vermonters who do not have shelter living in motels. And that program originally was going to expire last summer when we were not in session. There were some heroics put into place to make sure that actually they still had a place. There was money put in the budget last year, last year's budget, to come up with a plan about how to transition from motels to a longer-term plan. And ultimately a lot of that planning did not happen until about probably early May. Ultimately, how we got here is many, many parts at play. It's 30 years, 40 years of not building any housing except the most wealthy. No middle housing, no affordable housing, not no. I don't mean no. We have been building housing just not to meet the need. We also know that the pandemic showed quite a few of the cracks within our societal structure in terms of mental health needs, in terms of the opiate crisis. So a lot of the folks who are not housed currently need services or we need more housing and or the housing needs to be more affordable. So we're at a particularly challenging time because I've certainly heard from constituents that have said, vote no on the budget because we need to make sure that we're not just picking people to the street. That's incredibly challenging because if the house were to veto the budget, what that would mean is whatever we recreated would probably not go by the Senate. The Senate would not approve it and then the governor would veto it again. And the current budget has $10 million in it for the Department of Children and Families to assist individuals and households experiencing homelessness. It has another $15.2 million in American recovery in ARPA for emergency rental assistance program. It has a million in the general fund to provide coordinated care teams for wraparound support services, $5 million for housing opportunity program, $3 million for housing voucher, and then like another $18 million for the Office of Economic Opportunity to provide grants to community agencies to assist individuals experiencing homelessness, another $26 million in the general fund to assist further with the emergency housing program. So what is in the budget is not enough for what the need is currently. On the other hand, if we don't move the budget forward, what we have simply is even less for the people who need more. Also, in the budget is S100, which is essentially a field that really addresses quite a bit of zoning changes so that we actually can see a lot more middle housing, a middle income housing, as well as lower income affordable housing. It has the child care support in it from which we've heard so many people say, please, we can't have people go to work. And we know we have workforce shortages if we're not actually supporting our child care system. In it is also universal school meals. There's a program also to focus on helping Vermonters who want to get off of fossil fuels from how we heat our homes. There's budget in there for emergency medical services. There's like $100 million to increase rates for primary and specialty care, dental care, home health, nursing homes, residential care. We have a bottle bill that is not quite in the budget. There's a little bit in there, but basically updating our 50-year-old bottle bill. We have prevention and recovery funds. We have language in there that Tiff worked on to ensure that many of our state retirees can remain or can have an opportunity to choose what their retirement health care plan is because the government, the governor had made some proposed changes there. In some, there's a lot in the budget. And if you're hearing news stories about this challenge and this heartbreaking place that we're in, all of that is real. And I guess I would just ask for people watching and for constituents to reach out for more information because it's not as either or, you know, veto the budget and then we can get more money to help people. It's, for my perspective, obviously just mine, it is if we don't pass this budget, we end up going to the negotiation table with the Senate and the governor, both of whom have whittled the House budget down or in different ways already. So I'm not sure we would actually come out in a better place. I am going to save the good news that Representative Mary Catherine Stone worked quite. I mean, I think she lost a fair amount of sleep. Quite a few of us here, the entire Burlington delegation worked pretty hard to ensure that we had support to address some of the PCB remediation costs for our high school. And with that, I'll pass it over to Representative Stone to cover from education. I wanted to just set the stage because I know there's so much news and information out there. But I essentially wanted to give a sense of the challenge at hand. Thank you, Gabrielle, for setting that up. Yeah, I don't have much to add to it, except I do want to highlight that there are $16 million tucked into the budget as it stands right now that's designated to help with Burlington High School. And so that is something that's also at stake when voting the budget down. I'm not going to lie, that wasn't something that was really easy to get across the finish line, but we did it. So that's that's just something else that would be at risk if we voted the budget down. And I would have concerns about that being brought to the table again. But yeah, and the other thing that's tied to Education Committee, you already mentioned as universal school mills. That's something too that we fought really hard to get across the finish line. And that would also be at risk if the budget but if the budget were to be voted down. Tiff, do you want to add on to anything? Maybe about what's happening like next week with some of the meetings, what City Council is doing. Talk about how we're working with them. I have a few things noted that I wanted to share. And one of them is I just want to say publicly that Gabrielle and Mary Catherine are superstars. They have carried a huge amount of weight either in the areas of climate change. Mary Catherine is a first year and really did hold the coalition together in Burlington and got her committee to approve that $16 million. She was in the right place at the right time, but she was the right person too. And I can't admire either one of them more. When Gabrielle and I talked to people over the summer through surveys, we heard really about five issues from people. Housing, mental health, substance use, childcare, and paid family leave. Gabrielle's talked a little bit about housing. We've invested over $200 million in housing in this budget, $60 million of which is related to emergency supports for people who are unhoused or at risk of becoming unhoused. A lot of that money is for services, but those services are pretty critical to helping people find housing, stay in housing, find jobs that would lead to housing, get the medical care that they need, etc. We've invested a lot in strengthening the safety net. So as Gabrielle said, for years and years and years, we have level funded designated agencies that provide critical mental health and substance use support to Vermonters. And they are bleeding staff at a really frightening rate. And our Human Services Committee believed very strongly that the only way to strengthen those systems was to boost the Medicaid reimbursement rate for those services, which to the tune of $99 million, that's the price tag to do that. And that's in base support. So it's not a one time thing. It goes on. And this is the only way that we can strengthen and we can maintain and increase that workforce. And we've also in order to attract people to some of those fields that are so critical, we've put a lot into workforce investment, either through loan forgiveness, or other kinds of incentives that will attract teachers, mental health workers, nurses, psychiatric nurses, etc. I, we've made long term investments too, in, in child care, in transportation in anticipation of IIJA, the, the, isn't that right? IIJA, it's the, it's the, you know, Infrastructure Act that will support capital construction projects around the state. And what's been disappointing is that we lost some of the money that we wanted to commit to a softer off-ramp for people living in motels through negotiations with the Senate. We lost paid family leave because there was a difference of opinion between the Senate and the House about how to fund that. And the House version was a really strong one, and I am hopeful that we will take it up next year. So those are kind of my two major disappointments, but I'm really proud of the priorities that the caucus set, and that the House was able to pass as it relates to protecting particularly vulnerable Vermonters, but also through, for example, the child care bill, allowing middle income families better access to child care through subsidies. So up to 400% of the federal poverty level, families who earn up to 400% will qualify for some kind of subsidy. And it's a landmark, it's landmark legislation. Like people who were put that together are being asked to speak all over the country because this is where we need to go to make child care affordable, accessible, and to boost the salaries of those who work in that field. So it's very, I'll just end by saying, oh, no, I'll end by saying that next week, I mean, the Burlington delegation and other Chittenden County legislators have been very involved in trying to work with providers and housing officials to understand what is happening on the ground, where the pressures are, where volunteers could be helpful, how, whether money is getting out or not. There's money that we appropriated that would have been immediately available that because the Governor vetoed the budget is not and won't be until we can override the veto. So