 Okay, happy Wednesday everyone and happy New Year. It's great to see you all. I am going to go around and like we did in the past meetings, I'll call in one person. You'll say hi, what ward you're in, and then you'll popcorn it off to someone else. If you don't feel comfortable introducing yourself, then you can just stay muted. And I will just pass it to someone different, but I will start with folks in the room. Hi everyone, my name is Hannah King. I live in Ward 8, and I'm going to pass it off to Jonathan. I'm Jonathan Chappell Sokol. I live in Ward 1. I'm on the steering committee and I'll pass it to Richard. I'm Richard Hilliard. I live in Ward 1 on High Grove Court. So Angie. I'm Angie Chappell Sokol. I live in Ward 1. Hi, I'm Carol Livingston. I'm also on the steering committee and I live on Ward 1. Great, thank you. And then why don't we start with Dave. Do you want to kick us off on the folks online? Sure, good evening everyone. I'm Dave Cawley. I live on Nash Place and I'm in Ward 1. And why don't I pass it off to Ali. Hi, I'm Ali House. I use she and her pronouns. I'm from Ward 8. I'm going to pass it off to Jane. Hey everyone, good evening. I'm the Ward 8 City Councilor. It's nice to see you all happy new year. Passing it off, I'll do Kathy. Hi, I'm Kathy Awal, school board member from Wards 1 and 8, and East District. And I live in Ward 1. Great. Sorry. Okay. Sorry. How's it going? I think she handed it off to me. That sounded like my name. My name is Tom. I also live on Nash Place and I'm on the steering committee and I'll hand it off to Zariah. Hi, Zariah. She, her Ward 1 City Councilor. This is Paca and I live off of Riverside. And I'll pass it off to Selena. Hi, I'm Selena Colburn and I am representative in the Vermont House for the Chittenden 6-4 district along with my district mate Brian Sheena. I think we'll be joining us later, which is much of Ward 1 and some of the other surrounding wards. And I will pass it off to Karen Long. I think I'm I'm here. Hi, I'm Karen Long. I live on Henry Street. And I don't know who else has done it or not done it. So I don't really know. That might be it. I don't see anybody else. Oh no, there's a Karen Bastien. Hi, everybody. I just joined. This is Karen Bastien. I work for the UVM Health Network and the Office of Government and Community Relations. And happy new year. Nice to see you all. Hey, everyone. Jack Hansen and I'm the East District City Councilor. I live in Morty. Good to see you all. Oh, and I have to leave a little bit early tonight, a little before 8.30, unfortunately, but I'll be here for the councillor portion. Thanks. Oh, that's, oh my gosh, that, sorry, that was me being so silly. I think we have, Erhard has to go and then we can go to Olivia after. Hi, folks. This is Erhard Matka. I live down on Grove Street. Ward 1. Sorry, I'm not joining you visually. I'm driving. I'll try and join a little bit. And then Olivia, if you'd like to go. Hi, I'm Olivia Dresen, Public Works Engineer here for the main street item along with my colleague Laura Wheelock. Great. And then Laura, if you would like to go and then we'll go to the last couple of folks. Laura Wheelock, I work for Public Works. Thank you. And then Jason, you should be able to talk now. Hi, this is Jason Stumple and I live on Colchester Ave. Thank you. And then Lewis, if you'd like to say hello, okay, we'll go to Morgan then. North Winooski Ave is my first meeting. So I'm just here to listen. Great. Thank you for coming. And then Susan. Hi, I'm Bob Butonni. I'm with my wife, Susan Butonni. We live on Fletcher Place. I cannot see who the other people are. Thank you. And then, did I miss anyone? Just said. Okay, I don't think I missed anyone. If I did, then okay, cool. Now we're going to go into speak out. So if you have something you'd like to say on speak out, you can either indicate by physically raising your hands and I'll put you in speaking order or using the little hand raise function and I will call on you. So let's start with Dave, then we'll go to Counselor Stromberg. Thanks, Hannah. I wanted to let an announcement just to let everybody know that the Old East End is putting together another Winter Lude Festival this year. It's going to start in the month of February and we hold it at Shemaska Park. It's really self-directed activity. So we've cut a trail that connects the Park to Greenmont Cemetery. There's going to be, there's a great sledding hill there. And of course, there's decorations, lighting that's up at the barn. If you go by that park at night, it's a nice area to visit at night. But we'll also have some special events that are taking place in the first weekend in February. So Friday night, February 4th, there'll be a special lighting. We have volunteers who are putting together a special craft lanterns that will be hung all over the park. We have other ice luminaries that we'll be putting up. And we'll also have some hot beverages and warming things for folks. Then on Saturday, we're working with Burlington Parks and Rec. We're going to have a lot of loner ski equipment. So cross-country ski, snowshoes, some sleds. They're sized for kids and for adults. So if you haven't tried some of that outdoor activity, good place to come. They're free loan equipment to check it out. There'll also be a story walk too for kids that'll be there. It's a very good story walk. And we're hoping to have some music that will be playing, you know, sometime around 11, 12 o'clock. And we're going to repeat the same thing on Sunday. We'll also have refreshments as well. And we also hope to have, we're still working on this, but if we can get a permit for a fire pit, so warming area for folks. So it's a chance for folks to come out and kind of get rid of the winter blues. It's still COVID safe. So we're, you know, we're still practicing social distancing and masks we're needed. But we hope you can join us. There's an announcement in tonight's front porch form. So if you want to get involved or you'd like to get involved with some of the planning or on day of activities, there's some links there. So thanks very much. Thank you. That's going to be an issue for me tonight. Yeah, I'm sorry, I keep on muting myself and you're not supposed to do that. So I just, it's a habit. The opposite of the issue. So then we'll go to Councillor Stromberg, then Representative Colburn, then Allie, then Councillor High-Cower. Okay. Thanks, Hannah. So I'm going to keep this moderately short because it's a hard topic. But I want to be incredibly transparent with you all tonight and announce the fact that I am not running for re-election in this election term coming up on March 1st. I want to thank you all for sharing the space with me and entrusting me and reaching out to me throughout the last two years, basically. And it's been an incredibly, incredibly hard time, especially with COVID and just a lot of the more or less contentious issues that the Council has taken up. So I just, I am incredibly grateful. And regardless, I'm always around if anyone, especially, and after my term is up, after no longer a Councillor, I'm around to be as helpful as I can with whatever resources I am able to tap into or know about or point you to. I care so deeply about this community. And I, and the main reason I am taking a step back is to be able to, you know, I have to admit, like, you know, I won't be able to give my 100% if I were to run again. And whether that be for health issues, kind of mental health, things like that, just kind of time management and some of my other commitments, you know, I want to be able to give my 100% because you all very, very much deserve that. And I won't be able to do that. So I wanted to take kind of that responsible step back. And thank you all personally for this opportunity to be able to serve you and be here with you through a lot of the difficult times that we've been seeing. And yeah, I appreciate you taking the time tonight. NPAs are always fun. And yeah, I'll leave it at that. But thank you very much. DPW, right? That work with SDI? And then, oh, is that me next? Yes, sorry, again with the unmuting, that's all I mean. No worries. Well, that's tough back to follow and just really want to thank you, counselors, Stromberg, for your service to the city and the community and your hard work during of, I know how hard it is to serve on the city council for my time there, but I feel like the last few years have been really particularly challenging, just watching from afar. So really grateful for your service. I just wanted to give a really, really brief update from the legislature. We're in the second week of the legislative session. We're currently working remotely, but preparing to go back in person shortly was really grateful for the opportunity to have such a robust conversation with so many of you all about legislative priorities last month. We've already passed a couple of bills that really focus on just trying to get maximum flexibility to municipalities as they move towards the upcoming town meeting election cycle and votes and associated meetings in light of this most recent wave of the pandemic. I'm also very grateful to serve on the House Judiciary Committee where we've been digging into a lot of criminal justice issues. So we've been looking at a long time interest of mine and priority of the committees, which is the expungement and sealing of criminal records and trying to figure out how to do that with maximum safety, but also ability to give people chances to give back to the community and to find meaningful employment and housing as they've kind of paid their dues and are ready to move on. We've also been looking at racial disparities in the justice system and a number of ways to address those. And starting tomorrow, we're starting to take testimony on S30, which is a bill that would prevent folks from being able to bring guns into hospitals as well as a number of other potential gun violence prevention measures. So deep, deep at work. The last thing I just wanted to say to this group is that I and many of my colleagues in the legislature, including colleagues in the House Progressive Caucus have been really focused on trying to figure out how we can support our schools and educators and families, especially in light of that kind of late Friday afternoon guidance using air quotes that came from the agency of education where they made it clear that they were going to cease contact tracing and remove some testing access and really scale things back at a time when I think a lot of educators and parents and kids are feeling really worried and scared. And so some of my colleagues and I in the House Progressive Caucus released a statement about some things we think that would be helpful to educators after really listening to them and their union leaders. I'm happy to share that with folks, but also really wanted to invite people on any issue, but this issue in particular and Kathy, I'd love to find some time for a conversation with you just to hear your views on how we can really help support our schools during this really, really challenging time. And I will leave it there and just say I'm always happy to hear from any and all of you. Thank you. Then we'll go to, I think I said Allie, Councilor Hightower, then Susan, then Karen. Hi, everybody. My name is Allie, Allie House, and I'm really excited to introduce myself. I'm a social work student, and I'm also a public school educator. And I will be running for the City Council seat in Ward 8 and seeking the Progressive Party nomination. And yeah, so I'm actually super interested to learn more about Brian's Community Gardens project on Main Street and stuff that's going to be really cool and how it connects to racial equity and justice in our community. Yeah, I just a little bit about me. I'm really passionate about climate justice and housing justice, racial justice. Like I said, I'm a social worker and I work in Vermont Public Schools. So I've definitely seen the way that real world, the real world implications that local policy can can have on people's lives. And right now, Burlington is facing a housing crisis. Affordable housing is out of reach for so many in our city. And historically, Burlington has relied on outside developers to alleviate the problem. But there are a lot more options out there that don't involve gentrifying our city. And Vermont is also at a pivotal moment in terms of creating climate solutions. And that's something that really needs to be at the forefront of leaders' minds when creating and refining legislation. And I hope to be a part of that. And I've been really inspired to run by my students and my neighbors, my service users, my reps, and the people I work with. And definitely a huge shout out to Jane and all the work Jane that you have done in our district. It's been an honor to be your constituent and super proud of you. And also, like, totally, totally support your decision, like, and stepping down and taking care of yourself. It's so important in this work. And so, yeah, so I look forward to talking more when you all have candidates back at the NPA. Thank you. Great. Thank you. Now, Councilor Hightower, and then Susan, and then we'll finish with Karen. And Zariah is always fine, Hannah. But yeah, I think it's weird to get so many or maybe not weird, but certainly not usual to get so many candidate announcements in January. But I also, I think I've been at least somewhat quiet, but also on what my plans are. And I know I've spoken to lots of you in the room about it, but I will be decided yesterday running for re-election for the next two-year term. And I think everyone knows it's been a tough decision for me, similar to Jane, you know, had a really hard time with mental health issues over the past fall. But still, I think especially in even trying to talk to having conversations with some of you in the room and even in trying to convince some other folks to run, I think I realized that I am really excited about this work. And there is still a lot of work to be done, especially on housing and public safety. And I'm also hoping that the last two years have been incredibly difficult. And I do hope it's not a repeat of the last two years, not least, because I think some of the reasons that a lot of us get into this work, which is to have some of the, to support folks on the issues that they really care about, has been really hard to do. I'm sure Karen has felt that sometimes when we're not even responding to emails, because it's so hard to even find word one emails kind of in the hundreds of emails that we're getting. So I'm excited to do two more years, hopefully in times where maybe I can do some more of that community work and be a little bit more in community with y'all than has been possible to be in the last two years. So yeah, thank you all for the support that I have gotten over the last two years and yeah, hope to do another two. Thank you. Now we'll go to Susan, then Karen, and then Jonathan. You can actually kind of switch us off. Hi, it's Bobby Tani. