 voters have already heard the most about it and that we've been working on this for a while. In some ways we've been working on this for years. We, one of the really sustained initiatives that we've worked on during my almost decade now as a mayor is to try to really systematize and expand our investments in public infrastructure. We had a number, you know, we have in some ways wonderful legacy of public infrastructure here in Burlington but some of it is quite old and some of it had been underinvested chronically for some time when I came into office. And in 2016, we took a plan to voters that we call the kind of 10 year sustainable infrastructure plan. It was an initial kind of $50 million plan and it always envisioned a second major bond about now. In fact, we had initially planned for it to be in 2020 but conveyed that for a year when the pandemic kind of upended all of our plans. And so as a result, this past year, this 20, this the construction season we finished last fall was somewhat less active than we had been in every year since 2016. We did not get as much new sidewalk in the ground. We slowed down some in our overhaul of our parks and our reinvestment in our city buildings. And we feel urgency not to lose another season. So we did go to voters in December with a $40 million plan and 57% of the voters more than 57% of voters supported that but that didn't reach the two thirds threshold that our charter requires the two thirds super majority for bonding. Did you have that as well? We do not actually. I was interested when I learned that about Burlington. Yeah. So there's a number, there are many ways in which the Burlington charter is unique and really creates high standards. I appreciate that. We've met this standard before and I'm hoping that the proposal we are bringing forward this time which is substantially sharpened and tightened up in a number of ways which I could go through. And actually if I do have the ability to share screen here I can put up this chart. I think I do. Are you seeing that? Yeah, I can see this. Okay. So it starts with local match for grants is the first row. Is that what you're saying? Yep. Okay. So this is our revised plan and maybe I'll make it a little bit larger so people hopefully that's pretty visible. That's great. This is a, so about 40% of the December plan has been removed. That's this really kind of two areas, two big reasons we're able to make that change. One of the things that we heard from voters is that our proposal for setting aside $10 million to address the very serious issues that were more all auditorium didn't have enough detail and it didn't have enough specificity about exactly how we were going to deploy that money. And people, and I understand that with this and really many ways agree with it I didn't want to commit that $10 million until we know what is going to happen with this very uncertain situation with the Burlington High School. There's a big question mark hanging out there over the community about how much the new high school was going to cost. We had already approved a $70 million dollar valid item a couple of years ago, but that was before the PCBs were discovered at the high school and before there was a really a need to shift entirely to a new structure which is what we're headed towards now. So with that question marketed out there we had kind of talked with voters about this that we would spend as little of that 10 million as possible until we did know definitively what was going to happen with the high school but that was not fully satisfying to people. This really kind of locks that in and it limits the spending on Memorial Auditorium. It's the last row there if you can see it to $1 million. That's gonna allow us to keep the building standing basically will allow us to keep the heat on and keep building from deteriorating dramatically structurally if we were to let it go completely cold and stop operating a sprinkler system in the building. And we will use that time. We are actively working again. We had stopped our work on Memorial Auditorium during the teeth of the pandemic but we have a team working on this again now. And so we're gonna use this time to figure that out. The other way in which this item has been reduced is largely, you can see it primarily in the streets and bridges line there where we went from having almost $4 million plan to about half that 2 million. That we are now what that is a reflection of in part in addition to hearing voters that they're concerned about the price tag here. We also have greater clarity now than we did back in November, December about how the infrastructure, federal infrastructure bill is going to work. We are increasingly confident that some of the bridge projects at least that we had planned for the next few years and we have several including, I think we are planning on spending some money on the one between our cities a little bit. But- Very exciting. But it's primarily some other smaller bridges. We're not pretty confident that there will be some federal support for that. So that item has been reduced. We have taken similarly some money out of the transportation safety improvements because we're more confident that there will be federal funding for some of those investments. The I guess top line message that I wanna get back to that I hope people are clear on as they're going and voting this time is that the heart of this proposal now is critical money. Like you, it sounds like in public safety infrastructure we have three very old fire engines that it's time to replace. We also, if we're going to succeed at securing some of these federal funds need to provide a local match. And so it would really be kind of, I think problematic thinking we wouldn't really be saving money if we are giving up some of these opportunities to go out and secure federal support to cover some of these infrastructure pieces. That's a substantial chunk of this bond as well about $4 million of it, almost 20%. And then the rest of it is really, I think what most voters would agree is sort of core infrastructure spending on sidewalks where we have a big, big hole that we're climbing out of. We had underinvested in sidewalks for a long time. We've been doing much better