there's a meeting, it's a work meeting that City Council is sponsoring next Monday that starts at 6.15, not con toys, but in one of the rooms underneath con toys. That I think is going to be an important meeting. Burlington will have an opportunity to hear from a lot of different kinds of people about how this is going to affect Burlington and what our expectations of the state are in terms of bolstering city services and reimbursing the city for costs that we are going to incur. So that is happening on Monday of next week, right before the City Council meeting. So I guess we just want to open it up to questions now. We have them. If I may just say, the work that was done over the last five months is pretty phenomenal and a lot of the policy is really creative and as I started off with, it's just, I think the hardest part about being an elected official is you often, you know, you shoot for the moon and maybe you get some stars. So I'm hoping that we're able to see this budget pass. Does it do everything we came in wanting? Of course not, but it also shows a lot of incredible detailed work from, you know, over 150 people. Representatives, thank you for your work and thank you for that great update. Is there a deadline for when the budget needs to be passed? What? June 30th. Yeah, I mean we need to have a budget by July 1. And if we don't, nobody can quite predict what will happen. But we will essentially, I mean, if we can't override the veto, then we will be working between the 20th of June through the end of the month to come up with an alternative budget that will pass the Senate. But we have to start again with the Appropriations Committee. We have to take testimony. We have to, it's not like we're starting from zero, but you know, it is a negotiation. Then we will have to rely on Republicans to suspend rules so that we can immediately send whatever we pass over to the Senate for its consideration. Whether they will do that or not, I don't know. I think we all have an interest in having a budget on July 1 and yet that's not guaranteed. So it's a bit of a pickle right now. And we've been working on this, which is why you haven't gotten an end of session report from Gabrielle and me because we've been trying to deal with the aftermath of the session. And so I apologize on our behalf for not getting that to you sooner. So can you all hear me? I'm sorry. Yes. Okay, so I was just going to say that yeah, it's really hard to tell because Vermont doesn't have any procedures in place to address a government shutdown. And that would happen if we fail to approve a budget by June 30th. And a concern is that there are no processes in place to pay essential personnel. So it's like really, to me, like that really helps to state how serious this could end up being if we don't pass the budget. But I'm confident in our caucus that we will. But yeah, it's just something to hold in the back of your mind that if we don't, that's what would end up happening if the government shut down. Well, I'm concerned about the housing for the people that lose the money today. So what is the nature of what is this going to do? The state is scrambling. The state had three years to prepare for this. And had we not put money in the budget adjustment this year, people would have been unhoused as of March 15th. The governor did not have any money in his budget adjustment proposal to carry that forward. And I don't know that there was a plan. I'm sure that there are people within DCF and OEO, the Office of Economic Opportunity, who've been trying to pitch different things to because they could see what was going to happen. But I don't think that it was it has. I don't think that there was. I don't think those voices were heard. So we have the director of CEDO here who may have a more up to date accounting of what has happened today, what he has seen. I have heard from agency of human services personnel that about a third of the people who lost housing today have another alternative. But I don't I don't know that that is true. And perhaps Mr. Pine knows more than we do at this moment. I didn't know it was on yet. Well, if I may, there is a website now that is up that is providing updates and phone numbers, numbers of who, how many people are expected to be unhoused at what date and what what the executive branch is doing in terms of putting systems into place. And it's if it's helpful, it's if you if you Google DCF.vermont.gov and if you Google pandemic era GA program, you can get sort of a real time shot there. I just sent the link like the organizer of this. All right, I mean, the governor issued an executive order on the 26th of May to really engage pretty much all of the of the agencies in working towards this. And it's so it's not just AHS, it's the Department of Public Safety, it's Parks and Rec, it's not called that. It's Agency of Natural Resources. It's the ACCD, the Agency of Commerce and Community Development. Because everybody, all of those departments have a role to play. And they're talking about congregate shelter. There's a proposal that a request for proposals that went out. I know that in Chittenden County, couple of organizations are collaborating to put something together to propose how at least in Chittenden County, we can respond to this. Has the state at any time considered the effects on short term rentals? Yeah, well, I'm turning to you because you kind of have lived and breathed housing for much of your professional life. And we've talked about this before. I just think you'll speak more knowledgably about that. Sure. Were you referring to the impact of short term rentals on the housing availability? Is that what you're referring to? Yeah, I don't have a sense of numbers statewide. And in Burlington, our folks from DPI will be talking about that. It's hovered between 250 and 300 units that we know of through the systems that you use. So Airbnb, VRBO, those are the big ones. I don't know that there's anyone sort of sneaking in under the cover of darkness by going through another portal, but those are the ones. So in the scheme of things, is 300 causing to exacerbate the homelessness issue? It's certainly not helping, but I wouldn't say that it's a prime driver of this challenge. Well, I was more looking for the state who impacted roles similar to what Burlington or individual cities have. So is the state looking at any way of they collect the taxes? They collect a fee right now. So in Burlington, I'll just say I should have mentioned, I'm Brian Pine. I'm the director of the city's community and economic development office. I am on the agenda, I think for another item, but I'm happy to try to answer it. Don't work for the state of Vermont. But our friends from DPI will talk in a little while about what the city is using the revenue from short-term rental registration fee. Not the right term, but it's something like that. So at the state level, no, it's just going into the general fund. I just, we have tried for four years to get a rental registry within the state. It has failed. We've failed to override the governor's veto when we have passed it. This year, we didn't even really get it into legislation because it's so controversial. But that's the only way as a state. We can know how many rentals are out there, how many of them are short-term versus long-term. I think there are a lot of things at play that have reduced the amount of housing stock that is available. The pandemic didn't help in terms of bringing in a lot of people who could pay cash for homes and really tightening the market here. We haven't been building. We have under-invested in building affordable housing over the last 20 years ever since the Vermont Housing Conservation Board was formed because we have a clause in the enabling legislation that basically enables us to take money from the property transfer tax that's supposed to go to them to use it for other things. It's how we've paid for a lot of other things. And so VHCB has maybe been funded at 40% or 50% of what they could have been. And that would have affected our ability to create more housing. It's estimated that we'd have at least a thousand more units on the market of affordable housing, permanently affordable housing had we done that. But at any rate, that is, this year we got very close to full property transfer tax. They're their full share of the property transfer tax, which is a major victory, which just kind of astounds me every year. But at any rate, all right. Any other questions for our representatives? I do have a question and I also want to thank our representative because I know we've got plenty of work for so many issues, including housing. I think it was you, Representative Gloomley. Can anyone hear me? Is it on? It just is on. Okay. You mentioned that the Senate whittled down off-ramp money. So there was some money at some point that I guess the House proposed that was supposed to be specifically to help the transition from motels to more permanent housing. There was like specific monies for that. And then when it got to the Senate side, that was whittled down. Maybe this is just really a question I should ask our senators, but do you know why and what those negotiations were about? And is there any possibility that some of that could come back in in a newly negotiated budget, even though I understand nobody wants to renegotiate a budget? So what is important for all of us, even those of us who serve on the Appropriations Committee to remember is that like we don't alone do the budget, right? So I'm not, it's a process and it is a process that involves lots of different personalities with lots of different priorities. And there is the House, I don't mean to point fingers is what I'm saying, except to say