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, we want to give a shout out to DPW and to SD Ireland. They have put in a new force main on Fletcher Place and DPW is awesome. These guys are just, they bust their hump every day and we've learned to do little things to help them out, such as the the recycle on Tuesday. We try to, during the construction, we tried to group everybody's recycle bins together and also to be cognizant of shoveling out the snow berm, so it's easier for the folks to get the bins out from the curb and onto the truck to empty out. SD Ireland has been awesome. They laid in the pipe and they temporarily paved the street and they'll come back in the spring and finish off the project and we're grateful for the replacement of the force main in the piping system on Fletcher Place. I think it's part of a larger capital improvement being done on Fletcher Place and Flynn Avenue. Thank you very much. Thank you. Now, Karen, Ben, Jonathan, you're muted. Karen, still muted. Did that work? Yes. Okay, sorry. I was, I don't know, another part. I wanted to say that, Saraya, I'm really happy to hear you are going to run again. I think you've worked really hard and made a lot of changes and Jane, I'm sorry that you are going. This is both news tonight to me and good luck to your, I don't remember, is it Olivia? I don't remember the other girl's name, I'm sorry. But anyway, what I did want to say is that I would like to get somebody pleased from the auditor's office to talk to us about TIF. I am from California and I have a big history of what TIF has done to my state. So I just would like to cover it because it's not all, it is not free money. And I think that we really have to be careful about it. We've used it a lot. And I have a lot of questions. I know I won't be able to answer them, get them answered tonight because I think there's only 15 minutes for Brian Pine. But if we could spend more time on this next month please and get somebody from the auditor's office because they have repeatedly pointed out some of the problems with TIF in the state of Vermont. And I feel very strongly that our focus should be on a top notch high school, not a great street for Main Street. So thank you. Great, thank you. Now Jonathan. I'm speaking for my friend Jared Wood who is a strong believer that this should be a walkable city. And he told me today, he actually, we talked about this a couple of days, but he told me today, on his regular walk he counted 32 cars that did not stop as stop signs and one that did. And he doesn't think this is unusual. He doesn't think this is his neighborhood, which happens to be my neighborhood as well. He thinks that it's pretty much happening all around the city. And in order for us to think of ourselves as living in a walkable city we have to make sure that it's safe for people to cross the streets. And that's from Jared. Thank you. Great, thank you. And then I see Morgan just put their hand up for making a comment. Yeah, I just, I'm not really sure what the format is, but I just wanted to ask if anyone else had had any issues like along North Manuski Ave. There have been like, I think we've had three of our recycling containers, like brand new ones stolen, like right from outside our house. And there have been like almost a cross from where Butch and Babes used to be. There's been an inordinate amount of, I'm not really sure what to do, like people hanging out and like smoking and drinking like all hours of the night and like yelling and cursing. And it's it scared some of my house guests and some of the other folks in the building. And we weren't really sure what to do in that situation. Do any folks have any advice or experience in that? Hope for more police. I've not experienced this issue or the group of folks that folks are talking about. So I don't feel like I want to speak to it. Yeah, Morgan, if you want to email me, I can follow up with you. This is news to me as well. Sure. Yeah, that'd be great. Just like even my girlfriend doesn't even feel comfortable like coming into my apartment because there's some rowdiness going on almost every night. So thank you. Yeah, sorry to hear that. And please send us an email and we'll see what we can do. And yeah, that's unfortunate. Thanks for sharing that, Morgan. I'm sorry. Okay, thank you, everyone. We will finish speak out now and go on to the Community Development Block Grant Advisory Board appointment for the Ward 8 member. Does anyone would anyone like to run to be the Ward 8 representative? I am the current one. I seeing no hands. I had mentioned earlier I am willing to run again. And so I guess I will nominate myself to be the to continue as a Community Development Block Grant Advisory Board member for Ward 8. And so am I actually am I allowed to even do this vote or Jonathan maybe should run it. So this is a conversation just for Ward 8 people. And you're welcome to put your name in that nation. Yes. I only want a second from a Ward 8 resident. And then it would open to anybody else who's interested in doing it and then we have a vote. So is there a second among Ward 8? I'll second that. Seconds it. Is there anybody else who is interested in being the Ward 8 CDBG representative this year? If not all those Ward 8 residents who are in favor of Hannah King taking that role, say I or raise your hand. I think that was unanimous. So I guess you win. Nice. Thank you everyone. I'm excited to serve again. Now we will go into counselor updates. And so we I see Lewis, you have your hand raised. Do you have a question before I continue? And while we wait on Lewis to and Hannah, I don't know what format we're taking any for the counselor update. Is it Q&A or is you want us to give updates? So I believe we wanted did we want Q&A and then if there's time, we can do more in depth updates is kind of how we're thinking we do it again. So if anyone has any questions for the counselors, feel free again to raise your hand or indicate with the raised hand function and I will put you in speaking order. Lewis, I see your hand is still raised if you have a question or comment. No, I was just supporting your candidacy and recognizing that there was nobody else coming forward to to say otherwise. Thanks, Lewis. I appreciate that. Any questions for the counselors? Carol, I see your hand is raised. The City Council for these past several months has just been excruciating. I'm wondering, I read every now and then that Max is meeting with folks to come up with plans for how to ensure that the tenor of the meetings is safe for you all and it's respectful and it's efficient. I'm just wondering what your experience has been in the past several weeks that it's approved and if there's something that can be done that's more intentional and sort of professional in support pretty well. I'm just curious how it's going. I'm happy to speak first and I mean I think City Council meetings are hard because I think folks feel unheard for a lot of reasons because you know they get two minutes to speak and then they just kind of have to sit there so I can understand folks' frustration and at the same time I mean I don't know how other folks feel but like the last I mean really the last meeting that we had that was really difficult was the mask mandate meeting and I mean like I don't really know I feel like we handled it as well as like could be handled kind of across the Council like I feel like I appreciated you know like Ali spoke first and then Joan Shannon and Chip and I feel like folks tried to both like engage in a way that was compassionate but I mean there's just a lot of emotion these days like folks are really emotional and it's there I don't know if there's a way to make room for that but still like continue to work. I don't have any answers or I don't know that there's anything that like folks can do and especially because it yeah it's just all across the board I feel like it's not it's coming from so like a lot of it's a lot of different folks right like it's not like it's the same people coming over and over again in a way that there can be sat down have a conversation and so many different folks depending on the topic so I have no ideas I don't know if Jack and Jane do. Can I just get a synthesis of that question was it like how to prevent the like yeah Carol if you can speak into the mic it was just a little hard to hear. Here's a little. Sure I'm just and I have my double masks on I think I'm just concerned that I think it's a surprise when that happens to you as a counselor or even as someone attending and now in the time that we're living in it probably isn't so much of a surprise but I would think as a counselor you would want to know that you were sick and that you were going to be respected and that the conversation could continue in a respectful way there's a lot of work that you have to do and I feel like it got interrupted that day and just didn't know it since then things have been okay you feel like the tenor of the conversations are easier and more respectful and people are listening despite their frustration. Yeah can I actually say one more thing Jane before you go yeah because I think honestly like the city council meetings I've never felt unsafe at a city council meeting even that one even though it was I guess worrisome I I think one of the things that I think is wild and that I that has made me feel unsafe is having our address published and I think that's a Vermont law thing but that has been really hard for me especially because people do send threatening mails to our homes sometimes or show up at you know like different counselors or um the mayor's home and I think that can be that can be really hard and so that is my least favorite thing I think about like the way folks access me like some of the other internet stuff I can at least like not go to but like having to have somebody screen my mail so that I don't open that that feels a little harder to me. Yeah I would just add to not to spend too much time on this but it is an important point um that you bring up and I appreciate it I think you know in some ways like there are moments where I'm like is this gonna get worse like in the next 20 seconds and do we need like kind of a game plan because you sometimes don't know but I would say that there's a direct correlation with like if it's a contentious topic more or less there are usually more people at the meeting and just there's you know more more opinion behind things that's a little bit more strong um I I would agree that the address thing is a big is a big issue um I myself have opened up things that just say very strange things that are very kind of threatening or name calling and it's like why am I reading this that's not you know we're we're just here trying to serve the public like you don't have to agree with us but you don't have to like attack us personally it's not it's just not relevant and um so yeah that's a that's a pretty important thing um I would say that I did touch base with counselor uh the council president Tracy um about kind of like going forward and having a little bit more of a plan um obviously these are just kind of like roundabout ideas um but maybe one is like you know giving people a little bit more time to speak and then also um and depending on kind of how long and how many people are in there so it's like you know we usually do seven thirty to nine thirty um you know if there's only a few people can we do that up to three minutes or something like that so there's kind of like actually