for the last five years and people want to see us continue to make that progress. We need this. The other, in addition to sort of understanding that this is really core infrastructure and public safety investment, another thing that I hope people really grapple with is the cost, I think they're funny, you know, a year of $23 million, almost $24 million number. And that sounds enormous. The impact on the average Burlington household property tax paying household will be about $7 a month for when this is at its peak, when this bond is fully drawn down. And then a, I think a final really important point for the people who still say, yes, we understand this is important but we're worried about the high school. I understand those concerns and with this reduction in spending as well as some of the other policies and constraints on city spending that are in place. His voters can vote for this and they can be confident that there is substantial additional capacity within the responsible borrowing limits that the city has set formally through a debt policy that's sort of been vetted and essentially, you know, it has been accepted in a positive way by our credit rating agencies. There is a lot of untapped capacity here for an expanded high school plan. And we are, we are reserving well more than 50% of this, the overall combined capacity which is something we've done here, mayor in Burlington and we've sort of set a combined borrowing capacity between the city and the school district. We are reserving well more than half of that borrowing capacity for the school district. So, you know, it's, it's challenging to meet all of these needs, but we're working closely and in a coordinated way over sustained period of time to try to ensure that both entities, you know, that we do both, we really, we need to be a city that has outstanding schools infrastructure but that also has sidewalks that elderly residents don't trip and fall and hurt themselves on that, that has, that we can continue to have the very strong public safety response that Burlingtonians expect. I think this is a plan to achieve that. Yeah, so it sounds like you have a scaled back bond vote here to meet priority infrastructure and public safety needs and position you to accept federal funding, more free money. For those of folks watching live as a reminder, we do accept calls at 802-862-3966. That was a very succinct summary of it, mayor. I mean, maybe we should have let you summarize the, what we're after here, but hopefully some viewers appreciate all the detail. People want to know more, of course, we have a lot more up on the city website there for all three of these bond items, people can go to the city website and see full PowerPoint presentations, see frequently asked question documents are being posted in the next few days if they have not already. So there's a lot of information there. And I think you said that there is additional bond item on the ballot, or sorry, ballot item. Well, yes, there's two other financial ballot items and then for the city, the school district also has their, their budget will be about question number one. I'll talk about that a little bit here in a moment. And then we do have a, we have a non-financial ballot item that's a charter change that we could, you know, if we have time we can talk about too. But the, let's go to the other, there is another one that is a bond. It is a TIF bond, something that both of our cities have really been major users, I would say major, you know, the way in which Burlington-Wanuski have used the TIF program over the last 20 years has really transformed both of our cities. The Burlington waterfront is very different than it was in the 1980s and- As is our downtown. And as is your downtown, exactly. So essentially what we want to do, that's a helpful history to remember in that the kind of transformational efforts that have taken place on the Burlington waterfront and the Wanuski downtown and the St. Albans downtown have only been possible with the TIF program. We have the same opportunity for the Burlington downtown in the Main Street quarter. We are putting before voters the opportunity to vote yes on a essentially a $30 million plan to upgrade all six blocks of Main Street from Memorial Auditorium to the train station. And it is really a transformational plan that takes this sort of hodgepodge of different urban designs that has come up over the decades where we really, you know, we have on some blocks an enormous amount of our 99 foot right away devoted to diagonal parking and just one traveling in each direction that can take up as much on some blocks as 73 feet of our right away. By shifting that going to parallel parking, we are able to retain the great majority of the parking and get in other important public elements into the street, into the streetscape. The transform Main Street will have wide sidewalks for pedestrians. It will have wide sidewalks for outdoor eating in front of eating establishments. There will be a wide tree belt so that we can have healthy growth in our street trees that brings back, you know, you see these images of the periods, you know, before Dutch Elm's disease when Burlington's Main Street was just had these majestic trees. This will allow us to have much healthier trees along Main Street. We'll have protected bike lanes on both sides, adding one of the last really critical elements of our dedicated bike lane network that we've been building out over the last six or seven years. And there will also be stormwater, green infrastructure elements of this design that will dramatically improve our ability to retain stormwater during big storm events, protect Lake Champlain from harmful runoff and create a much better place for our Main Street. They'll be beautiful. We planted rain gardens that have that, both stormwater function as well as really enhancing the streetscape. We've been working on this too for many years. The city created the TIF districts in part to pursue a Main Street renovation although they didn't have exactly the vision that we did now for what it would be 10 years ago. Voters weighed in on the first piece of this plan, a number of years ago and approved it. And we, as a result, and I'm trying to a little