that this isn't something that the House itself can fully control. And so we had $20 million in additional money that was in the budget that we passed. It was stripped out. They found another $12.5 million in money that was already going to VHCB, but for another purpose and reallocated that to emergency housing, but we still had then $7.5 million shortfall. And in the budget adjustment of the Senate, we had funded people to go through the end of all, all people to go through the end of June and the Senate changed that and made and said that some people would exit at the end of May and some at the end of June. So, I mean, I think it's curious that, that I, I don't believe that senators, at least in Vermont Digger or any of the other, you know, media counsel not hearing anybody ask senators about this issue. I think that's probably because it's members of the House, you know, who many of whom stood up and said, I can't pass this budget because and that so that's where the attention has been. What I also think is what I, what I think is helpful to, it doesn't explain away the problem, but if you think about Vermont, we're a small state, we're only 650,000 people. That being said, folks in the Northeast Kingdom have a very different view scape than people living in Burlington in terms of how big government should be, whether or not government should be helping folks, you know, for three years or more. And I don't just mean the Northeast Kingdom, I mean across the state, even things like, you know, there's a strong streak of libertarianism in Vermont of, you know, why should there be any government? And so I, the sense that I hear from our constituencies is not necessarily reflected by all, you know, 179 other representatives and senators, what they're hearing from their constituents. And so that ends up being a lot of the conversation. I mean, to what Tiff said, four years of trying to pass a rental registry, just so we can know where there are rental units. And therefore, you know, if there's another pandemic, we know where we could open up doors and work with willing landlords. But there's a sense of, you know, a very strong sense of don't tell us what to do with our property, that sort of concept. And it ends up, ends up, you know, stopping a lot of conversations and bills that I think our constituents would probably support, but not necessarily receive support across all of Vermont. And I'm sorry to interrupt you. The audio is not good. Is it possible for you to check your audio? See if you can't get a little bit of a clear connection. Shoot, I'm sorry. That work, that did not work out. But I think I was having a hard time. Go ahead. Let's try again. Go ahead, please. Mary Catherine. Okay. So I was just going to say, can you hear me now? Yep. Great. Great. Okay. So I have been posting pretty regularly on social media, on both my Facebook and my Instagram, about the housing issue in particular, and talking about the budget, how it's made, the process, what happened in the house, what happened in the Senate, what happened at the committee of conference, and where we are now. And I'm also posting resources as they come about to help people who are unhoused. So I'm about to have to pop off, but if y'all want to look at those, they're up on my Instagram, which is Stone for BT is the tag. And also, they auto populate onto my Facebook, which is Mary Catherine Stone for Vermont. So I hope that's helpful. Just trying to break it down and just give information in clear terms about what is happening, what has happened, and what we're doing. So I just wanted to offer that up. Before I sign off. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Dale has a question. That's actually a question. I just wanted to express my gratitude to I just wanted to express my gratitude to the three of you for your thoughtful approach for your clear and detailed explanation for your compassion, your attempts to understand so many sides of this issue. And I want to recognize the courage that it takes to make these hard decisions and appreciate you for all of that. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. It's pretty heartbreaking. Yeah. We have another minute or two. If there's anything, any final comments or questions for our state representatives? Okay, I can't see them online. Yes, I can't say it any better than Dale did. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time tonight and and all the work. Well, thank you very much. Thanks for being here. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. And I'm sorry I have to leave. I've got a friend's wedding. And I got to run to now down the road. I want right. We'll have fun. Thank you. Bye. We're going to move on to the next agenda topic, which we're joined by Brian Pine, director of CEDO. He joined us briefly in the previous conversation, but he's going to speak now. I guess updating us on what's happening in downtown Burlington, City Place, the VFW building and any other interesting happenings. Great. So City Place gets all the attention, but there's other stuff happening. So let me tell you a couple of highlights if you would just in the sort of downtown development projects that I think maybe folks are aware of, but maybe not. And some are actually, if not actually inward six, pretty close. So the VFW on South Muske Avenue is slated for demolition and redevelopment to a, I believe a permitted project is six stories, which would have the VFW and a community kitchen on the ground floor. The second floor would be the space for the city's community justice center would move out of its cramped quarters at 200 church, the building that Burlington Telecom is in, and they would come up around the corner with all their stuff and move into a new building when that is ready. That's expected to start construction, probably not till next spring, the way things go as far as being able to get projects underway. So that is the Champlain Housing Trust is the developer with a group called Ever North. They use a financing mechanism called the Federal Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which ensures that the rents are reasonably affordable. They are going to dedicate 25% of their target 25% of their units for folks who've experienced homelessness. So that's I think eight if you do the math, they may end up with a few more, but they probably won't go much less than that. So that is a really positive development that will get underway, I think probably in spring of 24. One that's under construction right now is getting the address to 78 Main Street right across from Edmunds is Kotze's building 16 small family size, but small family size departments for home families who are coming out of shelter and are basically moving into transitional housing. In some cases, they may stay for several years, depending on if it meets their family's needs or if they have other goals around school districts and where they want to be located. But that project is actually well underway, ready for occupancy, I believe this winter, maybe next spring. So that's 16 family units. The old YMCA is a pretty beleaguered Burlington treasure that Bill and Patty and their staff have spent countless hours trying to protect the public safety and protect that incredible historic resource. It's honestly, it's such a challenge that when graffiti was removed a week ago, literally the next day, the entire space that had been cleaned was covered in new tags. That's the least of it though, the dangerous things that are happening inside are much more concerning, I think, than the graffiti. The graffiti bothers me, but it's somewhat, it's skin deep. It doesn't reveal the much deeper problem that's happening inside the building, which is lots of unhoused folks living in very precarious situations where there's sort of a leader who kind of decides who gets to come in and he charges them for the right to stay and he boards it up at night with screw guns to make sure it's secure. In other words, if there's a fire, they're going to have to jump through a window. So it's really incredibly hazardous conditions and there is a group that owns the property that is out of state and planned on building a hotel, but they kind of never dealt with the fact that they had to go through Act 250. So that process rather daunting and fortunately a local, local small developer, but local developer is in the due diligence period of sort of checking everything out to see if they can move forward. And some of us were at the meeting, NPA meeting last week for Ward 8 or Bruce Baker and his architect, Cleary Buckley, presented what they have in mind for the property, which is very similar in scale to what was permitted instead of a hotel. It would knock down everything you see sort of behind the traditional gable structure. Everything north of that would come down and be replaced by housing units. So it would actually not be a hotel, it would be housing. And it's anywhere between 60 and 80 roughly, could be a little bit more, could be a little bit, probably not much less. That would be a mix of market and affordable housing. It would have the 15, maybe 20% inclusionary housing. When we say inclusionary, there's a rent level. I can tell you it's about $1,200 a month is what the rent for a two bedroom inclusionary unit as well. While that sounds expensive, but you can't find that in Burlington unless it's mandated through a government requirement. So that's why we require that. So I think that is a very positive development. If Bruce is able to get a permit, he plans to commence construction immediately and remove the structure that used to house the pool and all the fitness center part of the building that will come down. And he will focus his restoration work on the