 So far, what kind of most of what you would like to say today? I think we'll bring in Steve to ask you your opinion of the settlement. I have an opinion, yes. And could you introduce yourself as a litigant, right? We're a palence. We're not really litigants. We're a palence. Yeah. And waitress. Here on Church Street with the members of the Coalition for Liberal City, right in front of the Burlington Town Mall, Town Centre, and the Burlington Town Centre settlement was reached. So, Michael, what do you think of that? The settlement is, I guess it's a step forward. It's disappointing in some ways and helpful in others. It's a big disappointment in the settlement. I think for me personally and for many members of the CLC, is that the overblown 14-story mall will still be an overblown 14-story mall. But there are positive developments that have come out of the settlement as well. One of them is that 200 parking spaces will be underground, which is where we believe all of them should have been to begin with. But the developer insisted that that was unfeasible, so there will be two underground spaces. A portion of the overlay district in which 14-story buildings, additional 14-story buildings might have been built. It's been agreed that no buildings in that portion of the district will exceed 10 stories. There are other provisions. There's a half a million dollar fund, which will provide for community-based downtown initiatives instead of investor-based downtown initiatives, such as the Mall Redevelopment as originally proposed. And there are some other provisions too, which I'm not thinking of just now. Sorry about that. Charles, what is your take on this? What does this mean? Yeah, in my sense. I mean, what's the Coalition for a Liveable City has done? And I want to make it clear, I'm speaking as an individual, although I've been very active in the CLC. But what they've done is provide the important and missing critical voice on development downtown. So, for example, the original proposal was to totally demolish the Cherry Street parking garage and not to provide any additional parking for people coming into the small businesses, to the restaurants on Church Street. And they would have suffered enormously had the original Sinex proposal gone through because all of the parking that he would build would be earmarked for the tenants, the commercial and the retail tenants in his building. So this would have taken off the table opportunities for tourists to come, for people from the wider area to come to drive in and to frequent the stores. So we saved him that. I think we also saved Sinex a terrible mistake in his own design where he had had 40 units of his apartments for students who would essentially be a downtown extension of the campus housing court for Champlain College. And this would not have helped him to rent on a commercial basis the rest of his units to be living next to a dormitory would have been, I think, a disaster. And he did not understand that. And CLC made it clear, nor in fact did the city council or the mayor understand the drawbacks in this system, one thing after another. So I think the settlement did address that. There will be no student housing downtown. There'll be much more parking. And so I think we won a small victory. But what I would like to just say very quickly is that the Marketplace District and the Marketplace Commission under the leadership of Ron Redmond really owes CLC an enormous vote of thanks. They haven't done so. Instead, they have taken the alternative position which is to uncritically endorse the Sinex proposal. We made it much more responsible. And I think the Marketplace Commission, I think the mayor and I think the city council owes CLC an enormous vote of thanks. And is the fight over? Is the fight over now with the settlement? Well, I think that what we're continuing to do is to criticize sort of a carte blanche for development. So, for example, Macy's is probably going to go under. Its owner, which is another large corporation, Hudson Bay Company, is losing value in its stock. It's very likely that they're already closing stores. So, I could see Macy's going under. The city council included that in the 14-story overlay district that they developed. And another buyer to that property will likely demolish it and put in 14 stories. So, we're beginning this process of incremental expansion of the downtown which is going to lead to just one very tall building after another. And I think that CLC has got to continue to make the case that this is not consistent with a livable city. Could you talk a little bit about the tax incentives that this law is getting from the tax payers in drilling? Okay, so part of this small proposal involved a tax increment financing which is essentially a subsidy for developers. Developers are very excited about tax increment financing because it takes public funds and uses them to support private development, if not directly, at least indirectly. So, in this case, around $22 million was approved by the tax payers to be borrowed by the public to support this development. And much of that was to... Well, part of it was to pay for the streets. In other words, the real estate that the mall currently covers will become the extension of Pine Street and the reconnection of Pine Street and St. Paul Street. Initially, this TIF money was going to be used in part to pay the developer for the real estate that would make up those new portions of those streets and the additional millions would be to actually build the streets, pave them, engineer them, put in the sidewalks and the other amenities that are part of a pleasant downtown street. So, the CLC and other people opposed that concept of public money subsidizing private development and brought a suit against that as part of the settlement agreement that was reached. The developer has agreed to give back that real estate to the community, so the community won't have to pay for it, but TIF money will still be expended to develop those streets when we feel that is really the responsibility of the developer. What Michael was saying is that the Don Sinek and the Growington Town Center group has agreed to give back the street beds to the public at no cost. And my point was that these street beds were originally given to the developers of the mall, apparently at no cost. The city has apparently not been interested in doing the research to find out if any money was paid, but it would appear from the settlement that Don Sinek has accepted the fact that the project which he purchased pretty inexpensively, in fact, was a beneficiary of this free public land and now he's returned that to the city, which is I think a good thing, although we will be paying quite a bit of money for the development of the streets and the street frontage, which is benefiting his project specifically. So, I don't think the TIF process is itself beyond criticism. Where did we go from here? Where does coalition go? In what direction? I think, as Charles suggested, the goal is to have development proceed responsibly and with the public interest in mind rather than primarily focusing on the interests of developers and investors. And that's the real objection here. To go back to the very beginning, the deal breaker, as far as I'm concerned, was when the city and the city council agreed to change the zoning law at the behest of the developer. The whole purpose of zoning laws is to protect the public interest and have the city develop in a way that serves the general population, the residents of the city and the residents of the area. If a developer can come into town and say, oh, those zoning laws you have, they don't work for me. I need some different zoning laws. And if then the city jumps and goes out of their way to make these