giving people that time because I do understand that that is frustrating and does kind of like it doesn't help the situation when there is kind of a lot of like you know the dialogue is healthy in many ways um and then also just kind of like having a little bit more of a system for when there's a repeat offender in the room um again that's an elongated conversation for another day but like truly planning on going forward with a plan with with what to do with that because we do have some of the same individuals show up and obviously we want to welcome everyone into our meetings that's that's not only law but it's also just the right thing to do but if there is somebody who's consistently causing an issue and interrupting our business like as a council like that actually is a problem and um so I would say for like from from since that meeting things have settled down but it's I always know that personally that when things are when there's a large agenda and there are some contentious items on there like it's we kind of expect that so um yeah it's not great and I don't think we should be numb to it or tolerate it because then that's how we kind of normalize that behavior and it should not be normalized so I do agree with that and sorry that kind of went on for a little while but that there's my thoughts on that I can chime in too but if there's other you know if there's other questions that people have too that want to get their due time I don't want to keep going on this one but I'm happy to share my thoughts if there's not people in the queue on the on with other questions I don't see any other hands raised okay well I can share my thoughts on this too and then if people have other questions they can talk about that and or if not we can the three of us can share they're on our minds that we're working on I am getting feedbacks um and an echo from that from the cdo mpa um account zoom account but um yeah I think it's a really complicated issue around like you know civility and kind of how people engage and how people express themselves I mean I think we are making decisions that affect people's lives and um you know have a real impact and and can really um you know in some cases whether it like in some cases the decisions that we make you know can cause can cause harm to people um so like I think about you know there were a lot of people that were really there were some folks that were really upset about um the removal of the the encampment at Sears Lane and who were um you know shouting and and kind of you know being intense at a city council meeting but at this and and so it's the balance between the fact that you know we have to like we have to be able to have these conversations we have to be able to um debate these policies um but at the same time like I want people to be able to express themselves especially like if something we're doing is deeply impactful um so I think it's a it's a tricky dynamic to deal with I think something like npas is a really great solution I think so this issue which is like let's give people more opportunity to express how they feel about what's going on in the city and have an opportunity to help shape what's going on in the city so I think creating these healthy spaces that give people that voice and that agency over decisions that impact them is a really great pathway forward because if people don't feel hurt or if they don't feel like they have any say in decisions that affect them they often are going to express themselves in ways that are you know more abrasive or or um more problematic so yeah that that would be some of my thoughts on it but I do think it's it's really complicated but it's definitely when when people are super you know vitriolic and and stuff towards us it definitely has a chilling effect on people wanting to step up and run for office if they know they're going to get completely attacked and and kind of torn down publicly constantly a kind of it discourages people from wanting to run which is a bad thing thank you I see Karen has their hand up if you'd like to ask a question hi thank you uh at the city council meeting there was a request for people to join that tax I think it was like the tax board with Joe McGee and I didn't catch what you I know it was maybe a renter what was it that they were still missing for positions on that board or committee if I made one renter oh go ahead Jen all right it was it was a renter and two um where's the two renters and one homeowner there's one of it's it's commercial property one commercial property in one renter I think okay I think those are the two slides yeah there's two there's two slots for renters um and just so people know what we're talking about this is a this is a this is a committee of stakeholders from across the city anyone can apply to it and we encourage people to apply to it um there's a couple positions within the committee that no one has applied for but um and those are yeah two renters that are going to be on this committee and and one commercial property owner but what the committee is trying to do is trying to look at reappraisal in Burlington in that process and how we can reform that going forward but also looking at um looking at the local property tax system more broadly and and how you know that can be reformed to to ease the burden on people so it's really important I know we all really care about this and it affects the cost of living in Burlington a lot so hopefully we can get that committee rolling soon we just need those positions to be we need people to apply from those categories in order to round out this committee okay thank you yeah I heard it but I didn't catch what what you were looking for and I just want to share an experience we had with a couple different people we had an apartment a duplex unit that was available for rent and two of the people had experienced really wicked rent increases like 450 dollars and they felt their landlords were just kicking them out you know I mean really we did have to raise a rent like 100 and I don't know 125 or something but to raise it 450 um it just did seem like a way without evicting it was a way to get rid of their renters so I don't know how that's being handled I encourage them to come to the counselor speak and I don't know if they did but I just wanted to share that that that is happening even though we've got these eviction rules um I guess landlords can do that and raise the rent as much as they want because then they know the people will move yeah and I can speak to this quickly because right now because you don't need cause evictions you can just raise the rent to get people out but you don't even have to do that right you could just tell people that they're evicted so this was something that we put into just cause eviction which was which made it harder to pass because we got this land back of we're trying to do rent control which we weren't trying to do with the just cause eviction bill of saying yes you have to have a clause and also the city then can regulate how much you can raise your rent before it's counted as a eviction because otherwise that would have made the just cause eviction um yeah ordinance that will come powerless essentially folks could just say okay I'm not evicting you but your rent is now this high so it is coming hopefully in the just cause eviction um ordinance of hopefully that passes looking at representative coburn the legislature which is where it's sitting right now okay thank you great thank you um now I think we'll move on to school board updates and announcements uh Kathy if you have anything we are just working on the budget we next month will come with the presentation on it and the other thing is Burlington High School and Burlington Technical School we hired an architectural firm or firms it's Freeman French and Freeman Colin Lindbergh and out of Massachusetts Drummy Rosanna and Anderson and yesterday or no Monday we held the first of a bunch of visioning work sessions and that was four hours of the day looking at going through all sorts of charades or charrette I think charrette um it was it was very interesting I I the other thing is that um there will be two more there'll be faculty and staff will be interviewed on January 18th and 19th and then there'll be a public workshop at the end of January early February for anyone who's interested in coming and you know seeing where that is and giving their two cents as far as what they think should be in this new high school and and then we're also just continuing working on the per pupil waiting study which has gone on to the legislature now the full legislature and we'll still keep fighting that they will enact the full study which was given to them because it is the most equitable at the moment they have pulled ESL kids out of that and they're going to use grants to pay them which I personally have a huge problem with and I'm hoping that that will get changed when the full legislature starts talking about Celine you probably would know more about that from your side but in any way that's kind of what's going on in the school board right now hey great does anyone have any quick questions representative Colburn yeah I will say for folks who have been following pupil waiting and the and I share I share Kathy's real frustration with the choice of the task force to try to kind of treat ELL students very differently and their question about this funding formula but there was a pretty strong memo that came out from Tammy Colby today for anybody who's following it who was one of the authors of the initial study that this group was charged with implementing that really pushed back on the use of categorical aid for ELL students and went pretty pretty deep into some of the questions and concerns that at least she had about that and so I think some of us were really happy to see that and Kathy I'll try to make sure to get that to you so you can take a good look at it I was going to add I do have a question though and Mike so you know I heard and continue to hear I mean I am just hearing for sure parents and families and students but in particular educators just seem to really be at a breaking point as we move through this current wave in our schools and I think many are feeling pretty abandoned by the state on the the shift from the agency of education away from kind of contact tracing and test access and I'm happy to share some of the things that I've heard are really critical to educators but I'm curious like what the school board is thinking and what you are thinking about how to support teachers through you know the next couple months at least which it just it sounds like people are really struggling at this point they are and we are trying to do what we can but when you get those mandates from the state and they stop the contact tracing I mean I know some semblance of it is going on still but I you know at some point if they do this then yes then we will have to have a really big discussion on it it is it is bad in the schools I I have a son and four little kids with COVID right now from age two to four year old so none of them are are um inoculated at all so I understand that fear firsthand and I you know we do have to do something I know that Tom has gotten uh the superintendent has gotten more of those tests he asked the health department if he could hold back what was left over when they were giving them away to keep using them in the schools I know he's gotten many N95 masks so that every teacher was given two in in the school I I think he is trying to do as much as he can but I'm not sure how much the district can do if there's no help coming from the state on this with contact tracing and other things I know that there are very few teachers that are I mean there are not that there are very few teachers I'm sorry there are many teachers that are out and there are many kids that are sick in our school so it is a problem and it isn't the time I personally feel we should be pulling back but so I hear you and if there was a chat I would sort of share this statement and some of the ideas that you know I really heard from educators one thing I will pass along just from a recent conversation with Jeff Fanon who's the executive director of Vermont NEA um his board had a conversation with Dan French over the weekend and um it does it does sound like purchasing masks I mean getting them maybe is another question but purchasing high quality masks is an allowable use of some of those federal dollars they've clarified so um you know if you all have some of those funds that still need to be spent that could potentially be a way to meet some of those needs but I'd be happy to talk to you more outside of this meeting too Kathy okay they're good yeah let's do that great thank you I'm not seeing any other questions so we will move on to Brian um if you'd like to start your presentation sure thanks Hannah and um great to be back at the Ward 1 NPA a little lone fact when I was just graduating at UVM I became a NPA steering committee member at Ward 1 many many years ago so that's sort of where I got started anyway um with me tonight though is our two colleagues from the Department of Public Works Laura Wielach and Olivia Doris and um there may be opportunities for them to join in