older historic profession. The part that faces College Street is where they're going to focus the historic renovation on. Going downtown a little bit more. We have cranes very active on 151 South Champlain Street, which is next to August 1st. That is a 49 unit housing development that is underway. It's moving pretty rapidly. The developer is Nate Degas. I think that's how you say his last name. Maybe somebody here knows it. He's done a lot of Winooski. When you see projects that have sprung up in Winooski, he's done a few of those. So he's a local experience developer. That is probably going to be ready for winter occupancy as well. In that case, they had originally permitted it to include the affordable units within the property, but we have this opportunity that you're allowed in certain areas where there's already, well, let's see how it's defined. Where incomes fall below a certain level, you have the ability to pay into the housing trust fund rather than create the affordable units on site. When the money goes to the housing trust fund, it allows for new developments to happen in other locations. I'll talk a little bit about what is happening with the housing trust fund when I talk about City Place. That project is not a city is not funding that project at all. We're funding the COTS project and we're funding the CHT project. We don't have any city money envisioned to go into the YMCA redevelopment. That is entirely a private endeavor. So City Place is the big one. And if you've all noticed, they've put a significant amount of concrete and rebar and steel is now going into the property. The steel is arriving in the coming days, which means when you begin to put steel up, you go vertical. And all the stuff we've seen now has been, we haven't seen much, but there's a lot going on in terms of what's called the podium, which is where the buildings start going vertical is at the top of the podium. And below the podium is a parking structure and essentially the foundation, which has to go all the way down to bedrock because of the size of these structures need to be anchored way down far. So that's what they're doing. 424 housing units for 40,000 square feet of retail, which is kind of hard to envision how much that is. But think of City Hall altogether, I think it's about 10,000 square feet. So 40,000 square feet of retail is a fair amount of retail on the ground floor. There was going to be a hotel at one point. There's no hotel envisioned right now, but that may come back. So I just want to warn you for full disclosure. They say that they may decide at some point while they're building part of it to go with the hotel. But that would be not in lieu of, well, that would be in lieu of some housing units, but they'd still maintain a fairly large number of housing units. So right now going through the permit process to add, this is kind of an interesting development to add about 50 housing units because the top floors of these buildings all had essentially mechanical penthouses. So HVAC equipment that needed to be take up the entire floor. But because of the City's ordinance that requires all electric buildings to move towards net zero, we have basically no need for all that mechanical space. So they have freed up an additional floor on each building that they're seeking a permit amendment to go add residential units. So that's a really positive development. They scrapped, they're scrapping the idea of a restaurant on the top floor. That included a observation deck, which was never really clear how that was going to work. Kind of hard to imagine the, sorry, how you, how you control access and ensure safety of an observation deck on a building that's like 100 feet tall. So they couldn't find anyone who was willing to ensure their building if they had an observation deck, unless it had a massive level of staffing. So they, they are not doing an observation deck, but they need to provide some public amenities in the building. And so the idea is to take the space that was theoretically going to be the observation deck and turn it into publicly accessible ground floor restrooms that will be available, a hopefully significant number of hours, which is a really great benefit for downtown to have more public restrooms. As you know, the local partners are three local contractors, if you will, and developers. Their relationship right now for the affordable housing is through Champlain Housing Trust in and Ever North. And so that's where the city funding comes in is the 85 affordable housing units will sit on the western side of this property. So it's kind of hard to picture, but if you come up Pine Street, you used to go down into a little area that you came up into a parking garage. That part garage is all gone, but you will enter, you'll go continue on Pine Street up to the northern portion of Pine Street, which is from Cherry to Pearl will be reconnected. So that's a big part of the public improvements to make this project sort of reconnect our downtown, both on Pine and on, excuse me, on St. Paul, they'll be reconnected through property that used to be part of the mall on both ends there. So Champlain Housing Trust will have their building will sit on the western portion that essentially faces Macy's at some level, and then it starts to essentially look out up for the parking garage and off to the lake. And there will be a third party developer that is yet to be, I think all of the ink is not yet dry on that relationship. So that's between City Place Partners, which are the three local partners, and they will be bringing in a third party that will basically develop and own the northern portion of the property. When I say the northern, it actually includes a lot of what's on St. Paul, and then it bends around and goes all the way down Cherry. And then as you turn onto Pine, that's the CHT portion down at that point. So it's the closest building to the old Macy's, the current Burlington High School. And that third party developer is, no, we don't know who it is yet. So it's not, that has not been announced. That is, that will be expected in the coming weeks. So if all goes as planned, we're looking at these buildings being ready for occupancy in some maybe in early 25, but the rest of latter portion of 2025, at this rate. These are complicated sites to work on. You got a lot of issues with staging and mobilization of your crew. Right now, it's kind of easy because they have the whole site to work with. But once they start adding steel and more concrete to this, to the site, it'll get much more crowded. What else can I answer about that one? Do you have a general idea what the cost will be for the units? It's hard to know on the private side because we don't have a whole lot of, we don't have a whole lot of insight into the rent levels on the private units, but the Champaign Housing Trust units will be renting for a range from 800 to 12, 1300, depending on the unit size. So the largest ones will be in the 1200 range. That'll be three bedroom units will be in that range. And that's 85 out of the whole development of 425. So the rest will be whatever, I hate to say it, but it's kind of whatever the market will bear will be the rest of the units. And they are at this point. Yeah. There's really kind of a strange thing in the financing world that I don't want to go too far into, but just suffice to say that the secondary market that buys half the mortgages in the US does not favor condo development because of what happened in the crash of 2008. They got burned. They lost a lot of money, a lot of banks and business. And so they're really unwilling to finance condominium construction because they are afraid that it's built speculatively and you may lose money on them. And so they don't, they don't support that. I've got a question with all of these new people moving into downtown. Does CETO do any coordinating with Green Mountain Transit for increasing bus service? And I mean, I assume that that has to get sort of thought through years in advance. Is there any, has that started yet? It's a great question. There's 420 land total parking spaces that go with this project. So that includes what the employees and the customers of the retail will use, as well as what the folks living there will need. I don't have much data on what the demand for parking is. True demand, not just sort of expected demand from private sort of market rate units, but the use of cars, ownership of cars and utilization of cars downtown in buildings that Champlain Housing Trust owns and manages is extremely low, very low. So there will be, I mean, it's, they really see for, for an 85 unit building, they need, they believe they need about 14 parking spaces. That's how low the car utilization is. And that's because of the downtown amenities. You're across the street from the bus station. I mean, you are in the most transit rich place you can be and still be in Vermont. So as far as expansion, I don't know, Dale, but I don't know if that, I don't know if GMT has a plan to increase either the frequency of existing routes or to change the routes. That's, that's something that I don't think that's really in the works right now. I think the whole transit system is challenged by honestly by a number of factors, the way we fund it is really backwards. We fund it primarily through the property tax locally. So the city puts 1.8 million of its property tax dollars each year into GMT's budget and the other towns put a very small amount, but it's still not connected to, to what it's funding, you know, the property tax isn't related to running a bus and it's just totally disconnected. So we need to change the way we envision transit and really deal with the time you have to wait, which is the headways, you