bit bring up some images as we talk here. I think we'd add to this presentation if I can pull that off. The first people will remember that we did a major overhaul of St. Paul Street, the lower two blocks of St. Paul Street a couple of years ago. This is a similar overhaul, but even more transformative on Main Street. On an important corridor. A key corridor. And again, because of the nature of the TIF program, people can vote yes on this and be confident that there will be no impact on their property tax rate. That's right. The TIF is an investment tool where the revenue generated from the growth and development actually pays off the debt over time. So we had a very successful use of that tool, as you mentioned earlier. Are your TIF districts in good shape now financially? Yeah, we're on track to close ours out in 2024, which is very exciting. And after the debt is paid off, then new revenue comes into the city, which is another great aspect of the program. Yeah, we are on track for the Waterfront TIF district to be paid off as well in, I think, 2025. And that will start to change maybe some of the... There is some controversy around the TIF program. There is some sense, you know, and I think there's a healthy and fair debate over what the impact of the TIF program is on the Education Fund, on the rest of the municipal budget. What will be exciting, and when it sounds like in just a couple of years, and then one year after that in Burlington, is for the first time, these TIF districts will be kind of expiring, and there will be this traumatic infusion of new revenues into the Ed Fund and into the municipal budgets. And that's, you know, the program hasn't been old enough in some ways, especially as Burlington has extended its TIF program a couple of times. I'm responsible for one of those extensions, but my predecessors as well. So there's been a delay in the completion of these TIF districts. But it'll be, my chart start to change. I think it'll be a really welcome thing that will be newsworthy when that happens. And we're getting close to that. Definitely. I do have these images, Mayor Lada. I'll just pull on that. Let's see. This is, let's see, are you seeing a view of Main Street from- Yeah, absolutely. With the trees and the wide sidewalks and everything. Protected bike lanes, it looks like. Yep, there's protected bike lanes on both sides, dedicated in each direction in this vision. And what I don't have set up here, but maybe people who know Main Street well can picture, you can see City Hall in the background here. This is the block just west of that with the old armory on the right side, the comedy club and the Nordic, North Star Sports on the other side of the street there. And if you can picture that block in your mind's eye, it's almost all asphalt right now between the sidewalks. It is diagonal parking with huge backup lanes on both sides of the street. This gives a sense of just how much more, how many other functions we could achieve in this valuable public right-of-way. It's the only right-of-way, sorry, I think there's one other, but it's our, most of our right-of-ways are between 45 and 60 feet wide. This is 99 feet wide, and it really does create the opportunity for placemaking. One little detail that you can see here that I really hope we are able to implement is if you see on the left side of the image there, there's, if you look carefully, just above the individual wheelchair there, you can see people sitting on what is envisioned as one of those swings, like down on the, those distinctive swings down on the Burlington waterfront would be carried. There'd be one of these every corner coming all the way up Main Street, kind of linking in a pretty unique Burlington way, the beloved waterfront with beloved church street. And I think it's gonna be a really, I think it's gonna be a, I know other communities who have taken on projects like this, one in particular that I visited that has resonated with some people when I mentioned it to them, Greenville, South Carolina, did a Main Street renovation 30 years ago, and it totally changed the city. We were starting from a better place than that Main Street was at the time, but I think this can have a similar transformative effect and really be something that impacts the city for many years to come. Well, it's really multimodal use, which adjusts to changing trends and transportation and also climate impacts. Exactly. So that's true. Let's hear about item three. That's the one, I do wanna just reinforce. It is important that people understand that they can vote yes on that one and again, be confident that we know no direct impact on their property taxes. And in fact, I think if you take the long view, it will help us with the property tax burden when this public investment goes in the ground and it inspires a broadening, widening of the tax base. The final item is we are for the first time and we're doing something that I have only done with great restraint, only I think this is the third time in the 10 years that we have come forward and we are requesting a increase in the general city tax rate. This is the tax rate to help basically fund the main property tax rate that we used to fund city operations. And what we are facing here is, the reason we feel that we need to take this step and that 10 members of the city council agreed with me that we need to take the step even though we know the Perlentonians already pay a lot in property taxes and we always looked to all other options before taking this step is that we have some structural challenges that we are facing in the budget right now that I don't see any other way to address other than requesting this increase. The big issue that is really driving this, there's sort of three challenges that we are dealing with in this budget. I'd be interested to hear Mayor Lara if you feel like you're looking at similar challenges. First of all, we have a lot of non-propery tax revenue sources, many of which took a major hit during the pandemic, some of which have been slow to recover and there's still a fair amount of uncertainty about them. In particular, we have very substantial waterfront revenues that did not come back last summer and there's uncertainty about next