changes, then there's really no point in having zoning laws. There's really no promise which the zoning law represents is broken. If as a resident you can look at the laws and you can kind of see, well, our downtown is going to be this high or our neighborhoods are going to be this dense and you can kind of count on that. Not that it's never going to ever change but that certain things are pretty solid and you can expect them to remain that way. That's not the case anymore because this developer, because I think of the number of dollars that he promised to invest in the community that kind of dazzled many, many people and made them perhaps less clearly than they might have otherwise and they were then willing to just change the laws to suit the developer instead of requiring the developer to observe and respect the laws. And those laws are really laws that grew out of the community and they reflected the vision that the community has for their city. I believe that that vision should have been respected by our city officials and the developer coming in as well. And how does it stand now with the zoning laws? Can another developer come along and have his way? That is an open question, really. I mean, certainly the CLC and others who have resisted this development have shown that it might not be altogether easy that you can't just do that without some kind of turmoil or pushback, so I think that's helpful. The environment, the fact that people are actively engaged in their community is a known factor now. I don't think that was expected in this case, but it still is an open question. They were able to change the law because they had the support of the mayor and the council and perhaps that could happen again. That's the danger. That's where the solid reassurance, the good zoning laws provide for the community that has been eroded by the way these laws were changed, Helter Skelter to serve Don Sinek. Hi. That wasn't for me. Sorry, later, but it's just occurring. You'll never be able to hear me over the lumbus truck. Yeah, we can wait. He's going to move in a second. I was the designated representative for the appellates who were appealing the permits that the law had gotten from the city. myself, Barbara Gru and John Franco negotiated with the developer to try and see if we could reach a mediating agreement. The creation is if we could agree on something, it's probably not going to be something we really wanted or that they really wanted, but it's what we think we could live with. And that's basically what it came down to. But we looked at all the circumstances. We looked at what all our options were and one option would have been to continue to fight this as long as it went. I unfortunately don't think it was going to go as long as we hoped, but I think we decided we could get something now that we wouldn't get later and it was probably the best we were going to end up with. The system is heavily slanted in favor of this development, the way the whole thing was set up and the way the courts were ruling. There were some rulings in our favor, but a lot of them were not, and you could see how they were trying to make it more difficult for us to proceed as this thing went along. So I think we've settled on some important issues, though, and these guys have probably gone through some of it. One is at least in future developments on this site, there's a phase two possible, there won't be 14-story buildings on that. They've also agreed to not sell the land for Pine Street and St. Paul Street, which are going to return to the city. They're not going to sell that, they're going to give that to the city now. Now, they still want to charge for the improvements to it, but at least they're going to give that back. There'll be no students, no student... Well, there could be students. A student could rent a unit in this building, but none of this where a college is going to rent a whole floor or rent a hundred units and rent them out to students. We have a downtown student living facility. And then, I'm probably forgetting one item, but the thing that I thought was the biggest thing for us, because it's the future, and I think it's some of the things that probably Charles and Michael have talked about. This isn't the end of this struggle. This guy builds one thing. It could be a domino effect to build much more. We got them to agree that we, not them, we will establish a nonprofit fund, probably through the Vermont Community Fund, which will be our umbrella organization. But it'll be a fund that we manage, not them, not the developer, we will manage it. And that fund will be for the purpose of protecting and promoting the character of Berlin. And it'll start with some money from the developer. I'm hoping we're going to grow it, and it's going to be bigger than what he's putting in. And that will be what I would call a counterweight to the notion of just keep building, change the ordinance, build bigger, build bigger. We want to do things that will preserve the character. And neighborhoods and people and organizations that want to do that, we may be able to provide some funding to do that. Because up till now, the side that we're at has been really under, let's say, under funding. We don't have the weapons that they have. They've got all the money and all the resources. This will be our counterweight, to see that we want growth of a certain type. But we don't want to see everything just get pushed aside, the money and interest get whatever they want, and sort of force the issue. I think there's a lot of common ground on good development in this city, and we're going to help to be part of that. So that's the future of this. It doesn't end now. There's a lot of future to come. Let me start by saying that, as Steve says, money is a big factor here. The way this turned out has a lot to do with who has more money and who has less money. It's really not a level playing field for citizens trying to shape their community because as in this struggle, we saw that we were outspent six to one when it came to advocating for or against ballot items that allowed this project to go forward. So the CLC, the Coalition for Relivable City, the name really tells a lot. It's a coalition. It came together as a number of different community organizations that have been advocating for things, specific issues in their areas, such as in the arts district or city hall park or advocating for a walkable and bikeable southern connector, et cetera. People involved in those various issues came together in a sort of a laser focus around this small project because it was so big and so central. And the concern is to then work together at a grassroots level, kind of real democracy, real people, not investors and money calling all of the shots and make this community livable for the people who live here and the people who visit here and not focus instead on the interests of investors who are looking for returns, focus instead on the interests of people who love this community and want to shape it and live in it and enjoy it and not take kind of a backseat to moneyed interests. Well, I would just say that I would welcome the Marketplace Commission Ron Redmond and the City Council and certainly the Mayor to continue to meet with CLC on these variety of somewhat contentious development issues because CLC is not going anywhere. We have, I think, quite a collection of experts and people with a lot of experience in urban development and we are conscientious and we are thoughtful and we are trying to keep in mind the greater interests of the residents of Burlington and we need to have government open to our input as it should be open to the input of every citizen and that's got to mean something more than two minutes of public comment period at City Council.