have to deal with where the routes take you, which is not in the right, always in the right places and all of those challenges. But that's part of what I was thinking is if there's more people living downtown rather than working downtown, seems like it would change the need. I don't know how, but it may. I mean, we are, you know, the things have changed quite a bit since the pandemic. So people living and working in the same place is something that we didn't envision just a few years ago. And in some ways, this is kind of an interesting, ironic twist that the city place project as originally envisioned had 280,000 square feet of office space. It would be largely vacant and they'd be trying to figure out how to convert it to housing now. So thank goodness it wasn't built. It would be like what they call the empire state building for like a decade was called the empty state building. No one was in it when it first was built. But I think you're right that we will need to grapple more with transit and how to move people, especially if job growth happens further out and yet people are living downtown without cars. The state building has a good rooftop observation deck there, right? Which one? That's a great example of a good room. I had a quick question on YMCA. So has Bruce got some magic wand where Act 250 isn't a concern for him? Yeah, it's the state Act 250 exemption. If you're building housing and you have 20% of your units designated as affordable, you don't have to go through Act 250. That's the state land use control law. It's basically take the Burlington process and just redo it for the state. So you do it twice. It's a little bit more onerous, but it's basically the same process. Ours is called the mini Act 250 really. Ours is because it's kind of like Act 250. The criteria is slightly different, but it means you have to hire all your consultants twice, present materials twice, risk a permit appeal twice, slow things down considerably. But it's appropriate in many cases. I don't know that in the largest population center that it's really getting a whole lot of value though. It's meant for larger regional developments that are, you know, was intended to really deal with ski area development is really what it was originally intended for, which had a lot of impact on the natural resources and the, you know, regional area and view sheds and things like that. Yeah. Another question on the, I don't think so. I think isn't V said in the building were seven days and CBO are further down in the South Champlain. Oh, no, no, no, South Champlain is a whole way down, down, down, down Main Street. Go down main and you get to August 1st. Oh, oh, no. Yeah. So it's, yeah, it is. It's just north. Exactly. It's just north of V set. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Right. Any, sorry, East. East. Any questions for Brian? Sam, I don't know. I can't see online any longer. I got picked off in Zoom, but okay. Well, thank you. That was a succinct, but I'll complete it. Oh, I should have mentioned, I did mention briefly, but the Housing Trust Fund is an important local source. And the work that they, our DPI team have done around regulating the short-term rentals is doubling. So the Housing Trust Fund by taxes that we all pay teeny little bit, a penny per hundred dollars of value goes to the city's Housing Trust Fund, which supports permanently affordable housing for low and very low income households. But it generates about 500 to about 565. Let's just say it's $565,000 a year and already the short-term rental tax is generating on track to generate more than that in this fiscal year. So it will double what we have available, which is really critically helpful. It doesn't mean the resources are going to be enough, but it's, it makes a huge difference. That's great. Thank you. Sure. So when we pay our taxes, if you look carefully, you'll see a few line items on it. One of them is Housing Trust, Housing Trust Fund. And that goes to support, comes to our office, we administer it. I serve as the trust fund manager, but most people do the work. I don't really do a lot of the work. Make sure we're doing it correctly. And that money is, generates about $565,000 a year from the tax. And because of the taxation of short-term rentals, when someone rents an Airbnb, they pay a tax and a portion of that tax goes to the city. And that's going into the Housing Trust Fund, that tax. So what incentives would the city have to look for the cheaters? Bill, maybe Patty and Bill can talk about that. I think if they're cheating, they're not using Airbnb, because Airbnb makes them pay it. It's not optional. You can't get out of it. I don't understand that. Yeah. Yeah. But if the city is profiting from the benefits of... Well, I think calling the city profiting is a little bit misconcerving, who's getting the money. The money goes to the Housing Trust Fund. So it's used for affordable housing. It's not used for the city to meet, we don't pay our salaries with it. So it's not used for that. It's used to create affordable housing. So it's a way to fund an important pressing community need with revenue that's different from you paying your taxes. It's someone who's coming to use a short-term rental. They're paying a little bit extra. So we're talking like an extra $0.75 or $2 or whatever it is to support affordable housing. But it adds up. Okay. Ryan, thank you very much. Right. We're going to move on to our last agenda item, which this is a good segue. We're going to talk about short-term rentals and code enforcement. So we have Bill Ward here from the Department of Permanency and Inspections. Yes, and Patty Weyman. Patty's the Housing Manager. It's going to start with a couple of quick introductions just so that folks have a little bit of history. I'm Bill Ward and I'm the Director of the Permanent Inspections Department. Grateful to have another department head like Brian Pine having good teammates makes it really make the work a lot easier to do and really grateful for the knowledge he brings and the team atmosphere that the mayor has got us working in to make things better for everybody. We try to do the same thing in our office. Our office, for those that used to know it as code enforcement, just before the pandemic, it was turned into what's now called the Department of Permanent Inspections. It took what was a single group of us that were code enforcement and I was the director and it made me the director of the Code Enforcement Division, the Zoning Division, which took the zoning team that was in City Hall and brought them down to 645 Pine Street with us. And it took the Department of Public Works trades team, which was building inspectors, plumbing and mechanical inspector and electrical inspectors over to be under my control. I've shared this very politely. I tell people either the mayor loves me or hates me because it is an incredibly challenging job to do any one of those divisions. But like Brian said, being the department head, if you have the right people and it makes your job a lot easier. So as we developed that department, we had the good fortune Patty was the case manager. So she's the housing division manager and has been sort of the lead person on the short-term rental registration with me. So I'll have her tell you a little bit about the housing division. So we, Patty Wayman lately said, we oversee or are responsible for inspecting the 10,000 plus or minus, it's a little over 10,000 units that the city has that are rentals of that. That's the primary responsibility. We also respond to complaints from anyone, everyone about anything, pretty much. There's chickens in someone's backyard. We're getting calls about it or if there's trash on a green belt, we might get a call about it. Somebody's toters being left out too long. We're getting calls about it. I'll try to speak louder. I mean, I know I can. We also respond to, if you're familiar with the C click fix app that the city uses. It's a great way for, in my case, to monitor activities that my team is responsible for responding to. When I say team, I have four housing inspectors and one administrator that worked for me. And then Bill said I worked for Bill. Again, a large part of the primary responsibility is the rentals. It's really quite nice, in my opinion, that the ordinance was plugged into chapter 18, because it makes sense. I mean, a rental is a rental is a rental. We just now have two different kinds of rentals. We have long-term rentals and we have short-term rentals. Probably worth noting that Patty and I talked about this before tonight that most of you probably were aware, short-term rentals were happening before we had a short-term rental ordinance. But from a logistical perspective, the short-term rental ordinance, it's not even a year old. It was the end of June when it was actually enacted by city council. And it wasn't actually effective. Once the council approves it and the mayor signs it, there's an effective date. That effective date was August 3rd. So we're still a few months away from a true birthday when it became effective. But part of the things that were required under that ordinance was that property owners were required to register as a short-term rental after the ordinance was implemented. And our office was responsible for confirming that they had done that and that they were meeting the other requirements about the limited number that each property owner could have. The Department of Permanent Inspections couldn't do all of these things itself because monitoring all of the different websites that someone might use from another community to book a short-term rental is an incredibly large job to begin with. We farmed that out. We signed a contract with an organization