this presentation but I'll try and I'll try and run through what is a longer presentation than it should be we tried to pair it down for uh NPA presentation so I will uh I'll go in and get access to um sharing my screen all right so we're here tonight to talk about the downtown tax increment financing district and I want to just um point out that it is different from the waterfront tax increment financing district which I will now start calling TIFF it's an acronym that I think folks have heard hopefully but in a minute I'll explain exactly what a TIFF district is and hopefully that will help clarify for anyone who isn't familiar um the downtown district uh we will I'll show you in a minute the boundaries of the downtown district and how it relates to the waterfront TIFF district and uh tonight our purpose is really to explain the need for voter authorization um in March for bonding to fund projects or a specific project um uh downtown and I'll explain that in just a minute so I'll go through describing an overview of what what is TIFF the already TIFF approved projects the um downtown a little bit of background of the downtown TIFF and what exactly we are asking the voters on the um March 1st ballot so there's a lot going on on this slide but essentially what I'm what we're trying to show is that the um the concept of TIFF is that a municipality is given a tool to essentially freeze um future tax growth a portion of which has to be captured to repay financing public public improvements um the financing incurred by the by the city to cover public improvements and so think of streets and sidewalks and occasionally in the past it is fun things like parking and parking garages but today's approach is much more focused on on building this concept of great streets which we'll talk about in a few minutes um the um I guess I should try and shrink this this is probably interfering in my slide isn't it yeah so the um table up at the top attempts to show that uh we set the the taxable value at the time that the TIFF TIFF district is created at the bottom of that uh table its original taxable value is the base value of the district and all of the taxes that flow um through those properties continue to flow to the taxing authorities so the education fund gets it it's tax revenue and the city gets its tax revenue as if nothing has changed uh and and which the future growth of tax value in the district that gets captured partially uh 75 percent of it goes to fund the public improvements and the other 25 percent goes to the Vermont Education Fund on the municipal side 100 percent of municipal um growth in value is captured and that that value is used to repay the financing so the the circled diagram on the left part of the screen is essentially a city would would issue bonds municipal bonds and those bonds are used to build the public infrastructure that public infrastructure contributes to new private development and investment in properties the growth in value of which is what we call the increment and that is what comes back to the city for the purpose of repaying the bond so rather than paying the bond through property taxes and putting that burden on um on taxpayers to fund these improvements it is largely being funded by the growth that occurs as a result of the public improvements so hopefully that helps already approved um voters approved a um a section of improvements on main street and we call that the middle block really from um from church street um basically to pine street and that part is fully approved by the voters what hasn't been approved are the blocks um from union to church and from um from st paul i'm sorry from pine down to battery so this vote is asking for approval uh to include all six blocks in our downtown uh great streets project and that's why we need to go uh for voter approval in order to do that what voter approval means is that we are essentially agreeing as as a city to borrow funds uh either issuing bonds to the municipal bond bank uh or doing another um instrument to raise the capital to do the improvements so that's the that's the whole purpose of of going to the voters and that's why it's required this is the part of the presentation that is usually discussed by my colleagues at um at dpw but um i will do my best um this is sort of their uh wheelhouse but really what this project seeks to do is if you look at at the the concept that a public road a public street you know has to accommodate many uses and sometimes those uses are competing with one another or maybe could be potentially in conflict and so the idea of great streets is to create um safe spaces for all users and to have a public space that is really has has lots of amenities meets the needs of pedestrians bicyclists public transit and vehicle owners uh but creates new spaces high quality spaces for communities to sort of gather and meet in the public domain and to um and to be able to you know have a more thriving um aesthetically thriving but also environmentally um sound infrastructure for handling things like stormwater and a big part of the Great Streets project which was installed on St. Paul Street from Maine down to Maple Street included some significant investments in infrastructure that really minimize stormwater runoff which of course as we all hopefully have our lake in mind is a you know real positive impact of this Great Streets approach this is sort of a you know bird's eye view looking up from um I believe this is Pine Street so on the left might be the building that has the um that has an awning that could be I think that's the north star site north star cycle rate and you're looking up in the brick building is uh is city hall up on the left there so the concept here is a generous sidewalk a generous tree belt with room for public seating a dedicated bike lane um a a lane of parking two lanes of traffic another lane of parking and similar amenities on the other side the north side of the street but not the bike lane on that side as well the bike lane is on actually no I'm sorry in both cases there's a there's a bike lane so again this is uh this is the public works uh wheelhouse for the project but I'm I'm doing my best I can so it's my first NPA as well so what are we trying to address we're trying to address a a city street which has been um has seen better days it has had um you know we think at least five decades perhaps more of maintenance and patching and repairs here and repairs there um and the city has kept up the best it can but I want to put in a plug for the fact that DPW has a very limited capital budget um uh our our whole city capital plan for the year is is usually in the neighborhood of about two to three million dollars that's for the entire city and all infrastructure needs not just the streets and sidewalks so um there's a you know a term of deferred maintenance which I think cities across the country experience this which is the needs far outpace the the ability of of local taxpayers um to fund the improvements and so there was a time when the federal government contributed significantly to Burlington uh when in 1981 when Bernie Sanders became mayor Burlington got about a million dollars of federal revenue sharing and that money was completely flexible could be used for anything and it was essentially a federal grant that came to cities and was used for things like building new sidewalks and curbs and stormwater improvements all those things that money went away but if we had it coming to us today I had estimated it would be about six million a year it turns out it's actually closer to nine million a year will be coming to us annually from the federal government to make these types of investments so without that support cities need some tool to be able to finance public improvements so the ravine that cuts across main street many of you may have heard of this so many of you haven't but this is a picture actually in the ravine it's it's 20 feet from um from the bottom to the top so it's a very deep cavernous ravine that runs um diagonally across the main street on this diagram on the left half of the page here um this is this is the library this is the fire station and the ravine runs the sewer ravine runs right through here and the reason why this is an issue is because in order for this parking lot which in until the 70s had a jail a two-story jail on it but a two-story building built in the um in the early 1900s is significantly less of an impact than what would happen under today's standards with steel construction and building codes that require steel and concrete so this would be a you know a redevelopment opportunity if this sewer line is relocated so it'll most likely be rerouted and that's most likely the um the route that the city will be taking but in order to spur private development to occur on this lot this this infrastructure improvement has to be made so we do have downtown and we have the waterfront tiff districts i'm just going to say that the waterfront is everything here plus this sliver which is what is included where the berlington town center project is is being is planned and the blue area is what is the downtown tiff so it sort of surrounds the core um of the of the downtown and it's um it was approved by the voters in uh 2012 actually but the state uh vermont economic progress council approved it in 2012 um and so we are uh sorry established in 2011 voters made their first approval of the tiff financing plan in 2012 first debt was incurred in 2016 um we have until march 31st uh so that's basically year and uh two months from now to incurred debt and that means you issue bonds that's the same as incurring debt if you don't do it by the end of uh march of 2023 you you lose the ability to finance projects using um this retained um incremental tax value so that's what we're trying to accomplish here we have until 2036 to continue to retain the education portion what we what we we also obviously retain the municipal portion um but i just wanted to point out that we have we have certain dates and certain deadlines that we're trying to comply with so the previous projects that have happened due to due to tiff uh as a result of the downtown tiff investments um major public investment in the great streets on st paul street as i mentioned earlier uh to support that neighborhood to support the the business community um but to to create a more sort of thriving welcoming um public streetscape also improvements made to the city's public garage and the marketplace garage um the brownfield redevelopment of brownfield remediation of the brown's court parking lot which was a city-owned parking lot and stormwater upgrades um on main street adjacent to city hall park as part of that project and this uh great streets project if if approved again completely rebuilds main street all the way from union to battery or south union to battery including subsurface utility upgrades reconstructions replacements extensions relocating or upgrading the ravine sewer and what we refer to as related costs which are the costs to basically manage the process so it's costs that cito incurs it's costs that dpw incurs it's costs that are our consultant as well incurs and costs to maintain the district all the way through fy uh 2036 so when the state auditor comes and does an audit the costs that we spend of staff time to do the audit are included in that as well those are the types of costs um i'll try and do a quick summary here so we have time for questions meant original taxable value of the tiff district 170 million when it was created in 2011 current taxable value is 285 million uh leaving an incremental value of 115 million that's a growth of 66 which which does outpace um the growth of other areas of of the city um we believe largely because of some of the amenities that are are created when we invest in things like uh st paul street and the um parking garage and the uh improvements to city hall park for instance so we've incurred 10 000 of previously approved um debt and we've we've only actually um issued financing of 5 420 000 of that 10 million so we still have a balance of 4 580 000 remaining of debt authority from that approval which would be applied to this project to reduce the amount of borrowing going forward um our process going forward quick summary the great streets investments for main street the ravine sewer relocation um new debt obligation of of 25 million 920 000 with related new related costs of 1 470 000 over the life of the district um projected increment that will come from the private development that we know about today so this is not speculative development this is actual development that we know is occurring in the works and underway now will generate enough increment to service to service this debt this in this lastly this point is it does tiff by definition does not increase local taxes to repay um this debt but in fact captures the new increment only so i tried to do it in 10 minutes i think i managed okay are there any questions okay we'll go to tom and then air hard yeah hi hi brian uh this is tom darin thought that after you showed how that the incremental uh tax increases are used to pay down the borrowed money and um at some point um that that the bond or whatever is is um is paid