summer. The biggest issue is that we are facing, as I think the entire economy is facing, as the entire world is facing for the first time in a long time, very serious inflation. We have a couple of years of inflation that in the last two years had been inflationary period and we are in the middle of negotiating collective bargaining contracts with our employees who have had to experience that inflation and we need to do right by our employees and work with them through that collective bargaining system. And then we also come in, we did learn like I think most communities, we did learn some things, see some things differently during the pandemic have made some new equity commitments using federal funds initially in the current year budget but these are equity commitments that we intend to extend over and we wanna be building into our kind of structural budget if you will and make them into long-term commitments. In particular, these are new equity commitments in a number of areas and the largest area, our biggest change has been a pretty substantial increase in our investment in racial equity and racial justice initiatives. So those are the three challenges, the three solutions that we've worked through and it makes sense that we think our way through this challenge and the city council essentially blessed on Monday is one, we are using some of our ARPA funds to create substantial revenue replacement reserves. So we are budgeting, assuming the revenues are gonna come back to pre-pandemic times over the next couple of years. If they don't, we will use ARPA funds to fill in the gaps until they do, which was one of the explicit things ARPA funds could be used for. Our second kind of major strategy is we are also going to use these federal funds to phase in some of these new equity commitments. Again, consistent with the legislation where we are trying to help communities that were clearly impacted by the pandemic, where we are helping with economic recovery efforts, where we're addressing some of the inequities of the pandemic using these federal funds in this way is to phase them in. I think it's something we've done many times before with something that a lot of people remember. Just a few years back, we were working to increase the size of our police department. We got federal grants that allowed us to initially expand the size of the department. And then over several years, we took on more and more of the local cost. Essentially, we're proposing to do something different, similar with this budget. And then finally, the final piece of that is there's still about a $2 million, a little more than $2 million gap projected in the upcoming budget. And we are proposing a four cent tax increase tax rate increase to address that. Two points I want people to hear, I hope people hear me out on as they consider that. And then I'll go back to you, Mayor. One, we are fortunate to be able, this doesn't happen very often, but because we just went through this painful reappraisal process here in Burlington and because of what is going on with the health of the Ed Fund in part because of other, I think, pandemic related new revenues, the school district will actually be bringing forward, they have brought forward a valid item that will result in a seven percent tax decrease on the school, the Ed Fund side of the property tax bills. So that means since the schools make up about 70%, the Ed Fund makes up about 70% of the tax bill that Brawn-Antonians get, that even though they can vote yes on the municipal bill, on the municipal increase this year and still see their tax bill go down. The other piece I do try to remind people, urge people to see the kind of long view here and understand that for a decade, it has been a real priority of my administration to recognize, to work with the fact that Burlington is a property tax burden community to keep our property rate increases below the rate of inflation. And if you look at that 10 year record, we have done that. We have been well, even with this increase, if you compare the increases in the consumer price index to the increases in the tax rate over that period, the inflation has been considerably higher. So that's been the metric that we've been focused on and been fortunate in the past, people have supported that logic. I hope they will do so again this time. That's great to hear. Do you have an estimate for the dollar amount tax impact or is that complicated by the shifting with the Ed Fund side of things? Well, I should have it for the average home. I mean, it works out to a little bit more than a 6%. So whatever your property tax bill is this year, municipal side would go up about 6%. But the Ed Fund side is protected to go down 7%. So, and again, given the Ed Fund side is well more than half of it. Overall decrease. There would be an overall decrease. It's very exciting. We are at 6.01. So I think we are done on the television side of things but still live on YouTube. Is there anything else you wanted to share? I think I would just reiterate that I know these are important issues for voters. There will be numerous other opportunities over the next five weeks to speak to me, to I and other members of the C team will be going to all of our MPA meetings. I have my coffees on Wednesday mornings, continue to have them. I think we're gonna try to keep having them in person through this period. So on Wednesday mornings at the Bagel Cafe, people can come and speak to me, directly ask questions about these or other city matters. And again, if you go to BurlingtonDT.gov, there will be lots of additional information about each of these items there. And I appreciate Burlington voters considering these and seriously considering supporting all three items. Well, thank you, Mayor Weinberger. And thank you viewers for tuning in to town meeting TVs on going coverage of local community candidates budget and ballot items. You can find this in more forums at www.ch17.tv. Don't forget to vote on or before the first Tuesday in March, town meeting day, March 1st, 2022. Early voting by mail is available by contacting your town clerk's office. Polls will also be open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. on town meeting day. Thank you for watching.