called Host Compliance. So they track, they claim it's hundreds of different websites, but Brian mentioned some of the big ones. But there are really all sorts of different web tools that people can use to book a short-term rental. And in doing that, they provide us a great deal of information about the total number of rentals that are currently active in Burlington. And we have to sort of sift through the data that comes in to see if the person that was renting a year ago stopped eight months ago, or maybe they just stopped in the last 60 days. Today's an important day because today was one of the, today's the day when people have, if they were in non-compliant status, the ordinance actually allowed them to have a single unit that was non-compliant, had to end by May 31st. So one of the things Patty and I will end with tonight is to say, it's a little early for us to give you like enforcement data on those because we will see in the coming days what happens as far as those, if those folks truly stop. But with that host compliance data that we get, we have to take what they provide. They don't have all of the data on every address because they can only presume to know the approximate location and the specific address because if you've gone on the websites, they don't say that it's 600 South Willard Street that you're renting until you actually rent the property. So they give us approximates and they use some photos to try to figure out which properties from the assessor's office match up with that. They've only been able to say they're clear that they have 75% of the current 260 that are active that 70, yeah 75% that they've identified. We're putting that data, the data we have from host compliance together with our rental registration data to sort of have the overlay and make sure that we're not missing anybody. Patty's going to talk a little bit about what happens with the short-term rental ordinance, what people have to do and then we're going to talk about what we're doing with some of that data. So like long-term rentals, and I feel like I have to define the define the difference between a short-term rental and a long-term rental. Long-term rental is anything over 30 days. Short-term is anything less than 30 days. So and one of my counterpart in zoning would say the punchline is the magic number is one. Any property owner as a rule and I'm saying this as a rule because there are a few caveats and exceptions. As a rule, one short-term rental is the rule for any property owner. That has to be registered and inspected and inspected is again by the minimum housing standards that we have set forth in Chapter 18. How many can a owner register? They can register one whole unit. I use duplexes a lot as a visual. Say you own a duplex and you live on one side, you can have the choice to long-term rent or short-term rent that other side, but that's your one. If you don't live in that duplex and say you live in, somebody lives in South Burlington or on another street in Burlington, take that duplex. You can short-term rent one side, but the other side has to meet the what I have nicknamed the affordability criteria under the inclusionary zone in Article 9. Those are the same numbers that Brian just shared earlier about affordability. They can rent one unit if they don't live there as a short-term rental. If an adjoining unit, if they have a matching unit, that meets the affordability criteria. Like I said, I use that as a visual because you can't live on Ward Street and have a whole single-family home on Pine Street. You can't live on Ward and rent a single-family home at short-term rental because you're not living there. If it's a full unit, you could short-term rent rooms in your single-family home. Like I said, there are a lot of caveats and not a lot, a couple. You can rent up to two bedrooms in your single-family home, so you would be there, and you can rent out two. If you rent out three, it becomes and not register and be inspected by us. You still need to register the short-term rents. If it's long-term rents, you then need to be, or I'm sorry, I'm just speaking. If you have three bedrooms that you are renting, whether it be short-term or long-term, you then need to have that property inspected. If it's only two bedrooms, it does not need to be inspected, but it still needs to be registered. Am I missing any of the exceptions? So we're going to have questions afterwards too, but I wanted to give you that high level of how things have been changing because I did a very similar presentation back in February to City Council, and the numbers at that time from host compliance, we had checked. It was February 6th of this year. There were 269 actively advertised, listed, and being used short-term rentals. As of this morning when I checked it, it's nine fewer, it's 260 that are actively listed, advertised, and being rented. Now our job over the coming days is to make sure that anyone's that were not owner occupied come into full compliance or stop renting. That's part of what we'll talk about in a few minutes, but Patty's going to talk about the actual data when we get rental registration data, how we parse out the short-terms and the long-term so that you know what we've got for specific short-term rental registrations with the City. So what I did literally just before we came over here, we have 228 units, short-term rental units in the City of Burlington registered, registered in our OpenGov system. We have three statuses in that software. There's active, stopped, and complete. Active, stopped, and complete. So active means, generally means that we're probably waiting for a piece of documentation like the Homestead Declaration to be uploaded, or I've reached out to the property owner and said, I need the names on the lease. I need a signed document or something to that effect. It's active. It probably can be or maybe it can be, but I need a little more information. Complete means they've checked all the boxes and they are have jumped through the proper hoops and are in good standing as of when it was processed. And I might say it's for the next year. They have to redo this every year. The owners have to do this every year. Stopped means, yeah, there's something that's not lining up or it doesn't, it can't possibly be a short-term rental in the City under our current ordinance. Of the 228, I thought this was interesting. It seemed like that was gaining speed over time. 33 units have converted to meet the affordability criteria. So, and I'm going off. No, that's good. They see some nodding heads because that's what that's encouraging. That was what the design of what the City Council members hoped when they put that that part into the ordinance. So that's a good thing. So as of right now, you have 38 units more to affordable. That were previously not meeting this. So what I've learned, and this is where I'm going off script a little bit, is there are three categories of property owners, managers, hosts. One is people who will follow every rule and won't ask questions. They just do what they're supposed to do. They're the people and would always do that. Have always done that. I've always found out what the rules were. The second group is, okay, I have two short-term rentals. Do I really want to give it up? Okay, what do I need to do to make it fit? And then there are a few that probably are going to make us enforce and will never going to stop unless we make them stop. I call that job security. I'm going to talk. That's a great segue to talk about what we do with enforcement. The steps in enforcement are just like if we had another housing issue. There's some form of a written warning to the property owner. Ours is typically an order. The order says, here's what the deficiency is. You're not registered and you're renting. That's the case. So it tells what the deficiency is. It tells you what you have to do to come into compliance. That's called the remedy. And it gives you a comply by date. So it tells you what you did wrong, what you have to do to come into compliance and the date you have to do that before we take additional action. If you come into compliance, we're good. If you don't, there are read reinspection fees for that unit we charge. It's just like if you'd get a service charge for something that you asked for and things, you know, you had a person coming and you weren't there to meet them, they'll charge you a service charge. We charge that and we can tick it for each violation. So if you are unregistered and you have not had the unit inspected, there's $150 ticket for each of those violations and the reinspection fee. So the fees increase for each reinspection. If we had to do another order, there'd be a shorter compliance period and the fees double. And if they have, if we have two periods of non-compliance, the third step is sending that information of two periods of non-compliance to the city attorney's office for a prosecution. We're not there yet, but we may, as Patty said, there may be some people that do those challenges, but again, we'll do what we've always done and I think we'll have some pretty good results. Our standard with most housing inspections, these are typical long-term rental units, is somewhere around 85 to 90% compliance just on the order itself. So I think a lot of times people will do the right thing as long as they know what it is and what they have to do and why. And even if there are challenges with that, people write to us all the time and said, oh, here's a problem, I've got to fix this. What do I need to do? Can I get one more week before you come and inspect? We do those things routinely. We're very easy to work with. Just like tonight, we'll be really easy to work with if you have questions. Leave it at