off and then what how is the uh taxes on that property then allocated between education in the city and is that sufficient to maintain all those improvements that are made over time but that last question is a good one i have never never been asked that one before but the uh yes the tax um revenue to both this education fund and the city go restores to its full amount as um as it would under other circumstances so yes they after it's fully repaid uh tax revenue begins to flow back to the the two taxing authorities the city and the state ed fund um your question about is there sufficient revenue for um um maintaining these improvements i would say that part of the concept of tiff is to grow the city's um tax base over time and the the hope is is that since you've grown the tax base you actually have greater ability to cover ongoing costs to upgrade and maintain your critical public infrastructure because you have a bigger revenue stream to do that so i think your chances of being able to cover public um infrastructure and maintain it over time can only get better because you've grown the value of your you've expanded your tax base so i think that's probably the the answer that i would give there okay i i think at the beginning of your pitch you said that the you implied that the taxes that we get from that area today are not sufficient to do this type of project oh absolutely not i mean the taxes you get today are what's being used to fund city services in our schools now so uh yeah i mean there's there's definitely not enough revenue today um under current under current scenario um then that's to do a capital investment of 30 million dollars though it's not so it's you know i'm saying it's really it's not the same as maintaining the infrastructure this is for a capital investment that will be made as a one-time investment and then maintained over time i might add also during our great streets process dpw looked at the cost benefit and the long-term maintenance of a lot of the materials and items that are selected in those standards with the understanding that we do currently struggle to maintain some of our assets to pay a little bit more for some of these materials so that they do last longer they're hard you can go now and then um karen you can follow error hard hey brian welcome back to word one after many years um so two questions one is and you know project looks really overall looks great i just have to continue to register concerns about the continuing loss of additional parking downtown and so i'm wondering if you or the folks from public works have an estimate about how many net parking spaces along main street are going to get uh get lost that was question one question two um is uh you know with all the federal funds coming through the state and through the city i'm just wondering if you all looked at some of those funds to accomplish some of this work thanks sure i'll let laura answer the parking and i will say for the federal funding um there's a lot of potential funding for various projects there's going to be some competitive funds we don't know what those competitive funds will look like we don't know how well we'll score we also know that the needs for infrastructure far exceed um what we will be able to secure from the federal funding so um this is a case of if your needs are you know in the neighborhood of you know the capital committee for the city has been looking at a capital plan that over the next five years it has about a hundred million dollars of capital costs to upgrade facilities buildings streets um the water you know everything so we're going to be competing for every dollar we can get and we're very aggressive probably no community our size does better but i don't think we can fund projects like this um hoping that we can get federal funding so um just to tack on though that the tiff does require us to always continue to pursue other funding sources for these types of projects and not just sit on our laurels and rely on it um we do already have one grant to help with stormwater on main street and and we continue to pursue other grant opportunities for the parking spaces um you have a great memory that is certainly a conversation from the last you know start of our concept um but we are certainly not ready to be able to give any sort of numbers today because we are are still working on it the conversation about the concept we've asked to come back in February to start the conversation but really that's going to happen over the next two to three months um hopeful to get to some sort of conclusion around May that thanks so much okay and then i think we'll end with Karen your question because we're running out of time thank you um i went to those meetings i feel like it was 76 parking spaces we were going to lose i don't know i have a pretty good memory but i remember it being you know a fair amount but my question is what are the projects the projected projects that will bring in the tax the additional tax money that we need um because these streets are already out there you know there's businesses on them i know there's that one parking lot but there's a lot of businesses already there and i don't know who would tear down i think of the ski rack and whatever but and as far as getting money i've looked back at the 2011 tiff original request and two of the properties that were it said why we were doing it was 30 42 king street and that's a brilliant in housing authority that is tax-free so that did not bring any more money for the city and then the other one is the eagles landing that we can only tax the land not the 25 million dollar building it's that dorm for champagne college so i'm just wondering how does the finances really work out if we have some buildings there already and i guess mainly what are the ones that are going to bring us all this extra money to pay off this 25 million dollar debt sure the um you're right the concept of tiff is that these public investments will spur new private investment and i should just mention that it doesn't necessarily mean removing and demolishing and completely rebuilding some cases it will but it more often involves investing in significant upgrades to a building that make it um you know more attractive more structurally sound more energy efficient um you know all sorts of investments that are result from from the tiff improvements i would add that on st paul street a private development that occurred right across from eagles landing was largely linked to the public investment that was made and that is used to be a parking lot a surface parking lot many many years ago if you remember it was organum it was more it's known as stratos and so stratos is an example of a of a property which was redeveloped within the tiff district as well and it's the corner of battery street and and king street is a commercial property that was a um um a property that occurred a development that occurred because there was notion that there was going to be new public investment in infrastructure both on the waterfront and in the downtown and so it's it's it's examples would be the vfw which is a um about a 15 million dollar redevelopment of the vfw property that will keep the vfw there and will result in um in a new center for the vfw and the veterans and housing affordable housing that cht is developing and that's taxable so don't don't confuse it with bha housing it's not tax exempt but it's taxable so that's fully taxable um and the other that we know about is the ymca redevelopment of the old ymca on college street again investments made adjacent or nearby have have a um you know multiplier and beneficial effect beyond just that street and so the redevelopment of the of the old y is uh is is very much alive and in the works it may not end up being a boutique hotel but that was the original plan but it may in fact become a residential development as well on south south shamp plain just south of um of august 1st is a um is a redevelopment of of a parcel that's been um very under under utilized it's mostly a surface parking lot that is is counted in there as well so there's a there's a number of projects within the downtown tiff those are three that we know that are furthest along for two of them are fully permitted the vfw site is currently getting financing and is is going to be entering permitting and those are the three that were that were aware of those are the only three that we've counted on in addition to um background growth that has occurred in the district and so those together will be sufficient i would um just to add karen you know you mentioned you know how do the finances really work the financial package that went to bepsi is a council document um it was their last meeting in october of 2021 um publicly available for review you'll actually see in there that the shamp plain college site does contribute to the downtown tiff just not in the most traditional way so um that is there okay and then i think if there is not any final questions we can go on to brian's presentation before that brian talks let me just say we'll be back to talk to you in february so sorry we only had a little bit of time tonight thank you very much thank you okay brian you're up yeah so i this is going to be funny but like i have this virtual background i'm going to it's going to be on just for a second you know if it's going to go on i might as well just do this because this is this was from something earlier but i was trying to i i didn't realize it was still on so then i was like i might as well just like let you see it so you know why i'm like being awkward and then i'm going to make that go away so you can focus all right so hi everyone thanks for having me tonight it has been a few months since i first asked to come but there's been a lot of important stuff um to talk about in the ward 1a mpa you were one of the first mpa's i asked to speak to because what i'm going to talk about affects um our neighborhood um the this section of the city from ward two ward one ward eight around uvm the most um but i at this point you're the last mpa so it's interesting brian pine this is your first mpa to speak about great streets this is my last mpa to speak about is good and our and um some ideas about public safety that's come out of our work um and i'm really excited to actually go after brian pine because for many years um one of the vision the vision of is good is to have garden walkways um all through the city of burlington streets that are lined with gardens that um that you know people hang out and and that build community and great streets is an example of how the city can invest in that on our on our main streets um the work of is good um is more about what neighbors have done on our side streets and so i'm going to start out with a uh explanation i'm going to try to share my screen i always worry i'm going to show people my to-do list and and you will have vicarious trauma but i succeeded and you're seeing um you should be able to see this uh presentation now so we're going to talk about this idea called the neighborhood outreach worker um program and it would be a pilot project um that i'm proposing and it came it's been inspired by the work of is good so um this last spring after um a quiet period during during the pandemic um as i as people were coming out of like isolation and and restrictions um were lifted um we saw a wave of of um behavior in burlington um that disturbed quality of life um and i believe it was mostly related to the mental health and and associated substance abuse issues of people and particularly students in this neighborhood and at that time when people were shooting guns and blocking streets with parties neighbors got together and we talked like what do we need like what do we need to deal with these problems when they get to that level and that led to the this idea of the outreach worker project so first um and so that the idea the the now program the neighborhood outreach worker program is that it would be a community development program grounded in transformative justice that will cultivate public safety by building relationships improving access to social health care and economic resources and growing community competency to manage quality of life issues and it's inspired by the lessons learned through the work of is good which is a mutual aid neighborhood project uh isham street gardening and other optimistic doings many of you know about this work because we work together in the community coalition at uvm but some of you may not and so i think it's important to just talk a little bit about what is good is before i talk about the now program so it makes sense um how there's a connection there and you can see here there's pictures of the butterflies that come visit us uh every year now that we plant butterfly plants you can see uh one of the other co-founders phil hammersloaf and a staff from uvm john mehia building a planter and in another picture you see college students on my street and a staff from uvm eating kale out of the gardens while they play basketball um and uh isham street gardening and other optimistic doings were a mutual aid and community building project that has transformed isham street over the past 12 years from being one of the worst streets