that and leave it back open to the group. The rental numbers, are they available to everybody? When you need to check, for example, I can go online and go on certain houses. Can I do the same with the rental registrations? Yes, I think the open portal that we have does have data on all of the rentals in Burlington because you could look up and see which areas of the city have properties that have been given a five-year certificate and which ones have a four-year. Someone who knows the system would find it easier than someone who is just poking around trying to find it. So if you want, let me know what specific things you'd be looking for. If you send me an email, I'll send you how to find it on the website. General, if we have to register, then we should be able to see who everybody is registered. Wasn't that the complaint that the governor had that he didn't think everybody should be out there knowing who is renting a house? Yes, so it doesn't have a specific person's name to say that this person, whether it's anonymous information, where it says, again, you can look up in the ward map and see ward five and six that I want to search for the properties and these wards that have been given the highest certificate of compliance rating or the lowest rating. Those types of things are available through the open data portal. But it doesn't say it is not going to have Nick Anderson's name or Patty's name or mine that bills it. Make a distinction between short-term rental and long-term rental. Do they have different photos? There is not. They're all in one place for our purposes for the public. But all of the information is public in the sense that if you wanted, say if you knew about a property on your street and say, is this property registered, having a hard time finding it, you can get a public records request and we can give you everything that we have that is releasable on anything that's up there. We're really, like I said, easy to work with and happy to share the information. So the new thing in this ordinance is that people cannot have two units anymore for short-term rentals. They still have to live on the premise if it's in the entire house. Right. So I think there's, there might be a little bit of confusion. What we define as units and whatnot. I speak in units. A single family home is a unit. A duplex has two units. An ADU, for instance, is a unit. An ADU has very specific conditions. One of the two units on that property has to be owner occupied and that's where it's similar. You can have, if it wasn't an ADU, if it was just two units on a property, you wouldn't have to follow the guidelines of the ADU. You could live in one and short-term rent the other. Or you can meet the affordability criteria, live somewhere else, and short-term rent that second unit. It gets a little bit ADU, accessory dwelling unit. Very specific definitions. And the other thing that, and I said earlier, there are a lot of things that we've found. So short-term renting and Airbnb, the Airbnb is the biggest, VRBO second. There are anywhere between 70 and 100 platforms that people can use according to the two or three different companies that we've spoken with. This has been around for about 20 years. I think in the last 10 years, some of the bigger communities jumped on to regulating because it was, for a variety of reasons. I don't want to, you know, but what we've found is that a lot of the folks, we didn't really have a neat, nice place to put short-term rentals. We have the zoning ordinance and we had the housing, we have zoning and we have the housing ordinance. For a long time, we were trying to make it fit under zoning as like a B&B. But it really never met, a short-term rental is a new phenomena and didn't meet the traditional definition of B&B. So, which is why I think it fits nicely under Chapter 18. We just need to tweak it a little bit at some point here. But let's get through the first year or two with this and see what really needs to be changed. The other pieces, a lot of people, they weren't talking about the fact that they were short-term renting. They registered and were inspected as long-term rentals and they just did it because there was no other, nobody enforcing. There's no, there was nothing to regulate. Some people would go out and get the, did, we saw real influx once there was public conversation about the short-term rentals. People were racing to get B&B permits from zoning and those will stand for, as long as they keep using them as, you know, B&Bs or short-term rentals. But now that we have this ordinance, it's much clearer where people fall and what they should be doing in my opinion. I'm not sure they're all valid yet. They aren't all valid yet. They won't be valid until Bill and Patty put their seal of approval on. I would say, right, but the end of May, you know, if someone's going to rent into June, we'll get, after that rental period, we'll get the information from host compliance that that's when we'll know we have a violation at that particular property. So we're not quite there yet until we see that someone, if they're not allowed to rent past, if they've got a second unit or they're doing something that's non-compliant, they had to have ended by yesterday. So we won't know if they actually stop until we have tonight's data or tomorrow. If we are, and that's why I was glad to give you this presentation, but didn't want you to feel like it was final information because I said that to City Council. One last wonky piece of this is that part of our check to see if it's a person's primary residence is their filed April 15th deadline that they had to file a Homestead declaration. So in order for us to guarantee that we've got the most updated information, I couldn't give that to City Council in February when I spoke to them. And I'm still not sure that everyone's filed them with the State of Vermont if they had to, but that's something that we cross check to see if someone says they live there, but you know, they're registered as a voter in Arizona and they register their car in Arizona, then they're more likely a resident of Arizona and not Burlington. So we have to cross check a number of things if there's a question about someone's actual primary residence or not. But again, my experience is that most everyone is completely honest. And when you tell them what the rules are and that you've noticed they're not in compliance, they work with you to come into compliance. That's what we expect and we'll certainly let you know if that's not what we find. I don't have any questions. Well, thank you both. So sorry, Nick, go ahead. So it's one of the criteria that it has to be for profit or for remuneration. There are some three kind of house sharing sites out there like CouchSurfing kind of style where you might have short term visitors, but it's a barter or free based system. Is there a difference there? Yeah, we cross check what's actually happening because they don't want to give a definitive answer on recording and then someone who is doing it for rent now says, oh, no, what I'm doing is this is free. And because that's part of the challenge, we'll be able to confirm that information. But if there's not money changing hands and it's something like that, it's probably not something that we would regulate. But chances are if there are other issues, there'll be some other way for us to regulate it. Because if you have unmanaged people coming and going, there are going to be trash issues. That's a violation because it's not clean and sanitary. We can write an ordinance violation for that. There may be yard parking. You probably remember from your zoning days, the yard parking problems. If you have too many people, no, but when you have too many people at a place that are not properly managed, you do end up with too many cars. The cars don't have space in the driveway or they don't have resident parking stickers to be on the street. They park on the yard, they get tickets and there can be zoning violations for those repeated violations. And the other thing is the noise complaints. When you have too many people or people that are unregulated, you have parties and noise. So there's a variety of different ways that that still might come under the city scrutiny. So, but it probably is not going to be something that's regulated under this because there wouldn't be a taxation associated with someone who's not exchanging hands, exchanging money, you know, a hand to hand for staying overnight. This is not related to short term rental, but I think this may fall under your purview. Recently, there was an article in Seven Days about a house fire and the concern that some requirements of the city were not being met, one of which is providing housing, alternate housing for residents. You probably can't comment on that specific case, but it is that an issue. Yeah, we had spoken with the reporter and then WCAX did a follow up story. I think the message was a little bit clearer. I don't think that it was as clear that Patty was working with the property owner that night and had thanked him for helping to relocate the tenants, which is exactly what a property owner who owns a property is responsible for doing. But I'm pretty confident that Patty, because I've seen her both speaking in person with these tenants, we can account for the tenants from each of those units to know that there are a couple that are housed and still, or I think there may be down to one that is in housing and is getting, last Friday they got their first reimbursement check from the city when the property owner had not paid for the relocation costs. But yeah, every one of those folks has resources and has Patty's contact information and has all along. Without using names or specifics of any there were about 10 units that were displaced took a little bit to get names and contact information and really understand who's in which unit. One tenant is what I would call on the verge of homelessness right now because of their situation. Another tenant was rehoused in another of that property owner's units elsewhere. The other seven or one of them I believe I don't know he hasn't reached back out to me so I'm not 100% certain what his situation is but he was well known to the property owners. I don't know if he worked for them or whatever. He did not have renters insurance but he was at least at last contact stable. The others have not presented although I've reached out to every single one of them. Oh and there's at least one staying with family. One or two maybe. So there's about five families units whatever that are currently temporarily housed and are paying for that temporary housing through renters insurance. They have not approached the city for and because the property owner has not reimbursed him. My understanding is nobody except for the two tenants I submitted that had submitted receipts to me that went unpaid have we reimbursed but we're on a new week. I'm probably going to have to beg, borrow and steal. That's another way of saying it. Have to issue at least another check to one tenant because they have been staying in a I'm going to say a homewood suites but it's something like that a sweet hotel and the money goes quickly. It's not going to be a quick fix at that particular house because there's an electric service connection to the house so it's going to be a significant repair time. I met with the the property owner and his attorney and so they're aware of the circumstances and they know our expectation for taking care of relocation of the tenants and they know what the city will do if they don't act according to chapter 18. Could you explain chapter 18? So what happens when there's an emergency in a building and all the tenants have to move out? Is it the responsibility of the property owner to provide housing or because I've also heard that the property owners don't like to do that because the insurance companies will not reimburse the property owners. So there seems to be confusion. Sure. I think part of the confusion for us comes because a lot of the times we don't even hear about it when these cases happen. I can remember having a very similar circumstance because of some flooding that happened on South Willard Street a few years back and two neighboring properties had had tenants who needed to get relocated and one of the tenants who didn't get relocated called us to ask for assistance and I posted the unit unfit and that means the property owners required to help to assist in relocating the tenant and pay for the relocation expenses and there's a qualifier and there are reasonable relocation expenses so it really depends on what needs to happen. It could be a temporary hotel finding them another unit that they own or someone else that they own but it's the assistance that goes there. But they had asked me, are you enforcing this evenly, Bill? I said, yeah, we are. We're always even with what we do. What's your question? Well, what about the property next door? Did you do the same thing to them? Did you post that unfit? I said it didn't but I didn't know that it had the same problem. I'll go over there next and I went over there and found that the unit next door had downstairs that looked wet but it was vacant and I knocked on the other doors and found the tenants that were there that were not affected. I said, hey, where's the tenant downstairs? So they said, oh, the property owner has them put up in a hotel because it got flooded last week. I was like, oh, well, that happened naturally and if someone does what needs to happen then we don't need to issue an order that says you have to do that. So two similar circumstances, one we had to issue an order. The other one, it happened because the property owner did what is the right thing to do is you've got to contract to house someone and something happens where they need to be relocated. They relocated them and nobody contacted us because it wasn't necessary. I also can I just add one more point to that. We can post a unit as unfit for human habitation. We don't condemn buildings, that's more of the building inspector's role, but we can post a unit as unfit for human habitation. In this particular case, the property, the entire property was posted as unfit for human habitation because it had no electricity. The electricity was cut off to the whole building as a result of the fire which displaced 10 units of tenants. Frequently, it's just a single unit and we are charged with making a determination as to whether it is within the realm of control by the of the tenant or is this something that in other words, did the tenant cause their displacement or is it the property owners, you know, are they responsible for it? And in this case, obviously it had nothing to do and none of the tenants did anything to cause their displacement, which is why the property owner is responsible for the cost of that displacement. And to make it a little bit clear, if I go in and post a unit as unfit due to I'm going to call it squalor, the property owner didn't cause that it is, you know, I'm not going to insist that the property owner rehouse them while the unit is cleaned or made habitable again. That's when my case management comes back in and I coordinate with resources and stuff, but I'm not going to issue an order for that that property owner to rehouse that particular tenant. I hope that helps. Okay, then one last thing is so I talked to a lot of tenants and a lot of neighbors and almost no one understands renters insurance. So no one seems to tell tenants anywhere in Vermont that they'd be very well advised to think about renters insurance. So no, it seems to be a well kept secret. So I wonder if there's more that can be done with educating the public about renters insurance. Thank you. No, that's a great, that's a great, I'm sorry. Maddie and see. Yeah. So there's two things I'm seeing. One is the resource that I would steer people to is the Vermont tenants as a resource. Maddie Roberts is my primary. We have a very good back and forth, very lively back and forth frequently. She absolutely that's the first thing. One of the things that she would talk about in coaching somebody. Unfortunately, people realize that there's a thing called renters insurance after an incident. I know that there are a lot of property owners that write it into their leases, but they don't ask for documentation that the tenant has it. And I'm not going to get into the legal, you know, to me, if a tenant has tenant renters insurance and the property owner has property on property insurance, it's for the two insurance companies to figure out who's responsible. I'm just I'm enforcing the ordinance. I'm not even talking to folks about it. It definitely behooves people to have rent. I'm speaking from personal experience when I was a tenant a million years ago that it behooves people to have renters insurance for justice reason. I have a sneaking suspicion I may at some point in the very near future be hearing from the people that have been silent because it's not renters insurance doesn't last forever. But my suspicion, why more don't is also not just because they don't know, but with rents being as high as they are, it's probably considered an extra expense that they it's valuable, but they're making up. They're basically gambling is by guess, because I would agree just any extra expense. And there's not a direct, you know, you can't count on it at the end of the month is if nothing happens, then some people feel like that it wasn't worth it. So my suspicion is that's part of it too. But we'll do what we can with putting out some additional information through Matty, because again, Matty is our contact with the tenants. We're sort of the neutral party between property owners and tenants. We we assist both because Patty said there are times when tenants do things that damage a property. And that's not our job to go in and say, yes, now you have to relocate them because they damaged, you know, this thing or whatever. There's a provision in the code that says we make that decision and either party that's agreed to they disagree with our decision. They can appeal that to the citizen panel called the housing border review. They're like the DRB, the Development Review Board for zoning. They're like the DRB for housing things. Five member citizen panel and they hear appeals from either tenants or property owners, you know, when they if one or the other objects to a code case, but more than that, more frequently they hear security deposit cases when there's a dispute between property owners and tenants. So if you ever have a chance to apply for that, it's a really valuable position to the city. We have, you know, I think there's a full slate right now, but it's incredibly important to have quality members on that board. And as many, you know, have all the positions filled because it helps to make sure that people get a fair shake. Yeah, we didn't mean to talk this long, but hopefully it was helpful. Yeah, that's great information. Yeah, thank you. You clarified a lot of things. Why didn't it happen before? So it's just happening now. Right, right. I could tell you a story. More to come. Another chapter to come. Okay, with that, I think that's the end of this meeting and actually we're going to be off until September and Ward 6. So we will send out newsletters and let you know when we're coming back. But have a great summer. Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Yes, no, thank you for inviting me.