in burlington to being a model for how neighbors can improve their quality of life and you can see here gale shampnoy from uvm is with me and some neighbors you can see the mayor um with us coming down to this is when um ro weinberger first came into office come down and tour and learn about what we were doing and the city city began partnering us with us then to improve the actual infrastructure of the street to support the organizing we were doing around gardening and so now we have bumpouts and trees and a repaved street and we're excited to talk more with the city about how to um do these kind of infrastructure changes um branching out from isham street and beyond so the roots of is good it was a mutual aid project between neighbors i'm not going to read all of this to you for sake of time but you i'm going to share this so people can read it later but basically me and phil hamersloaf my next door neighbor and sam a grad student on the other side of me started gardening the green belts together uvm said they could give us money um because we were a partnership between students and neighbors we then doorknocked and built this neighborhood organization that created a vision for our street and we in our original vision engaged all of our neighbors tenants and landlords college students and elders staff from burlington health and rehab neighborhood artists activists business owners and we continue to do so as we build a vision that goes beyond this street so these are the trunks and branches of is guard our five phase action plan and we've basically completed phase three and we're ready to move to phase four and five phase one was establishing gardens on one side of the isham street phase two was doing the other side phase three was incorporating hiccoc which we're in the process of completing we've been planning phase four which is connecting our garden walkway with existing gardens on booth russell and charles so that there's a garden walkway from north union to north willard um and it crosses lumas which is part of another garden pathway for the city um where you see the planters going across the old north end from the east district all the way to the battery park and so our hope is that from this intersection like gardens will just blossom and spread out all through the city over the next few years as we launch phase five um which this spring we're going to be calling on gardeners all across the city to mobilize and start building networks of other community gardens so that eventually the whole city will be crisscrossed with urban permaculture and we like to say it will become the emerald city of the green mountains so the soil of as good as our economic and social support i'm not going to read everything but it's residents of the street students um we have had grants from uvm from aarp from the new england grassroots environmental fund and from cito um we improve quality of life through our community organizing around gardening and good deeds we improve the physical and social environments of the street and unintentionally crime rates drop significantly when compared to surrounding streets and the only difference that the police could identify was the gardening and the community organizing and so in 2014 we wrote a grant with the burlington police department and you can see here that the burlington police department said that they wanted to bring the knowledge and skills developed through the is good program to other neighborhoods struggling with quality of life issues um and you can see that lieutenant lawson who still works in the city last i heard um and his officers who who worked in this district at the time noted a dramatic difference and we were you know we had established a positive relationship with them around you know what they were doing what we were doing um however we didn't get the grant um around this time unfortunately things changed in burlington and the police started actually killing people and um police violence increased and so it's been i can't say it hasn't been strained for some of us since then but we have to find a way to move forward together um and so we didn't get that grant but um we continued to receive other funding we continued to do our work through the pandemic you can see here during the pandemic we tried to be creative we have a band playing out of a truck and people were dancing on their porches um we made signs the the burlington health and rehab was the was ground zero of the pandemic 11 of our neighbors died in a few weeks in that building and people were trapped there for a while so we made these signs and relatives would come stand and wave and people would come sing to them um we had one of our neighbors died by suicide it was it was pretty traumatic time for us but we continued gardening using social distancing and as the gaps in the social safety net widened we tried to catch each other and take care of each other um so i'm going to just skip over this part for time because this is about phase four and five and i'd be happy to come back maybe in the spring to talk about phase four and five because people in other parts of world one and eight might want to like um join forces with us and link gardens at that time um this is just what we've been doing around phase four you can read it in the presentation later um so i guess this is important though because we had a discussion about public safety and quality of life with neighbors in pomeroy park after people notice an uptick in substance use related um incidents as well as college students um behavior disrupting and damaging the neighborhood and the sga came they they've agreed to partner with us on implementing phase four um we've got like 40 to 60 new people signed up to help in the spring so we're really excited for this energy going into the spring to building phase four and working in partnership with the city to see what we can do with pomeroy park um so these are is this a snapshot of other mutual aid groups where you know regardless of your political leanings these are groups that are where where people are helping each other neighbors are looking out for each other you see like is good in the people's kitchen and people's farm stand we do food justice food not cops does food justice but they also um provide people with other supplies um cop watch is sort of a mutual aid public safety group you see the racial justice alliance migrant justice worker center and the old north end mutual aid where people every day ask for things in neighbors chip and money and supplies and get it for them and we need to figure out moving out of the pandemic how to integrate mutual aid into our public safety system um you know when you ask how does it is good actually cultivate public safety and improve quality of life it does we do it through building relationships between people in our environment we change the physical and social environment which influences human behavior we increase access to resources which improves the social determinants of health and we grow community competency to manage quality of life issues using restorative practices which reduces all kinds of harm and reduces conflict now how can the city further support this we we are asking that the city work with us to create garden walkways all across the city that we expand funding for all mutual aid that improves social determinants of health that we create new programs in neighborhoods to promote community development and that's what i'm going to cover in the remaining couple of minutes here so this is a just a sketch i made from memory one night when i had trouble sleeping about the public safety system of cairn burlington you can see you know you've got 911 and the police and fire but then you have um social services and human services and other health care services and mutual aid fits into this but it's not integrated in and we think it should be and furthermore we need to create some new programs to fill in the gaps and so one of those programs would be the neighborhood outreach worker program we would provide peer outreach by having training by training and paying teams of neighbors it would be my proposal would be a team of a student and another resident like a retired person an elder or middle-aged person there i call myself that you know someone who's out of school but we create the idea is that there's someone who's appeared to the student neighbors and someone who's appeared to the non-students and they go as teams to help in situations where there's conflict and they could address quality of life issues such as noise parties disorderly conduct fighting fireworks fires littering and vandalism as long as it's not too um aggressive or serious or dangerous um so here's a list of duties i'm not going to read everything but it's like basically going and doing outreach meeting people walking around attending community events providing an unarmed response to complaints whether that be instead of 911 or follow-up like uvm does they do follow-up the next day um that they could facilitate access to emergency resources follow-up after incidents teach relationship skills design interventions with the community that empower people and do not use violence or coercion and i also think there should be professional support through supervision with a social worker because in the professional social work we engage in self-reflection where every week when you're training you have an hour to process the things you're experiencing and learn i feel like all of our public safety workers need that including police and i don't think we give that opportunity to the people doing the toughest work um so how are they accountable i think that this should be embedded in CEDO um there should be an assessment ongoing training reporting of data evaluations with the communities and mpa's and in other groups um and meeting with other providers regularly to coordinate i see it fitting into a new um a reimagining public safety right now when you call 911 if it's a level three call a lot of the times they can't answer it and when they do come it doesn't necessarily resolve the issue level two calls are the mental health and substance abuse calls which i believe are the highest amount but i'd need to look at the numbers right now i we instead of sending police to level three we could send community support liaisons to new police social workers or neighborhood outreach workers or some combination for level two if we would if we could bring into um this new project the city's been looking at a new mobile crisis program if we can bring that to existence and they covered level two calls then the police could focus on level one calls which is what they're doing now with their what they have to do so it really takes the pressure off the police and gives people what they need versus having the police go and having to try to handle a situation which may not be um one that they're really the best person to go to so i see um it also embedding peers into every possible piece of the system of care like the howard center is doing and we're looking at on the state level is important this program would embed peers more peers into the public safety system so i'm going to skip this part it's just an overall vision of how if we do programs like this and improve the social determinants of health it will save money and improve outcomes through the pandemic and if we do enough of this and we keep reinvesting those savings into programs like this we really could bring an end to poverty and a lot of injustice and inequity and needless suffering um because we would be meeting people's needs when they have a problem instead of reinforcing trauma or reinforcing the problems driving the problem so what's the damage this is an example of the damage we get on isham street but we fix it quickly because that's important but i used it just sort of as a joke picture this is a proposed budget it's a lot of detail and it's not perfect but i paying them 30 an hour and giving them benefits i'm not giving them benefits because they're part-time my bad having a full-time well-paid director with benefits paying them well for part-time work and spending a lot on training it would be about 300 grand a year which isn't a which is not a large amount when you if you had outreach workers you could call every Thursday Friday and Saturday to help with problems in the neighborhood um and so what are some possible funding sources we could ask uvm to redirect the 100,000 that isn't being spent for the police because there's just not enough police now to sign up to do those shifts and even when there were they weren't being taken um or we can get more pilot money from uvm she on plane could chip in cito could apply for grants the city could fund us so last but not least i just have a few quotes um phil hamersloff the other co-founder he said since our first block party in 2010 the culture of the street has evolved you can see the change it's palpable students say hello to each other they say hello to us we talk they're sharing going on and this is a quote from the grant with the police i i said that they included the key is to inspire someone to do something greater to unlock our optimistic doings start with just acknowledging people who live around you they notice what you do too so become a role model invite people in ask for their ideas and so that's why i've been going around to the mpa's to you know engage with people share these share these ideas here's some feedback and i'm just hoping it it contributes to a conversation throughout the city about as we recover from this pandemic how do we come up with solutions to public safety and quality of life that improve the social determinants of health and that do not reinforce um the trauma that drives the problems and so that being said i'm curious to hear any of your thoughts or questions now and if there isn't enough time um you know you can reach out to me and we can meet or talk on the phone or you you know i'll come to your neck of the woods and we can talk about gardens or whatever so thank you anyone have any questions yeah actually um brian i have a question for you um so i know you had mentioned um a plan for having consultation with um like a social work supervisor whether that's like an msw you know um or whoever um and i guess i was just curious if you had any plans to um like provide any sort of on-call supervisor in the moment and if like it would also include compensation for any like outside consultation time yeah so um that was in that's in some of the details i i rushed over but i appreciate you asking because i'd like i can share a little about that that the program director i would propose and once again this is a starting point who knows where it ends like the community you know we would we would talk about what do we really want with cito and build that together as a neighborhood um this is just what i think based on what my neighbors told me but uh i think a social work a professional social worker with an msw preferably licensed should be the supervisor because of the training they have and that they would provide weekly hour of supervision with each staff person to help them learn skills and they would be available on call um and this you know the step it's a lot to ask of someone to start to have that person always have to be on call every friday saturday thursday friday saturday so i'm not sure how that will go over especially now that social workers are so taxed and exhausted by the pandemic however it's it's worth trying and um i yeah i would propose that they would be on call so the idea is that they would be you know they would basically be like floating you know to situations to provide backup the way a police sergeant does because that's i i've witnessed police interventions many times and often there's a police sergeant monitoring from somewhere and they will come intervene if they need to so similarly we'd have a professional social worker there to step in and they'd also have access to the police and fire and emt's at a moment's notice and mobile crisis if it was running so that it escalates they just you know either press a button or there's some way they immediately summon help um so they wouldn't be out there on their own um uvm had concerns um and i think i want to honor that about putting students on the street at night i hear that however there are students on the street at night if you live in this neighborhood you see a lot of students on the street at night so and they're not trained in conflict resolution and i see them breaking up fights all the time so you know there might be a way to do it to manage liability and give people the training and protection so they could do this job and train others in the moment how to handle conflict safely because i i see lots of people getting hurt all the time i'm always going out with first aid because students get into fights so um so yes i kind of diverged a little but yeah i would propose that there be um some pretty serious supervision of this project by a professional who is trained in um the skills needed to manage this program so thanks thank you and then Richard uh Brian uh not talking about conflict but more about community and i don't know if you've spoken to Dave Corley or anyone else from the old east end um coalition and all the work that they've done using uh shamanica park basically as a focal point much in the same ways you want to redevelop pomeroy perhaps but uh i'm not quite sure it's if it's in your um state constituency as it were what's the word um but uh you might be interested to see what they've done with grants from all sorts of places and they've been absolutely inspiring and if you go up to shamanica park uh and the neighborhood around you'll see what i mean yes i'm familiar with their work um i believe that i remember sophie um when the idea first came up in the community coalition and we regularly engage with each other in the community community coalition at uvm that being said though i have not sat down with them yet to talk about what we want to do with pomeroy park and learn what they did with shamanica because and that is something that's on the to-do list because um my understanding is that there was a lot of partnership with the city and so we're hoping to do something similar where we partner with the city we do we bring the neighborhood together and really um the park already serves that purpose but we want to work with the city to take it to another level and so i i appreciate the suggestion um and it is our intention to talk with i believe you call yourself the old east end neighborhood i can't remember your name but i know the group um that we are it is our intention to talk with you and also i mean when we talk about linking garden walkways we're gonna want to talk with like there's people all across the city who's been asking to meet with me about this because there's all little pockets of people who are trying to organize stuff so we may see similar groups to ours pop up all over burlington because of this so um around gardening and improving the neighborhoods i see another hand and i think left hand lawson just retired oh he did yeah that kind of makes me sad he i enjoyed working with him so and we will end with morgan hey hey what's up ryan it's morgan lamp here um i was just curious uh it's a great interesting idea but i was just wondering um if there's concern about like actively putting community like you were saying actively putting community members or or school you know students into known harms way and if that program might need like somebody as a part of it like maybe like a police presence for immediate action i don't know if you guys have ever been you know attacked or like had a you know a violent counter but uh it wouldn't take more than you know one before that really you know affected community so we would just want to have that that mind to um you know community safety because i don't think i i don't know like i mean i'm a healthy man i wouldn't feel comfortable approaching a group of folks necessarily depending on the situation so there's opportunity there but i would just worry about people's ultimate safety in each moment because it's so variable and unpredictable and dynamic yeah i think it's a legitimate concern and um but we have people doing this work already in the city when i first moved to burlington in 1998 i worked at spectrum as an outreach worker and we were doing work with restorative justice and harm reduction um we would go out on church street and we would and our our jobs as outreach workers was to get to know the kids and the adults who hang out on the street get to know the business owners and get to know the police and when there was a problem businesses would call us before the police and we got training in the escalation and we would break up fights and i was 22 years old i was not you know i wasn't not um you know as as cautious as now but i was young i was just out of college i worked with other people who were younger than me 16 17 18 year olds and people older um but we were trained in de-escalation we were trained in conflict resolution we were we we regularly processed stuff with supervisors when things happened i have been hit by people before and hurt in all of my jobs as a social worker um i've been injured that happens to people in healthcare all the time actually nurses get assaulted at the hospital a lot um it's part of the job when you do public safety work so yes it is a risk um that you we would need to have training we would need to have supervision and uvm suggestion which i'm open to was that they don't go out at night uvm suggestion was that they do work in the data build relationships and then they follow up similar to what oscars doing now and that they call the police at night i'm never gonna support the idea of calling the cops because your neighbors are loud you can do it if you want i'm not going to do that i want people to have some skills though to to feel more comfortable talking to their neighbors when that's when there's a problem it's you know there's a difference with fighting i don't expect everyone to do what i do because i will run outside and try to stop a fight um but i also have been doing that for 23 years you know so um and you know maybe next weekend i'll get shot and you'll be like karma look you know it finally happened and it'll be used by people to say oh how dangerous the city is but i'm gonna have hope that you know using de-escalation and and being trained and smart that you can assess safety in a situation there were definitely situations when we were outreach workers where we we had to call the police like you're not going to like try to break up a fight when you know there's knives and guns and you can see that you know so i hear you on on the concerns and as a community i think we need we need to continue the discussion of like what how do we respond to things in in a way that de-escalates versus escalates because we we've sent police to situations where it escalates pretty quickly and someone dies you know and that didn't need to happen either so um this needs to be discussed more as a community and as a society you know like how do we respond to conflict and how do we learn more there's one other thing that you made me think of that's important to recognize that as part of this work i've been to every ward and i've heard all kinds of critiques and concerns that one of the things that we learned is the community justice center is launching a program where they're going to be doing mediation training and conflict resolution training in the city and they're doing it in small subgroups first as a test but they're essentially doing some of what we are talking about these outreach workers doing so there also could be other ways to train the community in conflict resolution so people feel more comfortable in a low level situation de-escalating it versus you know so i'm not talking about a street fight but like if there's like an argument like the other day um there was people yelling outside of my house and i was like i'm going to go out and see what's going on but my neighbors went out asked what was going on and diffused it just people going out saying hey what's going on do you need help made the people calm down you know and that's partially the work that is good because we just we look out for each other so when something happens we it's like you know the street went from having one Sicilian grandmother with a broom made to like 10 you know who go out there and hey what's going on what broke let's clean it up right now you know and but i find cleaning things up in front of people then they don't make messes anymore when they see you do that you know when you go out and you speak to people when there's a conflict early enough you can maybe prevent a fight and so this is the kind of stuff i think the community needs to be educated and more regardless of who we send in at the moment um so i just share all that because it's all connected and your concern is very valid we have to make sure that we are looking out for workers in all professions when we put them into dangerous situations and i have to be honest as a frontline healthcare worker we're not doing that right now we're putting teachers social workers nurses in extremely dangerous situations every day so um and i would even say the police so you know we need to be rethinking about how we treat our workers and how we um take care of them i just said a lot sorry but it is a big big point to make morgan so thank you okay thank you so much for coming in brian um i i'm sure we'll see you back in a couple months for an update okay now we will go on to redistricting so richard and an i'm here is on here and online okay i'm here do you want me to go first richard sure okay um so we out of respect for people and uh people here in their bedtime i'm gonna try and um just go through this pretty quickly so richard and i are members of the ad hoc redistricting committee that was formed uh back in i think september october and we have finished with uh our gathering of public input regarding the redistricting process so there was the committees made up of a member uh from each of the eight wards and our goal was basically just to gather uh public input regarding the uh structure of the the wards um as many you probably know every 10 years there is a census and based on the results of that census uh the wards may or may not have to be redistricted um in order to um create wards that have an equivalent number of people in each ward um we um the public input was obtained through three public meetings which were attended mostly over zoom but were also held in person through npa meetings um and a mentee survey done during the public meetings and finally a survey that was distributed via front porch forum and on the cido website um we feel that the extent of the public input was somewhat limited probably due to a combination of factors but uh partially because of the time limit that we were put under in order to uh or that we were given to collect this information um but we're we're hoping that the the input we collected will be valuable so we do have a final meeting tomorrow night in order to finalize the recommendations um and the final recommendations are going to be presented to City Council by Diane Meyerhoff who is a consultant who helped us gather uh the comments and input um and will summarize them so hopefully that presentation is going to take place uh towards the end of this month so unfortunately our recommendations have not been finalized yet but given that we expect uh February's meeting to be pretty full with uh town meeting agenda items we just decided to prevent a very present a very brief summary now so um unfortunately well we may have some results of the survey uh basically there were four general themes that came out of the public input um so the first one uh as summarized by Diane is that uh Ward 8 does not work um so in general input suggests that the ward was configured to create a student ward perhaps gerrymandered and therefore not thoughtfully designed some felt it was inherently undemocratic others pointed to the ward's low voter turnout and difficulty in securing poll workers long-term residents were troubled that the primarily student populated ward diluted their representation they felt this was unfair because they have a long-term commitment to the city um the second theme was that residents in general are not in favor of the district system in general people felt that having a half a counselor didn't meet their expectations for representation rather residents favored multiple representatives in award configuration so going back to the two city counselors per ward uh some expressed concern that the larger districts would result in expensive campaigns and perhaps organized funding for those campaigns and then uh theme three was that ward configuration must preserve neighborhoods and for the ward configuration should keep wards intact um so i had collected some comments that came through the survey and through the um npa meetings um that are from ward 8 members in particular uh since i'm the ward 8 representative i don't think i'm going to go through all of them just in the interest of time and i know that richard wanted to say something um but i just wanted to um read a couple of them um so one was from maddie posig and she states that ward 8 does not fairly represent to cross section of the citizens of burlington upon closer inspection of its usual unusual boundaries it's obvious to see that ward 8 was configured to represent the on-campus student community to place a particular community entirely in one ward skews its representation um and uh linda rizvi had uh two main points to make first was that the redistricted map redistricted map should not be gerrymandered in general there are principles of proper redistricting to avoid gerrymandering which are available to read and learn about and these principles should be applied uh more than one of them have relevance for ward 8 one of the principles i'd like to address here is called compactness individual districts should be compact in appearance without wing-like protrusions on a map wings are an excellent indicator of gerrymandering if you look at a map of ward 8 you will see that ward 8 is nothing if not a wing this should be addressed with a new map by challenging the boundaries for ward 8 or eliminating ward 8 altogether and her second point was for ward construction it has come to my attention that uvm limits access to the campus if you're not a student or otherwise affiliated with uvm the rules surrounding that are understandable uvm to private institution it's important to note that the grounds are not the public streets of burlington this means that for contested races in ward 8 in comparison to a candidate who's affiliated with uvm any non-affiliated candidate is at a deep structural disadvantage and i think i will end there um and let richard give us his thoughts sure thanks an so i think our preface might be repeating a little bit of what an said but that there were some redistricting considerations after the last uh go around after the 2010 census and some of the criteria that if they'd have been followed at that time uh would probably not have allowed for instance ward 8 they were keeping geographical areas intact minimizing population differences between wards boundaries should follow main uh roads or geographical features as much as possible academic institutions should be in more than one ward minimized changes from current wards relationship to state districts um in addition to the feedback that we received that and detailed um some of you saw a survey that jonathan helped me with that was a survey monkey that we put on front porch forum uh back right at the start of the process uh and i pick up one or two of those because they were award one specific um one or two of them are not especially relevant to the um specific charge that an and i and the rest of the committee have uh but i think they're relevant and and represent uh strong sentiments within ward one uh for whatever reason ward one has been the most underrepresented ward for the past 30 years at least that means that there are more people per city councilor the city councilor represents a higher population than in other wards and diluting that with coupling with ward eight just makes matters worse uh not least because it means that owner occupiers and people that are making uh a lifetime investment in the community uh institutionally become underrepresented um interestingly uh in one of the first uh npa meetings where we discussed this uh city councilor uh hansen advocated for the elimination of district reps even as he said if he's talking himself out of a job because a councilor is spread too thin adequate can't get adequate response and that's picked up by some of the comments that we received in the ward one survey that said we're in favor of small awards city councilors need to have their fingers on the pulse of local problems and issues also questioned the extent to which city councilor workloads might be overwhelming it's not just city councilors that we're should be thinking about when we talk about redesign of wards within the city because we're electing other officers as well um including of course um school commissioners and the example that ward eight came up with that an brought up was that the school commissioners for ward eight really only represent about 10 um burlington school district students whereas in another ward they might be representing a thousand so that has to be considered by city council by city council when they look at the input uh and draw the final boundaries within ward one there seem to be support for small awards there was a question as to whether or not there should be an even or odd number of city councilors so that's part of the input uh one of the big questions that um came up and it came up in ward one and it came up um in the broader public meetings that we had uh was when we're designing uh wards districts configuration uh if we replace the concept of having districts um should we introduce at-large councilors and I would say there was a uh most people weren't in favor of districts uh the uh balance between in favor of at-large city councilors may only be one or two depending on arithmetic maybe more uh the balance was pretty much even as to whether or not um at large is appropriate and once again the concern was that uh the larger the the constituency for a city councilor um organized campaigns and outside party party money became uh became a bit of an issue um as Anne said we're a little bit premature here unfortunately because we have our final meeting tomorrow and then at some time possibly on the 24th of January there's a presentation to city council uh and that's to be confirmed as far as I know I think that's pretty much where we are have I covered everything Anne? Yeah I think so um we had a graphic of the survey results somebody named Sam was going to share his screen I can do the same if you want okay probably just the chart because there's too much just just the chart would be fine wow anyways I can just very quickly speak to this it's um it's the percent of so so if you recall the survey on front porch forum there were a dozen different um things to prioritize in terms of redistricting and it's almost eligible of them because it's in code uh but uh the blue bars are the percentage of um you know maybe I should do this because I think mine is still in English I'm sorry one interesting thing that I'll put in just very very briefly is that we received 33 responses from the ward one only survey that just went to the ONE um ONE East uh Centennial and yeah those two those two uh uh front porch forum neighborhoods we got 33 responses and the city wide survey only got 69 in total so um ward one was definitely very engaged and the the outlier war dates that contributed as well uh so we feel we feel as if our input is is fairly relevant so this is just a summary um so there were 12 different uh kind of in the instructions and folks were asked to rank them from one to ten uh one is the highest priority priority and all I did was just take the percentage of responses that that found themselves as either first second or third priority and the ones who were eighth ninth and tenth priority just to um kind of merge the data a little bit and I and uh the highest priority things to put into redistricting are they're kind of a statutory or the constitutional things like one person one vote compactness of the wards um out large seats was third but I'll come back to that respect for communities of interest and and preserving neighborhood boundaries and those were the ones that had the highest prior interest in high or calling high priorities the interesting thing about uh the orange the orange bars are the lowest priorities and the ones on the right side of the lowest priorities typically and they are there are things that were on the survey that really didn't have to do with redistricting so much as how one feels about um governance so it was um uh a referendum initiatives and uh establishing term limits um provisions of recall campaign spending limits and so forth the two the two items on either end of the spectrum that that are germane are the at-large seats which a significant percentage said they wanted but also a significant percentage said they didn't want so it was kind of controversial um and then the other one was at the far right which is preserving incumbency and that was the idea of preserving incumbency was very unpopular second most unpopular of possibilities so that's pretty much the net we can put this up on the on uh with the minutes and there's some tables that just kind of make it easier to read what's going on on this preserving incumbency is also very very ambiguous well can I ask a question on this and I can follow up with somebody else too but I guess it would have been nice if um this chart would have all spent the question of like how important is it for you to have two counselors but I feel like I heard Richard speak to that so I guess I'm just wondering how to make the comparison between how important it is for folks to have two versus having smaller words um I know that our our um general uh impression uh from the feedback we got is that people much prefer to have two city counselors um uh two from each word okay if there should be any change the preference certainly within word ones or I was that um uh word should be smaller on one rep per say 13 or 15 words rather than uh uh rather than two yeah two for a bigger word okay thank you okay so we'll know more tomorrow nice thank you are there any final questions okay thank you so much and I'm sure for all of your work on on the committee is for all of your updates over the last couple of months um so now we're going to end with the local war raffle I guess it's a hat maybe you should you would like to pick the one or the hat Jonathan you've got the list of names yep okay and if you've already won one of these let us know Selena and Susan and Bobby that's not on Susan and Bobby are though sorry to interrupt you folks know uh was there still going to be the there's no BIPOC presentation yeah um the REIB presentation is going to be delayed until next month or March they had kind of a last minute schedule change okay great thank you thank you here do you say that the two winners were I got a cold burn and um Susan and Bobby hey bob you're always the big winner okay nice thank you all it was great seeing you all tonight and I'm looking forward to next month thank you thank you very much thank you good night have a good night thank you